78. DEATHO KNOCKO by GILBERT AND GEORGE

TATE MODERN 10.5.11

Question: What do a shield, a wasp, a buddleia, a  sword, a spear and a mace have in common in Tate Modern?

Answer: Gilbert and George

Gilbert Proesch (born in Italy) and George Passmore (born in England) met at art school in 1967. For over 40 years they have adopted the identity of ‘living sculptures’ in both their art and their daily lives. One of their early works was ‘Underneath the Arches’, when they posed together for long stretches — up to eight hours —barely moving just miming to a record of the music-hall song of that title. Was this a sculpture or performance art or something else altogether? 

What exactly is ‘a living sculpture’? Here are their own words:

‘Being living sculptures is our life blood, our destiny, our romance, our disaster, our light & life. As the day breaks over us, we rise into our vacuum & the cold morning light filters dustily through the window. We step into the responsibility-suits of our art. We put on our shoes for the coming walk. Our limbs begin to stir & form actions of looseness as though without gravity they bounce about for the new day. The head afloat on top levels on the horizon of our thoughts – we like it because we’re so stupid, artistic & shy. Because we have come from nowhere & where we go nobody knows.’ (A Day in the Life of George & Gilbert the Sculptors 1971). 

In time they began to make pictures as a way of extending the idea of living sculpture so that their physical presence wasn’t necessary. ‘We are there like the viewer is there’, they said. Deatho Knocko  was one of their earliest large-scale works. It's a mild example of their perverse sense of beauty and appetite for unsightly things, things most people come to art museums not to see. And Death/Dead recur in their titles: ‘Dead Boards’, ‘Dead Head’, ‘Death Hope Life Fear’, ‘Death March’, ‘Death on Hope with Love’, ‘Death Over Life’, ‘Deatho Knocko’. 

With a tutor and group from City Lit I once visited them at their house/studio. There is an astonishing and unforgettable congruence between their life and their art.
In 2006 I stopped (at the Hayward Gallery, I think) to watch this Gilbert and George  black/white video with its liquid transparent quality, which should be viewed, it says, on high contrast. I don’t know why I found this so compelling. Perhaps it was Fingal’s Cave (always moves me to tears) being played by their next-door installation: ‘Gordon’s Makes Us Very, Very Drunk’.or perhaps it was the fragility of the faces, the slightly lowered lids, the cigarette slowly lifted to the lips, the stillness which allows you to stare – a thing impossible to do in real life.

tate.org.uk/modern

77. SEIGE by RICHARD WENTWORTH

TATE BRITAIN 9.5.11

‘     'You could describe art galleries as the history of the rejection of the domestic’, said  Andrew Brighton in a study day on the AT HOME WITH ART exhibition at Tate Modern in 2000. After all, a work of art is unfathomable and you can interact with it forever. But an object has a beginning, a middle and an end. You select it, use it – and walk away. Closure.

           What then are Richard Wentworth's two chairs doing in Tate Britain? They’re joined by a cable threaded through their seats, from which hang two lead balls, weights at the end of interconnecting cords. South American gauchos (cowboys) use bolas (balls) like these to capture animals by entangling their legs. Here each chair ensnares the other. What we most ask of a chair is stability, and these are useless. All they can do is roll against each other.

  But there’s more. These are mass-produced functional stacking chairs (though now they can’t even do that properly). John Ruskin ‘look at the (furniture & objects in) the room about you & denounce mind-numbing mass-produced perfection which came out of man’s slavery (to a machine)’. Oscar Wilde said ‘you should have nothing which was not a joy to those who made it & a joy to those who use it,’

Is it true that we prefer to have around us things with meaning? Are goods things to think with? Do clothes, for example,  have an instrumental function (keeping us hot/cool/dry) AND an expressive function, (telling the world who we are)? Until the 20C chairs were often passed down through families or crafted by someone you knew. They had an auto biography and you shared their history. Not any more. Walter Benjamin pointed out as early as the 1930s and 40s that ‘new furniture and houses celebrate glass and materials which are hard and flat, nothing settles on it. It makes for rooms in which it is difficult to leave a trace, so eliminates domesticity.’

