contemporary monkey

Birmingham's IKON Gallery: our lifeline to contemporary visual culture

Birmingham: England’s second largest city.  It’s a colossal second to London in population, cultural energy, and decent pubs.  The distance between the largest and second-largest, in population, is the equivalent of New York City and Austin, Texas.  Birmingham, however, is ground zero for the industrial revolution, heavy metal music, and the Balti.  The intrepidness of its history in the muscular shadow of London speaks volumes about its local pride and pluck.  At least that’s what I told myself while walking to the Ikon Gallery for a small, but important, gathering of art folk.

Birmingham is England’s Pittsburgh in that pretense doesn’t reveal itself here.  So with a handful of optimism and some hopeful yearning, I attended a local meeting of art-minded people to discuss the topic of a new contemporary art building to be built in Birmingham.  “Imagining Museums” was held at what is Birmingham’s lifeline to current visual culture: the Ikon Gallery.  The Ikon isn’t the Tate Modern, but it does a remarkable job informing us locals with contemporary visual culture.  Without it, we could easily be stuck listening to Pink Floyd.

Unfortunately, this is still England, and to ask British professionals to devise an image of the future is like making the request to meet in Hells’ conference room of getting no-where fast.  On the precipice loomed a fiery fur ball of committee meetings waiting to be gathered, rolled and spat out.

the IKON gallery; small but concentrated

Initial panel discussions from other global museum directors provided an immediate spark, with vital prompts to go for a new type of museum “while you have the chance”.  Great, I thought, this is going to be a blistering exchange.  After the administrators had their say, however, the exchange was thrown over to (mostly) the locals.  That’s when things turned a bit hazy and grey.

Having only lived in Birmingham for a year, but in England for five, it’s clear to me that Birmingham has an advantage that most British cities don’t.  All sorts of immigration happened, and is happening, in Birmingham, and to ignore the obvious is like wondering if there are any gay men in my home city of San Francisco.  Pakistanis, Caribs, Africans together make up 27% of the population (according to Wikipedia), and that number doesn’t include mixed race.  Amassing contemporary art from these communities, mixed with the current Anglo Saxon offerings, yields an understanding amongst nations that other cities can’t, or won’t, provide.  A new museum that includes nations united could eliminate the need for a British National Party, or any other narrow-minded, political group.

There was a push amongst the group of 50-60 art professionals to canvass the community, to ask them directly what they wanted.  Some of the international administrators were broadly suspicious of that idea.  What you don’t want is entertainment, warned one.  Perhaps give them a wizened choice, recommended another.  This sort of holier-than-though thought process is what gets the art community into trouble.  They turn super-nanny on us.

I’m not sure where this is all going, but as pie-in-the-sky meetings go, a room bursting with animation to discover the new world this wasn’t.  Regardless, there is a palpable (albeit at the low hum end of the audio range) local push for contemporary art in Britain’s second largest city, and with any luck, we might just get something that reflects it.

fashion faux pas: le beret est essential!

Forget about the art, the point of London’s annual Frieze Art Fair is to be an affected part of the art. It’s now my favourite thing about this typically posy British art fair - the living, breathing, accountants during the week, cool guys by weekend, semi-conscious sculptures milling around casually as cute art collectors. What other industry can you think of where the civilians come dressed like the heroes? Do you dine at your favourite restaurant in checkered trousers? Shop at the supermarket in an apron? Drop into a Birmingham Gentlemen’s club without a shirt? There’s real magnetism going on amongst the art crowd, but I doubt it goes the other way. Damien Hirst probably doesn’t dress up like an account executive, or a gallery girl (Grayson Perry on the other hand…).

best dressed man: Grayson Perry

Even that most witless and dim of the homo sapien, the English football supporter, is aware of la limitation de la couture du moment. There is no plumber that will slink to his seat in a rowdy, Chelsea versus Arsenal derby, catwalking to his seat in silver football boots and multi-coloured Petr Cech helmet. Art collectors and followers, however, are a brother from another mother. Looking around at Frieze, you’d think the typical West End Londoner was a card carrying artist. I’ve known only a few real artists, but they don’t, and never have, looked anything like the people ambling thoughtfully, but purposefully, amongst the merchandise on offer at Frieze. I don’t think I’ve even seen a single artist profiled in a magazine that looks anything like Friezers. However, as artists are busy creating stuff from messy material, they tend not to be wearing anything that screams Selfridges. In England, you probably couldn’t tell an artist from a farmer; so why is it that the hangers-on of the local art community feel the need to look so pseudo-arty? It’s not as if someone is going to ask them to dive into the thick of things to re-create a cor-ten sculpture, or add their own vision of Man’s Inhumanity to Man.

