Art Overload: Venice Biennale 2019

What do clairvoyant spiders, anvils, underground tunnels, washing-machines, a cow on an automated track to nowhere, looming environmental concerns, creation-myths, vanity, surveillance and issues of censorship, gender, race and politics all have in common? Two years have passed and it is time for the Venice Biennale 2019!

Writing about the Biennale as a whole is a feat worth applauding! Now in its 58^th cycle and featuring far over fifty countries and hundreds of artists/works in all mediums in what is a huge, complex art Olympics that is, for all its delights also quite exhausting! The central pavilion’s theme, ‘May you live in interesting times’ is a fittingly ambiguous, yet pleasingly all-encompassing, title for what is essentially the world barometer for art, what’s hot and what’s not. Who, which themes and ideas will be appearing in exhibitions near you! Save your applause, however, because instead of trying to cover it all, I have focused instead on the things that were most memorable or had resonance with me. In a vein-attempt to make some sense of it all (in no particular order) is my personal ‘unconventional’ top twenty-one of the ‘must see’ experiences this Biennale.

Arsenale

Tarek Atoui

Ceramic sculptures used to create unusual sound-based installations. Intriguing to watch how these pieces moved as it was to listen.

Image sourced from: https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2019/partecipants/tarek-atoui

Barca Nostra/Chris Büchel

One of the more controversial exhibits in this year’s Biennale, but also one of the most poignant. Barca Nostra is a shipwreck from a disaster in the Sicilian channel in which between 700-1,100 people seeking refuge from Libya were have believed to have perished. The ship appears ghostly but almost ‘at home’ in its maritime setting of the Arsenale (where many boats are docked) where it could be easily dismissed by those unaware of its history. It is debatable on whether displaying this boat, associated with such tragedy is tasteful or appropriate but I think its greater legacy in being a reminder and political tool ‘for change’ to those whose lives were senselessly lost is something which should not be ignored. In bringing this to the Biennale the reality of what happened becomes more significant in current memory than reading about it in a piece of journalism.  

Jesse Darling

Unable to use their right arm due to a neurological disease, Darling creates assemblages from ‘small, low-cost, everyday materials’. In ‘March of the Valedictorians’ red school chairs on impossibly long spindly legs teeter precariously whilst supporting one-another as a whole group. Humorous and playful.

 Zhanna Kadyrova

Russian Constructivism meets Pop Art in Kadyrova’s ‘Market’ in which fruits, cheeses and meats are ‘for sale’ re-created from tiles and concrete. The idea of ‘art as commodity’ is questioned as each item in this market is sold under the currency of weight. My parents are and have both worked in the fruit-trade all my life and so this piece has a personal association that appealed to me.

Tavares Strachan

‘Robert’ is a neon sculpture representing the skeleton of first African-American astronaut, Robert Henry Lawrence Jr who died in a training accident in 1967. This piece is part of a body of work Strachan has made around the story of Lawrence’s death in working in conjunction with SpaceX. The work raises awareness of Lawrence’s achievements as the first African astronaut as well as the racism encountered around the incident of his death and why, figures such as Lawrence should not have remained invisible in history for this long. Given the 50 years milestone since the moon landings, this collection of work gains added timeliness that leaves a lasting impression.

Christian Marclay

I have been a fan of Marclay’s work since I first saw the film, ‘The Clock’ in Plymouth’s ‘British Art Show 7’ 2011, in which 24 hours worth of film clips create a real-time clock. If you love movies and like collage then you will appreciate how entertaining it is trying to work out where each clip has come from or guess what the next one will be. For the Biennale Marclay presents, ’48 War Movies’ which are screened (with sound) simultaneously as each film is layered on top of the other to create 48 borders. The sound is perhaps more disorientating than the image, as the cacophony of noise is unsettling and chaotic as war itself. 

Image sourced from: https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/pics-from-the-biennial-part-1-1540588

 John Akomfrah [Ghana]

In a three-channel film titled, ‘Four Nocturnes’, British director, Akomfrah uses natural history and  archived footage edited alongside shots of characters contemplating, motionlessly. Unmistakably recognisable in its editing and beauty of photography present the concept that humanities destruction of the natural world is ultimately also a destruction of ourselves. 

Image sourced from: https://www.lissongallery.com/news/john-akomfrah-presents-four-nocturnes-video-installation-at-venice-biennale

Marco Godinho [Grand Duchy of Luxembourg]

Hundreds of blank notebooks ‘sculpted’ by the artist’s hands line a slope in the Grand Duchy of Luxemborg pavilion. Each one unique as its page’s have been manipulated and made supple by the sea water in the Mediterranean. ‘Written by Water’ is an exploration of ‘human learning and remembering as a continuous process of writing, erasing and overwriting. As with other works in the Biennale (referred to here) I am personally drawn to work which appears to be simple, but has been created from someone noticing something and then exploring it on a grand scale (in this case, almost obsessively). I like the idea that a book soaked in the sea could become a piece of sculpture as much as there is something mesmerizingly meditative about watching these books being created in the accompanying film to this installation.

