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The Contemporary Art Research Centre aims to build and provide an intellectual and creative milieu for innovation in contemporary fine art. Taking its identity from Andre Breton's articulation of the imagination, we draw on that legacy of surrealism to conceptualise our project of innovation. In this way we seek to imagine and enact possibilities of contemporary art in contingency with social politics, technology, models of knowledge and modes of experience. In the essay 'Once upon a time' Breton argues for the transformative power of the imagination, that it may be applied instrumentally to change circumstances yet is also excessive to utility, absurd and radically profane. The Centre aims to house this rich range of useful/less imaginative invention. Conceits of newness do not distract us, but resourceful adaptations, hybrids, mutations and detournements, as well as attention to the realm of the overlooked, the scatological and absurd promise of stuff, recognised through play - these things are cultivated here.

The Centre is divided into four interconnected spaces for discussion and action to these ends:

 

Foyer - art and social context

Work in this area is concerned with propositions for agency and the generation of expanded and hybrid modes of socially-sited artistic production. This is explored through collaboration, curation, writing, publishing, broadcasting and other modes of dissemination, in and with particular social contexts, spaces and encounters.
This is exemplified by the creative curatorial research of Roxy Walsh, notably the ACE funded touring group exhibition/publication: Infallible, In Search of the Real George Eliot: Aspects of Fiction in Contemporary Art which explored complex relationships between fiction and contemporary art, new forms of theory practice and in particular exploring performative writing. The expanded collaborative practice of Cullinan & Richards provides innovative models for socially-sited artistic production through their identification of their practice as a constructed situation in which authorship becomes blurred, and all participants have scope to shape the artwork. This can be seen in their project Curating Degree Zero Archive at The Artspace, Imperial College, London; and endorsed by their commission for Britannia Works, Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Centre, Athens. This survey of British art sought to identify practices that engage with multi-faceted, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic perspectives in post-colonial Britain. Julie Myers similarly expands the notion of authorship, using emergent technologies to enable the construction of methods and narratives across social, cultural and geographical boundaries. This can be seen in Elsewhere In Between commissioned by FACT, Liverpool and ACE a collaborative digital film shot by 5 people living in different parts of the world which uses database software developed by BT to produce an interactive narrative film.
Researchers: Charlotte Cullinan & Jeanine Richards, Roxy Walsh, Julie Myers, Jordan McKenzie,

 

Machine Room - art and technology

Work here is concerned with how technologies, methods and processes might be understood, detourned and reinvented. There is attention to the intellectual work of fabrication, but also to how propositions of the imagination can lead to inventive or perverse uses of technology and material. Diverse reprographic and recording technologies are manipulated to shape contact and encounter.
These interests are evident in the sculptural practice of Mark Hoskings in which found objects and materials are adapted and combined to generate new, critical functionalities such as water preservation and energy generation. See Disclosures VI: Disconnected, solo exhibition at VRIZA, Amsterdam. This critical interface between sculpture and industrial design is also presented in the publication Auto Roto Font (Bookworks. Co-author Ed Allington). Formal sculptural concerns are presented in the kinetic sculptures of Louis Nixon, and particularly in his enquiry into the dynamic between moving sculptures and architecture in the important artists' group Space Explorations, featured in seminal survey exhibitions Century City at Tate Modern, and Live/Life. Musee d'art moderne de laville de Paris; as well as publications: 'Space Explorations', with text by Penelope Curtis, David Barrett, Mel Gooding and 'Moving Targets'. Tate Gallery publications,by Louisa Buck.
Researchers: Mark Hosking, Louis Nixon, Charlotte Cullinan & Jeanine Richards, Stephen Hughes, Elaine Wilson, Gio D'angelo, Arnaud Desjardins, Jeff Dellow. Uneasy Dreams by Frank Millward - an interactive VisioSonics piece where moving image performs the attributes of the emotive expressive qualities of sound.

 

Hall of Records - art and epistemology

Work in this area considers how histories and bodies of knowledge might be generated, re-imagined and re-inscribed, through work with archives and physical collections, found objects, constitutions, laws and manifestos. Acting on official, unofficial, propositional and fictional undertakings, we propagate opportunities for mis-understanding, re-reading, re-inscribing, with a view to flexing meaning and authority.
These interests are presented in the video work of Volker Eichelmann, most notably his collaborative video archive project 'Do you really want it that much?' - '...More!' developed with Dr Jonathan Faiers and Roland Rust. This ongoing archive examines the representation of art and its spaces in mainstream film and TV, through the collection and highly particular organisation and presentation of sequences from mainstream film and television programmes that depict museums, galleries and artistic production. This work has been presented in the Lehnbachhaus, Munich; MAK, Vienna; Galéria Jána Koniarka, Slovakia and Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, His reflection on how devices of cinema construct our relation to history, in the video work 'Kurlichtspiel' was selected as one of the 50 videos representative of the history of video art in Germany since 1960. Elizabeth Price's work to detourne and represent mothballed or publicly inaccessible archives and collections of art are evident in her project to re-enact the Will of Alexander Chalmers, and the terms of his now defunct art Bequest over a 6 year period. This concluded with the video 'A Public Lecture & Exhumation' exhibited at Studio Voltaire, London. Also the video 'At the House of Mr X' exhibited at the Stanley Picker Gallery and screened at the Serpentine Gallery, London conflates information from commercial and curatorial archives relating to a collection, to generate a suggestive fiction.
Researchers: Mark Hosking, Elizabeth Price, Volker Eichelmann, Roxy Walsh, Arnaud Desjardins, Andrea Stokes, Sarah Jones

 

Lumber Room - art and materiality

This place is for experience, matter, noise. It is for knowledge developed through embodied temporal encounter. Attention is given to possibilities of materiality and process, unfolding in the making of pictures and things, through accident and event. Abstraction and performance meet over scatological play, profanity and eroticism. Waste.
These interests are exemplified in the waxed panels and frosted plexi abstract paintings of Andrew Bick, (see Memory Club, Hales Gallery) which explore time, accident and boredom as crucial and contingent to processes of image making. This is explored in JJ Charlesworth's The Scene in which Spock Plays Three-Dimensional Chess: On Andrew Bick's Memory Club Paintings. Concerns of the relation between materiality and language are also expressed in the paintings of Roxy Walsh; which drift, on the affects of accident, between mark and sign. See FELIX CULPA Solo Exhibition, DomoBaal, London. With Catalogue & essays by Dale McFarland, Adrian Rifkin, Sharon Kivland and Simon O'Sullivan. Also Elizabeth Price's ongoing process-based sculptural work 'boulder', and the accompanying text which annotates its incremental development, explore the relationships between matter, experience and translation, as featured in Thinking through Art - Reflections on Art as Research (Edited Katy McLeod, Routledge.)
Researchers: Elizabeth Price, Roxy Walsh, Sarah Jones, Alice Maude-Roxby, Andrew Bick, Ana Genoves, Brian McCann, Derrick Haughton, Jordan McKenzie, Roger Partridge

 

Directors: Sarah Jones and Louis Nixon