If you thought Milton Keynes is just about shopping and concrete Cows think again. There is a wealth of art and culture events happening all around the city.
Milton Keynes played a major part in the Cultural Olympiad South East and has hosted events such as the Milton Keynes Festival Fringe and IF:2012 - The Milton Keynes International Festival. The programmes of both of these events were diverse and included live music, theatre, dance, storytelling and visual art projects. Two of these were Collective Spirit - the Lone Twin project and Godiva Awakes by Imagineer Productions, a 10 metre high puppet who journeyed through MK at the beginning of August on its way to London.
Part of the International Festival is an exhibition at MK Gallery of Hariton Pushwagner, a Norwegian artist whose work portrays a dark picture of modern life. Through his Graphic Novel, animation, drawings and prints Pushwagner’s vision reveals an unsettlingly recognisable place of greed, materialism and excess and juxtaposes this with destruction and chaos.
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| Hariton Pushwagner, Self-portrait, 2002. Screenprint. Pushwagner Collection, Oslo. |
For forty years Pushwagner has drawn inspiration from his observations of post-war Norway and from Beat Poets such as William Burrough’s whose work he particularly identifies with. It is clear from his work that he’s concerned by the acute materialism that that sprung up after the war and the hold this has had on the people around him. He’s also interested in the physical mechanics of war, heavy industry and mass production. In the Long Gallery his monumental work The Apocalypse Frieze has the same effect Picasso’s Guernica or Bosch’s triptychs in that it stops you dead in your tracks. These giant works are astonishing in their obsessive detail and show armies of suited men engaged in acts of war, scores of black smoking factories, and depictions of death and destruction.
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| Hariton Pushwagner, Almost There. From A Day in the Life of Family Man, 1980. |
The exhibition was expertly curated to emulate the sense of mass production and repetition shown in his work. The presence of Pushwagner’s film Soft City playing in a loop within the space with its mechanical sounds of commerce and industry completed the experience.
The exhibition runs until the 2nd September and then travels to Norway and the Netherlands.
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Collective Spirit, the Boat Project by artists Lone Twin is part of Artists Taking the Lead, a series of 12 public art commissions across the UK to celebrate the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. The Boat Project is the winning commission for the South-East region and is funded by the Arts Council England.
This post by Edge Artist Ann Crearie describes the project and connects it with her own art practice.
Collective Spirit is a seafaring 30 foot living archive, crafted by an adventurous team of boat builders from wooden objects donated by members of the public. The project combines contemporary art and design with engineering and craft, exploring diverse areas of expertise and conceptions of art and modes of creativity and collaboration.
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| Lone Twin Artistic Directors Gregg Whelan & Gary Winters |
The items have been placed marquetry-style in the ‘topsides’ - the port and starboard elevations of the hull visible above the water.
There is a book that records the project with photographs of all the wooden donations and the people with their stories. The book costs £25.00 and is only available at the event or for the website www.theboatproject.com. It lists every item with a photograph of the person and a brief story. Item 1048 is from Elizabeth Salmon reads:
My grandmother had a son, Roland John Walker, who drowned at sea during the second world war, aged 21. When we were cleaning out my grandmother’s house we came across this coat hanger with the initials R.W. Roland Walker’s the only person in our family with those initials, so we hope it is his. It’s so appropriate to go on a boat, but it was never really talked about. We have a grave for him, but I’d like to know a bit more, I never knew him.
The accompanying bookmark ‘I am a boat’ (costs £1) and is made from sawdust and is the remains of the 1,221 wooden objects donated by people in South East England. As you hold it in your hands you are touching wood dating back to 1166, remnants of the floor of a royal palace and heirlooms of treasured items and collected memories.
My practice investigates collections and memories and so I was delighted to explore every nook and cranny of this nationally significant boat project. The visit was research for a new project that Edge Arts Collective are working on connected with the Shoe Industry.
Collective Spirit left Queens Court in Milton Keynes Shopping Centre later that day on its journey to Weymouth for the Olympics where you can see it until 11 August 2012. It is most definitely worth the visit.
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Things outlast us, they know more about us than we know about them. They carry the experiences they have had with us inside them and are- in fact - the book of our history opened before us.[1]
[1] W.G. Sebald, in Sebald and Jan Peter Tripp, Unrecounted. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004, pp. 79-80
