February 13th, 2010 Iain Sinclair
Shortly before JG Ballard's death last year, Iain Sinclair made a pilgrimage to the author's Shepperton semi, a shrine to his surreal tastes and happy family life. A new exhibition of his favourite paintings and of art work he has inspired honours this distinctive vision
Coming away from the official path, on a walk from the mouth of the Thames to Oxford in October 2008, I diverted through Shepperton. Light rain misted my spectacles. An uncertain detour was blocked by a two-tonne Jaguar saloon, white and racing green: XJ MOTOR SERVICES. The upstream settlement has evident 21st-century loot, as well as Edwardian weekend villas and chalets. There is a blue plaque to the literary giant they choose to commemorate: THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK LIVED HERE, 1823-1866. Modernist white cubes with big windows are attracted by reflections of light on water. Natural metaphors for unnatural liquidity in a time of recession.
I head for the station. That's where JG Ballard met me when I visited him. I never saw the inside of his house. We drove to a riverside pub and sat under whirring fans. I wondered why, after his great success with Empire of the Sun, he didn't relocate to one of those balconied, sharp-angled properties that were so attractive to the convalescing architects and blocked advertising men who populate his books. Foolish thought. Ballard was a working writer, first and last; the where of it was not to be disturbed. Fixed routines served him well; so many hours, so many words. Breakfast. Times crossword. Desk overlooking a natural garden. Stroll to the shops to observe the erotic rhythms of consumerism. Lunch standing up with The World at One on the radio. Back to the study. Forty-minute constitutional down to the river. TV chill-out meditation: Hawaii Five-O and The Rockford Files rather than Kenneth Clark.
The interior landscape of the suburban semi was a mirage. The more you studied it, the cannier the decision to settle the family in Shepperton, all those years ago, appeared. It was far enough out of London to limit the pests, the time-devourers. When journalists gained access they were mesmerised by the reproduction Delvaux canvases propped on the floor, the aluminium palm tree, the lounger in the front room; dutifully they repeated the standard questions about surrealism and how The Drowned World was saturated in Max Ernst. The house in Old Charlton Road was a premature installation; a stage set designed to confirm the expectations of awed pilgrims. But it was also a home in which the widowed author brought up three children who are always laughing in family snapshots.
Ballard may be the first serious novelist whose oeuvre is most widely represented in books of interviews. And whose future belongs as much in white-walled warehouse galleries as the diminishing shelves of public libraries. He was so generous to those who found his phone number, so direct: he rehearsed polished routines – and always agreed, with unfailing courtesy, that the world was indeed a pale Xerox made in homage to the manifold of his fiction. A late moralist, he practised undeceived reportage, not prophecy: closer to Orwell than HG Wells. Closer to Orson Welles than to either. Closer to Hitchcock. Take out the moving figures on staircases that go nowhere and stick with hollow architecture that co-authors subversive drama.
Spurning critical theory, Ballard joined his near-namesake Baudrillard as the hot topic for air-miles academics. Off-highway universities, indistinguishable from hospitals or hotels, approve infinite theses. A hall of mirrors in which students, who have lost the habit of literature, recognise, in the Shepperton master's exquisitely calibrated prose, intimations of a hybrid form capable of processing autopsy reports and invasion politics into accidental poetry. The incantatory manifesto, "What I Believe", deploys Ballard's favourite device, the list, as he curates a museum of affinities: "I believe in Max Ernst, Delvaux, Dalí, Titian, / Goya, Leonardo, Vermeer, Chirico, Magritte, / Redon, Dürer, Tanguy, the Facteur Cheval, / the Watts Towers, Böcklin, Francis Bacon, and all the invisible artists / within the psychiatric institutions of the planet."
It was almost dark when I got there, after walking down a street occupied by Indian restaurants, Chinese takeaways, charity and novelty shops. A man spotted me as I lined up the shot.
"A writer bloke is supposed to live in that house. We've been out here 25 years and I've never set eyes on him, tell the truth. But he's on the box."
The silver Ford Granada is tilted at a drunken angle, like a sinking cabin-cruiser, in the vestigial driveway. The privet hedge has been trimmed, the napkin of lawn made tidy. The Crittall window of the front room is overwhelmed by the sinister fecundity of a yucca. There is a cheerful yellow door with an inset panel of dark glass. The rear elevation is gritty with pebbledash. Perched on the wooden fence is a cutout Sylvester, the Loony Tunes cat, waiting to pounce.
It is easy to understand how Ballard, after he lost his driving licence in the 1970s, found everything he required within an hour's walk, in any direction, out from this house. The ford where Martian invaders from The War of the Worlds crossed the river. Film studios. Reservoirs. Airport perimeter roads. And the footpaths, playgrounds, woods and streams he never felt the need to describe. Territory in which his three children grew up and thrived. That is the particular magic of his final book, Miracles of Life: how, through minimal changes of emphasis, he revises his mythology to give readers the illusion of being guided, at last, close to the heart of the mystery. A mystery that is somehow incarnate in the hidden spaces of the bereaved Shepperton property.
Even now, when Ballard was unwell and removed to the care and comfort of his partner, Claire Walsh, in Shepherds Bush, the house seemed possessed by a form of illumination not on stream to the rest of Old Charlton Road. The afterglow of decades of scrupulous composition. Physical effects we impose, in default of sentiment, to compensate for the writer's troubling absence. Fay, Ballard's elder daughter, told me that in her childhood the house did indeed stand out from its shrouded neighbours.
"When I was young, the lights used to be on the whole time, even on bright summer days. Daddy loved the idea of brightness, intensity, as if we were living in the Med."
In too much pain to take the wheel, Ballard returned to the old house with Fay. It was strange now, this installation her father had created from the objects of his private obsessions: Ed Ruscha postcards, Paolozzi silkscreen prints, a lurid corduroy sofa. A domesticated Kurt Schwitters assemblage, in which the writer could actually live and work. And thrive.
"I hadn't visited Shepperton for many years, until the summer of 2008, when Daddy was quite ill," Fay said. "I remembered a dried-up orange sitting on the mantelpiece in the nursery. I walked through the door and it was still there. I said, 'Oh my goodness, you still have the orange.' He looked at me and he said, very quietly but seriously, 'It's a lemon'. It must have been there for at least 40 years. I don't see the lemon as something eccentric. It's not a relic. It's covered in dust. It hasn't been moved. It's obviously important to him. And it's very beautiful."
The front room, guarded by the spiky fronds of the yucca, was known, in an echo of colonial times, as the nursery. Fay presented Ballard with the plant, his Triffid-like co-tenant, in 1976; a Christmas present from Marks & Spencer. It was re-potted several times and addicted to regular hits of Baby Bio. Fay reckoned that, over the years, influenced by that story "Prima Belladonna", the yucca learned to sway and sing. The nursery was the family television room, where supper was taken. An unused exercise bike, now a junk sculpture, faced the substantial set.
When royalties and film rights rolled in, Ballard, modest and circumspect with consumer durables, commissioned copies of two Delvaux paintings destroyed in the second world war. Brigid Malin, who undertook this project, wanted to paint a Ballard portrait. He agreed, visiting the artist in her studio in Hemel Hempstead, and inviting her, in return, to recreate the lost works. One of which, The Violation, was placed in his study. Fay remembered how her father loved feeling "as if he could walk into the painting and be part of the landscape with these beautiful women". The propped-up Delvaux stood like a permanently occupied mirror to the left of the author's desk; with a long window, looking over the undisturbed garden, to the right.
Ballard was fascinated by technique, craftsmanship. When Fay, herself a painter, became a student of art history, he would discuss the anonymous interior spaces of Francis Bacon compositions and enthuse over the synthetic colours of carpets in hotel lobbies and airport lounges. As a young girl, Fay perched on the corduroy sofa in the study, fascinated by a Max Ernst poster, The Robing of the Bride, in which the fur-feather cloak of a naked birdwoman reprised the blood-orange tones of the ridged material on which she was sitting. She trawled through the shelves of reference books: Dalí, Warhol, Bacon, Helmut Newton. And other less obvious interests. Reviewing a Stanley Spencer biography in 1991, Ballard proclaimed the Cookham painter as the last representative of an "innocent world before the coming of the mass media". In a gesture of recognition, he said: "Small Thames-side towns have a special magic, each an island waiting for its Prospero."
Playing along with telephone interrogators, Ballard claimed that, like William Burroughs, he would have preferred to be a painter. Meaning that he lived by the discipline of the studio, infinite variations on a menu of established themes and motifs; that his books were sometimes collaged and cut-up like The Atrocity Exhibition, so that the texture of friable newsprint and degraded scene-of-the-crime photographs was palpable beneath the charged surface. He could move a narrative through time and space by a forensic cataloguing of objects, buildings, machines. Burroughs, in his final period in the red cabin in Lawrence, Kansas, did indeed become a painter and an elective surrealist, a recorder of dreams. He would tend the cats, pick up his prescription, and blast away at cans of paint. The house, through vanity portraits by visiting celebrities, remembers him.
