Grosse Fatigue

We visited the 55th Venice Biennale in November and I’ve not had a chance to write up any thoughts or observations.  I discussed it recently at the Programme Day and promised I would I post a few notes on the artist I highlighted, French artist Camille Henrot.

This iteration of the Biennale was curated by Massimiliano Gioni and there can have been fewer biennale’s as tightly curated as this one. ‘The Encyclopaedic Palace’ took inspiration from a work by a self taught American artist from the 1950’s, Marino Aurturi. He imagined a colossal museum that would act as a repository for all the knowledge and cultural artefacts of the world. A scale model of Aurturi’s place stood at the entrance to the Arsenale.

The Biennale then offered exhibition after exhibition examining art and epistemology and providing taxonomies of knowledge and the myriad ways in which artists have responded to the world and attempted to forge an understanding of it. Many shows highlighted work by ‘outsider’ artists, self taught, occultists, naïfs and artists that eschew scientific and emperical world views in preference for singular, creative, or mystical/spiritualist conceptions of the world.

It was a provocative show. Fascinating, infuriating at times. For my money, the best work was to be found in the film/video works. One of the most striking was a film projection by Camille Henrot. Her video, Grosse Fatigue drew inspiration from a residency at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC and presents a history of the world from the Big Bang to the present but one that punctuates its scientific rationalism with creation myths and much more and all delivered on a mac computer screen interface. It was a simple formal device that was both aesthetically astute and conceptually acute. Henrot’s ‘history of everything’ examined the digital sublime in the information age no less, and with real verve and wit.

 

The Great War

A number of students are working on the ‘Aftermath’ project in conjunction with the John Rylands Library in Manchester. The project offers them an opportunity to work directly from an archive of letters (held by the John Rylands Library) sent by soldiers from the frontline during World War 1. The soldiers were all former students and were corresponding with their tutor, one Professor Tout, at Manchester University.

In a number of tutorials I’ve found myself reccommending Joe Sacco’s extraordinary book/drawing. The book consists of a single drawing, 24 feet in length in concertina pages. It’s a complex rendering of the Battle of the Somme on a single day – July 01st 1916 – that manages to conflate the temporal and topographical into a narrative account all presented as a single drawing.

The Aftermath exhibition opens at the John Rylands Library, Deansgate, Manchester in February 2014.

Nine Little Art Histories

This ‘slow blog’ continues apace. This is the first post of this academic year. It was a hectic first semester. A number of students have aked for details of the book I discussed at the Programme Day recently.

Here are the details: Deep Design: Nine Little Art Histories by Libby Lumbkin. The book offers, as its title suggests, nine little art histories; nine short essays distinguished by their erudition and insight.

Lumpkin covers a number of features of our design culture that have largely been overlooked. The opening essay covers the Smiley Face motif/logo. The image is one we most closely associate with counter culture, and more recently here in the UK the acid/rave culture of the late 1980’s. It was in fact created by an American bank in Seattle to counter the counter culture – young people in the late 1960’s were eschewing financial institutions as a political gesture of opposition. The logo was devised in an attempt to make the bank seems more friendly. It’s a splendid essay that veers off in surprising directions and explores ‘the smile’ from the archaic smile or ‘agalama’ in Greek art to the beatific smiles of the Madonna in Ranaissance painting and back to the Smiley face.

It’s a book never ceases to inspire me. Seek it out.

Graphic Books: Chris Ware, Adrian Tomine and Lamia Ziade

Building Stories, Chris Ware

 

Over the past twelve months or so there appear to have been a number of books published which could only exist as hard copy print artefacts. It is perhaps a reaction to the rise of the e book/kindle/i-pad. They are concerned with the book form: paper, weight, ink, texture, binding, text, image and many take the book form into new territories.

 
Chris Ware’s Building Stories is exemplary. It’s hardly a book at all. This is a set of books, pamphlets, posters all housed in a large ‘board game’ box. The books etc. narrate a series of intertwining stories in beautiful graphic drawings. There is no beginning, middle or end; it’s non linear. You can begin wherever you like. This story of a building and its inhabitants manages to communicate in ways that text alone cannot. And indeed, even the sequential form of the graphic novel is taken to task as Ware plays on information graphics and children’s board games to explore relationships between image and text and sequential narrative.

