Yuck 'n Yum presents @ cabin:codex 27.05.11

To the DCA on Friday night for cabin:codex at the Centre for Artists’ Books in the Centrespace. This was in the middle of all chaos during my flat move, but I did take a couple of photos and here they are:



(L-R: Your correspondent, Andrew, Alexandra, Alex)

hiatus

There'll be a break in blog transmissions while I move to a new flat, a process due to begin tomorrow morning. On Saturday I get the internet connected to the new place, so expect further updates to follow later this weekend.

In the meantime, here's some audio-visual stimulus:

Cara Tolmie interview - The Skinny

My recent interview with Cara Tolmie has appeared in The Skinny: LINK

Degree show 2011 review - The Skinny

Rose Hendry

My review of the 2011 Duncan of Jordanstone degree show has now appeared in The Skinny: LINK

iinnddeexx

Yet more links from my Delicious page:

Peter Jensen

The Armando Project: Armando Gallop: A Life

BAN THIS SICK FILTH - A GUIDE TO GORNO « Viceland Film

¬_¬ http://igotthemethdudesinsideme.tumblr.com/

Philip Best - Sex Offender Boyfriend

Degree show 2011 review

Ross Fleming

Duncan of Jordanstone Degree Show 2011

Degree show time rolls around to Dundee once more, and the class of 2011 pitches up to offer the world its wares. 300 students, 11 undergraduate programmes, fourteen floors across two buildings. It’s quite an itinerary, and the Fine Art course is waiting for the yearly casting of thousands of critical eyes. The diversity of work in the Scottish art scene just now is its very strength, and trying to spot trends is probably a fool’s errand. Better just to grab a map on the way in and to simply get on with it.

The Cooper Gallery at the front of the Crawford Building makes an apt setting for the minimal sculptures of Julie Duffy, whose stark wooden planes, edged with insulation foam, command the space with some authority. Their spare, angular forms seem quite at home here against the classicist architecture. Next door, by way of contrast, we see an installation by Beth Savage from the Art, Philosophy and Contemporary Practice course. A video plays of the artist sat under a tree wearing a pair of big felt bunny ears on her head, and over on a nearby table there’s an arrangement of teacups full of egg yolks. The Bataille references are duly checked on the artist’s gallery handout, but it’s all done in such a way as to feel more like having fun than homework. Sculptures by Raluca Iancu are sort of fun too, and sort of traumatic at the same time, with wrecked cars and mangled planes depicted using soft, tactile materials in bright friendly colours.

Upstairs on Level 5 is a room painted top to bottom in black gloss, the setting for a hexagonal structure clambered over by an apelike celebrant of some unspecified esoteric rite. Phantom by Ross Fleming is a visceral telling of a secreted ritual, an act that’s all the more thrilling for being concealed behind a veil of darkness. Coming to it from the bright, airy Crawford corridors is much like stumbling into a black metal fan’s bedroom during a museum tour, and makes for a startling discovery. Walking further along the way, Katie Morrison shows delicately rendered paintings featuring tessellations of machine guns, hand grenades and fishnet patterns.

Deep in the basement of the Matthew Building, the graduates of the Time Based Art programme make an annual showcase of the college’s renowned technical facilities. The short films of Rose Hendry certainly delivered in this regard. Realised to an acutely professional standard in terms of both camerawork and sound editing, her witty wordless vignettes were viscerally thrilling and gave good joke too. The vivid pink of lipstick smoking on a cigarette, the bright red of tomato ketchup, the glamorous lady blowing a whistle amid the suds in Bird Bath, all these sights and sounds were indelibly branded onto the audience’s central nervous system. The shot of a cigarette, stubbed out on the yolk of a fried egg, will live long in the memory.

Yuck 'n Yum presents @ cabin:codex 21.05.11

To the DCA for cabin:codex at the Centre for Artists’ Books, where the editorial team discussed submissions from the launch event. During the discussion the camera was handed to our cover artist Ross Hamilton Frew. He took a few photos and here they are:


(L-R: Alex, your correspondent, special guest Dylan, Gayle, Andrew)

Degree show 2011

To the art school today, to see the 2011 Duncan of Jordanstone degree show. I took a few photos of what I thought looked interesting, and here they are:


Julie Duffy


Nathalie Connelly


Beth Savage


Beth Savage


Raluca Iancu


Raluca Iancu


Victoria Gazeley


John Henderson


Ross Fleming


Ben Reid


Rebecca Jones


Rebecca Jones


Rebecca Jones


Siobhan Millar


Katie Morrison


Sarah Johnston


Mark Stryker


Rose Hendry


Rose Hendry

AGK 2011 TEASER

AGK 2011 TEASER from yucknyum on Vimeo.