"Daddy produced two sculptures in the garden," Fay said. "I was very young, four or five. Sculptures made with milk bottles, chicken-wire and concrete, slightly in the style of Henry Moore, but moving towards Paolozzi."
I imagine an accretion of convenient materials inspired by the eccentric Facteur Cheval with his free-form towers, the lime-mortar-cement Palais idéal, that suburban temple of quotations. The Shepperton sculptures have vanished, they will not be part of the Crash show, the "Homage to JG Ballard", at the Gagosian Gallery in London. It is the first major gathering after the writer's death in April last year of work by artists he admired and by younger contemporaries challenged or seduced by the microclimate of the novels, essays and interviews.
The only record of the sculptures is a family photograph, taken in the garden, and reproduced in cropped form on the jacket of Miracles of Life. The three children, school-blazered, hair-ribboned, are delighted by something out of shot. Ballard, in dark sweater, white shirt, neat tie, smiles indulgently. Behind the fat cigar dangling from his hand, a minor sculptural intervention can be located: three diminishing Dalí mouths stacked one above the other. The cement used in this work was also employed to make a monument for his son's pet rabbit.
There were Ballard oil paintings too, much later, with strong primary colours. And painstaking Dalí copies undertaken to find how it was done: the bread, the rocks, the clouds. These things have disappeared. But typographical collages, like ransom notes to an alien culture, will be shown, in reproduction, at the Gagosian show; along with the provocative advertisements Ballard contrived for Dr Martin Bax's Ambit magazine. The ads display oblique fragments of text against found images. Walsh, Ballard's conduit to the information super-highway, is presented in these pieces as an early muse. One of the photographs was taken by Ballard in his Ford Zephyr – he was loyal to Ford – after Walsh came close to drowning, when she plunged into the sea in Margate wearing a coat and wellington boots.
A grid of monochrome snaps, recording the after-effects of a rollover accident in the Zephyr, will feature in the exhibition. The younger Ballard had active contacts in the London subterranea of the 1960s. Michael Moorcock, collaborator in mischief, editor of New Worlds, joined Ballard on a whirling carousel that led them towards Burroughs, Borges and Paolozzi. But the two writers were never more than tourists on the skirts of the hive at Muriel Belcher's Colony Room. "There were a couple of drunken days around Bacon," Moorcock told me, "but Jimmy and I tended to make our excuses and leave, because we were really family men and wanted to get home in time to fetch the kids."
Anecdotes proliferate and overlap, but shows like the necessary Ballard tribute at the Gagosian are made from hard evidence. Kay Pallister, who curated the exhibition, drawing on Walsh's archival scholarship, was surprised when I pointed out that the handsome and informative catalogue, in shocking pink with stencil-effect block title, was a reprise of Wyndham Lewis's Blast from 1914-15. History, in the white-walled bunker, is pyramid-based: the closer to the present moment, the more we are permitted to know. The warehouses and factories of the metropolis, solid Victorian ghosts outside Ballard's remit, are processing tanks for securing his posthumous reputation. The Gagosian's Crash assemblage, while respecting genealogies of peer-group influence, is most assiduous in showcasing the range of practising artists who deploy Ballardian themes. A steady-stare at signature metaphors: Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, the colonnades of abandoned surrealist cities, acid-attacked hoardings of movie-star faces. Faithful to the perverse doctrine of the "What I Believe" manifesto, disciples hallucinate a spinal topography of death-roads, minatory power plants and the flesh-pink atolls of inner-space.
The Ballard of Brigid Malin's portrait is a St Jerome of Shepperton: bare table, pencil and manuscript. He undertook numerous European pilgrimages with Walsh, as they investigated the genius of Velásquez, Goya, Dürer, Manet. "He loved Netherlandish art," Walsh reported, "especially Van Eyck." In London, on Sunday afternoons, they haunted the National Gallery. When I followed their footsteps, to search out the Malin portrait, it was not on display. "We've left him in the dark," the man at the desk said. "Much better for preservation. We can only show writers the general public request. Like Jane Austen."
I looked for a lemon by Francisco de Zubarán to represent the decaying object on the nursery mantelpiece. The closest I came was a still life of oranges and walnuts by Luis Meléndez. It wouldn't do, Ballard was nothing if not precise. He said what he meant and he meant what he said. The lemon, according to Lucia Impelluso, is a potent antidote to poison and a symbol of "amorous fidelity".
Posted in Art, Books, Culture, Exhibitions, Features, JG Ballard, Painting, The Guardian | Comments Off
February 13th, 2010 Antony Gormley
Western culture has long positioned itself as distinct from nature. Now with climate change, argues Antony Gormley, it's time to rethink the purpose of art
I have just driven through the Hatfield Tunnel. Above it are factory outlet shops that sell overproduced goods at reduced prices to bargain-hunters. The tunnel is long, and I imagine that the shops are plenty. These out-of-town malls are satellites of emergent in-town complexes, such as the new Westfield at Shepherd's Bush and the newer one that will be at Stratford East on the Olympics site. Art is similarly involved in a system of exchange and distribution that involves in-town and out-of-town franchises that may, as with the Guggenheim Museum in New York, spread first downtown, then to Bilbao, then to Berlin and finally to Abu Dhabi; or the Tate establishing outposts in Liverpool and St Ives, then expanding itself on Bankside and now expanding again. Art has seemingly become enmeshed in the same processes of expansion and growth that have characterised late capitalism.
And yet this bland comparison does not really wash. Shops are there to satisfy inflated desires. Art galleries contain forms and experiences that inspire, question and extend human experience. Art is the way that life tests and expresses itself, without which we are already dead.
But what happens to your enthusiasm for belonging and contributing to this system of distribution when you are told that we have 96 months before the tipping point, when the feedback systems of man-made global warming take over – probably resulting in tens of millions of climate-change refugees displaced and made homeless by the end of this century? When faced by the global climate crisis in a culture that encourages us to do more, produce more, be seen more, my initial response is paralysing fear; I want to shrink, to go into a hibernating state with minimum muscular effort and put minimal demand on any kind of fuel.
The carbon crisis calls for a re-examination of our faith in the technological basis of western progress. A change in belief is a cultural change; art and artists are implicated. As Paul Ehrlich and others have pointed out, human evolution has been driven by cultural rather than biological change; our brain size, synaptic activity, physical characteristics have not changed much in the last million or so years. What has changed is the material culture that we have made and which has in turn made us, from stone tool-making, farming, printing, the industrial revolution, the information revolution and now, maybe, the most critical and difficult revolution of all: a complete reversal of many of the values that we have held dear. We can no longer assume that more is better. Technology that was in some senses made to make life better has now become the problem.
But art is not technology; it is useless but vital. It is through art that we communicate what it feels like to be alive. When you ask "what is the point of art?" you could reformulate the question to "what is the point of human beings?"
At the British Museum there is a carving of two reindeer, crafted from a mammoth tusk 12,000 years ago. The artist's depiction of the antlers pressed against the flanks of the female in front, with the stag at the rear, of the eyes and the winter markings of the coat are the result of acute observation and enormous empathy with the life of these animals. It was by following the seasonal migrations of reindeer that modern Europeans survived between ice ages. When swimming across a glacial melt river, the deer were easily hunted. The making of this object was an expression of connection, identification with the continuation of life, its interconnectivity both in sex and in death and, by inference, the human position within a chain of being.
There is a strong connection between the urge for survival and the art of a people and a time. We have a task in hand. Culture in the developed western world has always positioned itself in distinction to nature: now we have to discover our nature within nature.
A Constable cloud study at the V&A: a small sketch in oil and pigment on board captures that most fleeting of things – the effect of sunlight on water vapour in our atmosphere. Here are ever-changing forms that evoke time, space and the act of being itself, but they are also an invitation to empathise with the exchange systems in our atmosphere. Single dry brushstrokes capture high cirrus against the thin, cold, high air, while rotating brushstrokes evoke the lower nimbus clouds that form hovering masses of white just above our heads. This sketch is another object that locates us within the scheme of things, showing our ability to engage in elemental exchanges.
I feel powerless, locked into a system and infrastructure that I cannot control, built on the basis of infinite growth that is unsustainable both in terms of demography and resources, people, air, water and food. How can I avoid making situations worse? How do I justify my life or indeed this culture as a whole? This was the problem keenly felt and left unsolved at the recent climate negotiations in Copenhagen. How can there be a consensus on the use of resources when half the developing world wants to experience the same standard of modern living as us and wants to undergo the past 300 years of western development in a sixth of the time?
An overcast sky, a dark river and a distant town. A naked woman sits on the ground and suckles a baby under a stunted holm-oak, sheltered by bushes. Opposite her, on a low brick plinth capped by stone, rise two broken pillars. To the side and in front of this altar stands a fully clothed man, nonchalantly holding a staff in his right hand. He is smartly dressed in breeches and a fine linen shirt with white and red leggings. He looks over to the naked woman; she looks at us. We are involved in this scene, which is as engaging and enigmatic as when it was painted nearly half a millennium ago. It's Giorgione's The Tempest and it hangs in the Accademia in Venice. Here we are held by an atmosphere partly meteorological, partly psychological. Lightning is striking in the distance behind the town where the sky is blackest. The effect of the work is to envelop us in that moment in the storm before the rain starts, when the world and everything in it is waiting to change: continuity, future, life, love, nature – everything hangs in the balance.
