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Image of the Artist @ the Royal Academy

This tiny little display is next door to the current ‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ show – not worth making a pilgrimage to the Royal Academy just for itself, but worth popping into if you’re in the building (as is the small Emma Stibbon display which is right next to it). No rush: it’s on till the end of the year.

It’s a display of eight self-portraits by current and recent Royal Academicians from the last 50 years. They are (in alphabetical order) Anthony Green, Chantal Joffe, Hew Locke, Sidney Nolan, Patrick Procktor, Paula Rego, Gillian Wearing and Clare Woods.

Obviously the genre of the self-portrait raises multiple, many-levelled issues of intention, agency and identity: Who am I? How do I depict myself? How much do I compromise what I see with the medium I’m using? How much am I influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by the vast tradition pressing down on me? How do I escape the weight of the past and develop my own voice and vision?

Here are the pictures in question, along with selected facts from the curators’ wall labels. Which ones do you like, and why?

Anthony Green – The Artist (1976)

The Artist, 1976 by Anthony Green RA © Royal Academy of Arts

Green’s humorous creations, cartoony paintings made in imaginative shapes, used to appear every year in the summer exhibition (he passed away in February of this year). Looking closely you realise there’s a whole narrative going on: for a start the curators tell us the thing is in the shape of a crown, which I didn’t immediately ‘get’. Spotlights shine down from the top right onto a full-length, fully clothed portrait of the artist standing on a sort of stage in front of a yellow stage curtain. And on the left are the stalls of a theatre, full of serried ranks of more self-portraits. The general idea is: Who is the artist performing for, creating for? Himself, copies f himself, clones of himself? I like Green’s works well enough when I see them but, well…

Chantal Joffe – Looking towards Bexhill (2016)

Looking Towards Bexhill, 2016 by Chantal Joffe © The Artist

Here’s Joffe and her daughter on the beach at St Leonard’s-on-sea. According to the curators, the image catches a girl on the cusp of adolescence, turning away from her mother. Joffe is quoted as saying, the more intense the emotion, the more she is driven to simplify the image. Personally I find this a disturbing and upsetting painting. The lack of any effort to convey sand, sea or sky repels me, but not as much as the faces. Eyes are what we look at in the people that we meet or look at and both sets of eyes here are distorted and bent and speak very loudly of physical deformity and/or mental illness.

Hew Locke – Chevalier (2007)

Chevalier by Hew Locke © The Artist

This is one of a series of eleven life-sized photographs from the series ‘How Do You Want Me?’ in which the artist adopts menacing personas. Here he is a sort of surrealist knight in an image saturated with colour and collages of unlikely images, not least the halo of machine guns and daggers which surrounds him. Locke says the series title ‘How Do You Want Me?’ is a satirical reference to the way the art world voraciously consumes the ‘latest thing’, especially the exotic or strange and – by implication – Black artists. So it’s by way of showing two fingers to the art world. Fair enough, but this rational explanation gets nowhere near conveying the over-coloured demented collage with a sword-wielding maniac at the centre.

Sidney Nolan – Self-portrait in Youth (1986)

Self-portrait in Youth, 18 April 1986 by Sir Sidney Nolan © Royal Academy of Arts

Nolan’s dates are 1917 to 1992 i.e. he’s one of the older artists here. This may or may not be reflected in the fact that this is pretty much the weirdest and most abstract work here. According to the curators, as a young man Nolan worked with spray paint in a factory and, later in his career, returned to spray paint as a medium. The heavily distorted image and bars of colour down the left, in one mode make me think of raves and acid and hard-edged psychedelic drugs i.e. a positive image. But then, really looking at the head and deep damage that’s been done to it, the radioactive degrading of the image, make me think of Francis Bacon and all his heads turning into meat or screams. Scary.

Patrick Procktor – Self-portrait (1991)

Self-Portrait, 1991 by Patrick Procktor © The Artist’s Estate

I like stylised paintings but I don’t warm to this one. According to the curators he’s holding a thick paintbrush loaded with white paint in his right hand. I thought it was a mirror or a mobile phone glinting in the sun. I ought to like the plain orange background but I don’t. The curators think this is a very ‘intellectual’ image because he’s glancing up at the frame of the picture i.e. investigating the limits of art etc. The asymmetry of his face, the unevenness of his eyes, speaks to me of mental illness and unhappiness.

Paula Rego – Self portrait (1994)

Self Portrait, 1994 by Paula Rego © Ostrich Arts Ltd. Courtesy Ostrich Arts Ltd and Victoria Miro

The curators point out how many artist’s self-portraits capture the artist holding a palette and brush and looking at the viewer in a pose which captures the moment of creation, as if we are there, with them, in that moment. They also shrewdly point out how the two most completed parts of this sketchy image are the face/eyes which see and the arm/hand which creates – as if the two most important parts of the act of creation are fuller, wholer, more complete, than the rest of the body, which fades away into irrelevance. So it’s an image about artistic force and power.

Gillian Wearing – Me as a Ghost (2015)

Me as a Ghost by Gillian Wearing (2015) © The Artist

Apparently Wearing has ‘explored’ her identity with numerous self portraits playing with format and genre. The smoke is meant to be a reference to her place of birth, industrial Birmingham but made me think of a genii appearing from a lamp. The t short slogan, ‘HEAVY METAL’ is a reference to the disproportionate number of heavy metal rock bands who haled from Birmingham. The artist and curators may think of this as an experimental investigation of issues of identity and mortality, but it also looks very much like the cover of a certain kind of album depicting a rock chick fan of the band.

Clare Woods – Life with the Lions (2020)

Life with the Lions by Clare Woods (2020) © The Artist

Apparently this painting is based on a photograph of the artist’s cat climbing over her, something which just about makes sense once it’s pointed out but I didn’t guess beforehand. Maybe I have a morbid imagination but I read it as the image of someone’s fact (blonde hair, eyes and nose) horribly melting into a great white blancmange. As paintings of cats go, it’s not a classic, is it? Neither is the mood exactly typical of most cat lovers: Woods explains that the title is from the Billy Bragg song of the same name, which captures the feeling of being present but detached, ‘a feeling of suffocation by responsibilities and expectations.’ All this puts into words the very negative response I had to this image. The glutinous melting effect is achieved by mixing thick oil paint directly onto the aluminium surface of the base, which maybe accounts for the powerful feeling of being asphyxiated.

Personal tastes

Personally, I like the Wearing and Rego, in that order. Wearing because it’s a photo/image which looks like a rock poster, could be on a billboard or a poster on the tube i.e which is very assimilable, not least because it makes her look very attractive in a rock chick kind of way.

The Rego I like because I like charcoal sketches, particularly if they’re unfinished (hence my veneration of Degas). I also like the strong female vibe, the aura of strength and indomitability about it. The obvious feature is the dark eyes which are about twice the size of an ordinary adult’s eyes. Decades ago I read some pop science which pointed out that the eyes are proportionately larger in babies than in adults and that, therefore, we humans are programmed to feel soft and sentimental and attracted by large eyes i.e. in order to warm to, and protect, babies. Obvious evolutionary advantage.

This apparently explains why we feel warmly towards Disney cartoons, from Mickey through hundreds of cartoon characters to Nemo or Frozen – they all have disproportionately large eyes and trigger a soppy sentimental feeling; certainly disarms our adult cynicism. If anything, the Rego portrait inverts the convention, because she looks not soft but spooky – not threatening exactly, but lowering and damaged. And the stumpy muscular right arm gives the image a dwarfish, freakish atmosphere, too. Don’t Look Now.

Reynolds

There’s a twist in the tail. This miniature display takes up only part of The Collection Gallery, the narrow corridor-shaped space at the start of the gallery. At the end of this corridor you can see the start of a completely separate exhibition, which is a selection of highlights from the Royal Academy’s Old Master collection, grand mythological themes, Biblical paintings and Renaissance statues. But the first work in that, completely separate display, is a portrait of Sir Joshua Reynolds, founder and first President of the Royal Academy. So when you look away from the eight self-portraits I’ve just discussed, your eye passes over the lovely image of Reynolds at the end of the corridor.

Self-portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1770 to 1780) © Photo: Royal Academy of Arts, London

The point is, the Reynolds portrait is clearly head and shoulders (pun intended) better than the eight works in this little display. It has class and dignity and gravitas. It reminds me of the umpteen histories of art which try and put into words the revolution in visual technology which the development of oil painting during the Renaissance brought about; how artists used the new medium of oil to portray depth and scale of subject, with true perspective etc, but then went on, as the centuries progressed, to focus on the conjuring of light and shade, in particular of dark shadow, to convey psychological and spiritual depths unlike any art which had gone before (Leonardo, Rembrandt).

In this picture Reynolds is clearly channelling Rembrandt and the sophisticated Old Master tradition of strong contrasts of light and shade which came to be referred to as chiaroscuro. It has a human dignity and depth and sensitivity which none of the eight modern images come close to matching.

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by Simon on June 2, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition

Posted by Simon on June 2, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/06/02/image-of-the-artist-the-royal-academy/

A Year in Art: Australia 1992 @ Tate Modern

This is a very, very political exhibition, bigger than I expected (5 rooms), artistically important, wide-ranging, illuminating and sometimes very upsetting.

It’s a broad selection of art from contemporary Australia all based round the theme of the calamitous impact of white European colonisation on the continent’s indigenous people. (As I understand it, we should nowadays not use ‘Aborigine’ or ‘aboriginal’; it’s best practice to say ‘indigenous Australians’ or ‘indigenous people’.)

This exhibition brings together art works by indigenous people, alongside works by Australian artists of European descent, all revolving round the themes of colonialism, expropriation, racism, and cultural erasure i.e. the systematic denial of the existence of indigenous people, their deprivation of legal and voting rights, crude attempts to turn them into good Christian citizens, and the banning of their culture, language and traditions.

The exhibition displays a wide variety of media including paintings, photos, artistically treated documents, maps, a huge video installation, some very large fabrics accompanied by sculptures. There’s a lot of explanatory text which makes you feel thoroughly ashamed to be white, British and, of course, a man, since some of the women artists in the show consider the appalling violence and injustices meted out to the Indigenous people the result not only of colonialism but of specifically ‘male modes of power’.

Untitled (Alhalkere) by Emily Kame Kngwarreye

Australia 1992 is part of a series Tate has recently devised which aims to look at the artworks which cluster round a key year in a country’s history, the series having the general name ‘A Year In Art’. The first one was ‘A Year in Art: 1973’ which explored how artists responded to the 1973 coup d’etat in Chile which brought General Pinochet to power.

This is the second in the series and the title, ‘Australia 1992’, begs the question: what is so important about the year 1992? Well, it was the year of a landmark decision by the Australian High Court which overturned the concept of terra nullius (meaning ‘land belonging to nobody’). This was the doctrine by which the British had justified colonising the land now known as Australia.

The concept was used to, in effect, deny the existence of the native Aboriginal peoples who had inhabited Australia for 30,000 years, had developed a lifestyle in balance with its particular natural characteristics, as well as complex societies built on clan structures, a culture rich in hundreds of distinct languages. The High Court decision was the climax of decades of work by indigenous rights campaigners and provided a new legal basis for ongoing campaigns to expand indigenous rights and extend legal protections to indigenous culture.

Buluwana, Female Ancestor by John Mawurndjul (1989)

The art works in the show aren’t all from the year 1992, far from it, much of it is from the subsequent thirty years and some of it is bang up to date. But it all rotates and revolves around the issues thrown up by that 1992 ruling.

Room one

The first room contains three important elements. Firstly, a set of four videos by key artists featured in the show, namely Helen Johnson, Judy Watson, and Dale Horton. These are all 4 or so minutes long. The fourth video features an extended interview with Aborigine artist John Mawurndjul who explains how, although he lives in the new world, the new dispensation of the white man, he maintains the stories and traditions handed down from his father and his father’s father, hence the title of the film, ‘I am the old and the new’. John takes the camera team to a dry and dusty location out in the country where he explains the design and meaning of ancient Aboriginal rock art. He’s also filmed using traditional tools and paints, in particular a kind of soft bark brush, to create the fine striping visible in a work like Buluwana, Female Ancestor.

Another important display in this room is of drawings made by Edward Koiki Mabo of the land on Torres Island which he claimed was his under ancestral indigenous law, drawings used in the 1992 court case. There are three of these, indicating the location of plants, landmarks, traditional use and ownership, which had been passed down to Mabo through 17 generations of tradition. They’re the subject of a wall label explaining more of the detail of the case, its results and implications.

Lastly, there’s a factual (i.e. non-art) map of Australia, an attempt by scholars to represent the language or nation groups of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

The AIATSIS map of Indigenous Australia attempts to represent the language, social or nation groups of indigenous Australia, by David R. Horton (1996)

Note that the word ‘Country’ is used in a special sense to denote the Aborigines’ ancient connection with the land of their ancestry. So throughout the exhibition the curators refer to Country not ‘the country’ or ‘the landscape’.

Artists and works

There are five rooms in the show and, given that the central one is enormous, space for lots of art works.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye expresses her cultural life as an Anmatyerre elder and her intricate relationship to country in Untitled (Alhalkere) (top of this review).

John Mawurndjul is featured with his bark painting Buluwana, Female Ancestor, created with a fine cross-hatching technique used by generations of Kuninjku artists.

Dale Harding was the subject of one of the videos in the first room. There he explained that he often paints directly onto a gallery wall to create a site-specific work and images of these make them look dramatic. Sadly, that hasn’t happened here and he’s represented by a moveable work, The Leap/ Watershed, in which he’s blown ochre onto a large canvas to create an abstract shape. Although this isn’t particularly obvious, apparently it is intended to reference both the life-giving attributes of the land and the 1867 massacre of Aboriginal people in Mackay, Queensland. ‘The Leap’ refers to a rock formation in Yuwi Country where around 200 indigenous people chose to leap to their deaths rather than surrender to the Queensland Native Police Force.

The Leap by Dale Harding

There’s a great series of works by Judy Watson entitled ‘A Preponderance of Aboriginal Blood’. These 15 framed works take official documents used by the Australian authorities in the 19th and 20th centuries to categorise indigenous peoples and allot them (or not) voting and other rights. Thus, until 1965 you had to be able to prove you had a ‘White’ parent in order to vote, in Queensland. The categorisations include racial ones by which a person was defined as being ‘fullblood’, ‘half-blood’, ‘quadroon’ and so on, terms I’m familiar with from the same system applied in the American South in the slavery era.

What turns them into art is that Watson has spattered them with red pain mimicking blood. These documents obsessed with ‘blood’ have been drenched in the object of their enquiry, blood which also indicates the numbers of indigenous people murdered by the white military and police over the centuries. A stain on Australia’s history and conscience.

From ‘A Preponderance of Aboriginal Blood’ by Judy Watson (2005)

The complete set, along with a detailed explanation, is available on the Tate website.

In a similar spirit of taking colonial documents or concepts and undermining them, is the work of Helen Johnson. She’s represented by a couple of enormous rectangular fabrics, suspended from the ceiling, on which she creates images complex satirical images. The series is titled ‘Seat of Power’ and is from 2016.

Seat of Power by Judy Watson (2016)

This work needs a bit of explanation (which is available on the Tate web page devoted to it). It consists of a large unstretched acrylic painting on canvas which depicts a satirical image of the British parliament in session by the Victorian illustrator Richard Doyle, itself overlaid with partially legible text which refers to a chair that was gifted to the House of Representatives in Canberra, Australia by the UK branch of the Empire Parliamentary Association in 1926.

It’s big and it’s striking but, as you can see, it needs a fair bit of explaining unlike, say, all of the indigenous art on display which speaks immediately to the eye and heart. It also demonstrates a small principle about art and literature, which is that satire doesn’t have to be funny. It can be, but it doesn’t have to be and Watson’s works aren’t.

This point is easily made by comparison with a set of works by Gordon Bennett titled ‘How to Cross the Void’. These are a series of gawky cartoons or sketches of scenes, with satirical text written in, but unlike the Watson they are actively funny. The best example is this one depicting a dark-skinned man hanging himself in a cell, with the advice that, if you get into difficulty hanging yourself, you can always ask a policeman. They’ll be happy to help 🙂

‘Ask a policeman’ from ‘How to Cross the Void’ by Gordon Bennett (1993)

But alongside the amusing cartoon element there’s also something quite conceptual or cerebral going on in this series. All the images incorporate a black square. This is a reference to the clack square painted by the Russian Suprematist painter, Kazimir Malevich, made in 1915. In retrospect, art historians take this to be a founding work and moment in modern art for completely rejecting all vestiges of realism or figuratism. Malevich intended it to be the end of that tradition of painting and the start of a new tradition of pure abstraction and sometimes referred to it not as a square but as a void.