 
The key narrative, in Building Stories’ numerous cross narratives, features a story of a young woman living alone, a former art student, who finds her career trajectory didn’t map out quite how she imagined it might. She muses on her daily struggles and reflects upon her life, her insecurities and her relationships. It focuses upon the incidentals. Ware takes time to draw out, literally and metaphorically, the details of our lives and the moments we find for analysis and reflection. The drawings are precise and the narrative draws upon cinema (Yasujiro Ozu springs to mind), board games, comics/strip cartoons (Richard McGuire et al) and graphic novels.

 
Ware guest edited a volume of Dave Eggers Literary magazine (book) McSweeney’s some years ago. Ware’s McSweeney’s contains wrap around posters, mini-books and pamphlets. The essays and contributions cover the history of comics and the graphic novel (Rodolphe Topffer, George Herriman et al) and the artists that have proved to be inspirational for a new generation (including Philip Guston). Ware introduced the edition with a quotation from Nabokov:

I don’t think in any language. I think in images. I don’t believe that people think in languages. They don’t move their lips when they think. It is only a certain type of illiterate person who moves his lips as he reads or ruminates. No I think in images, and now and then a Russian phrase or an English phrase will form with the foam of the brainwave, but that’s about all.

BBC Interview with Vladimir Nabokov, 1962

 
Ware goes on to claim that ‘Comics’ are ‘not a genre, but a developing language and …the real reward of this bastard form of half art/half writing [is] a purely individual musical vision that comes to life on paper’.  Ware, perhaps more than any other artist/writer explores this new and developing language.

However, there are other artists/writers worthy of note and other books that have been published recently. Adrian Tomine’s drawings for the New Yorker magazine New York Drawings was published last year. It is a beautiful book, bound in the manner of a children’s annual from the 1950’s. It is not a graphic novel. This is a collection of images, but the images are beautiful and articulate.

 
The drawings capture New York street life and the curious paradoxes and moral dilemmas of contemporary life in the city; Tomine is a flaneur for the 21st century. There is a wonderful precision and economy in Tomine’s line drawings and yet the line retains a verve and immediacy. Imagine a mix of Horoshige, Manet and Herge.

 
Another terrific graphic book I came across last year was Lamia Ziade’s Bye Bye Babylon: Beirut 1975 – 1979. It is a graphic memoir of her childhood formative years in Beirut during the civil war that laid waste to the city and the country told in text and images. It tellingly uses the power of images and details to build a broader picture of life in the city, a Bazooka chewing gum, a Kent cigarette packet, a Lebanese ID card. Ziade offers a picture guide to the various factions vying for control of Beirut: Kataab, Amal, Saiqa, Marada et al and an inventory of the artillery in use during the conflict: Kalashnikov AK 47, M16, Dragunov, Tukarev etc. The images are rendered in Ziade’s exquisite watercolours. They have a naïve childlike quality. The brushwork is simple, the colour vivid and the frisson between the naïve simplicity of a child’s perspective and the shocking images of violence and war has an incredible communicative power. It’s a terrific book and it demonstrates perfectly Nabokov’s assertion that we do indeed think in images.

 

Read-Handed, Adrian Tomine, New Yorker, June 2008

Bye Bye Babylon, Lamia Ziade, 2011

Building Stories, by Chris Ware is published by Random House.
Mc Sweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Issue Number 13, guest edited by Chris Ware, is published by Hamish Hamilton
New York Drawings, by Adrian Tomine is published by Faber & Faber
Bye Bye Babylon: Beirut 1975 – 1979, by Liame Ziade is published by Jonathan Cape

Martin Honert, Kinderkreuzzug, Berlin

Martin Honert,
Kinderkreuzzug,
Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhoff
Berlin,
07th October 2012 – 07th April 2013

I have been familiar with Honert’s work in reproduction for a number of years. He features in a number of Taschen’s contemporary art survey books. This was the first time I’d come across his work in a gallery. I found the experience much more affecting than I expected.

Honert’s figurative sculptures are fashioned in epoxy resin and mixed media. They put one in mind of the figurative sculptures found in a museum diorama from yesteryear, a ‘tableaux’ recreating the past, frozen in a moment or indeed the figurative toys you played with as a child in the schoolroom. There is a kitsch element to them. There is a simple innocence too. They send you directly back to your childhood.