Has our confidence in human continuity undermined our ability to make art at all? Art, certainly western art, has been an expression of confidence: confidence in a culture's lifestyle and in its continuity into the future. Now art undermines and investigates systems of power and, rather than projecting stable, traditional values into the future, questions the viability of any kind of future at all. We have to re-evaluate the function of art within the frame of a sustainable lifestyle best exemplified by those societies that have had little technological advance.
In 1770 Joseph Banks visited Tahiti and wrote of the Tahitians: "... thus live these – I had almost said happy – people, content with little, nay, almost nothing ... From them appear how small are the real wants of human nature, which we Europeans have increased to an excess which would certainly appear incredible to these people, could they be told it. Nor shall we cease to increase them as long as luxuries have been invented and riches found."
Rising sea levels are destroying the homelands of Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Solomon Islands (among others) as a result of too much CO2 in the atmosphere, put there by us, and yet they are furthest away from the benefits and excesses through which our industrialised world has enjoyed itself. The people of Tuvalu are the ones who are suffering for our sins.
Can we use art as a way of investigating this perilous time? Can we change from our obsession with production values? Instead of the perfection of an Asprey's catalogue or the gloss of the desirable branded object, can we accept that art has to find its own raw and direct way of existing?
In the turbine hall at Tate Modern the light is strange, the air is thick, it is summer but cool. Adjusting to the orange, yellow light coming from a great disc in the ceiling, people are moving slowly. Some lie on the ground. I had a distant impression that there were bats hanging from the ceiling; they moved, black silhouettes scuttling. Looking carefully at the golden light source, I realised it was a half disc pressed against a mirrored ceiling. The mirror stretched the entire length of the hall and made the disc circular and complete: we were mirrored in the ceiling; these were not bats, they were us. Passing under the bridge, I lay down among others who were in the picture on the ceiling: we could change it. I waved to myself, someone waved back. I was in a picture that was unfolding. I was inside an artificial world that was unfolding through and with us as participators. This was Olafur Eliasson's Weather Project at Tate Modern in 2003.
I can think of many artists who can do this. Joseph Beuys and Robert Smithson, Richard Long and Walter De Maria showed the way of direct working with a site, making a place to be in ways that art had only pictured before. Jannis Kounellis, by investigating the materials of trade across Europe continually in smell, texture and arrangement, underscores the relation between man and matter. Simon Starling investigates the subtle inversions and interdependencies of energy and made structures. Following the lead of Lothar Baumgarten, Francis Alÿs investigates the tribal relations of the city's forest floor dwellers and celebrates them. The work of all these artists makes you feel more alive, more aware, both of the human predicament and of our material and elemental surroundings. There are more – many more – who are using their lives to balance thought, matter and feeling in a way that has never existed before.
Last summer I was in Scotland, in a wood just west of the Pentland Hills, and came upon a robust hut, its thick walls made of large lumps of the local dark igneous stone. It was slate roofed with a single door. Stepping in, down, and getting used to the low light entering from two unglazed windows from each gable end, I recognised that the floor was uneven and, in the half light, that I was actually standing on bedrock. This surface revealed the surface of our earth, unadorned, bruised, cracked, wedged open by roots, smoothed by ice, pitted by water, laid by sedimentation. This revealing of the underneath of things, the hidden support that lies beneath trees, homes, buildings, was both shocking and engaging. Here was a useless building in which we could encounter our dependency: a brilliant work by Andy Goldsworthy.
What I am asking for is a reassessment of what art is and how it works. I am questioning the linear trajectory of art history as part of western development, recognising that all art exists in the sense of a continuous present. We are now in a position to acknowledge that those stages in an evolutionary past that would, in previous times, have been thought of as primitive, are coexisting in this era and are not superseded – and actually the use of the fetish and the totem as reference points for a model of art are enormously useful.
How do I justify the work and life of my studio, with its 10,000 square feet of heated space and my 17 assistants? In the final analysis I do not have to justify what we do; this workshop is part of cultural evolution, part of an attempt to define my own belief systems and those of my colleagues. I can only hope that this is a creative community, a place where people can share skills, ideas and energy. I hope that it can be a fulcrum of change and exchange in which the idea of an inclusive culture can be born. In making art a specialisation and its exchange a matter of high monetary worth, we have lost sight of its central subject – the human being. In the art of the 20th century the Duchampian breakthrough was the examination of human labour and mass production in the "found object". I would like art to refocus on the lost subject.
But it is also my responsibility to make sure that I can deal with my own impacts, including the carbon footprint of the studio and all its activities. I have had the carbon footprint of the studio assessed and minimised my flights; the studio is insulated, and we will install solar panels on the roof (it is wide and relatively flat). We must recycle more of our materials and investigate the viability of a wind turbine. I must also decide whether carbon offsetting is a conscience salver or a real benefit.
Having done all of this, my greatest responsibility is to make work in the most direct way that I can, and interpret this time and place in a way that makes people more aware of themselves and it.
A collection of essays on art and climate change, Long Horizons, commissioned by the British Council, is available from www.juliesbicycle.com.
Posted in Antony Gormley, Art, Art and design, Climate change, Culture, Features, John Constable, The Guardian | Comments Off
February 10th, 2010 Skye Sherwin
Cool and emotionally stark, Norwegian AK Dolven's portraits of lives and landscapes nonetheless reveal extraordinary depths
AK Dolven's current exhibition is enough to make you shiver. In her scratchy 16mm film The Day the Sky Became My Ground (2009), a nude young woman is captured spinning around, with the Arctic sky behind her. But as the camera scans up and down, the image somehow turns upside down: the sky beneath her, she hangs from the precarious ice. Watch long enough and the image seems to abstract into fractured white landscape and pink skin. Another recent work, Ahead (2008) projects a high-definition static shot of a white mountainside on to a six-metre-high screen. Buried to their waists in snow, a small group of people slowly attempt to drag a young woman up the slope, on some inscrutable pilgrimage to the mountaintop.
One of Norway's best-known artists, Dolven divides her time between London and the Lofoten islands in the north of the country, where both of these works were shot. She settled in this scarcely inhabited landscape in 1975, in her early 20s, and though she has since lived all over Europe, Lofoten has been the place she consistently returns to. It wasn't until 1995 that she made her first work there. Her film installation, Saturday Night, depicting curtained windows behind which a house party is in full swing, was a challenge to cliched ideas about Norway's isolated, dour north.
Indeed, Dolven's camera is as often trained on urban life as it is on nature. A celebrated series of video portraits in 2001 featured her own interpretations of work by Edvard Munch, still influential for Norwegian artists. She reimagined Munch's famous painting, Puberty (1894–95), as a self-confident teenager, wearing nothing but headphones. Conversely, the assured composition of Munch's Self-Portrait With Cigarette (1895) is recreated in the image of a restless young woman, whose left hand toys with a remote control while a cigarette burns down in her right. In place of Munch's agony and ecstasy, Dolven's videos seem emotionally minimalistic. Yet, as with her paintings, they strip back representation in favour of bleached-out layers of paint. Her work is full of depth, revealing extraordinary moments in seemingly everyday scenes.
Why we like her: Dolven's 2005 film Amazon updates the myth of the hunter who cut off her own breast the better to shoot her bow. Her archer might have had a mastectomy, but her body positively gleams with strength and beauty.
Borderline: In 1989, Dolven lived in an apartment block directly on the border between West Berlin and the DDR. She recounts how border patrols watched her through binoculars as, one wintry day, she stood naked on her balcony with her film camera, taking self-portraits. (The out-of-focus, stylised image she filmed makes up part of a portrait in her current exhibition.)
Where can I see her? Dolven's solo exhibition is at London's Wilkinson Gallery, and her public art project, Untuned Bell, has just been unveiled in Oslo, Norway.
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February 10th, 2010 Skye Sherwin
From homeless shelters to Iraqi heirlooms, Rakowitz's political art tackles the cultural erasure brought about by poverty and war
Rather than stand on the sidelines, Michael Rakowitz takes a can-do approach to political art. An American of Iraqi-Jewish descent currently based in Chicago, his interest in the west's relationship with Iraq has consistently defined his work.
Often he has devised practical, creative ways to get discussion going at ground level: public art projects that directly involve people. Begun in 2004, a project he called Return saw Rakowitz relaunch in Brooklyn a version of his grandfather's import/export business; the local Iraqi community were invited to send items to Iraq for free, testing channels of communication at a time when there was almost no postal infrastructure. For another of Rakowitz's projects, Enemy Kitchen (2006), cooking classes became a way to broach cultural boundaries, teaching school kids family recipes with the help of his mother in workshops staged in California and New York.
