Dalton and Deller in Waltham Forest

Pen Dalton's printed wall installation 'Matrilineal Descent' at Tokarska Gallery uses Dalton's own family history to raise issues identity, gender, migration and motherhood. Originally designed for an academic conference on identity in Northern Ireland and informed by writings on identity from Michel Foucault and Stuart Hall that regard ‘the self’ as formed within specific historic, cultural and social contexts, 'Matrilineal Descent' is a powerful, personal piece where the personal informs the wider work and the issues it raises. This installation is complemented by a series of text-based prints - copies of which are in the V&A - that draw on feminist psychoanalytic/linguistic theory – notably that of Julia Kristeva - in exploring understandings of motherhood.

Through her work in art education Dalton has argued "that modernist art education has been and continues to be a complex of gendered discursive practices: saturated through with masculine and feminine divisions and hierarchies which in turn produce gendered identities as hierarchical and working class girls as subordinate, ready to assume subordinate positions in the wider social and
economic culture."

Identity is also the theme at the William Morris Gallery which hosts Jeremy Deller's English Magic. English Magic reflects "the roots of much of Deller’s work, focusing on British society - its people, icons, myths, folklore and its cultural and political history." He has addressed events from the past, present and an imagined future and worked with a varied range of collaborators including archeologists, musicians, bird sanctuaries, prisoners and painters.

His film, also entitled English Magic, forms a major part of the exhibition, bringing together many of the ideas behind the works and featuring the visual and thematic elements that reflect Deller's interest in the diverse nature of British society and its broad cultural, socio-political and economic history. The music is performed by the Melodians Steel Orchestra from South London and was recorded in Studio 2 of Abbey Road Studios in London:

The William Morris Gallery, the place of Morris birth, has recently been transformed to create a new world-class destination and international centre of excellence for the study of Morris, where visitors can enjoy the most intense and personal encounter with one of the foremost creative artists and original thinkers of the nineteenth century.

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Jeremy Deller - English Magic.

Maciej Hoffman: the collision of thoughts with reality

All the angst of the world seems spilled out in drips, splatters and gestural brushstrokes on the huge unstretched canvases of Maciej Hoffman's current exhibition at Walthamstow's Tokarska Gallery. The distressed surfaces depict equally distressed characters with existential Expressionist force and a seeming spontaneity of style.

'Disquiet', 'Powerless', 'Nameless', 'Confused', 'Agitator'; Hoffman's titles are accurate indicators of his content. These are grandiose dramatic works full of the tension and conflict by which Hoffman is frequently seized; the collision of thoughts with reality. Stress and fear flow from the problems of the everyday through the walls of his studio to rip apart the work. Almost all his days, he says, are accompanied by stress and the fear of danger, encircled, as he is, by a world in which a price is paid for each breath. 

The child of artists, Hoffman was antagonistic to following in his parents footsteps which resulted in a "troubled" childhood. He was a teenager during the beginning of martial law in Poland. Then came the fall of communism and his immersion in the birth of Polish “capitalism, post-communism”. For fifteen years he worked for one of the biggest Polish advertisement agencies yet this freedom to use art for commercial purposes combined with the unrelenting dominance of the profit principle came to seem as much of a trap and constraint as that which he had experienced under communism. 

Hoffman is interested in art as freedom. His sense is that our control systems for classification, measurement and supervision are narrowing our space for what is irrational, imperfect or disordered. Artistic creation remains the one real margin of freedom we can use. His fluid, gestural manipulation of paint on canvas is seemingly raw, random, unfinished, and yet the emotional impact of his angst is as great as the size of the works themselves. Soutine, de Kooning, Keifer are inspirations and references but Hoffman is assuredly his own man with his own tortured vision.

Maciej Hoffman's paintings are at the Tokarska Gallery until 6 October, Thur - Sat, 12pm - 7pm.

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Lou Reed - Sad Song.

Caravaggio: Sacred and Profane

Yesterday I heard Andrew Graham-Dixon speak at the Tokarska Gallery about the portrait of Caravaggio that he paints in his biography of the artist Caravaggio - A Life Sacred and Profane. Graham-Dixon gave a fascinating and entertaining two hour presentation of Caravaggio's life and work up until his escape from prison in Malta.

Among the most interesting aspects of the talk was Graham-Dixon's description of the cultural background in Milan from which Caravaggio came; Carlo Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, had argued that the High Renaissance art of Raphael and Michelangelo had led the Church astray and that Catholic art needed to engage with the poor masses by means of a popular realism which could grab the attention, through its drama, of those who saw it thereby aiding their meditation and prayer.

Graham-Dixon argued that Caravaggio's paintings invite a profane reading but, for those able to see, the symbolism of the paintings allows a sacred reading meaning that, in a sense, the painting judges you through your response to it. As a example, he discussed Bacchus noting that Bacchus, who is a pre-figuration of Christ, is holding out to us the wine which is his salvific blood and that the rotting fruit symbolises the sinfulness of our lives from which Christ will save us.

