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I Should Be Doing Something Else Right Now Q&A

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20 Apr 2020

Now that our world has been brought to an unexpected halt, we can see more vividly than ever how in our previous state of acceleration, change had become the basis of existence and the presiding operational model for modern life. Such was the starting point of our current (now closed) exhibition I Should Be Doing Something Else Right Now, abruptly interrupted by unfolding world events.

In speaking to our current situation more than we could have anticipated, I Should Be Doing Something Else Right Now now expands online to frame our new online cultural programme, reflecting how artists are connecting, and for some, the imperative to fill time. We speak to the artists who were part of the original exhibition to understand how their lives and creative practices have changed since the lockdown.

Vivienne Griffin

The title of this exhibition, ‘I Should Be Doing Something Else Right Now’, comes from your work. Can you tell us about what this title means to you?  

I think everyone's work is ultimately biographical, even if it's indirect or abstract. When I started making art work I was a very young single parent - I was also coming out as (no labels ultimately fit, coming out as not straight). I had this constant feeling for most of my adult life that I should be living another life, my time felt stolen from me as a young parent but ultimately when I did get time to myself I’d miss my son and feel groundless. There was always this push and pull, especially when making work, finding justifications for spending money and time on art was sometimes impossible - I just did it anyway without justifying it but always with the sense that I should be doing something else right now. It's the same with poetry and music. How can we say that we have to make art? At the same time no one would want to live in a world without it even in the age of commodification as a form of validation.  

M 

A 

Y 

B 

E 

things will change, superficial fast content is becoming boring as I fully immerse myself in it, Instagram gives me a headache, I also love all the memes that are flying around, it's bringing out a hilarious hysterical side of people. 

The starting point of the exhibition was to think about the speed at which things change in today’s hyperconnected world. The whole world has now had to get used to an enormous shift in behaviour almost overnight, with lockdowns and social distancing the new normal. How do you feel about this enforced slowness?  

It's enforced slowness but it's also an enforced pause; in the house that you are in, the job that you are in, the marriage or relationship or lack of one, the view out your window, where you can walk to - you're suddenly stuck with it. But, it's also a time to accept that we have what we have, what actually matters is our reaction to what's happening. It feels like the fall of or at least a re-evaluation of capitalism. There is a dichotomy between accounts of this situation with some people saying they have ‘never been happier’ while at the same time anonymous numbers rack up on the death rates, a database of nameless statistics, an oversight that they are individuals. The language the UK government used initially was disturbing - like herd immunity - reducing us back to animals in a meat market. The connection to the origins of the virus from wet markets is the best campaign for meat free diets ever.

It’s great that there are good things happening too but hard to hold both experiences at the same time - also I’ve been thinking alot about the the pandemic of fear and its impact on our immune systems; when you are in a state of fear your body is focused on producing cortisol not on boosting your immune system. In that case it’s actually life saving to see good in what is happening, other than just bad news and statistics -  

*fear eats the

soul.* 

And now,

We Live Online 

I’ve been so immersed in the face of my phone and my laptop I almost feel institutionalised by it. Walking through Hackney Central today was like being in a simulacra of what once was. And yet, I never want it to return to the drive towards more, more, more that it once was.

What else should you be doing right now?  

Wishfully - 

I should be jumping into the Atlantic Ocean 

I should be meditating on a mountain in Tibet 

I should be singing in a punk band 

I should be watching the sunrise in LA 
I should be in a desert  

I should be building a house in Connemara 

I should be writing a book  

Reality - 

I should be doing my PhD -  

I should be running everyday 

I should be listening to all those albums I want to listen to  

I should be reading all the books I haven't had time to read 

I should be recording my own album 

I should be meditating 

I should be doing all the things I never had time to do 

Can you recommend one thing that’s helped you get through this period of self-isolation?  

Yes I can.

