February 3rd, 2010 Adrian Searle
Saatchi Gallery, London
The Empire Strikes Back is a wet punch. One might expect Charles Saatchi to show just the sorts of things that are presented: a stuffed camel in a suitcase, a taxidermied dog morphing with a furry vacuum cleaner, photographs of veiled women whose burkas turn out to be pixelated with tiny porn shots, yet more of Subodh Gupta's over-familiar sculptures made from cooking utensils, a black medical cot piled high with tarry mattresses that breathe wheezily to the power of compressed air. There are painted gags about Jasper Johns, dystopian jokes about technology, including a rattling old Xerox machine with half its gubbins missing, and an army of figures made from old floor lamps, neon tubes, discarded bits of plumbing. I see a GCSE-level art project coming on.
This isn't to say that The Empire Strikes Back is all bad. Some pieces are worse than bad, others just obvious. A speech by Gandhi spelled out in bones adds nothing to any argument. It just took a long time to make. T Venkanna's reworked versions of Douanier Rousseau are fun and sexy, and so is Chitra Ganesh's cartoon of a liberated Indian superwoman. Rashid Rana's pixelated view of an endless sea of rubbish is queasily beautiful, and – best of all – Yamini Nayar's photographs of half-abandoned rooms take us somewhere strange and oddly threatening.
A lot of the work looks exoticised for the gallery, the artists playing up their post-colonial otherness as a gimmick, rather than making art of substance. This exhibition gives us no clearer view of the art of a subcontinent than did a recent Serpentine gallery exhibition. There's also no film or video – areas where some of the best work is made.
Rating: 2/5
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Exhibitions, India, Installation, Painting, Reviews, Saatchi gallery, Sculpture, The Guardian | Comments Off
February 2nd, 2010 Adrian Searle
Saatchi Gallery, London
The Empire Strikes Back is a wet punch. One might expect Charles Saatchi to show just the sorts of things that are presented: a stuffed camel in a suitcase, a taxidermied dog morphing with a furry vacuum cleaner, photographs of veiled women whose burkas turn out to be pixelated with tiny porn shots, yet more of Subodh Gupta's over-familiar sculptures made from cooking utensils, a black medical cot piled high with tarry mattresses that breathe wheezily to the power of compressed air. There are painted gags about Jasper Johns, dystopian jokes about technology, including a rattling old Xerox machine with half its gubbins missing, and an army of figures made from old floor lamps, neon tubes, discarded bits of plumbing. I see a GCSE-level art project coming on.
This isn't to say that The Empire Strikes Back is all bad. Some pieces are worse than bad, others just obvious. A speech by Gandhi spelled out in bones adds nothing to any argument. It just took a long time to make. T Venkanna's reworked versions of Douanier Rousseau are fun and sexy, and so is Chitra Ganesh's cartoon of a liberated Indian superwoman. Rashid Rana's pixelated view of an endless sea of rubbish is queasily beautiful, and – best of all – Yamini Nayar's photographs of half-abandoned rooms take us somewhere strange and oddly threatening.
A lot of the work looks exoticised for the gallery, the artists playing up their post-colonial otherness as a gimmick, rather than making art of substance. This exhibition gives us no clearer view of the art of a subcontinent than did a recent Serpentine gallery exhibition. There's also no film or video – areas where some of the best work is made.
Until 7 May. Details: www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk
Rating: 2/5
Posted in Art, Culture, India, Reviews, Saatchi gallery, The Guardian | Comments Off
February 1st, 2010 Jonathan Jones
This journey through the culture of the Black Atlantic – from Primitivist modernism through to postmodern video work – is full of startling insights, even if it eventually loses its way
Jacob Lawrence's Street to Mbari, a picture in pencil, tempera and gouache of a crowded market in Nigeria in 1964, is the kind of work that curators put into a group exhibition at their peril. It is so good, so convincing, that it almost blinds you to the merits of every other artist in Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, which opens today at Tate Liverpool. And yet Street to Mbari – a portrait of Africa by a great African American artist – is also an argument in favour of this exhibition, and a way to penetrate its complex ideas.