Caravaggio became caught in a battle between the realist and baroque styles; a debate over the extent to which the Counter-Reformation should engage with the poor masses as Borromeo had argued. The baroque was essentially based on fear of the masses by emphasising submission to the majesty and authority of the Church. By contrast Caravaggio indicated inclusion of the masses by depicting the poverty of Christ's disciples.

The two styles were set against each other in the Cerasi Chapel at Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome where Caravaggio's Crucifixion of St. Peter and Conversion of St. Paul frames the altarpiece, the Assumption of the Virgin by Annibale Carracci. The rear of the horse in the Conversion of St. Paul is positioned to point directly at the Carracci. Yet Caravaggio is, in his time, ultimately the loser in this battle - despite regularly defending his honour with physical acts of violence - as two major commissions he had been awarded (The Madonna of the Palafrenieri and The Death of the Virgin) were both rejected as a result of profane readings of his realism.

The tragedy of Caravaggio's life then accelerated as a direct result of these rejections with the profane aspects of his life dominating although redemption was regularly offered through the protection of the Colonna family, Franciscan spirituality which valued his realism, and the offer of a pardon from the Pope. Although there was insufficient time on the night to complete the story, in the summary of the book on his website, Graham-Dixon concludes: "Caravaggio had lived much of his life surrounded by poor and ordinary people. He painted for them and from their perspective. In the end he died and was buried among them, in an unmarked grave. He was 38 years old."   

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Tom Jones - Bad As Me.

British Design 1948 - 2012 and 1948 Olympians

On entering British Design 1948 - 2012 at the V&A, one is confronted by one third of John Piper’s huge mural The Englishman’s Home created for the Festival of Britain 1951 and depicting varying forms of British architecture. Over 80 works created by many of Britain’s leading artists featured in the Festival of Britain, including other significant Neo-Romantic works such as Graham Sutherland’s mural The Origins of the Land.

Peter Fuller has argued that the work of the "best artists at the end of the 1930s and throughout the 1940s", such as Henry Moore, Sutherland, Piper, and even Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, "is stamped by a recognition of indigenous tradition, and of indigenous landscape: but it is not nostalgic; rather, the threatened and injured land emerges, again, as a metaphor, a wasteland redeemed through the aesthetic processes themselves."

Home and Land were key themes of the Festival of British and likewise are key themes too in the first room of this significant exhibition. At this time, as Fuller also notes, "the finest examples of the English neo-Romantic sensibility were greeted, literally, with worldwide acclaim." This influence can also be seen and felt in other sections of this opening to the exhibition.

Piper’s mural was selected by Sir Frederick Gibberd, masterplanner of Harlow New Town, to be gifted to Harlow at the end of the Festival of Britain. Gibberd assembled a huge collection of public art for Harlow (to the extent that it is now known as a Sculpture Town) including Moore’s Harlow Family Group, originally sited outside St Mary at Latton Church in Mark Hall. Piper also created an Emmaus mosaic for the Humphrys and Hurst designed modernist church of St Paul in Harlow Town Centre. Examples of Gibberd's designs plus Harlow Family Group feature in the exhibition.

An even more significant engaging of Neo-Romantic artists by the Church occurred through the design of the new Coventry Cathedral by Architect Basil Spence. Spence won the competition to design a new cathedral in 1951 and gathered a team of artists and craftspeople that included both Piper and Sutherland. Examples in this exhibition of work by many who were part of that team demonstrate that although consecrated in 1962, the new Cathedral typified the decorative modernism of the 1950s.

The engagement of the Church with artists such as Piper and Sutherland had been developed by Bishop George Bell and Canon Walter Hussey with St Matthew Northampton and Chichester Cathedral being the outstanding examples, after Coventry Cathedral itself. Bell and Hussey, like their French counterparts Père Regamy and Couturier, sought to work with the engage with the significant artists of their day, which in their case were primarily the Neo-Romantics. Yet Fuller notes that in less than a decade the influence of Neo-Romanticism had been lost and similarly this exhibition contains no other example of a nationally significant commission by the Church subsequent to Coventry Cathedral.

While the Church has continued to commission new work on the basis begun by Bell and Hussey, this exhibition suggests it has been unable to engage in any significant manner with the subversive strand of work - the counter-cultural movements from 1960s ‘Swinging London’, through to the 1970s punk scene and the emergence of ‘Cool Britannia’ in the 1990s- which are showcased in the exhibition’s second room. The only significant reference to Christianity, after Coventry, in this exhibition comes with Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy wallpaper where prescription drugs are given Biblical labels suggesting that healthcare has become our contemporary religion. The use Hirst makes of Christian references in this work suggests that Christianity has been superceded, an impression also given by the absence of Christian references in this exhibition after Coventry. In this way, the limitations of the Bell/Hussey, Couturier/Regamy approach become apparent as the mainstream art movements of the day may not share a natural affinity with the Church (particularly when the Church is seen as a part of which is to be subverted) and, if the focus is on engaging key mainstream artists, then less focus is paid to supporting emerging artists with a Christian faith able to engage effectively with the mainstream art world.

