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    contemporary, painting

    Dreamscapes at Art @ Five

    September 26, 2009

    Published on Culture 24

    Dreamscapes, Art at Five, Brighton, until September 20 2009

    Matisse famously said that a painting should be like a comfortable armchair. If so, Dreamscapes could well swallow you up and leave you gasping for air. There’s a lot going on in this pictorial upholstery.

    The exhibition flyer coins an intriguing phrase to describe it – “a labyrinth of colour”. Most paintings use the full spectrum of all seven shades at their brightest, plus varying amounts of gold leaf and glitter.

    The three artists in the show are at least technically accomplished. Nick Vivian has painted a number of woodland scenes containing richly hued trees bathed in golden light. They are gently kaleidoscopic and evoke a world of fantasy and magic, rather than closely-observed nature.

    He appears to use a stencil edge to cut out the forms of sycamore leaves and a sponge to capture the effect of dense foliage. At least one piece is further dappled in gold paint.

    Kim Anderson has also plundered the rainbow in the name of decorative art, but her signature technique involves drips and scratches as well as broad washes of colour.

    Her abstract works are inspired by major light events such as twilights and equinoxes. A couple of smaller paintings, Oyster I and Oyster II, are more muted, and the colours have been painted over with thick whites and greys. Yes, the effect is nacreous, but it is also understated, and that is welcome.

    The most overwhelming paintings in the show are by Yvonne Coomber. Her pictures feature meadows of wild flowers and, as with her colleagues, a degree of innovation.

    She action paints the grass and lays the oil paint on in thick discs to make flower heads. Once again, light floods these scenes, making the whole thing even more self-consciously pretty than it already was.

    kinetic sculpture, music

    Stephen Cornford – Works for Turntable

    September 4, 2009

    Published on Culture 24

    Stephen Cornford – Works for Turntable, Permanent Gallery, Brighton, until September 20 2009

    It seems unlikely the record players on display will ever make another sound. In place of one slip-mat, for example, is a stone wheel and a marble has been harnessed to the stylus. It is surely beyond repair, yet on the side is a red button and on the wall a sign inviting visitors to go ahead and press it.

    Surprisingly, it works. The stone wheel turns, the marble gets dragged around its spokes, and the whole thing is amplified by a speaker in the middle of the plinth. Each device is on a timer, and so the piece of music lasts about three minutes, the length of a perfect pop song.

    There are eight customized turntables in the Permanent Gallery’s exhibition, all of which dispense with vinyl, instead playing a combination of springs, wires, marbles, ball bearings, bells and gravel. Tunes you can whistle are thin on the ground, but there are drones, rattles and rumbles aplenty.

    But such avant-garde use of record players does have some precedent amongst musicians. French composer Edgard Varèse experimented with phonograph turntables in the 1930s. Then in 1939 John Cage composed a piece using two variable frequency turntables to accompany a piano and cymbals.

    Cornford’s turntables are likewise designed for performance. Visit the gallery at 6pm on Saturday September 19 and you can see the artist present an evening of improvised sound. If you like what you hear, there is also a limited edition 7-inch single available to accompany the exhibition.

    Nothing, however, beats trying them out for yourself. Press one red button and you have to press them all.

    installation, sculpture

    Alexandre da Cunha – Laissez-Faire

    September 4, 2009

    Published on Culture 24

    Laissez-Faire – Alexandre da Cunha, Camden Arts Centre, London, until September 13 2009

    Some artists take inspiration from nature, and some from light: however, Alexandre da Cunha must have taken inspiration from the acquisition of a job lot of industrial mop heads.

    The mops are now woven together to form a giant net, which hangs from gallery floor to ceiling and runs in a curve through the middle of the space. Their arrangement encourages the viewer to walk around, to peer through, and to treat them like a work of art but no attempt has been made to disguise their original purpose. They are cleaning products.

    It is some ninety years since Marcel Duchamp signed a bottle rack and put it on display in a gallery, and the gesture continues to find echoes in the work of artists today. Brazilian sculptor Da Cunha locates recycled goods and objects sourced from pound shops, and then tends to improvise.

    Another work in the room consists of three squat totem poles fashioned from white pots and topped off with incomplete plaster casts taken from coconuts. As if to advertise their uselessness, a cheap drinking straw has been placed in each. This flimsy addition challenges the dignity and certainly the worth of the artwork.

    The third piece is a wall-mounted board covered with green fabric and smeared with red paint. It probably should be called a painting, except it looks more like something dug out from a skip following an accident with a tin of gloss enamel. Like the rest of Da Cunha’s work it has a difficult aesthetic. In other words, it is quite ugly.

