176. WISH TREES by YOKO ONO

TO THE LIGHT

Serpentine Gallery until 9 September

As well as being famously married to John Lennon, Ono is known for her unswerving belief in art's power to change society. This exhibition is a testament to that, but not everyone is happy about what she does or h ow she does it.  'Childish and brainless, Ono lives down to her name', says Michael Glover of the Independent; ' a fine, fun show' says Alastair Smart of the Telegraph; Richard Dorment's verdict is 'elusive, uneven, but by no means negligible'.

Before you get inside the Gallery, you are invited to write a wish on a label and tie it to one of the  Wish Trees. When I was there the trees were white with labels (in many languages). Most were wishing health and peace and goodwill to family/ friends/nations/ the whole universe. Others were more specific:

• I wish people would smile all the time and bake more cakes.
• I wish I made sense.
• I wish I was more popular.
• I wish to meet a millionaire man who is caring and God fearing  and will become my husband.
• Please grant me patience and allow me to express joy and love for my husband that's being hindered by premenstrual hormones. Thank you and love to you.
• I wish Yoko's exhibition was better.

Inside the gallery Ono's smiling face on video presents #smilesfilm. She aims to make a film which 'includes a smiling face snap of every single human being in the world'. Viewers are invited to join in by uploading and sending images of their smiles there and then, creating 'a global string of smiles covering the planet'. After giving the technical details, Ono ends with 'Big Kiss. I love you'. Is this twee - or simply un-British?
Laura McLean-Ferris of the Independent is one of several reviewers who have the space to give an overview of this many-faceted show. It's hard to know where to start. For example there's the sound of a regular heartbeat in one corner with the label Heartbeat Syria 2012 on the wall. Footsteps We Made consists of paper copies of John and Oko's footprints, shown walking up the wall 'to the sky' with an Oko poem beside them.

Yoko Ono
Installation view, Yoko Ono: TO THE LIGHT
Serpentine Gallery, London
(19 June - 9 September 2012)
© 2012 Jerry Hardman-Jones

Pointedness 1964 consists of a crystal globe, 4-5cm in diameter, balanced at eye-level on one of these transparent Perspex stands. Beside it is the text: This globe will be a sharp point when it gets to the far corners of the room in your mind. Now I happen to have seen this just after reading an essay on  'Why do we have a brain?' by Professor Daniel Wolpert. Apparently it's not to think or perceive. Movement is the most impotant function of the brain. You generate beliefs (and actions) from data (what we sense from the world),  and from memory. (Which is presumably what Murray and Federer relied on last weekend when they saw a ball coming their way). Is Ono reminding us that we may walk away from the installation with a new configuration tucked away inside our brain...?
Back to the Wish Trees. In the Guardian the critic Michael Bracewell accused anyone who happens to find the whimsy of the Wish Tree less powerful than he does, of being both sexist and racist. Would you tie a label on the tree? What might it say?
www.serpentinegallery.org/2011/03/yoko_ono_to_the_light.html
dailymail.co.uk/.../Yoko-Ono-launches-latest-London-art-exhib...
independent.co.uk/.../yoko-ono-to-the-light-serpentine-gallery

175. ALL DRESSED UP FOR MAM AND DAD by PETER GOODFELLOW

c the artist

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY BP Portrait Award

Oil and collage on canvas 1480 x 1180 mm

This self-portrait is witty, warm and intriguing. Inside his coat are a variety of collaged portraits of his parents, recording their lives before and up to his birth. He writes 'I owe them so much and this way I carry them with me always.’

