Art in Reading

On a warm and damp October day, I head off to Reading.  I've been invited to the launch of

the autumn events of Reading International which you can read about here

We started at the Library with the launch event for ‘reading in Reading’
by David Raymond Conroy, Ghislaine Leung, Cally Spooner and Jesper List Thomsen, who are writers  who have been invited to respond to Reading through the use of storytelling and narrative structures closely related to various aspects of the town's contemporary culture. Collectively, the artists have written a 'superstructure' (shown below on the placcard), which will host the group’s activities and operate as a tool to devise a number of reading events between October 2017 and May 2018.

Jesper did the talking and young people read the superstructure.

Then came the release of the doves which was amazing and I would love to repeat that at our launch! 

We then made a walk through the abbey ruins to the museum.  (The museum is undergoing an amazing restoration)

Amazing to see old and new in tandem

At the museum  we attended the opening of ‘The Critic as Artist’ curated by Michael Bracewell and Andrew Hunt including work by Miles Aldridge, Stephen Buckley, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Lucienne Cole, Dexter Dalwood, Kaye Donachie, Donna Huddleston, Travis Jeppesen, Gareth Jones, Scott King, Linder, Bertie Marshall, Malcolm McLaren, Katrina Palmer, Alessandro Raho, Simeon Solomon, and Cally Spooner. 

The exhibition is about and for the Irish writer and dramatist Oscar Wilde, who had been a visitor to Reading prior to his imprisonment at Reading Gaol, and whose ideas and legend remain startlingly contemporary. The museum is housed in a building  which opened in 1883, the year Wilde set sail to ‘declare his genius’ to America. Rather than focus on Wilde’s sensational and tragic downfall, as is too often the case, ‘The Critic as Artist’ examines the author’s theories of aesthetics and art criticism, which advocated freedom from moral restraint and the limitations of society, as well as the creative ability of criticism to reach beyond the limitations of the work of art. These were and remain radical, integral to a developing idea of ‘the modern’ and above all joyously balanced between seriousness, ironic play, provocation, poetry and paradox.

With this in mind, the exhibition is titled after Wilde’s celebrated essay of 1891, in which he lays out the central points of his aesthetic and art critical theories. Wilde subtitled his essay,‘With some remarks upon the importance of doing nothing’ – championing indolence as necessary to artistic cultivation, and pose, repose and contemplation as elevated modes of existence – very much in the lineage of what Kierkegaard had previously defined as the ‘glittering inactivity’ of the aesthetic state.  I need to think about meditation fits in with this!

I have to tell you my favourite is Oscillate Wildy by Lucienne Cole, apologies for the light reflection.  The title also encompasses the title of a Smith's instrumental, one of the few.

I met the artist championing a bag decorated with one of the versions.  All are unique. 

Next stop, and after a cup of tea at the museum, is the opening of  ‘How a Black Void Replaces the White Cube and a Painting Moves from the Fine to the Performing Arts’ by Abel Auer at The Rising Sun Arts Centre.  I bump into my friend Lorraine, who I worked with back in the day.  The exhibition connects joint musical influences from Auer’s hometown with the history of music in Reading exemplified by the town’s annual music festival and continues the artist’s fascination with painting, through his decision to create an installation based on a cinematic representation of the medium with an ambient soundtrack.

Abel invented a new way to show painting that involves a cinematic representation called “CPS”. The process involves a painting being illuminated in a dark room with a strong projector alongside drone music in a black cinematic void. 'People tend to spend much longer in front  of each painting than they would in a white cube.’ states the artist.  Well, that worked for me.  His project also seems to argue for the medium’s radical relevance for small arts organisations and intimate communities outside of the capital, alongside a form of ‘truth’ that rebuts the bureaucracy of major institutions of contemporary art.


Abel Auer was born in Munich in 1974. His work has been described as blurring the boundary between abstraction and figuration, between reality and hallucination, seriousness and the grotesque. As a founder of Hamburg’s Isotrop in the 1990s, he was part of an influential and now historically important network of alternative institutions and activities in Germany, and continues to create work that questions dominant discourses in contemporary art.

Then it was time to go home so I missed a performance of ‘Ante Phylloxera’
by Rochelle Goldberg, Veit Laurent Kurz, Stefan Tcherepnin, Hanna Törnudd and friends
South Street Arts Centre.  Not to worry, the exhibition, which the performance celebrated will run from today to Saturday 11 November 2017 at Jelly, Unit 53, Broad Street Mall. 

‘Ante Phylloxera’, a project by New York and Berlin based artists Rochelle Goldberg, Veit Laurent Kurz, Stefan Tcherepnin and Hanna Törnudd. The title is taken from the name of a wine named after a 2010 vintage created from a 150-year old, un-grafted Cabernet Franc in Touraine that escaped phylloxera (a grape germ) in the nineteenth century.  As a metaphor for unlikely ingredients, the project synthesises historical and contemporary cultural moments.  Reading is home to a recent rise in the digital economy within the unlikely context of rural life; it's history includes Reading Abbey, one of the first international hubs  as well as Berkshire’s traditional bucolic landscape.

Ack.  https://readinginternational.org/