Posted by Simon on May 12, 2023
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/05/12/australia-reviews/
Walk in the main entrance of the British Museum, go through the central courtyard past the great round building in the middle and walk on through the archway into room 24. This room is titled ‘Living and Dying’ and contains cases exploring ‘how people everywhere deal with the tough realities of life and death’. There’s a number of display cases looking at particular aspects of this (big) subject via the customs and artefacts of First Peoples from around the world, a lot of them from around the Pacific, although some are from Africa. But four or so big display cases are devoted to artefacts and explanations about the culture of indigenous Australians, or Aborigines as we used to call them.
Indigenous Australians understand that ancestral beings created the land, the oceans and all living things, passing on knowledge of how to live from, and care for, the land. People burn bush-land to maintain the fertility of species and perform ceremonies to mark important life stages.
Ancestral knowledge is passed from one generation to the next through painting, dancing and telling stories about the great ancestral beings. It is embodied in the designs and materials of both art works and functional, everyday objects, and these vary greatly across the continent, reflecting the great environmental and cultural diversity of Australia.
The AIATSIS map of Indigenous Australia which attempts to represent the language, social or nation groups of indigenous Australia
Australia has been inhabited for at least 60,000 years, predating the modern human settlement of both Europe and the Americas. Although William Dampier visited the north-west coast of Australia in the late 1600s, and Captain Cook mapped the east coast in 1770, the permanent British occupation of the continent only began in 1788 with the arrival of the First Fleet of convicts, which established a penal colony at modern-day Sydney.
The first whites came into contact with the native peoples from the first day and relations between the white interlopers and black natives were troubled and sometimes violent from the start. However, some native peoples managed to stay out of contact with whites until as late as the 1980s, 200 years after the first settlement.
Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders believed that ancestral beings were transformed into animals and plants, and that the properties of plants embody ancestral knowledge. Maintaining land and sea resources, knowing how to use the different parts of plants, and creating objects from them, thus had a spiritual as well as practical side.
One case contains nine baskets demonstrating the wide variety of styles and materials used by the hundreds of different clans or peoples ranged right across Australia’s diverse environment.
Aboriginal dilly-bag (1925) © The Trustees of the British Museum
Purukapali is a major ancestral being for the Tiwi people of Bathurst and Melville Islands. In accordance with ancestral law laid down by Purukapali, Islanders mark death with public funeral ceremonies called Pukamani, in which men and women sing and dance, and erect posts on the graves of the deceased.
Baskets called tunga are woven to hold the dead person’s possessions and payment for those taking part in the ceremony. Men and women adorn themselves with elaborate body decoration and wear specially designed armlets and other ornaments. The men dance holding carved and painted hardwood spears. The distinctive baskets are placed upside down on the grave poles.
This case displays some tunga baskets, a selection of ceremonial armlets for men and women, and some impressive multi-barbed spears.
Aboriginal barbed spears from the Tiwi Islands
Indigenous Australians often depict the great travelling paths of ancestral beings in their paintings. In the guise of humans, plants or animals, spiritual beings crossed the land, creating features such as hills and waterholes. Some of these ancestral journeys (or ‘Dreamings’) cover thousands of miles.
The places where the ancestors stopped or performed important deeds have great spiritual influence. Many of these sites and their associated stories are known only to men or only to women. This picture, Kungkarangkalpa (Seven Sisters), depicts an important woman’s place near salt lakes in the Great Victoria Desert of Western Australia.
Kungkarangkalpa (Seven Sisters) painted by Anne Ngantiri Hogan, Tjaruwa Angelina Woods, Yarangka Elaine Thomas, Estelle Hogan, Ngalpingka Simms, Myrtle Pennington of the Tjuntjuntjara Community of Western Australia (2013) © The Trustees of the British Museum
The artists, all senior women of the Spinifex people, depict a story about ancestral beings that took place there. Seven sisters who are singing and dancing across the land are being pursued by a lustful man, Wati Nyiru. The women escape his unwanted attentions by launching themselves from a hill into the sky, where they become the Seven Sisters constellation. Here’s a schematic version of the painting explaining its various aspects.
Schematic explanation of Kungkarangkalpa © The Trustees of the British Museum
A number of objects on display in the museum were made by the Spinifex people. Many of the Spinifex people were moved off their land when the British carried out atom bomb tests in the 1950s and 1960s. After a long struggle their claim for native title to the land was recognised by the Australian courts in 2000.
Typical of their art is this painting made by senior men of the Spinifex people: Roy Underwood, Lennard Walker, Simon Hogan and Ian Rictor. It depicts an important songline (or ‘Dreaming’) relating to a place called Pukara and the travels of two ancestral men (Wati Kutjara) who travelled across the land, creating its features and customary law.
Pukara, collaborative painting by artists of Spinifex people (2013) from Tjuntjuntjara, Spinifex region of Western Australia © The Trustees of the British Museum
The museum provides another schematic explaining key elements in the painting.
Schematic view of Pukara © The Trustees of the British Museum
Interestingly, artists from the Spinifex people, in the last 30 years, have taken to painting their stories and country in a for suitable for sale to outsiders i.e. they have engaged with the white art market, not only at home but abroad. The result is that you can now buy Spinifex art at galleries around the world. This particular painting was created by the community-based Spinifex Arts Project and bought by the British Museum in 2013.
Inspired by ancestral land and traditions, Indigenous Australians are bringing artistic innovation to ancestral traditions.
Sculptural objects made from plant fibres have long been part of Indigenous Australian culture. Historically, woven fibre baskets and sculptural forms were made for practical or ceremonial use but since the 1970s an increasing number of fibre works have been produced for the fine art market. In Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, women create woven sculptures of ancestral beings and animals.
In Pukatja (formerly Ernabella) in South Australia, Aboriginal artists use a wide range of materials and techniques. These include batik, a method of producing coloured designs on cloth, by brushing or stamping hot wax on the parts not to be dyed. The textile designs are inspired by ancestral landscapes, local plants and animals. The display case shows three sculptures of camp dogs and three batik textiles.
Batik on silk textile by Nyuwara Tapaya (2000) © The Trustees of the British Museum
Women at Ernabella Arts in Pukatja, South Australia, began producing batik work after visiting Indonesia and seeing the technique being used there. The artists are inspired by the colours and forms of the ancestral landscape of the desert region where they live. Unlike some of the other paintings we’ve looked at, they don’t attach specific meanings to their designs i.e. they are purely decorative.
The Torres Strait is the body of water which separates northern Australia from Papua New Guinea to the north. It is littered with a large number of medium-sized and small islands. Each of these was populated by Indigenous peoples, known collectively as the Torres Straits Islanders.
A map of the Torres Strait Islands showing the large number of tiny islands, by Kelisi (source: Wikipedia)
Although many islanders now live on the mainland they retain strong connections with their island homes. The sea, the sky and the land remain central to their identity and spirituality.
Before Christianity was introduced to the Torres Straits in 1871 the islanders held elaborate funerals involving masks and ceremonial dances. Often wearing turtle-shell masks, feathered head-dresses called dhari and pearl-shell chest pendants. Contemporary masks and head-dresses often incorporate new materials and forms but they are still inspired by ancestral beings and stories.
Thus the case displays a couple of traditional masks, a warup drum, dhari head-dress, stone-headed club and pearl-shell pendants. The Torres Strait drum known as the warup drum is shaped like an hourglass. This one is carved from solid dark wood. The larger end represents a fish’s head with open jaws. On the top is carved a lizard and along each side run two projecting bands ornamented with cassowary feathers and seeds. Feathers and goa nuts are attached to each side and incised decoration is infilled with white.
But it’s not just about old and traditional artefacts. The British Museum has bought, and displays, plenty of works by contemporary Indigenous Australian artists. This head-dress was made by contemporary artist Alick Tipoti.
Kaygasiw Usul by Alick Tipoti (2014) © The Trustees of the British Museum
Tipoti is from Badu Island in the Torres Strait. The name of this mask, Kaygasiw Usul, means ‘shovel-nose dust trail reflected in the heavens as the milky way’. It’s made from fibre-glass stained with polyester resin to create the transparent effect of turtle shell, along with plastic, nylon and superglue fastening more traditional materials.
The mask represents an ancestral shark, the Kaygasiw Usul, whose tail fin stirs up an underwater sand trail that forms the Milky Way. The small mask on top represent ancient dancers and the mask inside the mouth symbolises the main dancer.
As may be obvious, I have lifted most of the text of this post directly from the British Museum wall labels and captions.
Posted by Simon on May 8, 2023
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/05/08/relating-to-ancestors-british-museum/
This is a very, very political exhibition, bigger than I expected (5 rooms), artistically important, wide-ranging, illuminating and sometimes very upsetting.
It’s a broad selection of art from contemporary Australia all based round the theme of the calamitous impact of white European colonisation on the continent’s indigenous people. (As I understand it, we should nowadays not use ‘Aborigine’ or ‘aboriginal’; it’s best practice to say ‘indigenous Australians’ or ‘indigenous people’.)
This exhibition brings together art works by indigenous people, alongside works by Australian artists of European descent, all revolving round the themes of colonialism, expropriation, racism, and cultural erasure i.e. the systematic denial of the existence of indigenous people, their deprivation of legal and voting rights, crude attempts to turn them into good Christian citizens, and the banning of their culture, language and traditions.
The exhibition displays a wide variety of media including paintings, photos, artistically treated documents, maps, a huge video installation, some very large fabrics accompanied by sculptures. There’s a lot of explanatory text which makes you feel thoroughly ashamed to be white, British and, of course, a man, since some of the women artists in the show consider the appalling violence and injustices meted out to the Indigenous people the result not only of colonialism but of specifically ‘male modes of power’.
Untitled (Alhalkere) by Emily Kame Kngwarreye
Australia 1992 is part of a series Tate has recently devised which aims to look at the artworks which cluster round a key year in a country’s history, the series having the general name ‘A Year In Art’. The first one was ‘A Year in Art: 1973’ which explored how artists responded to the 1973 coup d’etat in Chile which brought General Pinochet to power.
This is the second in the series and the title, ‘Australia 1992’, begs the question: what is so important about the year 1992? Well, it was the year of a landmark decision by the Australian High Court which overturned the concept of terra nullius (meaning ‘land belonging to nobody’). This was the doctrine by which the British had justified colonising the land now known as Australia.
The concept was used to, in effect, deny the existence of the native Aboriginal peoples who had inhabited Australia for 30,000 years, had developed a lifestyle in balance with its particular natural characteristics, as well as complex societies built on clan structures, a culture rich in hundreds of distinct languages. The High Court decision was the climax of decades of work by indigenous rights campaigners and provided a new legal basis for ongoing campaigns to expand indigenous rights and extend legal protections to indigenous culture.
Buluwana, Female Ancestor by John Mawurndjul (1989)
The art works in the show aren’t all from the year 1992, far from it, much of it is from the subsequent thirty years and some of it is bang up to date. But it all rotates and revolves around the issues thrown up by that 1992 ruling.
The first room contains three important elements. Firstly, a set of four videos by key artists featured in the show, namely Helen Johnson, Judy Watson, and Dale Horton. These are all 4 or so minutes long. The fourth video features an extended interview with Aborigine artist John Mawurndjul who explains how, although he lives in the new world, the new dispensation of the white man, he maintains the stories and traditions handed down from his father and his father’s father, hence the title of the film, ‘I am the old and the new’. John takes the camera team to a dry and dusty location out in the country where he explains the design and meaning of ancient Aboriginal rock art. He’s also filmed using traditional tools and paints, in particular a kind of soft bark brush, to create the fine striping visible in a work like Buluwana, Female Ancestor.
Another important display in this room is of drawings made by Edward Koiki Mabo of the land on Torres Island which he claimed was his under ancestral indigenous law, drawings used in the 1992 court case. There are three of these, indicating the location of plants, landmarks, traditional use and ownership, which had been passed down to Mabo through 17 generations of tradition. They’re the subject of a wall label explaining more of the detail of the case, its results and implications.
Lastly, there’s a factual (i.e. non-art) map of Australia, an attempt by scholars to represent the language or nation groups of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
The AIATSIS map of Indigenous Australia attempts to represent the language, social or nation groups of indigenous Australia, by David R. Horton (1996)
Note that the word ‘Country’ is used in a special sense to denote the Aborigines’ ancient connection with the land of their ancestry. So throughout the exhibition the curators refer to Country not ‘the country’ or ‘the landscape’.
There are five rooms in the show and, given that the central one is enormous, space for lots of art works.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye expresses her cultural life as an Anmatyerre elder and her intricate relationship to country in Untitled (Alhalkere) (top of this review).
John Mawurndjul is featured with his bark painting Buluwana, Female Ancestor, created with a fine cross-hatching technique used by generations of Kuninjku artists.
Dale Harding was the subject of one of the videos in the first room. There he explained that he often paints directly onto a gallery wall to create a site-specific work and images of these make them look dramatic. Sadly, that hasn’t happened here and he’s represented by a moveable work, The Leap/ Watershed, in which he’s blown ochre onto a large canvas to create an abstract shape. Although this isn’t particularly obvious, apparently it is intended to reference both the life-giving attributes of the land and the 1867 massacre of Aboriginal people in Mackay, Queensland. ‘The Leap’ refers to a rock formation in Yuwi Country where around 200 indigenous people chose to leap to their deaths rather than surrender to the Queensland Native Police Force.
The Leap by Dale Harding
There’s a great series of works by Judy Watson entitled ‘A Preponderance of Aboriginal Blood’. These 15 framed works take official documents used by the Australian authorities in the 19th and 20th centuries to categorise indigenous peoples and allot them (or not) voting and other rights. Thus, until 1965 you had to be able to prove you had a ‘White’ parent in order to vote, in Queensland. The categorisations include racial ones by which a person was defined as being ‘fullblood’, ‘half-blood’, ‘quadroon’ and so on, terms I’m familiar with from the same system applied in the American South in the slavery era.
