Enduring the Misery So You Don't Have To

  To the fabled few Dismaland is an experience worst endured alone and in the rain.

 That’s exactly what I did, except along with several other hundred people who had the same idea earlier this week one particularly miserable rain filled morning as I queued along the sea front at the Somerset seaside town, Weston-Super-Mare.  Dubbed the UK’s ‘most disappointing new visitor attraction’ the exhibition situated in Weston’s dilapidated Tropicana Lido aims to bemuse and turn the whole idea of an ‘amusement park’ on its head, subvert it, fill it with irony and humour mixed with the controversy, political undertones and social commentary that we’ve come to expect from the Bristol originated street artist’s work.  The site features several of Banksy’s works ever pushing the ‘artist’ as we now seem to call him into territory increasingly outside that of just graffiti or street art and into the broader realms of almost Damien Hirst ambitions of being a media savvy entrepreneur. The concept of the park itself and work within it has been curated (we’re told) by Banksy himself and excitingly features the work of over fifty other artists including Jenny Holzer and David Shrigley.

Like cogs in the infernal consumer, social media machine multitudes of us bought into the hype, the speculation and almost feverishness as we either queued for hours in the rain or clambered in vein in an attempt to purchase tickets online. An unprecedented demand for what is essentially, ‘an art exhibition in wolves clothing’ of the likes Charles Saatchi and Nick Serota (Tate Director) can only dream of! Love Banksy or hate him, there is so much to be said for the phenomenon in sheer popularity alone that this attraction has caused. It is possibly one of the most intelligent marketing events in recent years, that has managed to convince thousands of people to stand for hours queuing in the rain, endure a truly incompetent website, miserable staff and terrible customer service based on the promise of having a ‘bad’ or ‘dismal’ time. Our shared frustration and misery only adding to the attractiveness, hype and irony of the whole experience!  Those lacking a sense of humour need not attend!

Is it all a gimmick, a one-liner a joke at society’s expense or is there something more to offer in the thinking, artists and work within Dismaland? If art becomes ‘popular’ it is sometimes dismissed as being a bit naff, vacuous or shallow in appealing to the masses? Think Pop Art in the early 60s America. But what’s wrong with being popular? We now look upon Pop Art as something more crucial and important to art history than perhaps the reception it was met with by critics at the time. I think the mistake that people make is when they associate popular with being ‘good’ or having ‘quality’ to it which is often subjective and very often not the case. The grim reaper on a bumper car, two trucks colliding in on each other, a killer whale jumping from a toilet into a paddling pool and a beach ball suspended above knives may not be ‘good’ art, ‘tasteful’ or even particularly well-made but is popular because it is often deliberately easily accessible.

Is a joke that no one gets funny? Not really unless it’s ironic, you want it to be told in a language, a wit that everyone can understand. Comic book art, advertising in the 60s is a visual language meant to be understood by the masses and so political cartoons, one-liners and non-conformist acts of rebellion are designed to communicate their message across clearly be it in the form of slogans, word-play, use of celebrity, parody or satire. The danger of this so called popularity or ‘wisdom of the crowds’ is exactly that, cliché; and the danger of a lot of work presented at Dismaland is that in all its clever cynicism it soon grows tiresome, repetitive and above all is quite quickly forgotten. It is art that should only be enjoyed as part of a balanced art diet! Even the overtly more practically used political banners by Ed Hall lose some of their power in being statically hung in a tent-based installation; they are only really animated in the context of the people who carry them.

A flat photo-realistic painting of a dystopian landscape, of which there are many in Dismaland doesn’t have the same meaning in its production and intent behind it as a George Shaw painting in my opinion. Nor does the asylum seekers raft boat ‘fairground’ style game have the same lasting resonance that pricks much deeper at your conscience, like an Ai Weiwei  work does, in which the production is as symbolic (if not more so) as the finished work itself. That’s sort of where the art in Dismaland disappoints, that it feels confused as to who its real audience are, if it is disillusioned teenagers, working class, middle class, celebrities, idiots, journalists or all of the above! Guerrilla Island toward the back of the park does offer some earnestness, some radical politics in the form of a museum of cruel design, objects designed to hurt (example, pigeon spikes for the homeless), the Comrades Advice Bureau and a mini library. If you take time to process these amidst the distractions of the fun fair I salute you.  

Dismaland does well at addressing a bigger political message about Art, its purpose and value, particularly in how Councils need to reassess how they value the arts/culture in their towns and cities to create more provision for them providing easier access to disused spaces; as Dismaland demonstrates how much prosperity culture can provide to a seaside resort in the rainy summer holiday months. I enjoyed being part of the spectacle, the experience; Bill Barminski’s fake security gate made of cardboard was one good example at using performance within an art experience and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t fun exploring the remnants of Tropicana, riding inside the Astronaut’s Caravan as it spun around you and attempting to knock over anvils with ping-pong balls. We shouldn’t be afraid to not take art seriously some times and if you are walking around expecting it all to be art you're severely missing the point; its as much of a fair ground as it is an art exhibition as it is a bar and music venue. Make of each what you will! It pokes fun at our familiarity of how we expect to view art in museums and galleries and maybe an amusement park could be a fun place to see art?!