I started emailing a Tibetan Buddhist nun who is living in a monastery in India. I couldn't help to draw a comparison between her voluntary isolation for a number of years and our enforced isolation. She grew up in Bethnal Green, in the 1970s, at the age of 20 she was ordained in a Tibetan monastery. She asked the head of the monastery if she could go and live in a cave because she felt ostracised as a woman living with monks. She spent thirteen years in this cave - three of which were in silent retreat; Jetsuma Tenzin Palmo.  

I have a relationship with emails that started a few years ago where I just pick someone who seems unreachable and then without expecting a response I start a one way conversation - I did this once with my mother who died 24 years ago - it's really cathartic to write into a void. I did get a response from India - I’ve been in touch with a nun from the Indian monastery who has been extremely thoughtful in her response - she also gave me some advice that I don't want to share unless it's one-to-one. There’s a picture of Tenzin on my instagram @vivienne.griffin, DM me if you want to know more.  

This time has put my life (everyone's life) under a microscope - problems are magnified. Then there are people with second homes in the countryside who have received a lot of criticism - if I had a house in or near nature I’d have gone there too. 

Trying (trying not succeeding) to have a routine around work is also helpful. I am an addict and in sobriety I can use anything else, mostly work but people, places or things. I want to work all of the time but I try to have a daytime schedule and time off in the evening to watch a movie or trash TV.

You’ve been constantly changing and rearranging the sculptures in your piece since the exhibition opened. How does this form part of the work?   

This hasn't happened yet and was postponed due to Covid-19 but the intention was that nothing is fixed and materiality is accumulative. The large piece of black glass on top of the plinth is a stand in for a screen, I was going to smash the screen and add in homemade zombie knives, cast from pewter. Zombie knives have now been banned in the UK because of the exponential rise in knife crime and they can't serve any other purpose. I’ve seen kids on the estate I live in flash them about, they are theatrical, if you have one why wouldn't you show it off and then feel pressure to use it. It's been capitalised on by some unscrupulous manufacturer.

I hadn’t intended for this to be so bleak, I think on any given day it's different, Hackney Marshes is keeping me sane, coffee is keeping me wired, people banging on about their gardens is driving me nuts, isolation is relative, time is different, I don't want to go back to how it was before, it can't stay the same, everything is different and I know it needed to change, I have lost ideas about wanting things, now I just need things, wanting things is on hold for now at least.

Vivienne Griffin - I Should Be Doing Something Else Right Now, installed in Gallery 31
Vivienne Griffin - I Should Be Doing Something Else Right Now, installed in Gallery 31

Sam Williams

The starting point of the exhibition was to think about the speed at which things change in today’s hyperconnected world. The whole world has now had to get used to an enormous shift in behaviour almost overnight, with lockdowns and social distancing the new normal. How do you feel about this enforced slowness?  

Despite being quite hectic and busy as a person, I am quite accustomed to slowness in my work and in the process of making work. To have it now applied to daily life is... OK with me. Obviously the circumstances under which it's happening make it quite a strange and difficult situation in many ways, but slowing down and finding new ways to do things and connect with people is an interesting challenge. I'd been thinking a lot about it last year in connection to making the Salvage Rhythms work, which is all about individual bodies attempting to make something out of a damaged landscape and find ways to connect with those around them whilst cultivating individual and collective survival.

What else should you be doing right now?  

I should be preparing, researching and rehearsing for a new outdoor performance commission I am making in collaboration with my friend, the artist Hollie Miller. Of course things are now a bit up in the air and have been pushed back until August. We are working with a cast of eight performers, so the physical distancing rules make this impossible at the moment. I should also be making some bread but there seems to be a total shortage of flour, so I won't be doing that.

Can you recommend one thing that’s helped you get through this period of self-isolation?  

Books, music and communication tools that have allowed me to see friends virtually – I have also had the change to learn more about and start to practice fermenting, preserving, pickling and learning to cook and eat with zero waste. It's a good habit to get into without needing to take things to the extreme, and right now making everything last longer is a good skill to have.

