May contain spoilers!

So I made the fatal mistake of reading a review of the Richard Hamilton retrospective at Tate Modern prior to seeing it. ‘No big deal’, you say but in the age of twitter and instant access news it’s difficult to read any book,  walk into any film or exhibition without some preconception of what to expect. We’ve lost the element of surprise. You’ve seen most of the film in the trailer, read the book, downloaded the soundtrack often before you’ve even sat down in the theatre. And of course, whilst a certain amount of ‘knowing what you’re in for’ is important in giving you a reason to be there, it’s also kind-of sad that there is less surprise, shock or mystery to so many of these experiences. In terms of art, a little ignorance goes a long way (albeit if it’s met equally with the desire to learn). Anyway, what I’m getting at is the difficulty of forming an individual opinion, thoughts and ideas on an exhibition or to experience it open-mindedly if you’ve already read too much about it elsewhere. And does popularity in the form of reviews lead to a consensus that something is ‘good’? Appropriately for a retrospective centred on a Pop Artist it becomes a debate on quality in relation to popularity. Do our parameters of judgement change if we know the thing we are critiquing is deemed popular?

'Just what is it about today's homes that makes them so  different, so appealing?' -1956 Collage

This of course just my opinion, perhaps I’m too easily influenced by what I read instead of using it as a counterpoint to make my own conclusions but I still cannot help but enjoy seeing an exhibition that I’ve only  been drawn to by the title, knowing nothing of what artists/works to expect. The flip-side to all this, is how the internet, reviews, sharing and ironically, even blogging, opens art up to an even bigger audience that includes people who go to exhibitions all the time and those who may be considering to go perhaps for the first time. Wonderful, and how else are you going to hear about an exhibition other than a review, mailing list or advert/poster that could well be online or on someone’s Facebook page? Still, I’d say every once and a while read a book, see a film, visit an exhibition on as little information you can, find out the bare minimum of something that pries your interest and go for it blindly. It’s really hard to do.

If you’ve read this far already then maybe you’re interested in hearing a bit more about the Hamilton retrospective at the Tate, but I’d suggest that if you’re planning on going to see it anytime soon, then read no further! Those of you who’ve already been or perhaps not interested in going at all (why wouldn’t you be?) then allow me to continue...

'Transition IIII' -1954 Oil on panel.

As I said, I read the review so I already knew that Laura Cumming from the Observer thinks that this retrospective has too much in it and should have been edited down more. Reluctantly, for reasons mentioned above, I am inclined to agree and ponder; does a retrospective have to include absolutely everything to be a retrospective? Should the Tate ever decide to honour my passing with a retrospective of my own work, I’d be horrified to think they’d put everything I’d ever made in, thinking of the hand drawings I did at A-level for example. Not that they were particularly bad or good, but more that they wouldn’t be relevant, I never came back to hands since and it had no influence stylistically on my later work...or so I’d say...The same goes for Hamilton, did I really need to see half a gallery dedicated to his turd drawings against a sunset, when one would have been enough to get the point across? The amount of work shown was incredibly comprehensive, Hamilton was a prolific maker and evidently, from what I just mentioned, with an excellent sense of humour. That humour now comes across as more subtle than I assume the reaction it would have had in the 60’s when some of the more political pieces were more prevalent. From the collage and precursor to Brit Pop, ‘Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing’ (pictured) to the reconstructed Duchamp’s Large glass and photorealist styles of ‘The citizen/the subject/the state’, Hamilton’s work spanned several decades of vast changes in technology and the rise of mass-market consumerism which he explored and utilized in his work. In fact, Hamilton’s art career could best be described like a collage, he explored and collected a variety of different components, images, fragments, techniques that all seem slightly different but come together as often reassembled re-edited and reconfigured works commenting with wit and humour on elements of consumerism, politics, fame, design and advertising. Instead of focusing on the breadth of his entire career this post will focus on the particular work that resonated with me and present some usual commentary as to why that is.



'Towards a definitive statement on the coming trends in menswear and accessories (a) "Together let us explore the stars" -1962 Oil and collage on panel.

