114. DARK LINE by ANN CHRISTOPHER

KINGS PLACE SCULPTURE TRAIL

Near Kings Cross – at York Way, to be exact - tucked away by Regent’s Canal is a complex which offers the Pangolin Gallery, music venues, cafes and bars. And a sculpture trail.

You are looking at Dark Line , one of 24 sculptures which grace the banks of the Canal and invite you to wander through to meet work by very famous and by not-so-famous sculptors.

Dark Line seems to spring gracefully up into its space. It’s full of paradoxes. It's slender yet tough; solid, but a fissure runs down its body; sharp and precise but with intricate, delicate surface texture; as still as a standing stone yet it draws its shape in the shadow on the floor. As you follow the trail you see it against the changing vistas of water and sky; massive buildings and cosy chairs; inside and outside.

The art critic Richard Cork wrote recently that on the wall of the artist’s studio hang the words of the psychoanalytic theorist  D,W,Winnicott:  ‘it is in the space between inner and outer worlds - which is also the space between people, the transitional space - that intimate relationships and creativity occur’. Anthropologists and theologians talk of ’liminal space’, from the Latin word meaning ‘threshold’, a place betwixt and between, where new things happen.  I think they’re talking about the same thing.

In about 1996 I was given three small glass pyramids by Ann Christopher as a gift from my family. The certificates of authenticity read ‘The precise cut lines form a taught (sic) web containing the clear inner space of the glass pyramid’.  The sides are patterned with etching but through the clear glass I experience an echo of a child’s delight in the mystery of being able to see inside a solid object. As you do with a glass marble.

pangolinlondon.com

annchristopher.co.uk
Ann Christopher R.A. Marks on the Edge of Space, Catalogue by Richard Cork

113. UNTITLED by RONI HORN

Hauser & Wirth, Saville Row 

 UNTITLED © Roni Horn; Courtesy the artist & Hauser & Wirth   
Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography Zurich

Ten coloured glass sculptures stand in a large airy North Gallery, which welcomes the shimmering patterns of light and weather from the street outside. For a moment I see them as giant lozenges, frosted with sugar. Each is the size of patio tub, with sides which are matte and would be rough to touch. The tops are smooth as silk. You could be looking down on still, sacred water resting in a ceremonial vessel. You want to dip your hand in to test it, but already you know the answer. 

Some pieces are as pale as a cloud, others are shades of blue - delphinium, pale lavender, aquamarine; the colours of glaciers and summer skies; flowers, the Aegean sea and butterflies.

 Roni Horn, an American artist, has said that she choses Iceland as her material in the way that a sculptor might chose marble. She has documented the country in books and photographs, focusing particularly on the changeability of the weather. The art critic Adrian Searle describes her Library of Water - at a building north of Reykjavik - where she has a glade of glass columns, each containing melted water from a different Icelandic glacier, glaciers which are disappearing...

I have loved her work since the time when she was Rebecca Horn and I walked into the Tate (in the 1990s?)and spied a grand piano hanging from the ceiling. It was called Concert for Anarchy. and was not the sort of thing you meet every day, even in an art gallery. Moreover it was a working piano timed to go off every 2 or 3 minutes. The lid flies open and the keys  thrust themselves out higgledy piggledy, the strings inside shuddering and the noise, well, challenging. A minute or two later the keys sidle back into their rightful place and the lid closes and you wait in suspense for what might happen next.

Everything is a shock. The piano looks precarious - but you know it can't be. It's a musical instrument which needs a gifted touch to bring it to life - but this one has dispensed with all that. Nor does it need human music - it composes its own.

The piano itself had formerly been used as a prop for her film Buster's Bedroom 1990 (Tate T11851) set in a Californian mental asylum. Horn describes how, the piano having freed itelf from the psychiatric clinic,  is now composing its own music, developing a new tonalty (Rebecca Horn, The Glance of Infinity).

Untitled is very beautiful and with weather extremes predicted in the next week or so, it'll be possible to see it in many different lights.

www.hauserwirth.com
www.tate.org.uk/britain
ww.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/feb/26/roni-horn-t.
www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/ 

112. DEVON – SURGING TIDES OVER THE ROCKS AT HARTLAND by ALAN COTTON

The Series Paintings

Messum’s, Cork Street

The story goes that long ago the brilliant and provocative painter and art critic John Berger met Cotton. (In 1972 Berger's TV series and book Ways of Seeing changed everything for many of us).  He admired the young artist's vital and fresh paintings. 'I really think the knife is the way you should go', he said, and that was the beginning of the densely textured impasto effect which is Cotton's trademark.


What I like about Surging Tides is its honesty and grittiness. This artist makes paint and colour  luscious, even thrilling. (Alas, these reproductions do not do his work justice - go to Messums website for a more truthful depiction).It's a brave artist who choses to paint beautiful places. You face two stern challenges. How do you bring something new and unique to what is so familiar? And how do you resist being beguiled by beauty in order to bring a deeper, layered appreciation of what you see?


Cotton reminds me that the seaside is much more than picture-postcard prettiness. Those rows of sharp shards of rock point out to sea like bayonets. They defend our shores by joyfully and energetically doing battle with the never-ending flow of tides and waves. At Hartland the coast puts up a fight. There are parts of Devon and Cornwall where the rocks are not to be trifled with. They are rugged and sharp. Slate can slice through an unprotected foot in the most beguiling of pools; rocks find the innards of an unwary ship. Not like the East Anglian shoreline which is soft and crumbling. Sand and dunes move and sway with the waves. Cliffs may finally surrender and tumble into the foam.  Here the rocks have seen it all before and are not going to give one inch. 

Yet it’s a seascape which is almost an abstract. I particularly like the curved lines of the waves as they approach the rocks. It’s as if the sea had found a hollow and the resulting pattern is intriguing, almost vertiginous. And the way the light falls on the golden left hand corner as well as on the sea itself is a delight.

 

Devon – Hidden Cove at Hartland is also splendidly robust. Look at those waves – they’re firing straight up in the air. The rocks on the left stand like sentinels. Is that the partly submerged spine of a sea monster? And the sea itself is very physically present, rich, solid, shockingly white. 

P.S. I noticed how thoughtful and, indeed, useful the lighting was at Messums. This is not true of every gallery I’ve visited.
alancotton.co.uk 

messums.com
Ways of Seeing (Penguin Modern Classics) by John Berger

111. JAKUB by JAN MIKULKA

National Portrait Gallery BP Award

I’m ashamed to say I didn’t give this Visitors’ Choice winner a second glance...It’s an art style called photorealism, which means that when you see it, it’s so incredibly life-like it could be a photograph. I went round this show several times, once with a friend who needed convincing that yes, all the portraits in front of him were painted by someone; photographs were not allowed. 

It’s a portrait of Jakub Wagner, a documentry film maker, by his friend from childhood, the Czech artist Jan Mikulka, and came top of the poll when visitors to the National Portrait Gallery voted for their favourite painting at this year’s BP Award show.  It received 2,280 votes, nearly 10% of the poll. Unlike the five who won the BP Awards, there’s no money for this unofficial prize-winner – only glory.

It’s hard to understand what magic guides the subtle, delicate handling of paint and how the artist breathes life into a limited tonal range. Jakub is said to have caught the public’s imagination with its ‘minutely detailed and skilful rendering of hair and skin tones and effective lighting’. Jan, a lifelong friend commented ‘I wanted to capture Jakub’s sensitive nature at short distance’.

But why not a photograph (which would have saved five month’s work, the time it took to complete the painting)?  Because five month’s worth of fleeting expressions, words, silences are also captured in the final image and it shows? Because, though wanting our artists to be flamboyant, Bohemian and visiting psychological spaces the rest of us can’t clamber into, we also relish and honour superb craftmanship when we see it?

I have another idea. We live daily life by glancing at other people, not by gazing at them. We know that if we pay serious attention to another face, we enter a new sort of relationship, for good or ill. A gaze can start a love affair - and a street fight. Perhaps because the sitter has already given so much of his time to the artist ( and indirectly to us), we feel we have permission to return the gaze, to stop, reflect, and stay with whatever we experience, in a way we couldn't if we were flicking over to the next photo shot?

 

This year’s BP Award show was seen by more people than ever before and the good news is that the prize winners and selected entries will be at Wolverhampton Art Gallery 24 September – 1 November and at Aberdeen Art Gallery from 12 November to 31 January 2012.     All three at the top of the poll can be seen on: www.npg.org.uk/bp

www.janmikulka.com/home/cv

110. IT’S COMPLICATED 1 by JESSICA ZOOB

 JOY: recent works by Jessica Zoob

Medici Gallery

One of the great pleasures of walking into a solo show is to find yourself surrounded by not one but many works by the same artist. It’s a temporary ‘sacred space’, like a theatre; an experience of immersion different from looking at a single painting. We sometimes recognise the power of such shows by turning them into block-busters - usually a retrospective of someone very famous or dead – or both.

Walk into the double room of the Medici Gallery and you will be surrounded by paintings which are rich, subtle and very beautiful. You could even say they live up to the bold title of the current show:Joy.

It’s Complicated 1 (in a series of two), is an abstract with recognisable landscape features, if you only stay and look at what’s there. The image  cannot do justice to the soft background - at times langorous, at times spicy - or the visceral greens which are gloriously wet and squishy, a carpet of living moss and sea weed. If you walked on them you’d feel cool water oozing up between your toes.

But at the same time you know it’s no ordinary landscape. What we see are mysterious layers of paint, worked over, built up and scraped back over weeks and months. Zoob also uses materials such as gesso, sand and crushed glass to add texture. Parts of the  canvas are free flowing, others are as intricate as a delicate miniature.  The work is physicallly demanding and expensive. Zoob says that at times when working on a series you pull a colour (about £1000 worth of paint) and most of it ends up on the floor. 'You have to be prepared to lose huge amounts of what you have created in order to get the whole thing to work as one'.

.

But ‘I don’t want people to notice the method or technique’, says Zoob. ’What I am trying to do is create something that appears absolutely simple...I want people to feel rested when they look at my work – to wander through these worlds and explore the magic that is here’.

 

 As you move around you begin to notice the extraordinary way in which Zoob paints the viewer into the picture. Sometime she  places us high in the sky looking down like a bird on a mysterious terrain. Deep Water  gives us another sensation, that of being plunged into something. It’s hard to believe we’re looking at a flat canvas, because the picture is full of vitality, its paint thick and opaque, alive with currents and trailing weeds and things we’ve never seen before. It’s how we imagine  it might be if we could sink down, eyes open, and move around freely.  It reminds me of some of Bill Viola's videos.

Freedom does the same with air.I don’t know how you can paint what is invisible, but Zoob does just that. She says she 'wants to create something massively energetic but also really quiet – sometimes it is the quietest person in the room that is the one most worth listening to'.

Some of her paintings are very large and impossible to reproduce here. Zoob admits that she under-rated the complexity of working on a grand scale. ‘Painting something twice as large as you have done before is not twice the work; it is about eight times as difficult... But when you feel you are winning, it is the most exciting feeling in the world’.

If you go to the Medici website, click on Zoob to see the catalogue of the show. Then go to her biography, because at the bottom of the page is a link to two interesting articles by Helen Chislett about Zoob's work published in Art of England.

 www.jessicazoobdesire.com

medicigallery,co.uk

artofengland.uk.com

109. TWEEZERS by ANN JONES

Signs of a Struggle: Photography in the Wake of Postmodernism

Victoria and Albert Museum   

 This photograph, alongside another  entitled HAIRCLIP, is cracking an old joke.
 In the frame is a photograph of set of tweezers much larger than life. Tucked in the left hand bottom corner of the frame is a label which reads:

Thought to have been used for the removal of hair from the eye-brow. Whether the eye-brows were removed partially or totally is unknown.   European c 1990s

Beside it, in an identical frame, is a U-bend hairclip, also enlarged.
This is the label:

Used to secure hot rollers in the hair. Rollers were electrically heated, then applied to the hair, which was scorched into temporary curls.  British c 1980s                                                       
These two works are part of a series Daily Life, Women, a parody of the way museums (used to?) display artefacts from other cultures. By withdrawing the tweezers and hairclip from their normal context and enlarging them, the artist turns them into curiosities, inviting us to ponder the irrationality and naivety of our own cultural practices instead. Why, for example, do we eliminate hair from eye-brows, legs, chins, ears, (not forgetting more intimate parts) and even from the head itself, but send out for more to stick on our eye lashes or make toupees and hair extensions?

Postmodernism is playful and this time the joke is really on us.  Whatever happens, it seems as though people throughout the world will insist on using clothes and personal decoration for deeply personal ends. At the opening of Tate Britain the four architects on the platform were entirely clad in black. So was the chairman. So were all except one when the second bunch of celebrities took the stage. Black is useful in a dirty city? It makes you look slim?