    Most people don’t visit galleries in order to view unwanted objects with limited visual appeal, but perhaps they should. Such works still make a worthwhile point about the role of the artist and can still lead one to question the very point of coming to the gallery and looking at art in the first place.

    Duchamp gave it all up and took up chess. He may not have seen much future in ready-made art, but others clearly have.

    video

    Johanna Billing – I'm Lost Without Your Rhythm

    September 4, 2009

    Published on Culture 24

    I’m Lost Without Your Rhythm – Johanna Billing, Camden Arts Centre, London, until September 13 2009.

    Most conceptual art has a tendency to sharpen up the critical faculties. Johanna Billing’s video pieces, on the other hand, charm them into agreement. Be warned that this show could make you want to sing along or even dance.

    Her latest film is called I’m Lost Without Your Rhythm. It has an infectious soundtrack by a Swedish band, which the artist has rerecorded with her own guest vocals. And it features a group of teenagers improvising dance routines. The footage is well-produced and some clips are played backwards to emphasize the beat.

    This alone would make a perfectly watchable film, but then there’s the conceptual bit. The video was made with students in Romania and their school is on a grim East European housing estate. They begin their class by typing on obsolete machines from the GDR. It’s an unlikely milieu for contemporary dance, but the estate proves as expressive as any in the more MTV-friendly lands to the West.

    An earlier film called Magical World explores similar themes. Here the setting is a run-down cultural centre in Zagreb and the activity is a music rehearsal for kids. A teacher plays piano. A girl plays the flute. Almost everyone plays maracas. And they struggle through a song in English. This melancholy number, which gives its name to the piece, was written about changing times in 1968. Here in Croatia in 2006 the times are changing again, but the young singers can’t quite seem to grasp the meaning of their song.

    The most catchy work in this show is a collection of films called You Don’t Love Me Yet. Billing has chosen a little-known song by sixties psychedelic rock pioneer Roky Erickson and staged a tour of cover performances by local bands at art fairs and galleries around the world. In Stockholm, for example, the camera lingers on the audience where expressions range from laughter, to sadness, to boredom. Our own reaction becomes just one of many possibilities.

    The first film of the series takes place in a beautifully lit recording studio. The song is given an epic seven and a half minute treatment, complete with small choir. Erickson’s original track was full of anguish but this is a lush, anthemic version. Contextual play and historical comment have rarely sounded so good.

    video

    Johanna Billing – interview

    September 3, 2009

    Published on Art and Music

    Take a Sad Song and Make it Better

    You Don’t Love Me Yet is a woeful, mixed-up song by a troubled singer from a trippy 60s rock band. But artist Johanna Billing is puzzled by Roky Erickson’s little known classic. “It’s quite a hopeful song,” she suggests, “Because it’s ‘You Don’t Love Me Yet’ so it’s not really so sad”.

    Billing is a filmmaker who often works with music. Most of her chosen tracks could be described as melancholic, but her video pieces are strangely life affirming. So when she re-records You Don’t Love Me Yet in a Stockholm studio, with a brass section and a choir, the result is as euphoric as an all-star charity appeal. “I thought it was very interesting to make a kind of spectacular, which resembles Band Aid. Normally with such a group, you have a clear message, and I thought it was really important to have something ambiguous and slippery, and searching.”

    Her engagement with the record is indeed searching. Billing has been touring the song since 2003 and inviting bands in cities all around the world to do a cover version. So far they have filmed over 200 different performances. It begs the question, are these pop promos? She says: “It could always be that the videos are close to other fields but it’s this kind of confusion I quite like. On the surface it’s similar to something you recognise, but there’s something a bit different also.”

    The footage can be enjoyed at the Camden Arts Centre until 13 September, along with the filmmaker’s latest work, I’m Lost Without Your Rhythm. Once again, she has found a haunting track (My Heart by Swedish band Wild Birds and Peace Drums) and recorded a new version to accompany an upbeat film, featuring improvised dance. It may come as a surprise to find an artist arranging her own soundtrack and adding vocals, but Billing explains that she used to play piano and misses performance: “I love working with film but it’s been such a pleasure to arrange these versions and it’s the closest I’ve got to making music myself at the same time.” Not content with recording one piece of music to go with this most recent film, she tells me she is currently working on a new backing track featuring improvised drums and marimba (a type of xylophone).

    Billing’s search for new artistic/musical effects began when she was a teenager: “Ever since I started working, I was thinking if only I could make some kind of art that would make me have the same feeling that I have when I listen to this specific song, because for me that has always been more powerful or physical.”

