Interview with Catherine Elwes

"Video is the default medium of the twenty-first century: Catherine Elwes interviewed by Claire Nichols" in Video Arte e Filme de Arte & Ensaio em Portugal, Numero Books/Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2008

Turner Prize 2008

Turner Prize 2008
Tate Britain
30 September 2008 - 18 January 2009


With Mark Leckey announced as this year’s Turner Prize winner, the viewer of this year’s exhibition may be surprised to hear that the award once used to excite quite controversial debate. That is, if one considers this year’s absence of egg throwing (as one woman did in protest to Martin Creed’s installation back in 2001) or pillow fighting (in response to Tracey Emin’s installation of her bedroom back in 1999) a lack of critical breath. All of this year’s short-listed nominees are for the most part somewhat of a quieter, and arguably more disquieting nature.

The first nominee on show is Goshka Macuga. Amidst her installations, you might feel as if you have arrived at an airport lounge. Macuga uses stainless steel and glass in conjunctions as bland and repetitive as all of today’s arcades of social regeneration. Macuga is a curator, collector and an artist. She throws us back into a glass world once so idealistically delineated by Mies van der Rohe, one of the pioneering Masters of Modernist architecture, and juxtaposes new imagery with wartime photographs from the archives of artist Paul Nash.

Cathy Wilkes’s installation is an agglomeration of found objects. First impressions might conjure a severely post-modern supermarket nightmare. This is not a lively zoo, however. Wilkes’s caged-headed mannequins and her carefully assembled prams and sale items are seemingly long-dead objects of curiosity (right: Cathy Wilkes Installation view: Selective Memory: Scotland and Venice, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 2005, Courtesy of the Artist, The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow © Cathy Wilkes, Photo: Ruth Clark Photography). The death-knell from the Tate security guard rendered this experience all the more real for me, as I overstepped the invisible ‘line’ – “Please do not come too close to the art objects”, a low voice insisted behind me. This warning was not to protect against some dangerously animated tigers, but rather to keep vigil for a deity. Wilkes’s installation is indeed a fragile constellation, and treads a fine line in mediating the theoretical and material relics of our daily world.

Clean-cut simplicity is at the heart of Runa Islam’s films. In one of her films, Islam uses the camera to draw through and with the space. She has programmed a machine to spell out a journey through an industrial warehouse, tracing the form of the letters CINEMATOGRAPHY. In another film, the artist revisits the city in which she was born in India, seeing herself partly, she claims, as a tourist. She films a silent slow pan portrait of stationary rickshaw drivers – a delicate and richly coloured sunset scene. As with many of Runa Islam’s films, however, any sense of calm is always tinged with irony. Here we come to realise that the artist has paid the rickshaw drivers to rest whilst she films them. Inverting their job role, the focus shifts from the film to its maker.

On the other side of the coin we have Mark Leckey, this year’s winner, who is seduced by the convincing possibilities of film: its ability to transform worlds. His raw material consists of pop entertainment icons from the Eighties such as Felix the Cat, and also incorporates the work of other artists. In Leckey’s words, he is interested in ‘finding something that attaches itself to him’.

One artwork Leckey is clearly taken by is Jeff Koons’s shiny silver rabbit. Leckey films the expensive kitsch art object on a rotation table in his flat, panning in and out of mirrors in the room, and across the surface of the sculpture’s own glowing reflections. This film is shown on a single screen monitor and also makes an appearance as a fragment of Leckey’s larger installation, Cinema-in-the-Round, which records the artist giving a public lecture. In this address, the artist brings together slides of artworks and popular culture that excite him, from Philip Guston to The Simpsons. He collates them thematically under ridiculous headings such as ‘meat and potatoes’. Speaking over his film of Koons’s work, Leckey stands at the lectern proclaiming in a stark northern accent: “It’s gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh”.