 Its downfall for me however is given its huge opportunity and press coverage it could had a rare chance to be so much more than a cheap laugh or a ‘place to be seen’. I think it plays to the audience as being  a consuming, disillusioned society that isn’t so much looking for answers or solutions as it is for someone to blame. Jaded by political and capitalist systems in a world increasingly under threat of environmental self-oblivion; there isn’t much optimism or, if Dismaland was anything to go by, much in the way of what we can actually do about it. Its most dismal trait is its portrayal of a troubling acceptance or apathy that the world may irreconcilably be doomed so why bother. It had the opportunity to be much more of an activator to promote and encourage positive change but does so very shallowly or more often choosing to ignore it all together. I am sceptical whether this Disneyland parody set in a very British stereotypical seaside town could provide the political awakening that has been somewhat lacking but much needed in those of my generation and younger? And that really is quite dismal.

But hey, on the plus side makes for some great photo opportunities though!

If you insist on fulfilling the dismalness for yourself then I suggest you arrive at Weston early and queue! For those of you further afield you may want to try booking a ticket online:

http://www.dismaland.co.uk

Good Luck!

All text & Images Copyright of Natalie Parsley©

The Bones Don't Lie

Parsley’s Guide to Gallery Survival (for dummies) rule no 3; If you’re going to accidently knock, touch or move the art work then try to do so in the most ironically named gallery space you can find and above all NEVER ever, ever return to the scene of the crime...

 

 

That’s right, my friend’s rogue art-altering scarf decided to go awol and fractionally move one of the tiniest bones on the table of installed work by Jenny Holzer in the ‘Pigsty’ gallery of Hauser and Wirth, Somerset during our visit early last week. Oh calamity! A complete accident of course but had said scarf knocked one of those bones onto the floor the gallery assistants ‘may have had to close the gallery’. Queue lots of walkie-talkie communication, man wearing white gloves to move bone two millimetres back inline....and breathe. Crisis adverted! There is a LOT of one eyebrow-raising to be had; this is a level of Art attention to a standard seldom seen! 

 

I’m fascinated by the elite spectrum of the art world. When a urinal, a fence, a glass of water, a bone becomes so precious that we react to its place within the work it resides with such caution and reverence. I would be curious to know if the reaction to our moving of the bone wasn’t as much out of respect that it was a human bone and more that it was a component in a highly expensive piece of art work? Perhaps a bit of both, the ethics of that question and indeed the politics of it are highly sensitive baring in mind this piece of work does contain human bones used to signify (note they aren’t the actual bones) bones of victims murdered for sexual pleasure (hence its name ‘Lustmord’) in the war in Bosnia. It is a tenuous line for discussion indeed but I am more belligerent to challenge the issue of how we 'treat' art works in gallery spaces. Broadly speaking, to the commendable gallery assistant charged with the art works ‘protection’ it is part of the job to treat art as though it were sacred, as precious as gold or as hazardous as a radio-active substance such is the halo of security that surrounds artwork when it reaches the level of being financially a cultural asset. And whilst my opening anecdote quite cheekily mocks the absurdity of this behaviour I am very seriously interested in just how powerful, how reverend and important art can become to infect our behaviour in this way. To the extent that we as the audience also partake in the acceptance of the ‘bones’ becoming or being considered as art so that we either partake or not in our attention for those few minutes. This opinion is not formed out of immaturity, naivety or lack of respect as no matter how much art I have seen, I am ever conscious of how the art world is perceived from those who may experience it for the first time. Perhaps I never want to feel too comfortable, familiar or settled with any of what the art world has to offer and that my appreciation of it comes from that we must still question, still scrutinize what every artwork brings balancing our own interpretations with that of the art institution within which it resides; never buying into one completely irrespective of the other.

 

One should celebrate that there is a respect for art in this way albeit to an extreme zealousness but I think that there is a balance to be had with respect, common-sense and an unpretentious humbleness that grounds artwork into not loosing sight of the reality and intention for which is was made and that is very often to be seen/experienced irrespective of the monetary value it accrues under its ‘art’ status.

 

American born artist Jenny Holzer’s offering to Hauser and Wirth is mixed and showcases the breadth of the artist’s work the likes I had not previously known about. There are the familiar LED text-based works known as the ‘Truisms’ from the 80s and many new works including paintings, drawings and benches in bronze and stone. Titled ‘Softer Targets’ the work is based upon her ongoing examination of the ‘war on terror’ and is the title of a redaction painting from a classified Federal Bureau of Investigation report, ‘The Terrorist Threat to the US Homeland’ in which the former classified text was made public although heavily redacted so not all details were disclosed.

