368 MORE SWEETLY PLAY THE DANCE by WILLIAM KENTRIDGE

MARION GOODMAN GALLERY, Lower John Street, London W1F 9DY

This still image  cannot begin to convey the excitement, the provocation, the depth and the pleasure of More Sweetly Play the Dance. It is from Kentridge’s first substantial solo presentation in London for 15 years and includes monumental ink-on-paper paintings, sculptures and drawings as well as two immersive multiscreen film installations.  

More Sweetly Play the Dance is an eight-screen processionary danse macabre. 

It may give a taste of the experience on sitting on scattered chairs in the upper gallery immersed by a 40 metre, life-sized,  constantly moving screen. An  entire brass band leads the procession,  with its haunting, wailing but vital, defiant anthem.

Who are these people? Most of them are filmed marching past holding up silhouettes transcribed from enlarged Kentridge drawings: a group of priests sway past bearing a forest of lilies; patients cling to drips with sketched saline solutions barely keeping them alive; robed shadow-figures hold giant classical busts, propagandist portraits, bird cages and miners’ heads (many of which are shown in the adjacent upstairs gallery). A trio of skeletons dance on a platform dragged across the artist’s barren, charcoal-drawn landscape. Kentridge’s long-time collaborator Dada Masilo brings up the rear, dancing en pointe with a rifle to the last strains of their canticle, as if singlehandedly “hold[ing] the hope and disillusion together”. William Kentridge, Peripheral Thinking, 2014-15

Some cultures have, or have had, the notion of dancing as a means of staving off death. This art work, however, feels more like  a cortege of people deprived of a fully realised life – is this yet another procession of refugees fleeing a skirmish or warlord or destitution? But the energy, beauty and depth of Kentridge's work mean that the images flicker with hope and determination.

 ‘My concern has been both with the existential solitude of the walker, and with social solitude – lines of people walking in single file from one country to another, from one life to an unknown future’. William Kentridge, A Dream of Love Reciprocated, 2014 

 www.mariangoodman.com/artists/william-kentridge/

www.mariangoodman.com/

www.artsy.net/artist/william-kentridge

367 ABANDONED SPORTSFIELD by GRAEME WILLIAMS

ART FIRST, EASTCASTLE STREET, LONDON

AS THE GRASS  GROWS/MARKING TIME

photographs from post-apartheid South Africa

Abandoned Sportsfield, Mzwiwabantu, Britstown, 

Merino Inn Hotel, Colesburg

'Now I see' is our normal visual response as we negotiate the world outside us. Then we move on. The  effect of this terse, repetitive exhibition - full of real situations and real people, but set out without commentary - suggests that the artist is interested in stopping the 'Now I see' moment, and giving us the chance to reflect on time past, present and future.


Downstairs in Art First's lower gallery are selected works from two photographic essays by South African photographer Graeme Williams. Between 1989 and 1994 the artist covered South Africa's transition to democracy for Reuters and other news organisations. In Marking Time his new images (2008-2013) offer a compelling view of the shifts and realities of a nation working out the challenges of the first 20 years of a new democracy. Using a square format and bleached light Marking Time focuses on unfinished, abandoned, re-imagined and re-invented structures in a quickly-changing landscape: shared electricity supply points, a shack without windows, an abandoned brick factory.

Burgersdorp South Africa,2015, Ashenkosi Gatyeni (18)

Nearby As the Grass Grows is a collection of portraits of the first generation born after the end of apartheid, eligible and free to vote for the first time in the 2014 elections. All we know about Athenkosi is that he:

left school after Grade 6 when his father told him that he needed to find some work so that he could help with his family. 'I work a bit as a DJ. I have never really thought about what I want to become'.

The captions are brief, just a few facts plus date, place and name: Mosele, Dimpho, Ntombi, Siphosethu, Jacob and Vuyisa. Real people.
 
http://www.artfirst.co.uk/future_exhibitions.html 

http://graemewilliams.co.za/ 

366 THE RISING TIDE by JASON DECAIRES TAYLOR

THE RIVER THAMES, VAUXHALL

Photograph by courtesy of Sheila Needham

Take a sunny but chilly Sunday afternoon. Add a couple of young grandsons and mention a beach - for that is what the Thames near Vauxhall Bridge is turned into twice every 24 hours. Even more, mention the prospect of ice cream and cake at the splendid Members' Restaurant at the top of Tate Britain, and the deal is done.

The Rising Tide is an underwater sculpture  concealed and revealed by the daily ebb and flow of the tide on the Vauxhall foreshore. Four proud horses and riders highlight the role of the Thames as 'the lifeblood of London', an evolving centre for culture, industry, commerce and much, much more.

The artist is a qualified diving instructor and underwater naturalist. He is also an award-winning underwater photographer, famous for his dramatic images capturing the effect of the ocean on his sculptures. He created the world's first underwater sculpture park off the West Coast of Granada, listed as one of the top Wonders of the World by National Geographic. His work not only pioneers examples of marine conservation but encourages environmental awareness and an appreciation of the breath-taking beauty of the underwater world.

