London Performance Studios is pleased to present BLANKS, a major new commission by Associate Artist Sam Cottington, in which the languages of sculpture and performance are brought into counterpoint with the apparatus of the exhibition and the theatre. BLANKS can be understood as an exhibition in a series of acts—a series of actions, or sleights of hand by the artist—as well as a piece of theatre, in which objects and staging act as stand-ins for various modes of discursive production and the publics that such discourse might bring to life. 

First, Cottington seems to present the viewer with an enumeration of readymades. However, as the viewer approaches these found objects for a second look one, and then another, of a series of found telephones begins to ring. The suite of assemblages is now an environment-cum-scenography for four plays written by the artist, and performed by actors somewhere on the other end of the line. 

Performed live over the phone, each play perverts the status of the objects staged for exhibition by inviting listeners to engage with a series of unclear relationships and scenarios, invoked and mediated by contemporary communication technology.

As sculpture becomes prop, viewer becomes audience, and exhibition becomes stage, Cottington explores what critic Sianne Ngai has called the ‘gimmicks of production’: those moments when an object or person performs too much or too little—when it’s too easy, undeserving of praise or overly produced, trying too hard, camp—and how in those moments, the sublimated labour in everyday judgements of taste or aesthetic value are revealed. In setting the sculpture within the language of the readymade and materiality of the assemblage, and against the made reality of the theatre—sculptural realism against theatrical melodrama—BLANKS asks us to deconstruct how the discursive lines of aesthetic acceptability, propriety, decency, and criticality are shored up by a policing of the suspension of disbelief, in whatever genre of ‘real life’ scenario they are encountered. 

Scripts from the four plays presented in BLANKS are collected in new publication Phone Plays, which accompanies the exhibition. This is the first publication in Scores, a new imprint co-commissioned by Montez Press and London Performance Studios, that publishes scripts and performance texts by artists, theatre-makers and performance-makers working between the visual and theatrical arts.

→ You can order Sam Cottington’s Phone Plays book here

This exhibition is organised by Sam Cottington, as part of the Associate Artists Programme.