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

 

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/

 

Whose line is it anyway?

One particularly blustery spring morn a dot went for a walk and consequently found itself on a train to Honiton before arriving  at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery ‘Drop me a Line’ exhibition where it was then joined by lots of other dots that then became a bunch of lines that came from all over Devon, Somerset and beyond...

 

It was too difficult to resist the obligatory Paul Klee reference when beginning to write about the current exhibition of line inspired work at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery created, curated and installed by Somerset-based artists Louise Baker and Michael Fairfax. Klee even more relevant when you take in to consideration just how playful (literally) this particular exhibition is due to its concept of viewer/participant interaction as part of the work which is to be told in two parts (so as to avoid a one liner!) at the gallery throughout 2015.

 

 

Ahem, the current and first, ‘Drop me a Line Part I’ also sees the gallery divided into two halves with Michael Fairfax’s installed piano wires, strung in a series of constellation-like configurations (to be plucked or bowed by the viewer) in the downstairs rooms whilst upstairs Louise Baker’s  lines on paper feature hundreds of mixed-media drawings (in the broadest sense of the word) collected as result of an open call to any ‘line-makers’ out there that sought the opportunity to drop her a line of their own making (interestingly many but not all have been sent by artists). The received lines have then been collated into a huge wall work by Baker where the lines are revealed not just drawn but dribbled, daubed, gilded, stitched, collaged, burnt, printed, written, smudged, stained, sketched, scribbled and torn. There are lines which are solid and fixed others that are more fluid and temporary, varying from the completely abstract to the more representational; each one as different as the handwriting of the individuals who made them (should you feel compelled you can also create your own line to add to the series to be shown later this year). You seldom see such a wide variety of mark-making all in one place and it was both fun and fascinating to try and guess the work/marks of any artists I recognise (with more mysteries than that of being solved!)

 

 

 

I imagined what a delight it must have been receiving these unique drawings individually in the post, each with their own story/ journey they’d undertaken. Therefore in some ways, I felt a little disappointed that the  joy and surprise of each drawing’s uniqueness/subtlety felt as though it got lost in presenting them all together on a wall. The intimacy of each one sometimes a struggle to see in the gallery space and having to contend with the surrounding drawings around it so the sense of an overall journey, chronology or line was a little confused. I speculate that Baker, also a maker of extraordinary hand-made art books, will collate them into a book at some point which I can only imagine would help resolve some of the issues I had with seeing the work presented in this way. Something of a mark-maker myself though I still found much I could relate to and be inspired by, in addition to this work Baker has also displayed a series of threshold lines (pictured above) made from graphite which has been crushed/brushed/stepped on by the feet of visitors as they enter/exit the doorway to her studio space at Hurstone in Somerset. They are a poignant reminder of the beauty in the simplicity to be found in everyday, incidental mark-making and the traces we create unintentionally. More personally too they were reminiscent of my own tribulations with using a hammer and graphite to make drawings during my MA. 

 

 

Contradictory, Fairfax’s work downstairs reveals the other side to installation by which the work has been installed to fit the space so much that the room and gallery walls become part of the work itself. The piano wires connected by tuning pins attached to the walls are composed in response to the architecture of the room and form their own shapes, patterns and lines of varying lengths and degrees. It is a sensorial experience for both sight, sound and touch. With the use of either their hands or bows (provided) viewers are invited to pluck, stroke, strum and listen to these lines whose sounds are reverberated in different walls around the gallery. To aid the hearing process viewers can also pick up, what for lack of knowing its official name, I’m going to somewhat crassly call a ‘piece of wood’ (pictured below) to listen to the walls more intently creating a sharper/deeper sound. Viewers can also record and send their sound interactions which will become the basis for work made in the second ‘Drop me a line’ exhibition later this year. I love the idea of listening to walls and the old saying of ‘if the walls had ears’ as a way of people responding to and interacting with a space in a way they would never normally have the opportunity to; would the walls of an old cob walled cottage sound different to that of its modern brick counterpart? There’s that and the fact, that regardless of one’s personal musical abilities it is fun to be able to touch ‘the art’ as it is fun to make sounds and noise by plucking piano cords. There are even many dualities between this work and the drawings upstairs in the way we talk about rhythm, pace, depth, richness, sharpness and resonance as qualities within the work. It is these variables that will mean that the range of responses generated by these drawings and sound recordings will be vast. My attempts weren’t so much spaghetti western as they were random noise but I enjoyed the experience none-the- less.

 

 

One of the most remarkable and special things about art is that sometimes you can make a lot of work out of very little and what ‘Drop me a line’ does is take something very seemingly straight forward and as simple as a line, as its starting point and creates opportunities that invites copious possibilities from its participants which are both fun and revealing at the same time. In all the richness of sound and visual imagery you almost forget it’s the humble line that threads all the work together.

 

 On that note I’ve a few lines of my own.

You will visit ‘Drop me a line’ at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery.

You will visit ‘Drop me a line’ at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery.

You will visit ‘Drop me a line’ at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery.

You will visit ‘Drop me a line’ at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery.

You will visit ‘Drop me a line’ at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery.

You will visit ‘Drop me a line’ at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery.

 

You really should.

'Drop Me A Line Part I' is on at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery, Honiton until May16th 2015

More details and opening times at: http://www.thelmahulbert.com/thg.aspx?pageID=2

On a magic carpet ride

Rudolf Stingel at Palazzo Grassi

Picture the scene. You've been in Venice for three days, seen hundreds of art works as part of the Biennale ranging everything from flayed rats sewn together to mountains of rubble and perhaps more shockingly of all, even the occasional painting; you've walked miles through floods, over bridges, under bridges, over and under again, eaten olives (even though you know you don't like them) and cheese and bread and ham for breakfast, noon and dinner, drunk profuse amounts of prosecco willingly (it was hardly a chore) and all the while wandering with purpose in search of your next art fix.

