Between: white cube

Showing posts with label white cube. Show all posts

Monday, 18 December 2023

Artlyst: Antony Gormley Explores Self Awareness White Cube Bermondsey

My latest exhibition review for Artlyst is of Body Politic: Antony Gormley at White Cube Bermondsey:

"Antony Gormley has spent his career investigating the relationship of the human body to space. Through his fertile imagination, this has proved to be a seam that he can continuously mine, whether using his own body or those of others, in order to explore questions of where human beings stand in relation to nature and the cosmos. His latest exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey uncovers new ways to probe these fundamental issues.

“The responsibility of the art of our time is to reflect on and provide instruments for examination and self-awareness” Antony Gormley

He is doing so at a time when human beings are predominantly urban dwellers in industrially manufactured habitats, and when, Teresa Kittler writes, there is a broad “cultural acceptance of the rights of money, goods, ideas and tourists to travel – a phenomenon accelerated by new technologies” at the same time as national governments are controlling or denying that same right to migrants. In this exhibition, Gormley uses the industrial processes that produce clay blocks, concrete, iron and steel to create works that examine the dynamic tension between our need for refuge and our need to roam."

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Brian Eno - Thursday Afternoon.

Monday, 23 May 2022

Artlyst: Les Lalanne, Schütte And Gursky London Spring Exhibition Highlights

My latest set of reviews for A rtlyst cover exhibitions at Ben Brown Fine Arts, Frith Street Gallery, and White Cube Bermondsey for Les Lalanne, Thomas Schütte And Andreas Gursky:

"Re-enchantment, magnification and framing; are some of the approaches utilised in three shows which demonstrate the diversity and vitality of the contemporary art world.

Les Lalanne, the late French wife and husband artistic duo, are the dreamers who re-enchant. As homage to their aesthetic and as a kitsch comment on their now elevated status, for one half of this extensive survey of their work at Ben Brown Fine Art and Claridge’s ArtSpace, the work is set within the cotton-wool clouds of heaven ...

Magnification is also an essential strategy for Thomas Schütte, as demonstrated by the grandiose figures and heads in his exhibition at Frith Street Gallery ...

Framing is key to the dual operation of Gursky’s images, enabling them to function as both astute social comment and painterly compositions. Social commentary and critique are shared strands running through these otherwise very different exhibitions. We are all richer for the diversity of approaches and work to be found here."

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

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Mavis Staples and Levon Helm - This May Be The Last Time.

Monday, 28 June 2021

Artlyst - Rachel Kneebone: A Complex Tableau Of Organic And Geometric Forms

My latest preview for Artlyst is of Rachel Kneebone's upcoming exhibitions at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and White Cube:

'Kneebone’s sculptures convey movement and metamorphosis through the stillness of porcelain, a medium usually associated with calm rather than fluidity. She explains that “My work moves around metamorphosis, change and simultaneous states, so nothing about it is fixed.” ... This piece, like the Chapel in which it is set, enables a moment for pause and reflection on the relation between strength and vulnerability and the capacity of the human spirit to create, even in adversity.’

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

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Mavis Staples - My Own Eyes.

Thursday, 5 March 2020

Exhibition update

Pace Gallery has a solo exhibition of new works by Light and Space master JamesTurrell at 6 Burlington Gardens. On view until 27 March 2020, the exhibition features three new works from his Constellation series.

Turrell investigates the immateriality of light itself. With these new pieces, Turrell continues his exploration of technological possibilities combined with sensory practices and gradient colours. Presented in site-specific chambers, the works feature elliptical and circular shapes with a frosted glass surface animated by an array of technically advanced LED lights, which are mounted to a wall and generated by computer programming. The light changes are subtle and hypnotic, one colour morphing into the next. The programme runs on a loop that is imperceptible to the viewer, prompting a transcendental experience.

