71. MONUMENT TO AN UNKNOWN ARTIST by GREYWORLD

SOUTHBANK, by TATE MODERN  22.4.11

Just around the corner from Tate Modern this gentleman stands at a great height. Monument to the Unknown Artist  is a piece of interactive public art created by Greyworld,  a world-renowned artists' collective founded by Andrew Shoben, Professor of Public Art at Goldsmiths College., London University.The sculpture stands in front of the monumental Blue Fin building, named after the 2,000 blue aluminium fins that cover the building's facade and change its appearance as you walk round it. 

At first glance the Unknown Artist looks harmless enough: a massive bronze statue of a man in a loose- fitting suit, wearing a neck scarf. His stone plinth is so tall that any potential  protesters (who keep central London on its toes) would have to bring their own scaffolding before they could climb and deface this particular gentleman.

He’s probably up so high because he’s susceptible to trouble. He’s animatronic: ‘a mechanised puppet using electronic and robotic ways and means to simulate life',  indeed to copy the movements of passers by.  Alas, he’s been a bit  lifeless recently. I wondered if he’d been turned off for health and safety reasons? Or was he just dispirited by the noise and clutter of the huge building sites now surrounding him? (The Tate was originally designed for 2 million visitors a year. Now numbers are reaching up to 5 million and there's serious building going on). But whatever else happens, if the wind is blowing  his clothes - which look as though they’re made of bronze too - gently flutter.

But this morning he's back in form, playful, even mischievous, waving his paintbrush about to strike a pose or two as I move around on the pavement below,

What’s written on the plinth? Non plaudit, modo pecuniam jacite  which means, ‘Don’t applaud, just throw money’. I think he’s a bit of a mystery. Why communicate to us in Latin? What would he do with the money anyway?

Nearby  is a paradox. The bronze Unknown Artist on the plinth is programmed to be life-like; walk along  Southbank and you see real live human beings pretending to be statues. With paint and costume and props they try to earn an honest crust by posing motionless  and being endlessly photographed.
 
 With that Latin motto ringing in my ears, what could I do but toss some coins into a silver horn lying on the pavement?

70. COUNTRY WALK, BIRDSONG by DAVID HEATHCOTE

Country Walk, Birdsong 137 x 170 oil on canvas

GV GALLERY, LONDON 13.4.2011

Birdsong is usually thought of as something beautiful and pleasing, even though it is often  a call of distress or a defence mechanism.  And how does it become 'art'? I wrote about one way of doing this in Blog 347. Something Going on Above My Head (1995-9), then in Tate Britain, brings together the sounds of two thousand birds, creating what the artist calls a ‘sculpture’. For five years, Oswaldo Maciá collected bird calls from international ornithological archives and audio libraries, reworking them into a symphony, scored according to the birds’ pitches.

Heathcote’s Country Walk, Birdsong at the GV Gallery in Chiltern St is another expression of birdsong, this time by an artist who has linked it with a passion for ‘a deeper understanding of my world of landscape’. 

Birdsong is a tricky subject to paint. For many it's just a memory anyway. It's in short supply in central London, where I live, though birds do their best in the many magnificent parks, despite competition from traffic in land and sky. The water birds on the lakes and ponds are the loundest, squawking and squealing as they go about their daily business. It’s only on hot days that they fall silent and other birds get a look in.They retract their legs, settle their plump chests on the ground and angle themselves to face the sun – like sun-worshippers on  beds on Rhodes’ beaches.

Let’s begin with the artist’s own lyrical description of his early years:

 ‘I had grown up with landscape all about me. I was at home with it, with its sights...scents and sounds. I was at ease with it. Now I am on a creative path to re-explore it. I am on the beach. A flying bomb clatters over me, and as it rackets across the estuary towards London, the Spitfire trying to catch it is giving up and banking away. I am on the sea now, rowing with a friend from Whitstable to Sheppey, straining to the limit. The tide is turning strongly against us. Now I have netted a great crested newt in the pond on the hill. Taken home it will escape. I am fishing on the marshes, watching a heron landing. I see my father hurrying to the pigeon loft to take the ring off a bird that has streaked in at the end of a race...’

But when I do pay attention to birdsong I'm at the bottom of an ocean of air which is filled with darting creatures above my head making random (to me, not to them) musical notes. How can you possibly paint that?  Heathcote uses strong vibrant colours and lucid patterns which run or meander downwards against a breath-taking blue. Some of the strokes are strong, some fragile. Mingling, clashing, tumbling, they remind us that birdsong is a beautiful gift outside our control, reaching us unbidden, when and where it likes. His landscape drawings breathe an air of contemplative calm,

woman in a long dress, 43x19x20, edition of 10

David Heathcote has produced a great range of work: media, form, style, ambition and reach. He taught art in Rhodesia and Nigeria, then turned to sculpture – “almost by chance”, he says – when he returned to his home country. This bronze, Woman in a Long Dress  is still and calm,  her long arms strong, capacious, confident.  Elegant and lithe, she has substantial presence, firmly grounded and with a profound inwardness.  