So why is there a black square in all these works? Because Bennett is asking whether any cultural artefact can truly inhabit a void, in other words whether any artwork can escape from the time and place of its making, escape from its history and transcend its cultural context. The general idea is that, no, it can’t, and this might be more true of Australian modern art than many other types…

A different work by Bennett is assigned a room of its own. Dominating the room is a characteristic example of the traditional heroic white conception of the discovery, claim and colonising of Australia, ‘The Founding of Australia 1788’ by Algernon Talmage from as late as 1937

‘The Founding of Australia 1788’ by Algernon Talmage (1937)

As you might expect any modern artist to do, Bennett subverts and interrogates this kind of pompous white triumphalism with a version of his own, titled Possession Island (Abstraction) (based on a different painting, ‘Captain Cook Taking Possession of the Australian Continent On Behalf of the British Crown (1770)’ by John Alexander Gilfillan).

Possession Island (Abstraction) by Gordon Bennett (1991)

As you can see, a once fluid realistic oil painting has been converted into a stippled black-and white image in the style of a blown-up newspaper illustration. The coloured bands do three things: 1) they mask the only indigenous figure in the original painting, who has thus been erased in the same way the indigenous presence was erased for so many centuries. All that is left is the drinks tray he was holding for the refreshment of his white master. 2) The precise rectangular shapes may or may not be a reference to Malevich, which I’ve just explained. 3) But I was intrigued to learn that the colours of the blocks are those of the Aboriginal flag. In my ignorance, I didn’t know that there was an aboriginal flag.

There’s another aspect to this. Tate have cannily displayed these works in a room with a window looking out across the River Thames towards St Paul’s Cathedral, which is bang opposite Tate Modern. Insofar as St Paul’s is a seat of state, religious and ceremonial power of the Australian colonial power, Britain, the sight of it juxtaposed with these stories of colonial repression and brutality amounts to a form of geographical satire.

View across the River Thames and Millennium Bridge to St Paul’s Cathedral from a room in Tate Modern

A bit more subtly, the window in question is a tall narrow one whose shape echoes the tall red rectangle in Bennett’s work. Conceptual and visual echoes and ironies are bouncing round this room.

Yhonnie Scarce

Arguably the best items in the exhibition are the set of enormous hanging fabrics by Yhonnie Scarce. Scarce is an Australian glass artist who is a descendant of the Kokatha and Nukunu people of South Australia. The idea behind the works is fairly simple but results in extraordinary pieces which, for me, dominated the exhibition.

Each work is a hugely magnified antique photo of members of Scarce’s family, blown up and printed onto bed linen. These are then displayed alongside blown glass artefacts relating to the images. In the photo below, the work on the left is ‘Remember Royalty: Papa Willy’ and is a photograph from 1920 showing Scarce’s great-grandfather, William, at work shearing sheep. The image is printed onto an antique woollen blanket, an obvious reference to, or invocation of, this labour. He worked hard all his life to support his 12 (!) children. The toolbox below the blanket contains actual tools (I noted shiny new spanners) mingled with glass-blown replicas of yams, traditional foodstuff of Will’s Kokatha people.

Two works from the series ‘Remember Royalty’ by Yhonnie Scarce

The work on the right follows the same patter: it is a vintage photo taken in around 1911 at the Koonibba Mission Schoolhouse and showing Scarce’s maternal grandparents and children. The wall label tells us that mission schools like this were dotted all across Australia where indigenous people were exposed to brutal regimes of cultural assimilation i.e. forced to wear European clothes and practice Christianity. In another act of care and tribute to her ancestors, the trunk below the printed sheet contains glass balls, each of which contains a horizon line and constellations: the artist is returning to her ancestors the connection with their land which deprived of during their lives.

There are four of these huge photo-sculptures (in the other two, Scarce’s blown glass artefacts are sewn into the fabric of the photos), and because of the immediacy of the images, and the directness and poignancy of their family stories, these were, for me, the standout works in the exhibition.

Three videos

1. Vernon Ah Kee

At the far end of the exhibition is a big long darkened room containing Vernon Ah Kee’s four-screen video installation ‘tall man 2010’. This splices together news footage of the protests and riots following the death in custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee on 26 November 2004, on Palm Island, an island off the coast of Queensland. Doomadgee died in police custody as a result of multiple injuries. In the protests that followed, the police station, local courthouse and police barracks were burnt down. Sergeant Chris Hurley, who arrested Doomadgee, was tried and acquitted for causing his death.

One of the central figures leading the protests was Lex Wotton, a member of the Palm Island Aboriginal Council. Ah Kee presents him as the ‘tall man’ – an Aboriginal term for a bogey man or spirit who elicits the truth from wrongdoers. Wotton later won a lawsuit, alongside other Palm Island residents, which found that the police had illegally discriminated against them. The State of Queensland paid them A$30 million compensation.

So, from what the wall labels tell us, it seems to be an equivalent of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May 2020. It is typical of the American-centric nature of all our media that the Floyd incident and movement it gave rise to massively entered Britain’s consciousness and cultural sphere (houses round where I live still have ‘Black Lives Matter’ posters in their windows) while the death of Doomadgee didn’t cause a ripple.

Still clip from ‘tall man’ by Vernon Ah Kee (2010)

On a practical level, the footage is continually punctuated by the bars used in the creation and editing of film footage and by the loud sonic whine which indicates to editors that there is no soundtrack. Unfortunately I have mild tinnitus and found this very loud, penetrating high-pitched whine made it impossible for me to be in the room.

2. Bonita Ely

In 1979 eco-feminist Bonita Ely travelled to Jabiluka in the Northern Territory and filmed this performance, titled ‘Jabiluka U02’. Here the Mirrar indigenous community has waged a decades-long campaign against plans to mine uranium in the Kimberley flood plain. To be frank, watching her dig a pile of sand in what looks like a park is a little underwhelming. But the wall label links it with ongoing struggles against Australia’s mining corporations, singling out two current instances: in 2019 the Australian government allowed the Adani company to develop a coal mine that will endanger the Barrier Reef. And in 2020 the mining company Rio Tinto deliberately destroyed rock shelters in the Juukan Gorge, holy to the Puutu Kunti Kurram and Pinikura peoples for thousands of years. I did hear about this in the British media. Why aren’t Rio Tinto boycotted? Why aren’t the people responsible for vandalism like this named and shamed?

3. Peter Kennedy and John Hughes

This is a long video which is shown at a completely different scale from the Vernon Ah Kee; that is shown across a huge screen dominating a very big wall; the Kennedy and Hughes video, by contrast, is shown on an old-fashioned TV. It addresses the history of white management, capitalism and institutionalised denial of indigenous rights, but I found it completely impossible to watch because of the highly repetitive, droning high-pitched soundtrack which eclipsed the contents and gave me a headache. Must be better ways to get your message across, guys.

Tracey Moffat

Filling one side of the big central room is a series of 24 large photos by Tracey Moffatt titled ‘Up in the Sky’, shot in 1997. They depict life in a rough and ready Outback town. The whole series can be viewed on the Tate website.

The curators say the subject of the series is the forced separations of Aboriginal families by government agencies i.e. taking indigenous babies from their families and giving them to white foster parents or, as in some of these photos, Catholic convents. The abducted babies became known as the Stolen Generations.

From ‘Up in the sky’ by Tracey Moffatt (1997)

But if you look at the whole set you’ll see that Moffatt’s photos do much more than that. Most of the photos are of poor whites, what Americans call ‘trailer trash’. They prompted upset and outrage at the gross injustice of all those stolen babies and broken families. But the pictures of the immediate present also triggered feelings about living that kind of life, in that kind of place, not dissimilar from the feelings triggered by the Chris Killip exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery. Imagine living there, in a one-horse town where the horse died long ago, leaving desolation and wasted lives.

It triggered one big thought which goes slightly against the grain of the show: this is that, whereas all of the works by all of the artists in the exhibition address the injustices done to and the tragedies suffered by the indigenous people, nowhere (I think) is there mention of the injustice done to the white people sent to Australia. Almost all of them were convicts or the soldiers sent to guard them.

According to Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore, some 160,000 convicts were sent from Britain to Australia during the 50-year existence of ‘The System’ of transportation, most of them the poorest of the poor who had never been more than ten miles from their places of birth. Suddenly they were transported to a different planet.

Imagine being a nineteen-year-old woman sentenced to transportation for stealing a loaf of bread, wrenched away from your family and place of birth and familiar surroundings and sent half way round the world in the company of criminal and violent strangers to a completely alien, unfamiliar and unfriendly landscape. Imagine being the young soldiers sent to guard them.

My point is that there’s a kind of double injustice at work here. First the injustice and cruelty of the forced transportation of over a hundred thousand Britons. And then the behaviour of these scared, angry, brutalised Brits, to the relatively defenceless native peoples they discovered. Brutality upon brutality. Horror doubled. It’s a terrible historical legacy and this exhibition really drums into your mind multiple threads of injustice, violence and cultural erasure which continue up to the present day.

Video

Most exhibition promotional videos are a zippy 30 seconds long. This one, at 14 minutes, is a more in-depth consideration of the issues and starts by explaining the 1992 High Court ruling in favour of Torres Strait Islander, featuring the man who brought the case, land-rights activist Edward Koiki Mabo, before going on to describe the practice of some of the artists in the show.

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by Simon on May 1, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Australia, Exhibition

Tagged A Preponderance of Aboriginal Blood, A Year In Art, A Year in Art: 1973, Aboriginal rock art, aborigine, Adani, AIATSIS map of Indigenous Australia. David R. Horton, Algernon Talmage, art, Australia, Australian High Court, Black Lives Matter, Bonita Ely, Captain Cook Taking Possession of the Australian Continent On Behalf of the British Crown, Chris Killip, colonisation, contemporary art, cultural erasure, Dale Harding, Dale Horton, Edward Koiki Mabo, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Empire Parliamentary Association, exhibition, fullblood, George Floyd, Gordon Bennett, half-blood, Helen Johnson, How to Cross the Void, indigenous Australians, indigenous people, Jabiluka, Jabiluka U02, John Alexander Gilfillan, John Hughes, John Mawurndjul, Judy Watson, Juukan Gorge, Kazimir Malevich, Kokatha people, Koonibba Mission Schoolhouse, Kuninjku, Lex Wotton, Malevich, Millennium Bridge, Mirrar people, modern art, Mulrunji Doomadgee, Nukunu people, Palm Island Aboriginal Council, Peter Kennedy, Pinikura people, Politics, Possession Island (Abstraction), Puutu Kunti Kurram people, quadroon, Queensland Native Police Force, Remember Royalty, Richard Doyle, Rio Tinto, Seat of Power, Sergeant Chris Hurley, St Paul's cathedral, Suprematism, tall man 2010, Tate Britain, Tate Modern, terra nullius, the black square, the Stolen Generations, Torres Island, Tracey Moffat, Transportation, Up in the Sky, Vernon Ah Kee, Yhonnie Scarce, Yuwi Country

Posted by Simon on May 1, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/05/01/a-year-in-art-australia-1992-tate-modern/

Maria Bartuszová @ Tate Modern

Born in Prague, Slovak artist Maria Bartuszová (1936 to 1996) spent most of her career in the central European Slovak city of Košice, the second-largest city in Slovakia near the borders of Hungary and Ukraine. Here she developed and experimented with relatively small-scale abstract sculptures, the overwhelming majority of them using white plaster cast in organic rounded shapes. To enter the four rooms of this retrospective is to enter a world of whiteness, comprising scores of mysterious, self-contained ovoid shapes, some incorporating metal or wood, but the great majority a pure, smooth, round whiteness. At first glance they might almost be bones or fossils in a natural history museum.

Installation view of Maria Bartuszová @ Tate Modern

The four rooms of this exhibition bring together works rarely exhibited before in the UK to create an light and airy survey of Bartuszová’s career from the early 1960s, when she began her experimentation with casting, to the late 1980s, when she was making bigger, more varied and more site-specific art.

During her working life Bartuszová created around 500 sculptures, ranging from numerous small organic forms to larger commissions for public spaces, as well as works designed to be integrated into landscapes. They have titles like ‘egg’, ‘drop’, ‘folded figure’ though many are so pure and abstract they can’t even manage a title and are simply labelled ‘untitled’.

‘Folded Figure’ by Maria Bartuszová (1965) Collection of Amy Gold and Brett Gorvy

Filling balloons with plaster

They look like this because in the 1960s Bartuszová began experimenting with taking balloons or even condoms, and pouring plaster into them in order to create smooth, white balloon shapes. Because the plaster obviously weighted down and distorted the balloons, creating a smooth flowing ‘blobby’ effect, she called this playful approach ‘gravistimulated shaping’.

As an experiment she sometimes dunked the setting plaster in water which also had the effect of smoothing the surface. The early sculptures made using this method evoke natural and living forms, such as drops of water and, above all, eggs, although other biological or anatomical shapes may suggest themselves to the viewer.

‘Untitled’ by Maria Bartuszová (1973) Tate © The Archive of Maria Bartuszová, Košice

Casting balloons in plaster

In the 1980s Bartuszová inverted her practice, so to speak. Instead of blowing wet plaster into balloons, she started doing the (more obvious) approach of blowing up the balloons and casting the plaster around them. She called this ‘pneumatic casting’.

The most obvious change was in the surface texture of the casts which went from being beautifully smooth to becoming relatively rough and textured. But there were other implications, the most striking of which was that, having made the case, because it’s so fragile, you can crack or fragment it, and suddenly create a completely different psychovisual impact. Instead of smooth completeness, you have fragmentation and craggy edges. And she went on to discover that, the bigger the balloon (she took to using meteorological balloons), the more holes you could make, and the more strange and evocative the resulting shape would appear.

‘Egg, but not Columbus’s’ by Maria Bartuszová (1987) Courtesy Slovak National Gallery, SNG

Endless eggs

This turned out to be a highly resourceful strategy, in that:

It can be scaled up: you can make massive cracked shell sculptures this way and the bigger the sculpture, the more elaborate the sense of shells within shells within shells.
She also discovered that you can add together these balloon-shaped fragments to create ‘multicellular’ shapes and, insofar as they are cracked and exposed, allowed her to explore countless types of empty space and ‘negative volumes’. She described each result as ‘a tiny void full of a tiny infinite universe’.

Looking at them now it suddenly occurs to me they look a bit like the clotted balls of frogspawn, but somehow frozen and cracked. Or maybe the models of complex molecules I saw in school chemistry lessons and you see in scientific literature. She referred to them as ‘endless eggs’. Here she is in her studio, in the 1980s.

Maria Bartuszová in her studio with sculptures, Košice, Slovakia 1987 by unknown photographer

The damaged eggs really have a very different vibe from the balloon casts. The latter feel smooth and complete, and very sensuous to look at. Freud says that looking is an evolutionary advanced form of touching, and you can feel the smoothness and calming weight of the earlier shapes in your mind’s eye. But the cracked shells, obviously enough, feel jagged and damaged, empty and lifeless and, somehow, spent.

Add wire

The next step down this route was to introduce metal wire. If you look closely at the photo above, you can see that that’s what she’s doing: finalising the arrangement of twines of fine wire in, around and through a complex congeries of cracked egg shapes.

‘Untitled’ by Maria Bartuszová (1985) Tate © The Archive of Maria Bartuszová, Košice

This apparently simple addition adds a whole new layer of complexity to the works. The untitled piece I’ve shown, above, is the work that Tate has used on the poster for this exhibition and it is certainly very characteristic of this phase or branch of her work, but I’m not sure I like it.

I very much like abstract art, and geometric shapes and I know what they mean when the curators point out that many of the balloon ones are small enough to imagine cradling in your hands. But something about the ragged asymmetricality, the unpredictability, and the jagged surfaces of the broken shells made me uneasy. If my mind’s eye warmed to the smooth curves of the full-bodied balloon shapes, it recoiled from the broken, barbed feel of these works.

In the country

In the 1980s Bartuszová moved to a house in Košice with a studio and a large garden on a hillside. There are photos which show a rambling sloping garden with small trees into which she has inserted some of the multiple balloon works.

Tree by Maria Bartuszová (1987) consisting of a plum tree, plaster, string, plastic, foil and paper, in the artist’s garden in Košice, Slovakia © Center for Contemporary Arts (NCSU), Bratislava, Slovakia. Courtesy the Archive of Maria Bartuszová, Košice and Alison Jacques Gallery, London. Photo by Gabriel Kladek

After the Soviet crackdown on the Prague Spring of 1968, many artists retreated from political or social statements and found refuge in nature and spirituality. Bartuszová took to spirituality, reading about Zen Buddhism (as so many people did in the early 1970s) and, more to the point, began incorporating natural objects in her work.

