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Roland The magazine of The iCa’s visual art pRogRamme issue 5 / febRuaRy—apRil 2010 feaTuRing a guide To Billy Childish Unknowable but Certain GALLERy guide 4 biogRaphy 12 aCTiviTies & publiCaTions 14 ediTions 16 ArtisTs’ film Club 17 oTheR evenTs 18 baCkgRound maTeRial 22 plus texts and other contributions by: max beckmann, Richard birkett, neal brown, Charles bukowski, martin Clark, louis-ferdinand Céline, bo diddley, knut hamsun, matthew higgs, Jutta koether, Robert Walser The iCa is proud to present the fifth issue of OLANDR , which has been produced to accompany our new exhibition Billy Childish—Unknowable but Certain. The first half of the magazine contains a guide to the exhibition and other events at the iCa, while the second half features a variety of texts and images by the subject of the exhibition, billy Childish, as well as contributions from a wide range of authors, artists and commentators, providing a broad context within which to understand Childish’s work. The magazine also includes a special insert that forms part of Cosey CompleX, a one- day event at the iCa on 27 march. Roland / issue 5 / febRuaRy—apRil 2010 Billy Childish / gallery gUide Billy Childish Unknowable but Certain 17 FEBRUARY�18 APRIL 2010 The iCa is proud to present a major contemporary world that is a feature of all solo exhibition by artist, musician and his work. writer billy Childish. The artist was The iCa’s upper galleries present born in 1959 in Chatham in kent, where Childish’s output as a musician and writer, he still lives, and his prodigious range of covering a career which began in 1977, activities can best be understood as a total and providing a context within which the work of art—one which centres on his recent paintings can be understood. one own extraordinary persona. Childish is room concentrates on his music, which has a cult figure, and one who has gained an involved a huge range of collaborators and international following, but this exhibition bands, and which maintains a stubbornly is the first occasion on which a public independent ethos originating in the punk institution has attempted to encompass era. The other room features books and his long and wide-ranging career. pamphlets containing Childish’s writings, The iCa’s lower gallery features a often designed and published by him and group of Childish’s recent paintings, which illustrated by his own woodcuts. The have an unusual command and power. it display includes polemical and campaigning includes self-portraits of the artist, often literature, but also his more personal poetry shown hill-walking; images of boats on and prose, much of which is profoundly the medway estuary, where he lives; still autobiographical in nature. lifes with flowers, featuring pots made by The exhibition has been curated by the artist’s mother; and paintings depicting Richard birkett of the iCa and matthew the swiss modernist writer Robert higgs of White Columns, new york, and Walser, including works based on police is staged concurrently with an exhibition photographs showing the author dead in of the artist’s paintings at the latter venue the snow. Childish’s paintings are highly (5 march—17 april 2010). expressionistic, conveying a sense of the visionary significance that he discovers rose, paint on board, 2009 in objects, places and people. They also mark sladen demonstrate the deliberate rejection of the director of exhibitions, iCa 4 5 Roland / issue 5 / febRuaRy—apRil 2010 Billy Childish / gallery gUide loWeR galleRy painting has been a consistent part of Childish’s wider resonance—as a metaphor for the artist’s practice since the late 1970s, and for many years he attempts to order his experience of the world. concentrated his painting into a few weeks of the The pictures of Walser overlap with a group of year, during which time he would work intensely to self-portraits by Childish, which show the artist in produce a large number of canvases, most of them the midst of towering landscapes, including the atlas made in just a few hours each. in the mid 1980s mountains. in some of these pictures the artist is Childish shifted this pattern, since when he has spent depicted in a yellow suit, making reference to a most weekends painting at his mother’s house in character in Mysteries, hamsun’s novel of 1892. Whitstable, kent, where an upstairs bedroom serves The character of nagel is a radical, almost Christ- as his studio. The paintings in the iCa’s lower like figure who arrives in a small norwegian town gallery are all made since 2007, in oils (with charcoal wearing a yellow suit, and who proceeds to create under-drawing), and display subjects and composi- turmoil in the contented community through his tions that have recurred in the work of this period— eccentric and provocative behaviour. The existential while Childish