Just when you thought it was safe to sing Bonnie Tyler...
it's the AGK 2!

Yuck ’n Yum are delighted to announce the sequel to last year's hugely successful AGK.

The 2010 Annual General Karaoke saw creative types from across Scotland make their very own karaoke videos, and the chosen songs were performed at the Chambers Suite in Dundee. This year’s AGK will take place on September 24th.

We NEED you to set the agenda! We're hoping this year's event will continue to present unmissable art and thrilling karaoke, so once again we're asking for your Karaoke video submissions. Just like last year, £300 is up for grabs for best video!

The Deadline for video submissions is the 15th of August. For full details on how to submit your video and for up to date AGK news visit : agk.yucknyum.com

Yuck 'n Yum - Mercy Guest Blog 19.05.11

Ben Robinson - William Beckford



All this week Yuck 'n Yum are writing a guest blog over at the Liverpool-based art and design site Mercy. Today's post features me, and you can see the post here or below:

My name is Ben Robinson and I’m the Yuck ‘n Yum features editor. Each issue contains two 500ish-word articles about different aspects of contemporary culture: one piece written by me, the other commissioned from someone else. There’s never been any specific brief as such, and as a result the zine has covered a massively diverse range of cultural production over the past three years. A few examples would include the 19th century aesthete William Beckford and the seduction of a young boy, a tour round the atrocity museums of Hungary, the sadly missed Timperley comic Frank Sidebottom, the window displays of Harvey Nichols in Edinburgh during the credit crunch… all of these things are intrinsically related to art and all belong inside Yuck ‘n Yum.

I don’t think it’s the job of the zine to explain why such things might be good or bad, beautiful or ugly, or indeed art or non-art. That’s entirely up to the reader, and they can savour the exquisite taste or spit the rank slurry out in disgust.

A short selection of texts from the archive can be found below:

Ben Robinson: ‘Cut Hands Has The Solution: William Bennett and Afro Noise’

Nero Acrilico : I Wanna Fly Away

Jonathan Baxter : Words

Gayle Meikle : Terror Haza : Museums As Art

Ben

Zazou @ Kage nightclub, Dundee 27.05.11

On Friday 27th May from 11pm DJ Ben 'Jack Your Body' Robinson will play alongside Il Discotto & Poupée Flash at Zazou, purveying Italo and cosmic disco, minimal synth and cold wave at Dundee's Kage nightclub.

Yuck 'n Yum presents at cabin:codex 29.04.11 - Ross McLean

The brilliant but notoriously tardy photographer Ross Fraser McLean was on hand a few weeks ago at the Yuck 'n Yum cabin:codex event. He took a few photos, and here they are:

Yuck 'n Yum - Mercy Guest Blog 17.05.11

All this week Yuck 'n Yum are writing a guest blog over at the Liverpool-based art and design site Mercy. Today's post features our newest member Alex Tobin, and you can see the post here or below:

Being a n00b, I wondered "how did I (a person who still can't really cook well enough to be called self-dependent) end up here (in a reputable arts collective), doing this? (undertaking work that requires a modicum of responsibility)". And in that brief space of mental quietness that happens when I consider things like that, I heard Impostor syndrome calling out "Aleeeex, Aaaaleeeex".

Impostor syndrome is not that syndrome that involves delusionally - unless you actually are married to a hat - mistaking your wife for a hat. Actually, it's a mild kind of affect that Wikipedia describes like this: "Impostor syndrome, in which competent people find it impossible to believe in their own competence, can be viewed as complementary to the Dunning–Kruger effect, in which incompetent people find it impossible to believe in their own incompetence."

Impostor syndrome is finding yourself participating in quite respectable, grown-up situations, and fearing being exposed as the unqualified blaggard that (to your own mind) you are. The most noticeable example of Impostor syndrome is when you leave home for the first time and have to pretend to be an adult (for some reason I find it most discomfiting to keep up this pretence when I'm at the supermarket).

I imagine that everyone who has any sort of responsibility applied to them gets Impostor syndrome about 90-100% of the time. Personally, I get it whenever I have to cook for myself, become a member of Yuck 'n Yum, guest-blog on design websites, or go out and buy milk.

Thankfully, Wikipedia's definition (whilst acknowledgeably containing "insufficient inline citations") is quite a comforting validation. Only competent people get Impostor syndrome. It's a comfy catch-22. If you find it hard to believe in your competence: don't worry! That means you are competent! Maybe you could even join us in Yuck 'n Yum one day (The only really terrible people are people who think they're good at things - see "Dunning-Kruger effect").

Alex.