Narratives and Spaces

I made it to London’s East End determined to see as many new (to me, that is) contemporary galleries as possible, and to consider how/why they had displayed the works shown. Here are my highlights –

* LONDON NEWCASTLE PROJECT SPACE – IMAGINE A joint exhibition by students of Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf and UCL Slade School of Fine Art.
[This was still being set up, with no information available about the artists or their works, so my apologies to them, I cannot credit either properly.]

Two pieces dealt with display issues my own work raises. One drawing was actually on A4 tracing paper (as many of my own are), simply hung by two little bulldog clips on the white wall. Up close I could see this was an intriguing life drawing in day glow pink. Sadly, hung ill-lit in a corridor made this single piece far too easy to miss.

Another installation comprised scattered metal blobs on the floor in front of what seemed a sheet of muslin with shapes painted on to it. The sheet was hung from a straight batten, and allowed to gather as it fell to the floor (I am planning for the unused paper from my current big piece to sit rolled below). This was in a prominent spot and well lit, so it might have been eye-catching regardless of the work’s quality. But the way this installation used its gallery space, with good lighting, room for viewers to move round it, and with the sensual pool of fabric where it met the concrete floor really made it striking, whereas the little life drawing was just too hard to see. It is possible that this artist wanted the life drawing to be elusive, but my work is all about perception, so I need it all to be visible.

* RIVINGTON PLACE: Autograph-abp. ROCK AGAINST RACISM/SYD SHELDON and FRANTZ FANON 1925-1961

These two photography exhibitions didn’t sound like they would offer me much food for thought, and I almost kept walking, but I remembered the Rock Against Racism movement when it began in the late 1970s, and couldn’t resist a look; then I found myself considering the Fanon exhibition upstairs.

ROCK AGAINST RACISM/SYD SHELDON – this comprised a collection of Sheldon’s photographs, negatives, proofs and posters made from these images. It should have been a repetitive, and consequently flat experience. However its curator had used the same images in different formats and arrangements which actually forced you to look again with fresh eyes at the people who were their subjects, and somehow this made them feel present and vivid, rather than idiosyncratic figures from a lost past. It was encouraging to see how successful this was.

FRANTZ FANON 1925-1961 – I had heard a little about Fanon as an important thinker and writer concerned with the after-effects of colonialism, and this was an exhibition of photographs by Bruno Boudjelal who had revisited important locations from Fanon’s past in Algeria. I expected it to be very inaccessible – I can’t claim to be knowledgeable or affected directly by the issues that troubled Fanon – but again the curation of these images made a real difference. Like Sheldon’s photos these were monochrome, but unlike his, they were deliberately etherial, often fuzzy and indistinct, and only one was repeated. Whereas Sheldon showed his against bright walls and used vivid coloured backings, these were against a charcoal painted wall, and the repeated image projected onto it. Lighting was subdued. This very effectively conveyed the difficulty of finding reliability in the photographer’s hunt for accuracy about Fanon’s early life. There was nothing vivid or present in the effect these images conveyed. They were elusive and beautiful, and very seductive. The projection even appeared to be suspended before the wall behind it. I thought I’d feel alienated, but actually I wanted to stay longer.

* RAVEN ROW: JOS DE GRUYTER & HARALD THYS: FINE ARTS

I loved this gallery. It was a lovely space to be in. This is a regency fronted house with its back knocked out and a concrete extension added. All walls are white painted. The original doors, floors and panelling have been preserved as far as possible.

These two artists are known for working in video, but this show was chiefly a collection of primitive watercolours with giant steel ‘figures’ dotted about, bearing pencil sketched faces taped casually in place. In this building the paintings seemed a determined imitation of a 19th Century gentleman’s collection. The steel figures appeared rude pastiches of visitors to the show.

The building’s attic space is something completely different. It has been left unaltered since its sitting tenant died, and is visually stuck in the 1970s. Strange stilted videos were showing in its main rooms. These are what these artists are more known for. They featured stiff, inarticulate old-fashioned characters performing mysterious surreal scenes. Seeing them in this building above the rest of the show made me question the activity of looking at art. What do we do when we say something is ‘art’ and look at it?! Are we viewers less real than the ‘art’ because we frame it and elevate it? What does it mean to give an object ‘value’?

I don’t think I’ve ever been to an exhibition that posed these questions so directly, or with such a sense of purpose and fun. The charm and status of this gallery’s lower spaces really did give the paintings a heightened value, when many had titles that plainly declared them jokes, ‘Venus as a Peasant’, for example, or ‘Man Holding His Wife’s Head on His Lap’. The period decor of the attic gave the videos an unmistakeable ‘arthouse’ feel, and yet they were part of the whole exhibition. The whole show was a very exciting use of site and space. I want my work to be shown somehow in a way that poses questions about looking and lookers. This gave me a lot to think about. I found it so interesting that later I looked the artists up online and discovered the show had previously been exhibited at MOMA in New York, a very different building. I can’t help feeling that Raven Row as a site enabled this show to do something new and special.

