Archive for the ‘exhibitions’ Category
Monday, November 9th, 2009
La Subversion Des Images tells us a lot more about the state of official culture in Europe than it does about surrealism. This is an expansive show of surrealist film and photography, but it is also incredibly lazily curated. The good news first, there are examples of Man Ray’s hardcore pornography that I’d not seen before, and I assume are rarely shown. His undated stag film Two Women, featuring both oral sex and strap-on penetration is very curious; and for me it made my trip to surrealist show worthwhile.
Overall I’ve never been impressed by surrealist film. Bunuel is obviously the exception who proves the rule that there weren’t any good surrealist film-makers. Hans Richter’s abstract films hold some interest for me, but it is the tedious Ghosts Before Breakfast that is featured yet again in the current Pompidou show. Richter’s film is shown on one three screens lined-up beside each other, with the result that the shorts on the other two distract the viewer’s attention from whichever movie they try to watch. With the exception of the four works shown on rotation in the temporary cinema at the end of the exhibition – Bunuel’s first two films are included, of course – the movies in this show are abysmally displayed.
The surrealist photography fares little better than the films in terms of inadequate display and it is equally variable in quality. There are many now iconic pieces from Man Ray, Hans Bellmer and Claude Cahun, but these are shown alongside mediocre works by minor surrealist photographers and pictures taken by the movement’s major literary figures who happened to own a camera (but weren’t necessarily over-endowed with a sense of visual flair).
Those unfamiliar with the surrealist movement may be left with the impression that the exhibition is comprehensive; it isn’t, as I’ve said, it is badly curated. Ida Kar may have played only a small role in the surrealist movement but she was a major – albeit for now largely forgotten – twentieth century photographer. There is nothing by Kar in this exhibition, not even her extraordinary portraits of Andre Breton (although pictures of him that are considerably less striking are included).
For me the omission of Ida Kar is indicative of what is wrong not only with this show, but curation in general. Given that Kar was an amazingly talented photographer, I can only conclude she is missing because the curators are unaware of her. This would not be surprising since on the whole contemporary curators know next to nothing about visual culture. They tend to avoid serious reading (and rarely do archival research), preferring instead to ‘learn’ about art more or less solely by going to each other’s exhibitions. This leads to a situation in which the same names are featured in show after show.
Claude Cahun was ‘rediscovered’ not so much by the art world as by those engaged in gender studies. Kar needs ‘rediscovering’ too, and perhaps by making the poverty of contemporary curatorship more shameful by publicising it via the omission of Kar from shows such as this, I can assist in the process of her rehabilitation.
I also really hated the way La Subversion Des Images was organised by theme. I’d have much rather had rooms dedicated to individual artists, with a mixed room or two for the amateur photographers in the surrealist movement and its minor figures. Nonetheless, despite being at best half-cocked, there remains just enough in this exhibition to make it worth visiting. It didn’t thrill me but I wouldn’t have wanted to have missed it.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: André Breton, Centre Pompidou, Claude Cahun, Ghosts Before Breakfast, Hans Bellmer, Hans Richter, Ida Kar, La Subversion Des Images, Luis Bunuel, Man Ray, Paris, surrealism, Two Women
Posted in exhibitions | 22 Comments »
Thursday, November 5th, 2009
Omer Fast’s film installation Nostalgia is a good example of how material is formatted to fit the institution of art. This is not a criticism of Fast or his work; everyone has to survive in a capitalist society, and in doing so we all reproduce our own alienation. It should go without saying that the creation of a society where all distinctions between high and low culture are abolished in favour of a truly human world is a pressing task – but in the meantime, where I’m forced to choose between art and popular culture, I’d opt for the latter most of the time. That said, it is hard to see how Fast and his fabulous films could operate outside the art arena in this society. To make my own experience of Fast’s current London show a little more like mass culture and less like elite art, I walked through the gallery to watch the main feature Nostalgia III before taking in parts I and II. If Nostalgia were a DVD, part III would be the feature and I and II the extras.
Nostalgia III is a 30 minute sci-fi short. The set dressing indicates it takes place in an alternate version of the 1970s or possibly 1980s. Europe is impoverished and many of its inhabitants are fleeing to north Africa, where as illegal migrants they face a militarised border, brutality and the ongoing threat of deportation. As ever, Fast is poetic in his approach, deploying a collection of interlinked stories that undermine each other and thus raise questions about the ways in which truth is constructed. Nonetheless, given that Fast has made this piece for a gallery audience, his deliberately crude reversal of European bigotries is an astute move: white middle-class institutional racism is so deeply embedded in high culture that the kind of subtleties which would be understood by a broader audience will inevitably be lost on most of those who will see this piece in its current setting.