What turns them into art is that Watson has spattered them with red pain mimicking blood. These documents obsessed with ‘blood’ have been drenched in the object of their enquiry, blood which also indicates the numbers of indigenous people murdered by the white military and police over the centuries. A stain on Australia’s history and conscience.
From ‘A Preponderance of Aboriginal Blood’ by Judy Watson (2005)
The complete set, along with a detailed explanation, is available on the Tate website.
In a similar spirit of taking colonial documents or concepts and undermining them, is the work of Helen Johnson. She’s represented by a couple of enormous rectangular fabrics, suspended from the ceiling, on which she creates images complex satirical images. The series is titled ‘Seat of Power’ and is from 2016.
Seat of Power by Judy Watson (2016)
This work needs a bit of explanation (which is available on the Tate web page devoted to it). It consists of a large unstretched acrylic painting on canvas which depicts a satirical image of the British parliament in session by the Victorian illustrator Richard Doyle, itself overlaid with partially legible text which refers to a chair that was gifted to the House of Representatives in Canberra, Australia by the UK branch of the Empire Parliamentary Association in 1926.
It’s big and it’s striking but, as you can see, it needs a fair bit of explaining unlike, say, all of the indigenous art on display which speaks immediately to the eye and heart. It also demonstrates a small principle about art and literature, which is that satire doesn’t have to be funny. It can be, but it doesn’t have to be and Watson’s works aren’t.
This point is easily made by comparison with a set of works by Gordon Bennett titled ‘How to Cross the Void’. These are a series of gawky cartoons or sketches of scenes, with satirical text written in, but unlike the Watson they are actively funny. The best example is this one depicting a dark-skinned man hanging himself in a cell, with the advice that, if you get into difficulty hanging yourself, you can always ask a policeman. They’ll be happy to help 🙂
‘Ask a policeman’ from ‘How to Cross the Void’ by Gordon Bennett (1993)
But alongside the amusing cartoon element there’s also something quite conceptual or cerebral going on in this series. All the images incorporate a black square. This is a reference to the clack square painted by the Russian Suprematist painter, Kazimir Malevich, made in 1915. In retrospect, art historians take this to be a founding work and moment in modern art for completely rejecting all vestiges of realism or figuratism. Malevich intended it to be the end of that tradition of painting and the start of a new tradition of pure abstraction and sometimes referred to it not as a square but as a void.
So why is there a black square in all these works? Because Bennett is asking whether any cultural artefact can truly inhabit a void, in other words whether any artwork can escape from the time and place of its making, escape from its history and transcend its cultural context. The general idea is that, no, it can’t, and this might be more true of Australian modern art than many other types…
A different work by Bennett is assigned a room of its own. Dominating the room is a characteristic example of the traditional heroic white conception of the discovery, claim and colonising of Australia, ‘The Founding of Australia 1788’ by Algernon Talmage from as late as 1937
‘The Founding of Australia 1788’ by Algernon Talmage (1937)
As you might expect any modern artist to do, Bennett subverts and interrogates this kind of pompous white triumphalism with a version of his own, titled Possession Island (Abstraction) (based on a different painting, ‘Captain Cook Taking Possession of the Australian Continent On Behalf of the British Crown (1770)’ by John Alexander Gilfillan).
Possession Island (Abstraction) by Gordon Bennett (1991)
As you can see, a once fluid realistic oil painting has been converted into a stippled black-and white image in the style of a blown-up newspaper illustration. The coloured bands do three things: 1) they mask the only indigenous figure in the original painting, who has thus been erased in the same way the indigenous presence was erased for so many centuries. All that is left is the drinks tray he was holding for the refreshment of his white master. 2) The precise rectangular shapes may or may not be a reference to Malevich, which I’ve just explained. 3) But I was intrigued to learn that the colours of the blocks are those of the Aboriginal flag. In my ignorance, I didn’t know that there was an aboriginal flag.
There’s another aspect to this. Tate have cannily displayed these works in a room with a window looking out across the River Thames towards St Paul’s Cathedral, which is bang opposite Tate Modern. Insofar as St Paul’s is a seat of state, religious and ceremonial power of the Australian colonial power, Britain, the sight of it juxtaposed with these stories of colonial repression and brutality amounts to a form of geographical satire.
View across the River Thames and Millennium Bridge to St Paul’s Cathedral from a room in Tate Modern
A bit more subtly, the window in question is a tall narrow one whose shape echoes the tall red rectangle in Bennett’s work. Conceptual and visual echoes and ironies are bouncing round this room.
Arguably the best items in the exhibition are the set of enormous hanging fabrics by Yhonnie Scarce. Scarce is an Australian glass artist who is a descendant of the Kokatha and Nukunu people of South Australia. The idea behind the works is fairly simple but results in extraordinary pieces which, for me, dominated the exhibition.
Each work is a hugely magnified antique photo of members of Scarce’s family, blown up and printed onto bed linen. These are then displayed alongside blown glass artefacts relating to the images. In the photo below, the work on the left is ‘Remember Royalty: Papa Willy’ and is a photograph from 1920 showing Scarce’s great-grandfather, William, at work shearing sheep. The image is printed onto an antique woollen blanket, an obvious reference to, or invocation of, this labour. He worked hard all his life to support his 12 (!) children. The toolbox below the blanket contains actual tools (I noted shiny new spanners) mingled with glass-blown replicas of yams, traditional foodstuff of Will’s Kokatha people.
Two works from the series ‘Remember Royalty’ by Yhonnie Scarce
The work on the right follows the same patter: it is a vintage photo taken in around 1911 at the Koonibba Mission Schoolhouse and showing Scarce’s maternal grandparents and children. The wall label tells us that mission schools like this were dotted all across Australia where indigenous people were exposed to brutal regimes of cultural assimilation i.e. forced to wear European clothes and practice Christianity. In another act of care and tribute to her ancestors, the trunk below the printed sheet contains glass balls, each of which contains a horizon line and constellations: the artist is returning to her ancestors the connection with their land which deprived of during their lives.
There are four of these huge photo-sculptures (in the other two, Scarce’s blown glass artefacts are sewn into the fabric of the photos), and because of the immediacy of the images, and the directness and poignancy of their family stories, these were, for me, the standout works in the exhibition.
At the far end of the exhibition is a big long darkened room containing Vernon Ah Kee’s four-screen video installation ‘tall man 2010’. This splices together news footage of the protests and riots following the death in custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee on 26 November 2004, on Palm Island, an island off the coast of Queensland. Doomadgee died in police custody as a result of multiple injuries. In the protests that followed, the police station, local courthouse and police barracks were burnt down. Sergeant Chris Hurley, who arrested Doomadgee, was tried and acquitted for causing his death.
One of the central figures leading the protests was Lex Wotton, a member of the Palm Island Aboriginal Council. Ah Kee presents him as the ‘tall man’ – an Aboriginal term for a bogey man or spirit who elicits the truth from wrongdoers. Wotton later won a lawsuit, alongside other Palm Island residents, which found that the police had illegally discriminated against them. The State of Queensland paid them A$30 million compensation.
So, from what the wall labels tell us, it seems to be an equivalent of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May 2020. It is typical of the American-centric nature of all our media that the Floyd incident and movement it gave rise to massively entered Britain’s consciousness and cultural sphere (houses round where I live still have ‘Black Lives Matter’ posters in their windows) while the death of Doomadgee didn’t cause a ripple.
Still clip from ‘tall man’ by Vernon Ah Kee (2010)
On a practical level, the footage is continually punctuated by the bars used in the creation and editing of film footage and by the loud sonic whine which indicates to editors that there is no soundtrack. Unfortunately I have mild tinnitus and found this very loud, penetrating high-pitched whine made it impossible for me to be in the room.
In 1979 eco-feminist Bonita Ely travelled to Jabiluka in the Northern Territory and filmed this performance, titled ‘Jabiluka U02’. Here the Mirrar indigenous community has waged a decades-long campaign against plans to mine uranium in the Kimberley flood plain. To be frank, watching her dig a pile of sand in what looks like a park is a little underwhelming. But the wall label links it with ongoing struggles against Australia’s mining corporations, singling out two current instances: in 2019 the Australian government allowed the Adani company to develop a coal mine that will endanger the Barrier Reef. And in 2020 the mining company Rio Tinto deliberately destroyed rock shelters in the Juukan Gorge, holy to the Puutu Kunti Kurram and Pinikura peoples for thousands of years. I did hear about this in the British media. Why aren’t Rio Tinto boycotted? Why aren’t the people responsible for vandalism like this named and shamed?
This is a long video which is shown at a completely different scale from the Vernon Ah Kee; that is shown across a huge screen dominating a very big wall; the Kennedy and Hughes video, by contrast, is shown on an old-fashioned TV. It addresses the history of white management, capitalism and institutionalised denial of indigenous rights, but I found it completely impossible to watch because of the highly repetitive, droning high-pitched soundtrack which eclipsed the contents and gave me a headache. Must be better ways to get your message across, guys.
Filling one side of the big central room is a series of 24 large photos by Tracey Moffatt titled ‘Up in the Sky’, shot in 1997. They depict life in a rough and ready Outback town. The whole series can be viewed on the Tate website.
The curators say the subject of the series is the forced separations of Aboriginal families by government agencies i.e. taking indigenous babies from their families and giving them to white foster parents or, as in some of these photos, Catholic convents. The abducted babies became known as the Stolen Generations.
From ‘Up in the sky’ by Tracey Moffatt (1997)
But if you look at the whole set you’ll see that Moffatt’s photos do much more than that. Most of the photos are of poor whites, what Americans call ‘trailer trash’. They prompted upset and outrage at the gross injustice of all those stolen babies and broken families. But the pictures of the immediate present also triggered feelings about living that kind of life, in that kind of place, not dissimilar from the feelings triggered by the Chris Killip exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery. Imagine living there, in a one-horse town where the horse died long ago, leaving desolation and wasted lives.
It triggered one big thought which goes slightly against the grain of the show: this is that, whereas all of the works by all of the artists in the exhibition address the injustices done to and the tragedies suffered by the indigenous people, nowhere (I think) is there mention of the injustice done to the white people sent to Australia. Almost all of them were convicts or the soldiers sent to guard them.
According to Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore, some 160,000 convicts were sent from Britain to Australia during the 50-year existence of ‘The System’ of transportation, most of them the poorest of the poor who had never been more than ten miles from their places of birth. Suddenly they were transported to a different planet.
Imagine being a nineteen-year-old woman sentenced to transportation for stealing a loaf of bread, wrenched away from your family and place of birth and familiar surroundings and sent half way round the world in the company of criminal and violent strangers to a completely alien, unfamiliar and unfriendly landscape. Imagine being the young soldiers sent to guard them.
My point is that there’s a kind of double injustice at work here. First the injustice and cruelty of the forced transportation of over a hundred thousand Britons. And then the behaviour of these scared, angry, brutalised Brits, to the relatively defenceless native peoples they discovered. Brutality upon brutality. Horror doubled. It’s a terrible historical legacy and this exhibition really drums into your mind multiple threads of injustice, violence and cultural erasure which continue up to the present day.
Most exhibition promotional videos are a zippy 30 seconds long. This one, at 14 minutes, is a more in-depth consideration of the issues and starts by explaining the 1992 High Court ruling in favour of Torres Strait Islander, featuring the man who brought the case, land-rights activist Edward Koiki Mabo, before going on to describe the practice of some of the artists in the show.
Posted by Simon on May 1, 2023
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/05/01/a-year-in-art-australia-1992-tate-modern/
Born in Prague, Slovak artist Maria Bartuszová (1936 to 1996) spent most of her career in the central European Slovak city of Košice, the second-largest city in Slovakia near the borders of Hungary and Ukraine. Here she developed and experimented with relatively small-scale abstract sculptures, the overwhelming majority of them using white plaster cast in organic rounded shapes. To enter the four rooms of this retrospective is to enter a world of whiteness, comprising scores of mysterious, self-contained ovoid shapes, some incorporating metal or wood, but the great majority a pure, smooth, round whiteness. At first glance they might almost be bones or fossils in a natural history museum.
Installation view of Maria Bartuszová @ Tate Modern
The four rooms of this exhibition bring together works rarely exhibited before in the UK to create an light and airy survey of Bartuszová’s career from the early 1960s, when she began her experimentation with casting, to the late 1980s, when she was making bigger, more varied and more site-specific art.
During her working life Bartuszová created around 500 sculptures, ranging from numerous small organic forms to larger commissions for public spaces, as well as works designed to be integrated into landscapes. They have titles like ‘egg’, ‘drop’, ‘folded figure’ though many are so pure and abstract they can’t even manage a title and are simply labelled ‘untitled’.
‘Folded Figure’ by Maria Bartuszová (1965) Collection of Amy Gold and Brett Gorvy
They look like this because in the 1960s Bartuszová began experimenting with taking balloons or even condoms, and pouring plaster into them in order to create smooth, white balloon shapes. Because the plaster obviously weighted down and distorted the balloons, creating a smooth flowing ‘blobby’ effect, she called this playful approach ‘gravistimulated shaping’.
As an experiment she sometimes dunked the setting plaster in water which also had the effect of smoothing the surface. The early sculptures made using this method evoke natural and living forms, such as drops of water and, above all, eggs, although other biological or anatomical shapes may suggest themselves to the viewer.
‘Untitled’ by Maria Bartuszová (1973) Tate © The Archive of Maria Bartuszová, Košice
In the 1980s Bartuszová inverted her practice, so to speak. Instead of blowing wet plaster into balloons, she started doing the (more obvious) approach of blowing up the balloons and casting the plaster around them. She called this ‘pneumatic casting’.
