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

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 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.

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.