Scissors, paper & glue!

Teachers on a limited materials budget throughout the land rejoice as the variety of things you can do with a sheet of cardboard and bottle of PVA is demonstrated with staggering, inventive aplomb in Michael Beutler's 'Pump House' on show now at Spike Island!



Michael Beutler 'Haus Beutler' (2014/16) Mixed media.

Industrial alongside low budget materials such as paper, string, sticky-tape, cloth, timber and yes, copious amounts of PVA glue are used by Beutler and his team to create large-scale, ambitious and immersive spaces. For his first solo exhibition in a gallery in the UK the German born artist tailors his work to fit the former Tea Factory space that is now Spike Island; here cardboard is rolled, scrunched, wrapped and overlapped to create walls, panels, lights and free-standing architectural forms or prototypes. The resulting work is temporary and bordering between the precarious and surprisingly robust as the limits to how these common-place materials can be recycled and manipulated is inventively explored. Its professional amateurism let loose, in what is the first of what I anticipate to be many more oxymoron’s used to describe what Beutler has achieved in bringing Pump House to Bristol's Spike Island. 

 'Tea Factory' (2016) Card, dye, rope, metal pipes, pulleys.

Cardboard painted tubes in one area of the gallery, titled ‘Tea Factory’ are one example of how play and low-tech experimentation with paper to create structure and form can become vastly transformed when the boundaries of scale and volume are pushed; the throw-away nature of these materials now becomes more sculptural, more weighty and architectural. Are they arches, bridges or Christmas crackers, I'm contentedly uncertain...Walls within ‘Haus Beutler’ (2014/16) become abstract, patch-work quilt like collages, blurring the distinction between abstract surface and structure. All of it is a form of serious or extreme play. I.e. If you could take a humble rag rug or toilet-roll archway/bridge and make another one on a grand scale then it adopts a new sense of purposefulness, celebration of the material properties the materials contain. For example cloth is malleable, can be stained, stretched, scrunched, compacted; it has a tension to it, all of which are properties that in Pump House are adopted into large scale building techniques (the cloth becomes bricks for building).  

It is always refreshing to see art that is fun and walking in and around Pump House feels like being a participant more than a spectator to the work; watching other people inhabit these unusual paper-lined walls feels like being in the art work. As previously alluded to I also like the contradiction of everything in the spaces looking very hand-made and unpolished yet being aware through watching the video pieces (dotted throughout the installation) that it has actually taken a huge amount of team work/effort to create all the stuff in it. It’s a testament to making and the construction and attributes that come with a creative process.

'Haus Beutler' (2014/16) Mixed media. (detail)

I promised myself I wouldn’t write about comparing the work to Phyllida Barlow here; I will not compare Michael Beutler to Phyllida Barlow. I will not compare Michael Beutler to Phyllida Barlow. I will not compare Michael Beutler to Phyllida Barlow....But, I think it is almost impossible not to see similarities between the two artist’s works!!! I’m sorry. Originality being only undetected plagiarism aside, both artists use low-grade materials to create abstract, often unstable looking forms that can be walked in or around by their audience. I think the crucial differences between the two being that Barlow is more of a painter and Beutler is much more context and process driven; the materials often coming from off the site they are built in and thus transformed back into their original environments in an altered state; the central piece in the exhibition alluding to Spike Island’s original use as a tea factory also echoed in the use of tea-bag bricks throughout. The processes of how the components in his installations are made is also often more ingenious than the result and within Pump House a variety of Heath Robinson style contraptions which have been designed to mass-produce walls of wavy, shiney corrugated card are displayed alongside the resulting constructions themselves (and believe me they are quite wacky, but they do the job they were designed for!). I think Beutler wants the audience to know how it’s made and part of the creative challenge is him devising these contraptions made from bits of wood and sticky-tape that enable him to quickly produce larger volumes of surfaces and components to build with.

