Contemporary London Art Blog

New Contemporaries 06

2006-11-30T08:17:00.000Z

This year's talent-spotting roundup benefits immensely from being housed in the old school building on Club Row, part of the organisation's new office premises based at Rochelle School, just behind Redchurch Street. It's a large two storey building with several well proportioned rooms, some warreny corridors, an atmospheric upstairs space and just the right level of dishevelment to make art sing. The work this year is the usual mixed up bag of art school obsessions that tends to reflect the movement of the art marfket more generally. So there are abstract/conceptual films (the best being Tom Price's subtle animation of naturalistic heads, like an animated Warhol screen test), colourful blobby paintings, large lumpy sculptures etc etc. There is a definite sense of materials being important once again, with a lot of handmade or hand crafted objects and very very few arm's length dematerialised projects. The Royal College and Goldsmiths dominate procedings as usual.

A few pieces stood out for me: a large unapologetic print of donkeys, the shelf of paper cut out sculptures like the results of a kid's workshop, the animation mentioned above, Jessie Flood-paddock's (great name!) Philip Guston inspired clay sculptures, and finally Laura Morrison's paintings and painted objects (see image above) that struck the right balance between all sorts of different poles (interestingly she is a graduate of the Chelsea Diploma course which had such a good degree show earlier this year, bettering the MA by some distance). The show makes no great claims for itself. It's just a collection of stuff that caught the selectors' eye. But it works as a purely aesthetic experience and resembles nothing so much as a really good disparate MA student exhibition.

David Smith at Tate Modern

2006-11-28T10:15:00.000Z

Another panegyric for the Tate I'm afraid: the David Smith exhibition is quite simply a great show. There's plenty of work from all phases of his career, but not too much that you get swamped and end up sick of the stuff. The rooms are nicely sequenced and very carefully hung, with plenty of empty space around the sculptures to enjoy. The ones that demand or suggest a frontal view are placed a few feet in front of plain walls, usually lined up nicely so that you get a sightline from the entrance as you progress through the galleries.

Room 5 is just beautiful, showing the work that he made on a Guggenheim fellowship that is generally considered to be a breakthrough into larger scale and more lyrical pieces. Hudson River Landscape and Australia (pictured above) in particular are just masterpieces!

Compare and contrast with the rather dowdy William Turnbull display in the central atrium at Tate Britain currently, where a whole range of interesting work is lost against the huge scale and distracting walls. Modernist sculpture might have been exactly what the slightly chalky white cube rooms of Tate Modern were designed for.

Perverted drawing

2006-11-28T09:56:00.000Z

I'll admit that I don't reverently read every word of every press release that I get sent, indeed that sometimes I turn up to an exhibition not knowing the slightest thing about what to expect. I wandered into the Whitechapel a week or two ago sort of by accident, I was passing and thought 'oh well, may as well take a look at the Hans Bellmer show and whatever is downstairs at the same time'. The name Pierre Klossowski was a new one to me, but I guessed that he was someone working in Europe today, producing these very large scale drawings of nudes, sado-masochistic scenes and general perversity in a retro style that recalls Art Deco, Symbolism etc. In addition there were a few fibreglass statues, essentially real life versions of the drawings, that brought to mind the Chapman Brothers in their spooky creepiness. It seemed like the work of a contemporary artist in thrall to the glamour of deviant sexuality (in the strict Freudian sense, I'm not making any moral judgments about this) and probably with half an eye on the lucrative market in semi-erotic wall decoration that keeps the galleries bubbling along.

Anyway, turned out that this Klossowski was the elder brother of Balthus, and lived through the Surrealist era being born in Paris in 1905 and dying as recently as 2001. The pairing with Bellmer upstairs was fairly interesting, if only to bring out the familiar twentieth century themes of the self and its fashionable dissolution through sex (Foucault was a fan apparently, when he could drag himself away from the nightclubs) and power games. The Bellmer show had some good looking drawings which I enjoyed if only to give us a break from his bloody doll's body. I don't know. Surrealism has had a bit of a critical reappraisal lately, from the Hayward show based on Bataille to the Tate Modern rehang and that heavyweight book Art Since 1900 by the October crew - but Hans Bellmer was never the strongest artist and this Klossowski ends up just looking like an enthusiastic amateur. At least Louise Bourgeouis has extended her formal range somewhat over the years and isn't still trying to actually live in the 1930s!

RIP Arts Council

2006-11-01T14:36:00.000Z

Victoria Miro was packed out last night at a party that seemed more like a wake, marking the mass defections from ACE visual arts that have occurred recently. Anyone who had any sort of interesting opinion on contemporary art was essentially given the boot, from Marjorie Althorpe-Guyton on downwards. Four out of the five departmental head have left in total (visual art, theatre, dance & literature), alongside Chief Executive Peter Hewitt who is expected to go in 2008, and many others. The atmosphere of anger and despair at all this was palpable, with quite impassioned speeches easily crossing the line of diplomatic discreteness. Put together with the withdrawal of funding from some of our major national gallery spaces (only the interesting ones, the mainstream is free to prosper of course) and the picture is worse than alarming. Why, even Matt’s Gallery – surely the best gallery in London to anyone who knows anything about art – is threatened with closure as ACE has decided it should now be successful enough to earn more of its revenue commercially. But doh! The non-commercial nature of Matt’s has always been its major selling point, right? Who ARE theses people?

Word has it that Chairman Sir Christopher Frayling is playing the role of ineffectual patsy, allowing the ministers to push through their social inclusion agenda at the cost of intellectual rigour, critique, high culture and all that arty farty nonsense… At a recent meeting of the National Council David Lammy MP went so far as to suggest “stretching the content of the arts envelope to include different aspects of social cohesion”. In other words, less cash for contemporary art, more cash for fucking kid’s workshops!

This government started so well, with Chris Smith, free museum entry and all that. But a narrow interpretation of widening participation that is fixated with spoon feeding young people and the socially excluded has brought us to this terrible, frightening situation. Is no one going to stand up for the virtues of hardcore intellectualism? What about aspiration? Why should we only look forward to a culture that gives everyone equal access to dumbed-down spectacu-tainment-style art (Serota’s phrase “experience vs interpretation") when we could be trying to sustain and build the best intellectual climate in the world?

Power 100

2006-10-16T16:53:00.000+01:00

We received a nice email from the web editor of Art Review asking us to promote the annual Power 100 list. Cut out their faces and pin to your studio walls, folks, so that you can't fail to recognise the powerful elite pulling the strings that make us all twitch to the beat of the sound of money changing hands. I just thank god that Frieze weekend is over and we can all get back to normal. It isn't natural seeing so many tanned and super-skinny people in London, where we're meant to be bloated and if anything slightly blue in colour. The Power 100 amusingly has Google at number 100 for some reason. Other than that it's the usual list of dealers, curators and collectors, with a few blue chip artists thrown in for luck. Ultimately, it means nothing. None of these people will ever impinge on your pathetic pointless life.

We are obliged to point out that other art magazines are commercially available.
Art Review (new design in the style of GQ, fully downloadable)
Art Monthly (black and white is awlright!)
Frieze (brrrrrrrr)
ArtForum (the oldest and the best)

Fischli & Weiss Tate Modern

2006-10-14T18:54:00.000+01:00

I'd love to be one of those cynical hardbitten bloggers who is constantly having a go at the establishment and raving about the state of things. But, I can't help it, the Tate have put on another great exhibition with Fischli & Weiss! Navigating your way round a few black rubber casts, you enter a huge space with double exposure flower photos hung from floor to ceiling, around some impressively large prints of their airport series. The hang really works, and sets the tone for room after room of great work presented just how you might like to see it presented.

The "Suddenly this overview" series of small clay models, for instance, are shown on a forest of white plinths crammed together so that you almost have to force your way through them, bending to read the titles and getting involved with the details of each piece. Must be a nightmare to invigilate. This series is pretty typical of the duo's work. It's like seeing someone's brain being shaken out so that every idea, ideal concept, half remembered image or stereotype falls on to the floor. In fact their practice could be where the rival discourses of visual culture and art theory coincide. You can see it in "Visible world" (which is becoming an old favourite at the Tate now, so many times has it been shown or lent out) the collection of 3000+ archetypal photographs. You can see it in the heterogeneity/indiscriminateness of everything they do.

