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Tony Morgan & John Blake, Installation Shots, Richard Saltoun
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Tony Morgan & John Blake, Installation Shots, Richard Saltoun
Exhibition
Some Dimensions Of My Lunch: Conceptual Art In Britain: Part 3: Tony Morgan & John Blake
29 Jul 2016 – 26 Aug 2016
Regular hours
- Friday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Saturday
- 11:00 – 17:00
- Tuesday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Wednesday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Thursday
- 10:00 – 18:00
Address
- 41 Dover Street
- London
England - W1S 4NS
- United Kingdom
Richard Saltoun Gallery presents a season of four one-month exhibitions devoted to Conceptual Art made in Britain during the 60s and 70s.
About
The third exhibition focuses on Tony Morgan (b. 1938 Leicestershire - d. 2004 Geneva) and John Blake (b. 1945). These two innovative and experimental filmmakers are also known for their early photo-conceptual works, for which this exhibition will focus.
Tony Morgan left London at the age of 22 to embark on a month-long walk to Rome, an epic walk which he later referred to as his "first performance" and cites as the nexus for his later performances and 'exercises'. The most famous of these, The Book of Exercises, 1971, will be exhibited for the first time in it entirety: encompassing 49 pages of typewritten text and 21 black and white photographs. Bringing together photography and text, the "book" attempts a taxonomy of activities according to their usefulness to the community: washing, transportation, housework, harvesting, versus private wealth, censorship, and the abuse of legal power.
John Blake, like Morgan, used the landscape and his movement within it to explore 'site': the camera became integral to documenting these explorations. Untitled (M Panorama) 1968/69, a pair of photographic panoramas takes as its subject the Vale of the White Horse in Uffington, Oxfordshire, which changes size and shape as Blake changes his own vantage point on the site. Blake begins to more literally change physical shape with the 11-part work Skin II (1969/70), where we see folds of flesh being pinched and pulled in large-format photos that exaggerate his proportions. Exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum (1971) and the São Paulo Biennale (1971), this is the first time since 1971 that it has been exhibited in the UK.
Typically brought together because of their prodigious use of film in their practice, the relationship between Morgan and Blake extends further than this. Richard Saltoun has selected works which demonstrate lesser-known aspects of their oeuvres, re-establishing both Morgan and Blake's importance as conceptual artists - not just filmmakers.
