a-n Writer Development Programme 2019-20

Following the second workshop in the programme, led by frieze deputy editor Amy Sherlock, three of the participants chose to write about British-Nigerian painter Joy Labinjo’s exhibition at Baltic, ‘Our histories cling to us’, her first major solo show. Here’s Joanna Byrne’s 600-word take.

Review #5: Joy Labinjo at Baltic

Where is home, when we find ourselves caught between two worlds? Exploring what it means to belong is central to ‘Our histories cling to us’ at Baltic, Joy Labinjo’s first major solo show. A young painter of British-Nigerian heritage, Labinjo draws upon her own diasporic identity and personal history. Her starting point is photographs of family, friends and ‘unknowns’ captured in the UK, Nigeria and places in-between.

Walking amongst the paintings, set out over two rooms of the gallery, feels like wandering through scenes from a colourful family scrapbook, recomposed as large-scale, graphic canvases. Like the family album – or social media feed – which compresses space and time via photographic montage, Labinjo’s vibrant compositions flatten out decades, time zones, geographic and spatial locations. 

The lo-fi aesthetics of the snapshot are reflected in the jarring colour combinations and off-kilter compositions of Come Play With Us? and Everything Will Be Alright (both 2019). Bodies are cut off at awkward angles, while the stark flash of a disposable camera freezes faces, distorts colours and muddies backgrounds. The graphic patterning, striped folds and colour-blocked shadows of garments and fabrics flow into Labinjo’s rendering of her subjects. Hovering between the figurative and the abstract, faces are mapped in flattened daubs of pure colour; a myriad of skin tones that in Maya Angelou’s words, “confuse, bemuse, delight…” 

In works such as The Final Portrait, Family Portrait and Jane and Mary Jane (all 2019), Labinjo invites us into the performative, more harmonious space of the formal studio photograph, often used by families to communicate togetherness, commemorate special occasions or rites of passage. Family Portrait (2019) depicts a mother wearing a loose crimson dress and patterned traditional headcovering, her young child sat in her lap, while the father, in a dark suit, stands behind them protectively. The Final Portrait – of whom, we wonder? – appears to be constructed from several snapshots; cut-out figures of all ages perch atop mid-century furniture cribbed from adverts and mail-order catalogues. This is painting as montage. 

Recurrent motifs of lush green tropical plants, bright stencilled leaves and boldly patterned fabrics – visual shorthand for ‘Africa’ – are culled from Instagram and pasted into Labinjo’s multi-layered compositions. Allusions to doors and windows – often rendered in solid rectangles of unadulterated colour – alert us to spaces beyond the here-and-now of the assemblage, a desire that exceeds the boundaries of the canvas. Is this a visualisation of homesickness, of nostalgia – “painful homecoming” – that might permeate experiences of diaspora? While Labinjo cites artists such as Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid and Claudette Johnson as influences on her representations of black subjects, comparisons may also be drawn with Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s tactile and sensual multi-layered paintings of diasporic subjects in domestic spaces.

Labinjo’s painting-as-montage occupies a transitional space, the somewhere ‘in-between’ space of an emerging artistic practice. Her vibrant canvases commingle spaces and places, past and present, the ‘real’ and the virtual; converging, almost merging into a unified whole. This sense of being in-between, Stuart Hall says, is an important part of the experience of diasporic identities: not just “being”, but “becoming”. Always in the process of becoming.

Joanna Byrne

‘Joy Labinjo: Our histories cling to us’ continues at BALTIC until 23 February 2020

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

Four out of the eight writers on the a-n Writer Development Programme 2019-20 chose to review the Judy Chicago exhibition at Baltic, curated by Irene Aristizábal. To follow is Kitty Bew’s 600-word piece.

Review #4: Judy Chicago at Baltic

Is every man a rapist at heart?” This is just one of life’s many eternal questions put forward by artist Judy Chicago in her exhibition at Baltic, Gateshead. In this first major UK survey of her work, Chicago demonstrates the political self-awareness that has bared its teeth throughout her five-decade career. In part determined by the space, curator Irene Aristizábal presents a summary of a vibrant and vital artistic practice that veers from 1970s First Wave feminism to more recent reflections on the global climate crisis. 

Throughout the gallery we’re faced with an autobiographical brooding of one personal life experience or another. In My Accident (1986) Chicago documents the occasion she was hit by a truck while out running, detailing not only the incident but the lasting emotional trauma. Grim photographs of her naked, bruised body are accompanied by illustrations in pencil depicting the more prosaic details of the accident and aftermath: the croissant she would have eaten that morning, her legs in mid-sprint, a fat pet cat reclining.

Chicago and her partner Donald Woodman worked together to create My Accident, reflecting a career-defining impulse to collaborate. The Birth Project (1980-85), for instance, is the result of a joint-effort between Chicago and 150 female needleworkers. Made up of interviews, personal testimonies, educational panels, painting and needlework, it is a body of work that is rich in colour, craft and research, although disappointingly just seven out of a potential 85 artworks are shown here. Included is The Creation (1984), a monumental tapestry that simultaneously glorifies the exact moment of birth as well as the plush colour spectrum afforded by textiles. What stands out here are Chicago’s efforts to universalise the ubiquitous yet neglected human experience of childbirth. As the artist says, it is “a subject worthy of attention of the entire human race”. Forged by the hands of women, Birth Project is one of Chicago’s most feminist artworks – rivalled only by The Dinner Party (1974-79), of which we are sadly only given a pared down video version rather than the full, spectacular mixed-media banquet.

Chicago shines brightest when drawing directly from the personal, and artworks that fail to do so seem muted in comparison. The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction (2015-17) is a three-part reverie conveyed through a series of drawings, each part dealing with an inescapable aspect of the contemporary human condition: grief, ageing, and the deterioration of the natural world. Musings on the causes of animal extinction speak to a shared, contemporary insecurity about the state of the world, but what we are offered here are preparatory sketches that provide little more than an inventory of endangered species and their human-made causes of endangerment: polar bears stood on melting ice caps, choked sharks washed ashore – images that have become the go-to emblems of wildlife extinction. The omission of the final painted glassworks, along with the decision to present an abbreviated version of both The End and The Dinner Party, results in a selection of work that fails to convey the artist’s unique sculptural range, at times leaning too heavily on the two-dimensional.

The best thing about this exhibition is its vulnerability. Chicago’s deepest insecurities and her most banal pleasures are unpacked. In Autobiography of the Year (1993-94) a series of 140 drawings chronicle singular moments in a year of her life, echoing the frank intimacies of The Accident. Tender thoughts about her partner and the eccentricities of her pet cats are interwoven with darker reflections on the validity of her own artistic practice, the sexual aggression of men, and the death of her mother. Chicago conflates the poetically prosaic and intensely depressing realties of everyday life. It is in these moments that her artwork truly resonates.

Kitty Bew

‘Judy Chicago’ continues at Baltic until 19 April 2020

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

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