Tate Liverpool seems an apposite place to explore the bleaker aspects of the Atlantic. The museum is contained within the forbidding 19th-century warehouses of the Albert Dock, which speaks more lucidly than any other British setting of the history of the slave trade, documented in detail at the International Slavery Museum nearby.
But Afro Modern is more complex than that. It is inspired by a book, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, first published in 1993 by the British cultural critic Paul Gilroy. Gilroy's thesis, reacting against essentialist Afrocentrism, is that black culture's response to the modern world, into which Africans were transported so violently, has been ambivalent. As I understand it – and it is a difficult book – Gilroy believes that although African migration in the 18th century was brutally enforced, the development of black consciousness in the Americas and Britain was never just a rejection of "white" culture, but an engagement with it. Black culture, in other words, has crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic – at first in chains, but then willfully and creatively.
Those journeys are well captured by the work of Jacob Lawrence, who was born in Atlantic City in 1917 and in the aftermath of the Great Depression, created the most important American history painting cycle of the 20th century, The Migration Series. It portrays the journeys of black people from the oppressive south to the northern industrial cities in search of work and freedom. Lawrence's Street to Mbari is the exhilarated, ecstatic, yet composed and detailed record of an outsider's response to Africa. In Lawrence's eyes, Africa is the new world. It is a painting that travels; not a document of "homecoming", but as a record of complex perspectives, of what was gained as well as lost.
The show is more subversive than it first appears. Yes, there are nods to the Harlem Renaissance – notably poems by Langston Hughes illustrated by Aaron Douglas – and documents from the civil rights era, including a telling work by David Hammons in which black faces and hands press desperately at the glass panel of the door to a university admissions office. But here too are works by white artists who were entranced by "the primitive". Picasso's 1909 Bust of a Woman comes from the same period as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and shares its deliberately jarring, shocking transformation of a face into a carved wooden African mask.
Man Ray's photograph Noir et Blanche (1926) portrays the famous Parisian avant garde muse Kiki of Montmartre resting her pearl-complexioned face next to a mask from Africa. The picture finds a similarity in the almond shapes of their faces that, too, echoes Les Demoiselles. These images take us to the very heart of the fascination with African art that so inspired European modernists a century ago.
These are artists whose views on race would probably seem highly offensive to us. And not so long ago, an exhibition such as this would have felt obliged to point this out, to provide long wall texts explaining that modern art's "primitivism" was the racist culture of an age of empire. But this exhibition is far more ambivalent: it documents the jazz age dances of Josephine Baker as comic, self-conscious, dramatisations of the kind of fantasy Picasso indulges in Les Demoiselles, with watercolours and magazine photographs that reveal how she became an icon for Parisian artists. It sets a painting of Harlem by the strange British painter Edward Burra alongside jazzy works by the Harlem Renaissance painter Aaron Douglas – the pure shapes of Douglas's murals contrasting with Burra's meaty caricatures.
Near Lawrence's street scene is Constantin Brancusi's abstract sculpture The Blonde Negress (1926): a shining metallic vision of a futurist head that resembles a cross between yet another African mask and a design for a beautiful robot. Brancusi's eroticised, idolised visions of an abstract human form indicate how modernists drew on Africa to invent a utopian model for a new humanity. Elsewhere, a film by the surrealist Maya Deren records Voodoo rituals in 1940s Haiti – the very appearance of which reminds us that no history of the Black Atlantic world can just be aesthetic or art-historical.
One of the best things about Gilroy's book was the way in which it broke up the distinctions between high art and popular culture, and between history and the new, that limit conventional views of modernism. The Black Atlantic discusses JMW Turner's 1840 painting of a slave ship and tells how its bloody sky and sea scattered with flailing African bodies so upset its first owner, John Ruskin, that he sold it. Yet it also discusses how Quincy Jones was influenced by a stay in Sweden in what Gilroy sees as his pivotal role in the reinvention of jazz. Gilroy sees such music as one of the fundamental black contributions to a "counter-culture of modernity".
