All posts in category Sculpture

ALERT by Antony Gormley

Imperial College Road

If you ever visit the Natural History Museum or the Victoria and Albert Museum you’ll know that running between them is the semi-pedestrianised road called Exhibition Road, which runs in a straight line up to a gateway into Hyde Park. Just beyond the entre to the Science Museum, half-way up on the left, is Imperial College Road, a fully pedestrianised street which leads into the open space of Dangoor Plaza. Bang in the middle of the pedestrianised road (as you walk along the pavement towards the car park and the bike racks at the other end) was recently unveiled the latest sculpture by one of Britain’s most famous and media-friendly artists, Sir Antony Gormley OBE RA.

ALERT by Sir Antony Gormley (2022) (photo by the author)

Antony Gormley biography

Born in 1950, Gormley has been extraordinarily productive and has sculptures and installations at sites all over Britain, Europe and the world.

His most famous work is probably The Angel of the North, but you might have heard of Another Place (1997) which consists of 100 cast-iron humanoid figures facing out to sea on Crosby Beach, near Liverpool.

In 1991 Gormley developed a work titled Field consisting of around 35,000 individual terracotta figures, each between 8 and 26 cm high. These toured the world, getting placed in various interesting locations and buildings. In 1994 as many of the little figures as he could fit into the space were shown at Tate, and then at the British Museum, under the name Field for the British Isles. Or you might have caught sight of 2007’s Event Horizon, when he placed 31 life-sized and anatomically correct casts of his own body on top of prominent buildings along London’s South Bank, staring rather spookily down on the rest of us.

Most of Gormley’s works are based on the dimensions of the human body, very often his own body, which he has had cast in fibre glass, more often metal, in all kinds of positions and postures. I caught him on Radio London this morning explaining that he wants people to ponder the fact that we are first and foremost bodies – we like to think of ourselves as ‘people’ and personalities who act on the things we see external to ourselves – but we are only able to do this because we exist, first and foremost, as bodies in space. It is this insight or principle, which his work reverts to, again and again.

Gormley is not only an inventive sculpture but he must also be one of the most personable and articulate living artists. Although his work is, in a sense, remarkably restricted in range (mostly life-size models of the human figure) he can talk about it endlessly and – this is the key thing – always makes it sound fresh and interesting.

ALERT

This new piece in Imperial College Road follows this ongoing interest of Gormley’s in the adult human body, but with a twist. The twist is that it isn’t a naturalistic depiction of the body, but a diagrammatic, schematic one, with the result that, if you didn’t know otherwise, you could easily take it as an abstract piece.

ALERT is a 6-metre-high sculpture which uses stacked and cantilevered blocks of weathering steel to evoke the human form. Gormley regards the work as “the conversion of anatomy into an architectural construction.” The aim is to “re-assess the relation between body and space”.

ALERT is actually based on the posture of Gormley balancing on the balls of his feet while squatting on his haunches. He realised this posture is one of someone watching and waiting and surveying the world around them. It is a posture of being “alive, alert and awake”.

Project diagram of the sculpture, showing different views and scale next to a typical person

Like most of his sculptures ALERT is made of weathering steel, designed to form a stable oxide coating and an organic hue over time. Rust, to you and me.

The pedestrian precinct where it’s located faces onto a quad or square green space between modern campus buildings. There are plenty of benches around this grassy rectangle which is busy with students going about their day. It’s a nice, relaxed vibe. The pedestrian walkway where it’s located is lined by London plane trees and Gormley hopes that the work will ‘interact’ with them – in the summer “the deep red oxidised surface contrasting with the vivid green of the plane trees’ leaves and in the winter its orthogonal geometry [acting] in consort with the organic inscription of their boughs.”

As usual, reading an artist’s official statement gives quite a misleading impression of what you actually see, because behind the trees and dominating the pedestrian walkway is the steep facade of a tall grey office block in brutalist concrete, which I believe to be the Sir Ernst Chain building. Being a drab metal grey colour itself, ALERT is quite difficult to make out – it certainly matches the brutalist building in colour and design far more than the organic curves and green leaves of the trees.

ALERT in front of the Sir Ernst Chain building (photo by the author)

Location

Most of the road has been completely renovated and pedestrianised as part of a fabulously generous donation of £5 million by former Imperial College students Brahmal Vasudevan (founder and CEO of private equity firm Creador) and his wife Shanthi Kandiah (founder of legal firm SK Chambers), two super high-achievers. ALERT was intended to be the cherry on the cake of this redesign.

In the press release, the couple are quoted as saying they were pleased to work with “JJS Fine Art Ltd, the Gormley studio, White Cube and Imperial College London” to bring this project to life. This is a good point because, of course, Imperial College is one of Britain’s leading centres of excellence in science and engineering and ALERT, in its mixture of art and engineering, is an apt symbol of collaboration across disciplines.

The Queen’s Tower

What none of the press blurb conveys, what you don’t know until you visit the location, is that the nice green space opposite Gormley’s sculpture is dominated by an enormous Victorian building, the Queen’s Tower.

The Queen’s Tower, Imperial College (photo by the author)

The tower is 287 feet tall, clad in Portland stone and topped by a copper covered dome. You can go inside and climb the 324 steps from the ground to the base of the dome on a narrow spiral staircase, all the way up to the viewing platform at the top with fine views over London in all directions and, in the belfry, a peal of bells! (Admittedly, none of this is open to the public at the moment.) Some photos of it show it lit up with coloured lights at night. In every way this impressive edifice dwarfs the Gormley sculpture into insignificance. When you read about ALERT you think, ‘6 metres, wow, that’s massive’, but if anything it should have been twice the height to begin to compete with either the tower just north of it or the science block immediately south of it.

According to Imperial College, who own the land and the sculpture, ALERT will provide “a point of interest and intrigue”. Well, one of the most intriguing things about the sculpture has been the controversy it’s sparked.

The controversy

One of the funniest things in life is when a roomful of extremely clever people come up with a plan, discuss it, develop it, test it, implement it, roll it out and…it’s only then that anyone outside their group sees it and says, ‘Er, guys…I think we may have a problem. Did none of you notice this?’

To take a recent example, former Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng working with a small, loyal team at the Treasury and coming up with the bold idea of borrowing huge sums to make unfunded tax cuts including cutting the 45% rate of income tax, and only when he proudly revealed it to completely unprepared financial markets, discovering how catastrophic the impact would be.

Well, on a smaller scale, it was apparently only after this huge, expensive sculpture had been conceived, designed, built and installed in this prestige location that anyone pointed out, “Er… you see the big bit sticking out the front? It looks like a man’s penis…Did none of you notice?’

This is what the creators intended, a stylish, cleverly designed and artfully engineered schematic sculpture of a man squatting down, “alive, alert and awake”.

Schematic of ALERT showing how it echoes the shape of a human being squatting

But this is how some have interpreted it – as a short-legged man with an erect penis sticking out from his body.

Schematic of ALERT showing how the big protuberance could be interpreted as a 3-metre long (metallic, rusty) penis

For what Sir Antony and all his collaborators, his sponsors and the college authorities overlooked is that they were installing this artwork on a university campus, an epicentre of gender politics and super-sensitivity, where a cigar is never just a cigar, where anything anybody says, does, writes, draws or creates has the potential to become a pretext for outrage and grievance. Thus the students union has described the statue as ‘exclusionary’, reinforcing the gross injustice that only 42% of students at the college are female. Time to pop some popcorn in the microwave and enjoy that traditional British pastime, a moral panic about a new artwork:

University wits have already renamed the area Dong Plaza. I wonder if the sculpture will be graffiti-ed, or whether angry feminists will splash it with paint or, better still, attempt to cut the protuberance off – although, having walked around it and patted the protuberance a few times, they’d need industrial-scale welding equipment to do that.

At the end of the day, ALERT is just another bit of nondescript modern sculpture in an all-too-familiar drab, metallic, geometric style, dwarfed by the long row of dismal office blocks behind it. If you’re in the area it’s maybe worth going to check it out to see what the storm in a teacup is about, but more to discover the peaceful quad with its lawn and numerous benches, a restful place to sit after a visit to one of the busy museums. But the most impressive sight in the area is the dominating Queen’s Tower. I wonder when they’ll reopen the viewing platform to the public. Now that would be worth a visit.

Mary Sibande @ Somerset House

Mary Sibande (b.1982) is one of South Africa’s most notable contemporary artists, which makes it all the more surprising that this is her first solo exhibition in the UK.

Sibande calls herself a sculptor but she is also a very good photographer. In fact she mainly works with fabric, sewing her own fabric-based sculpture, and the friend I visited the exhibition with described her as a fabulous seamstress – hence, presumably, the show’s title, I Came Apart at the Seams.

For Sibande hit upon an idea early on in her career and has been producing variations on it for over a decade. The idea was to create life-size mannequins of herself, except

imagined as an alter-ego or avatar, who she named Sophie
to pose these sculptures in striking postures and activities
and to dress them in elaborate, sometimes fantastical, almost science-fiction garments

Over the years she’s used this simple-sounding idea to produce some quite simply staggering works of art. I’m amazed she’s not better known and hasn’t been snapped up by one of the major galleries. This is a FREE exhibition at Somerset House so if you’re passing along the Embankment or through Covent Garden it’s well worth making a detour to visit.

Blue

Long Live The Dead Queen (2008-13) was the series in which we first met Sibande’s avatar, Sophie, conceived as a domestic servant – as Sibande’s mother and grandmother were before her. In various iterations Sophie is seen either as a sculpture or in enormous crystal-clear digital photos, transforming her servant costume (in one iteration she is embroidering the Superman logo onto it) in a series of dreams of escaping her lowly status and gender.

I Put A Spell On Me by Mary Sibande (2009)

Purple

Sibande’s next series was titled The Purple Shall Govern (2013-17). In these Sophie is embodied as ‘The Purple Figure’.

The title is a play on words, making two references, mashing up the opening principle of the 1955 Freedom Charter of the African National Congress stated that ‘The People Shall Govern!’ – with the 1989 anti-apartheid Purple Rain protests.

During these, thousands of anti-apartheid protesters marched on the parliament building in Cape Town and the police sprayed the protesters with water cannon marked with purple dye so that they could be identified and arrested later. However, some of the marchers got their hands on the water cannon and turned it back onto the police and authorities, spraying them and thus symbolically equalising everyone.

Anyway, in Sibande’s hands the colour purple is the inspiration for a series of absolutely wild photos and fabric-sculptures, in which the Sophie figure is transfigured into a force of nature out of whose body and clothes and hair, wild dreadlocks or roots or tendrils cascade and explode in a twirling confusion.