Their famous chain reaction film is shown together with a documentary about making it (to underline the chronology of their ownership of the much-copied concept?) which is actually great because you can switch screens during the longeurs of a bubbling chemical reaction. And I had never seen the slide projection piece of multilingual questions. Simple but effective.

It's all here: handmade fake studio installation, animal costume films, carved objects, balanced sculpture photos. Plus, in the leaflet, a none too subtle underlining of the fact that (in case anyone should get the wrong idea) they aren't gay! Classic.

Push your way through the crowds flocking to Holler's slides and visit this well presented, inspiring show.
PS Tate gallery press officers can post a cheque to CLAB, PO Box etc etc etc

Turner Prize exhibition 2006

2006-10-07T08:16:00.000+01:00

Reasons why Rebecca Warren should win the Turner this year: her work has been so successful that it has started to stand for success and Warren-ism when in fact it stands for doubt, uncertainty and tentativeness. She has put loads of her brilliant vitrines full (well, hardly full, but you know what I mean) of bits of crap, dust and hair in the Tate show rather than just relying on her figurative sculptures. She's a woman, we need more women to win. She makes great plinths (eat her dirt, Gareth Jones). She is not afraid to take risks by taking something that fell off the side of a sculpture and sticking it on the wall (I once saw her exhibiting the boards that she had been using to stand here clay figures on). It's her turn. Mark Titchner is useless and increasingly megalomaniacal (Rotoreliefs??). Tomma Abts must be rich already from selling paintings, and in fact they're a bit boring aren't they? And who's great idea was it to let Phil Collins build an office in the gallery? Puhlease.

Did you read mad Lynn barber in the Observer spilling the beans on her year as a Turner Prize judge? Apart from the measly £250 travel allowance, what was most notable was that Barber took no interest in the discourse surrounding art, and of course found that she was as ignorant at the end of the year as at the start. She should have spent her £250 on some magazine subscriptions. Hilariously, she also revealed herself to be somewhat racist (by assuming that only people with British sounding names were British, sorry Haluk, Zineb, Zarina, Ergin etc..) and also strangely parochial (she had never previously been east of Hackney or south of Bankside! Predictably she went looking for a painter and found Abts. Ah well. I found it rather sad that she didn't want to engage in the dialogue around art since that's where all the interesting stuff goes on. Consequently she ended up with the opinion that it's all a bit of a fix, when really she was simply not interested in taking part in conversation.

You'll believe a Steamroller can Fly!

2006-10-07T08:04:00.000+01:00

After the grand but ultimately rather sedate set of Californian streetlamps at the South London Gallery, it's good that Burden has finally managed to put on a piece with some clout in the UK (remember the model plane machine fiasco at Tate Britain?). On the windswept parade ground at Chelsea College sits a huge set up. 12 tonne yellow steamroller, thick platform of chippings, scaffolding towers and a huge swinging arm with hefty conterweight. Every half hour a guy starts up the engine and slooooowly drives the steamroller around in a big circle. He changes gears, puts his foot down, picks up speed until it must be going at - ooh - 8mph? Then the arm lifts up and he switches off the engine.

The steamroller and driver spin round sedately a couple of times in silence before gently landing and rolling to a halt. Round of applause from gathered audience. This is everything it sets out to be: performance, sculpture, impressive feat of engineering, spectacular event, ridiculous proposition... one of the best things I've seen all year. Also strangely low key, but that's part of the problematic. When resources are poured into getting something done, it gets done, and then the thing doesn't seem like such a big deal after all, although at first it seemed impossible. CLAB would like to personally thank Chris Burden for letting us see a flying steamroller once in our lives! Thanks Chris.

Sarah Kent to go?

2006-09-13T13:24:00.000+01:00

As thousands of arts workers surreptitiously scanned the ads in this Monday's Guardian in search of a better paypacket, there it was... the ad that no one ever expected to see in this lifetime. Time Out magazine is looking for a new Visual Arts Editor to sit in Kenty's plush orthopedic throne. The applicant needs to be "a brilliant writer and razor sharp critic with a strong, opinionated voice". A "formidable" contacts book is also required, presumably with a large restaurant section.

Sarah Kent has been at the forefront of the London art scene for decades. Her book "Shark Infested Waters" effectively validated the Saatchi collection in terms of critical writing, and no matter how many reviews in Frieze you get, everyone knows that even a bad write up in Time Out brings in the punters like nothing else. The halcyon days of the late nineties are long gone however and the recent changes to the magazine seem to have dulled the quality of the reviews somewhat. Perhaps some fresh blood will sharpen them up once more. There are no obvious contenders for the job, which requires good art nous as well as the sensibility of a weekly hack... so my money is on an inside candidate possibly Helen Sumpter?

Just a coincidence?

2006-08-30T14:33:00.000+01:00

Charles Saatchi has for a second time been struck by fire, with his 'USA Today' exhibition of 30 young American painters at the Royal Academy postponed due to the alarming blaze in the west section and roof of the former Museum of Mankind in Burlington Gardens yesterday.

By a strange coincidence, the show is being publicised with this image by Josephine Meckseper entitled 'Pyromaniac 2'. We would never want to suggest that the whole thing was an elaborately staged publicity stunt... but was it? After all, news of the show has hardly been (ahem) setting the art world on fire, and anyway that old Museum of Mankind building is empty, almost derelict in fact and ripe for redevelopment.

We deserve to know the truth. Could this be yet another imaginative way of unloading some of the less valuable parts of his collection? And whatever WAS the result of that Momart fire in terms of insurance payouts?

Celebration Park - Pierre Huyghe

2006-08-27T08:52:00.000+01:00

On the one hand this is a conceptually sophisticated, multi layered installation which reflects the complexity of Huyghe's body of work over the past ten years or so. On the other, it's a crowd pleasing spectacle which could only have come about within today's system of large public art institutions, and uses audience friendly devices like animatronic penguins, puppet shows and dancing doors to seduce the general public. Huyghe talks the talk, that's for sure... just read the short interview printed in the gallery leaflet for some classic "French theory" of the best sort. But whether it actually adds up to much I just don't know.

I think the problem is one of scale. Seen individually, these films (and it is really the films that we are talking about here, the neon signs and sculptures being pretty much redundant) convey a unique and particular take on the world of signs. Amongst the clutter of everyday life or a group exhibition they stand out for their dreamy, thoughtful tone as much as their relationship to the objects of popular culture, myth, fiction, whatever. I remember seeing the Snow White film at Lotta Hammer gallery many years ago and just loving it. Wherever Ann Lee crops up she is a most welcome diversion. But seen all together like this, in spite of the generally clever installation which makes fantastic use of the adaptable spaces of Tate Modern, Huyghe's project seems to dissolve into a cloud of smoke.

Perhaps I'm being too harsh, maybe it's a good show after all. Aren't I always crying out for artists like this to attempt something grand, ambitious and sophisticated? I think the pieces work individually, so go and see them like that, enjoy the films, relax in to the experience. I suspect the problem is simply that a so called 'relational' practice such as this needs to rub against something else in order to function. It needs the reality of a community as in Steamside Day. It needs the prolematics of collaboration as in Ann Lee. It needs the grit of a real life story as in Snow White. On its own in the gallery it is just too isolated from the world to be read as it is intended. This is a practice, perhaps, in the best sense in that it is all about the doing rather than the receiving. And an audience just isn't part of that equation.

The Tate has a great website where you can watch streaming video of the films in the exhibition. Click here

Bill Viola Love/Death: The Tristan Project

2006-08-08T13:49:00.000+01:00

Oh my god Bill Viola is so bad I don't believe it. If you imagine the media's stereotypical idea of a Video Artist, then this is it. I suppose that could be because he has been so successful over the years and so massively influential that he kind of wrote the template. But really, this show in particular is lame in all the worst ways.

Every cod-spiritual cliche in the book is pressed into service here. From the moody lighting to the films themselves, long, ponderous, portentous, and heavy on the symbolism. I think this is especially bad here becaue the works derive from another project, essentially background projections for an opera I think. So they generally look like what they are - purely visual mind candy - rather than having any sense of being works of art in themselves.

