contemporary monkey

“…It provides a means for understanding the contemporary world, and, potentially, for making it a better place.”  You’d be mistaken if you thought this ambitious phrase was lifted from an exhibition programme at a contemporary art gallery, or an expensive brochure at a museum of modern art.

It would be a good guess though.  People in the art world certainly throw that kind of thing around like it’s part of the badge, and it sounds like a focused aim of contemporary art.  Those That Know Best proclaim that contemporary art confronts us with purpose, and questions our angles and viewpoints in daily life.  Contemporary art tackles the tough problems with a smack on the head and makes us think about our choices.  It’s supposed to change our perception, make us think differently, get us to move in a new direction.  The position of contemporary art in our lives, however, is being usurped by a a new leader.  Ladies and Gentlemen of The Arts and Letters, Distinctive Guests, and Biennial Buddies, you’ve just been lapped.

The quote above was taken from the About Us section of The Design Museum’s web site.  Contemporary Art, over the last century, has had its chance to make friends and influence enemies.  Instead of addressing the everyday man, however, it chose to address the marginal few - in many cases, the very few - those that have bags of money, or the simple gullibility to create a market in a vacuum.  Contemporary Art has created it’s own No Girls Allowed Club.

Most of us have a bigger commitment to design than we do contemporary art.  Not that we haven’t tried the latter.  But design is more affordable, available, and intelligible.  It solves problems, makes us aware of ourselves, forces us to act, makes our heart beat faster.  It becomes part of our personal statement to our fellow Earthlings and probably beyond.  Design is our individual and collective branding.  It builds network-like organisation across imaginary lines of religion, geography, politics, and arguably solves a lot of the world’s problems right there.  Two parliamentarians, or members of Congress, could easily throw verbal blows across the room, but they could just as easily be seen later in the day exchanging applications on their iPhone, or talking about the design of the city’s new symphony hall.

Contemporary art, on the other hand, struggles to get noticed.  I often ask this question of people I know or just meet: Do you understand contemporary art?  Close to everyone says no, but they certainly mean to comprehend it one day.  How many countries, religions, industries have that apologetical clause at the end of of a statement, they mean to.  It’s like flossing your teeth, or joining a gym.  We know it’s the right thing to do, and we’ve been meaning to for the longest time, but…

Contemporary Art goes out of its way to make enemies, to confound, confuse, berate, annoy, mis-fire, even put to sleep.  Very few of us are buying what they’re selling.  However, most of us can talk about Ferraris, iPods, Prada, great CD covers, well thought out gardens, art deco skyscrapers, the latest hair style, cool night clubs and modern restaurants with contemporary takes on French cuisine.  We can go on about skateboard graphics, impressive graffiti, luxurious handbags, sleek running shoes, even Italian inspired salt and pepper shakers.  And  we don’t have to own or experience any of them.  We’d be happy as Larry aspiring to a level of just talking about it over pints, or browsing over shelves.

Jennifer Northrop is the Director of Communications and Marketing at America’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.  Cooper-Hewitt is the American equivalent to the British Design Museum, only more thorough in history (they seem to like collecting there).  She had this to say about the 2009 National Design Awards, and the effects of design in our lives.

“Design is intriguing to the public,” says Jennifer Northrop, director of communications and marketing at the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, “because design isn’t art.”

Ouch!

Birmingham's Water Works Tower

In the middle of a rare dead-level residential Birmingham are two narrow brick towers thrust into the sky, six floors in height, both called Water Works Towers.  Water works towers I’ve seen in other cities around the world are usually shaped like this, tall, narrow, mysterious, and I can’t figure out why.  I guess it’s compulsory that a water works tower is made to look like a fireman’s hose.

As it happens, this structure is the perfect void for an exhibit put on by the Ikon Gallery people, in a place that isn’t in the Ikon.  What’s more, the demonstration here is mostly audio.  The producer of the idea, Yukio Fujimoto is a Japanese conceptual artist working in sound, with an interest in how we humans hear (it’s already sounding like navel gazing, but stay with me).  This display is one of those rare times when conceptual art is more hit than miss.  This is not art considered to be inspirational, but after experiencing the show, I’m glad someone did it.  It’s such a little kid thing to do.