Rakowitz's political conscience was awoken early on. As a teen growing up in Long Island, he glimpsed his family's homeland through CNN's green night-vision images of anonymous sites bombed in the first Gulf war. The country his grandparents had fled in the 1940s was now at war with the place they fled to. Rakowitz became conscious of a process of cultural dislocation and erasure that he would later explore in his work.
Political and art-political themes come together in one of his most impressive works to date, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (2007), an extraordinary attempt to tell the story behind the National Museum of Iraq, which was famously looted during the second Gulf war. This complex narrative explores the history of the ancient Babylonian Ishtar Gate, taken from Iraq to Berlin's Pergamon Museum in the early 20th century and rebuilt by Saddam Hussein (it later became the site most photographed by US soldiers), alongside the plight of the embattled former director of the museum, Dr Donny George. Most astonishingly, it sought to recreate 7,000 missing objects – friezes, intricate ceramics and votive statues – with materials fashioned from Arab newspapers and food packaging sourced from Middle Eastern neighbourhoods in the US.
Why we like him: For paraSITE, begun in 1998 when Rakowitz was still studying, which demonstrates his inventively hands-on approach to social issues. Following discussions with local homeless people, he developed custom-built inflatable shelters, which can be heated via the air vents of existing buildings. Rakowitz has since recreated these nomadic dwellings, somewhat like silvery space-age tents, for homeless people in Massachusetts, New York City and even Ljubljana in Slovenia.
Truth and fiction: The artist found the inspiration for his current show, linking science-fiction fantasies and the art of war, on eBay. An American soldier was auctioning what looked like a helmet out of a Star Wars film, actually part of the uniform of Saddam Hussein's paramilitary group as designed by his son Uday, a long-time fan of the movie.
Where can I see him? The Worst Condition Is to Pass Under a Sword Which Is Not One's Own is at Tate Modern until 3 May 2010.
• This article was amended on Monday 8 February. The second sentence of the penultimate paragraph stated that Saddam Hussein's paramilitary helmets were modelled on those of Star Wars stormtroopers, when in fact they were inspired by the headgear of Darth Vadar himself.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Exhibitions, Features, guardian.co.uk, Installation, Sculpture | Comments Off
February 10th, 2010 William Feaver
When he was found hanged in his shed at the age of 46 – or was it 44? – Arshile Gorky, a master or reinvention, was perhaps the greatest painter in America. His death left the field open for his rival Jackson Pollock, says William Feaver
Jackson Pollock was carrying on one night at Jack the Oysterman's fish restaurant on Eighth Street, blasting the lot of them, the art crowd partying there after Willem de Kooning's first solo show. But who to yell at particularly? Who needed harpooning most?
Spotting Gorky – Arshile Gorky – standing to one side, sharpening a pencil, he lunged across ("Arshile": what kind of name was that?) and let him know, right between the eyes, just what he thought of him and his paintings. Gorky barely blinked, just went on shaving his pencil, each stroke of the penknife ending closer to Pollock's straining throat as he thought what to say. Then it came. "Pardon me, Mr Pollock," he said, looking down at him. "You and I are different kinds of artist."
In the mythology of the New York school and the advent of abstract expressionism this was a freeze-frame moment. Pollock the contender was sticking it to Gorky who, being a generation older, an immigrant of obscured origins, represented the derivative, the unassimilated, the surrealistic and indeed, it could be sworn, the doggone un-American. Someone told Pollock to shut up and he went off, muttering. But the situation remained: native growth versus foreign taint. And as it happened, the one-man debut of Gorky's friend the Dutchman De Kooning, celebrated that April evening in 1948, was to be eclipsed if not outclassed the following year when a still scowling Pollock posed for Life magazine in front of the tumbleweed whorls of Summertime (1948) and was awarded the headline: "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" By then Gorky had been dead for a little over a year.
He was found hanged in a shed, leaving a note that read "Goodby all my loved" or, some said, "Goodbye My Loveds". His wife Mougouch had left him, taking the children; he had lost some paintings in a studio fire; he had cancer, he had had a colostomy and he had recently broken his neck in a car accident.
Gorky, dead at 46 (or maybe he was only 44: dates vary), died at the time when he stood as good a chance as any of being singled out as the greatest living painter in the land. His timing was lousy, from a career angle, dropping out as he did just when champions were needed to implement the idea of world-beating American painting falling into line with the cold-war vision of America's brave new free-world hegemony. Having spent two decades catching on to the coat-tails of style he had developed a tentative yet expansive originality. Certainly, had he survived his despair, he would have rated higher among the founding fathers of later 20th-century American art.
As it was, the basic difference between Gorky and Pollock was a difference of direction. Pollock had headed east from Wyoming through the dustclouds of US regionalism in the wake of that vastly gung-ho mural painter Thomas Hart Benton; Gorky, the Armenian immigrant, had sailed the ocean to New York, reinventing himself along the way: listed in the Museum of Modern Art's 15th anniversary exhibition Art in Progress, 1944, as "American, born Tiflis, Russia, 1904", his was, in all but essentials, an assumed identity.
He told people he was a nephew (or cousin) of Maxim Gorky, unaware presumably that the Russian Gorky had been born Alexei Maksimovich Peshkov. He himself was Vosdanig Adoian, born, most likely, not in 1904 (or 1905 as he also made out) but in 1902, and not in Tiflis nor in Kazan, or Gorki or Nizhni Novgorod, but in Khorkom, a village on Lake Van near the eastern border of Ottoman Turkey. His father had emigrated to the United States in 1908, leaving wife and children who in 1915 fled from the Turks to Yerevan in Russian Armenia. His mother died of starvation in 1919. In 1920, after a nine-month journey to Ellis Island by way of Athens and Constantinople, Vosdanig and his sister Vartoosh lived with their father, briefly. Within a year he moved on, began taking art lessons and took to calling himself Arshile Gorky.
Cultural handholds for someone suddenly landed from afar in Providence, Rhode Island, were not easy to grasp. Decades later Clement Greenberg, the pundit-in-chief of the 50s American art ascendency, talked about "the provincialism that had been American art's historic fate"; that being so, and having been dealt by fate a doubly provincial hand, Gorky resolved to identify not with Armenia, nor America in isolation, but with European influences. After an initial Sargent phase and a dash or two of impressionism he moved on to the moderns. Having come so recently from Over There, he had little difficulty in concocting an impressive provenance, letting it be known that, being "Russian", he had studied under Kandinsky and, progressive that he was, had trained widely within the School of Paris. Soon he was teaching.
Mark Rothko, a student of his at the New School of Design in Boston, found him bossy but not implausible given what seemed to be a pretty good working knowledge of, particularly, Cézanne and Picasso. That he painted apples and pears à la Cézanne and terracotta-coloured women in Picasso's statuesque style of the early 20s, was to his credit. You could learn so much from magazine reproductions. Having been "with Cézanne", he said in 1932, "now naturally I am with Picasso". By then he was deep into painting a series of double portraits, based on a photograph, showing his boyhood self standing beside the seated figure of his mother, paintings demonstrating not so much a coming to terms with tragedy as an iconic reconciliation of where he had come from with what he was now making of himself.
In 1929 Gorky got to know De Kooning, his almost exact contemporary (assuming he was born in 1904), and they shared a studio for a while. His Portrait of Master Bill, in which the young painter sits back in "the creation chamber", as he called it, with an air of genial but byzantine detachment, sealed the association. "He knew lots more about painting and art," De Kooning recalled. "He had an uncanny instinct for all art . . . an extraordinary gift for hitting the nail on the head. We became very good friends." Both were attuned to cubism in all its varieties, but Gorky was the one to urge caution. When De Kooning tried for novelty Gorky would say, reprovingly, "very original". Gorky's idea was to help oneself, do likewise and pass it on. That way provincialism could be infiltrated. Similarly, when opportunities arose to earn a little working for the government-funded Public Works of Art Project, he talked of opening "new vistas" to people at large. His mural for Newark Airport (Administration Building), unveiled in 1937, was a hand across the ocean to his then exemplar Fernand Léger, a profusion of flattened tubes and vents.
Two years later, in May 1939, Gorky became a US citizen. In attitude however he remained resolutely internationalist. He spoke up for Picasso's Guernica when it was exhibited in New York that September and was foremost among the minority of artists who welcomed to New York fellow artists evading the war in Europe. Of these the surrealists were most resented. De Kooning, for one, objected to their cliques and airs and fashionability. Gorky, though, was charmed, especially by Roberto Matta, whose biomorphic vistas, busy with linear stuff shooting off in all directions, triggered a fresh and, at times, Disneyish spookiness in his work. This earned him the approval of André Breton, the self-ordained pope of surrealism, who saw in Gorky a well-versed recruit to the ranks of those who kept faith with the gospel of ambiguity in all things, not least rhetorical ambiguity. As he said, writing his equivalent of a character reference, "The marvels of the earth a hundred feet high, the marvels of the sea a hundred feet deep, have for their witness only the wild eye that when in need of colours refers simply to the rainbow."