"When the flames of passion and fever finally engulf the iner eye, the reflecting surface is shattered and collapses into undulating wave patterns of pure light" says Bill, helpfully. And what do we get? A woman in front of a wall of flame.

The best looking work on the nifty plasma screens has water as a main surface component, and you start to wonder just how much of Viola's career has relied on the attractive effects of rippling water, which I'll happily admit are pretty gorgeous. But their inclusion in this exhibition only underlines the utter vacuousness of his work more generally, and makes me want to shake the art establishment by the throat until they come to their senses.

Naturally, the gallery is very busy with visitors lapping it up.

Delfina studios to close

2006-08-07T11:01:00.000+01:00

Word has it that possibly London's most influential studio complex, Delfina on Bermondsey Street in Southwark, is to shut down. This may be connected to the breakdon of the relationship between its two wealthy founders. The place has been on a downward spiral for years as the area around it has simultaneously been gentrified and colonised by the corporate financiers of Ernst & Young, the Financial services Authority and many others. The well-regarded programme of exhibitions curated by David Gilmour was closed down years ago, and the interesting off-site gallery round the corner lasted only a couple of years. The restaurant, which is renowned for providing cut-price food to the resident artists, increasingly depends on hosting corporate events and ridiculous themed Christmas parties which the neo-Yuppies flock to like flies to a corpse.

So pretty soon a whole bunch of artists including Glenn Brown, Gary Webb, Jane & Louise Wilson, Goshka Macuga and Gareth Jones will be turfed out. And London's curators in search of an interesting 'foreign' artist will have to do a little more than just pick up the phone and ask for the names of the latest International Resident Artists.

www.delfina.org.uk

Hodgkin & Karin Ruggaber Tate Britain

2006-07-25T17:47:00.000+01:00

Howard Hodgkin is the general public’s idea of a Real Artist. A painter, naturally, who makes colourful abstract basically expressionist works and has done so consistently for his entire adult life. Hodgkin himself has no problem with this, and is equally unaffected by the waves of postmodern French theory that have made less confident artists tremble. In Hodgkin-world feelings and ideas are unproblematically translated into abstract brushmarks, and colours essentially act completely mimetically to conjour up a blurry scene from memory. Blur your eyes at half of these paintings and you might be looking at a photograph of a garden or bourgeois holiday scene.

Having said that, it’s one of those exhibitions which the Tate does brilliantly. The huge gallery walls are given a 1980’s style scumbled paint finish to create sympathetic backgrounds for the paintings. The work itself is arranged chronologically, hung with plenty of space around it, and given room to breathe. How could it fail? I’ve not read anything bad about the show since it went up and the public seem to be enjoying themselves – walking around with headphones on squinting at the blobs and streaks, getting off on the general painterliness of it all.

Putting Karin Ruggaber in the Art Now space next door is an illuminating bit of curatorial thinking, too. Once known for her dry-as-dust furniture constructions and faux-sculptural objects, she has evolved into a textile artist with an interest in touch, much in the vein of Richard Tuttle (some of who’s work is referred to here, if I’m not mistaken). Small plaster and concrete wall reliefs merge gradually into fabric pieces held together with pins and loose stitching. It’s visual, it’s highly tactile, and it’s pretty while also giving off an air of intellectualism (because of her refusal of Howard Hodgkin-style colour). Pairing her up with the elderly painter brings out the aesthetic tendency of her work, which I feel doesn’t really work in her favour. I found her a much more interesting artist a few years back when she was showing metal sheets with horse’s hoof prints in them, nice little stacks of wood and lath, and even homemade stationary products like notebooks and A4 folders that seemed to be all about the act of folding, scoring, cutting and gluing. The aesthetic fetishisation of texture was always present but she had not yet given herself over to it completely. Still, it’s worth going to have a look and there are a couple of really nice plaster wall pieces.

Kovats & Stokes shame

2006-07-15T14:23:00.000+01:00

Does everyone think we aren’t paying attention or something? First of all Matt Stokes wins Becks Futures by getting a church organist to play Northern Soul & Heavy Metal tunes, in a way very similar to Jeremy Deller’s famous Brass Band interpretations of Acid House classics, only not quite as good, original, and about ten years too late. Now Tanya “what do you mean you want another idea out of me?” Kovats is floating a barge from Bristol to London with a meadow on top, in an exceedingly similar way to Robert Smithson’s barge which posthumously ferried a chunk of natural landscape around Manhattan recently. Who let them get away with this? Not me. I say it loud and clear – copyists! Plagiarists! Go home with your heads held low in shame and come up with something for yourself for goddsake. Pah.

Tom Burr / Modern Art Inc

2006-06-16T14:41:00.000+01:00

Currently enjoying a large museum retrospective in Switzerland, it is interesting to see the work of Tom Burr in London at this tightly focussed Modern Art show. I say interesting rather than good, or enjoyable, because he is one of those artists who looks good on paper (literally, his work looks fascinating in reproduction) but in the flesh things are rather less impressive.

His project is essentially a queer revisiting of art history in relation to minimalism and the “architecture of intimacy” (i.e. toilets). This is pursued through the fabrication of louche minimal structures which are then often covered in velvet, velour, plastic, rubber etc to symbolically corrupt the supposed rationality of the form. These sometimes echo famous artworks (for instance he has made a large purple version of Serra’s Tilted Arc) and sometimes, as in this exhibition, play the part of figures lying prone or perhaps in abandon, accessorised with props like alcohol, silver fabric, and classic literature. It’s all pretty literal really, which is disappointing. He even goes so far as to use photos of Classical architectural fragments to symbolise the American mainstream, which surely is too simplistically reductive in anyone’s book.

Looking at this show I started to wonder who buys this kind of thing? Surely not private individuals, who would really need their own gallery-style space in which to house them. Are they aimed at the institutional market? In which case such a blatantly straightforward performance of gay sexuality might start to make a bit more sense, perhaps. You know how these institutions loved to be teased a bit, and nowadays that teasing performs the function of ticking access boxes as well. Result!

Nevertheless, it’s worth a visit just to see the framed painting/collages in the hallway which are pretty nifty in an elegantly formal way, without the overblown scale issues from which the main pieces suffer.

Turner Prize 2006

2006-05-28T11:57:00.000+01:00

Well, the contenders for this year’s Turner Prize have been named and it looks like it might be an interesting year for once. You’ve got to love Rebecca Warren, right? Her work has managed to stay attractively crazy and unresolved in spite of being embraced closely by the art establishment. The big clay ladies (and their great wheelie-plinths) have become something of an institution themselves I’d say, although I do miss her more ‘formless’ shelves of oddments from a few years before. Mark Titchner’s OK by me, although he has blotted his copy book somewhat with that overblown and frankly ridiculous show at Arnolfini recently. Stick to the signs, mate, and leave the carving to Ricky Swallow (not really). You can’t go wrong with Phil Collins it seems. Dry, a bit political, a bit pale youth, perfect for the Dazed & Confused/Frieze audience with their ‘interesting’ haircuts and sallow complexions – so he’s probably my tip for a winner. And finally Tomma Abts sneaks in with little abstracts that the press is already delighting in saying “don’t mean anything”, as if that’s the greatest crime of the century! So all in all this is a respectable list that should prove hard for anyone to make much of a fuss about.

The judges, on the other hand, this year include mad old Lynn Barber from the Observer, who recently wrote in the paper that she had never heard of the Wrong Gallery, thought Monet looked cheesy next to Pollock, had never seen Beuys’ Lightning with Stag in its Glare (in spite of this being on display at Tate Modern for several years) and was disappointed (actually “shocked”) that the new rehang didn’t include the work of any YBAs. What Andrew Renton and Dame Margot Heller will make of this vain has-been hack voicing her opinions is anybody’s guess. Roll on October and the annual gin & tonic bender that marks the opening.

"Bas Jan Ader"

2006-05-20T07:32:00.000+01:00

I dropped by to see the latest instalment of “the Bas Jan Ader project” but wasn’t too impressed and I reckon personally that the joke has worn a bit thin now. More of the same faux-conceptual art documents, antique-looking films and fabricated nostalgia. This was fun when it started a few years ago, but no one really believes it now, surely? The picturesque death at sea of the artist ties in too closely with the artwork and doesn’t leave enough loose ends for my tastes. Plus, now everyone knows who’s really behind it all, and it’s turned into the art world in-joke that no one wants to deflate.

