Absurdity without art

Midland Lead has provided me with some materials for my degree show and yesterday my order arrived, two short rolls of sandcast lead. A material that is literally cast in sand, a traditional method used hundreds of years ago to make lead for church roofs, and is still made by craftsmen for the same purpose today when the steward’s have a keen passion for tradition and the church in question is notable. Otherwise a similar (yet cheaper) method involving large modern rolling machines is employed to squash the lead into the desired uniform thickness.

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The sandcast method provides a unique product with two distinct surfaces, the one in contact with the sand is bumpy and pitted, yet appears soft and remains tactile. The surface open to the air is something else, it shows the molten lead’s cooling process, which causes the surface to refract and reflect the light in a dappled manner. The face is smooth yet slightly marked with erupted bubbles, it can easily take on erroneous marks and additional matter such as the casting sand.

These images were taken on a D-SLR with a macro lens.

My design for the lead (bumpy side in):-

Health & Safety warning: like a TV chef handling raw chicken, you should always wash your hands if you’ve touched lead, as it’s toxic if ingested; better still wear gloves. You should also wear an appropriate mask if you’re working with molten lead as you can breathe in airborne particles.

OK, so this is a bit of a last minute offering but I thought I’d throw my pennies worth into the ring. See also a-n’s review of this years Turner Prize.

Whilst in London I went to see the curators tour of this years Turner Prize Nominee exhibition, at the Tate Britain. After hanging around in the Manton entrance lobby after hours (which was a bit weird) we were introduced to Linsey Young, the new slightly edgy girl who replaced the last curator who’d been in post for 16 years. Young introduced the show sticking to her script, outlining the show and it’s ethos, which is to engage with the best of British contemporary art in each given year, according to a panel of 4 judges who are sent out to tour the world to see art shows and bring back their finding. The company of judges: Michelle Cotton, Tamsin Dillon, Beatrix Ruf and Simon Wallis are chaired in meetings by Alex Farquharson (the Director of Tate Britain) who has no say in the winner (unless it is a draw, when they get the casting vote).

This year the judges came back with the requisite four artists, three sculptors and an installation photographer. Each artist is given identical floor space and carte-blanche to hang and display their work, Young provides assistance to the artists fulfilling every whim and desire.

 

Helen Marten

Just nominated for the inaugural Hepworth Prize for Sculpture she presented at the 56th Venice Biennale, and has had solo shows in New York and London (which is still ongoing at the Serpentine Museum).

Her work consists of sculpture and writing, an assemblage of found objects, depicting what she terms as ‘slippages in time’. Each piece has a constructed narrative such as the first shown here, which Young describes as a scientist workbench full of exhibits and odd ephemera. Marten’s process starts with extensive drawings and design work, prior to the physical making stage. Each sculpture is packed with motifs and props such as lungs, snake skins, shoe insoles, sections of pipework, items pinned out, and sliding panels like in a puzzle. Her works represent a different portion of the day, such as during the evening, they take the form of 3D collages and often appear incomplete.

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Helen Marten – Tateshots video

 

Anthea Hamilton

Who was selected for her solo show in New York.

The big arse, the centrefold in all of the tabloids. Young makes it clear that the work is not a bottom or bum, but a butt (an important distinction made due to the works origin, coming from NY). The bum was designed as a doorway for a New York apartment block by a graphic designer, Gaetano Pesce but it was never made. The one at the Tate Britain was made by model creators from 12 sections of foam (due to it’s size it has to be assembled in-situ, and means that it’ll get destroyed at the end of the exhibition when its removed) and was finished by two painters from Madame Tussaud’s. Interestingly it was only later that I realised that the butt doesn’t have an anus, was this self censorship? Or staying true to the original (which was similarly lacking in detail) or just prudishness? Other contemporary artists have gone further, such as Paul McCarthy’s inflatable giant green butt plug which he displayed in Paris, there is Ai Wei Wei’s marble annal sex toys (RA) and Marcel Duchamp’s cast of a females arse (although this has no perceptible gluteal cleft either, but then it is an unpainted bronze cast). However on reflection, maybe Hamilton is just trying to raise a smile with her mooning butt, and not a grimace.

