Interlude - A series of curated summer exhibitions: Baghdad / Space Cog / Analyst

Regarding that line in 'Guest Informant' – it’s probably anybody’s guess, really, but I found the following (which you may well have seen already) on one of the Fall lyric sites: “[ This line, a topic of much contention, is as according to Sean Russell, who wrote on 14 Feb., 1996: “I wrote to Cog Sinister with a pile of questions, one of them being what the hell Brix was saying [in “Guest Informant”]. Lucy [Rimmer] wrote back and said she asked Brix, who said the phrase was “Baghdad/Space Cog/Analyst”.” So I’d guess you are right. By strange co-incidence, The Fall are playing at the Dome in Morecambe tomorrow night...

 

– Michael Bracewell, email to Andrew Renton, 25 March 2008

Frith Street Gallery is pleased to announce the first in a series of yearly exhibitions under the title Interlude which will be organised by a specially invited curator.

Baghdad/Space Cog/Analyst, celebrates a strong physicality in the manifestation of the works on show. The exhibition does not pursue a theme or organising structure – what might connect the works by these four artists is their making visible the processes of making – often with a ‘hand-made’ sensibility – and also making visible the journeys that works make as they come to be seen.

These journeys are literally exercises in covering distance, trawling through art or political history, or even the strangeness of materials as they are appropriated from one context to another.

Eugenio Dittborn has been making Airmail Paintings since 1984. Once out of pragmatic necessity, the work marks the sum of its journeys as it travels to and from Santiago. Diango Hernández sees most of his work as an exercise in staging the act of drawing. My Propaganda, My Drawings, for example, appropriates Soviet materials and those of his native Cuba, combined with his own drawings. João Onofre in video, photography and drawing, engages in recent art histories, particularly conceptual practice and reinvests them with a banality of remaking and acting out a conceptual logic to the point of beauty and absurdity combined. Black on black drawings of a line from Roxy Music or Swarovski studded drawings that offer a negative counterpoint to Boetti’s Afghan tapestries. Gabriel Kuri pulls disparate elements together to form an object that is both social and formal critique. Improbably materials combine to elevate the overlooked and frame unarticulated social conventions.

The exhibition takes its title from a line in a song by the Fall, Guest Informant. Although the song is ostensibly written by Mark E Smith, the opening line is chanted by his then wife, Brix. He claims not to know what the line actually says. Fall fans have debated this line for years. It’s clear that the line as we have it is almost certainly wrong, and that something is always lost in translation as it is transmitted from one person or place to the next.