news from the clutter

There are a few seats left for the Barbican’s screening of ‘Grey Gardens’ (1976, dir. Maysles Brothers) for which I’m going to be presenting an introduction. 

You can hear me (much edited) in discussion of the film on the Barbican’s podcast here.

Here are some images of a work I screened at Show-Off below:

See below for details of a recent event:

Show-Off, a choreographing of artworks.  Artists: David Batchelor, Sam Belinfante, Jane Bustin, Martin Creed, Blue Curry, Matthew Darbyshire, Rose Davey, Claire Dorsett, Iain Hales, Tess Jaray, Sam Kennedy, Rory McCartney, Bruce McLean, Zoë Mendelson, Paulina Michnowska, Lisa Milroy, Mali Morris, Rob Phillips, Heino Schmid and Tessa Whitehead, Phoebe Unwin, Vicky Wright, Sarah Kate Wilson, Rose Wylie, Joel Wyllie. 8th and 9th November, 7.30pm  Location: Battersea, London.Address details sent upon rsvp

Show-Off aims to mobilise sculptures, paintings, drawings and performances in front of a seated audience, physically bringing a procession of works to directly ‘meet’ the onlookers rather than the viewer activating the work through their own movements in space. Show-Off is born from a frustration with private views, where artworks often provide a context for socialising, which in turn obstructs the intention of artwork as viewed object.  Conjuring ideas of a catwalk, cattle market, debutant ball and auction house, art handlers will carry or direct each work on stage one by one to ‘show them off’. Each work will be professionally lit and illuminated for a limited time before being carried off stage.   The stage has been conceived and made by Gary Woodley as a design for flexible living, allowing it to be reconfigured in a multitude of ways. Individual plywood units will each be moved, stacked and rotated to present each artwork in varied formations.

THE PILES

Zoë Mendelson will be working in Studio 4 at Chisenhale Art Place between

2nd and 10th June to document and evolve works for This Mess is a Place, her Wellcome Trust funded project, which examines the psychopathology of Hoarding Disorder.

Read more about the project and its various branches at: www.thismessisaplace.co.uk

  Studio 4 is an artist-led project space, funded & programmed by artists at Chisenhale Studios

Chisenhale Art Place is at 64 – 84 Chisenhale Road, London E3 5QZ.

Please use Studios Entrance

This Mess is a Place is interdisciplinary (hovering precariously within the arts, psychology, anthropology, museology...), and explores the borders of Hoarding and Collecting, questions their connections and asks what makes one normative and the other pathological. Zoë Mendelson has been working with clinicians, archivists and anthropologists, among others, looking into how relationships to cumulative objects in space inform a number of fields in ways that can be seen to interrelate and impact upon each other. This Mess is a Place includes large-scale installation, a publication (2013, And Publishing), interdisciplinary public events and fiction writing.

    Timetabled public events

  These events are open to all

  Saturday 7th June: Hourly readings 

Short readings from The Detroit Project (Zoë's novel in progress) 1 - 5 pm. 6:00 pm: Drawing to Zelig 

A discussion of hysteria as cultural collage followed by a screening of Woody Allen's Zelig. You are encouraged to draw during the screening & assist in the creation of a lost clinical document. Sunday 8th June: 6 pm: Trash-talking: Projections of waste

Presentations & discussion of the making & contents of This Mess is a Place: A Collapsible Anthology of Collections and Clutter with some of its contributors.

The publication includes essays, texts and artworks from 30 varied & international voices.

More details are at www.thismessisaplace.co.uk/book

Tuesday 10th June from 6 pm:

The Piles Drinks & interaction with works at the end of Zoë Mendelson's week in Studio 4 Projections & performance at 7 pm

    Studio 4 will be open to visits from members of CAP only between 1 and 3 pm each day between

…An evening of collective nouns and clutter.

Following the publication of ‘This Mess is a Place: A Collapsible Anthology of Collections and Clutter’, Zoë Mendelson presented an evening dedicated to objects en masse and coagulated, including books themselves. Negotiating the nebulous boundaries between collecting and hoarding, Mendelson’s art practice and writing questions the locations and languages of the onset of a pathology.

Calling upon two contributors to the book, artists Daniel Rourke and Cecilie Gravesen, the evening was a chance to explore how museology, installation practice and critical readings of the object relate to the coagulated heap of the hoard. There was discussion of the visual diagnostic tools used by psychiatry to assess hoarding/hoarders developed with the support of psychiatrist, Dr Alberto Pertusa. Lynn Harris from AND Publishing  created a slide show depicting metaphorical innovations in the book as object.

Zoë Mendelson  performed sections of her novel-in-progress ‘The Detroit Project’ as well as showing an animation with an accompanying performance, alluding to ways of disposing of 250 misprints of Italo Calvino’s essay on taking out the rubbish, ‘La Poubelle Agréée’ (1974-6), as they were left over from the printing of the book.

Here are some images from the evening.

Appropriated Mishap, Animation and Performance by Zoë Mendelson

Still from the film Quiver by Cecilie Gravesen

Zoë Mendelson interviews Dr Alberto Pertusa

Hong Kong based Pipeline art magazine has devoted its two most recent issues to the subject of hoarding. The February edition of the magazine - which is available online or mostly in Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia - has featured Zoë Mendelson and This Mess is a Place on their back pages. Click here for a sneak look.

My large-scale project-in-progress, This Mess is a Place, has been awarded a Wellcome Trust Arts Award and now has its own website.