Hitting the big time with Breton, Gorky was in his element, relating back to his sources and origins, imaginary or otherwise, loosening up, marrying myth and Connecticut. His "Garden in Sochi" series, he explained, harked back all the way to "The Garden of Wish Fulfillment and often I had seen my mother and other village women opening their bosoms and taking their soft and dependable breasts in their hands to rub them on the rock. Above all this stood an enormous tree all bleached under the sun the rain the cold and deprived of leaves. This was the Holy Tree. I myself did not know that this tree was holy but I had witnessed many people whoever did pass by that would voluntarily strip off their clothes and attach this to the tree." Besides spending weeks upstate, drawing vegetation, he began teaching camouflage at the Grand Central School of Art. It was perfect for him: the idea of an art of deception and concealment, forms dissolved or overlaid with perplexities for a greater good.
Even here there was deliberation. In Waterfall, 1943, an arrow sported by a figure straight out of Miró points downwards at an array of flows and obstructions, landscape turning sour and collapsing into gloriously unkempt profusion. "Opposed to this vision of destruction is the vision of creation," he wrote, echoing Victor Hugo's "appearances dissolve and re-form", the novelist's recipe for inky doodling that now translated into the surrealist fad of automatic writing.
"Gorky was a quite well known but rather derivative painter for 15 years before he found himself in about 1943," wrote Alfred Barr, founder-director of the Museum of Modern Art. That small waterfall he found on the Housatonic River, New Milford, Connnecticut, and the flowers and insects he came upon at Crooked Run Farm, Virginia, fed Gorky's appetite for animation within ground cover. Suddenly he flourished. But still he worked as though retracing his steps. Nothing was as spontaneous as he made it seem. As Cy Twombly, one of his most distinguished successors, observed, "Gorky would copy a drawing into a painting." Always, whatever the scale, however colourful the polymorphic hubbub in a painting might be, he had been there before with his sharp pencil, marking the score.
"As he is in no sense a draughtsman, they must be appraised as doodlings for psychological rather than formal interest," said Artnews, in March 1947. "The visitor will be fascinated or bored in proportion to what these very personal forms signify to him." Breton, for one, was in no doubt. The Liver Is the Cock's Comb, he said, was "one of the most important paintings made in America". Exhibited in the surrealists' swansong show (for the time being) in Paris, at the Galerie Maeght in 1947, it was, and remains, a wonderful mishmash of diverse origins.
Four years after the end in the shed in Sherman, Connecticut, by which time De Kooning, Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell and, most famously, Pollock were encountering success to an unprecedented degree, Art Digest ran an article: "Gorky: Was He Tops or Second Rate?" That's not the question. Where Pollock, especially, changed the game, drizzling and hurling his liquids, attacking the painting from all sides, stooping over its automatic complexities then hauling it off the floor to grace a wall, to me Gorky was more a Walt Whitmanesque figure, more the "Noiseless Patient Spider" that "launch'd forth filament, filament, filament out of itself", more the spinner of dreams, stood to one side: "Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them."
"I am glad that it is about impossible to get away from his powerful influence," De Kooning wrote in loyal reproof to the editor of Artnews a few months after Gorky died. "As long as I keep it with myself I'll be doing all right. Sweet Arshile, bless your dear heart."
Posted in Arshile Gorky, Art, Art and design, Culture, Features, Painting, The Guardian | Comments Off
February 8th, 2010 William Feaver
When he was found hanged in his shed at the age of 46 – or was it 44? – Arshile Gorky, a master or reinvention, was perhaps the greatest painter in America. His death left the field open for his rival Jackson Pollock, says William Feaver
Jackson Pollock was carrying on one night at Jack the Oysterman's fish restaurant on Eighth Street, blasting the lot of them, the art crowd partying there after Willem de Kooning's first solo show. But who to yell at particularly? Who needed harpooning most?
Spotting Gorky – Arshile Gorky – standing to one side, sharpening a pencil, he lunged across ("Arshile": what kind of name was that?) and let him know, right between the eyes, just what he thought of him and his paintings. Gorky barely blinked, just went on shaving his pencil, each stroke of the penknife ending closer to Pollock's straining throat as he thought what to say. Then it came. "Pardon me, Mr Pollock," he said, looking down at him. "You and I are different kinds of artist."
In the mythology of the New York school and the advent of abstract expressionism this was a freeze-frame moment. Pollock the contender was sticking it to Gorky who, being a generation older, an immigrant of obscured origins, represented the derivative, the unassimilated, the surrealistic and indeed, it could be sworn, the doggone un-American. Someone told Pollock to shut up and he went off, muttering. But the situation remained: native growth versus foreign taint. And as it happened, the one-man debut of Gorky's friend the Dutchman De Kooning, celebrated that April evening in 1948, was to be eclipsed if not outclassed the following year when a still scowling Pollock posed for Life magazine in front of the tumbleweed whorls of Summertime (1948) and was awarded the headline: "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" By then Gorky had been dead for a little over a year.
He was found hanged in a shed, leaving a note that read "Goodby all my loved" or, some said, "Goodbye My Loveds". His wife Mougouch had left him, taking the children; he had lost some paintings in a studio fire; he had cancer, he had had a colostomy and he had recently broken his neck in a car accident.
Gorky, dead at 46 (or maybe he was only 44: dates vary), died at the time when he stood as good a chance as any of being singled out as the greatest living painter in the land. His timing was lousy, from a career angle, dropping out as he did just when champions were needed to implement the idea of world-beating American painting falling into line with the cold-war vision of America's brave new free-world hegemony. Having spent two decades catching on to the coat-tails of style he had developed a tentative yet expansive originality. Certainly, had he survived his despair, he would have rated higher among the founding fathers of later 20th-century American art.
As it was, the basic difference between Gorky and Pollock was a difference of direction. Pollock had headed east from Wyoming through the dustclouds of US regionalism in the wake of that vastly gung-ho mural painter Thomas Hart Benton; Gorky, the Armenian immigrant, had sailed the ocean to New York, reinventing himself along the way: listed in the Museum of Modern Art's 15th anniversary exhibition Art in Progress, 1944, as "American, born Tiflis, Russia, 1904", his was, in all but essentials, an assumed identity.
He told people he was a nephew (or cousin) of Maxim Gorky, unaware presumably that the Russian Gorky had been born Alexei Maksimovich Peshkov. He himself was Vosdanig Adoian, born, most likely, not in 1904 (or 1905 as he also made out) but in 1902, and not in Tiflis nor in Kazan, or Gorki or Nizhni Novgorod, but in Khorkom, a village on Lake Van near the eastern border of Ottoman Turkey. His father had emigrated to the United States in 1908, leaving wife and children who in 1915 fled from the Turks to Yerevan in Russian Armenia. His mother died of starvation in 1919. In 1920, after a nine-month journey to Ellis Island by way of Athens and Constantinople, Vosdanig and his sister Vartoosh lived with their father, briefly. Within a year he moved on, began taking art lessons and took to calling himself Arshile Gorky.
Cultural handholds for someone suddenly landed from afar in Providence, Rhode Island, were not easy to grasp. Decades later Clement Greenberg, the pundit-in-chief of the 50s American art ascendency, talked about "the provincialism that had been American art's historic fate"; that being so, and having been dealt by fate a doubly provincial hand, Gorky resolved to identify not with Armenia, nor America in isolation, but with European influences. After an initial Sargent phase and a dash or two of impressionism he moved on to the moderns. Having come so recently from Over There, he had little difficulty in concocting an impressive provenance, letting it be known that, being "Russian", he had studied under Kandinsky and, progressive that he was, had trained widely within the School of Paris. Soon he was teaching.
Mark Rothko, a student of his at the New School of Design in Boston, found him bossy but not implausible given what seemed to be a pretty good working knowledge of, particularly, Cézanne and Picasso. That he painted apples and pears à la Cézanne and terracotta-coloured women in Picasso's statuesque style of the early 20s, was to his credit. You could learn so much from magazine reproductions. Having been "with Cézanne", he said in 1932, "now naturally I am with Picasso". By then he was deep into painting a series of double portraits, based on a photograph, showing his boyhood self standing beside the seated figure of his mother, paintings demonstrating not so much a coming to terms with tragedy as an iconic reconciliation of where he had come from with what he was now making of himself.
In 1929 Gorky got to know De Kooning, his almost exact contemporary (assuming he was born in 1904), and they shared a studio for a while. His Portrait of Master Bill, in which the young painter sits back in "the creation chamber", as he called it, with an air of genial but byzantine detachment, sealed the association. "He knew lots more about painting and art," De Kooning recalled. "He had an uncanny instinct for all art . . . an extraordinary gift for hitting the nail on the head. We became very good friends." Both were attuned to cubism in all its varieties, but Gorky was the one to urge caution. When De Kooning tried for novelty Gorky would say, reprovingly, "very original". Gorky's idea was to help oneself, do likewise and pass it on. That way provincialism could be infiltrated. Similarly, when opportunities arose to earn a little working for the government-funded Public Works of Art Project, he talked of opening "new vistas" to people at large. His mural for Newark Airport (Administration Building), unveiled in 1937, was a hand across the ocean to his then exemplar Fernand Léger, a profusion of flattened tubes and vents.
