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Events
Bruce McLean and David Gothard
Opening evening & bar: Thursday 11 March, 6 – 8pm
Gallery open to the public: Friday 12 - Wednesday 17 March
Evening Performances and events:
JocJonJosch: Monday 15, 6pm
Film screening: Tuesday 16, 7pm
boyleANDshaw: Wednesday 17, 6pm
The First Act brings together a series of works and interventions that bridge performance, sculpture and architecture. For the opening night, Bruce McLean and Will Alsop will take on the role of barmen setting postures in motion, adding style to the night and referencing a Nice Style performance, High Up On A Baroque Palazzo, from 1974. Outside CHELSEA space and around London Jason Brown presents a new work by Bruce McLean for CHELSEA cab. From 2pm on Friday 12th and 10am on Saturday 13th Bruce McLean and David Barnett will use the gallery as a space for the rehearsal of their forthcoming new work, A Hot Potato on a Dark Background, opening at Testbed, Battersea, on 25th March. The gallery will then be taken on by a number of artists invited by David Gothard. On Monday 15th JocJonJosch will rehearse and stage a performance investigating their relationship as a group of three and the space that these connections frame. On Tuesday 16th Oleg Bilenchuk, Hessa Al Bader and Evangelos Gerogiannis, students at the Architectural Association, will present work developed in the research framework of the Intermediate 5 course. Following this at 7pm there will be a film screening. The films are selected by David Gothard featuring works by; James Balmforth, Mark Barker, David Barnett, Dominic McGlynn and Will Huntley, Robert Sherwood, Dean Tatulli, Edward Thomasson and Nataasha Van Kampen. Finally, on Wednesday 17th, boyleANDshaw will spend the day developing further Tennessee Williams‟ one act play I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix, which they have recently been working on while spending three weeks at the National Theatre Studio. The actors involved are Keeley Forsyth, Anthony Flanagan and performance artist Adam James.
Lisa Le Feuvre
Opening evening & bar: Thursday 18 March, 6 – 8pm
Gallery open to the public: Saturday 20 – Wednesday 24 March
Talk: The Mythology of Exhibitions: Tuesday 23 March, 6pm
RUN has invited Lisa Le Feuvre to create the Second Act of Should I Stay or Should I Go? where she presents a display titled: Donald Smith’s Partial History of Exhibitions: 1993 – 2010. The display celebrates the contribution that CHELSEA space Director Donald Smith made to exhibitions as co-ordinator and editor of the Contemporary Art Slide Scheme (CASS). Two projectors will present the original slides of CASS documenting exhibiting activity in London between 1993 and 2003, where 35mm colour images were taken by Donald Smith (originally in collaboration with the late Stacey Billups who tragically died in 1996). This important, and inevitably partial, contribution to the visual documentation of exhibitions took place at a time before visually historicising exhibitions had become a
common practice.
Alongside this incomplete history of London exhibitions, Donald Smith’s Partial History of Exhibitions presents images of the opening nights of exhibitions hosted at Chelsea space, in celebration of exchanges and collaborations that have arisen from the encounters that have taken place in this space over the years.
On Tuesday 23 March, Lynda Morris and Clive Phillpot will be in conversation with Lisa Le Feuvre in a talk titled The Mythology of Exhibitions, exploring the ways in which exhibitions are remembered, misremembered and forgotten. Lynda Morris will discuss some of the exhibitions she worked on between 1969 – 1974, from When Attitudes Become Form at the ICA and Rock and Roll, to Jack Wendler, Lawrence Weiner and Americans in London and the Book as Artwork 1960 to 1972. Clive Phillpot will discuss “Palace Exhibition Condemned by Press in 1971”, excavating an exhibition that he vividly remembers but which seems to have been forgotten in exhibition histories.
Teresa Gleadowe with Richard Wentworth
Opening evening & bar: Thursday 25 March, 6 – 8pm
Gallery open to the public: Saturday 27 – Wednesday 31 March
Building on Chelsea space's record of exhibitions tracing the history of London art spaces, Teresa Gleadowe will turn the gallery into a provisional archive, a partial mapping of London art venues present and past. Two major components will occupy the space. Since January 2010, the curators of RUN and their friends and peers have been asked to collect all the invitations and printed materials on London art exhibitions that they normally receive by mail or pick up at the galleries they visit. Such material will be presented as a possible archive of the current London art scene, a three-month's sample of current events and activities, some of which may one day claim a place in the historical record.