Nostalgia I and II feature individual soundtrack interviews with an Africa migrant now living in Europe. I shows a European male in combat gear making a snare as described on the soundtrack. II shows an interview taking place on split-screens. Both reveal a part of the research process from which Fast created Nostalgia III, and are very much supplementary to the longer piece. It takes 45 minutes to view all three works, and I spent just over a hour in the gallery; during this time I was one of six people actually looking at the work. However, while I was watching Nostalgia III there was a constant stream of people walking through the gallery from the offices and outside area that are accessed from back of the building – far more than were actually looking at the work. This may have been exacerbated by the fact that the gallery is currently being extended (the work of specialist art builders John Perkins Projects), but it nonetheless illustrates why art venue are often not the best places in which to display film. There was also a problem with sound bleed between the galleries (despite a lot of very visible and thus presumably cheaply installed soundproofing); and a further irritation with the screen of Nostalgia I being insufficiently blacked out. Despite these problems, do try to catch Fast’s Nostalgia if you can, it is on until 6 December 2009.
For stuff about Fast’s contribution to the 2008 Barbican exhibition On War, click here.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Africa, Barbican, Europe, John Perkins, John Perkins Projects, London, migration, Nostalgia, Omer Fast, On War, south London, South London Gallery
Posted in exhibitions, film | 14 Comments »
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
With plenty of galleries and art fairs closed for good by the vagaries of the current recession, some might see it as a surprise that Soraya Rodriguez’s Zoo has survived at all. No longer billed as an art fair, Zoo 2009 (16-19 October 2009) was restructured to include more curated projects and a section given over to multiples. Becoming more ‘educational’ is, of course, one way of securing sponsorship when the commercial sector has become both less willing and less able to support shebangs of this type. The location for Zoo had also changed, although this had nothing to do with the recession; the event is now taking place in a dirty former industrial space at the southern end of Shoredtich High Street, on the edge of both the city and east London.
Of the curated exhibitions, the outstanding show was organised by The Lux in collaboration with students from Goldsmiths College. The main work on show in Film As A Subversive Art was changed each day, with residues of previous displays left in the space. I went on Monday 19 October when the featured work was Francisco Valdes Reagan (2003); this takes a possession scene from Hollywood horror blockbuster The Exorcist (1973) and replaces the filmed content with a series of animated drawings (the sound appeared to be identical to the original). On another level of the same building, Nicholas Burne and Anthea Hamilton’s Calypsos used a series of four TV screens to good effect in the space allotted to it, but wasn’t to my taste; this show was curated by Studio Voltaire.
Rob Tufnell’s attempt at an alternative take on psychedelia, Altogether Elsewhere, didn’t really work in its dirty environment and disappointed me in the choice of works – despite Jennifer West’s film projections being fun. As for The Filmic Conventions ‘curated’ by FormContent, this was an unmitigated disaster. There were two projections but most of the works were displayed on single monitors with a single set of headphones. This resulted in it being difficult to take in the works because there were too many people visiting the space to be comfortably accommodated with such a restrictive number of headphones; having two headphones connected to each monitor and more seating would have done much to resolve the problem. The films themselves were uniformly dire. The only merit I could see in the FormContent fiasco was that it prepared me for the room of editions being sold by 176, Camden Arts Centre, Chisenhale Gallery, Dundee Contemporary Arts, ICA, Other Criteria, Paul Stolper, Peer, Serpentine Gallery, Studio Voltaire, The Multiple Store, White Cube and Whitechapel Gallery. To describe these displays as ‘depressing’ would be an exercise in understatement.
The prize exhibitions by Scoli Acosta and Clunie Reid were better than much of what was on the trade stands; the latter were almost as flatulent as the room of editions and multiples. Zoo is often seen as an opportunity for younger gallerists to flex their muscles and strut their sense of visual flair, but this year it was an old hand who had the only decent stand. Documentary material based around veteran live artist Stuart Brisley formed the core of England & Co’s display; but there was also work by the younger artists Chris Kenny, Georgia Russell, Harald Smykla and Jason Wallis–Johnson. Jane England looked to me to be far and away the oldest person manning a stand, but her eye is clearly far sharper than those of the younger gallerists.
