Posts Tagged ‘Peter Suchin’

Holy Objectionable Objectivists! A Richard Grayson Opening at Alma Enterprises in London!

Sunday, October 2nd, 2011

Friday 30 September was a hot night in London and the meteorologists were already promising us that the late summer heatwave was going to produce record October temperatures. Likewise, after the August lull, the art world was back in full party/opening mode. Since I didn’t want to be running all over the city, I decided to pick one event and to screw all the other invitations I’d received. The Serpentine private view that night was bound to be mobbed, so I quickly dismissed any thoughts of going there. I decided not to go anywhere too ‘institutional’ because I wasn’t in the mood for sweaty crowds. Flicking through the smaller shows it was clear the only game going for a dedicated blogger like me was Richard Grayson at artist run space Alma Enterprises in Southwark. Since Grayson shares a name with Batman’s sidekick Robin, it would give me an opportunity to shamelessly recycle the superhero joke I’d used in my headline when I last wrote about one of his openings in May 2009.

Grayson’s latest exhibition -  The Objectivist Studio – takes as its starting point the long dead right-wing fuck-wit Ayn Rand. Pro-’free’ market and anti-socialist quotes from Rand’s writing have been painted on canvases, paper, walls and even handmade furniture in Alma’s two rooms. The texts have been fragmented into pseudo-Italian futurist cum English vorticist style works. Graphically the pieces resemble classic modernism, but the choice of colours is pure po-mo kitsch. The results are arresting, and if the show had been a riot, a lot of people would have been nicked.  That said, the painted text at first proves hard to read. However, by vocalising the slogans letter by letter, it is possible to arrive at Rand’s intended meaning. Grayson is as ever deadpan about his work, but he looked cheerful and spoke excitedly about the joys of taking up painting once again. I’ve known Grayson for some time,  and I understand his political views as lying somewhat to the left of Rand. However, you wouldn’t be able to guess this from the press release accompanying his show:

Ayn Rand (1905-1982)… was the author of the novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and the founder of ‘Objectivism’ – a philosophy that holds that ‘the purpose of one’s life is the pursuit of one’s own happiness or rational self-interest.’ She expressed these ideas in her fiction and in publications such as The Objectivist Newsletter, The Objectivist and The Ayn Rand Letter, and her books Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology and The Virtue of Selfishness…

After puffing Rand’s book sales, and the widespread and continuing popularity of her leaden prose, the press release continues:

In an interview with the New York Times in 2007 John A. Allison, the chief executive of BB&T, one of the largest banks in the US said: “I know from talking to a lot of Fortune 500 C.E.O.’s that Atlas Shrugged has had a significant effect on their business decisions, even if they don’t agree with all Ayn Rand’s ideas… It offers something other books don’t: the principles that apply to business and life in general. I would call it complete.” he said… Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve who oversaw the program of deregulation and embrace of the ‘free market’ approaches that have shaped contemporary banking and finance was a devotee of Ayn Rand. Greenspan first met her when he was 25 and working as an economic forecaster…

Given all this, I was left wondering if Grayson’s game plan was to see if he could sell his paintings with their ugly Rand slogans to bankers and other finance scum, who are possibly the only people sufficiently greedy and grasping enough to even contemplate hanging such works in their homes. The crowd gathered for Grayson’s opening ddn’t look like they were sympathetic to Rand’s message. Among the artists present were Susan Hiller, Mike Nelson, Suzanne Treister and Mark Wallinger; the gallerists and curators I clocked included Roger Malpert from The Hayward, Alice Motard from Raven Row, and Ingrid Swenson from Peer; and crowding the beer table were theorists such as Peter Suchin and Pauline de Souza. The gallery and courtyard outside was packed with liberal and left art world cognoscenti: there wasn’t an Ayn Rand style right-wing arsehole – or a single banker for that matter – in sight!

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in art criticism, culture gossip & parties, exhibitions | 26 Comments »

Redchurch Street in the fall, or art in the dark…

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!

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Gustav Metzger opening at the Serpentine Gallery

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!

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