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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

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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)

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by Simon on April 26, 2023 • Permalink

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Posted by Simon on April 26, 2023

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Cecilia Vicuña: Brain Forest Quipu @ Tate Modern

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

Installation view of ‘Brain Forest Quipu’ by Cecilia Vicuña at Tate Modern. Photo © Tate Photography (Sonal Bakrania)

Biography

From Wikipedia:

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

Overarching title – ‘Brain Forest Quipu’

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

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

The sculpture – the ‘Dead Forest Quipu’

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

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

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

What is a quipu?

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

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

Or:

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

Ecofeminism

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

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

The soundscape – the ‘Sound Quipu’

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

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

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

The videos – the ‘Digital Quipu’

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

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

Save the rainforest

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

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

Sadness

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

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

Installation view of ‘Brain Forest Quipu’ by Cecilia Vicuña at Tate Modern. Photo © Tate Photography (Sonal Bakrania)

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

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

Tears of the forest

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

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by Simon on March 15, 2023 • Permalink

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Posted by Simon on March 15, 2023

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

Cezanne @ Tate Modern

This is a massive, encyclopedic exhibition of paintings, watercolours and drawings by the legendary, pivotal, hugely influential French artist, Paul Cezanne. It brings together around 80 carefully selected works from collections in Europe, Asia, North and South America, to give UK audiences a ‘once-in-a-generation’ opportunity to explore the breadth of Cezanne’s career. When it opened last October it was one of the events of the season, and even now, in its last weeks, it’s absolutely packed out. I had to queue to read the captions to each painting.

Self portrait

Here’s the man himself in a strikingly whorly, blotchy early work, which suggests right from the get-go his somewhat cavalier approach to realism i.e. not that bothered. Clearly what’s interesting him is not any concern to create a photographic or super-accurate likeness, but the potential of paint and the act of painting. The background is trippy enough but it’s really the use of the large, almost slapdash brushstrokes to construct his face and, in particular, his coat, which are so distinctive and, if you like this kind of approach, so thrilling.

Portrait of the Artist with Pink Background by Paul Cezanne (1875) Paris, Musée d’Orsay

Importance

Cezanne is the link between the impressionists and the cubists. He represents the last gasp of realistic, figurative art before the arrival of umpteen types of semi-abstract or avant-garde starting in the 1900s.

What made Cezanne so influential was his slow, steady departure from strict realism towards something else. Slowly his paintings became, not more abstract exactly, but revealed the abstract possibilities implicit in the art of depicting the world, in oil paint, on canvas.

The perspective of the paintings drifts out of ‘true’, becomes unkiltered. The objects are depicted with great intensity, but not photographic accuracy. He never stopped painting things in the real world – real world subjects – but to a greater or lesser extent, his works point or hint or move beyond realism, to the purely painterly possibilities inherent in painting.

His restless experimentation was a source of inspiration to countless artists who followed him. Towards the end of the exhibition there’s a section focusing on just this which includes a quote from Matisse saying that, in his darkest days, when he was filled with doubt about the experiments he was making with colour and design, he thought of Cezanne, and thought: ‘If Cezanne is right, then I am right.’

1. Experiments in form

There are quite a few reasons for Cezanne’s importance of which I’ll select two. The most obvious one is his endless experiments with shape and form. Possibly he was not a great painter to begin with, not in the sense of conveying the photographic accuracy of conventional nineteenth century salon art. So right from the start he wasn’t distracted by attempting to do what he was not temperamentally designed to, instead he was free to experiment. And so he developed a technique of working with patches of paint, blurred blocks of colour, swathes of paint, to achieve his effects.

This approach is present in all his works but comes out more vividly in some than others. Some of the later studies of Mont St Victoire really bring it out, as do his many paintings of outdoor bathers.

The François Zola Dam (Mountains in Provence) by Paul Cezanne (1877 to 1878) Amgueddfa Cymru/National Museum of Wales

In these paintings you can see the ‘real world’ in the process of being reduced to geometric shapes, mostly rectangles, with cones and triangles. Not neat and precise, this is before modern art existed… but in his paintings you can see the whole visible world metamorphosing into blocks and slabs of brushwork.

In his numerous studies of the landscape around Mont Saint Victoire, it’s as if some deeper secret, implicit in the view, in the landscape, is struggling to get out.

Deploying the same metaphor from another angle, in his later paintings you can see cubism struggling to break be born, you can see the future of twentieth century painting struggling to emerge from the chrysalis of Cezanne’s style. His paintings bulge with the weight of the future.

2. Experiments in colour

But a painting is not just shapes and composition, of course, it is also colour. This exhibition goes into considerable detail about Cezanne’s use of colour, in fact one gallery has a glass display case devoted to the subject. It includes some of the great man’s actual palettes, covered in oil paint. There’s an X-ray photo of a painting, an example of an abandoned canvas, both of which demonstrate his extensive reworking of motifs and application of layer after layer of paint. Fascinating insight into his working practice.

The case it also contains copies of memoirs of Cezanne by the famous collector Ambroise Vollard, and fellow painters Pissarro and Bonnard. The Bonnard book is open to a chapter he devoted to describing Cezanne’s use of colour. Here we learn that Cezanne used a distinctive palette. He mixed many of his own paints himself. This explains the very bright oranges, reds and greens (‘the emerald greens, brilliant red vermilions and iron-based earth pigments’) which you see throughout his works, especially in the still lifes of apples.

Still Life with Apples by Paul Cezanne (1893 to 1894) The J. Paul Getty Museum

In particular Cezanne was obsessed with the colour blue. Bonnard tells us Cezanne developed no fewer than 16 shades of blue. The gallery about colour (little more than a corridor) leads into a big room displaying a dozen or so of his landscapes/views of Mont Saint Victoire and, once you’ve been alerted to the importance of blue in his palette, you do start noticing that it dominates or underpins or anchors the tonality of many of the paintings.

Seated Man by Paul Cezanne (1905 to 1906) © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

I’m not sure I totally follow, but the curators point out that blue has a flattening effect on a composition, well, in the way Cezanne uses it. And this plays into his evolving interest in the canvas as the stage for the drama of painting and composition, a theatre of colours, as much as a depiction of anything IRL (in real life).

(Incidentally, note the enormous gulf in style between the mostly realistic apples of 1894 and the semi-abstraction of the seated man of 1906. See what I mean about modern art teetering on breaking through?

A personal view

Five years ago in 2017 I went to the exhibition of Cezanne portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. I wrote quite a detailed review, giving a summary of Cezanne’s life, career, artistic aims. o be honest, I was all Cezanned out. Therefore, my approach to this huge exhibition (abetted by the way it was jam packed) was not to try and read and process every wall caption, but to float.

I read the wall labels, thought about the ideas, but mainly floated among the images, considering them in a non-rational way, responding to light and shape, pattern and composition, colour and intensity. From a purely visual point of view I found many of the portraits clunky and alien (as I did at the Portrait Gallery show), I found many of the landscapes bleached out (as the South of France obviously is). Pretty. A bit fey.

Sous-Bois by Paul Cezanne (1894) Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Maybe it was my chilly northern soul, maybe the slightly harassed mood I was in, but I found myself most attracted to a couple of the super-saturated, intensely coloured depictions of Mont St Victoire, the deep emerald green colour rich as a jewel.

Mont Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cezanne (1902 to 1906) Philadelphia Museum of Art

Dark and intense. And the intensity of the palette is matched by the extent of the semi-abstraction. I mean I not only liked the dark colours, I liked the sense that the world was transforming into a panorama of abstract shapes. The two forces – intense palette, incipient abstraction – create a tremendously dynamic, thrilling image.

Geology

The curators make one interesting point about the Mont Saint Victoire paintings which I’d never heard before and this is about the importance of geology. Cezanne didn’t stop at appearances and a fine view. He set out to learn about the geography and geology of the mountain ridge (which is what the Mont is) from his childhood friend, the naturalist Antoine Fortuné Marion. This deep understanding of the different strata, rock types, their colours and textures, informed both the composition and colouring of his many, many studies of the ridge. The curators go on to suggest that this created ‘a new sort of landscape’, one that engaged quite literally more deeply with the terrain than most other landscape painters had ever done.

And the go on to make a really powerful suggestion. The impressionists set out to capture the unique quality of light of each passing, evanescent moment (Monet’s facades of Rouen cathedral at different times of day, the waterlilies in different light). Whereas in Cezanne’s Mont Saint Victoire paintings (or at least some of them), he is dong the exact opposite. Rather than the ever-changing surfaces of things, he is delving down into the deep, unchanging, geological strata. Instead of capturing the fleeting moment, he is trying to convey the strength and might of geological timelessness.

This interpretation is evident in one particular painting, ‘Mont Sainte-Victoire seen from the Bibemus Quarry’, which, by virtue of depicting a quarry, depicts precisely the rich orange rock which lies beneath the surface landscape. It exposes the bare bones, the skeleton, the foundations of the subject, in much the same way that the later bathers pictures seem to be delving into the geometric foundation or basis of human figures and their arrangement (see below).

The picture’s vibrant orange, tan and sand colours are a) very Cezanne b) reminded me of photos you see of the Australian Outback, Ayers Rock and so on.

Mont Sainte-Victoire seen from the Bibemus Quarry, 1897

Scope of the exhibition

The exhibition is roughly speaking in two halves. The first half is biographical and chronological. It looks at Cezanne in the context of his time, exploring his life, relationships and the creative circle that surrounded him. For example, friendship with the painter Pissarro, and partnership with his childhood friend, the gritty Naturalistic novelist Zola, who shared a common goal of trying to convey a new, unvarnished depiction of ‘reality’.

The second half arranges groups of paintings by theme, notably his three most famous subjects, still lifes of apples, scenes of Mont Saint Victoire (the great mountain overlooking Aix-en-Provence in the south of France), and his studies of nude bathers bathing at ponds and lakes out of doors.

Apples

The curators quote Cezanne as saying: ‘With an apple, I will astonish Paris’. When he left his native Aix-en-Provence for the French capital in his 20s, this is precisely what his rough and ready still lifes of fruit did. They didn’t find buyers and he failed to take the capital by storm as he had hoped. But his free way of depicting such an obvious, everyday subject, where the interest and the energy is in the technique, was to prove hugely influential.

The Basket of Apples by Paul Cezanne (c. 1893) The Art Institute of Chicago

The human figure

Cezanne was shy of using models in a studio. There’s an early work, a portrait of a black man named Scipio (1868). I can see the appeal of the novel way of dealing fabric and colour, but I don’t really like it. And another study, from nearly twenty years later.