In the same room there is a cloth suit on a hanger, based on a Mossimo design, and cut to Hamilton’s size, in fact all of the clothing Hamilton has made will fit her. A brickwork wallpaper covers the walls, high up in the corner there are two machetes driven into the wall which are draped with unexplained fabrics. There is also a bespoke boot embellished with sponges and corals.

Hamilton divided her space into two rooms, the walls of the second are covered in a mural painted by a collaborating artist (who doesn’t seem to be credited anywhere), and is based on a photo Hamilton took of the London skyline from the Vauxhall bridge one day in June at 3 pm (and reminiscent of ‘The Simpsons’ opening credits). In this space there hangs five chastity belts (although Young mistook them for nappies) with twisted gussets, which are decorated with Hector Guimard’s art deco designs. There is another boot, although Hamilton will not be able to wear this one, since it is made of marble and has no foot hole.

According to Young Hamilton experienced a life changing event, after which (like Proust) she started looking at details, and she noticed the mundane things around her.

There are rice cakes on lights across the dividing line between the two rooms, although Young didn’t know what there purpose was, she said she simply thought that Hamilton like rice cakes.

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Anthea Hamilton’s – Tateshots video

 

Josephine Pryde

Who was nominated for her solo exhibition in San Fransisco

A photographer who juxtaposes her images with objects and sculpture.

As you enter the room to the left Pryde has eight IKEA work tops lent up against the wall, each has a unique sun faded surface created by leaving the worktops in bright sunshine with items placed on top of them with varying densities, this has created abstract indexical traces. Young states that the artworks are transient as they will all eventually fade to white as Pryde has chosen not to fix the decay in any way.

In the middle of the room there is a toy train (complete with NY style graffiti) sat on a section of straight track and completely static. In other locations including Bristol, San Francisco and Berlin  (her home town) the train has moved, allowing visitors to take a seat on top and control the direction of travel. But at the Tate Britain Pryde decided that she did not want the train to be played with in this setting. The truth is, Young told us whilst discussing the IKEA works that Pryde was deeply effected by the BREXIT decision, and it was not only the track dynamics and motion that Pryde changed but also the title, from ‘Lapses in Thinking by the Person I am’ (when it was in San Fransisco August 2015), to ‘’The New Media Express’ (when it was in Berlin June 2016) to ‘The New Media Express in a Temporary Siding (Baby wants to Ride)’ when it was installed in the Tate. I believe that Pryde has put the train in a siding as a protest to the BREXIT vote and what she (and many others) might see as a shutdown of borders and free movement throughout Europe.

On the other walls Pryde has photos of female hands with painted fingernails. In this selection Pryde has only included women’s hands although she has exhibited men’s hands before. Young states that Pryde is asking questions about what it is like to be a photographer in a world in which everyone has a camera. She’s also an empowered female artist asking a question about being such a person in a digitally enabled culture.

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Josephine Pryde’s – Tateshots video

 

Michael Dean

Who was selected for his solo exhibition in London.

According to Young, Dean is the most political artist of the group. He went to a crap school, the worst in England according to OFSTED (in spite of which he later completed a Masters at Goldsmiths). All of his work starts from writing. A while back he was about to become a father for the first time when he was trying to fix a step in his home with cement, by a lucky accident he discovered that he could transpose his writing into the cement, which started his interest in 3D works. A common motif in this work is the representation of four beings, who are his family. Some of these abstract forms appear to me to be referencing a Robert Motherwell painting, ‘At Five in the Afternoon’ (1950). On the floor there is a pile of copper coins that are comparable with shingle on the shoreline, the quantity of cash was exactly £20,436, the amount the government states is the minimum that a family of four need to survive for a year in the UK. Dean then took away one coin, to display an amount below the poverty line.

The cast fists in the room also represent family members, the booklets he has created contain a language the Dean has developed out of street imagery like the hash leaf.

