In collaboration with Jesse Ash, Celine Condorelli, Will Holder, Christoph Keller, John Tilbury, Alex Waterman

Framed by a new publication by British artist Beatrice Gibson and editor and typographer Will Holder, the exhibition “The Tiger’s Mind” is the first solo presentation of Gibson’s work outside of the UK.

Investigating the utterances that form people and place, Gibson’s films explore voice, speech, collective production and their representation. Referencing experimental music, and employing the logic of the graphic score, their production processes are often orientated around open-ended structures which are, to varying degrees, given over to a collective apparatus. Through the gathering together of disparate social bodies and the structured production of speech, Gibson’s subjects and their voices are meticulously recorded and dislocated, scripted, reassigned and re-staged. Highly aestheticized, fiction also plays a crucial role in the film’s formal construction, at the level of both production and reception – whether deployed as a social motivator, editorial principle, self-reflexive device or as a means to effect a shift in meaning and perception.

Besides three existing films, a new work, commissioned and co-produced by Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, forms the departure point for the show. Conceived as the first chapter to the publication “The Tiger’s Mind”, which will be produced during the timeframe of the exhibition in an evolving process, six practitioners (John Tilbury, Alex Waterman, Celine Condorelli, Jesse Ash, Christoph Keller, and Axel Wieder) have been invited to the Künstlerhaus to have a public conversation in the space, scored by Cornelius Cardew’s 1967 improvisational composition of the same name. Employing the score as an organizational device for voices, the topic of the conversation will be its own production, reflecting on the relation between artist and audience, the meaning of interpretation, and the capacity of text and image to activate thinking and participation. The resulting publication will explore the transposition of speech into printed matter and the critical potential of experimental notation.

For the exhibition, the preface of “The Tiger’s Mind” has been published, featuring a text by Beatrice Gibson, Will Holder and JohnTilbury. The second part will be published in December 2010.

Events:

Wednesday, November 24 – Sunday, November 28: Public discussion
Sunday, November 28, 7pm: Performance

“The Tiger’s Mind” by Beatrice Gibson ist part of the project “Scores”, organized by Künstlerhaus Stuttgart in collaboration with the CAC Brétigny . The first part of the project was “Noise & Capitalism” by Mattin (September 1 – October 30, 2010) in Brétigny.

“Scores” is part of the project “Thermostat, cooperations between 24 French and German art centers”, an initiative from the Association of French centres d’art, d.c.a, and the Institut français in Germany.

With generous support of

About the films:

A Necessary Music
HD Video, 30 min., 2009

A collaboration between artist Beatrice Gibson and composer Alex Waterman, “A Necessary Music” is a science fiction film about modernist social housing. A musically conceived piece, referencing the video operas of Robert Ashley, the film explores the social imaginary of a utopian landscape through directed attention to the voices that inhabit it. Treating the medium of film as both a musical proposition and a proposal for collective production, A Necessary Music employs the resident of New York’s Roosevelt Island as its authors and actors, gathering together texts written by them and using them to construct a script for the film. Framed by a fictional narration taken from Adolfo Bioy Casares’ 1941 science fiction novel “The invention of Morel”, the film self-consciously dissolves from attempted realism to imagined narrative; what begins as a ethnographic study becomes instead an imagined fiction and an investigation into the mechanics of representation itself.

Narration by Robert Ashley
Funded by The Graham Foundation For Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and Arts Council England.

The Future’s Getting Old Like The Rest of Us
16mm film transferred to HD Video, 45 min., 2010

“The Future’s Getting Old Like The Rest Of Us” is a 16mm film conceived in the format of a TV Play and set in an older people’s home. Part documentary, part fiction, the script for the film was a collaboration between Beatrice Gibson and writer and critic George Clark, and was constructed from transcripts of a discussion group held over a period of five months with the residents of four Care Homes. Taking B.S. Johnson’s 1971 experimental novel House Mother Normal as its formal departure point and employing the logic of a musical score, the script is edited into a vertical structure, featuring eight simultaneous monologues. “The Future’s Getting Old Like The Rest Of Us” features actors Roger Booth, Corinne Skinner Carter, Janet Henfrey, Ram John Holder, Anne Firbank, John Tilbury, William Hoyland and Jane Wood.

“The Future’s Getting Old Like The Rest of Us” was commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery. Funded by Camden Council Homes for Older People, Arts Council England and devevloped with the support of FLAMIN, Film London.

‘If the Route:’ The Great Learning of London
2007, SD Video, performance documentation, 48 min.

‘If the Route:’ was a live performance based on “The Knowledge”, the infamous London cabbie navigation system and mnemonic device students must master in order to become licensed cabbies. A complex and fascinating mathematics of the everyday, “The Knowledge” involves learning 320 routes or runs mapped within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross.Playing on the title of “The Great Learning”, the well known score by Cardew. as it related to The Knowledge and its own system of learning, and borrowing from the methodology, structure and political intent of Cardew’s original score, The live performance of the ‘if the route’ was used the knowledge as the generative principle behind its composition and was developed with 10 students from Knowledge Point and four improvising string players.

In collaboration with musician Jamie McCarthy

“‘If the Route;’ the Great Learning of London” was funded by Arts Council England.