contemporary monkey

Penone: "Breath of Leaves"

It’s only a pile of dried, grey brown leaves, swept into a mound, placed in the middle of Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery.  They’re not particularly impressive looking leaves either; small and perfect shape, lacking in personality.  They’re from the box tree, offers the Ikon employee sitting near the sculpture.  He goes on to say that the artist wanted to use box leaves for their size and light weight, and allegedly, wherever the sculpture goes, so go the same leaves.  That day it occurred to me the gallery employees might be a worthwhile source of un-tapped knowledge of contemporary art.

The Ikon Gallery was showing an exhibition of sculptures by Giuseppe Penone in June.  Left on my own, which is what many galleries do to wanderers from the outside, I would not have been able to even make a guess why the artist did what he did.  At the pile of leaves, however, I made the decision that it was the gallery’s job to help me understand why last Autumn’s tree trimmings are called art.  Turning around, I glanced by a few of the other equally baffling sculptures, and returned downstairs to the manned front desk. The willing person there pointed me in the direction of the show’s programme, in addition to retrieving a more specific Penone exhibition guide.   He also provided me a brief one or two lines to think about while traveling through the show.  After sifting through the Hammurabi-like code of marketing copy for the gallery,  Penone’s point became more straight-forward.  In it’s most basic form, Penone’s discovered that the boundaries between people and nature are a fluid border, sometimes not obviously visible.  I returned to my first position: the dead pile of leaves, which was adjacent to two, similarly looking boulders.  (I learned later that one of the rocks is a man-made replica of a river boulder, which, itself was carved by nature over thousands of years.  The replica was made in a few months, but Penone’s point was, even if you could do it, why would you?  My question exactly.  I like Penone.)

I enlist my new-found friend, still perched on the chair near the heap of leaves, for more banter about leaves, rocks, branches, anything that seems to make sense at the moment.  To my surprise, the guy is happy to thrash out some meaning with me.  Together we sort through theories, insights, even wild guesses, for about five of the pieces that are within eyesight.  He seems to have been well-prepared for the artist (”he” doesn’t have a name tag by the way, so I have no idea what to call him).

Together, we reckon that the leaf mound is Penone’s canvas, and his body, the brush.  His is the form imprinted onto the pile of leaves, just as a kid would do after a father has raked a large pile from under an Autumn tree.  It looks more like good fun than serious art, but Penone adds to the shape by blowing sideways while he lies chest-down in the stack.  A half-conical valley is the only imprint left from his effort, and indeed the work is called, “Breath of Leaves”.  Nearby are photographs of Penone’s warm breath in an Italian winter forest.  Each breath develops its own shape, and the still photographs capture only one instant of each puff of warm wind.

Birmingham's Ikon Gallery

My guide and I went on for twenty minutes more, and during our discussion, I realized that he must have been waiting in a sort of limbo for a curious person like me who isn’t intimidated to ask questions.  Later he tells me that the learning centre upstairs is showing a video that Penone himself made where he explains why he does what he does.  Interviews by the artist aren’t common enough in my opinion, so after having left my guide to chat with another curious mind, I dashed up to the video room.

Penone describes using his breath as an invisible sculpture. By capturing his warm  exhalation in a chilly forest, he suggests that plant life is not much different: branches and roots instead of arms and legs, expiring oxygen through leaves rather than carbon dioxide via the mouth.

I was inside the Ikon gallery for nearly two hours - about four times the length that most shows can be consumed inside this smallish gallery.  Enabling all the resources of the Ikon, however, I was able to enjoy myself much more, and learn a great deal about the exhibit than I would had I only read the exhibition guide.  I don’t know why galleries or museum don’t encourage their people to come forward to discuss the current programmes.  If the folks are there only for security, the gallery should employ people to circulate while engaging the public.  The repeat business would certainly increase.

Zaha Hadid: one of the few soul-full

In the never-ending comparison between men and women, to me the variations are never as stark as they are dramatically overblown.  That philosophy proved to be true at the Pompidou Centre’s “Elle’s@centrepompidou” exhibition this past week.  Unfortunately, that’s a bad thing for women.  The works displayed were all 20th and 21st century pieces by women from The Centre’s collection.  I wonder if they’re all in a women’s locker room somewhere, separated from the male pieces?

When it comes to art after the 1950’s, women are equal to men in visual representing an idea. Never underestimate the power of disappointment to cross all boundaries.  Anything hanging on a wall at the Pompidou Centre seemed to fall into the Tracy Emin trap of making “objet weird”, made for shock purposes only.  From the vantage point of the 21st century, it all seems so quaint.  Women have successfully advanced since the 1960s, maybe not where they need to be, but certainly a giant leap for (wo)man-kind.  The social contract with men on display here is so outdated as to cause more confusion than create meaning.  One exception was Guerrilla Girls, who have rightly recognized women in the role of equal citizen, but convince us in their own humorous way.  Taking your audience forward is always more successful than reliving the past.

Typical of the installations was a Marina Abramovic video.  Whatever fascination Abramovic has with the concept of time, it’s not very interesting to the rest of us.  In a video that repeats itself, dulling its viewers with the phrase, “Art must be beautiful.  Artist must be beautiful.”  Abramovic brushes her hair in front of a camera.  For about 30 minutes.  The rumour is that the video continues with the same action, until she’s destroyed her hair and face.  I forced myself to watch 10 minutes of it, and it looked more like self-love than self-flagellation.  The point was made after 30 seconds, and it appeared that most people around me agreed by being swifter out of the room.