The Bather by Paul Cezanne (1885) New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

Don’t know about you, but I’m not impressed. The use of slabby tints of colour, yes. But I actively enjoy anatomically accurate depictions of the human body (or any other organism), even if sketchy or shadowy, in the manner of, say, Degas – and so this study portrait of a posed model (the exhibition includes the source photo of the model posing in Cezanne’s studio) feels just disappointingly poor.

The bathers

It does, however, shed light on one of the biggest motifs in Cezanne’s work, which is the image of naked bathers, adult humans who have stripped off to swim in a pool or lake in the country. He painted scores of images of this subject and the exhibition features about ten of them, including various studies, to show the different perspectives, treatments and coloration he used on each variation on the theme.

Bathers by Paul Cezanne (1874 to 1875) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The point is that, as in other areas, you feel that Cezanne is making a virtue of his shortcomings. Why should he paint the human nude with anatomical accuracy? It’s not as if that hadn’t already been done tens of thousands of times in the past three centuries (for some reason the many, many nudes of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres spring to mind).

No, instead he focused on doing what God appears to have put him on earth to do, which is to produce a completely new way of seeing the human body. These aren’t people. These are patterns of paint on a canvas. As such, why be afraid? Why not rework the image again and again, each time digging deeper into the underlying scaffold of the shapes, its compositional rationale, pushing it closer and closer towards abstraction, revealing some kind of truths about people, about landscape and about painting, at the same time.

It was this sense, that Cezanne had demonstrated something new, not in the narrow idea of a ‘style’, but the deeper sense of opening up the possibilities of what it means to paint at all, that inspired so many artists of the next generation. The most famous version of the Bathers is the huge one, and the most abstract treatment, on loan from the London National Gallery.

Bathers by Paul Cezanne (1894 to 1905) The National Gallery

Only a few years later, in 1907, the painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque would move one step beyond this approach to invent what came to be called ‘cubism’, the conscious and deliberate depiction of the geometric shapes lying underneath – not ‘reality’ exactly – but the way reality is conceived and created in the act of applying paint to canvas. They, like so many artists of their generation, acknowledged Cezanne as the man who opened the door.

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by Simon on March 6, 2023 • Permalink

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Posted by Simon on March 6, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/03/06/cezanne-tate-modern/

J.G. Ballard’s literary experimentalism

The most obvious thing about Ballard’s novels and short stories is that, although they have a hallucinatory intensity and routinely describe extreme mental states and characters who descend into psychosis and insanity, the outward form of them is for the most part extremely conservative.

Ballard’s prose style occasionally uses unexpected phraseology but is, at its heart, pukka – an eminently correct, professional, middle-class English voice. In other words, the searing weirdness of many of Ballard’s stories is conveyed in a disconcertingly respectable prose style.

It is, therefore, something of a surprise to learn that Ballard had a long-running interest in quite radical literary experimentation, and it’s useful to be aware of his efforts in this field because they inform your reading of the earlier and mid-period stories and novels.

This blog post is a brief overview of the most notable of Ballard’s literary experiments. (What follows is heavily indebted to a number of online articles which are referenced at the bottom.)

Project for a new novel (1958)

In the late 1950s Ballard was working on the journal of the Chemical Society in London and was much taken with the juxtaposition of snazzy layout and scientific content in related American magazines, such as Chemical and Engineering News.

He had the idea of cutting up headlines and text from it and other scientific magazines like it, in order to create collages packed with scientific words and phrases arranged in surreal combinations:

Letters, words and sentence fragments are pasted onto backing sheets with glue. Their design visually references everyday media, with headlines, body text and double-page spreads suggesting a magazine layout. Originally Ballard planned to display the work on billboards, as if it was a public advertisement.

In the end Ballard created four collage works, which became famous among his friends and close colleagues, and which are now in the possession of the British Library who curate Ballard’s collected notes and manuscripts.

One of the four collages Ballard made for his Project for New Novel. Note the phrase Mr F is Mr F, which became the title of a short story, and the names Coma, Kline and Xero, given to characters who turn up in the novel The Atrocity Exhibition

Ballard himself described the Project as:

Sample pages of a new kind of novel, entirely consisting of magazine-style headlines and layouts, with a deliberately meaningless text, the idea being that the imaginative content could be carried by the headlines and overall design, so making obsolete the need for a traditional text except for virtually decorative purposes.

I liked the stylish typography. I also like the scientific content, and used stories to provide the text of my novel. Curiously enough, far from being meaningless, the science news stories somehow become fictionalised by the headings around them.

It was a collage of things clipped from journals like Chemical Engineering News, the American Chemical Society’s journal – I used them a lot because I liked the typeface. I wanted to publish a novel that looked like that, you see – hundreds of pages of that sort of thing. Get away from text altogether – just headlines!

Many of the names, phrases and concerns which first appeared in the Project have resurfaced over the years, particularly the characters Coma, Kline and Xero who appear in The Atrocity Exhibition, Coma also cropping up in the classic short story The Voices of Time, and phrases such as ‘the terminal beach’ and ‘Mr F is Mr F’, both of which became the titles of short stories.

The four collages can also be seen in the background of a photograph of Ballard taken in 1960 in his garden at Shepperton, which has become a talisman for true Ballardians. The full text of Project for a New Novel was finally published 20 years after it was created, in New Worlds magazine No. 213, in 1978.

J.G. Ballard in front of his abandoned billboard novel, 1960. Photo: Mary Ballard

Advertisers Announcements (1967-71)

Between 1967 and 1971 Ballard produced five Advertisers Announcements. As he explained in an interview:

Back in the late 60s I produced a series of advertisements which I placed in various publications (Ambit, New Worlds, Ark and various continental alternative magazines), doing the art work myself and arranging for the blockmaking, and then delivering the block to the particular journal just as would a commercial advertiser.

Of course I was advertising my own conceptual ideas, but I wanted to do so within the formal circumstances of classic commercial advertising – I wanted ads that would look in place in Vogue, Paris Match, Newsweek, etc.

To maintain the integrity of the project I paid the commercial rate for the page, even in the case of Ambit, of which I was and still am Prose Editor. I would liked to have branched out into Vogue and Newsweek, but cost alone stopped me…

The five ads are:

1. Homage to Claire Churchill

Homage to Claire Churchill (1967)

Claire was his girlfriend and this a pretty straightforward happy photo of her. There’s no strapline or product logo as you’d expect in a real advert. Instead there’s a dense paragraph of text at the bottom, quoting a typical paragraph from his experimental novel, The Atrocity Exhibition, indeed the ad was published in Ambit in July 1967 and it borrows copy directly from ‘The Death Module’, simultaneously published in New Worlds and later re-named ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’ in The Atrocity Exhibition.

2. Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?

The Angle Between two Walls (1967)

This is a still from the art film Alone by American filmmaker Steve Dwoskin, which records a woman masturbating, shot from floor level and pointing up between her legs to show her hand as she touches herself.

What has this got to do with the angle between walls? Well, the correlation of sex and the angles of walls and buildings is explained in The Atrocity Exhibition by the book’s psychiatrist Dr Nathan. He explains that the book’s central protagonists has moved so far beyond conventional sex that he has excavated down to the fundamental paradigm of the junction – an obsession with how entities meet and combine of which human sex is just a small sub-set.

Hence the character’s obsession with the walls of the apartments and bedrooms he finds himself in, and with modern architecture like the (then new) Hilton Hotel, and the curving ramps and inclined planes of the new concrete multi-story car parks. These are all aspects of the modern world’s obsession with junctions and angles and the meeting points of lines and planes. As such they are visual correlatives of the strange angles and postures adopted by the human animal when it has sex.

3. A Neural Interval

A Neural Interval (1968)

This is a photo from a 1960s bondage magazine. It’s not particularly sexy, is it? Because of the sea in the background I initially thought the subject was a swimmer or diver with cumbersome kit photo-collaged on top of her. But no, this really is a supposedly sexy photo of bondage gear circa 1968.

The adjective ‘neural’ crops up a lot in late-60s Ballard, and the phrase ‘neural interval’ suggests a stoppage in time, or at least a stoppage of stimuli to the senses. It’s not immediately clear how this is related to a woman wearing bondage gear in a boat, although possibly the very disjunction between the words and the image are precisely its point.

4. Placental Insufficiency

A Placental Insufficiency (1970)

Ballard appropriates a striking photo by American photographer Les Krims. I thought that some or all of it must have been collaged, but apparently this woman looked like that and was happy to pose with a hunting rifle. Those Yanks, eh.

By this stage, after four ads, I think two or three things are obvious.

1. Women The photos are all of women, sexy or naked women in 3 out of 4. If Ballard is seeking to deconstruct the glib imagery of advertising, featuring naked women is a funny way of going about it. Still, it was 1967 or 68, I suppose when plenty of womens liberationists thought that burning their bras and stripping naked would abolish shame, embarrassment and the male gaze.

2. America For someone supposedly engaged in critiquing the modern world, deconstructing consumer capitalism, revealing the perverse fetishism which underlies the commercial packaging of homogenised sexuality etc etc, Ballard, like so many rebels and revolutionaries of his era, was strongly attracted to the epicentre of world capitalism and inclined to bow the knee to every type of American consumer product, including Hollywood film actresses and the long, cool, flash American cars which feature in so much of his mid-period fiction (like the heavy American Lincoln Continental driven by Dr Robert Vaughan, the demented exponent of car crash fetishism in Crash).

3. Texts But the really obvious thing about them is that, although the images are striking, the real force of the thing comes from the texts. Ballard not only doesn’t have the courage to leave the images to stand alone, or to give them brief and clever or satirical straplines: each one has to have quite lengthy and demanding avant-garde text stapled onto them.

5. Venus Smiles

Venus Smiles (1970)

Ballard himself took this photo of his partner Claire Churchill as she was contorting herself to get into a pair of jeans after a visit to the beach, hence the flecks of seaweed and sand sticking to her white skin.

This is the most interesting of the photos because of the way it’s been turned on its side, because of the big black bush between her legs, and the way the detritus clings to her skin like flies or enlarged bacilli. And the superimposed text, which starts off with characteristic Ballard obsessions with depersonalisation, ends up being unexpectedly sweet.

Conclusion

These pictures of five women, four of them naked, tend to confirm the suspicion that the super-imposed text might be clever but this arty contrivance – like so many attempts at avant-garde art – pales into insignificance next to the immense primal urge of male voyeurism.

