The Life Room
CHELSEA space
04.11.09 – 12.12.09
Private View: Tuesday 3rd November 2009. 6 – 8.30pm
What could ‘life drawing’ mean or be in the 21st Century? For six weeks CHELSEA space will host the world’s first Life Room – a studio facility for drawing and the body.
The Life Room will consist of a series of apparatus for fitness and drawing – running machines and easels, rowing machines and ‘donkey’ drawing benches etc. People will be invited to take up a nominal temporary membership, and will be able to train or draw independently but there will also be a series of master classes from artists, historians, personal trainers, and physicians.
In the late 20th and early 21st century the rise of the fitness gym represents a new realisation of the Olympian ideal and classical beauty; a place where people work on and observe the human form and where individuals can recreate themselves by sculpting/modelling their bodies through exercise. It seems obvious then that the gym also presents an ideal site for the artist to observe the human form and create images through life drawing. The Life Room, like any other gym, will be a place to see and be seen and to contemplate the intricacies of the human form.
The life room once was the heart and lungs of every art school, it was the meeting place where students learned not just about drawing, but the history, theories and theology of art. The life room was not a performance space, it was a rehearsal space and just like the gymnasium it was designed to build not just physical but psychological strength and confidence.
Today the human body is no less important in the daily thinking of artists and designers than it was two hundred years ago, few schools however have retained a formal life room .
Mindful of the importance of the human body in both classical and contemporary art and the gymnasium in both and bourgeois street culture The Life Room is an enquiry into what might be the equivalent space of the future. A place dedicated to observation, wellbeing, reflection, action, learning, endurance and shaping.
Within the wider programme at CHELSEA space this project relates to a series of enquiries into the possibilities of ‘live’ action, performance, discourse and rehearsal played out in the context of seemingly ‘set piece’ exhibitions. Bruce Mclean’s ‘performing’ of his archive over a six week period in Process Progress Project Archive and the rehearsals and improvisations of John Tilbury, David Toop, Pablo Bronstein, Gaby Agis, David Blandy and others in the exhibitions Rehearsing/Samuel Beckett and Turtle: An Anarchic Salon are exemplars of this strand of the CHELSEA space programme. Prior to The Life Room, in April 2009, Cally Spooner will curate a 3 day critical exploration of the score December 1952 by the American composer Earle Brown which will include musicians, dancers from the Laban Dance Centre, historians, theorists, composers and performance artists.
The Life Room at CHELSEA space will be a cultural experiment but does not necessarily have to be an isolated event. Coming at the end of 2009, there is the possibility for this project to appear in museums, galleries, educational institutions and fitness centres across the country as part of the 2012 British Olympic year.
More Information: http://www.theliferoom.org
