Marx on the Table

Private View: 17 Sept | 17:00 - 20:00
Open Exhibition: 18 - 26 Sept | Thu & Fri: 11:00-15:00
Sat: 11:00-17:00 | Sun: 11:00-16:00
Daisy Murphy Youth Dance, Shakespeare Centre, Sandgate Rd, Folkestone, CT20 2DA

‘Marx on the Table’ brings together five recent graduates who scramble a material or object’s functionality to signal towards alternatives. This group exhibition touches upon themes such as identity, class, storytelling, queerness, and climate chaos.

Curators: Elliot Gibbons / Artists: Meitao Qu / Anaïs Comer / Lily Hudson / Jessica Reeves / Sally Plowman

exhibition

When we write upon the table, we are most likely to layer a notebook or piece of paper over it to do so. By way of scraping at the surface of a varnished wooden table and forming a sequence of symbols which can be read, there is an inversion of the uses typically prescribed to the table. Sarah Ahmed understands this as a queering of use, or as “a certain willingness to be perverse”. Writing into the table’s surface is a queer use, in the sense that it releases a potentiality inherent to its original form.

In their book What’s the Use? (2019), Ahmed looks back upon a remark made by Karl Marx in his seminal text Capital (1867): Marx writes that “man changes the forms of the materials of nature in such a way as to make them useful to him” and that “the discovery of these ways and hence of the manifold uses of things is the work of history”. Ahmed’s analysis of this remark by Marx aptly enables her to conclude that the history of use is in fact a history of displacement; and how the binarism useful/useless underpins countless questionable ideologies, and politics. So, in queering ‘use’ a more just world can be sought for.

Through an analysis of Jacques Derrida’s reading of Marx within Spectres of Marx (1993), and his reflections upon a table found within an auction house or antiques shop, she states how signs of use such as scratches aren’t simply a sign of degradation or a loss of value but can be read as a testimony. She continues, the table “might testify to its own history”. Looking back at how an object has been ‘used’ - the histories it testifies to - enable us to imagine alternative uses. To queer an objects functionality is to attend to its own history of use, and seemingly work with and against such histories.

Marx on the Table - the first of two exhibitions selected for Folkestone Fringe’s new curator platform GLUE - brings together five recent graduates who seemingly attend to such histories of use within their respective practices. Through a process of then queering an object’s function, these artists signal to larger socio-political issues.

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Anaïs Comer creates objects that although initially appearing familiar, are in fact quite strange. Public amenities, such as lampposts and signage, are rendered peculiar by Comer. Often produced from a composite of wood, cardboard and plaster, these artifacts are visually handmade – at times they appear animate or are sentient in the sense that unlike normal streetlamps, or signposts, they are moveable and interactive. With ‘the sheppey inn’ (2020) and ‘with April showers’ (2020), Comer poses pertinent questions about our public architecture, and who they serve.

Lily Hudson’s ‘A Scout from Really Really Far Away’ (2021), ‘Untitled (The City)’ (2021) and ‘Surrender’ (2021) build upon a piece of writing exploring the relationship between mycelial networks, humans, and a broader cybernetic ecology; consisting of a series of satellites whittled from discarded tree branches, imagined scenes from a fantasy world using pyrography (wood-burning) on panels of varnished reclaimed wood, and a sculptural make-shift table with the word ‘surrender’ formed three-dimensionally with modified twigs. Through a retooling of natural materials Hudson urges questions around alternative infrastructures in the face of climate chaos, and how we can organise collectively with nature and each other to combat these urgent issues.

Sally Plowman presents a series of sculptural works which retool discarded and found materials into musical instruments. ‘WE OPEN OUR MOUTH TO SPEAK AND’ (2021) is a composition of five interactive wooden contraptions, each with foot pedals attached to the bottom. The foot pedal when pressed tenses a piece of string which triggers a combination of metal tubing and recycled tin cans to clash upon their chipboard surfaces. One larger sculptural piece, resembling an atypical table, unleashes a series of long metal cylinders upon its outer surface, generating a sequence of ominous thuds. Each person who presses their foot upon this peddle engraves it with a more perverse history of use. ‘garage band’ (2021) is a modified trike, gifted to the artist whilst living nomadically, which you are invited to pedal; pedalling of the trike causes a metal rod to collide with tin cans attached to the frame. Plowman’s practice is informed by a redemptive uptake of failure, following the ideology championed by the queer theorist Jack Halberstam, her work exemplifies the numerous possibilities inherent in choosing to leave a proscribed set of rules behind.

Meitao Qu’s ‘Sleep well’ (2021) repurposes a hamster cage, dollhouse assembly kits, and miniature greenery to reflect upon city planning and access. Shenzhen-born Qu recalls childhood memories of her architectural surroundings in the city and the changes engendered by the economic experiments of the Pearl River Delta, Southern China. A cluster of luxury developments, amusement parks, and tourist complexes, colloquially referred to as OCT (Overseas Chinese Town), are distinguished from the neighbouring working-class villages of Baishizhou with concrete walls and manicured nature, designed to obscure them from the sight of visitors. The diorama sculpturally staged by Qu poses the question of who can utilise what, and how class dictates the answer to this question. For this exhibition, we have produced a complimentary publication ‘guān’ featuring Qu’s recent collage works and writing, combining political imagery and personal narrative.

Jessica Reeves’ ‘Show! Me the Money...’ (2021) is an installation of handmade paper pulp fire bricks, made entirely from their own personal detritus, such as receipts, diary papers, and an old university prospectus. Condensing wet pulp into rectangular masses with a briquette press enables a transformation of these waste materials into an alternative source of fuel. Reeves’s choice of materials trucks with the binarism of high and low, provoking questions around class and access within the creative sector today. Forming part of Marx on the Table’s public programme, Reeves will deliver a workshop where they will invite you to make your own firebricks, sharing this survivalist practice that could become vital in our not-too-distant futures.

Reference:

Ahmed, S. (2019) What’s the Use? Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.