Event overview
Preview of The Asphalt World by Simon Bedwell, which will run for a month at Studio Voltaire
The Asphalt World
Simon Bedwell
Supported by the Department of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London and the Arts and Humanities Research Council
15 January – 15 February 2008; Thursday – Sunday, 12-6pm
Preview: Wednesday 14 January 2008, 7–9pm
'What, in the end, makes advertisement so superior to criticism? Not what the moving red neon sign says - but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt.' Benjamin, One-Way Street
'The parade has nothing to do with women, everything to do with men...Women are simply the scenery onto which men project their narcissistic fantasies.' Mulvey, Visual & Other Pleasures
With invested irony, Simon Bedwell makes drip paintings from used advertising posters, in a messy conflation of an 'abstract' language deconstructed to the point of bathos, and the full-colour, pouting, literal end of corporate seduction. There is a melancholy to these actions, too: imminent replacement by plasma screens makes paper advertising as redundant as the flaccid, glistening gestures they're covered with.
'The Department store is, in a sense, the poor-man's art gallery … there, people do not feel themselves measured against transcendent norms, that is, the principles of the life-style of a supposedly higher class, but feel free to judge freely, in the name of the legitimate arbitrariness of tastes and colours.' Bourdieu, Distinction
How do we value the things we surround ourselves with? Women are supposed to care for such things, whilst men - whose manliness is guaranteed by being outside, busy, working - involve themselves at the risk of revealing a lack of robustness to their heterosexuality. To gender a man's space is to sexualise it; there are only the most simplistic corporate models for the (hetero) male's interior. If to display is unmanly, what are the things men should have around them? Conflating department stores and bachelor pads, lifestyle shops and lofts, sexual consumerism and museums, Simon Bedwell will exhibit a series of new compositions: objects found, made and adjusted, in walk-through, still-life arrangements of banal, desultory precision.
* * * * * *
Simon Bedwell lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions and projects include: The Receivers, MOT International, London (2007); The Furnishers, White
Columns, New York (2007); Gents: A Melodrama with 2 Acts, Platform, London; The Adverts, Ritter/Zamet at Rental Gallery, Los Angeles (both 2005). Recent group shows include: Bring The War Home, Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York (2006); Post No Bills, White Columns, New York (2005); Becks Futures, ICA, London; Galleon and other stories, Saatchi Gallery, London, (both 2004).
Bedwell was a founding member of the collective BANK (1991 - 2003), an important counterpoint to the yBa’s scene in '90s London (Cat. BANK, 2000, Black Dog Press, London).
www.studiovoltaire.org/exhib-cur.htm
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 14 Jan 2009 | 7:00pm - 9:00pm |
Accessibility
If you are attending an event and need the College to help with any mobility requirements you may have, please contact the event organiser in advance to ensure we can accommodate your needs.
