"Reviewing my reviews"
In a show about 'marketing', 'selling out', 'duplicitious thinkng' and generally 'holding a mirror to the art world', it felt slightly odd to have the exhibtion reviewed by the art press. At the time, just before the internet really took over, glossy art magazines felt like important 'gate keepers' to an exclusive club of successful artists. One of the curators at Studio 1:1 gallery was Flora Fairbairn who was very well connected. She did a lot to promote this show and it even found its way into Modern Painters magazine and 'Contemporary', an art publication that has since ceased trading. There's also a review here from 'The Big issue' under a title I quite liked called 'Product Placement'.
In a show about 'marketing', 'selling out', 'duplicitious thinkng' and generally 'holding a mirror to the art world', it felt slightly odd to have the exhibtion reviewed by the art press. At the time, just before the internet really took over, glossy art magazines felt like important 'gate keepers' to an exclusive club of successful artists. One of the curators at Studio 1:1 gallery was Flora Fairbairn who was very well connected. She did a lot to promote this show and it even found its way into Modern Painters magazine and 'Contemporary', an art publication that has since ceased trading. There's also a review here from 'The Big issue' under a title I quite liked called 'Product Placement'.
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Photo: Jo Newman
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MODERN PAINTERS -Sally O'Reilly
24 FEBRUARY - 26 MARCH 2006
Automata, being of a mechanical era totally displaced by technological progress, are now more romantic than defunct. Function doesn't come into it any more. Chris Dobrowolski's moving objects compound this romanticism through their equally unmodish
cultural references, from pre-Internet mercantile entrepreneurship to old-school warfare before widespread terrorism and viral contamination.
Dobrowolski has employed old wooden boxes as containers for painted landscapes typical of eastern England: flat scrubby grass and bright skies that threaten weather change with every cloud. These pastoral scenes provide a backdrop for stilted arrangements of toys - trucks, figures, shops and planes - playthings that represent the tethers and tensions of adult life. The gallery is full of these microcosmic tableaux: some small and wall-mounted, others freestanding and sculptural; and one follows the perimeter of both gallery spaces on a raised Scalextric track. Sometimes the wooden boxes are augmented with gramophones, which provide a secondary space, kinetic motor and audio source combined. In Stop Me and Buy One (if you can) (2005) a toy van pootles around a track, passing through hinged doors from box to gramophone, round and round. In the foreground, a toy policeman and an
ice-cream van seem to stand by as if waiting to oversee and provide for the big event, while the tune 'Greensleeves' satirically and unremittingly fixes the pastoral scene. The pervasive obsolescence is funny, yet the humour is tinged with cynicism, as if the artist knows just how divisively charming the obsolete is.
The evolution of technology - from experimental to ubiquitous to embarrassingly outdated to antique is at once useful and problematic for an artwork. When intercepting this evolution, the timing is crucial. The seductive quality of Super 8 stock, for instance, often overwhelms its critical potential, while the use of an out-of-date video game might seem more edgy somehow. There is another facet to Dobrowolski's work, though, which implies that he is aware of the exploitation of nostalgia and employs it reflexively. Many of his scenarios involve some form of hard sell. One hilarious piece comprises a landscape in a box, a truck loaded up with a Bakelite hearing aid the size of an old telephone receiver and a toy shop made of card. The voice of a tiny but persistent hawker transmits through the earpiece, shouting 'buy my paintings' over and over, while the lights in the shop window pulse in rhythm to his cries. The overt nature of older forms of marketing, which seem so blunt and untargeted compared to current self-referential and viral advertising, seem ludicrous but not altogether impossible in the relatively crude machinations of the art market.
24 FEBRUARY - 26 MARCH 2006
Automata, being of a mechanical era totally displaced by technological progress, are now more romantic than defunct. Function doesn't come into it any more. Chris Dobrowolski's moving objects compound this romanticism through their equally unmodish
cultural references, from pre-Internet mercantile entrepreneurship to old-school warfare before widespread terrorism and viral contamination.
Dobrowolski has employed old wooden boxes as containers for painted landscapes typical of eastern England: flat scrubby grass and bright skies that threaten weather change with every cloud. These pastoral scenes provide a backdrop for stilted arrangements of toys - trucks, figures, shops and planes - playthings that represent the tethers and tensions of adult life. The gallery is full of these microcosmic tableaux: some small and wall-mounted, others freestanding and sculptural; and one follows the perimeter of both gallery spaces on a raised Scalextric track. Sometimes the wooden boxes are augmented with gramophones, which provide a secondary space, kinetic motor and audio source combined. In Stop Me and Buy One (if you can) (2005) a toy van pootles around a track, passing through hinged doors from box to gramophone, round and round. In the foreground, a toy policeman and an
ice-cream van seem to stand by as if waiting to oversee and provide for the big event, while the tune 'Greensleeves' satirically and unremittingly fixes the pastoral scene. The pervasive obsolescence is funny, yet the humour is tinged with cynicism, as if the artist knows just how divisively charming the obsolete is.