"slowing down and finding new ways to do things and connect with people is an interesting challenge."

Sam Williams
Sam Williams and Roly Porter - Salvage Rhythms

Your film in the exhibition draws upon a performance you did at the Somerset House Studios AGM in October 2019. Is this a way of working you’ve experimented with before?  

Last year I made my first real live works, with the AGM performance being one of them. I have worked a lot with choreography and performance in my past films and in collaborative works with choreographers such as Rosemary Butcher and Joe Moran. However these new live works were the first time I let go of the screen and concentrated on the outcome being live bodies in space. I found the process to be incredibly rich and rewarding and it has really opened up my practice in quite a dramatic way. It was great to have some nervousness back, which I had lost a bit as making films gives you so much control over what people see whereas live work always has some element of the unknown or unexpected at play.
 
The musician Roly Porter produced the soundtrack for the film. Do you often collaborate with musicians and composers in your work? What do you look for in collaborations? 

Collaboration is an essential part of my practice. I don't often collaborate with people on a technical level as I do all of the post-production work on my films myself, only occasionally working with a crew on bigger shoots. When it comes to musicians and composers, I have worked a lot with Simon Keep on sound design for my films and am part of the visual side of Emptyset with Paul Purgas and James Ginzburg. Working with Roly, however, was my first real collaboration with a musician where the whole work was created in conversation. This conversation included the amazing performers (Leah Marojevic, Samir Kennedy and Karen Callaghan). Roly and I first met many years ago and there was an immediate connection with our personalities and interests and we said that one day we should make something together. A lot of time passed in between but all of a sudden everything fell into place. That immediate connection is what I look for though, and it is important in building a space where everybody has a voice in the making and something to contribute more than technical skills alone. 

Rhea Storr

The starting point of the exhibition was to think about the speed at which things change in today’s hyperconnected world. The whole world has now had to get used to an enormous shift in behaviour almost overnight, with lockdowns and social distancing the new normal. How do feel about this enforced slowness?  

I'm fortunate enough to be able to work from home - I still feel fairly connected but perhaps connections have to be renegotiated and re-established. This week I've participated in an online book club, watched a small portion of a DJ set and finally started reading Afropean, which has been sitting on my shelf for some time. As well as more practical considerations, I think artists are in the perfect position to provide cultural content for people stuck at home. It's our jobs! Of course this labour shouldn't be exploited and I don't feel pressure to be hyperproductive, I just like to be busy.

What else should you be doing right now?  

Staying home, looking out for the people around you, picking up a non-productive hobby, resting. 

Can you recommend one thing that’s helped you get through this period of self-isolation?  

Some of my favourite filmmakers have made their work temporarily available online - Cauleen Smith and Ephraim Asili are my favourites so far. I like that there are film festivals putting their programmes online too, (it would be remiss of me not to mention the fantastic Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival next month). Yes, there are some concessions to be made in how the work is being viewed - it's not a cinema screen - but suddenly artist film is much more accessible to anyone with access to the Internet. 

"I think artists are in the perfect position to provide cultural content for people stuck at home."

Rhea Storr
Rhea Storr - A PROTEST, A CELEBRATION, A MIXED MESSAGE (excerpt)

Can you talk about the elements you use to manipulate your pictures?

Resist and Play takes footage from Leeds West Indian Carnival which appeared in another moving image work: A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message. I re-photographed the footage as stills and subjected them to differing levels of degradation - they are soaked in lemon juice and salt before processing. I wanted to explore abstraction as a way to hide or conceal information and destroying the photograph as a way to cloak a body, as a form of masquerade. The carnival backdrop is a playspace but it is also a space to subvert power through mimicry and mockery. 
 

Can you tell us about the poems you write to accompany the images?

