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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.

More Australia reviews

More Australia reviews

More Tate Modern reviews

More Tate Modern reviews

2 Comments

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/

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/

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/

ALERT by Antony Gormley

Imperial College Road

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

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

Antony Gormley biography

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

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

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

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

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

ALERT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Location

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

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

The Queen’s Tower

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

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

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

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

The controversy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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by Simon on October 19, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Sculpture

Posted by Simon on October 19, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/10/19/alert-antony-gormley/

Kamala Ibrahim Ishag: States of Oneness @ Serpentine South

‘States of Oneness’ is a new exhibition of paintings and drawings at the main Serpentine Gallery (Serpentine South, as it’s now known) by pioneering Sudanese artist Kamala Ibrahim Ishag.

‘Two Women (Eve and Eve)’ by Kamala Ibrahim Ishag (2016) © Kamala Ibrahim Ishag (photo by the author)

It brings together works in a variety of media, including:

numerous oil paintings
a number of early charcoal drawings
oil painting on leather drums
decorated vases or calabashes
a set of 5 Quranic prayers, photocopies of Arabic text which she has decorated with ink and acrylic paint
one large painted wooden screen

As usual, the plain white walls and light open spaces of the Serpentine’s rooms make an excellent setting for this major survey of an artist who is, I think, little known in the UK.

Installation view of ‘States of Oneness’ showing a) a big painting on the back wall b) the five framed Quranic prayers on the wall to the right and c) two painted calabashes in the foreground © Kamala Ibrahim Ishag 2022. Photo: George Darrell, Courtesy Serpentine

Ishag’s biography

Born in 1939, Kamala Ibrahim Ishag has practiced since the 1960s and become a defining figure of modern Arab and African art. In the early to mid-1960s, Ishag was part of the Khartoum School, an influential Sudanese modernist movement, which collectively forged an identity for the newly independent nation by drawing on both Arabo-Islamic and African artistic traditions.

Ishag in London

Ishag was among the first women artists to graduate from the College of Fine and Applied Art in Khartoum in 1963, and she followed this with studies in Mural Painting at the RCA in London from 1964 to 1966, and Lithography, Typography and Illustration from 1968 to 1969. During her time in London – the press handout tells us – she was subject to three strong influences:

she was drawn to the visionary tone of William Blake’s poetry and etchings
she was affected by Francis Bacon’s distorted figures
and she was struck by the distorted reflections of human faces and figures she saw in the curved windows of Underground trains

One of the exhibition’s rooms features some big paintings from the 1970s which directly reference Bacon, showing human figures in very dark colours, midnight blues and angsty purples, confined in dimly visible cages, with titles like ‘Loneliness’. Striking but not typical of her work.

Loneliness (1987) by Kamala Ibrahim Ishag © Kamala Ibrahim Ishag

Much more important, though, is the spiritualist and other-worldly vibe which you can feel flowing through all her work.

The Crystalist movement

In the mid-1970s, she co-founded the Crystalists, a postmodern, conceptual group which challenged the male-dominated and identity-focused Sudanese art scene and advocated for a new aesthetic modelled on diversity, transparency and existentialist theory. Her Wikipedia tells us more about the Crystalists:

The Crystalist Group broke away from traditional practices in the Sudanese art scene. Their intention was to distinguish themselves from the Khartoum School of painting and their traditional male-centred outlook. This new approach in Sudanese painting was marked by a public declaration in the form of the so-called Crystalist Manifesto. This document presented an artistic vision that attempted to work beyond the Sudanese-Islamic framework of the Khartoum School. Moreover, the Crystalists sought to internationalize their art by embracing an existentialist avant-garde, more akin to European aesthetics.

“The Cosmos is a project of a transparent crystal with no veil and eternal depth. The truth is that the Crystalists’ perception of time and space is different from that of others. The goal of the Crystalists is to bring back to life the language of the crystal and to transform language into something more transparent, in which no word can veil another – no selectivity in language. […] We are living a new life, and this life needs a new language and new poetry.”
(The Crystalist Group, Khartoum, 1971)

Events have moved on in Khartoum and the wider world in the half century since then, but you can hear the stands of mysticism, feminism and internationalism which have informed her work to this day.

Spiritualism in Ishag’s art

The Crystalists may have come and gone as a movement but Ishag’s interest in spiritualism and reaching beyond the veil has endured. Working out way to depict the many ‘states of oneness’. According to the press handout, this derives from the stories of spirits told by her mother and grandmothers, and the field research she carried out with spiritualist women convening healing Zar ceremonies, a traditional practice in North Africa and the surrounding region.

In terms of the work, this has resulted in a very distinctive handling of the human body and face, transforming human beings into willowy, undulating shapes, boneless spirits, barely embodied. In the most recurring instances I thought her people were transforming into spermatazoa, heads with wriggly tails for bodies. That’s what the tadpoles wriggling round the bottom of this picture remind me of.

‘Procession’ (Zaar) by Kamala Ibrahim Ishag (2015) © Kamala Ibrahim Ishag

Or as here, in the untitled decoration of a leather drum, where the bodies are made to taper parallel to palm trees, in an image obviously influenced by the landscape of Sudan.

Composition by Kamala Ibrahim Ishag (2016) © Kamala Ibrahim Ishag (photo by the author)

And above all her faces. So many of the faces which appear in these paintings are doubled, as if split, as if she is capturing the duality of human experience in every portrait. As mentioned above, this owes something to her seeing faces of people travelling on the Tube curved and distorted and refracted in Tube carriage windows.

‘Faces with two roses’ by Kamala Ibrahim Ishag (2017) © Kamala Ibrahim Ishag (photo by the author)

But looking at some of them, I thought about Freud and psychoanalytical notions of the conscious and unconscious selves, or wider depth psychology ideas about the multitude of selves we contain within ourselves. Looking at others I thought about the most basic tenet of most religions which is that we are made of body and soul, are made of bodily instincts and soulful longings. Then again, the ones with multiple eyes reminded me of Picasso or the Picasso which his philistine critics liked to mock, two eyes on the same side of the nose, that sort of thing.

Detail of ‘Faces with two roses’ by Kamala Ibrahim Ishag (2017) © Kamala Ibrahim Ishag (photo by the author)

These and many more interpretations are possible. I like art which allows indeterminacy of interpretation, allows thoughts and reflections to rise and connect and free associate.

Nature in Ishag’s art

The other really important aspect of her work is nature, to be precise, trees and leaves and flowers. There are many images of trees and leaves and of people’s willowy bodies undulating in line with arboreal curves. For example, the image at the top of this review of two women floating amid a sea of bright green leaves, or the spectacular ‘Lady grown in a tree’.

‘Lady grown in a tree’ by Kamala Ibrahim Ishag (2017) © Kamala Ibrahim Ishag (photo by the author)

This lady really is deeply embroiled with her tree. The idea made me think of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and all those figures from Greek mythology, mostly women, who turns into flowers or trees.

‘Nothing now remained of my dear sister except her face: all the rest was tree.’
(Iole describing the fate of her sister, Dryope, transformed into a tree, in book 9 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses)

But looking up close, it struck me the lady’s face is very reminiscent of the African mask-inspired faced of Picasso’s famous painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, from a hundred and ten years earlier, in 1907.

Detail of ‘Lady grown in a tree’ by Kamala Ibrahim Ishag (2017) © Kamala Ibrahim Ishag (photo by the author)

The people who float around at a gallery like the Serpentine and are available to answer questions are called ‘visitor assistants’. They are always extremely helpful and very well informed. I got chatting to one visitor assistant who pointed out that many of these images of trees and flowers derive from the plants in Ishag’s own garden in Khartoum. Some – like the palm trees on the drum I mentioned above – are obviously nods to Sudan’s wider landscape. But many not only show flowers but convey a very feminine sense of sociability in a calm, leafy, civilised space. Hence the stylised but still very evocative painting ‘Gathering’ from 2015.

‘Gathering’ by Kamala Ibrahim Ishag (2015) © Kamala Ibrahim Ishag

I assume this is a meeting of (rather ghoulish-looking) ladies who are drinking tea or a light beverage from the long glasses with tiny handles, or maybe just water, which symbolises the water of life. Maybe the glasses are both on the table and floating off it (at the same time) and the picture captures the way it’s the same water as feeds the trees and plants in her garden, which can’t live without it. So the water in the human glasses is one with the water feeding nature and so the plants can be thought of as growing out of the water in the glasses as it is all one.

The more you look, the more you see images of greenery – flowers, plants, tendrils and leaves, either as central motifs for a picture or as decorative elements furling around the split faces and swimming spermatazoa, or of people turning into trees, or of trees containing human faces.

