The current editors of The London Group’s Newsletter, Nicola Schauerman and Tim Pickup (a.k.a. ‘Genetic Moo’), have introduced an online ‘Gallery’ for members into the Newsletter.  My text-and-image piece,  ‘A Timetable Aslant  : School Leavers’ Last Day’, inaugurated the ‘Gallery’ in the 2018 Autumn edition! It can be accessed at:

www.thelondongroup.com/gallery

Thanks to Jake Moulson and Heather Phillipson I have a short video (7’ 13”) of my contribution to The London Group’s open-air exhibition at Shoreham (June, 2017). I was very fortunate to be able to place my ‘objects’ in Janet and Geoff Heuston’s delightful riverside garden. The video,  ‘Michael Phillipson – objects – with The London Group at Shoreham, 2017’, is on Vimeo and  can be accessed via my member’s page at the following link:

www.thelondongroup.com/michael-phillipson/

The London Group negotiated an exhibition-exchange with the Penwith Society of Artists of St. Ives.  Penwith members exhibited  a wide range of work at the Cello Factory in March, 2018 and 76 members of The London Group are exhibiting in the Penwith Gallery during September, 2018. My contribution is ‘some time later’ (mixed media on paper, 95x76cm). A companion exhibition, ‘ The London Group – the St. Ives Connection’ (including  work by earlier members of The London Group, such as Barbara Hepworth  – a founder member of the Penwith Society –  and Terry Frost) runs concurrently.

The Waterloo Festival 2018 at St. John’s Church

June 6th – June 24th

The London Group is participating in the Waterloo Festival  with a variety of events  locally and in the grounds of St. John’s Church. Under the title ‘Nothing endures But Change’  the Group’s President,  Susan Haire, has organised and curated an open-air exhibition of ephemeral sculpture by both members and friends of the Group.  My contribution, a small but cumbersome lump of inscribed and collaged rock entitled ‘flow everlasting’, is sited on the tarmac at the rear of the Church.

Title:    …flow-everlasting…

Materials:   sandstone grit, lead, shell, water, air…

Size:  depth (from ground):  14cm. / 5 and a half inches;   width:  61cm./24”;  height: 49cm./19”

Comments:    …remembering…  J. J.’s  self-re-circling dream-wake book… fin  negans…  and its turning  point – riverrun  –  and then, the heavy, the light, the congealing,  the erosion, the dust, the disappearing, the flow-without-end, the now…

The London Group was invited to exhibit at the Linden Hall Gallery in Deal. We responded with a show open to all members. Size restrictions operated in order to accommodate the large number of members’ submissions. My contribution was a small oil painting on canvas mounted on board entitled ‘away-from-here’…

The current issue (Volume 4 Number 1) of the Journal of Contemporary Painting focuses on the relation between painting and time. The contributors, themselves mainly painters, explore a wide range of interesting questions about the ways they engage time in their diverse approaches to painting.

Shortly before he died John Berger gave permission for the journal to re-publish his provocative 1979 article ‘Painting and time’ as the issue’s ‘Archival text’. I was invited by the painter Beth Harland, an Associate Editor for the Journal, to offer a response to Berger’s piece. In the issue my text, ‘Painting untimely’, follows Berger’s re-printed article. The journal is published by ‘intellect books’  (www.intellectbooks.com).

Here is the ‘contents’ page for the issue:

Very pleased that Theo Cowley is including my ‘Art’s Body’ audio-recording , featuring Jon Thompson, in a Luxus Extension event in Brussels celebrating Jon’s life and contribution to the arts on Friday, June 30th.

Michael Phillipson/Jon Thompson, Amelia Saul/Claude Wampler, Axelle Stiefel

 Luxus Extension

Art’s Body

This event brings together works made between artists for particular contexts and in various forms of collaboration. The works deal, on some level, with what is extra, yet intrinsic to art; the pool of resources that go into its production.

Michael Phillipson’s audio work ‘Art’s Body: A Largely Sedentary Masque for Three Personae’ is a recording of a voice-text performance. Written by Michael Phillipson and performed by Michael Phillipson, Jon Thompson and Paul Filmer, during Jon Thompson’s exhibition ‘Ars Universitas by Jon Thompson’ at the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, UK in 1985.

Sadly, Jon Thompson died in 2016 while we were preparing this event. We have inserted Willem Oorebeek’s ‘Regarding the Towers of Babel by Jon Thompson’, 2006 and a silkscreen print by Jon Thompson from the above exhibition.

Axelle Stiefel’s video documents a performance intervention, one of 3 produced for a program of live video streamed performances called ‘Performance Proletarians’ at Le Magasin, Grenoble in 2014.

Claude Wampler and Amelia Saul’s performance ‘N’a pas un gramme de charisme’ was performed at The Kitchen, New York City in 2013. Amelia Saul’s ‘The Script’, 2013 is a post-performance intermission leak “from the document dropped in lieu of a programme on the heads of the audience during the day of Claude Wampler and Amelia Saul’s performance ‘N’a pas un gramme de charisme’ (The Kitchen, New York City in 2013.)”

