PRESS RELEASE: feel free comments, suggest edits, question, critique, or compliment

Domestic Detail

An exhibition of very personal work by Audrey Williams and Sung Tieu

Preview: 25 May, 6-9pm

Open the following weekend and evenings by appointment

Did you know: Audrey Hepburn helped raise funds for the Dutch Resistance through silent dance performances?

And in 1944, like many Dutch citizens, she was forced to grind tulip bulbs to make flour for bread during the Hunger Winter?

The resulting malnutrition was what gave her her 20in waist.^[a]

It also caused anaemia, jaundice, asthma and other acute afflictions throughout her life. And the woman who longed far more for a large, stable family than for film stardom endured two divorces and four miscarriages – and kept smiling.

Late April 2018: Sung compliments the eyes in Audrey’s paintings. Muddling words, Audrey replies they are ‘the soul of the windows’. I imagine the soul of the windows spends a lot of time indoors. Like Audrey when her bones ache in damp cold. Unless you need something from outside, maybe a snack or to meet me in a coffee shop to show the way to your living room-cum-studio, you can stay at home and paint. Usually painting around four works a day. Sometimes adding the new canvases to the stacks of accumulated works before they are quite dry. So the paint peels when Sung and me pry them apart to see the many versions of Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, other popular culture icons incongruous amongst the less recognisable portraits of figureheads of Black history.

At Audrey’s school library, Black history was limited to one book on the transatlantic slave trade. She thought “we aren’t just that” so she found Louise Marie Thérèse, Lewis Latimer, Sonni Ali, Mary Seacole, Joseph Boulogne, Frances Barber, Queen Nefertiti… all of whom she’s excavated for us from amongst the Marilyns and Audreys, a Storm from the X-Men she painted for her adult son, big cats, small cats, giraffes, a man we like to call Mr. John Lewis (one of the founders of the department store where Audrey once worked), abstractions of Maasai warriors… Her chosen materials range from acrylics to glitter and rice, dried lentils, sunflower seeds... Many of her subjects become genderless and futuristic, every subject with a sparkling, head-on stare. I am looking at the mechanics of a soul, rather than the windows. I wonder if Audrey could be the A.I. invented to put artists out of work. I tell her when I see them I feel like this might be the future, and everything's going to be ok. She knows this is a compliment and glows a “thank you!”. Audrey Williams has passed the Turing test for now.  

She describes herself in the same terms during the car journey delivering her paintings to the show. She tells me she has some pain in her hand from painting Martin Luther King Jr. into the early hours of the morning: “the robot won’t stop… but the robots got to stop because she’s tired!” After charming a tour of patrons our friends Emalin Gallery are showing around the area, she heads home to nap.

After she mentions an exhibition she took part in at the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust, I remind Audrey we’ll need to put together a CV for this press release: Audrey Williams (b. 1951, London, UK) paints for herself, it’s not work.

“We all have dreams and this is mine.” This line reoccurs when she writes about her painting.

1963: Betty Friedan published Feminine Mystique. Now, for all its problems, the text  has a certain retro charm. She would be the first to tell us the world she wrote from is in the past, a time when “it was unquestioned gospel that women could identify with nothing beyond the home—not politics, not art, not science, not events large or small, war or peace, in the United States or the world, unless it could be approached through female experience as a wife or mother or translated into domestic detail!”

To Friedan ‘domestic’ is not a space, it was something specific, insignificant, done in private but nothing personal. And in being all that, it was an oxymoron of sorts. Or a negation. The antithesis of politics, art, science.

Domestic policy refers to admin decisions applied within the fraught arbitrary lines of a nation. The policy of the home to our anonymous family. Domestic policy covers a wide range of areas, including business, education, energy, healthcare, law enforcement, money and taxes, natural resources, social welfare, and personal rights and freedoms.

The minutia of putting in place. The furniture of living, the fixtures of chaos, the still life of politics. At the immigrant detention centre, the police station, the office, the hospital, inland revenue, the power plant, the museum, the job centre. We lean on it at best, (perhaps) avoid it if we’re lucky. It's something we know intimately but can never really fuck (with/up).

Sung writes to me: “I made a bed for the show also.... so that can go on the wall. The bed looks like the table and metal chair. I can bring it and we see how it goes during install?