Take the image at the top of this review, ‘Two Women’, if you look carefully at the trees, you’ll see they both contain a human face. In fact at the bottom of both trees, especially the one on the right, you can see a pair of human feet. This painting in particular, made me think of the Ents in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, giants in tree form.

The more you look, the more you see leaves, flowers, tendrils, trees everywhere, images of wholeness and healing to set against her continually disturbing depiction of human faces.

Detail of ‘Two figures in two balls’ by Kamala Ibrahim Ishag (2016) © Kamala Ibrahim Ishag (photo by the author)

‘Blues for the Martyrs’

As might be obvious by now but I think Ishag’s most recent work is her best. In the big paintings from the last decade or so all her themes – willowy people, strange split faces, trees and tendrils – emerge with most force and power. Some artists peak early and fade; Ishag strikes me as getting better and better with every year. Long may she continue.

Thus it is that arguably the most striking image in the entire show is the most recent. It’s titled ‘Blues for the Martyrs’ and it was made this year, 2022. One of those visitor assistants I was talking about explained it to me. In 2019 there were student protests in Khartoum. The police cracked down with violence. They beat up and threw protesters into the river (Nile). Hence the deep blue of the painting which portrays the river and the tendrils of river weeds billowing up through the water.

And the faces in their bubbles? Ishag is using the faux naif style she has perfected over decades to convey the sense of the souls of the dead, protected in hermetic bubbles, enduring, living on, smiling blissfully, a little childishly, maybe. They’re certainly strikingly unlike the troubled split faces, the ghoul faces, of virtually all her previous work. ‘Smiley face for the martyrs.’

‘Blues for the Martyrs’ by Kamala Ibrahim Ishag (2022) © Kamala Ibrahim Ishag

‘Blues for the Martyrs’ is pretty much the most striking painting in the exhibition, not least because it marks such a complete departure from the palette of almost all the other works. Much of the other stuff, whether painted on drums or calabashes or canvas, is predominantly brown or sand, colours of a hot desert country, sprinkled with green leaves, splashes of plantlife in the desert.

By contrast this painting is huge and painted a powerfully deep rich blue. It’s a very striking image but I’ve saved it till last because it’s so uncharacteristic of everything which came before it. Maybe it’s a one-off or…maybe it marks a new departure in Ishag’s work, which is still very much ongoing.

Summary

This is an unusual, unexpected, strange and often very beautiful exhibition, beautifully laid out in the Serpentine’s main big white gallery space. And it’s FREE. Well worth making a detour through the park to see.

Here’s the artist herself, pushing 83 and still rocking it.

Kamala Ibrahim Ishag. Photo © Mohamed Noureldin Abdallah Ahmed

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by Simon on October 14, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition

Posted by Simon on October 14, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/10/14/kamala-ibrahim-ishag-serpentine-gallery/

Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945 to 1965 @ the Barbican

Layout

The Barbican gallery is a big exhibition space, spread over two floors. On the ground floor, as you come in, there’s the ticket desk and shop, then you walk through a doorway on your right into the ground floor display space. This is divided into three successively larger ‘rooms’, the third and final one being a fairly big atrium. You then emerge from these into a corridor which runs back alongside the atrium spaces back to the shop, and off which are three alcove rooms or ‘bays’.

Back by the shop there are stairs up to the first floor gallery which runs round the walls and allows you to look down onto the atrium space you’ve just left, so you can see paintings and sculptures from above. You can walk right round this gallery but there are only alcoves or bays on along two sides of it, four bays on one side and four on the other. 3 + 3 + 4 + 4 = 14 distinct display spaces.

14 rooms, 14 themes

So when the curators set out to design this exhibition of post-war British art they had 14 spaces to play with and have come up with 14 topics or subject areas, accordingly. Starting in room 1, the visitor walks through 14 themed aspects of post-war British art, which are also arranged in a loosely chronological order, starting just after the end of the Second World War and ending in 1965.

‘Cyborg collages’: First Contact by John McHale (1958) Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York © Estate of John McHale

The new

The curators have made one key decision which defines the entire show: believing that post-war artists had to cope with the aftermath of ‘a cataclysmic war that called into question religion, ideology and humanity itself’, they have consciously chosen to focus on THE NEW ARTISTS of the period. They have ignored artists who’d come to prominence between the wars (so no Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth, for example; no Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, no Stanley Spencer, Surrealists or Bloomsburyites).

Instead the curators have tried to catch the mood conveyed by The New Generation of young artists who emerged immediately after the war and set a new tone. The result is that, although the exhibition contains the huge number of 200 works of painting, sculpture and photography, by an overwhelming number of artists (48) it has a surprising unity of feel.

Leaving aside the (excellent) photographers, the paintings in particular demonstrate what you could call a kind of damaged abstraction. There’s a blurred, grey and brown, muddy quality to much of the work. There are lots of earth tones, earth grey, earth cream, earth browns.

West Indian waitresses by Eva Frankfurther (1955) Ben Uri collection, presented by the artist’s sister Beate Planskoy © the Estate of Eve Frankfurther

The war hadn’t pulverised a specific landscape, as in the images of the Western Front made famous during and after the First World War. It had ranged far more widely than that. Crucially, it had permanently damaged mankind’s view of itself.

It was hard to be optimistic about people or ‘culture’ or ‘civilisation’ after news of the concentration camps broke in May 1945, and then the atom bombs were dropped in August 1945. And then the H bombs and the start of the incredibly fearful and menacing Cold War. Many artists struggled to believe in anything positive and channelled their energies into devising novel ways to express their horror and despair.

With so many works by so many artists, there are some exceptions, but overall I’d say this is quite a grim, depressing exhibition, with much to be justifiably depressed about. If you put the (five) photographers to one side, then there’s hardly any figurative work, and when there is (Auerbach, Freud, Bacon, Bratby, Cooke, Souza) it is heavily stylised or deliberately distorted. There are certainly no landscapes. It is an accumulation of damaged psyches.

From murk to clarity

It occurred to me that you could arrange almost all the works along a spectrum from Murk to Clarity. Then you further could sub-divide these categories. What I mean is that the murky end of the spectrum could be divided into images which look like:

bodies melted in a nuclear blast (Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter King)
bodies eviscerated in some grotesque medical calamity (Magda Cordell)
people drowning in Holocaust concentration camp mud (Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff)
bodies blurring into hunks of meat (Francis Bacon)
bodies reimagined as abstract shapes, blots, drabs and dribbles of paint (Gillian Ayres)
bodies combined with inorganic materials such as metal to become ominous cyborgs (Lynn Chadwick’s semi-abstract sculpture of a demonic bird, John McHale’s robotic family, Elisabeth Frink’s menacingly humanoid Harbinger Birds and the St Sebastian sculptures by Eduardo Paolozzi)

The murkiest of the murk

I’ve always heartily disliked the paintings of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. Both applied unbelievable amounts of paint to their canvasses to create nightmare brown meringues of mud. They themselves in interviews claimed they were seeking to get at the essence of the subject or to capture the fleeting nature of reality or some such. They obsessively painted London scenes such as two big muddy paintings here, of the Shell building on the South Bank and Willesden railway junction.

But for me the key fact is that both were Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and, to me, all their paintings powerfully, oppressively convey the feel of the grim Polish winter mud in which so many of their fellow Jews were worked to death, starved to death and exterminated.

‘Drowning in the mud of the Holocaust’: Head of Gerda Boehm by Frank Auerbach (1964) Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts © The Artist

Clarity

At the other end of the spectrum is what I’ve called Clarity, which can be sub-divided into maybe three rooms or artists:

artists in the Concrete room
Lucian Freud
Surface / Vessel room

In the room called Concrete are a set of surprisingly calm, clean, crisp, white abstract images. Victor Pasmore was a celebrate figurative artist when, in the late 1940s, he underwent a conversion to abstraction. By 1951 Pasmore had established a circle of younger artists who were equally committed to the cause of geometric abstraction, which they referred to variously as ‘Concrete’, ‘Constructionist’ or ‘Constructivist’ art, artists including Mary Martin, Adrian Heath, Anthony Hill, Robert Adams and Denis Williams.

Concrete is right next to the death camp vibe of the Auerbach room, Scars, and I really needed it. The white geometric shapes projecting from the canvas as Modernist friezes reminded me of Ben Nicholson (famous between the wars and so banned from this show).

Lucian Freud may seem an odd artist to group under the heading of clarity, but the exhibition features three of his earliest works which do, in fact feature this quality. Edgy, though. Distorted. The curators put it well when they say that ‘Freud’s forensic attention to small details suggests an uneasy vigilance, revealing anxieties just below the surface.’