Condensed novels and The Atrocity Exhibition

Knowing about the cut-and-paste novel idea, and having seen the Alternative Ads, it’s a lot easier to understand why Ballard originally wanted to have The Atrocity Exhibition done as a book of collage illustrations.

I originally wanted a large-format book, printed by photo-offset, in which I would produce the artwork – a lot of collages, material taken from medical documents and medical photographs, crashing cars and all that sort of iconography.

Alas, the practicalities of publishing intervened, and Ballard amended the idea to something related but different.

The final version of The Atrocity Exhibition is his most accessible piece of experimentalism because it was published as a mass market paperback. Superficially the book is divided into fifteen short ‘chapters’ but as soon as you start reading them you realise that none of them make sense in themselves, and they certainly don’t add up to a consistent narrative in the usual way of a novel.

Instead, each chapter is what Ballard described as a ‘condensed’ novel – clips and excerpts, moments of time, brief gestures and fragments of dialogue cut and pasted together. The reader has to sort out what is going on and how the fragments are connected, in his or her own mind.

Not only that, but each ‘chapter’ or ‘condensed novel’ references the same fragments, actions and images, repeated but in distorted form. At the most obvious level, the same ‘characters’ recur in consecutive sections – Dr Nathan, Catherine Austen, Karen Novotny – but there is also a stray meeting between two characters at some kind of formal conference or symposium which is re-enacted in each chapter, there is the repeated enactment of car crashes or of a helicopter crash which is its cognate; the male characters each display obsessive behaviour, such as Talbot assembling some kind of modernist sculpture on the roof or outlining furniture in an apartment with chalk; and each chapter contains a numbered list, although the items on the list change from chapter to chapter and so does the ostensible list creator. And so on.

The point is that The Atrocity Exhibition makes a lot more sense if you don’t come to it cold, as an unexpected freak show, but see it as a logical development and extension of Ballard’s long-running interest in fragments, collage and non-narrative.

Crashed Cars exhibition (1970)

In April 1970 Ballard staged an exhibition titled Crashed Cars at the New Arts Laboratory in London.

1. In the post-war period cars became a symbol of consumer empowerment and glamour. Cars were promoted in films and adverts and car ownership rocketed. However, so did the incidence of car crashes, with a number featuring high-profile fatalities – James Dean (1955), Albert Camus (1960), Jayne Mansfield (1967) (which, obviously, continued after the exhibition and down to our day – Marc Bolan (1977), Grace Kelly (1982), Princess Diana (1997)).

2. And after all, a car crash is the centrepiece of the closing song on the decade’s keystone album, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, when John Lennon sings:

I read the news today, oh boy
About a lucky man who made the grade
And though the news was rather sad
Well, I just had to laugh
I saw the photograph

He blew his mind out in a car
He didn’t notice that the lights had changed
A crowd of people stood and stared
They’d seen his face before
Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords

3. A quick search of the internet reveals that, as it happens, the highest figure for road traffic-related deaths during peacetime was 7,985 in 1966, the year before the Beatles album (by comparison, 1,782 people were killed in road accidents in 2018.)

So Ballard wasn’t being all that eccentric to envision a) the car as a key symbol of the twentieth century, and b) the mystique about car crashes – the way they had killed a number of A-list celebrities, the way people were gruesomely fascinated by them (‘Well, I just had to laugh, I saw the photograph’) – as telling us something profound and unsettling about our car-mad culture.

And so he staged an exhibition of crashed cars. Actually, there were only three car wrecks in the exhibition and – disappointingly – no photos of the event appear to have survived. Some of the visitors to the gallery vandalised the wrecks with wine, paint and urine, confirming Ballard’s belief that the growing ‘technological landscape’ was influencing human behaviour and social relationships and not in a good way.

Alternatively, they might just have been getting into the spirit of anarchic 1960s ‘happenings’.

To me Ballard’s Crash exhibition hardly seems experimental at all. It is well known that people stop to stare at car crashes and that traffic slows right down on motorways as people slowly pass the scenes of smashes. I’ve done it myself.

This is because there really is something deeply fascinating about the pathology of car crashes and something weirdly compelling about the way that objects which are promoted as smooth and curved and aerodynamically perfect are transformed into angular nests of smashed windscreens and random spikes of metal jutting out. For the last few days I’ve walked past a car parked near my work, the right half of whose bonnet and wings are buckled up and outwards like the carapaces of an enormous beetle.

Since 1970 we’ve had precisely 50 years during which all kinds of objects from the real world have been situated in galleries for our entertainment and mystification. A few years ago I came across a display at Tate Modern of a set of engine blocks from cars which had been blown up by suicide bombers in the Middle East, considered as works of art. No-one bats an eyelid at things like that any more.

So considering the exhibition as an investigation of just what it is that fascinates us about car crashes, and the suggestion that they have a strange and eerie beauty of their own, doesn’t strike me as at all weird. In fact it’s surprising that it took someone so long to come up with it.

Traditionally, the significance of the exhibition is that Ballard went on to explore the mystique and pathology of car crashes in the ‘controversial’ novel Crash (1973), although the weirdness of our obsessive car culture is also the subject of the less well-known novel Concrete Island which immediately followed it (1974). But I’m making the point that the Crash exhibition was part of a continuum of literary and artistic experiments which Ballard undertook in the first half of his career.

Practical conclusion

In the 1950s and 60s Ballard created more collages, now lost. I imagine these, like the New Project and the Advertisers Announcements were fun to make and show friends and maybe persuade a gallery to display for a while… But in the end your agent, your wife and your publisher want standardised texts which they can publish, market and sell. Which is what, after the mid-70s, Ballard produced in abundance.

References

Reviews of other Ballard books

Novels

Short story collections

Other science fiction reviews

Late Victorian
1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1900s
1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth’s atmosphere and brings about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1910s
1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1920s
1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, where they discover…

1930s
1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years – surely the most sweeping vista of any science fiction book
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Oxford academic Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra, as the natives call the planet Mars

1940s
1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950s
1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the Foundation Trilogy, which describes the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence, powered by ‘spindizzy’ technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them until one fireman, Guy Montag, rebels
1953 The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester – a breathless novel set in a 24th century New York populated by telepaths and describing the mental collapse of corporate mogul Ben Reich who starts by murdering his rival Craye D’Courtney and becomes progressively more psychotic as he is pursued by telepathic detective, Lincoln Powell
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke a thrilling narrative involving the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
— Some problems with Isaac Asimov’s science fiction
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention, in the near future, of i) the anti-death drugs and ii) the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1956 The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester – a fast-paced phantasmagoria set in the 25th century where humans can teleport, a terrifying new weapon has been invented, and tattooed hard-man, Gulliver Foyle, is looking for revenge
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding novel of Blish’s ‘Okie’ tetralogy in which mayor of New York John Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe
1959 The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut – Winston Niles Rumfoord builds a space ship to explore the solar system where encounters a chrono-synclastic infundibula, and this is just the start of a bizarre meandering fantasy which includes the Army of Mars attacking earth and the adventures of Boaz and Unk in the caverns of Mercury

1960s
1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Kerans is part of a UN mission to map the lost cities of Europe which have been inundated after solar flares melted the worlds ice caps and glaciers, but finds himself and his colleagues’ minds slowly infiltrated by prehistoric memories of the last time the world was like this, complete with tropical forest and giant lizards, and slowly losing their grasp on reality.
1962 The Voices of Time and Other Stories – Eight of Ballard’s most exquisite stories including the title tale about humanity slowly falling asleep even as they discover how to listen to the voices of time radiating from the mountains and distant stars, or The Cage of Sand where a handful of outcasts hide out in the vast dunes of Martian sand brought to earth as ballast which turned out to contain fatal viruses. Really weird and visionary.
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard space-travelling New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1962 Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut – the memoirs of American Howard W. Campbell Jr. who was raised in Germany and has adventures with Nazis and spies
1963 Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut – what starts out as an amiable picaresque as the narrator, John, tracks down the so-called ‘father of the atom bomb’, Felix Hoenniker for an interview turns into a really bleak, haunting nightmare where an alternative form of water, ice-nine, freezes all water in the world, including the water inside people, killing almost everyone and freezing all water forever
1964 The Drought by J.G. Ballard – It stops raining. Everywhere. Fresh water runs out. Society breaks down and people move en masse to the seaside, where fighting breaks out to get near the water and set up stills. In part two, ten years later, the last remnants of humanity scrape a living on the vast salt flats which rim the continents, until the male protagonist decides to venture back inland to see if any life survives
1964 The Terminal Beach by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s breakthrough collection of 12 short stories which, among more traditional fare, includes mind-blowing descriptions of obsession, hallucination and mental decay set in the present day but exploring what he famously defined as ‘inner space’
1964 Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb by Peter George – a novelisation of the famous Kubrick film, notable for the prologue written as if by aliens who arrive in the distant future to find an earth utterly destroyed by the events described in the main narrative
1966 Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin – Le Guin’s first novel, a ‘planetary romance’ or ‘science fantasy’ set on Fomalhaut II where ethnographer and ‘starlord’ Gaverel Rocannon rides winged tigers and meets all manner of bizarre foes in his quest to track down the aliens who destroyed his spaceship and killed his colleagues, aided by sword-wielding Lord Mogien and a telepathic Fian
1966 Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin – both the ‘farborn’ colonists of planet Werel, and the surrounding tribespeople, the Tevarans, must unite to fight off the marauding Gaal who are migrating south as the planet enters its deep long winter – not a good moment for the farborn leader, Jakob Agat Alterra, to fall in love with Rolery, the beautiful, golden-eyed daughter of the Tevaran chief
1966 – The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Sanders journeys up an African river to discover that the jungle is slowly turning into crystals, as does anyone who loiters too long, and becomes enmeshed in the personal psychodramas of a cast of lunatics and obsessives
1967 The Disaster Area by J.G. Ballard – Nine short stories including memorable ones about giant birds, an the man who sees the prehistoric ocean washing over his quite suburb.
1967 City of Illusions by Ursula Le Guin – an unnamed humanoid with yellow cat’s eyes stumbles out of the great Eastern Forest which covers America thousands of years in the future when the human race has been reduced to a pitiful handful of suspicious rednecks or savages living in remote settlements. He is discovered and nursed back to health by a relatively benign commune but then decides he must make his way West in an epic trek across the continent to the fabled city of Es Toch where he will discover his true identity and mankind’s true history
1966 The Anti-Death League by Kingsley Amis –
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into a galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick In 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped ‘andys’ – earning enough to buy mechanical animals, since all real animals died long ago
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after they are involved in an explosion on the moon
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin – an envoy from the Ekumen or federation of advanced planets – Genly Ai – is sent to the planet Gethen to persuade its inhabitants to join the federation, but the focus of the book is a mind-expanding exploration of the hermaphroditism of Gethen’s inhabitants, as Genly is forced to undertake a gruelling trek across the planet’s frozen north with the disgraced native lord, Estraven, during which they develop a cross-species respect and, eventually, a kind of love
1969 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s breakthrough novel in which he manages to combine his personal memories of being an American POW of the Germans and witnessing the bombing of Dresden in the character of Billy Pilgrim, with a science fiction farrago about Tralfamadorians who kidnap Billy and transport him through time and space – and introduces the catchphrase ‘so it goes’

