Alastair MacKinven, Et Sick In Infinitum, 2008. Oil on canvas. Courtesy the artist and HOTEL Gallery
A cumulative lists of all artists and projects involved in Nought to Sixty.
Nought to Sixty presents sixty projects by emerging artists based in Britain and Ireland over six months from 5 May to 2 November 2008.
Most of the artists in Nought to Sixty are under thirty-five, few of them have had significant commercial exposure, and in most cases this is their first opportunity to mount a solo project in a major public space.
The season is not intended to announce any new generation or style, but to build up a multifaceted portrait of the emerging art scene in the two countries, and to provide a space for exchange.
The Nought to Sixty programme consists of:
Events happen at the ICA every Monday night:
Sign up for regular updates about the Nought to Sixty and the rest of the ICA's programme, special events and offers. It's free.
Nought to Sixty is supported by:
Other partners:
MacKinven's humour satirises the value systems of the art world, whilst wryly deflecting to a more corporeal practice of involuntary evaluation.
Alastair MacKinven (born Clatterbridge, UK, 1971, lives in London) has an obsession with the body - its limits, idiosyncrasies and various behaviours. In his 8mm film All the Things You Could Be by Now if Robert Smithson's Wife Was Your Mother (2007) he transferred a pile of dirt from one area of a lawn to another, remaking the 1979 work Star Crossed by Nancy Holt (who was Robert Smithson's wife) MacKinven embedded a large pipe in the pile, undressed, then passed naked into the pipe and came out, wrapping himself in a silver blanket like a newborn child. Like the title, the work refers to conception, birth and supposed transformation; the artist's bare body becomes a base from which MacKinven questions art's myths, and in particular its associations with the transformative.
MacKinven's exhibition for Nought to Sixty entitled Et Sic In Infinitum Again employs the so-called 'Penrose stairs' - familiar from the M.C. Escher's 1960 lithograph Ascending and Descending - which connect into each other in an impossible loop. MacKinven has made a series of paintings of the stairs, surrounding the canvases with the kind of handrails used to help the elderly and infirm. Installed incongruously in the gallery space, these handrails are perhaps guides to viewing: ridiculously corporeal aids for a supposedly intellectual activity.
In these and other projects MacKinven treats the body both as something mystical, to be revered in its complexity, and as something problematic, a site of antagonism that must be regulated either through pseudo-Conceptualist scientific discourse or by adolescent shock tactics. Both these strands are evident, for example, in a soft-focus photograph from 2006: the exoticism of the subject matter (it is an image appropriated from National Geographic of a naked girl getting out of the water) and the crudeness of its title (Default Masturbatory Stimuli).
Similarly, for a recent performance at the Camden Arts Centre MacKinven glued his hand to the floor of one of the galleries. He then sat there waiting to see how long it would take until the institution's attendants offered him help - brought him a glass of water, for example - or tried to unglue him from the floor. This piece, which clearly plays with notions of institutional critique, was given a different spin in its title, Cut Off My Hand to Spite My Cock (2008), shifting the emphasis from a public investigation to a private act. Issues such as trust, vulnerability, violation and shame - are all relevant to his practice - as they are to many canonical works of art and performance of the 1970s, works which MacKinven often references.
A series entitled Critical Theory, shown at the Art Basel fair in 2007, is constituted by a group of paintings in MacKinven's trademark grey palette. The paintings depict different star ratings: from one (poor) to five (excellent). He asked his gallerist to sell them at prices that accorded to the rating, so that a 'one star' painting would cost less than a 'five star' one. Throughout his practice MacKinven's base humour satirises the value systems of the art world, whilst wryly deflecting to a more corporeal practice of involuntary evaluation.
Melissa Gronlund
Nought to Sixty in pictures: Alastair MacKinven
Why an institution of contemporary art(s) like this, and not any other?
Artist-led organisations that support networks of emerging art in England outside London.
Photos of the projects, artists and audiences taking part in Nought to Sixty.
Nought to Sixty includes a series of monthly discussions that address the networks that form and contribute to an emerging scene.