The sculptures map out Honert’s own childhood. They record memories. A school class history lesson devoted to the Children’s Crusade, a reading of Erich Kastner’s novel Das Fliegende Klassenzimmer (The Flying Classroom), a dormitory in a boarding school. They depict photographs, drawings, objects, memorabilia and memories.

They could so easily be self indulgent. And yet, Honert’s experience registers with all our own. The periods of wonder and confusion, loss and loneliness, friendship and belonging and the memories chime in the images we hold onto and which here materialise in 3D.

It is like taking a look at Honert’s family photograph album and childhood scrapbook. And yet, viewing someone else’s personal artefacts is seldom this interesting or arresting. They capture a historical moment; a political, social and cultural moment. Good stuff.

Fiona Rae, Leeds City Art Gallery

Fiona Rae at Leeds City Art Gallery.

I saw this show last summer and this post has been gathering dust in a file on my laptop while I’ve had precious little time to attend to the blog.   Call it ‘Slow Blogging’.

I first saw the work of Fiona Rae at Leeds City Art Gallery in The British Art Show of 1990.  The paintings were fresh and exciting, bold and savvy.  She revitalised abstraction.  22 years on and she returns to Leeds with a good sized show of recent-ish work. 

Those paintings of the 1990’s created a taxonomy of abstraction’s most recognisable signature motifs and swatches of paint and presented them catalogued, ordered and available for hire.  As her work matured the motifs broke loose from the cataloguing and played freely in a pick ‘n’ mix parody of abstraction’s greatest conceits. 

The show in Leeds is not a retrospective or survey show but features two large rooms of paintings from 2000 to the present.  The paintings have an instant appeal and easy charm; a pop infused abstraction.  The work features many of the hallmarks of Rae’s recent oeuvre:  graphic digital fonts, Japanese anime inspired motifs. 

Rae throws all these motifs in the air; her paintings always put me in mind of ‘The Band Concert’ the Oscar winning Mickey Mouse short of 1935 in which Mickey is a rather sententious conductor  of a ‘wind’ band attempting to play Rossini’s William Tell Overture at a park bandstand.  Inevitably, the concert is disrupted, initially during the Prelude by Donald Duck, mocking and irrepressible as always, pricking Mickey’s pomposity, then as the band strike up The Storm, by a real tornado sweeping in from across the fields. 

 Mickey and the band are sucked up and held, swirling within the tornado’s centrifuge, and order gives way to chaos, and yet amid the surreal madcap brouhaha that ensues they continue to play and keep time.   There is a unity.  At the close Mickey the conductor even earns Donald’s grudging respect.   It’s this precipitous balance between order and chaos that Rae’s work deals in.   And it’s also apparent that Rae’s brushstrokes resemble less the stock of previous painting’s pictorial gestures than the visual vocabulary of Disney and the slapstick of the cartoon.

Her work in the late 1990’s relied much upon chance and contingency played out on the surface.  Here the paintings in the Leeds show are much more premeditated and planned.  The motifs have become codified like options from a menu/toolbar and its clear Rae uses digital technology to organise and compose.   The paint is applied in flat opaque grounds, pours, drips, swatches of smeared impasto.  The marks dance and jitterbug their way across the surface, there are cloudburst downpours and small explosions and brushstrokes that arc away in the fading parabolas of firework trails.  Line drawings move in and out of recognition, graphic motifs sit awkwardly like uninvited guests at a party.  It’s a thrilling mix.

Rae’s work remains fascinating.  Her work remains in thrall to abstraction and yet retains its implicit critique.  She is one of our finest painters.   In an adjoining room there was a painting by Gillian Ayres, Helios, and it was possible to catch both it and Rae’s work in a single vista through the door.  It made for an interesting comparison.  Both artists seek to wrestle with pigment and energise a surface.  Good stuff.

The Trouble with Harry

The Trouble with Harry, 1955, Alfred Hitchcock, Universal Pictures

Starring, Edmund Gwenn, John Forsythe and Shirley Maclaine.

I couldn’t resist posting a film still/publicity shot for the film.  Seek this film out.  It will change your perspective of Hitchcock and it may of course change your view of painting.  Enjoy.

