I've had a proper day off today visiting several exhibitions and am looking forward to an equally relaxed evening watching the BBC's coverage of the likes of Fleet Foxes, the Vaccines, Mumford and Sons and U2 at Glastonbury.
I particularly wanted to see the exhibitions by Ai Weiwei at Somerset House and the Lisson Gallery. Weiwei's work often raises questions about our relationship to the past, in particular the contrast between mass manufacture and craft skills. With Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads at Somerset House Weiwei has sent on a world tour oversized re-creations of artefacts previously pillaged by the West. These traditional Chinese zodiac sculptures once adorned the fountain of Yuanming Yuan, an imperial retreat in Beijing. His Coloured Vases in the retrospective at the Lisson Gallery desecrate Han Dynasty pots by covering them in industrial paint; seen as a comment on the organized destruction of cultural and historical values that took place during the Cultural Revolution. Marble Chair, Marble Doors and Surveillance Camera work in the opposite direction by recreating ephemeral contemporary items in the material of longevity and status.
As with all who have been concerned about Weiwei's arrest, I am pleased and relieved that he has finally been released on bail and reassured to hear he is back home and safe. His experience is a reminder of the freedoms which we take for granted here in the West and for which many are struggling in China and as part of the Arab Spring. As Baroness Warsi said in an interview published in today's Guardian, "The great thing about our democracy is people believe in all sorts of things ... The great thing about democracy is you can engage in a democratic process."
Weiwei has said that "Power and the centre have suddenly disappeared in the universal sense because of the Internet, global politics, and the economy ... the Communists ... have to allow a certain amount of freedom, but this can't be controlled once it is allowed" (Ai Weiwei speaks). Weiwei is among those bearing the tensions of a process which, hopefully in the long-term and despite the current repressions, cannot be controlled and will lead to the freedom that we possess for people of all faiths and none to democratically exercise political responsibility and power being achieved by those who currently struggle for those freedoms.
At the Riflemaker Gallery Francesca Lowe has also been dealing in liberation. Headland: Woman in a Landscape consists of "five large-scale heads, five symbol-laden tree paintings, and a group of 'tree-cuts' which invite the viewer to indulge in a game of symbolic decoding, in order to reveal a woman's journey through the complex landscape of today." Made visible in the heads of each of her figures are their actions, choices and consequences: "Each woman's psychological thought process is openly displayed - an x-ray of internal activity." Lowe's Tree of Life paintings then contain on their branch each of the individual paintings in the series creating "a map of images and symbols which flow from place to place." Interestingly, in paintings like Grace and Abundance, the flow is towards renewal and ascension.
Anna Gillespie's work can be seen for the first time at Beaux Arts London, having been shown previously at their gallery in Bath. Gillespie's combination of sculpted figures with found objects is far from original yet the juxtapositions of scale and statement that she imagines create genuinely emotive and dialogical images. Thou shalt not kill utilised the lid of an oil drum as a globe on which was positioned an adult figure holding a child head-down ready to drop. This simple but beautifully poised work is also beautifully poised conceptually in the questions it raises about generational genocides.
Marialuisa Tadei has written that in an extreme world of consumerism her intention is to create bridges between the material world and the spiritual dimension. She deals in opposites, both in terms of materials and concepts, making the weighty light and vice versa. Donald Kuspit has written that "...if the basic point of serious visual art is to apotheosize the eye, to elevate it to the prime place in sensing, to celebrate it for its own sacred self and cognitive powers, which is why Aristotle said it was the highest sense, then Marialuisa Tadei's most esthetically pure and sublimely abstract works are those in the Oculus Dei series." These mosaic works are among the stunning pieces currently on show at the Hay Hill Gallery.
Finally, I also visited the room of works by John Craxton which can currently be seen at Tate Britain. Craxton features dreamers, musicians, poets and shepherds within landscapes composed of cubist or abstract fragments held together by colour harmonies which shine and sing. His work has been unduly neglected both in his neo-romantic phase where he, more than any others in that movement, re-captured the awe and mystery of Samuel Palmer's Shoreham paintings, and in his subsequent Cretan works imbued as they are with the light, shapes and colours of the Mediterranean.
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Fleet Foxes - He Doesn't Know Why.
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