  

Wentworth is an inveterate collector of discarded objects, keeping them hanging around in his studio in the hope that they’ll help him create something imaginative, fresh, even witty and unsettling.  When I saw Yellow Eight 1985  it was ‘filled’ with a mirror cut to fit the pails exactly so that it looked like water.

Wentworth has played a leading role in New British Sculpture since the end of the 70s. 'I live in a ready-made landscape', Wentworth remarked early in his career, 'and I want to put it to use'.  His work has changed traditional definitions of sculpture. By putting together things which bear no relation to one other and by taking everyday objects and materials out of their original context, he breaks down our traditional classifications  and stretches our understanding.

 Wentworth gave up making sculpture for a while in the 1970s, thinking that it had become 'as dry as broken biscuits'. He said  'humour is trying to find pockets of breathable air in a stifling atmosphere...I hate the way I work, the anxiety in waiting for enthusiasm to meet method, material to meet image, idea to meet language'. 

Amen to that. Sometimes ‘being creative’ works, goes well. More often it’s a diet of dry biscuits. But as long as there are people around like Wentworth to point out things like ‘a plate is the only object where you get your own & the minute you have finished with it it’s someone else’s’ (which he said at the study day in 2000 which I began with), life will never be dull.

 sculpture.org.uk/biography/RichardWentworth

AND TRY THIS Douglas, M. and B. Isherwood (1979). The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption.

76. UNTITLED (LIVING SCULPTURE) by MARISA MERZ

TATE MODERN 5.5.11

Walk into room 5 of Energy and Process  on Level 5 at Tate Modern and you’ll see this large puzzling metallic structure dangling from the ceiling. It seems to flourish in a room which is just a cube of air. It’s said that Merz’ works ‘appear to grow like plants or grip on like living creatures’.  

Marisa Merz finds meaning in the spiralling coiled organic forms of everyday life. She made this work by winding and clipping together thin strips of shiny aluminium. I’m using this picture because, although the colour is inaccurate, it best represents how Merz has made something solid, palpable and three-dimensional, yet at the same time fragile and tranquil.You walk round, see it from different angles and make your own connections. The sinuous shapes may remind someone of life underwater.  Cylinders may look like giant paint tubes crushed underfoot. Perhaps it  battle-ravaged armour?  And are those ‘arms’ cradling other pieces,  or holding them up high like joyful trophies?  Mert gives us no answers. She maintains that her work has no social or narrative context.  It’s just ‘organic shapes, symbolizing the continuum of growth, transformation, and progress' which is at the core of her thinking.

She and her husband Mario were part of the revolutionary Arte Povera movement centred in Northern Italy (Marisa was the only woman artist in this movement). I'm told that 'Povere' is best translated as 'frugal' rather than 'poor'. It  tackled established categories one after another until they came tumbling down. Artists used lowly everyday materials, including the synthetic – not for them the lapis lazuli or the exquisite marble artists had used for centuries. 

Some tried to integrate art with real life by using living plants, animals, even people. Rules and conventions about what was the ‘right’ size or an appropriate location for a work of art were ignored. It maintained that art need not be permanent and welcomed the temporary, the fleeting, even the ad hoc.  Above all it challenged Western Europe art’s assumption that art could only be practiced by professional specialists such as painters, sculptors, goldsmiths, and engravers.  Instead it honoured works of art which needed little or no technical skill, or skills found in daily life.

For example, in 1968 Marisa Merz began knitting nylon or copper threads into delicate web-like works such as simple geometric shapes to fit her body.  Knitting is associated with female domesticity, where manual skills are widely distributed and raw materials abundant, but her action was part of her commitment to social change and the radical role art can play in society and culture at large.

‘There has never been any separation between my art and my life’, Merz famously said.








tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/.../marisamerz

guardian.co.uk/.../serota-tate-modern-tenth-birthday 

tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/artepovera/default.h...