    It soon becomes clear Billing knows her music. When asked what type of band she would like to have joined, the artist lists a few of the more obscure names from rock history. Then ten minutes after the phone interview she sends through an email with more names and helpful weblinks. (For the record she would have been Judee Sill, Biff Rose, or a member of The Roches, Os Mutantes, Galaxie 500 or Yo La Tengo. “There’s something so great about trios,” she observes, “It’s something about the dynamics, about getting the most out of things.”)

    Her passion for music led to two years spent working as a music journalist, and this experience gave her an interest in pop songs as artifacts. “Pop music is never treated as seriously as art. You think of it as some kind of entertainment,” she points out, “I think that is why I find it interesting to work also with the background stories of these songs.”

    And in many cases that means giving the tale a happier twist. What’s not to like?

    architecture, conceptual, contemporary, installation

    Beyond These Walls – South London Gallery

    August 24, 2009

    Published on Culture 24

    Beyond These Walls, South London Gallery, until September 20 2009

    Beyond These Walls opened on July 24, three weeks after a fire killed six people in a neighbouring tower block. It was a grim coincidence: this is a show about the gallery’s local context, and the disaster has highlighted the contrast between the Sceaux Gardens Estate and the rarefied space next door for contemporary art.

    Tue Greenfort has tackled the problem head on by turning the gallery round to face the estate and creating a new entrance in the former protective fence. The rear courtyard now welcomes residents with an elaborate community notice board, the hub for the gallery’s outreach programme. Part classroom wall, part climbing frame, this is another artistic intervention by a group called public works.

    Esther Stocker has made a genuinely accessible installation, transforming the SLG’s education space into a walk-in Op Art sculpture. Foamboard is used to make dozens of rectangles and dashes, which run along all three axes of the 3D space. So the piece appears to stretch out beyond the gallery walls.

    Those walls also come under pressure from Pieter Vermeersch who has painted the entirety of the main exhibition space. His mural shows two graded spectrums of colour, from red to black along one side and from green to white along the other. Depending which way you look, the whole building gets lighter or darker.

    Meanwhile Leon Vranken has cut through the flooring to remove geometric shapes. It seems like an act of destructive mischief until you read, or perhaps work out, that the missing parts have been used to build a crude wooden chair and shelf on the other side of the hall. It’s an amusing gesture, but what the locals will make of it is unclear.

    The seven international artists on display here do succeed in unpicking the physical structure of the gallery. But given recent events in the area, they leave questions about the venue’s social context unanswered.

    architecture

    Serpentine Pavilion 2009 by SANAA

    August 21, 2009

    Published on Culture 24

    SANAA – 2009 Serpentine Pavilion, Hyde Park, London, until October 18 2009

    The slim steel pillars of the 2009 Serpentine Pavilion don’t so much hold the structure up as keep it tied down. The roof looks weightless and amorphous. At one point it is anchored just a metre above ground; elsewhere it floats up to the sky as its mirrored surface shimmers through the trees like a breeze.

    It is doubtless a hi-tech engineering feat, but one that foregrounds the natural elements of the surrounding park, welcoming in the lawns and reflecting both greenery and the sometimes blue sky. 

    On hot summer days this would be an oasis of cool. On rainy days the space provides shelter and a way to remain outdoors and yet dry, which is just as well. There is hardly an interior. Partial glass screens enclose a coffee kiosk and a seating area, and in one place overlap with another see-through shield. The demarcation of space is vague and there are trees both inside and outside.

    In places grass gives way to beds of white gravel, an unsurprising Japanese touch. Designers Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, who lead the firm SANAA, compare their pavilion to smoke, drifting in and out of the trees, “expanding the park and sky.” Their spec includes colourful, minimal chairs resembling cartoon rabbit heads.

    Other SANAA projects include the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and an annexe for the Louvre Museum in Lens, France, due to open in 2012. This is the ninth year in which leading architects have been invited to design a temporary pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery.

    The annual commission has previously given London a first chance to see work by the world’s most exciting practitioners. Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind and Olafur Eliasson have all been involved before. In October, each building gets dismantled. This year there will be less to remove, and the shape of the gap it leaves in the city will be strange.

    alt. rock

    Our Band Could BBQ Your Life

    August 17, 2009

    Published on Art and Music

    Not the New Grunge, then

    Judging by his taste in alcohol, Dan Ormsby is a man who appreciates innovation yet can also laugh at the notion. While on stage with band 4 or 5 Magicians he breaks off mid-set to raise a bottle of his new favourite tipple and announce with cheerful irony: “It’s Magners Pear Cider. 100% pure pear.”