Zahrah Al Ghamdi [Saudi Arabia]

50,000 handmade leather ‘pods, line lit fabric walls in Al Ghamdi’s immersive and interactive installation ‘After Illusion’. Viewers are invited to touch and explore the work with their hands to seek out interactive sounds triggered by placing a hand inside a correct pod. Leather being used as the primary material relates to craft within Saudi Arabia and title from an Arabic poem about ‘the struggle to remember home after being away for 20 years’. The other worldliness of this installation does go some-way to achieving just that.

Gr Iranna [India]

One of the several artists exhibiting in the Indian pavilion for this Biennale, Irana’s piece titled, ‘Naavu (We together)’ consists of worn and altered padukas (wooden footwear) which line the walls. Each one uniquely altered or adorned with objects (possibly from their previous owners) and symbols that are significant of various spiritual connotations within Indian history or culture. I have always liked objects, ephemera that tell a story of its owner and I like the possible connotations and narratives that seeing these shoes conjure.

Mark Justiniani [Philippines]

The piece, ‘Island weather’ by Justiniani is a work that must be experienced to be best understood. Viewers can step on top of a series of clear-topped, island-shaped platforms containing objects housed by mirrors. The effect is one of looking down to what appears to be infinity. Half a ladder, a stack of papers are in fact the reality but when placed in these mirrored containers appear, to the viewer standing above, to continue downwards forever into a black endless nothingness below. It is genuinely quite disconcerting but impressive at the same time.

Image sourced from: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/review/venice-biennale-2019-the-must-see-pavilions-in-the-arsenale

Gardini

Tomás Saraceno

Arachnomancy is performed in Saraceno’s ‘Web pavilion 7’ inspired by the Mabila Nggam divination practiced in Western and Central Africa in which spider’s actions and webs are interpreted. The pavilion features spider webs, tarot cards and divination readings. Aiming to use interactive installations and ‘sustainable ways of inhabiting the environment’ to turn audiences awareness to other species and systems. Again the joy for this work, for me personally, is an idea I have already expressed, that this work is great because spider’s webs are fascinating, the artist isn’t trying to compete with that idea, merely notice and present it to a wider audience through the context of art.

Image sourced from: https://universes.art/en/venice-biennale/2019/fast-tour-2/tomas-saraceno  

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu

For anyone who routinely feels compelled to wipe all the condensation off of steamed-up bathroom mirrors, the plight of Yuan and Yu’s robotic arm that ends with a shovel as it attempts to scrape back an endlessly encroaching red liquid to within a circular area will be highly relatable. Mesmerising in its almost human/animal-like size the giant arm might be one of the most videoed works in this year’s Biennale but it is also one of the most compellingly watchable.

Larissa Sansour [Denmark]

Denmark pavilion’s dystopian sci-fi film offering titled, ‘Heirloom’ ruminates on life, memory and identity after ecological disaster. Shot in black and white its otherworldliness and themes such as nostalgia, explored reminded me of Tarkovsky’s, ‘Stalker’.

Image sourced from: https://www.idoart.dk/kalender/larissa-sansour-heirloom-danish-pavilion-la-biennale-di-venezia-2019

Motoyuki Shitamichi [Japan]

An architect, an artist and a composer are the creative disciplines behind the Japanese pavilion installation that tells the story of ‘Cosmo-Eggs’. Essentially the work consists of photos of boulders, sound and an inflatable egg-yolk yellow central seating area connected by a series of sound cables, like umbilical cords. I struggled to see the point of all of this until I had read the allegory on the wall (see below) which helped contextualise the work and was a refreshing insight as an alternative creation-myth for the Japanese islands. For me personally it reaffirmed that the Biennale doesn’t have to always be a looking-forward or comment on current life but can be an exploration of traditions and storytelling, re-imagined for new audiences.   

“A long time ago, sun and moon descended to earth and laid a single egg. A snake came and swallowed the egg, and so sun and moon visited earth once more to leave behind three eggs that they hid: one inside earth, one inside stone, and one inside bamboo. The eggs soon hatched, and born were the ancestors of three islands. Once grown up, they each built a small boat and travelled to different islands: one in the East, one in the West, and one in the North. The tribes of these islands visited each other by boat, and despite occasional fights, they overcame pestilence and poor harvests to live in peace for a long time. Each island passed down its own language, its own music, its own traditions, its own festivals. They each possessed the power to speak with the animals: the earth tribe spoke with the worms and the insects, the stone tribe with the snakes, and the bamboo tribe with the birds.”

Image sourced from: http://myartguides.com/national-participations/japan-2019/

Roman Stańczak [Poland]

An inside-out luxury aircraft is the central piece to this year’s Polish pavilion. In reversing the aircraft the artist is attempting to criticise the ‘rich elite’ and inequalities of capitalism. Somewhat ironically, if this piece, as ‘art’ (and sold as art) then feeds back into the rich elite it is trying to challenge. All of that aside it is a fascinating piece to explore visually and out of curiosity.  

