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

64. POURED LINES by IAN DAVENPORT

SOUTHWARK BRIDGE, LONDON 17.3.11

There are several stunning pictures of this artwork on the internet - but this is the best I can do.

I’ve already wasted too much time trying to get access and permissions. Nor is it a DIY job.  We're talking of something which is 48 metres long (longer than 5 London buses laid end to end) and 3 metres high, one of the largest pieces of public art in London. Hardly a case of dusting down a Box Brownie and pointing it in the direction of a work which runs along a wall supporting a dingy low-slung Victorian railway bridge.

Ian Davenport was shortlisted for the Turner prize in 1991, the year that Anish Kapoor walked away with the prize (see Kapoor blogs Sky Mirror and Spire). In 2003 he was the artist  commissioned to make this major London landmark, close to Tate Modern, the National Theatre and The Globe Theatre.

It was 2 years in the making and has to withstand grime, rain, vandals and pigeons. And it took 6 months to research materials tough enough and big enough for the job.  His 1m x 3m steel panels were fired at 825^C at a remote factory in Germany, where Davenport set up a studio to mix 300 different colours, each applied by syringe allowing the paint to be poured in vertical stripes.There is a delicate balance between controlling the flow of paint and allowing it to run free. The result is full of surprises and unexpected colour combinations which pulsate and fluctuate: a painting with joie de vivre, which is just what you need scurrying along under a noisy, grubby railway bridge. One writer describes it as ‘countering the endless traffic noises by undulating with its own rhythms, riffs and moods’. The statistics say that it’s viewed by 1.2 million people who pass that way every year, most of whom never set foot inside an art gallery.  But I wonder? Is ‘viewed’ the right word? You can stand on the pavement and watch people hurry by. I like to think they know it’s there as a friendly presence. And that they would be outraged to lose it.  entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and.../article616010.ece www.thisislondon.co.uk/.../article-23365805-tate-lines-up-bankside-mural.do www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/sep/20/guide-to-pa. www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/filmstobuy/category/1/prod..

63, CRADLE TO GRAVE by PHARMACOPOEIA

BRITISH MUSEUM 15.3.11

Cradle to Grave is the name of a 14 metre-long installation which runs down the middle of the Wellcome Trust Gallery at the British Museum. The gallery walls are lined with ancient gold artefacts and sculptures from all over the world on the theme of Living and Dying, but Cradle to Grave attracts the crowds.

 It lays out for our delectation a lifetime supply of prescribed drugs which illustrate the medical stories of one woman and one man. Some of the treatments are common to both: each starts at birth with an injection of vitamin K and immunizations, and both take antibiotics and painkillers at various times. Other treatments are more specific. The woman takes contraceptive pills, and hormone replacement therapy in middle age. The man has asthma and hay fever when young, but enjoys good health until his fifties. He finally stops smoking after a bad chest infection when he is seventy. He is treated for high blood pressure for the last ten years of his life and has a heart attack and dies of a stroke in his seventies. He takes as many pills in the last ten years of his life as in the first sixty-six.

The pills are captured by  ‘pocket knitting’, a technique devised by one of the artists, Susie Freeman,  who  uses fine transparent nylon yarn to  construct pockets which are woven into a flexible fabric.  She says 'Aged seven my Allen & Hanburys bead swap-tin often came with me to school. At playtime I especially longed for the glittering, this desire once getting the better of me when I swapped most of my collection for a single faceted iridescent gem. Since then the collecting of tiny objects and their subsequent ordering has become a lifetime obsession. The methodology of pocket knitting, which as an artist I have used for the past thirty years, enables me to ensnare, arrange and use this system of containment to extract new meaning from the process of juxtaposition.” Each length contains over 14,000 drugs, the estimated average prescribed to every person in Britain in their lifetime. Family photographs and health-related memorabilia are there too.

Pharmacopoeia is the work of Susie Freeman, a textile artist, David Critchley a video artist and Dr Liz Lee a G.P. But is it art? Or science? Or craft? Or a learning device?   Or all of that? 

In the past craft and art seemed to run along parallel lines with a high degree of mutual suspicion. Craft was lowlier than art – and women did more of it. Art and science do not have a long and distinguished history of collaboration either. So is it a learning device? If it is, this is not new in art. You could say that conceptual art cannot help but be just that, as new insights rearrange the furniture of the mind. Some artists, such as Joseph Beuys, do not mince their words about what they are doing.