A Terrible Beauty is Born (Long Live The Dead Queen series) by Mary Sibande (2013) Copyright the artist

The above is an enormous digital print which is a) of wonderful clarity and precision b) printed onto fabric not paper and hung across one whole wall and c) is totally wild.

The po-faced seriousness of the political commentary on her works – the references to apartheid and this or that protest – in no way prepares you for the wild, crazed, science fiction pullulation of her imaginings.

It is extravagant, operatic – dreams, nightmares or visions on an epic scale and all the more weird and compelling for having been made, created, carefully and time-consumingly sewn out of fabric.

One entire room in the show consists of an absolutely amazing piece of sculpture – the black woman Sophie wrapped in purple fabric, while her hair appears to be exploding backwards into a huge tangled skein which is itself intertwining to form something like the roots of a tree. It is as if the human being is metamorphosing into an awesome, phantasmagorical force of nature.

It’s one of the weirdest and most powerful works of art I’ve ever seen.

A Reversed Retrogress Scene 2 by Mary Sibande (2013)

Red

Sibande’s latest series is titled In The Midst of Chaos There Is Also Opportunity (2017-). In these Sophie has transformed into ‘The Red Figure’ – red to express the collective disillusionment and anger of many South Africans at the enduring poverty in post-apartheid South Africa.

So blood-red is for anger, but also the power to heal and restore – there’s something of the priestess and healer in the Red Figure. She is sad, she is angry – but she is also empowered by the legacy and memory of all those who gave their lives to overthrow apartheid.

Come, you spirits of the land and the skies by Mary Sibande (2019)

As I say, the commentators, the curators, and Sibande herself, are happy to describe her art in terms of South Africa’s apartheid and post-apartheid history, the struggle for liberation and the long disappointment that came afterwards, and so on.

Maybe that’s where her art starts. But in my opinion where it goes to is somewhere altogether different, somewhere weird, strange and entrancing, to a zone which is disturbing, upsetting, amazing and supremely memorable.

Look closely and you’ll see that Sophie’s eyes, in all her reincarnations, are always closed: she is dreaming, according to the curators, dreaming of freedom and equality etc.

But the way I read it, Sophie is having dreams far bigger than paltry ones about politics and justice – dreams which are far more disruptive and uncontrolled and weird and enthralling, about human nature itself.

A Terrible Beauty and A Reversed Retrogress show humanity morphing into something much bigger and more cosmic than petty concerns about this or that cause or country – in them the purple and red figures are becoming cosmic, entwining with the natural world, seizing power and going beyond the human into an extraordinary new realm of the imagination.

Reviews of other Somerset House exhibitions

World Illustration Awards 2018 (June 2018)
Print! Tearing It Up (June 2018)
Beard (March 2015)
Malick Sidibé (January 2017)

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by Simon on December 12, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Art, Exhibition, Sculpture

Posted by Simon on December 12, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/12/12/mary-sibande-somerset-house/

Antony Gormley @ the Royal Academy

In the late 1990s I edited a what’s-on-in-London, arts and entertainment TV show for ITV. Mostly it was movies and stand-up comedy and West End musicals but I slipped in occasional blockbuster art shows.

We interviewed him for his 1998 exhibition show at the Royal Academy, the one where he positioned life-sized iron casts of his own body in various postures all round the forecourt, lying, standing on the rooftops, dangling from ropes.

What came over in the interview was his extraordinary fluency. He can just talk, in a calm mild voice, clearly and rationally, about art, for hours, without using jargon or difficult ideas. Here he is, in a short video explaining some aspects of this exhibition:

In his sensible calm voice he makes his art, modern art and its approaches, see seem eminently sensible and practical and interesting and, very often, blindingly obvious. Why didn’t I think of that?

For example, positioning a hundred or so iron casts of his own naked body across a two mile stretch of Crosby Beach in Merseyside. Seeing the figures dotted at random across the sane, some submerged in the sand, and then watching them be submerged and then revealed by the ebbing and flowing tide, is a wonderfully simple, but extremely evocative idea.

Another Place by Antony Gormley (2005)

A few years earlier Gormley had filled Great Court of the British Museum with 40,000 handmade clay figures. As soon as you heard about it, your realised it was a big blank space just crying out for some kind of intervention or installation.

Field for the British Isles by Antony Gormley (2002)

His best-known work is obviously The Angel of the North, erected in 1998, a vast steel sculpture of an angel, 20 metres tall, with wings 54 metres across, placed on a hill overlooking the motorway at Gateshead, Tyne and Wear. Yes. Yes the ‘North’ should have some kind of symbol or icon, something to mark it off from the soft South but give it pride and regional identity.

The Angel of the North by Antony Gormley (1998)

This big retrospective at the Royal Academy confirms that sense of his amazing fluency: there are recognisable themes (cast of his own body, for example) and plenty of other ideas and themes: and yet they all share this same quality of feeling just so, clever but not pretentious, just seeming like good ideas, good things to do, to have a go at.

Of course there’s a room of his trademark life sized casts of his own body, replicating the weirdness of all those bodies hanging all over the courtyard 20 years ago.

Lost Horizon I by Antony Gormley (2008) © the Artist. Photo by Stephen White

But he applies the same technique to other shapes and objects, though all distinguished by the same rust red iron finish, and the odd circular nodules which were originally part of the casting process but have become a visual and tactile signature. Having acquired such expertise at making huge iron casts of bodies, why not experiment with applying the same approach to other organic forms, with things as simple as fruit.

Body and Fruit by Antony Gormley (1991/93) © the Artist. Photo by Jan Uvelius, Malmö

But several rooms contain striking departures from the idea of the solid – the rust-red solid bodies and orbs we’re familiar with – a departure into explorations of the flimsy and the flexible and the peculiar sense of space this completely different approach can create.

Clearing V by Antony Gormley (2009) © the Artist, photo by Markus Tretter

I love industrial materials, I love stuff made from industrial junk redolent of factories and warehouses and the smelly, oily, petrol-soaked culture we actually live in.

I love Arte Povera and Minimalism and Mark Leckey’s current installation of the underside of a motorway bridge – and so that’s what I read into these wonderful ropes and tangles of thin but obviously taut and tremendously strong steel cable. Electricity pylons striding the countryside, motorway viaducts, overhead cables of trains and tubes and trams. Those complex metal grids which concrete is poured over to create tower blocks and tube power stations.

Our world is saturated with huge and immensely strong, durable industrial materials and designs.

The curators claim many of these more experiential sculptures are designed to make us aware of our bodies and the space we inhabit, but they reminded me of the vast, inhuman industrial processes which underpin our entire civilisation.

Matrix II by Antony Gormley (2014) © the artist, photo by Charles Duprat, Paris

The most experiential piece is The Cave, created this year. From the outside it looks like a Vorticist jaggle of angular steel blocks, which we are invited to go inside to discover a forbidding dark and angular space.

Cave by Antony Gormley (2019)

Some of the rooms change scale completely to show us much smaller early works from the 1970s and even change medium altogether to display a range of pocket sketchbooks and drawings. Even these have his trademark sureness of touch, a kind of radical simplicity, the human body against thrillingly abstract backdrops, and often made in the most primal materials, like this wonderful drawing which is made of earth, rabbit skin glue and black pigment. Rabbit skin?

Earth, Body, Light by Antony Gormley (1989) © the Artist

And then we’re back to a massive, radical and yet somehow entirely ‘natural’ feeling installation, Host, like Cave creates specially for this exhibition. One who huge room at the Royal Academy has been sealed watertight, the floor covered in sand-coloured clay and then covered with a foot or so of Atlantic seawater.

Host by Antony Gormley (2019)

What does it mean? Is it the image of a flood, of global warming and seas rising, of a drowned world?

On the whole I shy away from big ideas in art, and am more interested in an artwork’s actual tactile presence, the brushstrokes on the canvas or the shape and heft of a sculpture or, in this case, a purely sensual response to the smell of the seawater and the look of the rubbled clay just under the surface. Humans came from the sea and, all round the world, display the same wish to live on an eminence near water (as described at length in E.O. Wilson’s book The Diversity of Life).

And so Host had little or no ‘meaning’ for me, but conjured up all kinds of primal responses and longings from deep in my once-water-borne mammalian nervous system. I wanted to wade out into it. I wanted to swim into it.

Conclusion

No wonder the exhibition has been sold out since it was announced. Gormley has a genuine magic touch – everything he makes has the same sureness and openness and confidence. Although much of his sculpture sounds or looks like it should appear modern and forbidding, somehow it doesn’t at all. It all feels light and accessible and natural and unforced and wonderful.

Other Royal Academy exhibitions

Laura Knight: A Working Life (September 2019)
Helene Schjerfbeck (September 2019)
Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet (September 2019)
The Royal Academy Summer exhibition 2019 (July 2019)
The Renaissance Nude (April 2019)
Klimt / Schiele (December 2018)
Oceania (November 2018)
Dalí/Duchamp (November 2017)
Jasper Johns (November 2017)
Matisse in the studio (November 2017)
The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2017 (July 2017)
Intrigue: James Ensor by Luc Tuymans (December 2016)
Abstract Expressionism (October 2016)
The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2016 (July 2016)
In the Age of Giorgione (March 2016)
Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse (February 2016)
Ai Weiwei (November 2015)
Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2015 (June 2015)
Rubens and his Legacy (January 2015)
Allen Jones (January 2015)
Dennis Hopper – The Last Album (August 2014)
The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2014 (August 2014)
Bill Woodrow (February 2014)
Daumier (January 2014)
Bronze (December 2012)
The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2012 (August 2012)
David Hockney: A Bigger Picture (April 2012)

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by Simon on December 1, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Sculpture

Posted by Simon on December 1, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/12/01/antony-gormley-royal-academy/

Being Human: An exhibition of modern sculpture @ Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

‘Can sculpture capture what it is to be human?’ That is the question posed at the beginning of this small but varied and high-quality exhibition at the Bristol Art Gallery.

Spread over two floors, Being Human shows a selection of very different twentieth century sculptors (and a brace of film-makers) have conceived, worked, shaped and reproduced the human body.

At the traditional end of the spectrum, there are female nudes such as Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s Small female torso (1910). Wearing its Greek origins on its (armless) sleeves, the hair braided like a statue of Aphrodite, looking demurely down, her diaphragm and belly button nicely defined, the nipples oddly burnished as if generations of gallery goers have touched them for good luck or other purposes.

