Mark Sheerin – Page 4

drawing

Emma Stibbon: Melting Ice | Rising Tides

May 29, 2024

Her ink froze. Emma Stibbon was on the deck of the Antigua, a barquentine sailing boat forging a course into the arctic waters above Svalbad, Norway. The waters were rough as well as cold, and the artist was alleviating sea sickness by staying out on deck and drawing. Some works from this endeavour contain tiny spines of colour where the ice flakes have shaped the marks she was making in her sketchbook.

Melting Ice | Rising Tides is a show resulting from a) field trips to both arctic regions and b) time spent looking at the coast of East Sussex. It is hard to imagine a more coherent yet far reaching exhibition. It has purpose: to bring home the effects of global warming. And equal weight is given to the plight of Greenland, say, and the erosion of the Seven Sisters, not far from the gallery. And it has consistency: water colour and ink washes build to create a prevailing mood of monochrome coolness, where blue, green and lilac tints add nuance to the overall picture.

These drawings are better seen than photographed. They are beautiful: how sublime are the pale bergs upon the dark sees! How complex and enthralling is the foam atop a wave! In each of these drawings one feels the dramatic attempt of hand and eye to encompass extremes of nature and express the magnitude of the climate emergency. There are no human figures anywhere, yet our carbon footprint is everywhere in these stark and treacherous vistas.

Along with acrylic, watercolour and ink, there are plenty of innovative materials. Stibbon uses cliff chalk and sea salt in her preparations in a gesture that blends her works with their subject. On the crest of waves, there is delicate tracery left by evaporated water; she uses seawater in some of the works. Elsewhere aluminium powder gives her ice floes additional texture and grit. The labels in this exhibition repay cross referencing with the works. This must be the poetry of fact.

Such poetry, hardly to be expected from what is ostensibly a vast observational drawing exercise, is everywhere: breaking waves captured with impossible detail and care are mesmerising; coast guard cottages on clifftops which will eventually collapse are overwhelmingly lonely; the discovery of a local landmark in Seaford called Hope Gap results in a vertiginous study of a set of steps plunging down into a roiling sea.

At the heart of the show is a full scale recreation of a cliff fall, complete with chalk boulders, rocks and rubble, plus and an eight metre wide drawing of a Sussex cliff. In any other context this site specific monument would be the show stopper. Indeed, it is perfect the way that Stibbon has brought the local downland shoreline, so often celebrated here at Towner, into the white cube environment. The immensity of her subject and her theme both perhaps call for it.

But scaled right down to a modestly-sized blackened intaglio print, Stibbon is at her intense best: capturing a chaotic wave-scape which is of course completely ephemeral. Sea II (2012) is just one example of the artist’s ability to pause time. If only our species could do the same, these impending disasters may not all come to pass.

Emma Stibbon: Melting Ice | Rising Tides can be seen at Towner, Eastbourne, until 15 September 2024.

contemporary painting, Uncategorized

Andrew Sim, two rainbows and a forest of plants and trees (2024)

May 28, 2024

Urban nature is my favourite kind. Parks where ice cream is sold. Botanical gardens serving good coffee. Flower shows curated like art festivals. Tree lined streets leading to civic amenities. And, of course, residential gardens which allow metropolitan types to contemplate collections of plants, ready and to hand, like the contents of bookshelf. Nobody ever got eaten by a bear in a city’s green space.

I don’t know what Andrew Sim thinks of wild nature. They (not he/him) were born in Scotland, so they may have had a chance to see much of the UK’s wildest nature. But now they reside in New York and the trees that most attract their painterly attention are those in NYC gardens. They have said they will spot them on their way from A to B and now they appear to exercise a hold, as strong as any romantic sublime, over their imagination.

Consider the monkey puzzle tree, as Sim has done here. It is a fun tree. One follows the branches, as if through a maze. Our thoughts climb up and down the spiralling form and it is inevitable to visualise a cheeky lil’ monkey doing likewise. It is spiky as well, which is also cool, in a mildly punk rock way. And as for its puzzling nature? Well, if only every one of our societal problems could present such a low stakes dilemma as this: how a simian might get up and down a pine tree!

On canvas, the tree was all shades of khaki and lime, made bright greener by a black background. Unlike certain flowers which don’t bloom at night, this tree is coming alive before our very eyes. We can almost see it grow, by getting closer to observe the pulsing daubs of pastel which spread out along the branches and seem to move up the trunk in waves. The growth of a tree, one of the most ‘natural’ phenomena, looks here uncanny as if stage lit. The bulb of a streetlamp or security light is just out of view.

In this way nature is rendered theatrical and enchanted even if isolated to a single specimen of a plant most usually viewed by a roadside. This might make perfect sense in a city gallery, where the visitors also have patios and giant planters. But when I saw Sim’s painting it was ten miles outside of Edinburgh where mountainous ridges, picked out in sunlight, provided the backdrop.

The immediate context was a West Lothian sculpture park really full of trees; these are no doubt just as carefully husbanded as a garden pine might be, but their vibe was much more pastoral.

This beautiful setting was Jupiter Artland sculpture park. It offers Sim the run of its nineteenth century ballroom as an indoor venue for their paintings. Hence here was nature, translated into art, surrounded by musical history, embedded in horticultural surrounds, and connected on all sides by the art system, be that UK museums, or international collectors, or even gratuitous blogs. It was very complicated, this context, even if the painting in question is quite a simple idea.