Painting

Painting, edited by Terry Myers is a new volume of essays and articles devoted to painting theory and practice published under the banner Documents of Contemporary Art by the Whitechapel Gallery.  Myers has chosen essays/texts written in the last thirty years that best capture the range and breadth of the discourse in contemporary painting.

Unsurprisingly, it begins with Douglas Crimp’s ‘End of Painting’ essay from ‘The Museum & Its Ruins’.  It has set the tone for the discourse these past thirty years.  Painting is dead.  Discuss.  The debate is older of course.  Joseph Kosuth delivered a lecture exploring the relationship between painting, art and culture back in 1971, subtitling the presentation, ‘Why you can paint if you want to but it probably won’t matter’.   The only possibility left for painting was, in Kosuth’s words, a ‘post-vanguard’ position creating work for a marketplace.  Painting as an activity that mattered was over.  Painting was part of the problem.

The Painter Philip Taaffe in an interview in the exhibition catalogue accompanying The Birth of the Cool, Kunsthaus  Zurich , 1997 dismissed such talk.  ‘How can we talk of painting as dead, it’s as silly as suggesting poetry is dead’.  For Taaffe painting remained a purposeful practice.

This volume is devoted to painters and critics who still find purpose in the language and practice of painting.  It favours practitioners.  There are numerous interviews, in-conversations and manifesto’s.   Shirley Kaneda’s ‘Painting & It’s Others’ was hugely influential in the early 1990’s.   Marlene Dumas provides a splendid summary of her practice.   There are interviews featuring Bernard Frize, Peter Halley, Mary Heilmann, and Vija Celmins  et al

It might have contained more essays (and more essays in full).  But its purpose is not to provide an overview of the discourse and consequently there is no place for Yves Alain Bois’ ‘The Task of Mourning’ and his rail against 80’s postmodern painting.  Nor is there is room for contributions from the likes of Andrew Benjamin, Jonathan Rajchman or WJT Mitchell amongst many others.

I would have liked to see something by Saul Ostrow.  His articles and calls to arms in the pages of Tema Celeste in the 1990’s felt empowering at the time.  ‘Strategies for a New Abstraction’ offered a discursive position that sought to ‘reassert the viability’ of abstract painting.  Reading it again recently, it feels both slightly dated, and yet curiously, more relevant than ever.

If I have a favourite essay that captures what it means to engage in painting it is Joseph Masheck’s essay on the work of Jonathan Lasker:  Painting in Double Negative; Jonathan Lasker’s Third Stream Abstraction first published in Arts Magazine in 1990.  It marked an epiphany for me when I first read it and it opened up possibilities for conceptualising abstraction that were new to me then.  (The essay has since been reprinted in Dave Ryan’s Talking Painting: Dialogues with 12 Contemporary Painters).   

Another essay that doesn’t feature but might have done is Douglas Fogle’s ‘The Trouble with Painting’ (The introductory essay to the exhibition catalogue Painting at the Edge of the World Walker Art Centre, USA, curated by Fogle).  He offers an insightful overview of the problem painting faces in the 21^st century.   Fogle finds a delightfully mordant metaphor in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 film The Trouble with Harry.  This little known, seldom screened film concerns a corpse, the eponymous Harry, and a small town that can’t quite decide what to do with him.  They bury him, dig him up, inter him again only to be disinterred once more and so on and so on, repeatedly.   Should they bury him and forget about him or accept the truth and the consequences of their predicament and declare his death to the authorities.   This is the trouble with painting; it may be dead, but its body simply won’t go away; you can try and bury it but someone comes along and digs it right up again. 

At a talk to accompany the Ill –Discipline of Painting exhibition curated by Dan Sturgis at Warwick Arts Centre (and Tate St Ives), the American critic Bob Nikas (Abstraction, Phaidon) borrowed Fogles’s conceit before waxing lyrical on painting and its possibilities.  For Nikas painting is not so much dead and buried (or indeed repeatedly disinterred) but it has itself become a ‘ready-made’ and in acknowledging this state of affairs there is then room to manoeuvre and continue.

The Trouble with Harry is available on DVD.  It’s well worth seeking out. It’s quite a curiosity. It’s like nothing else in Hitchcock’s oeuvre.  Imagine if Samuel Beckett had written a farce/sitcom.  Peter Bradshaw wrote a piece about the film to accompany the Hitchcock retrospective at the BFI in London this summer in the Guardian.