‘Neurotic clarity’: Girl with Roses by Lucian Freud (1948) Courtesy of the British Council Collection © The Lucian Freud Archive/ Bridgeman Images, photograph

The third ‘calm’ room is titled Surface/Vessel. It features the paintings by William Scott and ceramic vessels by Lucie Rie and Hans Coper. What they have in common is the withdrawal of all bright colours and a return to the colour of canvas and clay, textured surfaces and irregular forms. I might have liked them because 15 years later they set the tone for the kind of abstract prints you could buy at Habitat and Ikea and my parents decorated my childhood home with reproductions of these kind of gentle, cream and earth brown soothing shapes.

Installation view of Postwar Modern showing two works by William Scott: Message Obscure I (1965) and Morning in Mykonos (1961)

Room guide

The themed rooms are:

1. Body and cosmos

The first three rooms are the three progressively bigger ones on the ground floor. Each is dominated by a big signature work. This first room is dominated by Full Stop by John Latham. This seems pretty meh in reproduction which doesn’t convey its size. It’s huge, monumental, 3.5 metres by 2.5 metres, a Mark Rothko of a painting, and a hypnotic image. Is it a solar eclipse, a black hole, an enormously magnified piece of typography. Something has ended – but what?

‘The death of colour’: Full Stop by John Latham (1961) Tate © the Estate of John Latham

Much smaller is the set of three prints by Eduardo Paolozzi, born in 1924 the son of Italian immigrants, so an impressionable teenager during the war. It’s impossible to make the prints out as heads because the images look eroded and decomposed as if by acid or, as wall label suggests, evaporated in the atomic blast so many around the world feared was coming.

2. Post atomic garden

The second room is bigger, contains more but is dominated by the mutant bird sculpture by Lynn Chadwick named The Fisheater (1951). It was commissioned for the 1951 Festival of Britain. It’s set on a slender tripod and aerial assembly, a slender outline of a bird made from thin metal rods and sheets of metal, looking a bit like the skeleton of Concorde, very slightly swaying in the ambient air, beakily looking down at us soft and vulnerable humans.

Installation view of Postwar Modern at the Barbican showing The Fisheater by Lynn Chadwick (1951)

Fisheater epitomises the combination of light, modern industrial elements with unnerving menace which is one of the threads which runs through the show, as in the Paolozzi robots and the robot-humanoid nuclear family grimly depicted in John McHale’s First Contact (above).

3. Strange universe

The third ground floor space is the biggest, lined with huge paintings by a variety of artists, but it is dominated by a signature work, three metal sculptures, about man-size mutant cyborgs made out of complex metal and engineering detritus, welded together and melting at the edges as if they’re robots which have been brought to a halt and slightly melted in the ultimate nuclear apocalypse. They’re by Eduardo Poalozzi who, I think, has more pieces than anyone else in the exhibition and emerges as its presiding spirit.

‘Humanoid figures assembled from electrical scraps and castoffs’: Installation view of Postwar Modern showing Saint Sebastian by Eduardo Paolozzi (1957)

This room also features some enormous paintings by Magda Cordell which are splashed with red and orange and look like the freshly flayed and eviscerated carcass of a humanoid life form.

Figure 59 by Magda Cordell (1958)

4. Jean and John

The first of the bays off to the side of the ground floor corridor contains 8 or so paintings by the husband and wife artists Jean Cooke and John Bratby. Bratby’s stylised but basically figurative still lifes of their home, with boxes of cereals on the kitchen table, were nicknamed ‘Kitchen Sink’ art, presumably before kitchen sink drama came along. Although figurative and colourful, these paintings somehow bespeak the horrible, pokey domesticity of English life and it came as no surprise to learn that Bratby was jealous of his wife’s talent, destroyed much of her work and beat and abused her. See what I mean by grim?

5. Intimacy and aura

This is the room with the neurotic early paintings by Lucian Freud which I mentioned above.

But it also features the first of the photographers, Bill Brandt. Photography, with its figurative realism, comes as a big relief after four rooms loaded with paintings of bleakness, despair, mutant robots and huge abattoir paintings. But it is even more of a relief to discover that Brandt is represented here by a series of photos of female nudes. It’s not that they’re nude so much as that they’re studies of people who are young, fit and healthy. It is a sudden oasis in a desert of radioactive despair.

Apparently Brandt had been renowned in the 1930s for his photojournalism (thus breaking the curators’ self-imposed rule that no-one from between the wars has a place) but 1945 saw a radical shift in his practice as he began experimenting with nude studies indoors. Not only indoors, but in spare, spartan uncarpeted rooms. So, although fully realistic, these studies also have a strange, spooky, spectral mood. Arguably these photos, although entirely naturalistic, manage to share the same sense of nervy ominous as so many of the paintings and sculptures.

The Policeman’s Daughter, Hampstead, London 1945 by Bill Brandt © Bill Brandt Archive

6. Lush life

This room is a surprise. One entire wall is a hugely blown up photo of the interior of a new model home designed by the visionary architects Alison and Peter Smithson. It’s a photo of their stand at the 1956 Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition. It was titled ‘House of the Future’ and the furniture was created using plaster, plywood and paint masquerading as the moulded plastic they’d like to have used but couldn’t afford, the kind of new super-slimmed-down ideals for living designs which were being pioneered and mass produced in America and which featured in the Barbican exhibition about Charles and Ray Eames.

Installation view of Postwar Modern showing the wall-sized photo of Alison and Peter Smithson’s 1956 ‘House of the Future’, with just one yellow ‘egg chair’, made from moulded reinforced polyester, on the low dais.

The American theme is echoed in a series of humorous collages created by Eduardo Paolozzi (is he the most represented artist in the show?). It’s a series of A4 sized collages he created by cutting up images from glossy American consumer magazines, titling the series Bunk. Of course they’re meant to be ironic and subversive and whatnot, but what really comes over is the power and optimism of the original images. Particularly when set against the post-atomic, post-Holocaust nihilism of so much of the rest of the show.

Bunk! Evadne in Green Dimension by Eduardo Paolozzi (1952) Victoria and Albert Museum, © The Paolozzi Foundation

7. Scars

As described above, the Auerbach and Kossoff, drowning in mud, Holocaust despair room.

The room also has a little TV on which is playing a film of a 1961 event carried out by another Jew (the curators emphasis the common ethnicity of these three artists), Gustav Metzger. Metzger pioneered an art of ‘auto-destruction’ in the late 1950s, staging works that enacted their own disintegration, mirroring the violence he felt in a world hell bent on its own destruction. In the grainy old film Metzger is wearing a gas mask, with St Paul’s in the background, while he sprays acid onto canvas which promptly shrivels and dissolves. ‘Happenings’ had been happening in America among beatnik audiences art colleges throughout the 1950s. This appears to be Metzger’s variation on the idea which – as so often in this exhibition – accentuates the negative.

8. Concrete

As described above, a roomful of works by Victor Pasmore and his fellow ‘Concrete’ artists. I especially enjoyed the small-scale, abstract sculptures by Robert Adams. Calm and healing.

Installation view of Postwar Modern at the Barbican showing works by Robert Adams, being: Divided form (1951), Rectangular bronze form number 7 (1955) and Balanced bronze forms (1955).

9. Choreography of the street

More photography, thank God. The black and white snaps of Nigel Henderson and Roger Mayne who specialised in capturing children at play in the gritty, ruin-infested post war streets. Mayne’s most famous body of work was created between 1956 and 1961, capturing the working-class community of Southam Street in North Kensington, west London. One of his photos was used for the cover Colin MacInnes’s novel, Absolute Beginners (1959), a copy of which is here in a glass case.

Street scene 1957 by Roger Mayne © Roger Mayne Archive / Mary Evans Picture Library

Reminds me a bit of the photo of young toughs in Finsbury Park, 1958, which marked the start of Don McCullin’s career.

The lovely and hugely evocative photos of kids playing in bomb sites are interspersed with a series of collages by Robyn Denny and Eduardo Paolozzi (surely Paolozzi is the most featured artist in the show?). And alongside these, collages and in the radical print designs created by Henderson and Paolozzi for their company Hammer Prints Ltd (1954 to 1962).

10. Two women

The two women in question are German refugee painter Eva Frankfurther and home-grown Mancunian photographer, Shirley Baker. Baker documented the changing face of Manchester in the 1950s and early 60s as the old slums were demolished and cleared for high rises and social housing. She walked the streets with a camera always in her bag, taking wonderfully evocative black and white photos of wretched slums and the old-style, working class inhabitants. In 1965 she started experimenting with colour photography and some of her colour photos are feature here.

