Locus Solus--Site, Identity, Technology and Contemporary Art (review)

Jon Bewley and Simon Herbert have, since the 1980s, researched and curated site-specific practice based in, but not confined to the vigorous northern city of Newcastle upon Tyne, the location where, for centuries, the northern European races warred over their borders and spheres of influence. Locus+ was established in 1993 as a company limited by guarantee with a board of practitioners, writers and curators committed to "acknowledgment that the brittle definitions between visual art culture and other disciplines continue to break down further into states of hybridity—whether this be in relation to fashion, design, architecture, film, music or further challenged by the steady growth of electronic imaging and information systems."

Locus Solus—Site, Identity, Technology and Contemporary Art deploys polemical essays around these general issues together with essays specific to a handful of the projects that Locus+ has initiated. At times reading like an extended annual report, it valuably summarizes the considerable amount of outcomes achieved in its short 7-year history. At the time of publication, this included 36 artists' projects (including N, by Gibson and Little), 18 publications (including audio CDs) and nine artists' multiples.

The networks implied are real and world-wide, with links and collaborations to related organizations, particularly in Ireland and Canada, and the artists they support and encourage. Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, Paul Wong, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, Ian Breakwell and Stefan Gec are among those featured. Gec's widely appreciated projects, related in an essay by Andrew Patrizio, describe his Ukrainian ethnic background, the associations he created between the Chernobyl disaster, the demise of the Soviet Bloc navy and the recycling of steel from Russian submarines in a north-eastern England port into bells and buoys, later seen and heard in a dozen European ports.

The project, like Locus+, evolves to this day and "rather than generating ideas directly through the visual, activates the space between things."