William Mackrell Lullaby

LULLABY

WILLIAM MACKRELL

Equivalents

At best, daily life, like art, is revolutionary. At worst it is a prison-house. At worst, reflection, like criticism, is reactionary. At best it creates plans for escape.

Openings always set the tone. As you would anticipate, this opening features the presence of the artist. But he is not there for the idle chat and ritual courtship from collectors or curators. He is quite tied up with his work Reach. He is scrawling with a crayon directly on to the wall but the just as compelling aspect to notice is taking place at the bottom right of your living picture. The medium states ‘crayon and cable tie.’ William’s left ankle is shackled. The artist’s mark-making benefits from the restriction - he is drawing restrained. It gives him a degree of balance and sets a limitation to his reach. The red crayola makes it more bodily than charcoal or graphite would. Red resembles lipstick marks - a profondo rosso, fatal attraction to the art. It is as if Richard Serra was in touch with his feminine side, was mildly self-harming (rather than prone to crushing others) and was a little bit taller. There are a couple of horses attached to a 2CV outside but I will return to that later.

William Mackrell is fascinated by the sublime and the absurd in art and the everyday. Each work is an experiment that he undertakes and the process becomes the content. Routines remembered, repeated and worked through. William is constantly exploring the networks and boundaries in the art world. Art is worked out and developed through trial and error, through connections and conversations. Wisdom, madness and folly in more-or-less (or less is more) equal measure.

I highlight works in anticipation of the Andipa exhibition and reflect on others presented at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) last year when it was my pleasure to work with William.

Exhibitions Curator

Dundee Contemporary Arts

When we sat in your room…

Exposed brings to mind Bruce Nauman’s Mapping the Studio 1 (Fat Chance for John Cage), (2001) but done as a rayograph in place of a multiple camera, 42 night shoot.

Nauman understood and used his studio as an essential element and structure in his artistic work, casting himself as the physical (artist) agent. This important installation from the year 2001 shows his empty studio – i.e. the basic pre-conditions for artistic production – pure absence as the presence of the self.

Kasper König, Mapping the Studio 1 (Fat Chance John Cage), 2003 Museum Ludwig, Köln, p7

You’ve got to watch light at work. It’s light that creates. I sit down in front of my photographic paper and I think.

Man Ray to Jean Gallotti, La photographie est-elle un art?, 1929 L’Art vivant, 103, 1/4/1929, p282

Last night I dreamt…

Mackrell’s Sleep is not to be confused with (but inevitably ends up in bed with) Andy Warhol’s 1963 film of Taylor Mead. A frustration at the practical impossibility to create whilst asleep is overcome and shown within a keep-you-awake light box on tells-thetruth Carbon paper. What you think would be inaction (especially if you have watched Warhol’s Sleep) is a bona-fide action painting, as restless as Mackrell’s constantly shifting practice. It is completely un-self-conscious, made whilst unconscious, primitive mark-making with a formalist strategy (complete with a formalist grid of the joined-together paper).

I ended up with sore lips...

With Lip Sync, Mackrell in black lipstick reads a statement and drags his lips across a piece of white paper. The blackness fades to grey as the lipstick wears off. The lipstick gets reapplied and he can start again, like coming up for air or the end of a sentence. Here the lipstick resembles charcoal, is less emotive somehow than the red crayon in Reach but is uncharacteristically EMO. An association to Bruce Nauman returns in his Art Make-Up (1967) but with added layers courtesy of Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s Kiss My Nauman (2007) where a Kiss tribute act become four equivalents to Nauman. The resulting work on paper nonetheless only partially tells this story. The less you know sometimes, the better it is for all concerned.

I left the North, I travelled South… I left the South, I travelled North…

The North South divide gets settled by a shouting match. Cues: Hair length, facial hair, level of buttoning going on with the shirt. Check shirt. More confrontational eye contact, check.

Never seen a keener midfielder…

A squad of friends attempted to play a football match with a concrete ball for 90 Minutes. The work is inspired by Saddam Hussein’s son Uday, who was reported to have inflicted this punishment on the Iraqi football team for failing to reach the 1994 World Cup Finals. At the opening of his exhibition at DCA, the game Gallery Assistants wore the strips.

There is a light…

1000 Candles is a full circle of tea light candles: at DCA, Mackrell showed them first unlit (potential), then lit (as performative object) and then left as a remnant. He also showed them as a document in photographic and video form.

‘I was working with a torch that had the power of one thousand candles, and the idea was to light one thousand tea lights in a circle on the floor. It was virtually impossible to light all of them because one candle would starve another of its oxygen and because of the heat, I couldn’t lean over to light them all.’

William Mackrell, in conversation with Isabel Vasseur and Simon Linington, 2012 Simon Linington & William Mackrell: Take Two, 2012, self published, London, p46

That when he goes, He really goes…

In the end we have Deux Chevaux. Two horses (deux chevaux) pull a car of the same horsepower through the countryside until they become tired or bored. For Andipa they are stationary outside the gallery – his potential means of escape. If he can extricate himself from Reach he can make his getaway. Going to the gallery is a performance. Outside the gallery is a performance. Inside the gallery is a performance. The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness. Turner (Mick Jagger), Donald Cammell, writer/co-director, Performance, 1970

BIOGRAPHY

B.1983 Lives and works in London

Education

2005 BA (Hons) Fine Art Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London

2004 Erasmus Exchange Program, Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest

Awards

2013 Spotlight Prize, Andipa Gallery & Royal British Society of Sculptors, London

2012 Emerging Artist Bursary Award, Royal British Society of Sculptors, London

Residencies

2013 Krinzinger Projeckte, Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2013 Lullaby, Andipa Gallery, London

2012 FLOOR, Museum of Contemporary Art, London

Take Two, Arts Gallery, London

Selected Group Exhibitions

2013 Why Painting, Krinzinger Projeckte, Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna

OVERT Exchange, APT Gallery, London

2012 Bursary Awards 2012, Royal British Society of Sculptors, London

Joint Ventures, Space in Between, London

I HEART 3D, Christie’s, London

Infinite Jest, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland

Oriel Davies Open, Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown, Wales

Drawing on Ideas, Royal British Society of Sculptors, London

DIFC Art Night, Cuadro Gallery, Dubai

2011 Over and over and over! Space in Between at Sluice Art Fair, London

Works in Video, Space in Between, London

The First Cut, RMIT Project Space, RMIT, Melbourne

The Explorers, Standpoint Gallery, London

Colour LIGHT Time, Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne

2010 Innovators 3, Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, Melbourne

Colour LIGHT Time, Two Rooms Gallery, Auckland

Where Beats This Human Heart, Space In Between, London

The Middle of Nowhere: Objects and Actions in the Abyss, Departure Gallery, London

Published to coincide with the exhibition:

Lullaby

William Mackrell

Andipa Contemporary, London 30.09.13-12.10.13

Printed in an edition of 300

ISBN 978 0 9568292 1 4

Text © Graham Domke

With thanks to:

Acoris Andipa

Andipa Gallery

Royal British Society of Sculptors

Graham Domke

Dundee Contemporary Arts

Angela de la Cruz

Rachel & Gregory Barker

Lloyd Anthony Barker

Darren Lucraft

Agnese Sanvito