Between: whitechapel gallery

Showing posts with label whitechapel gallery. Show all posts

Thursday, 13 July 2023

Artlyst: The Art Diary July 2023

My July Art Diary for Artlyst includes exhibitions at Whitechapel Gallery, Hayward Gallery, Salisbury Cathedral, Gloucester Cathedral, Firstsite, y Gaer Museum, Fry Gallery, Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, Newport Street Gallery, The Arx. Read about work by Brian Clarke, Deborah Harrison, Neo-Romantics, EVEWRIGHT, David Jones, Sean Scully, and Ella Baudinet, among others.:

'‘Life Is More Important Than Art’ claims the title of the latest exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery. Taking inspiration from African-American writer and novelist James Baldwin, who proposed that life is more important than art which is why art is important, the exhibition explores the intersection of art and everyday life and the role of contemporary art institutions in a time of uncertainty and change. As Whitechapel Gallery Director Gilane Tawadros has explained, Baldwin “meant that we have the bare necessities of life —a roof over our head, food to eat and so on—but life should be more than the bare necessities” and that’s “where art comes in”. So, when the cost-of-living crisis is causing severe financial hardship and the after-effects of the pandemic are still being felt, the exhibition asks what importance we can attach to art alongside more pressing concerns.'

My Artlyst interview with Sean Scully can be found here, another Artlyst piece is here, and my review of Scully's 'Endangered Sky' is here. My writings about David Jones can be found here, here and here.

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

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Candi Staton - Revolution Of Change.

Tuesday, 19 October 2021

Artlyst: Theaster Gates - Clay As A Profound Metaphor

My latest review for Artlyst is of Theaster Gates' 'A Clay Sermon' at the Whitechapel Gallery:

"In the beginning, there was clay. Clay was without form. Thus begins Theaster Gates’ ‘A Clay Sermon’, a film combining music, images, and words to paint a picture of the limitless potential of clay and working with Clay. No wonder the Judeo-Christian scriptures view clay as a profound metaphor for the relationship between a creative God and a co-creating humanity.

Gates’ exhibition combines history with art, religion and culture, the past with the present, that which is oppressive with that which is liberating, the improvisatory and the planned, chance and design; while using a huge diversity of media as artist, craftsperson, curator, designer, entrepreneur, historian, musician, priest/shaman, researcher, and social analyst. Featuring ceramic objects, sculptures, installations, film, and studio materials from the past two decades, this exhibition considers both the material and spiritual legacies of clay."

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

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Theaster Gates and the Black Monks of Mississippi Live Performance

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).

Wednesday, 7 March 2012

Emil Nolde: Inner religious feeling

Emil Nolde: The Religious Paintings is at the Berlin Extension of The Ada and Emil Nolde Foundation until 15th April.
'Emil Nolde considered his "biblical and mythical pictures" to be the high point of his artistic achievements. He kept a pedantic, handwritten record of the works, assigning some fifty paintings to this canon. "Religious, biblical pictures came about every few years", Nolde wrote. "The imaginings of the boy I once was, who sat engrossed in the Bible on long winter evenings, were reawakened. When I read, I saw pictures: the richest Middle Eastern fantasies. They constantly flew around in my mind's eye until much, much later the grown man and artist painted and painted them, as if inspired by a dream."'

Nolde, as Felicity Lunn writes in Emil Nolde, “regarded his religious works as central to his art” saying that “he experienced both a greater struggle and a more intense pleasure in the making of them than in any other area of his subject matter”:

“The group of paintings that Nolde made in 1909, in particular The Last Supper and Pentecost, demonstrate the artist’s attempts to portray Christian themes “with spiritual content and innerness” through a radical stylistic change … “the transformation from optical external charm to an experienced inner value”, asserted Nolde in his autobiography …

The momentum that began with these two paintings continued for three years until 1912, a period in which 24 works were produced, including The Life of Christ, stories from the New Testament, particularly events from the life of Christ and their effect on others, miracles He performed and parables …

The tour de force of Nolde’s religious painting, if not of his entire artistic output, is the nine-part work The Life of Christ. The idea of making a polyptych first came to Nolde in 1912 when he happened to place next to each other three religious paintings from the previous year. The remaining six were painted in 1912, and due to a change in Nolde’s approach during this period the polyptych is stylistically heterogeneous …

At the time Nolde was painting The Life of Christ he was experiencing great stress, caused partly by the serious illness of his wife, Ada, but also by emotional extremes of despair and optimism. The spirituality that radiates from the biblical figures in Pentecost and The Last Supper seems to have been replaced here by exaggerated, almost caricatured features often distorted by aggression and anger. Nolde was currently plagued by doubts concerning Christianity …

The third period of Nolde’s religious painting came in 1915, following his return from the Southern Seas, and was accompanied by a dramatic simplification of both form and colour. One of the most important of the seven paintings he made on religious themes was Entombment … Nolde described the work as “the most beautiful … that I was able to produce for a long time … a painting handled in light silver blue, opposite yellowish gold, and in terms of content in inner religious feeling.” Other paintings made in the same year, such as Legend: Saint Simeon and the Woman and The Tribute Money are also characterized by simpler structures, gentler and more lyrical than the passion of earlier work. Although reduced in palette, the colours are saturated and intense.”