    That said, the band launch into some old fashioned US pop rock. But if they sound like something from the 80s, that’s well intended because this is a high concept weekend which mixes the old with the happening now. Ormsby has picked 11 other UK bands to play alongside his on condition they take on one of the bands that features in Our Band Could Be Your Life, a classic book that chronicles the pre-grunge era. He’s added grilled snacks and called his weekend Our Band Could BBQ Your Life.

    “It’s about 30 years since the SST label was formed and I guess I see alternative music coming in waves,” says the singer, guitarist and promoter. “We are getting a lot of 80s electro, I think maybe guitars are due a revival.” SST is the groundbreaking California record company who gave you Black Flag, Minutemen, Hűsker Dű, Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr, all bands represented here.

    The Jelas, from Bristol, set the tone early on. They play three faithfully rendered tracks by Mission of Burma, and a handful of their own dadaesque jazz rock numbers. Singer Colin is passionate about the band he’s been chosen to cover: “They were pretty awesome,” he says and, 26 years after their break up, adds, “They’re definitely my favourite band.”

    Elsewhere there is less reverence, but no less commitment. The Muscle Club play their own melodic punk for fifteen minutes before stripping to the waist for some classic tracks by heroes of hardcore Fugazi. Simon from Amy Blue wears an evil-looking mask and goes wild covering the Butthole Surfers. And Winnebago Deal perform no less than 20 Black Flag songs with such intensity it provokes nervous grinning all round.

    Most sets include original material, but the lines blur between the sound of 2009 and that of a quarter century ago. Although it’s three taut three-piece bands who provide the most excitement. Not Cool (who take on Minutemen) play bass-driven punk with very strong vocals. Everyone To The Anderson (Big Black) are inventing prog hardcore. And The Xcerts (very modest as Hűsker Dű) play with a fury that will never go out of style.

    Bands like this demonstrate that raw energy and abrasiveness still have a place in music, if not in the current mainstream. DJ Rachel from the Silver Rocket Club says: “People talk about a new grunge, but this type of music has never gone away.” She also warns: “The peril of making a scene is that the moment it becomes popular then the clock is ticking. Once you are in a scene you are counting down the hours until you become unfashionable.”

    For the time being at least, this group of UK bands who share a love for a certain group of US bands are a safe distance from the beaten track. The Windmill in Brixton is a pub with a missing sign and it looks like a squatted community centre. But when Ormsby’s band take the chipboard stage to play a stunning cover of SludgeFeast by Dinosaur Jr, we could be in Amherst, Massachusetts, circa 1987.

    Except for that bottle of pear cider. That’s definitely new.

    photography

    Millie Burton – Home Improvements

    August 17, 2009

    Published on Culture 24

    Home Improvements by Millie Burton, The Space, Hove, until September 25 2009

    It’s not many galleries where you might turn up to find a business meeting in progress among the exhibits. But this very scene turns out not to be performance art. An exhibition really is taking place in a boardroom.

    A second visit proves to be much more conducive to a viewing. The room is unoccupied. Six impressive framed photographs adorn the white walls and an executive sponsor is only too happy to set up the short accompanying film.

    Home Improvements by Millie Burton is a show about junk. Her subjects include unhinged doors, disused TV sets and ripped out sink units. There’s nothing substantially wrong with any of the items. It’s just their owners were looking for something a little more in fashion.

    Burton’s pictures were taken at a recycling centre. Her scenes appear to be chosen with an eye for formal beauty. The colours are muted, the lighting natural. Devoid of the gloss of showroom catalogue, the goods exude durability rather than desirability.

    A small crowd of sink pedestals waits in vain to be reclaimed, but their candy colours mark them out as 80s rejects. The word champagne on a peeling sticker reminds you of a long forgotten house-warming bash. Like many of the shots here, this one is both matter-of-fact and wry.

    More vacant images fade in and out of view on the five minute film. A slight breeze moves the surrounding trees but a chintzy pink lampshade and unwanted boot remain stubborn, static and conspicuous. They may well have come from one of Brighton’s many renovated homes.

    To put such an anti-consumerist statement into a corporate setting is a bold move, but the show is reportedly liked by the business folk who use the building. Darren Connolly, from sponsors Mentor, says the photography “seems to work well in a business environment.” And the alternative, he added, was getting something in from Ikea.

    contemporary, hip hop, music, rock n roll, spoken word

    Trouble Tune Tonic at the South Bank Centre

    August 7, 2009

    Published on Art and Music

    Kier Vine/Charlie Dark/Gold Future Joy Machine/Dels/Speech Debelle/Sebastian Rochford and Leafcutter John

    He doesn’t quite hammer nails through his piano, but shortly after beginning to play Kier Vine does get to his feet and walk away. His instrument carries on playing, thanks to the magic of electronica and the recital takes a turn for the weird. So does the whole evening.