Humour aside, I was in no way demeaning this exhibition when I called it ‘professional amateurism’ because that is exactly what it is, taking low-tech, low material and transforming it into something new, arguably extraordinary,  which retains the look of a DIY mentality. On a smaller scale these things could be classed as amateur but the installation here is so complex in its variety and volume that it must take a team of organising, planning and professionalism in order to pull it off. It reminds me also of Spartacus Chetwynd, a Turner Prize nominee whose work also sought to challenge the definition of ‘amateur’ within art and critique it as a pure, unpretentious form of creativity rather than as a negative; the perceived ‘lack of skill’ in a work of art is a kind of skill in itself. Beutler’s installation shares some of those ideas I think and possibly may make people consider how we define ‘skill’ and what expectations that creates in terms of how we perceive skill and production within art.

Michael Beutler’s ‘Pump House’ is on at Spike Island Bristol until June 19^th 2016 http://www.spikeisland.org.uk/events/exhibitions/michael-beutler/

 

Look if you like, but you will have to leap

Creativity requires a leap of faith that is not limited necessarily to the making of art, but also in how we approach it or attempt to engage with it. The sentiment comes from the title of this week’s blog post, a line from the Auden poem of the same name, ‘Leap before you look’. As I understood it, the poem, (in the context of first coming across it during my art degree) is about taking risks, having the courage to move forward, indeed even leap into the unknown. For all this 'leaping' we may be rewarded with progress, innovation, revelation or new understanding.

 

Therefore appropriately titled, ‘Leaping the Fence’ the first exhibition in the newly reopened Hestercombe House acknowledges this same conviction of pushing of boundaries and pioneering exploration undergone in the practices of sixteen selected contemporary artists who have contributed to British art over the past thirty years. Although it is also asking its audiences to do the same in challenging their perceptions of what contemporary art is within the context of Hestercombe House and what are already well-established Georgian and Edwardian gardens that would have been groundbreaking in their own way upon their creation.

On Monday 26^th May, I went to have a look at ‘Leaping the fence’ (never really being one to sit comfortably on it).

(pictured left to right) David Batchelor 'Colour Chart Painting 33 (green)', Steve Johnson 'Binoculars (charm no 9), Adam Chodzco 'Untitled stile (teenage version)'

 

It should come as no surprise to find that there are a significant number of works in the exhibition which are distinctly garden and/or landscape themed. Perhaps the title of the exhibition inspired from Adam Chodzko’s turquoise glossed stile (pictured) that stands proudly, mixture between kitsch piece of aerobics equipment and ‘pimped-up’ take on the familiar countryside hurdle. It is a fence of sorts but sadly, despite the temptation, not for leaping over, at least not literally. The theme continues in what, joy for me, is Gavin Turk’s ‘Desert Island Scenario’ (pictured) a mahogany carved spade. Likened to Duchamp’s similarly conceptual ‘In advance of the broken arm’ whereby the authorship of the object is questioned, Turk takes the debate one step further by crafting his ‘ready-made’.

Gavin Turk 'Desert Island Scenario' (2003) Mahogany, 8 x 103 x 19.5cm.

Another tool-based piece in the exhibition that appealed to me (in the sense that it is probably the one I would most like to draw-and probably will) is Mark Hosking’s ‘Untitled (Lowland Rice) two steel sculptures that appear to be utilitarian pieces of farm machinery in bright red (pictured) and sage green. They appear at first like two abstract Anthony Caro works, their forms reminiscent in my view, of the late artists balancing/minimalist sculptures. In this sense the work operates on two planes, being sculptural for their form, colour and context but in also having a functionality that the artist has created from a United Nations pamphlet on sustainable development and survivalist technology. I’m not entirely sure what these contraptions are actually for, some sort of digging/sowing, I assume but am more interested in their ambiguity. In past discussions about tools and their uses, I’ve often found that the more interesting tools both visually and conceptually are the ones which cannot be easily defined in their use and/or being classified as a tool. The ambiguity of the objects imbues them with more potential than if their exact purpose is known. In Hosking’s work does this duality as art object and functional one help us, as stated by the catalogue, ‘question the clash between contemporary art and reality of life for large parts of the world’s population’?  Perhaps, it goes someway to doing so, but I find it harder to escape its reality as an art object more than its connotation to the wider world of farming/survival. Man’s relationship with the earth is explored deeper (literally) in Tania Kovats sculpture ‘Sunk’ and in Janice Kerbell’s social/scientific digital drawings garden design is determined by the climatic, architectural and functional conditions of a range of indoor environments. In an adjacent room, Marc Quinn presents a series of prints of frozen gardens of plants which would never grow together naturally. 