1970s
1970 Tau Zero by Poul Anderson – spaceship Leonora Christine leaves earth with a crew of fifty to discover if humans can colonise any of the planets orbiting the star Beta Virginis, but when its deceleration engines are damaged, the crew realise they need to exit the galaxy altogether in order to find space with low enough radiation to fix the engines – and then a series of unfortunate events mean they find themselves forced to accelerate faster and faster, effectively travelling forwards through time as well as space until they witness the end of the entire universe – one of the most thrilling sci-fi books I’ve ever read
1970 The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s best book, a collection of fifteen short experimental texts in stripped-down prose bringing together key obsessions like car crashes, mental breakdown, World War III, media images of atrocities and clinical sex
1971 Vermilion Sands by J.G. Ballard – nine short stories including Ballard’s first, from 1956, most of which follow the same shape, describing the arrival of a mysterious, beguiling woman in the fictional desert resort of Vermilion Sands, the setting for extravagantly surreal tales of the glossy, lurid and bizarre
1971 The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin – thirty years in the future (in 2002) America is an overpopulated environmental catastrophe zone where meek and unassuming George Orr discovers that is dreams can alter reality, changing history at will. He comes under the control of visionary neuro-scientist, Dr Haber, who sets about using George’s powers to alter the world for the better with unanticipated and disastrous consequences
1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic, leading to harum scarum escapades in disaster-stricken London
1972 The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula Le Guin – novella set on the planet Athshe describing its brutal colonisation by exploitative Terrans (who call it ‘New Tahiti’) and the resistance of the metre-tall, furry, native population of Athsheans, with their culture of dreamtime and singing
1972 The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe – a mind-boggling trio of novellas set on a pair of planets 20 light years away, the stories revolve around the puzzle of whether the supposedly human colonists are, in fact, the descendants of the planets’ shape-shifting aboriginal inhabitants who murdered the first earth colonists and took their places so effectively that they have forgotten the fact and think themselves genuinely human
1973 Crash by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s most ‘controversial’ novel, a searingly intense description of its characters’ obsession with the sexuality of car crashes, wounds and disfigurement
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre-long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it in one of the most haunting and evocative novels of this type ever written
1973 Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s longest and most experimental novel with the barest of plots and characters allowing him to sound off about sex, race, America, environmentalism, with the appearance of his alter ego Kilgore Trout and even Vonnegut himself as a character, all enlivened by Vonnegut’s own naive illustrations and the throwaway catchphrase ‘And so on…’
1974 Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard – the short and powerful novella in which an advertising executive crashes his car onto a stretch of wasteland in the juncture of three motorways, finds he can’t get off it, and slowly adapts to life alongside its current, psychologically damaged inhabitants
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the ‘ordinaries’ and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?
1974 The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin – in the future and 11 light years from earth, the physicist Shevek travels from the barren, communal, anarchist world of Anarres to its consumer capitalist cousin, Urras, with a message of brotherhood and a revolutionary new discovery which will change everything
1974 Inverted World by Christopher Priest – vivid description of a city on a distant planet which must move forwards on railway tracks constructed by the secretive ‘guilds’ in order not to fall behind the mysterious ‘optimum’ and avoid the fate of being obliterated by the planet’s bizarre lateral distorting, a vivid and disturbing narrative right up until the shock revelation of the last few pages
1975 High Rise by J.G. Ballard – an astonishingly intense and brutal vision of how the middle-class occupants of London’s newest and largest luxury, high-rise development spiral down from petty tiffs and jealousies into increasing alcohol-fuelled mayhem, disintegrating into full-blown civil war before regressing to starvation and cannibalism
1976 Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut – a madly disorientating story about twin freaks, a future dystopia, shrinking Chinese and communication with the afterlife
1979 The Unlimited Dream Company by J.G. Ballard – a strange combination of banality and visionary weirdness as an unhinged young man crashes his stolen plane in suburban Shepperton, and starts performing magical acts like converting the inhabitants into birds, conjuring up exotic foliage, convinced his is on a mission to liberate them
1979 Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut – the satirical story of Walter F. Starbuck and the RAMJAC Corps run by Mary Kathleen O’Looney, a baglady from Grand Central Station, among other satirical notions including the new that Kilgore Trout, a character who recurs in most of his novels, is one of the pseudonyms of a fellow prison at the gaol where Starbuck serves a two year sentence, one Dr Robert Fender

1980s
1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – set in an England of 2035 after a) the oil has run out and b) a left-wing government left NATO and England was promptly invaded by the Russians – ‘the Pacification’, who have settled down to become a ruling class and treat the native English like 19th century serfs
1980 The Venus Hunters by J.G. Ballard – seven very early and often quite cheesy sci-fi short stories, along with a visionary satire on Vietnam (1969), and then two mature stories from the 1970s which show Ballard’s approach sliding into mannerism
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the ‘Golden Era’ of the genre, basically the 1950s
1981 Hello America by J.G. Ballard – a hundred years from now an environmental catastrophe has turned America into a vast, arid desert, except for west of the Rockies which has become a rainforest of Amazonian opulence, and it is here that a ragtag band of explorers from old Europe discover a psychopath has crowned himself President Manson, has revived an old nuclear power station in order to light up Las Vegas, and plays roulette in Caesar’s Palace to decide which American city to nuke next
1981 The Affirmation by Christopher Priest – an extraordinarily vivid description of a schizophrenic young man living in London who, to protect against the trauma of his actual life (father died, made redundant, girlfriend committed suicide) invents a fantasy world, the Dream Archipelago, and how it takes over his ‘real’ life
1982 Myths of the Near Future by J.G. Ballard – ten short stories showing Ballard’s range of subject matter from Second World War China to the rusting gantries of Cape Kennedy
1982 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke – Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the monolith on Japetus
1984 Neuromancer by William Gibson – Gibson’s stunning debut novel which establishes the ‘Sprawl’ universe, in which burnt-out cyberspace cowboy, Case, is lured by ex-hooker Molly into a mission led by ex-army colonel Armitage to penetrate the secretive corporation, Tessier-Ashpool, at the bidding of the vast and powerful artificial intelligence, Wintermute
1986 Burning Chrome by William Gibson – ten short stories, three or four set in Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ universe, the others ranging across sci-fi possibilities, from a kind of horror story to one about a failing Russian space station
1986 Count Zero by William Gibson – second in the ‘Sprawl trilogy’
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, moon of the former Jupiter, in a ‘thriller’ notable for Clarke’s descriptions of the bizarre landscapes of Halley’s Comet and Europa
1988 Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson – third of Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy in which street-kid Mona is sold by her pimp to crooks who give her plastic surgery to make her look like global simstim star Angie Marshall, who they plan to kidnap but is herself on a quest to find her missing boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, one-time Count Zero; while the daughter of a Japanese gangster who’s sent her to London for safekeeping is abducted by Molly Millions, a lead character in Neuromancer

1990s
1990 The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling – in an alternative version of history, Charles Babbage’s early computer, instead of being left as a paper theory, was actually built, drastically changing British society, so that by 1855 it is led by a party of industrialists and scientists who use databases and secret police to keep the population suppressedand secret police to repress the population

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by Simon on January 30, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Literary criticism

Tagged 1966, 1967, 1968, 1970, A Neural Interval, Advertisers Announcements, Albert Camus, Ambit, America, avant-garde, Ballard, billboard, bondage, Catherine Austen, collage, Coma, Concrete Island, condensed novel, Crash, Crashed Cars, Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?, Dr Nathan, exhibition, experiment, Grace Kelly, hoarding, Homage to Claire Churchill, James Dean, Jayne Mansfield, John Lennon, Karen Novotny, Kline, Les Krims, Marc Bolan, Mary Ballard, Mr F. is Mr F., New Arts Laboratory in London, Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown, nudity, Placental Insufficiency, Princess Diana, Project for a New Novel, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, sex, sexuality, short stories, Steve Dwoskin, Tate Modern, texts, The Angle Between two Walls, The Atrocity Exhibition, the beatles, The Voices of Time, Venus Smiles, Xero

Posted by Simon on January 30, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/01/30/j-g-ballards-literary-experimentalism/

Albert Oehlen @ the Serpentine Gallery

Albert Oehlen

Albert Oehlen (b. 1954) is a German painter based in Switzerland. He has been a key figure in contemporary art since the 1980s.

“By bringing together abstract, figurative, collaged and computer-generated elements on the canvas, he continues to explore an inventive diversity of artistic approaches. Through Expressionist brushwork, Surrealist gestures and deliberate amateurism, Oehlen engages with the history of painting, pushing the components of colour, gesture, motion and time to new extremes.”

John Graham

The absolutely vital piece of information you need to know in order to understand this FREE exhibition of Oehlen’s work at the Serpentine Gallery is that ALL the pieces reference a much older painting by American artist John Graham, titled Tramonto Spaventoso (‘Terrifying Sunset’) (1940 to 1949).

Tramonto Spaventoso by John Graham (1940 – 49)

Graham is a fascinating figure, having been born Ivan Gratianovitch Dombrowsky in Kiev, fighting in Russian cavalry during the Great War, fleeing the Bolshevik revolution to Warsaw and then emigrating to America, where he took a new name, found a job and developed an experimental interest in art, trying out various forms of modernism and abstraction, and serving as a mentor to the young Abstract Expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Arshile Gorky.

