ON ON/Protest Apathy
Toby Huddleston
For Toby Huddlestone’s second large-scale/significant solo show, he presents two exhibitions spread over the separate floors of Outlet’s temporary city centre space.
ON ON, located as you enter the space on the ground floor outlines some of Huddlestone’s recent studio practice, indicating an ontology of time and action/activity. Here, he presents work that takes as its inspiration several differing elements of time and processes relating to it.
In The Technician Years he investigates ‘taken-time’, which is essentially time that is taken away from his own practice in order to earn money and work for other artists and organisations building and co-ordinating their exhibitions and projects. In a circular action, he takes the original flyers from these projects and reworks them as art-objects; small sculptures and 2D works that sit chronologically spanning the last 5 years. He takes something back, not only by creating a physical body of work but also reclaims some of the taken-time and churns it back into the studio as his own.
While this work catalogues Huddlestone’s activity away from his practice, he also presents work that catalogues key moments within it; activity that indicates a departure from the studio, showing his ongoing interest in intervention and processes more related to where he finds himself, but also allowing us to see that much of the creative contribution to an artist’s practice happens when seeing other exhibitions and attending previews. Actions in Galleries and Openings T-shirt (here worn by the artist at the opening then by the invigilators for the remainder of the show) both show the artist cashing in on research by making work from it. This could be considered ‘economic-time’ whereby the artist profits from a seemingly ordinary exhibition visit, taking as much from seemingly nothing.
Walking the same as people also touches on economic-time, but probably is better summed up as investigating ‘non-time’ (in relation to Marc Auge’s anthropological ‘non-place’), as the artist takes his action outside of the gallery context and tirelessly tracks commuters side by side on their usual commute towards work, a space and time understood as ordered, with its own rules, rules not to be tampered with. The artist recognises these, but wishes to probe and tamper anyway.
This taking from nothing, or more precisely, gaining something from negation is a reflection on ‘down-time’ and forms the basis of Rejection Letter Strategy, where Huddlestone has sent back all his rejection letters to all the selectors he has applied for artistic opportunity and failed, over the years since 2004. The question: WHICH IS MY BEST ARTWORK AND WHICH IS MY WORST? (STRAIGHT ANSWERS PLEASE WITH NO EXPLANATION) is typed directly onto the original rejection letter and sent with a covering letter to the relevant organisation/selector along with a SAE for return back to the artist. Down-time also inspires his ongoing series of Rants, which cover a diverse array of topics underlying thinking into why he is an artist, his disgust in certain art-world choreographers and other elements of this world that really piss him off.
The title of the show brings reference to the proximity recognised by Huddlestone to the work of 1960’s conceptual artist On Kawara, most notable for his date paintings cataloguing his artistic activity. In this ongoing work of which he has made over 2000 paintings, if he does not finish by the stroke of midnight the work is destroyed. Most days he does not make any, referring to Huddlestone’s idea of an artist always working, without a need for distinction between art and life. This does not necessarily mean making, but the philosophical and conceptual processes always at work as demonstrated in many of the works exhibited.
PROTEST APATHY downstairs is the documentation and gathering of archival evidence of an event of the same name that took place on 27 June 2009 in Trafalgar Square in London. Deriving from the artist’s own theory of a post-90’s internalised subversion; where one must puncture systems from (seemingly) the inside in order to articulate new philosophical and political structures, rather than the older more out-dated mode of sticking two-fingers up to authority in order to get your message across, Protest Apathy was an attempt at constructing and carrying out a demonstration that could not be nullified by the authorities.
An edition of 100 newspapers were distributed to both recruits and non-recruits (to the event) in Trafalgar Square on the day. Each newspaper contained nine apathetic protest slogans such as ‘NOTHING TO COMPLAIN ABOUT’, ‘EVERYTHING IS OK’, ‘CARRY ON’, ‘ALL IS FINE’, etc. that were given to people on the day. There were envisaged tools for political proclamation.
The documentation takes the form of video, photographic and also a fictional log of where the newspapers ended up written by the artist and his fellow artist-friends who helped out on the day. These will be available to visitors during the exhibition.
