THIS PARTNERSHIP WITH UNCLE IS FOR THE EXHIBITION HARDCORE / LOVE WITH ARTISTS ARTHUR JAFA AND MARK LECKEY. CAN YOU TELL US A LITTLE BIT ABOUT THIS EXHIBITION? It’s an amazing exhibition and the route to it happening was quite unusual as we are not a traditional gallery space. Gavin Brown, the New York based gallerist who grew up in Croydon, had heard about Conditions and got in touch with us. We were talking with him about doing something in Croydon and these two works
Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) by Mark Leckey and
Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016) by Arthur Jafa came up. Gavin had such an important role in bringing these works to an audience originally. Our idea was the dialogue between the two works, a ‘call and response’ loop, and this was compounded by the friendship and respect that Mark and Arthur have for each other. So, the exhibition is a powerful presentation, there are no frills, it is just the works in a dark room, facing eachother. To stage it in a half-empty shopping centre in Croydon seems very appropriate to the content of the videos, in that it is a space that is there to be interpreted. They are both videos whose meanings are authored by society as much as the artists and I think that they play with a lot more power outside of a museum context. The project with Gavin is also about fundraising for Conditions’ long-term future, raising awareness and gathering supporters.
WHAT DO YOU LOOK FOR WHEN IT COMES TO DECIDING WHAT ARTWORKS TO SHOWCASE AT CONDITIONS AND WHICH ARTIST TO WORK WITH? Our focus is mainly on platforming the work of the artists on the studio programme. We have done other projects and exhibitions as a way of raising the profile of Conditions and of showing art that we think is good.
AS A CROYDON-BASED STUDIO, HOW DOES CONDITIONS FIT INTO THE LARGER ART ECOSYSTEM OF LONDON? It cuts across a few of the London art eco-systems and I’m happy with it being a bit free-floating. Some people access Conditions more because they like the studios, others access it more because they want an experience of art education which they have not had. I find it interesting to work on a relatively small scale and occasionally do bigger events. It keeps things exciting.
CAN YOU TELL US A LITTLE BIT ABOUT THE ARTWORK ON THIS FLYPOSTING CAMPAIGN? I thought long and hard about designing these posters. There was an open brief, which was nice, but with such well-known artworks it was important to me to make an identity that conveyed our whole exhibition concept, not just two well-known images. The idea was to link the global and the local, or provincial. In
Love is the Message, The Message is Death there is recurring images of the sun, but also this line “the building is on fire” which seems like the tension between the heat and intensity of the sun, of violence and the sun as a life-giver and that dynamic frames a lot of the video: there is life and there is death. With
Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore the rave images are very widely circulated, but it starts with a landscape and clouds and loops back to this cold and romantic vista of a figure in a landscape with what looks like a pirate radio mast. It’s a romantic painting and it’s blue and cold, the opposite colour temperature to the sun. It was also a peripheral image – that the post-rave pirate radio mast landscape could feasibly be a place like Croydon and the figure was spiritually lost. With the font and the text, I wanted to suggest rave posters that you see on lampposts and hoardings. They often state a place, but no specific address, so you have to find it yourself. I gave the text to two of the artists who are at Conditions, Cameron Harris and Bobby Ingham, and they came up with the layout and font. We did a lot of testing to see how it would actually work in the street, and I think it was very successful.
WITH APPLICATIONS OPENING SOON, WHAT ADVICE DO YOU HAVE FOR EMERGING ARTISTS HOPING TO JOIN CONDITIONS STUDIO?Be real about the work and don’t think it’s not relevant to you. It’s more important to us to connect an interesting group of people, than to look at everyone’s CVs. Also do it if it is the right time for you. That’s important to listen to how you feel. i.e. what your capacity is, instead of feeling that you might be missing out on something.
https://conditions.studio