Merry Christmas from Leeds Weirdo Club
Leeds Weirdo Club
Doug Bowen, Matthew Crawley, Harry Meadley, David Steans, Leeds
Harry Meadley: It’s like the Wu-Tang Clan… I remember at one point us jokingly talking about a motorcycle club analogy, not in terms of us being outlaws, but in terms of it being an autonomous space, not governed by anything else… It’s like the Weirdo Club could be invited to do something, and then we would get together for it. I’m trying to think of an analogy… It’s like The Avengers. When the world is in need we’ll come together.
David Steans: It’s not like The Avengers, it’s not like Wu-Tang Clan, it’s not like a motorcycle club, it’s not like any of those things.
Harry: No it’s not like them, I agree.
Set up by Matthew Crawley, Harry Meadley and David Steans in October 2012 from their shared studio in East Street Arts in Leeds, with Doug Bowen joining later, the project then moved to Set The Controls For The Heart of The Sun, itself inhabiting the building previously used by Mexico in Leeds. Russian-doll-like, though in a curiously un-convoluted way, the project has always operated through their space being within another space, whilst appearing to maintain a quite distinct identity from the host-space.
Harry: The Leeds Weirdo Club in a way was a response to not really being studio-based artists, but still having a studio, and so having to think about using it in different ways.… It seems like a dead obvious idea, you have a studio, so you can just do a show in your studio, and because it’s your studio you can just do whatever you want. It’s just nice not having any institutional control.
Matthew Crawley: It’s very inward looking too, very self-conscious.
As a result, the project has in part appeared to roll through some productive convolutions of studio and gallery space, a playful meta-studio maybe, with carefully delineated areas of work such as an admin area, a ‘clean work’ area (a highly kitted-out stationery area), and a packing area (stocked with manifold types of tape); their 20 foot MDF workbench painted in an MDF-coloured paint designed by Steans; and an almost absurdly well-stocked, maintained and systematically ordered tool-wall.
Matthew: I think it’s hilarious, I mean, as if we were selling stuff?! We’ve got all this bubble wrap to pack it up for our customer, but when does this ever happen?
Doug Bowen: It was really efficient though.
Harry: We were kitted out to such a degree, we had loads of tools, mainly just for building more things to put tools on. So we had this massive wall that was like a big tool-wall, and so many people that would come for studio visits or something would comment on it, and it got a bit annoying.
The tool wall at Leeds Weirdo Clubs space at East St Arts, Leeds. Image courtesy of Leeds Weirdo Club
At the same time the group as a whole have continually been invited to participate in several projects outside of Leeds, providing consistent interruptions to the anchorage of a physical space, and quite naturally forcing a redefinition of the project’s identity: along with studio and gallery, you can add collaborative group too. Most of the time though, even whilst working under the banner of Leeds Weirdo Club, the group retain their own individual identities and delineations of authorship. Hence the ‘Avengers’ analogy. On their website they state: “Leeds Weirdo Club is not an artists group but an environment; not a ‘club’ in the formal sense of the word but an anomalous art institution.”
Their approach to this anomaly is refreshing, not being simply ‘institutional critique’, in the currently dumbed-down antagonism associated with the term:
Harry: Maybe it’s something like a distrust in art.
Matthew: We just don’t like it, do we?
Harry: It’s oppositional, but to no obvious purpose.
David: Which is why I’d say it’s not reactionary, it’s just in the character of the thing. An irony or a sarcasm, but not a protest… It’s not throwing a bucket of paint at a gallery - that’s cool by all means - but that’s not what this stuff is doing. That’s not its purpose, it just seeps through its pores. It all has a sense of humour too I suppose.
Their archive of documentation itself, whilst performing perfectly as documentation (everything is accredited, reportedly accurate dimensions provided, materials listed, well-lit professional photography given for each individual work present in each show), has these regular moments of excess, the attention to detail feels too anal, yet is presented utterly po-faced, toying with your patience either way. For example in a work of Harry Meadley’s featured as part of their show ‘An Evening For The Haters’ at their space in East Street Arts, the title’s excessive meandering length quickly curls back on itself in successive loops, acting out a pseudo-schizoid flash-fictional meta-narrative: ‘Field recording of a work which was a field recording of a work in the same space it was originally exhibited which happened to be the same space the work was exhibited played back on the same device used to make both recordings and… (Right… Harry… I’ve got to stop you there. This has already gone too far. No one cares. Literally, no one, not even you, cares about this work. You made that work before, and invented me to make it remotely interesting. You can’t keep going with this. You’re just making this work to give me more of a voice - but you won’t even tell anyone my name. It’s pathetic, and I resent it.) I don’t think it’s that bad - the context works quite well, plus it’s funny that no one will actually be able to hear the work properly - which was the problem with the original work. The work chain needs to be completed, this is the last work in this chain. (Yeah but it’s not the last in my chain is it? It’s not even a good ending to that work chain, which is a stupid phrase anyway. I’ve told you before and I’ll tell you again - get over yourself.) I’m trying! What do you think this is?’ (2013). Or in an exhibition by Matthew Crawley from 2014, again at East St Arts, titled ‘First Year’, the space appears to have been set-up as a fully-functioning nuclear bunker, with the materials list attesting to the level of detail enacted on the space, with each brand, type and quantity of tinned-good, volumes of both cleaning and drinking liquids, plastic containers for waste, etc. The aforementioned ‘inward-looking’ insularity taken to a logical extreme of superabundant proportions, and yet again, presented with an unerringly stolid lack of superfluity, in that the room actually appears to very simply perform its purpose, enabling an individual’s year-long survival of the apocalypse.
