Warren & Mosley

Stephen Walker reviews A Nodding Acquaintance exhibited at Edge Arts in ‘Parallel (of Life and) Architecture; Not Quite Architecture: Writing Around Alison and Peter Smithson’.

“Whilst Warren and Mosley’s installation included a timber framework that quotes from the Smithsons’ abstract cluster ideograms, the size, intention and material realisation of this framework was such that it began to undermine the Smithsons’ mega-structural propositions with a more delicate, human scale. In this sense, Warren and Mosley’s framework drew upon Michelangelo Pistoletto’s ‘minus objects’ such as Structure for Chatting while Standing Up (Struttura per parlare in piedi, 1965–66) in its detailed attention to the dynamics of standing, leaning and sitting. […] Described as the location for a possible street party, the gallery space was hung with lengths of Union Jack bunting which had been painted over in ghostly white, through which the familiar flag was barely legible. These moves both echoed and troubled the Smithsons’ own considerations of ‘Englishness’ as these were in play in the post-war era, updated for a Brexit-era uncertainty. A further unsettling was provided by a live-feed taken from an overhead camera and relayed to a large screen lying horizontally on the floor, catching the viewer in a disconcerting, disembodied and looped spectacle of their own presence. With an economy of means that set this apart from the other two installations, A Nodding Acquaintance played on the promise, awkwardness and ambivalence of the cluster concept and the notions of identity it supported.”

A chapter by Sophie Warren & Jonathan Mosley in Ben Stringer (ed.) (2018) Rurality Re-imagined: Villagers, Farmers, Wanderers and Wild Things (ORO Editions, California). In 2000 we completed a project exploring motorway travel and motorway environments in the UK. The project resulted in a body of work including moving and still imagery and installations exhibited at Prema, Gloucestershire; Gasworks, London; Fredereike Taylor Gallery and The Armory Show, New York. This short essay is a recollection and reflection on the experience of researching for the project and of selected completed works. An extract:

‘We are driving every day. Acceleration, speed, passing landscape, de-acceleration, motorway services, acceleration, speed, passing landscape … Motorway services are serial repetitions of architecture that create intervals of time on the journey. They break the smooth, engineered space of the motorway and the internal car environment. They are markers in the act of travelling but not of place. Their location is not related to a landscape but to a network. Our experience of them is not positioned within the network but within our journey. They oscillate around our needs, either too close or too far, until they are “the next one.”’

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Dennis Atkinson focuses on ‘Rogue Game’ in Atkinson, D (2017) ‘Art, Disobedience and Ethics: Adventures of Pedagogy’ (Palgrave Macmillan). An extract from p9:

‘Rogue Game illustrates the tensionalities between practices of the known and the not-known. I am using it to draw analogies with such tensionalities in practices of teaching and learning, where established forms of address, forms of knowledge, rituals of practice and theories of learning constitute pedagogical ‘knowns’ and where unexpected responses from learners, misalignments between a teacher’s expectations and what actually happens […] constitute the ‘not-known’ […]. The pedagogical aspect of Rogue Game concerning its dissensual dynamics (Ranciere), whereby heterogeneous games collide in the same space, encourages us to reflect on the architecture, divisions, regulations and boundaries of pedagogical spaces.’

Robin Wilson writes extensively on the works Was Here and Understanding the Measure of Things focusing on our practice within a chapter and featuring a work on the front cover. In the opening passage of the chapter he writes of Understanding the Measure of Things as published on the front cover of The Architects Journal:

‘As a work of art the image functions through a playful diversion of architectural methods and motifs toward the accentuation of process and performance rather than design production itself. The hand and model frozen in position (the future position of the completed house) in the instant of photography would seem both to be part of a practical exercise within an architectural process, whilst also presenting something supplementary and interrogative to it. The hierarchy of process to end product is destabilised here, registering a wider intention in Warren & Mosley’s work to question the distinctions between art and architectural practice.’

Wilson, R. (2015) ‘Image, Text, Architecture: The Utopics of the Architectural Media’ (London: Ashgate)

Artist Emma Smith in conversation with academic Dennis Atkinson discuss Rogue Game and our conversation with Can Altay and Emily Pethick is re-printed to constitute the chapter on ‘thisness’.

“Rogue Game provides a way of thinking about ideas of consensus and equality. In order to play the Rogue Game there are no rules. All the individual games have rules but in the Rogue Game relations occur with no prior subjectivities. These relationships have to develop on the spot: a praxis that deals with the ‘thisness’ of experience.”

Dennis Atkinson speaking at (In)visible Spaces of Equality at The Showroom, cited in: Smith, E. (2015) ‘The Practice of Place’ (London: Architecture Association Bedford Press) pp245-261.

Tim Stott writes a chapter on ‘Platform’. An extract:

‘Platform was an instruction-based game that took as its playground a graticular plan of the city, and as its play object, a generic architectural platform small enough to fit within the palm of a hand and with no marked identity, which had to be held, dropped, positioned, or discarded as close as possible to a grid intersection chosen by the player… The artists made this platform available to players in such a way that it was “open to interpretation and use,” in the understanding that the meeting of urban domain and the field of play would be an abrasive one and not always relaxed, as players, guided by the instructions of the game, necessarily sought out abnormal paths and restricted territories in the city. At the very least, players would face the choice of whether to follow the instructions of the game where doing so would destabilise and even transgress in some way the architectural fabric of the city. Even if they chose to give up the game in the face of some obstacle to their progress, this would make the players vividly aware of the normative and proprietary function of the city’s architecture.’

