NUMBERSTREAM | Soundtracks to Noriko Okaku 360-Degree Animations

Animations by Noriko Okaku responding to 360-degree positioning of your mobile device (iPhone, iPad, etc) using the YouTube app* :


From Where You Are III
animation by Noriko Okaku, sound NUZ JET LAG by Julian Simmons


From Where You Are II
animation by Noriko Okaku, sound THE SLIDER by Julian Simmons


( *if viewing in a browser rather than the YouTube app on a mobile device, reactive 360-degree is not possible. Some browsers such as Chrome allow the sphere to be investigated manually by dragging the mouse pointer )

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I’VE GOT THE BALLS | Berlin Screening | 16 January 2019


 

Premiere screening : Charlottenburg Berlin : 16th January 2019 : 8pm

Location : Delphi-Lux

Details + Reserve Your Seat !!! : Contemporary Fine Arts

 


 

UNSEEN TRIPLE-BILL SANDWICH > 16 January 2019, 8pm, BERLIN :

1. I’VE GOT THE BALLS, filmed in Mexico City, 28 minutes.

2. LIVESTREAM FACETIME CONVERSATION : UK KITCHEN <> BERLIN CINEMA, Sarah Lucas & Julian Simmons naked with CFA, anything might happen, 30 minutes.

3. TAPED-UP, filmed in London, 44 minutes.

 


 

PRESS RELEASE :

Contemporary Fine Arts is pleased to present Julian Simmons & Sarah Lucas: I’ve Got the Balls, a screening and livestream interview at the Delphi Lux Theatre on Wednesday, January 16 at 8pm. On the occasion of the final week of Sarah Lucas’ New Museum retrospective Au Naturel, which will travel to Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum this summer, CFA will screen two of Lucas’ performances as documented by filmmaker and Lucas’ partner Julian Simmons. Between screenings of I’ve Got the Balls (30 mins, Kurimanzutto, Mexico City, filmed 2018) and Taped-Up (44 mins, Venice Biennale, filmed 2017), Lucas and Simmons will be present via livestream from their Suffolk kitchen.

Curators Massimiliano Gioni and Margot Norton sum up the stretch of Lucas’ significance in the introduction to their New Museum exhibition: “Over the past thirty years, Lucas has created a distinctive and provocative body of work that subverts traditional notions of gender, sexuality, and identity. Since the late 1980s, Lucas has transformed found objects and everyday materials such as cigarettes, vegetables, and stockings into absurd and confrontational tableaux that boldly challenge social norms. The human body and anthropomorphic forms recur throughout Lucas’s works, often appearing erotic, humorous, fragmented, or reconfigured into fantastical anatomies of desire. Initially associated with a group known as the Young British Artists (YBAs), who began exhibiting together in London in the late 1980s, Lucas is now one of the UK’s most influential artists.”

Much of Sarah Lucas’ work, and her collaboration with Julian Simmons, begins in the kitchen. A place for gathering and the domain of the eggs that are crucial to her practice, it becomes a natural setting for developing ideas. Lucas’ Penetralia series, based on casting erect penises, began in the kitchen. Simmons recalls: “One winter when the heating oil ran out and the oil truck couldn’t get down the iced-up track, we fired up a neglected Rayburn stove in the kitchen, shut the doors, got really hot, stripped off, I slapped my nob on the table, and Sarah started making a mould with plaster bandage.” Who knows what might happen as Lucas and Simmons open up their kitchen to the Delphi Lux audience.

I’ve Got the Balls captures the Women’s Egg Throwing Event Lucas enacted at Kurimanzutto, Mexico City in 2018. Lucas has used eggs in her work since her 1969 Self Portrait with Fried Eggs, where she engaged questions of femininity and fertility, playing with a fried egg boobs motif. Sarah first brought female friends and collaborators together to lob 1000 eggs at gallery walls at CFA over Easter 2017 and most recently at the New Museum opening. Drawing upon the Pagan fertility rite of egg throwing in Spring, which later evolved into Christian Easter, Lucas’ egg throws are performances of self-actualization and solidarity. They are also a great time. Simmons’ film captures the egg throw in its meticulous preparation and joyful execution, revelling in the slow drip of yolky yellows.

In Taped-Up, Lucas is duct taped to a chair as she discusses her then-upcoming 2015 Venice Biennale Pavilion with art critic Louisa Buck. With one hand mobile to facilitate smoking and drinking, Lucas’ inhibited posture personifies a play with power integral to her practice. In her catalogue essay No Excuses for the Au Naturel retrospective, Maggie Nelson writes: “One thing is for certain: Lucas’s work enacts and shares in power. “Power. The word keeps coming up,” Olivia Laing wrote in a 2015 profile. “Lucas is aware that she possesses it herself, both as an artist and a person.” Perhaps that is what Lucas means when she says she believes in “beyond feminism.” Not that feminism didn’t or doesn’t have to do with power. But it’s easy to slip into presuming that power is only out there, something to be wielded against you, something on the horizon to struggle dourly toward. How to be alive – and even more alive – to the power we already have? How to make good pervy use of it how to not let it turn against you, how to stay on its pulse?” Lucas and Simmons certainly answer.