The images which form Resist and Play are captioned with poetic texts. I wanted the text to formally resemble slogans or advertisements, something with a direct message overlayed onto an image which is uncertain or obscured. The content of the captions takes a more poetic, obscure approach. I like the idea that the experience of carnival has a quality which can’t be communicated through either image or text. The yellow text in the exhibition - A SCRATCH, A FLASH, WHAT I SAW WASHED OVER ME BUT YOU CAN'T SEE IT HERE - was heavily influenced by Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. I'm quite taken by the idea that one can cloak oneself in a culture. There's always a danger that the masquerade will be misappropriated or usurped.

Rhea Storr - Resist and Play, installed in Gallery 31
Rhea Storr - Resist and Play, installed in Gallery 31

Maeve Brennan

The starting point of the exhibition was to think about the speed at which things change in today’s hyperconnected world. The whole world has now had to get used to an enormous shift in behaviour almost overnight, with lockdowns and social distancing the new normal. How do you feel about this enforced slowness?

It’s completely disorientating but also feels necessary. Things were clearly unsustainable with economies built on continual growth and extractive industries using up dwindling natural resources. I was in Beirut last October when the protests there began, calling for the fall of the regime – from one day to the next the political reality changed completely. Then there were the bushfires in Australia, the floods and the University strikes in the UK and now this global shift due to the virus. Any kind of ‘normal’ we knew has been upended. Slowness feels like an antidote to capitalism.

What else should you be doing right now?

Nothing for once. 

Can you recommend one thing that’s helped you get through this period of self-isolation?

Film festivals putting their programmes online. 

Maeve Brennan - The Goods, installed in Gallery 31
Maeve Brennan - The Goods, installed in Gallery 31

Your work in the show is part of an ongoing series produced in collaboration with forensic archaeologist Dr Christos Tsirogiannis, and shows documents of looted antiquities belonging to a convicted antiquities dealer. Can you tell us about your relationship with the objects that feature in the work?

My interest in Christos’ work stems from my time living in Lebanon from 2013–16 where I produced The Drift (51 minutes, 2017). The film documents forms of maintenance and repair, with a focus on Lebanon’s rich archaeology. I began to look into the recent influx of illicit artefacts entering Lebanon from Syria since the war began in 2011 and became interested in the western demand for these objects, as well as the underground networks in place that facilitate the looting and smuggling of cultural heritage.  

I came across Christos’ work in an article in 2017. He had identified two Greek lekythoi(vases) at Frieze Masters in London that were linked to convicted antiquities dealer Gianfranco Becchina. The vases were removed from sale and put under investigation. 

Having spent time interviewing looters and smugglers in the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon, it became clear that looting was a form of livelihood for them. The responsibility lies with the market for these artefacts and the continuing demand driven by sales predominantly in London and New York. When an object is looted it is violently removed from its archaeological context and can no longer contribute to a historical narrative. This is the reason Christos’ work is so vital, drawing attention to an illicit economy that facilitates this kind of damage.  

The objects are dealt with in a very interesting and dynamic way. It actually causessome things to change. Can you give an example, and, how does that make you feel?

Christos’ work is ongoing – his identifications often lead to the repatriation of looted or stolen antiquities to their country of origin. The works themselves incorporate this liveness. For example, the piece in Gallery 31 depicts a sales transaction of a looted krater by convicted dealer Gianfranco Becchina. However, a polaroid attached to the same document shows another object that has yet to surface in the antiquities market and is still in circulation. This image is pixelated because the object would be driven underground if dealers became aware of it. This work, as well as my broader collaboration with Christos, aims to make visible the largely invisible mechanisms of this illicit economy. 

This Q&A is the first in a series of long reads published as part of our online cultural programme 'I Should Be Doing Something Else Right Now'. Whilst our exhibitions might be closed, our online programme reflects on our response to isolation and a renewed appreciation of our shared wellbeing, the themes of connection and commonality are explored throughout, values which have always been integral to Somerset House as the home of a community of artists, makers and creative practitioners.

Explore the programme

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