Pieter Hugo
Abdullahi Mohammed with Mainasara, Lagos, Nigeria, 2007
C-Print
100 x 100 cm
Courtesy Galerie Bertrand & Gruner and the artist
http://bp0.blogger.com/_BRafeCbzk-M/R4z3brqU-DI/AAAAAAAAAM0/JDGOQgqIQME/s400/4th+Plinth+Image+Contact+Sheet1.jpg için Google Görsel Sonuçları
© 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
posted by Claire Nichols at 1:40 PM 0 comments 
Tuesday, January 15, 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
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
posted by Claire Nichols at 5:04 PM 0 comments
Monday, September 10, 2007
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
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
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
posted by Claire Nichols at 8:13 PM 0 comments
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
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
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
posted by Claire Nichols at 4:59 PM 1 comments
Thursday, December 07, 2006
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’.
posted by Claire Nichols at 1:10 AM 0 comments
Thursday, November 02, 2006
Rat Race
The Turner Prize 2006
Tate Britain
3 October 2006 –
14 January 2007
Four artists under 50 years of age are nominated for the Turner Prize based on their individual contributions to contemporary art. Year upon year (since 1984), it has always been interesting to see how the Tate’s Turner Prize balances the goal of surveying an array of contemporary art practice with the aim of catering for a variety of audiences.
From the socially engaged practice of Phil Collins to the formal concerns of Tomas Abts, this year’s show represents four very different approaches to making. The relationship the £25 000 winner’s prize has on the viewer’s relationship with the work on display gives a further edge to the Media driven exhibition (sponsored by Channel 4).
First up in this year’s ‘Rat Race’ is Mark Titchner. Democratic in his installations that position various social belief systems side by side, Titchner touches on the Turner Prize’s immersion in a world of advertising and self-promotion. His billboard pieces such as If You Can Dream It, You Must Do it, 2003, (below: Courtesy the artist and Vilma Gold, London) unabashedly
link the moral and aesthetic authority of bold design with religious and philosophical ideologies. This ambiguous, democratic attitude towards such broad concepts is further outstretched in the power that falls with the viewer in determining a sense of place within the non-space of his installations. In the dizzying optical illusions and hypnotic animations of Titchner’s installation, Ergo Ergot, 2006, for example, the sensual interaction and distraction the piece entices is intended as our stronghold within the work.
Rebecca Warren’s work shares more in common with the figurative sculptural tradition that stretches from Rodin to Picasso to the existentialist works of Alberto Giacometti. Warren’s unfired clay pieces, as the logical traces of this tradition should prove, project a humble ‘ugliness’ in their explosion out of and retreat back into the amorphous properties of the material. Warren’s wall-based vitrines share a similar patience with and embrace of material properties in the way the originally discarded objects she selects form part of a new visual context in their careful re-arrangement.
Whereas Warren’s work plays with the idea of material integrity, Tomma Abts’ work in the next room hinges on the idea of formal control. Abts’ pieces all start life as blank canvases, 48 x 38 cm, and using no source material and no preconceived notion of what she will paint, her pieces develop a formal logic through the improvisation with the paint that builds up each layer. In starting with a set frame and the idea that she will have no notion of what will appear, Abts ordains the painting with an autonomous power Warren finds more humbly in the consciousness she maintains and insists on within the act of making. Warren is unashamedly indulgent with the materials she uses, making the viewer’s experience of her work a far more human one, whereas Abts’ work leaves the viewer cold at the point where her insistent formal logic overrides any possibility of intuitive visual allusions becoming part of the work.
In the final rooms and passageways, Phil Collins presents an installation that explores the ethics of exploitation, inspired by the media spectacle of talk shows. Using the Turner Prize to play off the social tensions involved in our personal and public relationships with the media-propounded ideals of popularization and spectacularisation, Collins creates a comical and socially critical mouthpiece for the unheard ‘talk show hell’ stories he invites from the public. For the Turner Prize, Collins has built a fully functioning office, Shady Lane Productions, 2006. The aim of the office is to research and organize a set of projects exploring the influence that the camera exerts on the behaviour it seeks to record.
Have you been a participant on a talk show, makeover show or reality show?
Did the experience have a negative impact on your relationships or work?
Were the promises made by the show fulfilled?
shady lane productions would like to hear your story.
Visit the shady lane productions site at www.shadylaneproductions.co.uk .