Here is a large branch half-drowned in plaster to create the impression of snow. I liked these ‘snow casts’ because they look like branches in snow such as I saw just a few months ago when London had heavy snowfall, and because I love trees. She called the series of works exploring this approach ‘Melting Snow’.

‘Tree’ by Maria Bartuszová (photo by the author)

Metal sculptures

So far I’ve followed Bartuszová’s work along one particular avenue of development but there were, in fact, other strands and threads to her work. For a start there’s a whole different strand made up of works case in metal which obviously have a very different vibe from the cool white plaster works.

Folded Figure II (Haptic) by Maria Bartuszová (1967) © The Archive of Maria Bartuszová, Košice. Photo courtesy Michael Brzezinski

Ordinarily, I like small, geometric, metal abstract sculptures very much indeed but somehow these cold metal objects felt so far removed from the warm mental feeling given by the plaster casts – from the central logic of her development – that I recoiled from them, in the same way that I wasn’t sure whether I liked the cracked eggshells or their barbed wire finish meshes.

Bound and tied sculptures

More in line with the soft mood of the plaster casts was a kind of hybrid form she developed, where smooth, gloop plaster casts interacted with metal or wood. Most often this took the form of wire, or sometimes string, twined round eggs shapes to make them bulge, very much into the shape of cells at the earliest stage of cell multiplication when the nascent life form consists of only 2 or 4 or 8 cells. You can see examples on the table in the first photo at the top of this review, or in the photo below.

Untitled by Maria Bartuszová (1986) © The Archive of Maria Bartuszová, Košice

Again, I didn’t like the use of the thin wire or twine. Inexplicably and irrationally, they made me feel tied up in wire, made me feel breathless and constrained. According to the curators, these many objects tied and bound and wired symbolised for Bartuszová ‘the bonds and constraints of human relationships’. The curators only mention in passing that she experienced ‘challenges in her marriage’ which eventually broke down and ended in 1984. Quite.

The curators make these works out to be sophisticated and complicated meditations on or expressions of the way personal and familial relationships are interconnected with nature, they way they capture the trace of a moment in solid form, in a tactile fragment of time. That her work is a thinking-through of sensual shapes, an extended exploration of feeling through sculptural practice. Fair enough. But the wire-snagged endless eggs made me feel like I was ripping my hand on barbed wire and the wire-bound cells made me feel asphyxiated.

On the other hand, I liked what you could call the ‘belted’ works, where the constraining force isn’t wire but more like a belt. Her work along this line of investigation, in the 1980s, continued with the themes of binding and pressure but incorporated many more materials such as acrylic, string, bronze, rubber and wood. Basically, I found these funny and charming.

Untitled by Maria Bartuszová (1972 to 1974) Courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Social art

Bartuszová left a legacy of some 500 sculptures which stimulate, please or disturb in their quiet but steadily experimental, abstract way. About 80 are on display in this exhibition. But there are (at least) two other distinct aspects of her practice.

In the mid-1960s Bartuszová had branched out to experiment with small sculptures composed of interlocking shapes, many from her trademark plaster (such as ‘Folded Figure’, 1965) but also series cast from bronze and aluminium. These were conceived as 3-D jigsaw puzzles which could be taken apart and reassembled.

Installation view of Maria Bartuszová @ Tate Modern showing some of her interlocking 3-D puzzles (photo by the author)

Early in the show there’s a series of black and white photos recording how some of these works were used in innovative workshops for blind and partially sighted children. Rather than summarise I’ll quote the wall label in its entirety:

In 1976 and 1983 art historian Gabriel Kladek organised and delivered a series of workshops for blind and partially-sighted children. A key element was the use of Bartuszová’s hand-sized and enlarged sculptures. The sculptures could be handled and several of them taken apart and reassembled. Kladek photographed the workshops, capturing the young participants’ joyful exploration of the sculptures. The workshops encouraged the children to experience different shapes and textures through touch, differentiating between geometric and organic forms. Prioritising movement, the body, touch, action and active engagement with sculpture, the use of these sculptures highlights the artist’s forward-thinking, participatory approach.

Sweet, huh? But would only work with the smooth and rounded forms, not so much with the fragile eggs, let alone objects bound with wire and twine.

But Bartuszová got involved in a surprising number of public commissions. She lived in a communist country and all artists and writers were expected to make practical contributions to society. Since these are obviously site-specific and generally very big, none of these big public pieces are included in the exhibition, we have to be content with (generally old black-and-white) photos and explanatory wall labels.

Thus we are told about:

a bronze fountain she created for the Institute for Physically Disabled Children in Košice (1967 to 1971)
monumental reliefs she created for the Southern Slovak Paper Mill (1973 to 1975) and Eastern Slovak Steelworks (1974)

There are photos of her in situ at these locations supervising the creation of the works. In addition there are also photos of the futuristic models she designed for playground climbing frames and slides, and a set of photos recording the creation of a monumental public sculpture titled ‘Metamorphosis, Two-Part Sculpture’ (1982) at the entrance to the Košice crematorium.

These are sort of interesting mainly because they show how brutalist, post-war modernism was very similar either side of the Iron Curtain, suggesting that it had less to do with the creativity of individual artists than a certain design logic emanating from modern building materials, technologies and production methods. If you have lots of steel or pre-stressed concrete available along with large-scale factories and workshops for its production and design, then certain stripped down shapes and designs logically follow, whether you’re in Slovakia or San Francisco.

A photo of her at a large workshop, cleaning snow off one of her slides, and of a partially sighted child paying with one of her forms, can be see at the Tate magazine article, A Futurist of Form.

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by Simon on April 28, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Sculpture

Posted by Simon on April 28, 2023

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Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle Of Thread And Rope @ Tate Modern

‘I am interested in the feeling when confronted by the woven object. I am interested in the motion and waving of the woven surfaces. I am interested in every tangle of thread and rope and every possibility of transformation.’
(Magdalena Abakanowicz, 1971)

Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930 to 2017) was one of Poland’s most famous modern artists. This fairly big (6 room) exhibition at Tate Modern aims to give a comprehensive overview of her career. It follows a simple chronological order, showing the artists evolving steadily through a series of explorations and innovations.

Abakanowicz began her career more interested in weaving and fabric design than in painting or sculpture. She graduated from the Academy of Plastic Arts in Warsaw with a specialization in weaving in 1954. Weaving was encouraged because it was the kind of ‘craft’ or ‘folk art’ which the communist regime supported.

Room 1

This displays a number of early works from the start of the 1960s, flat woven tapestries in abstract patterns, using dark colours, generally shades of brown. They reminded me of American 1950s Abstract Expressionism. Reproduced as flat images, as below, they remind me of 1950s modern jazz album covers.

Brown Textile 21 by Magdalena Abakanowicz (1963) © Fundacja Marty Magdaleny Abakanowicz Kosmowskiej i Jana Kosmowskiego, Warsaw

Except that they’re not paintings and they’re not flat, they’re lumpy, bumpy woven fabrics. Anyway, mildly interesting though this first room is, it’s just preliminary work, preparing for you what comes next.

Room 2

This becomes a bit clearer in room 2, which features really massive tapestries but now made out of very coarse-woven fabric and with 3-D bulges and folds and joins. Tapestry as proto-sculpture.

Helena 1 by Magdalena Abakanowicz (1965) © Fundacja Marty Magdaleny Abakanowicz Kosmowskiej i Jana Kosmowskiego, Warsaw

During the mid to late 1960s Abakanowicz first emerged as a leader of the ‘New Tapestry’ movement in Europe. Artists associated with the movement began to claim fibre as a valid medium for the creation of art. Her interest in the tactility of fabric, in its potential for emerging from the flat plane, its ability to have fold and seams and wrinkles, is clearer in this example.

Installation view of Magdalena Abakanowicz @ Tate Modern (photo by the author)

Room 3. The Abakans

But it’s only when you walk into room 3 that you get the full Monty, the impact of her innovation, the riotous new form which made her reputation. For it took about a decade for Abakanowicz’s art to evolve into its full flourishing as enormous, three-dimensional sculptures made out of thick, heavy, coarsely woven fabric (sisal, sometimes incorporating wool and horsehair) created and hung in a variety of strange, portentous shapes.

Installation view of Magdalena Abakanowicz @ Tate Modern (photo by the author)

Suddenly these are objects to walk among, to wander between and around and enjoy their strange, heavy, ragged shape and heft and mystery, which is why the curators call this room ‘the fibrous forest’. This was still the 1960s and critics didn’t know how to categorise or even name these pieces. In 1964 one critic, Elżbieta Żmudzka, suggested the term ‘Abakan’ to describe them, a term the artist happily accepted and incorporated into her practice. Altogether, there are 26 of these massive, looming, strange shapes in the exhibition.

‘The Abakans were a kind of bridge between me and the outside world. I could surround myself with them; I could create an atmosphere in which I somehow felt safe because they were my world.’

Abakanowicz began to exhibit internationally and win recognition and prizes: in 1965 she won a gold medal for applied art at the São Paulo Biennial and, on the back of this, was appointed professor of weaving at the Poznań art academy, where she taught until.

But the thing about these big international expos is that is you are brought into contact with a wide variety of gallery spaces and installation possibilities. The sheer size of the Abakans, and the way they can be arranged in patterns or shapes, to make mini-mazes naturally lent themselves to creating relationships or ‘situations’ within the gallery. She was one among many 1960s artists who paved the way for modern installation art. The exhibition includes photos of some dramatic examples.

Artist in front of Bois le Duc, Provinciehuis van Noord-Brabant, ’s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands (1972) © Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation. Photographer: Jan Nordahl

The curators emphasise that, just as she refused to be limited by conventional ideas of weaving and fabric, so she refused to be bound by the specifics of the time and place where she happened to have been born, namely the repressive communist regime in Poland, but was determined to become an international figure and travel as widely as possible. In fact she went on to cross the Iron Curtain more than any other Eastern Bloc artist and took part in hundreds of exhibitions worldwide.

The forests of childhood

About here is where you realise the importance to her of Abakanowicz’s childhood and youthful memories. For Abakanowicz was the daughter of an aristocratic family and was brought up in a manor house deep in the Polish forest deep (near the village of Krępa, 140 kilometres from Warsaw). For her, then, the natural world was a mysterious forest of enormous trees, of strange shapes looming through the mist, none of which scare her, all of which, years later as an adult in Warsaw, she remembered as comforting and healing presences.

‘Strange powers dwelled in the woods and the lakes that belonged to my parents. Apparitions and inexplicable forces had their laws and their spaces…’.

The Abakans, therefore, are not monsters but healing, if strange and mysterious, presences.

The artist conveying how the Abakans have a protective, reassuring, hide-and-seek quality

And:

‘The Abakans were my escape from categories in art. They could not be classified…Larger than me, they were safe like the hollow trunk of the old willow I could enter as a child in search of hidden secrets.’

Worth mentioning, maybe, that I really really wanted to touch and stroke the coarse, nubbly surface of these huge objects and, where there was an opening, slip inside like a naughty child playing hide and seek. Needless to say, not only are you not allowed to hide in the Abakans, you are not allowed to even touch them – I was ticked off by a gallery attendant for just leaning quite close to one – which kind of undermines all her claims for the Abakans as being warm and comforting presences. In the modern gallery, curators ensure that they are cold and clinical and aloof, bringing out their spectacular side but stifling the warmth and comfort which the artist talks about so much.

For these childhood memories developed into a deep reverence for nature, and an identification of her artistic practice – strands and fibres and weaving – with the basic elements of the natural world.

‘I see fibre as the basic element constructing the organic world on our planet… It is from fibre that all living organisms are built, the tissue of plants, leaves and ourselves… our nerves, our genetic code, the canals of our veins, our muscles… We are fibrous structures.’

Room 4. Abakans and beyond

The next room is even more dramatic, with half a dozen huge works, which have abandoned the brown and ochre earth hues of the previous work for bold gold and red. The examples here seem much more distinctive and characteristic than in the previous room, that’s to say they have far more individual character, although their titles tend to be as minimal as possible, for example ‘Abakan red’ and ‘Abakan orange’.

Installation view of Magdalena Abakanowicz @ Tate Modern (photo by the author)

Rope

The room also contains specific sub-genres or sets of other types of fabric sculpture which spun off from her main concern. Several of these involved rope, which became a more important material for her in the 1970s. I love art made from found objects, I love the Arte Povera movement from the same period (the early 1970s) in Italy, and so I warmed to her description:

‘Along the Vistula River one could find old, discarded ropes. They had their own history. They became my material. I pulled out thread, washed and dyed them on our gas stove.’

According to the wall label:

The work shown here is a total ‘situation’ devised by the artist, combining a pair of giant garment-like, hanging forms that have been created from industrially woven cloth and ropes that spill out onto the floor. The hollow ‘garments’ evoke a protective shell or coat, while the entwined fibres of rope suggest the complexities of the nervous system.

‘Set of Black Organic Forms’ by Magdalena Abakanowicz (1974) (photo by the author)

These several works interested me because I just happen to have seen the exhibition of work by Barbara Chase-Riboud at Serpentine North which is very much about cascades of fabric and ropes, some unspooling from the main sculpture across the floor. Exactly as here.

On the whole I liked the Chase-Riboud more because her ropes and plaits dangle from large, abstract metallic pelmets. These are interesting in their own right as metal sculptures, but the juxtaposition of hard angular metal with flowing plaited fabric creates a very powerful dynamic effect. Compared with the Chase-Riboud, I found some of the Abakanowicz a bit, well, weak. The two huge black ones, above, looked like enormous coat hangers to me. Others were more powerful.

Abakan Yellow by Magdalena Abakanowicz (1970) © Fundacja Marty Magdaleny Abakanowicz Kosmowskiej i Jana Kosmowskiego, Warsaw

It’s a mild irony throughout the exhibition that Abakanowicz is cited as saying she is not a very eloquent explainer of her work and that she leaves it to others to define and describe, and yet, whenever she is quoted describing her work, she is in fact wonderfully eloquent:

‘The rope to me is like a petrified organism, like a muscle devoid of activity. Moving it, changing its position and arrangement, touching it, I can learn its secrets and the multitude of its meaning…It carries its own story within itself, it contributes this to its surroundings.’

Like everything she did, this use of rope was applied on an often large scale, in one-off installations, leading visitors around the works and sometimes even connecting different buildings. For example, at the 1972 Edinburgh International Festival she deployed a long stretch of painted red cable winding throughout the city.

The more you read, the more you realise how a lot of her work was very site-specific, created for particular exhibitions or events. What we’re seeing in this Tate Modern exhibition is only a fragment of the hundreds of pieces and installations she created in different galleries and cities across half a century.

Room 5. Abakany, the movie

In 1969 Abakanowicz collaborated with the avant-garde film director Jarosław Brzozowski and experimental composer Bogusław Schäffer to create the film Abakany. Alas, I can’t find this anywhere on the internet. There’s an alcove or viewing area at the exhibition, set off to one side where you can sit and watch the entire thing.

It was filmed at the sand dunes of Slowiński National Park in Łeba on the Baltic coast of Poland. The artist planted Abakans in the sand, supported by wooden armatures. The film captures the effect of the fibres blowing in the wind. It is a typical memento if its time, youthful and exuberant and optimistic. The beach scenes are interspersed with indoor sequences showing Abakanowicz working in her studio and gallery space.

The abstract modernist soundtrack prompted a thought. The wall labels are continually telling us how important the natural world and natural imagery was to Abakanowicz. Well, how cool it would have been to have included soundscapes in the exhibition. If, especially in the section of big shaggy hanging shapes which they call the ‘fibrous forest’, they had played an ambient recording of an actual Polish forest, the sounds of wind, distant bird calls, maybe occasional patters of rain on leaves. That would have helped it feel a little less cold and sterile.

Invented anatomy – Embryology

One corner of the coloured Abakan room is taken up with a distribution of fabric bags or sacks, of all sizes, the big ones poo-shaped, the smaller ones like smooth pebbles or rocks. A rummage, a spill of rough fabric containers, creating a rubble of soft boulders. A soft rockery

Installation view of Magdalena Abakanowicz showing ‘Embryology (1978 to 80) @ Tate Modern (photo by the author)

These are from the 1980s. By then Abakanowicz was bored of being labelled a ‘fibre-artist’ and began to use other materials to make increasingly figurative sculptures. In 1978 she made a new series of ambiguous forms titled Embryology, made from a combination of fabrics and fibres bundled and bound into rounded, organic masses. 800 of these forms were originally shown together at the Venice Biennale in 1980, when Abakanowicz was invited to exhibit in the Polish national pavilion. The curators quote another one of her eloquent explanations:

‘The contents, the inside, the interior of soft matter fascinated me… By ‘soft’, I meant organic, alive. What is organic? What makes it alive? In which region of throbbing begins the individuality of matter, its independent existence? …They were completing my physical need to create bellies, organs, an invented anatomy. Finally, a soft landscape of countless pieces related to each other.’