Venice Pavilion

A mysterious but compelling queue of people beckons closer inspection of the Venice pavilion, revealing an embodied experience experienced by no more than 8 people at a time. Stepping from the heat of the Gardini into what is a life-size, inflatable tube with water underneath is a remarkably welcome and cooling experience (not to mention slightly hap-hazard) as it is basically like walking on the world’s longest and biggest waterbed (or imagining of intestinal tract)! It is an unashamed spectacle in which the viewer becomes participant in its existence as a piece of art.

Aya Ben Ron [Israel]

Historically speaking, the Israeli pavilion has always been one of my favourites out of the four Biennale’s I have attended. This year’s offering may not be up there with my favourites but it definitely made me think. ‘Field Hospital’ is an interactive art ‘institution’ established by the artist, Aya Ben Ron, with the aims to ‘provide a space in which silenced voices can be heard and social injustices can be seen’. Looking and acting like a ‘real’ hospital the pavilion is transformed into a waiting room where viewers wait to be called to experience ‘care-kits’ upstairs which include special video/seating chairs showing recorded testimonies of social injustices and Safe-Unit areas in which participants can scream in sound proof booths.

Offsite

Dysfunctional –Ca’d’Oro

If you see one offsite exhibition during this year’s Biennale, Dysfunctional should be it. Featuring 21 artists from the Carpenter’s Workshop Gallery who have made work in response to the architecture of the Ca’d’Oro and its collection of Renaissance art. It is refreshing in its lack of pretentiousness as it seems to celebrate really well-made, visual but still thought-provoking pieces as a much welcomed break from the depth of intensity needed in digesting many of the other Biennale shows. Shown here: Maarten Bass 'Real Time XL' (2019) a recorded twelve hour performance involving painting, removing and repainting hands on a clock-face. And the Vernoeven Twins 'Moments of Happiness' (2019) glass giant bubbles. 

Renata Morales, Invasor –Ca’Ressonico Gallery

Self-portraits of the artist and 70 gloss painted-used tyres make the components of Mexican artist, Morales’ exhibition at the Ca Ressonico Gallery. This assembled collage of stuff which includes dinosaurs (why not) aims to, “challenge our perceptions of texture, touch, beauty, solace and violence”. I struggled to engage with how all of these elements came together, personally,  but from a purely aesthetic and debatably shallow perspective enjoyed seeing so many coloured tyres as an installation.

Eila Yenlysarja –Various locations

The Biennale’s best kept secret (one you won’t find in any of the guidebooks)! Yenlysarja’s weathered, textured surfaces and palimpsests materialise themselves around the city in various locations. A celebration of beauty and purity in surface and form. I could look at these all day long!

The Biennale can be seen across locations in Venice until November 24^th

https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2019

 
Previous Posts about the Venice Biennale can be read here:
2017 - http://spannerintheworkz.blogspot.com/2017/07/viva-venezia.html
2015 - http://spannerintheworkz.blogspot.com/2015/06/i-always-believed-in-futures.html
2013 - http://spannerintheworkz.blogspot.com/2013/11/venice-biennale-2013.html

Images (except where specified) and text copyright of Natalie Parsley ©

Catch the Chicken!

Nicholas Wright Ceramic Wall Pieces (early 1900s -present)

The prolifically produced and charming animal-influenced ceramics of Birmingham born artist, Nicholas Wright [1956- ] have been a staple viewing of my visits to Spike Island studios ever since I can remember. I learnt recently that he has been at the studios in Bristol from the very start in the 80s when a community of artists worked together on site. It is therefore really quite surprising that the current exhibition showcasing over a hundred of his works (produced over the last thirty years) is the first time his work has been shown on this scale in the UK. 

Nicholas Wright Ceramic Wall Pieces [detail]

‘A Chance to Look at Chicken’ is just that; chicken, birds, cats, mice and cows are the subjects of this unusual menagerie of animal representations in ceramic. Each one unique and situated within a crafted border of fauna. Influenced by religious iconography and pierced forms from ancient bronze-age metal work, these individual pieces have been designed in a dome-like shape mimicking a boss, which one learns, is a ‘decorative keystone used in the vaulting of medieval architecture’. They have a simple-looking nativity, imaginative or folk-like appearance which gives these pieces their individual character and, like most things of this nature, is deceptive of the skill and craft involved in producing them. In their perceived simplicity they reminded me of Picasso’s animal ceramics, specifically his birds of which I caught by circumstance at the Louisiana gallery in Copenhagen last year. It had me thinking that there seems  to be a quiet joy and elegance in sculpting something from imagination and in its simplest of forms, which is pleasing to the eye and more reminiscent of the actual feeling of happiness or feeling of ‘lightness’ on the glimpse of fleeting moment of seeing a bird than the laboured, detailed representations I tend to render in my own work. One is an intent on capturing the nature/character of the animal being represented, the other a more intense study of what it looks like.  Despite Wright’s representations being created in heavy fixed ceramic there is a transience in their depiction that is perhaps more lifelike than the static observational nature of my own. It is an interesting variation that makes me question what I am looking to convey or achieve in my own work.