The Turner Prize 2006 picks up on various strands of contemporary art practice and attitudes that are important discussions to have. To frame the discussions the artists have with their own work and in relation to their contemporaries in an institution with as big an advertising and power infrastructure as the Tate is a discussion that is only taken up by two of the nominated artists however: Mark Titchner and Phil Collins. And the latter is the only artist who consciously engages with various audiences on a level particular enough to broach issues about his work within the wider context of art, poignantly addressing the notion of artist as celebrity.
Tate Britain
3 October 2006 –
14 January 2007
Four artists under 50 years of age are nominated for the Turner Prize based on their individual contributions to contemporary art. Year upon year (since 1984), it has always been interesting to see how the Tate’s Turner Prize balances the goal of surveying an array of contemporary art practice with the aim of catering for a variety of audiences.
From the socially engaged practice of Phil Collins to the formal concerns of Tomas Abts, this year’s show represents four very different approaches to making. The relationship the £25 000 winner’s prize has on the viewer’s relationship with the work on display gives a further edge to the Media driven exhibition (sponsored by Channel 4).
First up in this year’s ‘Rat Race’ is Mark Titchner. Democratic in his installations that position various social belief systems side by side, Titchner touches on the Turner Prize’s immersion in a world of advertising and self-promotion. His billboard pieces such as If You Can Dream It, You Must Do it, 2003, (below: Courtesy the artist and Vilma Gold, London) unabashedly
link the moral and aesthetic authority of bold design with religious and philosophical ideologies. This ambiguous, democratic attitude towards such broad concepts is further outstretched in the power that falls with the viewer in determining a sense of place within the non-space of his installations. In the dizzying optical illusions and hypnotic animations of Titchner’s installation, Ergo Ergot, 2006, for example, the sensual interaction and distraction the piece entices is intended as our stronghold within the work. Rebecca Warren’s work shares more in common with the figurative sculptural tradition that stretches from Rodin to Picasso to the existentialist works of Alberto Giacometti. Warren’s unfired clay pieces, as the logical traces of this tradition should prove, project a humble ‘ugliness’ in their explosion out of and retreat back into the amorphous properties of the material. Warren’s wall-based vitrines share a similar patience with and embrace of material properties in the way the originally discarded objects she selects form part of a new visual context in their careful re-arrangement.
Whereas Warren’s work plays with the idea of material integrity, Tomma Abts’ work in the next room hinges on the idea of formal control. Abts’ pieces all start life as blank canvases, 48 x 38 cm, and using no source material and no preconceived notion of what she will paint, her pieces develop a formal logic through the improvisation with the paint that builds up each layer. In starting with a set frame and the idea that she will have no notion of what will appear, Abts ordains the painting with an autonomous power Warren finds more humbly in the consciousness she maintains and insists on within the act of making. Warren is unashamedly indulgent with the materials she uses, making the viewer’s experience of her work a far more human one, whereas Abts’ work leaves the viewer cold at the point where her insistent formal logic overrides any possibility of intuitive visual allusions becoming part of the work.
In the final rooms and passageways, Phil Collins presents an installation that explores the ethics of exploitation, inspired by the media spectacle of talk shows. Using the Turner Prize to play off the social tensions involved in our personal and public relationships with the media-propounded ideals of popularization and spectacularisation, Collins creates a comical and socially critical mouthpiece for the unheard ‘talk show hell’ stories he invites from the public. For the Turner Prize, Collins has built a fully functioning office, Shady Lane Productions, 2006. The aim of the office is to research and organize a set of projects exploring the influence that the camera exerts on the behaviour it seeks to record.
Have you been a participant on a talk show, makeover show or reality show?
Did the experience have a negative impact on your relationships or work?
Were the promises made by the show fulfilled?
shady lane productions would like to hear your story.
Visit the shady lane productions site at www.shadylaneproductions.co.uk .
The Turner Prize 2006 picks up on various strands of contemporary art practice and attitudes that are important discussions to have. To frame the discussions the artists have with their own work and in relation to their contemporaries in an institution with as big an advertising and power infrastructure as the Tate is a discussion that is only taken up by two of the nominated artists however: Mark Titchner and Phil Collins. And the latter is the only artist who consciously engages with various audiences on a level particular enough to broach issues about his work within the wider context of art, poignantly addressing the notion of artist as celebrity.
posted by Claire Nichols at 9:18 PM 0 comments
14 Magnolia Double Lamps
Chris Burden
14 Magnolia Double Lamps
South London Gallery
15 September – 5 November 2006
Chris Burden, 14 Magnolia Double Lamps, 2006. Restored 1920s Los Angeles street lamps. Photo: Andy Stagg.