La Jeunesse by Robert Wlerick (1935)

Whereas only a few yards away, and well on the way to the abstract end of the spectrum, is Ken Armitage’s Moon Figure of 1948. This was my favourite piece in the second room, although a moment’s reflection suggests it is less a bold leap forward into modernity than an appropriation of Cycladic art from around 3,000 BC – even down to the crossed arms, which feature in so many really ancient Greek statues.

Moon Figure by Kenneth Armitage (1948)

More thoroughly abstract were Yee Soo Kyung’s Translated vases number 8 of 2012. Yee has smashed up ceramics into fragments which she then reassembles using the traditional art of kintsugi, visible repairs in gold, to create something which is only vestigially ‘human’ at all in form.

In the first room is maybe the best, or my favourite piece, from the exhibition, Help by Bernard Meadows. It’s from as long ago as 1966, and is one of a series Meadows began to make in the mid-60s expressing ‘human fear and anxiety’. The idea is that crushed sphere is crying for help, and that the piece pays tribute to the harrowing existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. Does it, though? If you hadn’t read all that, might you not mistake it for a bit of sculptural fun by a jokey modern artist like Anish Kapoor?

Help by Bernard Meadows (1966) Tate

The wall labels tell us that at the core of the exhibition is a set of works associated with the so-called ‘Geometry of Fear’ school of British sculptors. According to the Tate website:

Geometry of Fear was a term coined by the critic Herbert Read in 1952 to describe the work of a group of young British sculptors characterised by tortured, battered or blasted looking human, or sometimes animal figures.

Read used the phrase in a review of the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale of that year. The British contribution was an exhibition of the work of the group of young sculptors that had emerged immediately after the Second World War in the wake of the older Henry Moore. Their work, and that of Moore at that time, was characterised by spiky, alien-looking twisted and tortured figures.

They were executed in pitted bronze or welded metal and vividly expressed a range of states of mind and emotions related to the anxieties and fears of the post-war period. The artists were:

Robert Adams
Kenneth Armitage
Reg Butler
Lynn Chadwick
Geoffrey Clarke
Bernard Meadows
Eduardo Paolozzi
William Turnbull

Of their work Read wrote:

These new images belong to the iconography of despair, or of defiance; and the more innocent the artist, the more effectively he transmits the collective guilt. Here are images of flight, or ragged claws ‘scuttling across the floors of silent seas’, of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear.

Possibly the most ominous figure here is one of Elizabeth Frink’s many space-age, sculpted heads, brooding and minatory.

Prisoner by Elisabeth Frink (1988)

To quote the wall label:

As a child in the Second World War, Elisabeth Frink witnessed falling planes and burning soldiers in the airfield near where she lived. On a holiday in Devon she had hidden in the bushes to avoid getting caught in the crossfire of a battle. These visions haunted her sculpture which examines the human capacity for cruelty. She was taught by Bernard Meadows, one of the postwar ‘Geometry of Fear’ artists. Frink added pity to their earlier generation’s images of alienation. Prisoner has a hypnotic vulnerability.

Maybe all this angst is true of half a dozen of the works on show here, but there are plenty of other utterly angst-free enjoyments of the physical heft and thews of the human body conceived as a big solid object in space.

Thus there is nothing particularly fearful about Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s bust of Horace Brodzky. Brodzky was an artist and critic, and Gaudier-Brzeska made the work as he was falling under the influence of – or influencing – the pre-war London movement known as Vorticism, which was much fascinated by planes and lines and angular shapes, cubes and squares.

Horace Brodzky by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1913, cast 1956)

And what could be more prosaic than a sculpture of a woman bending over to dry her feet, which combines a posture from degas with the clunky clayiness of Rodin’s sticky fingers.

Woman Drying her Feet by Hubert Dalwood (1955)

And the curators astonished me by singling out as one of the most sexy or erotic statues, this exercise in elongation by Reg Butler, one of the geometry of fear sculptors who didn’t let his existentialist alienation stop him from producing numerous sculptures of naked or nearly naked girls.

Girl by Reg Butler (1953-4)

An example of post-war deformation, influenced by Alberto Giacometti’s walking stick people, her head worryingly disappearing into a blunt dollop, her bulemic pre-pubescent body scrawny with malnutrition… but sexy? Not to my mind.

Featured sculptures

Ken Armitage – Moon Figure (1948)
Emile-Antoine Bourdelle – La Bacchante (1909)
Ralph Brown – Lovers
Reg Butler – Girl
Lynn Chadwick, Idiomorphic Beast 2017
Frank Dobson – Noni
Hubert Dalwood – Woman Drying her Feet
Jacob Epstein – Sleeping Baby
Jacob Epstein – Hands of Nan
Jacob Epstein – Kathleen (1935)
Elisabeth Frink – Prisoner bronze
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska – Bust of Horace Brodzky
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska – The Wrestler
Wilhelm Lehmbruck – Small female torso (1910)
Bernard Meadows – Help
Robert Wlerick – La Jeunesse (1935)
Yee Soo Kyung – Translated vases number 8 (2012)

Drawings

Elizabeth Frink – Horse and rider (1970)
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska – Woman on horseback

Films

Two films are included. What have they got to do with sculpture? Nothing whatsoever, that I can make out. A film is a film is a film, although they are both about ‘the body’.

Mary Reid Kelley – This is Offal
John Wood & Paul Harrison, 1994 – Harry Houdini (there’s no escape that I can see)

Conclusion

Curators have to come up with themes and ideas for exhibitions, and ‘twentieth century sculptures of the human body’ is a reasonable enough theme – although it is odd to include a couple of very average drawings, and some completely off-the-wall videos into the mix.

But then its quirkiness is, maybe, the appeal of this small-ish exhibition. Coherence is over-rated. The very fact that the pieces are so disconnected and random creates more space for the visitor to wander around them and relate to each one individually, trying to figure out which ones you like, and why.

And, incidentally, hints at the extraordinary explosion in ways of seeing and conceiving and making art which occurred in the twentieth century and which this tiny but intriguing selection represents.

Other Bristol reviews

Other blog reviews with ‘human’ in the title

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by Simon on November 26, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Sculpture

Posted by Simon on November 26, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/11/26/being-human-modern-sculpture-bristol-art-gallery/

Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2019

The Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition is the world’s largest open submission exhibition, running every year since 1769. This, the 251st exhibition, was curated by Jock McFadyen RA, he has overall responsibility for its look and layout – although it’s worth noting that most of the fourteen or so individual rooms were allotted to other artists to sub-curate.

1,583 works

Over 15,000 works were submitted by artists professional, super-famous, or utterly amateur. From these the curators have chosen 1,583 pieces to be displayed in the Academy’s fourteen massive exhibition rooms, in the courtyard outside, and even spilling over into a street display in nearby Bond Street – ‘a colourful installation of flags featuring work by Michael Craig-Martin’.

Large walking figure by Thomas Houseago, in the Royal Academy courtyard (not for sale)

Variety of media

Over 1,583 works in every imaginable medium – prints and paintings, film, photography, sculpture, architectural models and much more – making it the largest Summer Exhibition in over a century. How on earth can the visitor be expected to make sense of process such a vast over-abundance of artistic objects?

Well, the answer is that everyone does it in their own way. My son and I always have a competition to find the cheapest – and the most expensive – works on offer (see the winner at the end of this review). He also likes comic or quirky pieces so he loved this sculpture of a tiger covered in Tunnock teacake wrappers.

Easy Tiger by David Mach (£57,600)

The architecture room

Some people come to see the room of architectural models and blueprints. Usually I call the architecture room the Room of Shame, from a lifetime’s experience of growing up close to an appalling New Town in my teens, and then starting my working life in the poorer parts of London amid slums and rundown housing estates. The planners and architects who designed those places should be ashamed at the barren, soul-destroying environments they condemned other people to live their lives in.

But to my surprise, I quite liked the Room of Shame this year. If you think of all the elaborate models on display as sets from science fiction movies, utterly unrelated to the actual world we all live in, then I found a lot of them entertaining fantasies. And there were some quirky and genuinely inspiring buildings, from the model of an enormous concrete grain silo which has actually been converted into an art gallery in China, to a pyramid of recycled plastic bottles built on a hypothetical beach somewhere.

‘Bottlehouse’, in the architecture room

I couldn’t help sniggering that a lot of architects – from the evidence here – appear to have just discovered something called The Environment, and are making bold little wooden models of cities which will be environmentally friendly and carbon neutral and made from recyclable materials. Well done, chaps. About fifty years too late, but it’s a nice thought. The army of cranes I see around Battersea Power Station don’t seem to be putting up anything beautiful or sustainable, and when I recently visited Stratford East I had a panic attack at the sheer amount of concrete that has been poured to make vast walled sterile walkways and esplanades without a tree in sight.

Amaravati Masterplan Model (1:1000) by Spencer de Grey RA (not for sale)

Photography

Some visitors like photography, and I noticed what I thought was a higher proportion of photos than usual though, as always, that may be a purely subjective impression. They give you a handy pocket-sized catalogue of all the works as part of the entrance price, and I’ve kept the ones from the last five or six years, so I suppose I could go through and do a precise analysis of how many photos have been included in previous years compared to this year…

For me, a lot of art (and certainly a lot of writing about art) is very samey, covering the same sort of subject matter, often small and set indoors. I really liked this photo because it was one of the few images which conveyed the sense that it is a big world with lots and lots, and lots, of people in it, people who live in worlds and conditions we can’t imagine, whose day-to-day existence is as different from our comfortable Western lives as Martians. (It’s a bloody big photo, too, at 1.5 by 2 metres.)

Saw Mills #2, Lagos, Nigeria by Edward Burtynsky (£47,000)

Big names

Some come looking for the works by big-name international artists like Wim Wenders or Anselm Kiefer or Richard Long. There was a huge muddy oil painting by Anselm Kiefer (2.8 metres by 3.8 metres), a turbulent thick impasto of brown tones, over which he had scored lines and patterns and writing. Sounds pretentious but it had real presence, it knocked most of the other paintings in its gallery out of the park. This reproduction is useless at conveying its huge, looming, disturbing, and very physical presence.

Fünf Jahre Lebte Vainamoinen Auf Der Unbekannten Insel Auf Dem Baumlosen Land by Anselm Kiefer

Modest works

Size isn’t everything. All the rooms were packed to overflowing and it was often only on the second or third go-round that I noticed small, shy and retiring works, such as a pair of lovely photos of small songbirds which, on close inspection, appear to be attached to their perches next to brightly coloured brickwork by tiny golden chains.