Turrell was raised a Quaker and has come back to being active. He says that being a Quaker influences how he lives his life and what he values. Noting that people tend to relate any work in light to the spiritual, he suggests we greet light in three major ways that aren’t necessarily partitioned:

'There is a psychological aspect, a physical aspect, and a spiritual aspect. In terms of the physical, we drink light as Vitamin D, so it’s literally a food that has a major effect on our well-being. The strong psychological effects of light can readily be felt in particular spaces. One can feel this in Gasworks—it expresses the powerful quality of light. In terms of the spiritual, there are very few religious or spiritual experiences that people don’t use the vocabulary of light to describe.'

Goodman Gallery is presenting Land of Dreams, the UK premiere of Shirin Neshat’s most recent body of work. The Iranian-born New York-based artist has dedicated her practice to progressing understandings of the religious and political forces of power that shapes human existence and has gained a reputation as one of the most significant artists working today.

The exhibition comprises photographic portraits and two video installations. For the first time, both mediums converge into one immersive experience to present a portrait of contemporary America under the Trump administration.

In the first video we follow Simin, an estranged Iranian photographer, who travels through rural America knocking on citizens’ doors to shoot their portraits and to document their dreams. For the second, we enter the clinical dystopian interiors of a bureaucratic Iranian colony housed within the mountains. Here Simin’s portraits and dream documents are logged and analysed by the protagonist alongside fellow Iranians in lab coats.

Combining striking imagery with political satire, the videos evoke a shared humanity among those living under social, political and economic injustice. The series also deepens Neshat’s long- standing interest in the duality between the ephemeral nature of dreams and the tangibility of political issues.

The photographic portraits represent the photographs that the fictional protagonist Simin would have taken during her interviews. They capture the diversity of American identities, including Native Americans, African Americans and Hispanics of varying ages and genders. A number of the portraits are inscribed with hand-written Farsi calligraphy, which annotates the subjects’ dreams or notes their name, place and date of birth.

For the artist, America is on the verge of a paradigm shift: “We are seeing a reshuffling of the cards of power and its players. With the rise of white supremacy and the present threat against immigrants, I now turn my lens towards my host country, America. This new series of work investigates how these changes ultimately rupture individual lives”.

Flowers Gallery has an exhibition of new works by British artist Ishbel Myerscough. Grief, Longing and Love draws together intimate self-portraits and portraits of family to explore a universal journey of loss and longing. Myerscough is recognised for her highly detailed and meticulously observed portrayal of her subject matter, which over the past three decades has primarily included herself, her close friend and fellow artist Chantal Joffe, and their families. In this exhibition, Myerscough combines a focused study of youth and coming-of-age with adult experiences of parenthood, desire and bereavement, evoking the complex cycle of human experience.

In a brief but explosively inventive career, Alina Szapocznikow radically re-conceptualised sculpture as a vehicle for exploring, liberating and declaring bodily experience. ‘To Exalt the Ephemeral’, the title for this exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, comes from the 1972 manifesto that she wrote, summing up her goals and challenges as a sculptor. ‘My gesture is addressed to the human body, ‘that complete erogenous zone,’ to its most vague and ephemeral sensations. I want to exalt the ephemeral in the folds of our body in the traces of our passage.’

The exhibition begins with ‘Noga’ (‘Leg’) her first body cast, ‘Untitled’, the first cast of her mouth. It then moves through the scope of her experiments with different materials: bronze, resin, cement, car parts, polyurethane, and photography. The exhibition displays her interest in Pop Art and Surrealism, as well as her formal investigations of sculpture. described her work at the end: ‘‘Despite everything, I persist in trying to fix in resin the traces of our body: I am convinced that of all the manifestations of the ephemeral, the human body is the most vulnerable, the only source of all joy, all suffering, and all truth.’

In the expressive paintings of Dutch born, Belgian artist Bram Bogart at White Cube Mason's Yard, the focus is on paint as physical matter and the medium’s material possibilities. Primarily an abstract artist, Bogart explored how the ‘script’ of a painting or the ‘non-repetitive element of rhythmical brush strokes’ could imbue abstraction with meaning. During his long career, Bogart immersed himself in the formal concerns of painting, working through numerous stylistic shifts including an early period of figuration, followed by cubist geometric abstraction, gestural abstraction and finally sensually coloured sculptural paintings with heavy accumulations of paint, for which he became widely acclaimed. Through a process of ‘building’ with paint he fused gesture with matter, to produce powerfully physical paintings with a sculptural, three-dimensional presence.