The most obvious change was in the surface texture of the casts which went from being beautifully smooth to becoming relatively rough and textured. But there were other implications, the most striking of which was that, having made the case, because it’s so fragile, you can crack or fragment it, and suddenly create a completely different psychovisual impact. Instead of smooth completeness, you have fragmentation and craggy edges. And she went on to discover that, the bigger the balloon (she took to using meteorological balloons), the more holes you could make, and the more strange and evocative the resulting shape would appear.
‘Egg, but not Columbus’s’ by Maria Bartuszová (1987) Courtesy Slovak National Gallery, SNG
This turned out to be a highly resourceful strategy, in that:
Looking at them now it suddenly occurs to me they look a bit like the clotted balls of frogspawn, but somehow frozen and cracked. Or maybe the models of complex molecules I saw in school chemistry lessons and you see in scientific literature. She referred to them as ‘endless eggs’. Here she is in her studio, in the 1980s.
Maria Bartuszová in her studio with sculptures, Košice, Slovakia 1987 by unknown photographer
The damaged eggs really have a very different vibe from the balloon casts. The latter feel smooth and complete, and very sensuous to look at. Freud says that looking is an evolutionary advanced form of touching, and you can feel the smoothness and calming weight of the earlier shapes in your mind’s eye. But the cracked shells, obviously enough, feel jagged and damaged, empty and lifeless and, somehow, spent.
The next step down this route was to introduce metal wire. If you look closely at the photo above, you can see that that’s what she’s doing: finalising the arrangement of twines of fine wire in, around and through a complex congeries of cracked egg shapes.
‘Untitled’ by Maria Bartuszová (1985) Tate © The Archive of Maria Bartuszová, Košice
This apparently simple addition adds a whole new layer of complexity to the works. The untitled piece I’ve shown, above, is the work that Tate has used on the poster for this exhibition and it is certainly very characteristic of this phase or branch of her work, but I’m not sure I like it.
I very much like abstract art, and geometric shapes and I know what they mean when the curators point out that many of the balloon ones are small enough to imagine cradling in your hands. But something about the ragged asymmetricality, the unpredictability, and the jagged surfaces of the broken shells made me uneasy. If my mind’s eye warmed to the smooth curves of the full-bodied balloon shapes, it recoiled from the broken, barbed feel of these works.
In the 1980s Bartuszová moved to a house in Košice with a studio and a large garden on a hillside. There are photos which show a rambling sloping garden with small trees into which she has inserted some of the multiple balloon works.
Tree by Maria Bartuszová (1987) consisting of a plum tree, plaster, string, plastic, foil and paper, in the artist’s garden in Košice, Slovakia © Center for Contemporary Arts (NCSU), Bratislava, Slovakia. Courtesy the Archive of Maria Bartuszová, Košice and Alison Jacques Gallery, London. Photo by Gabriel Kladek
After the Soviet crackdown on the Prague Spring of 1968, many artists retreated from political or social statements and found refuge in nature and spirituality. Bartuszová took to spirituality, reading about Zen Buddhism (as so many people did in the early 1970s) and, more to the point, began incorporating natural objects in her work.
Here is a large branch half-drowned in plaster to create the impression of snow. I liked these ‘snow casts’ because they look like branches in snow such as I saw just a few months ago when London had heavy snowfall, and because I love trees. She called the series of works exploring this approach ‘Melting Snow’.
‘Tree’ by Maria Bartuszová (photo by the author)
So far I’ve followed Bartuszová’s work along one particular avenue of development but there were, in fact, other strands and threads to her work. For a start there’s a whole different strand made up of works case in metal which obviously have a very different vibe from the cool white plaster works.
Folded Figure II (Haptic) by Maria Bartuszová (1967) © The Archive of Maria Bartuszová, Košice. Photo courtesy Michael Brzezinski
Ordinarily, I like small, geometric, metal abstract sculptures very much indeed but somehow these cold metal objects felt so far removed from the warm mental feeling given by the plaster casts – from the central logic of her development – that I recoiled from them, in the same way that I wasn’t sure whether I liked the cracked eggshells or their barbed wire finish meshes.
More in line with the soft mood of the plaster casts was a kind of hybrid form she developed, where smooth, gloop plaster casts interacted with metal or wood. Most often this took the form of wire, or sometimes string, twined round eggs shapes to make them bulge, very much into the shape of cells at the earliest stage of cell multiplication when the nascent life form consists of only 2 or 4 or 8 cells. You can see examples on the table in the first photo at the top of this review, or in the photo below.
Untitled by Maria Bartuszová (1986) © The Archive of Maria Bartuszová, Košice
Again, I didn’t like the use of the thin wire or twine. Inexplicably and irrationally, they made me feel tied up in wire, made me feel breathless and constrained. According to the curators, these many objects tied and bound and wired symbolised for Bartuszová ‘the bonds and constraints of human relationships’. The curators only mention in passing that she experienced ‘challenges in her marriage’ which eventually broke down and ended in 1984. Quite.
The curators make these works out to be sophisticated and complicated meditations on or expressions of the way personal and familial relationships are interconnected with nature, they way they capture the trace of a moment in solid form, in a tactile fragment of time. That her work is a thinking-through of sensual shapes, an extended exploration of feeling through sculptural practice. Fair enough. But the wire-snagged endless eggs made me feel like I was ripping my hand on barbed wire and the wire-bound cells made me feel asphyxiated.
On the other hand, I liked what you could call the ‘belted’ works, where the constraining force isn’t wire but more like a belt. Her work along this line of investigation, in the 1980s, continued with the themes of binding and pressure but incorporated many more materials such as acrylic, string, bronze, rubber and wood. Basically, I found these funny and charming.
Untitled by Maria Bartuszová (1972 to 1974) Courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery, London
Bartuszová left a legacy of some 500 sculptures which stimulate, please or disturb in their quiet but steadily experimental, abstract way. About 80 are on display in this exhibition. But there are (at least) two other distinct aspects of her practice.
In the mid-1960s Bartuszová had branched out to experiment with small sculptures composed of interlocking shapes, many from her trademark plaster (such as ‘Folded Figure’, 1965) but also series cast from bronze and aluminium. These were conceived as 3-D jigsaw puzzles which could be taken apart and reassembled.
Installation view of Maria Bartuszová @ Tate Modern showing some of her interlocking 3-D puzzles (photo by the author)
Early in the show there’s a series of black and white photos recording how some of these works were used in innovative workshops for blind and partially sighted children. Rather than summarise I’ll quote the wall label in its entirety:
In 1976 and 1983 art historian Gabriel Kladek organised and delivered a series of workshops for blind and partially-sighted children. A key element was the use of Bartuszová’s hand-sized and enlarged sculptures. The sculptures could be handled and several of them taken apart and reassembled. Kladek photographed the workshops, capturing the young participants’ joyful exploration of the sculptures. The workshops encouraged the children to experience different shapes and textures through touch, differentiating between geometric and organic forms. Prioritising movement, the body, touch, action and active engagement with sculpture, the use of these sculptures highlights the artist’s forward-thinking, participatory approach.
Sweet, huh? But would only work with the smooth and rounded forms, not so much with the fragile eggs, let alone objects bound with wire and twine.
But Bartuszová got involved in a surprising number of public commissions. She lived in a communist country and all artists and writers were expected to make practical contributions to society. Since these are obviously site-specific and generally very big, none of these big public pieces are included in the exhibition, we have to be content with (generally old black-and-white) photos and explanatory wall labels.
Thus we are told about:
There are photos of her in situ at these locations supervising the creation of the works. In addition there are also photos of the futuristic models she designed for playground climbing frames and slides, and a set of photos recording the creation of a monumental public sculpture titled ‘Metamorphosis, Two-Part Sculpture’ (1982) at the entrance to the Košice crematorium.
These are sort of interesting mainly because they show how brutalist, post-war modernism was very similar either side of the Iron Curtain, suggesting that it had less to do with the creativity of individual artists than a certain design logic emanating from modern building materials, technologies and production methods. If you have lots of steel or pre-stressed concrete available along with large-scale factories and workshops for its production and design, then certain stripped down shapes and designs logically follow, whether you’re in Slovakia or San Francisco.
A photo of her at a large workshop, cleaning snow off one of her slides, and of a partially sighted child paying with one of her forms, can be see at the Tate magazine article, A Futurist of Form.
Posted by Simon on April 28, 2023
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/04/28/maria-bartuszova-tate-modern/
‘I am interested in the feeling when confronted by the woven object. I am interested in the motion and waving of the woven surfaces. I am interested in every tangle of thread and rope and every possibility of transformation.’
(Magdalena Abakanowicz, 1971)
Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930 to 2017) was one of Poland’s most famous modern artists. This fairly big (6 room) exhibition at Tate Modern aims to give a comprehensive overview of her career. It follows a simple chronological order, showing the artists evolving steadily through a series of explorations and innovations.
Abakanowicz began her career more interested in weaving and fabric design than in painting or sculpture. She graduated from the Academy of Plastic Arts in Warsaw with a specialization in weaving in 1954. Weaving was encouraged because it was the kind of ‘craft’ or ‘folk art’ which the communist regime supported.
This displays a number of early works from the start of the 1960s, flat woven tapestries in abstract patterns, using dark colours, generally shades of brown. They reminded me of American 1950s Abstract Expressionism. Reproduced as flat images, as below, they remind me of 1950s modern jazz album covers.
Brown Textile 21 by Magdalena Abakanowicz (1963) © Fundacja Marty Magdaleny Abakanowicz Kosmowskiej i Jana Kosmowskiego, Warsaw
Except that they’re not paintings and they’re not flat, they’re lumpy, bumpy woven fabrics. Anyway, mildly interesting though this first room is, it’s just preliminary work, preparing for you what comes next.
This becomes a bit clearer in room 2, which features really massive tapestries but now made out of very coarse-woven fabric and with 3-D bulges and folds and joins. Tapestry as proto-sculpture.
Helena 1 by Magdalena Abakanowicz (1965) © Fundacja Marty Magdaleny Abakanowicz Kosmowskiej i Jana Kosmowskiego, Warsaw
During the mid to late 1960s Abakanowicz first emerged as a leader of the ‘New Tapestry’ movement in Europe. Artists associated with the movement began to claim fibre as a valid medium for the creation of art. Her interest in the tactility of fabric, in its potential for emerging from the flat plane, its ability to have fold and seams and wrinkles, is clearer in this example.
Installation view of Magdalena Abakanowicz @ Tate Modern (photo by the author)
But it’s only when you walk into room 3 that you get the full Monty, the impact of her innovation, the riotous new form which made her reputation. For it took about a decade for Abakanowicz’s art to evolve into its full flourishing as enormous, three-dimensional sculptures made out of thick, heavy, coarsely woven fabric (sisal, sometimes incorporating wool and horsehair) created and hung in a variety of strange, portentous shapes.
Installation view of Magdalena Abakanowicz @ Tate Modern (photo by the author)
Suddenly these are objects to walk among, to wander between and around and enjoy their strange, heavy, ragged shape and heft and mystery, which is why the curators call this room ‘the fibrous forest’. This was still the 1960s and critics didn’t know how to categorise or even name these pieces. In 1964 one critic, Elżbieta Żmudzka, suggested the term ‘Abakan’ to describe them, a term the artist happily accepted and incorporated into her practice. Altogether, there are 26 of these massive, looming, strange shapes in the exhibition.
‘The Abakans were a kind of bridge between me and the outside world. I could surround myself with them; I could create an atmosphere in which I somehow felt safe because they were my world.’
Abakanowicz began to exhibit internationally and win recognition and prizes: in 1965 she won a gold medal for applied art at the São Paulo Biennial and, on the back of this, was appointed professor of weaving at the Poznań art academy, where she taught until.
But the thing about these big international expos is that is you are brought into contact with a wide variety of gallery spaces and installation possibilities. The sheer size of the Abakans, and the way they can be arranged in patterns or shapes, to make mini-mazes naturally lent themselves to creating relationships or ‘situations’ within the gallery. She was one among many 1960s artists who paved the way for modern installation art. The exhibition includes photos of some dramatic examples.
Artist in front of Bois le Duc, Provinciehuis van Noord-Brabant, ’s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands (1972) © Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation. Photographer: Jan Nordahl
The curators emphasise that, just as she refused to be limited by conventional ideas of weaving and fabric, so she refused to be bound by the specifics of the time and place where she happened to have been born, namely the repressive communist regime in Poland, but was determined to become an international figure and travel as widely as possible. In fact she went on to cross the Iron Curtain more than any other Eastern Bloc artist and took part in hundreds of exhibitions worldwide.
About here is where you realise the importance to her of Abakanowicz’s childhood and youthful memories. For Abakanowicz was the daughter of an aristocratic family and was brought up in a manor house deep in the Polish forest deep (near the village of Krępa, 140 kilometres from Warsaw). For her, then, the natural world was a mysterious forest of enormous trees, of strange shapes looming through the mist, none of which scare her, all of which, years later as an adult in Warsaw, she remembered as comforting and healing presences.
‘Strange powers dwelled in the woods and the lakes that belonged to my parents. Apparitions and inexplicable forces had their laws and their spaces…’.
The Abakans, therefore, are not monsters but healing, if strange and mysterious, presences.
The artist conveying how the Abakans have a protective, reassuring, hide-and-seek quality
And:
‘The Abakans were my escape from categories in art. They could not be classified…Larger than me, they were safe like the hollow trunk of the old willow I could enter as a child in search of hidden secrets.’
Worth mentioning, maybe, that I really really wanted to touch and stroke the coarse, nubbly surface of these huge objects and, where there was an opening, slip inside like a naughty child playing hide and seek. Needless to say, not only are you not allowed to hide in the Abakans, you are not allowed to even touch them – I was ticked off by a gallery attendant for just leaning quite close to one – which kind of undermines all her claims for the Abakans as being warm and comforting presences. In the modern gallery, curators ensure that they are cold and clinical and aloof, bringing out their spectacular side but stifling the warmth and comfort which the artist talks about so much.
For these childhood memories developed into a deep reverence for nature, and an identification of her artistic practice – strands and fibres and weaving – with the basic elements of the natural world.
