As promised, a few more shots of work from the current Saatchi Gallery exhibition, The Shape of Things To Come:New Sculpture

Kris Martin: Summit

David Altmejd: The New North

Berlinde De Bruyckere

David Batchelor

Arty Bits

I went again last night to Poetry Unplugged in Covent Garden, my third visit in four weeks, and once again was astounded both at the slickness of the organisation and the uniformly high standard of the performances and the poetry. In three weeks I've now seen about ninety performances from about fifty different performers and have yet to see a bad one. Next week will be my fourth and final visit. I'm looking forward to it already.

I really can't recommend it highly enough if you are a poet visiting London on a Tuesday evening who wants to have a go at an open mic.

Of course Now that I've left the Midlands there are other regular performances that I can't make. My reviews of Bilston Voices have, of necessity, ceased. Do not despair. The latest one has been reviewed by Gary Longden over at Behind The Arras. It sounds as if it was another great night.

Before I went into Poetry Unplugged I paid a second visit to the "Shape of Things To Come" exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, this time with my camera. I'll be posting more pictures later, but here's one to be going on with - Fokert de Jong's "The Shooting Lesson".

And while we're on the subject I can also recommend the current exhibition of Doctor Who as represented in comics which covers everything from the old TV21 days right up to now. It's at the Cartoon Museum in Little Russel Street.

That time of year again

It's that time of year again, the point where I have had my annual visit to one of the London Galleries followed by a nice meal and then followed by an evening at the theatre. This year the theatre was Simon Callow doing for Shakespeare what he has previously done for Dickens, the meal was Lebanese and the gallery was, as last year, the Saatchi where the current exhibition is "The Shape of Things To Come: New Sculpture".

The exhibition is varied and interesting, though often pornographic (and vaguely disturbing) without being erotic. As with last year though it isn't the exhibition that's prompting my post - it's the exhibition guide.

I have reached the conclusion that the reason people don't like modern art has nothing to do with the art itself and everything to do with the specious claptrap of the critics.

Here then are some of the phrases from this years guide. Interpretation notes are provided.

"these identifiers change the viewers perspective and turn the room's vaguely prehistoric ambience into less numinous territory"

(the  little paper crosses on top of the rocks stop them looking like rocks and make them less spiritual - that's what the words mean but surely the intent must have been the opposite)

"explore the boundaries of traditional figuration by embedding his subjects with otherworldly elements and recocneptualising how to represent the human figure in all its spatial, spiritual and psychological mmultiplicity"

(he makes stautues that look a bit like people but not really by using lots of things that people aren't actually made of)

"the crashed car is recycled from a subject of horror into a kind of metaphysical art"

(he bends cars into shapes that they couldn't ever have actually crashed into)

"sculptures which occupy a space between abstraction and representation"

(stylised sculptures)

"abstract deformation is turned into beauty"

(things that should be beautiful are made to look ugly)

"(the) large fuzzy masses look like rubble found at a building site"

( (the) large fuzzy masses look like rubble found at a building site)

"have a lifelike quality which makes their dirty and broken down facture all the more affecting"

(they are quite realistic but poorly made - again, this is what the words mean but seems to me to express the opposite of the actual intent.)

"create a bold new figure for the female nude"

(not very lifelike female nudes)

"explores the actualisation of pattern  and the tension between the exquisite decorativeness ond DIY"

(looks a bit like home decoration but might be art)

"in contrast to pure conceptual forms of minimalism, present a messy aesthetic, both alluring and overtly ugly"

(not really minimalist but looks quite interesting if not very pretty)

"The Milky Way is a sprawling web of wood and neon tubes illustrating its title subject but withot pretending to be to scale, useful or even correct"

(A sculpture made out of neon lights that is called The Milky Way  But isn't anything to do with it really.)

"composed of 119 found neon tubes... suggests a madness held in check but disconcertingly on the verge of being out of control"

(pretty but chaotic - possibly bonkers)

""they are charged with an alter-like quasi-shamanistic power"

(they look vaguely religious and are presented on plinths)

As I say, none of this should be taken as criticism of the art itself which, for the most part I found interesting and ocacasionally marvelous, but with descriptions like that is it any wonder that that the general public see it as being just so much pretentious nonsense?

Newspeak: British Art Now Part 7: Phillips de Pury and Company Gallery

The final gallery, the one that isn't really part of the exhibition, is a rather different affair to the others. It is a gallery filled with furniture and tableware designs and while some of them a rather interesting - and one so startling that you just go, "I want one!" it raises an interesting question about art.

Before we get to the question I'd like to give a better idea about what's in the gallery. The guide book continues its theme of florid overblown descriptions by describing an array of spoons by Max Lamb as "one of the sweetest and purest explorations of form and process. It is and will always be an array of spoons. 

Elsewhere, there are oddly designed though strangely appealing chairs, drinking glasses, knives forks and plates and all other domestic items. One hanging mobile was quite interesting, being a white square with a light bulb shaped hole in the middle, the illuminated background and dark centre making a kind of negative space lamp. The gem though was Bastian Bischoff and Per Emanuelsson's Clock Clock which is an array of twenty-four analogue clocks whose hand positions form the time in the pattern of a digital clock. As the the minute changes the hands of all of them rotate rapidly and hypnotically before settling into a configuration representing the new time. Utterly Brilliant and I can only repeat, "I want one!"

Anyway, to that question.

We have discussed frequently and heatedly the question of "what is art" and the equally vexed question of "what is good art". Neither of those is the question raised, though, by this exhibition.

That question is, "What is art for?"

