99. ECHO LAKE by PETER DOIG

Echo Lake 2305 x 3605 x 50 mm

 Tate Britain

When I first saw Doig’s work in 2008,

I wrote:
I do not love thee, Dr Fell,

The reason why I cannot tell;

But this I know, and know full well,

I do not love thee, Dr Fell.
-except that I substituted 'Peter Doig' for Dr Fell'.

The verse was said to be made up on the spot when the 17C satirist, Tom Brown, was threatened with expulsion from his Oxford college by the Dean, Dr Fell. It's a translation from Latin: 'Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere - quare; Hoc tantum possum dicere, non amo te'.
Brown was forgiven.

I went on to write what I didn't like:

•  your saccharine, chemical colours
•  your eerie  ordinariness
•  the way your refer to things I've never heard of
•  the solitude and abandonment
•  above all your open-mindedness so that, unlike in a history painting, the viewer has to provide the story.

A year later I changed my mind  after seeing Hill Houses, the second picture below. I can't include it as my chosen picture as I don't know where it is at the moment, so have chosen Doig's Echo Lake at Tate Britain.

It’s difficult to do justice to such a  large painting  when here  it's scrunched up into an image measuring a few centimetres. We have a man in a white shirt,  dark tie and trousers, who has stepped into the edge of the lake and his ankles are sending ripples which disturb the gloomy stillness of the water. They are spreading towards us. The low perspective gives us the unsettling feeling we are looking back at him from the surface of the lake, rather than the safety of the distant shore. The man’s arms are raised to his head as if he’s shouting into the night. His pale face is blank, mask-like. Some may be reminded of Munch’s The Scream.

This pastoral scene is disturbed by a sinister  American police car which squats behind the man and to the left. It too appears to look out onto this lake of strange, earthy browns. Those who know about such things say that Echo Lake is  loosely based on scenes from the 1980s horror film Friday the 13th. Doig  sometimes paints from photographs, including his own, and  uses film, posters, post cards and album covers. He also makes reference to art history. Nothing too specific - more a hazy collective memory. 

The bottom half of the painting is a blurred mirror image of the land above: an echo. Images reflected in water are common in Doig’s paintings. He has observed that ‘reflections function as entrances to other worlds’ .

He writes ‘Often I am trying to create a ‘numbness’...something that is questionable, something that is difficult, if not impossible, to put into words ... I think the paintings always refer back to a reality that we all have experience of...'
 

Hill Houses

My conversion in 2009 began when I saw Hill Houses, part of the British Council Collection: ‘a frosty mirage that whiffs of narrative and memory, beckoning beyond the unframed canvas to something as un-contemporary as Monet's Water Lilies...through the mistiness, the view takes us by surprise, as if swooping into the windscreen of a car as it races over the skyline. The road, a big vertical stripe, ought to guide us into the scene, but instead forefronts the flatness of the picture plane. Telegraph poles are blurry, not so much pacing out the landscape as shimmying across it. Only in the top third is distance suggested - pinprick windows, a tail-flick of road. It is a meeting ground for the sublime and the kitsch, where sentimental markers, those marzipan houses and fairytale pines, effectively strike a match against the terror of the wilderness’. 

I'm grateful to Dorothy Feaver for that quotation. She speaks about the painting  brilliantly on:

collection.britishcouncil.org/collection/artist/5/17720

tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue12

98. BEETHOVEN'S TRUMPET (WITH EAR) by JOHN BALDESSARI

copyright John Baldessari

The Shape of Things to Come: New Sculpture

Saatchi Gallery until October 16th

This large scale work grabs your attention on the far wall as you enter Gallery 5. Its impact is both comforting and terrifying. Impossible to ignore.

This is how it came about: Baldessari was asked to do a retrospective show in Bonn in 2007 with all the art works he’d done about music. He visited Beethoven’s house where he found a cabinet of his ear trumpets.  ‘I was really fascinated by them as sculptural forms, especially one that he had designed himself that I thought was quite beautiful’. Some years later he describes having one of those ‘three o’clock in the morning moments when you are awake and all of a sudden I thought ’wait a minute – ear/ear trumpet’.

