I’ve been a serious art gallery visitor over this last few weeks, well it gets me away from eating the remnants of the Quality street tin where the only sweetie’s left are the one no one wants.
I’ve ventured to London spent a day in Tate Britain (and got lost inside one of the exhibits), got annoyed in the Saatchi gallery and got a bit misty eyed in the Serpentine. I got confused (and annoyed, again) at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds and got a bit exasperated in Leeds city Art gallery.
First place on our whistle stop London art tour was the Saatchi gallery; I’ve not been before, didn’t fancy Tate Modern, it was free and lots of the other smaller galleries were closed over the holidays. I liked Richard Wilson’s oily thing but not much else. The title of the show is Newspeak: British Art Now part 2 and it’s like well…who says so? Charlie himself? I only recognised 2 of the artists in there and my God there’s loads of painting; happy slap dash painting much of it. There a few large sculptures placed in exactly the same place in each gallery but the medium’s not represented well. And there’s no video, or sound work, or performance (apart from some scary costumes from a Spartacus Chetwynd performance), or installations or drawings. Very odd that the very traditional mediums with a very samey kind of aesthetic is seen as being representative of British art now. Lots of artworks obviously inspired by other artists too which was annoying. I bet loads of the artists are from London Uni’s as well. How to be an Saatchi friendly artist: move to London, copy some ones else’s work preferably in painting, slap it all about, call the work something pretentious, wait for the man to snap up your work at the graduate show…..
With heavy hearts we headed over to the Serpentine and found to our amazement here was an artist doing something original, subtle, wonderful and moving, and also engaged the audience differently including making us move around the spaces by playing one video/sound piece at a time so we all moved around together. I’m not known for being clever and I’m sure there were lots of things that went over my head (there’s usually is) but it was just a great experience. There was a very weird moment when, without knowing, I’d emulated a very subtle work before I’d seen the actual work and then I saw the work and realised and my head went into a little strange place (it’s the piece on the windows). I highly recommend it.
As for the stuff in Tate Britain, Whiteread’s drawing exhibition was the best for me, interesting though that she had lots of work from the early 1990’s but no recent drawings. It was also quite empty not like the busy Muybridge exhibition, which was next door and on the same ticket which is a shame. There’s loads of photo’s to see by Muybridge including early landscape photos but as I’d seen the recent Yentob TV programme about the exhibition I felt like I’d seen it all.
Turner prize was worth a look; I’d had enough of paintings at the Saatchi gallery so Dexter Dalwood didn’t really get a look in. The Otolith groups’ work was a bit too clever for me although I found the artists description about the world having too many images and that you have to be careful about what you put into it, interesting. I found there work a bit too difficult to really engage with…it was something about Greeks and old TV and owls….!
I was surprised how much I enjoyed Angela de la Cruz’s’ sculptures although a few days later I was looking through a book about Serge Spitzer work’s and in 1972/4 he did some ‘Released Paintings’ and they look very very similar which made me suspicious. I know we could say that Whiteread was influenced by Nauman but she’s gone on to develop the concept (ish anyway); Cruz’s’ paintings/sculptures are exactly the same as Spitzer’s; he’s moved on she’s stayed there.
(Continued in next blog)