    Trouble Tune Tonic is a night of adventurous entertainment at the South Bank Centre. It’s free of charge and, in style terms, a bit of a free for all. Along with modern classical, the line up on Friday included spoken word, rock ‘n’ roll, hip hop, rap, jazz, electronica and video installations. But was it a tasty musical bouillabaisse or did more prove to be less?

    The piano piece that kicks it off is called Equal Temperance. It too is a bit of a collage as all of the music was collected from 29 pianos which have been strategically left around the city. So the first musicians we hear are members of the public, who sound better than our Saturday night talent shows would lead you to expect. Vine and producer James Bulley have spent three weeks reworking the material so the result is both ghostly and hypnotic. Despite the empty stage, it leaves an early evening audience spellbound.

    From classical with a twist we moved to poetry with a bassline. Now some would say that what with metaphor, meter, onomatopoeia, etc., the poet already has enough tricks up his sleeve. Why bother adding beats? Charlie Dark replied: “I think music just pushes it forward, in some ways, and engages more audiences. It’s an art form that hasn’t necessarily moved forward with other technological advances.” True, the lyre and lute are long forgotten, but what can music gain from poetry? “Maybe some substance in this day and age,” Dark said. “And something to think about while you’re dancing.”

    Not many people dance, but he is indeed engaging. Dark spins atmospheric narratives about London life that take us from the comfort of the Queen Elizabeth Hall Front Room to the mean streets of Croydon and across town to the Notting Hill Carnival. It’s still quite a minimal performance: one man and a drum machine with a bit of echo and reverb. The special effects mix in well, like sonic spice.

    By now we had a taste for the unusual. But the least usual thing about next act, Gold Future Joy Machine, was their name. “We heard you haven’t had a rock and roll band in this room for quite some time,” announces Johnny Kenton, frontman, “You’ve got one now.” There are seven on stage and they know how to tear things up. But perhaps good-time punk rock is a dish best served with plenty of booze and the bar was only doing steady trade. Given what we’d seen so far GFJM came across as a little bit trad.

    The same could be said for Dels, an MC who rocks the mic at high volume and bounces his rhymes off the beat of a live drummer. There’s a largely seated audience who leave a polite chasm between themselves and the low stage, as if waiting for Jools Holland to direct his studio cameras at the next act. Dels doesn’t look to enjoy his set much and admits to having toothache. Perhaps he should have had the thing extracted live on stage to keep up the interest levels.

    There’s more than a little interest in the next act, because Speech Debelle has just been nominated for the 2009 Barclaycard Mercury Prize, as it’s now called. The room fills out with likely Barclaycard owners and there’s a ripple of excitement as a small woman in an outsize t-shirt takes the stage with a three-piece acoustic jazz band. Speech is here to mix angry rap with a backing of cocktail-hour music and the unlikely combination works. The band hold back enough to showcase the lyrics and whether rapping about Facebook or the morning tube, this MC does so with drama, an added ingredient.

    “The boundaries are definitely blurring between rap, spoken word and song,” she later said. “I’m an artist that uses my voice as an instrument and working with live musicians has opened new ways of understanding my instrument. You could call it neo rap.” At one point she brings saxophonist Soweto Kinch on stage and there’s a jazz/neo rap fusion in full effect. “Hip hop is a young music,” she explained. “So it has the ability to draw in other music and go in different directions.”

    But there’s some music that even hip-hop can’t absorb. Sebastian Rochford and Leafcutter John perform some challenging electronica in nearby bar Concrete. It’s every bit as jagged and brutal as the prevailing architecture of the Hayward Gallery venue and the surrounding arts complex. If tonight has so far been a fairly palatable melange, this seems designed to stick in your throat. Indeed the piece is called Nails, which brings to mind all over again the thought of Fluxus Piece 13, in which George Maciunas did hammer nails into a keyboard.

    Nothing that sensational happens, but Trouble Tune Tonic does almost boil over. The venue is a dark, industrial shoebox. The alcohol is suddenly flowing. The late night set by Soweto Kinch is some 40 minutes late. Sweat drips from the ceiling. A crowd blocks out the visuals up on screen. Shouted conversations drown out the music. It’s no time or place for art, you think. Bring back the loud and dirty rock ‘n’ roll.