This is the first movie theatre screening and livestream interview CFA has hosted. It is an experiment we hope will broaden access to Lucas and Simmons’ work and power!

 

REALIDAD | screening at kurimanzutto

SHOWING IN MEXICO

17 MARCH – 7 APRIL 2018

KURIMANZUTTO, RAFAEL REBOLLAR 94, SAN MIGUEL CHAPULTEPEC 11850, MÉXICO D.F.


REALIDAD | SARAH LUCAS Y AMIGOS EN MÉXICO a film by Julian Simmons

A month in Mexico with British artist Sarah Lucas

72 minutes


‘The documentary REALIDAD accompanies the exhibition DAME ZERO at kurimanzutto. The film shows the original journey made by the artist to Oaxaca in 2012, in the company of friends, for the making of her first exhibition in Mexico, NUDS in Anahuacalli.

REALIDAD is not an art documentary; in fact, there is not much ‘making of art’ implicit in the filming, since the documentary does not seek to interfere with the creative impetus of the artist. It is an intimate portrait, somewhat social, where the various ‘actors’ move between drunken states caused by the consumption of mezcal. The documentary is basically that : Sarah Lucas in mezcálicos trances.

Which leads me to the first question I asked myself : what do international artists see in Mexico that brings them back? – and I think it is this ritualisation, this capacity, that daily life has – to impregnate itself with a total spiritual essence — an influence also found in the pre-Hispanic cultures that gave form to the first Mexican ideologies and a consequence of baroque thought that eventually curdled into a national ideal that was responsible for making the Mexican world a dictionary of symbols – ready to be read.

The documentary, in conjunction with Lucas’s exhibition at kurimanzutto, made me think of the journey across Mexico of the British Malcolm Lowry in the first quarter of the last century — also driven by a self-destructive momentum, where he channeled transcendental experiences with the (excessive) consumption of mezcal; experiences that were aphorised and published in his novel ‘Under the Volcano’ of 1947.

There is, in the reading of Lucas (and of Lowry) about Mexico something of a voyage to an unfathomable depth, something of a transit to an unearthly world, a space of symbols and representations, where death occupies a primordial place in the reading of reality.

Imagine a journey to Mictlán [the Aztec underworld], mediated, seen from afar, an ordinary glimpse of what transcends our physical experience of the world, evidenced by our self-destructive impetus, our constant – and foolish – need to self-destruct’  …this is DAME ZERO and REALIDAD.

Translated from the article A trip to the underworld with Sarah Lucas; DAME ZERO at kurimanzutto’
by Javier Villaseñor V. in CÓDIGO

TOWER – NUMBERSTREAM0 – digital download

Listen to the album + download > TOWER

TOWER album music Julian Simmons

Classical guitar + Tin whistle into Pure-Data >

PD NUMBERSTREAM programming > mathematic synthetic-sound generation & real-time microphone signal-processing.

Recorded in a c.1800 military tower 10 metres from the North Sea.  7 tracks, 63 minutes.

NUMBERSTREAM THE SLIDER | BBC Radio 3 Private Passions

Private Passions - NUMBERSTREAM THE SLIDER - Julian Simmons

“It’s like finding yourself outside at night…  in front of the heavens…  and the whole of reality drops away”,
Sarah Lucas describing ‘THE SLIDER’.

 


 

THE SLIDER is one of ten pieces of music chosen by Sarah Lucas for BBC Radio 3’s programme Private Passions, broadcast 5 February 2017.

 


 

“You remind me of Julian Bream, though less demonic!”, Sarah Lucas in conversation with Michael Berkeley.

 


 

Read more : THE SLIDER

 

BBC Radio 3 page :  Private Passions [shortened broadcast]

Art-Athina 2016 | 26-29 May | Κλειστό Π. Φαλήρου (TaeKwonDo)

Stand B2

Paul Stolper Gallery is proud to present works by Damien Hirst, Don Brown, Julian Simmons*, Mit Senoj, Peter Blake and Pablo Genovés

*HOOLIAN sculpture by Sarah Lucas, photographed and printed by Julian Simmons, limited edition of 6

*SQUAB SQUAW, portrait of Sarah Lucas with pigeon by Julian Simmons, special order print

Faliro Pavilion – Tae Kwon Do Hall, Poseidonos Avenue
Palaio Faliro, 17564 Athens, Greece

Visitor Information

For artwork enquiries, please contact rachel@paulstolper.com

NUMBERSTREAMEGGY | Quad Concert | Albergo Diurno Venezia – Milan

QUAD SURROUND-SOUND CONCERT

Date : Saturday 9 April 2016, from 8pm [several 15 minute movements each with a short interval]
Location : the subterranean ‘Metropolitan Daytime Hotel’ – Albergo Diurno Venezia – piazza Oberdan, Milano, Italy
Admission : free, booking required; bookings available from 29 March 2016