In the early galleries of Afro Modern, the curators follow this principle, mixing jazz culture and art together – Langston Hughes's poems are modelled on blues lyrics and eerily evoke Robert Johnson, but read with enormous weight and clarity on the page. Yet in the later rooms of the show, recent art is treated in isolation from that kind of larger cultural history. The least impressive room is the 1960s display, whose protest art seems narrow in comparison with the possibilities of 1920s modernism: you simply don't get the same sense of creative dialogue between black and white artists, although Frank Bowling's painting Who's Afraid of Barney Newman?, which reinvents Newman's abstract vertical bands in tropical colours and places on them a spectral map of South America, is a highly honourable exception. The last room presents Chris Ofili's painting Captain Shit, with its psychedelic black superhero, whose powerful features suggest Japanese comics. But offering the work in isolation from 1990s hip-hop, whose aesthetic it so clearly shares, is surely a bit po-faced.
In fact, the entire argument about the Black Atlantic seems to dissipate as the show goes on. Only fleetingly does its big themes surface in the contemporary work on display. In Ellen Gallagher's spooky painting Bird in Hand (2006), for instance, which resembles a design for a crazed countercultural remake of Pirates of the Carribean. And there is a hypnotically horrible film by American artist Kara Walker, Eight Possible Beginnings; or the Creation of African-America, in which the history of the US is told by puppets in black-and-white silhouette. They begin in folksy, sickly-sweet nostalgia, but rapidly degenerate into scenes of rape and abuse. I can't count the number of times I have encountered films by Walker in group shows; each time they grow to consume surrounding works. Here is an artist whose sense of history seems to be choking her, and threatens to swallow us.
Outside, rain lashes the pool at the heart of the Albert Dock, out towards the Mersey and the Atlantic beyond. This exhibition is a brave, intelligent – and at its best – transformative encounter with that melancholy ocean and its voyagers.
Rating: 4/5
Posted in Art, Art and design, Chris Ofili, Culture, Exhibitions, guardian.co.uk, Jazz, Music, Reviews, Tate Liverpool | Comments Off
February 1st, 2010 Laura Cumming
Tate Britain, London
The retrospective of Chris Ofili's paintings now filling several galleries at Tate Britain is exactly what you might expect – opulent, glittery, dazzling, gorgeous. If you have seen even one of his works you can probably extrapolate the massed effects of 60 more. But what is surprising, and dismaying, about this show is just how indispensable these effects turn out to be when Ofili starts working without them.
An early star, not yet 30 when he won the Turner prize in 1998, Ofili is the most famous black artist in British history. This has nothing to do with the dung. Rudy Giuliani may have accidentally ramped Ofili's reputation by threatening to prosecute the Brooklyn Museum for showing his black virgin propped on dried elephant ordure, but the mayor ought to have observed that this Anglo-African Catholic was applying the identical substance to paintings concerned with slavery. The dung is innocent, evenly distributed. Over here, naysayers were more confused by the references to blaxploitation movies and gangsta rap.
But those days are gone. The controversial works now belong to museums, blue-chip collectors and history itself. Seventies centrefolds, Don King, Ice T, Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars, all mixed up with racial stereotypes in a manner commonly considered provocative: these look like period pieces of the recent past.
But are they provocative, humorous, ironic? Everything is kept in play. Ofili's even-handedness, anarchic to some, non-committal to others, is so accomplished that one visitor was troubled by the absence of anything to roil the sheer optical pleasures.
The Tate has them in abundance. Here is Ofili's fantastic Afromantic idyll, keyed in the red, black and green of Marcus Garvey's pan-African flag. An Eden of ganja, ripe bananas and heat glowing in a haze of glitter, the paintings are enormous, intricate, abundant, panoramic glorifications of love.