Picasso Bird (Dove) 1953

Displayed together as a huge set, one can really appreciate the earthy colours of the glazes, mark-making and pierced-out shapes, defined and distinguishable like stencils or silhouettes against the white walls of Spike’s gallery space. Like Noah’s ark, some great animal archive or shrine they work well together as one big piece even if they were perhaps never intended to be shown in this way. Elsewhere a large ceramic chicken, from which the show derives its name, is displayed on a plinth alongside some of Wright’s drawings which are a useful addition revealing some of how he thinks about the web-like botanical fauna and mark-making present in the ceramic pieces.

Nicholas Wright Chicken Drawings (2018)

The pierced forms within the ceramics is echoed in an early work made by Wright (not shown here) when he noticed mice eating his paper in the studio. Wright used soup to paint onto the paper, the resulting work made from where the mice had nibbled at the soupy areas to create a stencil of sorts almost acts as an accidental precursor to the pierced forms of the ceramic work to come. The element of play and humour also present in the later works. I hope that Wright continues to use Spike as a studio for many years to come, but it is worth having the opportunity to see his work with the space it deserves outside the clutter of the studio. Visitors should seize the chance to look at chicken whilst they still can!

Nicholas Wright’s A Chance to Look at Chicken is on at Spike Island until 16^th June 2019

https://www.spikeisland.org.uk/programme/exhibitions/nicholas-wright/ 

Stripped but not bare

“I felt that these galleries should somehow be returned to what they once had been, halls for monumental sculpture. Places where people could come and wonder at the sheer physicality of sculptural objects.” - Mike Nelson

 

Nothing in Mike Nelson’s [1967- ] latest installation ‘The Asset Strippers’, located in the vast, stone-carved walls of Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries is trying to be art. It simply just is. Former industrial-sized knitting machines, a digger bucket, a cement mixer, scales, a lathe and a hay-turner are amongst a series of abandoned machines from salvage yards and online auctions of company liquidators, which have been collected and presented at the Tate as sculptural objects. Woodwork benches complete with vices, drawers and remnants of string and detergent bottles become the plinths on which many of these ‘ready-mades’ reside.

Each piece of machinery is a remnant fallen into neglect and disuse, symptomatic of the shift in ways of manufacture and decrease from manual industries to service ones. I confess that I don’t recognise what the majority of the machines here were even for! I am probably not alone in this acknowledging that there is also something unexpectedly exciting about trying to imagine or ‘work-out’ what the purpose of these things once was (or perhaps could be!). Like Francis Picabia’s paintings of imaginary Surrealist/Dada-esque machines, there is also the slightly more obvious connection to Duchamp’s ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by her Batchelors, Even’ in the way these mechanical parts have been arranged as though for a new use (for which they had previously not been intended) and collaged together. In one piece telegraph poles lay horizontally atop red, blue and yellow tarpaulin on which supports a circular tube (from possibly a drain) of sorts; balanced together in a sort-of ‘found-objects’ version of an Anthony Caro sculpture which can be seen also in the Tate Britain only a few rooms away. Nearby a former hay-turner is presented so that its’ turning blades take on the appearance of four golden suns or flowers; an association that I feel, relates to the dry sunny days during which the hay-turner would have been put to use. My mother commented that this machine reminded her of the one her parents used on the farm in Somerset and that she had never before looked upon or seen it in this way (as sculpture).
 

Formally and aesthetically speaking there is much to be gleaned from looking at all of this. Graffitied, worn and stained surfaces, flaking paint; artificial metallic blues and bright reds against natural woody browns and oil-stained metals. Boxy squares, circles, stacks and lines from threads and strings still connected in the knitting machines all make for a rich list of sculptural criteria. Though the question of whether we are being asked to appreciate these machines as sculptural objects or to look upon them as relics from the past (or both) is really where this piece becomes both socially significant as well as aesthetic. The knitting machines are reminiscent of the ones Nelson’s family worked on whilst growing up in the East Midlands, now in his early fifties, Nelson and many of his generation and before will have seen a broader picture, perhaps than myself, in just how much Britain has significantly changed from the industrial era to more service-based ones. Doors from a NHS hospital and wood from a former army barracks act as visual and functional barriers to divide and section the individual components of this installation into curated parts of one bigger, immersive piece; they also unintentionally or not comment on the value of both art and the materials it uses and the value or shift in value we have as a society towards institutions like the NHS and manual industries generally. For me, these make-shift walls help contain the unmistakable smell of oil from all of the machinery that is reminiscent of my grandfather’s workshop on the farm. I am utterly bias in this whole post from projects I have previously done on car engines and farming tools!