As with so many artists who fabricate personas to keep their work at arm’s length, what was originally a puppet has been successful and outgrown the “real” practice of the person behind it (see Bob & Roberta Smith for instance). Does this matter? I suppose not. But let’s put a stop to “Bas Jan Ader” after this exhibition at least.

Tiago Carneiro da Cuhna

2006-05-14T08:30:00.000+01:00

at Kate MacGarry gallery

This is one of those exhibitions that just leaves you feeling flat and unexcited. Tiago is a Brazilian artist living in Rio de Janeiro, and he makes these cast resin sculptures that are like geometric abstracted versions of recognisable figures – a monkey, a couple having sex etc. The press release locates them somewhere between precious artefact and kitsch ornament, though personally I’d put them a little nearer the latter. And that’s it. You could conceivably make a case for them being some kind of critique of Eurocentric notions of Latin America but only if you were feeling very generous (and I’m not). One strictly for those looking for something “challenging” to put on the mantelpiece.

Beck's Futures 2006

2006-05-13T18:44:00.000+01:00

This year’s Beck’s Futures prize, a whopping great twenty grand, has been awarded to Matt Stokes for his Jeremy Deller-inspired film of Northern Soul dancers at a church disco. The seductive power of 16mm film aside, the close similarities to Deller’s Acid Brass project clearly didn’t worry the judges when it came to picking ‘the most promising artist in the UK’.

Not that there was much to choose from this year. If Becks initially stood for unrecognised artistic talent, now it appears to stand for all that is fashionable, dumbed down and lazy. And I mean that in a negative sense! To pick a few random examples: Bedwyr Williams’ rack of size 13 shoes with stories attached wouldn’t look out of place in any first year BA show. Seb Patane throws together a few references to Aleister Crowley and trades on the currently fashionable occult bandwagon – see also Olivia Plender’s ‘homage’ to Oyvind Fahlstrom. Blood ‘n’ Feathers… well, er, the leaflet says that sentiment has a counterpart in laborious output but I thought that this kind of moral equation went out the window several decades ago. Anyone up for a 1950s gestural expressionist revival? Oh yeah, apparently performance-poet Sue Tompkins is.

So what was good, you ask. Well against my better judgement and certainly unexpectedly I rather fell for the jewel-like little paintings and assemblages of Daniel Sinsel [see above]. They have a kind of seriousness about them that suggests an authentically strange world view, not just a neat one liner dreamt up in the Macbeth one evening. The fact that he is already represented by Sadie Coles gallery just goes to show how voraciously the market is currently hoovering up new talent. But as usual, the quiet work which requires an element of effort from the audience loses out to crowd-pleasing spectacle. Should we ever have expected anything more from what is, after all, a competition sponsored by a brewer?

Speak Gillick

2006-04-27T13:52:00.000+01:00

Speak just like Liam Gillick by picking a phrase from each of these sections - it's easy.

“There are…

Certain phenomena
A lot of things
Questions about issues

That…

Are uniquely possible now
I’m quite interested in
Are quite problematic
Are quite urgent

Which indicate…

A specific dynamic
Some degree of crisis
A critical collapse
A bit of emptiness

In…

The near future
Something I might do
A neo-liberal environment”

Tobias Rehberger

2006-04-25T14:48:00.000+01:00

Rehberger was once a student of Martin Kippenberger and boy does it show – this is a really duff exhibition. He has fans all over Europe and the support of a big gallery here in the UK but what Rehberger needs more than anything else (apart from giving up the skunk) is someone willing to say “no” to him.

Downstairs there is a prime example of what the press release puffs up as being “sociable, interactive, utopian and playful”, but which is actually a corrugated cardboard tunnel/playhouse painted in bright colours. Apparently his work “thrives on chance
connections, unexpected encounters and the gaps between communication
and understanding” i.e. he doesn’t know what he’s doing, and no one else gets it either! On the first floor, he has built up a large wall of repeating polystyrene units that are casually sprayed with ugly neon paint, and there are some really horrible wall paintings throughout. It’s big, brash, confident & overbearing… yuck.

The top floor offers contrast in the form of a set of miniature sculptures that are meant to be interesting because of the materials they are made of. Designer dresses cremated and turned into pigment, luxury vehicle keys embedded in resin, one thing melted down and made into another. But this is hardly Simon Starling. Everything is loud in spite of its tiny scale, and makes its points in the most clunkingly obvious ways. Does the allure of a designer name outlive the physical reality of the garment? Is an artwork worth more than a luxury superbike? Er, that’s about it. This is really studenty work (no offence to students, keep it up chaps).

Rehberger’s large installation at the Whitechapell in 2004 was physically imposing and lacking substance, while his earlier small-scale works seemed to have more of an interesting edge to them. I’m thinking of his vases-as-portraits and his seating designs. Perhaps his success has simply been to much to handle, with institutions throwing large sums of money at him and asking him to fill bigger and bigger spaces. But I would urge any museum directors reading this (I know you’re all doing it) to visit Haunch of Venison and seriously reconsider their plans.

Between You & I

2006-04-14T08:26:00.000+01:00

In spite of the ubiquity of film in today’s contemporary art scene, or perhaps because of it, there is little discussion of the formal properties of the medium these days. Film or more likely video is usually taken for granted and the medium made to disappear. All the more important, then, to see work from an earlier generation of Structuralist filmmakers. Anthony McCall found fame in the 70s with his Line Describing a Cone, and now Peer have put on a large installation in the Round Chapel in Clapton (the area is known locally as “murder mile”) of a new piece called Between You and I.

The large interior of the chapel is blacked out and filled with theatrical smoke, really filled. From way up high above two video projectors beam white light down to the floor, describing slowly morphing line drawings that mix up elements of circles, ovals, straight lines and segmented curves. These follow some sort of cinematic logic over the course of a 32-minute loop, but to be honest it’s hard to make much sense out of it. The point seems to be to look up at the beams of light cutting through the smoke, which form solid but moving walls, intersect and enclose the viewer as you stumble about in the dark below. Don't be fooled by the image above, the reality is a lot less bright and vivid.

It would be easy to dismiss it as being very Jean Michel Jarre, very Orbital and generally very 70s in a “cool man” kind of way. The effect is so familiar from laser shows and nightclubs. It’s only the slowness and the monochrome palette that mark it out as Serious Art, and the fact that Peer have organised the installation. There is also a bit of an issue in that this is clearly video projection, and yet the aesthetics are tied in very closely to the world of film and celluloid. McCall really doesn’t take full advantage of the possibilities of contemporary digital animation. It’s an interesting experience to have, standing looking up at these huge white cones of light, but it means nothing and hardly transcends a verbal description of the process, which is a shame.

Click for Peer website

Jeffrey Charles Henry Peacock

2006-04-13T09:19:00.000+01:00

An interesting one, this. The old Jeffrey Charles gallery made a point of always emphasising strong curatorial conceits, and together with their new partner Henry Peacock (former rich kid Marxist gallery) they have embarked upon a series of “exhibitions without a gallery” that have so far seen artwork delivered by post and a film screening in Soho.

Announced by traditional invitation card, Do Not Like Do Not Dislike is an exhibition made by nominating four paintings currently hanging in Tate Britain. From 11 March to 16 April (on Fridays, Saturdays & Sundays only) the viewer is invited to go along and look at these paintings ignoring “the objects, some cultural, some utilitarian that surround them”. You go along to the Tate and find a huge biblical painting by Francis Danby, a strutting poodle by Stubbs, an unknown woman by Peter Lely and finally a figure by Francis Bacon. Nothing seems to connect the paintings but that’s not the point. As the invitation implies, to stand in front of a painting with no other motivation than to experience it leads to a very particular, and strong, physical impression. You are made to reconsider your own tastes, perhaps. Certainly you look more closely at the works and I especially enjoyed reassessing Bacon in this way – it looked very contemporary and not particularly great.

But most of all you feel an enjoyable sense of complicity with the curators and with other people who have taken part in this treasure hunt through the gallery. I swear the dog in Stubb’s painting was looking at me with a knowing look, as if to say “I know you’re not really looking at me as an ordinary viewer, you are more interested in contemporary curatorial strategies than nineteenth century painting and that makes you part of the in-crowd”. Was this the perfect balance of curatorial presence and artistic quiddity?