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Anthony D'Amato - Good And Ready.

Saturday, 3 November 2018

Windows on the world (419)

London, 2018

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Bob Dylan - Tangled Up In Blue.

Sunday, 3 May 2015

The best political act, the best faith act, is always an act, an action

The Observer has a major feature article on Theaster Gates, the artist that ArtReview likes to call “the poster boy for socially engaged art”. His Freedom of Assembly exhibition is at White Cube Bermondsey until 5 July 2015.

At 13, Gates was director of his church’s gospel youth choir and now plays with his own Zen-gospel band, the Black Monks of Mississippi. His joint masters was in religion, ceramics and city design.

'He paid his way through college cutting his friends’ hair. “I liked it because I always thought inside this little head under my hands is this vast possibility. With clippers and comb, there I went. That felt like the cultivation of a mindset, a skill set – and I wanted my girls and my guys to look good.”

He makes it sound almost a religious ritual.

“Well, yes. But better not to talk about that. There is always a part beyond what man owes man. It’s like: some decisions, most decisions I make, are not the right smart market decisions, but they are important to me.”'

His first show at White Cube was called My Labor Is My Protest. He says, 'In my body I felt for a long time that the best political act, the best faith act, is always an act, an action.'

My post about My Labor Is My Protest can be read by clicking here.

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Theaster Gates and the Black Monks of Mississippi - And The Whole Yard Said Amen.

Tuesday, 25 September 2012

Art as activism

Theaster Gates is an artist, curator and urban activist whose work aims to galvanise communities and act as a catalyst for social change. He is currently exhibiting at White Cube Bermondsey and "has created a multi-faceted installation that investigates themes of race and history through sculpture, installation, performance and two-dimensional works."

Gates refers to his working method as ‘critique through collaboration’ but, as this exhibition demonstrates, the way in which Galleries operate tends to neuter what is at the heart of his artistic practice. My Labor Is My Protest is a fine exhibition which is well worth visiting but it is not a collaborative experience.

Art Galleries, while often presenting as radical spaces, are in reality rule-bound spaces with 'Do Not Touch' being the generally unspoken or unsigned but rigorously enforced fundamental prohibition. It is interesting to observe the way in which rules are also enforced even when participation is an element of an installation.

Eva Rothschild's film Boys and Sculpture created for the Whitechapel Gallery demonstrated this clearly. Boys and Sculpture shows a group of boys, aged between 6 and 12, each entering a gallery full of Rothschild’s sculptures. Slowly and tentatively the boys begin by looking, then touching. They proceed to totally dismantling the sculptures, revelling in the joys of play and of destruction. This is real collaboration between viewer and artwork but is not, for reasons of health and safety, insurance and other related factors, something that most Galleries will entertain. Therefore, as on issues of commerce and materialism, many galleries talk the talk but don't walk the walk.

This is illustrated most clearly for me in My Labor Is My Protest by the installation of a library borrowed from the archive of Johnson Publishing Company, the Chicago-based publishers of Ebony. This curated selection of books and magazines offer a history of black American culture but this is almost irrelevant as the majority of the items in this library cannot be touched, handled or explored. It may be that the installation is replicating in reverse the experience of exclusion from participation and collaboration endured by black people in America for many years but, if so, why are a small selection of books made available for viewing. This is the worst of possible worlds, it seems to me, for this work, as, if the work is primarily about exclusion then our exclusion from the collection should be absolute and if not, if it is about accessing black culture, then to limit our access neuters the work's meaning. My guess given that Gates' focus is described as being "on availability of information and the cross-fertilisation of ideas" is that the latter is the intent and that the force of the work has been neutered for reasons of insurance.