She reclines like an odalisque, a constellation of red and green dots bursting from one nipple like stars. The contours of his body twine with hers: behind, before, above, between, below. The scene pulses with rapture.
The method was laid down almost from the start. Beads, glitter, map pins, sequins, paint used like ink, batik, henna decoration; applied in African cave art dots. Teeming excess and all of it multiplied by the use of resin beneath which images appear suspended as if underwater or trapped in amber – and then Ofili would add another layer by painting on top.
You can see this put to tremendous effect in a work like Spaceshit (1995)with its planetary shapes formed of tiny dots, each semi-transparent so that the painting acquires spacey depths. From a distance, they come across as intergalactic drifts; nearer, they look like Monet waterlilies reprised for modern times and eventually like hard, bright particles. The closer you stand the more there is to see, until you lose sight of the overall picture. Each painting has its own prolific micro-life.
Precise yet stoned, sophisticated yet simple: that is the basic proposition, a dichotomy between the highly disciplined technique and the blatantly swoony effects. You have to wait for the physical appeal to fade (if it ever does) to get down to what is really going on. And most often it seems to be just that: something unresolved, ongoing.
For some, this is Ofili's great strength, this improvisational mix of all and every-thing, like an open-ended poem or song. But it puts everything on the same level. A painting may include afro heads rushing about like fireworks or tiny photographs of the murdered schoolboy Stephen Lawrence and yet the glorious gaudiness is the main event, the constant. It is not that one painting looks like another, for Ofili has quite a range of effects involving density, motion, brightness, mood; it is more that the tone scarcely varies.
And this is exposed, quite literally, in the recent works painted in Trinidad where Ofili now lives. Almost every distinguishing characteristic has been pared away – layering, resin, glitter and all – to leave nothing but unadorned paint; and images that have nowhere to hide. A couple of islanders strumming banjos in the blue-black night, Judas dangling from a noose apparently added as an afterthought; the raising of Lazarus in the style of Matisse; a deep purple nude accepting a sundowner in what appears to be a stylised cocktail ad.
Ofili experiments with styles, experiments with inky blackness so that one sometimes has to peer into the surface to make out the forms. He makes an obvious verbal/visual pun on Der Blaue Reiter – two ultramarine horsemen in a midnight-blue forest – with Blue Riders. The colours remain rich, but the paintings are crude, mannered, struggling to make anything at all of their chosen content. They feel uniformly powerless and inert.
In the past, it has sometimes seemed as if imagery itself presented a quandary: not so much how but what to paint, hardly an unusual dilemma for an artist. Now Ofili seems to be fixed upon the latter, with these narratives, myths and local scenes, but uncertain with the former. Put politely, it's a bold departure.
But it sends you back to question the past. Did all those proliferating dots, swirls and patterns ever add up? Was it all as playful as people claimed? For answers consult the centrepiece of this show, The Upper Room (1999-2002), with its 13 magnificent panels arranged in a darkened chamber like the figures at the Last Supper.
Each depicts a monkey holding a cup, though the outline of the largest is dissolving in the golden surface, beneath a gilded dung clod of a halo. Each glows, quite literally, with its own luminous colour. Solemn and reverential, yet plainly tinged with the absurd, they keep a tension between monkey business and Bible story that defies explanation.
Rothko claimed that his numinous oblongs represented God; perhaps a monkey can stand in for Christ. Yet that does not seem to be what's going on in this spectacularly intense yet vague installation. The adoration of colour is obvious in each beautifully worked surface, the devotion is all there in the making. This is painting as an act of worship.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Chris Ofili, Culture, Exhibitions, Features, Reviews, Tate Britain, The Observer | Comments Off
February 1st, 2010 Tim Adams
The Foundling Museum, London WC1, until 9 May
The three artists chosen to collaborate at the Foundling Museum on the site of the original Foundling Hospital on London's Coram's Fields are, appropriately enough, a dysfunctional kind of family. Mat Collishaw and Tracey Emin and Paula Rego have history. Rego taught Emin for a while and was certainly an inspirational midwife to the violent angst of her art; Emin and Collishaw, meanwhile, were stormy lovers in the heyday of the YBAs, a six-year union that ended with Emin childless at 40.
The ghosts of some of this past seem to haunt the rooms in which they have displayed work, which responds in different ways to the already heavy history of this place. In the basement, Emin shows sketches she made during her pregnancy of 1991 that ended in a botched abortion: unknown hands clutching at her foetus, nightmares of labour and suckling, half-formed scribbles of a half-formed child who never was. This theme is picked up in her other contributions – the row of infant clothes she has collected and neatly hung on a rail but never used, the soft, woollen baby clothes her grandmother made for her, in the hope the maternal line might continue.
Outside are Emin's orphan mittens and socks, cast in bronze and left on railings, or on stone steps, in the forlorn hope of finding their twins. The inspiration might be Hemingway's suggestion for the shortest novel ever written – "Baby's shoes for sale. Never worn" – but the sentiment, mawkish, and self-absorbed, is all Emin's own.
Collishaw is more hard-headed in his response to the charitable foundation, which from its inception in the 1740s took in abandoned children, or those born out of marriage, or those who were the issue of rape, and gave them a rigorous upbringing and education. He shows a series of exquisite prints of Indian street children set against 18th-century backdrops – one young boy is framed by Ingres's bather, flesh on flesh – making the point that this museum is not all about oil-painted history: in some geographies, its concerns are very much of the moment.
Elsewhere, Collishaw muses on the mythic desperations of parenting, updating the Romulus and Remus legend in a large, backlit print that shows two naked cherub babies in the care of a pair of vast wild dogs on a knackered and bloodstained sofa.
There is little room for sentiment either in Rego's tableau Oratorio, which takes its tone from the scabrous moralising of Hogarth, one of the original hospital's champions (Gin Lane is included in the permanent collection). Her large-scale installation is a kind of altarpiece to the horror of rape and abuse of children; her sketches for it are full of witchy obstetricians and newborns with dislocated, doll-like limbs being weighed by the pound.
It's something of a relief after this to return to the section of museum that details the ways in which generations of discarded children were saved from the accidents of their birth, with the help of copperplate ledgers and worsted uniforms.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Features, Paula Rego, Reviews, The Observer, Tracey Emin | Comments Off
January 25th, 2010 Sean O'Hagan
A book of Dash Snow's Polaroids captures snapshots of the artist's life in all its raw, naked and gritty glory. But does it make the grade as art, wonders Sean O'Hagan
In pictures: Dash Snow's Polaroids
It is difficult to look objectively at the images in Dash Snow's posthumously published book of Polaroids, so freighted are they with the baggage of his short life. His death from a drug overdose last year cannot help but lend a valedictory tone to a body of scattershot work that is essentially about how fast and wild that life was lived. In Snow's snatched photography and primitive collages, it seemed like the outsider ethos of hardcore punk finally found its visual voice. And, as is often the case with confessional work of a transgressive nature – William Burroughs, Nan Goldin, Kurt Cobain - life and work are interwined to such a degree that it is hard to look at one without addressing the other.
Snow's life, was to say the least, colourful, and has left behind a fiercely contested legacy. Was he a self-styled outsider and outlaw – "the Downtown Baudelaire" as one American critic put it? Or was he the troubled but not especially talented child of great wealth and privilege? For Snow was born into old money. His grandmother, and greatest champion, is Christophe de Menil, the daughter of French aristocrats who amassed one of the greatest modern art collections in America. "Dash grew up around Rauschenbergs and Twomblys", his European dealer, Javier Peres, told me when I interviewed him in the wake of Snow's death last year, "But, basically, he said 'Fuck it!' to all that wealth and privilege".