“Former’ art fairs like Zoo aren’t the best way of taking in visual culture: there is too much too see, and since 99% of art is shit, the sheer volume of bad work makes it hard to appreciate the little that is good. Still, judged on Zoo, if the world economy has double-pneumonia, then the art world has the black death! All of which goes to prove once again that the current fiscal crisis is a groove sensation!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 176, Altogether Elsewhere, Anthea Hamilton, Calypsos, Camden Arts Centre, Chisenhale Gallery, Chris Kenny, City of London, Clunie Reid, Dundee Contemporary Arts, east London, England & Co, Film As A Subversive Art, FormContent, Francisco Valdes, Georgia Russell, Goldsmiths College, Harald Smykla, ICA, Jason Wallis--Johnson, Jennifer West, London, Nicholas Burne, Other Criteria, Paul Stolper, Peer, Reagan, Rob Tufnell, Scoli Acosta, Serpentine Gallery, Shoredtich High Street, Soraya Rodriguez, Stuart Brisley, Studio Voltaire, The Exorcist, The Filmic Conventions, The Lux, The Multiple Store, White Cube, Whitechapel Gallery, Zoo, Zoo 2009
Posted in exhibitions | 18 Comments »
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
The Cupar Arts Festival went head to head with The Frieze Art Fair once again this year, and for me there was no contest in terms of prioritising one over the other. I headed out of London and away from Frieze to Cupar in Fife (Scotland). The main attraction was The Attic Archive on at The Y (Marathon House, Bonnygate, Cupar, Fife KY15 4LG). The Attic is a private space on Dundee’s Union Street that has been an international centre for marginal art collaborations since the early 1970s; the Cupar Arts Festival exhibition provides a rare chance for the general public to get a sense of what’s been going on there all that time.
On display is a slew of works by malcontents ranging from international mail artists like David Zack and Carlo Pittore, via oppositional Scottish painters/sculptors such as Karen Strang and Andy Stenhouse to erm, people from London like Stefan Szczelkun and me! A lot of the material is in the medium of print and short run cassettes/CDrs (indeed some are one-offs), but there are also remnants from performances (including a hat set on fire by legendary American Neoist John Berndt, who was wearing it at the time it burnt, and clothes worn by Pete Horobin during his 10 year Data Project).
Causing intense excitement are a series of washing powder boxes (Lux, Ariel and Drive) that had housed the soap Pete Horobin used to clean his clothes during the 1980s. They bring back memories of old commodity packaging, and are a hot topic of conversation among visitors. The soap boxes are displayed on the top of various sets of industrial shelving, while beneath are hundreds of publications that can be picked up and read; and there is an armchair sprayed gold and painted with the name ‘Monty Cantsin’ in which visitors can settle and peruse some very obscure magazines and catalogues.
Peter Haining is on hand to talk about all this material, and will play any of the hand assembled CDrs or cassettes on display, if requested to do so. He also made me a pot of tea when I demanded one about two minutes after walking in – and it came in a Lotte Glob teapot. This environment and the work it houses clearly emerge from fluxus and conceptual art, and might more correctly by labelled as neoist, but some visitors will also see in it a reflection of post-slacker aesthetics. That said, the room was freshly painted, carpeted and well heated (all in all very comfortable)… even if the packaging used to transport everything is on display too! Make sure you don’t miss this show (on until 25 October, closed Mondays) because it is a rare opportunity to dig into the international anti-art underground of the 1970s, 1980s and beyond; and it will take you in even deeper than the recent and current London retrospectives of Ray Johnson and Gustav Metzger!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Andy Stenhouse, Ariel, Attic Archive, Bonnygate, Carlo Pittore, conceptual art, Cupar, Cupar Arts Festival, Data Attic, Data Project, David Zack, Drive, Dundee, Fife, Fluxus, Frieze Art Fair, Gustav Metzger, John Berndt, Karen Strang, London, Lotte Glob, Lux, Marathon House, Monty Cantsin, neoism, neoist, Pete Horobin, Peter Haining, post-slacker aesthetics, Ray Johnson, Scotland, Stefan Szczelkun, Stewart Home, underground, Union Street
Posted in exhibitions, neoism | 16 Comments »
Sunday, October 4th, 2009
Catching the opening performance of Shaun Caton’s ‘…netherwhat…’ at the Maurice Einhardt Neu Gallery (1 October) I could have imagined I’d walked into a time warp had I not been in Redchurch Street… I hadn’t seen Caton do a performance since the 1980s, and I understand he’s done nothing in London for the past 15 years, but he seemed to be picking up from where I’d left off with him. Every Caton performance may be unique but he also runs through endless variations on the same theme in his shamanistic rituals; and here he was on the 2 October 2009 with a noised up soundtrack splattering red paint over toy babies he’d strung up from the ceiling. It looked similar, not identical, to the last live action I’d seen him perform more than 20 years before. I braved the gallery, although most of the audience watched through a window from the street outside. Sample conversation: “Shall we go in?” ‘No, it goes on for three hours, we can come back later…” I certainly didn’t hear ‘culture’ talk in Redchurch Street in the 1980s, back then it was full of light industry, there weren’t galleries and art groupies strung out along its narrow pavements as is the case today.