I’ll leave you with a Zen-like quote from the invitation: “Let your mind move together with an object. Then there is the possible of real communication. To understand one another, there must be choice-less awareness where there is no sense of comparison or condemnation and no waiting for further discussion in order to agree or disagree. Do not like, do not dislike, all will then be clear. Do not select or reject anything”. Far out.

http://www.jc-hp.co.uk

Revel in Saatchi's unhappiness

2006-03-15T09:39:00.000Z

Millions of visitors, a world famous collection, a personal fortune… where did it all go wrong for Charles Saatchi? Last November the company he created to run the gallery at County Hall, Danovo, was found guilty of breaching the terms of its lease on the building and ordered to pay £1.8 million to the landlords (he was also called 'evil and manipulative' or something). Now it seems that the company is being wound up with the debt left unpaid (as usual the rich get away with it). Meanwhile Charlie looks West to find a new location for the gallery in Chelsea. It seems obvious that the whole enterprise has lost its way since leaving Boundary Road. Not only the architecture but also the exhibitions themselves have gone seriously downmarket, and any grudging respect for the curation within the artworld has also evaporated. With his crazy championing of scibbly paintings and the daft decision to use County Hall’s wood panelled chambers it looks more and more obvious that Saatchi is a man adrift. Perhaps his move to Chelsea will signify a return to more upmarket operations? The world holds its breath in anticipation (and has a good laugh in the meantime).

Update: here is a virtual tour of the new gallery which looks pretty classy to me. A step towards a more institutional feel, perhaps, a la Getty?

Bloomberg Spacey

2006-03-11T08:21:00.000Z

The only good thing in this show of work that “echoes the spirit and experience of American light artist Dan Flavin’s work”, i.e. that uses electric light, is the large panel of pale coloured tubes by Spencer Finch that reproduces the quality of light from a snowy day in Monet’s garden or somesuch. Look at the floor and it does seem uncannily like a snowy afternoon in France.

Aside from this, a more motley collection of neon, LEDs and bulbs you could not find this side of B&Q warehouse (assuming they had them in stock for a change). Generally I enjoy what goes on at Bloomberg towers, but this is a Flavin tie-in pure and simple that takes what is unusual about each artist (using light as a material) and makes that the mundane starting point for curation. Plus, they missed a trick by not including Martin Creed!

What is progress?

2006-03-05T14:28:00.000Z

It’s good to see that the reinvigorated ICA is once again able to generate angry articles in the national press. A couple of weeks ago Victoria Coren in the Observer wrote a lengthy attack on Tino Seghal’s project that did all the usual ‘emperor’s new clothes’ stuff and then fantastically concluded with a plea for the Arts Council to cut off their funding. Who’d have thought that a fun and fairly innocuous dematerialised one-to-one theatrical installation could have caused so much trouble? It wasn’t like this last year, when Seghal’s first ICA exhibition (part one of a three part annual commission) seemed to go down well all round. Tate Britain took the plunge and gamely bought a piece called “this is propaganda”, a process that required a verbal contract in the presence of witnesses, rather than the more normal paperwork (very unlike them to do this – they must have been offered a good deal).
The current project starts when you buy an admission ticket, and you are greeted by a cute-as-a-button young kid who engages you in conversation as he leads you into the first gallery. After a few preliminaries he stops and says, “can I ask you a question? What is progress?”. It’s unexpected and totally disarming, and I for one found myself quite touched as I tried to formulate a serious answer for this innocent kid. You talk about this for a bit as you are led down a corridor and introduced to a teenager who picks up the thread of conversation. And on it goes, relying heavily on the performers’ personalities and skills as well as demanding a lot of generosity from the audience. Upstairs you meet an adult who takes you through the top rooms at the ICA, some dingy staircases and on to the final section, a pensioner, who walks you back to the entrance, talking all the way. On the way round, the uniqueness of your personal version of the piece is countered by the fact that you keep passing other visitors deep in conversation with their own guides, reminding you that the whole thing is a carefully choreographed experience.
In spite of the fact that the exhibition relies so heavily on its actors for content (they told me more personal information than I wanted to know, quite frankly), the use of the passages, stairs and backrooms of the building as a stage and the simple conceit of the maturing guides gave a structure to the thing that worked. It was touching to experience the changes in personality from youth to old age so plainly laid out. I found it a memorable experience all round.
Tino Seghal has quickly established himself as a pretty unique artist with his ultra-dematerialised stance, partly through the clever positioning of his work away from the more normal live art/experimental theatre venues where it wouldn’t seem quite so radical. But already the artworld is beginning to suffer spoken word fatigue, and if next year’s show is to succeed like I think this one does, he needs to concentrate as much on the processes of interactivity and content of his pieces as their formal structures.

Tate Triennial shocker

2006-03-04T10:04:00.000Z

One of the first things Tate Britain did on seceding from Tate Modern was to instigate a Triennial of British art, which started with Intelligence, was followed by Days Like These, and has hit a new low now with the unimaginatively-titled “Tate Triennial”. Inviting Swiss curator Beatrix Ruff (Kunsthalle Zurich) to make the selection was an interesting idea, and has certainly led to a different and unpredictable range of artists. But my spies tell me that the Swiss fag-hag allowed Cerith Wyn Evans to make more than a few suggestions, and he should perhaps receive a credit as co-curator.

The wide intergenerational range of the show, and the way the galleries have been opened up to form a huge space (as during Inagaddadavida) are both good ideas. But that’s where the good ideas stop. This show is terrible. Where to start? Angela Bulloch’s bonkers installation of string and disco lights (see above) shows how all those drugs have taken their toll at last. Liam Gillick, who has a contract stipulating that he must be included in all shows put on at the Tate, contributes yet another unreadable text piece (see my comments on unreadable text in the Kosuth review below). Daria Martin (Hackney’s Matthew Barney) shows her terrible new film which articles in both Frieze and Untitled somehow failed to mention is silly, sloppy and pretentious all at the same time. There is Cosey Fanni Tutti without Genesis P Orridge (some tabloid-pleasing porn mags), Payne & Relph (no comment necessary) and for some reason even three poetry pillars shipped in by old man Hamilton Finlay. It’s a totally mad selection.

Ryan Gander doesn’t cope with the institutional scale well, his modest bale of newspapers would work in a smaller gallery but here looks mannered in the extreme. His wall of faded cork titles also elicited a “?” from this viewer. Several artists like Eva Rothschild, Lucy McKenzie & Jonathan Monk are given space to show just one work, which doesn’t really do much to illuminate their practices, and poor old Enrico David is relegated to the walls of the shop (actually, probably a good idea, considering). I like Rebecca Warren’s stuff but classically, the Tate in its infinite wisdom has decided to show her work inside perspex cases which totally spoils the effect. Adrian Searle wrote a comprehensive autopsy of this show in the Guardian, with particular vitriol reserved for the curator’s explanatory blurbs which are I must admit, spectacular in this instance, and I would agree with him wholeheartedly. Apart from Marc Camille Chamowicz, who actually shows a piece from 1979, this entire exhibition is painful, frustrating, pretentious, annoying, wilfully obscure and plain bloody stupid. But hey, at least admission is free.

Joseph Kosuth, Spruth Magers Lee

2006-02-11T22:33:00.000Z

Joseph Kosuth’s first solo survey show in London is a must see but, for anyone who didn’t know something about the artist, might seem like a homage to the power of neon lighting. The gallery is almost sizzling with the stuff. You’ve got to love Kosuth a bit, for the shades, for the dogmatic conceptual stance, for the sheer Kosuth-ness of his attitude. Dude! But at the same time he’s also pretty hilarious. Certainly, some of the works in this exhibition seem solipsistic in the extreme. I’ve seen many many art students go down the road of text based cod-conceptualism which tends to end up meaning lots of text written at funny angles or otherwise semi-obscured so that it is to all intents and purposes illegible. They appropriate the look of conceptual art rather than its content (I blame a basic misunderstanding of the structuralist term 'text' which actually means anything that can carry a meaning, rather than text per se).

