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Artist Cally Spooner is joined by Antonia Blocker, Curator: Public Programmes, to discuss art that adopts the language of its own production as its content.
Using her forthcoming film and Christopher Williams’ exhibition as reference points, the conversation reflects on how sites and mechanisms of production on an industrial scale, such as the film studio, can be rendered into an artistic output, such as an image.
The discussion considers what it means to both adopt and outsource the processes of such structures, and whether this creates the potential for alternative aesthetic conventions.
Cally Spooner (b. 1983, lives and works in London) is a writer and an artist. Using theory, philosophers, pop music, current affairs and corporate rhetoric as alibis to write, and casts of arguing characters to help her perform, Spooner produces plotless novellas, disjunctive scripts, looping monologues and musical arrangements to stage the automation of speech, outsourced subjectivity, mutated human resources and the short-circuiting of language as it transforms into labour. Appropriating different performance genres such as the Broadway musical, the television commercial and the radio play as both a form and a reference, Spooner considers how dematerialized, indeterminate, unmediated performance, can sit within the extreme visibility of entertainment and today’s attention economies.
Spooner has had recent solo presentations and performances at gb agency Paris, Zero Gallery Milan; Kunstverein Bielefelder, Frieze Film, London, Tate Modern, London; Performa 13, New York and Kunsthal Charlottenburg, Copenhagen. Recent group exhibitions at KW Institute, Berlin; Frieze Sounds, New York, Serpentine Gallery, London; Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover and Kunstverein Munchen, Munich. Spooner has recently completed a production residency at EMPAC (Experimental Media and Performing Arts Centre) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. She is a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists 2013.
