FormLAB

FormLAB

A Nomadic Studio

Artist, Liam Gillick refers to art moments as spaces that co-exist often with a sense of troubling absence (Cotter, 2019). [1] Where do art-moments reside? In my London studio I surrounded myself with raw materials, works in progress, finished goods, gleaned raw materials from South London, from the Docklands, the Isle of Dogs, the British Rail works - entire archeologies of London seemed to bubble to the surface. In my studio one would see works in process, works completed, piles of found objects, gallons of resin, drums of urethane, heaps of pigment, boxes of dolls, broken surfboards - fragments furniture collected around London. In the studio the art moments emerge and submerge during what is not a linear factory-like process but more a series of moments embedded in time.

Where is the work of art in its stages of development from drawing board to finished piece to a place 1 million years later when the work has dissolved. Is there a artwork lifecycle? I had been exploring how artworks changed over time. In the late 1990s Goldsmiths was at the nexus of a paradigm shift in art. Shifting away from extroverted YBA towards introverted DIY - each diametrically opposed. We were a generation of subtle poetics hand-made in face of the storm a commercially-driven neo-Modern. Artists like Edward Kienholz (1927-1994) with his found-object phantasmagoric assemblages; Dieter Roth (1930-1998) with his 100 Käse formidably blooming cheese-works each resplendent in various stages of entropic degeneration. If art had a trajectory that scales from un-formed materials to a work stationed or hung within a white cube space - then what was Georges Battaille indexing in his definition of “Formless” (Battaille, 1929)? The grasping of art that fits the lens brings us into a reification of art that fits that lens (and appetite). Left alone in its Modernist (or Post-Modernist) cage - it will just chase its own tail.

In 1997 I began to explore systems to turn the studio into a laboratory - first London and then Tokyo and later New York. FormLAB has turned the studio inside-out to spill practice into galleries, museums and public spaces in which we examine these problematized spaces as ever-emergent forms of practice with unfamiliar materials, processes and ways of working where agency becomes fluid. The focus of my doctoral and post-doctoral research in the US, UK and Brazil, FormLAB today explores the spaces between artists - what Beat Generation novelist William S. Burroughs and artist/poet/novelist Brion Gysin termed “the third mind.” (Burroughs and Gysin 1967).

FormLAB deconstructs the social self and reconstructs a third social self in the collaborative art-making. The artwork we create exists at all stages of the artmaking lifecycle - it isa the idea, it is the failed actions, it is the successful actions, it is the work that emerges. It is the work that submerges again either in the genesis of a new work but also the dissolution of the work or its being discarded on a rubbish heap.

Interdisciplinarity as Research

Artistic Research examines existing pathways and explores new pathways. Theory itself is the hybridization of siloed ways of thinking. The artist as explorer (Joynes pp 52-75) builds on this hybridization towards something beyond hybrid - towards a new discovery. According to Columbia anthropologist David Scott, theory is in fact “de-disciplinary, as in fact anti- disciplinary, the virtual undoer of disciplinary self-identities” (Scott p 374). As such FormLAB is an ever-evolving series of operations that sheds art as part of the process. It is a vehicle for the artist to engage in the unfamiliar, and with the other.

Exhibitions

Thomas Jaeckel Gallery (upcoming 2023)

Inside Out Art Museum, Beijing (2017)

Zanabazar Museum of Fine Art, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia (2014)

Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado, São Paulo, Brazil (2013)

Brazilian Museum of Sculpture, São Paulo, Brazil (2012)

Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, New York (2011)

Treignac Projet, Correze, France (2010)

FormLAB Tokyo (performance), Tokyo, Japan (2010)

Bauhaus Foundation, Dessau, Berlin and Queenstown, Singapore (2009)

Åmotgård Museum, Bygstad, Norway (2008)

Michael Steinberg Fine Art, New York, NY (2008)

Space Gallery, London, UK (2005)

Casa Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (1998)

Norimatsu Museum, Matsuyama, Japan (1997)

Douba Film Festival, Sichuan, China (2019)

National Zanabazar Museum of Fine Art, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia (2014)

Museum of Brazilian Arts (MAB-FAAP), Sao Paulo, Brazil (2015)

976 Gallery, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Launch for Venice Biennale (2014)

University of São Paulo, Brazil (2013)

Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, Korea (2012)

Fenberger Museum, Nagano, Japan (2012)

University of Minnesota, Katherine Nash Gallery, Minneapolis, MN (2010)

Welsh Museum of Modern Art, Wales, UK (2010)

Exit 11, curated by Luc Fierens and Benoit Piret, Grand-Leez, Belgium (2010)

San Diego State University, curated by Bibiana Padilla Maltos, San Diego, CA (2010)

Brazilian Museum of Sculpture, São Paulo, Brazil (2010)

Bauhaus Foundation, Singapore (2009)

New General Catalog, New York (2007)

Mazzeo Gallery, New York, NY (2007)

Sandra Bürgel Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2007)

South La Brea Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2006)

Romo Gallery, Atlanta, GA (2006)

CBGB, New York, New York, NY (2006)

Art Fair Tokyo, Japan (2005)

Romo Gallery, Atlanta, GA (2005)

Mizuma Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2005)

Bergstübl Mitte, Berlin, Germany (2004)

Mars Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2003)

Tactical Museum/ AIT, Tokyo, Japan (2002)

Maejima Art Center, Curated by Roger McDonald, Okinawa, Japan (2002)

Mizuma Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2001)

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (2001)

Gallery 4a, Sydney (2001)

Seoul Foundation for Art and Culture, Korea (2001)

Nylon Gallery, London, UK (2000)

Asahi Contemporary Art 2000, Tokyo, Japan (2000)

Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, Bangkok, Thailand (1999)

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[1] This sense of absence is a condition related to the post-Modern. A work of art today can index a site - but this both interestinh (and problematic) when there is nothing in that site to be indexed. The site becomes a placeholder- and indexes a “lack” L.Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) at least has an entity pulling the levers and pushing the buttons - what we actually have is the absence of anyone at the helm. Frustrated in the lack of meaning, we binge ever hungry for more - but we soon realize we are binging upon our own ego-focused illusion.

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(Image above: Still from performance, FormLAB innovating new forms of basketball on the Great Wall, Fulbright Award, 2017)