Two years later, in May 1939, Gorky became a US citizen. In attitude however he remained resolutely internationalist. He spoke up for Picasso's Guernica when it was exhibited in New York that September and was foremost among the minority of artists who welcomed to New York fellow artists evading the war in Europe. Of these the surrealists were most resented. De Kooning, for one, objected to their cliques and airs and fashionability. Gorky, though, was charmed, especially by Roberto Matta, whose biomorphic vistas, busy with linear stuff shooting off in all directions, triggered a fresh and, at times, Disneyish spookiness in his work. This earned him the approval of André Breton, the self-ordained pope of surrealism, who saw in Gorky a well-versed recruit to the ranks of those who kept faith with the gospel of ambiguity in all things, not least rhetorical ambiguity. As he said, writing his equivalent of a character reference, "The marvels of the earth a hundred feet high, the marvels of the sea a hundred feet deep, have for their witness only the wild eye that when in need of colours refers simply to the rainbow."
Hitting the big time with Breton, Gorky was in his element, relating back to his sources and origins, imaginary or otherwise, loosening up, marrying myth and Connecticut. His "Garden in Sochi" series, he explained, harked back all the way to "The Garden of Wish Fulfillment and often I had seen my mother and other village women opening their bosoms and taking their soft and dependable breasts in their hands to rub them on the rock. Above all this stood an enormous tree all bleached under the sun the rain the cold and deprived of leaves. This was the Holy Tree. I myself did not know that this tree was holy but I had witnessed many people whoever did pass by that would voluntarily strip off their clothes and attach this to the tree." Besides spending weeks upstate, drawing vegetation, he began teaching camouflage at the Grand Central School of Art. It was perfect for him: the idea of an art of deception and concealment, forms dissolved or overlaid with perplexities for a greater good.
Even here there was deliberation. In Waterfall, 1943, an arrow sported by a figure straight out of Miró points downwards at an array of flows and obstructions, landscape turning sour and collapsing into gloriously unkempt profusion. "Opposed to this vision of destruction is the vision of creation," he wrote, echoing Victor Hugo's "appearances dissolve and re-form", the novelist's recipe for inky doodling that now translated into the surrealist fad of automatic writing.
"Gorky was a quite well known but rather derivative painter for 15 years before he found himself in about 1943," wrote Alfred Barr, founder-director of the Museum of Modern Art. That small waterfall he found on the Housatonic River, New Milford, Connnecticut, and the flowers and insects he came upon at Crooked Run Farm, Virginia, fed Gorky's appetite for animation within ground cover. Suddenly he flourished. But still he worked as though retracing his steps. Nothing was as spontaneous as he made it seem. As Cy Twombly, one of his most distinguished successors, observed, "Gorky would copy a drawing into a painting." Always, whatever the scale, however colourful the polymorphic hubbub in a painting might be, he had been there before with his sharp pencil, marking the score.
"As he is in no sense a draughtsman, they must be appraised as doodlings for psychological rather than formal interest," said Artnews, in March 1947. "The visitor will be fascinated or bored in proportion to what these very personal forms signify to him." Breton, for one, was in no doubt. The Liver Is the Cock's Comb, he said, was "one of the most important paintings made in America". Exhibited in the surrealists' swansong show (for the time being) in Paris, at the Galerie Maeght in 1947, it was, and remains, a wonderful mishmash of diverse origins.
Four years after the end in the shed in Sherman, Connecticut, by which time De Kooning, Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell and, most famously, Pollock were encountering success to an unprecedented degree, Art Digest ran an article: "Gorky: Was He Tops or Second Rate?" That's not the question. Where Pollock, especially, changed the game, drizzling and hurling his liquids, attacking the painting from all sides, stooping over its automatic complexities then hauling it off the floor to grace a wall, to me Gorky was more a Walt Whitmanesque figure, more the "Noiseless Patient Spider" that "launch'd forth filament, filament, filament out of itself", more the spinner of dreams, stood to one side: "Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them."
"I am glad that it is about impossible to get away from his powerful influence," De Kooning wrote in loyal reproof to the editor of Artnews a few months after Gorky died. "As long as I keep it with myself I'll be doing all right. Sweet Arshile, bless your dear heart."
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective is at Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1, from February 10 to May 3. Box office: 020 7887 8888. www.tate.org.uk/modern
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Features, Painting, The Guardian | Comments Off
February 8th, 2010 Laura Cumming
Tate Liverpool
There is a work of such coruscating brilliance in this show that it overshadows most of the rest. No wonder it is saved until last. In a darkened gallery, preceded by a warning against explicit sexual content, what appears to be a silent movie unfolds to a score of speakeasy blues except that instead of actors there are shadow puppets performing in mordant black and white.
The film opens with a ship riding stormy waters from which bound slaves are being thrown. They drift to a desert island that turns into a gigantic head, swallowing and disgorging them in the American south. There, a male slave is forced – or is he? – into sexual union with a white man, the resulting baby tossed into the cotton fields by a midwife, where it grows into a sunflower and eventually a lynching tree. In between are many tragicomic scenes, each as complex as a Goya etching. Horror and sorrow are held in equal tension, violence intercut with tenderness throughout.
8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E Walker (2005) is controversial in America. Walker has been condemned for exploiting racial stereotypes, pandering to the white art world, even for marrying a white man. It is easy to see why her versions of history might offend because they are never clear-cut. Her marvellous graphic precision is used instead to spear the mind with images of the world turned upside down and inside out; her narratives have more in common with Flannery O'Connor than Uncle Tom's Cabin.
So Walker is definitely in the right room of this show, the one devoted to subversive originality. Though the curators have called it "From Post-Modern to Post-Black: Appropriation, Black Humour and Double Negatives" instead. From which you may deduce all you need to know about their unremitting academicism and dead-handed approach to art.
The subject of this chaotic, badly displayed but undeniably fascinating show is, in any case, ideas more than art, namely those of the eminent intellectual Paul Gilroy in his 1993 book The Black Atlantic. Or at least the central idea of the Atlantic as a kind of continent in negative, a place where cultures perpetually crisscross so that there is no dominant national tradition either in Europe or America; that black culture only means something to black people being as insidious an idea as that of European culture only having meaning for whites.
This is where modernist art comes in on cue: it's what cubism famously draws from African sculpture and, conversely, what African-Americans get from cubism. It's the surrealists with their ethnographic photos; it's Josephine Baker and art deco; it's the Guyanese-born Frank Bowling reprising Barnett Newman in the colours of the Rastafarian flag.
It is also, alas, paintings such as Edward Burra's Harlem and Palmer Hayden's Midsummer Night in Harlem, hung next to each other to show a painful convergence: the white Englishman and the black American producing equally awful variations on "primitivist" art.
Bowling excepted, this only takes the show as far as the 1930s. Thereafter, as it seems to me, Gilroy's ideas are harder to illustrate through art than music or writing. There are obvious two-ways: Lorna Simpson's Photo Booth of African-Americans which gets its commemorative aesthetic from Christian Boltanski; Glenn Ligon's stencilling of one of Richard Pryor's deadly race gags in the manner of a Richard Prince joke painting (with an overlay of Warhol gold). Would Prince ever dare?
But the theme peters out as the show goes in too many different directions at once. Naturally, it must include protest art (though there are noticeably few highpoints here other than David Hammons's 1969 Admissions Office, a glass door with a black face and hands pressed desperately against it like the traces of a scorched man).
And the curators don't want to leave out body art, gender art, identity art and so on, which introduces a whole slew of polemical work, some of which has no obvious place in this show. Why is the Cuban Ana Mendieta extensively represented when her ritualised performances with blood, earth and water surely speak exclusively to feminism when much more relevant artists such as African-Americans Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Kalup Linzy or Martin Puryear are not here at all?
In the opening galleries, Afro Modern presents art in the culture of jazz, blues, du Bois and Baldwin. But this approach, so conducive to Gilroy's ideas, pretty soon fades away to expose the dry box-ticking of this show. There is no more point in showing Chris Ofili's Double Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars (1997) without referring to its obvious soundtrack in rap, for instance, than in propping it next to a Pan-African version of the stars and stripes in red, black and green. Displayed like this, they are just one variety of black art after another.
No show that includes works by Jacob Lawrence or the inspired collagist Romare Bearden can truly lack power. If you have never seen Bearden's strange and compelling images, made of scraps of high and low art, old masters and ads, African masks and cartoons, then Afro Modern is ultimately worth the visit. Bearden orchestrates his fragments like a street scene through which the eye moves, taking it all in on the go. His vision of country folk by a railroad watching for a train to come – and then go – is bleakly beautiful: catching the spectacle of life even as it departs.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Exhibitions, Features, Reviews, Tate Liverpool, The Observer | Comments Off
February 7th, 2010 Laura Cumming
Tate Liverpool
There is a work of such coruscating brilliance in this show that it overshadows most of the rest. No wonder it is saved until last. In a darkened gallery, preceded by a warning against explicit sexual content, what appears to be a silent movie unfolds to a score of speakeasy blues except that instead of actors there are shadow puppets performing in mordant black and white.