 

Censorship and/or the lack of it is a reoccurring theme and in the hand-painted works which aesthetically have a look of an early abstract expressionism about them (early Jasper Johns?) but feature the text from those reports, soldiers accounts, autopsy reports, torture diaries. It is a quietly unnerving read with our attention drawn to what is concealed within these texts often more poignant and unsettling than what is revealed.

 

The Truisms presented on flashing LEDs laid on the floor or curving-up the wall robotically reel out programmed messages such as, ‘Your oldest fears are the worst ones’ and ‘Everyone’s work is equally important’. They inform us in the language of train-station monitors and signage that we are familiar with but also ironically now feel almost retro from the 70s/80s when the works were first created. The newly commissioned LED work titled ‘Move’ in the opening gallery takes the familiar technology synonymous with Holzer’s work but adds a new level of surveillance as the mechanised LED bar suspended vertically moves and follows the viewer in response to their movements. If the affect in Holzer’s original Truisms was confrontational than this was even more so.

 

In the 70s Holzer began her Truism body of work by posting them as flyers around New York, today maybe she’d be tweeting them? How artists today, like Ai Wei Wei have used online media as a political tool for ‘the truth’, freedom of speech and liberation. It does beg the question whether we have all become too media-savvy, too self aware to respond to the original Holzer 'Trusims'; the older technology creating new challenges for the viewer to engage in the same way as previous audiences may have? If the ‘medium is the message’ then I think it is going to be harder to digest Holzer’s messages in this exhibition as personally I found the amount of text to read too much to digest, looking more at the power of the lighting, its colour, its movement or physical qualities of the carved out of stone words rather than actually reading them. The messages within the text of what Holzer is communicating is however still incredibly relevant, they are sort-of universal slogans, statements that continue to prompt engaging thought and discussion about consumerism, feminine identity and our relationships with one another but I personally feel the way we assimilate this information has changed and I find myself listening more and thinking more deeply about these messages in her work reading them in my own time, on paper or online after the initial experience of seeing them in the gallery. I think I question whether Holzer’s work is a bit superfluous in a gallery context and actually works better out in the world, in isolation so we read it for what it is saying and not read it as ‘art’. Hmmm...

 

There is something of a duality that is formed in discussing Holzer’s work. On one hand I find her reserved aesthetic a bit cold and a bit tedious but this is often counterbalanced by passionate political reasoning. The ideas are very emotive and in some of the work even quite poetic. There is a contrast in the hardness/mechanical-ness of the stone benches or LEDs with the softness of what are often very revealing, humanly relatable texts. Or as I found in one review online, the ‘Hardness of material meant to endure what humans cannot.’  

 

The truth can be confrontational, ‘hard to swallow’ or it can ‘set you free’ and there is something in the directness of Holzer’s work which cuts out the metaphor and trompe l’oiel and presents a clear narrative and way in to quite literally reading her work. Here is the message, now what do you think? I tend to be more reflective and enjoy the smoke and mirrors of in arts ability to lie, to mimic, to play with reality it allows for more imaginative, deeper, perhaps more subconscious types of ‘truths’ to be revealed that I just do not think can be manifest with the forcefulness of Holzer’s work. In the true language of advertising, I think about it in that moment and then I’m gone. I am yet to experience any subliminal after affects!  The Truisms on the stone seats and LEDs don’t last with me as long as perhaps the paintings or indeed, room with the bones in do.

 

 It will take a while to forget the bones! Though in truth probably not for the reasons intended.

 

Jenny Holzer’s ‘Softer Targets’ is on at Hauser and Wirth Somerset until November 1^st.

http://www.hauserwirthsomerset.com/

 

With thanks to friends for supplying some of the images. Image marked with * sourced from: http://www.independent.co.uk

and http://www.hauserwirth.com

Text copyright of Spannerintheworkz, Natalie Parsley ©

 

 

Tales From The Tool Shed

Is Facebook supposed to be educational? 'Bored Panda' anything other than amusing procrastination?! Imagine my delight logging on to my Facebook account to find amidst the usual shower of cat photos, political garbage and relentless invitations to play candy crush saga (NOTE: I’m still not interested!) something that was actually, amazingly, inspiringly and, somewhat vainly, relevant posted on my wall! THANK YOU!!

 I was so excited to learn about the work of artist, Lee John Phillips and his ‘Tool Shed Project' that I felt compelled to spread-the-word further here on the blog.     

 “Talented artist Lee John Phillips has undertaken a project of epic proportions to celebrate the memory of his late grandfather. Phillips estimates that it will take him about 4-5 years to draw all 100,000+ items left behind in the shed by his grandfather, who passed away roughly 20 years ago. Everything from large tools to jars full of nails, nuts and bolts will be covered!”

