Jesse Jones, The Spectre and the Sphere' 2008, production stills. Courtesy the artist. Photographer John Jones
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:
A new film work by Jones looks at the history of Marxism to the ghostly strains of the Internationale.
Jesse Jones was in Cinema 1 on Monday 9 June at 8.45pm.
The work of Jesse Jones (born 1978, Dublin, lives in Dublin) primarily takes the form of short films, works which renegotiate the material and ideological structures of cinema. They are concerned with how cultural artefacts can be restaged to reveal embedded histories of dissent - and their contemporary relevance. The artist isolates forms and subjects that can be utilised as tools, both in re-imagining and in directly intervening in the public sphere.
In 2006 Jones initiated 12 Angry Films. This ambitious collaborative project attempted to recuperate the 'drive-in' cinema - a form of mass entertainment associated with 1950s America - in order to investigate how it might be developed as a collective activity and transformed through radical content. Developed over a nine-month period, the production of the 'drive-in' films started with an invitation sent out to various Dublin trade unions and community groups (including some non-English speaking participants). The project developed around a series of workshops, including screenings and non-verbal drama sessions, and the final films were guided by a number of rules: they should be set in a car, should last three minutes, and should not be in English.
The resulting six short films tackle personal subjects as well as wider concerns about employment, globalisation and human experience. They formed the centre of a film programme, screened in a temporary drive-in cinema constructed by Jones in Dublin's Docklands. The programme also included a series of features themed around radicalism and protest, including Salt of the Earth (1954), Herbert J Biberman's film about strike action in a New Mexico mine. As Maeve Connolly remarked, 12 Angry Films is 'simultaneously a critique of cinema history, a site-specific public artwork and form of political action', and epitomise Jones' interest in the recuperation of theatre and cinema as spaces of popular imagination.
Jones' own short films are largely non-narrative vignettes, and often employ a particular location as an arena for performance. For On the Waterfront (2005) the artist invited members of a boys' brass band to perform the score from Elia Kazan's 1954 film of the same name - about trade unionism in America - in an open space between two housing blocks. The resulting film depicts the space as a resonant amphitheatre, the ethereal music helping to create a web of social and political histories.
For Nought to Sixty Jones is showing a new work, The Spectre and the Sphere (2008). The film looks at the history of Marxism, and includes artefacts that trigger a number of ideological echoes. The soundtrack employs a ghostly recording of The Internationale, performed by Lydia Kavina on the Theremin, and the film explores Vooruit, a castle in Belgium that was built by Socialists in the early twentieth century and is now a flourishing arts centre. Jones has chosen to accompany her screening at the ICA with a showing of The New Babylon (1929), a satirical film by Soviet filmmaker Grigori Kosintsev about the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871.
Richard Birkett
As part of her Nought to Sixty screening of The Spectre and the Sphere, Jesse Jones presented The New Babylon (1929), a silent film with live accompaniment from Oort. Listen to a short excerpt from Oort’s soundtrack to the The New Babylon (mp3).
Nought to Sixty in pictures: Jesse Jones
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.