Gasconades (Letsdothis) by Mat Collishaw (£685)

The Wohl Central Hall where this photo was, is themed around animals, who appear in all shapes and sizes, in paintings and photos and sculptures. Other strong themes were concerns for the environment and recycling in the Room of Shame, and ideas of immigration and identity, particularly in Gallery I which was sub-curated by Jane and Louise Wilson.

Identity

As soon as you see the world ‘identity’ you know there’s going to be images of black people, and gays and lesbians, and probably refugees and immigrants. It’s a stock theme usually accompanied by stock images, and sure enough there’s paintings of a black couple and group of ladies (by Arthur Timothy), a video of a black girl dancing in her front room (by Sophie Perceval), a photo of a black mother and daughter (by Pepukai Makoni). There’s a painting of two men kissing by Ksenija Vucinic.

A Portrait of a Couple by Ksenija Vucinic (£750)

[In fact I completely misinterpreted this painting, thinking it depicted a gay couple – not least because of the word ‘couple’ in the title – when it is a much more complicated image. See the comment below this review, from the artist, explaining her motivation.]

The room is dominated by a big blue hanging fabric by Jeremy Deller with the motto: ‘We are all immigrant scum.’ This made my son quite cross. He thought it was patronising its audience, as if a) wall hangings will have the slightest impact on one of the great social and political issues of our time and b) as if absolutely all the nice, middle-class white people who attend an exhibition at the Royal Academy are not already bien-pensant, cosmopolitan liberals.

We are all immigrant scum by Jeremy Deller (not for sale)

‘Preaching to the converted,’ is the term he used.

Wolfgang Tilmans

Dodging the woke messages, I liked this photo best of anything in the PC room. Possibly the two guys are gay and so shoehorned into the ‘identity’ theme. But the image is caught so vividly, I could almost feel the wet sand giving way under my own feet, evoking memories of when I’ve done this kind of thing.

And, to be honest, I fancied the two blokes. Fit-looking young men, aren’t they?

It was only when I looked it up in the catalogue that I realised it’s by the über-famous Wolfgang Tilmans (who had a big retrospective at Tate Modern not so long ago). And that it’s on sale for the not inconsiderable sum of £72,000.

Liam and Tm jumping up the cliff by Wolfgang Tillmans (£72,000)

Most of us, I suspect, just like pottering around this vast gallimaufrey of every style of contemporary art work you can imagine, letting ourselves be surprised and sometimes astonished at the big, the small, the political, the personal – the world of animals (beautiful prints of whales, photos of dogs) and world of men (a number of works depicting brutalist high-rises), the world of woke (gays and blacks) and the world of weird.

The Scarred One by Benedict Byrne (not for sale)

It doesn’t come over at all in this photo, but you know all the little fuses and bits of wire and coloured components you find inside transistor radios? Well, this work is actually a three-dimensional piece made up of a hundred or so of those wires and coloured components all attached to a black background to make this design.

Technological Echnological Mandala by Leonardo Ulian (£9,000)

From patterns made by man to the incredibly beautiful patterns of nature, he also liked this 3-D rendered giclée print on cotton rag depicting in vibrant super-colour a beehive.

The Language of Bees by Richard Devonshire (£500)

For my part, I liked this screenprint, unsure whether it’s a photo or a painting, or a graphically altered photo. Whatever the precise nature, on a hot summer day, it spoke to me of cool water. I could feel the ozone breeze blowing off the splashing water into my face.

Falling Water II by John Mackechnie (£1,100)

There are about 1,500 other examples I could give, but maybe that’s enough…

For the last couple of years we have been a little disappointed by the Summer Exhibition. This year, maybe it was the weather or my hormones, but I felt it was a return to form, I thought there was a really massive variety of works on display and, for some reason, lots of it really clicked with me.

For sale

As always, most of the artworks are for sale with proceeds helping to fund the Academy’s non-profit-making activities, including educating the next generation of artists in the RA Schools. The free catalogue I mentioned earlier lists all 1,583 works, their titles, artists and prices, if for sale.

It’s always part of the fun to try and figure out the cheapest and the most expensive works on display, and, as you wander round and different pieces take your eye, having a bet with your friends or family about how much each piece costs. As far as I could tell, this is the most expensive piece, an untitled bronze sculpture of an androgynous woman with a branch on her head and coils of wire round her hands with a couple of metal numbers thrown in, by Mimmo Paladino, which will set you back a cool £337,000.

Untitled by Mimmo Paladino (£337,000)

The promotional video

Reviews of other Royal Academy exhibitions

Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2019 (July 2019)
The Renaissance Nude (April 2019)
Klimt / Schiele (December 2018)
Oceania (November 2018)
Dalí/Duchamp (November 2017)
Jasper Johns (November 2017)
Matisse in the studio (November 2017)
The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2017 (July 2017)
Intrigue: James Ensor by Luc Tuymans (December 2016)
Abstract Expressionism (October 2016)
The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2016 (July 2016)
In the Age of Giorgione (March 2016)
Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse (February 2016)
Ai Weiwei (November 2015)
Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2015 (June 2015)
Rubens and his Legacy (January 2015)
Allen Jones (January 2015)
Dennis Hopper – The Last Album (August 2014)
The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2014 (August 2014)
Bill Woodrow (February 2014)
Daumier (January 2014)
Bronze (December 2012)
The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2012 (August 2012)
David Hockney: A Bigger Picture (April 2012)

1 Comment

by Simon on July 30, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Photography, Sculpture

Posted by Simon on July 30, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/07/30/royal-academy-summer-exhibition-2019/

Mike Nelson: The Asset Strippers @ Tate Britain

The Asset Strippers by Mike Nelson

British installation artist Mike Nelson (b.1967) has filled the central atrium of Tate Britain with a rich collection of objects plundered from Britain’s industrial heritage, the entire installation titled The Asset Strippers.

There are old weaving machines, heavy-duty metal cabinets, two huge old-fashioned weighing scales, the threshing wheels of a tractor attachment, the huge rubber tracks from a mechanical digger. He has collected knitting machines from textile factories like the ones he grew up around in the East Midlands, woodwork stripped from a former army barracks, graffitied steel awnings once used to secure a condemned housing estate, doors from an NHS hospital, and much, much more. It is a rag and bone yard, a paradise of defunct paraphernalia artfully arranged to clutter and fill Tate’s long narrow central space.

Installation view of Mike Nelson: The Asset Strippers at Tate Britain. Photo by the author

My experiences of manual and physical labour

I absolutely loved the sight and smell of this installation. It took me right back to my childhood. I grew up in a village store-cum-petrol station. I started working in the shop when I was about 11, graduating to the till when I was 14. They let me serve on the petrol pumps when I was 16, waiting for cars to pull in then leaping up, pulling the cold, metal, petrol nozzle out of its socket on the pump, and guiding the long, thick, dirty, rubber tube away from the pump itself and over towards the fuel filler door. Some doors you could open manually, some you had to ask the driver to ping open for you. Unscrew the metal cap or pull out the cheap plastic cap. Insert the nozzle and pull the trigger, setting off the familiar noise of the fuel pump. Asking the owner how much they wanted, then asking if they wanted their oil and water and tyre pressure checked as well.

Off to one side of the forecourt was the tyre bay where customers left their cars for a few hours and where a succession of the village lads eased the rubber tyres off with long heavy metal tyre levers, and patched up or replaced the inner tubes. Later there was an expensive new machine which gripped and removed the tyre from the metal wheel with great snorts of compressed air.

The bay was dark and smelt of rubber and oil and Swarfega. Out back of the main house was a huge shed, really a small warehouse, in which were piled hundreds of tyres of all shapes and sizes in vertical columns, towering tubes of smelly dirty rubber, often half full of stagnant oily rainwater which spilled over you as you made your way along the narrow walkways between them looking for a particular size and manufacture.

Beyond the village were the fields where you’d see the migrant workers endlessly bent over the ploughed furrows during the summer and autumn, picking vegetables, cabbage and kale, sometimes in the blistering sunshine, sometimes in the driving rain, chucking them onto the flat-bed truck pulled by a tractor which lumbered slowly in front of them. I stood at the pumps in a waterproof coat, the rain streaming down my face as I filled up another car, and wondered which of us had it worse.

Like many students, I got Christmas work as a temp postman. Going out on the rounds was fun, so long as it didn’t rain. I was fascinated by the big sorting rooms, with their arrays of metal cabinets and pigeonholes, the hundreds of fraying postal sacks everywhere, and the huge industrial weighing scales. There’s a pair of giant scales here in this exhibition. They are set on a brace of stinky, oily, creosoted old railway sleepers, with a couple of big granite rocks surreally placed on the scales themselves. They made my heart sing.

Installation view of Mike Nelson: The Asset Strippers at Tate Britain. Photo by the author

Working as a dustman

Later, during my A-levels and in the holidays from university, I worked on building sites, and in factories. I worked as a temporary dustman in my local new town, up at 5am , on the road at 6.30am, done by noon. (Most of the dusties had second jobs they did in the afternoons. Each round had been designed to end at a pub where we a) processed all their rubbish b) had a well-earned pint.

There were two roles – pullers-out and chuckers-on (plus, I suppose, the driver). Pullers-out were dropped at the edge of this or that estate and spent an hour or so pulling out every single rubbish bag from every single rubbish bin and assembling them in piles out on the pavement. The cart would be off somewhere else for a while, clearing up another area, then, suddenly, would come storming into the puller-outs’ estate, and the chuckers-on would jump down from the bar at the back of the cart and walk along beside the cart as it drove slowly through the estate, stopping at each pile for the chuckers-on to, well, chuck the rubbish on.

The blighted landscapes of the 1970s! Rundown estates, high-rise blocks, wheel-less Ford Cortinas up on bricks, abandoned kids’ bikes and toys strewn across grass verges littered with dog poo, and everywhere rubbish, rubbish, rubbish spilling out of ripped bags onto the verges and pavement. Chicken bones, all sorts of packaging, half-eaten meals, unknown rotting vegetable matter, cardboard, sacks of ashes and burnt coals. A world of waste, every day, pulled out, piled up and chucked on by sweating, dirty, working men.

Installation view of Mike Nelson: The Asset Strippers at Tate Britain. Photo by the author

How Mike Nelson assembled The Asset Strippers

All these thoughts and feelings and memories came flooding back as I strolled among this wonderful graveyard of old, heavy industrial machinery and furniture (cabinets and benches, looms and equipment). Work. The universe of work and the countless tools and devices and machinery which people have built and worked with over hundreds of years.