Lee John Phillips 'Tool Shed Project' *

Lee John Phillips 'Tool Shed Project' *

Meanwhile, elsewhere, “Not so talented but passionately curious” artist, Natalie Parsley (that’s me) has also been drawing her late Grandfather’s tools estimating it may take between four and five hours to draw the chosen few, picked seemingly at random, but actually via a highly discerning process of aesthetic elimination (in other words I draw what I like the look of)! Saws, hammers, clamps, bill hooks, pliers , keys, spanners and even the occasional nail or bolt. I jest, but on a serious note there is something uncannily brilliant about the discovery of another artist working with drawing tools in a similarly obsessive manner to myself as I have previously done and most recently on the ‘Drawing a Day’ projects from 2013 and 2014.

It is also interesting to analyse what motivates other people to take on these sorts of projects and how there is a reoccurring theme of cataloguing tools of which the aesthetic is of huge appeal to me. I speculate my love/appreciation for order, systems and archiving comes largely influenced from working in a bookshop, but I think that psychologically there is something bordering on compulsive versus the meditative and reflectively endearing about painstakingly ordering, sifting through the items left in Phillip’s Grandfather’s tool shed that is both cathartic and a touching tribute.

“Phillips has been numbering each object in his meticulous project, and has drawn nearly 4,000 at this point. He has spent so much time drawing recently that it has taken a toll on him; “I already have to have physio for the toll it’s taking on my body. About 5% done so far!” he writes on his Instagram."

Experiments with Tool catalogues, labels etc. during my MA.  

Detail from 'Kaye's Tool Kaleidoscope' (2011) Natalie Parsley 

I’m in pretty good health, or at least can honestly say that my art has never physically damaged me (mentally, more likely!) in some way other than fatigue, the odd paper-cut  and I  wouldn’t yet speculate the untold damage years of graphite, turps and varnish inhalation may have caused on my system. Ahem, none-the-less this doesn’t pay dividend to my commitment to drawing and particularly my history of drawing tools. In recent years the tools in my own practice have taken more of a backseat but their influence has been present in other ways either in; drawing similar hard-edged/sculptural objects OR drawing something completely different/opposite to tools i.e. softer/more organic things such as plants, animals, insects. In this way, I had something of a revelation when I realised that my ‘long time art hero’ Jim Dine has explored plants and tools as well as plants with tools in the same image. This is an important distinction as I feel that Dine’s intention in doing this is in order to provide a contrast and a greater understanding of the properties and formal qualities of tools and plants respective. For example, you cannot appreciate, or comprehend the solidness and weightiness of a tool until you know how to capture the lightness and delicateness of a plant. That sounding more Buddhist than it perhaps should, but I am beginning to think that there is possibly, to my mind nothing more enlightening, more revealing than drawing both in terms of perception and personal solace. Recently I have been drawing a lot of plants, but then conversely almost craving to go back to drawing tools with a renewed fascination and attention.

From the 'Drawing a Day Project 2014-2015' Natalie Parsley

From the 'Drawing a Day Project 2014-2015' Natalie Parsley

I will post more of my recent work soon, but want to give it an opportunity to be first seen away from the internet before I reflect and document it on here. Watch this space...! 

Going back to Phillip’s project however, I admire the detail in which he draws each object individually ever perhaps slightly daunted it is part of a much bigger body of work. It has taken me years to appreciate noticing the unique patina each tool bears, the sign or trace of the person who wielded or possessed it. This makes Phillip’s project very much unique, in the same way a portrait is. This project is very much a portrait/tribute to his Grandfather and gives the project more meaning than just becoming pleasing wallpaper. Looking back on my early work, mono prints of tools I missed the opportunity to capture some of that uniqueness that is present in each individual tool. Rather than being an illustration or documentation of tools, I am almost reluctant to admit in the early days my tools had always been more about me, the tools almost a redundant shape on which to hang expressive mark making and intensity. I say 'reluctant' because I do not see myself as an ego driven artist so it feels difficult to contextualise my work within a personal viewpoint. The last few years have been about looking more closely and I’ve grown slightly more patient and with that has come a more conservative and conceptual treatment of tools. There is a slickness and clarity of purposefulness to Phillip's project that I sometimes lack in giving my work a truly professional or contemporary edge. Ultimately my aim is to find a middle ground between the early tool work and my new sense of intention and focus. In recent years my outreach to the art world and public place within it has wavered but my commitment and curiosity have remained.  The fight against the darkness is truly never ending?!

Natalie Parsley (2015) Mono print and ink on paper.

More of Lee John Phillip's Work and further details of the 'Tool Shed Project' can be found at:

 https://leejohnphillips.carbonmade.com/

https://instagram.com/leejohnphillips/

*IMAGES AND TEXT FROM: http://www.boredpanda.com/grandfather-died-illustrations-tools-shed-project-lee-john-phillips/

Make Mine A Double!