In a previous work, titled ‘Coral Reef’, seen at the Tate in 2000 Nelson similarly used reclaimed materials to create a movie-set-like-labyrinth of rooms. Each sparsely lit by naked-bulbs and grubby reclaimed timber to create a slightly seedy or sinister spaces, a gallery reception area, a taxi-office, a heroin-den; each with a story awaiting to happen, they are suspenseful and the closet experience I have ever come to like being inside an Edward Hopper painting; their commonality being the absence of people. There is something similarly haunting about ‘The Asset Strippers’ and as the name suggests it is after the factory has closed, the people who once knew the purpose of these great beast-like contraptions have since left along with their stories and their skills to work these machines. All is quiet. All is now still. It seems that in stripping these places into their bare commodities we have also stripped or lost something of the people, stories and time in which they previously existed. It is a proverbial ghost-ship but in being reclaimed as sculpture, as ‘art’ and displayed in the Duveen Galleries of Tate Britain where historically ‘treasures of the empire’ were seen, they are memorials to this past heritage whose concept of  ‘value’ is in-turn put into question. What once were stripped assets are now reassembled art. 

 

Mike Nelson –The Asset Strippers at Tate Britain until October 6th 2019

https://www.tate.org.uk/press/press-releases/mike-nelson-asset-strippers

 

I can see clearly now

*Study of a piece of Brick, to show Cleavage in Burned Clay (1871) 

Watercolour and bodycolour over graphite on wove paper

One-hundred and forty-eight years have passed since its creation but I do not think I may ever see again a more exquisitely rendered and divinely detailed observation of a piece of brick than the one painted by John Ruskin in 1871, currently on display as part of an exhibition of Ruskin’s art and influences/collection  at Two Temple Place, London. Covered in a moss/lichen this humble depiction of a piece of brick, so seemingly small and insignificant in real life, once drawn becomes the object of speculation. Victorian ‘Artist, art critic, educator, social thinker and true polymath’, it was Ruskin [1819-1900] himself that,   

“...urged his audience to ‘Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance’.” (Cooper, 2019, p29)

What could be more relevant a statement today, in a society in which we are so busy, so consumerist focused, working and ‘stressed’ that we are increasingly having to be reminded to stop, consider and be more ‘present’ and active in being more aware. In an exhibition that celebrates the bicentenary of Ruskin’s life it is fascinating and hugely relevant that it should focus on this exact topic, stated in the catalogue itself, 

“This is therefore not so much an exhibition of art as an examination of how Ruskin used imagery to help develop education and wellbeing”(Pullen, 2019, p13)

Long before the term, ‘wellbeing’ as we know it today had been incepted, Ruskin was encouraging people to look and notice the world around them. Drawing and painting for him were a form of enquiry to understand and appreciate nature, architecture better, how the landscape effects us and we in turn have an impact on the landscape in which we walk through, live on, utilise and work on. In some ways it was a moralistic view on the power of art, "To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one."3 Contrary to much of the work at the time it was not even necessarily about capturing an aesthetic form of ‘beauty’, 

“For Ruskin, beauty was not neat; it could be savage, grotesque, changeful, on the point of bursting into full bloom, but never florid or decadent. He offered a new way of experiencing and interacting.” (Cooper, 2019, p4) 

Inside Two Temple Place

I could have lingered in the busy room of Two Temple place for ages looking at this piece of brick, its variation of surfaces, colour, textures and detail. It is the embodiment of what the term, Romanticism means to me; the ‘greatness’ observed in something naturally occurring  on something as mundane or potentially overlooked as a lump of brick. The relationship between nature and the man-made, the brick is made of earth (clay) but is now a man-made thing, the moss is taking over the brick as it decays and returns back to its ‘natural’ state. It becomes its own miniature planet/ecosystem. It is amazing how this one drawing both connects with Ruskin’s appreciation for both architecture and nature but also his opinions that he wrote and spoke about on the importance of the hand-made, understanding where things ‘came-from’ or how they were created and how the rise of capitalism threatens to undermine the rights of workers and value in what is made/produced. 

I confess to not having really known a huge amount about Ruskin prior to this exhibition and whilst I claim to be no expert it is interesting to see that for many of his ideas it seems to me that in many ways, he was a man ahead of his time. Though it is hard to ignore or write about Ruskin without acknowledging that for all his influence in the arts (Pre-Raphaelites, Arts and Crafts movement for example) he himself was a strange and troubled, the speculation that he never consummated his marriage, his controversial fascination with young girls/women and prickly nature are strange but to some extent are perhaps symptomatic of his child-like sense of fascination and obsession for understanding the workings of things that consumed or were at the forefront of his existence. Later in life at the loss of his family and cousin he suffered a mental breakdown from which he never really recovered.