Mark Leckey
Resident Poster, 2008
© Mark Leckey

For all of Leckey’s performative gameplay, he’s certainly a refreshing break from the deadpan self-seriousness of the other three. Many of the works in this exhibition touch on similar themes: theatricality and the gluttonous consumer gut. But Leckey gives us a little more. He uses his own experience growing up in the 1980s in the north of England as a way of connecting with the viewer. Leckey’s public lecture, especially, opens itself up to a meaty dialogue about both desire and transformation. It is a critical forum and exciting scene that neither of the other three succeed in creating. And this is perhaps why Leckey deserves the Prize money – the £25,000 cheque he says he will now hide away, because of the credit crunch.




This article was published in The Oxford Times on 01 January 2009

Lawrence Weiner: As Far as the Eye Can See

A new collection of essays on Lawrence Weiner published in association with The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, reviewed on TATE ETC.'s website

http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue13/booksetc.htm

Continuation

Richard Prince
Continuation
Serpentine Gallery
26 June 2008 - 7 September 2008
















Richard Prince
Covering Hannah (1987 Grand National), 2008
248.9 x 332.7 cm
© 2008 Richard Prince

Richard Prince is an artist who shot to international fame in the 1980s. He is renowned for his appropriation of adverts, trashy novels and bad jokes - elements of American consumer culture that allow him to filter the American dream. Some might also like to cast him as “the one who got rich through stealing the image of the Marlboro Man”. Continuation, at the Serpentine Gallery, is a show Prince has curated himself, in collaboration with the gallery’s directors.

Many of the works in the show are previously unseen, and Prince, we are told, has curated these works from his own collection in a way that mirrors their display in his own studios. Upon reading this, one might expect to witness a dynamic, rough and ready arrangement of works. Contrarily, the works are genteelly and spaciously arranged, and the gallery itself, a Neo-Classical pavilion in its picturesque chocolate box setting, is partly responsible. The entrance to the exhibition is a delicately lit hall of fame for Prince’s mutely coloured, lightly painted cast car bonnets. The artist plays off the gallery’s teahouse of British politeness in his presentation of all that is macho American. His life-size working model of a vintage car pushes the boundaries in this vein, pimped all over with semi-pornographic images from his ‘Girlfriends’ series.

For Prince, the car is an important allusion to the freedom of the open road; the exhilarating American landscape. The same goes for his now infamous enlarged photographs of original Marlboro cowboy campaign shots – one of which earned him £1.7m – the highest price ever paid for a photograph, to date. Beyond the hotly debated critical and moral issue of appropriation, however, Prince’s cowboy series is about the Romantic demise of the American dream. The cowboys furiously traverse the open prairie planes, and, freed from the logos and lettering of Marlboro advertising, we longingly re-imagine their destination ad infinitum.















Richard Prince
Untitled (cowboy), 1989
Ektacolor photograph
127 x 178 cm
© 2008 Richard Prince

Continuation takes us on a fascinating visual journey through a largely masculine Americana, told by an artist who in the 1970s worked as a picture-clipper for Time-Life magazine. Prince is both a collector and an artist and this is a wide-ranging exhibition about his fascination with image production and consumer desire – between seedily slathered canvases based on his collection of naughty-nurse literature and his new paintings that playfully appendage limbs to the painted women of renowned Modernist artist, Willem De Kooning.




This article was published in The Oxford Times on 15 August 2008

Street and Studio

Street and Studio: An Urban History of Photography
Tate Modern
22 May 2008 - 31 August 2008


















Pieter Hugo
Abdullahi Mohammed with Mainasara, Lagos, Nigeria, 2007
C-Print
100 x 100 cm
Courtesy Galerie Bertrand & Gruner and the artist
© Pieter Hugo


Tate Modern’s Urban History of Photography celebrates the cultural importance of the portrait in historical and contemporary uses of the photograph. In this exhibition, the studio and city streets are motifs that set a yardstick against the evolving relationship of artist and subject. We navigate the viewpoints of over 100 photographers chronologically, from the 19th into the 20th Century. It is a steep and
informative journey through social ideologies, Modernist trends, clothing fashions and industrial booms.

