Artlyst - Visionary Cities: Michael Takeo Magruder – British Library

My latest review for Artlyst is of Michael Takeo Magruder's Imaginary Cities at the British Library:

'Magruder translates his source material – which are precious entities in their own right – into either digitally immersive or physically tangible artefacts that re-present their source in alternative forms. These enthrall and convince in and of themselves, while also enhancing our appreciation for the source itself. To do so requires the paying of attention both to the source map and to the properties of the form in which the re-presentation occurs. The creation of these installations is, therefore, a labour of love.'

My other Artlyst articles and interviews are:

• Van Gogh’s Religious Journey Around London
• William Congdon Holy Sites And The Kettle’s Yard Connection
• Mark Dean Premieres Pastiche Mass At Banqueting Hall Chelsea College of Arts
• John Kirby: The Torment Underlying The Civilised Facade
• Curating Spiritual Sensibilities In Changing Times
• Ken Currie: Protest Defeat And Victory
• Bosco Sodi: A Moment Of Genesis
• Bill Viola And The Art Of Contemplation
• Art In Churches 2018: Spiritual Combinations Explored
• Sister Wendy Beckett – A Reminiscence
• Marleen Hengelaar-Rookmaaker On The Legacy Of ArtWay
• Guido Guidi: Per Strada Flowers Gallery London
• Peter Howson Artlyst Interview
• Peter Howson: The play is over – Flowers Gallery
• Camille Henrot: Scientific History And Creation Story Mash Up
• Nicola Green Explores Recent And Contemporary Religious Leaders – St Martin-in-the-Fields
• Art And The Consequences Of War Explored In Two Exhibitions
• Helaine Blumenfeld Translating Her Vision
• Alastair Gordon A Testament To His Faith
• Sacred Noise: Explores Religion, Faith And Divinity
• Bill Viola: Quiet Contemplative Video Installation St Cuthbert’s Church Edinburgh
• The ground-breaking work of Sister Corita Kent
• Katrina Moss Chaiya Art Awards Interview: Where is God in our 21st century world?
• Picasso To Souza: The Crucifixion Imagery Rarely Exhibited
• Apocalypse Now: Michael Takeo Magruder Interviewed
• Jonathan Anderson: Religious Inspirations Behind Modernism
• Michael Takeo Magruder: De / coding the Apocalypse – Panacea Museum
• Giorgio Griffa: The Golden Ratio And Inexplicable Knowledge
• Arabella Dorman Unveils New Installation At St James Church Piccadilly
• Can Art Transform Society?
• Art Awakening Humanity Conference Report
• Central St Martins in the Fields Design Then And Now
• The Sacramental And Liturgical Nature Of Conceptual Art
• Caravan – An Interview With Rev Paul Gordon Chandler On Arts Peacebuilding
• Art Awakening Humanity Alexander de Cadenet Interviewed
• Polish Art In Britain Centenary Marked At London’s Ben Uri Gallery
• Michael Pendry New Installation Lights Up St Martin In The Fields;
• Mark Dean Projects Stations of the Cross Videos On Henry Moore Altar;
• Refugee Artists Learning from The Lives Of Others;
• The Religious Impulses Of Robert Rauschenberg;
• The Christian Science Connection Within The British Modern Art Movement;
• Artists Rebranding The Christmas Tree Tradition;
• Art Impacted - A Radical Response To Radicalisation;
• The Art of St Martin-in-the-Fields; and
• Was Caravaggio A Good Christian?

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Bill Fay - City Of Dreams.

Metropolis: Reflections on the modern city

The Ikon Gallery, in partnership with Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and The New Art Gallery Walsall, aim to establish a new and ambitious international collection of contemporary art for Birmingham and the West Midlands region, using the theme ‘Metropolis: reflections on the modern city’.

Metropolis, which is currently on show at the Gas Hall in Birmingham,  presents visions of life in modern cities around the world. With approximately 50 works in various media including digital projection, painting, sculpture, photographic installation and video art, it considers themes such as architecture, movement and consumerism, as well as the marginalised people and places of the metropolis.

