Spotlight: Sam Bailey and The HIX Award 2018

Surreptitiously housed down the winding staircase of the Tramshed Restaurant, Shoreditch, HIX ART Gallery has slowly but surely established itself as a forward-thinking hub of contemporary art in London’s lively East End. Known formerly as the Cock ‘n’ Bull Gallery—named after the eponymous sculpture of Damien Hirst, elevated in monumental style above the diners upstairs—the gallery was inaugurated back in 2012 with a succinct manifesto for progressive and exciting art exhibitions that drew from established voices to the very best of London’s up-and-coming.

Occupying the cosy basement area of the restaurant and fuelled by the passion of its founder Mark Hix—friend to many of the YBAs and himself a dedicated art enthusiast—the gallery is currently curated by the talented Sophie Harriott, turning around a series of six-weekly shows that engage with a plethora of artistic styles and concepts.

In the last year alone, they have exhibited infamous illusionist and oxymoron aficionado Patrick Hughes—accompanied by all 12 of his studio assistants; the pop-expressionist social vignettes of Philipp Rudolf Humm; the celebratory yet subversive all-female Brains & Lip Takeover show; and numerous solo-presentations of nascent artistic careers, including the Matisse-come-Perry still lifes of Jacob Yarwood, the quasi-exotic surrealism of Joshua Raz or the prosaic yet heroic figures of Ben Edge’s intimate outsider portraits.

Launched soon after its opening, in 2013, was The HIX Award. Confronting the irksome limbo that exists between graduation and going-pro, the Award aims to foster a breadth of young artists teetering on the proverbial knife-edge of their gesso stained palettes. Since its inception, the Award has garnered a national reputation for its accessibility and success. Nominated artists take part in a curated group exhibition at HIX, with a generous cash prize and solo-show presented to the winner.

Shortlisted by Hix himself, each year’s finalists are judged by a new cohort of esteemed visual artists, the panel having included the likes of Stephen Webster and Dylan Jones, as well some of Britain’s favourite enfant terribles, the YBA’s Tracey Emin and Gavin Turk. The unique addition of a People’s Choice Award provides a direct link between the artists and public; a germane and novel dialogue for artists at such an early stage of their career.

The HIX Gallery’s earnest manifesto is ratified by its Award’s talented alumni. It’s first winner, Nicholas Permain, selected for the prestigious FBA Futures in 2015; its second, Felix Treadwell, named GQ’s ‘British Artist to Watch’ in 2017; and its third, Ally McIntyre, a print of her HIX Award-winning painting, Moon Cries for Ferdinand, now a part of the V&A’s permanent collection. Sam Bailey, the most recent of which, busy grinding away in his studio in advance of his solo-show with HIX in November. 



Graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2017, Bailey’s works are a series of mnemonic whispers. Layering watercolour and gouache on archival newsprint, anonymous and lurid apparitions are laced with a subtle melancholy. Both aesthetic and haptic, the material substance of his work echoes the DIY ethos of his subjects: images of activists from various protests in the 1980s, such as the Women Peace Camps of Greenham Common, the subject of his winning piece, Smoker 3 (2017).

A nauseous blend of mustard green and hollow grey, the self-effacing figure oscillates from recognition to neglect; the loose splatters and stains evoking a warm and quasi-nostalgic dotage. The materiality of his portraits—Baconesque phantoms that beleaguer the histories of protest, media and affect—are indeed concerned with questions of time and physicality during the crossover from Fordist to Post-Fordist modes of production and consumption. However, their very inability to be grasped—like memories themselves—reflects the cognitive dissonance of an age; stretched from nostalgia to futurism, paranoia to anaesthesia.

Whilst Smoker 3 exudes a plaintive disposition, Bailey’s works equally turn to the fiercely existential. Whilst his palette seamlessly shifts from darker hues to the ethereal, his characters’ consistent lack of a graspable identity is tantamount. His work, Beanie Test (2018), reminiscent of the supreme alienation one would find in Giacometti’s Annette (1952), the mix of muddied flesh and vertiginous black souls a rapturous expression of the modern self.

Ahead of his upcoming solo-show this November at HIX, I spoke with him about the Award, his work, and the ambivalence of digital life.

Smoker 3 (2017) (left) and Beanie Test (2018) (right)

So, Sam, how did you hear about the HIX Award?

There was a card left by my work at the St Martins degree show and then a few days later Sophie Harriot from the gallery emailed me suggesting I apply. I’d had a few emails asking for applications for various opportunities but Sophie’s was noticeably more personable. It’s been an incredibly generous and friendly experience from the beginning. 