First Year, Matthew Crawley, 2014. Image courtesy of Leeds Weirdo Club
David: [It has] the character of a think-tank, a dysfunctional think-tank. I think that’s important. Looking back we’ve always made pains to say we are individual artists. I think that is because to say otherwise would be dishonest, because a lot of what we have done has happened in response to a dialogue that we are in anyway, going to the pub, chewing over an idea and seeing where it arrives. It never ends up anywhere we would have individually taken it.
One of the few pieces attributed to all four of Leeds Weirdo Club is ‘Gently Used’ (2015), a custom-made mascot suit of a furry-haired purple monster with a seemingly incessantly cheery disposition, a lolling green tongue and small yellow horns designed by them. Instigated by Bowen after he joined Leeds Weirdo Club, ‘Gently’ had his first outing for a show at Toast’s space in Confederation House in Manchester, and he went on to make an appearance at numerous other openings, the mascot used as a kind of proxy for the Leeds Weirdo Club, though always being worn by someone else.
Harry: [So] you have this team mascot, but it’s given a different function, or emotional range - we give each person performing in the costume a lot of license. When we have briefed people about it, we’ve just told them that this mascot has a wider emotional range than a standard mascot - so it’s not just being excitable, or being funny, etc. People have done different things with the character, making it pensive, agitated, really critical or bored. What if one of these characters is more real, more genuine - and maybe that’s a link, that there is something about all our work having scepticism….an institutional scepticism.
David: I think everything we’ve done is insufficient in some way, but then presented as such. The mascot is an insufficient mascot.
Gently Used, Doug Bowen, Matthew Crawley, Harry Meadley, David Steans, 2015. Image courtesy of Leeds Weirdo Club
This notion of self-determined insufficiency, of finding something wanting and yet not correcting it, but in fact taking pride in it, extends to the origins of their name too:
David: The genesis of our name is that me and Harry went down to Leeds Museum, and noticed this display of ephemera related to the Leeds Savages Club - a group of fin de siecle, bohemian writers in the city, who were really into Native American mythology, hence the ‘Savages’ - and despite the dubiousness of that, what we took from it was the idea of denoting yourself as something. At the time we were talking about coming together and doing some work with our studio, and at the same time referring to ourselves as ‘weirdos’, which is really not a cool term, and it just seemed to stick out.
Harry: Once it was said, it instantly stood out. It’s slightly separatist, as in ‘we are weirdos’, but also people quite like that, it’s welcoming somehow.
There’s also an interesting play here with their institutional status, like they are both an insufficient institute, and at the same time a gratuitously efficient one. For example a well-stocked and maintained ‘packing area’ but a dearth of customers for whom it might facilitate; and again, for the opening of Harry Meadley’s show, ‘Dom Peri’, a case of Dom Perignon appears to have been served as the opening events beverage (a super-abundant act of generosity in our post-post-scarcity era where it’s rare for gallerists to even bother with the pretence of a ‘suggested donation’ sign), only for the empty bottles to tauntingly appear as emblems of a great party you literally just missed, in the following show by David Steans, ‘Champagne Murders’.
Champagne Murders, David Steans, 2014. Image courtesy of Leeds Weirdo Club
At the same time the Leeds Weirdo Club feels born of quite natural motivations:
Harry: I think as a provincial city student you can be part of something larger, like there are more ways in, though I don’t know if that’s still the case. With the Weirdo Club too, I think in part it came out of doing projects elsewhere, but still wanting some form of local activity as well, just to make your experience of living here nicer… It wasn’t necessarily in response to a lack though, there was stuff going on [in Leeds].
David: We were just doing it because it was fun to do. We didn’t have any grand ambitions for it beyond itself.
Doug: I think as well you could be quite ambitious with the work, like with Matt’s work [‘First Year’; ‘Life Cycle of a Mould Mite’, 2015], we made a very big, site-specific piece that having to wait for the opportunity to do it in a gallery doesn’t really make any sense when you already have a space that is perfectly good for the idea.
Although the group no longer have a studio, and thus no platform as such, the last project, ‘Discovery Centre’, was itself a spin on this ‘stop-gap’ lack. Treating the Leeds Weirdo Club as an archive of itself, their entire studio was packed away into a storage unit, with people arranging visits to the collection and requesting specific boxes to look through. What could potentially be a breather, a moment of pause, is itself neatly used both as a literal and conceptual ‘packaging’ of the Leeds Weirdo Club, and at the same time, a moment to ‘take stock’ of their own direction. The temporal pause itself playfully instrumentalised.
Discovery Centre, Doug Bowen, Matthew Crawley, Harry Meadley, David Steans, 2015. Image courtesy of Leeds Weirdo Club
David: The room was dark, with everything stacked up and packed away. It was as stark a reduction of the Weirdo Club as possible.
Harry: It contains basically the entire contents of the studio, which is nice as a kind of stock-take, where this is literally all the ‘stuff’, which obviously when it is in a studio it’s just the same, but I guess it’s a different mode of viewing.
David: It’s like a punctuation mark. It’s a really crude material-index, you can’t really access it, it’s not content, it’s just the material stuff, until whatever else happens next… There starts to become an ideology to having a regular program, which it didn’t seem appropriate for this project to do after a while.
Harry: I think it’s nice just to move on to other approaches too, it’s nice not to have to think we have to do these projects in this way… I love just having the storage thing.
Matthew: Apart from the fact that every month Doug wants £20 off of us.
Samuel Playford-Greenwell