 Baldessari is fascinated by the blocks and knots and paradoxes which exist when we try to communicate. Here we have the ear of a composer who cannot hear; ‘Beethoven’s trumpet’ which is designed not to play music but to humbly receive it; a silent sculpture about communicating through sound; an intimidating  large-scale anthropomorphic work which dwarfs (almost swallows up) the viewer. Finally the accompanying text indicates that the work is silent until the viewer speaks into the trumpet, at which point a section from Beethoven’s six last quartets will be heard. When I tried all I heard was silence...

copyright John Baldessari

In 1970 Baldessari burnt all of the paintings he had created between 1953 and 1966 as part of a new piece, titled "The Cremation Project". A year later  he was commissioned to produce an onsite art work for the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design but the college didn't have the funds to bring the artist from California to Canada. He suggested the students wrote the message ‘I will not make any more boring art’ as if it were a punishment.  ‘To my surprise’, he commented, ‘they covered the walls’. In the meantime, Baldessari made a recording as he wrote the same phrase over and over again in a notebook in his studio. An ironic disjunction of form and content. 

In vowing not to make boring art they had just made yet another piece...You may have seen it on display at Tate Modern in 2009/2010.

www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue13/ninetofive.htm 
 metmuseum.org/special/john_baldessari/view
saatchi-gallery.co.uk

97. THE MIRROR OF JUDGEMENT by MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO

Serpentine Gallery until September 17

I arrived soon after the Gallery opened and the first thing I noticed was a comforting waft of paper and cardboard. All I saw was the entrance to a labyrinth, a winding maze of paths which curled and swirled through the Gallery lined with whorls of cardboard chest-high, leading to hidden installations and sculptures.  ‘A labyrinth is a place where one loses oneself in order to search for oneself’ said Pistoletto. Inside are artefacts symbolising four religions: two mirrors for Judaism, a prie-dieu for Christianity, a prayer mat facing Mecca for Islam and a large sculpture for Buddhism. Laura Cumming in the Observer describes 'an overwhelming sense ...of open-armed generosity towards everyone on their journey through life'.

But it’s the mirrors which are magical. As early as the 1960s Pistoletto received critical acclaim for his Mirror Paintings.. Mirrors, no longer hung at window height like paintings on a wall but reaching down to the floor, change everything. They can reflect anything except themselves. They create a passage through which space seems to pass, doubling the size of a gallery and opening a door between art and life. For whereas figurative art usually meant an object out there, fixed once and for all, now the viewer became an integral part of the work. What’s more, with every movement the picture changes.

Pistoletto was one of a number of Italian artists in the 1960s who believed that  art could be made from anything: people, products of earth, moisture, sound, energy... No longer did you need skill to use expensive paints, brushes and precious materials: art could be crafted, written, filmed, spoken, even grown. And while it could be built to last, some might exist for a few short hours, or even seconds. Their work, labelled Arte Povera, has been described as ‘poor art of poor materials in exultation of a poor life’. This is unkind. It provided important spaces and opportunities for trying out new attitudes and actions in a decade which propelled Italian artists, for too longer outsiders, to the centre of an increasingly liberated art scene.     

When I visited the exhibition I walked through Gallery One. All I saw was a circle of corrugated cardboard standing end-on and chest high. It wasn’t until I noticed a child being lifted up to peer inside that I stopped and leaned over. What I saw was spectacular - and vertiginous. I saw not only the cupola above my head reflected back as a bottomless cup, but deep, deep down was a perfect circle of blue summer sky. An abstract painting?  A detail from a landscape?

