Two new books launched by Art on the Underground
Date uploaded: September 12, 2012
One Thing Leads to Another - Everything is Connected and Central Line Series
Launch Wednesday 3rd October 2012, 7pm
Whitechapel Gallery
Art on the Underground in association with Black Dog Publishing are delighted to announce the launch of two new books ― Central Line Series and One Thing Leads to Another – Everything is Connected ― documenting past and ongoing temporary commissions that took place on the Central and Jubilee lines. The publications are part of a collection that will eventually comprise the commissions for all Tube lines.
Central Line Series presents five projects commissioned and produced from 2009 to 2012 that draw on themes of communication and exchange: Michael Landy’s Acts of Kindness (2011) that galvanised over 700 commuters to share the stories of their experiences of kindness on the Tube; artist Ruth Ewan, composer Kerry Andrew and poet Evlynn Sharp who worked with forty members of Laburnam Boat Club youth project to produce A LOCK IS A GATE (2011), an album of experimental songs, a book of drawings, posters for the Central line and artwork for Bethnal Green Tube station; Anna Barham’s WHITE CITY (2012), a series of text and video works accessed through QR codes embedded in posters; and Alice Channer’s Hard Metal Body (2012) at Notting Hill Tube station comprised detailed imprints of elastic waistbands from clothing.
Also included in the publication is the Central line’s current collaboration between Bob and Roberta Smith and Tim Newton at Stratford station. Their film, Who is Community? (2012) imagines a meeting between the founder of the modern Olympic Games, Pierre de Coubertin and the German theorist Hannah Arendt, exploring ideas of community and freedom in public space in the context of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Central Line Series also contains a rich consortium of specially commissioned essays, explanatory texts and colour installation photographs, video stills, drawings and illustrations. Mark Pagel, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Reading and author of Wired for Culture, 2012 writes on the theme of language; Federico Campagna, a political and literary activist takes up the theme of community, and a reprinted text by Kazys Varnelis, Director of the Network Architecture Lab at Columbia University reflects upon shifting patterns of communication and notions of public space in the digital era.
One Thing Leads to Another – Everything is Connected brings together the commissioned artworks and associated events created for the 30th anniversary of the Jubilee line. Presented in 2010 and 2011, the projects explored “the value of time”, London Underground’s core ethic. Richard Long’s work―that titled the series and launched the commissions―was a photograph of a spectacular mountain scene through which he had walked, overlaid with text; and as a limited edition print given away to thousands of Tube travellers. Jubilee line customer daydream survey was Daria Martin’s inquiry into how people occupy their time on the Underground; photographer Nadia Bettega gave Brent Youth Inclusion Programme five days to invent and inhabit fictional personas which became photographic portraits; Goldsmiths Art Writing MFA students gave Tube customers a way to occupy their time in Timepieces, a booklet of new writing and drawings. With a thirty year duration, John Gerrard’s Oil Stick Work (Angelo Martinez / Richfield, Kansas) 2008 in the ticket hall of Canary Wharf station, was a 24-hour digital moving-image work depicting painstaking labour undertaken in a post-industrial American landscape. At Stratford, Matt Stokes’ The Stratford Gaff: A Serio-Comick-Bombastick-Operatick Interlude was a multi-channel film encompassing a series of fleeting acts by local performers, relating to the area’s history of popular entertainment; and in Linear, Dryden Goodwin’s series of drawings and films were portraits of Jubilee line staff that appeared at exhibition sites, posters and on advertising screens.
One Thing Leads to Another – Everything is Connected also features newly commissioned essays on the history of the Jubilee line by David Rooney, Curator of Transport at the Science Museum, London and a fictional piece responding to the notion of time, travel and the city, by writer, editor and publisher Matthew Stadler. Also included is information on each artist’s project, their practice and process, with installation images.
The books will be launched at Whitechapel Gallery on 3rd October at 7pm at which Central Line Series contributor Mark Pagel will give a lecture.
For further information please contact Janette Scott Arts PR, on [email protected] or +44(0)7966 486156.