Directly opposite the Shaun Caton shindig, Artwars Project Space was hosting the private view for Martin Sexton’s Spectres Of Marx, another time warp; or rather, a case of the changing times making what the art whores of the yBa and its heirs considered to be deeply unfashionable, appear as timely as it ever was. Sexton’s exhibition is inspired by the last words of Wilhelm Reich: “Comrades! Even now I am not ashamed of my communist past.” So Marx, Reich, sexual repression, orgone energy, the credit crunch, deconstruction and Jacques Derrida are what Sexton was confronting us with. I walked through the door and the first thing I saw was art critic Peter Suchin, who’d also been very much in evidence at the Gustav Metzger opening a couple of days earlier, standing beneath a red bust of Marx. Sexton himself was wandering around playing the role of genial host, and Douglas Park was manning the bar.
Down the road at the A Foundation Galleries on Arnold Circus, Arts Catalyst was hosting the private view for Interspecies: Artists Collaborating With Animals. This art and science hook-up also very much went against the grain of yBa orthodoxy – although personally I was much more excited by the anti-gravity experiments Arts Catalyst was involved in, than in failing to see Kira O’Reilly’s durational live action Falling Asleep With A Pig. In the area set aside for them, I could see no sign of either the artist or the animal that were supposedly sharing a confined space for a couple of days. I also expected to see Mark Waugh of the A Foundation and Rob La Frenais of Arts Catalyst, but in fact saw no one I knew. I did take in some stuffed pigeons courtesey of Beatriz da Costa on the A Foundation roof before moving on to 22 Calvert. This is the UK‘s first not-for-profit foundation dedicated to promoting art from Russia and Eastern Europe. It was set up earlier this year by Nonna Materkova, and I went to the opening of its third show, Re-imagining October, curated by Mark Nash and Isaac Julien.
The focus of Re-imagining October seemed to be contemporary Russian film addressing the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 (and yes, this was a revolution, but a bourgeois and not a proletarian uprising). The work on display looked interesting, but it was impossible to judge properly because the place was so crowded. Instead of worrying about the art (as I’ve indicated, mainly moving image), I chatted to the likes of Ilze Black, Zinovy Zinik, Ilona Cheshire and Mark Rappolt. Alongside the likes of 176 and Raven Row, 22 Calvert itself seems to represent part of a trend for well endowed private foundations to take over at least some of the functions of public arts organisations in London. It is a world away from the tumbledown galleries around the corner in Redchurch Street. If you haven’t already been to 22 Calvert, both the show and the space look like they’re well worth checking out.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: '...netherwhat...', 176, 1980s, 2009, 22 Calvert, A Foundation, Arts Catalyst, Artwars Project Space, Beatriz da Costa, communism, credit crunch, Douglas Park, east London, Falling Asleep With A Pig, Gustav Metzger, Ilze Black, Interspecies: Artists Collaborating With Animals., Isaac Julien, Jackques Derrida, Karl Marx, Kira O'Reilly, London, Mark Nash, Mark Rappolt, Mark Waugh, Martin Sexton, Maurice Einhardt Neu Gallery, Nonna Materkova, orgone energy, Peter Suchin, Raven Row, Re-imagining October, Redchurch Street, Rob La Frenais, Shaun Caton, Spectres Of Marx, Wilhelm Reich, yBa, Zinovy Zinik
Posted in culture gossip & parties, exhibitions | 16 Comments »
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
The Gustav Metzger retrospective Decades 1959-2009 is the most extensive single exhibition of auto-destructive art ever to be held in London. Not just the work, but also the head-on collision between the Serpentine as a chic white cube space and Metzger’s decidedly funky left-field practice is in itself interesting. The good news first, and that is Metzger’s Liquid Crystal Environment has never looked better! With the walls inside the North Gallery painted black, and very effective blackout curtains, the colours are really luminous. This piece was also a highlight of the otherwise lousy Tate Triennial earlier this year, but at the Serpentine it looks even better than it did there, or at the Summer Of Love exhibition at Tate Liverpool in 2005. There are scatter cushions on the floor, so you can just lie back and trip out to these light projections. I could easily spend several days in this installation groovin’ on the ambient vibe.
The rest of the exhibition highlights Metzger’s varied practices of the past 50 years, with many pieces realised in new ways. For instance, his series of Historic Photographs are now easier to view than in earlier incarnations, although in most cases there are still obstructions to prevent these works being gazed at from a comfortable and familiar distance. Moving on, Metzger’s trade mark displays of old newspapers and waste materials are too cleanly and neatly laid out. Although this highlights Metzger’s grunge aesthetic, I still found it surprising that a series of car scrappage adverts torn from recent newspapers should be evenly spaced along the walls as if they were somehow equivalent to a series of Jeff Koons pictures. Personally I’d have preferred less space around these and all the other works, anything but the white walls on which they were displayed (light grey would have seemed more appropriate), and considerably dimmer lighting.