Andrew Sim’s exhibition can be seen at Jupiter Artland, as part of Edinburgh Art Festival, until 29 September 2024.

landscape photography, Uncategorized

Tyler Green, Carleton Watkins: Making the West American (2018)

May 22, 2024

Carleton Watkins made photographs that secured business deals for industrialists. He made photographs that offered conclusive scientific proof to geologists. He made photographs that were both commodities and souvenirs. And he even made photographs in order to give evidence in corporate law. Dominated thus by clients, Watkins is presented, in Tyler Green’s 2018 biography, squarely, as an artist.

HIs art inheres in technical innovation and an eye for composition. The photographer built his own ‘mammoth plate’ camera (almost as large as it sounds). He found vantage points in the wilderness that were to convey both scale and steepness, just some of the elusive qualities of ‘being there’. I concur in Green’s characterisation of his subject as artist, despite those commercial and scientific interests. A mere cameraperson could not have changed the course of US history, in ways both cultural and political. He was both instrumental and inspirational to expansion into the West.

The fascinating central aspect of this book is the way in which ideas about this region were more or less invented by this pragmatic artist, at the time working hand in glove with some of the nation’s wealthiest business tycoons. Yet somehow, whatever brief he was working to, Watkins managed to create artefacts of great, and quite unnecessary, aesthetic appeal.

Of course, there is no reason why rich folk and politicians should not appreciate some beauty in their everyday working lives. But in nineteenth century San Francisco, so many of these types were exploiting the pictured environment in the course of railroad, water, and mining ventures. Accordingly, Watkins’ art seems frequently like window dressing for the big league. But his vision is ultimately stronger than that of the various capitalists with whom he collaborates.

Through the lens of this pioneer, the West appears a land of awesome natural power. If presented as untouched, it appears primordial. Where populated, sparsely, it is an Eden. In Watkins’ lifetime and through Watkins’ influence, tourism became a real phenomena in this part of the world. And would-be photographers were to demonstrate by their various failures, just how grandiose were Watkins’ achievements.

He did sell from a gallery. In fact he had two consecutive spaces in San Francisco. He lost stock and records to the 1906 earthquake which must have made Green’s job of assembling the pieces of a life extremely difficult. However the author was spurred on by an eerie connection. It emerges in the course of his research, in a conversation with his father, that Watkins’ major patron, William H. Lawrence, was Green’s great-great-grandfather and one of a number of entertaining characters who appear in the milieu of the western frontier at this time.

Readers will at this point recognise that this tenacious and admiring book is spurred by something greater than opportunistic interest. Carleton Watkins: Making the West American is born of a clear passion for a good story; Watkins’ works, while so often instrumental, were passionately adherent to the need for a good picture.

Carleton Watkins: Making the West American is published by California University Press and can be purchased from Blackwells or elsewhere.

contemporary art, Uncategorized

Interview: Paul Watson

May 16, 2024

Bacchanalia Beneath the Wind Turbines, Paul Watson, 2019

An artist and I stand on the summit of Whitehawk Hill, atop the hidden remains of a neolithic encampment. He is dressed in black, and smokes actual cigarettes, as I might have expected. Beyond that I’ve little idea how this meeting, with one of Folklore Twitter’s dark luminaries is about to play out.

The setting, a prehistoric site we both chose, is disappointingly nondescript. I had hoped it will channel some chthonic energy into the piece you are about to read. But for the time being, myself, and this leading online goth and Brighton-based artist, contemplate a mobile phone mast. He seems to love it!

“I don’t believe in magic” he tells me later in the East Brighton cafe to which we repair. But, dimly, I had thought of Paul Watson as a serious occultist, with a suitably esoteric vision. His last published body of work comprises of shadowy charcoal figure drawings of gloomy naked models. These subjects looks so close to the relic-littered soil of old Albion. His drawings reference myth, pagan spirits, and a spirit of utter dejection which is very 2024. (Watson has an abiding interest in the English civil war).

To further characterise his drawing, I would say that his figures are very inward. In charcoal, their bodies are pale or grimy, never warm or especially inviting. Whereas classical life drawing conveys a sense of anatomical fidelity, Watson seems to dispense with flesh in favour of bone. His men are stony or grave rather than vigorous; his women perhaps dented rather than curvaceous.

Their environment can change; it is a background of midnight black in that series, a featureless sepia desert in the latest. Sanguine pencils, rather than charcoal, give his figures renaissance pedigree, quite at odds with the mood of fin de siècle Viennese expressionism. His photography, in which he shifts gears again, is stark and notable for the models’ otherworldly masks; and Watson makes these himself.

Masks lend his sitters an air of atavistic power. It will amaze you, for instance, how a muzzle of ivy or an eye mask of oak leaves can imbue a stranger with great mystery and potency. You wouldn’t want to meet many of these photographic subjects on a dark night, and yet in their world it is always night.

There is a vital intrigue here, because in person Watson is approachable, open and upbeat. For all the obscurity of the pagan rituals he seems to evoke, he offers complete transparency of means. He makes books, because these are more accessible (“People are in this country are far more comfortable buying books, than buying artwork. They know what to do with books.”).

He also runs a detailed commentary on his practice at lazaruscorporation.co.uk. He is upfront about his paper, his pencils, and his process. If he is searching for a life model, you will read about it. Even his thoughts about blogging are right there, on the blog. He will also, endearingly, wear his musical influences on his artistic sleeve, having stayed true to a few bands from the 80s which I, for one, have been trying to forget. Perhaps unfairly.

On the one hand he still inhabits an eldritch isle. His book England’s Dark Dreaming assumes the guise of a semi-mystical pamphlet. Watson took inspiration from ‘samizdat’ publications dating to the English civil war. “I started that after the Brexit vote,” he tells me, “and it was very much a cry of rage at the growing right wing presence in England”. Watson quotes the words of ‘landscape punk’ David Southwell, who claims that ‘reenchantment is resistance’. Watson concurs, aiming “not to view the world purely in materialistic terms and to use whatever is available to find wonder in the world.” Such wonder, he seems to say, will always elude the price tags of late capitalism.

On the other hand, he is unafraid of the light of day. “I don’t see any paradox,” he says, “between an enchanted world and a demystified process.” Watson might be horrified were I to present him as angst-ridden as, say, Ian Curtis. “I’m not interested in building on that whole artist myth of tortured genius,” he says. “I like demystifying the whole thing. I don’t think it takes away from the finished piece. I think it adds to it this whole thing.”

How else, in the age of deep fakery, can you be verifiably real? Of his masks, for example, he says: “It was definitely not AI. It was crafted with glue and petals and wood – whatever I was using.”

And here is the total artistic programme. When Watson is not coding software in his day job, he is working, as if from command-lines, series by series, on an attempt to create a vehicle or a lens to allow us all to imagine the unimaginable: namely the end of capitalism. Watson’s latest works are influenced by an unpublished, unfinished work of the late Mark Fisher, the theorist who is best known for saying the end of the world is easier to imagine than a working ideological alternative to the current Neo-liberal worldview.

Watson picks up: “I think that is true. It is very difficult to imagine something different from capitalism, so what I’ve been trying to do with Acid Renaissance [the most recent series – see above – which in fairness is warmer and lighter] is to break the imaginative chains by going into the mythic again and then start to imagine this future England almost like a social anarchist state”.

In these sepia scenes of Leonardoesque cartoon we are confronted by details that Watson must hope we can take forward into that unimaginable future; here a laptop, there a wheelchair, in one, even and especially, wind turbines. Despite some deep historical references, Watson is clear he would like to effect change in the present. “I’m not interested in going back to the past, “ he says. “I’m interested in going to a post-industrial future”. Yet it is no pastoral idyll which the artist has in mind. “I’m fairly healthy but there are many people who rely on electricity and having the infrastructure of hospitals and things like that. So I very much don’t like these back-to-the-land fantasies. I think they’re fascist, because you’re essentially saying: we can kill off this part of the population. So I think you’ve got to imagine this post-industrial future which still does have things like electricity and healthcare”.

If that sounds difficult to imagine, perhaps it will indeed take a truly widespread, far reaching renaissance of an acid nature for us to collectively hallucinate what Mark Fisher’s idea of impossibility might actually look like on this planet of ours. In the meantime, we have Watson’s coming book.

Whatever the future, there is something which the artist believes is essential to human expression. “I think there’s something very fundamental about creating images of the human body,” he says. He compels my attention with an image in England Dark Dreaming in which one of his mythic, future-past characters is making handprints on a cave wall. In this common palaeolithic act the body is implicated in “the very earliest form of art.”

Having spent six yeas of a research degree trying to put the term ‘cave art’ into question, I am not sure. But whatever the case it was grand to stand alongside such a thoughtful and committed contemporary artist on the site of an encampment dating back 5,500 years and look across our city by the sea.

As Spring sunlight played on the water and the South Downs offered Brighton’s denizens their protection, we imagined being able to look across to the summit of Chanctonbury Ring by night and to see a bonfire. This mental journey back in time felt easy in the present company. Or was it a journey into the future? Reaching for my smartphone I took my own photo of the phone mast and we hiked back down the hillside.

For more information on this artist, and to read his generous writings and/or view prints and books for purchase, visit Lazarus Corporation.

Uncategorized

Oh, and guess what!?

May 7, 2024

The show that cannot go on

Well here I go, being a fucking idiot because: “Paranoids are not paranoids because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations,” as the proverb from Thomas Pynchon goes.

But I need to clear my throat and say again that the situation in Gaza is an ongoing and worsening genocide, that the campaigns against dissent (here and to an even greater extent in the US) are intolerably anti-democratic, and that a ceasefire cannot go far enough. So many lives wiped out and lives destroyed amidst pain unimaginable as we sit here in the relatively safe UK.

It is utterly sick, this perpetuation in the name of zionism, US hegemony, white supremacy. Who could have guessed, having enjoyed the cosy assurance that has come with a liberal-seeming media and its centrist-minded, sensible grown ups, that these fascist forces would amass themselves with such energy and hate against people with nothing (there) or people with issues (here). It is genuinely terrifying.