‘I see fibre as the basic element constructing the organic world on our planet… It is from fibre that all living organisms are built, the tissue of plants, leaves and ourselves… our nerves, our genetic code, the canals of our veins, our muscles… We are fibrous structures.’
The next room is even more dramatic, with half a dozen huge works, which have abandoned the brown and ochre earth hues of the previous work for bold gold and red. The examples here seem much more distinctive and characteristic than in the previous room, that’s to say they have far more individual character, although their titles tend to be as minimal as possible, for example ‘Abakan red’ and ‘Abakan orange’.
Installation view of Magdalena Abakanowicz @ Tate Modern (photo by the author)
The room also contains specific sub-genres or sets of other types of fabric sculpture which spun off from her main concern. Several of these involved rope, which became a more important material for her in the 1970s. I love art made from found objects, I love the Arte Povera movement from the same period (the early 1970s) in Italy, and so I warmed to her description:
‘Along the Vistula River one could find old, discarded ropes. They had their own history. They became my material. I pulled out thread, washed and dyed them on our gas stove.’
According to the wall label:
The work shown here is a total ‘situation’ devised by the artist, combining a pair of giant garment-like, hanging forms that have been created from industrially woven cloth and ropes that spill out onto the floor. The hollow ‘garments’ evoke a protective shell or coat, while the entwined fibres of rope suggest the complexities of the nervous system.
‘Set of Black Organic Forms’ by Magdalena Abakanowicz (1974) (photo by the author)
These several works interested me because I just happen to have seen the exhibition of work by Barbara Chase-Riboud at Serpentine North which is very much about cascades of fabric and ropes, some unspooling from the main sculpture across the floor. Exactly as here.
On the whole I liked the Chase-Riboud more because her ropes and plaits dangle from large, abstract metallic pelmets. These are interesting in their own right as metal sculptures, but the juxtaposition of hard angular metal with flowing plaited fabric creates a very powerful dynamic effect. Compared with the Chase-Riboud, I found some of the Abakanowicz a bit, well, weak. The two huge black ones, above, looked like enormous coat hangers to me. Others were more powerful.
Abakan Yellow by Magdalena Abakanowicz (1970) © Fundacja Marty Magdaleny Abakanowicz Kosmowskiej i Jana Kosmowskiego, Warsaw
It’s a mild irony throughout the exhibition that Abakanowicz is cited as saying she is not a very eloquent explainer of her work and that she leaves it to others to define and describe, and yet, whenever she is quoted describing her work, she is in fact wonderfully eloquent:
‘The rope to me is like a petrified organism, like a muscle devoid of activity. Moving it, changing its position and arrangement, touching it, I can learn its secrets and the multitude of its meaning…It carries its own story within itself, it contributes this to its surroundings.’
Like everything she did, this use of rope was applied on an often large scale, in one-off installations, leading visitors around the works and sometimes even connecting different buildings. For example, at the 1972 Edinburgh International Festival she deployed a long stretch of painted red cable winding throughout the city.
The more you read, the more you realise how a lot of her work was very site-specific, created for particular exhibitions or events. What we’re seeing in this Tate Modern exhibition is only a fragment of the hundreds of pieces and installations she created in different galleries and cities across half a century.
In 1969 Abakanowicz collaborated with the avant-garde film director Jarosław Brzozowski and experimental composer Bogusław Schäffer to create the film Abakany. Alas, I can’t find this anywhere on the internet. There’s an alcove or viewing area at the exhibition, set off to one side where you can sit and watch the entire thing.
It was filmed at the sand dunes of Slowiński National Park in Łeba on the Baltic coast of Poland. The artist planted Abakans in the sand, supported by wooden armatures. The film captures the effect of the fibres blowing in the wind. It is a typical memento if its time, youthful and exuberant and optimistic. The beach scenes are interspersed with indoor sequences showing Abakanowicz working in her studio and gallery space.
The abstract modernist soundtrack prompted a thought. The wall labels are continually telling us how important the natural world and natural imagery was to Abakanowicz. Well, how cool it would have been to have included soundscapes in the exhibition. If, especially in the section of big shaggy hanging shapes which they call the ‘fibrous forest’, they had played an ambient recording of an actual Polish forest, the sounds of wind, distant bird calls, maybe occasional patters of rain on leaves. That would have helped it feel a little less cold and sterile.
One corner of the coloured Abakan room is taken up with a distribution of fabric bags or sacks, of all sizes, the big ones poo-shaped, the smaller ones like smooth pebbles or rocks. A rummage, a spill of rough fabric containers, creating a rubble of soft boulders. A soft rockery
Installation view of Magdalena Abakanowicz showing ‘Embryology (1978 to 80) @ Tate Modern (photo by the author)
These are from the 1980s. By then Abakanowicz was bored of being labelled a ‘fibre-artist’ and began to use other materials to make increasingly figurative sculptures. In 1978 she made a new series of ambiguous forms titled Embryology, made from a combination of fabrics and fibres bundled and bound into rounded, organic masses. 800 of these forms were originally shown together at the Venice Biennale in 1980, when Abakanowicz was invited to exhibit in the Polish national pavilion. The curators quote another one of her eloquent explanations:
‘The contents, the inside, the interior of soft matter fascinated me… By ‘soft’, I meant organic, alive. What is organic? What makes it alive? In which region of throbbing begins the individuality of matter, its independent existence? …They were completing my physical need to create bellies, organs, an invented anatomy. Finally, a soft landscape of countless pieces related to each other.’
Embryology is the title of this specific work but also the name she gave to a wider idea she felt she was exploring. As the curators put it:
Although Abakanowicz did not identify herself as a feminist, her woven sculptures have been seen by curators and writers as emblematic of powerful female imagery and art-making. Birth, life, vulnerability, and decay are suggested by forms that resemble nests, wombs and eggs.
As it happens I’ve been reading about gender essentialism, the umbrella term given to the notion that gender differences are rooted in nature and biology. My understanding is that this – the notion that women are somehow more intrinsically associated with reproduction, giving birth, nurturing and so on – is deprecated in modern feminist theory. My understanding is that in modern feminist theory ‘gender’ is regarded as something which is socially constructed and therefore can be changed. In the eyes of leading theorists such as Judith Butler ‘gender’ has a performative aspect i.e. we create our gender through our behaviour. This is obviously a variation on existentialist notions that our destinies are not foretold and that we create who we are through our actions, and indeed the basic idea of the social construction of gender is routinely traced back to Simone de Beauvoir who, as long ago as 1949, summed it up in a famous quote, ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’.
I know all this mainly because my daughter, the Sociology student, has drummed it into me in repeated conversations. Regarded from this perspective, Abakanowicz’s deep interest in wombs, fertility and so on seems rather dated, rather conservative. (Discuss.)
The two big rooms showing these colourful Abakans and the Embryology pieces are the centrepiece of the exhibition, full of dramatic masterworks. The final room, number 6, initially seems to be something of an anti-climax. It is much smaller, narrower, and almost entirely consists of texts on the wall, lots of photos and a couple of videos. There’s only one art work, radically different from everything before as it contains no fabric but is made of wood and metal.
It took a while for me to realise what was happening, to realise that this exhibition, all the stuff we’ve seen in the first 5 or 6 rooms and alcoves, only covers the first half of her career. It only takes us up to the 1980s, whereas Abakanowicz carried on working and producing till the end of her life in 2017, over thirty years later.
This final room is by way of being a timeline or chronology of her entire career, up to and including the 1980s, but then covering the final 30 years which the main exhibition doesn’t. From it we learn a lot more about her life which sheds life on what we’ve just seen. For example, fresh out of art school she found work in industry and took part in state-organised design exhibitions. Hmm. You can see how this experience would feed into her own confidence about creating large-scale installations and ‘environments’ a decade later.
The chronology brings out her extraordinary international success. In the 1970s she has 21 solo shows and participates in over 75 group exhibitions in Poland and worldwide. As early as 1973 she began moving beyond the Abakans, with a series of works titled Heads, Seated Figures and Backs. Insofar as these are obviously figurative works they mark quite a departure from what had gone before.
Exhibition view of Abakanowicz at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, showing Heads (1973 to 1975) and Seated Figures (1974 to 1979) Photo © Artur Starewicz/East News (1982)
In 1981 the communist Polish government declared martial law and this seems to have marked a darkening of her worldview or certainly of her work. In 1985 she began a series of anonymous, headless figures she called the Crowd series, and which she continued adding to until 2014. In 1987 she began a series she titled War Games (which she continued until 1995) where she used felled trees in the Masurian Lake District of Poland to create a total of 21 huge forms that suggest both weapons and bodies.
(It’s one of this series, Anasta, which is the sole piece included in this last, chronology room, but it isn’t really given the space for you to engage with or enjoy it, and now I understand why. All these later works were designed to be outdoors, in huge spaces, to breathe and interact with each other. This one feels cramped and confined.)
In their medium and design and purpose, these all feel completely different from the fabrics and Abakans which came before. During the 1990s she became increasingly interested in trees and forests, the medium they’re made out of (wood) and their ecological and spiritual meaning. In 1992 she began a series titled Hand-like Trees.
In 1998 she created Space of Unknown Growth, a massive land art project near Vilnius, Lithuania, consisting of 22 concrete ovoid forms. Of the half dozen or so large-scale projects which are captured by photographs in this room, this one was my favourite.
‘Space of Unknown Growth’, Europos Parkas, Vilnius, Lithuania. Photo © Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation. Photographer: Norbert Piwowarczyk. (1998)
But by now I’d realised why the exhibition is so oddly skewed towards the first half of her career and why nothing from the second half is on display here. It’s because the works from these last 30 years are, without exception, huge site-specific installations which cannot be moved and so cannot brought into a gallery space. All we can have of them is photos and descriptions on a wall.
Thus the wall labels tells us that in her late career Abakanowicz undertook major commissioned public sculptures around the world, each one of which responded to the unique landscape and history of each site. Thus:
OK, these bodiless legs have been cast with the fissured texture of tree bark, giving them an organic vibe, but you can see how very far she had come from any sense of the weaving and abstract shapes which dominated the first half of her career and which, in the shape of the 26 Abakans, dominate this exhibition.
Agora, 106 iron cast figures installed at Grant Park, Chicago. Photo: Kenneth E. Tanaka (2006)
Posted by Simon on April 26, 2023
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/04/26/magdalena-abakanowicz-every-tangle-of-thread-and-rope-tate-modern/
This is a huge, vast, awe-inspiring, ginormous exhibition, full of riches and surprises and fun. The Saatchi Gallery is housed in a grand and spacious building just off the King’s Road. It has three floors of exhibition space (ground, 1st and second floors), some of its rooms are huge, plus little side-rooms, nooks and crannies, corridors and the stairwells you go up to move between floors.
Every inch of this space, all the rooms and all the walls are covered with wild and vivid examples of the exhibitions subject, for this is a huge, comprehensive exhibition of Street Art and Graffiti. Wow, is it big! Wow, is there a lot, a huge amount, to take in! It aims to be the most comprehensive exhibition of graffiti and street art ever held in the UK and surely it is.
The Cosmic Cavern by Kenny Scharf – a dayglo party installation, inspired by the night-clubs and discos of the 1980s in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
To give a quick sense of the scale, here’s a list of some of the participating artists:
10Foot, AIKO, Alicia McCarthy, André Saraiva, BÄST, Beastie Boys, Beezer, Bert Krak, BLADE, BLONDIE, Bob Gruen, Brassaï, Broken Fingaz, C. R. Stecyk III, CES, Charlie Ahearn, Chaz Bojórquez, Chris FREEDOM Pape, Christopher Stead, Conor Harrington, CORNBREAD, Craig Costello, CRASH, DABSMYLA, Dash Snow, DAZE, DELTA, DONDI, Duncan Weston, Dr. REVOLT, Eric HAZE, Escif, Estevan Oriol, Fab 5 Freddy, FAILE, Felipe Pantone, FUME, FUTURA2000, Glen E. Friedman, GOLDIE, Gordon Matta-Clark, Gregory Rick, Guerrilla Girls, Gus Coral, Henry Chalfant, HuskMitNavn, IMON BOY, Jaimie D’Cruz, Jamie Reid, Janette Beckman, Jason REVOK, Jenny Holzer, Joe Conzo, John Ahearn & Rigoberto Torres, José Parlá, KATSU, KAWS, KC ORTIZ, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, KING MOB, LADY PINK, Lawrence Watson, Lisa Kahane, Malcolm McLaren, Maripol, Martin Jones, Martha Cooper, Maya Hayuk, Michael Holman, Michael Lawrence, Mister CARTOON, MODE 2, Ozzie Juarez, Pablo Allison, Pat Phillips, Paul Insect, POSE, PRIDE, PRIEST, Richard Colman, RISK, Robert 3D Del Naja, Roger Perry, Shepard Fairey, SHOE, Sophie Bramly, STASH, Stephen ESPO Powers, Stickymonger, SWOON, TAKI 183, Toby Mott, TOX, Tim Conlon, Timothy Curtis, Tish Murtha, Todd James, VHILS , ZEPHYR.
Site-specific mural by selected group of participating artists in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
Room after room is packed with paintings, artefacts, sculptures, installations. There are standard gallery rooms with paintings hanging discreetly on the wall but there’s also some vivid installations, namely a mock-up of a 1980s record shop whose walls are plastered with old posters, complete with racks holding real LPs you can browse through.
Interior of Trash records, including interactive record player, t-shirts, skateboards, and a multitude of youth culture ephemera in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
There’s a life-sized shop full of colourful clutter and bric-a-brac. There’s a corridor lined with black and red graffiti, which is illuminated in pinky-red light, giving you a full visual experience as you walk through it. One of the best bits is a room covered with dense black-and-white patterns giving you pleasantly zig-zaggy optical illusions, in the middle of which are some stands with squiggly over-coloured zoomorphic swirl sculptures. All pleasantly weird and wonderful and disorientating. Some toddlers in it at the same time as me loved it.