As you can see from Tramonto Spaventoso there was also a lot of Surrealism mixed up in his style, along with a refusal of being afraid to look amateurish and cack-handed. The terrifying sunset consists of a roughly drawn portrait of a man with eyeglasses and caricature moustache, the picture behind him divided into four quadrants showing (from top left) four golden circles which might be suns but also have lions’ faces drawn in them; two black classical pillars between which you can see a ploughed field leading off to the horizon and a sky with clouds; a mermaid with a curlicue tail whose breasts appear to be spurting milk at the central figure, and with blood pouring from a wound in her side; and at the bottom left another yellow lion face, this one with three legs appearing around its mane.

The John Graham remix

Oehlen has taken this obscure work by a now-largely-forgotten artist and subjected it to a whole series of remixes, mash-ups and distortions. He’s been doing this for at least ten years and this exhibition brings together about twenty of the results, small, medium-sized, large, and absolutely enormous in scale.

Sohn von Hundescheisse by Albert Oehlen (1999) Private Collection, Photo: Archive Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin | Paris © Albert Oehlen

So in each of the twenty or so mashups you are looking for those elements: face in the middle with a huge moustache; suns with faces; columns in the upper-right corner, with a series of lines going to the horizon, a mermaid at bottom right.

These figures or symbols are submitted to all kinds of distortions of shape and colour and position. The pain is applied in violent haphazard way, using extremely bright and vibrant colours with no regard for creating a consistent palette or tone (in real life the pink line along the top of this one looks almost fluorescent).

Oehlen’s aim is obviously to reference and recreate the original in the most random, attacked and disrespectful way possible, chucking out all guidelines of taste and decorum to see what happens. This makes it difficult to like. My initial reaction was visceral repulsion and anthropological amusement at what, nowadays, in the 2010s, comprises successful contemporary art.

However, once you have grasped that every single one of the works is referencing the Graham painting, it introduces a childish Where’s Wally aspect to trying to identify in each work the deeply buried mermaid and moustaches etc. And this activity ends up drawing you into his visual world, wild and deliberately scrappy, garish and amateurish though it is.

Vorfahrt für immer by Alber Oehlen (1998) Private Collection. Photo by the author

The Mark Rothko chapel

This is most obvious in the big central room of the Serpentine Gallery which has a circular cupola to let light in. Here Oehlen has created a new work especially for the Serpentine, a site-specific work which takes the remix approach to the Graham original to new heights and absurdities.

This space is now the location of two overlapping re-interpretations of other artists’ work, because the layout, the size and hang of these enormous Oehlen works is deliberately based on the layout and hang of the paintings which American Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko made for what became known as ‘the Rothko Chapel’ in Houston, Texas.

The Rothko Chapel, Texas

But whereas Rothko’s paintings are carefully composed and co-ordinated to create a shimmering meditative effect, and promote a spirit of serious meditation, Oehlen’s works rip up any idea of respect and decorum, consisting of wild hand-drawn cartoons, massive sketches, garish washes and caricature figures and faces.

It’s almost as if he’s doing everything he can think of to undermine the idea of ‘art’ as a serious activity worthy of respect. He has apparently given interviews throughout his career discussing the influence on him of Surrealism, but I think you have to go a step further back to DADA, with men on stage shouting nonsense poetry through megaphones while someone attacks a piano with a hammer to find artistic cognates of Oehlen’s works.

Installation view of Albert Oehlen at the Serpentine Gallery. Photo by the author

This resolutely iconoclastic approach explains a lot about what you’re actually seeing, but there’s a bit more going on as well. It was an excellent Serpentine visitor assistant who explained the importance of the John Graham original to me. But he then went on to explain other things Oehlen has done with these huge works.

Charcoal is usually used by artists to do sketches and drawings. But some of these works are done in charcoal on canvas primed and painted white i.e. given the status of paintings. (See image on the left, above)
By contrast, watercolour is usually employed in lightly figurative work to create delicate washes and effects, but here Oehlen uses it (or a very watery acrylic) to create huge and very rough lines or areas of pure colour (see image above, right)
In other, smaller works you can also see that Oehlen has got a spraycan and simply sprayed reasonably crafted works with spatters of cheap, dayglo, spraycan colours, such as ginger.

Above and beyond these technical mashups, there are also two obvious visual references. One is to the notorious moustaches of Salvador Dalí, exaggerated into schoolboy cartoons (see above).

The other is the references to Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, which features heavily in the current Dora Maar exhibition at Tate Modern. Here’s Guernica: look at the heads at the far left and far right. In both instances the head is depicted side-on, face-up, at an unrealistic angle from the ‘neck’ supporting it.

Guernica by Pablo Picasso

Compare and contrast with this, one of the enormous panels in the Oehlen show. Clearly he is channeling the Guernica neck and head (along with the Dalí moustaches and the Graham composition).

Installation view of Albert Oehlen at the Serpentine Gallery. Photo by the author

Conclusion

So, it is good to be informed: having been told that the Graham painting underpins everything in this exhibition is crucial to understanding the show.

Knowing that the Graham painting itself showed heavy Surrealist influences, feeds through into feeling the Surrealist undertones of the Oehlen works, and you can have a laugh at the Dali moustaches, you can congratulate yourself at spotting the Picasso reference.

Knowing that the big central room is a parody or pastiche or riff on the Rothko Chapel also helps to explain its layout and the sheer scale of the paintings Oehlen has filled it with.

And I did like some of the images he’s come up with – like the one I opened this review with, whose sheer bloody-minded, cack-handed, over-coloured exuberance achieves a kind of Gestalt, a totality of awfulness which is sort of impressive.

But no, at the end of the day, despite all the extenuating circumstances, and the intellectual interest of all this background information, no, I found them horrible.

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by Simon on January 13, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition

Posted by Simon on January 13, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/01/13/albert-oehlen-serpentine-gallery/

Sense Sound/Sound Sense: Fluxus Music, Scores and Records in the Luigi Bonotto Collection @ the Whitechapel Gallery

Fluxus

Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finished product.

The word Fluxus literally means ‘flow’ and all the artists associated with it were more interested in the process, in interaction rather than a stable polished final product. As such they are associated with performance art – you really had to be there! – or conceptual art which only required thinking about, no finished product necessary.

It was a very loose international association which stretched beyond artists to include musicians, composers, performers, poets, dancers, anyone who was prepared to have a go at experimental performance which, in the later 1960s and through the early 1970s, was a lot of extrovert creative types from John Cage and his Black Mountain College colleagues through to Yoko Ono and friends in Japan.

Display case of records, musical scores, magazine articles and photos at Sense Sound/Sound Sense: Fluxus Music, Scores and Records in the Luigi Bonotto Collection at the Whitechapel Gallery. Photo by the author

Luigi Bonotto and the Bonotto Foundation

This is a FREE one-room display of Fluxus-related objects from the collection of Luigi Bonotto. Who he?

Luigi Bonotto was an Italian businessman who made his money from a textile factory and business in Molvena. He became involved with contemporary art in the 1960s and hosted a series of events by Fluxus artists at this home. Here, artists met each other, planned and created new works which Bonotto took it upon himself to document and record.

Gradually Bonotto set out to keep the work of the artists of Fluxus and Experimental Poetry alive, and dedicated his life to preserving, cataloguing, and promoting their poetry, music, and work.

Forty years later the collection has grown to house over 15,000 documents, often given by the artists themselves, a unique archive with which to study the creative processes, relations and collaborations between the artists. It is now housed in the Luigi Bonotto Foundation which, of course, has its own website.

The Luigi Bonotto Foundation

Sense Sound/Sound Sense

So, after all that explanation, what about the display? Well, it’s like an interesting old junk shop, with display cases showing magazines and photos, a number of fairly big objects, rows of old, long player vinyl records, and some music stands holding iconic Fluxus-related scores such as John Cage‘s iconic 4’33”.

Cage’s ideas about ‘preparing’ a piano by placing nuts and bolts and other impediments among the strings were taken up by a wide variety of followers.

George Brecht (1926 to 2008)

In one of his iconic works Incidental Music, gave musicians a list of ways to interact with a grand piano such as opening the piano and stacking wooden blocks inside the instrument until one falls and creates a noise, or by dropping dried beans onto the keys. Here’s the complete ‘score’, obviously in fact a set of instructions.

Incidental Music by George Brecht (1961) Courtesy of Fondazione Bonotto © George Brecht

Dick Higgins

Higgins had the idea of creating a musical score by firing machine guns at it. Here’s the resulting score and the electronic thingy at the side included headphones so you could listen to the result. Note the written text at bottom left. As so often with conceptual art, it takes longer to read about than it takes to look at.

Installation view of Sense Sound/Sound Sense: Fluxus Music, Scores and Records showing Symphony 245 by Dick Higgins (1981) Photo by the author

Takehisa Kusugi

Kusugi’s score Musical Piece set a new standard of simplicity: simply place the piece of paper these instructions are written on against your ear and rub. That’s it.

Elsewhere there was a piece of music made up of recorded birdsong placed on a loop, quite a funny big cartoon of a man playing flute and out the end of it dripping spittle which was collected in a jar.

Probably the most striking artifact is this missile titled Bomb Cello by Charlotte Moorman.

Installation view of Sense Sound/Sound Sense: Fluxus Music, Scores and Records in the Luigi Bonotto Collection at the Whitechapel Gallery.

Charlotte was a classically trained cellist who teamed up with Fluxus artist Nam June Paik (who recently had an enormous retrospective show at Tate Modern) to create all manner of happenings and wacky performances. She performed naked or wearing a range of outfits, she played a man i.e. had a man sit in front of her while she went through the motions of playing a cello, and did the same to a TV and to a stack of TVs, in various performances.

The photo above captures Charlotte in the process of ‘playing’ a naked man, a performance titled Human Cello (1965). But it was Charlotte herself who designed the bomb cello standing next to it, which has strings, keys and a bow attached.

On the right in the picture is an artifact titled Composition for a record player and five musicians, with the toy musical instruments usefully attached. You get the idea.

Installation view of Sense Sound/Sound Sense: Fluxus Music, Scores and Records in the Luigi Bonotto Collection at the Whitechapel Gallery.

There are lots of LPs, sheet music, photos and magazine articles and wall labels and headphones so you can listen to the wackier compositions to your heart’s delight and study numerous other ‘scores’ for performances, as well as smashed up, fragmented or otherwise twisted and reinterpreted musical objects, like Claes Oldenburg’s drumkit made out of drooping, sagging sewn fabric. Or a violin case filled with lighted candles and titled A Little Night Music.