Because I have vertigo I had to pull back quickly and reassure myself that I was standing fair and square on the gallery floor. A circular mirror had transformed that floor into a deep-cut well and the sky looked like a fathomless ocean.
Some interesting reviews are listed below: Charles Darwent's in The Independent 24th July 2011 is  sub-headed 'An Arte Povera pioneer reveals the miracle within cheap materials – and gives us a vision of our wonderful selves'.

http://www.pistoletto.it

www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/m

www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/8630864/Michelangelo-Pistoletto-The-Mirror-of-Judgement-Serpentine-Gallery-review.html

www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jul/24/michelangel

96. BAQARI’S WIFE by AKRAM ZAATARI

PHOTOGRAPHY: NEW DOCUMENTARY FORMS

TATE MODERN until 31.3.2011

c artist 290x190mm

Zaatari examines the faces and attitudes of anonymous people in the Lebanon from the 1940s to the 1970s, drawing from the archive of photographer Hashem el Madani. His studio acted as a safe haven where people could act out their fantasies within the conventions of studio portraiture. He kept a cache of props: Bedouin clothes, plastic guns, caps, scarves.  I’m reminded of a seaside photograph taken in England when air travel was the privilege of the rich. It shows my mother as a young girl posed with her friends in a plywood ‘ aeroplane’.

This picture was scratched because of a jealous husband of the Baqari family who never let his wife out by herself. The text accompanying the photos is taken from conversations with Madani: ‘He was upset because she came to the studio without his knowledge. He came asking for the negatives. I refused to give them to him because they were on a 35mm roll. In the end we agreed that I would scratch the negatives of his wife with a pin, and I did in front of him.  Years later, after she burnt herself to death to escape her misery, he came back to me asking for enlargements of those photographs or other photographs she might have had taken without his knowledge.’  

190x244mm

This charming photograph is more typical of the display It was taken in Madani’s parents’ home and the little girl’s name is unknown. Madani comments 'In the 1940s and 1950s people loved to pose with a radio. I bought a radio for 200 Lira and I would ask people to touch it as if they were switching frequencies. Once, a little girl placed her dollies next to the radio.'

 Akram Zaatari is one of five photographers in a remarkable exhibition exploring documentary forms. Each room contains one discrete project, in which the artist calls into question the relationship between the documentary value of photography and the museum as its proper context. All the works are new acquisitions and other artists' subjects include elections in the Congo, everyday life in pre- and post- Soviet Ukraine, conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan and  the ecological  effect of American power production and consumption.

One of the strengths of this exhibition is the way it interrogates our own society. Jealous husbands are not confined to Lebanon in the 1940s. Pollution does not end when you step outside America. And what are our current conventions in photography? Why do we spend a fortune on weddings (at a time when marriage has hardly been more fragile) and nothing on funerals? Why do we prioritise unhealthy body shapes? And how come we give ourselves permission to turn humiliation and suffering into spectacle now that the camera is everywhere? 

www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks%3Fartistid%3D11598%.

universes-in-universe.org/eng/nafas/articles/2009/akram. 

95. THE DANCE by FOLKERT DE JONG

The Shape of Things to Come: New Sculpture

at the Saatchi Gallery until October 16

open every day 10am-6pm

This jolly mannequin is an arresting figure. He’s part of a merry throng of dancers, but almost at once we suspect that all is not well. So we walk into and around the group, stop and browse. We confront their antics. They smile back, but there’s  an oddly hypnotic quality in their eyes. Those grins are sinister, half street hustler, half clown.  The queasy black coating is dripping like tar. You notice that the single figure shown here is the only one with hands and fingers – the arms of the rest metamorphose into rigid polystyrene planks in a fetching baby pink.
 
The dancers  in the artwork (made of polyurethane foam) are all copies of one composite character: a 16th/17th century trader created out of many figures, some historical. There's also a reference to  Rembrandt’s painting The Nightwatch.  De Jong explains that in this nightmarish song and dance ‘the clones are ripping each other off... and dancing towards their destiny: self destruction’. 

De Jong is Dutch. This installation recalls the monument in New York’s Battery Park celebrating the Dutch purchase of Manhattan allegedly for beads and mirrors. His constructions often deal with unfair deals, with profiteering and colonialism. 