 

69, BLUE PURPLE TILT by JENNY HOLZER

                                     

TATE MODERN LONDON 7.4.15

When I've come across Jenny Holster's eye-popping  slogans strung across the walls  and ceilings of various galleries, I've been less than enthusiastic.  But when Tate Modern gives her an Artists’ Room devoted solely to her work, it’s time to think again.

Up 5 floors of escalators, turn left, find Room 8 – and light sweeps over you like a wave of water or sound.  Blue Purple Tilt was created specially for the room and takes it over: seven double-sided vertical LED signs in luscious colour. It's a shock. Only the far wall feels safe.

At her best, as the artist Lucy Cumming said in The Guardian last year, Jenny Holzer 'can make a cliche mysterious or a haiku monumental'. The notice on the wall cautions ‘Its scale emphasises that it is a sculptural object in its own right. Indeed the viewer’s response may be shaped as much by the hypnotic glow of the letters streaming smoothly or flashing abruptly as it is by the words themselves’.

Amen to that!

But what are the words saying? I edge cautiously nearer as they move in and out of my vision, marching up the slope and disappearing round the back:

• Enjoy yourself because you can’t change anything anyway
• Everyone’s work is equally important
•  Exceptional people deserve special concessions
•  Good deeds are eventually rewarded
•  Extreme self consciousness leads to perversion...

The savage colours and the anonymity invite a response. People I don't know are trying to make sense. Is she bearing witness or lamenting or provoking or reassuring? Would it be  a pantomime audience's 'Oh no, it isn't!' or a more reflective 'It depends what you mean by...'. 

If you want to find (and argue with) more, then try mfx.dasburo.com/art/truisms.html  where her Truisms  are listed in alphabetical order.

Holzer says that since childhood she has been interested in ‘rapturous writing’ and wanted to write ‘ecstatic, fantastic things’, inspired by the texts of political, religious and other passionate writers.
On the right is one of her
Inflammatory Essays,
www.emptykingdom.com/featured/inflammatory-essays-jenny-holzer, each consisting of exactly 100 words in 20 lines. They were originally fly-posted across New York.  Holzer uses more or less anything to carry her messages: plaques, printed fliers. stone benches, telephone booths, stickers, T-shirts, condoms, paintings, photos, video,  light projection,  and the Internet. To see even more go to tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?artistid=1307 .  

guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/mar/14/jenny-holzer-baltic-review-cumming 

 

68. VIOLA AS TWINS by LOTTIE DAVIES

Viola as twins (c) the artist

MALL GALLERY 1.4.11

Blogging combines three of my favourite things: walking, researching and writing. And some days you accidentally discover pure gold.

I was at the Mall Gallery with a friend at the 2011 Renaissance Photography Prize exhibition, sponsored by Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, to raise funds for the Lavender Trust (for the care of younger women with breast cancer). We both decided that Viola As Twins was the image we would most like to take home and live with. When  I started to research the artist, to my delight I came across a photograph I saw at the National Portrait Gallery in 2008, one of the most memorable images I have ever seen. It’s Quints (below) and won the  Taylor Wessing Photographic Prize that year.

Both images are part of a portfolio of Dreams and Nightmares, drawn from the memories of the artist and her friends. Not knowing this, what first drew me to Viola As Twins  was the calm 'authenticity' of a film set.  Perfection. I can stroke that leather sofa, know how to switch on that fringed lamp, might slip on the polished parquet floor, am poised ready to jump down and pick up that ball of wool if it runs out of control. And the colours... My school corridor was painted green (exactly that shade) below,  cream on top, with a black line separating the two. All our rugs at home were beige and fawn and rust and brown... yes, yes, you're right! 

But what is going on? The children stare ahead as if each is alone in the room. The ‘mother’ is oblivious of them, distracted by something outside, yet that badge of caring motherhood - hand knitting - is in her hands. Why haven’t the girls raided that exquisite 1930s dolls house? Who could resist it?

This is how the one of the artist's friends recounts her dreams;

It's a very sunny, positive atmosphere. Viola (my three year old) runs up to me with her arms open wide, calling "mummy, mummy", a big smile across her face. As she gets closer another Viola coming from behind her does exactly the same thing. The whole atmosphere shifts, turning the dream into a nightmare. I'm left speechless, wondering who the second girl is and, by the same token, if the first one is really my little girl at all.

Another, very brief dream; Viola's there again, happy and smiling. She's blonde with blue eyes (in real life and in the dream). Then suddenly another little girl appears. In the dream I know her to be Viola too, but this second girl is dark, with green eyes, also very pretty. They both behave like I'm their mummy but don't seem to notice one another. I feel like something's wrong, then I realize I can't remember having had twins. I don't know who my daughter is.

copyright: the artist

 Quints  on the other hand has all the majesty, sensuality and vigour of a Titian or a Caravaggio. It's a grand and beautiful setting, usually reserved for celebrities like the Madonna and Child. But there's not just one baby here, there are ...three, four, even five. Davies used a model for the mother together with her 10 week old niece who posed as all 5 of the quins. Here, as they say, is the back story, told by the friend whose dream it was:

Bizarre nightmare... I was pregnant with quintuplets, and this was scary... (having a 10 and 13 year old already)... I had to convince my midwife (who has retired) to be with me throughout the pregnancy and birth, as she had been with my other kids. Then ...I was worried about the size of vehicle we now needed... How was I going to park that in London as easily as the small car we had already? I wasn't able to pursue my career, and my husband had to give up his music career... would our relationship suffer? How would our 10 and 13 year old cope? Where would the finance come from? Would they have to become show babies like the French-Canadians in the 1950's (I think) who had the state looking after (them),and the mother had restricted access to her babies? I then woke up, rather bemused!

What makes this image so outstanding is the brilliant way Lottie Davies captured  what she said she set out to do: the 'calm and serenity of motherhood, as well as the feeling of imprisonment'. And how imaginative to make the setting so lush, so glorious. We're used to seeing pictures of young babies in medical surroundings or as part of a quotidian family tableau. But here birth is celebrated as the gorgeous, powerful and disruptive event it really is.

Lest anyone thinks this artist confines herself to multiple births, go the websites and see her portfolios of work -  portraits, travel photography, photojournalism and fine art - on locations as far apart as the Kalahari, the Arctic Circle, Guatemala and Japan.

morganlockyer.com
ericfranck.com 
http://freshfields.com 

67. KINGS CROSS by ALEX CAVE

MEDICI GALLERY, LONDON 28.3.11

When I saw 

Alex Cave's painting, my first thought was of Robert Delaunay’s exquisite Tour Eiffel  painted a hundred years earlier. It was in the Royal Academy's 2002 exhibition PARIS CAPITAL OF THE ARTS 1900-1968. Delaunay showed the viewer the Eiffel as no one had ever seen it before.  Like Leger and the Futurists, he wanted to express the dynamism of the machine age and honour a building which some saw as its most illustrious symbol.

Cave too is looking afresh at a familiar scene. Just as the rigid motif of the Eiffel tower – reproduced in millions of paperweights and key rings - is shattered and planes merge with the forms of the surrounding buildings, here we glimpse what’s going on when Kings Cross, St Pancras (with which it shares an underground station) and  Euston join the party a hundred years later.

The viewer is plunged knee deep into clutter and excitement. Nothing and no one is content with where they are at the present moment. Anything is possible - Paris, Lille, Brussels, Edinburgh, Cambridge, Mornington Crescent... Two large clocks ratchet up the anxiety,  reminding travellers that their time is not their own. And it’s not only people who are on the move, the very bricks and stones join in. The buildings themselves seem to lean forward so as not to miss one minute of the technicolour circus below. 

The text accompanying the exhibition says that Cave is developing what he describes as ‘‘combinatorics art’, inspired by his fascination with technologcal and mathematical concepts. I’m out of my depth here. What I do know is that these abstract figurative/landscape works are arresting. There's an eerie third dimension he manages to get us to see. A stolid Kings Cross station, which next year celebrates its 160^th birthday, looks almost fragile, unstable. It’s as if you could stretch out your hand and pluck a building from the picture. Or walk round and see what’s behind a barrier or a person. There’s a paradox in this. It’s so real – and so fantastical.  The colours are a surprise too: beautiful, romantic, lucid, like a fairy tale or a children’s picture book. Except that they’re not. This picture is not sweet. Like a still life, there’s also change and fragmentation. But it is energising, optimistic, innovative.

While I was writing this blog, two things happened. 

•  St Pancras held a Spring event: 12 hours  of live art and cultural performance
• And it was reliably reported in the  newspaper that a tame ferret alighted on a Scottish platform having caught the train at Kings Cross. No wonder paintings of railway stations need to be revisited with combinatorics art...

