Art Now: Seb Patane
So this song kills fascists
Until 13 January 2008
Millbank, London UK
Seb Patane’s pared-down tableaux comprise drawings, found imagery and objects, sound and live performance. He is drawn to the darker, esoteric recesses of twentieth century culture, collecting and resurrecting material that contains a potency, from the iconography and sonic experimentations of early industrial music to transgressive underground literature. Using simple gestures of customisation and concealment, Patane depletes the material of narrative to leaves a residue of menace.Patane’s new body of work for Art Now, So this song kills fascists, explores ideas of performance as a means of protest. The sound work, from which the installation takes its title, questions the revolutionary potential of music while new drawings, reminiscent of Surrealist or psychographic automatic writing, suggest a non-visible dimension implicit in the music. The central installation, Last Dance of the Nodding Folk, resembles an expressionist stage set, a theme echoed in the theatrical images leaning, placard-like against it. Footage of a fire juggler introduces an element of ritualised and controlled movement, which links to the energy of the drawings and the viewer’s choreographed passage around the installation. Patane identifies an aesthetics of subculture where protest has been exchanged for stylised performance, a husk detached
from belief.
Tate Britain’s Art now programme responds to current developments in contemporary British Art. The 2007 programme is curated by Lizzie Carey-Thomas, Rachel Tant and Katharine Stout.
Keep on Onnin’: Contemporary Art at Tate Britain, documenting Art Now projects from 2004-7, is available in Tate shops.
Forthcoming: Art Now: Strange Solution, 2 February – 13 April 2008 Karla Black, Alice Channer, Dee Ferris, Anthea Hamilton, Katy Moran