I was lucky enough to go to the Shirley Baker exhibition at the Photographers Gallery a few years ago – none of the colour photos here are as good as her black and white ones. In a funny kind of way, colour shots of this kind of scene look oddly older, more technologically dated, than the pure black and white ones.

Anyway, the point is… look at the rubble! And in 1965! Twenty years after the war, large parts of England were still struggling to drag themselves into the modern age.

Hulme 1965 by Shirley Baker © Nan Levy for the Estate of Shirley Baker

11. Cruise

The wall label in this room informs us that:

Cruising, or looking for a casual sexual encounter in a public place, was central to the expression and exploration of male same-sex love and desire in the postwar years…

And so it is that one wall features a couple of early works by David Hockney, large browny-black background with all kinds of graffiti, words, lines and squiggles drawn across them:

The title My Brother is Only Seventeen (1962) was derived from graffiti that Hockney read on the toilet walls of Earl’s Court station, a popular cruising spot.

My Brother is only Seventeen by David Hockney (1962) © Royal College of Art

But the real revelation of this room is arguably the best thing in the exhibition. In 1954 Francis Bacon painted a series of seven huge paintings depicting a man in a dark suit sitting at the bar of a hotel, although the background has been stylised to become the slender bars of some kind of cage set against a very dark background. Three of the series are hung here, side by side.

Man in Blue I by Francis Bacon (1954) Collection Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam © The Estate of Francis Bacon

A photo like this doesn’t do the paintings any kind of justice. They are not only enormous but also, despite their stylised subject matter, have the depth and resonance of Old Master paintings. It took me a while to realise that, unlike all the other rooms in the show, the walls of this room are painted black, as if we are in a very old museum or gallery, and these three Man in Blue paintgins have the power and depth of Old Masters.

Black upon black, depths of blackness, inky impenetrability and ominousness. Possibly the best part of the entire exhibition was standing in front of these three enormous variations on a dark, baleful image and letting it soak right in to your soul.

12. Surface/vessel

As described above, a calming, peaceful room of the paintings by William Scott and ceramic vessels by Lucie Rie and Hans Coper.

13. Liberated form and space

Big colourful paintings by Gillian Ayres, Patrick Heron and Frank Bowling. From the reproductions I thought I’d like the Ayres, but in the flesh I found them a too big and I didn’t warm to her use of ‘dribbles, splashes and stains’ of paint, as the curators themselves describe her work.

‘A world of abstract shapes and dripping paint’: Break-off by Gillian Ayres (1961) Tate © the Estate of Gillian Ayres, courtesy of Marlborough Gallery, London

By the same token, I didn’t warm to the press release photos of paintings by Patrick Heron, but in the flesh found them to be some of the very few genuinely colourful, vibrant and life affirming paintings in the entire exhibition. The wall label explains that, like Pasmore and other post-war artists, when he moved from figurative to abstract painting Heron experienced a great sense of liberation.

June Horizon by Patrick Heron (1957) Wakefield Council Permanent Art Collection (The Hepworth Wakefield) © The Estate of Patrick Heron

14. Horizon

The exhibition ends on an oddity.

We met Gustav Metzger in the Scars room, represented by a film of one of his auto-destructive events. Here, at the end of the exhibition is a blacked out room with half a dozen film projectors projecting onto two walls a series of abstract swirling shapes, which were to become super familiar in the Psychedelic movement and subsequently in the lava lamps of millions of suburban bedrooms. Metzger had moved away from the ‘auto-destructive art’ of the 1950s and towards what he now titled ‘auto-creation’, in which the work of art takes on its own life. This immersive room, complete with bean bags (but no spliffs) is titled Liquid Crystal Environment and was created in 1965 using heat-sensitive chemicals sandwiched between rotating glass slides in a projector.

It’s an odd piece to end on because it seems so out of synch with the rest of the show. It feels like a little bit of the Psychedelic Sixties which has got lost in an exhibition which is overwhelmingly about the grim psychic damage, the anxieties and angst of the early Cold War, with the long memory of the Holocaust festering under the shadow of nuclear apocalypse.

Maybe it’s meant to feel cheerful but it doesn’t, which might explain why the two or three times I walked past I didn’t see anybody on the numerous beanbags.

Immigrants

An impressive number of the artists were refugees from Nazi Europe (Auerbach. Kossoff, Metzger, Lucie Rie, Hans Coper, Eva Frankfurther, Magda Cordell). But the curators go out of their way to include artists from colonial backgrounds, non-white immigrants from what was still the British Empire. These include:

Francis Newton Souza (India), with his intimidating, highly stylised black Christs (1958) in the first room
Anwar Jalal Shemza (Pakistan) with a series of Islam-inspired abstracts in the same room as Heron and Ayres
Kim Lim (Singapore Chinese) with her delicate abstract sculptures

The Barbican’s birthday show

The curators point out that the exhibition has been timed to coincide with the fortieth birthday of the Barbican’s opening, for it was in the grim post-war period that the Barbican Estate was first conceived, to occupy what was at the time an enormous bombsite in the heart of London.

The Barbican itself, a grim, forbidding, concrete bunker, on an oppressive grey, rainy day, was the perfect setting for an exhibition about the damaged lives, damaged psyches and damaged country which – despite occasional bursts of colour – is what comes over so powerfully in this show.

Other Barbican reviews

All my other Barbican reviews on the Art and Exhibitions page

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by Simon on March 4, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Second World War

Tagged Adrian Heath, Alison Smithson, Anthony Hill, Anwar Jalal Shemza, atom bomb, auto-creation, auto-destructive art, Barbican, Barbican gallery, Ben Nicholson, Bill Brandt, Bunk, Cold War, Colin MacInnes, David Hockney, Denis Williams, Eduardo Paolozzi, Elisabeth Frink, Eva Frankfurter, exhibition, Festival of Britain, Francis Bacon, Francis Newton Souza, Frank Auerbach, Frank Bowling, Gillian Ayres, Gustav Metzger, Hans Coper, Holocaust, Jean Cooke, John Bratby, John Latham, John McHale, Kim Lim, Leon Kossoff, Lucian Freud, Lucie Rie, Lynn Chadwick, Magda Cordell, Mary Martin, modern art, Nigel Henderson, Painting, Patrick Heron, Peter King, Peter Smithson, post-war British art, Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945 to 1965, Prints, Robert Adams, Robyn Denny, Roger Mayne, sculpture, Shirley Baker, Victor Pasmore, William Scott

Posted by Simon on March 4, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/03/04/postwar-modern-new-art-in-britain-1945-to-1965-barbican/

Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art @ Barbican

This is a fabulous exhibition, packed with wonderful paintings, photos, films, drawings, posters and all kinds of memorabilia connected with a dozen or so avant-garde and trend-setting nightclubs around the world from the 1880s to the 1960s, And as well as all the lovely works and ideas and stories, it raises a number of questions, which I’ll address at the end of this review…

First the clubs and their stories. The Barbican exhibition space is laid out not as ‘rooms’ but as successive alcoves or spaces running off the first floor gallery, from which you look down onto the ground floor which can be divided up into various areas, or opened up to make one through-space (as they did for the Lee Krasner exhibition).

There are eight of these room-sized alcoves upstairs, and in this exhibition each one tells the story of one or two famous nightclubs which became a focus for artists, or was designed and decorated by artists, in various countries from the 1880s onwards…

Paris

The Chat Noir nightclub was the most famous of the new generation of nightclubs which opened in the Montmartre region of Paris in the 1880s. The darkened interior combined Gothic, Neo-Classical and Japanese features, in fact it contained so many artworks some people nicknamed it the Louvre of Montmartre.

Reopening of the Chat Noir Cabaret by Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen (1896) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

In 1885 a shadow theatre was installed on the Chat Noir’s third floor in a room hung with drawings by Edgar Degas, Monet and Toulouse-Lautrec. Here artist Henri Riviere and collaborators staged what ended up being a series of 40 increasingly elaborate shadow plays. The exhibition features photos and drawings of the Chat Noir, along with some fabulous posters, and a big display case of some of the elaborately designed zinc silhouettes used in the plays, explaining how they were made, what characters they represent, along with some of the books, kind of novelisations of the plays they staged, including music and illustrations

The shadow theatre’s owner Rodolphe Salis took it on an international tour in the 1890s, inspiring a generation if avant-garde artists.

Meanwhile, the strange and dramatic dances of Loïe Fuller staged at the Folies Bergère in the 1890s were trail-blazing experiments in costume, light and movement. Fuller held long sticks attached to swathes of fabric to enormously increase the swirling effects of her dances. She was a real innovator who set up a laboratory to experiment with spectacular effects.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec captured her performances in a series of delicately hand-coloured lithographs, she inspired early film-makers like Edison and Lumiere brothers, and the alcove devoted to her also has a set of huge and very evocative posters by the great poster-maker of the era, Jules Chéret.