I am back here in Vietnam with my family and remembered the scene I shot of my aunties praying for me in my grandpa's living room... maybe that video work could be shown on a square TV monitor? Have you seen it yet? It's the No Gods, No Masters video. I thought it could work quite well with Audrey's somewhat spiritual paintings... also following no masters but her own intuition. And I am thinking whether to write this article or not... but I guess that would be all the ideas I have so far…”

“No Gods, No Masters is exquisite.” I reply. We back and forth about ways of creating a domestic scene in this hallway.

Talking about Sung’s work it’s inappropriate somehow to use terms like ‘motif’ and ‘theme’. Sung has been including what’s dubbed Ghost Tape Nr. 10 in her recent artworks.  “When Ghost Tape Nr. 10 was recorded at the end of the 1960s as part of “Operation Wandering Soul”, spirituality had been weaponized as part of the US war machine.^[b] Psychological Operation’s (PSYOP) objective is to induce or reinforce behaviour favourable to US strategic targets. The tactic was to tap into deep beliefs of the Vietnamese people to decrease the enemy’s morale. A tape was recorded, using Vietnamese actors, to compose a 4-min sound piece that would confront the Vietcong of their anxiously wandering souls once killed in war. The spiritual anchor for the tape lies in the Vietnamese tradition that dead relatives should be buried close to their ancestors, as it is believed that their souls would otherwise never be left in peace, but wander the Earth restlessly in a kind of eternal, terrestrial Hell.”

The sinister creativity of American PSYOP’s was what capture Sung’s attention. The theme perhaps: the psychology of psyops. With this frame, the soundtrack doesn’t feel to be in such stark contrast to Sung’s scenes shot, at her family  home in Hai Duong, that - in inverted colours - initiate us viewers into No Gods, No Monsters.

She told me once “I’m German so I’m allowed to be serious”. It’s a stiff virtue and a curse of the German art scene, simultaneously freezing people out and in, holding on and getting stuck.

I first hear about Audrey at the Peckham Jobcentre. Where my job coach and I chat about politics for the hour time slot I’m assigned to search for work in. I’m unemployed whilst waiting for a DBS check to clear so we have nothing else to do. She tells me her friend started painting as she recovered from cancer. Now she’s addicted to art. When she calls to congratulate me on starting work, I ask to studio visit the Audrey the art addict. She tells me she was thinking the exact same thing.

Audrey happens to live on the same street in Streatham as Gaby Sahhar, the previous artist exhibited at Play-Co and my good friend.

Today (May 15) I find out Audrey’s mother and me share a birthday. It’s tomorrow (May 26).

[These statements turn out to be fake news]^[c]

More or less about the cosmos and more about cleaning: Elvia Wilk’s essay The Grammar of Work.

“In Miwon Kwon’s 1997 analysis, a lot of male institutional critique of the time aimed to ‘mess up’ the white cube, only for those same critics to be enfolded into the embrace of the institution once again. They had the luxury of critique as a form of exit, because they’d always be invited back. Instead, afforded no such luxury, [Mierle Laderman] Ukeles opted to stay and help clean up the mess.  

As Ukeles points out [...] repetitive acts of maintenance looked a lot like what male conceptual artists were doing – but they got to do it in service of art/progress, whereas, say, their wives and assistants were doing it in service of them (of him). Who does maintenance? Workers. Who does progress? Artists. [...] ‘after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?’”1

When the institution is the home of somebody it’s hard not to be fond of, does critique becomes a playful joke or a testing conversation^[d]? A day to day difficulty becomes an inconsequential detail, forgotten, ignored, ironed out [...] Does Ed clean up the mess^[e][f][g]?

To quote Audrey “We all have dreams and this is mine.”

Anyway, this isn’t, can’t and won’t be “institutional critique”. It’s the home of some bodies. It’d be highly inappropriate to stage a revolution in your mate’s front room. What’s more, who’d care? So, no revolution.

These are the toughest institutions to crack: the home, friendship, family, networks, the inside of our own heads, where everyone is trying their best (we hope). Do do we make something so small that it is insignificant, or easier to keep in check? The minutiae where change won’t matter/can happen.  

In exhibition, art becomes something we all stand for, like a police officer’s uniform with its deliberate aesthetic anonymity. A detail of domestic policy. ^[h]

 (I hope/hate that) we can’t be reminded of the police without thinking of brutality.