As a paranoid sort of guy who loves chuckling along to Pynchon more than joining barricades, I have to say that today, for example, there is nothing more important to do than protest, nothing better for a human (in possession of any humanity) to do than to put my head up, along with so many braver allies of Palestine, above the parapet and say a full-chested, Fuck this!

About two months ago I switched bank away from Barclays since they have too many interests in maintaining the occupation and clearance of an entire subjugated nation. I kept it to myself for a number of reasons. I was afraid to tweet about it and cynical about my own motivations. Was I, wondered, I still doing the bare minimum, and would I, wondered I, simply put a target on myself by confronting a vast multinational bank on the fervid feeds of Twitter.

Now, guess what, I no longer give a shit. I must try, according to Gilles Deleuze, to fight the cop in my own head rather than the streets. I should try and augment the positive, unafraid energy which Left Twitter exudes and which has been quietly inspiring me since long before October 7th 2023.

By sharing this, I am, deliberately putting myself into a paranoid situation. But all my mini psycho dramas together with real or perceived threats to my career prospects, are as NOTHING, not when compared with the actual knowledge of a family in Rafah who know that, hey, bad people really are out to get them. I would like for all of us to be free, once and for all, of this fear. Freedom for Palestine is freedom for you too.

contemporary art

Urine: a survey

April 9, 2024

Piss is having a comeback in art, though some will argue that it never went away. As far as my generation is concerned this bodily fluid burst onto the scene when American artist Andre Serrano sank a crucifix into a case of his own urine and photographed the result. Piss Christ had such a cultural impact that following its appearance in 1987 it made it into discussions, just two or three years later, in a classroom at Long Road Sixth Form College, Cambridge, where I was studying an art history A-level. It had appeal outside the venerable academy as well, becoming a touchstone for radicalism and humour among friends who had perhaps no further interest in contemporary art. In Piss Christ they knew all they needed to know.

I mention piss because this year I’ve recently found it in strong evidence twice, making pivotal appearances in two installations at work in both the UK and Switzerland. The latter example is salient, Swiss artist Shahryar Nashat is at MASI Lugano, where a prefix to his epic show is so unassuming you could miss it. But once you see this introductory work, two giant canisters of a homemade golden fluid just inside the door, it colours everything else in the basement of this slick gallery in the Swiss Italian Alps.

The rest of the show looks like an abattoir designed by Stanley Kubrick, and a film featuring digitally-manipulated wolves is an attractive counterweight to the grim practice of collecting what looks like two weeks’ worth of one’s own piss.

Since the UK is the UK, piss is even more frowned upon. Actually, for the longest time it’s been frowned upon in public especially. The Croatian artist Dora Budor has fixed her attention on the many hostile architectural features which make pissing onto the side of a city building a hazard for shoes, socks and trouser ankles. There is one of these by the National Justice Museum close to the Nottingham gallery in which she is showing. Photo below. I don’t know the official term for this, but it sits about a foot off the ground and angles liquid away from the brickwork in order to frustrate drinkers who have been unfortunate enough to encounter one on the stagger home.

Budor has produced half a dozen of these architectural oddities in cardboard. They line one large interior wall of Nottingham Contemporary where I’m sure no one would dare use them. But given that anecdotal evidence suggests that some public galleries (I mention no names) serve as public conveniences as much as platforms for public art, Budor has made it clear we should be pissed off about how life in the modern era is often quite shit.

I’ll save shit for another blog post, suffice to say that Gavin Turk has not been entirely original by canning his own brand of piss, and selling it in packs of six, like Heinekens. Oh, and I saw a Marcus Coates film about psychosis in which this artist, who now travels the realms of madness as well as the realms of the spirits, performed a psychodrama so real to him that the frightened evidence began to soak the crotch of his jeans. I should also mention Hellen Chadwick’s Piss Flowers. Their early 90s date would indicate that this taboo art material really is a hardy perennial. Here ends my by no means exhaustive survey of urination in contemporary art.

I don’t know what it means. I don’t know why it compels me. But having visited these spaces in Nottingham and Lugano within four weeks of one another I can offer the observation that piss is in the air. Now if you’ll excuse me, I genuinely need to go take a leak.

Shahryar Nasha, Streams of Spleen, is showing at MASI Lugano until 18 August 2024 // Dora Budor: Again, can be seen at Nottingham Contemporary, until 5 May 2024 // Gavin Turk, Artist’s Piss, was unveiled at 15 Bateman Street, London, in December 2021 // Marcus Coates, The Directors was an Artangel commission screened in various locations in Pimlico, London between September and October in 2022 // Helen Chadwick, Piss Flowers, was made during a residency in Banff, Alberta, 1991-92

renaissance

The Last Supper, again and again

April 2, 2024

It was as startling as a ghost. The door was ajar and in the Church of Sant’Ambrogio; it was dark and cool. I looked around me: a medieval christ on the cross; a gothic statuette of Saint Ambrose with a barbed flail; a faint fresco of the mother of God from a c.1300. But none of these revenants were to shock as much as the most spectral scene in western art: the dramatisation of an ancient betrayal so calamitous it still has the power to horrify.