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Michael Dean’s – Tateshots video

Yesterday I visited London with a fellow part-time student Gill and her husband Bob, we went straight to the pop up exhibition on the Strand called Infinite Mix, curated by the Hayward Gallery in association with The Vinyl Factory. It was simply amazing, and I whole heartedly recommend it, it’s an eclectic mix of engaging video installations which although they have a very varied content, to me they seemed to have a common theme, they all seemed to be working on theories of Proust. From Martin Creed’s video Work No. 1701 (2013) a short documentary/music video of several physically impaired people crossing a road in New York, unassisted by walking aides, prosthetics, bystanders, or even friends their journey is hard and lonely, to Ugo Rondinone’s Thanx 4 Nothing (2015) a stand-up poet (John Giorno) delivers a kind of eulogy on his 70th birthday, full of references to life and death, the flickering from positive to negative, the lights going out and the poet slowly walking off the stage at the end of the poem.

So to further explain my interpretation. I’ve been reading Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” AKA “Remembrance of Things Past” on and off for sometime now, since it’s a close fit with much of my work. In order to get to the bones of the work quickly I’ve also been cheating by reading abridged versions and summaries such as Alain de Botton’s book explaining Proust’s magnum opus titled “How Proust Can Change Your Life”, a pretty bold proposal for a book. Well I’m not sure it’ll change your life but it might take up a fair portion of it if you read as slowly as I do, it’s over 1.25 million words long, captured in seven volumes. But some people say that it contains the secret of immortality, so who wouldn’t have a go right?

The storyline is needless to say complicated, but one thread, the timeless, deathlessness one is a bit like the Dallas storyline, SPOILER ALERT! the one where Bobby Ewing wakes up in the shower after he had previously been killed in a car crash, it was only a dream; wiping out 12 months of the soap. At the end of Proust’s book the narrator realises that he can be immortalised through the writing of his story, which the reader has just read, job done! Beyond the legacy creation the narrator takes a long and winding journey, the story is full of internal monologues, and the characters tackle life and love, disillusionment and memory. One important reference de Botton brought to my attention was Proust’s theory that it is our own bad experiences in life that enable us to analyse the everyday beauty. Proust wrote:

Infirmity alone makes us take notice and learn, and enables us to analyse processes which we would otherwise know nothing about. A man who falls straight into bed every night, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will surely never dream of making, not necessarily great discoveries, but even minor observations about sleep. He scarcely knows that he is asleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. An unfailing memory is not a very powerful incentive to study the phenomena of memory.

To me Proust is suggesting the Levi Strauss theory (the philosopher not the jeans manufacturer) of binary opposites, a theory he developed from Ferdinand de Saussure’s work on semiotics. Strauss’s notion was that our understanding of the world is (at least in part) constructed from a collection of polar opposite appreciations, we know that ‘villainy’ is a character trait on one end of a spectrum, with ‘Heroism’ at the other, therefore the explanation of one word can be provided by it’s antonym. Strauss went on to suggest that one position is favourable and therefore dominant for example ‘healthy’ is preferable to ‘sick’, and when you are healthy you rarely think about being sick, but when you are sick being and getting healthy again becomes an overwhelming thought that can be  all encompassing.

I thought that these ideas were captured succinctly by Creed, Rondinone, and Dominique Gonalez-Foerster, whose hologram of the ghostly opera singer fading in and out to the recording of Maria Callas (1923-1977) was akin to Proust’s concept of ones legacy providing their immortality.

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Further, Proust had a conversation with a young man who was fascinated with a materialist world, he would go to the Louvre to ogle at the palatial works. However Proust took the man back to the Louvre to view the many still lifes of Jean-Siméon Chardin to highlight that the good-life of the visual arts is in fact all around us, one just needs to alter ones expectations and look for them.

This idea rang a bell with Cameron Jamie’s (2007-9) Massage the History film, which seemed to show a desire for materiality and social climbing.

 

The references within the installations to transcendence seemed to be endless, whether it was spacemen in the heavens shown against a Gospel soundtrack, in Rachel Rose’s (2015) Everything and More, or Elizabeth Price’s (2015) K, in which a voice referencing HAL (the computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey) talks of sorrow and loss to a percussive background beat, reminiscent to the sound only familiar to those of us who’ve experienced the workings of a CAT or MRI scanner.