The 1948 and 2012 Olympics bookmark this exhibition. The ‘austerity games’ of 1948 (as they became known) took place at a time of economic crisis in a city devastated by bombing, but they provided a platform for reconciliation and reconstruction. In 2012 Britain welcomes the Olympics once more, and while the spirit remains, the context in which they are taking place has entirely changed. The exhibition tells the story of British fashion, furniture, fine art, graphic design, photography, ceramics, architecture and industrial products over the past 60 years. Highlighting significant moments in the history of British design, the exhibition looks at how the country continues to nurture artistic talent, as well as investigate the role that Britain’s manufacturing industry has played in the global market. It also examines the impact that Britain’s ideas-driven, creative economy has had on goods and design industries world-wide.

Similar sporting contrasts are also apparent in Katherine Green’s touring exhibition, currently at the Tokarska Gallery, 1948 Olympians. In 1948 London was recovering from war, athletes were truly amateur and therefore not paid. Athletes trained on rations whilst working full-time and raising children, they had to take unpaid leave to compete and many had to hand sew their own kits. When the Games were over, they returned to work and carried on as normal. Green’s images of the athletes that took part that year tell a story of a different age. For some shown here, sport became their lives, but for many it was a past time that practicalities meant they could not continue.

Green is a social documentary photographer based in London. Her work often focuses on the idea of community and what makes or bonds communities. She aims to highlight and celebrate members of the community who may otherwise go unseen. She says of this work: "At the same time as drawing parallels between 1948 and 2012 Olympic Games, I do hope these portraits and oral histories go some way to demonstrate the knowledge and experience of a valuable generation of people who are overlooked in our society. It has been a great privilege to spend time in the company of such interesting and modest people."

Green’s work therefore shows us some of those who have lived through the massive changes documented in broad outline by the V&A’s exhibition and offers an understated antidote to the lavish, opulent celebration of sport which will be the 30th Olympiad. If Britain has remained a global leader in design, sport or indeed any other fields, Green’s work suggests that this is not solely due to artists and designers who were born, trained or working in the UK and who have produced innovative and internationally acclaimed works from post-war to the present day, but also to the interesting, modest and overlooked people that she documents with such care.

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Tom Jones - Soul Of A Man.

Spiritual Life - Creativity

This is my latest Spiritual Life column for the Ilford Recorder:

“Begin, begin,

let something be.

Make a blot,

a dash, a stroke.

Make your mark.”

I read this poem last Saturday at the Private View for an exhibition I have organized throughout December at the Tokarska Gallery in Walthamstow. It suggests that we understand ourselves and the world as we make things or make things happen; in other words as we use our God-given ability to create. The art we have included in this exhibition offers us that kind of understanding through their expression of creativity.

Earlier in that same week I had been at the 15^th Anniversary Assembly of TELCO, The East London Communities Organisation, where the phase ‘mark your mark’ was also being used. TELCO has made its mark with successful campaigns for a London Living Wage. Last Wednesday, they celebrated jobs gained by local people through their London 2012 Jobs initiative.

A 61 year old lady who had experienced periods of homelessness and who had thought she would never work again was among those who had gained jobs. Our creativity has been given to us by God to make that kind of mark on our communities and on the lives of others; as well as also being for the marks we make when we paint or write.

The key thing is to make a start in some way, to begin to use our latent God-given creativity. In Church recently, many of us have been reading Jesus’ story of the talents in which he makes the same point; don’t sit on your gifts and talents, instead make a start to make your mark!

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Radiohead - No Surprises.

Exhibition pieces

I have two pieces in the latest commission4mission exhibition which opens at the Tokarska Gallery tomorrow.

Broken journey, fragmented story is an installation made from noticeboards containing images and meditations from a sequence of Stations of the Cross and Resurrection which have been displayed, with omissions, in a random pattern which disrupts the agreed linear sequence of the Passion journey and narrative. The Gospel story is rarely able to be told fully and in the way in which we might ideally wish to do so. The installation raises questions about the effect that this fragmentation of the story has on us, on those who hear the story told, and on the story itself. Is a story told in fragments disconnected and incoherent or do the fragments and omissions enable new insights and connections to be made?

In Your face is a map of the world Christ takes the sin of the world onto himself in and through his crucifixion. The title is lifted from a song by 30 Seconds to Mars and the scrawled words come from my poem, Dancing the black night blue.

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Love - She Comes In Colors.