Folies Bergers by Jules Chéret

Vienna

The Cabaret Fledermaus was opened in Vienna in 1907 by the Wiener Werkstätte. It is a total art work in which every element – chairs, tables, light hanging, stairs and the brightly coloured tiled walls – each tile featuring a unique fantastical motif – were designed to create an overwhelming effect. Joseph Hoffmann designed the overall concept and commissioned the Wiener Keramik workshop to produce the tiles. The club hosted satirical plays, poetry readings, avant-garde dance and a variety of musical events, including a performance of The Speckled Egg by the 21-year-old Oskar Kokoschka, a puppet show based on an Indian folk tale – the exhibition includes the fragile, original hand-made puppets.

Postcard showing the Interior view of the bar at the Cabaret Fledermaus (1907) Collection of Leonard A. Lauder

London

Not to be left behind, some London artists banded together to set up The Cave of the Golden Calf in 1912, an underground haunt in Soho set up by Frida Uhl Strindberg. It was located in ‘a dingy basement below a cloth merchant’s warehouse just off Regent Street, where her artist friends Spencer Gore, Jacob Epstein, Wyndham Lewis, and Eric Gill contributed to the futurist and Russian ballet-inspired art that covered the club’s interiors. It was also, apparently, possibly the first ‘gay bar’ in the modern sense and was certainly conceived by its creator, as an avant-garde and artistic venture.

This section included designs for the interior by British artists Spencer Gore and Eric Gill, as well as Wyndham Lewis’s highly stylised programmes for the eclectic performance evenings. I came across Wyndham Lewis at school and have never stopped loving his savage angular art, either satirising English society or brutally conveying the reality of the Great War, which he saw from the front as a bombardier. For me his programme designs were the best thing in this section.

Study for a mural decoration for the Cave of the Golden Calf by Spencer Gore (1912) © Tate, London 2019

Zurich

Zurich during the war is famous as the birthplace of the Cabaret Voltaire (1916), which in its short existence (February to July 1916) hosted far-out Dada events and happenings in a deliberately absurdist environment. The exhibition includes samples of absurdist sound poetry and fantastical masks that deconstruct body and language, as used in the anarchic performances of original Dadaists Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings and Marcel Janco. Later Jean Arp recalled ‘pandemonium in an overcrowded, flamboyant room’ with works by Picasso or Arp hanging on the wall while Hennings sang anti-war songs there were puppet shows, improvised dances, African drums, and booming ‘poetry without words’ was yelled through a megaphone by people wearing silly costumes. This is a 1960s reconstruction:

Rome

The curators select two clubs from the post-war period in Rome which demonstrated the hold of the dynamic new art movement of Futurism in Italy in the 1920s.

In 1921 Futurist artist Giacomo Balla was commissioned by Ugo Paladini to create a Futurist nightclub and the result was Bal Tic Tac, which used Futurist angular design to create a wonderfully colour-saturated designs for the club’s interior. The exterior of the building was sensible neo-classical, the interior deliberately undermined this with brightly coloured interlacing shapes meant to capture the movement of dancers. It was one of the first places in Rome to promote the new American jazz music. A sign on the door read, ‘If you don’t drink champagne – go away!’

Also in the same room is a display devoted to drawings and furnishings for Fortunato Depero’s spectacular inferno-inspired Cabaret del Diavolo (1922) which occupied three floors representing heaven, purgatory and hell. Depero’s flamboyant tapestry writhes with dancing demons, expressing the club’s motto ‘Tutti all’inferno!!! (Everyone to hell!!!)’.

Black and White Little Devils: Dance of the Devils by Fortunato Depero (1922) © DACS 2019. Archivo Depero, Rovereto. Courtesy Mart Archivio Fotografico e Mediateca

–

Weimar Germany

After Paris in the Belle Epoque, probably the most famous era of nightclubs was in Weimar Germany between the wars, the exhibition doesn’t disappoint, with a selection of paintings and drawings of decadent German nightclubs by the likes of George Grosz, Otto Dix and Max Beckmann, Grosz – as usual – for me at any rate, emerging as the star among the men.

But, living in the era when we do, the exhibition goes out of its way to promote the work of ‘often overlooked female artists’, such as Jeanne Mammen and Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler.

Jeanne Mammen is really good. Her drawings and paintings are recognisably from the same time and place as the guys, but feel a little softer, more rounded, her figures are a little more like humans and less like the porcine animals of Grosz or Dix. Also her use of colour, particularly watercolour, the colours washing or dribbling or spilling over to create colour and life and action and depth. She depicted almost only women, many set in overtly lesbian nightclubs, in fact some of the wonderful pictures here were illustrations to a 1931 book titled A Guide To Depraved Berlin.

She Represents by Jenna Mammen (1928) published in Simplicissimus magazine Volume 32, Number 47

One of the most purely beautiful paintings in the exhibition is Karl Hofer’s iconic portrait of a couple of Tiller Girls, the Tiller Girls being dancers who did high-precision, high-kicking routines.

Tiller Girls by Karl Hofer (before 1927) Kunsthalle Emden – Stiftung Henri und Eske Nannen © Elke Walford, Fotowerkstatt Hamburg

Interestingly, a social theorist write in the same year this was painted, 1927, that the uncanny precision and interchangeability of the girls mirrored the large-scale mechanical methods of manufacturing which were then coming in and capturing people’s imaginations: ‘the hands of the factory correspond to the legs of the Tiller Girls’.

Strasbourg

Meanwhile in Strasbourg, Theo van Doesburg, Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp worked together to create the L’Aubette (1926–28), conceived as the ultimate ‘deconstruction of architecture’, a highly modernist, strict, functional design, with bold geometric abstraction as its guiding principle. The vast building housed a cinema-ballroom, bar, tearoom, billiards room, restaurant and more, each designed as immersive environments.

The Ciné-bal at Café L’Aubette, Strasbourg, designed by Theo van Doesburg (1926 to 1928) Image: Collection Het Nieuwe Instituut

Harlem

During World War One a Great Migration began of African-Americans from the Deep South to escape segregation, poverty and violent racism. They came north, to northern cities like Chicago and New York, and brought with them new music and sounds, specifically jazz. In New York many settled in the uptown Harlem district which underwent a great artistic flowering of music, poetry, dance, art and more, which eventually became known as the Harlem Renaissance.

The exhibition includes a fascinating street map of Harlem (by E. Simms Campbell) which shows all the different nightclubs and the types of jazz to be found there. The most evocative thing here is the movie made around Duke Ellington’s jazz suite, Symphony In Black, which was intended to convey a panorama of African-American life.

All the static artefacts struggle to compete with the evocativeness of a) the music and b) some of the scenes from the movie. But what comes close is the fabulous silhouette art of Aaron Douglas who is represented by paintings and prints and illustrations to a book of blues lyrics by Langston Hughes. Vivid, beautifully crisp and rhythmic, it’s no wonder the curators chose one of his images as the exhibition poster.

I’d like to know a lot more about Douglas, every one of the half dozen or so images on show here are excellent. They also made me realise the black and white silhouette art of Kara Walker, the contemporary Afro-American artists, is not as original as I thought it was.

So far all these settings and stories and artists have been European and American, part of a familiar narrative of Euro-American modernism which most of us are pretty familiar with. But this huge exhibition has a few surprises in store. First, the non-Western subjects.

Mexico City

Two and a half thousand miles south of New York City is Mexico City. Here, in the aftermath of the prolonged Mexican Revolution, in the early 1920s, a radical new art movement emerged named Estridentismo which sought to overthrow established bourgeois modes and create a new poetry which combined the folk fiction of the peasants with the reality of urban life in the big cities. How to unite rural peasants and urban workers – it was Lenin’s problem, Mao’s problem, Guevara’s problem, and the founders of the movement – Ramón Alva de la Canal, Manuel Maples Arce and Germán Cueto – discussed this and much more at the Café de Nadie (Nobody’s Café) in Mexico City.

One of them came up with the characteristically inane motto: ‘Chopin to the electric chair!’ (characteristic for the post-war era of anti-bourgeois rhetoric)

Well, the twentieth century was to send many poets, painters, composers and musicians to the gulag, to the death camp and the execution cell, so in a roundabout way they got their wish.