But guess what? It turns out that the high priest has fallen into the same trap himself. While several generations of artists in the last 40 years have taken the ideas of dematerialisation, institutional critique etc and used them to open up an expanded vocabulary of a whole variety of material forms, Kosuth has been ploughing the same long lonely furrow.

I’m guessing that the artist himself was heavily involved with the curation of this exhibition, and it looks great. The long gallery has been divided up into several smaller rooms, painted institutional grey and each crammed with work from the last forty years. There’s the pane of glass (Any 2 by 2 metre pane of glass leant up against the wall, from the early 60s), there are some dictionary definitions, some photos of clocks. It’s a lot like a museum show. Then there are the more sprawling neons from the 1980s that add a degree of sensuality through handwritten red text, and some huge wall pieces that give you a crick in the neck as you stumble across the room trying to read them. But it’s too much, you just can’t read it all. So you end up looking at them as images. The linguistic content becomes pretty much irrelevant, whether it’s philosophical quotes about the nature of art, or newspaper clippings about phallocentrism.

I don’t know, maybe it could be a failure on my part. I’m lazy. On the other hand, when did art become such hard work? Plus, when you do actually read through one of these pieces in its entirety you invariably end up thinking “so what”, and wondering why he didn’t just hand out a bunch of photocopies instead. Kosuth doesn’t actually offer much else. Unlike some of his peers like Art & Language, for instance, who have moved on and developed ways of making serious artistic points that seem to take the contemporary situation into account much more. Time has moved on.

So it’s a good show, interesting to see what he’s been up to all these years, but hardly earth shattering. Incidentally, I sat next to someone at a wedding last year who turned out to have worked as the nanny for his kids several years ago, and she said he was very particular about turning the lights off. Say no more.

Water water everywhere (in south London)

2006-02-08T11:09:00.000Z

Visiting the South London Gallery is always a bit of a pilgrimage. I don’t care what anyone says, it’s a long way to South London and transport links only make it longer. But once you get there… sometimes… the trip is worthwhile. That big room with its ornamental detailing is a grand space and in the past there have been some great-looking shows such as Tracy Emin’s career-making retrospective, Anselm Keifer’s gargantuan White Cube-athon, Gilbert & George, & Joelle Tuerlinckx to name a few. Plus who can forget the 100 topless drummers, my word what an evening!

But German installation artist Daniel Roth is a damp squib of an idea. Following standard procedure, he has carried out some so called “research” into the lost rivers of London, and found that Peckham derives its name from the river Peck. This exhibition, then, is built around the conceit that the SLG is built upon an underground water source that threatens the fabric of the building itself. So far so routine. The gallery contains a cube of earth that is meant to contain a well, with a skeletal plumbing system coming out of it that runs up and around the huge walls, eventually disappearing into a bit of moulding on the ceiling. There are also some neat pencil drawings on the walls (to reassure is that Roth is a real artist capable of technical skill?) and a pointless obviously fake bit of skin supposedly with a rash on it from the “poisonous” liquid being pumped up from below.

Overall it’s just an unconvincing, unbelievable bit of engineering that pays lip service to the idea of installation art. It doesn’t transform the space or even our perception of the space in any meaningful way. It’s lazy cod-conceptual art by numbers, that perhaps aims at having the associative strength of Robert Gober (think of all those tubes, tunnels and concealed spaces that have real metaphorical substance) but ends up reading as nothing more than a dinky formal diagram. Roth must be a capable professional operator to convince galleries that he’s up to the challenge of tackling a big space. But content-wise this guy is about as deep as a slice of toast. With Nigel “ultra-negative dialectic” Cooke’s miserable paintings lined up for the next exhibition at the SLG, at least I won’t have to make the trip down there again in a hurry. Bring back local authority control!

Richard Deacon - Lisson

2006-02-04T10:19:00.000Z

No one really knows what Richard Deacon’s art is meant to be about, or if it’s meant to be about anything. He skips merrily from form to form, happy in the workshop turning out pieces for customers worldwide, and everyone is happy. In many ways he is the consummate artist. I always liked his series “Art for other people” best, since they were smaller scale, and somehow more problematic in the relationship between material & making. The larger gallery work can be spectacular but cold.

After working with bent wood for a couple of years Deacon has now turned his attention to ceramic, and characteristically has apparently come up with a whole new way of approaching it to make some interesting shapes. The series that gives this exhibition its title, “Range”, consists of medium sized blocks of clay that he has sort of hollowed out, leaving just a cluster of thick struts that outline a twisted polyhedron. The shapes are notable for their heaviness, rather than elegance, for their lumpen solidity. This is underlined with a glaze that is flicked and drizzled on like salad dressing, leaving glossy blobs and streaks over the surface and allowing much of the natural fired texture to show through. Unbelievably, it is actually an original and genuinely sculptural approach to clay – who’d have thought it possible these days?

The carved forms are each mounted on custom plinths, which I also rather liked. A few years ago Deacon curated an exhibition of medieval sculpture at Tate Britain for which he also designed a set of weird and wonderful plinths in various bright colours. The effect was fantastic and it seems like once the traditional modernist aversion to plinths is put to one side, there is a whole new vocabulary just bursting to get out and find its application. Plinth revival, anyone?

There’s a scaled-up set of struts in the front room in steel, which doesn’t work, and a set of collage drawings upstairs that I’m rapidly tiring of now. But tucked away in the side mezzanine space around the corner are two lovely floor pieces, ribbons of unglazed ceramic as if freshly extruded from a machine, spilling all over with wanton abandon. Richard Serra for ants. Great stuff, as long as you don't mind getting off on purely formal thrills, but I for one wouldn’t want to be responsible for picking it up at the end of the exhibition.

Great news at the Serpentine!

2006-01-26T14:44:00.000Z

Good news at the Serpentine Gallery, where chief curator Rochelle Steiner is leaving to work in New York. Since reopening with Steiner at the reins the gallery has consistently put on duff shows that singularly fail to live up to their promise. Good artists have shown bad work, like Gabriel Orozco’s boring geometry paintings, or been curated in a deadening institutionalised manner like Blinky Palermo. And who can forget the opening exhibition by Manzoni that shut achromes away behind dusty Perspex boxes so that all their material qualities became imperceptible? Why bother? Doug Aitken, Richard Artschwager, The Kabakovs, Takashi Murakami, Oliver Payne & Nick Relph… the only thing I can think of that has really blown me away since the renovation was Stan Douglas, whereas previously every show had an excitement about it that made the trip to Kensington Gardens worthwhile. The increased financial worth of the loans that the renovations enabled, together with Steiner’s deadening touch have made the Serpentine a place to visit only for the fancy schmancy alcohol-fuelled openings in their cool pavilions.
Simultaneously, who should slip into his newly created seat as Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects but none other than the one and only wait for it… Hans Ulrich-Obrist. Rumour has it that he already has hundreds of great ideas for exhibitions swimming around in that great big shiny forehead of his. Can’t wait to see how things start to change over the next year or so. “The ICA can go jump in a lake” said Ulrich-Obrist, earlier.

Barry, Buren & LeWitt at Albion

2006-01-23T15:47:00.000Z

Wow, I’ve been “wowed” by a couple of spectacular Sol LeWitt at Albion, miles away just south of Battersea Bridge (near Howie St, RCA fans). These weren’t your normal late period LeWitts, with earth tones and wavy lines that may as well be by some sad old St Ives reject. What he has is a couple of those early “instruction” pieces, where a set of instructions is followed in order to come up with a certain particular composition. They tend to start simply enough, but then get so complex and convoluted that your mind spins out and you have to just take it on trust that the final diagram is an accurate rendition of the piece. I’ve seen many before in books or on a small scale, but these take full advantage of Albion’s massive walls and have got to be 15 or 20 feet high. Amusingly, the handwritten text is also scaled up to a similar size.

What you end up with is a pair of elegant, complex, richly detailed geometric drawings that follow and demonstrate (or better, are evidence of) a set of fixed rules. Conceptual art at its finest.

The show has been curated by Lance Fung whoever he is, and also includes some dubious Robert Barry wall texts, ugly Burens, and tucked away around the corner, a set of gorgeous mirror-based Daniel Burens that play a similar game of simplicity-into-complexity. White tape stripes on square mirror panels, arranged to form larger grids which cast great reflections and shadows around the room. They’re actually almost like Robert Smithson always wanted his crappy mirrored kaleidoscope/box things to be, but better.