Whilst Kahlil Joseph’s hard to watch yet riveting piece m.A.A.d (2014) shows the life of an African-American man, this time a would be gang member in Compton L.A., taking the viewer literally from cradle to grave, in a life of exposure to gun crime, drugs and death. A dual screen (double barrelled) portrait of life in the 90’s in this hard gangland environment, set to a hip hop track synonymous with the culture.

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These references culminated with Cyprien Gaillard’s 3D video installation Nightlife (2015). Which opens to an abstract close-up that pans out to present Rodin’s The Thinker (a bronze depicting Dante’s Virgil, contemplating the entrance to hell) the movie goes on to depict animated trees moving and dancing (in the wind) to a repetitive soundtrack (fading in and out). The performer is Alton Ellis singing the line “I was born a loser” from Black Man’s World (1970’s). Cypress trees, which seemingly represent black people are prevented from entering an area inhabited by palms and exotic plants, a kind of paradise (or maybe they’re just not allowed into the nightclub). A tree is shown to be lain dead on the ground, a palm I assumed had been murdered, and at the end a helicopter highlights a needle-less (dead) tree, whilst the viewer is raised up above a firework display, appearing to be heading heavenward as the music fades out.

In short, an amazing must see exhibition.

A short clip from within the installation – ‘Nightlife’ (2015) by Cyprien Gaillard

 

It’s been a long summer… and I’ve been photographing fields of barley and wheat, videoing the harvest, the internment of the stubble and the crows picking through the remains. What I need to do now is run through some tutorials on how to use Adobe Creative Suit so that I can make the most out of the years long student subscription that I sign up for back in June!

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The raw video will be whipped into shape for my degree project, in which I want to investigate the harvest as a metaphor for impermanence, and corporeality. Whilst I know, this is well trodden ground I hope to achieve something new so I have started with some research into a few themes that interest me: –

Picturing and giving thanks for the harvest is older than christianity, the Egyptians for one: –

The Chinese also depicted the Ox plowing the fields. In Chinese mythology the Ox was a heavenly creature before being banished to earth to work as a draft animal. Plowing the fields was a penance for over stating the gods promise to man, that hard work would prevent starvation, instead the Ox quantified the Gods promise stating that hard work would result in a meal at least every three days.

This cave painting was discovered in the Mogao Caves, from the Northern Zhou Dynasty, known as “Cattle, Peacock, Frog and Snake” it symbolises a life-cycle. The frog (although I think it looks more like a terrapin) is eaten by the snake, the snake is eaten by the peacock, allowing the farmer to plow the field and feed the many villagers in safety. Although this seems contrary to the Buddhist mantra that all life is sacred, this seems to suggest a loophole, that you can benefit from death so long as it’s not by your hand, the caption says that it depicts an “enlightenment of the people and animals to kill each other in order to survive”.

Juan Sánchez Cotán painted many still lifes in Spain during the 17th century, known as bodegón. They tended to utilise a black backdrop which contrasted starkly with the specimen vegetables, fruit and foul that hung in the compositions. They appear like the items in the religious festival, embodying the best of mans endeavours to cultivate and reap the land. A very exciting contemporary artist, Ori Gersht recreates Cotán’s painting as photographs and then blows up the produce, photographing the point of impact with a high speed camera.

 

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Gersht also references Harold Edgerton’s photography, such as .30 Bullet Piercing Apple (above)

Referring to the cycle of life I feel that it’s important to touch on death, I’ve drawn on many works of art, in addition to those I’ve previously discussed in this BLOG. I wanted to look at Anya Gallaccio, an artist whose work investigates the ephemeral nature of nature. Her work includes many installations which are typically either self destructive such No place better than this (1996) consisting of burning candles or simple decaying Preserve ‘Beauty’ (2003) comprises cut flowers or  as with Absolute (1996) and Lost Art (1996) which incorporates blocks of ice melting at room temperature. She has also made a series which puts cut flowers behind glass panels of used doors Red Door With Handle (2003). Each challenges the viewer to consider mortality, and transcendence, hinting at an afterlife whilst acknowledging the decomposition of dead matter on earth.

 

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To be continued…