Later in the 1920s, some of the group plus new members set up the ¡30-30! group (named after a popular rifle cartridge) with a socialist agenda of bringing art to the masses, and they organised lots of exhibitions and events in 1928 to 30. In January 1929 they staged an ambitious interactive exhibition-cum-event in a large carpa or low-cost tent used for travelling circuses. The Carpa Amaro event featured many woodprints, a deliberately cheap, affordable form.

The exhibition includes photos of these young firebrands, alongside a case of handmade masks made by German Cueto, and then a wall of thirty or so of the woodcuts which featured in the carpa exhibition by artists such as Gabriel Fernandez Ledesma and Fermin Revueltas Sanchez, ranging in subject matter from revolutionary leaders to suckling pigs via many portraits of working people.

Viva el 30-30 by Fernando Leal (1928)

Nigeria

Then, to my surprise, there is a whole section about Nigeria, specifically about the highly influential Mbari Artists and Writers Club, founded in the early 1960s in Nigeria.

The exhibition focuses on two of the club’s key locations, in Ibadan and Osogbo, describing how they were founded as laboratories for postcolonial artistic experimentation, providing a platform for a dazzling range of activities – including open-air dance and theatre performances, featuring ground breaking Yoruba operas by Duro Ladipo and Fela Kuti’s Afro-jazz; poetry and literature readings; experimental art workshops; and pioneering exhibitions by African and international artists such as Colette Omogbai, Twins Seven-Seven, Ibrahim El-Salahi and Uche Okeke.

There were some striking paintings here, I appreciated the swirling designs of Twins Seven-Seven but was drawn to the three works by Ibrahim (later discovering these are talismanic pieces of post-colonial African art).

There was a very interesting film playing, Art In A Changing Society made back in 1964 by Francis Speed and Ulli Beier, which was a TV documentary-style introduction to the art and architecture, design and dance and music of post-colonial Nigeria but which I cannot, alas, find on the internet.

Tehran

Lastly, and most unexpected of all, we come to Tehran in 1966 where the club Rasht 29 emerged as a creative space for avant-garde painters, poets, musicians and filmmakers to meet and discuss. There were spontaneous performances and works by artists like Parviz Tanavoli and Faramarz Pilaram hung in the lounge while a soundtrack including Led Zeppelin and the Beatles played constantly.

Best of the works here were the three or four works by Parviz Tanalovi, who incorporated industrial leftovers and detritus into picture sculptures i.e picture sized and shaped objects, which hang on a wall, but which come out of the picture frame into three dimensions. Apparently many of his works incorporate a grille which looks to me like the symbol of a prison but apparently refers to the traditional design of a saqqakhaneh, the ‘sacred commemorative water fountains’ which gave their name to the artistic movement they all belonged to Saqqakhaneh.

1. Including the non-Western clubs

As you can see, it’s a lot to take in. I find it hard to keep in mind all of the aspects of Modernism across Europe and the States – bringing in new non-Western countries is a brave and admirable move – it is good to learn about Ibrahim El-Salahi and Parviz Tanalovi, in particular.

But it begs quite a few questions:

1. Why do we get to see so very little non-Western art in all our major art galleries. Mexico, Nigeria, Iran – these are all major countries with huge populations and long cultural heritages. Yet you only rarely hear anything about them.

2. Do they really fit into this exhibition? Not only was the Western stuff unified by coming from a common European artistic heritage, but it was unified in date as well, showing the flow of thought from the late-nineteenth century through the Great War and into the inter-war period: it covers the period roughly described as Modernism. Whereas the Nigeria and Tehran stuff suddenly leaps into the 1960s, a completely different period with a completely different vibe.

So not only do I know next to nothing about Nigerian or Persian traditional art, but I am not told anything about Nigerian or Iranian art of the 1900s, 20s, 30s, 40s or 50s to help put the sudden focus in the clubs of the 1960s in focus.

2. Recreating the nightclub vibe

There is one massive aspect of the show I haven’t mentioned yet – which is that, having processed through the historical exhibition and display up on the balcony, the visitor then goes back down to the ground floor and discovers that, in the central gallery space, the curators have recreated some of the art clubs which we’ve been reading about. Specifically, there is:

Chat Noir a white room with 7 or 8 of the big metal stencils fromt he Chat Noir hanging from the ceiling and slowly rotating in the mild breeze and throwing shadows on the wall, all to the contemporaneous music of Debussy and Satie – a very calm, peaceful, meditative room
Cabaret Fledermaus a striking reconstruction of the Viennese nightclub in which the walls and bar are studded with brightly coloured tiles

Recreation of the Cabaret Fledermaus, Vienna, 1907

L’Aubette a reconstruction of L’Aubette, the semi-industrial, architectural complex in Strasbourg, complete with cinema projection running a series of contemporary films, including Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin and Metropolis

Recreation of the cinema-ballroom L’Aubette by Theo van Doesburg, Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp

Mbari Clubs and a nice space set off from the corridor by a barrier or wall made out of sculpted patterns in a Nigerian style, inside which was playing a video of Nigerian youths dancing

You can see that a great deal or time, trouble and expense has gone into recreating each of these ‘zones’. But.. The most obvious thing about most nightclubs is, or was, that they were traditionally subterranean, smoky, often very noisy and very cramped and packed environments, in which people are drinking too much and laughing and joking and often having to shout over the very loud music, and laughing and going off to the bogs or stopping for a snog on the stars or chatting up the barmaid or barman, and asking someone for a light. They are/were places of intense hectic human interaction.

It was an ambitious, maybe quixotic notion, to try and recreate all that human bustle, noise, sweat and booziness in… the uniquely silent, white, perfectly scrubbed and essentially sterile environment of the modern art gallery. Nothing could really have been more dead than the Mbari Clubs little zone, completely empty when I walked in, admired the Yoruba wall paintings, and walked out again. Or the loving recreation of the Cabaret Fledermaus, beautiful coloured tiles and all, and utterly empty and utterly silent when I walked through it.

Conclusions

This is a fascinating insight into an enduringly interesting subject, a subject which has inspired all manner of artists across numerous countries and periods.

In fact, maybe you could think of The Nightclub as being an entire genre, a very twentieth century genre, as The Nude or The Landscape were for previous centuries.

And I admire the way the curators have made it so multinational, showing the same impulse at work across multiple cultures and continents.

Like previous Barbican shows it is so packed as to be overwhelming, bringing together over 350 works rarely seen in the UK, including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, films and archival material.

And yet I was really perplexed by the recreations. The young woman who took my ticket explained that they have been having music evenings, with live bands playing. Maybe that helps, maybe that lifts it a bit. But it was eerie walking through perfect recreations of places which were meant to be temples to human interaction in all its smelly, sweaty, boozy, smoke-ridden, music-drowned glory but were now empty and silent – turned, quite literally, into museum pieces.

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by Simon on December 9, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, History

Tagged Aaron Douglas, Afro-jazz, art, Art In A Changing Society, avant-garde, Bal Tic Tac, Barbican, Cabaret del Diavolo, Cabaret Fledermaus, Cabaret Voltaire, Café de Nadie, Carpa Amaro, Charlie Chaplin, Chat Noir, clubs, Colette Omogbai, Dada, Dadaism, Degas, drawing, Duke Ellington, Duro Ladipo, Edison, Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, Emmy Hennings, Eric Gill, Estridentismo, exhibition, Faramarz Pilaram, Fela Kuti, Fermin Revueltas Sanchez, film, Folies Bergère, Fortunato Depero, Francis Speed, Frida Uhl Strindberg, Futurism, Gabriel Fernandez Ledesma, George Grosz, Germán Cueto, Giacomo Balla, Hans Arp, Harlem, Henri Riviere, Hugo Ball, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art, Italy, Jacob Epstein, Jean Arp, Jeanne Mammen, Joseph Hoffmann, Jules Chéret, Kara Walker, Karl Hofer, Langston Hughes, L’Aubette, Loïe Fuller, Lumiere, Manuel Maples Arce, Marcel Janco, Max Beckmann, Mbari Artists and Writers Club, Metropolis, Mexico City, modern art, Modern Times, Modernism, Monet, Montmartre, New York, Nigeria, nightclubs, non-Western, Oskar Kokoschka, Otto Dix, paintings, Paris, Parviz Tanavoli, photography, poster, Ramón Alva de la Canal, Rasht 29, Rodolphe Salis, Saqqakhaneh, shadow puppets, shadow theatre, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Spencer Gore, Strasbourg, Symphony In Black, Tehran, Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, the Belle Epoque, The Cave of the Golden Calf, the Great War, the Harlem Renaissance, the Mexican Revolution, Theo van Doesburg, Tiller Girls, Toulouse-Lautrec, Twins Seven-Seven, Uche Okeke, Ugo Paladini, Ulli Beier, Vienna, Weimar Germany, Western, Wiener Werkstätte, Wyndham Lewis, Yoruba

Posted by Simon on December 9, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/12/09/into-the-night-cabaret-clubs-modern-art-barbican/

Olafur Elliasson: In Real Life @ Tate Modern

Olafur Eliasson was born in 1967 in Copenhagen, Denmark. He specialises in dramatic art ‘experiences’ – and they really are dramatic and wonderful.