How was your experience of the Award?

It was great, it was very exciting to get shortlisted and to be given the opportunity to show work alongside, and meet, so many talented artists. It was a real boost after graduating.

How has winning the HIX Award contributed to your practice?

Most importantly being able to focus on making artwork, there’s no way I would have been able to spend so much time in the studio without winning the prize. Also, the added confidence it gives you after graduating to push the work further.

Was there a favourite moment for you?

Probably being high fived by the artist Sue Webster at the after party, on the night of the award, it topped what had already been such an overwhelming and surreal evening.

Let’s talk about about your work, Smoker 3, which won the prize.

Where does the image come from?

This series depicts images of activists and protestors based on archival photographs. The activist shown is from a protest at Greenham Common, smoking in one of the Peace Camps, taking time to pause and think, but also achieving something at the same time by the very nature of being present, in occupation.

Do you always work on newspaper print?

I wouldn’t say always, I had a time when I focused on it more than other surfaces but now it’s one of a few. It came about from using whatever paper was at hand for testing ideas and I liked the effects I was getting with it, slightly blurred imagery, the paint bleeds into it much more than thicker paper. I wanted to use it for a project and it felt right when researching activists from the eighties, as a reference to pre-digital information exchange.

Is there a nostalgia at play here? For this pre-digital age?

There is an aspect of that in some recent work as it’s an age I grew up in but I’m not looking to make artwork that’s sentimental, or prescriptively saying the past was better than the present. I do have mixed feelings about the internet, it’s a great tool creatively, for research and learning, but the way it is with us all the time on mobile devices, meaning we’re essentially on call 24/7 is not so healthy. There seems to be much more time pressure today, to constantly be productive and quicker.

Protesting, of a kind, has also started to inhabit that space in a questionable one click fashion on social media. I wanted to look at protests in the UK when people didn’t have those tools, how committed they were and how for them time and their physical presence over long periods through occupation, were their weapons.

So, you work is an attempt to wrestle with these ideas of contemporary protest?

Not overtly, but it’s certainly been a contributing factor to my interest in the theme of historic protest. It’s hard to imagine that some aspects of ‘online activism’ will have a significant impact, particularly in the echo chamber scenario where likeminded people share their views and support for causes. But the internet has also been a great tool in raising awareness of positive action successfully, such as the Women’s March on London last year.

Is your emphasis on the importance time, materiality and physical presence, best understood in opposition to the hyperactivity of the internet?

Yes, it is. I’m really not very prolific when it comes to painting because I like to spend so much time looking at my work before I take the next step, building up layers and seeing where the work takes me, it’s a slow process. And yes, it has been a reactionary way of making work, I want to make artwork where the hand is evident and escapes the general homogenization of experience through slick digital media.

When I was studying there was a lot of work being made digitally, taking on our current malaise by using the same technology, there were some really impressive artworks being produced. But for me when I used something digital to make artwork it felt like I knew the end product before I got there, it felt too planned. I wanted to go back to making work where the outcome wasn’t so clear and human error, and the materials I used, created their own unexpected results.

Opening this November, Bailey’s upcoming show will continue in this earnest, painterly vein. Reflecting the confidence the success of the Award has given him, expect a series of works which push Bailey’s use of colour and scale to new heights. Continuing to work from used photographs, his new series will hone in on the perpetual twilight of our current 24/7 malaise of non-stop connectivity. Citing the work of painters such as Pierre Bonnard and Sterling Ruby, the show is likely to push its audience to the affective limit, combining historical sense with intuitive sensibility. To quote one of his favourite authors, Jonathan Crary, Bailey’s works are “a dark prospectus of human life in the absence of community or civil society.” One he renders, nonetheless, in a dazzling beauty.

AucArt Interview

AucArt Interview – Saatchi Magazine Feb 2018

How easy is it to become an art collector? Not easy enough, says new online auction house AucArt.

Being a young artist isn’t easy. If you’re not occupied building a DIY mezzanine at your live-in studio down in Deptford, you’re probably busy queuing down 5 back streets just to get into Cass Art’s annual Student Sale. One major fault line in the student-come-artist trajectory of many young creatives is the ability to simply show and sell their works. The art market is a notoriously opaque world, full of hyper-minimal white lobbies, undisclosed sales figures and a whole host of art-historical specialists all sporting their latest Pince-nez. For young artists and nascent collectors both, it’s a hard nut to crack.

