urban rambler

an intermittent art blog

[urban-rambler]

A while back I used to go to Paris quite often. The place where I’d stay was in the 11e arrondissement, a few streets above rue de Charonne. Though the district, even then, was full of bars and res...

An urban ramble through Paris. Or two...

[urban-rambler]

Red and Green

Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Apples, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

18 April 1918

... so to Gordon Sqre; where first the new Delacroix & then the Cézanne were produced. There are 6 apples in the Cézanne picture. What can 6 apples not be? I began to wonder. Theres their relationship to each other, & their colour, & their solidity. To Roger & Nessa, moreover, it was a far more intricate question than this. It was a question of pure paint or mixed; if pure which colour: emerald or veridian; & then the laying on of the paint; & the time he'd spent, & how he'd altered it, & why, & when he'd painted it—

We carried it into the next room, & Lord! how it showed up the pictures there, as if you put a real stone among sham ones; the canvas of the others seemed scraped with a rather thin layer of cheap paint. The apples positively got redder & rounder & greener.

Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. I 1915-19 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979, pp. 140-1)

[urban-rambler]

Stainless

Portrait of Harry Brearley, discoverer of stainless steel, by Faunagraphic, Howard Street, Sheffield, May 1013.

Commissioned to mark the 100th anniversary of Brearley's discovery.

I especially like Brearley's anachronistic badges and the artist's signature bird. There's a great timelapse film of the mural's painting here.

[urban-rambler]

S-H-O-P-P-I-N-G 

Whitechapel Gallery, London, May 2013

If nothing else you have to admire the honesty. Gone is any appeal to philanthropically aiding the gallery by purchasing artists’ editions or to grandiose notions that you too can collect art (if on a modest scale). No, buying a limited edition print at the Whitechapel is now simply “shopping”. You might as well be in IKEA, albeit a very superior branch. Even the assymetric above-the-eyeline hang is IKEA-esque, though the prices most definitely aren’t.

I wonder what - if anything - the artists make of this, the charitable donation of their work so unabashedly commodified? These prints, interesting though they are, are designed more to be sold than to act as any artistic testament. And yet, in their way, they do exactly that: they’re a little piece of an artist or exhibition, a distillation of their essence, an expensive souvenir. Assuming you’ve even seen the show, of course.

Here in the Whitechapel foyer, grouped together, stripped of their associations, promiscuously forming new ones, they’re in the realm of lovely things, of home decor, of will that go with my flowery curtains or my stripey rug.

But possibly that’s a good a reason as any to buy a piece of art…

[urban-rambler]

Umbrella

Adriano Costa, Mendes Wood, Frieze London 2012

[urban-rambler]

Small pleasures

Matt Hoyt, Bureau, Frieze London 2012

Matt Hoyt makes tiny sculptures, exquisitely crafted and carefully displayed.  Some of their forms seem vaguely natural, others unidentified fragments of something man-made. Meticulously arranged in groups, they resemble new archaeological finds whose functions are not yet understood.

You're tempted to pick them up one by one and examine them closely, to turn them over in the palm of your hand. The open art fair display lends itself to this. (In a public gallery, surely, they'd be museumified in vitrines.) Somehow, just - not wanting to disturb their delicate arrangement, maybe - you manage to resist.

[urban-rambler]

Small change

Left: Grizedale Arts/Yangjiang Group, Colosseum of the Consumed

Right: Bedwyr Williams, Curator Cadaver Cake (Both Frieze London 2012)

It's de rigueur for art fairs to display at least a modicum of self-awareness, commissioning projects that aim to challenge, question or (re-)enact their fundamental principle of art in exchange for money.

This year, Grizedale Arts ably provided the organisers' alibi, presenting a series of artist and community-run stalls within a specially created structure by Chinese collective Yangjiang Group. I nearly bought a terracotta Ruskin bust from the Coniston Institute stall, didn't and regretted it.

The centre of the installation formed an ampitheatre for dining opportunities (their words) and food-related performance. The space reminded me of an old-fashioned dissection theatre more than anything, but perhaps my view was coloured by catching part of Bedwyr Williams' Curator Cadaver Cake, in which the artist performs an autopsy on a horribly realistic curator-shaped cake. Alas, I've never had a strong stomach for such things and made an escape before I could witness these disturbing scenes.