Mike Nelson assembled this collection by scouring online sales and auctions, focusing on big ‘statement’ pieces of equipment which were being sold off from closing-down factories or defunct businesses. He then arranged them:

as units – most of them being made up not of one object but a pair or more of objects artfully combined
carefully situated these ‘units’ throughout Tate Britain’s long narrow atrium, to create a walk-through phantasmagoria of industrial junk

The curators suggest that the pieces appear first as industrial artefacts, then you realise they have been assembled into sculptures, and from that point onwards they shimmer back and forth between mementos of the real world and aesthetic contrivances. Maybe. But my sensibility was too flooded by their size and bulk and strong industrial design. I just saw them as beautifully engineered and designed tools.

Are we really living in a post-industrial society?

The wall labels claim all these wonderful objects are testimony to, or heirlooms of, ‘a lost era and the vision of society it represented’.

I can’t help wondering if that’s true. Every week the dustmen still come and empty my bins, in fact there are more trucks than ever since there are now separate bins for waste, recycling and food, as well as periodic visits by the big caged van which takes large objects, as well as the one you order up to remove garden waste, cuttings, and prunings.

Someone picks all those up by hand. Someone drives the dustcarts back to the depot, which is supervised, run and maintained by people, who then supervise the sorting of bags into different skips, which are then sent to waste food aggregators, or to the incinerator or – at my local tip in Wandsworth – loaded onto river barges and sailed slowly down the Thames to be offloaded and carted up slopes of waste and thrown into vast landfill sites in Essex.

People do that, all of that. Driving the carts, humping the rubbish, loading the barges, skippering the tugs, docking the other end, unloading, carrying from the docks to vast holes in the ground with big diggers. Hard physical work, all down the line, involving dustcarts, huge containers loaded by massive cranes onto giant tugs pulled by big trawlers down to industrial docks and unloaded onto giant diggers which carry the waste across derelict landscapes to the big holes.

Maybe it’s not ‘industrial’ in the sense of taking place in big factors, but it is industrial in the sense of being highly mechanised and relying on giant machines powered by oil.

Installation view of Mike Nelson: The Asset Strippers at Tate Britain. Photo by the author

Certainly all this wonderful equipment has been thrown away. But that doesn’t mean all the functions they performed have been superannuated. Far from it. It just means they’ve been replaced by newer, more effective equipment.

Indeed it is a little too easy to dismiss heavy industry, manufacturing and labouring as having somehow disappeared from Britain. For sure, the vast coal mining industry has more or less vanished, ship building pretty much gone, and industries like car-making and steel-making are much reduced and hugely more automated than they were in my youth (in the 1970s).

But, to quote the Manufacturers’ Association:

UK manufacturing is thriving, with the UK currently the world’s eighth largest industrial nation. If current growth trends continue, the UK will break into the top five by 2021. In the UK, manufacturing makes up 11% of GVA, 44% of total UK exports, 70% of business R&D, and directly employs 2.6 million people.

In other words, there are still lots and lots of our fellow citizens working with heavy machinery, in light and heavy industry, making things. And tens of thousands of people still work in docks and shipyards, at distribution centres and industrial warehouses, in agriculture and in food packing plants up and down the country, and in the basic kind of street cleaning/rubbish collection, gas-water-electricity mains maintenance jobs which I’ve described above. In manual labouring jobs.

A moment’s reflection makes me think of the huge HS2 project, and the Cross-Link project, both huge feats of engineering which require skilled workers and supervisors working with very heavy drilling, tunnel-making and railway-building equipment.

So it feels, to me at any rate, just a bit too easy for the curators to dismiss these objects as:

remnants from a bygone era… [with which] Nelson creates a melancholic journey through Britain’s recent social and political history.

Or to comment that the installation:

presents us with a vision of artefacts cannibalised from the last days of the industrial era…

Go ask the Manufacturers’ Association if we truly live in a post-industrial society, and they will tell you that the death of Britain’s manufacturing industry has been much exaggerated.

And in any case, many of these artefacts are not truly ‘industrial’.

Take the ‘doors from an NHS hospital’ which are included in the show. We still have NHS hospitals and they still have doors, so these objects are hardly ‘cannibalised from the last days of the industrial era…’

Similarly, the steel awnings used to block up the doors of abandoned council properties – well, I see the same kind of thing quite often as I cycle round my part of London, blocking up derelict buildings with steel panels still seems to be ongoing practice. So, again, there’s nothing particularly ‘industrial’ or ‘post-industrial’ about them.

The concrete tubing which features at the end of the hall, arranged on a couple of old telegraph poles, I’ve seen massive concrete tubes like that being installed in the current updates to the London water mains. And telegraph poles – we still have them, don’t we?

Many of these artefacts aren’t symbolic of anything, they’re just worn-out examples of objects which we still use and which still make up the built environment around us. To call all of this stuff ‘post-industrial’ or relics ‘from the last days of the industrial era…’ is to simplify their origins and effects.

Sure there are old-fashioned weaving looms and light engineering machinery which, yes, I dare say that’s been superseded. But rubber tyre tracks for diggers, doors for hospitals and metal grilles blocking up abandoned council houses – these are types of objects still very much in use.

What I’m driving at is I think the aesthetic and emotional, and even historical-intellectual, effects of this installation are far more complicated than the curators, and maybe even the artist himself, imagines. Some of the objects are relics of now-defunct industries and technologies. But others are just knackered examples of machinery and industrial designs which we are still using.

So the display is – in my opinion – saying something about the continuity between Britain’s heavy industrial era and the present, so-called, post-industrial age. Revealing unexpected continuities amid the wreckage of obsolescent machinery.

The dignity of work

Anyway. I loved this installation and loved these big heavy old smelly objects, loved their shape and size and weight, loved their smells of rubber and oil and machinery. I bent right down to smell the tough, rubber smell of the digger’s tracks, I wanted to open and close the huge heavy metal cabinets, I wanted to make the looms work again, I wanted to stand on the big red scale and see if it still works.

These are objects of love and veneration because they contain within them the cumulative toil and effort and care and labour of generations of workers who have spent the best hours of their lives building, installing, maintaining and using this equipment.

For me this huge installation is a hymn to the dignity of working life – which I know as well as anyone, is often undignified, dirty and degrading in itself – but which gains in human dignity by virtue of the effort and concentration and care which has gone into it. Here’s the section of big concrete tubing laid out on a ‘stand’ made of telegraph poles I mentioned earlier. I loved its round shape. I loved the smell of the wooden poles and the lost functionality indicated by the couple of white porcelain insulators, the bit which held the electric wires separate from the main pole and visible at the bottom of the photo.

All placed on rust-resistant-painted steel bars and laid on the kind of massive tarpaulin sheet you find in any number of industrial site.

Installation view of Mike Nelson: The Asset Strippers at Tate Britain. Photo by the author

The installation is divided into three sections, with knackered wooden partitions dividing them off and creating walkways across the atrium for visitors going to other exhibitions. Even these partitions are made from the remnants of old buildings, with heavy wooden doors which many of the visitors I saw hesitated to touch or open because they looked, well, old and intimidating.

What beautiful objects! What an inspiring installation!

It prompted all kinds of half-articulate thoughts and feelings. Made me remember all the physical labouring job I’ve had, the memory of all the things my hands have held and lifted, in sun and rain and snow.

And reflect poignantly on the trillions of man and woman hours of work which have been expended in this country, in the toil and use of so many machines, so much equipment, from trawlers hauling in nets in the North sea to coalminers using heavy drills in South Wales, from the shipbuilders riveting and welding on the Clyde, to the fleets of light engineering factories along the A4, where my old man started his working life.

We commemorate the dead of the Great War or D-Day in big public ceremonies. I can’t quite see how it could be done practically, but we should also rejoice celebrate mourn condole and remember the vast amount of work work work our forebears carried out, day after day, dutifully, sometimes with love, sometimes with loathing. For better or worse we live amid the result of all their efforts. It is insulting to dismiss this vast, unimaginable legacy of toil and sweat in a few glib sentences. This exhibition is a moving tribute to the pith and marrow of our forebears’ lives, to the achievements of all their work.

Work by the Blue Orchids (1981)

Curators

Mike Nelson: The Asset Strippers is curated by Clarrie Wallis, Senior Curator of Contemporary British Art, Tate, and Elsa Coustou, Curator of Contemporary British Art, Tate.

Reviews of other Tate exhibitions

Frank Bowling (July 2019)
Franz West @ Tate Modern (May 2019)
Van Gogh and Britain @ Tate Britain (May 2019)
Magic Realism: Art in Weimar Germany 1919 – 1933 @ Tate Modern (April 2019)
Dorothea Tanning @ Tate Modern (March 2019)
Don McCullin @ Tate Britain (February 2019)
Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory @ Tate Modern (February 2019)
Christmas slugs @ Tate Britain (December 2018)
Turner Prize 2018 @ Tate Britain (December 2018)
Anni Albers @ Tate Modern (December 2018)
Edward Burne-Jones @ Tate Britain (October 2018)
Aftermath: Art in the wake of World War One @ Tate Britain (September 2018)
All Too Human @ Tate Britain (March 2018)
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Not Everyone Will be Taken Into the Future (January 2018)
Red Star over Russia (December 2017)
Impressionists in London @ Tate Britain (November 2017)
Giacometti @ Tate Modern (September 2017)
Soul Of A Nation: Art In The Age Of Black Power @ Tate Modern (July 2017)
Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 @ Tate Modern (June 2017)
Queer British Art 1861-1967 @ Tate Britain (April 2017)
The Radical Eye @ Tate Modern (March 2017)
David Hockney @ Tate Britain (February 2017)
Robert Rauschenberg @ Tate Modern (February 2017)
Paul Nash @ Tate Britain (December 2016)
Painting with Light @ Tate Britain (August 2016)
Georgia O’Keefke @ Tate Modern (July 2016)
Performing for the camera @ Tate Modern (March 2016)
Frank Auerbach @ Tate Britain (February 2016)
Every Room in Tate Modern (January 2016)
Every room in Tate Britain (part one) (January 2016)
Every room in Tate Britain (part two) (January 2016)
Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past @ Tate Britain (January 2016)
Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture @ Tate Modern (December 2015)
The EY Exhibition: The World Goes Pop @ Tate Modern (November 2015)
Agnes Martin @ Tate Modern (September 2015)
Fighting History @ Tate Britain (August 2015)
Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World @ Tate Britain (August 2015)
Sonia Delaunay @ Tate Modern (May 2015)
Salt and Silver @ Tate Britain (April 2015)
Sculpture Victorious @ Tate Britain (April 2015)
Conflict, Time, Photography @ Tate Modern (March 2015)
Late Turner @ Tate Britain (January 2015)
Malevich: Revolutionary of Russian art @ Tate Modern (August 2014)
British Folk Art @ Tate Britain (June 2014)
Ruin Lust @ Tate Britain (March 2014)
Richard Deacon @ Tate Britain (February 2014)
Paul Klee – Making Visible @ Tate Modern (January 2014)
Art under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm @ Tate Britain (December 2013)
Lowry and the painting of modern life @ Tate Britain (September 2013)
Lichtenstein: A Restrospective @ Tate Modern (March 2013)
Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian avant-garde @ Tate Britain (September 2012)
Damien Hirst @ Tate Modern (September 2012)
Picasso and Modern British Art @ Tate Britain (July 2012)
John Martin @ Tate Britain (December 2011)

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by Simon on July 19, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Sculpture

Tagged art, exhibition, industrial art, industry, installation, installation art, labour, manual labour, Mike Nelson, post-industrial, sculpture, Tate Britain, The Asset Strippers, the Manufacturers' Association

Posted by Simon on July 19, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/07/19/mike-nelson-the-asset-strippers-tate-britain/

Franz West @ Tate Modern

Franz West (1947-2012) is best known for his unconventional objects and sculptures, installations and furniture work, which often require an involvement of the audience.