Then you arrive at the Palazzo Grassi...  

If life were a movie (in my head it could well be) then about now there'd be some kind of musical cue, something classical or brassy, and there'd be an arial shot of the protagonist (you) as you stepped unknowingly onto the Prussian/Oriental red carpeted floor inside the central atrium of the Palazzo Grassi only to look up, cue panning shot, as your eyes follow upwards three layers of balconies, that same red carpet wrapped floor to wall all the way up and up til you reached the ceiling. Dramatic pause for sense of awe.

... 



Ahem, but surely something as mundane as a wall-to-floor carpeted interior of a seventeenth century building couldn't possibly fail to be exciting no matter how you analyse it afterwards....? It was such a strange sight to come across, that when you were actually stood there amongst it all none of it felt like it was actually real, hence my need to provide the prior background context to what was already a heightened, magical experience of just being in Venice itself. There was a sort-of breathtaking absurdity to having this entire space given to the work of one artist when relatively each floor was pretty much the same as the one that proceeded it, the same red carpet (approx. 5,000 square metres of it!) covering floor/walls with a single silver monochromatic painting by the artist in each room (more on that later). Normally Palazzo Grassi is a contemporary gallery filled with hundreds of singular artworks at one time; you now had the entire space dedicated solely to the work of one artist. That artist is, Rudolf Stingel somewhat of a local, originally from Merano, Italy (but works mostly from New York) and whose work explores how art can intervene with ‘the exhibition space’/context it is shown in by displaying his paintings in environments that respond to/unsettle that space. In turn it attempts to answer how we view or perceive paintings based on their context and how an environment, its materials, textures, colours, patterns, climate and how does that alter how a painting is created/act of creation.

The literal definition of the Persian word for carpet means, ‘to spread’ which has a wonderful irony in this installation due to the sheer amount of carpet it uses and as a result it certainly makes you more aware of the building itself, the architecture (the geometry in the carpet pattern echoing shapes within the building's design), its height, layout, scale, period features (the ceiling has been left untouched) and amplifies the gallery's sense of grandeur with its new found luxurious, red carpet coating that both protects the building from its inhabitants and vice versa. Carpeting naturally also acts as a way of slowing you down, in the way that carpeted surfaces generate more friction and both literally slow us down as well as creating a softer, more homely sense of ease.  The smell of it and texture that envelops you as you walk around the rooms and acts as both an insulator and sort-of ‘suffocator’ at the same time, I wasn’t sure whether I felt comforted or trapped by being surrounded in so much carpet! The acoustics, or lack of, were interesting too and everything became quite soundless and muffled. It all made me increasingly aware of the archetypal gallery as a context for viewing art and how we are distracted by the noise of our feet, the coldness of the rooms, the familiarity of the whiteness of the walls and how it can sometimes mean you don’t really ‘see’ the art work on the walls properly at all. On saying that, the paintings that we were now in a supposedly more slow and aware state-of-mind to view, were in fact pretty average. On the first floor were large abstracts whose surfaces were silver monochrome textured with prints and traces of the pattern present in the red carpet. I thought these were actually more successful than the paintings on the upper floors and had some subtly intriguing surfaces. On the other floors they were, on the whole, smaller (see bottom picture) depicting silver monochrome photorealistic portraits of the artist’s friend, Franz West and portraits of sculptures (yes, you read that correctly, portraits of sculptures like a cherub or saints). These paintings are often hung solely in a massive room on their own and you couldn’t help to notice their silvery glow standing out against the redness of the carpeted walls but I just couldn’t really figure out why they were there, why the things depicted in them were chosen, it seemed a little too random for my liking. One possible solution may lie in the curating of these works which does, however, suggest a journey from abstraction to the figurative but also the inner journey that the viewer undergoes as they unknowingly at first become part of the installation as well as viewing it. There is some theoretic rationale too that accompanies this idea (in a pamphlet on the work you’re handed at the start) referring to Freud’s study in Vienna with its oriental carpets on walls and floors as, I think, a rather tenuous link to ‘the feeling of containment and the sensory experience that we discover when entering this labyrinth guide us into the Ego, with its representations and illusions...’ Maybe (raises one eyebrow).

Perhaps the Freudian reference was taking affect and I was becoming increasingly paranoid and sceptical about this whole installation/work of art by simply not really and wholly trusting the intended interpretation that this was an artwork about the redefinition of the meaning of a painting and its perceptions because the crucial thing, the crucial part in that concept, ‘the paintings themselves’ was the one thing that was a bit cold, unimportant and fighting against its’ surroundings. If this was anything to go by then the artist is surely saying that 'redefining the meaning of a painting and its perceptions' lies within the context in which it is hung-in and not with the actual painting itself (am I repeating myself?). So why bother to paint at all or perhaps why bother to paint unless one paints for a particular space? Point indeed. I am beginning to be convinced that Stingel is an artist who is interested more in how we perceive the art we are looking at than the painting of the actual work itself, although often I thought the two went together?  I did admire how this whole installation quietly forced me to ponder and ‘got into my head’ with its befuddling of the senses, ‘Alice in Wonderland’ meets ‘Arabian nights’ style, where, up was no longer up and down was no longer down, smells, sounds and textures generated a contradictory magical and disturbing intimacy.  To some extent that sense of displacement and unfamiliarity is exactly the right mind-set to perceive a painting, as you are much more unaware of what to expect and more open to interpretation. Either that of course or this whole time I had actually accidently walked into a branch of Carpet World in the middle of Venice...!?