Much of Metzger’s oeuvre deals with the ecological destruction wreaked by capitalism, and while hanging it as if it is decorative does provide a neat counterfoil to its ugly but urgent message, inevitably such a mode of display runs the danger of blunting its impact. That said, it still provided a fantastic contrast to Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa’s expensive and wasteful folly in the Serpentine grounds; a temporary pavilion made from brightly lit aluminium, designed to look impressive in photographs but which is extremely unpleasant and impractical for human use.
Metzger has always excelled at drawing out the contradictions of the art world and exposing the many ways in which the majority of those active within it uncritically serve capitalism. Unsurprisingly, there were fewer rich socialites at the Metzger opening than I’ve come to expect at Serpentine private views. Instead the event was littered with those dedicated to marginal and oppositional aesthetic practices, ranging from Sarah Andrews to Alastair Brotchie, Bronac Ferran to Martin Sexton. Rut Blees Luxemburg to Peter Suchin, Kristine Stiles to Bruce Gilchrist, Sarah Sutch to Matt Hale, Jo Joelson to Clive Phillpot, and Ilze Black to Tony White. There were plenty of Serpentine regulars in evidence too – Nicola Lees, Sally Tallant, Rose Dempsey, Sophie O’Brien – but I could see no sign of co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist, although his current artist-in-residence Hilary Koob-Sassen, and unofficial writer-in-residence Tom McCarthy, were both present and correct.
Despite my surprise at the tasteful installation of work that really isn’t pretty and shouldn’t be treated as such, this is still a great and important show, so make sure you check it out. And look closely at the labelling, which I’m told Metzger went through word by word, since you won’t see it bettered in any other London museum or gallery. Gustav Metzger Decades is on at The Serpentine (Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA) until 8 November 2008.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Alastair Brotchie, Auto-Destructive Art, Bronac Ferran, Bruce Gilchrist, Clive Phillpot, Decades 1959-2009, Gustav Metzger, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Hilary Koob-Sassen, Historic Photographs, Ilze Black, Jeff Koons, Jo Joelson, Kazuyo Sejima, Kensington Gardens, Kristine Stiles, Liquid Crystal Environment, London, Martin Sexton. Rut Blees Luxemburg, Nicola Lees, Peter Suchin, Rose Dempsey, Ryue Nishizawa, Sally Tallant, Sarah Andrews, Serpentine Gallery, Sophie O'Brien, Summer of Love, Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool, Tate Triennial, Tom McCarthy, Tony White
Posted in exhibitions | 15 Comments »
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
The Pompidou Centre in Paris has rearranged its collection to highlight women artists. Looking through the material now on display I was left with the impression that the French Musee National D’Art Moderne has an acquisition problem. Given the material the curators had to work with, they probably did a reasonable job of selecting it; it’s just that looking at pieces ranging from relatively recent photographs by Rut Blees Luxemburg to much older work by Niki de Saint Phalle, the acquisitions seem to have been poorly made in terms of the choice of works by those artists who merit being in this collection. There are notable exceptions to this such as the utterly talentless one trick pony Rachel Whiteread, whose ‘sculptures’ of domestic spaces are far too literal to be of any interest me. But the curators have cunningly managed to make Whiteread’s very large work disappear. They’ve performed this conjuring trick on Whiteread’s ‘negative space’ by placing her primo example of schlock at the entrance to the show, and all the visitors I observed ignored it; those I spoke to about it said they’d thought it was as an architectural feature rather than a work of art. It thus qualified as the most ignored work on display.
The highlights of elles@centrepompidou include Touch Cinema by Valie Export (a film from the sixties showing a woman allowing men to come up from a crowd to grope her tits), various films by Carolee Schneemann and photographs by Hannah Wilke. Overall this ‘permanent display’ creates the impression that it was in performance works that women artists have been able to create the greatest impact over the past 50 years. There are some good artists on display, and a lot of bad ones too, making it very much like any large show, since 99 percent of all art is utter shit.
Dominique Gonzalez-Forester has made better work than the films on display here, and she delivers a rather pathetic slap to the public’s face when she prefaces them by saying this was the best work she was able to make over a two years period because she’d been so engrossed in reading books she hadn’t been able to concentrate on her own work. Patti Smith is represented by a diagram, when a piece of her music would have seemed more fitting: there are also sections given over to female furniture designers, which is a nice idea although the displays aren’t too hot. All in all the Pompidou deserve ten out of ten for their focus on women artists, and about one out of ten for execution; the work is badly installed and very poorly organised, rather than being displayed by theme, it would have worked much better being organised by artist.