Embryology is the title of this specific work but also the name she gave to a wider idea she felt she was exploring. As the curators put it:

Although Abakanowicz did not identify herself as a feminist, her woven sculptures have been seen by curators and writers as emblematic of powerful female imagery and art-making. Birth, life, vulnerability, and decay are suggested by forms that resemble nests, wombs and eggs.

As it happens I’ve been reading about gender essentialism, the umbrella term given to the notion that gender differences are rooted in nature and biology. My understanding is that this – the notion that women are somehow more intrinsically associated with reproduction, giving birth, nurturing and so on – is deprecated in modern feminist theory. My understanding is that in modern feminist theory ‘gender’ is regarded as something which is socially constructed and therefore can be changed. In the eyes of leading theorists such as Judith Butler ‘gender’ has a performative aspect i.e. we create our gender through our behaviour. This is obviously a variation on existentialist notions that our destinies are not foretold and that we create who we are through our actions, and indeed the basic idea of the social construction of gender is routinely traced back to Simone de Beauvoir who, as long ago as 1949, summed it up in a famous quote, ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’.

I know all this mainly because my daughter, the Sociology student, has drummed it into me in repeated conversations. Regarded from this perspective, Abakanowicz’s deep interest in wombs, fertility and so on seems rather dated, rather conservative. (Discuss.)

Room 6. Timeline of Abakanowicz’s career

The two big rooms showing these colourful Abakans and the Embryology pieces are the centrepiece of the exhibition, full of dramatic masterworks. The final room, number 6, initially seems to be something of an anti-climax. It is much smaller, narrower, and almost entirely consists of texts on the wall, lots of photos and a couple of videos. There’s only one art work, radically different from everything before as it contains no fabric but is made of wood and metal.

It took a while for me to realise what was happening, to realise that this exhibition, all the stuff we’ve seen in the first 5 or 6 rooms and alcoves, only covers the first half of her career. It only takes us up to the 1980s, whereas Abakanowicz carried on working and producing till the end of her life in 2017, over thirty years later.

This final room is by way of being a timeline or chronology of her entire career, up to and including the 1980s, but then covering the final 30 years which the main exhibition doesn’t. From it we learn a lot more about her life which sheds life on what we’ve just seen. For example, fresh out of art school she found work in industry and took part in state-organised design exhibitions. Hmm. You can see how this experience would feed into her own confidence about creating large-scale installations and ‘environments’ a decade later.

The chronology brings out her extraordinary international success. In the 1970s she has 21 solo shows and participates in over 75 group exhibitions in Poland and worldwide. As early as 1973 she began moving beyond the Abakans, with a series of works titled Heads, Seated Figures and Backs. Insofar as these are obviously figurative works they mark quite a departure from what had gone before.

Exhibition view of Abakanowicz at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, showing Heads (1973 to 1975) and Seated Figures (1974 to 1979) Photo © Artur Starewicz/East News (1982)

In 1981 the communist Polish government declared martial law and this seems to have marked a darkening of her worldview or certainly of her work. In 1985 she began a series of anonymous, headless figures she called the Crowd series, and which she continued adding to until 2014. In 1987 she began a series she titled War Games (which she continued until 1995) where she used felled trees in the Masurian Lake District of Poland to create a total of 21 huge forms that suggest both weapons and bodies.

(It’s one of this series, Anasta, which is the sole piece included in this last, chronology room, but it isn’t really given the space for you to engage with or enjoy it, and now I understand why. All these later works were designed to be outdoors, in huge spaces, to breathe and interact with each other. This one feels cramped and confined.)

In their medium and design and purpose, these all feel completely different from the fabrics and Abakans which came before. During the 1990s she became increasingly interested in trees and forests, the medium they’re made out of (wood) and their ecological and spiritual meaning. In 1992 she began a series titled Hand-like Trees.

In 1998 she created Space of Unknown Growth, a massive land art project near Vilnius, Lithuania, consisting of 22 concrete ovoid forms. Of the half dozen or so large-scale projects which are captured by photographs in this room, this one was my favourite.

‘Space of Unknown Growth’, Europos Parkas, Vilnius, Lithuania. Photo © Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation. Photographer: Norbert Piwowarczyk. (1998)

But by now I’d realised why the exhibition is so oddly skewed towards the first half of her career and why nothing from the second half is on display here. It’s because the works from these last 30 years are, without exception, huge site-specific installations which cannot be moved and so cannot brought into a gallery space. All we can have of them is photos and descriptions on a wall.

Thus the wall labels tells us that in her late career Abakanowicz undertook major commissioned public sculptures around the world, each one of which responded to the unique landscape and history of each site. Thus:

Katarsis, 33 figures in bronze at the Giuliano Gori Collection, Santomato di Pistoia, Italy (1985)
Negev at the Billy Rose Sculpture Garden, Jerusalem, seven ten-ton wheels carved from the local limestone and dramatically positioned along the edge of a precipice (1987)
Space of Dragon, ten massive bronze animal heads created as a permanent public work for the Seoul Olympic Games (1988)
Sarcophagi in Glass Houses, giant wooden forms used for casting engines which she encased in a glass greenhouse-like structure, now permanently sited Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York (1994)
Hand-like Trees, an installation of huge bronze sculptures at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (1994)
Unrecognized, 112 headless, two-meter tall iron figures, each striding off in their own individual direction, situated in Park Cytadela, Poznań (2002)
Agora for Grant Park, Chicago, 106 headless figures, each nine-feet tall and cast in iron; begun in 2003 and completed in 2006 this was Abakanowicz’s largest – and last – permanent public project

OK, these bodiless legs have been cast with the fissured texture of tree bark, giving them an organic vibe, but you can see how very far she had come from any sense of the weaving and abstract shapes which dominated the first half of her career and which, in the shape of the 26 Abakans, dominate this exhibition.

Agora, 106 iron cast figures installed at Grant Park, Chicago. Photo: Kenneth E. Tanaka (2006)

The video

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by Simon on April 26, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Sculpture

Posted by Simon on April 26, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/04/26/magdalena-abakanowicz-every-tangle-of-thread-and-rope-tate-modern/

BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON @ the Saatchi Gallery

This is a huge, vast, awe-inspiring, ginormous exhibition, full of riches and surprises and fun. The Saatchi Gallery is housed in a grand and spacious building just off the King’s Road. It has three floors of exhibition space (ground, 1st and second floors), some of its rooms are huge, plus little side-rooms, nooks and crannies, corridors and the stairwells you go up to move between floors.

Every inch of this space, all the rooms and all the walls are covered with wild and vivid examples of the exhibitions subject, for this is a huge, comprehensive exhibition of Street Art and Graffiti. Wow, is it big! Wow, is there a lot, a huge amount, to take in! It aims to be the most comprehensive exhibition of graffiti and street art ever held in the UK and surely it is.

The Cosmic Cavern by Kenny Scharf – a dayglo party installation, inspired by the night-clubs and discos of the 1980s in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

To give a quick sense of the scale, here’s a list of some of the participating artists:

10Foot, AIKO, Alicia McCarthy, André Saraiva, BÄST, Beastie Boys, Beezer, Bert Krak, BLADE, BLONDIE, Bob Gruen, Brassaï, Broken Fingaz, C. R. Stecyk III, CES, Charlie Ahearn, Chaz Bojórquez, Chris FREEDOM Pape, Christopher Stead, Conor Harrington, CORNBREAD, Craig Costello, CRASH, DABSMYLA, Dash Snow, DAZE, DELTA, DONDI, Duncan Weston, Dr. REVOLT, Eric HAZE, Escif, Estevan Oriol, Fab 5 Freddy, FAILE, Felipe Pantone, FUME, FUTURA2000, Glen E. Friedman, GOLDIE, Gordon Matta-Clark, Gregory Rick, Guerrilla Girls, Gus Coral, Henry Chalfant, HuskMitNavn, IMON BOY, Jaimie D’Cruz, Jamie Reid, Janette Beckman, Jason REVOK, Jenny Holzer, Joe Conzo, John Ahearn & Rigoberto Torres, José Parlá, KATSU, KAWS, KC ORTIZ, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, KING MOB, LADY PINK, Lawrence Watson, Lisa Kahane, Malcolm McLaren, Maripol, Martin Jones, Martha Cooper, Maya Hayuk, Michael Holman, Michael Lawrence, Mister CARTOON, MODE 2, Ozzie Juarez, Pablo Allison, Pat Phillips, Paul Insect, POSE, PRIDE, PRIEST, Richard Colman, RISK, Robert 3D Del Naja, Roger Perry, Shepard Fairey, SHOE, Sophie Bramly, STASH, Stephen ESPO Powers, Stickymonger, SWOON, TAKI 183, Toby Mott, TOX, Tim Conlon, Timothy Curtis, Tish Murtha, Todd James, VHILS , ZEPHYR.

Site-specific mural by selected group of participating artists in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

Room after room is packed with paintings, artefacts, sculptures, installations. There are standard gallery rooms with paintings hanging discreetly on the wall but there’s also some vivid installations, namely a mock-up of a 1980s record shop whose walls are plastered with old posters, complete with racks holding real LPs you can browse through.

Interior of Trash records, including interactive record player, t-shirts, skateboards, and a multitude of youth culture ephemera in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

There’s a life-sized shop full of colourful clutter and bric-a-brac. There’s a corridor lined with black and red graffiti, which is illuminated in pinky-red light, giving you a full visual experience as you walk through it. One of the best bits is a room covered with dense black-and-white patterns giving you pleasantly zig-zaggy optical illusions, in the middle of which are some stands with squiggly over-coloured zoomorphic swirl sculptures. All pleasantly weird and wonderful and disorientating. Some toddlers in it at the same time as me loved it.

Into the New Realm with Felipe Pantone: installation in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

There are 13 rooms in all and each one is given a theme, within which what seem like floods of artists are explained and displayed.

The exhibition sets out to give a historical account of the genesis and development of modern graffiti sometime in the 1960s and from then on twines the development of graffiti in basically two places, London and America, specifically Los Angeles.

Accompanying the explanation of the development of street art was a lot about contemporary music, which also came in two essential flavours. First of all there’s what I thought was a surprising amount about English punk, with several walls made up of fabulously retro old posters for scores of punk bands.

There’s a lot about the Clash who in 1980 left sleepy London town for America where they entered into all kinds of collaborations with US hip-hop and rap bands. The show includes FUTURA2000’s legendary 30-foot-long painting, made on stage with The Clash during a performance.

There’s a passage devoted to Don Letts, film director, disc jockey and musician, collaborator with the Clash among many other groups. To my surprise a whole section is devoted to bad boy impresario, Malcolm McLaren. There’s a series of photos depicting the mutations of his shop on the Kings Road, Sex, which morphed into Seditionaries and several other incarnations, and then to his post-punk attempts to stay ahead of the trend by moving to America and exploiting the new sound of hip-hop.

Wall-sized photo of Malcolm McLaren and the arted-up boogie box he’s carrying in a display case in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

And then of course, there is hip-hop itself, with several galleries devoted to massive photos of key bands such as Public Enemy, NWA and many more rappers and DJs with colourful confrontational soubriquets, juxtaposed with the graffiti and street artists who inspired or were inspired by them.

Classic photo of Public Enemy by Glen E. Friedman in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

I found the jumping between black American culture in the 1980s and essentially white punk culture from the late 1970s quite confusing, but in a fun, disorientating kind of way. London, punk, tower blocks and concrete subways, the Clash, Mrs Thatcher and so on, I immediately get, relate to and remember. Life in some American ghetto, bling and baseball caps, and the complex social legacy of the civil rights movement or Black Power, a lot less so. In fact, not really at all.

I guess there are two ways to approach such a funfair, such a festival of art, such an overwhelm-ment of paintings, installations, set-ups and so on: one is to read the sensible wall labels, which attempt to give a coherent account of the birth and growth of street art, and go slowly mad with the level of detail. The other is just to stroll around and react to the scores and scores of vivid, vibrant setups and displays. Here’s the cluttered shop of bric-a-brac I mentioned. What has it got to do with graffiti, what is it trying to do? To be honest, I don’t know, but I loved it.

Puppet Workshop ‘Rubbish Stuff’ by Paul Insect in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

So far I’ve given the impression it’s mad and cluttered and busy, and some of the rooms or spaces definitely are. But others are the complete opposite, big traditional gallery spaces with sensible wood floors, white walls and all kinds of works hung on them.

Some are sets of paintings on wood (or concrete) because one of the things that comes over is that, among the 100+ artists on display, some began as street artists but have been going for 30 years or more and have evolved a more studied conventional practice. Hence a very conventional display which looks like this:

Installation view of BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

In other places, works have been sprayed directly onto the gallery walls by contemporary artists.

Wall art by Kenny Scharf, created specially for BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

Running the entire height of one of the big stairwells is what amounts to a dense wallpaper made up of hundreds and hundreds of photos of New York subways trains entirely covered with classic urban graffiti. There’s a room devoted to the work of Lawrence Watson (born 1963) who worked his way up through the New Musical Express and The Face, during which he was commissioned to do a photojournalism on the New York hip-hop school and took classic snaps of artists like Run-DMC, LL Cool J and Public Enemy.

Lawrence Watson installation featuring contact sheets and a performance video of one of the many hip-hop acts he photographed, at BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

There’s what you could call a busy but essentially orderly displays, such as this one of brightly coloured rectangles with catchy images or logos.

Site-specific poster installation LONDINIUM 2023 by C.R. Stecyk III in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

Then there’s politics because young people are constantly rebelling, bless them, before they grow up, get married, get a mortgage and kids and vote for people like Boris Johnson or Dominic Raab.

I warmed to the rebel imagery of the English punk strand of things, and especially liked a huge long wall covered in posters for punk bands and gigs in the late 70s, mixed up with posters execrating Maggie Thatcher and weathered old copies of the magazine Class War, which I used to get when I was a student, mainly for the hilarious covers, like the satirical covers of Private Eye, only with added venom. Ah, the Miners Strike, the Battle of Orgreave, bombs in Northern Ireland, Exocets over the Falklands, those were the days, eh?

Part of the punk poster collage in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

Some definitions

1. Graffiti

Graffiti is a name-based, usually illegal art work which can range from simple tag signatures to elaborate, multi-coloured designs.

Graffiti is probably as old as civilisation i.e. cities. We have graffiti from ancient Rome (displayed at the British Museum’s Nero exhibition). Modern-day graffiti arose in 1967 in New York and Philadelphia as a form based on repetition of the artist’s name or tag, embellished and stylised. Graffiti movements or communities arose round the increasingly popular. Generally, you gained respect the more daring and illegal your work.

Untitled by ZEPHYR, a venerable graffiti artist who’s been ‘working’ for over 50 years, in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

2. Street art

Street art is usually illegal work that falls outside the scope of ‘graffiti’, for example, image-based posters, stickers, stencils and installations. In a modern art context, street art dates from as recently as 2000 when a critical mass of artists, many of them originally graffiti-ists, crystallised the practice and attracted attention from curators and art scholars.

3. Murals

Murals are large-scale wall art, whether legal or illegal.

Exhibition contents

Let me try to give a more structured overview of this huge, unwieldy phantasmagoria by, basically, copying the press release.

The curators’ stated aim is to zero in on exceptional moments in the history of street art. These include the emergence of punk, the birth of hip-hop (celebrating its 50th anniversary, happy birthday, chaps) and street culture’s growing influence in fashion and film.

What comes over just from that preliminary introduction is that the exhibition is nowhere near complete. These are just a tiny fraction of works from an art form or movement which was spontaneous, undisciplined and often ephemeral by its nature. It’s a tiny selection of what could arguably be seen as the only really global universal art form, found as much in urban centres in Latin America, Africa, Russia, China, the Far East, as on the mean streets of Brixton or Philadelphia.

‘Toy Alley.. after the Murder’ installation by PRIEST in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

Anyway, the exhibition is divided into what the curators call ‘chapters’.

1. Vandal

First thing you see on entering the gallery is a graffiti-filled installation of what looks like a teenager’s bedroom, ‘The Vandal’s Bedroom’ by American artist Todd James, presumably to establish several themes: predominantly that this whole worldview is by and for youth, angry sullen teenagers and students or – in America more than England, I suspect – black kids from ghettos who felt outside all existing norms and social structures. The other theme being mess, it’s a mock-up of the bedroom of the messiest teenager in history, covered in posters and magazines and rubbish and sci-fi paperbacks but mostly festooned with scrawls and tags and ‘toons. Looked like my son’s bedroom on a good day.