This is a big exhibition, taking up no fewer than ten rooms at Tate Modern and the overwhelming impression you get is that West relished amateurishness, the cack-handed, graceless elevation of the everyday into ambiguous and intriguing objects – like this set of sculptures made out of bottles and baths and rolls of carpet and toilet seats and plates stacked on each other in no particular order and covered in papier-mâché and painted a horrible vomit-brown.

Redundanz by Franz West (1986)

His works’ determined lack of grace and finish ought to be off-putting but I came out of the exhibition really liking them.

Deliberate amateurishness

A modern artist like Jeff Koons gets his kicks by making objects and sculptures which are manufactured to a technicolour-bright, smooth, hyper-real perfection. Their gleaming finish satirises the impossible perfection of airbrushed models, movie stars, and adverts. His sculptures are satires on, ahem, modern consumer capitalism.

West makes the same general point (i.e. isn’t capitalism, advertising and consumer culture awful?) but with the diametrically opposite strategy.

From the start of his career in the late 1960s, through to the end – as an award-winning showstopper at the Venice Biennale and numerous other international art festivals – West set out to undermine the shiny world of western consumerism with determinedly hand-made and amateurish artefacts, where you are meant to see the joins and the glue and the shabby lack of professional finish.

Big papier-mâché sculptures

Thus the most characteristic – and memorably enormous – works here are huge, hand-made, hand-built, wonky, papier-mâché sculptures which look like they could have been made by enterprising schoolchildren.

Installation view of Franz West at Tate Modern 2019. Photo by Luke Walker

The exhibition builds up to a climax in the last couple of rooms which contain vast, pastel-coloured, abstract sculptures all made out of wood and cardboard and gauze and papier-mâché. Are the bright but gentle pastel colours symbolic of something, packed with artistic meaning? No. In a typically off-hand, deliberately unpretentious way, West is quoted as saying he got the idea for the colours of these big works from children’s pajamas 🙂

Epiphanie an Stuhlen (2011) by Franz West. Photo by Luke Walker

Early drawings

The road towards these monster sculptures began in the late 1960s, when West (born in 1947) was a well-known alcoholic and trouble-maker on the periphery of the Vienna art scene. He was arrested a couple of times, and took part in friends’ ‘happenings’ and installations in those far-gone, heady days of revolution and sticking it to the bourgeoisie. Only slowly, and relatively late (around the age of 26) did he begin to make anything like ‘art’ himself, in the early 1970s.

Initially these consisted of really bad, amateurish drawings. There are several walls covered with them, sets of human figures drawn with breath-taking gawkiness. Some are funny, most are notable for a kind of confident ineptitude.

Untitled (1972) Private collection © Estate Franz West © Archiv Franz West

Many of his pictures and collages satirised contemporary pornographic magazines. Apparently, he made the images ‘absurd’ by ‘decontextualising’ them – as you can see by this one, a penetrating study of the wickedness of contemporary pornography.

West was, according to the wall labels, keen to satirise the Freudian theory that human behaviour is based on sexual drives. Hence lots of crudely drawn images of men with erect penises about to penetrate women with crudely drawn breasts.

Frohsinn (1974) by Franz West

The Passstücke

But West’s real breakthrough came when he invented the Passstücke (Adaptives), abstract papier-mâché pieces which were intended to be picked up and played with. These are as rough and amateurish as his drawings, but it was the contexts he put them in that began to make them interesting. For example, there are a handful of replicas of the early hand-pieces and visitors are encourage to mess about with them in what look like department store dressing rooms.

Passtucke mit box und video (1996) Photo Luke Walker

There are several very rough, amateurish video films and lots of photos of West’s friends in Vienna’s 1970s underground art scene putting these funny, odd papier-mâché shapes on their heads, wearing them like clothes, or – in one striking scene – there’s a topless woman using a plate-shaped piece of papier-mâché to lift and move her naked bosoms while a fully dressed man sits nearby and plays improvised jazz on a trumpet. A naked woman! With boobs! Improvised jazz!

You can still smell the wild, crazeee, avant-garde vibe of these subversive rebels 40 years later. I bet they smoked pot. I bet they stayed up all night talking about philosophy and the meaning of life. Crazeee.

Bigger, brighter, and with added furniture

After two or three rooms acclimatising you to West’s relatively small and amateurish early art, and to the 1970s world of flairs and slacks and beards and long hair and bare boobs which it came out of – the visitor walks through a doorway into the first of a series of far larger, much more open spaces, in which Franz is suddenly making much, much larger sculptures and installations.

There’s a big one comprising four walls made of papier-mâché which create four office booths, each of which contains home-made furniture. For Franz had started to make furniture.

Wegener Räume – an installation of four gouaches, four sculptures on wooden bases, four seats, wooden walls, paper, cloth, gauze, plaster and metal by Franz West (1988)

The office furniture was, originally, meant to be sat on and used, just like the Passstücke are meant to be handled, twirled round your head, worn on your wrist or whatever.

West wanted to make art that was functional – art and furniture at the same time.

BUT – I couldn’t help smiling to read, on a whole succession of wall labels that – unfortunately, regrettably, sadly – this or that piece of furniture or hand-held sculpture was now too old and fragile to be touched. Please don’t touch the interactive art. Ne touche pas. Nicht tasten.

Some furniture by Franz West, namely: Caseuse (1989), Untitled (1989) and Untitled (Stuhl) (1989)

Furniture usable and unusable

One of the wall labels says that West was interested all his life in blurring the border between art and the useful, sculpture and the everyday, which involved interrogating the notion of the gallery as th enly place where are could be displayed, etc etc.

An intention which, you can’t help thinking, must be judged a complete failure seeing as a) you are not allowed to touch any of his interactive art b) this entire exhibition is taking place in an, er, very traditional art gallery and c) that the exhibition costs a fairly steep £13 to enter.

As long as you don’t take the po-faced wall labels too seriously, this is a very enjoyable exhibition. It’s full of silliness.

In 1987 West made Eo Ipso, for a survey of sculpture in Münster. It’s made from his mother’s old washing machine which he unravelled into a twisted approximation of a bench and then painted a dire lime green. And then photographed his artist mates sitting on it (not for very long, I imagine).

Eo Ipso by Franz West (1987)

Here are some big papier-mâché heads he made out of plaster, gauze, cardboard, iron, acrylic, foam and rubber.

Lemurenköpfe by Franz West (1992)

According to the wall label:

In Roman mythology lemurs are tortured spirits living in limbo because they were never buried or because they committed crimes during their earthly life. At the beginning of the 20th century the term Lemurenköpfe was coined by the Viennese intellectual Karl Kraus to describe the Social-Democrat political group, who did not manage to prevent the rise of extremism. When they were first presented at documenta [an exhibition of contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany] West invited visitors to fill the mouths of the Lemurenköpfe with garbage, creating sculptures with ‘bad breath’.

Satirising the art world

The same childish simplicity is on evidence throughout. In a darkened room there’s a projection onto a big screen of a characteristically amateurish film titled Vier Gellert Lieder. According to the guide:

West show this video with Bernhard Riff between 1992 and 1996. they recorded several meetings with artists and curators at openings and dinners, often giving artists absurd instructions to talk to camera. They then set the images to the music of Beethoven’s Six Lieder which had themselves used the texts of poems by Christian Furchtegott Gellert. When editing, they cut up and repeated clips of dialogue, slowed and speeded up the footage, and distorted colours. The video is a surreal portrait of the art world as a clique of weirdos and obsessives, rather than a place for the refined creation evoked by Beethoven.

What’s sweet about the film and the guide text is the touching belief that most of the world doesn’t already think of modern art as rubbish and modern artists as con-men and art dealers as slimy crooks.

Watching some of the leering, goonish, freakish artists and their simpering dealers and curators, and comparing them with the old-fashioned but pure and graceful music, had the – presumably – intended effect on me, which was to ponder how far, how very, very far, modern Austrian, German and, by extension, European art has fallen in the past century.

A Franz west living room

The final room features a number of bookcases holding the typically modish books Franz liked to read (Freud, Nietzsche, Sartre, Benjamin, all the usual suspects), some relatively small papier-mâché sculptures, and a couple of sofas on which you’re meant to sit and watch another, really amateurish film recording West and a bunch of mates assembling ‘The Hamsterwheel’, an unofficial group show that took place during the 2007 Venice Biennale.

British artist Sarah Lucas has worked with West on a number of projects – in fact she designed the plinths and backgrounds and the design of a lot of this exhibition – and was involved in the Hamsterhweel project and features in the film. Of the Hamsterwheel she’s quoted as saying:

We all spent a couple of weeks together, knocking things up, and nobody what it was going to be, really. It all seemed a bit chaotic, but by the time it was done, it had a sublime quality – everything worked and it had this amazing elevated feel to it.

And next to the bookshelves, hanging on the wall, is the poster West made for this show. It recycles one of the deliberately crude and graceless drawings from his 1975 series, Sexuality. Has a kind of amazing, elevated feel to it, don’t you think?

The Hamsterwheel by Franz West (2007)

Post-war Austria

Walking among the many posters West has created, and amid the steadily more enormous papier-mâché sculptures, enduring the terrible videos, and reading solemn references in the wall labels to West’s use of imagery of penises and turds… you can’t help feeling you’re walking amid the ruins of a once-great civilisation.

