Nough collective

Kulter#19: No Grey Goom
Goo is the title to a Sonic Youth album, released in 1990. The epic black and white cover of the album relates very much to the works on display at Kulter last Sunday. French artist Jean-Philippe Rousset presents a video in which he paints himself black. The black paint is applied to the ceiling and drips back onto his white overall. The video is projected upside down, which gives the viewer the impression that the artist is painting the floor. Reversing an image is an old trick, but here it works.
The black and white drawings by Jacco de Jager work in the same way. It is an alternate view on newspaper and magazine photography in black and white.
Goom is the third exhibition, after Slagroom and Rather Whipped, presented by art collective Nough.
There is no general theme to the exhibitions as artist Julie Dassaud told me, before she started drawing black on white on the window, supported by computer images produced by live coding* by Laurens van der Wee en Roel van Doorn (making sound programmes on the spot). Together they created a new image in projection and sound.
And since there is no theme, maybe your humble reporter may suggest one: How can black and white together avoid to ever be grey. Oh yeah, we have all studied philosophy sometime! But seriously; all works seem to look for extremes: either black or white. This art is about making no compromises, in a joyful way. Like the soap fountain of Evelien Zonneveld. The fountain melts by the water that makes it a fountain. Afterwards people were tuning the analog radio system hanging from the ceiling, hoping not ever to find a channel.
And so I left Kulter at about 8 o’clock, chanting in my head: No grey goom, no grey goom, no grey goom**.

* live coding: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_coding
* grey goo: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo