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    architecture, contemporary, London

    Taking a view on London's East End art scene

    January 15, 2010

    Many will tell you that London is the centre of the art world. And if you had to choose a centre for art in that city, it would still have to be the East End.

    “It really is London’s cultural engine,” says Rachel Mapplebeck of Whitechapel Gallery. “It’s also got the highest concentration of artists in Europe, apparently, so it’s a very thriving cultural quarter.”

    Her gallery is certainly thriving. Thanks to a £13.5 million expansion programme, attendance is up by 130%. And more than 300,000 visitors came in the first six months since reopening in April.

    Whitechapel has become a gateway to more than 180 galleries which are clustered around nearby Hoxton and Shoreditch. For several years there has been a critical mass of activity in the area, but the colonisation of East London began more than two decades ago with a simple fact of economics.

    “Yeah, it is cheap,” laughs Mapplebeck. “There were a lot of amazing spaces in East London and I think as well there was that kind of moment kind of in the late 1980s, early 1990s, where there was this great sense of opportunity and there was this great entrepreneurialism in the visual arts.”

    The pioneers of this part of town were artists like Gilbert and George and Michael Craig-Martin, who brought their studios here, and gallery owner Maureen Paley, who opened up shop in 1984.

    So, for example, Vyner Street in Bethnal Green used to be a run down street full of old warehouses. Now it is a run down street full of old warehouses which contain white-walled galleries. Collectors can be spotted getting out of Jaguars and pressing buzzers next to discreet steel doors.

    Regent Studios is a forbidding block of  flats nearby and home to several artist run spaces. From an affordable HQ on the second floor, Cathy Lomax runs Transition Gallery and publishes magazines Garageland and Arty.

    Her core audience of students, artists and collectors is undeterred by the graffiti-covered stairwells. “More established artists who are around here come by regularly,” says Lomax, pausing to observe an unexpected new phenomena.

    “There seem to be more art tours as well going on,” she adds. “Now people want to go and see the art hovels of the East End, or something, and I think that when people do that art experience they quite like the fact that the galleries are hard to find and in a building like this. It kind of makes it all a little bit more exciting.”

    The rich rewards of all this excitement are best seen at the other end of Hackney Road in Hoxton, where design houses do business above galleries and architects’ studios neighbour those of artists.

    At the heart of the district is Rivington Place gallery, home to the Institute of International Visual Arts. Despite rising rents, Director Tessa Jackson thinks the creative vibe is here to stay.

    “It’s a mixture between the economics of the area and the sort of urban forms that we get in this part of London,” she says. “I think the style of the buildings suits having the gallery on the ground floor. They’re not big corporate buildings.

    “It’s also quite close to residential,” she explains, referring to nearby Hackney estates, “That suits artists and creative people -  what they’re not going to be doing is commuting huge distances – they’re wanting to keep the outgoings to a realistic level.”

    Sure enough, at The City Arts and Music Project, artist Wayne Chisnall turns up on his bike. At this bar-cum-gallery near Old Street station, the work now on show is inspired by the urban landscape.

    Chisnall talks about his piece, a nightmarish tower made from wood, bone, nails and other found objects. “East London is a rich picking ground for debris,” he says. “I think the East End is one of the grubbiest, grimiest parts of London but that’s quite a positive thing for me.”

    It is perhaps also, he agrees, the centre of the art world: “There’s so many artists here and everyone’s sort of eager to make it and there’s a really good energy.”

    It is hard to disagree, looking around his exciting group show as night falls on City Road and the DJ starts warming up the room. But as the East End gears up for the 2012 Olympics, it is getting harder for artists to find live/work spaces in the area.

    Chisnall will have to move studio in January owing to redevelopment, but he remains keen to stay in the East End. So it is good he is a philosophical sort. “I’ve always been quite fascinated by that sense that nothing is permanent,” he says. “It’s all in a state of flux.”

    Written for Culture24

    art fairs, contemporary, photography, sculpture

    Politics for sale at the 2010 London Art Fair

    January 15, 2010

    London Art Fair, Business Design Centre, London, until January 17 2010

    “The cynic,” Oscar Wilde once said, “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” In which case, London Art Fair risks making cynics of us all.

    136 galleries and dealers have set out their stalls at the Business Design Centre in Islington with price tags on pretty much everything. If you don’t frequent auction houses, art fairs are places you can imagine buying a piece by Hockney, Hirst or Warhol.

    Andy’s Marilyn screenprint at Caroline Wiseman Modern and Contemporary will, incidentally, set you back £110,000. Whether or not you could afford it, you can’t help but weigh up the cost.

    Indeed, most will find something just about within their reach. Alan Cristea Gallery is knocking out a Julian Opie piece called Walk, 200 limited edition black boxes on which an LED animation shows a beskirted woman in motion. At £1,057.50 each, that would fit on the credit card.

    No matter how serious the work, checking prices soon becomes a habit. So you may be surprised at this year’s fair to see how prints of paramilitaries, photos of Hiroshima and the severed heads of gang victims translate into pounds and pence.

    Golden Thread is a leading gallery from Belfast, and they’ve been bringing work to London Art Fair for five years. A blackened wreath and pair of toy-like assault rifles make bold statements about the political situation in Northern Ireland. But that doesn’t mean they are not for sale.

    “Doing the art fairs is a bit of a project for us,” explains curator Sarah McAvera. “It is both raising the profile of Northern Irish art and making art in Northern Ireland more sustainable.”

    McAvera will not be taking commission for any pieces they sell. Golden Thread is a not-for-profit gallery with funding from the Arts Council. All revenue goes towards developing future work and art publications.

    “Because of where we are, we can’t ignore our history,” she adds. And halfway through day one of the fair, the response to such Troubles-influenced work has been “really good”.

    Collectors are also warming to a nearby series of mushroom clouds on display from photography dealers Ordinary-Light. Nevada test blasts, reportage from Hiroshima and pro-nuclear propaganda are among the vintage prints available to buy.

    “I thought it was a good way to breach a different audience on what the bomb represents,” says Director Brad Feuerhelm. “Some of these photographs have an abstract quality.”

    Although dependent on seeing a return for his collection, the American dealer shows a genuine interest in the history of science, the A-bomb and what he calls its “nefarious effects”.

    “With any of this we have to have a humanitarian perspective, in particular when putting a price on these sorts of images,” he acknowledges. But there’s no great secret to pricing, says Feuerhelm: “It’s reflective of what I had to pay.”

    Further on are more saleables brought to you at an indirect cost to human life. Works from artists’ collective Antena Estudio deal with extreme violence on the streets of their native Mexico City.

    Sculptor Andrés Basurto is here with a row of glass skulls inspired less by Damien Hirst and more by the beheadings which take place in local drug wars and the images which routinely appear in the media.

    Basurto insists the collective sell work to make it easier to produce work, but also says they are “prepared not to sell”, reasoning that gaining exposure to “a different public” is a positive step.

    “It is impossible not to react to what we have seen,” he adds. “It is impossible not to have an opinion on what we see. For we see a severed head four times a week in the news and as artists we have something to say about this.”

    Clearly there should be room for social comment, even at an art fair. And the three controversial shows have been made possible by an entire section of the fair given over to curated shows, Art Projects.

    Bad news, it seems, is not all bad for business. “There’s a large number of collectors that are moved by it. The market for that is surprisingly big,” explains Art Projects curator Pryle Behrman. Art can be about anything, he adds, provided it makes a “novel statement”.

    Although Art Projects has been running for six years, it has never attracted so many applications from galleries with political work to show.

    “I definitely think we saw a theme this year,” says Behrman. “There was quite a lot to do with the Middle East, but also the atomic bomb and Northern Ireland, issues that have been bubbling away for a while.”

    Meanwhile, a world away from the warzones, they were chopping the mint for cocktails in the Collectors’ Lounge, where potential buyers are welcomed by designer chairs and soft lighting. Here it is hoped that politics and money will mix like whisky and ginger ale. Or is that being too cynical?

    Written for Culture24

    comics, conceptual, contemporary, hip hop, installation, music, video

    Fortress of Solitude by David Blandy at 176 / Zabludowicz Collection

    November 26, 2009

    Published on Culture24

    David Blandy – Fortress of Solitude, 176 / Zabludowicz Collection, London, until Summer 2010

    Strap on the artificial guitar and fire up the games console and you are ready to enter David Blandy’s world. It is indeed, as he demonstrates, a stage. We find our truth in the roles we play.

    Guitar Hero is just part of it. Fortress of Solitude includes a library of games, books, comics, films and records which invite the viewer to load up, read, or put on different mass culture artefacts. Each carries a Soul Archive label as if a piece of Blandy’s very essence.

    His influences, and the show is about nothing else, are eclectic. They include Kafka and Joyce, but also Marvin Gaye and EPMD. Martial Arts seem to tie the whole lot together as the sphere where hip hop, video games and of course film collide. Way of the Samurai is the subtitle of both a book (Mishima) and a movie (Jim Jarmusch).

    It could also reference Blandy’s longest running video pieces. Soul of London, Soul of the Lakes and The Five Boroughs of the Soul all star the artist in an orange kung fu suit, with staff and portable record player. Each one documents a quest or in search of truth or the meaning of soul. On the subway in New York, a barefoot Blandy explains to a bemused local that he is doing a penance.

    In the Bronx, he risks getting shot. In London, he risks mockery. In Cumbria, he risks cut and bruised feet. But each film is cut and spliced with clips from the music and the movies the film-maker loves. So they combine postmodern hyperreality with real endurance, an intriguing mix.

    The artist also puts himself on the line with emotive lip-synced performances of hip-hop, reggae, funk and soul classics. In Hollow Bones he even mimes along to a Syl Johnson track called Is It Because I’m Black? Blandy by the way is, apparently, not.

    That could mean his performances are as hollow as the bones in the film’s title. Or it could mean that they are still bones, still the structure of his existence.

    17th century, painting, religious, sculpture

    The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting & Sculpture 1600-1700

    November 25, 2009

    Published on Culture24

    The Sacred Made Real at The National Gallery, London, until January 2010

    As you would expect from a pallid corpse in a darkened room, Dead Christ draws quite a crowd. Gregorio Fernández’s wooden bier is surrounded by a dozen curious visitors. If this was a roadside, they would be driving past slowly, rubbernecking.

    Thanks to 17th century special effects, the mortal wounds seem still fresh. Tree bark forms coagulated blood. A bull’s horn has been carved into fingernails. Glass has been used for half-closed eyes.

    The pathos is heightened by spotless, sculpted white sheets and a heavily embroidered pillow. These touches are perverse, given that no one has wiped the blood from Jesus’ lifeless skin or thought to cover him up out of respect.

    But that is really the point of polychrome sculpture, an artform for churchgoers rather than gallery visitors, which offers an immediate experience of the horrors and marvels of the Passion and the lives of saints.

    Some guilt-inducing religious pieces result. Cristo de los Desamparados by Juan Martínez Montañés hangs off the cross with a dead weight that makes the nails strain. Ecce Homo by Pedro de Mena disrupts the conventions of classical art splattering blood across Christ’s otherwise perfectly toned back.

    This is the first time such works have been seen alongside contemporaneous Spanish painting. It suggests their influence has been overlooked.

    Indeed artists like Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Zurburán would have trained in guilds of painting where polychrome sculptures were brought for colouration. Owing to some baroque-era red tape, sculptors were not allowed to do this for themselves.

    Now several paintings are displayed alongside three-dimensional works which could have directly inspired them. Immaculate Conception by Velázquez, for example, sits next to a stunning and very similar Madonna by Montañés.

    All of which suggests that a Spanish tradition of realist painting, from Velázquez and Zurburán onwards, can be traced back to the work of some little-known sculptors. You cannot deny the impact of the examples on display here.

    alt. folk

    Laura Marling at Concorde2

    November 8, 2009

    Laura Marling played a support set at Concorde2 in Brighton last week.  It was good, but not as good as headline act Daniel Johnston. Anyway, my review for News of the World can be found here. Scroll down.

    archaeology, museums

    Coin collection shines at the Ashmolean Museum

    November 5, 2009

    Published on Culture24

    The £61m redevelopment at the Ashmolean Museum has made headlines this week, but another money-related story of no less interest can be found at the new building in Oxford.

    The museum is also home to a raft of coins ranking among the ten most important monetary collections in the world, containing 300,000 monetary objects which, until now, had been tucked away in a remote vault which visitors dared not enter.

    When the museum reopens this weekend many of the coins will have a dedicated gallery, where a bold caption on the wall proclaims money to be “the value of the past”.

    With displays from ancient Britain as well as India and the Middle East, plus Greek and Roman coinage, it is hoped that gallery seven will be a microcosm of the rest of the museum.

    One bank of exhibits (no pun intended) explores money according to themes, grouping together bank notes, barter tokens, dollars and ducats under headings such as “Making money”, “Using money” and “Money and power”.

    Across the way, coins are collected by civilization. This reveals “the whole world in one wall”, according to collection keeper Chris Howgego, a feat made possible by the smallness of said artefacts. “Taking the weakness of anything and then turning it into a strength is quite a cool thing,” he enthuses.

    Just one side of a plinth is enough to tell part one of the story of English coinage. The Crondall Hoard contains the first coins made on these shores after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Only a high security case allows the museum to show them for the first time.

    The nearby Chalgrove Hoard features the celebrated Domitianus coin, which proves the existence of a lost Roman Emperor. It was found in a field near Oxford in 2003, while another local relic, the Oxford Crown, was struck at a royalist mint in the city for Charles I in 1644.

    The fact such coins feature leaders and often dates is one reason they command a whole field of study. Now students of numismatics and interested members of the public will also be able to handle the objects in their own study and seminar rooms.

    The Heberden Coin Room, as the collection is known, reaches much further into the new museum, since coins are showcased in 25 of the 35 permanent galleries.

    “As storytelling items, coins work very well because they contain iconography,” says Project Curator David Berry, explaining why such small objects appeal to so many departments.

    “It allows us to integrate a part of the collection in a way that is meaningful, not just for the sake of it.”

    By way of example, Berry highlights a coin which depicts Henry VIII as head of the Church of England. The museum is able to display it beside a sword formerly presented to the king in recognition of his role as defender of the Catholic faith.

    Symbolism aside, money has played a deeply functional role in shaping the new layout of the Ashmolean. New display strategy Crossing Cultures, Crossing Time highlights the connections and, crucially, the circulations between East and West.

    Central galleries which focus on trade in the Mediterranean and The Silk Road appear to demonstrate that globalisation is no recent fad. Money, it seems, really does make the world go round, so it really is good news that so much of the precious stuff has been raised to rebuild a regional museum, albeit the oldest in Britain.

    But rest assured that the best things in life, such as visiting the Ashmolean, will still be free.