Yet of all the postures he could have chosen as a tribute, why this one? Does it remind you of the man-in-the-pub offering you  fake watches or jewellery? Or is he an old-fashioned stand up music hall comedian (flourishing at the time when his parents were young), who swishes his coat open like a curtain to reveal something unexpected to a delighted and surprised audience?  Or is it a moving piece of self disclosure - most of us keep our history tightly buttoned up inside us.
Peter Goodfellow has been described as one of Europe's leading illustrators, but since moving to Scotland has become a well known landscape painter as well. He describes how, after working so long to tightly prescribed briefs, he wants the paint surface 'to have a life of its own'. I would  call this a narrative painting, a genre I love because you have to  co operate with the artist to unpick the puzzle.

npg.org.uk
npg.org.uk/publications   if you want the catalogue
murals-portraits.co.uk     to see more of Beauvillain Scott's work

174. BRUISED by NATHALIE BEAUVILLAIN SCOTT

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

B.P.PORTRAIT AWARD

Here's the only other example of 'narrative painting' I found in the B P Portrait Award exhibition.

copyright the artist

Nathalie Beauvillain Scott is an award-winning portrait artist and the subject's mother. The label tells us that her teenage son, Olivier, had recently been involved in a car accident, and was also the subject of a violent attack.

The background gives us more clues as to why he is looking at us with such sad, knowing - and bruised - eyes. Behind him is his image as a child, too young to imagine perils to come. (Nathalie's portrait of the young Olivier was selected for the BP Portrait Award in 2004). There's paperwork too, headed Hopitaux de Paris, Assistance Publique  dated Christmas Day 2010, which is an added poignancy. An image of the car involved and a clock recording the time of the crash completes this detailed, specific exploration of a young person's experience of something we all wish had never happened. The young Olivier from the innocent past , the clock with its split second record of a critical present moment, each reminds us of a future unknown to anyone.
npg.org.uk
npg.org.uk/publications if you want the catalogue

murals-portraits.co.uk to see more of Beauvillain Scott's work

173. ROSIE AND PUMPKIN by VANESSA LUBACH

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY until 23 September

The portrait is of the artist’s daughter, Rosie, holding the family’s bantam, Pumpkin. It's an action painting. Not in the art theory sense of action painting i.e. how the artist makes art - by dripping, dabbing, smearing, and even flinging paint on to the surface of the canvas. More about the action taking place before our eyes.  Most portraits are of someone or something capable of sitting or standing or lying still for some considerable time, for oil painting is a slow process. Alas, chickens are not known for their willingness to pose for camera or easel. I have watched my two small grandaughters handle their beloved chickens - Ivy, Betty, Nettle, Fern, Lily - with a confidence and skill which escapes me.

 Initial sketches and longer sittings were made with Rosie holding a toy helmet.  Rapid sketches and photographs of Pumpkin were used later. The artist has done well to capture what can only last for a very short time.

The eye is drawn to an alert Pumpkin painted in warm colours set against the blues and greys. Lubach says her aim was ‘to convey the moment of quiet astonishment that followed the battle of wits necessary to catch the agile and evasive bantam.’ I think Rosie's expression is remarkable: a shy pleasure in her success combined with her understanding of the importance of the task in hand. And a young person's endearing reticence as she co operates with her mother/artist's project.
npg.org.uk

vanessalubach.co.uk/

172. AUNTIE by ALEAH CHAPIN

National Portrait Gallery until Sept 23

'...the search for portraits that can astonish with their virtuosity  is balanced with the desire to find those  that demonstrate real human dignity and integrity', said Sandy Nairne, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, talking of this year's BP Portrait Award. Auntie is the painting which won  First Prize (£25,000).

Does it 'astonish'? I think it does. It breaks every rule about how women should be seen in public. Life-sized portraits are often of queens and empresses, landowners and savants, clothed in the splendour which reflects their importance. Artists and servant girls are also dressed to tell us what they are. Women's  bodies, when shown naked, are almost without exception young and idealised, either to make them fit for pornography or to transform them into 'nudes' to reflect the  traditions of that particular genre of painting.
And does the subject demonstrate 'human dignity and integrity'? I can only say that this is a woman I would like to meet.  She radiates warmth and strength, she is unpretentious, she accepts our presence as viewer without embarrassment and without fear.