So what do I do if I can’t clean up (this act)? Curators often remind themselves their job description is that of a caretaker, to take care.^[i][j] When All Welcome was my studio/home in Vilnius, Lithuania, I spent a significant amount of time cleaning. Between shows, during shows, installing shows. The labour is not the work. Do politicians evade questions for a living? Yes and no. Could your five year old do that? Is it art? Is a robot or a kid (or an immigrant) going to steal my job? Perhaps what Betty Friedan called domestic is a gesture no greater than the sum of its parts. The anti-performative, performed.

Perhaps the best we can do is try our best to stay accountable. I’ve never liked the connotations of a ‘gallery’, those glorified luxury goods shops. But in practice- you get what they’re selling for free (whether you want it or not). I prefer the term ‘open studio’, and luckily this is one.

Perhaps what separates the craft of psychological warfare from that of art making is [...]  intention, affect, intended affect. Is this a kind of refusal to be accountable for our actions? Because there’s no need to be [...] until there is. So back to work, my job here is to take care of things.

Perhaps my role here is to hype up, not clean up. To tell you how good and interesting these two artists are, to explain something to you, to show you in. Well: they are, how’d I do?, welcome home^[k]!  

Sung Tieu (b. 1987, Hai Duong, Vietnam) studied International Relations before turning to Fine Art. She is currently finishing her studies at the Royal Academy Schools. Having immigrated to Germany in the 1990s, as a post-effect of the Vietnam War, her work has looked at “how migrants create lives in their new homes. Through the Soviet connection, North Vietnamese people could come here as contract labourers. But after reunification, people lost their jobs and were left in a legal grey zone, not knowing whether they would be sent back or whether they could stay. Since many couldn’t get work permits, they opened their own businesses that were inexpensive to start up, such as flower shops or nail salons.” (2016)

Another title for this exhibition could be Open House.

Another one The Soul of the Windows.

A text from Audrey on 22 May: “Interesting Facts

Harry and Meghan married on the birthday of the first Black Queen of England. [...]

Princess Sophie Charlotte was born May 19, 1744. [...]

Charlotte was the eighth child of the Prince of Mirow, Germany, Charles Louis Frederick, and his wife, Elisabeth Albertina of Saxe-Hildburghausen. In 1752, when she was eight years old, Sophie Charlotte's father died. As princess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Sophie Charlotte was descended directly from an African branch of the Portuguese Royal House, Margarita de Castro y Sousa. Six different lines can be traced from Princess Sophie Charlotte back to Margarita de Castro y Sousa. She married George III of England on September 8, 1761, at the Chapel Royal in St James’s Palace, London, at the age of 17 years of age becoming the Queen of England and Ireland.

Queen Charlotte was the great great-great grandmother of the present Queen Elizabeth II who lives in Buckingham Palace.”

She quickly adds “also Malcolm X’s bday…”

Smiling.

The Raft Is Not the Shore.

Organised by All Welcome (me, Jasmine Picot-Chapman) at Play-Co, the home-studio of Ed Fornieles, with the invaluable support of Tamara Hart.

Citations: 1 bell hooks articulates this in terms of her personal lack of connection Freidan’s theory ‘I felt myself included in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, one of the first [Paulo] Freire books I read, in a way that I never felt myself— in my experience as a rural black person—included in the first feminist books I read, works like The Feminine Mystique and Born Female. In the United States we do not talk enough about the way in which class shapes our perspective on reality. Since so many of the early feminist books really reflected a certain type of white bourgeois sensibility, this work did not touch many black women deeply; not because we did not recognize the common experiences women shared, but because those commonalities were mediated by profound differences in our realities created by the politics of race and class.’ (from Teaching to Transgress) 2 The Grammar of Work, published by Frieze on 23 March 2018  3 Quotes/references from Sung Tieu: ‘Ghosts of the American Psyche Let the Serpent In’ in Pavillion Magazine,  and a 2016 interview with Amanda Ribas Tugwell for ExBerliner

This exhibition would not be possible without Andree Blake and Gaby Sahhar.

Thanks to everyone who edited this document (add your name!): Petero Kalule, Tamara Hart, Stefania Batoeva, Sung Tieu, Nhung Walsh, Elvia Wilk, Housmans bookshop.