London calling!

I feel culturally restored this week after a jam-packed two day visit to London. Five exhibitions and one conference (to end all conferences!) and a bag containing enough croissants and cheese to sustain me through it all.

First art exhibition stop of the day, was the 'Gesamtkunstwerk' exhibition at the Saatchi gallery featuring the work of over 24 'new' German artists. What can I say, it is difficult to be too critical about an exhibition that is on the scale and ambition of this one (that the Saatchi always does so well), and that is free entry to all. There was a reassuring mix of painters and sculptors in this exhibition, but might have been let down with little photography and no video (from what I can remember) and the feel I always get from Saatchi exhibitions is that the work on show is sometimes no more or less imaginative than what art students produce its just that the Saatchi artists' work is always on a much more ambitious and on a greater scale with huge paintings on even huger walls than what most art establishments would have no choice but to hang an entire end of year show on. But that's probably because I'm actually a bit jealous. What of the work though? I think that there was a lot of emphasis on recycled materials in particularly the sculptures and use of natural materials and the overall exhibition seemed really colourful, I mean that literally, there was a lot of colour, quite kitsch but I think that also ties in with my comment on the use of recycled materials and re-using the old to make the new. All this colour left me feeling that German art is a lot more 'playful' than the more 'serious' Germanic Expressionist stuff that art history has raised me on.

Somewhere after this exhibition I went to see the David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy, once I got through the crowds that is! Have to say that it was definitely not a disappointment, despite it being so crowded (and there's a whole blog post in there somewhere waiting to come out about art and experience) I managed to see it all which included my favourite Hockney painting of all time, 'St Nichols Canyon'. You have no idea how many times, how long I have looked and painted that painting prior to seeing the real thing. It meant a lot.

Isa Genzken

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/whatson.php

Gert and Uwe Tobias
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/whatson.php


Yayoi Kusama (above)
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/yayoikusama/
Now, next on the agenda was the Anselm Kiefer exhibition at the White Cube gallery in Bermondsey. You're not allowed to take photos so please look on the link below, http://whitecube.com/exhibitions/anselm_kiefer_il_mistero_delle_cattedrali/. This was my first visit to any White Cube gallery and the one at Bermondsey was truly something very special. I will leave you with that rather ambiguous statement and encourage you to visit the gallery yourself. Out of all the work I saw during my trip this was by far the best, the most moving and dramatic at creating a genuine sense of awe. Which was also helped by having one of the biggest doors into a gallery that I have ever seen!
As for the Kusama exhibition at the Tate Modern, the next visit on my whistle-stop-tour of London, I was really disappointed. The whole exhibition seemed a lot less installation based and fun than I had thought it would be, with so much of the work on show being Kusama's repetitive pattern/shape/dot paintings which I just thought were really boring. The surfaces weren't interesting and I can't think of anything that excited me about any of her 2D works at all. I know its harsh, but it should be, compared to the lush, intense painting feasts I'd seen prior from Kiefer and Hockney this was just so dull and I felt duped by all the hype that surrounded it. Even the best piece of hers, an installation 'The infinity mirror room' was displayed badly by the Tate and did not do the work justice. In the set-up I first saw in Liverpool the work was experienced individually, so that one person had to take off their shoes and enter a cube that housed the work whereas the Tate show had it set up so that viewers walked through the space (like a corridor) which really made the whole thing more like a tourist attraction than the imersive 'experience' that, I believe, Kusama had originally intended it to be. Ok, I know practically speaking for the kind of numbers of people visiting the Tate there's no way the 'one person at a time alone in the box' would work, but I guess I am just frustrated that the experience a viewer has on a work seems to be severely compromised by practicalities that it is better to have 'as many people view the work as possible' over offering a more authentic experience of the work based on how the artist intended it to be seen. Do you agree?
I think there is debate later, possibly next week to be had about how viewers engage with art in galleries, what makes a good or bad experience? And the kind of pressures galleries have associated with footfall adding to the equation of how much or little potential money could then be on offer from arts funding.

http://www.artlyst.com/events/making-space-exploring-creative-and-research-processes-through-dialogue-curation-and-exhibition-slade-research-centre

Ahem. Anyway, the rest of my London trip was as equally fantastic as the start was and ended with the 'Making Space' conference at UCL (University College London) in which six speakers (three artists and three psychoanalysts) talked about their work/research. Another first, as this was my first ever conference and as far as first ones go, this was absolutely marvellous! With speakers like Grayson Perry, Sharon Kivland and Martin Creed talking about their practice alongside professional psychoanalysts, Valerie Sinason, Kenneth Wright and Lesley Caldwell it set itself up, even before it began, as being pretty exciting. And it was. For fear that this post is probably too long already and that anything I write now being over sentimentalised I'll leave it there for now, but there is a wealth of information and stuff I would love to share with you about this conference but will have to wait until another day. All that I will say is that it was really useful to have a dialogue between artist and psychoanalyst and how they both interpreted and discussed creative processes of making work. That and Martin Creed playing guitar for his 20 minute slot instead of presenting a 'paper' (it actually said a lot more than the theoretical stuff did, in my opinion). Fab!

Thanks for reading!

Illuminos! Press info

Stop press! Some more information about the Illuminos Project happening between now and until March 4th!