The show’s on until March 24 so hop on a number 19 and check it out.

Beck's Futures rubbish

2006-01-18T13:28:00.000Z

The Beck’s Futures list has been announced and once again the nation is united in saying “who the hell are they?”. I recall the first year the exhibition was held at the ICA, some substantial artists were involved like Roddy Buchanan (who won) and Haley Newman. Subsequent years moved further and further down towards the bottom of the barrel, but still managed to namecheck interesting artists like Brian “don’t call me Cyril” Griffiths and Simon Bedwell. Now, however, all the good artists have been included, and it has effectively turned into a rival to New Contemporaries. Artists are chosen on the basis of their plump, firm juicy flesh, and the sweet sweet smell of innocence. The very word “futures” suggests that this is more an investment opportunity than anything else, a chance to get in while the price is low then just sit back and watch your investment grow.
But fuck me what an uninspiring bunch we have this year. A few lowlights – Blood’n’feathers (named after a song by Hole) with “intentionally” crappy paintings, awful Olivia Plender with her dreadful comic the Masterpiece, Richard “don’t confuse me with my brother” Hughes and his so far as I can see completely meaningless sculpture, and on and on. I’m prepared to be proved wrong by the exhibition. In fact I would love to be. But right now only groovy Sue Tompkins gives me any hope for art that is different, means something, and doesn’t capitulate quite so gladly to the marketplace.

See for yerself at www.becksfutures.co.uk

Bob & Roberta Smith

2006-01-14T11:27:00.000Z

The pretence that Bob & Roberta Smith are two real people has served Patrick Brill well over the years. No one really believes it and his real identity is well-known, but the idea of Bob & Roberta allows him to leave a certain distance between himself and his work. I suspect it also helps to generate ideas when times are hard. Their new exhibition at Hales Gallery (the first since leaving Anthony Wilkinson’s stable) is probably their best yet in my opinion. He has scaled up, literally, by nailing together his trademark signs into groups, and building a big sculptural nest in the centre of the gallery out of long lengths of skirting board and planks. Everything is covered in deadpan jokes, epigrams and slogans and the overall effect is one of stepping into someone’s brain, or being cornered at a party by someone genuinely funny for a change. I like the way he often mentions the artworld and what is expected of artists – “You want me to do a project in a mental hostpital, do you think I am mad?” And I suspect that collectors enjoy being teased a little as well.
The simple idea of combining his signs into clusters works really well. You get an overall effect as well as being able to see them individually, which puts a kind of critical bracket around each one. Two of the clusters are titled “110% Pessimism” and “75% Optimism”.
I have always enjoyed his concrete sculpures too, and here the viewer is invited to put on a jacket with its pockets filled with concrete, in order to listen to a dead man’s record collection. Somehow, in spite of the humour and the clearly fictional narratives that crop up, there remains a seriousness and a connection with real life underpinning everything.

Clemente & Acconci

2006-01-14T11:25:00.000Z

With one eye one the future gentrification of the King’s Cross area, Britannia Street now houses not only the huge museum-style space of Gagosian which launched a few years ago, but also the slightly less huge but still rather swanky warehouse/industrial style Kenny Schachter Rove gallery. At Gagosian the smell of money is so strong that the art itself often pales into insignificance. The entrance features a long line of finishing school Prada-drones typing away at their flat screen monitors, and a bookcase stacked with catalogues that had got to be 15 feet high. Really, it’s ridiculous.
Who better then, to adorn the walls, than Franceso Clemente, a big money painter who is synonymous with the 80s and appears to still be around. This exhibition is based around self portraits (as is the vast majority of his work) that see him portrayed as variously, a parrot, a buddha, headless, crazy man etc etc. The “idea” being that human identity is multifaceted. I don’t recommend thinking about that one too deeply but the paintings themselves are weird entities. Large scale (of course) fairly loosely painted in bright palettes that are almost Steiner-school in their symbolism. Much as I know I ought to hate them, I must confess that this guy kind of makes it work. His drawing is strong, hard edged, and pointed enough to take some of the sloppy New Age vibe out of the equation. And it takes some nerve to be so casual with the handling when big dollars are at stake. I guess this is why it worked so well in the 80s painting boom in the first place, and in fact they did remind me a little of Ashley Bickerton’s work purely by virtue of their boldness (I guess you could say “cohones”).
Across the street things are more exciting, with the return of Vito Acconci, or rather his conceptual architectural practice Acconci Studio. Just like any other architectural practice, they dream up fantastic and ridiculous proposals that don’t stand a chance of being taken up a by a client. The difference being that because of Acconci’s status as pioneering performance artist and all round creepy-guy they occasionally manage to secure arts funding to actually construct something. On display here are a selection of proposals rendered as large circular wall panels, computer graphics mixed up with hand written descriptions that outline schemes such as a city of spherical halls, or a self contained snail shell that clamps onto the exterior of trains or buildings.
It’s all great fun but I wonder what it amounts to? There’s a general reference to issues of personal, private and public spaces. There’s some kind of attempt to grapple with real issues, but what it lacks is a link to real people and real places. It would work better if these were proposals in response to a real brief – like real architects. But I guess it’s in the tradition of groups like Archigram and to a certain extent its very status as art is dependent on its socio-historical isolation from real communities.
At the far end of the gallery is a sculpture from 1981 “Fan City”, which it is possible to manipulate to produce tent like structures covered in words like “junkies” or “queers”. Large, cumbersome, completely like nothing else, this not only connects Acconci’s early and late phases but also operates as an utterly un-assimilatable object in its own right. Which I reckon is a good thing.

Paul McCarthy

2006-01-09T10:18:00.000Z

Finally managed to visit the Whitechapel’s big Paul McCarthy spectacular on its closing weekend, apparently the same idea as everyone else in London as it was packed. The main attraction was the off-site warehouse installation at the top of Brick Lane, but the gallery itself had a respectable round up of sculpture, drawing, and photographic documentation of old and new performances (woman gets leg chopped off, artist splatts paint on the wall etc). In the normal contemporary, market-based manner, the drawings were ostensibly ‘working drawings’ for a suite of films. This is meant to give them heavyweight art status but I was largely unimpressed. The vigorously worked pencil lines and written annotations just look like mannerism to me. In fact the whole question of mannerism vs authenticity kept ringing through my head as I strolled around this show in the company of so many other art afficionados.
McCarthy’s project combines cathartic desublimation on a personal level with a generalised attack on all (particularly patriarchal) authority figures. But it seems to me that he really peaked a few years ago with his animatronic figures and films like Heidi (maybe Mike Kelly’s involvement with that one helped, too). International success has led him to make bloated, kunsthalle-filling spectacles that are nowadays more pantomime than visceral affectivity-fest. Watching the cavorting actors in this new set of films it occurred to me that they were more concerned with showing the label on the tin of syrup to the camera than engaging with the stuff itself. It was all play acting, a crescendo without climax. Enough of a thrill to titillate the art audience, perhaps, but at the end of the day less cathartic than an episode of CSI.
The warehouse installation was probably the physically biggest thing I’ve seen outside of the Tate in recent years, and did have a certain sculptural thrill. The run-down building itself played a big role, providing some great shabby rooms for video projections, and a nice set of stairs from which to survey the scene. A series of boats, platforms and boatlike-sculptures made up the set on which McCarthy’s videos were filmed, although since this exhibition originally came over from Germany they were presumably carefully disassembled, wrapped and crated to be brought over here. This imperfect indexicality grated a little, and again underlined the fetishising of the “film set” as artwork, rather than any more genuine chance for the audience to mentally project themselves into the action. Gallons of fake blood, syrup and indeterminate gunk had long ago dried up to make artfully abstract expressionist paintings across the walls and tabletops of the different spaces. But strangely, it all came across as rather tame. With no opportunity to join in (as per Herman Nitsch) we were left at a safe distance to enjoy the spectacle of half hearted debauchery and wonder if we’d got any muck on our clothes by accident. Based as it was on Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride, the whole installation was essentially low culture for people who are too posh for the real thing.