But enough of the preamble. On a press trip to Lugano, I took the opportunity to visit the Alpine village of Ponte Capriasca to look at an early sixteenth century copy of Da Vinci’s Last Supper. In writing this, I hope to understand whether, in the uncanny surrounds of a church far from Milan, is one visited by the spirit of Da Vinci? Or by some awareness of lapsed Catholic faith? Or is the spooking merely a bad case of déjà vu, triggered by the frequency in which this image occurs in contemporary life?

Whatever the case, the sight remains arresting. Its sudden thereness gave me no time to reflect that this was the work of an engineer and former pupil of Leonardo, working at a remove of an unknown number of years and seven or eight hundred kilometres from the Dominican convent in Italy where the original commands a (no doubt) even greater presence. It did its work in a moment, dragging me in as if with shepherds’ crook.

I can only speculate about the refectory of Santa Maria Delle Grazie, which was made by the very hand of the master; in photo after photo, the authenticity of that rendering is attested to by decay. The fading and flaking of the original add to the effect of spiritual mystery. Had I not seen the way the original is slowly dying, would the church here in Ponte Capriasca have inspired this visit, and grabbed my imagination? Perhaps the texture of decay is the very quality which removes Da Vinci and his Last Supper from our profane daily lives.

In the Sant’Ambrogio, the drama is clear. It presents a tableau in which twelve apostles each have their own response to the brute fact of their master’s imminent and likely fate. They are grouped in interrelated trios that complexify the emotional scene. Christ has just announced that one of the assembled diners will sell him out to the Romans. Da Vinci and, then, his own followers or disciples have conceived of a range of emotions which range from anger and suspicion to fear, sorrow and utter disbelief. These expressions multiply, in shifting degrees from one copy to the next, because emotion cannot be measured like a Pantone colour. Jesus himself looks more downcast in this copy. Judas looks less filled with animus, more like a man who has made a solid business decision.

A few rough figures might be salient. There has been a church on this site since the 1200s. It is not documented when Cesare da Sesto completed this copy, but Leonardo’s former pupil lived between 1477and1523. Da Vinci painted The Last Supper between 1494 and 1498. It was only after getting home that I came to understand the most mind-blowing aspect of this imitation. It is not the fact that no photography is available, but rather it is the licence with which the so called Leonardeschi were to operate. Da Vinci’s followers painted about 100 last suppers in the Swiss-Italian alpine region.

While I was in Lugano, I visited another. This was in Santa Maria degli Angeli, a beautiful church on the edge of the city’s pristine glacial lake which dates to 1499/1500. This Last Supper was by Bernardino Luini who lived between c1480 and 1532. His interpretation is more than a sharpening or inflection of facial expression. It is a loosening and unravelling of Leonardo’s scene in which bodies leave the table and the groupings of disciple are split into a triptych. This was clearly a live situation vis-à-vis the canon of western painting. But I struggled to take it all in since I arrived during a St Joseph’s day service of mass.

I cannot say why this Italian speaking region of the Alps should contain quite so many versions of the Last Supper. It seems a very ambitious composition to transplant into these distant churches. Yet it might be said that the theatricality of the original is what allowed so many followers to re-stage it. The Italian master had established the dramatis personae and the tragic plot, it was up to his followers to re-present his work.

The late philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour noted that in reproduction paintings could take on new aspects of their originals and amplify the reception of the image in the same way as each new performance of King Lear does. It too has an original, a folio which is rarely seen. In our age, we have a new ‘folio’ for The Last Supper: popular novel The Da Vinci Code. I haven’t even read it, but since 2023, when it was published, the sacred meaning of this biblical scene is forever overlaid with the sinister mood of a work of popular literature, thriller selling 80 million copies with an accompanying blockbuster film about the evils of the Catholic Church. Perhaps this is why I felt spooked.

In which case, thank you Dan Brown for adding to the works of a very great humanist. I would like to imagine this writer on a tour of all one hundred copies of The Last Supper. I think he would soon realise that Da Vinci’s code, if that’s what we’re calling it, was as open source as Linux.

contemporary art

A Monastic Trio

February 8, 2024

Three good souls are performing, and improvising, their way through a weekday afternoon; large paintings are taking shape in the barn where they congregate. The trio combine music, movement and the slow application of bright acrylic paint. They address the canvas with gestural emphasis, and respond to one another with alacrity.

For most of the time, they work away unseen, unsung, and unbeknownst to the majority of those in Oxford on this Wednesday. While university Fellows read and write, students sit in lectures, tourists come and go, and the remaining occupants of the city are at their day jobs, these three labour at something with little tangible value. It makes their process, and their product, all the worthier for that.

The painted forms are abstract. The music freeform and dissonant. The dance is expressive and informal. The three make a noise and generate a real energy that can be felt beyond this cell of theirs. I hear it as I approach from the road and it feels like a calling. I push open the door and the mood in this hallowed space shifts, but only slightly. I feel accommodated by the group. A theme played by their oboe player lifts me. Their dancer and their painter may have stopped to listen to the sound of my entrance. I take a seat, feeling self-conscious, and begin to pen notes with an inevitable and unhelpful sense of theatre.

I’m sure that it would have been welcomed were I to break into song, but I don’t want to overstate the blurring of boundaries between audience and performers. There is enough interplay without introducing this blogger as a rogue fourth element. The woodwind is provided by Christopher Redgate. The dancer is Lavinia Cascone, but she too paints. The visual artist, who cedes control, is Mark Rowan-Hull. He too moves, with slow poise, to the music. All three watch one another, listen to one another and vibe off each other.