14 Magnolia Double Lamps stand proudly in two rows of seven, parading the main exhibition space of the South London Gallery. Each weighing down 1½ tonnes, they reach up in unison to clear the Victorian glass lantern ceiling by less than a metre. Chris Burden’s immaculately restored 1920s cast iron lamp posts were shipped into the South London Gallery from Los Angeles. In his installation Burden merges two phases of Victorian design, the gallery and the posts themselves, to create a wonderful sense of architectural disquiet.
Walking around the lamp posts that appear almost as decorative pillars, visitors to Burden’s installation are faced with a space seemingly in wait. The physical weight of the lamp posts, their perfect alignment and their colour uniform of battleship grey allow them to fit, aesthetically, within the Victorian building that has itself undergone a process of neutralisation through modernisation. The viewer is left to wander around what seem like ornate totems to industrialism. And just as elaborate, often secret, rituals form an important part of totemistic behaviour, there is a definite sense of movement and circulation begged of the viewer on this stage.
The design simplicity in Burden’s installation belies the significant technical feat of the piece, whose component parts, after meticulous restoration, made their heavy-duty journey from Burden’s studio in L.A to a secured grounding inside the main space of the South London Gallery.
Chris Burden’s re-fit in bringing Victorian lamps into a Victorian property, via a transatlantic journey, brings to light an historical irony. Burden’s lamp posts are rescued relics from a massive series once havened over Los Angeles’ megalopolis, as pawns in a civic ego. The majority were removed and destroyed in the 1960s and 1970s, the relics having become background noise on a broadly cultured stage. The original designs for these lamp posts was European, contributing to the pomp and pride harboured by L.A’s early century acquisitions. To return these posts to their design roots neatly though unsettlingly rejoins the Victorian municipal aim with it’s anti-matter.
This article was published in The Oxford Times on 13 October 2006
14 Magnolia Double Lamps
South London Gallery
15 September – 5 November 2006
Chris Burden, 14 Magnolia Double Lamps, 2006. Restored 1920s Los Angeles street lamps. Photo: Andy Stagg.
14 Magnolia Double Lamps stand proudly in two rows of seven, parading the main exhibition space of the South London Gallery. Each weighing down 1½ tonnes, they reach up in unison to clear the Victorian glass lantern ceiling by less than a metre. Chris Burden’s immaculately restored 1920s cast iron lamp posts were shipped into the South London Gallery from Los Angeles. In his installation Burden merges two phases of Victorian design, the gallery and the posts themselves, to create a wonderful sense of architectural disquiet.
Walking around the lamp posts that appear almost as decorative pillars, visitors to Burden’s installation are faced with a space seemingly in wait. The physical weight of the lamp posts, their perfect alignment and their colour uniform of battleship grey allow them to fit, aesthetically, within the Victorian building that has itself undergone a process of neutralisation through modernisation. The viewer is left to wander around what seem like ornate totems to industrialism. And just as elaborate, often secret, rituals form an important part of totemistic behaviour, there is a definite sense of movement and circulation begged of the viewer on this stage.
The design simplicity in Burden’s installation belies the significant technical feat of the piece, whose component parts, after meticulous restoration, made their heavy-duty journey from Burden’s studio in L.A to a secured grounding inside the main space of the South London Gallery.
Chris Burden’s re-fit in bringing Victorian lamps into a Victorian property, via a transatlantic journey, brings to light an historical irony. Burden’s lamp posts are rescued relics from a massive series once havened over Los Angeles’ megalopolis, as pawns in a civic ego. The majority were removed and destroyed in the 1960s and 1970s, the relics having become background noise on a broadly cultured stage. The original designs for these lamp posts was European, contributing to the pomp and pride harboured by L.A’s early century acquisitions. To return these posts to their design roots neatly though unsettlingly rejoins the Victorian municipal aim with it’s anti-matter.