Tim Stott (2015) ‘Play and Participation in Contemporary Art Practices’ (London: Routledge). ISBN 9781138850286.

Can Altay writes an essay on Rogue Game. An extract:

‘Inhabitation, cohabitation, movement and proximity in the Rogue Game provide ‘tools’ with which the limits of architecture can be revealed and exhausted; as well as prescribing the possibility of ‘an architecture’ that can intervene and contribute to other social processes and urban spaces in similar manners. Space expands through inhabitation and movement, since there is always a “spatial excess” contained within architecture, existing “beyond the relevance for the present, and into the realm of the future” as defined by Elizabeth Grosz (2001). The ways in which we occupy given systems, structures, and spaces are crucial, for any attempt to activate this excess, and to challenge, alter, or transform our given reality. Rogue Game thus suggests ways in which other architectures and urban contexts can be occupied.’

Can Altay (2014) ‘Rogue Game: An Architecture of Transgression’ in Rice, L. & Littlefield, D. (editors) ‘Transgression: Towards an expanded architecture’ published as one of the ‘AHRA Critiques: Critical Studies in Architectural Humanities’ series, (London: Routledge).

Jonathan Mosley and Rachel Sara (guest editors) (2013) ‘The Architecture of Transgression’ Architectural Design, (London/New York: Wiley Academy). ISBN 9781118361795

Danielle Rose King, ‘Rogue Game’ exhibition and symposium review at Spike Island, Art Monthly, 362: 12/12, p.362.

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The conversation and stills from ‘Rogue Game, First Play’ is published within Soon All Your Neighbours Will Be Artists (Birmingham: Eastside Projects, 2011). ISBN 978-19-06753-30-6

Editorial: Soon All Your Neighbours Will Be Artists began in January 2011 as a collaboration between members of the artist-led organisations Aid & Abet, Cambridge; Extra Special People at Eastside Projects, Birmingham; Spike Associates, Bristol; and WARP, Cardiff. Framed by major cuts to public funding to the arts in the UK, the publication aims to present sustainable models for art production. Artists were invited to contribute works that play on the status on ‘survival’ in their practice, and a collection of texts from various sources have been selected to further problematise a single conception of the term.

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An exhibition and publishing project by Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney with Architectural Theory Review. Other participating artists included:

atelier d’architecture autogérée (France)
Makeshift (Australia)
Temporary Services (USA)
Marjetica Potrč (Slovenia)

Editorial by Zanny Begg and Lee Stickells: ‘The Right to The City is an exhibition and publishing project bringing together a series of artistic, theoretical and philosophical escape plans. These escape plans range from the whimsical to the more serious, and present real or imagined ways of reinventing life in our cities. The project will explore the challenge of “putting foundations” under these “castles in the air” – seeking connections between art, architecture, philosophy and action.’ We were commissioned to create a new work ‘Strategies of Indirection’ responding to the notion of ‘the right to the city’ for the exhibition and speak at the conference. Our contribution to the collective catalogue was a sequence of short quotes that generated a meeting point of ideas.

Invited contribution to El Ahali journal edited by Can Altay.

Points of Purchase, Proposition No. 18  and Rogue Game, Proposition No. 17

Exhibited:

2007-9  Spike Island, Bristol, Kunsterhaus Bethanien, Berlin, ‘Social Diagrams: Planning Reconsidered’ exhibition Kunsterhaus, Stuttgart and ‘Publish and Be Dammed’ Self-Publishing Fair, London

Robin Wilson, ‘Image, Text, Architecture: the presence that WAS HERE’ chapter on the work of Jonathan Mosley and Sophie Warren, published in Jane Rendell et al. (ed) Critical Architecture, (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 130-134. ISBN 978-0-415-41538-5

Publishers summary: ‘Critical Architecture examines the relationship between critical practice in architecture and architectural criticism. Placing architecture in an interdisciplinary context, the book explores architectural criticism with reference to modes of criticism in other disciplines – specifically art criticism – and considers how critical practice in architecture operates through a number of different modes: buildings, drawings and texts.’

Robin Wilson writes a chapter within the publication focussing on our interventional work ‘Was Here’ in relation to a house design as reported in the architectural press with the work ‘Understanding the Measure of Things’.

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Sophie Warren and Jonathan Mosley, commissioned image work ‘Proposed Alterations to a City Plan’ 2006, pp 10-11

and

Robin Wilson, ‘Blue Sky Thinking: A Utopia in Bristol’, in Brandon LaBelle (ed) Surface Tension Journal, no. 1 (Los Angeles/Berlin: Errant Bodies Publications, 2006), pp. 2-12. ISBN: 978-0-9772594-0-3.

Reviewing our situation specific work and solo exhibition ‘Model (Blue Sky Thinking)’ Robin Wilson explores its relation to the context of the exhibition within an area of impending development and in relation to our wider practice.

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Robin Wilson, ‘Bristol – Process and Memory’, in Next Generation supplement to Art and Architecture journal, 2002, pp. 4-5. The article reviews our presentation for an event title ‘Next Generation’.

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A practice review focussing on the process and realisation of a house design in relation to the M5 Southbound body of work. The six page article developed our collaboration with writer on art and architecture Robin Wilson. The front cover to the magazine was an intervention into architectural reportage.

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