Friday 17^th of July and ‘Double Take: Photography and the Garden’ opens at Hestercombe Art Gallery. Bringing together photographs by Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932) with work by leading contemporary artists Sarah Jones, Helen Sear and Mark Edwards (all of whom have recorded a garden or returned to the theme of plants and gardens). The exhibition, curated by Kate Best aims to shed new light on the photographs of Gertrude Jekyll in the context of Hestercombe, not the subject of her photographs but whose influence can be seen in the garden which she created. These images are presented alongside contemporary photographers that share Jekyll’s enthusiasm in relation to an on-going exploration and fascination photography has with the theme of the garden, plants and our intervention with them. In the form of a double take, the audience is invited to look and look again at these works noticing new things each time, their meanings layered through the variety of photographic processes on display.  The exhibition aims to add depth to our enjoyment of the garden and ‘help us to see familiar landscapes anew.’

One of the first things that struck me prior to this exhibition was just how little I actually knew about Gertrude Jekyll. Born in the Victorian era it surprised me how a woman living and working at that time could defy singular categorisation. Part horticulturist, garden designer, artist and writer it seems so logical to us now that these professions would naturally fit together, unquestionably one informing the other and so forth, but during the late 1800s and early 1900s I can imagine the notion of the artist as gardener or the gardener as artist was considerably ahead of its time. In the accompanying exhibition catalogue Jekyll wrote of gardening as, ‘painting a picture with living plants’, using ‘the colour of flowers as precious jewels’. It is a good analogy that neatly ties-in with the theme of the exhibition at Hestercombe which combines the formal artistic practices of looking, image, surface quality, size, perspective, colour, texture and tone with the sensibilities shared in gardening and gardens the photos capture.

Helen Sear 'Pastoral Monument' (2012)

Jekyll’s black and white photography is peppered throughout the show. Depicting scenes from her own garden at Munstead Wood and villages in West Surrey they act as the reminder, the double-take if you like, for reassessing how we look at Hestercombe garden (views of which are framed through the windows of the gallery as you make your way around) and the contemporary artist’s work. To me, they appear like drawings or etchings and I wonder if this is perhaps something to do with their age or the way in which they’ve been exposed. Either way, they have a small, quietly spoken and haunting appeal to them which beckons one to look closer with an attention-to-detail and fastidiousness that is so synonymous of the Victorian era. There are usually two reasons that make you look again at something, either that it has hidden detail or is unusual in some way. The images in this exhibition have both!

 It isn’t only Jekyll’s photos that have a ‘drawn’ quality to them in this exhibition with Helen Sear’s series titled ‘Pastoral Monuments’ have a similar look of having been drawn except with pencil crayon. A series of jug bound displays of plants and flowers is depicted as though on crumpled paper giving the images a blurred softness and ‘lightness’. In actuality the image had been crumpled before being photographed again, an image of an image. It is an interesting process as it feels like a simulacrum in the sense it is several steps detached from the original vase of flowers it depicts so that you could go as far to say it is in fact a photo of a photograph! Or is it a photograph of a sculptural intervention!? The detachment from what is ‘real’ becomes ever distanced and the audience is forced to think about the nature of ‘what is a photograph?’ and ‘how is a photograph formed?’ The pressing and smoothing of the original flower image also sharing reference to the pressing of flowers. I found the process of making these images more interesting than the jugs/flowers they depicted; their large scale and size not really associating them in my mind to the bodily-like quality they were perhaps intended to convey.

Helen Sear 'Chameleon' (2013)

Elsewhere in the exhibition Sear has a projection piece titled ‘Chameleon’ of a large sunflower head gently swaying against a dark backdrop (pictured). Betrayed by its seeming simplicity, for me, it is one of the most interesting works in the show and succeeds where the photographic images don’t quite in creating a sense of the bodily or otherness. It does this by its looming scale a ‘head-like’ presence of the sunflower with its watching, eye-like centre and fiery yellow mane. At the time I couldn’t work out why the piece was called ‘Chameleon’ until I read afterwards that the name chameleon is derived from the Greek, ‘lion of the ground’ which as it turns out is an incredibly fitting description for a sunflower.  Watching it sway by an invisible breeze in this film was almost hypnotically mesmerising and quite alien and a bit disturbing at the same time. I never thought I’d feel this way about the humble sunflower! I had never heard of Helen Sear until recently but have now come across her work twice in the space of two months at Venice Biennale and now at Hestercombe. Both times I have been surprised at how accessible her work is but also how thought-out and immersive it is. Either with light, colour or scale her projections or photos seem to draw the viewer in.