Into the New Realm with Felipe Pantone: installation in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
There are 13 rooms in all and each one is given a theme, within which what seem like floods of artists are explained and displayed.
The exhibition sets out to give a historical account of the genesis and development of modern graffiti sometime in the 1960s and from then on twines the development of graffiti in basically two places, London and America, specifically Los Angeles.
Accompanying the explanation of the development of street art was a lot about contemporary music, which also came in two essential flavours. First of all there’s what I thought was a surprising amount about English punk, with several walls made up of fabulously retro old posters for scores of punk bands.
There’s a lot about the Clash who in 1980 left sleepy London town for America where they entered into all kinds of collaborations with US hip-hop and rap bands. The show includes FUTURA2000’s legendary 30-foot-long painting, made on stage with The Clash during a performance.
There’s a passage devoted to Don Letts, film director, disc jockey and musician, collaborator with the Clash among many other groups. To my surprise a whole section is devoted to bad boy impresario, Malcolm McLaren. There’s a series of photos depicting the mutations of his shop on the Kings Road, Sex, which morphed into Seditionaries and several other incarnations, and then to his post-punk attempts to stay ahead of the trend by moving to America and exploiting the new sound of hip-hop.
Wall-sized photo of Malcolm McLaren and the arted-up boogie box he’s carrying in a display case in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
And then of course, there is hip-hop itself, with several galleries devoted to massive photos of key bands such as Public Enemy, NWA and many more rappers and DJs with colourful confrontational soubriquets, juxtaposed with the graffiti and street artists who inspired or were inspired by them.
Classic photo of Public Enemy by Glen E. Friedman in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
I found the jumping between black American culture in the 1980s and essentially white punk culture from the late 1970s quite confusing, but in a fun, disorientating kind of way. London, punk, tower blocks and concrete subways, the Clash, Mrs Thatcher and so on, I immediately get, relate to and remember. Life in some American ghetto, bling and baseball caps, and the complex social legacy of the civil rights movement or Black Power, a lot less so. In fact, not really at all.
I guess there are two ways to approach such a funfair, such a festival of art, such an overwhelm-ment of paintings, installations, set-ups and so on: one is to read the sensible wall labels, which attempt to give a coherent account of the birth and growth of street art, and go slowly mad with the level of detail. The other is just to stroll around and react to the scores and scores of vivid, vibrant setups and displays. Here’s the cluttered shop of bric-a-brac I mentioned. What has it got to do with graffiti, what is it trying to do? To be honest, I don’t know, but I loved it.
Puppet Workshop ‘Rubbish Stuff’ by Paul Insect in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
So far I’ve given the impression it’s mad and cluttered and busy, and some of the rooms or spaces definitely are. But others are the complete opposite, big traditional gallery spaces with sensible wood floors, white walls and all kinds of works hung on them.
Some are sets of paintings on wood (or concrete) because one of the things that comes over is that, among the 100+ artists on display, some began as street artists but have been going for 30 years or more and have evolved a more studied conventional practice. Hence a very conventional display which looks like this:
Installation view of BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
In other places, works have been sprayed directly onto the gallery walls by contemporary artists.
Wall art by Kenny Scharf, created specially for BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
Running the entire height of one of the big stairwells is what amounts to a dense wallpaper made up of hundreds and hundreds of photos of New York subways trains entirely covered with classic urban graffiti. There’s a room devoted to the work of Lawrence Watson (born 1963) who worked his way up through the New Musical Express and The Face, during which he was commissioned to do a photojournalism on the New York hip-hop school and took classic snaps of artists like Run-DMC, LL Cool J and Public Enemy.
Lawrence Watson installation featuring contact sheets and a performance video of one of the many hip-hop acts he photographed, at BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
There’s what you could call a busy but essentially orderly displays, such as this one of brightly coloured rectangles with catchy images or logos.
Site-specific poster installation LONDINIUM 2023 by C.R. Stecyk III in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
Then there’s politics because young people are constantly rebelling, bless them, before they grow up, get married, get a mortgage and kids and vote for people like Boris Johnson or Dominic Raab.
I warmed to the rebel imagery of the English punk strand of things, and especially liked a huge long wall covered in posters for punk bands and gigs in the late 70s, mixed up with posters execrating Maggie Thatcher and weathered old copies of the magazine Class War, which I used to get when I was a student, mainly for the hilarious covers, like the satirical covers of Private Eye, only with added venom. Ah, the Miners Strike, the Battle of Orgreave, bombs in Northern Ireland, Exocets over the Falklands, those were the days, eh?
Part of the punk poster collage in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
Graffiti is a name-based, usually illegal art work which can range from simple tag signatures to elaborate, multi-coloured designs.
Graffiti is probably as old as civilisation i.e. cities. We have graffiti from ancient Rome (displayed at the British Museum’s Nero exhibition). Modern-day graffiti arose in 1967 in New York and Philadelphia as a form based on repetition of the artist’s name or tag, embellished and stylised. Graffiti movements or communities arose round the increasingly popular. Generally, you gained respect the more daring and illegal your work.
Untitled by ZEPHYR, a venerable graffiti artist who’s been ‘working’ for over 50 years, in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
Street art is usually illegal work that falls outside the scope of ‘graffiti’, for example, image-based posters, stickers, stencils and installations. In a modern art context, street art dates from as recently as 2000 when a critical mass of artists, many of them originally graffiti-ists, crystallised the practice and attracted attention from curators and art scholars.
Murals are large-scale wall art, whether legal or illegal.
Let me try to give a more structured overview of this huge, unwieldy phantasmagoria by, basically, copying the press release.
The curators’ stated aim is to zero in on exceptional moments in the history of street art. These include the emergence of punk, the birth of hip-hop (celebrating its 50th anniversary, happy birthday, chaps) and street culture’s growing influence in fashion and film.
What comes over just from that preliminary introduction is that the exhibition is nowhere near complete. These are just a tiny fraction of works from an art form or movement which was spontaneous, undisciplined and often ephemeral by its nature. It’s a tiny selection of what could arguably be seen as the only really global universal art form, found as much in urban centres in Latin America, Africa, Russia, China, the Far East, as on the mean streets of Brixton or Philadelphia.
‘Toy Alley.. after the Murder’ installation by PRIEST in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
Anyway, the exhibition is divided into what the curators call ‘chapters’.
First thing you see on entering the gallery is a graffiti-filled installation of what looks like a teenager’s bedroom, ‘The Vandal’s Bedroom’ by American artist Todd James, presumably to establish several themes: predominantly that this whole worldview is by and for youth, angry sullen teenagers and students or – in America more than England, I suspect – black kids from ghettos who felt outside all existing norms and social structures. The other theme being mess, it’s a mock-up of the bedroom of the messiest teenager in history, covered in posters and magazines and rubbish and sci-fi paperbacks but mostly festooned with scrawls and tags and ‘toons. Looked like my son’s bedroom on a good day.
Vandals Bedroom by Todd James in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
The socio-political turmoil of the late 1970s and 80s, where the decline of cities met artistic resistance, a shift which was felt in both the US and UK. Youth culture responded by painting graffiti on walls and public transport, creating art that reflected and reimagined the times in an explosion of expression on the streets. It was about identity in the face of oppression, self-awareness, and self-discovery in a moment of a depleted economic outlook.
A selection of American and European originators, photo documentarians and cultural icons who helped contextualize and spread graffiti culture around the world. In André Saraiva’s Dream series, there is a visual articulation of how graffiti, street art, hip-hop, punk, fashion and break-dancing all sprung from the late 1970s and early 1980s into the 90s and today, and became a hybrid celebration of underground culture.
Featured artists also include Mister CARTOON, known for his tattooing and Los Angeles murals; a Beastie Boys installation featuring fashion and ephemera from the band’s prolific history; and LADY PINK’s feminist murals, illustrations and paintings.
Feminist mural by LADY PINK, an Ecuador-born artists who started painting New York subway trains aged 15, in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
Hosts icons such as legendary NYC artist, Eric HAZE, a torch bearer for generations to come; a new large-scale painting by abstract expressionist artist José Parlá; advertisement posters by KAWS; and ephemera by Keith Haring, one of the most popular street artists of the 1980s.
Works commissioned specifically for this exhibition by graffiti trailblazers Shepard Fairey, LA-based activist, and FAILE, a Brooklyn-based artistic duo taking over the streets of NYC since the late 90s.
A site-specific installation by LA-based icon Kenny Scharf, the largest version to date of his immersive and interactive installation Cosmic Cavern, consisting of Day-Glo paintings, ephemera, and reused materials found in the streets of LA (see first photo in this review). Also the signature puppet characters made from recycled materials by Paul Insect, one of London’s original street art pioneers.
A deep dive into street culture history through archival photography, ephemera and fashion to examine the cross-pollination of influences across music, fashion and film. Includes a large wall vinyl by feminist collective Guerrilla Girls.
Works by hip-hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy.
Lisbon-based artist, VHILS, who repurposes waste and found materials to reimagine city walls.
Doors by Portuguese artist VHILS , in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
The final ‘chapter’ is titled ‘The Next Phase’ and contains new op-art works by Valencia-based artist Felipe Pantone, whose high-contrast, geometric patterns challenge perspective, creating a distinctive digital age aesthetic.
It’s huge, and there’s loads of wall labels which are on two levels: high-level ones introducing each room and giving overviews of particular moments, themes and places (New York and London, but plenty of others); and then more specific labels zeroing in to give the biographies of the scores and scores of artists featured and descriptions of specific works. If you studied all of them you’d be here all day. It’s a feast of colour, creativity and information.
The visitor handout includes 6 rules we visitors should comply with, for example ‘Respect the artworks’ and ‘Do not touch them’ etc. Rule 4 is ‘Do not sticker or tag the gallery’. Now I entirely understand why they say that – it is a very nice, clean gallery, staffed by nice, clean visitor assistants who are extremely helpful. Still – I couldn’t help finding it funny that an exhibition all about the wild, anarchic, street culture of the 70s and 80s is held in such an atmosphere of politeness and respect and silence, in beautifully maintained and utterly sterile white spaces.
Selection of works from the Afterlife Series by CRASH (2022) in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery
I was surprised there was no mention of New York’s most famous graffiti artist, the devastatingly brilliant, cool and beautiful Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 to 1988), subject of a brilliant exhibition at the Barbican.
Posted by Simon on April 24, 2023
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/04/24/beyond-the-streets-london-the-saatchi-gallery/
This isn’t an exhibition, it’s an awesomely immersive installation of blistering power and intensity. I loved it. I wanted to stay all day. I can’t recommend it too highly. And it’s free.
Installation view of Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different @ the National Gallery
You go in the main entrance, up the stairs. through swing doors and across an old-fashioned gallery lined with grand 18th century paintings, to arrive at the entrance to the installation, with the title in big letters over the doorway – ‘Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different’.
Here a couple of visitor attendants stand, pointing out the wall label which explains the installation, the list of paintings used in it, and a list of quotes from the text, as well as advising people that it contains loud music, sounds, flashing lights, and brutal, violent imagery. All sounds great!
If you want to proceed, you simply turn left and walk into a big, big room, the size of a school gym or assembly hall. The room is in pitch darkness but suspended from the ceiling are nine or so projectors and these are projecting continuous loops of overlapping, continually changing images and animations onto all four walls.
The basis of the loops are a selection of 22 classic paintings from the National Gallery collection and 3 from the Holburne Museum, Bath: 25 in total. There’s a full list in a wall label in the ante-room to the show but you don’t need to know them to ‘get’ the show – what they are becomes perfectly apparent as they morph in and out of view. The point is the treatment they’ve been subjected to, which is radical and brilliant.
Malani has turned them into continuous unfurling animations whereby each image appears and is immediately subject to all kinds of manipulations –flooded with colour wash, disintegrated as if by acid, and scribbled over with blunt crayon markings and animated figures generated by an iPad.
These beautiful, graceful classical paintings are walked over by matchstick figures engaged in indecipherable activities, are revived and reappear, are washed and disintegrated again, merge with other images, with photographs, with non-classical imagery of black or Asian people, are subject to random bars of colour exploding across them, at one point stock-market charts and graphic examples of complex financial systems, dancing stick figures, splurges of blood red paint, anarchy, chaos.
Installation view of Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different @ the National Gallery
Apparently there are 25 distinct animations, one for each classical painting, but they’re of different lengths and are projected over each other, so being played together like this creates endlessly changing juxtapositions and interactions. I was entranced, I was transported.
Why the systematic over-writing, destruction and transformation of such beautiful, elegant paintings? The clue is in the voiceover because, if your eyes are overwhelmed by the continual huge looping animations coming at you from all directions, your ears are hearing a narration, a woman’s voice telling a terrible story from amid the crashes and blizzards of imagery, and it is a story of war.
For it is Cassandra talking, princess of Troy, daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, sister of Paris and Hector. According to legend, Apollo fell in love with beautiful Cassandra and promised her the gift of prophecy if she would have sex with him. He gave her the gift but she went back on the deal, refusing to sleep with him, making him furious. Now the ancient gods could not rescind gifts they had given so Apollo couldn’t withdraw his gift of prophecy – so instead he took revenge by adding a codicil to the original gift – Cassandra continued to have the gift of seeing the future but Apollo now added that nobody would believe her.
Her plight was more than ordinarily significant or tragic because the main thing she foresaw was the sack of Troy after its long siege by the Greeks, its complete destruction, the murder of most of its inhabitants, including her venerable father, Priam, and the taking away into slavery of the remaining women, including herself and her mother Hecuba. This terrible fate she saw with crystal clarity and told everyone around her, but nobody believed her. Can you imagine the mental torment of her position, knowing the absolute worst but being powerless to prevent it?