During my group crit. my tutor David Baldry made one comment, that my work would really only achieve the effect I’m chasing if I get the display right, which I have to agree with. It is almost distressing to find myself embarked on a painting and drawing journey, when I’m someone who is most confident making when I’m dealing with shapes and spaces. When my head is taken up with two dimensional effort, it seems to have little energy for thinking in three dimensions. But he’s right. Display will be critical, and I need to collect more ideas. And not panic.

He also suggested that I try working BIG. I have made some pieces that are larger than others, but I have not really been as happy with them as the smaller images, and I hadn’t thought of using tracing paper really large-scale, because I’d been obsessing about using it wet, and is very difficult to manage wet when it’s large. But of course, I have loved working with the soft pastel images…

So I have begun a new piece. I bought a 1016mm wide 20m roll of 112g tracing paper, and a 120cmsq 9mm marine ply board, then set myself up with two tables and some G clamps, together with some protective decorators kit. I hope to keep it on a roll of paper somehow, as if it is its own screen, so it needs very clean edges:

I decide to re-work one piece that came out well in soft pastel on a small scale. It has a strong composition, in that it has a bold sweeping line through it that seems very powerful, and lovely rich colours, if I get them right.

Several days in, it is starting to come together. I’m spraying it with fixer regularly, in the hope of building up really deep areas of pigment. I’ve also begun experimenting by blending with paper stumps, in case grease from my hands is binding pigment and making each surface smoother, which will make it harder for future layers to fix.

Although I’m really enjoying the challenge of making this new piece, it has occurred to me that working smaller might be interesting too, and of course present other options for displaying my collection of pieces. I could just try to paint or draw the images much smaller, but I recently went into a shop and noticed it was selling individual till rolls, and decided to try printing onto them and make my own ‘film roll’ models. This took some fiddling about on my macbook which eventually crashed in misery, but I did manage to reverse print a selection of my recent pieces just before my technology gave up, and here’s my first attempt:

Tiny print issues:

* I’ve since researched what “thermal” means, and now realise this paper will change colour if heat or pressure are applied to it, which makes this trial unnecessarily difficult to manage, so I’ve sourced a non-thermal roll for future attempts. It looks like more fragile paper too, which will be more attractive.

* I have to act quick to make each print because it has to line up and the paper I’m printing onto wants to curl up. So I can only do this one image at a time. Hence it is even harder to line up images, and keep them still while I press them out.

* This printing method is not high definition. It is only as good as my printer, and not all the ink transfers fully. Downside: indistinct images. Upside: they look broken and faded – just like elderly ciné film frames!

Well, I had a go at a bigger watercolour on stretched tracing paper. It is not easy to build up dark areas of pigment, possibly because the bigger paper holds so much water.

I decide to let the paper dry and then re-work it to add more pigment. I did add masking fluid before I started, and rubbed it off when the paper dried, intending to have very light coloured patches as well as very dark ones.

Good news: the pigment soaks into the paper surface AND the masking fluid does not attach to the paint, so it comes off as I planned – here’s a video:-

Bad news: the paper buckles like crazy while it’s wet, but recovers perfect sleek ripple-freedom once it dries. I did think bigger paper would be more likely to suffer damage. This is disappointing, but might happen after another application of wet pigment.

Meanwhile I’ve taken part in a very interesting group crit, and had more tutorials, so am awash with feedback and stimulation!

Although the way I’ve displayed my work in my space is chaotic, the pieces do convey a sense of multiple narratives, and invoke a positive emotional response in some viewers. These discussions have also given me confidence that I might be working at an idea that is interesting to others.

My tutor Robin Warnes suggested I listen to Brian Eno’s John Peel lecture on BBC Radio 6 (sadly the link is expired). It was fantastic! Eno explains vividly the purpose he believes art serves: “culture as a sort of collective ritual … This huge, fantastic conversation which we call culture… which somehow keeps us coherent” and able to understand life better. This is the core of the experience of group viewings of something as mundane as my collection of ciné films. The traces of excessive viewing or stories edited out that I am investigating are actually records, indices, of different “conversations” over time and space. Eno also calls these events “synchronising”

Very exciting!

Another tutor, Sarah Jacques, reminded me of the Scottish artist Douglas Gordon, who has played with found and mirrored images (like my slideshow), but who made one of my favourite pieces at the National Galleries of Scotland’s Modern One. List of Names (Random) 1990-ongoing fills the walls of a big stairwell at this gallery, as if it is significant, but everyday. It looks like a memorial, or roll of honour, but because of its location, you can pass the whole thing, but not see it all together.

Gordon is quoted by the gallery saying of this work, “It was an accurate and honest statement but it was full of mistakes (like forgetting the names of some friends), so there were some embarrassing elements in the work, but that all seemed to be quite close to the truth of how our head functions anyway. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.”

When I look at this piece, I’m almost overwhelmed by both the tide of relationships recorded by the list AND all its omissions and errors, including the people he hasn’t met yet. I love it, and Sarah’s reminder of the artist has taken me back to a work that is dealing with the madness and irresistibility of our brains’ lust to make sense of the random stuff of living. I’m looking at that too by playing with the ‘lost’ and ‘damaged’ ciné films.