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75. HELDENORGEL by THOMAS DEMAND

 AMBIKA 3, UNIVERSITY OF WESTMINSTER 29.4.11

This photograph represents the most controversial art work I have so far tackled.

Heldenorgel (Heroes’ organ) looks like a huge (240 x 380cm) photo of the largest open-air organ in the world, built in 1931 in Bavaria to commemorate Germany's war dead. It plays the same piece of music at the same time every day. 

But this is not a photo of the organ, it is a photo of a three-dimensional, life-size paper replica, which took Demand ten weeks to make. He comments: '(The organ pipes)  are very fragile: half of the day I spent renovating the things I made the previous week.’ The damp German climate means the paper sometimes wilts and the glue comes unstuck. 'If I get up in the morning and see that it’s raining, I think, “Oh, man.”. 

After he has photographed his work he destroys it.

The 2011 Deutsche Borse prize of £30,000 annually rewards a living photographer of any nationality who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to photography in Europe between October 2009 and September 2010. The  short-listed artists are  currently showing at Ambika 3, the University of Westminster’s vast subterranean gallery.This work is Demand's entry – and at the moment tipped to win. 

The prize,  doesn’t go to the ‘best’ photo, which you might expect, but to the photo with the most innovative ideas behind it. It’s a contest which stirs up a rich controversy including the role of the Photographers' Gallery, the largest public gallery in Britain devoted to photography. The objectors are those who value practice over theory.

The organ looks oddly flat and unreal. This is intentional. You try to work out why and how the image was constructed. I first saw Thomas Demand's work in Rem Koolhaas's 2006 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, an ovoid inflatable canopy which seemed to float over the trees and lawns of Hyde Park like a giant setting moon. I was captivated. Inside Demand covered each room in wall paper in four colour tones: a night wall paper, a sunny mid day wall paper, an abstract winter version and one that referred directly to the exhibits. Close up the design looked artificial and abstract. It only regained its photographic appearance when seen from a distance. He claims he's not a photographer but a conceptual artist.

He's also an illusionist who challenges our illusions.

74. TREACHEROUS WOLF by YASAM SASMAZER

SAATCHI GALLEY 27.4.11

 

This striking installation makes an impact as soon as you walk into the gallery. The small figure of a child with a perky pigtail, which echoes the curve of the wolf’s back,  stares warily ahead  unaware of  the shadow behind her. Black-and-white is satisfyingly minimalist, sharp and clear, yet intriguing.

'My sculptures can never be totally grasped, like a picture that has something unresolved about it. They stay in your head like an enigma… It's simply a recognition of the fact that life is ambivalent’. This quotation from the German artist Katherina Fritsch about her own work, has some resonance with what Yasman Sasmazer is doing in The Treacherous Wolf. 

In myths and legends and fairy tales the child is usually seen as precious and sacred, a tabula rasa, free of social conditioning. But wolves are in a rather different category and certainly up to no good. This one is poised for action, back arched, ears pricked, jaw no doubt full of angry teeth. And look at those legs - they could leap over mountains.  But child and wolf are inseparable, joined interestingly enough at the heel. Again this draws on a rich mythology. Heels are where you are vulnerable – think of Achilles’ downfall. 

And the third element is the shadow, believed by some to be those parts of oneself you haven’t brought into your consciousness. Although it has a kind of threatening autonomy, you can’t be truly human without it and if lost it has to be sewn or glued back (as in Peter Pan) onto the heel .

The installation is unsettling, but the way it manages to embrace myth, cultural history  and everyday life transforms it into something open and mysterious.

P.S. Fritsch has been chosen as the next artist to have her work installed on Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth.

73. THE SACRED FIRE OF FAITH by RAMAZAN BAYRAKOGLU

satin and embroidery on canvas 235 x 145

  

SAATCHI GALLERY 24.4.11

From the opposite wall of the gallery it looks like a full-length picture of a church dignitary in sumptuous surroundings, recognisably within one of the classic genres of painting – portraiture. Except that there seems to be a narrative here: this man seems oblivious of the peril engulfing him. Walk nearer and the subject matter suddenly becomes less important than the way the picture is created, for it is an exquisite collage of satin and embroidery on canvas. The work is so fine, the colours so gorgeous and the craftsmanship so impeccable it’s hard to go back to the question ‘what is it about?' What you see is a beautiful work of art which has a cinematic quality about it. You’ve moved from long shot to close up. I feel I’m looking at the fragments of a story having not yet grasped the plot.