Have a look at the project's progress here

This Mess is a Place

is an interdisciplinary project-in-progress by artist, Zoë Mendelson, funded by the Wellcome Trust and executive produced by Manick Govinda at Artsadmin, which explores the borders of Hoarding – an inability to discard possessions - and Collecting, questions their connections and asks what makes one normative and the other pathological. Descriptions of hoarding suggest the emergence of pathology at the point at which living space becomes encroached upon to the degree that belongings overwhelm its function.

  Through large-scale installation, an interdisciplinary public event and fiction-writing, This Mess is a Place builds upon connections between collection and compulsion in Zoë Mendelson’s art practice, interpreting current psychological understanding of Hoarding Disorder. Through consultation with Dr Alberto Pertusa and Satwant Singh, specialists in defining diagnostic criteria and treatments for Hoarding Disorder, the project investigates the psychopathology of Hoarding, its onset and treatment, questioning how and when Hoarding separates from Collecting to become a pathology. It presents opportunities to question how we relate variously to objects, ‘functionally’ and ‘dysfunctionally’ and reconsiders rational and irrational relationships to stuff, spaces and accumulation.

I will be presenting a new installation (above) as part of INCONSCIENTS ! Les artistes et la psychanalyse at Galerie ALFA in Paris from 6 September until 6th October. Other artists in the exhibition include Cindy Sherman, Jim Shaw, Zoe Beloff and Hans Bellmer. There will be a book published (170 pages, hardback) to accompany the show, which can be purchased from the gallery. Details of the gallery are below. The exhibition is at three sites between rue de l'Echaudé and Place de Furstenberg. Nearest metro Mabillon.

Galerie A.L.F.A.

12, rue de l'Echaudé  - and two additional spaces on Place de Furstenberg,

75 006 Paris

WAKE and ARCHIPELAGO is a programme of installation and performance-related work conceived and curated by Anne Bean and Gary Stevens. 

Two spaces, located five minutes walk away from each other across Southwark Park, will be home to an ongoing programme of events, installations and performances created by over 20 artists who will work and/or reside in one of the two spaces from between one and six weeks from 11 June until 17 July.

  In ARCHIPELAGO (curated by Gary Stevens) at CGP London, each artist marks his or her territory.

  They may defend themselves against the others or cooperate; trade or start a war with them. 

They co-exist; there is no sequence of performances.

The audience can visit any or all of the islands at any time. The artists may be building something towards a performance or occupation. What remains may be the aftermath of some activity. 

They may build camps or nests. The features are constantly changing. The works struggle for autonomy, where they simultaneously stand alone and share a common space.   

Contributing artists include: 

Emma Benson, Ian Bourn, Claire Blundell Jones, Helena Bryant, Lee Campbell, Helena Goldwater, Michelle Griffiths, Zoë Mendelson, Graeme Miller, Frog Morris, Steve Ounanian, Florence Peake, Tim Spooner, Fiona Templeton, Caroline Wilkinson

  Zoë Mendelson. Collage sketch for Conscientious Objectophile, 2011

I will be resident in the gallery most of the time - during opening hours - over a six-week period. The timetable for my drawing/performances for this week is:

30 June: 1 - 5 pm

2 July: 12 - 6 pm

8 July: 1 - 5 pm

13 July: 12 - 2.30 pm

14 July: 1 - 5 pm

15 July: 12 - 2.30 pm

Final weekend: 16, 17 July special performances (timings tbc) including 'this woman to this wall' a ceremony on 16th in the afternoon.

Details of the work / performance I will be engaged in are below. 

Please check in to http://visibletracks.wordpress.com for updates and information about the show and artists as Archipelago progresses and alters form.

You can find details of how to find CPG London at: http://www.cgplondon.org/location.php?locale=LOCATION

  Zoë Mendelson's Conscientious Objectophile is a work in progress which builds slowly, meticulously and compulsively.  It is a burgeoning relationship between an archive and a space;  between small documents organised into a static form of storage and something bigger growing out of control.  The 'performance' of a vast, intricate pencil wall-drawing makes public an intimate, obsessional activity and questions the temporality of the piece in relation to its labour-intensity.

I look forward to seeing you,

FULL Information at:

http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/events/00000002924

12 JUL 2011

Town Hall Artwork Tours

  Town Hall Hotel & Apartments Patriot Square London E2 9NF townhallhotel.com

12 July 2011 at 5 & 7pm

ARCHIPELAGO

11 Jun - 17 Jul 2011

Performance 'islands' curated by Gary Stevens.

Artists include: Claire Blundell Jones, Helena Bryant, Florence Peake, Caroline Wilkinson, Frog Morris, Lee Campbell, Tim Spooner, Ian Bourn, Emma Benson, Zoë Mendelson, Michelle Griffiths, Steve Ounanian, Graeme Miller, Helena Goldwater.

Each artist marks his or her territory. They may defend themselves against the others or cooperate; trade or start a war with them. They co-exist; there is no sequence of performances. The audience can visit any or all of the islands at any time. The artists may be building something towards a performance or occupation. What remains may be the aftermath of some activity. They may build camps or nests. The features are constantly changing. The works struggle for autonomy, where they simultaneously stand alone and share a common space.

Inconscients! (Les artistes et la psychanalyse)

part 3

forthcoming this autumn 2011

Including works by Jim Shaw, Cindy Sherman, Henri Michaux, Zoë Beloff, Hans Bellmer, George Hugnet, Dorothea Tanning, Joel Peter Witkin among others.

In Treatment (10), 2011

Galerie ALFA

12 rue de l'Echaudé  75006 Paris  T +33 (1) 43 26 33 56  F +33 (1) 43 26 18 62

[email protected]

HORAIRES : TUESDAY - SATURDAY  11 AM - 1PM / 2PM - 7PM

ALFA project

4 rue de Trévise  75009 Paris