Sarah Jones 'The Rose Gardens' (Display VII) 2014

Continuing with the drawn-like qualities in photos theme, Sarah Jones’ series titled ‘The Rose Garden’ have the appearance of being almost painterly! In the same way in which ‘Chameleon’ used a dark background to bring out the intensity of colour in the sunflower Jones’ photos apply a dark background from which the flowers and their stems contrast. The reference to Dutch still-life or 'Vanitas' painting is clear and is what also probably gives them a painterly-like quality. Whereas artists once used brushes to capture the colour and detail in the botanical form they now have light and digital camera techniques to capture the image for them but in an almost forensic detail that almost goes beyond the abilities of what the human eye can see. Yet despite this detail they retain a flatness and a shine, brought on by the print of the image, that keep them in the realms of the pictorial, the illusion and Jones likens these photographs to the pressing of flowers, ‘containing within the image the record of the subject’s existence’. They capture a frozen moment in time neither dead nor living their existence theatrically immortalised as an image. Jekyll’s photos with children and people present in them take a slightly more unnerving feel in relation to Jones’ work which brings a psychological element of perception and the uncanny to Jekyll's photos.

Mark Edwards 'Table, Surlingham' (2012)

The most visibly noticeable with that in common to Jekyll’s photographs I feel is Mark Edwards who documents the often banal, reality of gardens and allotments and their mark upon the landscape. As Edward writes, ‘These are not landscapes of the sublime but of the overlooked and everyday.’ They share in common Jekyll’s honest presentation of ‘what gardens/gardening of the time were like’. Edwards images show use that same straight-talking but reflect gardening as we know it today in its much less formal and less structured design aesthetic. If I were a gardener myself, I would find Edward’s photos the most interesting as in their matter-of-factness they hold the most information and are relatable in that they look at the human element to gardens. In ‘Table, Surlingham’ a modest array of plants (including what I think appear to be strawberry and sweet pea?) are for sale on a table that is covered with a vibrantly floral patterned cloth. It is a humorous and sentimental image as the table cloth seems to act as camouflage with its surroundings but also to the over-the-top enthusiastic zeal shared by many gardeners for all things garden related.

Puns aside, this exhibition really did grow on me, I had limited expectations what an exhibition of photography could bring and was pleasantly surprised by just how conceptual and visual it was. It reaffirmed for me the difference between a ‘photographer’ and an ‘artist who uses photography’. There is a difference! I think that one or two more images could have perhaps been squeezed in (I am prone to a bit of overcrowding), but overall it was an elegant show that quite ambitiously weaved the work of three contemporary artists and that of Jekyll together. There was lots to be discovered in this exhibition and I expect more to discover if I were to visit again!

  ‘Double Take: Photography and the Garden’ is on at Hestercombe Gallery until October 18^th 2015

http://www.hestercombe.com/whats-on/events-and-activities/221-a-double-take-gallery-exhibition/event_details

Quotes sourced from Kate Best 'Double Take' catalogue that accompanies the exhibition (2015)

Images sourced from:

http://www.a-n.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/2975176.jpg

http://i4.walesonline.co.uk/incoming/article7261140.ece/ALTERNATES/s1227b/JS39030742.jpg

http://www.aperture.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/06_ak10266_JON_TheRoseGardens_Display_VII.jpg

Post Lozano

  If she were alive today would Lee Lozano be a blogger? I’d like to think so, as at the very least I think the medium would have been deeply interesting to her, its occupation with the ‘global audience’, exposure for the written word and debates on censorship and what constitutes public/private in an age when almost every aspect of people’s lives is documented online.  

 

But where are my manners?! Few people I know have ever even heard of the artist, Lee Lozano and to some extent that is exactly  what she wanted, self-creating her own infamy with a body of work titled ‘Dropout piece’ whose primary aim was to reject and create self-anonymity from the art world.

 

“She became competitively uncompetitive, ‘I will not seek fame, publicity or suckcess.’ That single declaration remains the cleanest summation of what Dropout Piece is actually amounted to: a total disengagement from all professional art world ambition.”1

 

In succeeding to do so, but still continuing to work privately and continue her practice (in the form of copious notebooks of thoughts and experimental performance pieces) she inadvertently created a legacy in the art of self-oblivion. Born 1930 in New Jersey she graduated philosophy and natural sciences before marrying and in four years divorcing, architect Adrian Lozano whilst studying towards her Bachelors in Fine Art. In the 60s she moved to New York befriending artists such as Stephen Kaltenbach and Carl Andre in which increasingly, due to the likes of artists such as Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson, the art was beginning to emerge outside the institution of the gallery/exhibition space. This was to be influential in the development of Lozano’s later performance and conceptual pieces.



IMAGE 1. Lee Lozano Installation view of the ‘Wave Series’ (1969) oil on canvas.