The film opens with a ship riding stormy waters from which bound slaves are being thrown. They drift to a desert island that turns into a gigantic head, swallowing and disgorging them in the American south. There, a male slave is forced – or is he? – into sexual union with a white man, the resulting baby tossed into the cotton fields by a midwife, where it grows into a sunflower and eventually a lynching tree. In between are many tragicomic scenes, each as complex as a Goya etching. Horror and sorrow are held in equal tension, violence intercut with tenderness throughout.
8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E Walker (2005) is controversial in America. Walker has been condemned for exploiting racial stereotypes, pandering to the white art world, even for marrying a white man. It is easy to see why her versions of history might offend because they are never clear-cut. Her marvellous graphic precision is used instead to spear the mind with images of the world turned upside down and inside out; her narratives have more in common with Flannery O'Connor than Uncle Tom's Cabin.
So Walker is definitely in the right room of this show, the one devoted to subversive originality. Though the curators have called it "From Post-Modern to Post-Black: Appropriation, Black Humour and Double Negatives" instead. From which you may deduce all you need to know about their unremitting academicism and dead-handed approach to art.
The subject of this chaotic, badly displayed but undeniably fascinating show is, in any case, ideas more than art, namely those of the eminent intellectual Paul Gilroy in his 1993 book The Black Atlantic. Or at least the central idea of the Atlantic as a kind of continent in negative, a place where cultures perpetually crisscross so that there is no dominant national tradition either in Europe or America; that black culture only means something to black people being as insidious an idea as that of European culture only having meaning for whites.
This is where modernist art comes in on cue: it's what cubism famously draws from African sculpture and, conversely, what African-Americans get from cubism. It's the surrealists with their ethnographic photos; it's Josephine Baker and art deco; it's the Guyanese-born Frank Bowling reprising Barnett Newman in the colours of the Rastafarian flag.
It is also, alas, paintings such as Edward Burra's Harlem and Palmer Hayden's Midsummer Night in Harlem, hung next to each other to show a painful convergence: the white Englishman and the black American producing equally awful variations on "primitivist" art.
Bowling excepted, this only takes the show as far as the 1930s. Thereafter, as it seems to me, Gilroy's ideas are harder to illustrate through art than music or writing. There are obvious two-ways: Lorna Simpson's Photo Booth of African-Americans which gets its commemorative aesthetic from Christian Boltanski; Glenn Ligon's stencilling of one of Richard Pryor's deadly race gags in the manner of a Richard Prince joke painting (with an overlay of Warhol gold). Would Prince ever dare?
But the theme peters out as the show goes in too many different directions at once. Naturally, it must include protest art (though there are noticeably few highpoints here other than David Hammons's 1969 Admissions Office, a glass door with a black face and hands pressed desperately against it like the traces of a scorched man).
And the curators don't want to leave out body art, gender art, identity art and so on, which introduces a whole slew of polemical work, some of which has no obvious place in this show. Why is the Cuban Ana Mendieta extensively represented when her ritualised performances with blood, earth and water surely speak exclusively to feminism when much more relevant artists such as African-Americans Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Kalup Linzy or Martin Puryear are not here at all?
In the opening galleries, Afro Modern presents art in the culture of jazz, blues, du Bois and Baldwin. But this approach, so conducive to Gilroy's ideas, pretty soon fades away to expose the dry box-ticking of this show. There is no more point in showing Chris Ofili's Double Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars (1997) without referring to its obvious soundtrack in rap, for instance, than in propping it next to a Pan-African version of the stars and stripes in red, black and green. Displayed like this, they are just one variety of black art after another.
No show that includes works by Jacob Lawrence or the inspired collagist Romare Bearden can truly lack power. If you have never seen Bearden's strange and compelling images, made of scraps of high and low art, old masters and ads, African masks and cartoons, then Afro Modern is ultimately worth the visit. Bearden orchestrates his fragments like a street scene through which the eye moves, taking it all in on the go. His vision of country folk by a railroad watching for a train to come – and then go – is bleakly beautiful: catching the spectacle of life even as it departs.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Exhibitions, Features, Reviews, Tate Liverpool, The Observer | Comments Off
February 6th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
Joanna Carey talks to Inga Moore about her determination to illustrate a classic of children's literature
New children's books come and go like the wind these days, but the old classics, all safely out of copyright, get wheeled out year after year. Abridged, reillustrated and adapted for stage, screen and wallpaper, they tend to be familiar even to those who have never read them.
When The Wind in the Willows was first published in 1908, it came with nothing more than a frontispiece by Graham Roberts. Since then almost 50 artists have illustrated it, EH Shepard and Arthur Rackham being the best known. More recent names include Michael Foreman, Patrick Benson and John Burningham – so what is it about the book that continues to inspire?
Inga Moore's glorious interpretation of Kenneth Grahame's masterpiece (with almost 100 illustrations) has now sold more than a million copies worldwide. Was it really a "long-harboured ambition", as it says on the dust jacket? "Not exactly," she says, almost guiltily. "I'd been in the pub with an old boyfriend and he'd suggested it, quite out of the blue. I was rather shocked. I might have thought about it, but only as an impossible dream. Shepard's are the definitive illustrations."
Gradually she was seduced by the idea. She'd read the book first as a teenager in Australia, and loved it for its celebration of kindness and companionship. She was intrigued by the idea of illustrating – and abridging – it, and making it accessible to a younger readership. But above all, it was the very "Englishness" of it that appealed. And the countryside: "I felt I could go a little further than Shepard, and show more of that whole world the characters inhabit."
Born in Sussex but brought up in Australia from the age of eight, Moore feels a powerful attachment to the English countryside. Her school in Adelaide had an impressive library where all the children's books (mostly British) were uniformly leather bound. At 14 her favourite was Boswell's account of Dr Johnson's travels in the Hebrides.
An imaginative, somewhat subversive child, she drew constantly, illustrating not just her own stories but also her schoolbooks, her homework, tests and exam papers. "If you'd only stop all this silly drawing," said the Latin teacher, "you might one day amount to something." She did stop – "for a long time" – and is still resentful about that teacher's attitude. She regrets not going to art school, and endured "one boring job after another" before eventually getting back to the drawing board. Supporting herself making maps for a groundwater company, she embarked on a series of landscapes and happily rediscovered her passion for drawing.
Another turning point was Raymond Briggs's book Father Christmas (1973). "It was uplifting, life-enhancing, and I realised that making a picture book was one of the finest things one could aspire to." She got started as an illustrator and in the early 80s, inspired by childhood memories, returned to England.
Elegant and composed, Moore talks with a quiet, slightly guarded intensity. She found London "gritty and heavy", but Hampstead was "manageable", and she continued to make picture books. But then came the economic downturn. With a new sense of urgency she completed her award-winning Six Dinner Sid (1991), about a greedy black cat, in just six months.
But when her flat was repossessed, she decided to leave London, and found a rambling, upstairs apartment in a crumbling Palladian pile in rural Gloucestershire. And that's where we meet, buzzards wheeling overhead as Moore shows me round. "I knew immediately that with this position, the quality of the light in the studio and the abundance of wildlife, it was the perfect place to live and work on The Wind in the Willows," she says. "I could never have done it in London."
Like most classics from pre-television years, The Wind in the Willows can be daunting for many children, but Moore's pictures generously illuminate that forest of words at every opening. For many illustrators today "less is more", but she is no minimalist and her illustrations are "wall to wall". With its wit, charm and finesse, and its atmospheric use of colour, her work rewards endless exploration.
For each spread she photocopies her original drawings, then works on them with a mixture of pencil, ink, watercolour, crayon, pastel, even oil paint – "anything that works". With intricate textural variations and masses of engrossing detail, she achieves a realism that is unusual today, and those warm, underground kitchens have never been more invitingly portrayed. Landscape painting holds a particular fascination for Moore, and she has reproductions of impressionist paintings pinned up all over the place. "I'm hoping some of the genius will rub off on me."
She has an unusual ability to change her style to suit her feelings about each book. "It's useful, yes," she says, adding ruefully, "but I can't help thinking that's rather a serious fault."
The landscapes in this book reflect the nearby Windrush valley, capturing not just the infinite tonal variety in the hills but also the grace and individuality of the trees and the gentle luminosity of the river. She emphasises the hilly nature of the countryside by creating a "composite" photomontage and then, in the finished artwork, making it "more extreme", so you can explore the exaggerated "helter-skelter" effect in a satisfying way.
She draws animals with a confidence born of empathy. "If I want to draw a buzzard," she explains, "I just imagine myself up there, and I can feel myself flying. I simply put myself in the body of whatever creature I'm trying to draw – I used to think everyone did that."
