Atsuko Tanaka: Electric Dress

You say you’re Japanese, and you want to be an artist? Well then, I predict there are bright colours and bountiful circles in your future.

It’s probably not relevant, but still, I’ve noticed lately that Japanese art, regardless of art movement, direction or starting point, embraces saturated, primary colours that are spun in geometric forms. After viewing an opening at Birmingham’s IKON Gallery for Atsuko Tanaka “The Art of Connecting”, I could only think of other, unrelated Japanese contemporary artists. It might also be that western curators for Japanese art are attracted to the same aesthetic. Either way, I like it. There’s a sort of Team Japan Way of Art.

Tanaka: Japanese Modernism, about 50 years after it started elsewhere.

Tanaka was in her twenties in post-war,1950′s when she created (as the PR goes) one of the 20th century’s most influential art piece: Electric Dress. Now supported by a metal armature – but worn originally by Tanaka – the dress is a drapery of electrical cables feeding energy to hand-painted light bulbs (in primary and secondary colours) which ignite in electrical impulses every few minutes. Probably an avant garde piece of its day, the  sculpture is still a show-stopper. If you were walking down Las Vegas Boulevard in this dress, you’d blend in with the other, shouty signs. While there are plenty of colours to the piece, there’s not so much geometry.

Tanaka: I'll just keep doing this, shall I?

The dress, however, seemed to influence her paintings, drawings, even land art, throughout the rest of her career, as suddenly paintings became flush with rounded, geometric patterns from acrylic and other man-made oils. If laid out horizontally, which is how Tanaka worked, the finished canvases resemble a schematic pattern for Electric Dress in un-animated phase, grounded; waiting patiently for its human mannequin.

IKON is also showing a short visual documentary on Tanaka, with an over the shoulder point of view while she repeatedly sketches circles in the sand. Nothing but that for 15 minutes. In fact, most of her career suggests she’s on a dedicated, mathematical undertaking. The girl found round and couldn’t leave it.

Yayoi Kusama: A garden of polka dots

Of course, round is usually associated with another of Japan’s post-war artists, Yayoi Kusama. At Victoria Miro’s gallery in East London, Kusama is exhibiting more of her polka-dot pride, in both painting and sculpture. Her pre-occupation with the idea of infinity has led Kusama to yards upon yards of brightly hued, vibrating polka dots. Nobody can claim a polka dot like Yayoi Kusama. Unlike Tanaka, Kusama doesn’t appear to be influenced by any one art group or -ism, and instead has roots in hallucinatory visions as well as her own mental struggle. Like Tanaka, however, Kusama was thrust upon the western stage during the 1950s, and to suggest the war might have had something to do with the aesthetic combination of bright colours and geometric forms would seem to make sense.

Takashi Murakami: Superflat...and super happy.

Which finally led me to think about the most famous living Japanese artist, Takashi Murakami, the Japanese prince of bright lights, syrupy colours, and happy faces, mixed up in a Warholian-sized art factory. One never knows if Murakami is really that joyful, or, as I suspect, just exhibiting the image of ourselves, back on ourselves. While researching Murakami, I came across a book called, “Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture” published in 2005.  According to Wikipedia, the book “interprets the complex intuitive twist of postwar Japanese art, while defining its high-spirited and naturally buoyant escape from human tragedy and the events of World War 2″.

So that’s what war does to us: initiates a search for happiness which then manifests in art. The usual claim is the other way around, art makes peace. Given this formula, and given the overabundance of today’s political and religious strife, I reckon by mid-century the Earth will be the merriest planet in the solar system. Can’t we just skip to that bit?

Haegue Yang: Semi-Depliable

There’s nothing that gets up the common man’s nose more than the “found object”. Stick a random stash of household items together, call it “Untitled 17″ and you can almost feel the money flow out of the public art fund. Since Duchamp first did it, the found object has symbolised the complete inability for artists to communicate ideas to people who could use it most. It’s best summed up in one of my favourite videos of British students at Tate’s Liverpool sculpture exhibit, unraveling Jeff Koon’s Basketballs. It’s not even generational anymore – nobody understands the found object.

Happily an artist currently exhibiting at Modern Art Oxford isn’t one of those pariahs, but edges fairly closely to taunting Mr John Q Public. There are things here you’d recognise from your shed, but as if you had them manufactured yesterday. Not so much found, as crafted and composed.

Haegue Yang: Non-Indepliable

There’s a load going on inside Haegue Yang’s first UK exhibit at MAO (showing until 4 September). It could easily have been subdivided into four or fives shows. Last week, I covered what was the most interactive of the bunch; her extrapolation of transparency and shape through architectural forms made up of window blinds. Her Semi-Depliable and Non-Indepliable structures are also conversations with architecture, but with more imaginative abstraction. The rest of the show, photographs and videos, are nice features, but don’t get the mileage that her structures carry.

For Semi-Depliable, Haegue shows us a haphazard choice of materials. It’s not until you discover that she’s a sort of vagabond artist does it all make sense. Haegue lives and works in both east and western cultures, and materials are obviously important to her; in the same way materials were important to Donald Judd. In fact, the pieces from Semi-Depliable, are strung with highly-crafted fabrics, alongside electric lamps, woven over a foundation of aluminium branches. To me it has that oxidised-aluminium sheen of Judd. Her structures, however, are not meant to be minimalist, but man-made shapes crafted into high-polish, high-tech, 20th century abstract forms. It’s Judd after a bottle of Tennessee whisky.

Haegue Yang: At least four shows bundled in one.

In other pieces, in the Non-Indepliable group, it’s more Cristo meets craft. Haegue takes what’s in front of her as a foundation, household drying racks in these instances, and mummifies them completely so there’s no other shape they could be. They are, as the title suggests, non-pliable (I couldn’t work out all the prefixes, but I’m pretty sure that’s what she meant). In her case, she’s wrapped household furniture with something lower tech than Cristo – yarn, cotton, or satin, all of which are highly crafted (knitted, in fact, so I really do mean crafted).

The Non-Indepliable structures as a whole are not only less bendy than the Semi-Depliables, they’re more closed; as in, use your imagination to guess what’s inside. It’s kind of limiting in dialogue that way. They’re very different from most of Haegue’s other work, which, from what I’ve seen online, requires active participation by viewers; even if it’s only gazing over the collection of parts. Because of this cloaking effect, Non-Indepliable are less dynamic and consequently less conversational. If Semi-Depliables (a great title for an animated French film) point in an abstract direction, Non-Indepliable point to a rainy day project.

Haegue Yang "Escaping Transparency" (photo: Edmund Blok)

Buildings occupy such a large part of our physical and emotional world, so it’s no surprise they’re used as symbols for modernism; good or bad. Films like Batman, Blade Runner, The Italian Job, or any romCom shot in New York, often use cityscapes to dramatise the story, issuing viewers with a visual clue for anticipated moments. That, and the attached music score invariably supply metropolitan centres with their own personas, and another layer in the composition. Buildings are, literally and figuratively, what we make of them.

Haegue Yang is an artist who works her way down these alleys, following earlier guides like Dan Graham and Isa Genzken as art attempted, in the past, to respond to modern architecture. Graham focussed on architecture’s affects on us, with viewers becoming essential to the work. Genzken, more bluntly, felt that Modernism was complicit in creating today’s vulgar consumerism. For Genzken, Modernism proved to be a disaster. Haegue’s work, currently showing at Modern Art Oxford until 4 September, chooses a little of both artists, but perhaps Graham played a larger influence.

Haegue’s predecessors chose sculpture, albeit composed of different materials, to convey their conversation with architecture. Fighting fire with fire, as it were. Graham used a balance of transparent or mirrored walls alongside natural surroundings to imbue a sense of self inside both built and natural environments. Genzken meanwhile used found objects to collage into dubious structures evoking a sense of near-collapse in manmade structures. Graham wanted you to come in and explore; Genzken would rather topple the thing on you.

"Escaping Transparency" (photo: Stuart Whipps)

Like Graham, some of Haegue’s work employs translucency through the permeability of window blinds which yield the possibility of a partial peek inside a scene. In wall-mounted light sculptures, she arranges faux portals where viewers wouldn’t expect to find a window-like opening. “Bedroom Radiator” and “Kitchen Boiler” are examples of works that replace common household amenities with box structures of brightly-lit bulbs, cloaked by a facade of half-opened, mono-coloured blinds.

In other works, “Dress Vehicles”, Haegue encourages viewers to climb inside rolling polygons of mini-blind structures, wheeling them around the room as participant-driver. It’s like wearing your own fashion statement, as you preen along the catwalk. True to Graham, finding yourself in the structure is more enlightening than critiquing from the outside. You feel both vulnerable and powerful behind partially shut, aluminium window armour, with a footprint of about ten feet. You could do some serious damage with these vehicles, if it weren’t for the permeability of your own identity.

Like fashion for windows (photo: Edmund Blok or Stuart Whipps, or somebody)

In yet another work called “Escaping Transparency”, polygons of blinds float completely off the ground into MAO’s rafters, thus cancelling any transparent or even semi-transparent effects the materials would have established had they been at eye level. This work is probably closer to Haegue’s true nature, dispensing a point of view not normally seen. Born in South Korea and working in Berlin, her peripatetic life probably enabled her to gain distance from local customs, yielding outside perspectives.

