a-n Writer Development Programme 2019-20

The third 600-word review stemming from our workshop at Baltic is by Rachel Marsh, the only writer to choose the group show ‘Animalesque – Art Across Species and Beings’.

Review #3: Animalesque at Baltic

Finding the line between human and animal is usually the role of evolutionary anthropologists. But the artists in the group exhibition Animalesque – Art Across Species and Beings at Baltic, Gateshead, first explore that line, then dance all over it using myth, imagination and science. 

The 17 participating artists come from 11 different countries, with work ranging from the early 1970s to the present day. The work, curated by Filipa Ramos, is similarly diverse, including video, sculpture, performance, drawing, vinyl lettering, collage, embroidery and audio. All explore the relationships between humans and other beings in the natural world, with the threat of the ecological crisis lurking just beneath the surface.

The exhibition opens in a surprisingly light-hearted manner. The text of Annika Larsson’s Becoming Animal (2012) playfully invites me to reimagine myself as a kangaroo: “The idea is absurd yet here you are standing in what may or may not be the outback wearing nothing but fur!” Opposite, two walls of brightly-painted boards reproducing the lexigram-based language Yerkish catch the eye, but at first seem incomprehensible – until I spot the key. Five boards of Amalia Pica’s Yerkish (2018) have been pulled out to spell ‘Hello | Visitors | Look | Pictures | Thank you…’ giving the unsettling feeling that I have been greeted by fellow (non-human) primates.

Ahead is the contented-looking form of Allora & Calzadilla’s Hope Hippo (2005), a life-size clay sculpture that provides a platform for a performer to sit and read a newspaper, blowing a whistle when they find an alarming news story. In 2020 it must be an almost continuous blast. Is anyone listening? Discarded newspaper pages drift in mounds against the hippo’s flanks. 

At the end of the gallery, 100 beautiful, nature-inspired forms of birds, roots and strange organisms float across the huge expanse of the back wall in Mary Beth Edelson’s Untitled (1972–2011).  Close-up, these intricate collage-drawings reveal the faces of iconic women – Yoko Ono, Grace Jones, Sigourney Weaver, Mary – entwined and subsumed into nature, becoming pods, root nodes, nuclei, or tentacles. They are both grotesque and compelling; man’s subjection of nature is also a feminist issue.     

There’s an entanglement of a different kind in Ho Tzu Nyen’s 2 or 3 Tigers (2015), a double video installation enclosed in its own dream-room. Inside is velvety blackness, a deep throbbing beat, and two videos playing simultaneously, face to face. On one side the tiger, floating in space, paws outstretched, incants his history in a strained human voice. On the other, the 18th century surveyor speaks of colonial conquest, his tiger-eyes beaming across the darkness. Their moment of meeting – “We’re Tigers, Were Tigers” – is an intense shamanic experience. 

The line between human and animal completely dissolves in Pierre Huyghe’s Untitled (Human Mask) (2014). Here, a macaque wearing a human mask, wig, and blue uniform, shambles around an empty restaurant in post-apocalyptic Japan, apparently working, occasionally pausing and playing with the hair of the wig. Why is this small humanesque creature so horribly disturbing? I could hardly bear to watch.  

Marcus Coates’ work, Degreecoordinates, Shared Traits of the Hominini (Humans, Bonobos and Chimpanzees) (2015) may provide a clue. His work presents a series of questions, such as “Do you feel compassion?”, which can be answered the same way by all hominini. This challenges our narcissistic idea that we are a unique, let alone superior species. As Charles Darwin wrote: “Differences are of degree, not of kind.” 

This is not a cutesy exhibition for animal lovers – instead it repays careful attention with startling, often uncomfortable revelations. Animalesque, humanesque… the line between humans and animals is itself a myth. We are connected and interdependent. The threat of extinction has become very real, and very personal, and it’s threatening all of us: We are animal. We are myth. We are in danger. Help us.