A Little Night Music by Marchetti Walter

As mad old Uncle Ian used to say: ‘Why not?’

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by Simon on December 31, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition

Posted by Simon on December 31, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/sense-sound-fluxus-luigi-bonotto-whitechapel-gallery/

Dora Maar @ Tate Modern

This is the most comprehensive retrospective of photographer and painter Dora Maar ever held in Britain.

Dora Maar photographed by Man Ray (1936)

Brief synopsis

Maar was a successful fashion and commercial photographer in the early 1930s
a social documentary photographer in the mid-1930s, as well as being a left-wing political activist, signing manifestos, going on marches
she developed into a dazzling surrealist photographer in the mid to late-1930s
Maar was introduced to Picasso in 1935 and was his mistress for nine years, documenting the creation of his 1937 masterpiece Guernica, providing the model for thirty or so many paintings and many drawings on the theme of the Weeping woman, and under his encouragement taking up painting again
1944 saw the break-up with Picasso, and the start of years struggling with depression – she never returned to photography
1940s to her death in 1997: experiments with a range of painting styles from her home in rural France

Dora Maar

Born in 1907, Maar was encouraged and supported by her father to study art, but became more attracted to photography. Living in Paris, by the late 1920s she had become proficient at photography and made contacts in the Paris artworld, She studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian, and frequented André Lhote’s workshop where she met Henri Cartier-Bresson. She became friends with the surrealist Jacqueline Lamba, who went on to meet the godfather of the surrealist movement, André Breton.

At the beginning of 1930, she set up a photography studio on rue Campagne-Première (14th arrondissement of Paris) with Pierre Kéfer, photographer and decorator. Though many prints during their collaboration were signed ‘Kéfer–Dora Maar’, Maar was usually the sole author. When their partnership ended around 1935, Maar established her own studio in central Paris and took independent commissions.

Through the early 1930s she undertook a wide range of commercial photography for advertisements and fashion magazines, travel books and some erotic magazines. All the photos from this period are crisp and clean and attractive, several shots of men and women in sporty poses reminding me of glamour photos from 1930s Hollywood of the likes of Gary Cooper or Jean Harlow.

The exhibition has nine rooms and the room of fashion photos and nudes is arguably the most enjoyable, for their variety and their tremendous evocation of 1930s glamour, Paris-style.

But what’s also interesting is you can see the logic of a sort of progression from fashion photos, sports photos, through tasteful nudes, and then increasingly experimental commercial photos, promoting shampoo etc, and then, suddenly…

Surrealism

A severed hand holding a bottle. A fashionably dressed woman in a long backless dress with… a star for a head… Suddenly Maar is a surrealist!

A very successful surrealist. She was one of only a handful of photographers to be included in the big surrealist exhibitions of the 1930s (in Tenerife, Paris, London, New York, Japan and Amsterdam), her work appearing alongside that of Man Ray (for me, maybe the greatest photographer) and Hans Bellmer (very disturbing chopped-up mannequins).

Interestingly, the early surrealists couldn’t quite see how photography fit into their idea of foregrounding the imagination and above all, the unconscious mind, because photography was associated, up till then, with documentary recording of portrait, landscapes or cityscapes. It took the development of photomontage – the cutting and pasting of several photographic images over or on each other – which persuaded the surrealists that photography could, indeed, be a hugely powerful disruptor of ‘bourgeois reality’.

Room five shows photos by her, alongside photos of the leading lights of the surrealist movement, friends ad fellow activists, male and female, including: Man Ray, Ren Crevell, Paul Eluard, Leonor Fini, Christian Berard, Lise Deharme – she was right in there, in the thick of the movement and the contemporary arts scene, and alongside photos of her famous friends, the exhibition displays catalogues and invitations to the surrealist exhibitions where her work was shown.

Anyway, the main thrust of the surrealist room is to showcase a range of experiments with surrealist photography, from fairly basic ideas of cutting and pasting one image onto another photo, to more interestingly experimental.

Several tropes recur:

Cut out a naked woman and stick it on almost any other image and it looks surreal/silly. Eyes.
Cut out eyes and put them anywhere, or create a flock of eyes with wings, or eyes on a beach with legs like crabs.
Shop-window mannequins. Stick them in any window and take a photograph and – hey presto! – poundshop surrealism

But a handful of the images are world class, as good as anything any of the men ever dreamed up.

Far more troubling was a set she made where she took the curved vaulted ceiling of a church somewhere, turned it upside down and then superimposed figures on it, on one version a street boy bending his body unnaturally backwards is a genuinely disturbing image (see end of this review).

My point being that a lot of her surreal photographs are relatively smooth and acceptable (like the shell-hand above) – extensions of her fashion shot style. But just a few of them are genuinely chilling and disturbing…

Social documentary

Another big room (room 3) is filled with Maar’s social documentary photographs from the 1930s. She took bleak, honest photographs of the terrible poverty to be found in ‘La Zone’ – a sprawling shanty town on the outskirts of Paris that was home to around 40,000 poverty-stricken Parisians and immigrants.

In 1933 she travelled to the Catalonia and took photos of street people in Barcelona.

Surprisingly, there’s an extended set of photos she took of street people in London, including pearly kings, blind musicians, and all manner of beggars, from the smartly dressed to the really worn-down and impoverished.

And there is a whole room devoted simply to every day scenes, the oddity or strikingness of sudden moments in the city, the kind of moments which the surrealists’ godfather, André Breton, tried and – in my opinion – miserably failed to capture in his self-important and banal ‘masterpiece’, Nadja, which photography, as a medium, is much better equipped to capture than prose.

Girl Blocking the Doorway by Dora Maar (1934)

To be honest, a lot of these are not classics, nothing like the images of the Depression being create by Dorothea Lange at the same time in America, and not as brilliantly composed and framed as the social documentary photos of Edith Tudor-Hart, both of whom have had exhibitions devoted to them recently.

The first five rooms, then, have shown us an extensive selection of photos across a number of genres – commercial, fashion, erotic, nudes, social realism and art-surrealism – that really make the case for Maar being a very significant figure from the time, and a handful of really outstanding surrealist images she created.

Then it all goes pear-shaped.

Picasso

In 1935 she asked a mutual friend to introduce her to Picasso, who fascinated her and, she became his mistress. Unfortunately he already had one mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, mother of his daughter Maya. Between 1936 and 1938 they spent summers at Mougins in the South of France, with a group of other artists that included Paul and Nusch Eluard, Man Ray, Roland Penrose, Lee Miller and Eileen Agar, and their relationship lasted until 1946.

I suppose the curators couldn’t avoid this big chunk of her life, but it has a very negative effect. The two rooms which deal with it unavoidably bring out that Picasso was a genius, and seemed to indicate (the narrative was a little unclear) that she more or less abandoned photography.

As to his genius, one entire room is devoted to the masterpiece Guernica, for the slender reason that Maar took a series of seven photos showing the progress of its creation during May and June 1937. Her photos are projected onto the wall and are nearly as bit as the original. This ought to have been fascinating, but wasn’t. They show us that Picasso’s initial pencil composition changed as he painted but beyond that…

Installation view of Dora Maar at Tate Modern showing the projection of Maar’s photos of the progress of Guenrica

The displays also tell us more than once that Maar was the model for the image of the Weeping Woman, an image which is included in Guernica and which he made about thirty versions of. This story is undermined a bit when we read Maar denying it, and claiming all these weeping women were nothing to do with her, but Picasso’s own invention.

‘You need to know that I never really modelled for Picasso. He never painted me “from nature”. One or two drawings, maybe, that’s all, although he did hundreds of portraits of me.’

The exhibition includes one of the Weeping Women (the one, in fact, owned by Tate) and this has a deleterious effect on the rest of the show because it is so brilliant.

Weeping Woman (1937) by Pablo Picasso. Tate

The exhibition includes an experimental series of portraits they made together, combining experimental photographic and printmaking techniques, and one big figurative painting she did during this time. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the relationship was a catastrophe for her.

In the late 1930s she was a photographer at the top of her game, firing on all cylinders, experimenting and developing. Then it all grinds to a halt. She helps Picasso with his work, she gets fed up with being excluded from his circle.

Why did she do it?

After Picasso

Picasso bought Maar a house in Ménerbes, Vaucluse, where she retired and lived alone. She turned to the Catholic religion, met the painter Nicolas de Staël (who lived in the same village), and turned to abstract painting.

The final two rooms give us a cross-selection of her paintings. These come in a bewildering variety of styles.

In the 1940s, hugely under the influence of Picasso she made still life oil paintings, which were well received when she exhibited them in a joint exhibition at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher, alongside those of Georgian artist Vera Pagava.

Still Life by Dora Maar (1941)

She painted semi-abstract landscapes of the countryside around her house in the Vaucluse, some of which are very pleasant. La Grande Range was included in Maar’s last exhibition, held in the Leicester Galleries, London, in 1958 and the curators quote the Times’s art critic, John Russell, praising their sensitivity and feel for large, open rather lonely places.

La Grand Range (1958) by Dora Maar

Another wall shows experiments with very small oil abstract paintings . The fourth wall displays a series of larger abstracts, often with black lines drawn over turquoise colour washes. I liked these more than the rather washed-out landscapes.

Untitled abstracts from the 1970s

And the final room shows her experiments with taking photographs without a camera, camera-less photographs or photograms. A photogram is made by placing an object on photo-sensitive paper and exposing it to light. Where the light strikes the paper, it darkens, where the paper is covered by the object it remains lighter. Maar experimented with household objects with differing degrees of transparency to control the amount of light let through to the paper.

Installation view of Maar’s late photograms

Paintings of the landscapes around her house in Ménerbes,[23] showed locations dominated by wind and clouds, strongly revealing the struggle of an artist with the ghosts of her past.[24]

Conclusion

Well, if the exhibition’s purpose was to pull Maar out from Picasso’s shadow and rehabilitate her as a photographer and artist in her own right, then it certainly succeeds.

However, the effort to rehabilitate her as an artist and painter is, I think, a failure, especially after the curators dazzled us with the Picasso room: nothing from the 40 or so years of painting in the second half of her life comes anywhere near matching the genius and intensity of the Master. Some of it’s attractive, some of it is competent enough cubist still lifes, or a certain type of washed out 1970s abstraction, but…

No, it’s back to the multitude of photos which fill the first five rooms that the visitor has to go to catch the range and inventiveness and technical competence and restless inquiring mind which made Maar such a presence in the world of photography in the 1930s, and which is surely her lasting legacy.