 

Metropolis is the largest public exhibition of this nationally significant collection which includes work by 25 major artists from India, China, Europe and the USA such as Miao Xiaochun, Zhang Enli and Grazia Toderi. ARTicle 14 by internationally renowned West African artist Romuald Hazoumè is on display as is Mohamed Bourouissa’s powerful and significant Périphérique series – translated from the French as both ‘peripheral’ and ‘ring road’ – which offers a cast of young, mostly male, characters, each scene reflecting a carefully staged moment of physical or emotional tension set in the bleak housing estates that encircle Paris. In addition, German artist, Christiane Baumgartner has been commissioned to make new work, specifically about the urban landscape of Birmingham.

 

As Emma Crichton-Miller has written in Prospects, "There is a strong emphasis on photography and film, perhaps because these forms are particularly adapted to the fleeting, elusive life of cities, where significant events can erupt in moments and innumerable human interactions take place daily against a backdrop of mute architecture." This is particularly so with Baumgartner’s diptych Ladywood inspired by reflections of a railway bridge onto the canal and Nicolas Provost's hypnotically beautiful Storyteller which scans and merges views of Las Vegas.

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Kraftwerk - Metropolis.

Art in the West Midlands

There is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to art exhibitions in the West Midlands currently:

• Metropolis: Reflections on the modern city is a major showcase of international contemporary artwork jointly collected by Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and the New Art Gallery, Walsall and developed in partnership with Ikon Gallery, as part of the £1 million Art Fund International initiative. Now shown together for the first time, these works represent an ambitious and nationally-significant new collection for Birmingham, Walsall and the West Midlands. Visions of the modern global city by some of the world's most exciting artists, Metropolis brings together stunning work by 25 contemporary artists of the highest international standing to Birmingham and includes digital projection, painting, sculpture, photography and mixed media installation.
• Caught in the Crossfire: Artistic Responses to Conflict, Peace and Reconcilliation. This exhibition at the Herbert Art Gallery takes us on a challenging journey from the home front to the frontline and back again, as seen through the eyes of artists, soldiers and people affected by conflict. Visitors travel through divided lands, debate the role of protest art, explore the aesthetics of violence and machinery of war, and reflect upon the aftermath of war where hope emerges and lives are rebuilt. A section of the exhibition focuses on the work of kennardphillipps made in response to the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
• Jacob Epstein and Damien Hirst: Birth, Death and Religion. Though Jacob Epstein died in 1959 – six years before Damien Hirst was born – they both deal with the universal themes of life, birth, death and religion which have been the subject matter of artists for many centuries. The work they both produce around these interrelated concerns highlights the way that artistic practices have changed throughout the 20^th century along with our social attitudes towards them.
• Bellini, Botticelli, Titian… 500 years of Italian Art. This spectacular exhibition at Compton Verney comprises forty of the City of Glasgow’s greatest Italian paintings – the finest and most comprehensive civic collection in the UK, and mostly unseen outside Glasgow. The works are of the highest quality and richness and chronicle a remarkable time span from 1400 - 1900, demonstrating the gradual move from religious to secular subjects. This outstanding exhibition includes landscapes, portraits and devotional works from the Renaissance. It will be followed by Flight and the Artistic Imagination - an exhibition exploring the instinctive human desire to fly from the classical era to the modern day. Starting with the imaginations of Leonardo da Vinci and Francisco Goya and ending with space travel, satellite images and everyday air travel, it is an exciting exploration of creative responses to flight.

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Deacon Blue - The Hipsters.

The Clean-Up King - Part 6

The explosives were placed in the cavity formed by the demolition ball and were held in place by the children. The detonator was pressed. Bricks flew. The blast rocked the crane throwing it down into the sea of water. A rain of rubble fell.