NUMBERSTREAM live string physical-modelling + splicing hand-drawn wavetables :
instruments constructed from mathematically generated sounds built by Simmons’s within Pure Data


“Simmons’s rarely performs public concerts. When he does they’re in quad …an insistence it seems – sound described sculpturally in the round.
I suspect there’s a subversive manifesto here: we’ve become over-familiar with orchestras, bands and solo performers being the centre of attention – up front; move closer, retreat or turn your back to them – and their sound.
Here within the quad NUMBERSTREAM, you – the listener, are at the centre, there’s no getting away from that – getting away from yourself!
…and not just being an inescapable focus of the sound-field, but in an abstract dimension the centre of a psycho-somatic and dare I say it a psychedelic, visual structure: Simmons’s NUMBERSTREAM works on you, creating perceptions, as if with rapid-prototyping lasers that accrete intricate solid objects floating within other objects, in a room of liquid resin.”

#impressive #sound at #Albergo Diurno during @miartMilano‘, GRANPALAZZO ‎@granpalazzo.


Supported by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi and coinciding with MIART art fair, part of a 3-day Sarah Lucas situation – INNAMEMORABILIAMUMBUM

Details and Booking

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POWER IN WOMAN – SARAH LUCAS | Sir John Soane’s Museum

Sarah Lucas sculptures now showing at Sir John Soane’s Museum London, 10 March – 21 May 2016

8 postcard print set and z-fold leaflet photographs & design by Julian Simmons, get yours at Sir John Soane’s Museum

 

MICHELE by Sarah Lucas, in front of J.M.W. Turner’s swashbuckling painting ‘VAN TROMP’S BARGE ENTERING THE TEXEL’
& above that Sir John Soane’s ‘DESIGN FOR A MONUMENT TO H.R.H. THE DUKE OF YORK’

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SARAH LUCAS – I SCREAM DADDIO | film now in FullHD

Sarah Lucas - Venice - I SCREAM DADDIO film still12To celebrate Sarah Lucas’s 6 month exhibition in the Venice Biennale, I’ve just re-published the I SCREAM DADDIO film of Sarah talking about her new works now in 1080 FullHD (you may have seen it via the British Council on YouTube in 720 HD).

So watch it now in vivid detail and with high-quality encoding on Vimeo…

I SCREAM DADDIO

be sure to hit the full-screen button – lower-right of the player.


Clips are featured on BBC2’s 12/2/2016 edition of Artsnight [ripped low-res from youtube]; go to Vimeo for the FHD original  ‘I SCREAM DADDIO’.


In 2016 I will be presenting a new 90+ minute 4K/UHD film on the run-up to this Venice exhibition – the making of the sculptures and other classic eggy capers. As part of miart 2016, previously unseen extracts were screened via two projectors in the Albergo Diurno Venezia, Milan, 8 – 10 April 2016.

To be premiered in London, stay tuned for venue details.

BLACK MILK | Book Signing | 12 Dec 12-2pm

BLACK MILK : atlas & catalogue of 11 Orbicular Drawings, published to coincide with the exhibition NOW JULIAN SIMMONS

I will be signing books in the exhibition

12 December 2015, 12 – 2pm

Lychee One, 38-50 Pritchards Rd, London E2 (brightly coloured warehouse, bell : LYCHEE ONE)

…see you there!

BLACK MILK cover - Julian Simmons 2015

30.6 x 23.7 cm | £20
55 photographs, 5 diagrams | 12,000 words | 72 pages – Fedrigoni paper | Ultra-dark ‘graphite’ ink | Softback – Fedrigoni grey card
Privately published 2015 | 1st edition – limited copies | Artworks, photographs, text : Julian Simmons

Publication : BLACK MILK

Exhibition until 22 December : NOW JULIAN SIMMONS

Gallery : Lychee One, 38-50 Pritchards Rd, London E2.  Tues-Sat 12-6pm.  Bell: Lychee One.

NOW JULIAN SIMMONS | Top-Ten London Contemporary Art Show

MILKY2 MAGNIFICATION - NOW Julian Simmons - Lychee OnePaul Carey-Kent’s – CHOICES UP NOW – top-ten London contemporary art show :

‘Julian Simmons is best known for the films and photographs he has produced with – and of the work of – his partner, Sarah Lucas.

Here he asserts himself through eleven intensely detailed meditative graphite drawings of concentric circles (if that doesn’t sound terribly assertive, consider that the biggest has a diameter of ten feet).

Their resounding lineations conjure enlightenment, itinerant shadows and – given that they resemble eyes and breasts by duck-rabbit turns – a little bawdy comedy.

The tone carries through into a handsome book, in which Simmons’ musings resonate with his milking of the mystical and he does a remarkable job of photographing pancake-flat drawings to make them look three dimensionally and celestially spatial.’


Lychee One, 38-50 Pritchard’s Road, London E2

Tues – Sat, 12 – 6pm, 25 November – 22 December 2015.


Exhibition Details : 11 ORBICULAR DRAWINGS