Vandals Bedroom by Todd James in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

2. Music and art converge

The socio-political turmoil of the late 1970s and 80s, where the decline of cities met artistic resistance, a shift which was felt in both the US and UK. Youth culture responded by painting graffiti on walls and public transport, creating art that reflected and reimagined the times in an explosion of expression on the streets. It was about identity in the face of oppression, self-awareness, and self-discovery in a moment of a depleted economic outlook.

3. Dream galleries

A selection of American and European originators, photo documentarians and cultural icons who helped contextualize and spread graffiti culture around the world. In André Saraiva’s Dream series, there is a visual articulation of how graffiti, street art, hip-hop, punk, fashion and break-dancing all sprung from the late 1970s and early 1980s into the 90s and today, and became a hybrid celebration of underground culture.

Featured artists also include Mister CARTOON, known for his tattooing and Los Angeles murals; a Beastie Boys installation featuring fashion and ephemera from the band’s prolific history; and LADY PINK’s feminist murals, illustrations and paintings.

Feminist mural by LADY PINK, an Ecuador-born artists who started painting New York subway trains aged 15, in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

4. Legends

Hosts icons such as legendary NYC artist, Eric HAZE, a torch bearer for generations to come; a new large-scale painting by abstract expressionist artist José Parlá; advertisement posters by KAWS; and ephemera by Keith Haring, one of the most popular street artists of the 1980s.

5. Blockbusters

Works commissioned specifically for this exhibition by graffiti trailblazers Shepard Fairey, LA-based activist, and FAILE, a Brooklyn-based artistic duo taking over the streets of NYC since the late 90s.

6. Larger Than Life

A site-specific installation by LA-based icon Kenny Scharf, the largest version to date of his immersive and interactive installation Cosmic Cavern, consisting of Day-Glo paintings, ephemera, and reused materials found in the streets of LA (see first photo in this review). Also the signature puppet characters made from recycled materials by Paul Insect, one of London’s original street art pioneers.

7. Timeline

A deep dive into street culture history through archival photography, ephemera and fashion to examine the cross-pollination of influences across music, fashion and film. Includes a large wall vinyl by feminist collective Guerrilla Girls.

8. Art with conscience

Works by hip-hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy.

9. Consideration into innovation

Lisbon-based artist, VHILS, who repurposes waste and found materials to reimagine city walls.

Doors by Portuguese artist VHILS , in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

10. The Next Phase

The final ‘chapter’ is titled ‘The Next Phase’ and contains new op-art works by Valencia-based artist Felipe Pantone, whose high-contrast, geometric patterns challenge perspective, creating a distinctive digital age aesthetic.

Summary

It’s huge, and there’s loads of wall labels which are on two levels: high-level ones introducing each room and giving overviews of particular moments, themes and places (New York and London, but plenty of others); and then more specific labels zeroing in to give the biographies of the scores and scores of artists featured and descriptions of specific works. If you studied all of them you’d be here all day. It’s a feast of colour, creativity and information.

Rules and respect

The visitor handout includes 6 rules we visitors should comply with, for example ‘Respect the artworks’ and ‘Do not touch them’ etc. Rule 4 is ‘Do not sticker or tag the gallery’. Now I entirely understand why they say that – it is a very nice, clean gallery, staffed by nice, clean visitor assistants who are extremely helpful. Still – I couldn’t help finding it funny that an exhibition all about the wild, anarchic, street culture of the 70s and 80s is held in such an atmosphere of politeness and respect and silence, in beautifully maintained and utterly sterile white spaces.

Selection of works from the Afterlife Series by CRASH (2022) in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

Where’s Basquiat?

I was surprised there was no mention of New York’s most famous graffiti artist, the devastatingly brilliant, cool and beautiful Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 to 1988), subject of a brilliant exhibition at the Barbican.

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Complete list of my exhibition reviews

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by Simon on April 24, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition

Tagged 10Foot, 1970s, 1980s, AIKO, Alicia McCarthy, André Saraiva, art, artefacts, Basquiat, BÄST, Beastie Boys, Beezer, Bert Krak, BLADE, BLONDIE, Bob Gruen, Brassaï, Broken Fingaz, Brooklyn, C. R. Stecyk III, CES, Charlie Ahearn, Chaz Bojórquez, Chris FREEDOM Pape, Christopher Stead, Class War, Conor Harrington, CORNBREAD, Cosmic Cavern, Craig Costello, Crash, DABSMYLA, Dash Snow, DAZE, DELTA, Don Letts, DONDI, Dr. REVOLT, Duncan Weston, Ecuador, Eric HAZE, Escif, Estevan Oriol, exhibition, Fab 5 Freddy, FAILE, Felipe Pantone, FUME, FUTURA2000, Glen E. Friedman, GOLDIE, Gordon Matta-Clark, graffiti, Gregory Rick, Guerrilla Girls, Gus Coral, Henry Chalfant, hip hop, HuskMitNavn, IMON BOY, installation, Into the New Realm with Felipe Pantone, Jaimie D’Cruz, Jamie Reid, Janette Beckman, Jason REVOK, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jenny Holzer, Joe Conzo, John Ahearn & Rigoberto Torres, José Parlá, KATSU, KAWS, KC ORTIZ, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, KING MOB, Kings Road, LADY PINK, Lawrence Watson, Lisa Kahane, London, Los Angeles, Malcolm McLaren, Maripol, Martha Cooper, Martin Jones, Maya Hayuk, Michael Holman, Michael Lawrence, Mister CARTOON, MODE 2, Mrs Thatcher, murals, New Musical Express, Northern Ireland, NWA, Ozzie Juarez, Pablo Allison, Painting, Pat Phillips, Paul Insect, Philadelphia, POSE, PRIDE, priest, Private Eye, Public Enemy, punk rock, rap, Richard Colman, Risk, Robert 3D Del Naja, Roger Perry, Saatchi Gallery, sculpture, Seditionaries, sex, Shepard Fairey, SHOE, Sophie Bramly, spray paint, STASH, Stephen ESPO Powers, Stickymonger, Street Art, SWOON, TAKI 183, The Battle of Orgreave, The Clash, The Cosmic Cavern, The Face, the Falklands, the Miners Strike, Tim Conlon, Timothy Curtis, Tish Murtha, Toby Mott, Todd James, TOX, VHILS, youth culture, Zephyr

Posted by Simon on April 24, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/04/24/beyond-the-streets-london-the-saatchi-gallery/

Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different @ the National Gallery

This isn’t an exhibition, it’s an awesomely immersive installation of blistering power and intensity. I loved it. I wanted to stay all day. I can’t recommend it too highly. And it’s free.

Installation view of Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different @ the National Gallery

You go in the main entrance, up the stairs. through swing doors and across an old-fashioned gallery lined with grand 18th century paintings, to arrive at the entrance to the installation, with the title in big letters over the doorway – ‘Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different’.

Here a couple of visitor attendants stand, pointing out the wall label which explains the installation, the list of paintings used in it, and a list of quotes from the text, as well as advising people that it contains loud music, sounds, flashing lights, and brutal, violent imagery. All sounds great!

The animation chamber

If you want to proceed, you simply turn left and walk into a big, big room, the size of a school gym or assembly hall. The room is in pitch darkness but suspended from the ceiling are nine or so projectors and these are projecting continuous loops of overlapping, continually changing images and animations onto all four walls.

The basis of the loops are a selection of 22 classic paintings from the National Gallery collection and 3 from the Holburne Museum, Bath: 25 in total. There’s a full list in a wall label in the ante-room to the show but you don’t need to know them to ‘get’ the show – what they are becomes perfectly apparent as they morph in and out of view. The point is the treatment they’ve been subjected to, which is radical and brilliant.

Malani has turned them into continuous unfurling animations whereby each image appears and is immediately subject to all kinds of manipulations –flooded with colour wash, disintegrated as if by acid, and scribbled over with blunt crayon markings and animated figures generated by an iPad.

These beautiful, graceful classical paintings are walked over by matchstick figures engaged in indecipherable activities, are revived and reappear, are washed and disintegrated again, merge with other images, with photographs, with non-classical imagery of black or Asian people, are subject to random bars of colour exploding across them, at one point stock-market charts and graphic examples of complex financial systems, dancing stick figures, splurges of blood red paint, anarchy, chaos.

Installation view of Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different @ the National Gallery

Apparently there are 25 distinct animations, one for each classical painting, but they’re of different lengths and are projected over each other, so being played together like this creates endlessly changing juxtapositions and interactions. I was entranced, I was transported.

Cassandra’s story

Why the systematic over-writing, destruction and transformation of such beautiful, elegant paintings? The clue is in the voiceover because, if your eyes are overwhelmed by the continual huge looping animations coming at you from all directions, your ears are hearing a narration, a woman’s voice telling a terrible story from amid the crashes and blizzards of imagery, and it is a story of war.

For it is Cassandra talking, princess of Troy, daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, sister of Paris and Hector. According to legend, Apollo fell in love with beautiful Cassandra and promised her the gift of prophecy if she would have sex with him. He gave her the gift but she went back on the deal, refusing to sleep with him, making him furious. Now the ancient gods could not rescind gifts they had given so Apollo couldn’t withdraw his gift of prophecy – so instead he took revenge by adding a codicil to the original gift – Cassandra continued to have the gift of seeing the future but Apollo now added that nobody would believe her.

Her plight was more than ordinarily significant or tragic because the main thing she foresaw was the sack of Troy after its long siege by the Greeks, its complete destruction, the murder of most of its inhabitants, including her venerable father, Priam, and the taking away into slavery of the remaining women, including herself and her mother Hecuba. This terrible fate she saw with crystal clarity and told everyone around her, but nobody believed her. Can you imagine the mental torment of her position, knowing the absolute worst but being powerless to prevent it?

Sound and vision

So, to recap, as images of classic paintings emerge out of the darkness, are defaced and scribbled over, a calm, detached woman’s voice reads a text which references the Tale of Troy, identifies as Cassandra, mentions key figures in the story such as Aeneas, Paris, Hector, seems to hint at the trauma of war and destruction, and yet, at other moments, segues off into what may be a description of a large sailing ship struggling through rain and storm of an ocean.

Noises, sound effects, washes of sound, obscure and cloud the voice just as the scribbles and animations deface the paintings.

The voice belongs to Malani’s longtime collaborator and friend, Alaknanda Samarth, and has the lofty visionariness of a classical actor – cool, detached, oblique – wonderfully fitting with both the classic paintings and the classical subject matter.

Installation view of Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different @ the National Gallery

Troy and Basquiat

1. Troy and Greek violence

I really loved this installation for two reasons. One is that I am besotted by the Tale of Troy and the Iliad, which I read as a boy and has stayed with me for the rest of my life, underpinning my studies at university, the central work of literature of the entire western tradition, standing at the door like a violent, lowering presence.

I happen to have recently read a lot of Roman literature including retellings of the tale of Troy by poets like Ovid and Seneca which has refreshed my memory with the extreme violence and rapine of the old Greek myths. Our modern culture has a cosy place for the old myths, treats them as assimilated and contained, but to reread them is to be appalled all over again by the brutality, the often exquisite tortures and the persistent sexual violence.

Thus, at the fall of Troy, Cassandra sought shelter from the pillaging Greeks in the temple of Athena, clinging to a statue of the goddess, but was dragged away and raped by Ajax the Lesser (there were two heroes named Ajax at the siege). For this desecration of her temple, Ajax was later killed by Athena. Cassandra passed as a slave into the possession of King Agamemnon and sailed back to Mycenae with him, where she was murdered along with Agamemnon by his wife, Clytemnestra, who had never forgiven him for the ritual sacrifice of their daughter Iphigeneia right back at the start of the war.

The Greek myths are not cosy and comforting. It’s bloodshed all the way through – rape, abduction, war, killing, massacre, more rape, revenge of the gods, murder. So what thrilled me about Malani’s installation is the way she has found an audiovisual equivalent of the terrifying destructive violence at the heart of Greek myth and legend. The scribbling over Old Master paintings with rude graffiti, acid destruction, incoherent animations perfectly captures the destruction of war, which is at the core of human history. That’s what thrilled me. Malini creates an audiovisual expression for the deepest truth about human nature. Congo. Iraq. Syria. Ukraine. The beauty of human perception and sensitivity is everywhere bludgeoned by brutes.

Installation view of Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different @ the National Gallery

2. Basquiat

The other reason was the powerful influence of Basquiat on the entire experience. Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 to 1988) was a brilliant young American artist who rose out of the street art and graffiti scenes in New York to create a stunning visual language to capture contemporary urban experience. The Barbican had sell-out exhibition devoted to him back in 2017.

Basquiat developed a vibrant visual style based on the primary colours found in spray cans, on the designs and logos used in graffiti, incorporating and deploying all aspects of street art with style and panache. A lot of Malini’s animated squiggles, random attacks of primary colour, scribbling out, reveals, animations, matchstick figures struggling through the blare of pattern, reminded me of Basquiat at his vivifying, energising, bracing best.

It was pure visual pleasure to slump against one of the walls (like everyone else was doing) and watch the incredible panoramic animations explode across the walls.

Contemporary fellowship

My Reality is Different is result of Malini’s selection in 2020 to be the first artist to receive the National Gallery’s Contemporary Fellowship, supported by Art Fund and part of the National Gallery’s Contemporary Programme. As far as I’m concerned, it’s an absolute triumph. More, please.

Installation view of Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different @ the National Gallery

Two videos

As far as I can tell there’s no official video of the installation. In a sense, how could there be, if it’s designed to create a loop of indeterminable duration and complexity? So I’ve embedded here the longest of the three videos of it you can find on YouTube which have obviously been made by visitors. They’re obviously amateur – a bit chaotic, out of focus, swinging round too fast – but they give you a good sense of the barrage of brilliantly changing imagery and ghostly, shimmering narrative that the visitor is subjected to.

And:

The text

Here’s the text that Alaknanda Samarth reads out. It’s adapted by her and Malini from ‘Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays’ by the East German writer, Christa Wolf (1951 to 2011).

It was here. This is where she stood. These stone lions looked at her, now they no longer have heads. The walls, today as in the past, the gate, where no blood can be seen seeping out from beneath. Into the darkness. Into the slaughterhouse. And alone.

Keeping step with the story, I make my way into death. Why did I want the gift of prophecy? To speak with my voice. There’s something of everyone in me, so I’ve belonged completely to no one. Troy’s end was in sight. We were lost. Aeneas had pulled out with his people.

What I grasp between now and evening will perish with me. ‘She’s laughing.’ They don’t know I speak their language.

Who was Penthesilea? I knew Penthesilea was going to fall in battle. I rejoiced to see her, a woman, put on her weapons. Who will find a voice again? ‘You’re lying when you prophesy we’re all doomed.’

War gives people their shape.

Nothing left to describe the world but the language of the past. The language of the present has shriveled. The language of the future, one sentence only. ‘Today I’ll be killed.’

Apollo. He conferred on me the gift of prophecy, approached me as a man. Due to my terror, he transformed into a wolf with mice, spat furiously into my mouth when he was unable to overpower me.

Dream-image. The sea burning. Last thing in my life, a picture, not a word. Will I split myself in two? Will I… How many realities were there in Troy beside mine? One day I announced ‘Troy will fall.’ A hot terror.

When I look, there’s no god, no judgement, only myself.

Events that aroused the craving for more events, finally for war. The first thing I really saw.

The paintings

German School – The Judgement of Paris
Jan van der Venne – The Temptation of Saint Anthony
Johan Zoany – The Auriol and Dashwood Families
Jacopo Bassano – The Way to Calvary
Hieronymus Bosch – Christ Mocked (The Crowning with Thorns)
Pieter Bruegel the Elder – The Adoration of the Kings
Bronzino – An Allegory with Venus and Cupid
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio – Boy Bitten by a Lizard
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio – The Supper at Emmaus
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio – Salome receives the Head of John the Baptist
Paul Delaroche – The Execution of Lady Jane Grey
Luca Giordano – Perseus turning Phineas and his Followers into Stone
Hans Holbein the Younger – Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve (‘The Ambassadors’)
Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altarpiece – The Deposition
Michelangelo – The Virgin and Child with Saint John and Angels (‘The Manchester Madonna’)
Guido Reni – Lot and his Daughters leaving Sodom
Guido Reni – Susannah and the Elders
Guido Reni – Saint Mary Magdalene
Peter Paul Rubens – Samson and Delilah
Jan Steen – The Effects of Intemperance
Harmen Steenwyck – Still Life: An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life
Zanobi Strozzi – The Annunciation
Workshop of Rogier van der Weyden – Pietà
Paolo Veronese – The Family of Darius before Alexander
Joseph Wright ‘of Derby’ – An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump

Trojan War-related reviews

Basquiat at the Barbican

Basquiat: Boom for Real at the Barbican

More National Gallery reviews

More National Gallery reviews

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by Simon on April 12, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Art, War

Posted by Simon on April 12, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/04/12/nalini-malani-my-reality-is-different-the-national-gallery/

The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance @ the National Gallery

‘The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance’ is a one-room, free display at the National Gallery in London. Go in the main entrance, up the stairs to the mezzanine level, then turn right and up more stairs to room 46.