It is as if a great holocaust, a vast devastating event, has ruined western civilisation forever, destroyed old beliefs in traditional forms and genres and ideas, and left its survivors like children scurrying amid the ruins, filming women’s boobs, drawing men with penises, creating coiled turds and melting, grungy, barbarous shapes out of papier-mâché.

And of course, it did. West was born in 1947 into an absolutely ruined Vienna, one time stronghold of Nazi sentiment and now divided between the four victorious allies, setting of the grim Graham Greene story, The Third Man. For anyone with a soul, an imagination and a conscience, it must have seemed like the old traditional values in art and life had been broken forever.

West’s posters

But then I looked up and saw another one of his overgrown baby toys and told myself to stop feeling so tragic. A lot of his work is fun and inventive and colourful and interesting. Looking back on the exhibition afterwards, I realised I had under-appreciated the long line of posters he produced, initially publicising small art events or friends’ music concerts, eventually he developed a recognisable brand or style of poster which he used to publicise his numerous exhibitions. As the curators put it:

West showed at major museums and large galleries, and would always produce collages and posters to accompany his exhibitions. He loved to combine photographic images with paint, and to use kitschy and crass typography. In this way, he refused the elegant design so often used to brand art institutions.

They’re deliberately scrappy, messy, amateurish and anti-polish… but oddly effective, strangely more-ish.

Plakatentwurf (Die Aluskulptur) 2000. Franz West Privatstiftung/Estate Franz West, Vienna © Estate Franz West © Archiv Franz West

Every rebel becomes a darling

What started out as anti-Establishment rebellion in the late 60s had turned into the art for a new kind of freewheeling post-modern Establishment by the later 1980s, certainly by the 1990s.

So that, in West’s final years, all his themes and tendencies came together in a series of large, brightly coloured and absurdist sculptures designed to adorn galleries and public spaces. In the right environment, some of these look strangely apt and appropriate. As so often, big bright modern art looks great in American cities.

Mostly West, an exhibition of Franz West’s sculpture outside the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts, New York, 2004 © Estate Franz West © Archiv Franz West. Photo by Reinhard Bernsteiner / Atelier Franz West

But in other contexts – like the horrible rear entrance to the Tate Modern extension – they look a bit more spooky, like the incomprehensible relics of a ruined civilisation, or like the baubles of demented giants or – more precisely – like the grimly desperate attempts of modern architects and planners to persuade us poor victims of their heartless designs that we don’t live in a barren, loveless, windswept world of brutalist car parks and soulless shopping centres.

Some Franz West sculptures round the back of the Tate Modern extension on a grim, grey London day (photo by the author)

Do West’s big sculptural statements enliven and brighten up civic life? Or make it all too obvious that we live in a world of brightly coloured tat?

Promotional video

Reviews of other Tate exhibitions

Van Gogh and Britain @ Tate Britain (May 2019)
Magic Realism: Art in Weimar Germany 1919 – 1933 @ Tate Modern (April 2019)
Dorothea Tanning @ Tate Modern (March 2019)
Don McCullin @ Tate Britain (February 2019)
Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory @ Tate Modern (February 2019)
Christmas slugs @ Tate Britain (December 2018)
Turner Prize 2018 @ Tate Britain (December 2018)
Anni Albers @ Tate Modern (December 2018)
Edward Burne-Jones @ Tate Britain (October 2018)
Aftermath: Art in the wake of World War One @ Tate Britain (September 2018)
All Too Human @ Tate Britain (March 2018)
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Not Everyone Will be Taken Into the Future (January 2018)
Red Star over Russia (December 2017)
Impressionists in London @ Tate Britain (November 2017)
Giacometti @ Tate Modern (September 2017)
Soul Of A Nation: Art In The Age Of Black Power @ Tate Modern (July 2017)
Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 @ Tate Modern (June 2017)
Queer British Art 1861-1967 @ Tate Britain (April 2017)
The Radical Eye @ Tate Modern (March 2017)
David Hockney @ Tate Britain (February 2017)
Robert Rauschenberg @ Tate Modern (February 2017)
Paul Nash @ Tate Britain (December 2016)
Painting with Light @ Tate Britain (August 2016)
Georgia O’Keefke @ Tate Modern (July 2016)
Performing for the camera @ Tate Modern (March 2016)
Frank Auerbach @ Tate Britain (February 2016)
Every Room in Tate Modern (January 2016)
Every room in Tate Britain (part one) (January 2016)
Every room in Tate Britain (part two) (January 2016)
Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past @ Tate Britain (January 2016)
Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture @ Tate Modern (December 2015)
The EY Exhibition: The World Goes Pop @ Tate Modern (November 2015)
Agnes Martin @ Tate Modern (September 2015)
Fighting History @ Tate Britain (August 2015)
Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World @ Tate Britain (August 2015)
Sonia Delaunay @ Tate Modern (May 2015)
Salt and Silver @ Tate Britain (April 2015)
Sculpture Victorious @ Tate Britain (April 2015)
Conflict, Time, Photography @ Tate Modern (March 2015)
Late Turner @ Tate Britain (January 2015)
Malevich: Revolutionary of Russian art @ Tate Modern (August 2014)
British Folk Art @ Tate Britain (June 2014)
Ruin Lust @ Tate Britain (March 2014)
Richard Deacon @ Tate Britain (February 2014)
Paul Klee – Making Visible @ Tate Modern (January 2014)
Art under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm @ Tate Britain (December 2013)
Lowry and the painting of modern life @ Tate Britain (September 2013)
Lichtenstein: A Restrospective @ Tate Modern (March 2013)
Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian avant-garde @ Tate Britain (September 2012)
Damien Hirst @ Tate Modern (September 2012)
Picasso and Modern British Art @ Tate Britain (July 2012)
John Martin @ Tate Britain (December 2011)

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by Simon on May 21, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Sculpture

Tagged art, exhibition, Franz West, modern art, sculpture, Tate Modern

Posted by Simon on May 21, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/05/21/franz-west-tate-modern/

Christmas slugs @ Tate Britain

Monster Chetwynd is the pseudonym of Alalia Chetwynd, born in 1973, a British artist known for reworkings of iconic moments from cultural history in improvised performances. In 2012, she was nominated for the Turner Prize. In the past she has gone under the names of Spartacus Chetwynd and Marvin Gaye Chetwynd. (This immediately reminded me of the punk band Spizz Energi who, in their heyday, changed their name every year, rotating through Athletico Spizz 80, Spizzoil and The Spizzles.)

Tate invited her to create a special Christmas installation and she has come up with the idea of two enormous soft sculptures of slugs, which currently decorate the main steps and entrance to Tate Britain.

Monster Chetwynd’s installation at Tate Britain. Photograph by the author

To be precise, they are huge mock-ups of ‘leopard slugs’, their fabric bodies dotted with spots and lined with blue and white LED lights. Monster has explained to the Tate press people, the Guardian, the Telegraph and everyone else who’s interviewed her, that she got the idea after watching leopard slugs mate on Life in the Undergrowth, a television documentary series by David Attenborough.

Monster Chetwynd’s installation at Tate Britain. Photograph by the author

In the wild leopard slugs slowly rotate together, dangling from the branch of a tree by a glittering rope of mucus. The idea is that this night-time mating ritual can be reimagined to show that the darkness of winter can also be a time of renewal and rebirth. And that giant slugs can show us how.

Indeed, after dark, not only the slugs themselves light up, but the entire facade of Tate Britain is illuminated as if covered by a great web of limacine slime.

The facade of Tate Britain flanked by giant slugs and illuminated by limacine slime

The facade of Tate Britain flanked by giant slugs and illuminated by slime-like lianas of fairy lights

Merry Christmas!

Reviews of other Tate exhibitions

Turner Prize 2018 @ Tate Britain (December 2018)
Anni Albers @ Tate Modern (December 2018)
Edward Burne-Jones @ Tate Britain (October 2018)
Aftermath: Art in the wake of World War One @ Tate Britain (September 2018)
All Too Human @ Tate Britain (March 2018)
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Not Everyone Will be Taken Into the Future (January 2018)
Red Star over Russia (December 2017)
Impressionists in London @ Tate Britain (November 2017)
Giacometti @ Tate Modern (September 2017)
Soul Of A Nation: Art In The Age Of Black Power @ Tate Modern (July 2017)
Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 @ Tate Modern (June 2017)
Queer British Art 1861-1967 @ Tate Britain (April 2017)
The Radical Eye @ Tate Modern (March 2017)
David Hockney @ Tate Britain (February 2017)
Robert Rauschenberg @ Tate Modern (February 2017)
Paul Nash @ Tate Britain (December 2016)
Painting with Light @ Tate Britain (August 2016)
Georgia O’Keefke @ Tate Modern (July 2016)
Performing for the camera @ Tate Modern (March 2016)
Frank Auerbach @ Tate Britain (February 2016)
Every Room in Tate Modern (January 2016)
Every room in Tate Britain (part one) (January 2016)
Every room in Tate Britain (part two) (January 2016)
Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past @ Tate Britain (January 2016)
Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture @ Tate Modern (December 2015)
The EY Exhibition: The World Goes Pop @ Tate Modern (November 2015)
Agnes Martin @ Tate Modern (September 2015)
Fighting History @ Tate Britain (August 2015)
Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World @ Tate Britain (August 2015)
Sonia Delaunay @ Tate Modern (May 2015)
Salt and Silver @ Tate Britain (April 2015)
Sculpture Victorious @ Tate Britain (April 2015)
Conflict, Time, Photography @ Tate Modern (March 2015)
Late Turner @ Tate Britain (January 2015)
Malevich: Revolutionary of Russian art @ Tate Modern (August 2014)
British Folk Art @ Tate Britain (June 2014)
Ruin Lust @ Tate Britain (March 2014)
Richard Deacon @ Tate Britain (February 2014)
Paul Klee – Making Visible @ Tate Modern (January 2014)
Art under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm @ Tate Britain (December 2013)
Lowry and the painting of modern life @ Tate Britain (September 2013)
Lichtenstein: A Restrospective @ Tate Modern (March 2013)
Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian avant-garde @ Tate Britain (September 2012)
Damien Hirst @ Tate Modern (September 2012)
Picasso and Modern British Art @ Tate Britain (July 2012)
John Martin @ Tate Britain (December 2011)

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by Simon on December 25, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Sculpture

Tagged Alalia Chetwynd, Christmas, David Attenborough, installation, leopard slugs, Life in the Undergrowth, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Monster Chetwynd, sculpture, Spartacus Chetwynd, Tate, Tate Britain

Posted by Simon on December 25, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/12/25/christmas-slugs-tate-britain/

I’m Still Here @ Royal Festival Hall

On the ground floor (Level 1) of the Royal Festival Hall is a suite of rooms rather hidden away opposite the loos and cloakroom. It turns out to be a linear and surprisingly big exhibition space. It is currently displaying artworks from the 2018 Koestler Awards.