For me, the stars of the show are the Pop paintings from 1957-1963 where combined images of cars, machines, appliances and people are composed with abstract mark making, signs and symbols. The canvases are left fairly neutral and almost minimal in their whiteness and use of space. Onto these surfaces cars, radios are half-painted/half-sketched so only an outline or trace of the object can be seen. What is revealed is small, stylistically detailed and rendered sections that hint the edge of a car’s bumper, a tap, a shoulder, before disappearing. They’re paintings that explore the way we read representational images in art by offering a ‘dot to dot’ of an object instead of presenting the whole package. This also makes them quite painterly as elements of realism sit alongside gesture, surface and form. Although their flatness remains and ties them into the realms of graphics/advertising, again in-keeping with the era they were created. Interestingly, for me, they all have a limited colour palette, fairly neutral in tone and on a personal level I am curious as to why I am drawn to this in both my own and other’s work (think Jim Dine’s prints for example)? Is it because the beige/off-white background is reminiscent of paper or vellum, which has an association of drawing and primed-ness/workings-out to it that appeals to my love of drawing? It’s interesting and something I need to give further thought to.

'Reaper' - 1949 Drypoint

In one of the opening rooms to Hamilton’s retrospective a series of prints are shown from his days as a student at the Slade, 1949-1951, they’re semi-abstract etchings of reapers and ploughs, titled ‘Variations on the theme of reaper’. Aside from my obvious delight at seeing a tool-related theme, these etchings were an interesting insight into the aforementioned Pop paintings due to their approach of deconstruction and reconstruction. It was apparent in these early prints that Hamilton was interested in figuring-out how things worked and reimagining them particularly within design and form. This same deconstructing can be seen in Hamilton’s obsession with Duchamp, Dada and reconstructing ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even’ but also in the Pop paintings under discussion here where aspects of the form/design of the car as object is played upon against the natural curves and design of people’s bodies or faces. In fact in some cases the two almost appear to fuse together perhaps also alluding to or signifying the growing ‘need’ and relationship that was prevalent at the time between people and the objects they possess that ‘become’ and/or form their identity.

'Hommage a Chrysler Corp' -1957 Oil, metal foil and collage on panel.

As a student I longed to see these paintings in real life, having spent many an evening squinting over often small or low resolution images in books as I made desperate attempts to replicate and understand them. Hamilton was a great maker of images, the flat and 2-Dimensional, the static, the one-liner, they are qualities I have been able to relate to in my own working methods. What a delight it was to finally see these paintings in-the-flesh, reaffirming the things that I enjoyed about them whilst showing me a closer view at their surfaces and colours that I was previously unable to see. The rewarding thing about this retrospective as a whole was making connections through seeing how his early work influenced the latter. Its also in some ways quite reassuring as it means I may never escape from tools or A-level hands for that matter as my concerns with those things will develop and lead to the themes of future work. I may be reluctant or unaware to notice it at the time but retrospectively it’s all connected.

Kurt Schwitters - What a load of rubbish!

A couple of weeks ago I visited the exhibition, ‘Schwitters in Britain’ at the Tate Britain [catch it if you can, it’s on until the 12^th of May]. Previously I’ve been lucky enough to view one or two of Schwitters’ collages and mixed-media works in collections in modern art galleries throughout Europe; every time seeing one of his ‘jewel-like’, multi-layered, aged, delicate and weathered creations and thinking, ‘I’d love to see a collection of his work someday.’   Then on Tuesday 9^th April, that day finally came!

 

Here are a few of my thoughts...

 

 Initially I was surprised by the scale of most of his work, a lot smaller than I had thought, but soon got distracted into the intensity of colours, painterly compositions and shapes, structures and forms. After keeping my ‘drawing a day’ diary for four months now, I am beginning to realise just what sort of things, specifically, that I find aesthetically appealing. Objects with a strong sense of form, shape, design particularly being favoured over those with more ephemeral, less tangible outlines and structure. For example, I think if I was asked to draw ‘light’ I would want to depict it as quite solid shafts and lines as to depicting its softness or affects of light hitting the edges/surfaces of other objects. I digress from Schwitters, but the point here being, that the structure and content of his work is what appeals to me most; the shapes created from his overlapping scrapes of paper as to the actual colour and textures of the paper itself. Schwitters described the use of objects/found-materials in his work as, ‘having equal rights with paint’, which I think echoes a little bit of what I said previously that the structure and content of the work is made from the objects within it acting in a similar way to how paint is normally used to create structure and content.

