Divine

'the diviner' 2018

In every sense of the word (and for reasons that will also hopefully become clear) Helen Sear’s exhibition which opened last Friday at Hestercombe Gallery, is divine. Least alone because the show opens with her most recent photographic work, titled ‘The Diviner’ (2018) spectacularly displayed on the gallery’s nineteenth century staircase [pictured]. An epically-sized series of three prints of willow trees taken over two years chronicled as their roots grew and dried with the rising and falling of the water where they grew. Their roots adorned by the artist, with flowers to denote their likeness to skirts; a fitting tribute, in the absence of any actual period-dressed skirted ladies, to the grandeur of Hestercombe’s ballroom-like setting. Many proms, in-fact my own having taken place here some years ago (though I never recall myself or anyone else wearing anything that quite matches the scale that Sear’s tree-skirts convey)! The trees divine water through their roots and mirror-image both their workings above as below, intentionally or not, allude an interesting insight into the dual-nature of Sear’s work depicting her subject matter through multiple viewpoints,  the known and the unknown, both here rendered visible. Its subject matter, scale and situ within the gallery, along with its use of colour and play of illusion through mirror-imagery really set the tone for the other visually intriguing and intellectually beguiling works exhibited. 

“Sear has always, it seems, been interested in looking with, looking round and looking through as she is in looking at.”

'stack' 2015

Sitting on the periphery between photography and fine art the works on show in ‘prospect refuge’ are united in being influenced by Sear’s interest in nature and our 'human/animal relationships within it'. The title of the show influenced by a concept from natural history writer, Jay Appleton whose concept of ‘prospect refuge’ states, ‘the perceived beauty of a landscape is directly linked to human survival’. Personally speaking, I am unsure if the images I see consciously trigger thoughts of survival, though I do find many of the stills from Sear’s film-based pieces, with their strong use of colour and focus on textures (a curtain, a net, light through trees) to be beautiful in an aesthetic sense. Maybe much of what we know of 'survival' in relation to the natural landscape has been lost or is now only ingrained in our subconscious? I am unsure, but this psychological-edge to the work creates a double-take in how it is perceived by the viewer. The film/sound piece ‘wahaha biota’ (2018) made for The Forestry Commission England that shows the planting and processing of trees is an example of how Sear’s work creates a sense of intrigue and beauty through green-filtered scenes of meadows and dappled forests in contrast to the isolation and strange sounds that also give these places an edge of being dark, primal and slightly foreboding. Though the overall impression I get is that for what is mostly an exhibition using photography it is surprising just how painterly, immersive and in some cases sculptural the images are. 

The exhibition features photographic and film-based works from 2015 onwards with the implied cross-over between sculpture and photography being an idea that the artist herself acknowledges within one of the first pieces you encounter in the gallery. Titled ‘Stack’, [pictured above] a pile of stacked logs is displayed on a large scale, which in-turn is also physically sliced and stacked vertically as an image along the gallery wall forming a visual blockade that is physically felt as well as seen,

‘a meeting of photography and sculpture, or treating the photographic image as sculptural,...’

In a visual-sense these logs are a series of cylinders piled onto one another, but it also raises feelings of deforestation, man's relationship with the forest, ideas of the homestead and stacking logs used for fires and so on. The doubling-up of the captured-moment of an image of stacked logs versus the stacking of the physical image itself calls into question the visual play between illusion and perception.  A theme explored across a number of Sear’s works from when she exhibited in the Welsh pavilion in the Venice Biennale in 2015. 

'...caetera fumus' 2015  

One of several pieces from the Venice Biennale exhibited at Hestercombe, titled ‘...caetera fumus’ reads almost like a transcription of the original painting of St Sebastian [1490] it was inspired from by Andrea Mantegna.  Instead of a figure the landscape becomes the protagonist, a bright yellow field in contrast to red twigs become symbols for blooded arrows and a light-box becomes a modern-day interpretation of creating a glaze in paint and almost celestial-like luminosity associated with religious imagery. In the same room, the curation of the quote, ‘Nihil nisi divinum stabile est. Caetera fumus’ [which translates as ‘Nothing is stable if not divine, the rest is smoke’] displayed, in my mind rather wittily, above the fireplace and refers to the impermanence of all things. I am fortunate to have seen these works before in Venice where the context of this work was closely tied to the building it was shown in, however, I feel that the work has more autonomy in the context of Hestercombe away from the heat and saturation of art in Venice where it can be contemplated quietly and more fully than I allowed time for previously. 

Colour and the reference to painting (as we have already had with sculpture) are also present in another series of photographs called ‘brand 1’ and ‘brand 2’. You could almost take these images on first glance to be paintings, stains or rubbings. 

“My use of colour is also to do with a convergence of the synthetic and the natural, using heightened colour to explore relationships between light and pigment, painting and photography.”

I think they are a photograph of a marking on a tree, but for me the uncertainty and place it fits between being photo and non-photo, is it a documentation of a moment in time or is it merely an image? Are these colours natural or manmade, real or unreal? Are questions what make these and many of Sear’s images worth revisiting.

“Her process of production often suggest a series of veils or membranes that may be alternately piled up and peeled away...Rather than merely giving us the world, or giving us to it, the photographic act is an overlayering , of times and places, signs and sensations.”

'the beginning and the end of things' 2015

The projection piece, shown on the floor ‘the beginning and the end of things’ (2015) is another example where our sense of perception is skewed and how Sear adapts her medium of film and photography to create something that (like ‘Stack’) her audience almost 'physically' encounters rather than merely 'looks-at', as one tries to work out what this unfamiliar amoeba-like changing coloured thing is. Her work has been linked to ideas within Surrealism and I can see why within this work particularly as it conveys an ever-changing puddle within which the trees and sky are reflected but at the same time are an illusion of the real-thing, an Alice in Wonderland-like portal to another world... It is real and unreal at the same time, uncanny, slightly trippy and strange but oddly also more engaging because of those things than had it been static or on the wall. Once again there is also something very painterly/impressionistic in its fluidity. It is not the only piece in the exhibition either where Sear combines new technology along with nature/natural images drones are used in the film piece, 'moments of capture' (2016).

There is more to be seen in this exhibition than I have referred to here in what is also worth noting is Sear's first solo show but second time exhibiting at Hestercombe, having shown work in 2015's 'Double Take'. Then as now, I feel that her use of colour, modes of display and references to painting/fine art is more exciting, inventive and engaging than I have felt about a lot of photography as a medium previously. It is great to have that perception challenged as it is also worth reiterating how great it is to see these works on my doorstep and I would encourage others to do the same. 

Helen Sear’s 'prospect refuge hazard 2' is on at Hestercombe Gallery until October 28^th

https://www.hestercombe.com/event/prospect-refuge-hazard-2-by-helen-sear/

Quotes sourced from: Drake, D (2015) Helen Sear: ...the rest is smoke, Ffotogallery Wales Limited: Cardiff 

Deep Purple

It would be both wonderful and daunting at the same time to have access to the amounts of archive footage and hand-directed footage that John Akomfrah has to wield with for creating his multiple screen-based works. Selecting, cutting and editing together their sound and time becomes a collage of multiple moving images and stories that are testament to the role of the director as both artist and editor. The Russian film director, Tarkovsky described filmmaking as ‘sculpting in time’ and every opportunity when I experience seeing Akomfrah’s work, that is almost certainly the impression one gets! A point I have mentioned here on this blog before, click here. I'll never get tired of it, it's a great analogy that highlights the often hidden or unnoticed role of the filmmaker who is responsible for both the physical and metal process of editing with the illusionary concept of time when it is captured on film.

It would be safe to assume that I am a fan of film and Akomfrah’s work, his films are incredibly well crafted technically and hold a conscious and visual resonance that retains attention and holds in your memory long after experiencing them. Even more amazingly, his films are almost always shown in places where they can be experienced for free! On this occasion I discovered his latest work, ‘Purple’ [2017] at The Barbican in London completely by chance. Featuring archive footage, footage shot across ten countries and shown across six screens simultaneously, ‘Purple’ at approx. and hour long and told over six movements is as complex visually, audially and conceptually as it is momentous. ‘Purple’ ambitiously expands upon ideas of global environmental concern touched briefly upon in Akomfrah’s previous work, ‘Vertigo Sea’ [2016] where now ideas of; ‘planetary relationality and rendering our mutual ecological devastation, both recent past and present’ are presented through histories of human progression from birth to death; the steam engine to artificial intelligence, nuclear power, medicine and more. Something I later find out is called the Anthropocene, which loosely refers to the, “proposed epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on the Earth's geology and ecosystems”. Armed with that knowledge it is easier to understand, for example why ‘Purple’ includes references to the atom bomb, for example of a human impact on radiation in soil. It isn’t all cheery stuff, nearly every human development features a knock-on negative impact for what it does to the planet, but it is incredibly moving and has moments of great beauty that enforce a message of the cruciality of how we arrived at our current situation and the importance of realising how we will continue to have an impact on the environment unless we change as well as what we possibly stand to lose. It does so without being too preachy in its tone; science and industry are referenced in a way that both highlights how humankind has progressed without commenting on whether for good or bad but calls upon a sense of collective responsibility for how those developments have led to further ways/means (such as war) which in-turn have blighted or poisoned our landscapes. I would go as far to say that one couldn’t after watching it all, leave without feeling something! 

In her essay on John Akomfrah’s ‘Purple’ being shown at The Barbican in London, Professor in Cinema Studies, Kass Banning alludes to the title of the work with lines from Jimi Hendrix’s song ‘Purple Haze’. Though the two aren’t deliberately related, it is a fantastically apt observation and conicidence to make the relationship between the lyric in Purple Haze, “Is it tomorrow, or just the end of time.” with the sense of urgency versus deferred responsibility. 

At whatever point the viewer enters this work they are at once assaulted with a wealth of visually stunning or arresting images that both accentuates the scale and sense of helplessness or global unity (depending on how you want to interpret it) the deeper references only begin to become more processable after spending some time with the work. Some screens show slow sustained shots of people standing transfixed by some unknown cause gazing or contemplating meditatively outwards into the landscape threatened by an impending man-made ecological disaster; a familiar motif in Akomfrah’s work that helps create a sense of contemplation and stillness to the otherwise emotive imagery being shown on other screens. It is also a reference that the artist states, to the German painter, Caspar David Friedrich who was amongst the first to place the single figure into the landscape giving Man a greater sense of connection or wider sense of totality and the sublime to the environment, “Romantic subject of man with a capital ‘M’ had the ability to access the world in the absence of the Almighty”. In that way aspects of faith, science and humanities relationship with the environment are intrinsically linked in this work.

Elsewhere waves undulate, huskies pull a sleigh, jellyfish float in peaceful green seas like translucent slices of cucumber, dancers perform in films by Ken Russell, a man undergoes hypnosis, bicycles are made in factories and ridden around English industrialised streets of the 1940s, cattle and chickens are farmed, ‘worker-bee-like office workers dash around in frenzied formation’, storms rage and stillness reigns over seas. It is an insane list of imagery that does it no favours describing it all here, but whose juxtaposition curated against quotes from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem ‘In Memoriam AHH’ [1849], shots of people and water flowing (a metaphor for the passing of time and also reference to the melting of polar icecaps) across photographs alludes to the temporary nature and flux of our own lives as individuals on the planet and the bigger picture of us as a species. [Coincidently, the title 'Purple' referring to the purple colouring used to dye the running water, possibly significant of pollution/toxicity, is a reference to the vertigo of his other film, 'Vertigo Sea' and is also a colour present in many of the shots.] The locations of trees, mountain-scapes and vast fields overshadowed by cooling-towers or used tyres or cannisters is both sickeningly overwhelming as it is beautiful. As Akmofrah himself states, “You can’t watch Mirror (1975) by Andrei Tarkovsky without being aware that this is a project trying to deal with really uncomfortable stuff. You find out later that it’s about his father leaving his mother to go fight in the Second World War and people making enormous sacrifices. The difficulty lies precisely at the junction between something that is incredibly beautiful to you and absolutely terrifying at the same time.” In that way it reminds me of the documentary films by Chilean director Patricio Guzmán, whose films ‘The Pearl Button’ [2015] and ‘Nostalgia for the Light’ [2010] or ‘Behemoth’ [2015] about the Chinese coal industry who both use literary references, poetic metaphor and visuals to frame the difficult and shocking revelations made in the work as a documentary. It would be impossible not to reference Godfrey Reggio’s ‘Koyaanisqatsi’ [1982] whose footage of global phenomena focusing on nature, humanity and the relationship between them to which Akmofrah’s work feels like a continuation of or reminder for the current generation that these issues are still relevant if not more so than ever.

John Akomfrah’s ‘Purple’ is on for FREE at The Curve, Barbican Centre until January 7^th 2018 https://www.barbican.org.uk/john-akomfrah-purple

Hidden Depths of Vertigo Sea

http://spannerintheworkz.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/hidden-depths-of-vertigo-sea.html

*Quotes and text used from the Barbican Publication accompanying this exhibition with essay by Kass Banning and interview with John Akomfrah by Ekow Eshun [2017].