The current edition of frieze has an excellent feature about the work of Gates as part of a thematic look at art as activism. Gates' work includes collaborative projects with other artists to purchase and rebuild homes in rundown areas of Chicago to teach carpentry and construction skills. This raises the question of what art is. In my ministry, for example, am I an artist when I read my poetry, show my paintings or use my meditations or is the whole of my ministry, including my involvement in community activism/projects, a work of art. Ultimately, it seems it would depend on whether I wish to describe it in those terms and whether others wish to accept it on those terms. We are all artists, at least if we wish to describe ourselves as such. As Ananda Coomaraswamy said, "The artist is not a special kind of person; rather each person is a special kind of artist.”

Gates has written that he leverages "artistic moments to effect real change." Mark Godfrey writes in frieze that without cynicism Gates "employs the commercialism of the art world to regenerate deprived neighbourhoods":

"His performances are ... addressing real questions of economic inequality and political disenfranchisement affecting black people in the States. At the same time, he is genuinely interested in rituals, not just as historical ceremonies, but as ways of bringing people and thoughts together, just as he is sincere in his approach to incantation and religious music, testing even the most secular members of his audience to reconsider their ambivalence about the 'spiritual' in art."

The idea of art as activism is easy to mock and frieze includes a satirical piece doing just that - peace achieved through impenetrable wall texts, poverty eradicated by carefully curated collateral events etc. Art cannot, of course, change the world but the activism of artists like Gates can impact positively on local communities.

His work is also of relevance to current debates about the usefulness or uselessness of art. Christopher Brewer and Daniel Siedell are currently in debate on this issue following an initial post by Siedell to which Brewer is responding. Siedell affirms Kant’s intuition that art is useless and states that “Taking seriously art’s uselessness is a way to preserve an aesthetic moment that defies the forensic structure of reality, a moment that testifies to an alien presence, grace.” Brewer begins his series of responses by suggesting that Siedell is setting up a false dichotomy in opposing the usefulness or uselessness of art.

Gates' work suggests clearly that art can be useful. Presumably, he would not accept the dichotomy which Siedell sets out and seems unafraid of engaging with the complexities of his practice and of his practice within both the "compromised situations of art practices today" and the inequality and disenfranchisement his work addresses. In speaking of his input to The Armory Show, Gates said, “If the belly of whales and fiery furnaces can render men or women unscathed, then surely, I can have a few conversations from within the beast. I want to make space for my friends and ensure that some new friends meet old ones. Holding court seems the best way to do this and a much better use of my time than the winter sale at Barneys.”

Gates has written: "I love when I go to new cities and I am taken to small, obscure spaces of beauty that I would never expect ... My hope is to grow the number of small acts of beauty and contemplation with the hope that the moments began to suggest that the place where I live is, in fact A PLACE. I want to enunciate PLACES that already exist and occupy those Places with happenings ... Everyone deserves to see and be a part of the transformation of their spaces into places. Beautiful objects belong in blighted spaces and creative people can play a pivotal role in how this happens. I want the young people in my neighborhood to look at the built environment and see the world as something worth critiquing, exploring and constructing."

This quote suggests that Gates is creating material signs for immaterial realities (sacraments); places, spaces or moments which convey critique or construction. In this way, his work could have resonance with David Jones' argument in 'Art and Sacrament' that "man’s makings have throughout all times incorporated both utile and gratuitous elements":

"The utile element of a making is purely animalic; wholly utile works – birds' nests and beehives, diesel engines and screwdrivers – are wholly mundane. On the other hand, the gratuitous element of a
making is seen by Jones as an engagement with ontological truth because the necessity directing that making is immaterial: there is no reasonable justification for making such works."

Jones is positing a continuum for making ranging from the utile to the gratuitous with art appearing towards the gratuitious end of the continuum while also containing elements of the utile. This would seem to me to capture better the real achievement of Gates' art activism than would the creation of a dichotomy between the useful and the useless.

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Theaster Gates with the Black Monks of Mississippi and the Journeymen for Christ - A Closer Walk with Thee (Speakers).