IT, is four floors of the waterworks building with over 1000 battery operated clocks ticking away in their own time universe.  Each clock is the same: cheap, small, square-shaped, black face, red hands that move with a stutter through each tick-tock.  Each of the floors is the same as well: small, concrete, 2 or 3 windows, hexagonal-shaped, about eight feet across. To get to each floor takes some mountain climbing expertise on narrowing stairs, but the constant ticking tells you that there really is only one way to go: UP.  It’s hard not to be curious.

probably 1000 clocks

I nearly missed the lone beating clock in the first room.  In fact I almost stepped on it.  Heavy breathing from the stair climb disguised the barely audible noise of the singular clock. Through cracks in the ceiling, however, I could make out the beating from the upper floors.  Floor 2 consisted of nothing but 10 clocks laid out in one line, while the third floor held a grid of 100 neatly aligned units, 10 x 10.  Finally the top, and last, floor incorporated 1000 of the now familiar boxes beetling away, lined up in as good a grid as you’re going to get inside a cramped tower room.  I learned later that the cheery young staff safely tucked away on the ground floor have to re-align the clocks every morning because each day the clocks push themselves around via the jerking movement of the second hand.

I wouldn’t call this time/ticking/audio experience necessarily inspirational; it doesn’t grip you with creative energy, but it’s a pretty cool thing to see nonetheless.  Maybe it does inspire you to be aware of yourself.  Regardless of the number of clocks vying for your attention, you could always make out a rhythm.  The gallery’s press release asserts that when you get to the top, the overwhelming number of clicking clocks results in a white noise of sound.  The release also insists that the clocks’ audible movement reminds us of our own lives ticking down to the ultimate end of our time.  I thought no such thing.  I wish there were a hundred floors more;  I’d love to hear what millions and billions of clocks sound like pressed into a limited space.  Yet another reason not to read the literature of galleries’ marketing departments before seeing or experiencing the work yourself.

If you linger at 1000 clock room for awhile longer, you’re also turned on to a treat of visual experience.  When you do that thing with your eyes by not staring at any one clock, like kids do when they begin to cross their eyes, your peripheral vision is obtusely aware of multiple second hands oscillating to their own beat.  It’s a little bit like standing in a room full of jumping beetles.  Don’t worry, I held myself back from stepping on anything, clock or beetle, in the top floor.

As I left the building, I was keenly aware of the environment where the tower finds itself, propelled out of its residential surroundings.  I was thinking it would be devastating to the neighbours if all 1,111 alarms were armed for the same time each morning.  Again, not inspirational, but I hope somebody does it.

Helen Chadwick's "Cacao"

An abundance of milk chocolate is evident in a room before I arrive at the top floor.  While I climb the stairwell of the New Art Gallery in Walsall, a foul, stale dairy scent warns me to stop walking and flee back downstairs.  The odor becomes more acute and recognizable, while a popping and slurping sound soon becomes evident.  Coincidentally my arrival at the top floor via the stairs has timed exactly with the lift opening in front of me, where I witness the faces of two visitors contorting from the instantaneous attack on their senses.  The installation is supposed to be about food, but I was hoping for something a little more palatable.  Why is it, by the way, that all art using food as a source commits itself to the rotting, diseased phase of its lifetime?

“Pot Luck: Food and Art” was on exhibition, with the entire floor flipped into a surrealist’s kitchen.  Toward the rear of the room, the reverberating fountain called “Cacao” is a six feet wide pool of milk chocolate (the cheapest chocolate by the way, which no pastry chef would dare touch) pulsing and bubbling like the inside of a lava lamp.  The dairy from the milk chocolate has been flowing for seven weeks now, in a not very refrigerated room.  Other than the hanging salami rain storm (remarkably with no whiff of decay), the chocolate goo pool is the only live food in the building.  Most of the exhibits use other media to represent food, which I suddenly realised was the best idea.

This flowing sludge was among a handful of ideas blended at the intersection of art and food.  The curators, Cynthia Morrison-Bell and Anthony Key, offer the notion that food is an easy lever for making sense of contemporary art because the viewer doesn’t require subjective knowledge before “getting it”.  Is that the answer to getting one’s head around contemporary art, by way of a more readily available medium?  Isn’t that what television tries to do?

