Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Leckey has curated an exhibition that explores the magical world of new technology, as well as tracing its connections to the beliefs of our distant past.
 
Historical and contemporary works of art, videos, machines, archaeological artefacts and iconic objects, like the giant inflatable cartoon figure of Felix the Cat – the first image ever transmitted on TV – inhabit an “enchanted landscape” created in Nottingham Contemporary’s galleries, where objects seem to be communicating with each other and with us.
 
In Leckey’s exhibition “magic is literally in the air.” It reflects on a world where technology can bring inanimate “things” to life. Where websites predict what we want, we can ask our mobile phones for directions and smart fridges suggest recipes, count calories and even switch on the oven. By digitising objects, it can also make them “disappear” from the material world, re-emerging in any place or era.
 
In this timeless exhibition, “the real and the virtual co-exist”, Leckey has said. Perhaps technology has created its own form of consciousness – an animistic future. While we already live in the realms of what used to be science fiction, we seem to have simultaneously gone back to our ancestral past – a time when ancient civilisations believed spirits inhabited plants, animals, geographic features and even objects.
 
Leckey’s theatre of “things” is presented in specially designed environments. Works by artists such as William Blake, Louise Bourgeois, Martin Creed, Richard Hamilton, Nicola Hicks, Jim Shaw and Tøyen are displayed alongside an Egyptian cat mummy, a medieval silver hand containing the bones of a saint, an electronic prosthetic hand that connects with Bluetooth, a bisected 3D model of Snoopy showing his internal organs, and many other treasures that all share connections. Loosely divided into four themes or scenes – the Vegetable World, Animal Kingdom, Mankind and the Technological Domain, Leckey’s exhibition is a collection of not-so-dumb things that all talk, literally or metaphorically, to each other.
 
Mark Leckey was born in Birkenhead in 1964. He currently teaches at Goldsmiths College, University of London. In 2008 he won the Turner Prize. Recent solo exhibitions include Work & Leisure at Manchester Art Gallery (2012), and See We Assemble at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2011).
 
The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things is the latest in a series of artist-curated Hayward Touring exhibitions. It comes to Nottingham Contemporary from the Bluecoat, Liverpool and will tour to De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill in summer 2013.

Curated by David Evans Frantz
 
Founded in 1952, ONE is the oldest collection of its kind in the world and the oldest archive LGBTQ organisation in the US.
 
The Cabinets will be filled with an eclectic display of materials from the archives. These include artworks and personal papers, some never seen before, by poet and painter Sidney Bronstein (1921–1967). Bronstein worked in Los Angeles from the 1950s onwards where he became actively involved in the city’s gay life. He drew and painted portraits of muscle-bound men in uniform who he met while cruising downtown Los Angeles. He meticulously recorded information about these encounters with servicemen in a 1950s accountants’ ledger, which was later used in the controversial studies on human sexual behaviour carried out by Dr. Alfred Kinsey. While given very few opportunities to exhibit his work, Bronstein continued to paint throughout his life.
 
Bronstein was also an early volunteer at ONE Magazine, the first widely distributed magazine for homosexuals in the US – a landmark publication recognized internationally by the LGBTQ activist community. For years issues were sold hand-to-hand, and for many ONE was the only connection to a wider gay community during the repressive McCarthy era in the United States. Copies of ONE Magazine and self-published zines from ONE will be on display. Radical topics include Are Homosexuals Reds? (1953), Are Homosexuals Neurotics (1955), Men who Find Lesbians Desirable (1959), Homosexual Marriage? (1953) and The Homosexual Villain (1955), authored by the journalist and novelist Normal Mailer.
 
Sheet music from the Collection of Ralph W. Judd, who gathered materials reflecting America’s changing sensibility toward cross-dressing in the 20th century, is also on display. With over 1000 different scores, titles include songs such as My Regular Girl is a Regular Feller, I Only Want a Buddy...Not a Sweetheart and I Want a Girl (Just like the Girl that Married Dear Old Dad). The display will also include a number of materials related to Julian Eltinge, a well-known female impersonator who performed in American vaudeville performances and was one of the highest paid actors during the early 20th century.
 
David Evans Frantz is Curator of ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles