18 March 2024

Banksy Tree Finsbury Park

Just 10 minutes from my home, in a particularly undistinguished stretch, is a very ordinary street, Hornsey Road. Rumours of a Banksy appearing there brought us for a walk this morning. 


Britain is full of odd little patches of lawn between blocks of council estates and roads. Hornsey Road is main enough to have constant traffic and buses trundling by. On the other side of the road the housing block is slap bang up to the pavement, too near. I've always felt sorry about that, and that I'd find it difficult to live somewhere where traffic and fumes are only a pavement away.

I was particularly struck by the gift of this artwork to such an area as this, truly a little forgotten corner, as if elevating the beauty and potential of all such hidden little corners.

The tree piece is so many things - pollarded branches frames the enormous splatter of green paint on the wall of the Victorian terrace of shops with flats above - just another familiar architectural feature of London after the bombing in World War II. My own home is like that, the abruptly ended terrace where decades ago a bomb fell, the site long filled in with a '50s council block.

So it's an odd little space. And the cropped tree, just undistinguished city furniture, now elevated to it's true significance, and probably international stardom.

The scale, the ambition of the green splatter is wonderful. It's the most perfect site-specific concept. It makes the tree sculptural, and it gives form and meaning to the paint.

Today the patch of pavement was filled with reporters and photographers. There were locals and visitors. What I particularly loved was that it brought out some local arty people, keen to talk, and delighted that for once something like this is on their doorstep. The neighbours of the tree, the people living in these unlikely flats, are being interviewed. The tree belongs to them, and to everyone.

The tree is commentary, it's an intervention, it's bold, beautiful, stunning, unmistakable. It's a happening.

28 February 2024

Hello Brain: Crick Institute

Not, as I accidentally read, Hello Brian.

Exhibitions are so much about context. I'd not been into the Crick Institute before, and was absolutely awed by the enormous atrium around which floors of glass-walled labs offer glimpses into the activities within. It's like a contemporary cathedral to science.


The exhibition area is the interface, the public engagement space, between all that proper, world-class research going on nearby, and us lot. It's a tricky brief, to offer an exhibition about the brain to all who may drop by - scientists, non scientists, students, families, children. I'd say the exhib largely succeeds - there are touchy feely exhibits and children's activities through to QR code links to further research papers. Each theme about the brain has a little vignette display, and there is bound to be something for everyone to find interesting or intriguing.



The space is further brightened by trails of knitted neurons - a great craft project in itself. More dodgy are some pendulous hanging protuberances which are available to sniff. To me they just smelled like cushions, they're too high for children, and I wouldn't like to go near them once the exhibition has been running for a few months.


And so to the wider context. I do love a sci-art exhibition, and genuine collaborations with scientists and contemporary artists. I also love to see historical scientific exhibits in old and new settings. I've strayed into what is not in this particular exhibition, but the wider context is the nearby Wellcome Trust and indeed the British Library, all a stroll near enough to combine into a marvellous, enlightening and totally free visit, right in the buzzy atmosphere of working scientists and researchers, keen to impart knowledge.

Hello Brain 

The Francis Crick Institute

1 Midland Road, London NW1 1AT 

2nd March to 7th  December 2024

www.crick.ac.uk hello-brain

The Zone of Interest: Jonathan Glazer: film

Every generation has to reinterpret histories and stories. No version is set in stone, and when we look back, it's through the understanding gained since. I'm a generation born well within living memory of the war. I say 'the war' as if that is definitive, and another war to end all wars. World War 2 in the '60s and '70s already seemed like a faded past, a sepia photograph in a multicoloured age. Now time has stretched even further, and that time seems nearer. The Zone of Interest is like one of those colourised postcards or home movies which seem to animate the past and make the distant characters seem real, contemporary and relatable.

As a post-war, just into baby boomer child, my childhood was coloured by my father's war stories, endless war films, and The World at War series, revealing the evidence, footage, testimony of the Holocaust. I remember talking to someone I knew, many of whose family had died or survived the Holocaust, and was amazed that, at the time, I knew much more about it than her, as growing up, her parents had tried to shield her from the truth.

Like all the audience for The Zone of Interest, I bring with me all the documentaries, films, knowledge and conversations I've encountered. Whatever you know about the Holocaust you bring to this film. It's always behind the scenes, over the wall, just out of sight. Its constant presence, its incomprehensible scale, seeps into every frame.

It's today's film. We simply observe. Of course these are actors, but they just get on with it, and there is little to reveal their inner life or thoughts as they carry on with their deliciously normal existence while yards away in Auschwitz, hell is going on. I don't need to see another movie for a while, I just need to think about this one.

The sound and the use of sound in this film is a masterpiece.


The Zone of Interest, Director Jonathan Glazer 2024

16 February 2024

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind: Tate Modern

I was about 10 when I first heard of Yoko Ono's art. A brother-in-law told me about the ladder piece leading to a small 'yes' on the ceiling, with the upmost derision and outrage. Remember that sort of attitude, that anyone could make that crap, and modern art is empty and stupid?

I was delighted to see that piece, Ceiling Painting/Yes Painting (1966), after so many decades, sitting there. For me, a poignant moment, and one of those star-struck experiences when in front of some art known well through reputation or images. There is was, still so full of potential, still poetic and direct.




There is work reminiscent of what you can still find anywhere you wander around an art school or graduation show, but here it is in its purest form, the conceptual ideas from Fluxus that artists are still working through since a century ago. Yoko Ono came from philosophy and her early connections with artists such as Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. We see in this exhibition her development of describing paintings and work in their most deconstructed forms, and then only showing the directions. There are several works created through instructions, including paintings for the viewer to imagine. 


It's fun, ridiculous, poetic, profound and performative to dress up as a shadow. It's also evocative of the shadows of the 20th century, still trailing into today. This is a woman who was a child in Japan during WW2. Again, the work can be read in multiple ways, and as an artist Ono is never heavy handed in proscribing meaning and interpretation.

I was reminded of early Ai Weiwei in Half-a-Room (1967). And other works, other artists. She is the light pencil mark, linking early conceptualism to contemporary practice.

Yoko Ono's work has changed and not changed over the years and decades. It constantly evolves and challenges, and yet stays consistent in its directness. Often artists who make an international career move into creating bigger works with higher production values, and in fact become like factories. That's marvellous, and produces work of great scale. Yoko has managed to forge a significant career where it's just her, her ideas, her practice, perhaps a microphone, a pen and paper, and production values within the grasp of most artists. She collaborates when it's appropriate, but it's concept first.

At any point in life, she has made work with just herself and the most direct and basic of materials - pen to paper, a microphone, her voice, her ideas. The reason the works resonate is because of the simple profundity, the pared down philosophy which is her discipline. It's not conceptual work just in the head - it's often touching, and there is no limit to how deep you can go with a light touch.

Cut Piece (1964) documents an event where the audience were invited to cut away pieces of her clothing. This is a film which is still very upsetting to watch, and in many complex ways. It's so eloquent, speaking of endurance, power, feminism and consent.   


Music of the Mind is quite a large show. There are fun pieces to participate in, small works to contemplate, raw and disturbing works, like mirrors to reflect your own thoughts and conceptions. It's quiet work, remarkably fresh and timeless, and well worth two hours of your time to take it all in.

The exhibition ends with a recording of Yoko and a microphone about 10 years ago when she was 80. If you already know her as a musician, you know how haunting her voice is. She voices the anguish of the soul, a screech and echo which you can only produce through pure authenticity in the moment.

In other news, this is a paid and timed ticket exhibition. I was lucky enough to go for free, but full price at £22 seems rather steep, don't you think?

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind 

Tate Modern Bankside 

London SE1 9TG 

15 February to 1st September 2024

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/yoko-ono

26 January 2018

Andreas Gursky at the reopened Hayward Gallery

The Hayward Gallery has reopened after a two year upgrade with a retrospective of master photographer Andreas Gursky.

Let me be a little honest here - who has not at times seen the odd photograph in an exhibition and wondered why it merits its place on the wall? This resistance is not limited to photography, but at times it is hard to discern the elevation of immediacy to well-considered art. Photography of course asks this fundamental question: Is it a great photograph, or is it a photograph of something great? My answer to this equation is for a photograph to meet both criteria, and even better is the great photograph which transforms its subject.


Andreas Gursky Bahrain I, 2005 C-print 302.2 x 219.6 x 6.2cm 
 © Andreas Gursky/DACS, 2017 Courtesy: Sprüth Magers

Gursky is an artist who truly earns their place on any wall. He is a photographer who has a vision, and has meticulously and consistently produced fascinating work for decades. He has a painterly soul, and uses photography to create a view of the world.

Scale is definitely a word to describe Gursky's work. Many pieces are almost unfeasibly large photographs, showing what could be described as a multiplied, almost kaleidoscopic view. He is well-known for works such as stock exchanges and city views. It's enlightening to get the chance to see more of his works, including earlier and smaller pieces. It must be said that almost all of the works at the Hayward arrest the viewer with the same layers of potential as some epic painting. You can really spend a lot of time with each, enjoying and looking in so many different ways - for those who like to critique, there are many technical aspects to consider, and for those who like to analyse, there are multiple ways to interpret the views and the message. You can stand and stare.

I remember first seeing Gursky's images some years ago, and being somewhat alarmed by the dystopian view, as if showing humans swarming like insects around some futile activity. Over time, we become more accustomed to the intensity and multiplicity of the view, and begin to see it differently. Yes, the commentary still remains, referencing globalisation, population, over production, mechanisation, as well as questions about purpose and existence itself. Gursky shows an image as a cluster of ideas, and a well-composed intersection of thought.


Andreas Gursky 99 Cent II, 1999/2009 
C-print, diasec 207 x 325 x 6.2cm © Andreas Gursky/DACS, 2017 Courtesy: Sprüth Magers

Gursky uses photographic, and increasingly, digital processes to make works. Much depends upon gaining the position for the overview. I've always resisted reading too much about his processes - what bits are real, what manipulated, as I much prefer not really knowing that, imagining which parts are actual and which digitised. I prefer the magic rather than pulling away the curtain.

Hayward Gallery

The Hayward has not tampered with its concrete Brutalist interior apart from paving the floor and stairs with something presumably designed to withstand the next few decades. Those tiles would certainly not be my choice - they seem too warmly-coloured, too small a grid, that they may compete with some work, than the plain interior pavement that was there before. Still there is the disconcerting sense inside like wandering around a covered exterior, a little unsure of where to go. It's fine to get a bit lost, and find the upstairs galleries which has magnificently opened out with really excellent natural light coming through from the new roof pyramids.

There has been some remodelling, with a new cafe and shop - best for concrete and industrial related gifts. The project space is now downstairs, and showing new Arts Council collection acquisitions. It seems almost incredible that no one at Hayward seems to have noticed that their reopening is focused on a male artist, and that three of the four artists in the project space are also male. There are also women artists, you know. It's not a new thing. The only reason they tend not to be as well-known as men, is that they do not get as promoted as male artists. This has skewed our culture for centuries, with women artists, famous in their time, overlooked by subsequent generations. Legacy starts now, Hayward. Give it some thought.

Andreas Gursky retrospective
Hayward Gallery
Southbank Centre
London SE1 8XX

25th January - 22nd April 2018


@haywardgallery

26th January 2018

30 May 2017

Hynek Martinec: The Birth of the Tragedies: Parafin

I saw this exhibition and started writing this review a few months ago, but it got curtailed as I had one of those all-encompassing deadlines this summer. However, I'd wished I'd had the time to go back and spend more time with these paintings. I have found myself thinking about them and telling a few people about them in conversations. One painting in particular has stayed with me. I still think this is the painting of our time.

Just off Oxford Street, in a fairly small commercial gallery, is hanging what must be the most extraordinary, most exceptional and significant painting made recently.

The Boat on the Moon has a large amount of black, but it is not just plain black - it is a shadowy dark brown-black which keeps the viewer peering in - it is an expert black. The figure is landscape of moon, body, candle-lit and yet digitised. A pre-natal scan is as disembodied as the dysmorphic blob of flesh beneath. It is revealed somehow as though an early brass telescope, and digital photorealism, all at the same time. I'm trying to use words to describe or evoke what is a delightfully complex and paradoxical experience. As a viewer, I love somewhat being left in mystery, and looking at a thing that will forever change and reveal more layers of meaning and associations.

The Boat on the Moon Hynek Martinec 2017


Hynek Martinec paints with the breathtaking skill of the Old Masters, but he paints now, and of now. We've seem painters who blend old and new, but few who paint as if he were a time traveller from a much more Baroque time, exploring our new world.

Much could be appreciated and written about the other paintings in this exhibition - extraordinary, assured, profound. This is painting for the long term.


The Boat on the Moon Hynek Martinec 2017 installation Parafin London


Portrait of Cornelis van de Geest Hynek Martinec 2016


Hynek Martinec: The Birth of the Tragedies


5th October 2017

1 March 2017

Revolution: Russian Art 1917–1932

The histories and stories told in this exhibition are too vast to reflect in something like a review - how to outline how a country of hundreds of millions of people can undergo a complete change of regime, a change of collective psyche. A total cultural revolution touches the life of every citizen, and the power of image was a major tool in promoting ideology in every aspect of life.

The RA has collected work from individual, collective and famed artists, and artefacts from unknown workers. There is a progression through time, with no starting echo of what had just come before. From a century on, this is what ideology looks like when the state is attempting not just mind control but aesthetic control also. The glorification of the noble worker, the forward-looking mechanisation and communist ideals of course masked the terrible human cost which artists portrayed at their peril.

What a sense of the energy of the beginnings of the start of the twentieth century and really the start of the modern world. There are too many highlights to note, but a couple of days on from visiting, the works I am still thinking about include Promenade by Mark Chagall. I thought this painting would be much smaller, and somehow much less...Soviet. Seeing it deep within context makes the flight of fantasy seem even more magical at a time when such individualist expression was seen as decadent. The sense of folk art it evokes is also reminiscent of the work artists were at the time also referring to a supposed golden and pure peasant past.

Promenade, Mark Chagall, 1917-18, 

Tram conductor by Alexander Samokhvalov, another glorification of the nobility of the worker, is stunning. The figure is oddly illuminated in a neon blue cast by the new electrification and modernity. Sturdy and imposing, she carries out her duties like a queen of this new world.


Tram conductor, Alexander Samokhvalov, 1928

Personally I tend not to partake of audio guides at galleries, as I prefer listening to my own thoughts and having unmediated discoveries, and so I don't know if the RA provides apt music in their guides. Photographs of composers put in mind that the perfect accompaniment to the exhibition would be some of the relentless symphonies of Shostakovitch and the magical inventiveness of Prokofiev. Occasionally in museums, perhaps amongst the harpsichords, a little appropriate music is quietly played in the background, adding atmosphere and context. In this vast exhibition, covering such traumatic years in Russian history, image was the medium used to reiterate message, through paintings, photography, film and artefacts, and yet music is also an intrinsic part of such culture. Once noted, its absence seems almost like an omission.

A peddled flying machine is such an idealistic enterprise. It rotates in its room at the RA, beautifully lit to cast shadows. Thoughts of insects, bird skeletons, Michelangelo, eccentric Victorians. A chance remark by another visitor who told me he had just visited a futuristic exhibition in Tokyo with similar structures, evoking alien creatures. In an exhibition so bound with a sense of place and time, Letatlin speaks of the shared push to the future and the space race which was to come later, once so many millions of people had paid so very dearly in transforming the soul of a country.

Image result for royal academy russian revolution flying machine
Letatlin, Vladimir Tatlin, 1930-32

Revolution: Russian Art 1917–1932
Royal Academy
London
11th February - 17th April 2017 

@RoyalAcademy

https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/revolution-russian-art

27th February 2017

17 February 2017

teamLab: Transcending Boundaries

My sister and I have a private phrase between us - "Fuck off and write your own novel!" How we laugh. It's such a great antidote to critique or indeed criticism to creative efforts by those who have not really put themselves through all those processes of actually producing something and putting it out there.

Why does there always have to be criticism? Why cannot people for once just accept that something is as it is, sit back and enjoy it without making unwelcome comments and suggestions?

Clearly there are actually reasons.

However, once in a while, there comes along a thing that is so disarming, that all those thoughts and ideas, all the alternatives that come to mind about different approaches, or what I might have done, and so on, just melt away, and you can sit back and enjoy an experience for what it is.

It's probably too late to book Transcending Boundaries by teamLab (although people were successfully turning up when we were there for returns and slipped in). Yes, I had criticisms, questions, alternative views. You get twenty minutes inside, and feel rushed when alerted that time is up, and that it would be frankly lovely to stay for a while more.


Lights, colours, flowers, butterflies, all gently moving around you, responding to your presence, seeming to land upon you.

Comments rise, but I let them go and let it be. Yes, with that opportunity and those resources, I may well have done it differently, but this time I'm happy to enjoy it and go off to write my own novel.





teamLab
Transcending Boundaries
Pace Gallery
London
25th January - 11th March 2017

@teamLab_net



17th February 2017

16 June 2016

Tate Modern Switch House - A New Context for Art Discourse

Initially we are all interested in this new space for art, rather than the art itself. Naturally there is some very distracting art in the Switch House, but more of that another time, except to say that there is a wonderful amount of Louise Bourgeois, which is obviously a good thing. The Turbine Hall itself is still a thrill. If you are a grown-up visiting Tate Modern and go in a side door rather than down the slope into the vast entrance, then you have grown up the wrong way, as the people have got so used to flying that they would rather waste their window seat reading the paper than experiencing the awe of the world spreading out below them, or passing through grey clouds to the sparkly azure side. Well, perhaps the Turbine Hall is not quite such an exhilarating phenomenon, but it is still a vast post-industrial wonder. Although not quite vast enough, as the new extension, the Switch House, indicates.



The new building has a lot of needs to fulfil, to accommodate visitors to what is the most visited art museum anywhere, to make spaces to show work, and to provide a contemporary setting for art which can also evolve as culture moves on in time. It also has to be something of an iconic structure, in sympathy with its surroundings and the older power station. It's a wonderful and welcome addition to what is becoming a very cluttered part of London - since TM came along, other blocks have sprung up next to it, offices and flats, oppressively crammed together, and often with odd angles jutting out.




Architects Herzog & de Meuron have created a building which is exactly right for Britain and for London - it speaks of so many layers of history in its bricks, but is totally now in its twisty shape - a computer age monolith. Inside it's all about the view, at each level, and especially the top 10th floor where there is a balcony to walk completely around - this must be the best complete and free view of London - and the views are new, that slight different angle which allows for different aspects. Through the nearby blocks, the City looks a bit manic, those odd-shaped office blocks almost spilling out into the Thames. There are higher views, but this is a complete London from it's ancient epicentre. I think I could live on this floor, endlessly understanding the changing skies and weather.




Views are not add-ons, the long banks of windows so integral to the structure both inside and out. And the interior is not exactly white-cube neutral, but a warm concrete with wooden floors that still smell of shavings. Visible metals echo the industrial heritage of the Turbine Hall side, and generous floors of gallery spaces look moveable to adapt for differently shaped exhibitions. Art-wise, Tate haven't fully moved in to this space as yet, but can surely now accommodate the streams of visitors that come.




There are plenty of issues to discuss about Tate and the curatorial choices made, the choices of artists, the factory-warehouse industrial ethos, the way they describe and interpret, and so on. I think, however, that they missed a trick in the Switch House - the layout continues the endless conveyor belt approach of the Turbine Hall, an exhausting trawl through what is often an educational experience rather than one which allows the art to create its own atmosphere. Tate are very aware that they are a public space, but to be a centre of discourse, where artists can arrange meetings, where tutors and mentors can conduct classes, where artists and others come to work, write and think, there ought to be many more places with tables and chairs available. Not just cafes, the odd bench, or the members room, but places where people can stay for hours, being creative, being productive, without being shuffled on, endlessly directed and curated.



Tate Modern
Bankside
London 

http://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern/new-tate-modern/building

13 June 2016

30-Second Architecture Edited by Edward Denison - book



It really does take just about thirty seconds to read through each section summary of fifty key principles of architecture. Of course, you can spend longer in examining the illustrations or following further references. The success of the presentation lies in the effective level of condensing expertise without infantilising the reader.

A useful reference guide even for those for some knowledge of architecture: for those wishing to learn, points are clearly made, examples are aptly chosen, and there are clear directions for further in-depth study.

Profiles of significant architects and buildings add context and the guide works like a readable, illustrated glossary. Definitions of terms reveal such mysteries as the flying buttress – an arch which carries the thrust from a wall onto an external support, and an elevation, a drawing which depicts accurate dimensions of a façade. Insights into the way architects think include concepts such as the solid-void, the relationship between built and open space. This stylish book makes for enjoyable and educational browsing.


30-Second Architecture
Edited by Edward Denison
Ivy Press
ISBN 9781782400400


Review: The Good Book Guide, Eleanor MacFarlane 2014

21st Century Design By Marcus Fairs - book




Here at the beginning of the 21st century, design and ideas can be disseminated in moments, entering the global consciousness. Yet despite such a broad platform, it is still individual creativity and bright sparks which drive designers. The scope of these contemporary designs is vast, ranging from architecture to lighting to domestic objects to logos to packaging and more. 

New materials and processes broaden the field, making sophisticated use of recycled materials, such as skips remade as gardens, or odd glowing balloon lights made from animal off-cuts. Rapid prototyping also makes all sorts of intricate constructions now producible in complex skeletal furniture.

Design remakes and rethinks the ordinary in surprising ways. This is an exciting read, packed with brilliant memorable ideas. Some may already be familiar in corporate use, others speak of a bright future when designs become borrowed and spread out. Some products seem faddy and unlikely to catch on – a table that converts into a skirt, anyone? In cutting edge buildings and interiors we may experience use-friendly technology incorporated within the best of modern aesthetics. A catalogue of what is going on now which may design our lives tomorrow.


21st Century Design
By Marcus Fairs
Carlton Books
ISBN 9781847327499


Review: The Good Book Guide, Eleanor MacFarlane 2014

7 February 2016

Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse: Royal Academy

It's really all about the Monet, but that's not a criticism. This exhibition focusses upon a particular time, especially in France, when the domestic garden emerged along with the middle classes - in other words, instead of a garden being a functional kitchen plot or a grand extension to palatial estate, people had the time to nurture a garden for pleasure and leisure. In the mid 19th century technology and travel also saw crazes for collecting plants, ferns and water lilies, at astronomical prices.


Gustav Klimt, Flower Garden, 1907

Photography was also entering into the visual consciousness, and so painters had new areas to explore - light and colour, freeing themselves from representation. Many artists put as much creative energy into gardening as painting, finding it a reflexive process, and more, we can see an evolution towards abstraction in this collection from 1840 to 1920.

But it's beauty really which these paintings are about, beauty in flowers, in sunshine and shade. This exhibition bombards with beauty and suggests to the other senses, fragrance, breezes, birdsong and other delights. Actually it's partly an exhibition that makes one wonder what art is for, or what the experience of art can be. Do artists intrigue and seduce through beauty, or go the other way. Why shouldn't art be gorgeous?

Perhaps here we see the garden become the new landscape, planted, managed and nurtured by artists, and then painted, a whole created world within a frame.


Wassily Kandinsky, Murnau the Garden II, 1910

There is a narrative in this exhibition which represents a clear chapter in the history of art. It begins and ends with Monet, although there are plenty of other star paintings and new discoveries along the way. Such an exhibition is bound to be the requisite blockbuster - 35,000 tickets have already be sold which means that views of the paintings are often obscured by other viewers. Most of these Impressionist-type paintings require some distance for the best effect and focus, and sadly, especially in the case of the wonderful, epic, awesome, ambitious Monet triptych which is the highlight, it is just not possible to stand back far enough from these works to see them properly.



Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse
Royal Academy
London
30th January - 20th April 2016 

@RoyalAcademy

https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/painting-modern-garden-monet-matisse

7th February 2016

15 December 2015

Europe 1600 - 1815 V&A

Sometimes when writing a review, I find I just have to give in and say Wow. Lucky enough to be able to go through these newly opened galleries at the press view, both visitors and museum staff were wowed by the substantial treasures in display.

How often we are told that certain oversized and overblown works were commissioned in order to impress - giant mirrors or cabinets, large and impractical decorative objects. Well, they still impress with awesome skill in ambitious scale.



Normally I write a review very soon after seeing exhibitions, but this time I waited to see if other thoughts occurred. It's like reviewing a whole fabulous new museum of a time when much was hand made, and yet the beginnings of mass production and exotic imports saw craft skills in full bloom, seeking to impress with flamboyant solidity.

Critique of the work is not really possible, but critique of the V&A's museum practice, upon reflection, comes out as top notch. The most sophisticated research results in a seamless journey through time. Information is there to check, but doesn't get in the way or impose upon the work. Lighting adds atmosphere and drama, and seats allow contemplation. There is so much work here, a really generous store of treasures that is nonetheless not crammed in.




The wonder is where all this stuff been until now. We know that national museums have most of their objects in archive or storage. Some items are rotated and displayed eventually, or in special displays, while other never make it into public view, perhaps because their time never quite comes, or because they may be too fragile. This new permanent section of the V&A raises the tantalising prospect that there are still plenty of high quality pieces lurking in the shadows, waiting for the limelight of public viewing.

1600 - 1815 is a large scope of time and history. The more you bring to this exhibition, knowledge of music, social history, European history, diseases, culture, literature,,,the richer it will be. These are the props and aesthetics of life before modern times, and sparks the imagination and sensibilities of what life would be like in that other place - the exuberant grandeur of the past.



Europe 1600-1815
V&A
London

@V_and_A


15th December 2015

19 October 2015

Ai Weiwei: Royal Academy

Ai Weiwei is perfectly transparent about his processes and the layers of meanings intended in his works, and yet they still manage to be mysterious and to take you to different parts of mind and feeling.

There is a gut reaction to his works: the scale, the materiality, the meticulous detailing, the hundreds and thousands of invisible hours inherent in his multitude pieces. There is beauty and grace, in the Chinese traditions he reconfigures. It's all there in front of you, making you feel and think.



Multitude is so often the vehicle of Ai Weiwei's art, in actual reality in works, and yet the most obvious metaphor. Straight is a powerful, sobering and heart rending memorial to the thousands of people, mainly children, who died in the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, not documented by the authorities, but by a project of the artist. Yet another multitude of people we never knew or heard of in a place we will never visit or know. This piece, in the transubstantiation of metal rods retrieved and straightened out from the debris of the disaster, speaks so clearly of irretrievable loss, that there can never be too many people on this planet, and that each individual is a precious life and soul.






There is so often deep sadness and anger in the works, and they are the more powerful that those drives are restrained and matched by tireless restraint. They don't shout and splash themselves around; they are built up, piece by piece, action by action, into beautiful aesthetic form, containing all those paradoxical emotions. Even in ignorance of the political context of the works, they are powerful and moving, and speak across cultures.

The crabs/Harmony piece, a corner pile of crab creatures, is almost unspeakably sad.

Sadness and yet strength. Making something beautiful out of an ugly and Kafkaesque situation. It's a triumph in a way, but at such a terrible cost.

Works manage to balance exactly the political intent with other concerns about humanity and history and time. The wooden bed-frame compressed into the rubble of AWW's demolished studio suggests layers of suffocating centuries.


I'm not going to describe the pieces - I actually went to a talk just before the exhibition which did just that - thus somewhat denying me the delicious element of surprise. However, they were better than described. It's hard to explain the visceral feeling some art conveys, and the psychological and emotional field which is created by seeing them. Ai Weiwei's works are not just important because they are political or successful, but because they are beautiful, imaginative, enjoyable and memorable. Go if you can.




Ai Weiwei
Royal Academy
London
19th September to 13th December 2015

@RoyalAcademy

15 October 2015

Carsten Höller: Decision

Why am I not having fun in this place designated for fun?

Carsten Höller is an artist whose contribution to culture is a playful approach within art institutions – they are delighted to have his works – it gives them edge and makes them interactive and groovy: technicians get to flex their expertise in realising the actualities of construction and installation. That only leaves the audience.

I walk through a metal corridor construction, unnerved by the darkness and echoes, the entrance to a Haunted House at a funfair. Actually I didn’t notice there was a choice of doorways, but it all ends up at the same place anyway.

Research into Höller’s background reveals that he was a research entomologist, specialising in insects' olfactory communication strategies, work in which he has a doctorate and continued working in into his 30’s – he is now early 50’s. This nugget of insight is key to understanding Höller’s approach – we are all as insects implicated in his experiments: setting up and testing interaction rather than any interest in emotional or intellectual responses. Höller says that he does not visit his exhibitions while they are open to the public, and so one wonders what the artist/scientist gleans from how people actually react.

Somebody else rotates the giant mushroom mobile. Well, that’s it, like Alice in Wonderland without the fiction.

What is interaction in a gallery – perhaps a truly engaging painting that cannot be touched may in effect be more interactive than any device available for handling because of the communication between artist and viewer through the medium of the artwork. Decision relies on a block naivety in the audience who are expected to have their minds blown and their perceptions revolutionised, as if they have never encountered ideas before. Where is the intervention of the artist – where is the interpretation, the vision, or the reflection where works deepen the more they are considered?

Beds that may or may not move a bit. A really exciting concept to read about.

Hayward’s curator Ralph Rugoff says of Höller’s slides that because of their context within a gallery, the viewer is offered more than one experience that if they were in a fairground. This disingenuous viewpoint disregards the problematic complexity of FUN, as if there were no childhood trauma or personal history trailed in with the audience. Not everyone has uncomplicated memories of fun and games, or has their entire paradigm of the world inverted through seeing an upside down reflection.

A wall of changing lights with some codification behind it. What impressive production values!

The exhibition relies upon a crowd response, assuming that everyone has the same inner realities, perhaps like the collective insect mind.

The upside down view helmets with mirrors. They make me smile a bit, as if Carsten Höller has invented upside down!

Decision is an experience of varying quality which allows the viewer to somewhat play around with items which tinker at the edges of ideas of perception. It’s the sort of thing science museums do extremely well, and a kind of exhibition parents love to bring their children along to before they turn into teenagers.