Then, as the smoke and dust cleared a large gap appeared in the compact, regular pattern of the city wall. Water began to heave as it moved towards the gap and then poured through tumbling outside the wall and out of the city.

Water drained through the gap keeping the level constant across the city until, finally, the storm began to end. With the ending of the storm, the sewers slowly began to reduce the water level. The gap in the wall was widened and deepened and, in time, the water cleared and the city people could begin to assess the damage.

Now they could see their foolishness and arrogance. Now they demolished the wall leaving only a final layer of rubble to remind them of what they had done.

In time this random collection of stones became covered with wild grasses, weeds and flowers. The countryside that the children had loved began to invade the city. Now, though, the city people had learn to welcome the wildness of nature. They knew little of the Clean-Up King and less of the children but they had taken the first step towards the other beautiful country.

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Check out Kings X performing King.

The Clean-Up King - Part 5

Then it began to rain. No ordinary shower or thunderstorm that passes. This was hard, driving, persistent and torrential rain like the spray of continual machine gun fire. It forced the people off their streets into their homes, offices and factories, wherever there was shelter. It fell without let up. It fell relentlessly.

As time passed the rain began to make the rubbish mountains slither and slide. Avalanches of cans, wrappers, carriers, fag ends, bottles and papers began. The detritus of the rubbish mountains floated down the streets silting up the drains, clogging the overflow pipes. As the sewers blocked, puddles formed in the streets and spread. Water rose to kerb level and began to seep into homes. Rain continued to fall as time began to blur. Tomorrow turned into today and the waters lapping at the city wall continued to rise.

The children, though, were not in love with the wall. They hated the imprisonment that the wall had imposed. They had longed to break free and now they seized their opportunity. Splashing, stumbling through the rising water they made their way to a large construction site where the foundations for what was to be the third largest building in the city were being laid.

“A hole in the wall! A hole in the wall!” they shouted to the builders who were beginning to climb their cranes in the hope of avoiding the rising tide. One began to operate a demolition ball. With repeated swings it smashed against the city wall making the firmly fixed stone splinter and small pieces fly. Others ran to find explosives.

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Check out Olivier Messiaen's Louange à l'éternité de Jésus.

The Clean-Up King - Part 4

The city people, though, were just too busy to pay any attention to two small children and their fanciful ideas. Theirs was a city full of enterprise, endeavour, efficiency and urgency. A city where targets were met and commitments honooured. Trains ran to time, buses traveled at twelve minute intervals precisely three miles apart, repairers and deliverers told you when they would arrive and then did so.

The city people were so sure of themselves and their effective, economic, enterprising city that they decided to become completely self sufficient. They decided to build a wall around their city. Not an ordinary wall with gates, windows and doors. No, there were to be no comings or goings through this wall. It was designed to keep the outside, outside.

Outside was what the city people feared. Outside was wildness - exuberant, lavish growth – where life went on with no apparent purpose and to no apparent order. Birds flew where they wished, wild flowers and grasses seeded and grew in every nook and cranny, and the weather – well, there was no controlling the weather!

So the city people built their wall. They built it thick and they built it high. They built it so that it cast the whole city into shadow, so that they could not feel the breath of the breeze on their faces, so that birds, animals, insects and plants were excluded. What they planned for was complete control. So they walked on concrete, worked in artificial light and mass produced their food.

The two children were saddened by the building of the wall. They asked the Clean-Up King about it but he just talked about the storm before the calm. It didn’t seem quite right and wasn’t very encouraging. They had been used to making the long journey to the edge of the great city. They had loved to lie in the long grass feeling the heat of the sun and the vibration of the crickets around them. They had climbed gnarled, knobbled trees bent with age and swum in the sparkling, bubbling, racing waters. It had helped them think about the other beautiful country.

Now all of these pleasures were denied them. All they could see were the grey tones of prefabrication and concrete. The city people, however, were proud of the independence they had created. Their pleasure came from meeting all their own needs by the creation of their own hands and they could see no drawbacks to the isolation in which they were living.