The paintings themselves emerge slowly as fingers dab and smear, as oil stick drips and arcs. Two canvases lean on walls, two rest on the floor. The pair without oboes are happy to wipe hands on one another and drum clean fingertips onto the canvas. They are happy to embrace stillness and move away from ostensible purpose, the production of artworks, to trace embodied arabesques around the paintings, drawing attention to the space they inhabit. The only rule, if you can call it that, is that the works, at this stage, have limited palettes: two are an infinite arrangement of blues, two are warm explosions of yellow.

None of this would happen without the instigation of Rowan-Hull. This UK artist is many things: a mesmerising performer, a generous collaborator, and an expressive painter. What’s more, he is a member of Oxford University. And as might be expected from an affiliation with Oxford, Rowan-Hull’s work is steeped in high culture: classical music, contemporary dance, and art theory. He is also a synaesthete, so tones of music and tones of colour come together with intensity. This can be seen from the concentration with which he moves around this space, which is both studio and stage.

Kendrew Barn, the venue, is an adjunct of St John’s College. Discreet signage directs you to an exhibition here which has run parallel to a recent conference at the College. During this event, art historians, musicologists and literary experts met to share perspectives on a most basic element of the painter’s art, gesture. But scholarly restraint was cast to the breeze on day two when Rowan-Hull staged an elaborate happening in a St John’s lecture theatre. On this occasion, Redgate and Cascone were joined by singer Maggie Nichols and artist/critic Matthew Collings, with electronica from Dr Emmanuel Lorien Spinelli. It is difficult to articulate the combined effect of these strong presences, suffice to say that one knew this quietly riotous, unfolding event to be Art with a capital A, because it fit into no other category.

Back in Kendrew Barn, the footing is a little more stable. Next to the performance area is a room in which four static works line the floor, with a fifth propped against the wall. Gallery notes reveal that Rowan-Hull’s father was an Anglican Minister and there are a number of his clerical stoles, draped around the shoulders of the 2m tall wall-leaning painting. A vivid luminosity, which actually comes from overhead spotlights, appears to emanate from these paintings’ layered depths. Four works – two high spec digital prints on photographic paper and two hybrid print-paintings on Perspex – bring together rich blues, greens and reds as if in the glass windows one might gaze at in church.

In this way the room sets an ecclesiastical tone which pits a 2,000-year-old religion against the latest developments in machine learning. In a paradoxical move, this show – which is after all entitled Gesture – includes two works here upon which Rowan Hull has not laid a finger. AI-generated clouds of layered colour are too rich for human hand and eye. Stained-glass meets a techno-futurist aesthetic and brings an overlay of staves, notes and musical notation together in a primordial vortex. The artist has briefed a computer to share his raw materials and then given the machine a presence in the resulting show.

One might compare the musical notation to iron tracery, framing gestural fields of colour. It structures the abstraction. Close inspection reveals the written music to represent difficult avant-garde compositions, in rare time signatures and polarising octaves. Meanwhile, two pertinent quotes, offered as takeaway postcards, are drawn from two secular philosophers, Theodor Adorno and Hans-Georg Gadamer. I have neither the scope nor the expertise to explore these writers here, but the excerpts appear to get inside the notion of gesture as a movement that is natural and corporeal, yet also symbolic and even spiritual.

In a third room, exposed barn rafters echo a single wooden seat, which resembles now a solo church pew. A giant cruciform hunk of rope which the artist found washed up on a Suffolk beach suggests a maritime take on the agricultural and nature-inspired works of the Italian Arte Povera group. An old-fashioned, starkly vacant pram, also a readymade, seems a nod towards dada, specifically Duchamp’s bicycle wheel. In these ways it emerges that the primary religion here is one we call art.

Assembled for the contemplation of one visitor at a time they are situated between the churchy wooden stool and a large projection screen where a series of moving images play out. This short reel, set in a large, bare rural homestead, show Rowan-Hull engaged in forms of contemplative activity for a lone cameraperson and, in this show, a lone spectator. The title Empty House Studies, hints at the mood of isolation which the artist acts out. In more than one film the camera opens and closes on him daubing red paint on a staircase wall. It looks bloody, but it might be Farrow & Ball. Empty House Studies offers a silent, peaceable form of the Viennese art movement known as Actionism, but as if Hermann Nitsch was replaced by the composer and painter John Cage.

Which is to say that this bijou exhibition engages with a lot of ideas, a surfeit of references, a plethora of theories. Yet at the heart of the resulting displays, which send the eye and the heart in so many directions, there is a shared performance in music, movement and paint. Redgate, Cascone and Rowan-Hull work away in a wordless realm and summon forces from across the exhibition space, channelling them into the form of paintings which are in no need of an audience, but which bear the impression of a collaborative dedication to art for unknown ends.

Gesture: Mark Rowan-Hull ran at Kendrew Barn, St John’s College, Oxford, between 23 January and 2 February 2024.