Peres also spoke of Snow's long estrangement from his mother, Taya, and his closeness to his grandmother, Christophe, who, it seemed, occasionally bailed him out when the fitful living he earned from his outsider art was not enough to support his wife and young child. Though Snow's troubles were deep and dark, there were many who dismissed him as a messed-up rich kid who just fancied keeping it real with the street kids and skate punks on the Lower East Side: slumming it with a safety net.
Snow's death, after a long and fitful struggle with heroin addiction, makes those questions seem on one level academic, but also adds to the difficulty of appraising his work in and of itself. The book is unlike any other collection of Polaroids I have seen. First up, it's big and wide – a kind of anti-coffee table book. Each photograph is presented actual size as well as enlarged, which makes them seem more arty and more raw. Again, the DIY punk ethos is present. The cover, though, is very post-punk: a matt-black background and what appears to be four titles in plain white uppercase: Freeze Means Run, Everywhere But The Electric Chair, Miserable Mornings, Neverending Nights, Situations Galore. Great titles all, but, as a nagging voice in my head keeps asking, are they ultimately the best thing about the work?
Snow's Polaroids first appeared on the pages of Vice. The anti-art, ultra-real, everything-is-disposable thrust of the magazine, aligned with its terminally cool sneer, may have tainted many people's view of Snow's work from the off. Here, ugliness itself is the defining aesthetic, though it is not the determinedly crafted ugliness of, say, the Chapman Brothers or Sarah Lucas, more the everyday ugliness of hard drug use, wilfully bad tattoos and young people who should know better behaving badly. It is one of the defining tropes of contemporary pop culture that everything illicit should be paraded rather than engaged in discreetly. Everything is not just permitted, but must be photographed, filmed, and posted on the web. In this context, Dash Snow is very much an artist of our times.
Often his photographs seem to celebrate drabness and/or clutter. Grimy bathrooms and dishevelled living rooms abound. The activity he records rends towards the puerile of the criminal, or both. There are snapshots of kids shooting up, kids snorting coke (in one instance on a flaccid penis), kids puking, tagging, flashing and falling down. Blood, nudity, graffiti and cocaine are the recurring themes, as well as Dash himself, the unsteady centre around whom all this determined dissolution is played out. There is desperation in all this too, but it is the now-familiar desperation of the self-indulgently confessional: Nan Goldin without the brilliant composition, the heightened colour or the underlying poetic sadness.
It strikes me that Snow's real strength, though, lies in his capturing the decisive moment on a Polaroid, a medium hardly suited to the action shot. His street reportage highlights a keen eye for movement and motion. There's an artistic perversity here that's oddly refreshing, the notion of making things difficult just for the sake of it. The end results also disrupt the usual thrust of the Polaroid as a purveyor of readymade nostalgia – the instant but already fading snapshot. Though even here, the tendency is towards the raw and the grimly authentic: a guy kicking in a shopfront, a rat diving for cover on a New York street, a friend puking in a long ectoplasmic arc on to the pavement. These images now seem like stills from the film of his frantic life. The Diary of a Beautiful Loser.
The question is, though, do they amount to anything else? Do they approach the mystery and mastery of art? For me, this book leaves that question hanging in mid-air, just as the bigger question of how his work would develop has been left unanswered by his all-too predicable death. It's maybe because of this abiding sense of a life – and a life's work - arrested that one of my favourite of these photographs is of a young man caught mid-flight, leaping from a rooftop, his arms outstretched against a grainy blue sky. Freeze-framed by Snow's Polaroid, for an instant he seems utterly free from gravity's pull. It is, of course, just an allusion, a trick of the camera. Oddly, I always think of it as a self-portrait.
Now see this
Now in his late 70s but still working, Kishin Shinoyama is one of the grand old men of Japanese post-war photography. A dedicated experimentalist, his work concentrates on the female form and ranges from the psychedelic to the formally austere. He recently began re-exploring the solarization technique that Man Ray made famous. A retrospective show of his work, entitled Nude, is on at the Michael Hoppen Gallery in London until 2 February 2010.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Features, guardian.co.uk, Nan Goldin, Photography, Reviews | Comments Off