The exhibition provides an academic pursuit of the lens, starting with its very embryonic technological and social stages. This is a long and well-trodden road: along the naïve unassuming routes of photography typified here in John Thomson’s images of Caney the Clown and his Covent Garden Flower Women, 1877, en-route to the well-known golden era of studio photography encapsulated by Cecil Beaton’s ‘photocratic’ class of elegant celebrities.

There are, however, some beautiful, non-standard, shock moments in this exhibition. With the 1930s seeing the studio a ‘safer’ commonplace tool, the photographer had to find new ways in which to become marketable, and so emerged the cheeky ‘surprise’ street photographers who startled their subjects in amusement parks and fair grounds. Mobile studio in tow, they tried to sell their somewhat humorous ‘real life’ portraits to their subjects, and these curious prints are collected here for our delight.

Seventy years later, in the guise of Martin Parr in the ‘Contemporary Street and Studio’ room, we witness the development of this ‘roaming’ photographic industry. For his Autoportraits series, 1999-2001, Martin Parr poses with a fake ‘friendly’ camera smile, perhaps conveying a sardonic stance towards the studio industry.

Jumping from the war years to the inter-war period, from 60s ‘Liberation’ to internationalism, a dynamic political undertone seems to lie at the heart of this exhibition. This political focus appears less interested in iconic photography than in social and aesthetic developments, such as the evolution from singular portraiture to image series and image-text combinations. Between beautifully composed originals by Henri Cartier-Bresson – pioneer of the ‘decisive moment’ – and Ron Galella’s aggressive, unauthorised paparazzi shots of ‘celebs’ such as Woody Allen and Mia Farrow (right: Ron Gallela, Woody Allen / Mia Farrow, September 18, 1980, New York City, Courtesy Galerie Wouter van Leeuwen, Amsterdam © Ron Gallela), we are immersed and seduced into the medium as much as we are given a safe critical distance. The show ends with Rineke Dijkstra’s hilarious filmic document of trashy late 90s clubbers, a convergence of studio and location photography in the medium of video.




This article was published in The Oxford Times on 15 August 2008

Fourth Plinth

Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square
National Gallery
8 January 2008 – 30 March 2008


Currently atop Trafalgar Square’s once ‘empty plinth’ is Thomas Schütte’s Model for a Hotel 2007. Schütte’s model collects the light available to it from the open public square, reflecting it through the edges of its primary coloured, horizontal glass panes. The model looks deceptively lighter than it is (weighing in at just over eight tonnes), not least because it is translucent against the sky. In this way it speaks to the historical weight of the buildings that surround it, thereby also drawing attention to its temporary nature. Every year Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth showcases the work of a new well-known artist, each facing the creative, temporal, historical and social challenges this public commission presents.

Now on show at the National Gallery are the six new proposals for the Fourth Plinth, commissioned from artists Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley, Jeremy Deller, Yinka Shonibare, Bob & Roberta Smith and Anish Kapoor.






Bob & Roberta Smith’s proposal is perhaps the most glamorous of the bunch. Their proposal is for an illuminated peace sign reading “Faîtes L’Art, pas La Guerre” (Make Art, Not War). It is to be powered by the sun and the wind, and is consequently the most collaborative in its making, involving a dialogue between renewable energy specialists, structural engineers and an architect. The physical mechanics of this collaboration are all on show as part of the light sculpture itself. Antony Gormley’s piece also involves collaboration, but on a level that is judged far more perfunctory by the artist. Gormley proposes that the fourth plinth be occupied 24 hours a day by members of the public who have volunteered to stand on it for an hour at a time. His proposal is characteristically philosophical and demanding in the relationship it seeks to have with the public. The feasibility study that accompanies his proposal reveals the mechanical finish he would like the complicated and potentially personable logistics of this piece to have. For Gormley, it seems, it is not important what the public choose to do, rather that they are doing what they are doing because he has facilitated it. One might go so far as to say that Gormley’s trademark body cast has transmuted on this occasion into the plinth itself. He carries the weight of the individual and elevates them, like the Gods, from ‘common ground’.