Meanwhile back at Vauxhall people of all ages stand on the muddy beach and ponder. Many will have seen the horses before from the tops of red double-decker buses passing over the bridge: horses  'drowning' at high tide as the water laps over their heads, but perking up and poking their heads above the tide as the water recedes. And then there is all that wet sand to play in, filling your crocks with sludge. And the splash of stones as they hit pools and scatter lumps of mud in all directions. And the terrible thought that if you stayed there long enough nothing would stop the tide making you invisible for ever.

Do take a look at      
www.underwatersculpture.com
and be amazed.

http://twistedsifter.com/2011/01/astonishing-underwater-sculptures-by-jason-decaires-taylor-30-pics/

365 FITTING by EVELYN O'CONNOR

 ART FIRST, EASTCASTLE ST, LONDON 
until October 4th 2015

 pva glue, acrylic paint, sugar, spray paint, pigment, plastic component 20x20x20cm

My first impression of Fitting is of a stack of delicious, soft, powdery, sugary confection, called 'Turkish Delight', or even 'Greek Delight',  depending on where you come from.  The colour is what used to be termed ‘shocking pink'. It's fashionable and bold. On my desk at the moment I have the notes accompanying Grayson Perry’s Provincial Punk exhibition at Turner Contemporary, Margate. His cover is doused in the same fun-loving pink. Art First, in Eastcastle Street close to Oxford Circus, is not a large gallery but it always surprises. 


In Fitting  the artist injects a kind of physical humour which lends itself to slapstick.  My brain says that of course I am looking at hard non-edibles, but I want to stretch out my hand and touch them.  I know I mustn’t. By mixing paint and sugar (and strawberry syrup - see below) and making it look so delectable, can you see a glorious rebellion against the current passion for rule-ridden cookery recipes handed down to us by experts, who perhaps unwittingly instruct, constrain, warn and deskill us?

As I walk away I wonder how Fitting will cope with London dust? The image of a Victorian glass dome with a knob atop springs to mind.

PLACED, JUST AS IT IS, pva glue, polystyrene beads, silicone, acrylic paint, sugar, food colouring, polystyrene, strawberry syrup, spray paint, pigment, plastic component,  20x44x14 cm

The use again of this piercing colour helps to defamiliarize the work. Evelyn O’Connor combines traditional sculptural materials with the stuff of everyday life, presenting us at one and the same time with the recognisable and the incomprehensible. 

The exhibition focuses on chance and of 'letting go' in the creative process. The art critic T J Clark, writing in the current issue of The London Review of Books, describes the experience of making (or if you're a viewer, of seeing) modern art as 'something that is truly senseless and preposterous as it comes into being, unknown and unidentifiable. and therefore if you're lucky,  a glimpse of freedom, a unique particular, a way to slip off the mind-forged manacles'. 

www.artfirst.co.uk
www.evelynoconnor.net
www.lrb.co.uk

364. ELIZA by MICHAEL GASKELL (2015)

 NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON

BP PORTRAIT AWARDS, 2015

Eliza by Michael Gaskel, Acrylic on Board 370x270mm (c) the Artist

Michael Gaskell has been selected five times for the BP Portrait Award, and won second prize for the third time this year. This  portrait is of his niece Eliza, who agreed to sit for him in early 2014 when she was 14, having first sat for a portrait for her uncle when she was a very small child.

‘I hope this painting conveys a sense of Eliza’s growing confidence as she develops into a woman’, says Gaskell, ‘but retains some of the self-consciousness which was also present at the time’.

There are many portraits of women in very different situations in the current BP Portrait Award show: naked or clothed, angry or anxious, fragile or determined, submissive and suspicious. But here we have no distractions. There are no props or background clues to feed a thread of story into our minds.  And while the glitzy London shop windows surrounding the National Portrait Gallery change their minds monthly as to what colour is or is not desirable, the artist focuses on one. To describe it as 'blue' is like saying a castle is a house. Blue is the colour reserved for the Madonna and the angels by Renaissance painters, using lapis lazuli, the most scarce and expensive pigment of the time, mined in Afghanistan under dangerous, even deadly conditions. 

The artist tells us that the primary influence in painting Eliza was the work of the fifteenth-century painter Hans Memling, especially in the lighting and the composition.

Memling's painting Virgin and Child  (1487) is next door in The National Gallery. 

The judges remarked, ‘ We agreed that this is a highly accomplished portrait, revealing the influence of Vermeer and Dutch seventeenth-century paintings while also having a seemingly modern, timeless quality.’

Sir James Lovelock (c) NPG

 In 2012 Michaael Gaskell was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to paint a portrait of climate scientist Sir James Lovelock whose career included the formulation of the Gaia theory, his highly influential hypothesis that the Earth is a self-regulating, single organism. Other commissions include a painting used on the poster for Wes Anderson’s 2012 film Moonrise Kingdom. 