Video and sound event, Friday 30th June, doors 7pm, starts 7.30pm prompt. No admission after.

Résidence Aviation Luchtvaartsquare 7/Square de l’Aviation 7 Brussels 1070

www.luxext.be

Delighted to be participating in The London Group’s ‘Sculpture Trail’ in the village of Shoreham on June 17^th and 18^th! Here are images of four of the nine objects I will be placing in a lovely garden bordered by the River Darenth.

‘Hybrid’ © – laburnum, lead, wood base, 25 x 10 x 11 ins            ‘Pantatonic’ © – hog weed, wood, plaster, paint, 23 x 10 x 17 ins

‘Poor Boy’ © – pitch fork, lead, wood, 17 x 19 x 8 ins              ‘We’re dicing with…’ © – (compr.), t.v., cabinet, paint, 47 x 18 x 9 ins

The catalogue for the Trail contains brief statements by the exhibiting artists. Here is mine!

Although my making always falls back on painting I like to move across a range of media. My choice of medium is project-specific. The three-dimensional objects (are they ‘sculptures’?) invariably emerge from some practical engagement with their materials. In the course of this handling they seem to propose something about their alternative potential as they fall away from usage! The vagrant materials – woods, metals, plasters, paints, machine-derivatives, whatever-at-hand –   collaborate in a resolutely useless venture. In their alludings they may gesture obliquely to the painting life which, however temporarily, they have set aside.

‘sisyphean’, (hazel, toy, paintbrush, can, 216cm x 33cm x 28cm, 2016) was my contribution to The London Group Annual Members’ Exhibition at the Cello Factory, London, October, 2016.

Alessandro Farrattini’s short documentary film about the ‘Combines’ exhibition can be seen on YouTube

Each exhibitor is showing three pieces together with a photograph. Here’s the text that I have written to accompany the exhibition, followed by images of my three exhibited pieces and my photo (‘At the Studio’s Threshold’) with its accompanying text.

RECOMBINING

“What a performance! Yes, we’re performers… of a sort…

What do we actually do? Well, er… er… we assemble things, assemble semblances. In practice we’re recombiners. We gather things up from all over the place, loosely initially, then we put them very much closer – usually – together. We try to goad them, appealing to their better and worse natures, by coaxing, nudging, and guiding – recombining we call it – ‘em into position, effectively their last resting place. ‘Just for once stick together will you for our sakes’ we say to them. We cross our fingers and hope for the best.

They have to be silent, very still and all surface. Just to be seen first of all, seen only and alone, entirely on their own as recombinant one-off surfacings. They make no appeal to any desires for the excitements of distracting movements and sounds. No subservience either to other people’s power, no electronic power or codings required to either incorporate or crack! All we, they, and any potential audience need is just enough light to attend to each recombinant’s idiosyncratic surfacing.

Like many others (Bobby Rushmount – the Mount Rushmore of recombination – was an early bird with his combine constructions of bits and pieces filched from Amsterdam’s high-and-low ways) we’ve come to recognise the ways that ‘medium’ and ‘media’ have fallen into unrescuable disrepair and, with their petty-fogging rules, are no longer ‘fit for purpose’. ‘We’ll stick with the eyes’, we said, ‘but we’ll need to abandon medium’s restricting authoritative edges by mixing things up mightily. We’ll expand and contract according to each recombinant’s shifting demands. In so doing we’ll enter rooms, spaces, times, on quite different terms. Naturally we’ll keep on drawing, painting, and object-shaping as they are absolutely intrinsic to the drive of our assembling, but, no more privileging of materials and tools!’. We’re no sloganisers of course, but maybe something like ‘Genetic Equality for all Surface Candidates!’ would fit the (our) bill.

When all’s said and done how can the in-hemming work of ‘medium’ and its plural cope with, let alone embrace, the diverse stretching and bending spatio-temporal demands and imaginative leaps engendered by art-making’s technology-stimulated multiple – installation-performance-happening-photo-film-digi-composition-textual-corporeality? To recombine on Art’s behalf is to turn the things of the world back on, into, through, and, with luck, out of that world in the hope of showing Art’s unspeakable difference to that very same world in which it finds itself perennially condemned to  drift.”

    bank of england                           flight plight                     hobbled Hermes virtually grounded

‘At the Studio’s Threshold’

Aaaaah, yes, there it is, suspended over the studio threshold itself, the abandoned still unanswered question of Art’s troubling Body! Of course, as the outside of all representation, the Body’s nowhere to be seen… but, were we to spot it over there in the far distance, way beyond culture’s deadening walls, then it would, almost certainly (perhaps), appear tremulously palindromic, self-condemned to turn back and forth without end through its un-self – a drifting swarm of disturbingly delightful congealing-collapsing fragments searching for its own life-support machine – trauma embodied (well, almost)…