Relics of the Future

I have just published two pamphlets about the 2017 Joseph Beuys in Connemara Residency, which neatly coincides with a new exhibition of his work in London (at Thaddeus Ropac gallery). My interest in Beuys is however more about the tangential possibilities which can be excavated from his work.

I am, therefore, not hugely excited about the physicality of the works on display at the exhibition Utopia at the Stag Monument. For me, Beuys himself would have been the attraction, the restless fedora-sporting enthusiast for an endless myriad of political and social causes. I admit to most enjoying his lesser-known 1982 pop song Sonne statt Reagan yet remain insufficient of an enthusiast to have learnt all the lyrics.

The idea of Beuys is what intrigues me; the polarising impact he had in West Germany in the 1970s, where for some he was little better than a mystical charlatan, while for others he was a genuine force for good after the horrors of Nazi Germany. There is something encyclopedic about his range of concerns and the artworks he based on these, and these for me provide a convenient series of cultural markers for my own Beuys-project.

The thought of creating a residency in a small Irish cottage based around Beuys began when I considered a particularly tatty rug worn as a cloak would make me appear like the artist. The effect was more of a tribute rather than impersonation, for I lacked the fisherman’s waistcoat and hat. From this brief performance has flowed a variety of artistic activity. Much of this plays around with the idea of ‘artist-in-residence’ which somewhat makes the figure of the artist especial and even sacred. This is in contrast to Beuys’ own statement that everybody is an artist, which is a flattening of the concept of genius. But I follow my own logic, and pronounce that if I am an artist, anywhere I stay becomes a residency, even if do not intend to make art.

Joseph Beuys was both a creator and follower of myths – including the well-known story relating to his WW2 experience in the Luftwaffe in which he claimed to have been shot down in the Crimea, and rescued by Tartars. This biographical founding legend is one of the keys to understanding Beuys’s physical use of materials such as fat and felt (which he said the Tartars wrapped him in) as well as wider themes of healing and transformation. Beuys’ grotty installations have something of the air of Renaissance alchemy to them, that lost pre-Enlightenment world.

With this in mind, I wonder if biographies should be treated as fiction, given that most people’s lives are pretty unknowable. That a stranger should attempt to construct a narrative of one’s life seems an impossible task, for while documents can be perused, writings analysed, they are not the same as understanding feelings, beliefs and foibles.

The reverse also is problematic – that if one has the chance to meet a well-known figure, be they writer, artist or other, there may often be a sense of disappointment. This could be because of the difference between the person, the personality, and the work they produce. Books are neat, well-formed objects, with the invisible hand of the editor upon them. Artworks, while sometimes less neat, are still discrete objects, a totality. The person is none of these – the famous artist may have slept badly the night before, and they may have worries completely unknown to us.

So perhaps it is all the best that I never met Joseph Beuys, and have instead chosen him to form part of an ongoing artwork, based around a small cottage in Ireland. The Beuys in Connemara Residency suggests a new facet of Beuys, a rural palate-cleanser to his frantic antics at Documenta in Kassel, and his ever-enthusiastic teaching. Building on existing accounts of his time in Ireland, the residency encourages a speculative approach to his work, and the opportunity to engage with local flora and fauna.

On the ferry to Fogo Island, itself an island off Newfoundland, what I had expected was quite different to the scene unfolding in front of me. There were lots of islands, mostly heavily wooded, and I had no idea which one was Fogo Island, nor even the length of the ferry ride itself.

I was headed there in August 2016 to spend some time at the Museum of the Flat Earth, an institution dedicated to the exploration of unconventional thinking (here’s a local report about it). The Museum is itself an artwork, an elaborate appropriation of esoteric thinking all created by Kay Burns, who also plays the role of curator Dr Iris Taylor.

It reminds visitors of the importance of questioning the information which we encounter on a daily basis as authoritative knowledge, with its displays focused around the history of flat earth thinking, key figures in the movement and local archaeological excavations.

Since then I have provided a voiceover for a video documenting Kay’s experiment to measure the Earth’s flatness on a frozen lake in Labrador (which I hope to show in London in the spring). I have also begun investigating the life and disappearance of Bartholomew Seeker (who was a key figure in the Canadian Flat Earth Society) through time spent in Ireland in 2017.