[urban-rambler]

Desk job

Mateo López at Casas Riegner, Frieze London 2012

A wooden desk with pull-out trays on either side. In one of the trays, an apparently blank sheet of lined file paper and a magnifying glass, inviting (possibly futile?) closer inspection. In the middle of the desk, five multicoloured pencil rubbers arranged with the casual creativity of the procrastinator waiting for higher inspiration to strike. The trays, impeding access to the desk itself, add to the air of thwarted activity.

Perhaps that's appropriate for a desk likely to be bought and looked at rather than put to practical use. Some of the many desks in López's gallery installations are similarly frustrated. Others become sites for further artistic production, cluttered with tools, objects and creations, resembling office workstations more than conventional notions of artists' studios.

Even López's drawings seem workmanlike, a compliment of course. Carefully mapping creative processes, they document, consider and invent, sometimes extending pre-existing objects and transforming them, sometimes taking on 3-D forms of their own.

[urban-rambler]

Country house

Tris Vonna-Michell at T293, Frieze London 2012

Arranged along a concertina of card, a series of b&w photos of a large estate somewhere - a house, a lake, a monument,  a landscape carved into sweeping grounds - projects a timeless air of moneyed tranquillity. The serenity's disturbed, however, by a commentary on headphones, where a demented voice half-chants half-sings desirable acquisitions for such a country pile: avenues, hahas, the works. With the headphones arranged at either end of the concertina, the likelihood of encountering a stranger grinning as sillily as you half way along is high. You replicate the passing nods and smiles of a country walk in the unlikely setting of a busy art fair.

By chance I recognized the estate in the photos as Gibside, a National Trust property near Gateshead. Built by a family with mining money, Gibside is a testament to the kind of overreaching Vonna-Mitchell's maniacal commentary evokes. Their projects included a 'Column of Liberty' built by estate workers in appalling conditions, a stable block so grand it was mistaken for the house and a house so elaborate it quickly fell into ruin.

Vonna-Michell, it turns out, has been in residence with the National Trust at Gibside and this work is a by-product, or perhaps a foretaste, of his show at Baltic in Gateshead which opens on 20 October. On the basis of this teaser, I'm curious to see it.

[urban-rambler]

Art by design

Assorted gallery stand furniture, Frieze London 2012.

Not strictly art per se but there's definitely an art to it. You could probably write a PhD thesis on the furniture galleries take to art fairs. Someone probably has.

See also Gavin Brown's outlandish example here. Wonder what offer he'd take for the bench?

(You could probably also write your PhD on the gallerinas' shoes.)

[urban-rambler]

Never say never again...

View of Frieze London 2012, with Tanya Bonakdar Gallery's stand (left) and Gavin Brown's Enterprise (with eponymous gallerist, right) and works by Rivane Neuenschwander (left) and Thomas Bayrle (right).

Despite annual resolutions otherwise, I went to Frieze and - shockingly - quite enjoyed it. I wrote a bit about it here and in the next day or two I'll post a few things I liked.

I'll post a few things from the Sunday art fair, too.

[urban-rambler]

Then I realized I could never go back home again…

Sophie Ernst, Home, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 17 March - 1 July 2012.

Berlin-based artist Sophie Ernst’s Home project is a meditation on belonging, loss and memory in the face of political upheaval. Her source material is an ongoing series of interviews with people forced to abandon their homes by world events, including the partition of India and wars in the Middle East. Working from these testimonies, Ernst creates architectural models of the lost houses they describe. Onto these models she projects footage of her interviewees' hands as they talk about their homes, sketch their memories, shuffle salvaged photographs. Each model becomes an luminous island in the darkened space.

Probably a busy bank holiday’s not the time to visit this show. Parabolic speakers above each model isolate the sound but mean it’s inaudible unless you’re directly under them, not easy with lots of people crowding round. The testimonies - so far as I heard them - were heart-rending but I didn’t feel I had the space or time to relate the projections to the models. It’s a shame, because there’s something fascinating about how the intangibility of memory, the incompleteness of photographs, the provisionality of drawing might be solidified into concrete forms, enacting the speakers’ evident desire to revisit, recreate, somehow, a place they’ve forever lost.

[urban-rambler]

Three's a crowd...

