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…