In an essay in the small illustrated book accompanying the exhibition, Neil Gaiman writes

 The joy and power of portraiture is  that it freezes us in time. Before the portrait, we are younger. After it has been created we will age or we will rot. 

www.michaelgaskell.net
www.npg.org.uk
www.npg.org.uk/whatson/bp-portrait-award/exhibition.php

www.jameslovelock.org
 
The link below will take you to a slide show of paintings by Memling and owned by the nation. It includes Virgin with Child 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/artists/hans-memlingpainting

363 EVENING ON THE THAMES by PETER WILEMAN

 Thompson's Gallery, New Cavendish Street

I live ten minutes' walk away from the London Eye, here silhouetted against a genteel fading sky. As I write on a very sunny Sunday afternoon I know that the Thames will be ablaze, not with coloured lights, but with the jazzy excitement of people of all ages from all over the world who have chosen to come and stroll along the promenade. There will see the open-air-theatre,  cafes.  jugglers, bookshops, an aquarium and, if the tide is out, the magnificent sand sculptures  made - and washed away - on the 'beach' below. I also know that in a few hours' time it will be a fairyland of colour and reflection and dazzle  on land and water. Which is why I chose this picture.

The artist writes 'my path has lead me inexorably, like so many others before me, to try and capture that elusive quality of light, that only a shimmering sunset, dawn of a new day, dazzling sparkle of reflection off both sea and river presents to one who is prepared to both look and see'.

I love the way that this painting is 'expressive' not 'instrumental'.  In other words it does not faithfully represent an architecturally accurate record of the Thames and its banks. Instead the colour, the edginess, the spirit of the Thames  glows.

The Distance Between

 The artist again: I contemplate the landscape with amazement as it changes hourly, yet remains fundamentally the same. This is a concept I love to explore in my paintings - a blazing sunset reflected in a calm sea carries the implication of impending darkness, while heavy clouds in an overcast sky might predict an imminent storm...

http://www.peterwilemanartist.co.uk/

www.thompsonsgallery.co.uk/gallery.php/Cavendish-Street 

362. MARTYRS (EARTH, WIND, FIRE, WATER) by BILL VIOLA

MARTYRS - EARTH, WIND, FIRE, WATER (2014) video

St Paul's Cathedral 

 

Martyrs shows four individuals, across four colour vertical plasma screens, being martyred by the four classical elements: earth flies up to entomb, winds slash and tear, flames engulf and water cascades with deadly accuracy. 

But Bill Viola's work opens with  stillness. The man in a white shirt sits calmly with head bowed, hands on knees.The man on the right is first shown shackled and crouching on the floor.  A woman in a slim white dress hangs suspended by ropes, ankles tethered to the floor. 
Then the  crouching man is gently uplifted, feet first, until suspended and the torrent begins. At the same genteel pace  a single flame descends from on high to settle near the seated man - then two or three or a hundred until a fireball blazes. The work lasts 7 minutes. It has no sound.

Some find the images too graphic and ask what business St Paul's Cathedral has to show such suffering. Others stand and, through tears, pray in front of the work as they  see the suffering of their own community reflected there. On the other hand for some the images are too anodyne, too safe, too picturesque.  The man is in flames, but is not being burnt.
 

We are used to watching violence in films or crime reconstruction or sports fixtures. There may be a replay in slow motion, but the media controls the viewer. Here it is different. As  the action is slowed down and the story unravels, our perception and understanding is deepened. These pieces bypass rationality. They touch our inner capacity to attend patiently to the nuances of real feelings. And to stay in the here and now, however terrible. Many people watch it more than once then walk quietly away.

Years ago I saw Viola's video The Visitation  at the Haunch of Venison Gallery. It features the moment when two pregnant women - Mary the mother of Jesus and Elizabeth her cousin -  embrace as they meet. It moved me to tears. The paradox is that we know we are watching actors, we know that they are feigning emotion. But Viola’s work is charged with a peculiar energy. We are no longer spectators.

In the face of dignity and resilience we may reflect on our own gift of life, of being, and the gift we could give in who we become, and how our lives and death may transform the world Bill Viola

HOW DO I GET TO SEE IT FOR FREE?
The installations have been given to Tate, and are on long-term loan to St Paul’s Cathedral.The good news is that anyone can see them for free, without paying what, for some, is a somewhat substantial fee for visiting the cathedral.  Just turn up at 11.30am or 2.15pm Monday to Friday. You get a BILL VIOLA sticker on your lapel and can in fact see much of the interior of St Pauls as you walk to and from the installation.

WHERE CAN I LEARN MORE? 
In Art and Christianity,  Mark Oakley, Canon Chancellor at St Paul's Cathedral, reviews The Unspeakable Art of Bill Viola by Ronald Bernier, 'a short, intelligent and accessible introduction to Viola's work'

AND SEE MORE?
Bill Viola Quintet of the Unseen (Blog 60)