This natural empathy is the key to her anthropomorphic wizardry. Like Beatrix Potter, she has an easy understanding of anatomy which allows her to give the animals human characteristics (and clothes) without sentimentalising or ridiculing them (except for Toad who, although always sensitively drawn, is never knowingly underplayed). Eloquent in stance and gesture, the animals express themselves physically as well as they do verbally.
Humour is ever-present – often a subtle humour, as in the wittily observed drawings of shoes. When creatures of impossibly disparate sizes meet on the page, there can be logistical problems, but with canny draughtsmanship and subtle manipulation of scale Moore makes it seem perfectly normal for a mole effortlessly to restrain a leaping horse. This suspension of disbelief is achieved with the same seamless blend of fantasy and reality that is central to Grahame's writing.
After The Wind in the Willows it made sense to use the same location for another classic – Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1911 novel The Secret Garden. I was spellbound by this book as a child, and always lingered over Charles Robinson's colour plates. Looking at that old book now I'm astonished to see that it had only nine illustrations. Moore has provided more than 100.
Again the old house provides inspiration with a real secret garden of its own, just like the one in the story which becomes a sanctuary for Mary, a lonely, unwanted orphan, and her sickly cousin Colin. Thanks to the garden, this story of loss, loneliness and ill-health soon becomes one of physical and spiritual regeneration.
Moore's great strength here is in her magical use of garden imagery. We see trees pruned, topiarised, espaliered and clipped to within an inch of their lives, while in the secret garden plants are left to their own devices, roses ramble unchecked, creepers run riot and wildlife flourishes. With high walls and occasional glimpses of the open moor, these illustrations are open to all kinds of imaginative interpretation.
But having spent over three years working on The Wind in the Willows, Moore hasn't stopped thinking about Rat, Mole and friends, and she frequently finds herself writing about them, with the result that she has now completed four chapters of a sequel. Locked away in a wooden trunk, it's "the next big thing on the horizon".
Posted in Art, Art and design, Books, Children and teenagers, Culture, Design, Features, The Guardian | Comments Off
February 5th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
There's more to Japanese art than calligraphy. Robin Powell uncovers the capital's edgiest contemporary culture – from bathhouse paintings to an exhibition in a public loo
Like any world-class capital, Tokyo has its fair share of major galleries. The largest national and private collections, such as the National Museum of Modern Art or the Mori Art Museum, are up there with the best. But plenty of smaller Japanese gallerists, collectors and artists also manage to find a foothold here. From venerable buildings that have survived earthquakes and bombings to the boutique art houses where every inch of wall is a potential display space, Tokyo is a haven for art lovers in search of something a little different. So why not take an improvised tour of the city's lesser-known galleries, to find out what makes them tick? And how do they manage to survive in a crowded city where space is the most precious commodity of all?
I start my tour, perhaps surprisingly, slap-bang in the middle of the city's main shopping area, the Ginza district. But the sober, brown-brick structure I'm standing in front of couldn't be more different from the neon-clad consumer paradise just a stone's throw away. This is the Okuno building, constructed in 1932, one of the first sets of flats in the city to have mod cons such as a lift and telephones. It's now a rabbit warren for Tokyo's art scene, hosting everything from established galleries and antique dealers to first-time solo displays and design firms. No fewer than 20 galleries are based here – many in what were once small bedrooms, and even, in one case, a former communal bathroom in the basement. This last is occupied by Gallery Serikawa, a cosy space whose ancient plumbing betrays its origins.
Gallery Serikawa is currently showing works by the Japanese artist Kiyoto Maruyama, appropriately enough because he is one of the last surviving painters of so-called "hot spring pictures", large-scale landscape paintings often found on the walls of Japan's public baths. These tranquil, generic nature scenes are designed to put the mind at rest as the body soaks in the hot spring. Upstairs, though, things are far less serene. In room 511, high up in the building, I locate the tiny gallery A Piece of Space, displaying a sculpture by the Swiss artist Susanna Niederer – an elegant, dusted-bronze windchime with five bell-shaped chimes suspended from the ceiling. Elsewhere, lacquerware artist Tamaki exhibits decorative boxes and trays imprinted with gold leaf. A few steps down the corridor, I find the Y's Arts gallery, covered wall-to-wall in British and European antiques.
Next stop is yet another public bath enjoying a second lease of life as an art gallery: Scai the Bathhouse. Bordering one of Tokyo's most famous cemeteries, it's an elegant building with high ceilings and windows, flooded with natural light. The gallery specialises in Japanese and international contemporary artists; Anish Kapoor and Louise Bourgeois have shown here. I find myself hooked by a subversive animation by the Korean multimedia artist and sculptor Jeon Joonho, his first solo show in Japan. The 13-minute piece, entitled Welcome, shows the serene landscape depicted on a North Korean 50 won note being disturbed by a flotilla of helicopters, one of which crashes, turning the olive-green fields into a raging bushfire. As in a previous piece of political satire by Jeon – an animation of a US $20 note, during which a workman gradually paints over the windows of the White House – the artist seems to be attacking the symbols of statehood as well as satirising the fallout from military intervention.
Next, I wander over to the Takahashi Collection, art bought by possibly Japan's most important private collectors, which has popped up at a variety of temporary spaces over the last few years, and is currently appearing in Hibiya, a faintly nondescript business district close to the imperial palace. A practising psychiatrist most of the week, Takahashi reserves Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursday afternoons for his hobby, and has amassed more than 1,000 works since 1997, shuttling them between different temporary spaces across Tokyo. The current space – open since April 2009 – will only be available until this December.
Takahashi tells me that he started buying work by contemporary Japanese artists such as Makoto Aida after hanging out at Ota Fine Arts, one of the most highly-respected private galleries in Tokyo. At that time, the work of Yayoi Kusama – a Japanese artist known for her multi-coloured, polka-dot designs – was a particular favourite. Takahashi concentrates on younger artists now, he says, but denies that he has ambitions to become the Japanese Charles Saatchi. "I don't have enough money to build a gallery," he smiles. "I spend it all on the art."
Perhaps he should follow the example of Tokyo's younger gallerists, who several years ago set up shop well off the beaten track, in the industrial Kiyosumi district to the east of the city. This nameless group – made up of gallerists and art dealers who made their name in the mid-1990s – brought their businesses under one roof in 2005 to create one of the largest gallery spaces in Tokyo. ShugoArts is here, one of the key forces behind the gallerists' collective, as is the groundbreaking Taka Ishii gallery. But the real heavyweight is the Tomio Koyama Gallery, which introduced the world to Takashi Murakami, probably the best-known Japanese artist working today.
But getting there isn't as easy as it sounds, as I discover. You take the metro to a rundown industrial area surrounded by warehouses; the galleries themselves – I have to ask directions – lie down a quiet road, opposite a cement factory. Once inside the building, improvised paper signs sticky-taped to the walls lead you to an industrial elevator. It feels rather like trespassing on criminal gang territory. And when I get inside, the galleries are largely deserted. The clean walls and bright lighting make for a flexible exhibition space – one of the largest in Tokyo – and there's a wonderful variety of work here, but the lack of visitors does nothing to improve the atmosphere. Tomio Koyama's current show is devoted to painter Atsushi Fukui and has the English title I See in You. Fukui has British connections, from an ongoing artistic collaboration with the musician David Sylvian, formerly of the 1970s rock group Japan. Fukui's mystical nature scenes, reminiscent of fairytales, hang alongside framed cartoon pages.
Impressive though Tomio Koyama is, however, when it comes to one-off galleries or bizarre spaces, few can compete with Design Festa in the trendy Harajuku district. Once a drab block of flats, four stories high, it is now a riot of pink scaffolding and garish murals. Every inch has been painted and decorated – and practically every inch can be rented out as well. It hosts the freshest art in the capital and attracts a young, international crowd. As I walk through, I find more than enough to catch the eye on the colourful walls: in one corner a manic cartoon, in another hundreds of painted cat designs. In another, a huge human face sculpted from concrete. Inside the gallery, students – who, drawn by the cheap rates, make up more than half of the artists exhibiting here – show off their latest creations: everything from video installations to cutesy knitware and keyrings, from portrait photography to manga-inspired sketches. I can't say that I love everything on display, but it's exciting nonetheless.
Design Festa is in fact two buildings merged to form one art complex, complete with restaurant and cafe. Its director, Takeshi Araki, shows me around. "Our smallest space is an 80cm square on the wall, which costs 525 yen [around £4] for a day," he says. "We also have a gallery in the toilet." Who could resist? I head downstairs for a closer look: it is indeed there, its walls crammed with small paintings, postcard-size pictures and sketches, all for sale. For one of the most crammed cities in the world, it's somehow fitting. "We like to have all genres, all ages, all kind of artists," says Araki. "We don't have any limits." You can say that again.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Exhibitions, Features, guardian.co.uk, Installation, Japan, Painting, Sculpture, Tokyo | Comments Off