William Bell Scott - visibly not a fan - looking askance at Ruskin and their mutual friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti getting rather touchy-feely in a photograph by William Downey.

Though Scott was friends with Rossetti, his reputed unease in Pre-Raphaelite company is also caricatured in this plate from Max Beerbohm's Rossetti and his Circle (1922), Mr. William Bell Scott wondering what it is those fellows seem to see in Gabriel.

[urban-rambler]

Outside in.

Decorative flora and fauna from the Central Hall at Wallington, Northumberland.

Originally a courtyard, the Central Hall at Wallington was remodelled in the 1850s by the Newcastle architect John Dobson  to resemble the cortile of an Italian palazzo. Pauline, Lady Trevelyan, the erudite and artistic mistress of Wallington, was inspired by Ruskin's writings on art and architecture and had travelled widely in Italy. She and Ruskin later became close friends. William Bell Scott, then Master of the Government School of Design in Newcastle, was commissioned to paint decorative scenes from Northumbrian history: from the building of Hadrian's Wall to the triumph of iron and coal. If Bell Scott's draughtmanship is sometimes awry (as in the delightfully boz-eyed portrait handed down through his art school's collection), the dramatic impact of his historical scheme means some of the quieter details are easily overlooked. Perhaps wishing to preserve a sense of outside in - the hall as a courtyard - Scott's design included groups of native plants on the piers encircling the space.

Flower painting being a suitable occupation for a Victorian lady, Pauline took on this part of the decoration, assisted by her charmingly-named friends 'Phluff' and 'Piggy'. As you'd expect from disciples of Ruskin, their work is full of closely-observed - if sometimes heavily drawn - detail: a frog in the bullrushes, a peacock butterfly settling on a flower. Half-hidden in a corner, a delicate, faint, only-just-there depiction of wheat, oats and cornflowers has an altogether different quality. Ruskin painted it himself on a visit 1857.

Bell Scott was unamused. Despite mutual friends like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, he despised Ruskin's theories of drawing and education. Introduced by Pauline to the man himself, Bell Scott liked him no better.

[urban-rambler]

You couldn't make it up.

Kid Acne, Park Hill, Sheffield, photographed May 2012.

[urban-rambler]

Life story.

Jaume Plensa, Wonderland, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, May 2012.

How concrete everything becomes in the world of the spirit when an object, a mere door, can give images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect. If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-open, one would have to tell the story of one's entire life.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (trans. Maria Jolas, Boston: Beacon Press, 1994, p. 224).

[urban-rambler]

Tell me a story...

Heather and Ivan Morison, Anna, The Hepworth Wakefield, 11 February - 10 June 2012.

Full disclosure: I worked with Heather and Ivan, back in the day, when their work existed in the space between the actual, the improbable and the faintly plausible. Thrillingly, you never quite knew were you were with them. Ivan would send out cards detailing events in his allotment - blackspot on the broad beans, a stunning display of sweet peas - and you were, more or less, happy to take his word for it. Except that, somehow, you wanted to see, just to make sure. They used images sparingly, evidentially, betting on the tendentious 'presence' of the occasional photograph. I believed them. Well, perhaps I did.

Anna, the Morisons' installation at the Hepworth Wakefield, evokes presence in a different way. Based on the life and work of cult novelist Anna Kavan, it grasps for archetypes and universals through coded messages.

Walking into the room, you're surrounded by disperate objects laid on wooden blocks: withered roses, an ox's skull, an egg. In the middle, a heap of black bones. Everything's resinous, artificial: mysterious symbols rather than actual things. A balloon glows overhead. One wall's ash-black, another bone-white. At certain times, the wall text says, puppets animate the installation. Puppets freak me out, and I'm glad I don't see them.

Instead, disembodied voices sketch connections between objects, guiding you round the space to piece the story together. In the echoing acoustics it's hard to hear them clearly. I feel I'm lost in some fantasy game. The Legend of Zelda or whatever. If I ask an invigilator, they might well say "Don't ask me, I'm just a kid." Heather and Ivan's work still gives and witholds.

The light in the gallery's beautiful. It's sunny outside.

On the way out I spot the puppets, strung up behind reception, inanimate and sinister.

Wish I still had Ivan's allotment cards.