Is this the same exhibition? Still not sure about those two videos about music in Kinshasa. They are just footage. No mediation from the artist.

Resistance to Höller’s enforced fun can grow to indifference then cynicism. Höller keeps on insisting that by altering our perception it will help us to see the real world. The viewer may well be amused, but there just isn’t the depth, abstraction or profundity here to examine why one might have a half-hearted response to overblown claims. His strongest works are diluted in the collective.

What now? Would I like to weigh myself in public, slip into some sort of harness and be swung from a crane for the view, which I can see anyway? And in this skirt?

Decision is weak as science and rather empty as art. Perhaps it’s a candidate for a new definition as gallery installation. All that interesting material and fascinating ideas are now ripe for metamorphoses into art.

A pile of pills. I just can’t pretend to think it’s exciting and dangerous to try one. I am not seduced.

Carsten Höller: Decision
Hayward Gallery
Southbank Centre London
10th June to 6th September 2015

@haywardgallery



I had written this review for the Frieze Writer's prize - obviously I didn't win that! I found the style I was attempting a bit of a struggle and not quite me - Frieze seems to like a walk through the entire exhibition in print, whereas I prefer to pick out the gist, and not survey or describe particular works.

15th October 2015

7 September 2015

Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World

It's a rare treat to see so many Hepworth sculptures all in one place. She is acknowledged as a major figure and influence of 20th century art, and yet some issues remain as to how Tate Britain has chosen to curate and present this retrospective.

The exhibition starts with a strange oxymoron of a statement, about it being a usual view that when Barbara Hepworth and her contemporary Henry Moore started working in the 1920's, it was assumed that artists didn't carve by hand. Really? So soon after the Arts and Crafts movement? Although Futurism and Modernism were embracing mechanism at this time, and although it was more usual to make models, there are plenty of examples of hand carving - not everything was cast. It's such a distraction to be confronted with my own wrong initial double negative assumption.

Naturally it makes sense to show an artist's work in terms of their contemporaries and collaborators, and especially in Hepworth's case the work of her husband the artist Ben Nicholson, with whom she exhibited. Usually in such a major retrospective it would be expected to focus purely on the artist, to have a chance to closely examine a wide range of their work. I don't remember such exhibitions of, for example, Henry Moore's work starting with a mixed room including Hepworth and Jacob Epstein's work by way of explanation or contextual orientation. A retrospective is a chance to see the artist in their own contextual world, somewhat abstracted from other art events apart from those they were directly involved with such as in print or other collaborations.

Barbara Hepworth was a woman artist in what was still frankly largely a man's world. She was an artist of great strength and vision who embraced the challenges of life, of motherhood, who worked through war and marriages and built up a considerable reputation in her lifetime.

She didn't need her artistry to be defined by the work of others then, and she doesn't need it now, and considering her drive and resilience, it is particularly insensitive to contextualise her with work from Moore and Epstein, as comparison to these men plagued and frustrated her professional life.

And so to the work.

Sculpture for a Modern World is well titled, as we see the formation of new ideas, new revelations about what lies within, new geometries and new meanings emerge through Hepworth. What a feel for materials she had, and what exquisite technique. A few of the larger wooden pieces are showing signs of breaking the bounds of her will, time and natural processes distorting the shapes.

Wood has a mind and a will of it's own, with undercurrents of grain and knots and direction. It's a marvel to see Hepworth's balance of mind and matter, as she so often reveals the best of her materials while creating spacey forms.

It's the internal carving and the inserted rods which are still thrilling to contemporary eyes - they still look like work for the future, but perhaps for a future which has already vanished, or which we have since taken a side step away from.

The inner colour is often a blue - a sort of aqua, minty, municipal swimming pool, 1950's plastic earring blue, probably with a touch of green in it. It's space blue. It's a blue which is hard to replicate now, but I wish Tate Britain had been able to paint the walls that blue as a magical and sympathetic setting for these precious forms.


Barbara Hepworth Pelagos 1946

A highlight of the exhibition is a film of Hepworth working in her garden at St Ives. She herself was something of a sculpture.

Barbara Hepworth

Oh yes, you want to touch them, to embrace them really. Barbara Hepworth was an artist with rare sensitivity and strength, and ability to create her true vision. At once delicate, imaginative and intriguing, these shaped blocks point to a future still to be achieved.

Barbara Hepworth Corinthos 1954-5 


Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World
Tate Britain
London
24th June to 25th October 2015

@Tate