The evolution of technology - from experimental to ubiquitous to embarrassingly outdated to antique is at once useful and problematic for an artwork. When intercepting this evolution, the timing is crucial. The seductive quality of Super 8 stock, for instance, often overwhelms its critical potential, while the use of an out-of-date video game might seem more edgy somehow. There is another facet to Dobrowolski's work, though, which implies that he is aware of the exploitation of nostalgia and employs it reflexively. Many of his scenarios involve some form of hard sell. One hilarious piece comprises a landscape in a box, a truck loaded up with a Bakelite hearing aid the size of an old telephone receiver and a toy shop made of card. The voice of a tiny but persistent hawker transmits through the earpiece, shouting 'buy my paintings' over and over, while the lights in the shop window pulse in rhythm to his cries. The overt nature of older forms of marketing, which seem so blunt and untargeted compared to current self-referential and viral advertising, seem ludicrous but not altogether impossible in the relatively crude machinations of the art market.
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Contemporary-Richard Dyer
Issue 81 2006 In March Chris Dobrowolski showed at Studio 1.1. His junk shop mechanical theatre tableaux seemed light hearted enough at first, but there is always a disturbing under-current of slightly manic intent. Toys, record players and train sets bring to life a strange half-world of deranged artists peddling their works at an art market disguised as a car boot sale. The work literally screams at the viewer 'Buy Me!' So much art these days does do this that it is quite refreshing to have it all out in the open. |
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Photo: Jo Newman
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The Big Issue - Helen Sumpter
March 13-19 2006
PRODUCT PLACEMENT
There's a certain nostalgic whimsy about the idea of automata, and an element of nostalgia is certainly present in this series of automata-Iike installations.
Constructed within rough wooden boxes and old record players, Chris Dobrowolski 's tableaux are con structed using dolls-house-size, battered old toy cars, trucks and figures. At the push of a button they 're activated into life with sounds and crude movements that, coupled with their worn appearance, suggest that they might date to a much earlier decade. In place of whimsy, Dobrowolski injects a dollop of humour by making the subject of many of his installations the marketing and selling of art, as if it were just another product you might find in a shop or on a market stall . An arrangement of old toy lorries and tables are set out Iike a car boot sale with art-related goods that include plastic dustbins full of paint for £10. Press the human sized doorbell on the back of one of the lorries and from a tinny speaker a crackly male voice repeats the boot sale traders' patter of "don't make me take it all back home with me". In another example a lorry sits on a slightly larger version of itself, surrounded by bunting. This time the refrain from the speaker is an emphatic "Buy my painting''.
In another work, opening the lid to a wooden box activates a toy ice cream van that trundles around a cracked and broken vinyl single playing the common ice-cream van tune of Greensleeves on an old mono record player. As another attempt at self-promotion, the toy figure inside a second ice cream isn't flogging ices, but art.
Studio 1.1, 57a Redchurch Street, London E2
March 13-19 2006
PRODUCT PLACEMENT
There's a certain nostalgic whimsy about the idea of automata, and an element of nostalgia is certainly present in this series of automata-Iike installations.
Constructed within rough wooden boxes and old record players, Chris Dobrowolski 's tableaux are con structed using dolls-house-size, battered old toy cars, trucks and figures. At the push of a button they 're activated into life with sounds and crude movements that, coupled with their worn appearance, suggest that they might date to a much earlier decade. In place of whimsy, Dobrowolski injects a dollop of humour by making the subject of many of his installations the marketing and selling of art, as if it were just another product you might find in a shop or on a market stall . An arrangement of old toy lorries and tables are set out Iike a car boot sale with art-related goods that include plastic dustbins full of paint for £10. Press the human sized doorbell on the back of one of the lorries and from a tinny speaker a crackly male voice repeats the boot sale traders' patter of "don't make me take it all back home with me". In another example a lorry sits on a slightly larger version of itself, surrounded by bunting. This time the refrain from the speaker is an emphatic "Buy my painting''.
In another work, opening the lid to a wooden box activates a toy ice cream van that trundles around a cracked and broken vinyl single playing the common ice-cream van tune of Greensleeves on an old mono record player. As another attempt at self-promotion, the toy figure inside a second ice cream isn't flogging ices, but art.
Studio 1.1, 57a Redchurch Street, London E2