The glue that holds what together? Art, how low can you go? Where were we? Repeating ourselves whilst under stress? I wish you were here to see it, the more I look at it the more I like it, I do think it good, but we said all that last week (and probably the week before). And well, we could do it again, we could? Shall we? The Five Art Things thing? We said all this last week didn’t we? And the week before. Other than things happening on-line, we rather obviously can’t really feature or preview forthcoming shows at the moment – we did say all this last week with the previous Five Art Things post and all the “oh, I don’t know, this five art things to go check out feature is kind of shot to pieces now. The regular feature was supposed to be about five upcoming art shows that we were excited about, five recommended art exhibitions that are about to open, five shows we were looking forward to putting on our coats and going out to, a selection of the five most exciting openings selected from the many (many) coming up… And today while you read here’s some experimental earfood from Chicago to explore. Cheer Accident are of course regularly covered on these fractured pages and we do like the idea of those of youwho only come here for the visual art discovering some fine fine music…

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And so, as we said last week (and the week before), for now it has to mostly be about art events happening on line, and here, in no particular order are five on-line art shows that have caught our eye (andwe are looking at lots of things, clicking a lot of links). Once again we’re not talking a “top five” or anything like that, What we have here are five art things that have caught our eye , five art things, in no particular order, five art flavoured things that we that we recommend…

1: Oozing Gloop – Commucracy Now! on line via John Hansard Gallery – “Throughout February 2021 in celebration of LGBT+ History Month, John Hansard Gallery is thrilled to present COMMUCRACY NOW!, a short film by Oozing Gloop and NewfrontEars (2020)”. View the good looking film here

“THE REVOLUTION IS BUFFERING! The world’s biggest and only autistic green Drag Queen, Oozing Gloop inspires people to re-imagine the structures that govern their lives. Defying usual understanding of meaning and belonging, this world to come is run via a new economy of government – COMMUCRACY.

BUT WHAT IS COMMUCRACY? Follow Oozing Gloop on this epic trip, where you’ll find psychoactive solutions for psychopathetic citizens trapped behind the very screens that are there to help them communicate! From the highest to the lowest, Oozing Gloop will seek to link the universal to the particular to revive the democratic impulse and pose the communist hypothesis”. Read the COMMUCRACY NOW! Manifesto here.

2: Ron Athey – Queer Communion at Participant Inc, New York – Feb 14 – April 4, 2021 – Now we do tend to focus on things happening over here (and yes, mostly our home grounds of London) but we do rather find most everything Ron Athey gets involved in rather stimulating. Been some time since he was last covered on these fractured pages, performances in Bristol and Birmingham I think, he’s in new York right now…  

Queer Communion: Ron Athey, curated by art historian and performance studies scholar Amelia Jones, offers the first retrospective of the work of Los Angeles-based performance artist Ron Athey – “The exhibition and related publication explore Athey’s practice as paradigmatic of a radically alternative mode of art-making as queer communion—the generous extension of self into the world through a mode of open embodiment that enacts creativity in the social sphere through collective engagement as art. Athey, through his significant and generative work as a performance artist, is a singular example of a lived creativity that is at complete odds with the art worlds and marketplaces that have increasingly dominated contemporary art over his largely undervalued career. Having been the focus of a homophobic, AIDS-phobic, and sensationalized political attack during the U.S. culture wars of the 1990s, in which a conservative leader denounced a partially government-funded Athey troupe performance as depraved, Athey’s practice remains a challenge to the politics of today’s renewed culture wars. Athey’s work will be organized in relation to thematic intensities and overlapping communities spanning religion, queer subcultures, music, literature, performance, film, and theatre, and displayed via photographic, archival, and video documentation as well as artworks and props from the original performances. The exhibition will travel to ICA Los Angeles in summer 2021”. Find out more here

it goes it goes it goes it goes, it repeats, repeating ourselves whilst under stress? I wish you were here to see it, the more I look at it the more I like it, I do think it good, no matter how closely I study it, however much I take it apart, it remains consistent, constant, I really do wish you were here to see it, of course I do, I do remember one thing, I tend to repeat myself when understress and like we did say last time or maybe the time before that? Like we said last time the thing we’re really missing right now is the underground artist-led shows, the gatherings in the back streets and broken buildings (the few that were left in the time before covid, Art BC as we call now), the broken buildings of East London or South of the river, butt we did say all that last week and well while the establishment galleries are able to set up shows and photograph them and film then and take them on line, to hang art on their walls for on-line presentations, the artist-led collectives, the things that tend to happen in empty shops and spaces hired for a week or two, we’re missing that entire layer, those vital breeding grounds, that whole underground word of mouth network where the really excite new art emerges, where artists meet and plot, the basement spaces, the learning places, the cutting edge backrooms that the establishment art world has little appetite for, the places and the shows that really do excite. It will be interesting to see what come out on the other side of all this. I do hope something very very special isn’t being lost for ever, we were losing so much of it anyway, magiacal places like Vyner Street, Redchurch Street, places where things could happen in a not so establiment lead formal kind of way…

On with the five art things….