  It is a compelling mystery that she is so unheard of given the prolific nature of work she actually produced. Her decision to disappear from the art world was not made out of apathy or an act of attention-seeking but a rebellion, a protest piece against the disillusionment and superficiality of the art world. Additionally it was met with shared adversity amongst many of the artists Lozano associated herself with along with the anti-war protest and feminist movements in America at the time. Prior to ‘Dropout Piece’ Lozano was gaining recognition for her series of large ‘Wave’ paintings that share a similar flat, minimalist sense of abstraction and use of colour to Barnett Newman (IMAGE 1) but becoming increasingly frustrated at the schmooze-filled pomposity of the art scene and after undergoing an extensive period of psychoanalysis she revolted against ‘expectation’ and resorted back to her earlier ‘word’ works; conceptual pieces handwritten in copious notebooks. This almost cataclysmic shift to something different in her practice, I feel has so much in common (but so little written about it) in relation to Philip Guston’s own choosing to retract from his success in the art world as a abstract expressionist painter to pursue his own path, his own re-invention as an artist. A bold thing to do and one that is not without risk nor always successful. Lozano herself very aware of the pressures and expectations put upon artists by both themselves and, more significantly for the motivation for ‘Dropout piece’; the expectation that the art world places upon the artists it is so reliant on. Lozano expresses this quite honestly and refreshingly defiantly at a lecture she gave on creative production,

 

“For example, what is expected of any artist or any creative person, as opposed to what really happens? Everyone knows that an artist’s best work often covers a very short period of time, yet the artist is expected to function on a high, high level of performance at all times. And, if an artist does very good work at one period in life, he or she is always, actually competing with their own great period of work. It’s almost very rare that an artist does high quality work and maintains this great period throughout their career. Yet it’s expected of him.”2

 

Prior to any of this however she had been making drawings, gestural paintings and caricatures of tools, screws, nails, flexi-pipes, sharpeners and mechanical objects which she collected off the streets and her ‘former’ studio floor (IMAGE 2). And for me, personally, it is her tool work made between 1964-67 that is particularly interesting...

 

IMAGE 2. Lee Lozano ‘Untitled’ (1964) Graphite and crayon on paper. 23 x 16”

 

IMAGE 5. Lee Lozano ‘No Title’ (1963-64) graphite and crayon on paper. Dimensions unknown.

 

In her series of tool drawings and large paintings tools are depicted with great intensity, often in extreme close-up with a very physical use of mark-making.

 

“In Lozano’s hands, screws are no longer a neutral means to hang a painting or set a bookshelf but rather explicit euphemisms of sexist logic: anthropomorphized machines aggressively screwing in and out of each other in acts of overdetermined functionality, regardless of pain or pleasure.”3

 

The concept of anthropomorphising tools being one reason I am interested in Lozano’s work,

 

"Given life they automatically become frenzied beings – clamps, pliers, screwdrivers and hammers fondling and struggling with each other in a kind of dangerous courtship."4 (IMAGE 3)

 

IMAGE 3. Lee Lozano ‘No Title’ (1963-64) graphite and crayon on paper. Dimensions unknown.

 

In my own work (IMAGE 4) the tools I depicted were nearly always unconsciously in groups or sets. I like to think this was a compositional decision; that the positive and negative shapes created by layering/overlapping the tools more interesting visually than drawing them statically or in rows. However, the large scale and intensity with which I drew them dictated otherwise, making them often more intimidating or, similarly to Lozano personified in some way. Tools are objects of character, their patina giving them unique surfaces and whilst I did not directly respond to imbuing them with the courtship and coupling in Lozano’s drawings I accept that other people could read into them in this way. If anything it makes me want to make new work that specifically explores these ideas. 'Tools and their relationships'! Ha!



IMAGE 4. Natalie Parsley. Tools 2. 2008. Oil and gloss mono print on paper. 250 x 220cm.



 Lozano’s tool works aren’t exactly comfortable viewing aside from the fact they aren’t always particularly accurately drawn, their composition of being squashed and almost perverse intimate close-ups of these familiar objects that creates feeling of claustrophobia or threat; met with the large scale of some of the paintings,

 

“The huge formats of many of the Tool Paintings give these dynamic images an overpowering forcefulness.”5

 

These are paintings that intend to intimidate and are as aggressive as they are sexually direct and full of double entendre and masculinity (IMAGE 5). In their exaggerated extremity they also have many parallels with comic books that both influenced Lozano and whose word-play inspired her written pieces. But the fact Lozano is a woman depicting these heavily masculinised objects with equally masculine connotations gives them a sort of anarchic sense of taking claim or ownership of them.

 

"Lozano’s early work was irreverent and unabashed, propelled by an overt and oversexed drive to misbehave as much as possible for a woman in the early 60s."6

 

As a woman myself, conveniently, who has depicted tools in her art for many years now it is incredibly liberating to discover Lozano’s tool work as it openly challenges stereotypes and throws an interesting perspective on my own relationship with tools that had previously, relatively gone unconsidered.  Perhaps being in a more liberal age of equality than America in the 60s I don’t see gender-equality as much of an issue regarding my own work in the sense it isn’t driven out of a desire to protest or misbehave but none-the-less after spending the majority of my tool-based art career looking at the prints of Jim Dine it is refreshing to counterbalance this perspective with a female artist. Dine and Lozano’s drawings have a similarity in their intensity of looking and use of drawing as a means of expression and almost cathartic ‘drawing-out’ which I too have frequently referred to in my own practice. This and the fact that each of them underwent bouts of psychoanalysis is evidence that there is more that unites the likes of Lozano and Dine other than just in their representation of tools.



