The Green Man & Regular Fellows: Images and Reviews
Sunday Lunch at The Green Man
Here are some of the photographs that I took at Reactor's The Green Man & Regular Fellows. The event took place in Nottingham across Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings of the last weekend in September. In honour of traditional pub opening hours The Green Man also had a Sunday lunchtime opening, where I took these photographs, featuring a pub quiz with a Harvest Festival hamper prize.
I only briefly stopped by the The Green Man on Friday night, before heading off again for a friend's birthday meal. But I was there all night Saturday (including the lock-in), for Sunday lunch, and then back that evening for last orders.
Scroll to the bottom of the post for reviews by Aaron Juneau and Jack Vickers.
Reviews:
Nottingham Visual Arts (Jack Vickers)
Reactor: The Green Man & Regular Fellows
Friday 30 September & Saturday 1 October: 6 pm - 11 pm
Sunday 2 October: 12:00 pm - 2:30 pm & 6:30 pm - 9:30 pm
There’s something brewing in Nottingham… For three days only, Reactor are opening a members-only pub, “The Green Man & Regular Fellows”.
The Green Man & Regular Fellows is a newly commissioned, live artwork in the form of a pub, complete with adjoining function room. Here Reactor's interest in the the nature of membership as a social construct manifests itself in a series of temporary groups and levels of fellowship. The structure of the work plays with the traditions and conventions of the ‘public house’ and ‘private members’ clubs’, producing unexpectedly dis lodged behaviours.
This brief materialisation of The Green Man & Regular Fellows presents a set of mysteries, inviting speculation about its symbols and purpose. Where did it come from, and who is it for? The Green Man & Regular Fellows offers membership, invites you in for drinks and provides a rich environment of song, laughter and games. As the Landlord calls upon the Regulars to lend a hand and the more Irregular members burst out of the back rooms, the atmosphere increasingly becomes more intense and behaviours more frenzied. It will soon become clear why our Regular Fellows like to come back time and time again.
The project will take place place at Trade Gallery, Nottingham (UK): www.tradegallery.org
Apply for membership here: http://www.thegreenman.vze.com/
See you there?
jonathanwaring.net now at v1.0
With yesterday’s change in WordPress theme (from my adaptation of veryplaintxt to LightWord), and a number of other less obvious changes and improvements, I'm finally declaring jw.net out of beta with a v1.0 designation. For the sake of posterity, this is what the site looked like up to v0.7:
jonathanwaring.net at v0.7
Stuart Tait and I will be presenting on Reactor at the Virtual Futures 2.0 conference
18-19 June 2011, University of Warwick
Stuart Tait and I have been asked to make a presentation on Reactor at the Virtual Futures 2.0 conference. Here are some details of the conference from their website, and a little on what we have planned:
Cyber Conference on Art, Performance, Philosophy and Emerging Technology
Virtual Futures is an interdisciplinary conference. This year‚ highlights will include presentations on artificial intelligence, bioengineering, bioethics, cybernetics, net security, performance art, social media, the future of copyright and virtual reality. Returning speakers will be joined this year by a fresh array of world-renowned practitioners.
The list of main speakers is here:
http://virtualfutures.co.uk/vf2011/speakers/
The full programme is here (we're 15:20-15:40 on Sunday):
http://virtualfutures.co.uk/vf2011/programme/
And here's our abstract:
http://virtualfutures.co.uk/vf2011/programme/reactor-assemblages/
The presentation will discuss the work of UK-based art group Reactor from the perspective of one ‘guest’ member, Stuart Tait, and one ex or virtual member, Jonathan Waring. The presentation will take the form of a dialogue between Tait, who will be present at the conference, and Waring, who will be presenting via video projection.
Reactor’s practice creates ‘microcosmic worlds’ that thematically draw upon recognisable social forms, such as totalitarian states or self-help groups, in what artist and writer David Burrows refers to as ‘performance fictions’. These new collectivities are then performed or enacted in collaboration with audience-participants who take up positions within the work.
The presentation will begin by considering Reactor projects as ‘assemblages’, drawing upon the writing of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Manuel DeLanda’s development of their work in his Assemblage Theory of society. Erving Goffman’s concept of ‘role adjustments’ will then be used to discuss the way participants’ change positions within a project as it is enacted. The presentation will explore the relationship between the project, as it is actualised, and its virtual dimensions, such as the characteristics of a particular role, back-story for the project, memory, or project planning. Finally, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the diagram will be discussed in relation to Bergson’s cone diagram and the counteractualisation of the project back into the virtual of co-participants’ minds.
jonathanwaringphotography.co.uk
My photography portfolio website jonathanwaringphotography.co.uk now has its own hosting. Prior to this it lived in a sub-directory here at jonathanwaring.net. This caused various problems with the way it appeared in Google (and other) search listings, prompting the move.
The site documents some of the professional photography work I have done for clients. I initially worked documenting art gallery shows and live art events, before broadening my scope to produce images for a wider range of clients.
Please take a look if you have the time.
Paper on Reactor and ‘Big Lizard’s Big Idea’ to be presented at Chelsea Theatre symposium
Date: Sat 13 Nov, 9:30-21:15, Chelsea Theatre, London, £30/£20(students)
Daniel Oliver will be present a paper discussing ‘The efficacy of insincerity in Big Lizard’s Big Idea’ as part of the one day symposium ‘A Make Believe World’ during this year's Sacred Festival.
Big Lizard's Big Idea, 2009 (promo, 01:12)
In one of last month's posts I outlined Reactor’s pivotal 2005 work Total GHAOS. A work which came to define the group’s interests and mode of practice, as well as—more personally—marking the beginning of my four-year immersion in this practice as a member of the collective. Big Lizard’s Big Idea was the final project on which I worked with Reactor. Initially co-commissioned by the Donau Festival (Austria, April-May 2009) and Wunderbar Festival (UK, November 2009), the project then happened a third time without my involvement at Schirn Kunsthalle's ‘Playing the City 2’ (Germany, September 2010).
Daniel's paper will, "...evaluate the efficacy of Reactor’s practice of ‘relational insincerity’ by comparing the performative force of our behaviour as participants in the Big Idea with our behaviour towards the ‘big Other’ of liberal capitalism. This comparison employs Slavoj Žižek’s elaboration of ‘the performative force of ideological illusion itself’, and David McNeill’s discussion of ‘Corporate Sincerity’ and ‘Pragmatic a-sincerity’".
Unfortunately I am unable to attend the symposium due to other commitments, but the outline Daniel has sent me is intriguing and I look forward to reading the paper in full. Hopefully—with Daniel's permission—I will be able to reproduce and discuss it here in more detail in the future.
A full programme for the symposium can be downloaded here and booking information can be found here.