Nolde’s religious works were recognized as significant by his supporters but “in contrast, however, were the reactions of more academic artists on the one hand, and the Church and the general public on the other.” His “religious paintings were accused of being “destructive and vandalising” and full of “clumsiness and brutality” as well as “mockery and blasphemy” and, as a result, were on several occasions removed from exhibitions. Eventually The Life of Christ was prominently displayed in the Nazi organized ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition which sought to hold the work of many of the Expressionists and other Modernist artists up to ridicule but instead drew large and fascinated crowds."

I first saw a significant body of Nolde's work at the Whitechapel Gallery exhibition of his Unpainted Paintings in 1990. Andrew Graham-Dixon explains:

"By the mid-1930s, Hitler, Goebbels and company had decided that Expressionist painting amounted to no more than a parody of the Nazi dream of Germanic racial purity. Nolde's art was labelled ''degenerate'', more than 1,000 of his works were confiscated from German museums and he was forbidden to paint.

The ''Unpainted Pictures'', as he called them, are the works which Nolde did not paint in the later 1930s. He did not paint them, that is, as far as the Gestapo - who checked up on him periodically - were concerned. They are all watercolours, which had the advantage for their creator of being small, and therefore easy to hide. Hard to smell out in other ways too: watercolours (unlike oils) are odour-free.

The ''Unpainted Pictures'' glow with vivid, saturated colour, but the frenzied Expressionism of Nolde's early years seems to have given way to something else. Solitary ships sail towards explosive, firework-display sunsets. Other images offer brief resumes of old themes - dancing girls and troubled northern skies - but suffused with a deep, dark richness of hue that translates as brooding melancholy. They seem the works of an artist for whom sheer obduracy - the very fact that he can continue to paint at all - has become a last resort."

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Jackson Browne - The Rebel Jesus.

Thursday, 22 December 2011

Martin, Richter, Sasnal, Krokatsis and McElheny

John Martin is one of those artists who have enjoyed huge popularity combined with critical opprobrium, both in his own day where he was derided as a 'people's painter' and later where few other artists have been subject to such posthumous extremes of critical fortune, and yet, despite the critical drubbing, have been hugely influential:

'Martin's paintings anticipate biblical epics and disaster, movies and CinemaScope; sci-fi illustrations, concept albums and heavy metal graphics; Spider Man and the avatars of video games. Film directors have acknowledged the immense debt, from DW Griffith to Cecil B DeMille and Roland Emmerich' - The Observer, 25 September 2011

Artists like Martin and, in particular William Blake, must surely be inspirations to all those artists whose creative vision is not fully understood or appreciated within their lifetime.

Gerhard Richter and Wilhelm Sasnal stand in the opposite space as current critical favourites but no less vital for all that. It seems appropriate that both have had major exhibitions which have overlapped in London as, in a visual culture flooded by photographic images, the work of both attests to the continuous spellbinding power of painting. In their work painting is addressed to historical crisis while their use of readymade images explores the nature of appearance and the capacities of vision.

Richter is also fascinated by reflection, both in plain glass and in mirrors. He showed his first Mirror in 1981 but this was a continuation of his work with glass begun with the 4 Panes of Glass in 1967. Richter treats both glass and mirrors as a source of uncertainty and unpredictable visual effects. These are works which are concerned with chance because the images presented change all the time. According to Richter, they 'show something that isn’t there at all, at least not where we see it.'

Playing with reflection is currently a popular activity. Henry Krokatsis’ works are composed solely of the bevelled, faintly ornamental mirrors that were mass-produced and ubiquitous to British suburban interiors between the 1920s and the 1960s. These relics have been reconfigured and expanded to reference the high-status interiors of Europe’s grandest Rococo houses, with their cabinets de glaces and pier mirrors. These works reference minimalism via their geometry, austerity and lack of gesture yet they simultaneously embrace arbitrariness, material history and the narrative reward of subject matter.

Josiah McElheny's The Past Was A Mirage I Had Left Far Behind has transformed Gallery 2 at the Whitechapel Gallery into a hall of mirrors through the use of seven large-scale, mirrored sculptures arranged as multiple reflective screens for displaying reconfigured abstract films. The sculptures refract the projections and reflect the viewer within the work, saturating the gallery in images and light.

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Arcade Fire - Black Mirror.