So, to recap, as images of classic paintings emerge out of the darkness, are defaced and scribbled over, a calm, detached woman’s voice reads a text which references the Tale of Troy, identifies as Cassandra, mentions key figures in the story such as Aeneas, Paris, Hector, seems to hint at the trauma of war and destruction, and yet, at other moments, segues off into what may be a description of a large sailing ship struggling through rain and storm of an ocean.
Noises, sound effects, washes of sound, obscure and cloud the voice just as the scribbles and animations deface the paintings.
The voice belongs to Malani’s longtime collaborator and friend, Alaknanda Samarth, and has the lofty visionariness of a classical actor – cool, detached, oblique – wonderfully fitting with both the classic paintings and the classical subject matter.
Installation view of Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different @ the National Gallery
I really loved this installation for two reasons. One is that I am besotted by the Tale of Troy and the Iliad, which I read as a boy and has stayed with me for the rest of my life, underpinning my studies at university, the central work of literature of the entire western tradition, standing at the door like a violent, lowering presence.
I happen to have recently read a lot of Roman literature including retellings of the tale of Troy by poets like Ovid and Seneca which has refreshed my memory with the extreme violence and rapine of the old Greek myths. Our modern culture has a cosy place for the old myths, treats them as assimilated and contained, but to reread them is to be appalled all over again by the brutality, the often exquisite tortures and the persistent sexual violence.
Thus, at the fall of Troy, Cassandra sought shelter from the pillaging Greeks in the temple of Athena, clinging to a statue of the goddess, but was dragged away and raped by Ajax the Lesser (there were two heroes named Ajax at the siege). For this desecration of her temple, Ajax was later killed by Athena. Cassandra passed as a slave into the possession of King Agamemnon and sailed back to Mycenae with him, where she was murdered along with Agamemnon by his wife, Clytemnestra, who had never forgiven him for the ritual sacrifice of their daughter Iphigeneia right back at the start of the war.
The Greek myths are not cosy and comforting. It’s bloodshed all the way through – rape, abduction, war, killing, massacre, more rape, revenge of the gods, murder. So what thrilled me about Malani’s installation is the way she has found an audiovisual equivalent of the terrifying destructive violence at the heart of Greek myth and legend. The scribbling over Old Master paintings with rude graffiti, acid destruction, incoherent animations perfectly captures the destruction of war, which is at the core of human history. That’s what thrilled me. Malini creates an audiovisual expression for the deepest truth about human nature. Congo. Iraq. Syria. Ukraine. The beauty of human perception and sensitivity is everywhere bludgeoned by brutes.
Installation view of Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different @ the National Gallery
The other reason was the powerful influence of Basquiat on the entire experience. Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 to 1988) was a brilliant young American artist who rose out of the street art and graffiti scenes in New York to create a stunning visual language to capture contemporary urban experience. The Barbican had sell-out exhibition devoted to him back in 2017.
Basquiat developed a vibrant visual style based on the primary colours found in spray cans, on the designs and logos used in graffiti, incorporating and deploying all aspects of street art with style and panache. A lot of Malini’s animated squiggles, random attacks of primary colour, scribbling out, reveals, animations, matchstick figures struggling through the blare of pattern, reminded me of Basquiat at his vivifying, energising, bracing best.
It was pure visual pleasure to slump against one of the walls (like everyone else was doing) and watch the incredible panoramic animations explode across the walls.
My Reality is Different is result of Malini’s selection in 2020 to be the first artist to receive the National Gallery’s Contemporary Fellowship, supported by Art Fund and part of the National Gallery’s Contemporary Programme. As far as I’m concerned, it’s an absolute triumph. More, please.
Installation view of Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different @ the National Gallery
As far as I can tell there’s no official video of the installation. In a sense, how could there be, if it’s designed to create a loop of indeterminable duration and complexity? So I’ve embedded here the longest of the three videos of it you can find on YouTube which have obviously been made by visitors. They’re obviously amateur – a bit chaotic, out of focus, swinging round too fast – but they give you a good sense of the barrage of brilliantly changing imagery and ghostly, shimmering narrative that the visitor is subjected to.
And:
Here’s the text that Alaknanda Samarth reads out. It’s adapted by her and Malini from ‘Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays’ by the East German writer, Christa Wolf (1951 to 2011).
It was here. This is where she stood. These stone lions looked at her, now they no longer have heads. The walls, today as in the past, the gate, where no blood can be seen seeping out from beneath. Into the darkness. Into the slaughterhouse. And alone.
Keeping step with the story, I make my way into death. Why did I want the gift of prophecy? To speak with my voice. There’s something of everyone in me, so I’ve belonged completely to no one. Troy’s end was in sight. We were lost. Aeneas had pulled out with his people.
What I grasp between now and evening will perish with me. ‘She’s laughing.’ They don’t know I speak their language.
Who was Penthesilea? I knew Penthesilea was going to fall in battle. I rejoiced to see her, a woman, put on her weapons. Who will find a voice again? ‘You’re lying when you prophesy we’re all doomed.’
War gives people their shape.
Nothing left to describe the world but the language of the past. The language of the present has shriveled. The language of the future, one sentence only. ‘Today I’ll be killed.’
Apollo. He conferred on me the gift of prophecy, approached me as a man. Due to my terror, he transformed into a wolf with mice, spat furiously into my mouth when he was unable to overpower me.
Dream-image. The sea burning. Last thing in my life, a picture, not a word. Will I split myself in two? Will I… How many realities were there in Troy beside mine? One day I announced ‘Troy will fall.’ A hot terror.
When I look, there’s no god, no judgement, only myself.
Events that aroused the craving for more events, finally for war. The first thing I really saw.
Posted by Simon on April 12, 2023
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/04/12/nalini-malani-my-reality-is-different-the-national-gallery/
‘The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance’ is a one-room, free display at the National Gallery in London. Go in the main entrance, up the stairs to the mezzanine level, then turn right and up more stairs to room 46.
It’s amazing how much you can cram into one room in a gallery, in this case ten or so paintings, 4 or 5 drawings and several sculptures which, taken together, open up whole imaginative worlds and intellectual vistas. Amazing how much you can extrapolate from one work of art, about an entire era’s attitudes to men and women, ageing, its sense of humour, its fear of the supernatural.
It all starts by considering one of the best-known faces in the National Gallery: Quinten Massys’s early 16th-century depiction of an old woman, popularly known as ‘The Ugly Duchess’. Made in Antwerp in about 1513, it is an extremely striking image.
An Old Woman (‘The Ugly Duchess’), about 1513 by Quinten Massys © Photo: The National Gallery, London
Quite obviously this is an exaggerated and grotesque caricature. Focusing just on the features, you’d have thought it was the face of an old man, but the closer you look you realise all kinds of things are going on in this picture. The most obvious element is probably the woman’s mannish, ugly face but you quickly move o to notice the very low-cut dress revealing her ample but wrinkled bosom.
It’s obviously a satire or caricature of the stock standard Renaissance portrait, which, of course, showed the sitter to best advantage, flattering them by smoothing out wrinkles and omitting blemishes. Quite obviously this painting is doing the exact opposite, packing in as many unflattering details as possible – big ears, stubby nose, disappeared lips, as many wrinkles as the human neck can cope with, a huge expanse of neck and bosom revealing the mannish solidity of her shoulders and the wrinkled bust.
The ‘philtrum’ is the technical name for the groove which runs between nose and lips, but it’s not only this which is long but the entire space or stretch of face from nose to mouth which is as huge as possible, almost giving her the prognathous appearance of a chimpanzee.
So there’s an implicit contrast with the genre of the standard Renaissance flattering portrait. But there’s another contrast worth mentioning, which is the contrast between the gargoyle grotesqueness of the face and body and the immaculately naturalistic detailing of the headdress and cascading wimple.
Detail of An Old Woman (‘The Ugly Duchess’), about 1513 by Quinten Massys © Photo: The National Gallery, London
Seeing a painting like this in the flesh allows you to go right up to it and marvel at the extreme detailing of the fabric of the headdress – you can virtually see each thread of the fabric, the detail of each one of the embroidered flowers; to marvel at the intricate working of the diadem or broach including the glints of light on the lovingly crafted pearls – which are, when you look really closely, echoed by the pearls studding the ring she’s wearing on her right forefinger.
So, to put it crudely, there’s another contrast at work here, between the deliberate grotesqueness of the face and the breath-taking filigree detail of the setting (headdress, broach, and amazing depiction of light and shade in the folds of the linen wimple).
Talking of her finger, there’s one last relevant detail which is the flower. In her right hand, between finger and thumb, she is delicately holding the flower of a rose which hasn’t yet opened. This is a traditional symbol of budding love i.e. a visual signal appropriate for a very young woman, a teenage virginal girl. Here it works as another element emphasising the grotesqueness of the portrait and satirising the entire genre.
Mention of the rose leads us to the next factor, which is her partner. The exhibition has obtained on loan from a private collection in America the painting which originally partnered the duchess, namely Massys’s portrait of an old man.
An Old Man, about 1513 by Quinten Massys. Photo © Evan Read, Department of Paintings Conservation, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Now, you don’t have to be an art scholar to notice that, although it isn’t exactly flattering, although he too has a lugubrious nose and plentiful wrinkles, the husband portrait isn’t in the same class of grotesque as the old woman. Feminists interpret this as unfairness: why is the old man acceptable but the old woman grotesque?
One way of answering this is to say, with feminists, that Western society has always been sexist and patriarchal, with continuous misogynist tendencies. That age in women was treated far more harshly, seen as far more negative, than in men, and that an older man’s efforts to dress well and make the most of himself was respected whereas the same behaviour in an older woman was derided.
But there’s another way of thinking about the issue, regarded as an artistic problem or genre. This is that ‘the old woman’, as subject, afforded Renaissance painters opportunities for invention, play and satire that portraits of more ‘normal’ people didn’t allow. As the curators put it, the ‘unruly bodies’ of older women, no longer smooth and supple as in standardised models of beauty, can be seen as metaphors for social disorder, for the topsy-turvey world which attracted medieval and Renaissance culture as much as its hierarchies of order.
There is undeniable joy in beholding ‘the Ugly Duchess’ trample beauty standards, social conventions and gender expectations.
Back to the husband, and art scholars debate whether the posture of his right hand is politely rejecting the budding rose which the duchess is offering him.
Away and above these debates about symbolism is a simpler fact about this work which is the amazing depiction of the fur around his neck. Again it isn’t so clear in a reproduction, but in the flesh, standing in front of the actual painting, you can really see the difference between the depiction of the fur lining his coat and what appears to be the black velvet of the coat itself. it’s stunningly sensual and alive.
There’s a number of reasons why I strongly prefer the art of the Northern Renaissance to the Italian Renaissance. One is the rocky barrenness of the settings of so many Italian paintings, compared with the lush grass, flowers and verdure of northern paintings. I like the flowers and animals, the little rabbits and whatnot you tend to get in the background of northern Renaissance art.
Portraits like this don’t have animals and pastures in them, but they exemplify two other aspects of northern art I like. One is the extraordinary fine detailing of fabric, embroidery, jewellery and so on. The other is the ugliness of the people. Italian Renaissance paintings capture the handsomeness of Italian people, but I live in grotty northern Europe among people who are, by and large, not fashion models. Therefore I like the frank depiction of non-beautiful people. The exhibition gives an example of an older couple by a contemporary of Massys, Jan Gossaert.
An Elderly Couple, about 1520 by Jan Gossaert © The National Gallery, London
It’s hard to think your way into the mindset of the man on the left who probably paid a lot for this painting and was presumably, happy enough to pay for this pretty unflattering depiction. It bespeaks a mindset different from the Italian Renaissance, one which prioritises honesty at all costs. For me it’s something to do with the northern Protestant, or even Puritan, spirit. Truth over gloss. Epitomised by the arch Puritan Oliver Cromwell telling his portrait painter to depict him ‘warts and all’. It is the humanist tradition, accepting of human weakness, frailty and imperfection.
As to its relevance to the Ugly Duchess, this painting epitomises some of the conventions of double portraits which the Duchess flouts. The older woman is modestly dressed (her clothes covering her up to the neck). Her eyes are modestly cast down. And, crucially, she is standing behind and on the left side of her husband.
In double portraits of couples like this, it was the convention to depict the man standing on the right, the hierarchically superior position, our left as we look at it. Therefore the duchess’s position on the right hand side of her husband (in the world of the picture) is another way in which the composition subverts or mocks conventional standards of portraiture.
But talking of the Italian Renaissance links to the rather surprising presence of Leonardo da Vinci in the exhibition. Why? Because among his multifarious other interests, Leonardo had a well-attested interest in ‘the grotesque’. His notebooks contain page after page filled with sketches of a spectrum of non-attractive people, ranging from old and gnarly, through ‘ugly’ people and then beyond the bounds of plausibility to monsters who could have come from the island of Dr Moreau.
Grotesque caricature heads of five men and two women by Leonardo da Vinci © The Trustees of the British Museum
Leonardo’s grotesques were surprisingly popular. Many copies were made of his sketches and distributed around art workshops all over Europe. Thus Massys’s image, which I take to be quintessentially north European, turns out to derive almost directly from a sketch by the quintessentially Italian artist, Leonardo.
The debt owed by Massys to Leonardo isn’t trivial. Although the Leonardo original has disappeared, the exhibition includes copies of a Leonardo grotesque woman which, as you can see, are the direct source of Massys’s painting. Hardly anything about the Massys version is original except precisely the aspects I like, the fantastic detailing.
Bust of a grotesque old woman (1510 to 1520) by Francesco Melzi, after Leonardo. Royal Collection Trust © His Majesty King Charles III 2023
Western societies have often found the notion of the old and decrepit vaunting their attractiveness and flirting as if they’re still teenagers worthy of satire. ‘Mutton dressed as lamb’, as the proverbial saying has it. In fact, like everything else, the Middle Ages codified this into a genre, calling it the May-December relationship. To my surprise, a few seconds on Google show me that this term is still widely used to describe:
‘an amorous relationship between two people with a considerable age difference. The months symbolize the seasons, with spring representing youth and winter representing old age.’