A handful of the images are quite stunning (this is not a subjective view, as the same three or four images – the shell-hand, the face with a spiderweb projected on it, the woman in evening dress with a star for a head – appear on all the posters, on the front of the catalogue, as postcards and associated merch in the Tate shop).

And many of the social documentary photos are good, if lacking the bite of Edith Tudor-Hart.

But scattered in among these 60 or so images are a handful which, as I mentioned above, I thought penetrated to a deeper level, were neither ‘acceptable’ images of poverty or slickly-made surrealism – but took us somewhere quite different, deeper and more disturbing.

Though not reproduced on book covers or postcards or posters or mugs or fridge magnets or tote bags or t-shirts, I thought this small handful of genuinely creepy images captured something genuinely profound and chilling, something which gestures towards real greatness.

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by Simon on December 23, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Photography

Posted by Simon on December 23, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/12/23/dora-maar-tate-modern/

Dóra Maurer @ Tate Modern

This is a lovely FREE exhibition on the third floor of Tate Modern. It is the first UK survey to celebrate Dóra Maurer’s five-decade career, bringing together 35 works, ranging from:

her conceptual photographic series
the experimental films
her colourful graphic works
and the striking large geometric paintings

Potted biography

Dóra Maurer was born in 1937 in Budapest, capital of Hungary. She was a child during the Second World War and grew up in a society dominated by the Soviet-supported Communist Party. She came to adulthood just after the failed Hungarian Rising of 1956 led to Russian tanks being sent in to repress the uprising and demands for greater democracy.

It was during the 1960s that Maurer emerged as part of a generation of neo-avant-garde Hungarian artists who produced highly experimental work in parallel to the ‘official’ art system of the socialist regime.

Photographs

She trained as a graphic artist and printmaker in the 1950s and quickly began pushing the medium to its limits in her early works. She had an eye informed by questions of design and layouts.

From early on her main interest was in movement, displacement, perception and transformation. The exhibition includes a set of photographs she and a colleague took of each other across the courtyard of a tenement building as they moved along the gallery thus creating a series of variations. Another set shows a series of hand gestures: same hand, infinite variation of gestures, titled, in a suitably technocratic way, Reversible and Changeable Phases of Movements No.6.

She was interested in taking shapes and patterns and subjecting them to set changes and transformations, a fascination which resulted in probably her best known work, Seven Twists.

Experimental films

One room is devoted to five of her experimental films. This short clip gives you a feel.

She’d wanted to experiment with films since the late 1960s but didn’t have access to the equipment. Then in 1973 the state film organisation made its facilities available to artists and, voom! she was off.

Again she is playing with repetition, variation, and displacement. Relative Swingings splices together three separate strands of film to create a dizzying disorientation, shot in her own flat, some of the scenes more or less static, others made by lying on the floor and swinging the camera back and forth to create a blurred image of the ceiling.

Repetition with distortions

In 1974 she placed a coil of wire under a thin metal printing plate and pressed down so that it left a mark on the plate. The plate was inked and a print was made. The coil was then placed under the same plate and pressed down and a new print was made. Doing this in succession recorded what she called ‘phases of displacement’.

Traces of a Circle (1974) by Dóra Maurer. Tate

As her work became more geometric and abstract, Maurer explored system-based painting and the way in which geometric forms are affected by colour and perception. Some of these were exercises set for her students for she was now teaching in the Creativity Exercises Circle.

The third room explores her large-scale experiments with repetition and distortion. The most striking example is a set of four rectangular wooden panels suspended from the ceiling and part covered in mirrors, with a distinct gap between them, titled 4 out of 3. It’s the four panels hanging in mid-air at the right of this photo.

Installation view of Dóra Maurer at Tate Modern. Photo by Matt Greenwood

As you walk around, or as you observe other people walking round, they enter the reflective surface of the mirrors and leave them. It’s a simple, unpretentious and beguiling invention. Note its relationship with the coloured squares hanging on the wall behind it (5 out of 4), which clearly show the way Maurer takes a pattern and then subjects it to variations and displacements.

The Schloss Buchberg commission

In 1983 Maurer was awarded a commission for a site-specific project at Schloss Buchberg, near Vienna. For this she needed to think big, big spaces to cover, and an opportunity to play with colour. As she covered corners, curves and vaulted ceilings she began to appreciate the three-dimensional visual distortions they created on two-dimensional designs.

In the late 1970s Maurer had developed personal rules and techniques for producing varied shapes (such as 5 out of 4 and 4 out of 3, above) which included the strict use of just eight specific colours.

The Schloss Buchberg commission prompted her to expand her colour palette and experiment with three-dimensional affects, playing with perspective and perception. Thus some of her new works in the 1980s require the visitor to stand in just the right place in order to appreciate the optical illusion being created. In this respect she reminds me a bit of Bridget Riley’s Op Art.

Installation view of Dóra Maurer at Tate Modern. Photo by the author

The huge colour shapes

The show culminates in the fifth room with a display of Maurer’s most recent works, half a dozen enormous bright colour paintings with no frames, which are just coloured shapes mounted on the walls.

These are, quite simply, marvellous. Who would have thought there was still the scope to create objects which are, in a sense, so simple, but yet so inspiring. They are entirely flat – the impression of curving, of shape and shadow is created by varying the colours.

Stage II (2016) by Dóra Maurer. Photo by the author

Somewhere there’s a reference to Matisse’s late cutouts, but Maurer has reached this point entirely by herself, and by following a fascinating evolution through successive theories and experiments with shape and variation, with pattern and displacement, which the exhibition has traced so well.

Dora is still alive and producing new work at the ripe age of 82. May she long continue to do so. This is a really fascinating exhibition which leads to a completely unexpected and uplifting conclusion. Lovely!

Promotional video

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by Simon on November 23, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition

Posted by Simon on November 23, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/11/23/dora-maurer-tate-modern/

Kara Walker @ Tate Modern

Kara Walker

Kara Walker was born in California in 1969. She is an American contemporary painter, silhouettist, print-maker, installation artist, and film-maker. I have previously come across her work in:

1. The big exhibition of prints held at the British Museum in 2017, where I wrote:

In this room the standout artist for me was Kara Walker, with her stylised black-and-white silhouettes of figures from the ante-bellum Deep South. I’ve seen an exhibition of these before, so there’s an element of recognition and familiarity in my positive response. Coming towards the end of a rather exhausting exhibition featuring over 200 images, the clarity, purity of line and savage humour of her work sets her apart.

Restraint (2009)
Confederate prisoners being conducted from Jonesburgh to Atlanta (2005)

But her style is also capable of a strange dreamlike quality, fantasias of colour, exploitation, journeying across the seas, converting history into eerie illustrations for a very grown-up set of fairy tales.

no world from An Unpeopled Land in Uncharted Waters (2010) Aquatint by Kara Walker © Kara Walker. Reproduced by permission of the artist

2. The other place I’d come across Walker is in the huge book, Women, Art and Society by Whitney Chadwick (2012) where Chadwick writes:

Works like [Kara Walker’s] installation Narratives of a Negress (2003) raise complex issues about history, memory, and ethnic, gender and cultural identity. (p.492)

So I was familiar with Walker’s crisp, black silhouettes, and the way that, despite their often emotive titles the actual illustrations are often more teasing, strange and fantastical than the apparent straightforward obsession with slavery would suggest.

Slavery! Slavery! by Kara Walker (1997) Installation at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Kara Walker and the Queen Victoria Memorial Monument

So when Tate announced that this year’s annual commission would be given to Walker, anyone familiar with her work will have expected it to touch on the issue of slavery – and she didn’t disappoint. She has created a huge sculpture which parodies the Queen Victoria Memorial Monument outside Buckingham Palace.

To understand how Walker has parodied the original, let’s take a moment to refresh our memories.

The Queen Victoria Memorial, outside Buckingham Palace, London

The Victoria monument is 25 metres high and contains 2,300 tonnes of white Carrara marble. As well as a solid, matronly Queen Victoria seated holding the orb and sceptre, the memorial also carries statues representing courage, constancy, victory, charity, truth and motherhood. The central monument, created between 1906 and 1924, is by Sir Thomas Brock, but the whole design, including the nearby Memorial Gardens, was conceived by Sir Aston Webb and the Memorial was formally unveiled by King George V in 1911.

Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus

Walker decided that, in London, home of the slave trade for so many centuries, and a city stuffed to the gills with very white marble statues of and monuments to very white imperial heroes, it would be an interesting gesture to create a memorial, on a similarly imposing scale, to all the victims of the transatlantic slave trade.

The result is Fons Americanus (Latin for American fountain), an enormous monument made up of various human statues and a water feature spouting water into a set of concentric pools at its base, also filled with miscellaneous statues of people and a surprising number of sharks.

Installation view of Fons Americanus by Kara Walker (2019)

Walker replaces the smooth Victorian allegorical figures of the original with crudely carved cartoon figures representing archetypes from the slave trade, topped off with a staggering female figure spouting water from her breasts (and also from a nasty gash in her neck).

Each of these figures has a symbolic meaning and, although it’s not immediately obvious, most of them actually reference works of art from the British tradition, nineteenth century paintings of rafts and slaves and so on. There’s a full list of the different figures and explanations on the Tate website:

Key to Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus

Broadly speaking, Walker replaces the British or imperial icons, depicted in the smooth neo-classical style of the original monument, with figures from various aspects of the slave trade – a weeping boy, a native woman instead of smug Queen Vic, a generic sea captain, a kneeling praying man in chains, and a tree with a noose dangling from it to represent the countless Africans who were hunted down, tortured, lynched and hanged.

Installation view of Fons Americanus. Photo by Matt Greenwood

First thoughts

1. Scale

The most obvious thing about filing the Turbine Hall is that your work must be big, and Fons Americanus is big alright. You can view it from the ground floor walkway but it’s worth going down to the lower level to walk around it and really get a sense of its hugeness. It towers over the mere mortals at its feet.

2. Aesthetics

All the Tate labels and webpages emphasise that the point of Fons Americanus is to subvert and parody the smooth surfaces of traditional monuments, as those monuments in their turn smooth over and gloss over the violence, and horror and exploitation which lay at the basis of the British Empire.

And that this explains why the surfaces of all the figures have been left deliberately pockmarked and rough to the touch. And, in the same spirit, explains why the human figures aren’t perfectly proportioned human figures based on the ancient Greek ideals of standardised beauty; instead they are deliberately rough and crude, because life is crude and real people are rough.