 

 ‘Anything with a stone’ - This reminds me of Kandinsky’s painting ‘Red, yellow, blue’.

 

It would be easy to make comparisons of Schwitters’ work to Picasso’s early collages so I’m simply going to mention it and then move swiftly on because it is the influence that Schwitters had on his predecessors that is actually a lot more interesting. With Schwitters’ deployment of the theory of Merz as, ‘essentially the combination of all conceivable materials for artistic purposes’ in his art; another crucial stepping stone was laid on the path towards ‘the everyday’ in an ‘as’ art. Influences of which can be seen in Pop Art particularly Richard Hamilton, Rauschenberg and Daniel Spoerri. Consequently, the more I think work I see by artists who were part of Dada (Schwitters, Duchamp, Man Ray etc) the more clearly I can see how much of what they did fed into what later became Pop Art. Pop Art being the more commercial, glossy mass produced younger sibling of Dada but still with its same values of the everyday, play and experimentation with ‘what is art?’ at its core.

 

 There’s a feeling of nostalgia with Schwitters’ work, apart from literally looking worn, stained and aged the colours, textures and patterns in the work feel old-fashioned. They remind me of wooden toys, fairground games or pub signs whose paint is beginning to chip, fade and peel off. The piece titled, ‘Merz Picture 46 A. The Skittle Picture’ does actually comprise itself of wooden playing pieces in a box frame composition and look like the leftovers from some battered old pub game. Play, of course being a factor in the making of Schwitters’ work as, to some extent, must have been an element of chance; after all most of the materials used in his collages were scrapes and throw-away objects. Part of me wonders if this is simply because the content within the collages is itself now old (sweet wrappers, bus tickets, newspapers, metal, feathers etc) and I wonder if they felt as ‘aged’ at the time they were created? A modern-day Schwitters collage would be drastically more intense in its colour palette, textures and surfaces due to the wide selection of materials, glossy papers and printing inks that are commonplace today. Or, perhaps more than likely, he wouldn’t be doing collage from paper scrapes but taking on digital mediums and left overs/waste? Collage from the content not of our bins but our computers recycle bins?! Modern-day Merz.

 

There were elements to this exhibition that felt a little bit empty, that it was all a little bit ‘nice’ and I wanted to be challenged a bit more, made to think, which the installation of the ‘Merz Barn’ (large scale plaster sculptural works comprising of found objects that filled rooms and created immersive environments for the viewer) did go some way in challenging my expectations as did a surreal performance piece called ‘Ursonate’ but perhaps I was looking for something more, but not really knowing what that was. Neither was I particularly a fond of his free standing sculptures made from stone, wood or bone and plaster. That’s of course completely subjective and it is good to see the other sides to Schwitters’ practice, but they only acted as additions to the painted and collage work which were really the stars of the show and completely captivated my attention. 

 

'En Morn'

 

Equally I was so busy looking at work didn’t pay too much heed to context that the work was made in, for example Schwitters’ time during the war exiled from Germany to be interned on the Isle of Man to his involvement in London art scene and influences that the Lake District had on his work up until his death in 1948. It seems that despite the amount of art I subject myself to seeing that I never really take as much attention and enthusiasm to understanding the context surrounding the work. Retrospectively, I did find something interesting in the way in which Schwitters’ collages made during his time living in the Lake District used more organic and natural found materials in his collages than when he was living in London where the work took on a more urban feel, but I think maybe I would have noticed these differences eventually anyway without having known when/where they were made. I feel the same way about music and that really I am only interested greatly in the music itself and very rarely if at all know anything about the band/artist that produce it. Does it change how I feel about the music if I know the lead singer’s favourite colour is blue? Or that they used to be a furniture maker?  Would Schwitters’ have minded if I sort-of ignorantly, if unintentionally, paid no attention to his life and situation he found himself in during his time in Britain? Or maybe that would have been just what he intended, he himself stating, ‘The picture is a self-sufficient work of art. It is not connected to anything outside.’ With that in mind I’ll leave it for you to decide whether I made the right decision upon seeing, ‘Schwitters in Britain’ in noticing less of the ‘Britain’ part and instead  focusing more on the ‘Schwitters’.