“Escaping Transparency” is a tidy ending to these see-through models. Lifting the structure completely off the ground and into the heavens allows the slate to be wiped clean, and begin the next evolution of habitable structure. A new conversation begins.

From an earlier exhibition...no doubt, the girl like the blinds.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park: The Easy Bit

Photography. What is it about the medium that puts fear in the hearts of artists and curators? You’d swear it’s the equivalent of a silver bullet to werewolves given the reasons why photography isn’t allowed in galleries. The backwards thinking of the art industry is one of self-destruction, with every opportunity to get the word out, squandered. No wonder artists starve; they hate food.

I haven’t gone off on this topic lately, but was recently reminded of My Thoughts On The Trouble With Art after a visit to Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP). If wandering around on the great tracts of land owned by YSP is liberating, then its Longside Gallery, located on the perimeter, is solitary confinement. Phobic wouldn’t be too extreme in describing the gallery’s sensibility for communicating and promoting artistic merit. You’d think with the recent public budget crunch would force arts organisations to go guerrilla. Instead, they’ve gone missing.

Here’s how it works at YSP. Cameras are allowed throughout the grounds, no doubt because securing the acreage is so unwieldy that a ninja team the size of London’s Metropolitan Police would be required to scold evil, camera-phone bearing ne’er-do-wells. At least common sense has taken over on the commons.

If Art needed to get away from it all, this is where it would go.

However, at Longside, which is showing “three significant young artists, Claire Barclay, Becky Beasley and Karla Black…”, as the brief-ish paragraph states on the Information pack down at YSP Main Hut (which is the starting point, before taking on the two kilometer hike to Longside). Curiously, YSP’s web site has no information on the gallery show. Ever. It’s like it never existed, and yet there they sit: three “significant” young artists. Closer to cows than people.

The space itself is ample, and makes complete sense for small to medium sized sculptures. For the Arts Council Collection (which owns the works) the Longside and its sister venue in London, Southbank Centre, are regular domains for the world’s largest loan collection of British art. By the way, the Arts Council Collection is paid for by you and me: Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer.

One has to assume that if copyright protection is the scourge of the Arts Council Collection, then investment must certainly be higher on the list. If that’s so, then they’d better be talking a great deal about their collection. Every tax payer should have access to it, and every collector should covet it. Otherwise, why do it?

So, to sum up. On distant farmland, about a two hour drive north of Birmingham (about four hours from London), is a sculpture park that isn’t close to anything so you’d have to want to get there if you live anywhere south of the Midlands; and when you finally do arrive, another 2km away, on foot, up a long hill, dodging sheep and cow droppings, is the Longside Gallery. The tax-supported Arts Council Collection won’t allow any photography, but provide a well-designed, but less useful, paper-based brochure. Strangely, there is nothing on the YSP web site that even attempts to promote anything in the gallery. YSP’s partner, The Southbank Centre, provide a page of description for the gallery generally, but “Current Exhibitions” are so dated that an old show from the Spring of 2010 is listed. These are people who are not accustomed to telling their customers (us) where their art is.

The Fear of Digital: Full size digital photos from The Arts Council

I asked the two youngish desk folk if photos were in digital format somewhere online, so bloggers like me could promote the artists. They said yes, and they weren’t lying. However, one digital file per artist is hardly an effort in promoting these “significant young artists”; and saying very little about the show is either mis-informed, hapless, or lazy. Art fans have to know to visit the Arts Council site to find a proprietary file for the analogue brochure (which won’t work on Apple devices, by the way). Sorry to all you fans of the gallery’s art, but no copying and pasting – even text.

It’s a shame because the boundless space at YSP is a rare thing, and a true gift to citizens. Talking about art, is the point of art. Photography is part of that discussion, itself only one aspect of social media. And social media is doing more for art than money ever will. Especially if you’re in the middle of a cow-field.

John Salt: Photo-realism of the stricken

John Salt is an English photo-realism painter, but instead of pursuing perfection, he chooses to focus attention on the destructed. We could use more painters like John Salt on British television. Just think of the possibilities of a dented X Factor or post-apocalyptic Eurovision. Heavy gloss just doesn’t carry the day in moments of pay more (taxes) and get less (um, everything?).

Most of Salt’s images now showing at Birmingham’s IKON Gallery are of 1960s and 1970s American automobiles. Unlike early photo-realists, his images are not of newly-minted Yankee muscle rolling off the highly charged, Henry Ford production line, but in fact, caught out as 20 years beyond their prime. Think Barry Manilow minus the multiple face tucks.

