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

 

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