To conclude, looking at the work of Marina Abramovich once again provided a stark reminder of just how bad her live art is, since her ungainly movements mean that she is never convincing as a performer, while her narcissism renders her twitchy locomotion much uglier than it would appear in someone less self-absorbed and self-obsessed. Her work is truly awful, and thus for me her name offers a counter-term to The Stendhal Syndrome. The Abramovich Syndrome is thus the feeling of being underwhelmed and bored shitless by seeing a huge amount of art; and that’s just the way I felt after viewing elles@centrepompidou. My feelings on this score were underlined when I went upstairs to look at the mainly dead white males from the French National Collection. As Duchamp observed, works of art die and museums are their graveyards – and my visit to the Pompidou Centre left me with a bad case of The Abramovich Syndrome.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Carolee Schneemann, Centre Pompidou, Dominique Gonzalez-Forester, elles@centrepompidou, Hannah Wilke, Marcel Duchamp, Marina Abramovich, Musee National D'Art ModerneMusee National D'Art Moderne, Niki de Saint Phalle, Paris, Patti Smith, Pompidou Centre, Rachel Whiteread, Rut Blees Luxemburg, The Abramovich Syndrome, The Stendhal Syndrome, Touch Cinema, Valie Export
Posted in art criticism, exhibitions | 23 Comments »
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
Yoko Ono keeps popping into my life. Last week I was reading and commenting about her on the Old Rope blog. The piece in question particularly grooved me because it featured an embed of Ono’s Bottoms (AKA Four) from YouTube. Here’s a short extract from that blog followed by some of my comments:
“…Ono has taken more than her fair share of shit over the years. Richard Di Lello’s The Longest Cocktail Party, whilst being an illuminating and entertaining insight into the world of Apple, also offers glimpses of the derision leveled at Ono - even from within the Beatles inner circle.
“Though far from perfect, it must be remembered that Ono’s art was challenging and (at times) part of a wider fluxus tradition. As a woman, as an artist and being, gasp, Japanese, Yoko took flak on all fronts…
“Mister Trippy says: I always thought Cut was the best thing Yoko did, the piece where she sits still and the audience cut off her clothes with a pair of scissors. Very powerful. But her work is variable and nothing else is as truly brilliant as Cut. I remember taking in her Whitney Museum show in New York in 1989 and she’d redone these fragile 1960s pieces in bronze, mind-bogglingly terrible. But great to see the Bottoms film again… I love that one too! Didn’t realise it was on YouTube… BTW Yoko is great fun too in her only ‘roughie’ softcore porn film Satan’s Bed from before she met Lennon.
“oldrope says: Agreed, Trip. Cut certainly makes the cut. I believe it was repeated in some form many years later, but that seems a trifle unnecessary in my book.
“I was also a little disappointed with Skyladders inside St Lukes in Liverpool (aka The Bombed Out Church – you actually have to sign a form on the way in saying they are not responsible if it falls in on your head) last year. Though I quite liked the ‘instruments’ for people to play with.
“At the risk of sounding cliched, I groove on her earlier work most.
“I’ve not seen Satan’s Bed, but it sounds like a good Saturday night in.
“Mister Trippy says: I agree with you about the ladders, about the only things I liked in that Liverpool Biennial were the moving trees, but that was coz I could watch local kids being naughty by repeatedly pressing the emergency stop button once they worked out where it was. And it was conveniently close to A Foundation where I was doing a performance. Still Yoko’s work in that Biennial was no worse than say Tracey Emin.
“If you like trashy films then Satan’s Bed is a real treat – out on DVD in the UK so not at all hard to find…. BTW: Did you know that both Yoko and me appear on the recent Intermedium Records double CD compilation Tribute To Gustav Metzger. But that’s the closest I’ve ever got to her….”
The Tribute To Gustav Metzger is also an example of an item missing from my Discogs discography (and indeed Yoko’s too), as discussed on my last blog. The Metzger tribute also features Melissa Logan from Chicks On Speed and was originally done for broadcast on Bayerischer Rundfunk (Bayern 2) in Germany on 12 December 2008. It was curated by Justin Hoffmann. So that’s two things from last year in which I shared a billing with Yoko (the Metzger tribute and the Liverpool Biennial). And right now both Yoko and me are two of more than 100 ‘artists’ from around the world featured in International Fluxhibition #3: Thinking Inside The Box at The Gallery in the E.H. Hereford University Center at the University of Texas at Arlington (on until 31 July). The show is made up mainly of contemporary takes on Flux boxes, and my contribution was accepted despite not meeting the brief. It is Score for Fluxhibition #3 – 2009:
“Don’t send a work to the Fluxshow.
Tell the curator it got lost in the post.