Images from:

http://www.tate.org.uk
http://www.southwillard.com/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Distinct lack of snakes in an exhibition of ladders at The Brewhouse...

Ladders, ladders everywhere you look. Hmmm...I think it’s fair to say there is a clear theme in Andy Davey’s exhibition currently on at The Brewhouse! The show features over 30 mixed media drawings, three massive paintings as well as several actual ladders on the wall – if merely looking at a ladder gives you feelings of vertigo then look away now!

 

As a fellow artist whose own work features agricultural and hand tools, I can understand how easy it is to become obsessed with drawing/and re-drawing the seemingly mundane. The simple fact of the matter is, the more you spend time looking at these objects [ladders/tools] the more reason you find to be fascinated by them. Initially for me, it was the formal qualities of tools that appealed to me; their shape, texture, colour and surfaces were something I wanted to make art about. My ‘relationship’ with tools in my own work later gained greater significance as I developed my practice and began to question it more whilst studying. With Davey’s drawings [some of which more fragmented and abstract than others] I get the impression that it is also the formal qualities of, in this case, ladders that is the basis for his work. The negative shapes and spaces in and around the ladder are deconstructed and reassembled amongst the (also fragmented) forms of the ladder itself.

Part of me did wonder if maybe Andy starts these drawings by chopping up an actual ladder and sticking it back together. Regardless of the exact process he may use the results are exciting, dynamic and lively compositions that almost quiver with a sense of movement and rhythm more familiar to the design of jazz posters than a ladder. These kinds of work, I anticipate, possibly leave your average viewer thinking, ‘What? That’s a ladder?!’ Who ever knew that the humble ladder could be so dynamic! Despite the places my work has taken me, what has always appealed to me about art has always been the same and that’s arts ability to give new perspective on things that we know well/are familiar with. So it is very refreshing to be reminded of this in Davey’s exhibition of work.

 

If anything the exhibition isn’t really about ladders at all, it’s about drawing and as the title suggests, ‘work’ and ‘surface’ which Davey has done even to the extent of drawing on the gallery walls themselves! The painted surfaces are layered, dragged and scrapped through revealing and disguising the structure of the ladder in the work so despite the dominance of the ladder as a ‘grid-like’ structure the work doesn’t look as geometric and slick as you might expect. They are much more gestural and expressive with the ladder often emerging out of a cloud-like vapour. Yet despite all the symbolism that the ladder and the cloud-like forms in some of the drawings could suggest I don’t, personally, read too much into them metaphorically. They could quite easily become, ladders to heaven, ladders to earth, Jacob’s ladder and many other sorts of associations (and maybe to some people they do) but for me they are more formal than that, a more compositional thing used to create an image/mark making/expressive. Who knows? Maybe they have personal significance or attachment to Andy, we’ll find out at the artist’s talk on February 6^th (see note below). I find myself making links between Davey’s drawings and the work of,  Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers and Richard Hamilton’s paintings all of whom have depicted objects in their work but they’re [the objects] are always a kind of trace of the whole thing and it’s often not entirely clear what you are looking at. I prefer Andy’s more black and white drawings, as I’m not so keen on some of the colour combinations on some of the coloured works –which could just be down to a matter of taste. I’d like to know how he does choose his colours, a question I will save for Wednesday 6^th. The only other thing was that I wouldn’t have minded a ladder of my own so I could see some of the drawings close up as they are hung high (mostly because there are so many and the hanging also mimics the height of the actual ladder on the adjacent wall) but then maybe I just need grow taller!

 Andy Davey’s, ‘Work : Surface’ can be seen at The Brewhouse until, February 23^rd. Or come along on Wednesday 6^th February to an artist’s talk, with the artist himself! More details can be found on:

http://www.thebrewhouse.net/exhibitions/1483/work-surface