Mark Hosking 'Untitiled (Lowland Rice)' (1998) Steel and paint, variable.

The exhibition also features painting by Clare Woods, sound installation by Susan Philipsz and film from Spartacus Chetwynd and Mark Wallinger (the Chetwynd film being the stronger of the two for me). Did I mention Tracy Emin is in this show too? Well, her work’s here and maybe lends a certain amount of popularity and recognisability along with the shows’ other five Turner Prize nominated/winning artists, but other than that her neon poems/phrases, like the one featured in this show don’t do a lot for me personally (I think I find them too obvious) however I do not doubt will appeal to some. No stranger to this blog we also see a painting by David Batchelor whose green gloss blob has seemingly inspired a similar green arc filling the top floor of the gallery windows. It’s an impressive sight when you come down the stairs or driveway to the front of the house (pictured) that reaffirms that something new, lively and fun inhabits within. Largely, the exhibition is well placed with the different rooms each giving their own atmosphere/context to the work. It particularly works well in the case of Bill Woodrow’s ‘Clockswarm’, a cast bronze in the shape of a mantel piece clock of a swarm of bees which sits as though it were built for the space on the fireplace opposite Ruth Claxton’s sculpture featuring, possibly what could be a bee-eating bird. Mark Nelson’s installation ‘Taylor’ (pictured) also works well in the building completely filling the room on the ground-floor. A raft of barrels tied (expertly!) together with rope supports a small tent and supplies for a journey. Where is it going? I’m drawing up my own recollections of the recent floods on the levels...Nelson is best known for his labyrinthine installations, ‘Coral Reef’ shown at the Tate in 2000 being among one of the most ambitious, disorientating and filmic pieces I have seen. ‘Taylor’ similarly has filmic connotations referencing the character, George Taylor from ‘Planet of the Apes’ who tries to escape upon a raft in vain. This work was site specific to Liverpool as one of the last centres for the British slave trade and references the political plight of refugees from Haiti and Cuba.

Mike Nelson 'Taylor' (1994) Metal, canvas, wood and mixed media, 250 x 336 x 456cm.

To ‘art tarts’ (so I’ve been told!) like me, then this exhibition will come as a shining example at a time of great losses in contemporary arts in Taunton and is therefore a glimmer of hope for the future. It deserves every success and is a delight to be able to enjoy and see these works on my doorstep. To the unconverted, undoubtedly there will be those who come to Hestercombe with more traditional expectations of painted landscapes, flowers and botany. To those ends you are probably best suited to looking at the gardens, but if are willing to not just look, but to leap into embracing or attempting to understand something new, something challenging, something difficult then you will be rewarded with an experience that is every bit as colourful but in many ways more, joyous and contemplative as the gardens themselves.

It is also a refreshing reminder that regarding creativity, sitting on the fence is a good vantage point but it also stops us from moving forward. This proves that it sometimes pays to do away with the fence altogether and venture into the unknown. Let's hope art at Hestercombe continues to do so. 

 

'Leaping the Fence' is on at Hestercombe Gallery until 14th September 2014.

http://www.hestercombe.com/your-visit/gallery