I got to Tate Modern as it opened at ten am and there was already a long queue outside the exhibition, mostly of parents with small children, toddlers and even babies, because of all the art displays on anywhere this is probably the most ooh and aah.

Curators categorise and sort and order and structure exhibitions. It’s open to any of us visitors to do the same. In which case, at the top level, Eliasson produces roughly three kinds of work, the traditional look-at-the-wall-label-then-look-at-the-exhibit sort; the clever circus attraction mirrors and kaleidoscopes – and then the totally immersive ‘experiences’ which require no explanation.

Wall label art

Into the wall label category fall:

Room one which contains a huge glass display case, inside which is a jungle – in fact some 450! – complex, fancy, inventive geometric shapes and designs and prototypes which Eliasson and architects and engineers he’s worked with for decades, notably the Icelandic artist, mathematician and architect Einar Thorsteinn, have produced: models of buildings, booths, shops, street plans, spaceships, all kinds of clever shapes generated from copper wire, cardboard, paper photocopies, Lego, wood, foam and rubber balls.

There’s a room of pin-prick clear digital photos. On one wall a grid of 42 photos of a river which Eliasson white-water rafted down (river raft, 2000). Opposite it an exactly matching grid of 42 photos of glaciers in Iceland.

Installation view of Olafur Eliasson: In real life at Tate Modern, showing the grid of photos of the river to the left, of the glacier to the right. Photo by Anders Sune Berg

As you might expect, Eliasson is very aware of global warming (aren’t we all, darling) and so has spent considerable time and effort flying to and from Iceland, driving chunky Land Rovers and gas-guzzling four-by-fours up to the glaciers and recording the way they’re melting away as a result of human beings… er… flying all over the place and driving billions of petrol and diesel-fuelled vehicles everywhere. Thus:

Ice Watch which was staged in front of Tate Modern in 2018, is an installation of ice blocks fished from the water off the coast of Greenland. It offered a direct and tangible experience of the reality of melting Arctic ice. Other works, like those in this room, are a more abstract reference to the changing environment. In Glacial currents 2018, chunks of glacial ice were placed on top of washes of coloured pigment. This created swells and fades of colour as they melted onto the paper beneath. In The presence of absence pavilion 2019, a bronze cast makes visible the empty space left by a block of glacial ice that melted away. Glacial spherical flare 2019 is constructed with glass made from small rock particles created by glacial erosion.

So this is the kind of art you have to a) read about and then b) respond to with the appropriate sentiments – ‘Global warming, isn’t it terrible, somebody ought to do something, that wonderful Greta Thunberg’ etc.

Optical illusion art

Eliasson likes kaleidoscopes, and prisms, and distorting lenses and mirror balls. Thus as you stand in the queue to enter the gallery space, outside in the foyer is hanging a huge geometric ball with light projected through it to cast a complex shadow on the wall.

Stardust particle by Olafur Eliasson (2014). Photo by the author

There is a room with one vast jagged mirror ball casting rainbow-prism colours all over the walls. Another with a big white silk screen onto which is projected a continually changing swirling white shape. There’s a sort of catwalk which lets you walk through a ‘tunnel’ made of thousands of jagged fragments of reflecting metal, which reflect your moving image into thousands of fragments. There’s a concave lens embedded in the wall of one of the galleries so you can see the visitors in the next room amusingly distorted.

Installation view of Olafur Eliasson: In real life at Tate Modern. Photo by the author

There’s a wall of moss – ‘a vast plane 20 metres wide entirely covered with Scandinavian reindeer moss’. Why? Why not? This reminded me of Richard Long’s environmental art. But 1. the friend I went with was upset that this much sphagnum moss had been torn up and removed from its natural habitat i.e. she saw it as an act of destruction 2. as always with unusual sculptures, I wanted to touch it, to get up close and touch and stroke and smell it. But none of that is allowed and there’s now a security tape (not in this picture) preventing visitors from touching it, and a burly security guard strolling up and down to make sure nobody gets too close.

Moss wall by Olafur Eliasson (1994) Photo by Anders Sune Berg

Immersive art

But Eliasson’s really distinctive trademark is the immersive experiences. There are three or four real crackers here. In one you go into a pitch black room and then there is a sudden flicker of intense white light by which you just about make out a weird white blog in the centre of the room. Only as you carefully blunder your way in the pitch black towards it (trying not to trip over the numerous toddlers underfoot) do you realise the periodic flash of intense light is illuminating a continual small-scale fountain of water, whose shape – caught in mid-snap – is always different, always changing.

Big Bang Fountain by Olafur Eliasson

Along the same lines – well, involving water – is another darkened room in which a sheet of sine misty spray is continually falling. Not a pour or drench of water, a fine mist so that it’s comfortable to stand under and feel only a little damp – as indeed hundreds of visitors do in order to be snapchatted and instagrammed by their giggling friends. When there are no people under it, you can enjoy the rainbow prism effect of the hidden wall lights refracted through the mist.

Beauty by Olafur Eliasson (1993)

Last and most spectacular of all is Din blinde passager (Your blind passenger) from 2010. You have to queue and are let in a few at a time into a airlock between the gallery and then the experience. And then you open the inner door and enter a 39-metre-long corridor full of dense fog, really dense fog, fog where you can’t see anything more than a couple of yards away, and which is lit by Eliasson’s trademark orange light. At first it’s wonderful and disorientating but the real power comes from it being so long. It really lasts. It takes an appreciable time to walk that distance and this is long enough for your entire system to begin to acknowledge and acclimatise to the new circumstances.

Din blinde passager/Your blind passenger by Olafur Eliasson (2010)

Oh and I forgot the coloured shadow room. A bank of coloured lights are at the back at floor level projecting upwards onto the entire facing wall and anyone who walks in front of them projects multiple, multi-coloured shadows. So a number of people walking through create a complex interaction of shadows. It’s titled Your uncertain shadow (2010). This is a really interactive creation, with loads of people throwing shapes and silly poses and my favourite was a baby which has just reached the crawling stage and its parents let it crawl around the floor casting huge multi-coloured baby shapes on the wall behind it.

Your uncertain shadow (colour) 2010 by Olafur Eliasson. Photo by Maria del Pilar Garcia Ayensa

There’s much more. There are long narrow trays full of sleepy liquid in which one wave is travelling up and down. There’s a room with a mirror for a ceiling where you can look up and see yourself looking down. There are more prisms and mirror balls.

The lifts are illuminated by the trademark Eliasson orange glow, as is the lobby outside the exhibition.

Downstairs the Tate Modern café has been given an Eliasson makeover by Studio Olafur Eliasson’s ‘kitchen team’, SOE Kitchen, so that you can munch on the same kind of tuck Eliasson enjoys at his Berlin studio.

The Expanded Studio

The show culminates with a space called The Expanded Studio, which ‘explores Eliasson’s deep engagement with social and environmental issues.’

You exit the main gallery rooms into a school-type space: down one side is a long wall covered with magazine and newspaper pages, and photos and articles. These are full of positive uplifting messages about how we can change the world and change ourselves and be more mindful and live in the present and co-operate and engage and energise our communities and save the planet, arranged into a casual A to Z order.

All this is alongside a big round table surrounded by kids making objects and shapes out of some kind of meccano-like set.

Installation view of Olafur Eliasson: In real life at Tate Modern. Photo by the author

It reminded me of school. It was just like school, like the woodwork or design classes back at school, with the corridors lined with examples of uplifting art and inspiring slogans about diversity and equality and opportunity, and big posters across the dining hall saying SAVE OUR PLANET. Just like my children’s junior and secondary schools, with lots of concerned parents milling round on an open day or Parents’ Evening.

And made me reflect on the maybe, possibly, essentially juvenile nature of all art, at some level. Insofar as it is play and men and women’s lives are, for the most part, not spent in play, but in work, and if not in work, then in childcare and childrearing and childworrying, and worrying about their rent or their careers or their sick parents or their various ailments.

Because the drawback about school, and about art galleries generally, is that sooner or later you have to bid farewell to the high-minded sentiments about gender and diversity and the environment, and walk back out into the actual adult world, where no-one gives a toss about your fancy ideas or your idealistic slogans.