It’s amazing how much you can cram into one room in a gallery, in this case ten or so paintings, 4 or 5 drawings and several sculptures which, taken together, open up whole imaginative worlds and intellectual vistas. Amazing how much you can extrapolate from one work of art, about an entire era’s attitudes to men and women, ageing, its sense of humour, its fear of the supernatural.

The Ugly Duchess

It all starts by considering one of the best-known faces in the National Gallery: Quinten Massys’s early 16th-century depiction of an old woman, popularly known as ‘The Ugly Duchess’. Made in Antwerp in about 1513, it is an extremely striking image.

An Old Woman (‘The Ugly Duchess’), about 1513 by Quinten Massys © Photo: The National Gallery, London

Ugly

Quite obviously this is an exaggerated and grotesque caricature. Focusing just on the features, you’d have thought it was the face of an old man, but the closer you look you realise all kinds of things are going on in this picture. The most obvious element is probably the woman’s mannish, ugly face but you quickly move o to notice the very low-cut dress revealing her ample but wrinkled bosom.

It’s obviously a satire or caricature of the stock standard Renaissance portrait, which, of course, showed the sitter to best advantage, flattering them by smoothing out wrinkles and omitting blemishes. Quite obviously this painting is doing the exact opposite, packing in as many unflattering details as possible – big ears, stubby nose, disappeared lips, as many wrinkles as the human neck can cope with, a huge expanse of neck and bosom revealing the mannish solidity of her shoulders and the wrinkled bust.

The ‘philtrum’ is the technical name for the groove which runs between nose and lips, but it’s not only this which is long but the entire space or stretch of face from nose to mouth which is as huge as possible, almost giving her the prognathous appearance of a chimpanzee.

So there’s an implicit contrast with the genre of the standard Renaissance flattering portrait. But there’s another contrast worth mentioning, which is the contrast between the gargoyle grotesqueness of the face and body and the immaculately naturalistic detailing of the headdress and cascading wimple.

Detail of An Old Woman (‘The Ugly Duchess’), about 1513 by Quinten Massys © Photo: The National Gallery, London

Seeing a painting like this in the flesh allows you to go right up to it and marvel at the extreme detailing of the fabric of the headdress – you can virtually see each thread of the fabric, the detail of each one of the embroidered flowers; to marvel at the intricate working of the diadem or broach including the glints of light on the lovingly crafted pearls – which are, when you look really closely, echoed by the pearls studding the ring she’s wearing on her right forefinger.

So, to put it crudely, there’s another contrast at work here, between the deliberate grotesqueness of the face and the breath-taking filigree detail of the setting (headdress, broach, and amazing depiction of light and shade in the folds of the linen wimple).

Talking of her finger, there’s one last relevant detail which is the flower. In her right hand, between finger and thumb, she is delicately holding the flower of a rose which hasn’t yet opened. This is a traditional symbol of budding love i.e. a visual signal appropriate for a very young woman, a teenage virginal girl. Here it works as another element emphasising the grotesqueness of the portrait and satirising the entire genre.

Her husband

Mention of the rose leads us to the next factor, which is her partner. The exhibition has obtained on loan from a private collection in America the painting which originally partnered the duchess, namely Massys’s portrait of an old man.

An Old Man, about 1513 by Quinten Massys. Photo © Evan Read, Department of Paintings Conservation, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Sexism and unfairness

Now, you don’t have to be an art scholar to notice that, although it isn’t exactly flattering, although he too has a lugubrious nose and plentiful wrinkles, the husband portrait isn’t in the same class of grotesque as the old woman. Feminists interpret this as unfairness: why is the old man acceptable but the old woman grotesque?

One way of answering this is to say, with feminists, that Western society has always been sexist and patriarchal, with continuous misogynist tendencies. That age in women was treated far more harshly, seen as far more negative, than in men, and that an older man’s efforts to dress well and make the most of himself was respected whereas the same behaviour in an older woman was derided.

Artistic licence

But there’s another way of thinking about the issue, regarded as an artistic problem or genre. This is that ‘the old woman’, as subject, afforded Renaissance painters opportunities for invention, play and satire that portraits of more ‘normal’ people didn’t allow. As the curators put it, the ‘unruly bodies’ of older women, no longer smooth and supple as in standardised models of beauty, can be seen as metaphors for social disorder, for the topsy-turvey world which attracted medieval and Renaissance culture as much as its hierarchies of order.

There is undeniable joy in beholding ‘the Ugly Duchess’ trample beauty standards, social conventions and gender expectations.

Flower and fur

Back to the husband, and art scholars debate whether the posture of his right hand is politely rejecting the budding rose which the duchess is offering him.

Away and above these debates about symbolism is a simpler fact about this work which is the amazing depiction of the fur around his neck. Again it isn’t so clear in a reproduction, but in the flesh, standing in front of the actual painting, you can really see the difference between the depiction of the fur lining his coat and what appears to be the black velvet of the coat itself. it’s stunningly sensual and alive.

Contemporary couples

There’s a number of reasons why I strongly prefer the art of the Northern Renaissance to the Italian Renaissance. One is the rocky barrenness of the settings of so many Italian paintings, compared with the lush grass, flowers and verdure of northern paintings. I like the flowers and animals, the little rabbits and whatnot you tend to get in the background of northern Renaissance art.

Portraits like this don’t have animals and pastures in them, but they exemplify two other aspects of northern art I like. One is the extraordinary fine detailing of fabric, embroidery, jewellery and so on. The other is the ugliness of the people. Italian Renaissance paintings capture the handsomeness of Italian people, but I live in grotty northern Europe among people who are, by and large, not fashion models. Therefore I like the frank depiction of non-beautiful people. The exhibition gives an example of an older couple by a contemporary of Massys, Jan Gossaert.

An Elderly Couple, about 1520 by Jan Gossaert © The National Gallery, London

It’s hard to think your way into the mindset of the man on the left who probably paid a lot for this painting and was presumably, happy enough to pay for this pretty unflattering depiction. It bespeaks a mindset different from the Italian Renaissance, one which prioritises honesty at all costs. For me it’s something to do with the northern Protestant, or even Puritan, spirit. Truth over gloss. Epitomised by the arch Puritan Oliver Cromwell telling his portrait painter to depict him ‘warts and all’. It is the humanist tradition, accepting of human weakness, frailty and imperfection.

As to its relevance to the Ugly Duchess, this painting epitomises some of the conventions of double portraits which the Duchess flouts. The older woman is modestly dressed (her clothes covering her up to the neck). Her eyes are modestly cast down. And, crucially, she is standing behind and on the left side of her husband.

Left and right

In double portraits of couples like this, it was the convention to depict the man standing on the right, the hierarchically superior position, our left as we look at it. Therefore the duchess’s position on the right hand side of her husband (in the world of the picture) is another way in which the composition subverts or mocks conventional standards of portraiture.

Leonardo, the source

But talking of the Italian Renaissance links to the rather surprising presence of Leonardo da Vinci in the exhibition. Why? Because among his multifarious other interests, Leonardo had a well-attested interest in ‘the grotesque’. His notebooks contain page after page filled with sketches of a spectrum of non-attractive people, ranging from old and gnarly, through ‘ugly’ people and then beyond the bounds of plausibility to monsters who could have come from the island of Dr Moreau.

Grotesque caricature heads of five men and two women by Leonardo da Vinci © The Trustees of the British Museum

Leonardo’s grotesques were surprisingly popular. Many copies were made of his sketches and distributed around art workshops all over Europe. Thus Massys’s image, which I take to be quintessentially north European, turns out to derive almost directly from a sketch by the quintessentially Italian artist, Leonardo.

The debt owed by Massys to Leonardo isn’t trivial. Although the Leonardo original has disappeared, the exhibition includes copies of a Leonardo grotesque woman which, as you can see, are the direct source of Massys’s painting. Hardly anything about the Massys version is original except precisely the aspects I like, the fantastic detailing.

Bust of a grotesque old woman (1510 to 1520) by Francesco Melzi, after Leonardo. Royal Collection Trust © His Majesty King Charles III 2023

May – December couples

Western societies have often found the notion of the old and decrepit vaunting their attractiveness and flirting as if they’re still teenagers worthy of satire. ‘Mutton dressed as lamb’, as the proverbial saying has it. In fact, like everything else, the Middle Ages codified this into a genre, calling it the May-December relationship. To my surprise, a few seconds on Google show me that this term is still widely used to describe:

‘an amorous relationship between two people with a considerable age difference. The months symbolize the seasons, with spring representing youth and winter representing old age.’

In medieval art and literature the unequal relationship of an older man and a younger woman was often mocked (as, maybe, in our day, the marriage between Rupert Murdoch at the age of 85 to former model, Jerry Hall, or the references I keep reading about Leonardo de Caprio’s alleged penchant for much younger girlfriends). Less often described (and mocked) was the pairing of an older woman and a younger man (in our day and age, often referred to as a toy boy’). In medieval literature Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is one such older woman who takes a young male lover for explicitly sexual reasons.

Mention of the theme, as a popular one of the day, allows the curators to include a visual illustration, The Unequal Couple by by Israhel van Meckenem which shows an older woman (left) being cosied up to by a handsome young blade. The way he is reaching out to touch the bag of coins she is jealously guarding very heavily conveys the satirical thrust of the picture, that this kind of relationship is ‘against nature’ and could only exist because the May partner wants to get their hands on December’s money.

The Unequal Couple, about 1490 by Israhel van Meckenem, after the Master of the Housebook © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

Feminist interpretation

You won’t be surprised to learn that there is a revisionist feminist interpretation of the painting. Feminist art scholars agree that it can be read as a cruel joke in which the viewer is invited to laugh at this woman’s pathetic attempts to appear young and sexy, so we are being invited to mock her implied self-delusion.

But there is an alternative way to read the painting, which is as depicting an old woman who refuses to accept either the biological facts of aging or the social conventions which define what a woman, of any age, may or may not wear, and how she may or may not think of herself. If she regards herself as a winsome beauty, shyly offering her man a symbol of her budding love, then…why not?

To echo what I wrote above, a feminist interpretation sees a duchess who is also subversive of standard notions of beauty, defiantly flouting the conventions of her day.

Witches

But old women have been, for much of recorded history, quite ambivalent figures. (In fact, arguably any category of human being can be ambivalent. A young man may be smooth and debonair like Romeo or a thuggish killer like Edmund in King Lear. Humans have many sides, stereotypes, avatars, expectations.)

Anyway, old women have can be mocked for their pretensions (as the duchess appears to be) respected for their wisdom or even feared as uncanny figures. This fear can go to the extreme of thinking they have uncanny supernatural powers, in other words, are witches.

And it’s in order to highlight the similarities and differences in Renaissance iconography of older women – between an old woman satirised and an old woman feared – that the display includes an iconic image of a witch, made by Albrecht Dürer around the same time as Massys was doing his entertaining grotesque.

A Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat, about 1500 by Albrecht Dürer © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

As with most Dürer this image is packed with symbolism representing the inversion of traditional values and decorum. The woman is naked but not in the sexy manner of Renaissance nudes; the naked body of an older woman is seen as repellent and disgusting. The broom between her legs and her grip on a goat’s horn suggest the uncontrolled and inappropriate nature of lust in an older woman. She is rising the goat backwards but her hair is flowing in the wrong direction, into rather than with the wind. It is an image of reversal and chaos. Whereas the Massys painting was made for comedy and entertainment, the Dürer takes some of the same themes and treats them with horror, repulsion and fear.

Alice

Even this inclusion of witches hasn’t exhausted the ramifications and connections unravelling from this one painting. I think I knew but had forgotten an important fact about it which is that Massys’s portrait directly inspired the figure of the Duchess in ‘Alice in Wonderland’, as portrayed in Sir John Tenniel’s classic illustrations.

Alice, the Duchess, and the Baby by Sir John Tenniel (1865)

Here, in a sense, the Ugly Duchess found her spiritual home. As a painting she was only available for centuries to a handful of viewers. Even hung up in the National Gallery she was only seen by a small number of people. But as published in the Alice books and very widely distributed, she entered a kind of rogues’ gallery of all the other fantastical characters dreamed up by Lewis Carroll. Beyond fear or ridicule she is transformed into an object of pure, delightful entertainment.

Video

In this 10 minute long video National Gallery restorer Britta New discusses the conservation treatment of ‘The Ugly Duchess’, describing discoveries made during the conservation process, and the painting’s connection to sketches by Leonardo da Vinci and John Tenniel’s illustrations.

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by Simon on April 10, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition

Posted by Simon on April 10, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/04/10/the-ugly-duchess-beauty-and-satire-in-the-renaissance-the-national-gallery/

Infinite Folds by Barbara Chase-Riboud @ Serpentine North

This is the first UK solo exhibition of American artist, novelist and poet Barbara Chase-Riboud. Born in 1939 in Philadelphia Chase-Riboud now lives and works in Paris. She’s most famous for her sculptures. The exhibition also includes half a dozen works on paper but these are eclipsed by the size, presence and elegance of her big metal-and-fabric sculptures.

Early experiments

Chase-Riboud is a good example of the kind of artist who, when starting out, experiments widely, copying and incorporating elements from contemporaries and predecessors, before they work their way through to a new look and feel, an innovation of their own, and then really hunker down on it, making it their brand, exploring all its ramifications. Francis Bacon worked his way through early experiments to stumble across blurred images of screaming men in claustrophobic spaces and spent the rest of his career mining and exploring this discovery.

And so this beautifully laid out exhibition at the Serpentine North Gallery kicks off with three or four early works, which are biggish sculptures, made of gnarly, clotted metal arranged in skeletal, organic shapes, displaying the influence of Giacometti and other post-war Modernist sculptors.

These are interesting but are totally eclipsed by the style of work which made her name and dominate her output. In these, cascades of wool, rope, braided fabrics and silk tumble to the ground from eerily sculpted, angular metal forms. Very roughly, and from a distance, they could be taken as lush curtains tumbling down from metallic pelmets.

Installation view of ‘Infinite Folds’ by Barbara Chase-Riboud @ Serpentine North (photo by the author)

It’s only as you approach that you begin to get a number of very strong sense impressions. First of all there’s the dysjunction between the hard cold metal pelmet and the flowing cascading wool and skeins and silk and braid which tumbles from them. Something very powerful and impossible to put into words is happening.

The pelmet

You can consider each of the two elements in isolation, though your attention is torn between them. At the top is the cold metal, itself distorted and twisted into shapes which suggest folds of fabric but somehow angular, forbidding, almost threatening. As you move through the exhibition you see her working through variations and experiments with different shapes and scales and patterns of the ‘pelmet’.

Installation view of ‘Infinite Folds’ by Barbara Chase-Riboud @ Serpentine North (photo by the author)

Clearly, in this example, the metal element takes up more than half the sculpture, is more than merely a ‘pelmet’, is a haunting collocation of fragments and slivers, open to any number of interpretations.

The fabric

The second element, of course, is the cascades of fabric I’ve mentioned. You can see how these are made of long skeins of wool, some punctuated by knots, intermingled with heavily braided and plaited material.

Like the metal ‘pelmets’ I found myself responding to these in different ways. Some looked really soft and welcoming. I could imagine nestling down among the very soft and comfy-looking fabric of the first, black, example, above. Whereas the golden cascades look a bit more ‘formal’ and subtly off-putting. They reminded me of the braids and tassels you get at old-style theatres, which often have plush curtains not only on the stage but sometimes above doors into the main part of the theatre, and the feeling of red plush theatre seats which are sometimes lined with decorated binding.

So I found something ‘theatrical’ in a lot of the works, but other visitors might see and feel something completely different. Whatever the connotations it evokes for you, they have an immensely sensual impression on the mind. You really really want to reach out and touch them, to compare the feel of the stiff cold metal and then the yielding and sensual strands and skeins.

Colour

There’s black ones and golden ones and bright red ones and chrome ones.

Installation view of ‘Infinite Folds’ by Barbara Chase-Riboud @ Serpentine North (photo by the author)

There are copious wall labels which assign different works to different periods and projects, some with very literary or philosophical or political aims. For example, the red one, two above, titled ‘Numero Rouge’, refers to the way that Chase-Riboud ‘was captivated by the use of the colour in the art and architecture of Beijing’s Forbidden City where architectural features such as roofs and columns are constructed of red tiles or lacquered in red respectively’.