This article was published in The Oxford Times on 13 October 2006
posted by Claire Nichols at 8:23 PM 0 comments
Celebration Park
Pierre Huygue
Celebration Park
Tate Modern
5 July - 17 September 2006
Pierre Huyghe, A Journey That Wasn't, 2005
Super 16mm film and HD video transferred to HD video, color, sound; TK min
Filming in Central Park : Public Art Fund
Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris
Photo: Pierre Huyghe
Copyright Pierre Huyghe
The Tate Modern gives us a pronounced opportunity to explore the celebratory aspects of a selection of Huyghe’s work, from the nineties to the present. We go, for example, from viewing a small screen interview with the original voice of Snow White, Blanche Neige Lucie (1997), in a room with large white dancing doors, to hearing the slow-wind scene shift music of his more recent large screen puppet musical, This is not a time for dreaming (2004), an exploration of his struggle to satisfy a commission from Harvard University. Renowned and reaffirmed as a politically motivated artist, the Tate gives us ample space here to explore the various faces the notion of celebration adopts in the many social collaborations that make up his oeuvre.
Huygue’s films in this exhibition are no less than epic, both in subject matter and logistic scale. His film, A Journey that Wasn’t (2006), brings together footage of his own journey through Antarctica in 2005 that ran with a declared mission to find an albino penguin, and footage of the orchestral re-enactment of this voyage on Central Park ice rink. A Journey that Wasn’t reaffirms the co-existence of chance and control in his childishly willed adventure, with the double narrative of the diary and the orchestral piece building up loosely science-fictional connotations. The aural and visual pomp and circumstance of the band to a night-time backdrop are stunning. Their sense of effort, occasion and unison strongly reflects the collaborative force behind what was a 24-hour a day survival operation through deserts of ice. The gap between the gravity of this situation and its inherent pointlessness is the gap where Huygue endorses celebration. This is the point at which we start to lose ourselves in a cinematic experience of the layered narrative.
Leaving the exhibition, stills of Huyghe’s films stick in my head, but only from the most outlandish, the most surreal and the most celebratory parts. These images are taken from the points at which each film broke away from a single potential narrative, the points at which there were more questions than there were answers. Model design plan infrastructures fall to the ground at a whim, plants grow at an abnormal rate, children wear animal masks, celebrating their immersion into a new socialised land redevelopment programme, wind is caught in a large plastic bag from a cliff face and orange jacketed men trawl tragi-comically through white landscapes.
Celebration Park
Tate Modern
5 July - 17 September 2006
Pierre Huyghe, A Journey That Wasn't, 2005
Super 16mm film and HD video transferred to HD video, color, sound; TK min
Filming in Central Park : Public Art Fund
Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris
Photo: Pierre Huyghe
Copyright Pierre Huyghe
The Tate Modern gives us a pronounced opportunity to explore the celebratory aspects of a selection of Huyghe’s work, from the nineties to the present. We go, for example, from viewing a small screen interview with the original voice of Snow White, Blanche Neige Lucie (1997), in a room with large white dancing doors, to hearing the slow-wind scene shift music of his more recent large screen puppet musical, This is not a time for dreaming (2004), an exploration of his struggle to satisfy a commission from Harvard University. Renowned and reaffirmed as a politically motivated artist, the Tate gives us ample space here to explore the various faces the notion of celebration adopts in the many social collaborations that make up his oeuvre.
Huygue’s films in this exhibition are no less than epic, both in subject matter and logistic scale. His film, A Journey that Wasn’t (2006), brings together footage of his own journey through Antarctica in 2005 that ran with a declared mission to find an albino penguin, and footage of the orchestral re-enactment of this voyage on Central Park ice rink. A Journey that Wasn’t reaffirms the co-existence of chance and control in his childishly willed adventure, with the double narrative of the diary and the orchestral piece building up loosely science-fictional connotations. The aural and visual pomp and circumstance of the band to a night-time backdrop are stunning. Their sense of effort, occasion and unison strongly reflects the collaborative force behind what was a 24-hour a day survival operation through deserts of ice. The gap between the gravity of this situation and its inherent pointlessness is the gap where Huygue endorses celebration. This is the point at which we start to lose ourselves in a cinematic experience of the layered narrative.
Leaving the exhibition, stills of Huyghe’s films stick in my head, but only from the most outlandish, the most surreal and the most celebratory parts. These images are taken from the points at which each film broke away from a single potential narrative, the points at which there were more questions than there were answers. Model design plan infrastructures fall to the ground at a whim, plants grow at an abnormal rate, children wear animal masks, celebrating their immersion into a new socialised land redevelopment programme, wind is caught in a large plastic bag from a cliff face and orange jacketed men trawl tragi-comically through white landscapes.
posted by Claire Nichols at 8:19 PM 0 comments
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