My answer, and I stress that it is purely my opinion, is that art seems somehow less when it is functional, that art should be pointless - that pointlessness is part of the point. And I realise how confused that sounds. Let me try to explain it this way. If I have a painting on the wall it remains a piece of art if I take it off the wall and wrap it in a cloth in the attic. And the wall remains a wall, still separating the inside of my house from the outside - functionality undamaged by the removal of the art. Art doesn't need to have a purpose for it to be art. 

Of course, like everything, it's rather more complicated than that. What do we make of the masks hanging on my landing wall. They certainly have a function, albeit a ceremonial one, in the cultures where they originated. Does that mean they aren't art? Am I saying that the existence of a purpose automatically negates the possibility of art?

The truth is that I don't know. So I am undecided if the designs in the gallery constitute art or not. I suppose, if we take that clock as an example, we could argue that its function in telling the time would be served better by one single analogue clock and that everything beyond that is useless and therefore qualifies as art.

I'll need to give this more thought but for the moment I'll, at least tentatively, agree with Wilde that all art is quite useless.

Newspeak: British Art Now Part 6 - Gallery 13

Some years ago now I went to the Saatchi Gallery that was down by the Thames. It contained, among other things,  lots of Damien Hirst's cut up animals, Tracey Emin's My Bed and a piece by Richard Wilson in which one of the rooms had been filled with oil. I had a different, short-lived blog back then in which I was rather more scathing about the art than I would be now but one of the things that I did like was that oil filled room. I said

The peach of the collection though, and one which I had expected to hate, is Richard Wilson's 20:50. One of the rooms of the County Hall has been filled to waist height with thick black oil. One person at a time can walk out into the centre on a platform and look. The light from the windows shines in and the liquid reflects with absolute clarity the upper half of the room below you. The effect is strange and disorienting. It's an Alice in Wonderland sensation of things not being in their proper order or their proper place. You feel suspended in a vertiginous space and the very mundanity of the wooden doors and the elegant fittings makes it even more confusing. The long queue restricts the time you can spend looking but it's well worth it.

Another installation of the same concept fills the final gallery in the new Saatchi. Last night I was taken to task for not writing about it here but, as you can see, all things come to those who wait. This is a very different piece to the one I originally saw simply because it's a very different installation space. It is, however, equally disorienting and arresting. The large, empty room has its walls and columns perfectly mirrored in the reflective surface of the oil. It confuses the eye and creates a sense of vertigo. Such a simple thing to look at is so profoundly out of kilter with our normal perception of space that most people stand and look at it for a much longer time than they imagine they have as they try to make sense of it. I know there are those to whom this kind of thing isn't art at all but frankly they are wrong. It's a triumph of art and illusion and remains so regardless of the type of space it''s installed in.

There is one more gallery to describe. I've left it until last because it isn't really part of the main exhibition being a sponsored gallery of design and whether furniture design should be considered art at all is something I shall discuss in my next post on the subject.

Newspeak: British Art Now Part 5 - Galleries 9 to 12

I'll be honest. Gallery 9 didn't really appeal to me as much as some of the others. Clunie Reid's photographic collages with additional graffiti left me completely unmoved. Peter Peri's geometric forms on black backgrounds were rather better with Infanta being my favourite of the collection. I liked them well enough but not as much as I'd liked other things in the gallery. Fergal Stapleton's two black boxes also did very little for me. Black perspex boxes on black stands with red lights inside.

"It's a red light in a box." commented my friend. I consulted the guide book.

"Or to put it another way," I said, "It's 'bound by a concern with elucidating the various stages of the fictive, the apparent and the real...holding in equilibrium the fantastical with the blunt actualities of junk, exemplifying this in their reordering of things known, producing new and surprising value out of meagre means'".

It was however, in spite of all that, a red light in a box.

We moved on to gallery ten, a decidedly odd and rather unsettling affair in which one corner had been filled with a mountain of old hi-fi speakers and powered with a vacuum cleaner and a player piano. The sounds it produced were quite eerie and the sensation of walking around and through the sculpture, becoming, in essence, part of the sculpture was odd. I didn't really understand the point though. As you may guess the guide book left me no wiser as to the intent of the piece.

Two artists were represented in gallery eleven - Ryan Moseley whose paintings had a cartoon grotesqueness to them that reminded me vaguely of something I've seen before though I've still been unable to work out quite what. They all seemed to included severed or separated limbs in a bizarre and disturbing carnival setting. Jonathon Baldock's strangely decorated and mistaken busts were also unsettling and the realisation that they were constructed - unconventionally - of  dough did little to alleviate the disorientation of the forms.

And finally, as we entered gallery twelve we came to a familiar piece of art. Anyone who watched School of Saatchi will have seen Eugenie Scrase's winning piece which was a piece of fallen tree impaled on a fence. I discussed it at the time and you can go look up what I said back then. For now suffice it to say that having seen it in real life rather than on TV my opinion remains unchanged.

Donald Urqhart's drawings were rather more conventional, being a series of sketches of and about famous blondes - Dusty Springfield, Jayne Mansfield, Diana Dors and so on. They were well done but overshadowed by the strange spectacle in the corner where an art group, littlewhitehead presented a very disturbing piece in which a group of figures, very realistic figures, were huddled looking at something in the corner. It's strange sense of suppressed violence and aggression made approaching it an uncomfortable experience.

Lynette Yiadom Boakye's paintings were also uncomfortable viewings as their grotesque cast of would-be celebrities were nightmarishly portrayed with a distinctly zombiefied look.

Which brings us at last to gallery thirteen.

Newspeak: British Art Now Part 4 : Galleries 7 and 8

Gallery seven contained some of my favourite exhibits. Three artists were represented, Rupert Norfolk, Tim Ellis and William Daniels. Ellis' works were combinations of objects - plates, wooden stands and such - and were visually quite appealing but the bizarreness of the catalogue reaches its absolute zenith in the two descriptions. Or, depending on your point of view, its nadir. All the following phrases appear

a ubiquitous logic from the haphazard and coincidental

a sensitive interlacing between artifice and natural order

assemblages of totemic significance

engage in the notions of value, authorship and display

strives to engender his work

fabricates an instinctive harmony or genetic bonding

their familiar scaling becomes a template of karmic measurement

speaking the same cryptic language of universality and timelessness

If anybody can make sense of that lot I'll give him sixpence! I have no idea what they mean and no idea of how they can possibly relate to the work. It was pretty though.

William Daniels paintings were also pretty with an incredibly skilful use of light. He has an odd technique, sculpting copies of famous paintings in assorted materials, often metal foil and then painting a picture of the result in meticulous detail with every crease, fold and reflection perfectly crafted. The results are quite startlingly arresting.

It is however Rupert Norfolk whose art, a kind of trompe-l'oeil on a grand scale, attracted me most. There are only three pieces displayed and all have them the same eye-deceiving, mind-bending quality. The first, at first glance, looks for all the world like a random assemblage of stones in a dry stone wall. Only on close inspection do you notice that every stone is completely symmetrical. Each one has had one side carved and smooth into a replica of the natural opposite side. They have then been assembled into the wall. It must have taken ages and has the beautiful pointlessness of all great art. The second piece looks like a crumpled blanket thrown haphazardly onto the floor. Once again closer inspection reveals the trick. While some of the creases are real, some are not. The pattern of the weave has just been made to look like creases in parts that are actually flat. The third object is an industrial machine painted in highly reflective aluminium paint and lit starkly so that the shadows are all crisp and sharp. Once again it's a lie. The lighting is actually completely flat and neutral and the apparent shadows are painted onto the machine giving the illusion of harsh lighting. It's all quite magnificent and I shall certainly be looking out for further exhibitions of his work.

Gallery eight contained only two artists, both painters. Sigfrid Holmwood's selection had the look of old masters about them, paintings of medieval peasants going about their daily lives. They were all done, however, with a startling and garish palate of fluorescent colours that were bright enough to hurt the eye. I admired the skill but wouldn't hang one in my home if you paid me to do it. Ged Quinn's were also an oddity. From any distance they looked like classical landscapes, painted with painstaking detail. Only aspects of the subject matter, examined in closer detail, showed the oddity. For example a towering gloomy forest has, when you look, a tiny, but detailed painting of Hitler's Berghof nestling in the leaves on the forest floor and covered in graffiti. Very clever stuff.

Gallery nine I shall leave until next time.

Newspeak: British Art Now Part 3 : Galleries 4 to 6

Moving on then.

Gallery four showcases the work of three more British artists and is the most playful so far. Mark Pearson's trio of sculptures are decidedly odd. They are pastiches of Nazi iconography. Or to put it in the terms used by the guide "[he] approaches building a Nazi-esque standard  with all the gusto of a football hooligan on a garden shed rampage".

Quite.

They are really parodies rather than pastiches with plywood plinths  supporting collections of cheap beer steins and topped by a tin foil Brandenburg Eagle. I found them quite amusing, a reaction that I think the artist hoped for. Having read out one of the more florid passages ("encapsulates the feelings of inadequacy and impotence that underlie white supremacist culture") I paused for reaction from my friend. She leaned closer, looked at the shelf supporting the eagle and said "I quite like that colour pink".

Barry Reigate was represented by two paintings and three sculptures. He is clearly a fan of cartoon imagery for the paintings, while quite chaotic in overall execution have quite a few cartoon characters embedded in them. This is quite appropriate considering that the three statues of cartoon rabbits have neon lighting tubes embedded in them. Embedded in rather painful looking positions. I shall leave the image to your own imaginations. Like Pearson, he has produced work that is both humourous and grimly grotesque.

The third artist, Iain Hetherington had four bright, cheerful, colourful paintings each with a central image of a baseball cap. They were a vivid contrast to the stark white walls of the gallery and quite appealing.

In gallery five the first thing to catch my attention was the title of the first piece, a series of black and white posters of various sizes, inexplicably titled "Jerking Off The Dog To Feed The Cat". It was quite effective but having read the description at least ten times I am no wiser about that title. The artist, Alastair MacKinven has eight more pieces and while the series of four that the guide raves about most struck me as less interesting variations on Escher's endless staircases theme, at least a couple of the others showed that his geometric forms can be interesting. Oddly I had the opposite problem with Pablo Bronstein whose work was by far the most technically competent I'd seen so far. The trouble was that it was technically competent architectural drawings. They were well done but left me completely cold.

Gallery six was a bit of a mish-mash. Three life size cardboard cut-outs of models from Clare Stephenson, sevem paintings from Phoebe Unwin and two odd pieces by Goshka Macugo. Both Unwin and Stephenson were well enough done but not really to my taste. Only the Macugas held my attention more than momentarily. One I didn't really get - a desk with some books and lamps on it - but the other was a sculpture of the famous medium (and fraudulent charlatan) Madame Blavatsky levitating, It was very effective and the facial carving was especially impressive.

That's all for now, but in the next entry I shall tell you all about the artist who impressed me most in the gallery.

Ongoing #59/Harrow Daily Poem #16

and other random cross-threading.

Right.
Tougher to explain than write. Probably not a poem by some standards.
Possibly not by mine.

The doodle is empty frames in a gallery.
And where was I on Saturday? In a gallery of course. So there's the Newspeak cross-thread.
And what is my other thread about? The nature of the "explanations" in the guide book. Bingo. Cross-threading number two, or perhaps three. Artspeak.

This poem interlaces randomly chosen descriptions from the guide with made up descriptions from my mind. Where does one end? The other begin? With something that is nothing more, and nothing less, than an experiment in forms and parody.


The title is

The conflation of alternate forms in the minds of the artists

In new paradigms of transactional negation,
Paintings flirt between abstraction and figuration.
Studied genericism and fetishistic staging
Is both nihilistic and auto-erotically engaging.
An underlying discontent beneath the harmonious surface of serial production
Results in a development of thematic variations complicit in their own destruction.
The distinction of the reality, the image and the name
Is an oedipal autopsy, a semiotic game.
New and surprising value out of meagre means
Where the removal of essential elements, underpins the scenes.

Newspeak: British Art Now: Part 2- Galleries 1 to 3

It wasn't a promising start.

The first gallery contained the worst combination - art I neither understood nor liked. That's not to say that others can't appreciate a piece of hanging cellophane, a lot of clingfilm covered in baby oil and paint or a torn tent-like sack of sugar paper. I'm sure they can. I can't see it myself though and the opaque descriptions in the guide didn't help, featuring such illuminating phrasing as "bridges the experience of tangible matter with the intimacy of memory" and "simultaneously monumental and flaccid. As I struggled to make something of these works by Karla Black, I was concerned for what was yet to come but gallery number two was more to my liking.

Here two artists were represented: a painter -  Hurvin Anderson - and a sculptor - Daniel Silver. Anderson's paintings showed a fine grasp of the human figure and of composition. I was particularly taken by an untitled night scene which captured perfectly the sense of a dead night under an empty black sky, completely void of stars. Silver's work was interesting for its juxtaposition of classical figures with odd plinths and re-carved or replaced sections. It left me a little unmoved but was well done.

Gallery three was an eclectic selection from Steven Claydon, Matthew Darbyshire, and Scott King. I quite liked all of it. Claydon's pieces included an incongruous selection of illuminated objects and his screen with vaguely disturbing animal forms (with the decidedly odd title "The Thingliness of Things (Potatoes In The Cellar)). Scott King's sole entry was a portrait of Cher resembling the well-known and iconic image of Che Guevera. Matthew Darbyshire's two piece were bright and garish but oddly appealing for their random composition with pieces of coloured glasswear in a cabinet and a selection of items on a carpet.

Three galleries down and two of them had been full of things I liked. It was, after all, a good start.

Newspeak: British Art Now: Part 1 - Overall impressions and the gallery space.

I'm going to do a lengthy series of posts about the exhibition because I really enjoyed it and don't want to do it a disservice by rushing. There are three things I want to comment on, the art itself, the gallery space and the picture by picture guide to the exhibition. This latter is such a remarkable piece of work that I shall discuss it separately in a series of posts entitle "Artspeak".
I'm sure that you will look forward to it.

First a word about the gallery. It is quite simply one of the best designed, best laid out, best lit art spaces I have seen in London. The lighting has a natural quality that enhances the art. The galleries are spacious and the artworks given enough room to allow the art-lovers to stand and gaze as long as they wish. Ten out of ten for the space. The art is more of a mixed bag as you would expect from an exhibition that includes thirty very diverse artists in thirteen galleries. There is art I like and art I don't like and there is art I understand and art I don't understand. Here we had every possibly permutation of those things. For example I still don't understand the thinking behind Richard Wilson's oil filled rooms but I absolutely love them. On the other hand I understood the architectural drawings of Pablo Bronstein but didn't much like them. I'll give more detail in other posts but my overall impression was of a day very well spent.

Definitely not for those who think art has to be paintings of things, though.

Ongoing 40:Annotated Version

It occured to me this morning that perhaps not everybody is as familiar with the works of the artists mentioned in my last poem as I am. So here is the post again, but this time with some explanatory notes.

It seems I've missed a couple of these out. So here's one I wrote a couple of months ago. The doodle is of a couple of people in an art gallery. It inspired, if that's the best word, a series of short poems - nursery rhymes really - about various modern artists.




Exhibition

Tracy Emin sewed a tent
With every lover's name.
I'm not suspicious minded but
When it went up in flame
I couldn't help but wonder which
Of them should take the blame.

Rachel Whiteread had a house.
She turned it inside out
By filling up with concrete mix -
A prize winner no doubt,
That had the added benifit
Of keeping burglars out.

Paintings made with added dung -
The work of Chris Ofilli,
And some among the critics yawned
Proclaiming it too silly.
But they will burn like billy-o
If the weather should turn chilly.

Damien Hurst displayed a cow
He'd cut up with a knife
And in the world of art today
That kind of thing is rife.
It would have been a better trick
To bring it back to life.

Mark Wallinger, he walked around
A gallery at night.
To make sure he was seen there
He turned on every light
And dressed up as a bear.
Some said, "That bloke's not right."

Martin Creed turned off the lights
And then he turned them on.
Then off, then on, then off, then on.
Some said it was a con.
And when he left them on, at last,
His audience was gone.


------------------------------------

Verse 1. Tracy Emin is an artist who is probably best known for the piece "My Bed" in which she recreated an extremely untidy bed and bedroom as an installation piece. It met with howls of derision from the popular press and from people who think that art is "paintings of things". Another of her pieces was a tent on which she put the names of everyone she had ever slept with. This piece, along with others, was destroyed when a fire burnt down the warehouse where it was being stored. Cynics suspected that one of the lovers had done it to get rid of the evidence.

Verse 2. Rachel Whiteread is another controversial winner of the Turner Prize. Her installation was made by filling a house with concrete, letting it set and then removing the house. It was a negative space concept piece and had the usual mixed reaction from the "oh yes it is/oh no it isn't" art critics.

Verse 3. Chris Ofilli does paintings which should endear him to people a little more. What puzzles them are the lumps of elephant dung that he tends to incorporate. At least that's the sole thing that any reports ever mention about his work. Personally I rather like it. But then, I've taken the trouble to form an opinion by looking at it not by reading the newspapers.

Verse 4. Damien Hurst does all sorts of stuff but mention his name and the only reaction you're likely to get is "He's the bloke who cuts up dead animals, isn't he?" Indeed he is but that's hardly a description of all of his work. Nevertheless there are a fair number of his pieces that do involve animals cut up, pickled and reassembled.

Verse 5. Mark Wallinger is another artist with lots of unusual concepts. The one that attracted the most attention on the news was the one where he put on all the lights in an art gallery, dressed up as a bear and spent the night walking round and looking out of the windows. Even I'm not sure what the hell that was all about.

Verse 6. When he was interviewed after winning the Turner Prize, Martin Creed seemed rather bemused (not to mention amused) by it all. Not surprising. His winning piece was an empty gallery where the lights turned on and off at random intervals. Make of it what you will.

And the winner is...

... Eugenie is it? Well, not much of a surprise after my anonymous correspondent posted the link to the gallery pictures last week but still a bit of a mystery, for me at least, as to how she managed to win. Actually though, there was a larger mystery to be solved in this week's final School of Saatchi. The mystery of the missing Ben. He was seen early on cutting up bits of cardboard for his collage but then disappeared from the screen completely until the final judging. All the others were seen preparing their works for the exhibition where the judging would take place but Ben was noticeable only by his absence. One of the two works he was exhibiting wasn't even mentioned until the judges showed up, being glimpsed only briefly in the background as the camera panned around.
At the end of the program I was left with the idea, which I may check out by watching it again, that the order of elimination corresponded exactly to the amount of screen time the artists received. So the invisible Ben went out first. His main piece had been the aforementioned collage in which he had meticulously slotted together tiny pieces of cut up cardboard representing his journey through the ten week process of the competition.
Suki and Samuel followed him out of the running. Suki's piece had been a white wooden tower that you entered via a ladder and in which you could hear a recording of a buzzing insect. Samuel had been forced to a rethink on safety grounds when his original concept of a Van der Graaf Generator with a wig was vetoed by the gallery and Charles Saatchi. He re-presented it as a performance piece, running for only a few minutes and surrounded by a safety cage.
My favourite, Saad, was the next to go. His works were a recreation of a makeshift asian sun-shade and a couple of elaborately constructed discs with some grafitti on them. They were OK but not as interesting as any of his previous pieces.
That left Matt - who had presented a wooden caravan with a strange narrative interior about a sad caravan dwelling prophet called Professor T. Elphas - and, of course, Eugenie.
As the winner, Eugenie deserves dwelling on a little more. She presented two pieces. One was a foam grappling hook on a high shelf with a rope hanging from it. The other, which was the piece that won it for her, was a length of fallen tree impaled on the bars of blue fence. It was certainly striking but there seemed to be an element of falsity about the whole process. Her works in the series have included a whistle hanging from a bathroom towel rail, a tassel on a wire and the aforementioned foam grappling hook. These are a little too close to being the work of a confidence trickster for comfort. The tree on the fence was interesting, the most interesting piece in this exhibition, but can she really take any credit for it? She had spotted it as she walked along a street and got permission from the property owners to cut down the fence and remount it in the gallery. I suppose that Tracey Emin had a point when she said that there was art in realising that it was an artistic object and in the cheek required to persuade the owners to give it up but I remain unconvinced.
All in all this last program was a bit of a disappointment with none of the concepts showing the imagination of previous episodes and none of the executions being very remarkable. Still all the contestants have shown flashes of greatness through the series and I shall look forward to seeing them in the future.
And I hope we get a few more programs like this.

And the winner is... chapattis?

School of Saatchi time again. This week I can imagine people sitting and swearing at the TV. I was tempted myself. A couple of the pieces had something about them but for the most part they were the kind of modern art that makes the newspapers scoff, the Colonel Blimps have fits of apoplexy, and the Turner Prize judges wet their pants with joy.
Each of the six contestants had to remove a piece of existing art (though the definition appeared to be wide) from a room in Sudeley Castle and replace it with a contemporary take on the theme. So Suki removed the books from a bookshelf in the library and replaced them with mirrors. To enhance her work she spray painted a lot of books black and spread them around the shelves and floor of the room. In the same room Saad placed a carpet on the floor where a table had previously been and covered it with piles of chapattis, nearly 2000 in all we were solemnly informed.
Over in the chapel Matt took down a candelabra and replaced it with a sphere full of red wine that had been solidified with gelatine. Sadly it had also gone opaque but the judges seemed not to realise that this wasn't his original concept. It reflected the stained glass windows rather prettily and was quite pleasant which is more than can be said of Sam's installation a few yards away. This was a copper plate and frame which issued a constant annoying hum and changed to a slightly different annoying hum if anyone touched it.
Back in the main castle Eugenie and Ben were at work transforming a bedroom. Ben took town a classical painting (which seemed to be of Queen Elizabeth I) and replaced it with a stark painting of grotesque figures and large blocks of white and black done on what looked like a piece of scrap wood. Eugenie started off by having a tassel pulled back and forth on a piece of wire attached to an electric drill but then contrived some nonsensical explanation of why it was better to have it hanging stationary and leave the motion in the mind of the viewer.
I'm pretty open-minded about art but to me these all looked like conceits looking for an expression rather than anything genuinely creative. One of the judges, speaking specifically of Eugenie but accidentally describing all of them, said that there is a fine line between something you would order from the BBC props department when you wanted a piece of joke modern art and an actual piece of modern art. Most of these particular pieces seemed to be on the wrong side of the line. For the record the public seemed almost completely underwhelmed by all of it but Charles Saatchi heaped lavish praise on the chapattis and the glass sphere. Incidentally the chapattis provided the humorous moment of the night when Saad had a hissy fit because he thought Suki's black books clashed with the concept of his piece.
Next week is the last of the four programs when they get to mount a joint exhibition at the Saatchi gallery. My money is on Saad as the winner. He deserves it just for sheer entertainment value.

Warning: Spoiler Alert. Don't read the comments if you want to maintain the mystery until after the final. They contain what may well be the result.

High concept, low tide

And so to episode two of School of Saatchi, the reality show featuring up-and-coming conceptual artists. This week the brief was to create pieces of public at to be exhibited in Hastings, a town that could hardly be called famous for its avant garde artistic vision. To facilitate the process the six contestants were placed into three pairs and given a ludicrously small budget and time frame to work with.
Each group came up with a different idea and, while the reality of the executions never matched the ideal of the concept, I liked all of them. Suki and Sam produced a two part instalation based on the geometric form of a radar reflector, built on a much larger scale and placed into a crumbling and rotting beached boat. It was quite beautiful and it worked as a symbolic merging of the old and new. If the other part of the sculpture - a smaller rotating version of the same form - didn't work as well, they were at least partially successful.
Matt and Eugenie had a series of concrete islands in a boating lake to work with and came up with the playful idea of set-dressing them as animal enclosures, as if in a zoo, but without the animals. This was the one that Charles Saatchi liked best but, to me, it seemed more like an elaborate joke than a successful work.
My favourite was Ben and Saad's "Ghost Huts". They had been given a site where there were a number of eerie tall wooden huts and initially struggled with finding an idea until Saad discovered that there had originally been two more huts but these had burned down in a fire. Using black scaffolding and netting they recreated the ghosts of the huts in their original spaces and it was really very effective. It reminded me a little of Do Ho Su's work in the Psycho Buildings exhibition at the Hayward a couple of years ago.

There were two parts of the program that I found especially amusing. The first was when they rolled in Martin Creed to give his opinions of the works in progress. I always find it amusing that Martin Creed is so highly rated given that his works include a crumpled up sheet of A4 note paper, an empty gallery with a bit of blutac stuck to the wall and - my favourite - another empty gallery with the lights going on and off. This guy has minimalism nailed!

The other amusing thing was a single comment and it was amusing because some years ago there was an episode of Doctor Who in which the Doctor had parked the TARDIS in the Louvre and two art lovers (John Cleese and Eleanor Bron, if memory serves) started to discuss how the art of the piece was in the separation of its form from its functionality - a remark echoed almost word for word by one of the judges tonight, underlining both the accuracy of the original satire and the essential vacuity of art criticism.

Next week they have to create works that will sit well alongside the old masters in a stately home. That should be fun!

Once more, but is it art?

There is a new reality show - of sorts - on TV, and it's one that I intend to watch. In School of Saatchi, a group of artistic hopefuls are competing to produce a series of artworks with a major exhibition sponsored by Charles Saatchi and a studio for three years as the prize. Tonight's first episode whittled down the very large number of applicants first to twelve and then to six in an X-Factor style process that includes a panel of art experts, including Tracey Emin, Matthew Collings, Frank Cohen and Kate Bush (not the pop singer, the Head of Art at the Barbican).
The style is a little bit X-Factor, a little bit Dragon's Den and a little bit The Apprentice.
Of course it's the art that matters.
Artworks exhibited in the first episode were a mixed bag. Of the three video artists I liked Suki Chen's video of starlings the best. She, along with Saad Qureshi, another video artist with an out of focus film of someone on a swing, made it through to the final six. I didn't really get Eugenie Scrase's whistle hanging from a bathroom towel rail though she was another finalist. The fourth was Samuel Zealey, a man whose sculptures included two strong magnets held apart by cables and a large tractor wheel on a treadmill - clever but not, to me very interesting. Matt Clark's installation was a plywood constructed room filled with models and Ben Lowe was a self-taught commercial artist working mostly in abstracts who wants now to move towards a more surreal style.
One thing they all had in common was that in the life art drawing task they proved that they couldn't draw at all. Even the panel agreed on that.
It was, for an open minded art lover, an interesting program and I look forward to seeing more. Of course anyone who thinks that art means "paintings of something" (my father, who was also watching and tutting loudly, being one) should probably be watching I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here on the other side.

Walking In My Mind

Finally, we have the missing work from the 19th. The display still isn't perfect. Click on each of the four floorplans to get a larger, more readable image. Depending on your computer you may or may not then be able to use Control and + or Control and - to change he image size.

There are notes below the pictures which should be considered as part of the work, not separate from it. Working down from the top we have the attic, the upstairs, the downstairs and the cellar.

The Hall is as far as most people reach, the face that most people see, a superficial, surface image. It is the friendly face presented to the world. It is sunshine on the rippling pond. It is the coat of paint on the rotten wood of the garden fence. It is not who I am, it is who you think I am.

The Front Room (which in most British Houses is usually at the back, which is the case here) is the nice room where we take important visitors. It is decorated in the taste we wish the world to believe we have. It is our best face, our Sunday Clothes, the silver cutlery and best china only brought out to make an impression. It is not who I am, it is not who I want to be, it is who I want you to think I am.

The Living Room is where we are comfortable, where we surround ourselves with the things that make us happy, where we are most like the people we really are. It is comfortable slippers and a warm cup of cocoa. It is a relaxing armchair in familiar surroundings. It is not who I am, it is who I am comfortable being.

The Kitchen is where everything is cooked, the ideas factory for trying out new recipes. It is the melting pot for the influences and associations of the world around us. It is the big bowl where everything gets mixed up and baked (or half-baked) thoughts and ideas come out the other side. It is not who I am, it is how I become who I am.

The Master Bedroom is where I think the thoughts that make me human, where I dream the dreams, hope the hopes and wish the wishes. Dreams and hopes and wishes change as often as the posters that hang on the bedroom wall.Nothing is constant. It is not who I am, it is all of who I was and who I will be.

The Guest Bedroom is a space reserved for visitors who never come. No one: not family, not friends, not lovers ever comes to visit. No one can enter my mind but me. The room remains empty and unvisited. It is not who I am, it is how I am.

The Bathroom and Toilet is where all the dirty and detritus and faecal matter eventual goes. Theodore Sturgeon said "nine per cent of everything is crud". Or he may have said "crap", sources vary. He was right though. It is not who I am, it is the ninety percent of who I was that was worthless.

The Attic is where all the lost things go. It is the room for broken dreams and broken toys. It is where the things that were once important, once loved, once part of life have been put away to be forgotten, to be occasionally examined in the flashlight of nostalgia and then discarded once again. It is not who I am, it is who I might have been.

The Cellar is locked. It is where the bad things are kept, where the bodies are buried. It is the antithesis of the attic. It is a place of regrets, a place of sorrows. It is not who I am, it is who I am ashamed to be.

The House is who I am.

----------------------------------------------

And this of course is all self-indulgent, pretentious twaddle. But then again, that is what I promised you and I am nobody if not a man of my word.

Anticipation is half the pleasure

There is a poem for today.

I have it here in front of me on a piece of paper. The trouble is that the only way I can think of to post it is to use Paintshop to create it and then import it as an image which you will be able to enlarge and examine at your leisure. This is because it is what is called a "concrete" poem and the physical layout of the words on the page is as important as the words themselves.

It is a poem inspired by that Art Exhibition at the Hayward and called, perhaps unsurprisingly, "Walking In My Mind. It takes the form of a map of a house with a verse representing each room and each room representing an element or aspect of my life.

In other words it's pretentious twaddle. But it's my pretentious twaddle and you will have to wait a couple of days until I manage to get it into a displayable format.
Bet you are already anticipating the pleasure.

Walking In The Mind

So, what about the latest exhibition at the Hayward then?

Last year I spent one of my free days during my summer job visiting the Psycho Buildings exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. It was, as you can read, a mixed success, but boating on the roof of an art gallery was certainly one of the more unusual things I’ve ever done in the name of art.
This years exhibition is called Walking in my Mind and consists of installations by ten artists. The opening hall contains works by two artists – Keith Tyson * and Yoshitomo Nara. Nara’s recreation of his artist’s studio in a wooden hut in the middle of the space echoes to some extent Do Ho Su’s replica of his New York apartment in last years show but is rather less interesting. It’s OK but totally overshadowed by Keith Tyson’s installation of Locked Out of Eden and Studio Wall Drawings which, to my mind, was worth the price admission on its own. The two side walls of the gallery are covered with small works any one of which rewards examination on both artistic and linguistic levels while the end wall is a single piece in which a complex painting is the backdrop to a copy of the periodic table, each section of which references the element concerned with smaller details. We spent far too long looking at it and trying to work out the detail.
Up the stairs there is Thomas Hirschorn’s Cavemanman which is a series of caves built of masking tape and with various things stuck to the walls. I tried to like it but it left me cold. It seemed a rather too mundane interpretation of the theme. There was also the first section of the Charles Avery installation which, according to the accompanying book is part of “a philosophical allegory, an encyclopaedic investigation of an imaginary island and everything it contains – it’s people, customs, mythology, topography, human history and natural history”.
Well I liked the individual components well enough but even now that I now what it’s supposed to be about I’m damned if I can see that level of coherence in it.
Perhaps the piece that would raise the hackles of modern-art haters most was Jason Rhoades The Creation Myth, which at first sight is no more than a room full of random junk and pages of hard core pornography. There is quite a lot more structure to it than that as the “map” to it makes clear. The junk is deliberately assembled in sections that represent various aspects of human creativity. I didn’t like it much because, well because the bottom line is that no matter how much I know on an intellectual level that it is deliberately assembled, it still looks like a pile of junk.
Bo Christian Larsson’s work winds up the stairwell and consists of quite a lot of small, quirky items – statues of owls, boots with viciously sharp knives sticking out of the tops, more boots made of chains, a small “forest of trees with gold paper on one side. Again they are individually moderately interesting but there is an overarching “concept” involving several characters who apparently created a “performance without spectators; part spontaneous happening and part private ritual” in an empty gallery. Seems to be a rather pompously self-indulgent concept to me.
By far the must unpleasant installation was another one of these high concept pieces, Mark Manders’ Self Portrait as a Building. This is another (possibly specious) attempt by an artist to tie everything he does together under an umbrella concept. And it works even less well than either Avery or Larsson’s pieces. It gets the “unpleasant” label for the subject matter of the individual pieces. A dead and bisected cat does nothing for me.
Yayoi Kusama probably does nothing for most people but I quite liked it. She has an obsession with polka dots and the installation starts in a room full of large red and white polka dot balloons, moves out onto an astroturf covered terrace with similarly decorated pieces and spills down onto the embankment of the thames where the trees have been wrapped in matching polka dots.
Two pieces remain. Chiaru Shiota has created a tunnel out of lengths of intricately arranged knotted black string which circles round a group of giant white dresses like the worlds most complicated spiders web and immediately produces the comment “this must have take days to set up” from almost everyone.
And finally there is the hypnotic Extremities from Pipilotti Rist (an anagram of “Pilot, I strip it”). This is a video and audio installation in which the display creates a disorienting 3D effect by projecting through curtain onto a wall. Balls of light form a background against which disembodied body parts float around while a poem is repeated endlessly over a mesmerising soundtrack. Quite beautiful inits way.

And that’s it, out into the gift shop to try to find a poster of Keith Tyson’s work. (There isn’t one but there is a lot of it illustrated in the exhibition’s official book.

All in all a little less successful than last year but certainly one that I enjoyed in part. The Hayward’s annual summer exhibitions are turning into a bit of a mandatory visit for me. I wonder what next years will be.

*If you only check out one link check out Keith Tyson's, it's one hell of a web site!

Back in China

Back at our hotel in Beijing I spent a few minutes checking on my emails and then met up with a few of the others to head over to the Temple of Heaven. Once there we split up with some choosing to do their own thing while Alisdair, Darren and I – who had plans for the afternoon – strolling around together. I have been to the Temple of Heaven before. I know I have. I have the photographs. I wanted to go again because I have no memory of it at all. The reason for that is that when I visited last, on my first trip all those years ago, we were taken there straight from the airport on our arrival. We were all so tired and jet-lagged that it’s a wonder we were still able to operate cameras.

It was worth another, more wide-awake, visit. The pictures really say it all.

When we had had enough of the rather marvellous site, we wandered out of the gate opposite to the one we had entered by and went into a nearby cafe for lunch and to discuss our plans for the afternoon. Last night I had had no plans but then I overheard Alisdair asking Neil about a place he had read of – 798. 798 is an art village, a series of converted warehouses and other buildings in which the very best of the Beijing art scene can be found. I always love to visit galleries, especially when I’m travelling and can see things I might not get the chance to see at home. I had never heard of 798. I had, truth be told, never realised that China now has a vibrant and exciting art community. When I heard it being discussed I asked if he minded if I tagged along and a little later Darren also decided to join us.

Outside the cafe we soon found a cab and, after some confusion with our written directions, we were on the way. It proved to be rather a long way out towards the airport. Eventually we got there and went in. It was everything I could have hoped for and more. It was huge, bigger than my home town, with hundreds of galleries and bookshops and restaurants and bars. If I ever return to Beijing again I shall take at least a whole day there. I could easily spend a week there. Every kind of art was on display. Paintings both representational and abstract. Sculpture in every possible style. Satirical works and highly stylised works. Photography, graffiti, embroidery.
It was completely marvellous.







Among the exhibitions that I saw and especially enjoyed were

· an exhibition of black and white photographs of Chinese life

· a series of paintings of women’s faces hidden in clouds
· some photomontages showing thousands of people in a mixture of landscapes
· a statue called “The Ideal and the Reality” which morphed from the classic Marilyn Monroe pose into a female Chinese soldier without indicating which was the ideal and which the reality
· a series of large photographs by a former prostitute showing herself nude in various unlikely places such as business offices, in each of which she was shown as having the position of power by virtue of holding the shutter release with the cable running out of frame to the camera

· various outdoor statues that were in the streets and squares.

However the one that impressed the most by far was also the strangest. We were wandering more or less at random in and out of galleries on the principle that there was far too much to see for us to employ any kind of logical approach. In one there was a Chinese woman at a desk in a large white room with a single work at one end. The work in question looked at first glance like a green laser hologram of a larger than life figure. Closer inspection revealed it to be no such thing. It was in fact a sculpture made of fine mesh net and cunningly lit with green light so that the sculpture, the lighting and the resulting shadows created the hologram illusion.
The woman from the desk indicated a curtain covered doorway that I hadn’t previously noticed. We went through and found ourselves in a large darkened hall filled with sculptures in the same style. Red and green lighting on elaborate mesh sculptures created a startling illusion of holograms that floated around the gallery space like disembodied phantoms. I was like being trapped in Superman’s Phantom Zone and it was really quite remarkable.



The artist, according to the leaflet I picked up on the way out, was a Korean called Park Sung Tae and I can do no better than quote from that leaflet. “Park’s installations have gained a reputation for the uniqueness of their materials and for their... communication with the installation space. [They]... have been constantly spotlighted by leading art fairs around the world and have been collected by major art museums of Korea, including the National Museum of Contemporary Art and Seoul Museum of Art.”



When we came out we went for a couple of beers in one of the rooftop bars which had a slightly disconcerting glass floor that allowed us to look down onto the heads of the people in the gallery below.

I vowed as I sat there that the next time I come to Beijing, and I am certain there will be a next time, I shall spend at least a whole day at 798. I only wish that there was something comparable here in the UK, but I’ve looked at art galleries all over the world and seen nothing quite like it.

In the evening we had dinner at John’s and then a night time walk around the Hutongs which was much more impressive than our daytime bicycle tour had been, but it was a last evening kind of activity – interesting but full of the knowledge that it was all over now and tomorrow we would be on our way home.

As ever I had thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing, especially as it had proven to be such an unusual trip.