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.

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.

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.