It’s the Pope. Under a threatening glowing sky of the kind you only see when it is reflecting  some terrible catastrophe: a volcano, apocalyptic warfare, Armageddon. And the flames themselves? Hell fire? Or the descent of the Holy Spirit on Christ’s disciples as described in the New Testament? Or a reference to other Christian iconography about the Holy Spirit when flames represent zeal, enlightenment and ardour?

Back to Bayrakoglu’s unconventional method of making a portrait. Intricately stitched details are blurred by tangled masses of delicate threads, a device which creates a surreal and dream-like impression. I immediately thought of the Dutch born artist Michael Raedecker,  short-listed for the Turner prize in 2000, whose work – using a combination of thread and paint - is described as ‘suggestive of unsettling narratives, presenting an eerie dislocation of idealised luxury and a sense of discomfort’.  What is unsettling is the unlikely intimacy between lowly craft materials (more used by women) and the more conventional styles and techniques of portraiture.  Ambiguities and tensions abound.

Turkish contemporary art is known for pushing at  boundaries and this work in a commercial exhibition at the Phillips de Pury space on the top floor of the Saatchi Gallery - Confessions of Dangerous Minds -  is no exception.It’s a risky business having the confidence to introduce an element of bathos into a serious investigation into the contemporary state of painting. It works beautifully.

Image © Phillips de Pury

72. BRUTALISM:Stereo Reality Environment 3 by JOSE CARLOS MARTINAT

TATE MODERN 22.4.11

Today with the sun well and truly out and the temperature in the mid 20s, the 2011 Southbank Festival opens, the beginning of four months of fun and games to celebrate the 60^th birthday of the Festival of Britain. It was a happening planned and built to inspire and encourage a war-ravaged nation.

What has this to do with the squat, sharp-angled,   uncommunicative not-particularly-joyful picture on the left?

It’s a scale model of Peruvian military HQs, which, during the Fujimori presidency, became notorious for the torture, murder and disappearances orchestrated by the secret services. In a section called States of Flux: Architecture and Power  Tate Modern is drawing  attention to the way architecture is used by the state to shape our environment - and so shape us. 

Martinat’s sculpture glowers in the corner of the room. a squat, blind, repressive structure. Inside, a computer searches the internet for references to Brutalismo/Brutalism, and picks up extracts about Latin America and global dictatorships – and that form of Modernist architecture called Brutalism. It spits out random scraps of paper which flutter like white butterflies to the floor. The ones I picked up were in what I think is Spanish.

This harsh piece by the Peruvian artist José Carlos Martinat made me think of other conflicts between the artist and the state. WeiWei’s sunflower seeds fill the Turbine Hall downstairs. They are the work of a beguiling and persuasive artist who has recently been arrested and is in custody in his homeland, China.

In the 50s when the Southbank was developed, Brutalism was fashionable because of its 'honesty', its uncompromising, anti-bourgeois style and the fact that it looked like sculpture. It was good at shouting at the top of its voice new age Utopian aspirations. No cosy domesticity here, nothing integrating and protective.

Which made me think of what has happened to those Festival of Britain buildings built in ‘brutalist’ concrete by the river 60 years ago. They've worked brilliantly, with the help of  much care and imagination over the years. By the 90s the Royal Festival Hall had become one of the busiest concert halls in the world. Now the Southbank Centre is one of the most capacious free-and-easy places in London where you are welcome to sit all day, picnic, use the cafes and bars, dig into a book or your laptop, hold a work meeting, conduct interviews, hold tutorials, run a mother-and-baby group – and that’s all in the public space – while concerts and dancing and jazz and poetry are going on around you.