The Koestler Trust is the UK’s best known prison arts charity. Each year, it encourages over 3,000 people from inside the criminal justice system, as well as ‘secure forensic and immigration removal settings’, to express themselves creatively, and learn new skills by entering work to the annual Koestler Awards.

The Mental Health Hydra, a collaborative work by members of the Bluebird House secure mental health unit

This year there were 7,236 entries. Rather then whittle this down themselves, the curators asked three wives and two families who’ve each supported a family member though a prison sentence, to select the works from this huge array which really spoke to them about the experience.

Since the five groups each chose around 40 works, the exhibition contains some 200 pieces, many of them for sale, many of them profoundly imaginative and moving.

AAAAARGH! by Michael at Bolton Probation Office

There’s a really wide range of styles and types and sizes of work on display, including paintings and sculpture, poems and videos, animation and craft.

Left: Lift by the Spinney (secure mental health unit) Right: Circle by Gordon from HM Prison Edinburgh

Left: Life by the Spinney (secure mental health unit) Right: Circle of Life by Gordon from HM Prison Edinburgh

Many of the works are done to a very high standard indeed. Anthony Gormley curated last year’s show. This work – Night at the chippy by ‘Brian’- won the Grayson Perry Highly Commended Award for ceramics. In other words, the project has secured the co-operation of some of Britain’s leading artists.

Night at the chippy by Brian (The State Hospital)

I don’t know why, but writing that sentence made me cry. So much talent, so many young lives, gone astray.

Disconnected by Peter at HM Prison Dovegate

If you’re passing by the South Bank Centre, make the effort to go visit this exhibition. It’s open from 10am till 11pm, and is FREE.

Space Shifters @ the Hayward Gallery

I went to see Space Shifters during half-term so the exhibition was packed with mums, dads and lots of toddlers running round, whooping in amazement, smiling, poking their tongues out and pulling funny faces. Why? Because this is an extremely open, light and interactive exhibition of modern art which plays with space and perception.

Installation view of WeltenLinie (2017) by Alicja Kwade © the artist. Photo by Mark Blower

Take WeltenLinie (2017) by Alicja Kwade, a set of black frames big enough to walk through, some of which contain mirrors, most of which do not, with abstract sculptures or blocks of material dotted among them. According to the free pamphlet given to every visitor, Kwade’s

sculptural installations, objects and films illustrate or attempt to give material form to abstract questions and scientific principles. Addressing the relationship between reality and illusion, they ask us to think about what we know and how we know it.

To be honest, I don’t think ‘they ask us to think about what we know and what we don’t know at all’. I found it much more fun watching kids tentatively exploring to see if the next frame was a mirror or a blank space, before stepping through the blanks, posing in front of the mirrors and pulling silly faces, and running round the back and hiding.

This is a brilliant exhibition to bring kids to.

Installation view of Space Shifters

Space Shifters features works by 20 ‘leading international artists’ that ‘alter or disrupt the visitor’s sense of space’. In case you’re wondering, these artists are:

Leonor Antunes
Larry Bell
Fred Eversley
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Jeppe Hein
Roni Horn
Robert Irwin
Ann Veronica Janssens
Anish Kapoor
Yayoi Kusama
Alicja Kwade
John McCracken
Josiah McElheny
Helen Pashgian
Charlotte Posenenske
Fred Sandback
Monika Sosnowska
Daniel Steegmann Mangrané
De Wain Valentine
Richard Wilson

At one point I heard a little boy running round an exhibit shouting ‘mirrors, mirrors, mirrors’ and there are, indeed a lot of mirrors – distorting mirrors, see-through mirrors, polished balls which are, in effect, mirrors.

For example there’s a set of free-standing mirrors which look like the type you get on old-fashioned wardrobes, stuck onto round wooden frames. It turns out that these are costumes – rather heavy costumes – designed to be worn by performers, who walk slowly along straight lines indicated on the gallery floor. Here is a very poor photo of just such a performer,wearing the mirrors, walking the line.

Abstract Bodies by Josiah McElheny. Photo by the author

Down on the ground floor is an entire room devoted to the work Narcissus Garden by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. This consists of stainless steel balls arranged in an organic pattern a little like the shore of a lake, inviting you to wander into the ‘inlets’, to view the balls from different perspectives or to settle down amid the sea of reflections, like this family was doing.

Installation view of Narcissus Garden by Yayoi Kusama

In the first gallery there are beanbags supplied so you can lie back and watch two big mirrors shaped into a sort of butterfly wing, which is attached high up on the wall and slowly rotates. From the beanbags you are given a slowly moving panoramic reflection of the gallery interior and everyone in it.

Installation view of 360° Illusion V (2018) by Jeppe Hein © the artist. Photo by Mark Blower

Installation view of 360° Illusion V (2018) by Jeppe Hein © the artist. Note the bead curtains on the upper right. Photo by Mark Blower

Some of these works are old – the first version of the Narcissus Garden dates back to 1966. Others have been created specially for this exhibition. What’s interesting is that you can’t tell the difference. In many key ways ‘modern’ art hasn’t really developed much since the extraordinary breakthroughs of the 1960s.

Two of the most striking mirror-based artworks are upstairs. One can be seen through windows, situated on one of the terraces or ‘sculpture courts’ outside the gallery. It is Sky Mirror, Blue by Anish Kapoor who made it in 2016. This big blue concave mirror reflects a section of the sky and, as you watch, you can see England’s distinctive clouds moving slowly across it. Quite restful and entrancing.

Sky Mirror, Blue (2016) by Anish Kapoor. Photo by the author

Probably the most stunning exhibit, and the only one which truly qualifies as a profoundly disorientating experience, is 20:50 by Richard Wilson, which was premiered as long ago as 1987.

Into one entire room of the gallery, carefully lined and sealed, have been poured thousands of litres of recycled oil which rise right up till the surface is exactly flush with the v-shaped walkway which visitors can go along.

As you walk ‘out’ into this gangway, the ‘lake’ of completely flat, completely placid oil, works as a room-sized mirror and perfectly reflects everything above it, the walls and ceiling, as well as the views out the window. It is a genuinely disorientating and wonderful experience – which is why a queue forms for it as soon as the gallery opens (at 11am, by the way).

Installation view of 20:50 by Richard Wilson (1987) at Space Shifters © the artist. Photo by Mark Blower

It’s not all mirrors, though. In several rooms whole areas had been partitioned off by heavy metal bead curtains, downstairs a set made of lead grey metal, upstairs a lighter set painted golden.

Kids loved running back and forwards through these. I’m amazed they hadn’t been pulled off their hangings.

There were a number of rather more subtle sculptures, experimenting with tall vertical and spindly feel, or a big circular purple blob which looked like an enormous half-melted candle, the central crater, rather like 20:50, brimful of fluid.

Another striking piece was Handrail by Monika Sosnowska (2016). There is, apparently, an order to the show: you are meant to go round the first room, lie on the beanbags to admire 360° Illusion V, then progress up the ramp and through the lead curtains into the space containing WeltenLinie and other works, before going up the stairs to the upper floor.

As you do so, you may or may not notice that the standard black handrail lining the staircase is, at some point, taken over by a lithe red handrail which twists around it like a snake and then, as you emerge into the large upstairs gallery, you discover that the red handrail suddenly goes mad and runs all over an entire wall in a crazy scrawl.

Handrail (2016) by Monika Sosnowska © the artist. Photo by the author

But I think my favourite work – or the one which made me smile and I remember best – is the very modest work by Fred Sandback. Born in 1945, Sandback began making minimalist sculptures out of elastic cord and wire back in the 1960s. In the exhibition guide Sandback explains that he got frustrated with sculpture which got ‘bogged down in its own materiality’, so he set out to make something ‘without an inside’ that could exist on an equal footing with the viewer.

The idea was to have the work right there along with everything else in the world, not up on a spatial pedestal.

For decades he’s simply been using off-the-shelf acrylic yarn to create simple shapes and spaces. And so his piece in this exhibition consists of one string of red yarn pinned out to form a triangle, one side across one wall, changing angle where the wall joins the next, both lines extending down to the floor where the third side of the triangle runs across the floor.

Untitled by Fred Sandback

So minimal it’s almost not there – which is exactly what I like about it. In a world full of ever-escalating clamour and rage, Sandback ‘performs choreographies without words or scripts’. It’s a matter of

conjuring up a form and then getting comfortable with it and seeing where it may take you.

As I stood enjoying it, several other visitors came up and stepped over the barely visible red line on the floor ‘into’ the art work – and the gallery assistant had to ask each of them to please step back out of it because if they stepped ‘into’ it they destroyed its Zen-like purity. A totally relaxed, open and permissive art work which – however – requires strict policing!

This is a great show, mind-opening, eye-widening, light and airy, and hugely enjoyable. Bring the kids. If you don’t have any, borrow some. They’ll love it, and you’ll love watching their reactions.

The promotional video

Reviews of other Hayward Gallery exhibitions

Lee Bul: Crashing (May 2018)
Adapt to Survive: Notes from the Future (May 2018)
Andreas Gursky (March 2018)
History is Now (April 2015)
Martin Creed (February 2014)
Art and Power (1995)

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by Simon on October 24, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Sculpture

Posted by Simon on October 24, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/10/24/space-shifters-the-hayward-gallery/

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All posts in category Sculpture

Imperial College Road

Antony Gormley biography

ALERT

Location

The Queen’s Tower

The controversy

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Blue

Purple

Red

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Conclusion

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Featured sculptures

Drawings

Films

Conclusion

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1,583 works

Variety of media

The architecture room

Photography

Big names

Modest works

Identity

Wolfgang Tilmans

For sale

The promotional video

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The Asset Strippers by Mike Nelson

My experiences of manual and physical labour

Working as a dustman

How Mike Nelson assembled The Asset Strippers

Are we really living in a post-industrial society?

The dignity of work

Work by the Blue Orchids (1981)

Curators

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Deliberate amateurishness

Big papier-mâché sculptures

Early drawings

The Passstücke

Bigger, brighter, and with added furniture

Furniture usable and unusable

Satirising the art world

A Franz west living room

Post-war Austria

West’s posters

Every rebel becomes a darling

Promotional video

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