The Clean-Up King Part 3

In the morning the crowd came back. Only this time they didn't just stand and laugh. This time they dropped rubbish, broke the broom, threw away the shovel and tipped over the barrow. They made the children run away, but the clean-up King still went on working. He righted the barrow and, using his hands, refilled it. As he wheeled it away the whole crowd followed him.

When they reached the quarry, and saw where he was going, they all began to shout. "In the pit, in the pit!" Then they all rushed forward and pushed the clean up King into the quarry with his rubbish. He lay on the heap of rubbish, clutching his side, when down came a torrent of cans, bottles, tins and other junk. The crowd were pelting him with rubbish. They did not stop until he was completely covered up and they could not even see one hair on his head.

Back in the city the children sat on the pavement and cried. They had seen it all but there was nothing that they could have done. Suddenly they heard someone speaking to them and it sounded like the clean up King. They looked all around but they couldn't see anyone. "I'm really here," said the King, "it's just that you can't see me anymore." "We can still clear up," he said, " but I will need your help more than ever."

The two children picked up the shovel and went to find the barrow. They started to work while the clean up King told them all about the other beautiful world. When people came to watch they told them what the clean up King had said about the other beautiful world. Most people laughed and said that it was all their imagination but some people joined them and began to help. Then the clean up King would come and speak to them too.

They are all still working now. The junk mountains have got smaller but they are still there. More people have joined them but not enough. They dream of a day when everyone lives in the other beautiful world but they know it won't happen until everyone in the city joins in their clean up. What about you, won't you?

The Clean-Up King - Part 2

When the clean-up King got out onto the streets he found things were worse than he had thought. There were hills of junk and mountains of rubbish. That wasn't all though, then there was the smell. The stink from all that thrown away food, scraps and leftovers, as it rotted and decomposed was terrible. The clean up King held his nose and set to work.

It wasn't long before he had filled his barrow. Outside the city he remembered that there was a great, deep quarry. He wheeled his barrow out of the city gates and along to the quarry. He emptied his barrow and started back again. He hadn't made much difference, the junk mountains looked as high as before, but he dug his shovel in one more time and began to fill up again.

After a time people began to notice the clean up King. Some people stopped to watch him, then started to make jokes and laugh. Other people joined them and then there was a crowd all pointing and laughing. Once, when he had just cleared up one space, a man walked out of the crowd and dropped more rubbish onto the clean ground. Everyone in the crowd clapped and cheered. The clean up King kept on working.

When evening came and it became dark and cold the people in the crowd began to drift away until there were only two people left watching the King, a boy and a girl. After a time he noticed them there and called to them to come over. "Why are you doing all this?" they asked. "Sit down here with me," said the clean up King, "and I'll tell you."

He told them about a different world with grass, trees and flowers, animals, birds and fish. A world with deep, rich, beautiful colours where everything was fresh, clean and sparkling. "Oh, if only you could see the glint of the sun shimmering on the river's ripples," he told them and while he told them it seemed as though they could.

"Why don't you help me?" he asked them. "We could get so much more done if you would." They thought for a moment. "People would laugh at us," they said, "our parents wouldn't like it, we'd get dirty, and there's too much anyway, you'll never get it finished!" "Don't worry," said the clean up King, "you start when you're ready", and he got back to work.

The children watched him as he shovelled and brushed by himself. "He could do with some help," they said, "he'll never get through on his own. We could help for an hour or so and then go home." One took the broom and the other the shovel, the King wheeled the barrow and the work moved a little faster.

The Clean-Up King - Part 1

Once upon a time there lived a King who ruled over a great city. A city made up of houses, flats, bungalows and maisonettes which housed lawyers and cleaners, builders and accountants, parents, teachers and children of all shapes, sizes and descriptions. Although each of the King's subjects were so different they all had one thing in common. To a man, woman and child they were all untidy.