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by Simon on October 28, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition

Posted by Simon on October 28, 2019

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Takis @ Tate Modern

This exhibition is loads of fun on two levels.

The works themselves are funny, beguiling, surprising and inventive
Takis was a creature of the 1960s and many of the works here, along with photos of art ‘happenings’ and manifestos and action poetry, all create a warm nostalgic glow for that long-vanished era of optimism, peace and love

Takis’s real name is Panayiotis Vassilakis. He was born in Greece in 1925, so he was a teenager during the German occupation and then a young man during the ruinous Greek Civil war of 1946 to 1949.

He came from a poor background and had to teach himself about art and poetry and philosophy. To escape the repressive aftermath of the war he went in 1954 to Paris, centre of European art and his earliest works are sculptures, small ones which are derivative of early Greek cycladic art (so called because found on the Cyclades islands), and taller slender, featureless human figures which are a bit reminiscent of Giacometti.

But in 1959 Takis had a Eureka moment and transformed his art into something completely new and different which he maintained for the rest of his long career.

He started working with industrial components and forces. Specifically, he became interested in magnetism. He had a revelation that sculptures merely gestured towards energy and dynamism – why not incorporate real, actual electro-magnetic energy into works of art? Why put an industrial magnet at one end of a plank of wood, and secure two nails on wires at the other end, and let the magnetic forces attract attract attract the nails but the wire not quite be long enough for them to touch it? Thus highlighting the space and energy and force.

Why not make these invisible forces which are all around us visible?

Magnetron (1966) by Takis

Thus a work like Magnetron which made me laugh out loud and there’s plenty more where it came from. Taut wires pulled by household or waste metal objects straining towards a magnetised lump or shape or implement of metal.

Takis literally grew up amid the wreckage of the Second World War, exacerbated by the Greek Civil War. In Paris he scoured second hand shops and army surplus stores looking for bits of kit and equipment he could reversion into his dynamic sculptures.

Why not create a field of scores of metal balls or nodes or cogs, each supported by a slender wobbly metal wire from secure metal stands, and over this field of metal flowerheads suspend a couple of strong magnets. All you’d have to do is brush your hand through the metal flowerheads and then the complex forces of attraction and repulsion will keep them swinging and swaying for hours afterwards.

Magnetic Fields by Takis (1969) on show for the first time since the 1970s

Many many artists have painted abstract paintings, big canvases of red or black or white or blue and then made them dynamic by adding on angular shapes, mathematical shapes, cones and triangles and so on. But – why not create the same effect in three dimensions be concealing magnets behind the surface of the canvas so that the black cones (and any other abstract shapes you want – are not flat on the surface but caught in suspended animation as if hurtling towards it!

Why not dangle wires with metal needles from the ceiling and have them brush against a wire suspended from two electrified poles and have the wire rigged up to an amplifier which amplifies the sound it makes and projects it from a loudspeaker. As the metal plumb or needle sways in the random breeze or zephyrs created in a gallery it will strike or brush along the stationary wire creating an eerie electrical signal.

In fact why stop at one? Why not create a set of them with different wire lengths and thicknesses to create an eerie orchestral or polyphonic effect?

And why, after all, stop with magnets and electromagnetism? The greatest use of electricity is to power lights.

According to a wall label Takis got stuck at a train station somewhere on the journey from London back top Paris (an experience anyone who’s ever travelled on a British train is familiar with) long enough to become dazzled and awed by the forest of lights of all different shapes and sizes and colours which festooned the station.

Why not recreate that visual overload in a gallery – although filtered through his trademark fondness for the slender and tall, for poles and stands (remember those Giacometti statues?)

Installation view of Takis at Tate Modern (2019) Photo by Mark Heathcote

So it is that through his long career since about 1959, Takis explored all kinds of logical consequences of this basic insight, the idea of making dynamic sculptures using the electrical and magnetic forces created by industrial bric-a-brac.

Apparently he gave birth to a genre or field or movement known as Kinetic Art and, as you might expect, he became a darling of the avant-garde, feted by Beat Poets and French intellectuals.

I love art made from industrial junk. I love the whole Italian Arte Povera movement and 1970s minimalism for this reason. We live in a society overwhelmed with machinery, defined by machinery and gadgets, it seems crazy not to incorporate it into art, to turn it into art.

There’s also just a boyish love of gadgets and ingenious devices. I liked the piece which looked like a clock face with one arrow headed hand swinging round it at random. There’s a love for the time and effort which has clearly gone to produce the sheer beauty of industrial design. And then there’s an anarchist, science fiction pleasure to be taken in seeing bits of important sober kit taken completely out of context and set to surreal and comic uses.

There are quite a few of the magnetic works but it is surprising how much variety can be wrung out of one idea.

The last room is enormous and contains a forest of the so-called Signals works, where he takes three large slender flexible poles and tops them with a wide range of industrial artefacts.

Triple Signal by Takis (1976)

The first Signals works were so distinctive they gave rise to a famous London avant-garde gallery named Signals in their honour, location of many a happening and event. As well as industrial parts some of them incorporate used ordnance from the Greek Civil War, or even fragments of apparatus which he himself blew up in the studio.

An abiding fascination with all manifestations of energy. Maybe that’s why I like industrial art as well. It bespeaks an enormous amount of design and effort which has gone into their manufacture.

The Signals in fact reminded me quite a bit of the mobiles developed by Alexander Calder in the 1930s, especially when you came to look at the shadows they cast on the walls. That was one of the claims to fame of the mobiles, not only the restless movement of the thing itself but its shadows fleeting across surfaces.

This big final room also contains a couple of massive balls

Electromagnetic spheres by Takis (1979)

When these are set in motion by external events (wind, a push) their movement over a live coil generates energy which can be translated into sound. In the 1980s he set up the Takis Foundation to encourage art and education. He took to talking about the music of the spheres, and how his objects restored a spiritual dimension to a world in danger of being overwhelmed by technology.

To be honest, I thought that was just artistic boilerplate. The kind of high-minded hogwash artists often come out with, which is often the result when they sit down and think about what they’re doing, or is often a rationalisation after-the-fact of something, a discovery or style or innovation, which they felt themselves towards much more intuitively. Or accidentally.

It was also an odd thing for him to be saying, as if he was trying to run away from the consequences of his own life’s work. Some of the wall labels explained his desire to get away from technology, the threat of technology, the encompassing power of technology – and I watched visitor after visitor step up and take photos of the work and its label on their super-smart mobile phones before posting them to social media.

It is far too late to try and revive medieval beliefs in the music of the spheres or Romantic ideas about earth and authenticity. Everyone lives in the Cloud now, all our memories are digitised and stored half-way round the world, are being sorted and categorised by the artificial intelligence algorithms of countless advertising agencies.

If anything, Takis’s work, taken altogether, is testament to a vanished era of optimism when guys in polo-necked sweaters thought that playing with lights and magnets in small London art galleries could stop the vast tsunami of the future rolling over the human race.

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by Simon on October 27, 2019 • Permalink

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Posted by Simon on October 27, 2019

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Franz West @ Tate Modern

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

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

Redundanz by Franz West (1986)

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

Deliberate amateurishness

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

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

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

Big papier-mâché sculptures

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

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

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

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

Early drawings

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

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

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

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

Frohsinn (1974) by Franz West

The Passstücke

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

Passtucke mit box und video (1996) Photo Luke Walker

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

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

Bigger, brighter, and with added furniture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Furniture usable and unusable

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

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

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

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

Eo Ipso by Franz West (1987)

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

Lemurenköpfe by Franz West (1992)

According to the wall label:

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

Satirising the art world

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

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

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

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

A Franz west living room

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

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

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

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

The Hamsterwheel by Franz West (2007)

Post-war Austria

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

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

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

West’s posters

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

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

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

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

Every rebel becomes an Establishment darling

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

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

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

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

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

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

Promotional video

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by Simon on May 21, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Sculpture

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

Posted by Simon on May 21, 2019

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

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All posts tagged modern art

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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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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Key words of contemporary artspeak

A collage of quotes

Repetition and faith

A dictionary of received ideas

The list of keywords

Bourgeois

Challenge

Desire

Erotic

Gender

Practice

Queer

Sex

Subvert

Same-sex desire

Transgressive

Unconventional

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Imperial College Road

Antony Gormley biography

ALERT

Location

The Queen’s Tower

The controversy

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Ishag’s biography

Ishag in London

The Crystalist movement

Spiritualism in Ishag’s art

Nature in Ishag’s art

‘Blues for the Martyrs’

Summary

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Layout

14 rooms, 14 themes

The new

From murk to clarity

The murkiest of the murk

Clarity

Room guide

1. Body and cosmos