I returned to my latest pieces, 15, 16, 17 and 18, rubbed off the masking fluid and assessed what this had done. I was right. The old fluid had bonded with the paper in places, and had not formed a proper barrier. Frames 15 and 16 show this, and are scrappy versions of the original ciné frame 18d as a result. The new fluid masks with a much cleaner edge, so 17 and 18 turn out better than I expected. However both masking fluids on all four of my inked pieces, 15 to 18, have bonded with the thicker areas of ink, which lifts off with the dried fluid as I rub. Gentle rubbing does not help. Keeping control of my paintings of these damaged frames with ink will be difficult if I want to use masking fluid to leave patches of pure light.

Here are my peeled pieces, photographed on a window to emphasise the masking fluid’s effect:

I am losing confidence in ink as a medium for these tracing paper images. I wonder whether watercolour would be less susceptible to coming off around any blobs of masking fluid. It certainly appears to penetrate the paper with pigment in a way that these acrylic inks don’t.

It is tempting to rush in with a watercolour version of these pieces, but I’m worried that this would result in an image that feels like a hasty copy of them, rather than its own response to the original ciné image. Also, the ink pigments are so much brighter – maybe I can make a delicious image if I try again.

I decide to persist for now with one more ink image of 15d, but choose another different damaged frame to work from as well, one with a more defined real shape, 22d – the licking cow – on much bigger paper.

It was a lovely sunny day, so I was able to make a timelapse video of the inked tracing paper drying

And here are the two new images dried and stuck to my space window:

I’m not really very pleased with them. The masking fluid did the same thing and peeled off ink once it had dried and I could rub the fluid off. The pigments are strong, but not subtle. The images look crude. Maybe I’m over thinking things and they’ll grow on me. Time to do something else.

AGNES MARTIN

My tutor, Jane Watt had suggested I take a look at this exhibition at Tate Modern. Before my visit I’d read a little about Agnes Martin, and was not sure her work would be particularly relevant to my project, but after spending a morning absorbing her work, I admit I was wrong.

Martin’s working methods were very different to mine. She was almost obsessive in her attention to precision and consistency. I’m not naturally systematic or tidy. Despite this, to my surprise, her work had great expressive emotive power. From the pieces collected for this show, I think she achieved this because she made works that are so sparing of distracting clutter that they force you to stop and analyse their effect on your brain, but also:

– by restraining her colour palette so that minute variations in pattern and pencil/pen/brushstroke are exaggerated;

– by rehearsing and experimenting on a small scale before moving to her big canvases;

– by using the same size and shape of support, either for her small rehearsals, or her big pieces, so that differences in variation of pattern or proportion are also exaggerated.

Here are two good examples:

I was thrilled to see many of her small pieces were made on tracing paper. She made full use of the magnified variation in tone given by tracing paper, although her paper was far less crinkled and damaged than mine has been. I suspect she kept her paper better by using a single thin wash of colour, and not taking it to the edge of her paper, so that the distortion affected the unpainted border evenly. Her paper is neatly and evenly crinkled round all edges.

Here is one of my favourites:

Although her elegant minimalism is far from the eclectic colour and texture of my ciné film project pieces, she seems to be attempting to provoke a similar sort of emotional connection with her work. I can see that what connects my sequence of images might help to work in a similar way for my viewers – if I can display them in the right way. Her tracing paper images are in simple plain wood box frames. Something to bear in mind when planning how to show mine. I am not sure it will work for all of them, as light shining through them has become an important consideration for me.

JOSEPH CORNELL: WANDERLUST, Royal Academy of Arts.

I had less time to spend here and it was very crowded, so I could not see the film showing in the first room for bodies, I had a lovely time looking at the rest of this exhibition. I’d seen a couple of his boxes in other exhibitions before, but it was a real treat to see so many examples of his work in one place. I love the intimacy of Cornell’s work – you can see the effort he has taken to make familiar things into something ‘other’, and his delight in taking your head into another place.

The written information for this show really helped bring it to life. I know writing is ‘definite’ and could be said to clutter a visual art display, but these are mainly small, detailed pieces, full of found text and imagery – they make you long to know more, and this information was useful. Cornell called himself an ‘armchair traveller’. He was fascinated by the wide world, but never explored it in reality. With his invented objects and collages, he was doing something similar to what we all do when we try to recall stories we only partially remember or understand. This is at the root of my own project.

Some of these exhibits, such as these two, were especially interesting as ideas for showing my own ciné film pieces:

If I put a collection of my pieces in one case/box, their dissimilarity could be really intriguing and their transparency, like the glass/mirrors of Cornell’s Pharmacy, could look good, especially if I manage to illuminate them somehow.

Later I managed to see Cornell’s film, Gnir Rednow, click here for a link to the site where I found it. This is brilliant! I never realised Cornell made film from found off-cuts! He got Brakhage to film this elevated rail journey to make a film project for Cornell called ‘The Wonder Ring’, but later made Gnir Rednow from the strips of film Brakhage had discarded. This is far more sensual than a simple train journey because Cornell’s unusual collection of sequences emphasise the patterns and shapes of the trip and its landscape, and the patterns of movement. It makes me want to make more from my own lost and damaged frames…