Louise Nevelson

A few areas of the exhibition that I thought succeeded though, were in the category of 3D.  Zaha Hadid is one of the most inventive designers of space, and the exhibition created a small place for photos and drawings of her buildings.  Louise Nevelson was also present through a monumental wooden piece called, “Reflexions of a Waterfall I”.  The form and space created transcended the smallness of the show’s purpose of female/male differences.  Along with Hadid, Nevelson made me think of the female sense of physical placement in space as something special and possibly unique.  I think.  I’m not sure why men couldn’t have that same sense, but maybe we don’t.  We’re better at parking cars, aren’t we guys?

In Art and Auction, June 2009 issue, Jack Kilgore gives good advice for appreciating art.  He says, “Art is a form of communication, and the pictures must have a soul.  They have to have something special.  You know it when you see it.”  I saw very little soul at the Pompidou, but I did witness confirmation of what I knew before going in.  While men and women might approach life from different perspectives, as contemporary artists they are alike: most of the time, self-indulgent with occasional traces of hope.

Martin Kippenberger

Plowing through Adam Lindemann’s “Collecting Contemporary“, I ran across Martin Kippenberger, a German artist who died of liver cancer in 1997.  He was 44.  Hmmm, I wonder what his lifestyle was like?  On the Saatchi Gallery site, his life’s work is said to be prolific, mostly because he claimed that anything could be art.  As you might have noticed, ‘anything’ is exactly what the 1980’s were good at making and discarding, so the prospects for work were good for anyone with that sort of a philosophy.

Model Interconti

The more I read about him, the more I feel Martin Kippenberger was my kind of person.  He seemed to treasure pointing out the ridiculousness and gullibility of the art industry to take itself too seriously.  Particularly of his fellow artists.  Reminding them they were just as human as the everyday man, and working in the materialism of the 1980’s, Kippenberger  seemed to take every opportunity to poke the art world in the eye.  He worked in all sorts of media, but his ironic wit was sharp throughout.  Once he purchased a Gerhard Richter painting, which looked like the top of a coffee table, and made, well, a coffee table out of it.  He purchased a run-down gas station in Brazil, and named it after a Nazi War criminal.  He used a bar in Berlin to jam his paintings onto a side wall, after which he painted that very same wall as if it was a typical scene captured in the moment, preserved for art historians of the future to lavish praise on this “must be the most popular artist of the day”.  Kippenberger himself, brands himself; an early form of today’s famous for being famous “celebutantes”.  Why not.  At least Kippenberger had the talent as a painter of realism, the cheek to promote himself outrageously, and self-perception to know it was all a game anyway.  It was kind of sport for him, not art.

Paris Bar Berlin

The only problem I have with any of his work is that you have to know the inside joke.  It’s a lucky art lover who might accidently find him or herself with an appreciative gallerist, critic, or curator who might be good enough to let the audience in on the obscure stories.  Without which, the joke goes untold.  Maybe Kippenberger would find that interesting anyway.

Something that Jeffrey Deitch said in the book, Collecting Contemporary (by Adam Lindemann) I thought was a very useful idea for understanding contemporary art.  Deitch is one of New York’s art dealers, with a background in finance as well as art.  Although he doesn’t come out and say it, his perspective is one where art is collectible for financial gain.  Still, what do you do with a Harvard degree, and Citibank Art Advisory on your CV?  I’m guessing the phrase “capital gain” comes up in his conversations with clients.

But everyone has their reasons for existing in the art world, and for a moment, let’s give Deitch credit for creative thinking.  He looks for an artist who “creates his or her own aesthetic world, as opposed to an artist who’s just making a nice object.  There are a lot of artists who make very nice objects, but you can’t really say that there is a whole vision of the world that you can grasp in their work.”

Creating worlds is a place where traditional story tellers excel, and artists should be held to the same level of expectation.  For example, in film, the Coen Brothers create their own worlds, and whatever the outcome to the protagonist, we’re always someplace we’ve never been.

Fargo: Joel and Ethan Coen

There was an online video once about a London artist by the name of Richard Galpin (Hales Gallery) where we followed along with him as he created his own invention using existing photographs.  Working with an enlarged C-Print of an existing city centre, he slowly peels away slices and sections of the original photograph, revealing his version of a futurist’s cityscape. The result shares very little with the original photo, but is useful as a “blank” screen for ground breaking results after a few hours.  It’s a revolutionary approach in that the world he’s given is not the world he’s taking.

Richard Galpin: Distructure 1

Frank Stella

Are the colours of modern society, un-natural?  The argument made thoughout a recent exhibition at Tate Liverpool is that off-the-shelf colour (their term: ready-made colour) can’t be found in nature.  Surely man invented the hyper-active, vibrant colours of such stuff as cars, signs and iPods.  Wouldn’t their alien surface properties have to be natural because, well, we’re natural, aren’t we?

The theme threaded throughout the show, “Colour Chart: Reinventing Colour, 1950 to Today” is the absolute nature of modern colour, and in this case the reference is to the commercial type - the cans you buy off the shelf.  In fact, for some pieces the point is that colour itself is art, not to be subsumed by a larger spiritual, cultural, or political meaning.

I love the suggestion made at the event, because I found myself liking many of the works simply because they were colourful.  The argument could be made that modern colour itself is more pleasurable than the shapes and forms constructed by contemporary artists.  In fact, rather than constructing the cliche vitrine with this year’s dead farm animal, I wish Damien Hirst would just write down the colours he’s thinking about at the time, and paste the Pantone list onto a stretched canvas.  I’m willing to bet it would be an improvement.

Ellsworth Kelly

Man invented machine with his hands, the productive results from which are no more than extensions of man himself.  Andy Warhol claimed he wanted to be a machine, and I think he was successful in his search.  Showing that machine paint applied through a machine process (silk screening) by a Factory employee suggests colour might be only one element to the finished work.   If post-mid-century colour is un-natural, then so are we humans.