There is an undisclosed art-drone uniform, and the Frieze-ettes seem to have let slip the particulars amongst the membership. The time spent sorting out hair-do’s, scarves, beards, ponytails, colourful trainers, £300 distressed waistcoats, and that tattiest of all ensemble piece: the French beret, is time spent not doing something else. Like looking at, and talking about, art. On the positive side, at least they smell nice. Not like those filthy artists.

JMW Turner

I have a new art theory: the big difference between 19th century art and that of the 20th century are the parties.  It’s a tale of two Tates, in this instance, and ultimately it serves only to fortify the boundaries between centuries.  We’re just better at entertaining ourselves today than we were in Victorian times.

“Turner and the Masters” at Tate Britain is a subdued, thoughtful, quiet, whispered event.  I saw a security person reprimand a scholarly gent for delivering a reproachable glare to an underling.  So much musing and rumination going on.  And this was a Friday (Friday day, but still, you’d think everyone would be looking forward to a big weekend of ripping up the garden or cleaning guns for a field day of clay pigeon shooting and other horsey things).  Manners were the rule of day at Tate Britain, and you’d have to blame it on the Turner exhibit.  There was a mass of teenagers in the Duveen’s galleries above, but none skipped downstairs to the Turner exhibit.  The £12 entry fee was steep enough no doubt, but you’d think there would be just one old lady accompanied by a caring grand daughter.  Nope, just old ladies and old men being cared by more old ladies and old men.  I could have been at the dog races, and the crowd wouldn’t be much different.

The curation itself was very insightful, and a successful means to reveal the life of Turner, the man.  I learned a lot about Turner’s inadequacies, competitive streaks, and other incapabilities to gain some true insight into why geniuses do what they do.  It was a very impressive and learned time, and I imagine many others would have enjoyed it as well.

It’s not that the place was lacking a crowd.  Each room was filled with more gray hair than a Cotswold village.  Anymore and it would have seemed like a Sunday morning in church.  The type of people at this event were what one might call traditionally British: older, certainly middle age and beyond, and mostly white.  Maybe even all white.  All if this is unfortunate because it was a great chance to get inside the head of Turner; to see what professional competition and the pressure of history does to a man.  Plus, all those Turners next to all those Rubens, Canalettos, Claude Lorraines.  This is what art education is supposed to do - place the subject in historical perspective.

Pop Life at Tate Modern

Still, if you not going to throw a good party, don’t expect anyone to come.  At Tate Modern down the river (and frankly, on the happening side of it as well), they were doing just the opposite.  While the Millbank-induced sleep session at Tate Britain was in full snooze for its afternoon nap, Tate Modern had the pedal to the metal.  All sorts of age groups and colours were thumping about “Pop Life”, and the ticket price was no more than the Turner exhibit at £12.  Pop Art, as a subject, is always going to be more of a party than landscape painting will ever be; and for that day, more people learned about Pop Art than Turner’s art.  Tate Modern made you feel like you were in Warhol’s Factory alongside his contemporaries, while Tate Britain made you feel like you should be studying something important under a tree.  Because Pop art is really about people, it’s more entertaining to look at art about yourself than art about someone from 150 years ago.  I guess that’s why pop art is so appealing to artists in the first place: it comes with its own built-in customer base.  Like buying a photograph of yourself going down a roller coaster.

In the end, no matter how much you know about art, or how “good” the art is, it’s the parties that get folks to come down.  It’s a shame that Tate Britain couldn’t have thrown a better one.  Maybe the next Turner exhibit should be a big drunken barbecue; the contemporary landscape art happening of our day.