The artist comments: ‘The Dutch seem to be very proud of their historical conquests. For me as a kid growing up there, they are like adventure stories, with costumed characters as in Hook and Peter Pan’. When he was asked ‘Do you see your sculptures as monuments of sorts?’ he replied ‘Not deliberately, but there is a strong reference to the powerful meaning and function of monuments in my work...Maybe they’re monuments for the moral subjects that are unspoken ...We humans have to face the fact that we are part of a natural process...it is embedded in our system, but there is hope! 
Morality, compassion and intelligence can save us.’

 www.folkertdejong.com
www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/sculpture/

http://dailyserving.com/2011/05/an-interview-with-folkert-de-jong

94. CHARTRES AND NOTRE DAME by ROGER HIORNS

Saatchi Gallery

The Shape of Things to Come: New Sculpture

The full title is Copper Sulphate Chartres and Copper Sulphate Notre Dame, being card constructions with copper sulphate chemical growth... Hiorns explores what happens when what he has created is handed over to reactive material. It’s a hands-off process: a chemical solution with self-determining properties is set free to transform a ‘found’ object. He calls what he does - drawing back from the artist’s total control of an art work -  ‘material disenchantment’.

Hiorn’s work was short listed for the Turner Prize in 2009 partly on the strenght of his Seizure 2008. A disused bed sit in an abandoned 60s social housing block was filled with over 75,000 litres of copper sulphate which encrusted every surface. A domestic space – usually warm, lively, protective – is infiltrated by something which is fantastical, poisonous and lifeless. Was it a comment on the ambition of modernist architecture to  free people through rational expansion and usefulness?

This is also the man who in Vauxhall 2003 sank a steel drain into the surface of the Sculpture Court at Tate Britain but instead of water running down, flames leapt up out of the grating.

Leo Benedicticus in the Guardian  quotes him (see below) as saying: 'I don't like explaining and being explicit. I don't make art with lots of announcements and whistles and bells.' Earlier he commented 'I try to keep myself out of my work.   Seizure is kind of autogenetic – growing by itself. I prefer to distance myself from ideas of posterity, of the longevity of a piece of art. None of that seems healthy'.

.www.saatchigallery.com

www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/dec/07/roger-hiorns-turner-prize-profile

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1357484/Naked-flame-Will-Roger-Hiornss-latest-work-people-hot-bothered-British-Art-Show.html

93. IRIDESCENT GLIDE by ANDY STEWART

mixed media on canvas 160 x 140cm

Sarah Myerscough Gallery

Your Skin is Like Vinyl

Andy Stewart’s paintings are among the most beautiful I’ve seen since I started my blog.

But you really have to be there to appreciate its physical presence. An image cannot do it justice. The central panel is a luminous swathe of gold, lavender and coral unfurling like tulle or lace. There is a tiny playful splatter of crimson, orange , white and yellow. Above is a long black oval. It looks as if the paint it still wet, gleaming like a mirror. It’s cradled and contained by a thin but deep green line running along the base which has been squeezed straight out of the tube. Some of the paint is so thick and sculptural, you want to touch it.  The shapes are complicated and simple, open and closed, flowing, cloudy, smudged and sharp. If you take a small section from any part of this painting, you find something beautiful.

Stewart includes gloss paint, glitter and diamond dust among his materials. Sometimes he applies paint directly from the tube, sometimes it’s poured, or pulled across the surface with a trowel. It’s said that Stewart uses canvas as an 'artist’s playground...where chance and controlled gesture are reconciled by compositional structure’. ‘Chance’ in this context must be mixed with experience and knowledge. I cannot imagine what courage it takes to apply layer upon layer on something already superb, knowing there is no delete button. 

Stewart gives his paintings titles of real things, such as The Advocate, London’s Burning, My Father is from Scotland, The Lost Chord. It's tempting to do a bit of 'cloud-spotting' for meaningful shapes but we’re not looking at pictures of things. The American abstract painter  Helen Frankenthaler, who is said to be one of Stewart’s influences,  speaks of  ‘interior landscapes’ - worlds which express feelings and images from below our consciousness. Our consciousness or the artist's? And why is it so tempting to get in there somehow to see what is going on?

 Matthew Collings wrote of Frankelthaler's 'strange and imaginative vagueness (which) can seem like a glass of cold water in a desert. You didn’t know until you drank it that you’d been dying of thirst’. He could have been talking about Andy Stewart.

Taste and see at the Sarah Myerscough Gallery - the show is extended until August 27

 www.sarahmyerscough.com

Helen Frankenthaler: Delicacy and Assault: paintings 1959 – 2002 by Matthew Collings