There is also a political, Black Lives Matter thread running through the exhibition, with Chase-Riboud – herself an African American woman – referencing Black icons such as Malcolm X and Josephine Baker. In another sequence she commemorated Sarah Baartman, the Khoikoi woman from southern Africa who was demeaningly put on display in London and Paris in the nineteenth century, under the name of the ‘Hottentot Venus’

But I found the works themselves so powerful that I tended to lose track of which work was meant to be carrying which meaning and just enjoyed studying the ‘formal’ aspects of the sculptures, enjoying them as clever, inventive themes and variations – with the fundamental principle or idea of the dramatic contrast between warm fabric and cold metal running throughout, providing a kind of unifying metaphor.

Installation view of ‘Infinite Folds’ by Barbara Chase-Riboud @ Serpentine North (photo by the author)

Cleopatra

The Serpentine North Gallery consists of a square corridor which runs round two inner rectangular spaces. The main corridor space has smooth white plaster walls. The cut-through spaces have been left with the rough brickwork exposed. One of these cut-throughs contained more looming black ‘pelmet’ works of the standard design.

Installation view of Infinite Folds by Barbara Chase-Riboud @ Serpentine North © Barbara Chase-Riboud 2022. Photo © Jo Underhill, courtesy Serpentine

But the other one houses several pieces which were notable departures from the pelmet motif.

Chase-Riboud has travelled widely, maybe more so than most American artists who tend to be quite parochial (after all, they’ve got a whole continent on their doorstep). And so she has taken inspiration from a wide variety of cultures and traditions. In China she visited the Han Dynasty burial tomb which contained the bodies of Prince Liu Sheng and Princess Dou Wan. Both bodies are encased in traditional burial suits made from delicate jade plaques sewn together with gold wire.

These were the inspiration for a series of works looking distinctively different from the pelmet sculptures. Here Chase-Riboud created works assembled from thousands of bronze squares, intricately sewn together with bronze wire. The series is named after Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt.

These have an explicitly feminist aim which I’ll quote in full:

Chase-Riboud evokes the power, energy and desire associated with Cleopatra through objects that seemingly could be found either in her long-lost tomb or within the contents of her home. [The Cleopatra series is part of] Chase-Riboud’s interest in exploring ‘power as wielded by women’.

Another series of works refer to the goddess Shakti, the female consort of the god Shiva, ‘who is said to represent cosmic energy, fertility and female creativity… [in which Chase-Riboud explores] the the interconnectedness of the poetic, spiritual and sexual experience.’ Bearing that in mind, I wondered what this striking piece represents.

Installation view of ‘Infinite Folds’ by Barbara Chase-Riboud @ Serpentine North

Promotional video

Chase-Riboud the writer

Alongside her work as a sculptor, Chase-Riboud has published volumes of poetry, historical fiction and a memoir.

1974 From Memphis & Peking (poetry)
1979 Sally Hemings (novel)
1986 Valide: A Novel of the Harem
1987 Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra (poetry)
1989 Echo of Lions (novel)
1994 The President’s Daughter (novel)
2003 Hottentot Venus (novel)
2014 Every Time a Knot is Undone, a God is Released (poetry)
2022 The Great Mrs. Elias (novel)
2022 I Always Knew: A Memoir (based on letters she wrote to her mother, Vivian Mae Chase, between 1957 and 1991)

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by Simon on March 31, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in America, Art, Sculpture

Posted by Simon on March 31, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/03/31/infinite-folds-barbara-chase-riboud-serpentine-north/

Artspeak key words

Modern Couples was a enormous exhibition held at the Barbican in the winter of 2018/19, which examined the role played by couples, women, lesbians, gay men and transgender people in the avant-garde art and literary movements of the early twentieth century.

Beginning by describing the working relations of no fewer than 40 (mostly heterosexual) artistic couples, the exhibition went on to examine a variety of other forms of artistic collaboration – between same-sex partners, between trios of artists, ménages à trois, and among larger groupings and movements, such as the Surrealists. The exhibition was a polemical one designed to show that:

not only was the core of the Modernist movement based around radical new ideas about love, sex and eroticism, but also that:
Modernism was the result of an unprecedented number and variety of types of artistic collaboration

With over 80 named artists and some 600 objects and artworks on show, the exhibition was an overwhelming bombardment of information and took a lot of time and several visits to really absorb.

Key words of contemporary artspeak

Above all, it was a very wordy exhibition, with over 40 lengthy wall labels, totalling some 100 paragraphs of densely factual text, plus extensive quotations from the writings, letters, diaries and so on of the numerous artists and authors featured.

As I read through these labels I became more and more aware of the repetition of key words and phrases and the recurrence of key themes and ideas. Eventually I began to wonder what it would be like it I cut and pasted together all the phrases which used one or more of these keywords; to see what picture would emerge from this textual collage.

A collage of quotes

So: this blog post is intended as a collage of the keywords (and, therefore, the key themes) from the exhibition. After all, collage – cutting up and re-arranging words and images – was a distinctive invention of the Modern movement.

I’m not sure what conclusions to draw. On a purely logical level, the repetition of a small set of closely related terminology to do with love, sex, desire and gender suggests the narrowness of the concepts underpinning the exhibition and the tremendous limitedness of the curators’ concepts and vocabulary.

But, on another level, the repetitions may have a sort of incantatory quality: like the holy words and phrases repeated by Christians and other religions at their weekly services, annual festivals, rites of passage, baptisms, christenings and deaths. In Christianity these would be keywords like God, love, Father, Son, sin, forgiveness, love, atonement, saviour, saint. In the jargon of modern artists and curators the keywords are bourgeois, challenge, desire, erotic, gender, practice, queer, sex, subvert, same-sex desire, transgressive and unconventional. If religion concerns things of the spirit, modern art is all about the body.

Repetition and faith

Repetition performs a number of functions for a believer: it grounds them in their beliefs; the reassuring litany of familiar words and ideas binds you to the community of the faithful; repetition drums home key terms and concepts with a brainwashing function which eventually makes independent thought impossible. To the initiate, the litany is a quick introduction to the value system of the ideology.

In much same way, the following keywords are central elements in the modern secular religion of critical theory, touching on notions of identity politics, LGBTQ+ activism, feminist theory, and a kind of watered-down Marxism – the key elements which dominate modern art jargon.

Their purpose is not to explain anything but to create a sense of identity and community among believers, to identify the enemy, rally the faithful, and endlessly repeat the key dogmas which the true believer must hold in order to be saved.

A dictionary of received ideas

Viewed another way, this post invokes the spirit of Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas. This was:

A short satirical work assembled from notes compiled by Gustave Flaubert during the 1870s, lampooning the clichés endemic to French society under the Second French Empire.

For his own amusement Flaubert assembled notes towards ‘a dictionary of automatic thoughts and platitudes’, where a platitude is defined as:

A remark or statement, especially one with a moral content, that has been used too often to be interesting or thoughtful… A trite, meaningless, or prosaic statement, often used as a thought-terminating cliché… The statement may be true, but its meaning has been lost due to its excessive use.

Note how a key aspect of a platitude is that it has lost its meaning due to repetition. That’s my point about these artspeak ideas. They may seem radical and shake your world the first time you read them, when you’re 17 or so. But just in this exhibition the same ideas are repeated 10, 15, 20 times, which makes them start to lose their power. And if you visit 10 exhibitions which feature the same basic ideas, rephrased 10 or so time, you’ll have read the same ideas about art ‘subverting bourgeois norms’ 100 times. And if you’ve visited hundreds of art exhibitions then you’ll have seen this same handful of ideas expressed in all possible permutations, thousands of times.

Over time repetition makes them go from exciting and mind-opening, to familiar and comfortable, and then on to threadbare empty. Incessant repetition turns them into platitudes and clichés.

So I am both a) lampooning the clichés of contemporary artspeak, using the texts available at this particular show and b) showing how endless, brainless repetition of the same handful of ideas and phrases eventually empties them of all meaning.

The list of keywords

In what follows I give three elements:

the keyword
the attitude any self-respecting, progressive follower of intellectual fashion should adopt towards it (in italics) – that’s the bit which is most a homage to Flaubert’s dictionary of platitudes and stock attitudes
then quotes from the wall labels at the Modern Couples exhibition, which illustrate how the keyword is used by curators

N.B. I’ve punctuated the list with illustrations of images from the exhibition.

Bourgeois

Bourgeois morality. Bourgeois conformity. Bourgeois conception of marriage. Awful. Stifling. Must be combated and overthrown.

‘Toyen and Štyrský believed in the political nature of eroticism, convinced that desire could transform human consciousness, fight bourgeois conformity, assault the hypocritical status quo, while opening up a liberated space unfiltered by aesthetic and moral constraints.’ (Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann)

‘In Hausmann’s eyes, Höch needed to free herself from the bonds of bourgeois morality and as he wrote to her, ‘kill the father in yourself’.’ (Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann)

‘Inspired in part by their friend and collaborator Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1921 assertion that henceforth “the streets shall be our brushes, the squares our palettes“, bourgeois representation was to be eliminated and photography and design were to be valued equally with painting and sculpture.’ (Varvara Stepanova and Alexander Rodchenko)

‘[Mayakovsky, Osip and Lilya Brik’s] unconventional relationship placed friendship, love and creativity at the centre of a way of life that paid no heed to the bourgeois conception of marriage.’ (Lilya Brik, Osip Brik and Vladimir Mayakovsky)

Alexander Rodchenkom Lilya Brik and Vladimir Mayakovsky

Alexander Rodchenko, Lilya Brik and Vladimir Mayakovsky

Challenge

All good art ‘challenges’ bourgeois conformity, popular conceptions, gender stereotypes and everything else bad.

‘Within the same photographs, polarities such as poetry and violence; submission and agency; and male and female are challenged.’ (Lee Miller and Man Ray)

‘Throughout the 1920s, Cahun and Moore pursued a project of theatrical camera play that yielded hundreds of photographic images, mostly featuring Cahun in a variety of roles that challenged the established repertoire of gender stereotypes.’ (Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore)

‘Stieglitz interpreted O’Keeffe’s early paintings as embodying female sexuality and O’Keeffe, perhaps in an attempt to counter such an interpretation, began painting New York City, challenging the popular perception of urban motifs being essentially masculine territory.’ (Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz)

Georgia O’Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz (1918)

Desire

This is polite curatorspeak for sexual attraction, lust, sex, sex drive, libido, carnality, lasciviousness, all of which are banned. ‘Desire’ is the very broad term which covers all of this. Heterosexual ‘desire’ is deprecated. The best form of ‘desire’ is same-sex desire, preferably female. Purer, more refined.

‘The exhibition begins on the Lower Level where all the principal themes that gave rise to Modernism and underpin Modern Couples are introduced: desire, agency, transgression, liberation, activism, collaboration and the urgent pulse of experiment.’ (Introduction)

‘In her confident embrace of female same-sex relationships, Sackville-West engendered desire in Woolf that then permeated her writing…’ (Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf)

‘The relationship [with Vita] gave rise to Woolf’s Orlando (1929), a transformation of desire into writing.’ (Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf)

‘Zürn shared Bellmer’s fascination with mapping desires and fears onto the female body. Eyes, limbs and breasts, often entangled with hybrid animal forms are recurrent motifs in her work.’ (Unica Zürn and Hans Bellmer)

‘For Bellmer, Zürn was a living incarnation of his Poupée and so he played out his desires on her body in a number of works that are powerful but undeniably shocking.’ (Unica Zürn and Hans Bellmer)

‘Klimt was one of Austria’s most acclaimed artists, who put the female form centre-stage, celebrated desire and the human psyche and created luxurious canvases, murals and mosaics.’ (Emilie Flöge and Gustav Klimt)

‘Male homosexuality was illegal in the United States when the American photographer George Platt Lynes was active from the mid-1930s until his death, and yet he trailblazed defiantly homoerotic works that celebrate male desire.’ (George Platt Lynes, Glenway Wescott and Monroe Wheeler)

George Platt Lynes, Stoneblossom (c. 1941) by PaJaMa. Collection Jack Shear

Erotic

Just as same-sex desire is the best form of desire, so the optimum form of eroticism is homoeroticism. Both are based on the universal if unspoken disapproval shared by women and gay art curators of heterosexual male sexuality.

‘More than any of his contemporaries, the French sculptor Auguste Rodin knowingly placed eroticism at the centre of his work.’ (Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin)

‘The, inanimate, naked figure sprawled on a bed of twigs and only visible through a peephole was cast from her body, the result of a long artistic and erotic dialogue between the two artists.’ (Maria Martins and Marcel Duchamp)

‘Saint Sebastian became one of [Lorca and Dali’s] coded signs, the preferred mascot for their different aesthetics. The saint’s historical association with male homoeroticism and sado-masochism may also have been on their minds.’ (Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí)

‘Male homosexuality was illegal in the United States when the American photographer George Platt Lynes was active from the mid-1930s until his death, and yet he trailblazed defiantly homoerotic works that celebrate male desire.’ (George Platt Lynes, Glenway Wescott and Monroe Wheeler)

‘Homophobic views were rife in post-war America when PaJaMa – an acronym for the collective formed by Paul Cadmus, Jared French and Margaret French in 1937 – began taking their homoerotically charged photographs.’ (PaJaMa: Paul Cadmus, Jared French and Margaret French)

‘Erotically charged photographs of these dolls were celebrated in Surrealist circles and remain extraordinary relics of a “mad love”.’ (Unica Zürn and Hans Bellmer)

‘Together [Lee Miller and Man Ray] made the darkroom and studio a place of shared photographic and erotic experiment.’ (Lee Miller and Man Ray)

Lee Miller with a cast of her torso, Downshire Hill, London, England 1940 by Roland Penrose © Roland Penrose Estate, England 2018. The Penrose Collection

Gender

‘Gender’ is possibly the central concept of modern art theory. What all modern art is about. What all contemporary art curators are obsessed with. The best art subverts, interrogates, undermines etc bourgeois gender stereotypes, expectations etc.

‘Gender indeterminacy, sexual empowerment and the fight for safe spaces of becoming were part of the avant-garde currency.’ (Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener)

‘Capturing Picasso with his eyes closed and wearing only his bathing trunks while holding a bull’s skull, Maar makes Picasso’s famous machismo her subject. In a turnaround of gender expectations, Picasso becomes Maar’s muse.’ (Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso)

‘In 1934 [Toyen and Jindrich Štyrský] founded the Czech Surrealist Group that was known for rejecting notions of gender entirely.’ (Toyen and Jindřich Štyrský)

‘[Toyen]’s use of phallic imagery is a rare example of a female artist humorously commenting on the standard erotic language of the time and subverting gender expectations.’ (Toyen and Jindřich Štyrský)

‘Born Maria Cerminova, Toyen chose an ungendered pseudonym, which she claimed, came from the French word for citizen “citoyen”.’ (Toyen and Jindřich Štyrský)

‘With new inspiration Hannah Höch continued to comment on the battle of the sexes, gender and the ‘new woman’ as an engine of social renewal.’ (Til Brugman and Hannah Höch)

‘Throughout the 1920s, Cahun and Moore pursued a project of theatrical camera play that yielded hundreds of photographic images, mostly featuring Cahun in a variety of roles that challenged the established repertoire of gender stereotypes.’ (Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore)

Suzanne Malherbe/Marcel Moore (1928) by Claude Cahun. Courtesy of Jersey Heritage Collections

Practice

Blanket term for what any artist actually does.

‘The photograms have solely been attributed to László, yet a double portrait of both artists is evidence enough of their collaborative practice.’ (Lucia Moholy and László Moholy-Nagy)

‘[Sonia]’s practice soon impregnated all aspects of life, experimenting with domestic interiors, dress, theatre designs and textiles in parallel with the chromatic fireworks found in Robert’s painting.’ (Sonia Delaunay and Robert Delaunay)

‘Taeuber-Arp’s puppets for King Stag show the importance of performance and dance within her practice.’ (Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Jean Arp)

‘[Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov] were prolific and versatile, engaging in a Russian form of expressionist practice known as Neo-Primitivism.’ (Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov)

‘The American photographer Margrethe Mather was instrumental in the development of her fellow countryman Edward Weston’s practice as a photographer.’ (Margrethe Mather and Edward Weston)

Edward Weston and Margrethe Mather (1922) by Imogen Cunningham. George Eastman Museum © Imogen Cunningham Trust

Queer

Hugely important concept. Far larger than the art world, ‘queer’ is a central part of the campaign throughout the humanities and beyond to overthrow traditional bourgeois notions of gender stereotyping and heterosexual convention. See ‘Queer Studies’.

