‘Our definition of play is to deliberately break the rules and invent our own, thus freeing creative activity from restrictions, to redesign aesthetic and revolutionary actions that undermine or elude social control.’ (CutUp, 2006)
CutUp are a London based group of artists linked by a shared desire to reorder the urban landscape through intervention and play. CutUps practice incorporates collage, film and installation and focuses largely on the creative potential of the street as a site for interventionist art and disruption.
CutUps belief in utilising existing materials from the street, has led to works manifesting themselves as the re-ordering of advertising posters and street furniture, without adding anything new, recycling what was there already. Interested in the idea of the street as a stage for intervention or creative activity as determined by Walter Benjamin and later the Situationists, the collective aims to introduce elements of disquiet into the urban everyday.
For their second exhibition at Seventeen, CutUps sites for intervention are again brought into the gallery space, temporarily, before returning to the street. The exterior of the gallery will be boarded up, and the boards perforated by drilling, creating imagery through the dispersion of light from within. The interior of the gallery will house a wooden, cubic structure, echoing the exterior it is also pierced. Inside the box is a new film projection, in which a four-sided tower of drilled boards is at first illuminated and then consumed by a fire started in its centre. Around this structure sit a number of new collaged and re-ordered advert works, housed in light boxes, and the gallery is dominated by a new sound installation. The show extends further outside the gallery space in the form of CutUps outdoor interventions on the streets of London, which have already started to appear, and should endure after the show closes.
CutUp live and work in London. Recent projects include Satellites, curated by i-cabin at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, La Vida Te Espera at NIU Gallery, Barcelona.
Cut Up, Untitled, 2006
Drilled hoarding construction
Cut Up, A Source Of Uncertainty, 2006
Durational Sound Installation, 94 speakers, mini disks and circuit boards
Cut Up, Collapse And Cluster, 2006
Reordered television advert on DVD
Cut Up, Out of the Ruins of the Real, 2006 (Still)
16mm transfered to DVD
Cut Up, Untitled, 2006
Cut advertising poster in light box
190 x 130 x 13 cm
Cut Up, Untitled, 2006
Cut advertising posters in light boxes
257 x 127 x 9 cm
Cut Up, Untitled, 2006
Reordered bus shelter advertising poster in light box
185 x 127 x 9 cm
Cut Up, Untitled, 2006
Drilled board in lightbox