The work is beautifully painted, the colour and tone never for one moment faltering, never dishonest.

The artist says 'The fact that she has known me since birth is extremely important. Her body is a map of her journey through life'.


http://www.npg.org.uk
aleahchapin.com

171. A FLOR DE PIEL by DORIS SALCEDO

WHITE CUBE GALLERY, ST JAMES

This is a delicate and fragile sculpture: a shroud made of thousands of rose petals, neither fresh nor withered, but connected to each other in a suspended state which changes with time. When I saw it, it lay in unruly folds, almost covering the gallery floor, an unhealthy liverish colour, which reminded me of skin -  and then of flayed skin.

Salcedo, who is Columbian, is an unsettling artist. You can still see the scar left by her eerie manipulation of familiar places and ordinary things if you look down at the concrete floor of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Shibboleth 2007 was the long meandering crack which ran through the Hall and seemed to push the building apart, summoning up fun and intrigue and, for some, where-is-the-Health-and-Safety-officer?

 I first came across her work when I saw at Tate Modern Untitled 1998, a wardrobe filled with cement with a wooden chair poking through. It felt like revenge on all the anxieties wardrobes cause us: the secrets hidden at the bottom (Christmas presents for the children, pornography); the mirrors which ask you if you are too old or too fat; its magic which might whisk you off to C.S. Lewis' Narnia or suffocate you with a lock which snaps shut.

 She often bears witness to violence and on the floor below Piegaria Muda (mute prayer) is an installation evoking a mass memorial or collective burial site, which she began in Los Angelos after researching the violent life of young people in the city. Her magic is sinister, secretive. A crack through which we glimpse another world.

A Flor de Piel developed as the simple but impossible task of making a flower offering to a victim of torture.
whitecube.com/artists/doris_salcedo

170. DAYS by BRUCE NAUMAN

.ICA GALLERY  until 16 September 

   The first problem is that sound art is invisible, so this image is a merely a sketch of a New York gallery where DAYS was installed some time ago.  The British premiere is at  the ICA (Institute of Contemorary Arts) in the Mall, accessible now only from Trafalgar Square.   Which is itself another problem.  Acres and acres of roads and parks in central London are cordoned off .  There are so many pedestrian diversions I despair of reaching any of the three galleries I've targetted. Some pavements are so crowded I need to  look carefully before taking the next step.  Buses stand nose to tail along Whitehall.   The Olympics are coming to town!
           

You walk between 14 flat panel speakers to hear Nauman's award-winning work, experiencing  the sound of a continous stream of 7 voices coming from 14 flat panel speakers reciting the days of the week in random order. The days crash into each other, empty and meaningless. Is this art?

Nauman always invites us to see the bare stuff of life in a new way, to fashion sound into 'art' in our own heads. At first I reflected on the way we chop time up into segments, label them, dismiss some and pour great significance into other bits and pieces. And how we live as if we own or  'have' time: time to use or waste or give away. But we only ever have the present moment, the 'now', each unique second, this moment when I am writing this sentence - and you are reading it.

But there's another dimension. I'm alone in the gallery. Sun streams through the windows from the Mall where I can see flags fluttering, JCBs loitering, and piles of gleaming barriers stacked and waiting for action.  Out there there's been a collective decision to create Olympic time - Special Time, Liminal Time - when life's ordinary rules do not apply.

I climb several flights of stairs to a place where, I'm told, I can encounter over a hundred artists, some of whom have been working with sound for many years, others new to sonic art. The gallery consists of a room empty except for a comfortable wide rectangular black bench in the centre. In the centre of that is sunk a screen rather like an I Pad. Stroke it and up comes an index of names. Select one and touch: hey presto the artist's work is there in the room with you.The project, entitled SOUNDWORKS, is a virtual exhibition space, a place to sample a wide range of audible approaches. You should be able to hear them on the dedicated SOUNDWORKS microsite at www.ica.org.uk/soundworks as well as in the ICA galleries.

 ica.org.uk