Joe Watling - Placing On Stage

SHIFT. Gallery, 32 Shelmerdine Close, London E3 4UX

27th November - 18th December 2010

Private View Saturday 27th 2-7pm (note the time of the opening)[1]

Gallery is viewable by invitation and appointment only.
For enquires or to make an appointment please email mail@shiftgallery.com

I'm still playing with the idea of the title of the show being "placing on stage" the translation of Mise-en-scène.[2] I'm afraid i am jet-lagged, and so is my writing. I've been playing around with so many different ways and formats, but i think i'd like to settle on different quotes between you, me and others, with footnotes that reveal the authors only in the printed version at the gallery on the day of the opening.[3]

Winter Lake had never gone anywhere. It was right there behind the false wall they’d built in the night.[4] Why hang things on the wall when the wall itself is so much more a challenging medium?[5] (B)ang away, beaver (away), dig (away), drudge[6] You saying I'm a con artist or summit :)[7] A computer hacker learns from mysterious rebels about the true nature of his reality and his role in the war against its controllers.[8] An insurance salesman/adjuster discovers his entire life is actually a TV show.[9] The central mysteries of the episode focused on an attic room whose occupants disappeared without trace overnight, and the kidnapped partner of a stage magician.[10] The original cell was built in England…for an audience of one person as part of a one-act play…[11]

Let’s not worry about the smell of paint and sawn timber that would have pervaded the viewing room[12] This fantasy is the reason why we prefer an ideal freestanding object, and why we do not like the idea of the visibility of the apparatus of support. It is partly based on the wish to maintain our own body as a free object, and the kind of horror at ourselves having to have scaffold to keep us going.[13] Winter Lake had never gone anywhere.[14] The shifting ‘cloud’ of information and interpretation being the work of art… compared with the process of exhibition-making as two types of ‘forced collaboration’ where certain aspects, such as how the choice of artists is made, and where the credit lies in artistic appropriation are obscured… the exhibition is only part of the story. [15] Long Story, Short Notice[16] In jokes?[17]

Also, i agree that the email version of the text should be 'straight', but the printed version will be rotated at 14 degrees. By the way, i can't believe i used '%' to mean 'degrees'! I wonder what angle '%' is at?! Of course, i am only writing this to you in an email so that i can validly quote myself, but i think this way of working is somehow very akin to your way of working. The gallery is very much quoting itself, and this 'quote' (pardon the quotation marks) has reached its own validity through function.[18]