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Between rock and hard places in Ethiopia

January 3, 2024

Exploring the sunken churches of Lalibela

Lalibela is a troubled, troubling town in the Highlands of Ethiopia. It is under curfew and without power. Our 2022 trip was memorable, absolutely, a fantastic experience: memorable for the food, the scenery and eleven miraculous churches all hewn into rock; but we still get updates via text – disturbing messages about civil war, food shortages and even drone attacks. We can’t forget the churches. We can’t forget the locals.

In summer 2022, we sat on a terrace with views across the surrounding jungle valley. Over a drink or two, our guide told us how, just last year, these treetops echoed with the sound of gun battles, a scene of bitter fighting between the Ethiopian government and Northern militia forces. Indeed, still parked outside was a residual UN jeep, some material evidence of some stark facts. We have happy memories of our Airbnb as well. Our host chatted with us as we ate breakfast; he recommended places to eat, charged our phones and even procured us a litre of honey. Both locals have our numbers now, and they reach out to us from time to time. There is nothing we can do about visas, or debts, or the threat of displacement.

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Those churches were the reason we came. To reach them we were to climb down steep red steps into man-made crevasses which brought us up against grave, square-cut facades or to small dark entry ways, hewn low in the rock. Before entering we removed shoes and padded in dusty socks around uneven floors, past priest holes like small caves and gloomy altars just a foot off the ground. A sparse interior might have a few worn rugs, a smoky candle here or there, or burnished paintings revealing devotional icons upon which we shone our phones to see ancient panels leaned with formality against walls of volcanic stone.

Most of the churches were dug down and into the rock face, but four are actual monoliths, meaning they are cut away from all sides. The most impressive edifice, Biete Giorgis or the House of Saint George, has a cruciform footprint. You can imagine jumping from the nearby plateau onto the roof. A tour of Bet Gabriel-Rufael, the House of the Archangel, meanwhile, took us through an unlit 35m tunnel. It was confined, totally dark, said to reflect a journey through hell. Prof D found the going v. hard, but owing to the difficulties of the terrain, these were surely the most fun ecclesiastical monuments which our daughter, little A, had ever known.

Fun was not the intention. These churches were planned, chipped, scraped and shovelled into existence during the dark ages, not widely considered one of history’s most laugh-a-minute eras. They were built in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries by a regional king who wanted to put his manor on the map as a new Jerusalem. Ethiopia, the home of Coptic Christianity, has done its own religious thing since the fourth century. I’ll gloss over the details, but these churches are older than most in Europe. It goes on here still, the worship, the services, the feast days. We navigated the trenches of eight or so churches, making our way around congregants from the town.

Some of the townsfolk, I saw too much of. These were the pair of teenage boys who, having engaged me in conversation, knew my name, my place of origin, and my indulgent attitude towards young people who want to ‘practice English’ so they can ‘study at university’. In fact, they had all the English they needed to try and sell me bracelets and souvenirs. That might sound harsh, but they tailed us for a full day and gave to the beginning of our stay, a quiet sense of menace, stoked I admit from my having seen ominous films like Straw Dogs (1971) and Deliverance (1972). D, who knows territory like this, told me to ignore them. This only seemed to hurt their feelings. That was the most difficult thing about travelling to Lalibela: the requirement to ignore impecunious local inhabitants.

Another difficulty was the permanent power cut. Lack of electricity meant that each time we stopped for food we would need to charge phones off generators. We ate to the sound of their constant chugging. After dusk we navigated the compound and our three-bed room with the help of a wind-up torch. We got early nights. We bathed in the morning with warm water brought to us in a bucket by our Airbnb host. And after breakfast I could enjoy the slow and careful preparation of a coffee or two. The strong Ethiopian brew meant that, when I left for the sightseeing, unlike my phone, I was 100% charged.

Our room had a balcony from which you could hear insects, birds and prayer calls. The view was largely tree canopies, simple dwellings, and blue skies. I found it meditative to sit there, while D and A recovered with siestas. The new Jerusalem, during this respite in fighting, was a much more peaceful place than one finds in the vicinity of the old Jerusalem right now. It is an eternal tragedy that the world’s most holy places seem to attract the most warlike aspects of human nature. Paranoia has dominion over the Earth.

Before we flew to Lalibela we tried to pass security at the airport in Addis Ababa. During this routine check I was pulled aside because they found a pair of binoculars in little A’s bag. It’s against on/off martial law, apparently, to bring binoculars into Ethiopia. We were heading in the direction of the conflict so, naturally, they thought that a small family on UK passports might be smuggling military equipment to the militia. Admittedly, I enjoyed the level of suspicion, given that nineteenth century poet Arthur Rimbaud took up gun-running in East Africa. But I don’t think he flew.

The binoculars were really innocuous: small, not too powerful, and fitted snugly in a purple case branded with the logo of one of the UK’s most respectable charities: the National Trust(!). But upon their discovery we were separated, and I was escorted, by armed official, back the way we had come through the departures hall and into a windowless back office. There was quite a bit of waiting – I wondered if would we miss our flight; there was also some questioning – I wondered if I would do jail time. But after I had signed a paper or two, the binoculars were confiscated and I was taken back to departures to rejoin D and A.

If you ever go to Lalibela, let me know. If our guide and our host are still in business, you’ll be looked after well. The churches I’m sure, will be open to visitors, for another millennia, at least, you would say.