Studies of Birds (assorted artists) from the Ruskin exhibition at Two Temple Place, London

Within the exhibition at Two Temple Place there are examples of Ruskin’s work alongside that of artists such as Turner whose depictions of landscape, weather and nature had a significant influence on Ruskin who sought to not just capture the ‘likeness’ of something through drawing it but use painting/drawing as a way of understanding the atmosphere, the phenomena of what it actually felt like to be in that place i.e. how do you recreate the sensation/the likeness of the wetness of water in a painting of a seascape? Where does water from a mountain stream flow down to, where is it from (he was interested particularly in geology)? There are also numerous drawings of architecture, particularly of Venice, where Ruskin wrote ‘The Stones of Venice’ [1851-3] including a huge painting by John Wharlton Bunney of the Basilica in San Marco square [1877-1882]. Ruskin’s own work and pieces he collected by other artists were donated to the Museum of Sheffield, founded by Ruskin in 1875, as a place where metalworkers could see places such as Venice, that they otherwise would never have been able to see. It was this kind of philanthropy and criticism of capitalism that prompted Ghandi to take Ruskin’s ‘Unto this last’ [1860] as one of his text’s for transforming society.

*Study of a Peacock’s Breast Feather (1873)

Set in a neo-gothic mansion, it is impossible to fail to notice how glaringly appropriate Two Temple Place is as venue for this exhibition. It is worth seeing for the outside stonework (complete with gargoyles) and inside, mahogany-clad walls and stained-glass windows alone. Upstairs is a wall dedicated to images of birds by the likes of Audubon, Turner, Edward Lear, Henry Stacey Marks and others including Ruskin himself. Here a study of a peacock’s breast feather by Ruskin is another painfully beautiful reminder of how the beauty of the whole can be told in one single feather so intently and forensically drawn. This drawing is realistic but isn’t about showing off a technical level of skill, as such but more about the inquisitiveness that drawing and looking at drawings creates. Many of Ruskin’s drawings were unfinished because they were working drawings rather than about creating ‘finished works of art’. A lot of this echoes my own thoughts about drawing and how I use it, personally as both a way of observing or better understanding something more closely but I also use it as a way of escaping and distancing from myself so that all the thoughts and worries one may have become lost in all one’s focus and attention being on the ‘thing’ that is being drawn/looked at. Personally, I am a life-time convert into the benefits of an art education to provide the ability to see intrigue and beauty in the world which is why I still have the need to draw.

In addition to this exhibition I read a succinct new book to coincide with the bicentenary by Research Curator, Suzanne Fagence Cooper, who writes an excellent account of the themes, ideas and teachings in Ruskin’s life have had and continue to have resonance with the present. The following eight sentences taken from the book, offering an insight into why he is still relevant (Cooper, 2019, p8/9);

-          the ways that ‘hand, head and heart’ can work together

-          how drawing makes us notice the overlooked

-          what stories the buildings around us can tell us about the people who made them, and live in them now

-          how we can travel with more care through the landscape, walking and thinking, observing the clouds, or the earth beneath our feet

-          our struggles with love, and with the loss of the people and things we love

-          different responses to our own mental frailty, and the anxieties of others

-          possibilities for working more effectively, and more fairly

-          above all, how we can keep learning, whether we are young or old, in small ways and in great tumultuous revelations

I think the works by Ruskin in the exhibition at Two Temple Place compliments Cooper’s observations quite accurately. For all the artistic delights in this exhibition an unexpected highlight comes in the form of a colourful collection of minerals from Ruskin’s museum in Sheffield and are a fitting reminder of one of Ruskin’s more memorable quotes, “you will never love art well until you love what she mirrors better.” (Pullen, 2019, p37)

‘John Ruskin: The Power of Seeing’ is on at Two Temple Place (for FREE) until April 22^nd 2019

https://twotempleplace.org/exhibitions/john-ruskin/  

‘To See Clearly: Why Ruskin Matters’ by Suzanne Fagence Cooper is available to buy wherever fine books are sold

*Images sourced from: http://ruskin.ashmolean.org/collection/8979/object/14197 and https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Study_of_a_Peacock%27s_Breast_Feather.jpg 

1                     Cooper, S. F. 2019. To See Clearly: Why Ruskin Matters. Great Britain. Quercus.

2                     Pullen, L (2019) The Power of Seeing. Great Britain. Two Temple Place

A thing of beauty...

A thing of beauty is a joy forever,
Its loveliness increases it will never
Pass into nothingness...    -Keats

Maybe we all need a little joy in our lives every now and then? That question is largely rhetorical. Maybe I am getting older and am more conscious about what is happening politically in the world but in my lifetime, I do not remember a time as wrought as the one we are living in now; for that reason and the colder, darker winter days, I think that we need things that are inherently uplifting to compensate. And it is ‘joy’ that is the resonating theme present in the work and literally in the accompanying text, mentioned not once but several times, which describes the work of Albert Irvin [1922-2015] whose epic sized paintings are on display alongside his prints, early paintings and works by abstract expressionist painters (who influenced him) in an exhibition on at the Royal West of England Academy (RWA) in Bristol.

