<h1>Archives</h1>
    contemporary art, intervention

    James Turrell, Deer Shelter Skyspace (2006)

    April 12, 2011

    It was not a day you would think you might need protection. My recent visit here was on a mild Spring afternoon. But once inside the skyspace, the breeze up there carried the force of a roar.

    The clouds or perhaps the Earth appeared to be moving twice as fast. It brought to mind footage which had been speeded up to make a disturbing point about the unstable climate.

    Shelter is not necessarily the point of James Turrell’s work. In a number of similar skyscapes, it has been said the American artist is more keen to simply bring the cosmos closer.

    But it happens that this piece of work is built into a listed 19th century fold for livestock belonging to the Bretton Park Estate in West Yorkshire. It has a certain historical purpose.

    Now, as a restless wind skims overhead, the opening in the roof reveals how exposed we might have been as we wandered o’er nearby dale and distant city streets.

    Stone benches tilt back to allow a perfect view of the elements. A square aperture helps accentuate the pictorial drama of the skies above, or at very least their infinite indifference.

    This prospect of oblivion is troubling and Deer Shelter offers only limited physical cover. But for a moment or two of contemplation, existence does seem here at least as solid as the four walls.

    There’s a PBS documentary featuring an interview with James Turrell available here. Deer Shelter meanwhile can be seen at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and further details including press at time of opening can be seen here.

    aggregation, contemporary art

    Found Objects 09/04/2011

    April 9, 2011
    • Ai Weiwei’s arrest has been a gift to the blogosphere with much better coverage at Hyperallergic and Eyeteeth than you will find here. But here’s a curious thing: the dissident artist’s collected blog posts are briefly reviewed in the Guardian today. He posted every day for 4 years.
    • Meanwhile Russia’s most troublesome artists have just been awarded a state prize worth 400,000 roubles. Kriston Capps at the Washington Post gives you some idea of what the group has had to endure before now and he’s surely done well to secure a few quotes.
    • Colm Tóibín has written an informed and readable piece about the life of Joan Miró. Among other things, the story in the Guardian argues that Barcelona was once a bit too provincial for the Catalan painter. Another snippet of Miro news this week details his friendship with Hemingway.
    • In an even more gossipy vein, here is a piece from Vanity Fair about the love life of Pablo Picasso. The painter was “a bit of a vampire” it seems.
    • Just as scary is the report on this show at CCCS Florence on the ever interesting We Make Money Not Art blog. It features sound art you really don’t want to be hearing.
    • Paris Review has an interview with Pavel Zoubok, whose New York gallery is the city’s only space devoted to collage. He explains the medium’s popularity with writers, women and web-users.
    • If you haven’t seen the new public art installation outside Craven Cottage (home of Fulham Football Club), it’s worth a peek. Footie blog Off the Post sums it up just about as well as anyone.
    • And if that doesn’t make your smile, this might. Someone writing under the pseudonym Facebike has written a very engaging story for Artsdesk. But whether it’s a pisstake of art or their local council, I’ll leave you to decide.

    contemporary art, contemporary sculpture, intervention

    Leo Fitzmaurice, Arcadia (2007)

    April 7, 2011

    This sign is at once ironic, illusory and completely superfluous. So it ticks a lot of boxes to signal that it really just labels itself. Arcadia is after all the name of this artwork.

    More irony comes from the introduction of roadside signage into such a wild, mythical realm. A nearby motorway would kill the atmosphere. It would make shepherding a nightmare.

    Then illusion comes from the fact that, lovely as this scene be, it is far from unspoiled nature. It is the heavily landscaped nature of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and it certainly isn’t Greece.

    And thirdly, there is this sign’s lack of necessity. We can see this is an attractive view. So Leo Fitzmaurice’s artwork really just gets in the way. Culture is unavoidable like that.

    It will always speak of the millions who have gone before us. So the heritage-brown sign reminds us Arcadia has been at times a battlefield, a historic industry and a ruin.

    It also recalls that famous tomb painted by Nicolas Poussin. His signage reads: Et in Arcadia ego; an “I woz ere” by death.

    Death in this case may come by road or industrialised sightseeing. There may be an environmental message here, and what are those any more if not momento mori?

    The above work is one of a series Leo Fitzmaurice has installed around the idyllic grounds of YSP near Wakefield. This is by the visitor centre. For directions etc, see gallery website.

    aggregation, contemporary art

    Found Objects 03/04/11

    April 3, 2011

    It seems about time criticismism did some aggregation. So from now on I’ll try to post links to some of the news stories, features, blog posts, videos etc, which I’ve enjoyed on any given week.

    So here goes:

    • My first virtual found object has to be the first show by Dead Hare Radio. It features a chat with art blogger Caroline Miranda from C-Monster.net, who among other things can tell you how and why to aggregate web links. Thanks to all involved!
    • Journalists or bloggers of any description may like this celebration of the trade by Jeff McMahon at Contrary Magazine. Journos get a William Burroughs-style junk sickness, apparently.
    • I really enjoyed this urgent report about the progress of Kasimir Malevich’s Black Sqaure. Blogger Vvoi from New Art describes his encounter with the painting at the State Gallery in Moscow.
    • After reading these two reviews of the Watteau show currently at the Wallace Collection, I feel satisfied and yet dissatisfied: the former because they tell me so much about it; the latter because I now so much want to see the exhibition for myself. They are by Fisun Güner in New Statesman and Charles Darwent in the Independent.
    • But here’s an altogether different sort of review by Hrag Vartanian at Hyperallergic. The future of art criticism? Perhaps.
    • The usual sight of a farmer’s market in Brighton this weekend got a bit more interesting after reading this piece in Frieze about locavorism, urban agriculture and restaurants as art. It also includes a couple of tasty tidbits about Gordon Matta-Clark.
    • In the wake of Tate’s acquisition of a £65.5m Picasso, here’s the most racy analysis of artwork-as-commodity you are likely to read all year, from Ben Street’s blog on Art21.
    • Jonathan Jones at the Guardian makes the shocking claim that artists should (occasionally) be able to paint and draw.
    • A press release can still reach where a spray can can’t: Street Art at MoCA in Los Angeles. Oh, and there’s this.

    Arts Council England, contemporary art

    Arts Council funding – a modest proposal

    April 1, 2011

    If you’re heading out to look at some art this weekend, it may be with some relief. Chances are that on Wednesday your nearest gallery made it onto Arts Council England’s list of National portfolio organisations.

    NPOs will continue to get funding, albeit reduced by some percentage figure: typically 11%. So most galleries are going to have to scale back by more than a tenth, to offer much less of what they offer so well.

    The quality of exhibitions will no doubt suffer and there will be less support for artists. And that varied programmes of talks may have to charge at levels which preclude some non-Etonians.

    Of course, there will be job losses too. But even these are unlikely to make headlines. In fact as far as most people in will realise, it will be business as usual. The galleries will still be there.

    For this reason, I would suggest ACE change their decision and withdraw all funding from 15 of the most high profile art venues in the country, who in turn should close up shop the next day.

    Galleries that must close include: BALTIC, Nottingham Contemporary, Ikon Birmingham, FACT Liverpool, Cornerhouse Manchester, New Art Gallery Walsall, Yorkshire Sculpture Park and the beautiful De La Warr Pavilion on the South Coast.

    ACE should of course put all several London galleries out of business: Serpentine, Whitechapel, Camden and ICA. And most deliciously of all Kettle’s Yard Cambridge and Modern Art Oxford.

    This would save about £14m a year. We would still need to cut another £0.9m, but that could easily come from abandoning work on Turner Contemporary and The Hepworth Wakefield.

    Okay, that might be an incalculable loss. But think how 17 major empty and unfinished galleries would play in the hearts and minds of anyone with a scrap of sensitivity: worse than a cancelled outreach programme.

    If we are living in a society of the spectacle, why not give this government the spectacle they deserve?

    agriculture, arte povera, sculpture

    Pino Pascali, Farm Tools (1968)

    March 29, 2011

    Leading agriculturalists, politicians and intellectuals got together this March to explore how Roman farming techniques can help us protect the environment in 2011.

    The setting was Italy’s leading school of agriculture in Florence and the occasion was to mark 50 years of a journal of farming history, namely Rivista di storia dell’ agricoltura.

    This publication would have been seven years old when Pascali made Farm Tools, so here both the artwork and the academic world appear to have been ploughing the same furrow.

    Both ventures seem to express the Italian tendency to cast back in time to antiqiuity. Understandable, but artists had previously been more interested in art and architecture than farming.

    This may have been an oversight, mind you. Historian Pliny the Elder makes an observation on the very theme which must have informed the arte povera movement:

    “In what manner then are lands to be cultivated to the best advantage? In the cheapest manner if it is good, or by good bad things.” Source: this 19th century encyclopaedia.

    Received wisdom and perhaps revived wisdom said that you could give the land too much “culture” or cultivation. And the same might be said of an audience, so Pascali uses rudimentary tools.

    Once they are propped against a gallery wall, they remind me, if nothing else, of how little I know about rural life. So “good bad things” indeed, to quote Pliny quoting the ancients.

    This work is on show at Camden Arts Centre, London, until 1 May 2011, in the Pino Pascali show mentioned in the last post.

    arte povera

    Pino Pascali, Vedova Blu (1968)

    March 25, 2011

    There is nothing like an early death to fuse an artist’s biography and work in the minds of his audience. Here is Pino Pascali, beside one of his best known works, inseparable.

    Common sense tells us that a motorcycle crash should not affect the worth of the Italian sculptor’s art. Yet it does, and this fact even seems to tell us something about the function of art.

    Pascali himself spoke of his sculptures as tombs. Since his death in 1968 they are what indeed survive him. We have photographs and footage too, but the art is more vital.

    But solemnity has gone out the window along with marble and bronze. Along with other artists from the arte povera movement, Pascali rejected traditional materials.

    In light of his death, the gesture says: you can’t take it with you. This fur-covered spider has outlived every Italian Prime Minister of the 1960s. Bet you can’t name any of them.

    Vedova Blu was created in a spirit of play, mind you. It is not very threatening, not even real, only the name suggests this Blue Widow is deadly. And this photo, of course, of a man at one with his own memorial.

    Work can be seen in ‘…a multitude of soap bubbles which explode from time to time…’: Pino Pascali’s final works 1967-1968. This show is at Camden Arts Centre until May 1 2011.

    contemporary art, philosophy, theatre of cruelty

    Nancy Spero, Maypole: Take No Prisoners II (2008)

    March 21, 2011
    Nancy Spero Maypole: Take No Prisoners II 2008 Installation view, Serpentine Gallery, London (3 March – 2 May 2011) © 2011 Jerry Hardman-Jones

    Antonin Artaud only wrote one play, said to be impossible to restage. So we might now find the best example of the writer’s so-called Theatre of Cruelty at a Nancy Spero show

    Certainly, the only performance of Spurt of Blood which this blogger ever witnessed would be difficult to review. Shouts, cries and physical convulsions don’t bear much repetition.

    Spero’s fascination with this French writer is well known. Her current show at Serpentine features some 25 works which quote from him or name him in their title. This work, however, does not.

    But Maypole: Take No Prisoners II does come to mind after reading the following quote from French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in which he calls for festivals with nothing to see:

    “Plant a stake crowned with flowers in the middle of a square; gather the people together there, and you will have a festival. Do better yet, let the spectators become . . . actors themselves.”

    So perhaps a gallery, where the visitor is surrounded by the action, where Artaud’s writing is screamed from the walls, is in some ways the antidote to classical spectacle Rousseau proposed.

