Nottingham’s Moot Gallery -until now situated in Sneinton; adjoined and adjacent to Stand Assembly Studios- is moving. The final show in their current space, The Long Take, absorbs this notion of transition and delivers, quite literally, a succession of works which inhabit a form on the threshold between existence and absence.

The show’s seventeen contributors, having been given Moot’s private fax number, have conspired to produce a collaborative drawing of unforeseen combinations; by faxing a document of their choice to the gallery, their work appears upon a continuous sheet of print paper, alongside (and essentially part of) the works of others. Placed in the centre of the room upon a long black-topped table, the roll of paper reaches out before the fax machine like a protracted tongue or span of premiere carpet, reaching down from the table’s end and flowing into a small cardboard box forming Viennetta-like curved ruffles.

Invited to take part in The Long Take were Justin Beal, Dave Bevan, Vanessa Billy, Simon and Tom Bloor, Tomas Chaffe, Karen Cunningham, Martijn int' Veld, Mark Harasimowicz, Jenny Hogarth and Kim Coleman, Brian Kennon, Jonty Lees, Sara MacKillop, Rachel Reupke, publishing collective Dexter Sinister and Jack Strange. The names, some more familiar than others, include some who have exhibited in Moot in the past, rising art stars –such as Jack Strange- and many unknowns. The Long Take, however, offered what Moot gallerist Tom Godfrey describes as “an even playing field”: None of the works which make up the thirty meter sheet in the gallery are unmistakably one artist’s or another’s, being as they are without signature. There is neither opportunity for individual ownership, nor room for curatorial intervention within the show; the responsibility for the configuration and development of The Long Take, as both artwork and exhibition, lies squarely at the feet of chance.

On the evening of the exhibition’s final day Moot will play host to the Reading Room -a nomadic cultural forum open to the public, conceived and lead by Nottingham-based curatorial organisation Hinterland- in which visitors to the event will discuss and examine different ideas concerning Mail Art, with particular attention being paid to Stephen Perkins’ essay “Networks and Correspondence Identities”. The term "Mail Art" refers to creative processes through which communication networks are utilised to stage, influence or form collaborative artworks. Employed by the Fluxus group in the 1960’s, and later by Fluxus ‘alumni’ George Brecht and Robert Filliou as Fête Permanente or the “eternal network”, Mail Art became “a pivotal medium through which (a) utopian model of creativity could be activated on an international scale”_; a model that sought to close the gap between the audience and the artist, and between art and life.

These open and collaborative exchanges were devised as a means of creative relief and freedom from the exclusive and competitive artistic hierarchical system, which was leaving artists increasingly disillusioned. This alternative system offered anonymity and collective dialogue; works posted and re-posted, worked and reworked, often forming exhibitions which solely existed upon arrival at the address of the subsequent contributor, who constituted the show’s new audience, in a transaction that Stephen Perkins describes in his essay as “a new ecology of human exchange”.

Within Moot’s The Long Take there are a great variety of contributions; lists of rules dictating what constitutes good design, how one should act if one was a cowboy, and how to behave within a crime “family” ala Corleone; doodles sent from a trip in Romania; an essay entitled “For Immediate Release” in which cultural critic Michael Bracewell condemns contemporary British life; and, among others, a number of works which reoccur frequently, with slight variations, punctuating the document’s unpredictability like melodic motifs during a freeform jazz recital.

With the voracious toll of technological progress our conception of the world as a significant, physical space has been redefined, whilst our ability to communicate with one another has been simplified; monumental distances becoming inconsequential. But with this ease of communication there is no sense of an improved dialogue, in fact, to the contrary, conversations have been reduced and sterilised.

Fax machines, increasingly rare, represent a bygone era in our recent past and technology’s lineage; possessing analogue qualities that place them between the letter and the email. When a faxed document comes through, we know that as the paper feeds out of the machine before us, that there is someone physically feeding the same message into their own machine, somewhere else in the world. And so, the sense of excitement Moot’s proprietors –artists Godfrey, Hessing, Jacobs and Jamieson- describe having experienced at the appearance of each of the entries in this fragmented diary is understandably human: with each click and whir of the machine’s gears the sheet of ink marches on, bearing to the timely onlooker the reward of seeing art born.

The Long Take was showing at Moot gallery 10 July - 3 August

Utopian Networks and Correspondence Identities, Stephen Perkins
 

Moot gallery