Anthropologists know better. Clothes and personal grooming have an instrumental function (they keep us warm, cool, decent etc) but also an expressive (they tell the world who we are). They are the goods we daily use to think with.

(On the way back from my visit to the V&A I saw a woman with I'm Not A Plastic Bag beautifully embroidered in pink on a cream linen shopping bag. Since no one could have imagined otherwise, is she telling us something about her values, with a hint that the world would be a better place if we followed her example?)             

The U-bend hair clip is particularly interesting. Nowadays things happen fast and postmodernism has to run to keep up. Jones could have photographed a pre-electric curler - tongs thrust into a fire and, when hot enough, opened up and clamped around a lock of hair until you could smell singeing. As long as newspapers said that 55 golden ringlets were tossed every time the American child actress Shirley Temple shook her pretty little head, many a small girl endured such treatment 50 years ago. And a short time ago hair straighteners were all the rage - how long will it be before they too are  seen as another quaint if slightly barbaric attempt to turn ‘nature’ into ‘culture’?

We now know that a superior tone is unsustainable in a post modern world. The Wellcome Collection in London and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge are but two examples I know of which transform the way we are invited to connect with material from around the world.
Both are places where we can consider what it means to be human.

cam.ac.uk/museums

vam.ac.uk
wellcomecollection.org

108. UNTITLED 1991 by LORNA SIMPSON

Signs of a Struggle: Photography in the Wake of Postmodernism,

Victoria and Albert Museum

The star work of this show is this image. That's the view of Louisa Lee, writing in Artists Insight. She sees Simpson's ‘understated diptych of a black woman with her back to the camera’ as something which is 'neither easily defined nor clearly labelled' but worth staying with.

When I walked into the gallery and first saw this picture, I was struck by the beauty of the image: a mysterious anonymous woman confined in murky space, whose face is hidden from us, but emanating strength and stillness - and vulnerability. 

There's a history of woman being depicted with their backs to us. It's a sort of  anti-portrait, denying us the normal clues that help us to recognise and have empathy with another human being. Some artists have treated their subjects romantically, others paint a cosy picture, yet others aim for poetry.

 The work on the left -  Woman at the Window - was painted by Caspar David Friedrich in 1822.  She’s mysterious too, slightly unreal, her feet hovering over the floorboards - but at least she has a window to look out of. 

 

So too does Dali’s young woman (his younger sister Ana Maria) in the picture on the right - Jeune fille à la fenêtre  - painted almost exactly a century later. Dali was influenced at that time by the Swiss painter Arnold Bocklin who joined ‘naturalism to fantasy’.  

 All three images are intriguing. But Simpson's picture is the only one with words. There is a column of text and figures running down each side. On the left is a jumbled list of percentages and estimated numbers:
20% - 1 out of 10 - 1 in 10 - 3 out of 4- one fifth - 10% - 75% - 100% - 50%.
What you read on the right is :
intermittent - daily - slow - for the time being - nightly up to now - against - in the meantime - weekly - fast - throughout - spend - constant

We are less trusting of statistics than once we were. Cheek by jowl and randomly scattered, do these ones look sloppy, approximate, untrustworthy, the sort of words we'd call up to support an argument or confound an opponant?The museum label explains that the image and text refer to a quota system in USA relating to minorities categorised according to race. 

Then there's the format: it reminds us of the millions of photographs which continue to be taken to record physical characteristics for purposes of ethnographic and medical research, police records and  identity. Many of the subjects must have had little choice about when and where, how or by whom they were photographed.I recall the first time I was issued with an identity badge when I applied for a job with Texas Instruments, an American company. It seemed very un-British and I doubted whether it would catch one....

This woman’s dignity seems to interrogate the statistics, despite the rough and ready generalisations which stand like pillars each side of her. Although she doesn't disclose her face to us, we understand that she is unique – and uniquely precious - like every other human being on this planet.

Nina Caplan, Features Editor in Time Out asks 'If artists can no longer promise us reality, then what are they showing us, and where has reality sidled off to while we're trying to figure that out? It would all be even more nerve-racking if the images weren't so beautiful'. I like her questions but for me the shock or frisson in this photo is exactly because something so beautiful is linked with and contaminated by powerlessness.

lsimpsonstudio.com

artistsinsight.co.uk       
www.vam.ac.uk