In medieval art and literature the unequal relationship of an older man and a younger woman was often mocked (as, maybe, in our day, the marriage between Rupert Murdoch at the age of 85 to former model, Jerry Hall, or the references I keep reading about Leonardo de Caprio’s alleged penchant for much younger girlfriends). Less often described (and mocked) was the pairing of an older woman and a younger man (in our day and age, often referred to as a toy boy’). In medieval literature Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is one such older woman who takes a young male lover for explicitly sexual reasons.
Mention of the theme, as a popular one of the day, allows the curators to include a visual illustration, The Unequal Couple by by Israhel van Meckenem which shows an older woman (left) being cosied up to by a handsome young blade. The way he is reaching out to touch the bag of coins she is jealously guarding very heavily conveys the satirical thrust of the picture, that this kind of relationship is ‘against nature’ and could only exist because the May partner wants to get their hands on December’s money.
The Unequal Couple, about 1490 by Israhel van Meckenem, after the Master of the Housebook © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
You won’t be surprised to learn that there is a revisionist feminist interpretation of the painting. Feminist art scholars agree that it can be read as a cruel joke in which the viewer is invited to laugh at this woman’s pathetic attempts to appear young and sexy, so we are being invited to mock her implied self-delusion.
But there is an alternative way to read the painting, which is as depicting an old woman who refuses to accept either the biological facts of aging or the social conventions which define what a woman, of any age, may or may not wear, and how she may or may not think of herself. If she regards herself as a winsome beauty, shyly offering her man a symbol of her budding love, then…why not?
To echo what I wrote above, a feminist interpretation sees a duchess who is also subversive of standard notions of beauty, defiantly flouting the conventions of her day.
But old women have been, for much of recorded history, quite ambivalent figures. (In fact, arguably any category of human being can be ambivalent. A young man may be smooth and debonair like Romeo or a thuggish killer like Edmund in King Lear. Humans have many sides, stereotypes, avatars, expectations.)
Anyway, old women have can be mocked for their pretensions (as the duchess appears to be) respected for their wisdom or even feared as uncanny figures. This fear can go to the extreme of thinking they have uncanny supernatural powers, in other words, are witches.
And it’s in order to highlight the similarities and differences in Renaissance iconography of older women – between an old woman satirised and an old woman feared – that the display includes an iconic image of a witch, made by Albrecht Dürer around the same time as Massys was doing his entertaining grotesque.
A Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat, about 1500 by Albrecht Dürer © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
As with most Dürer this image is packed with symbolism representing the inversion of traditional values and decorum. The woman is naked but not in the sexy manner of Renaissance nudes; the naked body of an older woman is seen as repellent and disgusting. The broom between her legs and her grip on a goat’s horn suggest the uncontrolled and inappropriate nature of lust in an older woman. She is rising the goat backwards but her hair is flowing in the wrong direction, into rather than with the wind. It is an image of reversal and chaos. Whereas the Massys painting was made for comedy and entertainment, the Dürer takes some of the same themes and treats them with horror, repulsion and fear.
Even this inclusion of witches hasn’t exhausted the ramifications and connections unravelling from this one painting. I think I knew but had forgotten an important fact about it which is that Massys’s portrait directly inspired the figure of the Duchess in ‘Alice in Wonderland’, as portrayed in Sir John Tenniel’s classic illustrations.
Alice, the Duchess, and the Baby by Sir John Tenniel (1865)
Here, in a sense, the Ugly Duchess found her spiritual home. As a painting she was only available for centuries to a handful of viewers. Even hung up in the National Gallery she was only seen by a small number of people. But as published in the Alice books and very widely distributed, she entered a kind of rogues’ gallery of all the other fantastical characters dreamed up by Lewis Carroll. Beyond fear or ridicule she is transformed into an object of pure, delightful entertainment.
In this 10 minute long video National Gallery restorer Britta New discusses the conservation treatment of ‘The Ugly Duchess’, describing discoveries made during the conservation process, and the painting’s connection to sketches by Leonardo da Vinci and John Tenniel’s illustrations.
Posted by Simon on April 10, 2023
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/04/10/the-ugly-duchess-beauty-and-satire-in-the-renaissance-the-national-gallery/
If you visit the Serpentine North Gallery to see the Barbara Chase-Riboud exhibition or any of their other exhibitions this summer, take the time to stroll round the back of the main building to see the big, bright new mural.
Joy and Grace by Atta Kwami (2021 to 2022) Maria Lassnig Prize Mural, Serpentine North Garden, 6 September 2022 to 3 September 2023. Courtesy the Estate of Atta Kwami. Photo: Hugo Glendinning.
It’s the work of painter, printmaker, independent art historian and curator, Atta Kwami, born in 1956 who passed away in 2021. It was in this final year of his life that Kwami won the 2021 Maria Lassnig Prize which led to this mural commission.
Its title is ‘Joy and Grace’ and it’s a good example of Kwami’s abstract style and bright palette. The information label nearby explains that the use of uneven shapes of bold colours reference the strip-woven textiles of Kwami’s native Ghana, especially a style called kente, made famous by the Ewe and Asante people of Ghana.
Kwami style riffed off Ghanaian styles of painting vending kiosks, signs, houses and other street furniture. It can also be seen as a visual equivalent of Ghanaian music and, in particular, jazz. Kwami was known for painting kiosks and archway sculptures that were conceived as expanded three-dimensional paintings which took advantage of, and interacted with, their different settings. The information panel quotes him as saying he sought a certain ‘musicality, rhythm and tone’ in his compositions which I think you can see.
The panel also explains that the work was not actually painted by Kwami but was based on one of his designs and painted by his widow, Pamela Clarkson, who shared a studio with him for over 30 years, and by his friend, designer, Andy Philpott, who collaborated on Kwami’s constructions. So it’s by way of being a labour of love and a tribute to a beloved husband and friend.
The mural looms over the outdoor part of the gallery’s café. As you can see in the first photo, there’s a patio and chairs and tables just beside it. Buy a coffee, sit and relax, and enjoy the interaction of structure, colours and location.
The day I visited was sunny so the clear blue sky overhead brought out the squares and strips of various shades of blue in the mural. Coming down to earth, the mural is set behind the foliage of a carefully constructed garden. This was designed by Arabella Lennox-Boyd. It was cut back when I visited in March but as spring advances bushes, shrubs and grasses will thrive and bring out the greens and browns in the mural. The visitor’s interaction will change subtly with the advancing seasons.
Joy and Grace by Atta Kwami. Photo by the author
Posted by Simon on April 7, 2023
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/04/07/atta-kwami-mural-serpentine-north/
This is a vast exhibition, almost intimidatingly, almost bewilderingly so. Not so much because of the number of objects – although the 150 artifacts it contains must be at the top end of anybody’s ability to really process and appreciate. No, it’s the scale of the subject matter. The poster and promotional material gives the impression that it’s largely an art exhibition but this is way wrong. In fact it’s more of a historical exhibition which aims to give an overview of Spanish cultural history from the earliest times, from around 2,500 BC, to the time of the Great War. Imagine an exhibition which set out to give an overview of British culture starting with the earliest finds at Stonehenge and going century by century through to the War.
But more than that, it also aims to cover the cultural history of Spain’s colonies in the New World i.e. central and South America. Imagine one exhibition which set out to cover the complete cultural history of Britain and its empire! That’s what I mean by the scale and scope of the thing being challenging.
So there are paintings, yes, lots of paintings, quite a few by masters of the Spanish tradition – but there is a lot, lot more besides, lots of other types of object and artifact. At places across the website the RA use the strapline ‘Take a journey through 4,000 years of art-making across Spain and Latin America’ and that’s closer to the mark.
The key fact to understanding the exhibition is given in its sub-title, ‘Treasures from the Hispanic Society Museum and Library’. The Hispanic Society Museum and Library in New York was founded in 1904 by philanthropist Archer M. Huntington in a set of buildings commissioned specially for the collection and which remain its home to this day. It is home to the most extensive collection of Spanish art outside of Spain.
So this exhibition is by way of presenting the greatest hits of the HSM&L’s collection. It contains some 150 works, including:
The exhibition is divided into 9 rooms and because each one makes such huge leaps in place and time and culture this seems the most manageable way of summarising it.
A glass case of fine silver torcs and bracelets and suchlike made 2400 to 1900 BC by the so-called Bell Beaker people. By the third century BC the peninsula was inhabited by the people the Romans called the Celts.
The Palencia Hoard by unknown artists (172 to 50 BC)
Quite quickly we’re on to the Roman colonisation, consolidated in the first century BC. The room contains a floor mosaic of Medusa and a breath-taking marble statue of the goddess Diana.
I was surprised there was no mention of the Carthaginians who colonised eastern Spain and exploited its famous silver mines, something I read about in Carthage Must Be Destroyed by Richard Miles (2010) among other sources.
Moving swiftly we beam forwards to the collapse of Roman rule in the 5th century AD and the arrival of the Visigothic tribes. There’s a case with a lovely cloisonne belt buckle from the 6th century, reminiscent of the much better one from the Sutton Hoo horde.
In 711 Arab and Berber invaders overran the Visigothic kingdom and installed their own Islamic governments. The territory came to be known as al-Andalus. In 756 Abd al Rahman I named himself Caliph and established a celebrated court in Córdoba. The peninsula remained under Muslim rule for the next 700 years with power moving between different dynasties and power centres. The room contains some stunning fabrics.
Alhambra silk from Nasrid, Granada (about 1400)
Among the most prized works by Muslim artisans from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries were ceramics and this room contains a lot of plates and bowls.
Deep Plate by an unknown artist (1370s)
This plate is made of tin-glazed earthenware and has been given an iridescent finish by applying a very thin layer of metal oxide. Potters would glaze with tin, lead, copper, silver, gold, or platinum, depending on availability and the desired outcome. For added extravagance, some of the dynamic patterns have been painted in vibrant (and very expensive) cobalt blue. In the centre is a coat of arms of one of the oldest aristocratic families in Catalonia, the Despujol. Designs like this were ostentatious showpieces for Europe’s rich and powerful. The two small holes at the top of this plate indicate that it was designed to be hung as art on a wall rather than piled with food on a table.
My favourite case in this room displayed eight or so fine metalwork door knockers and chest locks. The Hispanic Society’s collection of ironwork comprises some 300 pieces, including door knockers, pulls, locks and lock plates. I liked their medieval feel and especially the way they incorporate animals and imaginary beasts, such as a lizard, a wolf and a dragon, with intricate geometric designs influenced by Islamic tradition.
Two metal door knockers, on the left in the shape of a crab’s claw, on the right a bird with a long dropping neck (both around 1500)
Throughout the Middle Ages Christian kings from the north fought the Muslim invaders, without much luck. The pace of military campaigning picked up from the 11th century onwards. This came to be known as the Reconquista and was the west Mediterranean equivalent of what, in the East, came to be known as the Crusades. Unlike the Crusades it was successful and in 1492 the last Muslim state, of Granada, was overthrown under forces led by the joint monarchs, Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon, whose marriage and joint rule marked the de facto unification of Spain.
The Spanish pioneered the European slave trade from Africa. The ruthless and forceful displacement of Africans to the Iberian Peninsula began as early as the 1440s. Following the discovery of the Americas the majority of enslaved Africans were trafficked directly across the Atlantic where, throughout the American continent, they were forced to work on plantation and in the notorious silver mining industry. By the sixteenth century, it is thought that Spain had the largest population of enslaved Africans in Europe.
Room 3 is the biggest in the exhibition and the overwhelming impression in entering is the arrival of painting. There are works by Spanish masters such as El Greco, Velasquez and Zubaran. But, as with the exhibition generally, there’s much more to it than painting. The room covers the period from the triumph of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile over the Moors in 1492. They began a programme of forced conversion and violent expulsion of Muslim and Jewish communities as they bid to unite their realms under the Catholic faith. The Catholic Monarchs were followed by Charles V (1500 to 1558) and Philip II (1527 to 1598).
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were known as the Age of Gold. This was funded by slave labour in the New World, and especially the gold and silver mined by forced labourers working in terrible conditions in Spain’s Central American colonies.
It was also the Age of the Counter-Reformation when first Charles V then Philip II took it upon themselves to reinforce the Catholic Church at its most fierce and repressive (these were the glory years of the Spanish Inquisition which became notorious across Europe). Spanish rulers commissioned art which emphasised a sickly, sentimental, reactionary form of Catholicism or produced lickspittle portraits of terrifying, brutish kings, politicians and generals.
The Penitent St Jerome by El Greco (1600)
The most prominent painters of the period included artists such as El Greco, who moved to Toledo in 1577, and Diego Velázquez, who was appointed court painter to Philip IV in 1623. I appreciate that El Greco (1541 to 1614) is a classic of European art but I have never liked him. The milky eyes of his sickly saints and martyrs staring up into Catholic heaven have always revolted me.
The room is packed with lots of other nauseating Catholic imagery including an ascension, an altarpiece, images of Mary and Martha, a Mater Dolorosa, crucifixions, mothers and babies, a Pieta, images of the Immaculate Conception. There’s a big painting of St Emerentiana by Francisco de Zurbarán which is dire. The depiction of the fabric is impressive in a stiff late medieval way, but the face is awful.
Revolting in a different way are the power-worshipping portraits by the likes of Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599 to 1660). There’s a huge portrait of Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares, who carried out negotiations with the young Prince Charles who came to Spain to sue for the hand of the Infanta in 1623. With characteristic arrogance Olivares insisted that Charles could only marry her if he promised to convert to Catholicism along with all the British court. This was a non-starter and explains why Charles went onto the court of France and won the hand of Henrietta Maria from the much more pragmatic Henry IV.