3: Band of Holy Joy present Notes From A Gallery an online exhibition of “short film, performance art, live radio and wall art created and transmitted live from Gallery 46 and broadcast on our YouTube channel and through our website. The short films have been commissioned especially for the band’s forthcoming album Dreams Take Flight, a set of 8 songs whose themes are concerned with walls and mask’s, constraints and freedoms, lost connections, brutal interventions, crowded isolation, clouded behaviour. The songs themselves are shot through with personal ghosts and private acts, nagging doubts, fleeting moments of hope, illuminating the tricky art of living with love in these dark precarious times, always hoping to get by through whatever means, of magic music image light. As a statement of intent we will inhabit Gallery 46 for the duration of the exhibition and create visual and sound works whilst we are there, setting up a radio station, creating visual works, recording sounds, breaching isolation. This exhibition will run nightly from the 24th to 27th of February. We will be showing two new video films a night with a performance that corresponds or is inspired by that evening’s films”.

The on-line event runs from 24th Feb to 27th Feb, head to www.bandofholyjoy.co.uk for more. it should be a good one, allery 46 is one of our favourite London spaces. Previous Gallery 46 coverage

4: No 20 Arts say the gallery is “delighted to present THIS PLACE WHERE I STAND, an exhibition which brings together the work of Amy-Leigh Bird, Shaun Fraser, and Simon Kidd. From the shores of the Thames in London, to the Scottish Highlands and Islands, to Northern Ireland, each artist showcased in this exhibition places themes of identity and elemental links to site at the centre of their work.  Featuring sculptures, paintings, film, and works on paper, the exhibition is accompanied by an immersive soundscape designed in response to the artwork of each artist. Created by LOWT, the soundscape provides a cleansing sensory experience within which to discover the artworks of the three artists” You can explore the show virtually via the London gallery’s website until February 28th.

And yes, clearly This Place Where I stand is as much about texture and vusual sense of feel as anything else and yes it is almost frustraiting on getting to see it on line whe nmaybe more than most art exhibitions we’ve recommnded in thne last few weeks, this one really needs ot be seen in the flesh. This on-line view is almost a tease, all three artists need to explored properly, but hey, lockdown, nothing open, on-line or nothing. They s olook to be three well matched artists, this does look ot be an excellent show, I;ve been back to it several times now, damn frustraiting not oto be able to really see it, you walk around it, to smell it, to want to touch it. Desperately need ot be able t owal karound Amy-Leigh Bird‘s enticing Ancient Ruins piece.

5: Degree Zero: Drawing at Midcentury at Museum of Modern Art, New York – Yeah, I know, we’re off overseas again and this kind of big establishment space doesn’t need us but hey, rewarding film to watch and if we do all have to stay in rather than bump into each other and spill cheap red wine in the back streets of East London then work by Jay DeFeo, Willem de Kooning, Alberto Giacometti, and Cy Twombly features in “Degree Zero: Drawing at Midcentury,” on view through June 5 at Museum of Modern Art, New York.Bringing together approximately eighty works on paper from the museum’s collection, “Degree Zero” illuminates how artists used drawing to forge a new visual language in the aftermath of World War II. Modest, immediate, and direct, drawing was the ideal medium for this period of renewal. The exhibition looks across movements, geographies, and generations to highlight connections between artists who shared common materials and ideas between 1948 and 1961. Here’s where you go

And that was today’s fiver art things. Of course if you think we should be covering your art event then tell us about it. Right, I’m off to herd together some self portraits

Previously

10th February 2021 –  ORGAN: Five Recommended Art Things – Lennie Lee at Our Wonderful Culture, a Rosaleen Norton film, Tonight the Air is Warm at Kristin Hjellegjerde, Philip Gerald at Public Gallery, Michaela Wetherell and Pink-Collar Gallery and…

2nd February 2021 – ORGAN: Five Recommended Art Things – Ulay at Richard Saltoun Gallery, The Joy of Sex Spiked, Luiz Zerbini at Stephen Friedman Gallery, Pat Douthwaite at The Scottish Gallery, Deborah Brown at Unit and…

28th January 2021 – ORGAN: Five Recommended Art Things – Harry Adams at L-13, Sverre Malling at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Rebecca Brodskis, 90 Seconds of Art, more of Norman Ackroyd’s glorious work…

21st January 2021 – ORGAN: Five Recommended Art Things – Sara Berman and Alison Lousada at Gallery 46, Karine Laval, Peter Saville, Jason Seife at Unit, trumpet blowing and Cultivating, and if you really must, the London Art Fair…