At the same time, Richard Wentworth will provide a counterpoint to this survey of the present by initiating a project based on recollections of London's shifting art geography. This is the first manifestation of an exercise on which Richard Wentworth has recently embarked, to photograph the sites and buildings that once housed art spaces that have left their „snail trails‟ on the life of the city. This photographic project indexes the many private galleries and artist-run spaces that have emerged and disappeared in the last four decades, the migration of artists and art spaces – the dynamics of urbanism in what he has described as „the westernization of east and south London‟.
Jo Melvin
Opening evening & bar: Thursday 1 April 6 – 8pm
Gallery open to the public: Friday 2 – Wednesday 7 April
Jo Melvin's statements of intent: In 2009 Gustavo Grandal-Montero in charge of Chelsea Special Collections loaned me Lucy Lippard's catalogue Seattle 557,087 & Vancouver, 955,000. These related exhibitions took place in and around those cities in 1969 and 1970. The catalogue comprises artist's index cards. These are plans for artworks to be constructed by Lippard and her helpers. In some cases the plans show how the work should be assembled while others allow and encourage interpretation. I took the catalogue to Vienna where Lucy Lippard was speaking at a conference and asked her to sign it, she didn‟t have a copy and wanted to see it and the signing was an exchange for its loan. It is the first, perhaps the only Seattle/Vancouver catalogue to be signed by its organiser, some forty years after the event. Stories such as these are embedded in the stuff of the special collections.
The week will celebrate the special collections with the collaboration of Gustavo Grandal-Montero to point out threads connecting art and ideas and will focus on Lawrence Weiner, one of the contributor's to Seattle/Vancouver. We will launch the special collections guide, with an essay by Maria Fusco.
Mick Jones
Opening evening & bar: Thursday 8 April
Gallery open to the public: Friday 9 - Saturday 16 April
A wall of novels - pulp fiction from Mick Jones's lifelong collection of popular culture ephemera - and the furniture from John's Cafe on the Vauxhall Bridge Road, the very benches and tables where Mick and the Clash sat to eat egg sandwiches (when they weren‟t in The Swan pub) between the sessions for the London Calling album in 1979, recorded in Causton Street, SW1, just around the corner from CHELSEA space.
The title of the exhibition Should I Stay or Should I Go is taken from the iconic song of the same name recorded by The Clash in 1981, written and sung by Mick Jones for their Combat Rock album. A Clash lyric was previously used as a title of a show at CHELSEA space for A Riot Of Our Own, the remarkable exhibition about Rock Against Racism curated by Carol Tulloch, Syd Shelton and Ruth Gregory. Jane Ashley kindly supported the production of A Riot Of Our Own by a grant from the Laura Ashley Foundation and it was through Ashley that CHELSEA space Director Donald Smith was introduced to Jones.
Mick Jones will host the CHELSEA space evening and bar on Thursday 8th April. On Friday 9th April at 6.30-7pm in the Clore Auditorium, Tate Britain Jones will be in conversation with the author of The Look: Adventures in Rock and Fashion, Paul Gorman, talking about conspiracy theory and Sci-Fi in books from Mick Jones’ Rock & Roll Public Library as part of Late@Tate curated by Cecilia Wee (please note tickets are free but must be booked at Tate Britain on the night). At 5pm, Monday 12th March Mick Jones’ Rock & Roll Public Library, curated by CHELSEA space Director Donald Smith, will open at Project Space, Norwich University College of the Arts. The show at Norwich runs until 22nd May.
From the 13th – 17th of April RUN will invite artists, (including Sam Belinfante and Neil Luck 15th April from 2pm) musicians, fashion and graphic designers and commentators to engage in musical interludes and talks.
Will Alsop, Frank Sidebottom, Mark Titchner, Suzanne Treister and Syd Shelton have created limited edition posters in celebration of the anniversary of Chelsea SPACE and of the beloved tradition of especially designed exhibition posters.
To document each closing exhibition, Cally Spooner and Patrick Coyle will conduct a weekly audio programme commenting on the exhibition and presenting new and pre-recorded material. From the 19th of March, each Friday at 4.30pm, live on Resonance104.4fm.
Two features will inhabit the gallery for the entire duration of the exhibition: the purposefully built bar, designed by Lynton Talbot and Tim Rowson, and a new permanent work realised by Gary Woodley.
