Wednesday 8 July 6-9pm
Curated by Andy Holden featuring M!MS Album Launch & Grand Aesthetics Game
Free Event / All Welcome
Stanley Picker Fellow Andy Holden returns to the Gallery to curate our 2015 Summer Party; an evening of music, games, film and live performance, celebrating the official release of the M!MS Original Soundtrack Album.
Proceedings will commence with Holden’s Live Director’s Commentary of Towards a Unified Theory of M!MS (Maximum Irony! Maximum Sincerity); a film which began life during the artist’s Stanley Picker Fellowship with development of the soundtrack featuring Kingston’s Tiffin School Chamber Orchestra & Children’s Chorus and recorded live at The Rose Theatre as part of International Youth Arts Festival 2013. Two years on, the album launch event is now included in this Summer’s Festival programme.
The M!MS project – initially presented at the Zabludowicz Collection, London, then Spike Island Bristol and more recently to Kunsthalle Winterthur Switzerland – is a depiction of an art movement started as teenagers by Holden and his friends whilst living in Bedford. Ten years later, current young residents of the town were cast to play the artists to “re-make the art movement and bring the manifesto back to life”. The M!MS film is to be premiered at the Stanley Picker Gallery Summer Party as a single screen linear piece, with Holden’s live narration describing the process and ideas behind the year-long project. The soundtrack will be available to purchase as a 12” brown vinyl album in a gatefold sleeve designed by the artist.
The event will culminate in the first ever staging of the Grand Aesthetics Game; based on an activity originally devised by members of the M!MS movement, during the early development of their collective and penning of their Manifesto. Played by small groups at social gatherings or in cafés, the rules were mysterious and continuously evolving, leaving players unsure as to whether it was really a game or not. Adopting the image of the Glass Bead Game as it appears in the Herman Hesse novel, the Grand Aesthetics Game will take over the Gallery and players will immerse themselves in its nuances. Multiple rounds will be interspersed with screenings of short works, performances and live music by original members of M!MS.