Art Galleries everywhere aim to lead a broader audience to the front door, and using a common language sounds fundamentally correct.  Does that mean that art for blokes should include pints of beer?  Do we need an installation of “Feminine Art in the 21st century: Knock-off Handbags”?  Somehow this seems too easy, and probably truly insulting, to get Joe and Jane Public in for a quick lesson on contemporary art (although, if anyone would like to make the attempt to explain art to me and my friends with beer, count us in as beta testers).  We should probably be made to give art a good attempt if it’s meant to be inspirational and confrontational.  Galleries could always save the beer for goading us into the building in the first place.  And chocolate on the way out.

(Don't worry, I wouldn't call this art either)

Attention all artists: stop the inconsequential discussion with yourselves in the secluded and singular vacuum World Of One.  The reason nobody understands what you’re doing is very simple to explain: your work doesn’t mean anything to anyone but you.  This is not public art.  It’s not even contextual art.  It’s Art for One.  I hope you liked it, because the rest of us passed it right by.

In the June/July issue of Art World, Anna Barriball describes her recent time-based project in this way: “I like using things that have fallen between the cracks in some way, making the invisible visible.”  What’s she’s talking about is a series of text-based posters she’s made for the London Underground that use very short and featureless phrases in place of visuals.  One of the text reads, “on way to birthday party”.  Another: “I think I’m being watched”.

I remember seeing the latter not too long ago.  Those that use the London Underground will probably agree with me that the first thing on anyone’s mind while using the underground is, where’s the exit.  I’m usually placing full concentration on avoiding the push and pull of the stinking masses, while stepping over their left-behind detritus.  When I’m dodging people on the platform at Kings Cross, the last thing on my mind is art.  Especially art I have to work to understand.  Even the masses of sudoku gamers couldn’t be bothered.

Barriball goes on to say that these un-imaginative phrases were taken from the back of photographs, and she wanted them to be experienced in the present.  Her hope is that they trigger people’s memories or immediate experiences.  Her hope is misplaced by an underground mile.  The only thing they’re going to trigger is hunger satiation for rats after midnight.

I don’t know which is worse, this specific and pointless concept, or Art World for wasting valuable paper and ink.

Ellsworth Kelly: Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance 3

In 1951, the American artist Ellsworth Kelly purchased a pre-packaged set of coloured paper squares from a Paris shop (he already had Duchamp’s idea of ready-made art in mind).  Then he drew a grid of squares, numbering in the hundreds, on paper.  In each of these squares, he randomly assigned numbers between 1 and 18.  Sorting through his limited number of coloured paper squares, he arbitrarily assigned each with a number, you guessed it, between 1 and 18.  It only took the matching of numerical paper to grid for a work completed, and young Kelly was on his way to teaching himself the value of colour in art.  All this without having to endure the tedious boredom of classroom ennui.  A direct snub to the Bauhaus and other contemporary art schools.

That was modern art back then, you had to define it.  Thinking about it today, we might say, yeah, I could do that.  And we could have, but we didn’t.  Someone beat us to it.  That’s the best thing about art, some of it gets us to scratch our heads, wondering why we didn’t think of that.

At the time, Kelly was rebelling against the science of colour during a time when American abstract expressionism was thriving against form.  Kelly thought outside the canvas however, by revolting against the the limitations of the early 20th century Bauhaus theory.  He was stuck with the Josef Albers/Johannes Itten/Goethe school of colour management, with their perfect world of numbers and frequencies and pleasure measurement.  This was Kelly’s personal gambit into abstraction of what colour meant as a work of art.  In his mind, it wasn’t an empirical science as the Bauhaus claimed, but a random selection made out of thin air.  Chance placement of colour, IS the art.

Johannes Itten's Colour Wheel

I came across Kelly’s idea after visiting the Tate Liverpool’s “Colour Chart”.  On the surface, it’s the type of art where silently you’re thinking, that’s not so imaginative, anyone could have done that.  It doesn’t require artistic technique; no drawing, sketching, even welding.  But it did require someone to think differently about the nature of what art could be.  Someone did, and it wasn’t you or me.

These sorts of realizations are in turn personally annoying, but hugely gratifying.  It’s like watching a child solve what appears to be a complex “adult” problem with simplicity.  You’re dissatisfied with yourself for not thinking of it, and impressed that the kid did.  These are the moments in art that are real turning points in the way we should, and have, thought about art.  Given today’s disingenous [link: damian hirst dots] reproductions of yesterday’s art, I hope we find our own Ellsworth Kelly soon.

Damien Hirst's "LSD". Nearly fifty years after Kelly.