The Perimeter is delighted to present an exhibition of Andy Holden’s film Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape. The hour-long film is the result of more than five years work and contains a fully realised animated theory proposing the world is best now understood as a cartoon.
The film examines the formation of ‘laws’ within cartoons as a way of making sense of the world we are now within; a space where anything could potentially happen. Made from hundreds of cartoon clips, the work adopts a part-lecture, part-documentary, part-conspiracy theory tone, with the artist rendered as a cartoon avatar in order to narrate his theory. Laws such as “Everything falls faster than an anvil” and “Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation”, are combined with Greek myths, philosophy, politics, physics and the history of animation to create an exploration of the world as an irrational space where anything can happen, yet certain things reoccur, and in which a new set of laws have formed.
For this exhibition, The Perimeter has been transformed into a cinema. Visitors will watch what Holden describes as “a manifesto for art after art history, based on the oscillating zig-zag wave form of Charlie Brown’s jumper, the movement between knowing and not-knowing found in Bugs Bunny and the space of the ‘plausible impossible’”. Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape was first shown at Glasgow International in 2016, where The Art Newspaper called it an “epic and widely acclaimed masterpiece”. It was subsequently included in the Future Generations Art Prize during the Venice Biennale in 2017 and in numerous solo exhibitions including MOCA Toronto, The Cinema Museum, London and as a live performance at TATE Britain.
Andy Holden (b. 1982, Bedford) makes work comprising of sculpture, large-scale installation, painting, pop music, performance, animation, curating, and multi-screen video. His work is often defined by very personal starting points used to arrive at more abstract philosophical questions. Holden’s first major exhibition was ‘Art Now: Andy Holden’ at TATE Britain in 2010, where he exhibited Pyramid Piece, an enormous knitted rock, based on a piece of rock the artist stole from the Great Pyramid of Giza as a boy, and later returned. Solo exhibitions include ‘Chewy Cosmos, Thingly Time’ at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, (2011) and ‘Cookham Erratics’ at the Benaki Museum in Athens (2012). His exhibition at Cubitt, London (2012) took the form of a library which proposed the concept of ‘Thingly Time’. The library was restaged and expanded at Seventeen Gallery, London in 2023. As a teenager Holden wrote a manifesto for art titled ‘Maximum Irony! Maximum Sincerity’, which was revisited as an exhibition at the Zabludowicz Collection (2013) and Kunsthalle Winterthur (2015).
In 2021, he curated the exhibition ‘Beano: The Art Of Breaking the Rules’ at Somerset House, London. His work was featured in British Art Show 9, (2022) and most recently, he has exhibited at Tate St Ives, Cornwall, The Gallery of Everything and Charles Moffett Gallery, New York (2024). His work is currently on view at Kröller-Müller Museum, until September 2024 and is held in many public and private collections including TATE, Arts Council Collection and Kröller-Müller Museum. His first permanent public sculpture ‘The Auguries’ is now on view in Wakefield, U.K.
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