**Images from https://tankmagazine.com/tank/2017/10/john-akomfrah/ , https://www.cornerhousepublications.org/publications/john-akomfrah-purple/  and  https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2017/event/john-akomfrah-purple

The Lazy Reality

A couple of weeks ago in a lazy evening of television channel hopping boredom I stumbled across a documentary about the life and work of Japanese born artist, Yayoi Kusama (1929) on BBC4. Kusama, now eighty-five years old continues make work at a prolific rate, obsessively exploring her use of brightly coloured polka dots that swamp, multiply and create the surfaces of her paintings, installations and sculptures . After the documentary had finished the BBC also showed a video piece Kusama made in 1967 titled ‘Kusama’s Self Obliteration’. The film, running at approx twenty-five minutes is a psychedelic, (in every sense of the word) colourful, trippy, fragmented and experimental documentation of the artist as she paints polka dots on animals, people and plants in uniquely created/painted/lit environments also made by Kusama. Perhaps more unusual than the film itself however, was that I watched it in its entirety and from my living room. Yes, it is a sad, sad, lazy but true reality that I am useless at watching video art as I don’t often have the patience to watch it in a gallery even despite having a love of film (in the cinema sense). So I was interested how I felt more willing, more open to watching Kusama’s film because of the lazy convenience and relaxed familiarity of watching it on TV. Does that really matter? Is it better to see a film at all than only see it only in a particular context? And so this post isn’t really about Kusama or that film in particular, but is more of a confession, discussion and question of how and where we view video art in general.

 

Can video art be viewed outside the context of the gallery and in doing so does it cease to be art?

 

It’s an uncomfortable confession because there is a kind of snobbery, a ‘dumbing down’ by watching ‘art’ on TV as to a gallery as though some of the quality, the importance and authority of the gallery is lost when the work is shown on TV, which unsettles the fuzzy familiar experience of mainstream entertainment or information programmes. I’ll admit this self consciousness sounds slightly ridiculous but does raise some interesting debates on how context definitely alters not only how we view the work, in terms of time spent (because at home I’m watching Kusama’s film in the comfort of my sofa in my pyjamas) but also alters what the piece means by having it presented on the censored public serving corporation that is the BBC.  On one side the eager to please, usually politically correctness of public service broadcasting on the other the anti-establishment, radical and challenging tone of modern art and modern art galleries. The two in many ways don’t, in a natural or all too obvious way, fit together.  The censorship and risk-taking of galleries being different to that of the more tightly regulated world of British broadcasting...or so I assume? So it’s very interesting that maybe now the piece is 51 years old that the BBC thinks the public are now art conscious enough to be ready for the experience of a young Japanese woman painting polka dots on naked men and horses (and rightly so albeit better late than never). Maybe more contemporary video art should be shown on television? Would it be allowed? Had the Kusama video not been shown in context to the documentary that proceeded it would it have ever been shown at all? Equally, I wonder what would happen if the BBC decided to show a still of a Hans Holbein, Constable or Van Eyck painting for twenty-five minutes?

 

 I had the opportunity to see this same Kusama film in a gallery when I went to the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the Tate Modern two years ago and spent ages looking at the subtle layering of her infinity net paintings and immersive polka dot filled installations but gave little attention to this same film in the context of the gallery installation because (as often) I felt too impatient and excited by seeing all the other work on offer. There are many unspoken anxieties involved in the process of viewing art and one of them is the assumption that having studied art I must automatically be able to appreciate and understand it all. In truth, despite in having what I consider a good knowledge of how to ‘read art’ there’s still much about it that puzzles me which is why I continue to see so much of it (that’s also part of its appeal). However video and film art has remained awkward for me, despite over the years trying to sit through as much of it as my fidgety, nervous excitableness will let me and I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this way. Many friends and peers I’ve spoken to have mentioned how the amount of time a film demands its participant to commit is often frustrating compared to that of viewing a painting.  You can’t walk into a painting half way, it’s already a frozen moment in time whereas in film you can walk in towards the end, the middle or beginning and  have to be much more active and thinking in order to make sense of what is going on. This power struggle of attention between art and viewer is more obvious and directly questioning in video art, “are you going to stay and watch more? Will it all make sense in the end?”

Christian Marclay 'The Clock' (2010)

 

Ironically I am someone that absolutely loves cinema and see some shots from films and works by particular directors as being art or amongst the greatest works of art ever created.  Whether they need to be viewed in a gallery, cinema or on the television to be seen this way is perhaps subjective; I just think you have more time and the expectation is different if you plan to see a film instead of accidently seeing it half-way through. Christian Marclay explored the distinction between art and cinema in his 24 hour extravaganza, ‘The Clock’ which used images of clocks or references to the time from thousands of different films to create a 24 hour montage of clips that followed the real time you were watching it (still with me?). This was art as a celebration of cinema, but also showing that the limitation of cinema is that it isn’t set in ‘real time’, its escapism. As an art piece it combined those two things whilst always reminding you how long you’d been watching for and that your watching was happening in the present moment.