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Season’s bleatings from Germany

December 23, 2023

A search for plenitude in the Christmas markets of Bonn, Siegburg and Köln

I have never really been a Christmas person, but this year I have gone the whole hog. As whole as one of the hogs turning on a spit in Siegburg medieval market, but I am getting ahead of my tale.

It begins with a thirteen-year-old’s birthday. Little A no longer believes in Father Christmas. In the coming seven years she will cease to believe in anything. So Prof D and I took up an opportunity to eek out the last vestiges of childhood’s magic with a visit to a land of bright lights, street food, jolly crowds, and tremendous cake. We visited three different Christmas markets and felt to have eaten and shopped our way round the entire Rhein-Ruhr metropolitan region.

Our previous experience of a not-quite ‘echt’ German Christmas market was the one found, this time of year, in Birmingham. If you haven’t been, it’s jaw dropping. Dominating the city centre, it draws vast crowds of shirt-sleeved midlanders who quaff ice cold beer in ice cold temperatures, and they do so by the litre. It was little preparation for the civilised pleasures of Bonn.

So we hit the central Weihnachstmarkt within hours of arriving at Frankfurt airport. At the very moment we passed beneath a wide, glowing arch, which welcomed all visitors to this market, cathedral bells began to peal. Such joy! The spirit of Christmas was so clearly upon us, that anything seemed possible: gathering winter fuel, dashing through the snow, bringing figgy pudding. Anything for which our warm hats, scarves and gloves suited us.

Unbidden, another song came to me: ‘It’s the most wonderful time… of the year’. It swings, no? Briefly, ever so briefly, I felt like the good-natured protagonist of a coma-inducing festive movie. I felt like the hearty, mentally healthy, generous spirited font of love and good times, which a good parent must surely be, at least once a year. I stepped outside myself and began to consider the presence and the wholesomeness, which this setting was bestowing on us. I looked at D and was able to guess she was feeling something like this too.

And it was not hard to maintain the glow on my ruddy cheeks. We had mulled wine, and mulled non-alcoholic punch. We had pretzels and flammlachs (freshly flamed salmon) with chilli mayo. There was a towering pine tree festooned with gold LEDs, and a dinky carousel ride with spinning headlamps, and a neon trimmed ferris wheel, all of which reflected back from the varifocal lenses of my tinselled spectacles. My journey from a misanthropic cynic to wassailing family man was short and direct.

This was reinforced in the coming days. There were two or three more moments filled with crimbo spirit. In Seigburg, they serve up the Gluhwein with a medieval spin. All the stalls are lit by candles. This took us all the way back to the Middle Ages, while I continued to express my own middle-age. Gentle flames were to guide us from stand to stand. It was a trip: a very lengthy queue for roast pig led to the most perfect crackling which in turn led to a middle-aged high. We also ate oven-fresh rolls, tasting crystals of sea salt as we chewed the warm dough; this had a similar effect on D.

In Köln, we visited a gothic sky-scraper, a delicately buttressed cathedral so vertiginous that heaven might have been just the other side of the lofty criss-cross vaulting. Part of a crowd of tourists, we milled around taking selfies, largely oblivious to the mass in progress further up the nave. One could only wonder about the lives of the many artisans who carved the stone, gilded the crosses and stained the glass. I had reason to believe they liked good crackling.

We now gazed around dumbly, until the congregation suddenly raised their voices in song. This gave me a spiritual jolt for a nanosecond, but in that nanosecond I recalled all those lessons about the true meaning of this time of year. Recalled them and then forgot. We were soon pushing our way out of the exit and into the cold late afternoon air.

In the shadow of the cathedral was another Christmas market, a less fantastical apparition than found in either Bonn or Seigburg. The stalls were workaday and instrumental to the sale of a range of gifts which, it must be said, had little to do with Christmas. The twinkling lights did seem weaker. There was no choice but to join a sea of punters who flowed sluggishly past the expensive wares, it was a space in which my concern was about keeping us together and not getting lost. At one point we found ourselves caught in a human tectonic drift, squeezed into a slowly heaving moshpit, that was packed with visitors of all ages, in all states of anger. This too was the spirit of Christmas.

This suffocating mass of families – containing dozens of parents who were no doubt striving, like us, to be their best selves for the holiday season – were, more or less, facing an outdoor stage. It was gussied up in red and gold to heighten the mood of celebration. To complete a mood fitting the setting, there was a hard-working rock band up there, a covers band, who knew their market in all senses of the word.

I’m going to stick my neck out, destroy my charitable Christmas persona, and say that this band sounded terrible. But then a Germanic rendition of Fairytale of New York is not quintessential Christmas fayre. Or it it? Having seen this classic duet performed at the Cambridge Corn Exchange in 1988, by the actual Pogues, with the actual Shane MacGowan, and the actual Kirsty MacColl, it was, for me, a murder mystery. How did I get here?

Upon our return to Brighton, I was driving Little A to a basketball match when the original of this song came on Heart FM. “Do you like this song?” I couldn’t help ask the thirteen-year-old. “Yessss!,” she replied. “It’s SOOO good!” There it was, on the digital airwaves of a car radio, for a fleeting moment, much closer to home… Christmas plenitude. May you all experience something like it this season, no matter how briefly, no matter how incidentally.