Cally Spooner and Bruce Nauman

On affection

Barcelona
Jan 28 - Mar 10, 2017

Text
Installation
Selected Works

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NoguerasBlanchard is pleased to announce On Affection, a new group exhibition extended in time in the gallery’s space in L´Hospitalet focusing on performative practices that emphasize bodily experience and its ability to affect and be affected. Over the period of one season, participating artists are: Jacopo Miliani, Cally Spooner, Benoît Maire, Bruce Nauman, Fermín Jimenez Landa and Christodoulos Panayiotou. What we call performance these days is not the same as it was in its beginning. The practice has gone through many changes across the years while the supremacy of the object has been questioned. What hasn´t changed through the past years is the affective potential of performatic practices upon audiences. Affection is the process whereby affect – in the Deleuzian sense – is transmitted between bodies and there is no secure distinction between the ‘individual’ and the ‘environment’. In short, Affect cannot be fully realised in language but only through the body grammar.

For the second iteration of On Affection, two works by two artists are presented. The first Cally Spooner’s DRAG DRAG SOLO, 2016; a mute single channel film, projected on a double-sided, room dividing screen, with day light and day light bulbs. DRAG DRAG SOLO carries no sound of its own, but rather absorbs, and is affected, by other sounds in its proximity and, for the present show, DRAG DRAG SOLO is paired with an existing work by another artist, taking on the sound of Bruce Nauman’s, video work, Violent Incident, where two actors fight at the dinner table in a cycle of slapstick aggression. The video’s hysterical content is at odds with the mechanical repetition of the image. Movements are pre-programmed, from upper cuts to pinching, as the emotional turns into readymade techniques for fighting. The two works will be accompanied by a sound-producing ready made, sourced by Spooner from the outside or inside the gallery, in an un-synched constellation that explores the technical act of being affected, whilst considering the terrain of performance to camera, and its historical precedents.

Cally Spooner was born in Ascot, UK, in 1983 and lives and works in London. Bruce Nauman was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana (US), in 1941 and lives and works in Galisteo, New Mexico.

With special thanks to Zero, Milan, gb agency, Paris, and Biennale de l’image en movement, Geneva.

DRAG DRAG SOLO (2016) was produced by the Biennale de l’image en movement, Geneva, 2016

We are also grateful to Cal Cego, colección de arte contemporáneo, Barcelona for the loan of Violent Incident (1986), by Bruce Nauman.

Image credit: DRAG DRAG SOLO, 2016, (video still), single channel projection without sound, daylight, daylight bulbs, double-sided room-dividing screen, blinds. Copyright the artist. Courtesy ZERO, Milan, and gb agency, Paris.