Rachel Marsh

‘Animalesque – Art Across Species and Beings’ continues at Baltic, Gateshead until 19 April 2020

Images:
1. Allora & Calzadilla, Hope Hippo, 2005. Courtesy the artists. Animalesque / Art Across Species and Beings, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art 2019. Photo: Rob Harris © 2019 BALTIC
2. Amalia Pica, Yerkish, 2018. Courtesy the artist and Herald Street Gallery. Animalesque / Art Across Species and Beings, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art 2019. Photo: Rob Harris © 2019 BALTIC

Following the second writer programme at Baltic, each of the participants was tasked with writing a 600-word review of one of the current shows at the gallery. Jamie Limond chose the Judy Chicago ‘mini-survey’.

Review #2: Judy Chicago at Baltic 

‘Will I leave as I arrived?’. The words curl around the spine of a foetal figure, naked and alone in blackness, a little like William Blake’s befuddled Newton at the bottom of the ocean, or perhaps just the artist, recognisably curly-haired Judy Chicago, considering oblivion. 

Carefully rendered in the cold neon-glow of Prismacolor pencil on black paper, Study for How will I die? #2 (2014) is one in a series of picture-poems, Blakean ‘songs of experience’ in which Chicago wonders whether we exit the world in pain and confusion or with grace and acceptance. Will she die screaming in agony, or alone in a hospital, hooked up to a machine; or at home with her cat, Petie, or in her husband’s arms? 

Curated by Irene Aristizábal, ‘Judy Chicago’ at Gateshead’s Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art is not quite a retrospective, more a minor survey. It’s a shame there’s no title to tidy it up, as the show does a quietly successful job of weaving together the thematic strands of Chicago’s practice across the decades. Early works on childbirth lead to the death of the individual, lead, in a recent series of works on animal and plant extinction, to the deaths of species. 

Displayed on the same wall as Chicago’s imagined deaths are a series of drawings describing the very real trauma caused by human activity on the natural world: salmon battering themselves against concrete dams, sea turtles smothered by tumours. They employ the same alarming coloured-pencil precision as the death pictures, but with a slightly school-project quality, underlining key words in a mix of caps and cursive text. Anticipating the more recent school climate-strike movement, octogenarian Chicago speaking with the voice of rightfully angry children, they also recall My Accident (1986), a series of works on paper documenting the physical and psychological trauma she suffered after being hit by a truck while out running. Their oversized, blue-lined pages and scrapbook approach suggest a mid-term assignment.  

It’s a thread that runs throughout: Chicago deals with major themes in minor languages. Sprayed car hoods, textiles, ceramics. Dinner parties. New-Agey, hippy aesthetics tied to radical critique. It’s an innately feminist methodology that allows her to deal with the biggest of ideas on a human scale. The drawings from the death and extinction series are intimate, you imagine them done hunched-over, cross-legged on the floor. On a material level they’re quite joyous just to look at, the guilty pleasure of their craftsy ‘scratch drawing’ aesthetic married to such doom-laden subjects. They’re an engrossing highlight of the show. 

‘Judy Chicago’ successfully tracks the artist’s corrective addition of feminine perspectives to the cultural canon, though her seminal work in this regard, The Dinner Party (1974-79), is present in video-documentary form only. Chicago’s explanatory narration is engaging, even if it does flag up the work’s physical absence; there’s real anger below her matter-of-fact delivery as she details centuries of female innovation against the odds, while the other samplings at Baltic ably demonstrate the breadth and liveliness of her feminism beyond the piece that made her name. The Birth Project (1980-85), a large body of collaborative works combining trippy textiles and documentary research, addresses the staggering omission of childbirth from western art, while her Desert Atmospheres (1969-2019), a series of large-scale outdoor performances using coloured smoke canisters, add humanity and colour to the slightly pious land art of the 1960s-1970s (often a series of intrusive male gestures in the immaculate desert). Chicago stresses an acceptance of our active participation in the physical continuities of life, death, trauma, and of our place in the wider ecology.

‘Will I leave as I arrived?’. It’s a fitting question for this mini-survey. From the acid colour to the canny control of subject and aesthetic, Chicago’s voice remains distinct, her principles intact. Whatever happens to Judy the woman, Chicago the artist will leave as she arrived: gracefully pissed off.