Hoping to resolve some of these issues is Natasha Arselan, who this December launched her new online auction house AucArt. The platform will be the first ever auction house to specialise in early career contemporary art – working exclusively with BA/MFA students up to three years after graduation. Directly engaged with both the artists and their clients, AucArt looks to establish itself as beacon of transparency in an otherwise nubilous territory of tradition and mystique; part of a new wave of digital initiatives looking to disrupt the ossification of art and its ownership, the platform aims at “converting art lovers into art collectors.”

AucArt prides itself on its curation of up-and-coming talent. Natasha herself spent the last year nomadic across the UK, visiting degree shows and artist-run projects, hand-selecting her first batch of represented artists. “It was an organic process, there was a lot of experimental work that really stood out to me.” Each month, backed up by her in-house curatorial team and star-studded advisory board, one established artist will join the curatorial process, giving a unique vision to the collection on sale. A range of studio visits, 1-2-1 meetings and E-catalogues will create an intimate relationship between collector and artist, one of AucArt’s flagship policies.

“I try to operate on a personal level, I have known many of these artists for years and they are so supportive of the project, there’s a real sense that we’re in it together.”

A major feature of AucArt is their pricing system. Cutting the overheads of regular commercial settings, AucArt pays its artists 70% of the final sale price. The clever addition of a transparent Reserve Price and ‘Buy Now’ feature plays a novel role in protecting inchoate art careers. “I wasn’t happy with the current system – AucArt aims to go a lot further than other digital platforms.” The goal is to nurture, rather than capitalise on art. For the collector, this is equally beneficial. Clients feel informed and safe whilst they’re bidding, with much of the pretence of auction houses substituted for a chic and affable online interface.

AucArt has simple principles. Dedicated to the democratisation of art ownership and passionate about supporting artists during some of their toughest early years, Natasha has a distinctly ethical approach. “The traditional art market tends to cater for the 1%, our aim is to disrupt and challenge this position.” 

https://www.aucart.com/ 

Interview with Mark Fisher

CM: Hello Mark, the current debate surrounding Accelerationist Aesthetics seem to oscillate between two ostensibly separate formulations – in your opinion, does an Accelerationist aesthetic lies more in a process of ‘cognitive mapping’ – combatting our phenomenological discontinuity within globalised capitalism – or with an affective cartography of the latter, an experience of what it feels like to be a late-capitalist subject?

MF: I think this question points to a difficult problem with the very concept of accelerationist aesthetics. If accelerationism is about the inadequacy of experience as a category, then how is it possible to render accelerationism aesthetically? Cognitive mapping would seem to be compatible with a leftist accelerationism, but the issue here for me is: what is the aesthetic dimension of this process? It can’t be merely an illustration of a set of propositions that can be apprehended cognitively; the aesthetic has to be doing something in its own right.

For me, a leftist accelerationism could be partly about showing how the “experience” of late capitalism is very different from how it is ideologically rendered. That rendering is not something superimposed over experience, after the fact; it is more that experience (and the subject of experience) is first of all ideological. The problem then is how do we deal with what Ray Brassier has called “the myth of experience”. I think this is an experimental problem, and I guess from my point of view the most important task for a left accelerationist aesthetics is to produce and/ or simulate an “experience” that is beyond capitalism. What would a post-capitalist world feel like, and what kind of being would function in it?

Jon Lindblom, a PhD student in Visual Cultures, has done some interesting work on this area. One important emphasis in Jon’s work is on what he calls the drug-tech interface. Thinking about drugs in relation to technology, about drugs as a technology, gives the whole discussion on accelerationist aesthetics an important twist. In common with recent tendencies in my own work, Jon has been thinking about the psychedelic again, and the way the psychedelic opens up different forms of experience, time, etc. I would say that capitalist realism has suppressed the psychedelic – because the idea of a fixed and immutable reality is a kind of super-reification that is incompatible with psychedelics. Psychedelic ‘experience’ is productively paradoxical, in that it de-reifies both ‘experience’ and ‘reality’, both of which come to seem what they are – provisional and plastic.

CM: Many argue that an Accelerationist Aesthetic must utilise the vernacular of late-capitalist imagery in its work – stock, commercial and brand images; digital-rendering and -editing software; sci-fi and cyberpunk visuals, such as from video games and movies; references to contemporary social media trends etc. – presumably anchored in the belief of re-engineering capitalist technologies and tendencies against themselves. Do you agree at all with this sentiment?