Do it again for the next one.
No art is the best art!”
Returning to Yoko, regardless of whether you do or don’t like the stuff she does now, what you can’t knock is her sincerity. She clearly likes to make and show art, and is as happy doing so in a small gallery as a prestigious Biennial. And while Yoko’s musical output over the years has been variable too, I even find it hard to knock her on this score when you consider that she and Lennon had the good taste to employ Elephant’s Memory as their backing band shortly after arriving in New York City. Let’s do the Power Boogie….
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: A Foundation, Apple Records, Bayerischer Rundfunk, Bayern 2, Bottoms, Chicks On Speed, Cut, E.H. Hereford University Center, Elephant's Memory, Fluxus, Four, Gustav Metzger, International Fluxhibition #3, John Lennon, Justin Hoffmann, Liverpool, Liverpool Biennial, Melissa Logan, New York, Old Rope, Power Boogie, Richard Di Lello, Satan's Bed, Score for Fluxhibition #3, Skyladders, St Lukes, Stewart Home, The Gallery, The Longest Cocktail Party, Tracey Emin, Tribute To Gustav Metzger, University of Texas at Arlington, Whitney Museum, Yoko Ono, YouTube
Posted in counterculture, exhibitions, music | 25 Comments »
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009
On Sunday afternoon I went to the opening of a show entitled Vicky Gold Brand New Art Superstar at Guy Hilton Gallery in Fournier Street, London E1. It was actually a group show but Vicky Gould got the star billing under her new moniker of Gold, and was the main selling point. Allegedly Gould’s work was produced for her final year fine art BA show this summer, but was censored by Goldsmiths College because it focused on her sexual obsession with a lecturer called Paul Davis.
When I arrived for the opening the exhibition was still being installed. I was introduced to Vicky who was sitting on the floor making chocolate icing, presumably so that she could smear it over her body during her advertised performance. I was told she was going to do a pole dance too. On a back wall there was a large purple heart with Vicky’s name in gold. There were a variety of slogans sprayed across the walls, and some ‘pictures’ carrying statements such as ‘Die Paul Die’, a dancing pole and various other objects. The vibe was gaudy and faux-naive. On a television monitor there was a short film called Me and Teacher, which was also uploaded on YouTube when I wrote this post and to which I’d provided a link. When I checked again after uploading this blog, the film was no longer available; according to YouTube this was ‘due to a copyright claim by Emma Davidson’.
I hung around for an hour and a half at the Guy Hilton opening but nothing was happening. Eventually, Vicky Gould and the other artists whose opening it was wandered off, so I left too. I didn’t really care whether Gould’s story of being obsessed with her tutor was genuine or a hoax. A similar debate still surrounds the Chris Kraus book I Love Dick which came out in 1998. In the Kraus tome, the first person narrator Chris Kraus obsessively pursues cultural studies icon Dick Hebdige. For Kraus, sexual obsession is a vehicle for exploring her own emotions. It doesn’t matter whether the Kraus text is fictional or autobiographical, what counts is that she is able to deconstruct the obsessions she delineates. Gould doesn’t do this, and given that she’s fifteen or twenty years younger than Kraus was when I Love Dick was written, it isn’t really surprising that her ‘art’ looks shallow and unformed in relation to this earlier work.
If Paul Davis really was Gould’s tutor then he should have pointed her in the direction of I Love Dick and advised her not to attempt work of this type until she was much older. As a consequence, what Gould does very successfully is make Goldsmiths College look utterly bankrupt as an educational institution. According to its website, Goldsmiths employs a tutor called Paul Davis, but it isn’t clear to me whether the person appearing in Gould’s videos and other pieces as this individual is a stand-in or the man himself. That doesn’t matter, the representation is of a ‘geek’ who lacks the social and intellectual skills needed by anybody who is going to teach. If Gould is fictionalising her experiences and Paul Davis is not really anything like the person he is presented as being here, then this work is a cutting-edge example of institutional critique. Otherwise not only Gould, but also Davis and the college that employ him cut very sorry figures, although placed in a gallery context this sad mess still functions as inadvertent ‘institutional critique’.