Jamie Limond

‘Judy Chicago’ continues at Baltic, Gateshead until 19 April 2020

Images:
Judy Chicago installation view, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art 2019. Photo: Rob Harris © 2019 BALTIC

Following a fantastic second workshop by frieze deputy editor Amy Sherlock, which focused on reviewing, each of the eight writers on the a-n Writer Development Programme 2019-20 was tasked with writing a 600-word review of one of the exhibitions at Baltic.

Valerie Zwart chose to write about Joy Labinjo’s ‘Our histories cling to us’. Here, following feedback and a light-touch edit, is what she thought of it. The headline is Valerie’s, too.

Review #1: Re-shaping her histories: Joy Labinjo at Baltic

Joy Labinjo’s debut institutional show takes its title from the first part of a quote by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: ‘Our histories cling to us’. As suggested, the British-Nigerian artist’s cultural roots are the foundation of the exhibition. But the main inspiration for her work are the histories you’d have taken with you if your pre-internet house was on fire: family photo albums. The second half of the quote, ‘we are shaped by where we come from,’ while as true as the first, suggests a passive relationship with the past that few of us have; Joy Labinjo doesn’t, in any case. 

Her work is remarkably consistent: large, group portraits of family and friends, posed but relaxed, all eyes on the photographer, and often with the flash photography shadowing and composition you might expect from snapshots – such as someone half in the picture. The figures wear near-timeless, semi-formal western or traditional dress, and Labinjo shows a clear interest in patterning. All but one have backgrounds whose large, brushstroke-free blocks of strong colour have almost no architectural detail, apart from a recurring tropical plant or print contained in an otherwise-untethered window-like aperture.

Where has Labinjo come from, as an artist? She has named Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid and Claudette Johnson as formative influences, but not aesthetic ones. Both in terms of content and flat painting style, her work echoes that of Jacob Lawrence, a much-earlier painter of everyday black American life. Other recognisable British aesthetic influences are David Hockney’s idiosyncratic perspective and Patrick Caulfield’s flat architectural settings and black outlining. But that’s where the art histories end. 

The defining characteristic of Labinjo’s painting style is her planes; faces and bodies are fractured into organic-shaped facets, outlined with tints or tones of the same colour. This technique reaches a pinnacle in The Final Portrait (2019) which reads like a parade of the wide variety of colours that black and mixed-race skin can take on. This strategy extends to clothing, where blocks of flat colour and pattern are often outlined in black. After all this effort, for both painter and viewer, the paintings’ expansive, flamboyantly-coloured settings feel like a forceful exhalation of held breath. But here too, the artist is consistent: walls and objects have hard edges, which, teamed with Labinjo’s punchy hues, lend the whole an almost stained glass-like effect. 

The exhibition’s works on paper are three-quarter or head-and-shoulder compositions on largely empty backgrounds. Here Labinjo translates her facetted style, using oil bars, into lines and unblended chunks of colour, rendered expressively. Among these, two acrylic and watercolour works are a stylistic mid-point between the large-scale paintings and the drawings, featuring flatter colour blocking, but without the prevalent outlining.

In a film accompanying the show, Labinjo talks about the exhibited works as a series of practical decisions made in the face of an important deadline: the use of Powerpoint as a collage tool, searching Google and Instagram for images to ‘fill the space’ around her figures, buying odd colours because of their lower price, and pivotally, the last-minute decision to run back for the photo album. However, between Labinjo’s low-resolution, snapshot histories and her unique melted core/hard-edged painting style stands a great deal of considered thought and handling.

Ultimately, this exhibition’s signpost – its title – points in the wrong direction. The histories that cling to us may be where we derive our shape, but this coming-of-age exhibition demonstrates that the art is in living with those histories, and in making them our own.

Valerie Zwart

Joy Labinjo: Our histories cling to us, continues at Baltic, Gateshead until 23 February 2020

Images:
Joy Labinjo, Our histories cling to us, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art 2019. Photo: Rob Harris © 2019 BALTIC