MF: Not really. I think this misses the point of the accelerationist critique of capitalism – that capitalism essentially inhibits acceleration, continually reterritorializing on the familiar and the familial. All of the examples you gave have an exhausted quality; they are “futuristic” only in some long-established generic sense – they don’t relate to any plausible future. The whole emphasis on IT and communicative capitalism is a symptom of capitalist exhaustion. That was the future in the 1980s – it isn’t the future any longer, just as Kraftwerk is no longer the future of music. Social media and smartphones have already happened; extrapolating them into or as the future is surely a mistake. This is the point of all my work on hauntology – capitalism increasingly can’t deliver the future, because it arrests the potentials of technological modernity.

CM: Do you think we have seen a clear manifestation of Accelerationist ideas in some contemporary music production? I am thinking here of artists such as Holly Herndon, PC Music, Kode9, Ryoji Ikeda or even someone like FKA Twigs?
MF: To some extent, though I think there has been a slowing of the accelerationist tendencies in music culture. Up till the end of the 1990s, there was a proliferation of new sonic modes, which opened up whole new phase spaces, new terrains which were experienced by the listener in terms of an enjoyable future shock. Kodwo Eshun describes this brilliantly in his talk “Abducted By Audio” http://www.ccru.net/swarm3/3_abducted.htm It’s hard to think of much 21st century music which delivers this future shock in the same way.

CM: Is it possible that the recent ‘return to the body’ in contemporary art production – specifically through a technological lens – could be understood as an Accelerationist critique – in that it attempts to expose the material and affective infrastructures of a fully libidinised capitalism? One which is ubiquitously offered platitudes of dematerialisation?

MF: Yes, it could – but I think the emphasis on “the body” has a tendency to re-incribe a dualism in the attempt to too quickly overcome it. I suppose I would say that the focus on conditions which produce what is ‘experienced’ as embodiment. There isn’t any “natural” form of embodiment: all “experiences” of embodiment are produced by machineries of one kind or another. Which means that “the body” doesn’t exist. There is a material set of receptors and relays, plugged into and potentiated by various virtual and actual machines, but this isn’t the same as “the body”, which can only ever be a reification. So in many ways, I think the same goes for “the body” as for “experience”. The emphasis should be on material and conceptual dismantling of the way in which they are both naturalised/ reified.

Interview with Nick Srnicek

CM: Nick, your work is often seen in contrast to more ‘accelerationist’ (in the sense of which I think you now try to distance yourselves) thinkers such as Nick Land and the CCRU, can you briefly explain the disparities the latter and your work?

NS: I think one of the biggest differences is the subject of the accelerative process. For Land in the 1990s (I stopped reading him when he started writing racist stuff), capital was the subject to be accelerated and human consciousness was just a sort of emergent floating element being swept along by the process of capital. The ultimate endpoint there was to recognise our own illusory nature and accept immersion into the flows of capital. For Alex and I, the subject is perhaps more properly deemed reason, in a collective and inhuman sense. This is more Hegelian and Negarastanian than Deleuzian. The labour of the inhuman is a sort of collective boot-strapping process whereby what it means to be human is progressively uncovered and revised throughout history.

CM: In the post-capitalist society you imagine, do you think contemporary technologies such as Bitcoin, blockchain and other cryptocurrencies are good examples of a current technology which could be utilised in a larger scale?

NS: Personally, I think digital currencies have very little to offer. They are basically a renewal of the gold standard in digital form, and the gold standard fell for good reasons. Bringing it back is not a viable or desirable option. Digital currencies will likely keep being useful for marginal economies (black market economies, most obviously), but I don’t see them threatening global currencies in any way. The blockchain is much more interesting though, and from what I know of it, open to some very interesting potentials. I see a place for it in a postcapitalist economy, but I don’t know it well enough to say much with any certainty.

CM: Is your emphasis on the role of ‘cognitive mapping’ as an aesthetic programme concurrent to your political economy – as opposed to a more affective notion of accelerationist aesthetics as championed by Steven Shaviro – in response to what you see as the conceptual immediacy of folk political tendencies, which favour the personal and the affective over the structural and the rational?

NS: It is, to a certain degree. The issue with cognitive mapping is ultimately one of generating a strategy for a collective historical agent. A strategy, by definition, requires a mapping of the terrain of the struggle, along with an understanding of the various forces in play. This is a systemic – and therefore, rational – approach. But it isn’t simply the rejection of affective and aesthetic elements, since they play the mediating role between an abstracted strategy and local instantiations. So cognitive mapping tries to gesture towards the problem of connecting abstracted strategy to localised actions.