This piece has been so successful that Pharmacopoeia aims to turn its gaze from Britain to Africa.   The charity Keep a Child Alive supports work with antiretroviral treatments for AIDS. Pharmacopoeia, by documenting the pharmacological history and the photographic history of a number of children, plans to take their sci-art collaboration into new territory. 

condom packets

selection of pills

susiefreeman.com

http://www.pharmacopoeia-art.net/about/susie-freeman/

www.britishmuseum.org/explore/galleries/themes/room_24

www.pharmacopoeia-art.net/  

www.wellcome.ac.uk/

 

62, RYE HARBOUR I AND III by ANDY WOOD

MALL GALLERIES, LONDON 11.3.11

One thing I have to keep in check when selecting representational work is a tendency to chose places and subjects close to my heart. If I did that the blog would be full of East Anglia. Cornwall of course. And the Greek island of Symi. But here we’ve come to Rye, a place I’ve visited and once bought a deep Belfast sink in which to plant garden flowers, but whose main associations are non-pictorial. Remember that witty son of a former Archbishop of Canterbury, E. F. Benson, who wrote the Mapp and Lucia books, immortalised on TV ? Whose mother was said to be the cleverest woman in Europe? He’s a man from Rye and was once Mayor there.

Back to the picture. I love the composition, the emptiness, the calm. Three horizontal bands of gentle colour but with a hint of unease. A solitary, silent, blind house, its warm red roof picked up by the red at the top of the pole. And look at that fence. Who or what is it keeping in or out?

There’s no one there. No children kicking a rainbow ball around, no teenagers having a quiet smoke leaning against that sharply white-painted door, no one hanging out the washing.  Nothing is happening. It’s where you wait for someone or something. It’s the space between the notes of music when you wait for what you know will come next. Or think you know.

 And this is Rye Harbour I. Here is a very Heath Robinson contraption, something useful strapped on to a post put there earlier for a purpose which was important at the time - and perhaps still is. It’s leaning slightly – as one would after having the sea lapping round you every hour of the day and night.

I never get tired of minimalism. You don’t have the chance to fritter your attention away on this or that. All you see is the brilliance and warmth of that sky and a human gesture   erected by an unknown person wanting to make the world a safer or more intelligible place.

mallgalleries.org.uk
.andywoodgallery.com/ 

61. RAINBOW TREE AND RAINBOW JOY by SANJEEWA KUMARA

ASIA HOUSE. LONDON 10.3.11

The Quintet of the Unseen video by Bill Viola I found a few hundred steps south of Oxford Street – this picture is a few hundred metres north. It’s in Asia House, New Cavendish Street, a splendid Grade II* listed building, originally planned by Robert and James Adam in the 1770s but in 1775 the neo-classical architect John Johnson took over the site. It's magnificent, with a breathtaking spiral staircase, filigree plasterwork, classical paintings and elaborate marble chimney pieces.

On the lower ground floor is the gallery, presently showing Contemporary Art from Sri Lanka 2011, with work from 15 well-established or emerging artists, women and men who may well have spent their teenage years living in a highly chaotic political and social environment. The civil war which tore their country apart for 30 years only ended in 2009. A new generation has grown up with an understanding of the artist as political commentator, determined to engage with contemporary problems.

Kumara sees this work as outside the Western canon, dismissing conventions like pictorial balance, perspective and spatial depth. He describes his practice as ‘predominantly an art of surprises’. It’s a work in which I find his unconventional use of colour exhilarating and I like to be puzzled and challenged and disturbed by Surrealism. I do not understand why there is a musical instrument in the bottom right hand corner and a gun in the left.  What is that open-palmed hand doing top left? Why is that beautiful sinuous figure upside down – and still, it seems to me, on top of things?

I think I chose it because here is a rarity: a picture with a strong sense of colour, design and pleasure, which refuses to be merely decorative.

P.S. The two other 'political' works on the blog are the first - Fiona Banner's huge jets hanging from the ceiling of Tate Britain (18.9.10), and the ninth - Jeremy Dellar's crushed tank in the Imperial War Museum (12.10.10). Intriguingly different from Kumara's delicate allusive work.

independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/...art-from-sri-lanka...
asiahouse.org