See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jul/02/trouble-with-harry-alfred-hitchcock

 

Painting, Edited by Terry Myers, Documents in Contemporary Art, Whitechapel Gallery,

The Trouble with Harry, Alfred Hitchcock, 1955, Universal Pictures DVD 823 620 5 – 11

 

 

 

 

 

Screaming Blue Messiahs

I watched the Punk Britannia season on BBC4 in the early summer.  It was a tad disappointing truth be told.  However I did enjoy the episode devoted to the Pub Rock scene that presaged punk in the UK.  Indeed I would have gladly watched a whole series devoted to Brinsley Schwarz, Kilburn & the High Roads, Dr Feelgood et al.

I think it was while I was watching the series that I was minded to Google search for the Screaming Blue Messiahs.  The Messiahs were a post punk trio who emerged in the mid 1980’s.  I recall coming across them on an Old Grey Whistle Test in 1984.  They were a phenomenon: fast, furious, intense, brutal and raw.   They owed much to Dr Feelgood and British pub rock but the sound was a mix of punk, R’n’B, rockabilly, country, blues and even jazz.   The sound they achieved from bass, guitar and drums was staggering.  They played a live show for BBC radio around this time and I recorded it onto a C60 cassette tape.  I have it still.  Unsurprisingly the quality of the recording is very poor.  I saw them play live just the once, at Leeds University, if memory serves me right; they were breathtaking.

They received radio play from Andy Kershaw back when his show was not to be missed.  Perhaps here lies part of the attraction for me.  Many of my favourite artists and songs were taped from Kershaw’s show and I’ve lost many hours since tracking down vinyl/CD recordings of those home tapes.  Before the internet age it often took years:  in the case of tracking down a copy of Barrence Whitfield & The Savages singing Ben Vaughn’s The Apology Line’ I finally found it in a record store in New York some 10 years later (and I’m still searching for the radio version) and longer still before Kershaw issued his Great Moments in Vinyl History and offered up Carl & Pearl Butler’s ‘Sundown in Nashville’ on CD.

And so I looked up the screaming Blue Messiahs this summer and discovered a copy of that very gig I had recorded onto a C60 28 years ago was now available.  And it still sounds great.   If you need a blast of authentic rock music look no further.

The Screaming Blue Messiahs were guitarist and singer Bill Carter (ex art-college), bass player Chris Thompson and drummer Kenny Harris.

The Screaming Blue Messiahs: Live at the BBC, HUX Records.  HUX 103

There is a YouTube clip of them playing on the TOGWT:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Yc-X2lG_HM

Enjoy.

 

 

 

Damien Hirst at Tate Modern

Damien Hirst at Tate Modern: The blockbuster exhibition of the summer. It’s a curious affair. The show reveals itself as a series of set piece works presented like grandiose window displays. It’s all clean and crisp and clinical, but it’s clinical in the same way a department store’s perfume counter display’s are clinical; the veneer and cheap glamour masks and anaesthetises the real world.

The exhibition appears to be less a curatorial project than an ‘authorised biography’. In Hirst’s remorselessly successful progress there are no ‘blind alleys’ or ‘false dawns’. If the show is to be believed he finds an aesthetic ‘maturity’ during his Foundation year and the rest is history.
No surprise to find Hirst’s recent paintings (exhibited at the Wallace in 2010) not included. Hirst has also exhibited new paintings at White Cube, Bermondsey this year and was subject to a coruscating and damning review by Jonathan Jones in the Guardian.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/may/22/damien-hirst-two-weeks-review

It’s not all bad. Hirst achieved success for good reason. 1000 Years still surprises and demands our attention. But, money transformed his work and practice; where once we could admire his irreverence and chutzpah, now we can only despair at the excess. There is little more to say about ‘For the Love of God’, the diamond encrusted skull (The title stems from his mother’s critique. It’s a shame he didn’t take it on board). There is too much grandiosity, far too many diamonds. Jonathan Jones likens it to the favoured kitsch of a dictator, but perhaps it’s the dictatorship of the market, and we all need to be worried.

The show offers further evidence that the yBa generation’s fusion of Pop and Conceptualism did no more than commodify the latter.

Exit via the gift shop and pick up a £30,000 souvenir and wonder where it all went wrong