Marcus Coates

A Ritual for Elephant and Castle was one of the Big works at Art Space and it was entertaining, wierd and unique. There were four screens that portrayed Coates getting spiritual and in touch with nature in the most unlikey of places, in the poorly developed areas of London. When I was watching this i thought it was a fictional humerous take on the struggels in this area but he is really serious and considers himself a Shamen (they can communicate with animals). Where i grew up in Dublin there were alot of these badly developed housing complexes so for me this was really entertaining to see someone so naieve and funny trying to tackle the problems of redevelopment.

A similar work is 'The melancholy of Dawn Chorus' (2007).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCCpnDtgxXk

"The melancholy of Dawn Chorus is born of the solitary figures’ isolation, not only from the world of the birds and the beasts but also from each other. Deceptively, Coates’ real subjects are not the outdoors and the unknown but interiority and introspection. This is the true locus of ‘nature’ in the modern world, he seems to imply; not in the open spaces of the countryside, so obscured by cultural projection and anthropomorphism, but in the withered memory of something wild and ancient, buried deep within ourselves."
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/focus_marcus_coates/