does not consciously work in series, notion of a man ‘out-of-time’ is present in the he often returns to certain themes and motifs. writings of both hamsun and Walser, and is also Across thirty years of painting Childish’s work evident in much of Childish’s work, which expresses has been largely autobiographical and expressive, a desire for a spiritual response to the world, a often employing the self-portrait as a means to response often cast in opposition to the status quo. register experience and emotion. While his approach While the intensity of Childish’s paintings to the act of painting is intuitive and physical, his reflects the immediacy of emotional experience, their compositions consciously echo the work of artists subject matter speaks of a deeply ingrained personal with whom he has an affinity, including the early history and iconography. another group of works modernist painters edvard munch, mikhail larionov made in recent years depict old moored steamboats and karl schmidt-Rottluff, along with the writers and other ships on the medway estuary. These fyodor dostoevsky, knut hamsun and Robert images are evocative symbols of the region where Walser. This network of influences is echoed in Childish has lived for much of his life, and reflect his Childish’s depiction of the artist as anti-hero, a own personal experience of working in the Chatham creative archetype that embodies the intensity of dockyard as a teenager. They also evoke the worldly experience and the problematic attempt to persistence of such industrial icons in folk memory, translate it into art. and conjure up a decelerated response to contempo- Walser, a swiss modernist writer who died in rary living that is very characteristic of the artist. 1956, is the subject of a group of recent works by If a sense of temporality and mortality is central Childish, and a number of these paintings are to many of the paintings within this exhibition, then exhibited here.1 Walser’s most radical works a group of still lifes provides an equivalent medita- coincided with his committal to a mental home, and tion on the vibrancy of existence. evoking the he died from a heart attack while walking in the composition, gesture and intense hues of van gogh’s snow near the sanatorium. Childish’s paintings of flower paintings, these works are also marked by Walser include images of the writer’s death, based Childish’s choice of vases. each brown vessel on original police photographs of the scene, and appears to be a kind of totem, bearing primitive imbued with elegiac and dream-like qualities human or animal features that are sometimes through the use of thick impasto to build up the menacing, at other times comedic. These vases have snow-bound scene. Walser was known for his habit a very specific meaning for Childish, as they are of taking long nocturnal walks, and walking in the made by his mother, June lewis, a practice she landscape is important to Childish as well. The began after a trip to bali. one of these vases can be painter has often returned to the image of the seen at the iCa, placed at reception to welcome flâneur, and in his pictures of Walser this figure takes visitors to the exhibition, and displaying flowers Man Walking up a snowy slope, 2009 on a special poignancy, and the notion of walking a selected by the artist. oil on canvas, 182 x 121 cm 1. Walser’s early work was widely published and lauded, but as his hearing voices, Walser continued to develop his densely layered approach to writing grew more radical he became a marginalised and abstracted style, writing by hand in miniscule and almost figure, and he was largely forgotten by the time of his death. indecipherable lettering. Committed to a mental asylum in 1929, after confessing to 6 7 Roland / issue 5 / febRuaRy—apRil 2010 Billy Childish / gallery gUide ConCouRse The Concourse contains a group of simple text- manifestos that Childish has written or contributed based placards, and introduces a very particular to since the early 90s, employing his savage wit and —and notorious—side to Childish’s practice, that of regaling the reader with heartfelt appeals for creative his polemical work. Commissioned from a sign- integrity. The text on the placards is accompanied by writer who is a friend of the artist, the signs consist the symbol of the gallows, a central feature within of brief phrases that veer from the lyrical to the Childish’s iconography, and employed as a reference confrontational and declamatory. They often address to folkloric heroes and anti-heroes, and as a symbol the contemporary art world, and relate to a series of for public authority and judgement. uppeR galleRies The iCa’s upper galleries are devoted to presenta- Childish with his friend and fellow poet sexton tions of Childish’s work as a writer, musician, and ming.

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