Lee Lozano ‘No Title’ (1964) oil on canvas (two parts) 275.2 x 168.5 x 5.2cm.



  Where Lozano differs, is that Dine’s tools are relatively more static but ‘sexually’ charged by the mark-making that surround them (IMAGE 6); Lozano’s tools are cropped so that the moving-parts of the tool, the parts with teeth, which cut, which flatten and squeeze are amplified so have this feeling of being  more menacing, at times perverse and certainly more physical. In a precursor to Sol Lewitt, Lozano wrote her own list of verbs and used these ‘doing’ words as titles for her tool paintings, further underpinning associations with action/use.  

 

In my own practice an ongoing thread has been the idea that the function of objects is to be ‘put to use or be possessed’ and my MA explored someway into unravelling what it means to ‘use’ a tool and/or ‘possess’ one. Specifically I was interested if drawing could be a form of use and possession largely fuelled by a quote by Jim Dine who of his tool prints stated, "I wanted to possess them and what better way to possess them than to draw them"7. Whether Lozano was trying to possess them or not she was encapsulated in a form of ’Tool Mania’ and possessive lifestyle mixed with periods of casual and heavy drug-taking. It was as though she was seeking of ways in which to escape reality and thinking through frantically making work,

 

"...concerns shaping her practice, involving intimacy and exposure, the incommunicatability of living in your head and the psychological state of possession, whether taking possession or being possessed."8

 

IMAGE 6. Jim Dine ‘Untitled (C Clamp)’ from Untitled Tool Series (1973).

 

The idea of ‘incommunicatability of living in your head’ struck me as yet another example of the similarities that Lozano’s tool drawings have to Guston’s later works (IMAGE 7). They share the similarity of being inwardly bodily; ‘living in your head’ which Lozano conveyed with her treatment to thickly apply paint like a skin and make marks with a frenzied intensity, expression and physicality that are comparable to Guston’s fleshy, skin-crawlingly pink, eyeball filled figures. A depiction of what it feels like on a very sensorial level, to be inside a head. As cartoonist, Chris Ware writes of Guston’s work so succinctly,

 

"...these paintings are not what it looks like to see a human being, but what it feels like to inhabit one. Philip Guston is the first painter, ever, to truly paint a portrait from the inside out."9

 

There is, I feel without doubt a rawness of emotion in both Lozano's and Guston's drawings aside from their subject matter that warrants further research than I have gone into here. I see this post as the beginning of an on-going enquiry into Lozano's work.



IMAGE 7. Philip Guston ‘Rug’ (1980) Lithograph on paper, 495 x 736 mm.



Lee Lozano ‘Untitled (Be this occasionally)’ (1964) Graphite and crayon on paper. 13 x 18.5”

 

Lozano’s tool drawings and paintings only made for a short span of her artistic career which evolved from the early tool works to minimalist paintings and later written conceptual pieces performed often in private. Despite the diversity and shifts within her practice her reasoning and resistance to any sense of categorisation within the art system and nonconformity prevailed seeking recognition and appraisal amongst her peers rather than public.

 

Her work highlighted the dangers of expectation and assumption and demonstrated that artists are able to reinvent themselves and take on many evolutions within their practice, but most of all being admirable for not being afraid to stick two fingers up at the symbiotic, superficial relationship between artist and the art world, in fact making it into the catalyst for creating work. This path consequently led her down an incredibly self-destructive path and at times reliant on the support of friends and family which she continued to rely on up until her being diagnosed for cervical cancer which she died from in 1999 (she was 69).  Yet despite her elusiveness and relatively premature death her work went on to influence a generation of conceptual and performance artists working in America and thanks to the preservation of many of her works, countless since. I have known of her work since 2011, first discovering her in a book on drawing –since then I have felt obliged to unveil some of the mystery and have continued to seek her work out in exhibitions and in books. I still want to find out more, captivated by both the shifts within her practice, her mystery and determination met with anarchy against the establishment.

 

 That and the tools, of course!  

 

1 LEHRER-GRAIWER, S (2014) Lee Lozano ‘Dropout Piece’ Afterall Books: London p57

2 IBID p59/60
3 FOLIE, S (2011) ‘Lozano Tools’, An Art Service Publications; Minneapolis
4 IBID
5 IBID
6 LEHRER-GRAIWER, S (2014) Lee Lozano ‘Dropout Piece’ Afterall Books: London p28
7 DINE, J (2005) Jim Dine: Tools and Plants Alan Cristea Gallery: London p5.
8 OpCit p18