The culmination of this so far is yet another piece of island-based research, Navigating the Edge, (published by my own Imaginative Press) which begins with the sighting of an island floating above the clouds…

The above photo is a display from a small museum in Scotland, and it reminds me of an ongoing problem I have with the way art is exhibited. The Mona Lisa (like many artworks) has been reproduced to the point of destruction, and this means when I see it, it amuses me. The ‘art’ of the portrait here has vanished, we are just left with the wry smiles peering down on a mantelpiece full of objects.

There is no glass case, no labels, and I imagine the floral wallpaper is not currently the sort of thing used in the room where the Mona Lisa hangs in the Louvre. In fact, if we do see such wallpaper in an art gallery, I would immediately think there is some intended irony, a perhaps rather tired juxtaposition between the contemporary and the naff.

Recently I saw this display in Ferrara Cathedral, and it certainly is not representative of the lavish interiors (themselves an early version of installation art) of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque. There are plenty of other such ‘moments’ I saw, including a series of darkened  oil paintings at the back of the cathedral, of insufficient interest to merit their own 20 cent operated lighting system.

This cluttered approach is also evident in ecclesiastical museums, such as the one I briefly visited in Bologna. The walls were decorated in what was once very elaborate silk wallpaper, itself now faded and peeling away. This material suffocation was extended in a huge display case of priestly garb, the golden cassocks with endless brocades. Alongside these were a selection of reliquaries (which I imagined to be of second-rate quality, and not worthy of display with other examples in the church itself).

My problem is the binary choice between Catholic and Protestant, between ornamentation and minimalism, between Caravaggio and Saenredam. The latter, who painted the interiors of whitewashed Dutch churches in the 17th century, seems to point the way for Western abstract painting of the likes of Piet Mondrian and the emergence of the ‘white cube’ as a place to view modernist artworks.

I have for a long time disliked the ‘white cube’ aesthetic, as seen at Tate Modern, and the eponymous gallery itself. For me, the stripping away of any other detail which might distract the viewer, be it skirting board, furniture, colour, is repressive and clinical, and seeks to evoke a faux spirituality and a sense of authority. That said, lavish interiors can be just as repressive and unwelcoming.

I don’t have any conclusions to this jumble of concerns, other than a desire to generally reject the use of dichotomies as a means for considering art and its environments. (To be continued…)

Museums are the past, they are permanent, they are formal, they intrigue and bore in equal measure. I have been using the museum as a fictional device for some time, through the creation of my own Museum of Imaginative Knowledge, and want to reflect on some of the qualities of museums which attract artists.

Museums are sites of pilgrimage, know for their ‘treasures’ and ‘wonders’ which in London and other major cities attract millions of visitors. Art museums (although the label is used less often in the UK) such as the National Gallery provide both a visual repository of the history of Western Art and allow for its interpretation and continuing influence.

I am perhaps most interested in the interaction between the environment of the museum and the objects and displays which it contains. For the National Gallery, this is its position on Trafalgar Square, and its interiors, such as richly-coloured wallpapers and marble skirting boards. The paintings are usually contained within golden carved frames, all creating an atmosphere of both refinement and elitism. We, the visitor, are not at home here.

The contrast to this is Tate Modern, or any other contemporary gallery which seeks to elevate the independence of the artwork by the use of white walls. The idea that the viewer must not be distracted by the gaudy interiors of older galleries produces a space which is both minimal yet also repressive in its clinical whiteness. We, the visitor, are equally not at home here.

It was at Tate Modern in 2011 where I first developed such concerns, at a Joan Miro exhibition. I became disenchanted in a large white room, itself full of large minimal paintings, and found a loose screw on the floor, which for me was of more interest than the artworks being so earnestly presented. This habit then led me in 2013 to the discovery of the Tate Toblerone, a discarded chocolate wrapper close to a Francis Bacon painting.

Such detritus may be acceptable within the rectangle of a Kurt Schwitters artwork, yet to display the Tate Toblerone within a glass case would be to destroy its authenticity as a piece of litter and to enshrine it as a work of art.