On the other end of the scale, Jeremy Deller denies the transformative potential of his proposal. Seeking to present upon the plinth the remains of a vehicle that has been destroyed in an attack on Iraqi civilians, Deller says of his proposal that ‘it is not an artwork’. Deller may verbally be making a politically correct and democratic statement, but for his proposal to materialise in any case, despite art, would create an invasive and veritable arena for discussion about cultural displacement and public curiosity.

Yinka Shonibare’s piece engages with the idea of the monument as a way of drawing together the historic elements of the existing site with the present social climate. Shonibare’s proposal is to make a scale replica of Nelson’s ship, HMS Victory, to be housed inside a large glass bottle. The sails made from textiles patterned with rich colours, bought from Brixton market in London, Shonibare hopes to draw attention to the complex journey the material has undergone, in trade with the colonies and in its assimilation in the 1960s as a symbol of African identity and independence. Shonibare’s proposal aims to create a dialogue about multiculturalism beginning as a result of Nelson’s victory at the Battle of Trafalgar.






Anish Kapoor’s proposal draws attention to the plinth itself by giving it a role as a support for the five concave mirrors that perch off its faces. In Kapoor’s words ‘they turn the world upside down and in so doing bring the sky down to the ground’. Focalising London’s changing skyscape, however, is as questionably relevant an act on the square’s ‘empty plinth’ as Tracey Emin’s proposal for a sculpture of a small group of meerkats. Light-hearted and anecdotal, her proposal is daring, and, one might think, a little patronising. Emin claims to offer us a symbol of unity, for in her words ‘whenever Britain is in crisis or, as a nation, is experiencing sadness and loss (for example, after Princess Diana’s funeral), the next programme on television is Meerkats United’.

So who should win? Bob & Roberta Smith have my vote. Their wind and solar powered illuminated peace slogan would look as tacky during the day as it would in the night. But this playfully persistent nod to the thick-blooded military stream propounded through the rest of the Square would both echo a people’s revolution and provoke the Square’s deafeningly nationalistic chord.




This article was published in The Oxford Times on 8 February 2008

No One Belongs Here More Than You

A review of Miranda July's new book on TATE ETC.'s website

http://tate.org.uk/tateetc/bookreviews

Will Emin's work be lost at the Hayward?

Tracey Emin playing the Hayward cavern on the Guardian blog

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/2007/08

Gilbert & George

Gilbert & George
Major Exhibition
Tate Modern
15 Feb 2007 – 07 May 2007


'Your way is as hard as we are blood-hard with rigid-brained resolution' – a quote from Gilbert & George who star in their own feature-length movie, The World of Gilbert and George: and one which aptly encapsulates the colliding energies of quotidian ambition and East End lackluster that permeate the work of this artist duo on display at the Tate Modern. The “you” to whom Gilbert & George refer here is a ‘no-one in particular’ and an ‘everyone’; an entirely impersonal subject that embodies the landscape of each piece’s confrontation.


Gilbert and George
The Nature of Our Looking, 1970
Tate © The Artists
A five-part charcoal on paper sculpture

The retrospective progresses chronologically around one entire floor of the Tate. At the start, we bear witness to the shy boys out at play in their English garden: The Nature of Our Looking, 1970. Considered by the artists as a paper sculpture, this piece, akin to the other charcoal on paper works in the first room, creates a preamble of tension within and around the picture frame that has now become their signature motif. Their romantic poses, distant gazes, as well as the captions within the drawings, gather a sense of desperation from the physical and material limits of the page where the landscape falls off or fades out. The ‘fake aged’ quality of the paper and the rife pun exerted through the grid-crossed folds that these drawings be read as maps, are at the same time, paradoxically, anti-framing devices that serve to open their sculptures out into the democratic space of the viewer.