CM: Do you think the recent movement of what have been described as ‘New Materialist’ art practices – or more generally, art practices which take dematerialised platforms such as the internet or finance and reinvest them with a more bodily, affective and material nature – could be classed as a form of accelerationist critique? In that they reconfigure abstract, global and complex areas of contemporary capitalism in an attempt to reveal their material infrastructure and bodily affects.

NS: It possibly can, though I’m wary of saying much about contemporary artistic practice since I know so little of it. I think the work of people like Holly Herndon, Kode9, and Ryoji Ikeda are good examples of musical ‘accelerationism’, but in large part because their work doesn’t simply try to instantiate some pre-planned ideas. They’re working with material in new ways and inspired by related ideas, but it’s not ‘accelerationist’ in any simple sense. More part of a broad cultural milieu where these sorts of ideas are percolating and being developed through different media in different ways.

CM: Is there a worry with your emphasis on cognitive mapping, and technological modelling of objects such as the economy or climate change, that this will lead to a form of technological sublime (such as in your example of the software Minksy)?

NS: It definitely could, though in part the aim of modelling is to avoid that problem! It’s increasingly a risk though, as models get more and more complex – particularly in the back-end where all sorts of complex mechanisms and hidden politics go on. One area where you might see something like the technological sublime is when you get machine-learning algorithms that produce convincing results – but without anyone knowing how those results came about. It doesn’t leave people stupefied like normal technological sublime, but it does leave them no more aware of what is actually going on.

Interview with Asylum

Interview with Asylum directors Jo Dennis & Dido Hallett – Originally published by South London Art Map


Hidden within the Caroline Garden’s Chapel, the ruinous décor of Asylum has been home to a new programme of art initiatives co-led by artists Jo Dennis and Dido Hallett.

CM: For starters, could you tell me a little bit about yourselves and the Asylum space? I’m interested into how you managed to acquire such an interesting space to work with.

JD&DH: The space was on the Southwark Council website in the Commercial Property to let section. We made a proposal to run it as an art space and we were lucky enough to be given the lease in 2010. Jo and I both studied at Goldsmiths College and were practising artists looking for a space to run an arts programme in.

CM: Do you think the peculiarities of your space lend a certain something to artists/exhibitions, over and above the formalities of the white-cube milieu? And if so is that what attracted you to the space in the first place?

JD&DH: Asylum is a challenging space to hang a show in as the space is a work of art in itself, when putting on an exhibition in this space a lot of the white cube rules have to be disregarded and new ones made up. Some of the best shows we have had are the site specific ones that work with the space and look into its history and use the unique atmosphere of the chapel. When we first saw the space we knew instantly that this was something special and would be an amazing opportunity for any artist to get their hands on! We have recently taken on another intriguing and challenging space ‘Safehouse 1’ on Copeland Road in Peckham, last month the 2nd year illustration and graphics Camberwell College and students put on a show there.

CM: How does co-running and directing the space usually play out? Do you both take equal responsibility for the management/curation of your exhibitions? Similarly, is there a certain process that you follow when producing an exhibition or does it change with every project?

JD&DH: It changes with every project, sometimes one of us will take a more involved approach and sometimes we are completely hands off. We have collaborated with other artist lead groups and curated with other artist/curators. The exhibitions and events we have are a mixture of Asylum projects and other people renting the space. We have had shows with students from Camberwell, Goldsmiths, central St Martins, RCA and with more established artists. We have recently started a residency programme curated by Ed Ball who is on the MA curation course at the RCA. We generally work with artists who are passionate about the space and want to show there rather than source artists and curators.

CM: I’m aware that you enjoy working with short-term exhibitions and was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your interest in this area and what you think it offers artists and exhibitions?

JD&DH: Short 3 or 4 day exhibits suit how we work and where the space is. Asylum is situated in gated gardens which doesn’t get much passing footfall, having short exhibitions puts the focus on the launch event and encourages artists to get the people to the shows in a small window.

CM: Finally, is there anything coming up soon that you are involved in that you can tell us about?

JD&DH: Thursday 3rd July we will be having performances and screenings from artists involved in our residency program. I will put all the finer details up on SLAM web site. 24th-26th June at Safehouse we have MA film students from Goldsmiths doing a live performance.We will be putting in a proposal for the Artlicks weekender in October. We have Joran Rappa solo show at Asylum in October and also in October at Safehouse we will be hosting 2 exhibitions as part of the South East Asia Art Festival.





Asylum is an artist lead organisation based in Caroline Gardens Chapel in Peckham, London. It was founded in 2010 and is directed by artists Jo Dennis and Dido Hallett.