I understand the intention. I understand all that. But it’s still ugly. It’s still hard not to be repelled by the crudeness and ugliness of the figures.

Installation view of Fons Americanus. Photo by Matt Greenwood

Maybe she’s intending to give repellent content a repellent appearance, I understand the intention. But it’s notable how drastically Fons Americanus with its lunking crudity is unlike the silhouettes which brought her to fame. The silhouettes were notable for their style and grace and elegance of design.

I can’t help thinking that anyone familiar with the imaginative world of her silhouette works will be surprised and pretty disappointed by the blunt crudity of this enormous object.

3. Irony

There is a sort of politico-aesthetic irony here: I have read here and about other exhibitions, that Walker and many other BAME artists and writers are protesting against the white canons and the white rules of beauty which have dominated European and American art and media for so long. My impression is that for the past fifty years or more a lot of black artists and writers and film-makers have been campaigning to have black beauty, black pride, black appearance, black hair and black faces incorporated into much more diverse and inclusive notions of ‘beauty’.

OK, I understand the aim.

But there’s a kind of irony here that Walker seems to be playing to the crudest of racist stereotypes and clichés by making her black people so insistently and defiantly brutish and ugly, unfinished, rough and repellent. Maybe we are intended to overcome our repulsion from these crudely drawn figures and make the imaginative effort to sympathise for any human in dire need, no matter how crude and ungainly and clumpishly they’re depicted? Maybe the aesthetic clumsiness is part of a kind of moral test?

4. Patronising

But the biggest problem with this installation is the wall labels, the press release and all the relevant pages on the Tate website.

They all seem to assume that we’ve never heard of the Atlantic slave trade – that the existence of slavery 200 years ago will come as a massive surprise to Tate gallery visitors – and that the work will shine a dazzling new light on a previously unknown subject, confronting ‘a history often misremembered in Britain’ as the wall label puts it.

Misremembered by whom exactly? By art gallery visitors? Probably the most bien-pensant, liberal cohort of people you could assemble anywhere.

The notion that the slave trade is an obscure historical event which needs more publicising struck me as an extraordinary claim, especially since I went to see this sculpture during the 32nd Black History Month.

Had none of the previous 31 Black History Months mentioned slavery? Have no books been written on the subject, or TV documentaries made, or articles written or exhibitions about it held anywhere else? That assumption, which is taken as the premise of all the curator commentary, seemed astonishingly patronising, to me.

In fact I gave up reading the Tate web-page about the installation when I came to the sentence carefully explaining that London was ‘the capital of the British Empire’… OK. It was at that point that I realised the entire commentary was either for schoolchildren, or for people who have little or no knowledge about Britain or British history. But are these the kinds of people you are liable to meet at Tate Modern or Tate Britain?

In fact the type of person you meet most at Tate Modern are tourists. Every time I go, I end up helping some hapless foreigners find their way about, or explain the escalators and lifts, or the layout of two buildings to them (yesterday I had to explain to a family of Italians in the lift with me that they were going to the correct floor but in the wrong building).

Almost all the voices I heard as I walked round the installation were foreign: I particularly remember a French family who were posing their little kids for charming tourist pics on the edge of Fons Americanus‘s the pool, and plenty of other family groups were posing and taking family snaps around it, just as they do by the fountains in Trafalgar Square or at any number of other great big imposing public monuments in London.

What does its radical deconstruction of the tradition of neo-classical, British imperial monumentalising mean to them, I wonder?

Installation view of Fons Americanus. Photo by Ben Fisher

5. Artists and history

History, as a professional activity, is about the careful sifting of evidence. Historians undergo an extensive training in the use of archives and other sources, and ways of judging and assessing documents, speeches, books and so on.

Historians can obviously still be terribly biased, or commissioned by the state to write propaganda, and completely ‘objective’ history is probably impossible – but nonetheless the notion of objective history is still an ideal worth preserving and striving for, and most historians generally adhere to professional standards of presenting and interpreting evidence, which is or should be made available for others to sift and assess in their turn.

And hence the intellectual discipline of History – which amounts to an endless debate about all aspects of the past backed up by evidence.

Compare and contrast this meticulous approach with the worldview of artists, who are free to make great sweeping generalisations about life and art and society and capitalism and God and anything else they feel like, with little or no comeback, with no requirement for proof or evidence.

This is fine if they want to make provocative works out of industrial junk or surrealist paintings. But if they take it upon themselves to create works designed to be a complete reinterpretation of history over a period of hundreds of years – and if their new interpretation of history is going to be taught to schoolchildren and explained to school groups – then they assume a certain amount of responsibility.

In other words, to put it really bluntly – you shouldn’t rely on artists to teach you anything about history. You should rely on historians. That’s why they’re called historians. It is because they are lifelong specialists in an area of intellectual enquiry which is defined by rules, best practice, and policed by a community of peers, in academic journals and so on.

That’s Argument Number One against artists teaching history.

Argument Two concerns the idea of respecting the complexity of human history.

In my opinion, good history should try above all to capture the complexity of human motives and experiences. It’s a mistake not to take account of the extent to which people of the past were just as multi-faceted, complicated and capable of contradictory feelings, beliefs and actions, as we are today. They were people like us, not one-dimensional caricatures.

In order to create the space to let your imagination and empathy work, in order to fully enter into the spirit of another time and try to understand the people who lived in it and the multiple pressures and compulsions they lived under – we should not rush to judgement. As the American historian David Silbey writes in his incisive account of the 1900 Boxer Rebellion against Western imperialist forces in China:

Passing judgement is a dangerous role for a historian to play. (p.202)

The kind of history I like is continually upsetting my expectations, presenting me with counter-intuitive ideas, making me stop and think and really reconsider my existing beliefs. Thus the book about Eurasian empires, After Tamerlane, which I read recently, overturned my ideas about all sorts of aspects of the past, made me view lots of general trends and specific areas of history (such, for example, as the importance of the imperial conquests of Russia) in a completely new light.

My view is that Walker’s version of history doesn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know – that you weren’t taught at school and haven’t had reinforced by countless books, documentaries, newspaper and magazine articles and Hollywood movies about slavery – and by thirty-two Black History Months with their annual outpouring of exhibitions, articles and documentaries.

Instead of making you really stop and think, of prompting unexpected insights and new ways of seeing, for me, at any rate, Fons Americanus seems to set out to confirm all your prejudices and stereotypes:

to confirm your impression that all blacks in all of history were helpless victims of the slave trade
to confirm the stereotype that all white masters were racist sadists
to erase the fact that the slaves were sold to the traders by Africans who made a fortune by enslaving their fellow blacks
to erase the hundreds of thousands who worked or bought their way out of slavery, set up businesses or had lives as fulfilling as plenty of the miserably poor whites (and other ethnic groups) they lived among
to erase the role of Britain and the Royal Navy in abolishing slavery and then policing the world’s oceans to try and prevent it. As James Walvin points out in his history of slavery, ‘Between 1820 and 1870 the Royal Navy seized 1,600 slave ships on the Atlantic and freed 150,000 slaves, especially heading to Cuba and Brazil.’ Somehow, I don’t think we’re going much about these positive achievements in the deluge of wokeness coming our way.

In other words, I feel nervous about the reduction of an immense and extraordinarily complicated history of the multifarious experiences of tens of millions of people over several hundred years down to half a dozen, crudely-drawn, Simpsonsesque cartoon figures.

Installation view of Fons Americanus. Photo by Matt Greenwood

Fons Americanus is big. It’s very big. American big. Like a skyscraper or a Big Mac. But I recoiled from it:

a) aesthetically – it is crude and ugly and repellent
b) intellectually – its message, such as it is, is crude and patronising and dangerously simplistic

Second thoughts

To be honest, a lot of my negative response was triggered by Tate’s wall labels and by the Tate web-pages about Fons Americanus and the slave trade – commentary and labels which I found worryingly simple-minded, and single-minded: simplifying an enormous, complex, multifarious epoch of history down into a handful of slogans and images, and into a new, and worryingly simple-minded, orthodoxy.

My argument was, to a large extent, with the written interpretation of the work.

But there’s a different and much more obvious approach to the commission and presence of Fons Americanus here in Tate Modern, which is to ask: among all the hundreds of memorials and monuments and statues to countless white men and generals and politicians, most of whom served under the British Empire in one shape or another and which litter London’s public spaces: should there be a memorial to commemorate the transatlantic slave trade?

To which the answer is almost certainly an emphatic YES, Yes, there should be.

In which case the follow-up questions are:

Should it be this one?
and, Where should it go?

Where would you put it?

The Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern and global warming

Every year Tate commissions a contemporary artist to fill the vast space of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. The funding comes from Hyundai.

Hyundai is a South Korean multinational automotive manufacturer headquartered in Seoul. It manufactures nearly 5 million automobiles, luxury cars and commercial vehicles each year. If green activists have woken up to the fact that many art exhibitions are sponsored by oil companies, and violently object to their contribution to global warming, indeed have gone to the trouble of pouring oil at the front of the National Portrait Gallery which each year hosts the BP Portrait Awards… how long before the penny drops that oil is only actually a pollutant when it is burned to produce CO2 and a host of toxic poisonous chemicals hazardous to human life and all other life forms?

In other words, I wonder for how much longer a company which manufactures toxic, air-polluting ‘automobiles, luxury cars and commercial vehicles’ will be allowed to sponsor works of art and installations like this?

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by Simon on November 17, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Slavery

Posted by Simon on November 17, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/11/17/kara-walker-tate-modern/

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All posts tagged Tate Modern

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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Biography

Overarching title – ‘Brain Forest Quipu’

The sculpture – the ‘Dead Forest Quipu’

What is a quipu?

Ecofeminism

The soundscape – the ‘Sound Quipu’

The videos – the ‘Digital Quipu’

Save the rainforest

Sadness

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

Tears of the forest

The promotional video

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Self portrait

Importance

1. Experiments in form

2. Experiments in colour

A personal view

Geology

Scope of the exhibition

Apples

The human figure

The bathers

The promotional video

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Project for a new novel (1958)

Advertisers Announcements (1967-71)

1. Homage to Claire Churchill

2. Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?

3. A Neural Interval

4. Placental Insufficiency

5. Venus Smiles

Conclusion

Condensed novels and The Atrocity Exhibition

Crashed Cars exhibition (1970)

Practical conclusion

References

Reviews of other Ballard books

Novels

Short story collections

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Albert Oehlen