‘Many of their images were taken on the beaches of Fire Island, Nantucket and Provincetown, offering a record of a long standing LGBTQ community in the United States, as Fire Island especially, was – and still is – a sanctuary for queer freedom.’ (PaJaMa: Paul Cadmus, Jared French and Margaret French)

‘With Orlando [Virginia Woolf] craftily weaved together one of the most important queer texts of the 20th century.’ (Chloe liked Olivia)

‘These lively, cultural spaces attracted a variety of creative queer women such as the female modern dandy, the Symbolist inspired femme-fatale and the androgyne.’ (Chloe liked Olivia)

Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West

Sex

Generally disapproved-of word because mostly (but not always) associated with male sexuality, toxic masculinity, heteronormativity, gender stereotyping, gender conventions, bourgeois conformity and everything bad. Meaning men, basically. Thus Rodin’s ‘sexual prowess’ and Klimt’s ‘sexual exploits’ are disapproved of.

Broadly speaking, men have the rather disgusting ‘sex‘ while women, gay men and lesbians have the far more spiritual and superior ‘desire‘.

‘Dating from when Claudel and Roding first met, Je suis belle (1882) pairs two previously existing works and expresses the older artist’s feelings of sexual prowess with characteristic bravura.’ (Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin)

‘Duchamp made sexual union the focus of much of his conceptually oriented work.’ (Maria Martins and Marcel Duchamp)

‘The Erotic Objects became sexually charged keepsakes for Duchamp.’ (Maria Martins and Marcel Duchamp)

‘With “Chloe liked Olivia” Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own made a thinly veiled reference to female like-with-like sexuality for those looking out for it.’ (Chloe liked Olivia)

‘She was close to the Dadaists and Surrealists and was known for her sexually liberated relationships with artists and writers, including Louis Aragon, Aldous Huxley and Ezra Pound.’ (Nancy Cunard and Henry Crowder)

‘The extent of Dali and Lorca’s sexual relationship is unclear, although Dalí made a pointed reference to it in his later autobiography.’ (Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí)

‘This adventurous ménage à trois escaped the intolerance of American society for Paris and Villefranche-sur-Mer where they met a diverse artistic and largely sexually liberated community. (George Platt Lynes, Glenway Wescott and Monroe Wheeler)

‘Klimt was well known for his sexual exploits and illegitimate children, but his relationship with Flöge was respectful and mutually enabling.’ (Emilie Flöge and Gustav Klimt)

The Bride by Gustav Klimt (1918)

‘The decidedly cool and precise evocation of the hawk in the story reflects Westcott’s own struggles with aging and sexual frustration.’ (George Platt Lynes, Glenway Wescott and Monroe Wheeler)

‘The three first met at the Art Students League of New York, where Paul and Jared were lovers. Jared married Margaret in 1937, after which he sustained a sexual relationship with both partners.’ (PaJaMa: Paul Cadmus, Jared French and Margaret French)

‘Hausmann also upheld that a sexual liberation would enable a life unconstrained by monogamy and so was happy to maintain a relationship with Höch while still married to his wife.’ (Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann)

Subvert

The key central aim of all modern and contemporary art is to ‘subvert’ bourgeois convention and gender stereotyping and all bad things. Can be used interchangeably with ‘challenge.’

‘They also subverted the Greek myth of Narcissus (the tale of a young man who falls in love with his own reflection) to celebrate queer desire and refute historical ideas of feminine vanity.’ (Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore)

Drawing 18 from the cycle ’21’ by Toyen (1938) Subverting gender expectations?

Same-sex desire

The best kind of desire because it doesn’t involve horrible heterosexual men.

‘In her confident embrace of female same-sex relationships, Sackville-West engendered desire in Woolf that then permeated her writing.’ (Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf)

‘Woolf’s activism and advocacy for same-sex love echoed what was happening on Paris’s more tolerant Left Bank.’ (Chloe liked Olivia)

Transgressive

The main aim of modern artists is to ‘transgress’ all the terrible conventions of bourgeois / conventional / racist / sexist / homophobic society by producing fabulously transgressive art. Use with the verbs ‘challenge’ and ‘subvert’.

‘Perceived as transgressive in the racist context of the 1920s and 1930s, the relationship [of Nancy Cunard and Henry Crowder] was a source of profound enrichment for both of their careers and opened Cunard’s eyes to the segregation in the United States as well as introducing her to Black American culture.’ (Nancy Cunard and Henry Crowder)

‘It was their shared belief in the transgressive and poetic potential of erotic imagery that had the biggest impact on surrealism.’ (Lee Miller and Man Ray)

‘By all accounts, Zurn and Bellmer were magnetically drawn to each other and the intense and transgressive nature of their relationship is starkly evident in their respective works.’ (Unica Zürn and Hans Bellmer)

One of many iterations of ‘the Doll’ by Hans Bellmer

Unconventional

The modern artist is desperately unconventional. He, she and they aim to transgress and subvert and challenge as many artistic and social conventions as possible in order to attain a peak of unconventionality. Conventions are for ‘normies’. Bourgeois conventions were made to be transgressed, challenged and subverted by artists who dared to be unconventional.

‘Mather made several portraits of Weston and others, employing unconventional cropping. In a number of intimate nude portraits of Mather, Weston did the same.’ (Margrethe Mather and Edward Weston)

‘Their unconventional relationship placed friendship, love and creativity at the centre of a way of life that paid no heed to the bourgeois conception of marriage.’ (Lilya Brik, Osip Brik and Vladimir Mayakovsky)

‘From 1910 onwards, the year of their marriage, Sonia and Robert Delaunay sought to break loose from conventional approaches to painting’ (Sonia Delaunay and Robert Delaunay)

‘Most notable, was their adoption of face painting as a means of upsetting established conventions and celebrating what they considered the multi-dimensional and magical qualities of modernity.’ (Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov)

Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, Moscow, 1913

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by Simon on March 24, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition

Tagged A Dictionary of Received Ideas, activism, agency, Aldous Huxley, Alexander Rodchenko, Alfred Stieglitz, art, artistic collaboration, artspeak, Auguste Rodin, avant-garde, Barbican, Barbican art gallery, Bellmer, Black American culture, bourgeois, Bourgeois morality, Camille Claudel, challenge, Claude Cahun, cliches, collaboration, collage, contemporary art, couples, critical theory, Czech Surrealist Group, Dada, Dalí, desire, Dictionary of Received Ideas, Dora Maar, Duchamp, early twentieth century, Edward Weston, Emilie Flöge, erotic, eroticism, exhibition, Ezra Pound, Federico García Lorca, female sexuality, feminist theory, Flaubert, gay men, gender, gender indeterminacy, George Platt Lynes, Georgia O'Keeffe, Gerda Wegener, Glenway Wescott, Gustav Klimt, Gustave Flaubert, Hannah Höch, Hans Bellmer, Henry Crowder, heterosexuality, Homoeroticism, identity politics, Imogen Cunningham, Intimacy and the Avant-Garde, Jared French, Jean Arp, Jindrich Štyrský, Klimt, László Moholy-Nagy, Lee Miller, lesbians, LGBTQ+, liberation, Lili Elbe, Lilya Brik, litany, Lorca, Louis Aragon, Lucia Moholy, Maar, male homosexuality, male sexuality, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Marcel Moore, Margaret French, Margrethe Mather, Maria Martins, Marxism, Mayakovsky, ménages à trois, Mikhail Larionov, modern art, Modern Couples, Modern Couples: Art, Modernism, Modernist movement, Monroe Wheeler, Nancy Cunard, Narcissus, Natalia Goncharova, Neo-Primitivism, New York City, O’Keeffe, Orlando, Osip, Osip Brik, Pablo Picasso, PaJaMa, Paul Cadmus, Picasso, Practice, queer, queer studies, Raoul Hausmann, Repetition, Robert Delaunay, Rodin, Roland Penrose, Sackville-West, sado-masochism, Salvador Dalí, same-sex, same-sex desire, Second French Empire, sex, sexual empowerment, Sonia Delaunay, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Stieglitz, subvert, Surrealism, Taeuber-Arp, the Modern movement, the new Woman, the Surrealists, Til Brugman, Toyen, transgender people, transgression, Unica Zürn, United States, Varvara Stepanova, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Vladimir Mayakovsky, women, Zürn, Štyrský

Posted by Simon on March 24, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/03/24/artspeak-key-words/

Cecilia Vicuña: Brain Forest Quipu @ Tate Modern

The enormous empty space of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern has been a challenge and inspiration for artists to fill with novel, thought-provoking, immersive or interactive installations for over 20 years. Latest artist to rise to the challenge is Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña and her installation is titled ‘Brain Forest Quipu’.

Biography

From Wikipedia:

Cecilia Vicuña (born 1948) is a Chilean poet and artist based in New York and Santiago, Chile. Her work is noted for themes of language, memory, dissolution, extinction and exile. Critics also note the relevance of her work to the politics of ecological destruction, cultural homogenization, and economic disparity, particularly the way in which such phenomena disenfranchise the already powerless. Her commitment to feminist forms and methodologies is considered to be a unifying theme across her diverse body of work, among which quipus, palabrarmas and precarious stand out. Her practice has been specifically linked to the term eco-feminism.

Overarching title – ‘Brain Forest Quipu’

Only slowly did I realise the complex nature of Vicuña’s piece. Her project is given the overarching title ‘Brain Forest Quipu’ and consists of four separate and discrete elements, being:

the sculpture – the ‘Dead Forest Quipu’
the soundscape – the ‘Sound Quipu’
the videos – the ‘Digital Quipu’
the series of events – the ‘Quipu of Encounters: Rituals and Assemblies’

The sculpture – the ‘Dead Forest Quipu’

The main thing to see and respond to is the two separate installations, one above the sloping entrance ramp, the other the other side of the bridge, in the main hall space.

Both are huge ‘mobiles’, circular frames near the ceiling from which hang 27-metre long cascades of material. These include long strands of unspun wool and plant fibres and rope, among which hang a range of organic materials, found objects, cardboard and whatnot. These ‘curtains’ tower over visitors, evoking huge ancient trees of some imaginary rainforest or ancient mangrove swamp.

Installation view of ‘Brain Forest Quipu’ by Cecilia Vicuña at Tate Modern. Photo by the author

What is a quipu?

The quipu is an ancient South American recording and communication system made from knotted threads. Best to quote Vicuña herself on the subject:

‘In the Andes people did not write, they wove meaning into textiles and knotted cords. Five thousand years ago they created the quipu (knot), a poem in space, a way to remember, involving the body and the cosmos at once. A tactile, spatial metaphor for the union of all. The quipu, and its virtual counterpart, the ceque (a system of sightlines connecting all communities in the Andes) were banished after the European Conquest. Quipus were burnt, but the quipu did not die, its symbolic dimension and vision of interconnectivity endures in Andean culture today.’

Or:

The quipu (also written as khipu) is an ancient recording and communication system. It was used by the Quechua people of the Andes from 2500 BC through to the 16th century at the time of the Spanish conquest. Quipu means ‘knot’ in the Quechua language and consisted of a long textile cord from which hung multiple strands knotted into different formations and in different colours that were able to encode as much complex information as the alphabet. Although the exact meanings behind the knot formations are not now known, it is thought that they were used to record statistics, poems and stories, thereby creating a tactile relationship to memory and the imaginary. Cecilia Vicuña has been exploring and transforming the quipu in her work for over five decades. Her knots and materials are unlike the traditional form but inspired by it. Vicuña’s quipus work conceptually as sculptures, poems, performance, sound, and film, where a word, a gesture, or a group becomes a knot.

Ecofeminism

Part of Vicuña’s ecofeminism is an emphasis on collaborative, communal work, in contrast to the western idea of the isolated creative genius. Thus all aspects of the piece are collaborative: Vicuña has worked with London-based artists, activists and members of the Chilean community. Some of the objects incorporated into the sculptures were collected from the banks of the Thames (which, of course, flows just a hundred yards from the Turbine Hall) by women from local Latin American communities. Like so many 20th century artists she is incorporating found, damaged and everyday objects and fabrics into the work, materials that Vicuña calls precarios.

In this respect – artistic fascination with junk, detritus, the wreckage of our destructive civilisation – she is very reminiscent of Mike Nelson, whose impressive installations are currently on show about a mile down the Thames at the Hayward Gallery.

The soundscape – the ‘Sound Quipu’

There’s music, too. Vicuña worked with Colombian composer Ricardo Gallo to create created the soundscape i.e. New Age-ish, South American-inflected, pan pipes-type ambient sounds which are broadcast across the hall. The soundtrack includes Indigenous music from around the world, Vicuña’s own voice and music from fellow artists, alongside field recordings of nature and moments of silence.

It consists of 4 stereo tracks of approximately 8 hours each, containing 168 sound files from 23 contributors and 1 archive (played from within the ‘Dead Forest Quipu’); and one 8 hours quadraphonic sound file (played underneath the Turbine Hall bridge). There’s an intimidatingly long list of all the contributors and details of every track if you go to the Exhibition Guide page and select SOUND QUIPO. The one thing you can’t access, slightly irritatingly, is the actual soundtracks themselves.

This video gives a good sense of the sight and sound and shape of the whole piece:

The videos – the ‘Digital Quipu’

According to the wall label there are also videos by Indigenous activists and land defenders seeking justice for their people and our planet although, in walking from the installation hanging above the entrance ramp to the one in the main hall, I don’t think I noticed this. But then the Turbine Hall is quite a disorientating place, with hordes of people trekking across, either coming in or going out or walking across to the ticket office, or walking from there over to the lifts to the galleries.

Tate Modern is the most popular modern art gallery in the world with over five and a half million visitors each year. Pause to watch the video or look up into the dizzying height of the installation and you’re likely to be run over by coach parties of tourists.

Save the rainforest

For as long as I can remember good-hearted people have been earnestly campaigning to save the rainforests. This was a campaign when I was at university 40 years ago. A friend went to work for the WWF rainforest campaign 40 years ago. In terms of popular campaigning and awareness, Sting, Paul Simon and Neil Young all made albums or tracks on the subject 30 or 40 years ago. Numerous charities have been beavering away. Countless documentaries.

Despite all this the destruction of the Amazon rainforest (and rainforests around the world) continues apace. The Amazon in particular still appears to be being destroyed to create land where farmers can grow soya and ranch cattle to provide America with cheap burgers and fries.

Sadness

Therefore, of the many ways the wall labels suggest we respond to the installations (to create a space for new voices and forms of knowledge to be heard and understood, to become aware of the struggles of Indigenous peoples) the most likely or compelling one is mourning: if you do stop to think about the subject, it will be to mourn the destruction of the forests, the runaway catastrophe of climate change, and the complete deracination of the powerless Indigenous peoples.

This appears to be why the installation is titled ‘Dead Forest Quipu’. The stripped-bare feel of the dangling frames symbolising the destruction of green life, its transformation to metal skeletons and dry brown husks, bone-white of the objects representing the bleached bark of trees killed by drought or intentional fire.

Social weaving – the ‘Quipu of Encounters: Rituals and Assemblies’

Not that you actually see this on your visit but apparently the installation is being accompanied by a series of global events, or ‘knots of action’, connecting ancient Andean tradition and contemporary culture, inviting visitors to become active participants in the prevention of climate catastrophe.

Tears of the forest

Maybe the sculptures should have been made waterproof and had a continual trickle of water running down every strand, dripping into enormous pools at the bottom, to symbolise the million tears wept for the loss of the planet’s lungs and all those irreplaceable species.

The promotional video

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by Simon on March 15, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition

Posted by Simon on March 15, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/03/15/cecilia-vicuna-brain-forest-quipu-tate-modern/

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All posts tagged art

Anthony Green – The Artist (1976)

Chantal Joffe – Looking towards Bexhill (2016)

Hew Locke – Chevalier (2007)

Sidney Nolan – Self-portrait in Youth (1986)

Patrick Procktor – Self-portrait (1991)

Paula Rego – Self portrait (1994)

Gillian Wearing – Me as a Ghost (2015)

Clare Woods – Life with the Lions (2020)

Personal tastes

Reynolds

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Room one

Artists and works

Yhonnie Scarce

Three videos

1. Vernon Ah Kee

2. Bonita Ely

3. Peter Kennedy and John Hughes

Tracey Moffat

Video

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Filling balloons with plaster

Casting balloons in plaster

Endless eggs

Add wire

In the country

Metal sculptures

Bound and tied sculptures

Social art

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Room 1

Room 2

Room 3. The Abakans

The forests of childhood

Room 4. Abakans and beyond

Rope

Room 5. Abakany, the movie

Invented anatomy – Embryology

Room 6. Timeline of Abakanowicz’s career

The video

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Some definitions

1. Graffiti

2. Street art

3. Murals

Exhibition contents

1. Vandal

2. Music and art converge

3. Dream galleries

4. Legends

5. Blockbusters

6. Larger Than Life

7. Timeline

8. Art with conscience

9. Consideration into innovation

10. The Next Phase

Summary

Rules and respect

Where’s Basquiat?

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