Albert Irvin -Northcote (1989) and Rosetta (2012) Acrylic on canvas at the RWA

Text in the catalogue aside, the effect of walking into the gallery containing large-scale works radiating with colour, huge, clean sweeping brush-marks in dynamic strokes and patchwork quilt-like shapes, has as an immediate impact on the senses. Oranges, pinks, reds next to greens; complementary colours zinging and dancing from left to right in an assortment of shapes, daubs, dots and strokes that, I defy, almost regardless of one’s personal taste in art, not to widen their eyes in reaction to confronting a room full of Irvin’s paintings. Colour is incredibly emotive and perhaps more-so in the winter when we are faced with less of it on a daily existence. Personally, I found the first room of the RWA exhibition to be joyous for that reason. Although I am interested at analysing whether it was a joy because of the colours in the paintings or whether that sense of joy comes from what Irvin has done with colour? It is probably a combination of both, but part of me wondered if there was an element of the Duchampian ready-made to how some of the Abstract Expressionist painters used colour. Barnett Newman and Rothko weren’t so much creating ‘red’ as though we had never seen it, as they were presenting ‘red’, a colour, for what it is. Attempting to give space or volume to something which exists but maybe we never fully notice or experience (similar to that of Duchamp putting a urinal and calling it art). Yet, I also appreciate that a Rothko and a Newman are completely different in their treatment of how they applied colour to canvas, that creates different mood and feeling; I think I am just curious as to where my response to these works lies, in the colour (doing what colour does naturally) or in what artists, in this instance, Irvin do with it.

The highlights for me are Irvin’s paintings from the 70s onwards, around about the time he started working with acrylic paint and is said he, 

‘took to their [acrylics] properties immediately. Working horizontally stopped the inevitable run-off of water-thinned paint from top to bottom, and by placing the canvas stretcher on large cans, he was able to reduce the drying time of the saturated surface…’

These paintings are deceptively simple in their cleanness of how colour is applied in shapes and layered without becoming muddied almost textile-like or reminiscent of Matisse’s paper-cuts, and it is an interesting parallel to see Irvin’s thought processes displayed in the exhibition as using coloured paper scraps to build his compositions before he scaled them up into paintings. Incidentally, the vitrine displaying some of the paper cuttings alongside a pair of Irvin’s paint splattered shoes, brushes and paint cans was an unexpected highlight. The old irony ringing true for all artists it seems that the palette used to the mix the paint is often more interesting than the resulting painting... that unintentional freshness so difficult to recreate. Though Irvin does retain some of that sensitivity to knowing when to not overdo a painting and allow certain colours and shapes space. Arrived as if by magic by anyone who has ever tried to create an abstract painting and been left with a muddy, chaotic over-worked mess. It is harder than it looks.

Kestrel (1981) Acrylic on canvas.  213 x 305

Gesture and the use of movement and action present in these paintings, such as the sweep of yellow across a pane of blue in ‘Kestrel’ (1981) gives extra dynamism to the use of colour, rendering it less static as we attempt to imagine the tool, the movement and body it was attached to that created those marks, Irvin was known for using ‘improvised squeegees’ and decorating brushes. In the accompanying rooms to this exhibition a collection of paintings from an exhibition at the Tate titled, ‘The New American Painting’ includes a Pollock, De Kooning and Motherwell whose use of action, volume and bold confidence in their approaches to painting inspired Irvin when he went to see the exhibition in 1959. Certainly, the parallels between the Irvin paintings which use a lot of black in them alongside saturated colour, such as ‘Untitled 3’ (mid 1970s) use a similar colour visual language and use of saturation as some of the works by the American painters. These rooms included a collage by Grace Hartigan who I’d previously never heard of and was like a combination of Kurt Schwitters meets Abstract Expressionism.

Untitled 3 (mid 1970s) Acrylic on canvas. 213 x 305

Irvin’s early paintings, also on display (before he used acrylics), done in oils are contrastingly more representational; depicting street scenes, portraits and still-lives. Though they are still very painterly and become increasingly abstract with paint as a medium being applied in different thicknesses, mixed with sand or scrapped and smeared (with influences of Francis Bacon and even a Futurism-style sense of movement in some) being precursors to what lead to the later treatment of paint in this very physical, experimental way. The influence from meeting Cornish artist, Peter Lanyon in Irvin’s early branching out into abstraction are also readily comparable. Lanyon’s birds-eye view mix of abstraction with landscape elements filtering into Irvin’s treatment of painting on the canvas horizontally ‘from-above’.

Untitled 6 (1975) Acrylic on canvas. 178 x 

I remember hearing more than once from different tutors during my art education that, ‘angst is easy’ and that creating art which has the opposite effect and brings a smile or joy to people’s faces is actually quite hard to do. I mostly agree with that and in the same sense I think it can be often easier to criticise art than it can be to see the merit in it or face the difficulty of attempting to understand it when it is easier to dismiss it as being ‘rubbish’. Despite this, Irvin’s paintings aren’t angsty enough for me, personally speaking; they are quite flat and need room to breathe compared to the sumptuousness and intensity of a Howard Hodgkin or scratchy variation of marks in a Peter Lanyon. Yet for the use of colour alone I cannot fail to appreciate the joy they bring.