    Both writers seem keen to get away from theatrical representation. And Spero, while providing theatre in the above work, gives voice to her muse’s radically incomprehendable scream.

    Btw, the quotation is from Letter to M. d’Alembert, which is briefly discussed by Jacques Derrida in his essay The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation in Writing and Difference.

    For a more in depth discussion of Spero’s use of texts by Artaud in relation to Derrida, there is an interesting essay by Lucy Bradnock available here.

    Maypole: Take No Prisoners II can be seen in Nancy Spero at Serpentine Gallery until 2 May 2011. See gallery website for more details.

    contemporary art, lobsters, performance art

    Edwina Ashton, Peaceful serious creatures (lobster arranging), 2011

    March 18, 2011
    Edwina Ashton, Peaceful serious creatures (lobster arranging), performance, duration: three hours intermittently, 2011

    Most of those lucky enough to see Edwina Ashton’s performance at Jerwood Space in the next five weeks will be, presumably, non-plussed. How else to react to people dressed as lobsters?

    For three hour stretches the lobsters may be seen to rearrange objects. There may be more to it, but that’s the gist. It’s a response to the little known fact that real lobsters rearrange their caves.

    This is an extensive a tribute to a crustacean whose most famous fan was the 19th century French poet Gérard de Nerval. It was him that characterised them as  “peaceful, serious creatures.”

    Said term might of course also apply to artists. In which case, the piece is a good demonstration of “the choreography of positions between artist, artwork and audience.”

    It is only through this arrangement, according to Catherine Wood, that dancing lobsters and the like can be comprehended. This curator’s essay is well worth reading in the online catalogue.

    And this rule applies to painting and sculpture just as much as performance; performance merely foregrounds it. The implications are incredible and a little frightening.

    Positions on a dancefloor or indeed a stage change all the time. The movement of the audience will therefore determine the meaning and certainly the value of any piece of art.

    But of course we are being moved around in our turn by the artist, via whatever channels they hope to communicate, and the various appearances of the work.

    If proof be needed that the quality of your aesthetic experience boils down to social context, look no further than lobsters and a second essay, this one by David Foster Wallace.

    The novelist points out that until the 19th century, lobster was dished up in prisons. Many said it was inhumane to make the inmates eat today’s delicacy more than once a week.

    You would think that a taste for food might be less subjective than a taste for art. But as lobster numbers dwindled they became more desirable dance partners. Inevitable really.

    We can only be non-plussed for so long and no one can respond to a piece of art in isolation. Other people’s discourses are then part of what we are looking at. It’s lobster, after all. Eat it up!

    I haven’t even seen this piece yet, by the way. I’m planning to next week and will report back. It’s being performed at Jerwood Space  as part of SHOW, until April 21 (Tuesdays and Thursdays 2–5pm). See gallery website for directions.

    Advertising, contemporary art, fashion, global capitalism

    Coco Cartier and Ezili Lagerfeld, Voodoo Chanel (2011)

    March 15, 2011

    Brand power is interesting because brands are power. They can attract money and votes. They can set the conditions for certain types of behaviour. Even weapons have brands.

    This show makes a target out of one luxury fashion brand and at first you wonder why. It is after all only a designer label. Chanel is not slashing the NHS or sending people to war.

    What Chanel does, however, is create a market for luxury. It belongs to an elite and is one of the ways this elite recognise themselves. And the rest of us can just aspire.

    Subvert the brand and you subvert the hierarchy, at least that would appear to be the equation. But the project here seems also something of a celebration of this label, a tribute to its fetish power.

    This system of ours doesn’t run on a rational subscription to free market economics. Global capitalism thrives on magic and superstition, because people, being what they are, like such things.

    So it comes down to a choice between the high priests of the boardroom and the low priests of the shanty. And if the latter seem a frightening prospect, don’t worry. They’ve got a brand now too.

    Voodoo Chanel can be seen at Grey Area, Brighton, until 27 March. See gallery website for more details.