"Between 24 February – 4 March 2012 visual artists Illuminos are on a mission in Somerset. Travelling from North to South they will be creating a continually moving art happening, illuminating and projecting on ten pill boxes from the Taunton Stop Line each night. The work illuminates some of the 300 military bunkers built during World War II that create the Taunton Stop Line, designed to stop a potential German advance from the west. By the end of the ten days one hundred structures from the Stop Line will have been brought into the light drawing a historic line across the county."

http://www.tauntonstoplinelive.co.uk/

Art book of the month: February

Back by popular demand, ittsss the 'Art book of the month' review:

Kablamm!

February's choice, 'The First Pop Age' by Hal Foster

Without realising it (when I first picked this book up) this was to be the second book I was going to read by Hal Foster within the last couple months. What drew me to reading this book wasn't, as I mentioned, because I recognised the author (and had I known, I might not have actually picked it up at all because the last book I read of his, 'The Return of the Real' was pretty heavy going) but because I've always been a fan of Pop Art/'the Pop Artists', despite my own practice not necessarily having too much of an obvious link to the Pop Art style or use of 'popular imagery'. I would like to argue that in fact, tools are pretty popular, in the sense that we all claim to use them, but that's probably best left for another day. So, whilst my own work isn't directly about mechanically produced imagery, collage, design and celebrity icons, I have always had an unashamed love for the stylistic, impact and sometimes heroic 'in your face' brashness to pop art making it one of my all time favourite periods in art history. Second to that Futurism and thirdly maybe Surrealism. I like Pop because out of it the everyday object wasn't just 'art' in the Dada or Duchampian 'ready-made' sort-of-sense but the everyday object in art could now also be cool. A toaster, a golf ball, a Brillo box could be attractive, desirable and more; that's 60's American consumerism for you! Whilst this celebration in the aesthetic and design of everyday images, advertising and mass-production printing techniques is actually quite exciting for the arts I suppose my problem with Pop Art was that alone it was almost too concerned with appearances and that actually what I liked about the 'toaster, the golf ball and the Brillo box' were that they had meaning and significance that was also outside the superficiality of what they 'look like'. You're probably aware that when you look at specific artists within Pop Art that it is in fact, actually a lot more complicated than even that, and I'm not going to hazard going into it in any more depth in what is supposed to be a book review, but it does set the scene for some of the things that this book discusses and why I was interested in it in the first place.

As I mentioned earlier, the previous book I'd read by Foster, 'The Return of the Real' was useful as there was some good stuff on indexical mark making and representation but overall I actually found the whole thing pretty challenging in its use of terminology in places and as a result it lost my attention. I'm pleased to say that 'The First Pop Age' is different and reads a lot more like individual essays, which are divided into five chapters; each one on a different artist; Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha. Sadly no female Pop artists in this book (as in fact, the author acknowledges at the start due to reasons of female Pop artists receiving sustained attention much later in their careers as in Pop-another book to come out of that methinks) and artists such as Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenburg and Jim Dine rarely get a mention despite also being in the pop scene. Still, it would be impossible to cover it all at the cost of substituting in-depthly discussions on the five artists chosen. Also, if you're going to pick five pop artists then Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter and Ruscha seem at least pivotal ones to go for, also they are all painters. All of which poses the question, do we get tired of the same big names all the time? How much more is there to know, can we deconstruct about Warhol and Lichtenstein that hundreds of other books and essays haven't already told us? It is a fair question, I think and one that has no definitive answer, I only think that every individual book, no matter how popular the subject matter will always offer a different take and for some readers that 'take' or shall we say interpretation of a popular artist and their work might be the first time they've ever read/come across that work. So the whole thing is, as ever, very subjective; both to reader and author. 'Subjective' being the key word here and is actually how the five artists in, 'The First Pop Age' are untied in what Foster writes as he unravels the workings and decision makings in their paintings. Foster does take a different interpretation from the norm and chooses to discuss the formal qualities of Pop rather than subject matter. He also takes Pop further by debating how it has influenced images today, i.e screened and scanned images and whether we have moved on from Pop or do echoes of it still remain? I enjoyed reading what Foster had to say about works like '$he' by Hamilton and 'In the car' by Lichtenstein that are familiar to me and I can honestly say I never really knew anything much about Ruscha's work so that was also an eye opener. The good thing about the book was the breadth of work by each of the five artists (illustrated beautifully in colour!), as Foster discusses several important works by each of them making the whole thing a lot more paced and lively. All of which couldn't be more appropriate for a book on Pop Art. To speak generally again, I think I have always found books on pop art to be somewhat of a contradiction, the art in Pop is very often meant to be seen on impact and immediacy where as a book on Pop is always asking you to, 'stop' and 'reflect' and consider what it all might mean and I suppose whilst having the two together in the form of a book on Pop Art, like 'The First Pop Age' is somewhat of a contradiction what it is overall saying is that it doesn't matter if you're not interested in Gerhard Richter working from photographs, Richard Hamilton using collaged images or Andy Warhol reproducing food packaging what books like this do highlight is the complexity of our relationship to images and how we choose or are influenced to read into them or not. And that is interesting to every artist even if you don't like Pop.