The huge wealth Spain creamed from its black slaves and the enslaved Aztecs and Incas in the New World paid not only for a re-energised and harshly reactionary Catholic Church, but for its wars of conquest designed to undo the Reformation and reimpose Catholicism on Protestant countries. It was with this aim that King Philip II launched the Armada in 1588 which was designed to defeat the English, overthrow their queen, Elizabeth I, who, along with most of the aristocracy would have been treated as heretics and executed, and then a foreign ideology (Catholicism) imposed on the entire population, anyone complaining being subjected to summary execution.
Luckily the English navy disrupted the Spanish fleet and the ‘Protestant wind’ did the rest. But the Netherlands was not so lucky. Originally under the control of the Dukes of Burgundy, with the end of their line the Netherlands fell to the house of Hapsburg, which itself inherited the Spanish throne. Largely Protestant the Netherlands rebelled against Catholic rule in the 1570s starting the prolonged period of rebellion which is known as the Eighty Years War. In 1567 Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, 3rd Duke of Alba arrived with an army of 10,000 Spanish and Italian soldiers and proceeded to institute a reign of terror. As Wikipedia puts it:
Acting on orders of Philip II of Spain, Alba sought to exterminate all manifestations of Protestantism and disobedience through inquisition and public executions.
There was not a lot of difference between this and the Nazi conquest of the Low Countries 400 years later. None of this is mentioned in any of the wall labels. Spain’s role as arch enemy of free Protestant countries in the 16th and 17th centuries simply goes unmentioned.
The Duke of Alba in 1549 by Anthonis Mor, the man who ‘sought to exterminate all manifestations of Protestantism and disobedience through inquisition and public executions.’
Besides paintings testifying to the lachrymose religiosity of the Counter Reformation and the genocidal macho-ness of Spain’s generals, the room also includes:
My favourite piece was much earlier, a medieval wooden carving of St Martin on a horse from the late 15th century before the Reformation split Europe, before Columbus discovered the New World, before art became really professionalised – from a simpler time.
St Martin 1450 to 1475 by unknown artist
A huge modern map on the gallery wall gives a sense of the breath-taking amount of territory Spain arrogated to itself after Christopher Columbus stumbled across the New World on his failed attempt to find a western passage to India. He had, in fact, landed on Guanahani, an island in the Caribbean which he renamed San Salvador (in modern-day Bahamas).
His mistaken belief that the natives were Indians condemned indigenous peoples in north, central and south America to be known as ‘Indians’ for centuries afterwards, despite belonging to a huge range of peoples, languages and conditions and explains why the Caribbean islands are erroneously referred to as the West Indies to this day.
The Spanish conquistadors promptly conquered the empires of the Mexica (Aztecs) and Inca, massacring them where necessary, setting the survivors to work as forced labour on huge plantations or in the silver mines which they discovered in 1547 at Potosí in the southern highlands of Bolivia.
Spain divided its vast territories in the Americas into two viceroyalties: Nueva España (New Spain, modern-day Mexico and Guatemala), and Peru (which included Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador). Later, additional viceroyalties were created: Nueva Granada (made up of Colombia and Venezuela) and Mar de la Plata (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay).
Spain was to rule over this huge colonial empire until independence movements in the 1820s forced them to relinquish these territories allowing for the emergence of modern nation states.
The conquering Spanish implemented a strictly hierarchical society based on purity of bloodlines and skin tone denominating ‘casta’ (caste). Close ties to Spain and white skin elevated the status of the individual: ‘peninsulares’ (literally those from peninsular Spain) dominated the colonial administration; followed by ‘criollos’ (creoles), those of Spanish (or European) descent born in the Americas; ‘mestizos’, those of mixed parentage; and finally ‘indígenas’, those of indigenous descent. At the bottom of the pile were the hundreds of thousands black African slaves.
This room contains a lot of surveys and maps, for example several surveys of the new settlement of Mexico City, and including the famous World Map of 1526 by Giovanni Vespucci. This map was a copy of the padrón real, Spain’s master nautical chart which was kept in a secret location in Seville. It’s thought this ornate version was a gift for King Charles V. It includes decorative details such as ships in the ocean, camels and elephants across Africa, a collapsing Tower of Babel, and a Red Sea coloured vivid scarlet.
Detail of Giovanni Vespucci’s World Map (1526)
In the decades after the conquest there was, surprisingly enough, a flourishing of the arts. Indigenous artists who were skilled with local materials, techniques and iconography adapted their work to satisfy European tastes and religious beliefs. As it was prohibitively expensive to import domestic objects from Spain there was significant demand for locally produced decorative arts. This gallery contains 20 or so examples of this hybrid art including a number of bateas or trays, vases, caskets, bowls and jars, and an impressive shawl.
Shawl (1775 to 1800) by unknown artist
A large rectangular shawl with fringed ends, the rebozo, is perhaps the most enduring of all traditional Mexican garments. It was first recorded in the 1580s, and is still worn by women across the country today.
A room devoted to art and artifacts created for the Spanish Catholic church which moved quickly to lay out a network of ecclesiastical districts or dioceses under the jurisdiction of bishops alongside a far-reaching programme of church and convent building – all designed, of course, to convert the entire native population.
Not many Spanish artists volunteered to go and live in the New World so the religious authorities had to rely on converting and then training indigenous artists. These created fresco cycles, paintings and polychrome sculptures which were made in vast quantities, likewise fine ornamented silver and gold objects, and fabrics.
This gallery contains a range of religious paintings, sculpture and other objects from across the Americas that reveal how local artists used local materials and adapted traditional techniques, incorporating pre-Columbian symbols or other
local references such as flora and fauna in their work.
The room contains a number of dubious paintings of varying levels of amateurishness and kitsch, one incorporating fish scales into its surface. The objects, such as lamps, are more persuasive. But the standout item, and one of the highlights of the exhibition, is the set of four small sculptures of figures demonstrating the four states of people after death, namely a rotted skeleton covered in maggots, a flame-red soul burning in hell, a pale white naked person undergoing the torments of purgatory, and a dressed and serene personage enjoying the bliss of heaven.
The Four Fates of Man: Death, Soul in Hell, Soul in Purgatory, Soul in Heaven attributed to Manuel Chili, called Caspicara (around 1775)
The Spanish are everso proud of Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746 to 1828) but visiting the National Gallery’s exhibition Goya Portraits back in 2015 destroyed my respect for him. That exhibition revealed Goya to be a shockingly bad painter, particularly of portraits. He looks like a bad caricaturist. At one point in that exhibition they had hung Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington alongside one British painter Sir Thomas Lawrence and there was no comparison. The Lawrence portrait is a brilliantly penetrating, superbly finished and completely convincing portrait. The Goya portrait is far more muddy, murky and unfinished.
In this room there are only six or so works, three big paintings and three small sketches. To my astonishment the Spanish curator of the exhibition, Guillaume Kientz, makes the wild claim that Goya’s portrait of the Duchess of Alba is Spain’s equivalent of the Mona Lisa, a lodestone, a high water mark of the art of painting. Really? I think it’s dire.
The Duchess of Alba by Francisco de Goya (1797)
The background is drab and dead, her posture is stiff, and her face! And yet the curators are so confident that this is a great European masterpiece that they made it the poster for this exhibition. The fact that she is pointing with her right hand to the words ‘Solo Goya’ (‘Only Goya’) written in the sand only make it seem more clumsy, gauche and amateurishness.
Luckily, the room has a redeeming feature, which is a display of three small drawings from what came to be called Albums A and B. These small-scale sketches were to culminate in the better known series of sketches known as Los Caprichos. Goya’s depiction of faces in these is still dire, but the sketches aren’t about the faces, they are about striking and often unusual physical postures and positions, capturing the activities of everyday life of people and peasants with swift, vivid strokes.
This smudgy reproduction doesn’t do justice to the dynamic energy of the original sketch, the excellence of composition, the straining man’s calf muscles, the woman’s hauntingly blank face sketched in with ink. Million times better than the silly duchess standing on a beach.
Peasant Carrying a Woman by Francisco de Goya (1810)
Now, at long last, after what seems like an immensely long and exhausting journey, we finally enter ‘recent’ history i.e. the twentieth century. This is the last proper room of the exhibition and it contains a dozen or so huge paintings, 3 or 4 of them by ‘the Spanish Impressionist’, the master of light, Joaquín Sorolla.
The wall label gives an account of Archer Huntington’s founding of the ‘Spanish Museum’ in New York which opened its doors to the public in 1908. Soon after, Huntington visited Europe, where he saw works by the contemporary Spanish painters Ignacio Zuloaga in Paris and Joaquín Sorolla in London. Archer immediately planned to exhibit their work at
the Hispanic Society the following year as well as setting about buying works by other contemporary Spanish artists including Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa, Isidre Nonell and José Gutiérrez Solana.
Sorolla and Zuloaga can be seen as presenting differing views of Spain, from the lovely sunlit world of Sorolla to the darker vision of Zuloaga which is why the curators have hung them on opposite walls.
After the Bath by Joaquín Sorolla (1908)
Sorolla is less like an impressionist than the Spanish equivalent of John Singer Sargent, but painting in a Mediterranean setting drenched with light. His paintings look best from the other side of the room where the details of the composition fade a bit and the main impact comes from the drama of light and shade.
Possibly my favourite painting in the whole exhibition was Ignacio Zuloaga’s ‘Lucienne Bréval as Carmen’ from 1908. Why? Because I think I’m right in saying that she is the only human being in the exhibition’s 60 or so paintings of people who is happy, who is laughing. After scores of black-clothed clerics, members of the Inquisition and brutal, exterminating generals on the one hand, and countless Immaculate Conceptions of the Holy Virgin Mary and El Greco saints looking milky-eyed up to a heaven pullulating with baby angels, how lovely to come across an actual human being looking like they’re enjoying being alive.
Lucienne Bréval as Carmen by Ignacio Zuloaga y Zabaleta (1908)
As usual this internet copy isn’t a patch on the size and vibrancy of the original. The more I looked the more relaxed and happy I felt and so so relieved to have escaped the centuries of bleak Catholic oppression.
More Sorolla. Following the success of the Hispanic Society’s exhibition in 1909, Huntington and Sorolla embarked on an ambitious project that would dominate the rest of the artist’s career. Huntington wanted him to paint a series of murals for the Hispanic Society’s main building. Originally he wanted scenes from Spain’s long colourful history but Sorolla demurred – he wasn’t that kind of painting. The project evolved into the idea for a series of fourteen monumental canvases depicting the peoples, costumes and traditions of different regions of the country and to be titled ‘Vision of Spain’.
Painted between 1911 and 1919, the panoramic series was opened in a purpose-built gallery at the Hispanic Society in 1926, three years after the artist’s death.
Now it would have been very impressive to end the exhibition with one of these finished panels but, for whatever reason, the curators haven’t. Instead, the final room is a long narrow gallery in which is hung a preparatory sketch for the panels.
The wall label tells us that Sorolla produced around 80 of these preparatory studies, painted in gouache. They display a more sketchy, expressionist approach than the final work along, with modern processes such as the collaging technique papier collé.
This is sort of interesting but not as impressive as the final thing would have been. In fact it’s an odd, parochial, anti-climactic way to end an exhibition which, in its central rooms, encompassed the military and religious history of one of the greatest empires the world has ever known.
Sketch for the Provinces of Spain: Castile by Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1912 to 1913)
Two thoughts:
1. The end of the exhibition – and so, presumably, the Society’s collection – is strangely incomplete. What I mean is, they have Goya, in 1797 and 1810 and then…Sorolla from 1908: what happened in between? What happened in Spanish art between Goya and Sorolla? There appears to be a big hole in the collection. In France we got reams of Salon art but also Courbet and then the amazing achievement of the impressionists and post-impressionists. Even in unartistic England we had lots of anecdotal and social art and then the pre-Raphaelites morphing into the ‘Olympians’ and then atmospheric fin-de-siècle art with outstanding individuals such as Aubrey Beardsley. Did Huntingdon not buy anything of 19th century Spanish art because he wasn’t interested, because there was nothing worth buying? It’s a big gap.
And then the 20th century. I appreciate Huntingdon was buying in the Edwardian period but…did the trustees of the collection agree not to purchase anything after his commissioning of Sorolla’s ‘Vision of Spain’, nothing from 20th century Spanish culture? For example, by Pablo Picasso or Salvador Dali? And, as I understand it, the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1938 was central to Spain’s modern history leading, as it did, to the fascist dictatorship of General Franco which only ended in 1975.
I don’t know what exactly you’d include in the collection or exhibition to cover this period – I’m just saying that the omission of artifacts from almost the entire 19th and 20th centuries feels very strange and surely undermine the collection’s claim to represent ‘Spanish culture’. The last two hundred years are, arguably, the most important part of any modern nation’s history and culture. Which brings me to a bigger question:
2. What is a nation’s culture? I know that the curators at the British Museum or Tate Britain would agree with the curators of this exhibition that a national culture is somehow captured or conveyed by rooms full of medieval ceramics, ancient maps, old paintings and church accessories. But is it? Would you say that the ‘culture’ of Britain would be adequately conveyed by Roman mosaics, medieval church artifacts, Jacobean paintings and some works by John Singer Sargent (the rough equivalent of Sorolla)? Pretty obviously, no. That would just be a collection of miscellaneous historical objects masquerading as a portrait of a culture.
Surely you’d turn to sociologists to learn what a real culture consists of – its language and religion, its human and physical geography, the climate, the agriculture and the traditional foods arising from it (beef and beer in England, tapas, paella and wine inn Spain), its laws and customs and traditions, the things that make it unique, and then how it survived the storms and disasters of the 20th century and has fared in the post-industrial, multicultural world of the last 30 years or so.
I understand the aims of this collection and this exhibition, I see its strong points, I marvel at its breadth and detail. But in a sense, isn’t a living, breathing culture, as lived by a nation’s people, precisely everything which is missing from this exhibition?
Posted by Simon on April 3, 2023
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/04/03/spain-and-the-hispanic-world-royal-academy/
Books & Boots 