Cans, wrappers, carriers, fag ends, bottles and papers were left in a constant stream, like a snails trail, behind each of the cities inhabitants. Their cars pumped out a lethal cocktail that hung in the air like smog and infected their lungs. Their factories pumped more waste which gunged up rivers killing fish and wildlife.

No one appeared to notice, least of all care, with the exception of the King. Tears sprang to his eyes each time he looked out of his palace window and saw the mess that his city was in. He had tried everything he could to get his people to tidy up. He had put up signs, taken out adverts, issued health warnings, recorded startling documentaries and offered rewards but still they would not tidy up.

In the end he decided there was only one thing for it. So, he took off his crown, took off his robe, got up from his throne and walked out of his palace. He found himself a broom, a shovel and a barrow and pushed them down into the city to begin cleaning up by himself.

Global Cities

More on cities as I've been at the Global Cities exhibition in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern today with my friend Alan Stewart.

Global Cities looks at the changing faces of ten dynamic international cities: Cairo, Istanbul, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Mumbai, São Paulo, Shanghai and Tokyo. Exploring each city through five thematic lenses – speed, size, density, diversity and form – the exhibition draws on data originally assembled for the 10th International Architecture Exhibition at the 2006 Venice Biennale and presents existing films, videos and photographs by more than 20 artists and architects to pose questions about sustainability, public space and social inclusion.

The exhibition demonstrates how vital visual imagery is for understanding both the macro and micro levels of city life. Graphic images and timber constructions were creatively utilised to clearly convey the macro picture of relative diversities and densities between cities in a way that raw statistics simply could not achieve. Andreas Gursky's photos took a wide angle look at the beauty of urban skylines with Los Angeles, in particular, revealing that beauty that Victoria Williams noted in her song Lights.

Video installations in this exhibition tended to focus on the micro. Francis Alÿs led us on a merry dance through the different streetscapes of Central London to the rhythm of the drum stick that he ran along railings, cars, walls etc. as he walked. Huseyin Alptekin focussed in on individual incidents in Istanbul and Bombay setting the diversities of this incidents into play alongside each other much as we could experience in moving from one street to another within a single city. In Peripheral Stories Hala Elkoussy laid the real-life stories of her interviewees over a boundary-blurring journey through their peripheral environments.

Both the expansive and the minute are necessary to our understanding of what cities are and how they develop and this exhibition doesn't just pose questions but provides perspectives from which cities can truly be seen.

The destiny of the city

I've been reading Kester Brewin's book The Complex Christ (SPCK, 2004) on the recommendation of my friend Huw. For me it has been one of those books which confirm a lot that you had already been thinking about but where someone else instead of you has actually gone and put it all together and said it better than you ever could have done. Plus there are some interesting synergies with Nicholas Mosley's writings including on the actual and metaphorical properties of slime mould!

Anyway, one of the passages that particularly struck me was this about our response to cities:

"Christ approached the city in order to become a part of it, to infect it, to plant some seed within it that he hoped would take root and grow, drawing the city toward its fulfilled state: that of the place of divine and human cohabitation. This is not where our cities are now, but it is where they are destined to go. And for this reason we must not give up on them. Difficult as it is going to be, we must not abandon our cities or barricade ourselves into sanitized parts of them. If we are not going to face their troubles and stay around to improve them, who is? We must learn to appreciate that the very fact that there is pain in our cities is why they are so vital. The city is the place where we are forced to meet with and journey with 'the other': the drunkard, the ayslum seeker, the lonely, the homeless; it is a multicultural melting pot - all of humanity is here. So we must stay and celebrate these things and try to make them work because this is what the destiny of the city is: to be a place where we can all live together."

It reminded me of a great song, on We'll Get Over by The Staple Singers, called The Challenge in which they challenge us to live in the ghetto, bridge the gap between us, and cure hearts of hate. I once wrote a children's story called The Clean-Up King that deals with similar ideas which I may well serialise over several blogs in future.