The space of the viewer throughout the exhibition, though an open, highly associative arena of interpretation, is certainly not a comfortable position. To watch their feature length film, The World of Gilbert and George, from start to finish, inside the café, which is included as part of the exhibition space on the fourth floor, is at the same time both a casual and momentous event. The ‘feeding of the tramp’ sequence is tapered by the viewer’s polite, seated patience at the café table, whilst the scene in which Gilbert & George dance to the pop hit, Bend It (below: Gilbert & George, The World of Gilbert & George, UK 1981 / 69 mins / Colour, Published by Tate Media in association with the Arts Council England) offers a light-hearted break and momentary closed door on the politics of East end city life that is the contextual framework of the film. From their dancing to their annotated monotone proclamations of the words: ‘Tired. Station. Depressed. Pub. Waiting…’ across circling video footage of an urban 80s London, Gilbert & George are firmly in control of themselves and of the video frame. In their own words, ‘It was vital that we remain in control…otherwise we would have been lost’. This major retrospective enables an overview of the work of a pair of artists whose oeuvre and maxim is about confronting modern British life that recoils at such a self-conscious frame. Gilbert & George are ‘living sculptures’ about Sex, Money, Religion, Race, Englishness and Terror.


The World of Gilbert and George DVD is also available online at:
http://www.tate.org.uk/shop/gilbertgeorge.htm




This article was published in The Oxford Times on 2 March 2007

and on TATE ETC.'s myspace

Heaven and Earth

Anselm Kiefer
Heaven and Earth
SFMOMA
October 20 2006 – January 12 2007


Anselm Kiefer’s weightless pictorial idealism, the merged histories of his layered pieces that conjure static environments, are framed kaleidoscopically throughout Heaven and Earth by the natural and sculptural properties of the materials he uses and the post World War II German legacy he re-members.


Anselm Kiefer
Aschenblume, 1983-97
Oil, emulsion, acrylic paint, clay, ash, earth, and dried sunflower on canvas
149 5/8 x 299 1/4 inches (380 x 760 cm)
Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Gift of Anne and John Marion in honor of Michael Aupingth
Acquired in 2002

Die Aschenblume (Ash Flower), 1983-97, is composed of oil, emulsion, acrylic, clay, ash, earth and dried sunflower on canvas.  Displayed next to Die sechste Posaune (The Sixth Trumpet), 1996, itself composed of emulsion, acrylic, shellac, and sunflower seeds on canvas, a compositional juxtaposition is set up between the singular physical trumpet-like sunflower placed in relief down the centre of Die Aschenblume, and the devastational sprawl of seeds that cover the entire surface area of Die sechste Posaune.


Die Sechste Posaune (The Sixth Trumpet), 1996
Emulsion, acrylic, shellac, sunflower seeds on canvas
204 3/4 x 220 1/2 inches (520 x 560 cm)
Collection SFMOMA
© Anselm Kiefer; photo: Ben Blackwell

The Sixth Trumpet Judgment (Revelation 9:13-21) is the destruction of one third of mankind by two hundred million demonic horsemen. Positioned adjacent to Die sechste Posaune, the dried singular trumpet of Die Aschenblume is a mute symbolic relic of the angel’s call within this apocalyptic story, appended to the arid altar Kiefer loosely delineates through a layering of paint, ash and earth. Prayer symbols surface jarringly on this dry rendition of war-like sulphurous elements through touches of red paint that recall Lev 8:15, when Moses slaughtered the bull. Taking some of the blood with his finger, he touched the horns of the altar to purify it.