The music of the future

2006-01-06T09:54:00.000Z

As has been the trend of late, this exhibition is titled and themed after an obscure quote taken from a nineteenth century publication. There seems to be some kind of fixation on this period, pre-modern, caught up with occultism and dubious right wing philosophies, that has sort of grown out of the teenage-Goth theme of a few years back. Why, I don’t know. You don’t see the artists themselves walking around dressed as Goths or getting stuck into the Church of Thelema do you?

This show at Gasworks in Vauxhall, curated by sculptor Laurence Kavanagh, is a lacklustre collection by 8 artists hung in a darkened gallery with pallid spotlights picking out the works. It’s pretty insubstantial, with nothingy paintings by Dee Ferris and the unaccountably popular Lucy Skaer, foundation-level prints from clothing by Kate Davis, and a characteristically creepy video of a spooky face by Andrew Mania (made with support from an artists video agency, although quite why he needed so much assistance to film a handheld shot of a painting I don’t know).

I was looking forward to Ian Kiaer’s piece, but frankly it was rubbish. A paper folder with a silver bird motif leant up against the wall meant to reference spirituality (?). As I see more and more of his work it occurs to me that he is simply fetishising the corner, the junction between wall and floor, as a site for sculpture. You could put almost anything into this space but I demand more than that from good art, Kiaer’s simply got lazy with his success. It’s descended into lazy trash-formalism with spurious literary references for the critics to go on about.

The less said about Colin Lowe’s laughable prison cell, the better. Who makes padded rooms with electrified bed frames and tins of dog food these days??

Predictably, it is the curator’s work which comes out on top (aside from a scary film from mark Titchner in the usual style). He makes little models of planes and boats from table top veneer or tin boxes, in a Bill Woodrow style. Any other context they would be cute, but amongst this miserable collection they read as a blessed relief.

This isn’t the “music of the future”, and the artists only “assemble and re-appropriate historical art forms” in the sense that they lazily copy the look of artwork that’s been knocking around for years.

Emails

2006-01-03T16:14:00.000Z

A new year and already I'm getting emails about new exhibitions, but these two hardly sound like essential viewing. Take a look at this from Sadie Coles:

"During walks around Vienna last summer, Ugo Rondinone made a number of drawings. In these sketches he picked out windows and architectural details from the city’s buildings. For 'my endless numbered days', these have been transferred, as pencil on white canvas into a series of beautifully delicate, iconic paintings. On the reverse of each canvasare images cut from the New York Times on the date of the day each painting was made. The blunt reality of these images creates a jolt after the delicate fairytale like musings of a flâneur in the city. The casual installation of these airy, wistful paintings together with agroup of simple sculptures, based on the choreographing of different units, reflects the idea of hours idled away. They evoke the pleasure of time that doesn’t necessarily have to be filled, which are the ideal conditions for having ideas and making art."

All this talk of delicacy, hours idled away and the pleasure of time that doesn't have to be filled really grinds my nads when I think of the hard struggle that most artists put up with on a day to day basis. Who is this guy? And since when did sketches of architectural details become something that a hipster like Sadie Coles would touch with a bargepole. Oh yeah, there's a photo on the reverse that gives it a critical edge. I can almost see that after dinner moment when the host casually flips his painting over to share a bit of "blunt reality" with his guests.

The other email I had was for the Mustafa Hulusi show at Rachmaninoff's. Doesn't say what to expect but it does mention that "His flyposted works can be viewed corner of Richmond Road/Kingsland Road, Hoxton/Shoreditch High Street, bottom end of Hackney Road". That says it all really, doesn't it? Get out more mate!

Beatriz Milhazes at Stephen Friedman Gallery

2005-12-20T13:26:00.000Z

Everyone loves Beatriz Milhazes right now. She’s got a series of huge works at Gloucester Road, she’s got this solo outing at Stephen Friedman Gallery, and she’s even done a large mural for the restaurant at Tate Moderne. It’s this last example which suggests an intriguing relationship to Fiona Rae, another artists who constructs essentially decorative abstract images out of found patterns and repetitive stylistic quirks.

The big paintings at Stephen Friedman immediately show why she has been so popular. Firstly, she’s a painter right? Everyone loves to buy paintings to hang on their huge expensive apartment walls. Secondly, they’re inoffensively abstract with lots of interesting details to entertain the eye. But she’s no interior decorator! Thirdly and most importantly, the work is textured, roughed up a little, and conveys just enough of a hint of authentic Brazilian bohemianism.

It’s the distressed, scraped back and collaged surfaces that enable Milhazes to have her decorative abstract cake and eat it. They signify Brazil, Latin America, life in the barrios, authenticity, ‘real life’ as only those notionally outside the pampered first world are able to live it. But look at those abstract patterns! She may be from the slums (or the art school or wherever) but she aspires to live a modernist dream just like us. She is the perfect compromise or, as the press release has it, “occupies a unique position between Western & Latin American traditions”. Just like Gabriel Orozco’s geometric paintings, in fact.

It’s hard not to respond favourably to these large, absorbing pictures, and I’m sure that many will be responding favourably with their chequebooks. But still I can’t help feeling a slight distaste for such a self-exoticising artist.

2005 a good year for art

2005-12-16T15:27:00.000Z

Looking back at 2005 it seems to me that it’s been a really good year for exhibitions in London, with a revival of brainy conceptualism alongside the tedious continued success of basically decorative painting and drawing. The Tate empire has scored well, with a cute Anthony Caro show, Beuys and Jeff Wall standing out. The extravaganza that was “Frida” may have drawn coach parties like babies to a TV screen, but I’d rather see a disassembled Beuys installation any day. Tino Seghal at the ICA was a great experience too, and it’s great to see Jens Hoffman putting art back at the centre of things after so many years of pointless zeitgeisty art/design/advertising shows. I thought ‘London in 6 easy steps’ worked out ok too – at least there was some sense of excitement to it all.

Elsewhere I dug Ryan Gander’s installation at Store (also his Becks Futures contribution), Phyllida Barlow at Bloomberg (although super-ironically her actual work is never going to live up to the wonderful book on her by Black Dog), and ‘An Aside’ curated by a pregnant Tacita Dean. Her hormones may have exaggerated her whimsical tendencies, but this show at Camden Arts Centre was everything an exhibition should be.

Was the Folk Archive exhibition at the Barbican this year as well? I think so. I remember loving it so much at the time I kept on assaulting Alan Kane at the private view and telling him how this was “the perfect contemporary art exhibition, everything is perfectly judged, the tone is so perfect, spot on, and it’s arty as well as documentary, I love it” etc etc.

The year of brainy-art was sealed when Spruth Magers Lee put on a show of early Robert Morris minimalist sculpture. The first chance anyone under 60 has had to see these for real, as it were (although they were in effect replicas of course), in fact it turned out to be something of a damp squib. I reckon Serota’s mirrored cubes are the best thing he did in that phase, so another hats off to the Tate.

Hmm, this is turning into a Tate love-athon.

Rough Diamond turned out to signal the end for ace gallery Program just off Regent Street, as backers fell out with each other, so where do we look now for funky grunge sculpture & formal kicks? Anyway, it seems like there was plenty going on this past year, and people seem to be getting in the mood for difficult, elliptical art again which has got to be a good thing in my book. You don’t get any more inscrutable than Larry Weiner at el Lisson, and I see even Kosuth’s got a show coming up soon. Blimey. Let’s keep it hardcore in 2006.

Why

2005-12-15T16:38:00.000Z

Another bleedin' blog and the obvious question is why? Simply because when I went out looking for one dedicated to contemporary art exhibitions in London I drew a blank. Sure there are plenty that review films, theatre, even musicals alongside the art, but no one seems to be coming to it with any specialist knowledge or understanding, and that's what I want to read.

The obvious exception was the wonderful Artrumours.com but since Niru went all mainstream and establishment on us, the site has sadly expired. JJ must be very happy that he's still sat at the top of the greasy pole for all eternity now... (I'll resist making the obvious joke quite this early on in our relationship).

I don't claim to have the sort of inside information and access (let alone travel allowance) that Artrumours had but I will do my best to keep you - my notional public - informed and maybe even entertained.

I guess, if I try to be brutally truthful about it, I am also succumbing to the dreaded allure of vanity blogging, the attraction of mouthing off, and all the rest of it. But ha so what.