These days most people see artists like Andrea Fraser – the public face of institutional critique – as terminally unhip. If Davis or whoever taught Gould at Goldsmiths pointed her in the direction of the institutional critique movement, then they cunningly facilitated this student’s lampooning of a college that taught her art not wisely but too well. On the other hand, it looks equally possible that Gould is the rather sad result of very poor teaching. So is Goldsmiths a world-class training ground for double-bluffing and theoretically astute art hipsters? Or is it simply a money-grabbing business that is utterly shameless about the substandard eduction it offers it students? Whichever answer you pick, I’m sure you’ll choose it in a knowing post-modern sort of way!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Andrea Fraser, Chris Kraus, Dick Hebdige, east London, Emma Davidson, Fournier Street, Goldsmiths College, Guy Hilton Gallery, I Love Dick, institutional critique, London, Me and Teacher, New Cross, Paul Davis, south London, Vicky Gold, Vicky Gold Brand New Art Superstar, Vicky Gould, YouTube
Posted in culture gossip & parties, exhibitions | 34 Comments »
Saturday, July 4th, 2009
Yesterday I went to see the Futurism exhibition at Tate Modern. The first thing in this display is a large blown-up poster of F. T. Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism, which included the following: “We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, we will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice… we establish Futurism, because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians. For too long Italy has been a dealer in second-hand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards.”
Tate Modern interpretative material reiterated the importance of these lines: “With the publication of the Founding and Manifesto of Futurism in February 1909, Filippo Tomasso Marinetti laid out the blueprint for an avant-garde movement. He was deliberately provocative in his wholesale rejection of the past: ‘Turn aside the canals to flood the museums!… Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!’ Beginning with Italy, which he saw as artistically complacent, he proposed a total modernisation of contemporary culture in line with the advances in technology, philosophy and anarchist politics.”
But instead of destroying the academies, Marinetti and his chums became active participants in Italian fascism. Not only was Marinetti a rich scumbag, he was a seriously sad skunk to boot. Despite the far-Right trajectory of the movement Marinetti instigated, the hack work it churned out is now the stuff of which museum exhibitions are made; tatters from a rotting corpse that are displayed at Tate Modern like so many ‘holy’ relics to be venerated by credulous fools. Today Marinetti’s Futurist manifestos are about as relevant as the British monarchy; they come across as long-winded and terminally outdated in a world dominated by the strap-line, advertising jingles, twitter and spam email. Futurist visual ‘art’ by the likes of Boccioni, Carrà and Balla, is even worse; it is an academic exercise in ocular boredom that totally lacks the dynamism which is supposed to be its raison d’être.
After viewing the spaces dedicated to Italian Futurism, it was a minor relief to hit a room given over to the work of Picasso and Braque. Their Cubist slop looked somewhat more advanced than the sickly romantic street scenes of the Futurists; nonetheless Picasso isn’t ripe he’s rotten! He’s followed by the three Duchamp brothers – Moe, Curly and Larry. Oops, Moe and company are The Three Stooges! What I meant to say was Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Marcel Duchamp. Then you get Orphism, Russian Cubo-Futurism, nearly a whole room given over to publications (wow, is that dull!), Vorticism, and finally Futurism and war. Much of the material is familiar and all of it is completely superannuated. I found some of this stuff interesting when I was 12 years-old (35 years ago), but in the intervening period it has decomposed badly. Enough of that old Futurist rubbish, we want something new! How about post-aestheticism and a world-wide proletarian revolution with unlicensed pleasure as its only aim?
Wandering through this inert Futurist display, I remembered that Marcel Duchamp once remarked works of art die, and that museums and art history are their graveyards. The pieces by Duchamp and his brothers looked as dead as those of everyone else, and no more likely to get up and start moonwalking than Michael Jackson. The week before I went to the Futurism show, Chicks On Speed kindly sent me their new album Cutting The Edge, and although I’d only managed to listen to the CD a couple of times, some of the tunes started floating through my head while I was at Tate Modern. Art Rules, previously out as a single, whirled around my brain with the greatest aggressive persistence: “Brush it up, art star recipe, it’s two cups of gelatin, mix it well, stir in a concept, technology as well, whip in some finance and a pinch of cocaine, add a harmless scandal, a media plan all cooked up by your right hand man… Always modern, whose on top the artists or the dealers? Where are all the women, underneath the men! Invest in a collection or buy credibility…” This says it all really. You don’t need to bother with old farts like Marinetti when you’ve got Chicks On Speed. Art Rules has to be heard to be believed, it’s a super-retro lo-fi hi-energy dance tune that rocks like it’s 2099!
So rather than wasting any more time on the Futurism show, I raced off to groove to some Chicks On Speed records. And incidentally, more than 25 years ago I was already parodying the tedium of Italian Futurism by writing things like: “We will sing the love of hot running water and colour television…” For more of that see my Neoist Manifestos.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Art Rules, Carlo Carrà, Chicks On Speed, Cutting The Edge, Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, Futurism, Futurist Manifestos, Georges Braque, Giacomo Balla, Italy, Jacques Villon, London, Marcel Duchamp, Michael Jackson, moonwalking, neoism, Neoist Manifestos, Orphism, Pablo Picasso, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Russian Cubo-Futurism, Tate Modern, Three Stooges, Twitter, Umberto Boccioni, Vorticism
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