Kiefer works with the premise and process that creation and destruction are one and the same. This physical approach to making explains the congruity in dryness and desperation which both landscapes engender in their material layers, despite their compostional differences. The solitary relief flower in Die Aschenblume is not dissimilar to the evenly sprawled army of seeds in Die sechste Posaune. The latter painting represents a modern parallel of military hardware as well as offering the possibility of rebirth at the juncture where the fallen seeds (from heaven to earth) meet the pictorial and material representation of arid devastation. This gesture is echoed in Die Aschenblume in the way the sunflower hangs and hovers delicately in wait over the beaten surface, its dried head caught sculpturally between desired speech and hearing. The monumental scale of both aridly built up canvases lends a further humanity to Kiefer’s sculptural gestures within these paintings, as their scale serves to refer directly to Germany’s epic post-war historical legacy caught between its devastational earthen situation and the promise of heaven. His own poetic, gestural interface with a war-torn German inheritance holds a religious potency amidst his own cultural context where compatriots seem intent on forgetting.


Melancholia, 1990-1991
Lead and crystal
126 x 174 x 65 3/4 inches (320 x 442 x 167 cm)
Collection SFMOMA and private collection
© Anselm Kiefer; photo: Ben Blackwell

The crystal appended to the stationed lead airplane, Melancholia, 1990-91, is an art historical reference to Albrecht Dürer’s Melancholia I of 1514, an engraving representing the melancholic temperament through a depiction of an angel-winged woman, sitting on the ground with her head in her hands, a tetrahedron on the left hand side of the work. Kiefer’s sculptural replication of the tetrahedron in crystal, on the left wing of his lead plane is not only a nod to Dürer’s philosophical composition, but also a specific reference to the ravages of the air raids of World War II. Kiefer works with the dual life of both ideas and history, playing with the intermittent state of exposition this process allows. His oeuvre is almost democratic in its appeal to the viewer to find their own position between encompassed oppositions.




Kiefer exhibited at the Royal Academy a few months later, a show I reviewed for The Oxford Times on 20 April 2007

In Conversation with Daniel Buren

Photo-souvenir: Badaling, China, September 2005 © Daniel Buren

Daniel Buren
Intervention II
Modern Art Oxford
4 November 2006 – 28 January 2007

Daniel Buren’s photograph of Chinese tree decorations acts as a double tactic for the advertisement of his current exhibition, Intervention II, at Modern Art Oxford.

Part of his Photo-souvenir series from Badaling, China (2005), the image outlines his interest in the iconic. Due to the cultural nature of this connotation, we are made aware of a disjuncture between the site the photograph indexes and the site in which it is relocated; namely as an advert pertaining to his exhibition in Oxford. I approached Buren about what I perceived to be a religious haunt in his work, as well as discussing with the artist the importance of a site-specific viewing context.

One repeats a prayer, or creates a permutation of it.

Within the Upper Gallery at Modern Art Oxford, repeated across six aligned rows of suspended frames, Buren has installed coloured perspex panes via a logic of alphabetical correspondence:

A - blue
B - orange
C - pink
D - red
E - yellow

Daylight halls through the panes via the windows at the front of the gallery, to create perpetual shifts of line, colour and plane, dependent entirely on the physical position of the viewer within the space.


Photo-souvenir: From three windows, 5 colours for 252 places
work in situ, 2006
Photo Stephen White (with thanks to Calumet rental NW1)
© Daniel Buren and Modern Art Oxford

For Buren, the coloured panes have no translatable value beyond the way they are used as props that play with the light coming into the gallery via the windows.

For me, however, his choice of mass-produced Perspex sheets place the transcendent coloured light in contra-dialogue with the engineered life and the after-life of the material itself.

I asked Buren what will happen to the Perspex after the show ends. He talked about the specific choices he had made with regard to the size and the luminosity of the custom-made batch he had ordered, for what he firmly sees as ‘architectural interventions’ within the galleries at Modern Art Oxford. He spoke of the irrelevance and impracticability of keeping hold of the material to re-use in another show for example.

For me, the logistical nature of Buren’s comments re-write his choreography of materials within the show with a performative edge, with an emphasis very much placed on the site-specific cognitive realisation of the piece on the part of the viewer. The notion of the custom-made exhibition, therefore, is as important in necessitating a physical reception for the work as it is in permutating the politics of Buren’s iconic performance as ‘The Stripe Man’.