66. POVERTY OVER by MELANIE HOWSE

            ST JOHNS CHURCH, WATERLOO 23.3.11

‘Can incendiary thought-provoking art bring an end to poverty, from the dust towns of Afghanistan to the forgotten tenements of Liverpool and London’s East End?
If Mel Howse has anything to do with it, the answer is yes’. This is the opening sentence from a recent blog by Alison Jane Reid on ethical-hedonist.com/the-eyes-of-the world_593.html

This glorious pair of bowls, reduced by the image to look like finger bowls, is in fact big enough for a small child to bathe in. It’s made of enamel on steel. Christian Aid, an international development charity working with all faiths and none in over 50 countries, commissioned it as part of their POVERTY OVER campaign. It’ll be on tour for the next two years. Presently it’s at St Johns Waterloo and moves to Ely Cathedral on May 7^th (2011). 

Like Ian Davenport’s Poured Lines, it’s another example of a dynamic collaboration between great, innovative art, this time from a master glass painter, and manufacturing excellence, this time British, not German. The giant kilns she used at the firm of AJ Wells in Newport on the Isle of Wight. are the same as those used make London Underground’s iconic signage. Howse says she ‘likes working in industrial environments because it allows me to achieve results I could never attain in a studio’.

She also says that she is ‘very drawn to surrealism’. One of her cousins was Paul Nash, probably best known as a war artist, but also the person who organised the first international surrealist art exhibition in London in 1936:, So we have two giant all-seeing human eyes, a surrealist motif. According to the campaign publicity, the one at the top 'stares challengingly at us. This eye is society’s conscience’. The one below is partly hidden but as you move towards the sculpture  you see it looking up at you from the base. ‘The eye of the poor – unseen from a distance and lost as we walk away.’

It looks as though one bowl has power over the other – but essentially they're the same. ‘Poverty is staring at us and we are uncomfortable’.

POVERTY OVER is a bold campaign slogan. (Alas I didn’t even see pOVERty OVER at first).  But one good piece of news at the moment is that poverty worldwide  has fallen faster in the last 50 years than in the previous 500.

And it was an encouraging moment when the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon  ventured recently into a cautiously optimistic frame of mind. He said there was ‘no question but that poverty could be ended’. It would, he said, require ‘an unswerving, collective long-term effort’. This art work is a piece of Christian Aid's world wide involvement. 
melhowse.co.uk/portfolio.php?p=38 

65. THE ALCHEMISTS by ADAM GREEN

 
MEDICI GALLERY,LONDON18.3.11

There are many reasons for 
viewing a painting:

 - the artist is famous;

 - I like the subject matter e.g. East Anglia;

 - I like the genre e.g. self-portraiture;

 - the artist’s work has challenged or delighted me in the past;

 - I really don’t like it and am curious to know why...

 But when I visited the Medici Gallery's show Debut (on until 29/3/11), I chose this work initially because of colour, both glowing and gentle, with a curious receding pale blue/white which is definitely not sky-with-clouds, nor even clouds with circles of sky.

I next noticed the three dimensional shapes which remind me of my scientific daughter’s delight as a child in making them out of paper or card. But these shapes are made of air, some standing firm, others looking as though they may be rolling along the ground or in flight.

Lastly the alchemists on the left. What about them? It’s a topical subject. On February 24^th    this year, The Economist published an article about an academic who wants to rehabilitate them. They are a maligned bunch, he says, not buffoons, not at all like the characters in Ben Johnson’s The Alchemist, ruthlessly  satirized as vain, greedy, gullible fools. They were instead respectable seekers after knowledge working with well-constructed theories (even if misguided).It was their bad luck to be both despised as riff raff who got their hands dirty doing real experiments, and undermined by  amateur gentlemen-scientists who came from a different class altogether. 

Back to the painting and the artist. Green spent a year in Africa and an extended stay in Central America and his use of ornamental, hypnotic patterns is said to be drawn from Mexican and African iconography.  He also enjoys including vintage commercial images, putting the retro and the exotic side by side to achieve ‘a quirky, but dynamic composition’. Humour is there too, which adds a further complexity.

Is the artist, any artist,  an alchemist, trying to turn paper and oil and canvas and lapis lazuli and hogs’ hair into gold? Gold not just in terms of cash, but also gold in the viewer’s heart and mind. And is art theory spun by a series of well intentioned alchemists minting a currency which just happens to exude enough social respectability to get a place at the academic high table?  And what of us, the viewers? Are we also alchemists who persuade ourselves that we can see what we want to see when it isn’t really there? Finally the blogger as alchemist? No cash and very little status, I fear.

 I blame the ugly word – it’s hard to love a small collection of letters which include BGGR.

www.medicigallery.co.uk 

www.economist.com/node/18226821?story_id=18226821 

www.adamgreenart.com