 

 Video art gives a creative freedom to film makers that can potentially lead the shift from art world to movie world as is the case with Turner Prize, now Oscar winning artist turned director, Steve McQueen who has been quoted as saying, . “I don’t see much contrast from the art world to the movie world.”Similarly photographer turned Hollywood director, Sam Taylor Wood will be presenting her second directorial outing with ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ showing February next year. Or some artists like Matthew Barney remain more creative but equally (if not more so) ambitious away from the consumer-driven industry of cinema with work such as 'The Cremaster Cycle' which is a series of five feature length films but borders on being an immersive sculptural, painterly, installation, musical, performance, film all in one. 

 

The video art I have responded to best is when it acts as something other than film, i.e installed in a space/environment, projected in a room or on a screen like cinema, installation or painting (examples to follow). Every scene should grab you, capture the viewer's interest so that it hold them to stay and watch it all. John Akomfrah’s  film ‘The Unfinished Conversation’ (pictured below) being one such example of a film shown as part of the 2012 Liverpool Biennial that was a three-way split screen which filled the room and played three different narratives simultaneously whilst relating to one another to tell the story of cultural theorist and writer Stuart Hall. On a basic level it worked as a documentary, but visually some of the scenes, photography and clever use of the split screen enhanced the emotion and impact of the experience to being more than that of 'just a documentary'.

John Akomfrah 'The Unfinished Conversation'  (2012)

 

Bill Viola 'Martyrs' (2014)

Elizabeth Price is a video artist that combines text, stock footage and soundtracks to create punchy, mesmerising films. I first saw 'User group disco' (pictured below) as part of the British Art Show at Plymouth and it marked the first piece of video art I watched in a gallery from start to finish. At university in Plymouth, I also proceeded to visit it several more times. This film was brash and hard-hitting in its use of tabloid style text on top of close-up imagery of spinning and whirling kitchen utensils and ornaments; it sort of mesmerized and sucked you in. Although at the same time it was enigmatic enough to make you curious to stay and watch it until the end. It has to be said some of the simplest video art has often been the best, Kader Attia 'Oil and Sugar #2', 2007 (shown Liverpool Biennial 2012) delivers exactly what its title promises as oil is poured onto a stacked cube of sugar cubes. You can already picture what's going to happen, the inevitable collapse of the sugar cubes as they dissolve into the oil, but it is nonetheless watchable because you'd never see how these two materials react together elsewhere.

Bill Viola’s ‘Martyrs’ (pictured above) shown at St Paul's in London is not only an example of a video piece of art that wouldn't work as well outside its context but also how film can act, in this instance more like a painting, an altar piece with a straight forward narrative of action and consequence, full of elemental symbolism, lighting and framing that borrows itself directly from the language of early Renaissance painting. Viola' s work has been criticised for being 'too obvious' and too readable in its meaning through iconic imagery, but I personally think that their accessibility is part of their appeal and their use of symbolic imagery is archetypal. And the more you look you find there's loads of cross-referencing between painting and film, Peter Greenaway being another example. To look at this another way it is a shame that, generally speaking, we don’t take the same amount of time/attention to viewing painting/sculpture as we do viewing film. Although tellingly this probably reflects the time we are in.

Elizabeth Price 'User Group Disco' (2009). Watch the video here: http://vimeo.com/36307724

 

What it really comes down to is a question of audience, video art in galleries allows for creative freedom and experimentation for artists, it can present new ways of seeing the world and developing/testing new technology. Like all art it can either alienate audiences if you aren’t expecting to spend time watching it or it can open-up and make art more accessible to those unfamiliar or uninterested in painting, printmaking or sculpture. Maybe it is about empowering the audience so they can decide if and when they watch a piece of video art, which is pretty much and has gone without saying, what the internet does already, but then what role does the gallery play? Like painting or sculpture there are plenty of good and bad examples (some of the good hopefully mentioned here) of film art. Despite getting slightly more patient and slightly more knowledgeable over the years I think I will continue to endeavour with my inhibitions around video art; never knowing how long or not to spend viewing the work, whether I should sit on the uncomfortable wooden bench, the floor, or stand in the doorway or back of the room, whether I should walk around and come back to it later, whether I should wait 5 minutes or two; things I never feel as self conscious about when viewing other art, but then they are also reasons why I will continue to enjoy confronting and being challenged and maybe not feeling as guilty for watching it on the television as much as seeing it in the gallery.