Albert Irvin and Abstract Expressionism is on at the RWA until March 3^rd 2019

https://shop.rwa.org.uk/collections/events/products/albert-irvin-and-american-abstract-expressionism

Not the destination

“Describing something is like using it -it destroys; the colours wear off, the corners lose their definition, and in the end what’s been described begins to fade, to disappear.” 

I love this quote, for reasons that, in a manner rather paradoxical, will hopefully become clearer as I describe them. The quote is (one of dozens more that caused me to ponder) from Olga Tokarczuk’s InternationalMan Booker Prize winning novel, ‘Flights’. A book I have tried (and always feeling as though I have failed) to successfully describe to people on several occasions, each time, explaining that it is a novel of fragmented parts, fleeting narratives, some of them purely fictional others rooted in fact, told across different times and by different people with many of them taking place or being linked by moments in in-between places, such as airports and train stations. The transitionary spaces we are when nothing is happening or something is waiting to happen -what do people think and do in those moments and in those places? Like eating a bag of pick and mix sweets, each time you reach into the bag you reveal a different flavour, shape or colour to try. However, as the quote from the book itself explains, it seems futile to attempt to summarise the diversity of places, thoughts and ideas in which this book took me. You may totally disagree, no two readers would  read this the same, which is plenty reason itself for giving it a try!

When I am enjoying reading a book, I like to make notes, notes of quotes I find interesting or ideas which resonate with things I have spoken to people about, places I’ve been or other anecdotal connections of a personal nature that mean something. Over the years I have built up a little library of these quotes, many of them are funny, some could be described as quite profound and some are purely incidental but in little ways, they reaffirm what it means to exist, what it means to be me. I found myself doing this a LOT whilst reading ‘Flights’. From a description of an airport as being like its own city, a dialogue about Dark Matter to series of facts listed off the packaging of sanitary pads in which we learn, “The word lethologica describes the state of being unable to recall the word you’re looking for.”

 Afterwards I like to read reviews of what bits other people picked up upon, wondering if others were drawn to the same passages of text as me. A review of the book by Tom McAllister in The Washington Post also picked-up on the quote about ‘describing things’ and I suppose the paradox for me came in the irony of wanting to describe and share why I liked this book, whilst the book itself drawing attention to the notion that sometimes describing does not do a thing/place justice. Ephemerality of the moment or ‘lived experience’ versus the permanence of ‘description’ being a theme alluded to in many of the stories throughout the novel; expectation versus reality. Tokarczuk trained as a psychologist and her experience in this field is drawn-upon in how she captures the thoughts and inner monologues of her characters with analytical, believable honesty. Part of the reason I write this blog is because of the challenge posed in trying to articulate in words, to describe how I feel about art I have seen or experienced. It continues to be something of personal interest. 

The book begins with a narrative about travelling and waiting in airports, in which the narrator's internal monologue recalls a memory about a visit to look at cabinets of curiosities rather than an art gallery. It is a fitting comparison to the construction of the novel's structure (or lack of) being like a cabinet of curiosities; a man searches for his missing family whilst on holiday in Croatia, a woman walks out on her family to live life during the day as a beggar, an anatomist in the 17^th Century dissects his amputated leg, Chopin’s daughter transports his heart from Paris back to Warsaw…It is the sort of book that really does not lend itself well to description as it sounds messy and eclectic. To begin with I wondered if I was reading it correctly, whether I had missed something and as it progressed, I wondered whether I was supposed to understand how it all threaded together or have an inkling to where it may be heading; the fact was I didn’t have a clue! Though I was enjoying the journey and individual pieces of this patchwork tale and I had to learn to let go of my anxiety that I did not grasp the bigger threads or meaning that was happening.

Ropography, we learn, “…is a painting term for the attention the artist pays to trifles and details.” Another reference within the book that mirrors much of what is happening within the book itself and in example echoed in a fantastic chapter towards the end of the book (page 403 in my paperback edition) titled, ‘The Origin of the Species’ in which invading airborne anemones reveals itself to be plastic bags. As an environmental comment it could easily stand alone from the whole book as a separate piece of prose.  It sounds utterly random and banal, which it is, but is beautifully written and intelligently translated from Polish to English by Jennifer Croft. The reader is left to chart and make their own connections to other parts within the book, create their own meanings as they see fit. In this aspect reading this book reminded me a lot of the process of interpreting art and for that reason I enjoyed it immensely. Regular visitors or those familiar with my work will also know that the everyday and banal is something of an ongoing obsession of mine. The descriptions of cadavers and embalming fluids and some of the dark humour of this book may not be to everyone’s taste but it is counterbalanced by the allure for the sense of the whimsical and chaotic unknown, “The things that exist in the shadows of consciousness, and that, when you do take a look, dart out of your field of vision.”

If you only read one book in 2019, make it this!

Flights -Olga Tokarczuk is available to read and buy now at all good libraries and bookshops.