Happy Travels

On first impression, Salt’s images could be speaking for former cities of glory, like Detroit itself; once proud father, now beaten down old man. When photo-realism washed over 1960s contemporary art, the story was not too far away from irony. It was, yeah, we could use photography to do this, and it would be much easier, more perfect, and think of all the hours of free time we’d have, but then again, bite me! Oil and canvas competing with photography, but then not, and that’s the point. Photo-realism showed photography who was boss in the art world, and if anyone was going to be playing cheap pretender to the throne, it was going to be painters!

In the 1960s, Salt left the farmlands of Shropshire for the freeways of America, and was immediately impressed by the size of the average US automobile. Using photographs of super-sized American cars, his hand was drawn to the clean lines and fresh paint of products produced in post-war Detroit: city of metal-bending and chest-thumping. Soon after, Salt was drawn closer to every day life: the shabby second nature that inevitably occurs after the brochure is discarded. While cars remained a steady subject matter, the aging process became more important for Salt (another one of those aptonyms where someone’s name determines their profession, like Arsene Wenger at Arsenal football club).

Aging industries

Salt’s perspective gradually changed to something much more broad, zooming out to take in the space these old hunks of steel occupy in the landscape. His later works reveal a wider angle for the end-game in the car world, after one clicks the odometer perilously close to the 100,000 mile mark.  Graveyard for the beasts, is a good description, hopelessly lost amongst other grave markers like crumbling homes, listing caravans, and rusted washing machines. It’s a scene where anything other than the natural landscape looks like it’s been dragged in by mules.

Instead of reproducing natural beauty, Salt chose to show the grimness in full focus. Frankly I hope he’s still around when The Only Way is Essex people are in their 50s. I want him to paint them in austere conditions – when the frost of post-spray-painterly tans have settled into a patina of pasted history.

The American Spy Plane: The Bat

At the Nottingham Contemporary Gallery, until 26 June, Huang is displaying a handful of works focused on globalisation. He combines Eastern philosophy with Western conceptualism yielding results that are more journalism than art. The biggest piece is a can’t-miss object, thrust manly, at the entrance to the gallery: a section of a plane’s fuselage seemingly crash-landed inside Gallery One. Remember that scene in the movie, “Romancing the Stone” where the semi-hermit Jack Colton, played by Michael Douglas, finds a ruined, marijuana transport plane in the Central American jungle, and is surprised to discover, through a four-year old newspaper used for packing, that the Doobie Brothers had broken up (years earlier)? I was hoping for something similar on Huang’s plane, a sort of treasure that comes alive from exploring a downed aircraft.

My hopes materialised somewhat, but in the end they were unfulfilled. On display were photo-copies of previous news reports from the 2001 encounter between a US spy plane, and a nosy Chinese fighter jet. Somehow the fighter jet managed to lose a battle with a twin engine spy plane, but, never mind. The incident was embarrassing for both countries, and nobody really knew what to say, expect perhaps “excuse me”. Speculation was rife in those days of what the Americans were doing flying over China in the first place, and the incident turned into an east-meets-west at 20,000 feet. Huang wanted to capture that “cultural moment” by re-constructing the front half of the arrested American plane, but was continually rebuffed by his own government at various stages of the process. The underlying suspicion was the Americans had pressured the Chinese to keep the collision event low-profile, and the Chinese capitulated (probably for some money and the rights to Scooby Doo). Huang uses the Nottingham fuselage as a sort of library for media clips, newspaper reports, official letters and faxes on the three separate dates when his re-animated plane was taken apart and removed from Chinese galleries or public places.

The daggers of Jack Colton upon learning the Doobie Brothers have broken up.

Apparently the piece was so political, it couldn’t find a home in mainland China. So what do you do if you’re a Chinese citizen, living in Paris at the time, and you can’t show your work in the home country? Where’s your go-to centre for subversive schemes? Probably somewhere big and western and modern and contemporary; something like the Tate Modern. Except, a hunted-down Chinese artist is already using the space at Tate. Fine; where to next? The city of fomenting rebellion: Nottingham! (I say cheekily, but not being dismissive of the lovely city at all, just, well, you know, it’s not on your list of top ten places to show your mutinous, revolutionary art. Even with the Robin Hood legend).

The exhibit/demonstration sounds well and truly newsy, doesn’t it? And it is. The plane is strewn with reportage, which makes the idea more historical evidence that political theatre. It’s journalism gone arty and made me wonder if this is really effective. It doesn’t much advance the conversation for western, modern, or contemporary art that it purports to be influenced by? (The gallery’s guide reveals the artists John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, and Joseph Beuys are influences for a group Huang founded in China, called Xiamen Dada Group.)

Bats hanging from inside The Bat

Nottingham’s Gallery guide also states, “His work examines how cultures collide and transform as a result of massive political and economic forces – imperialism, for example, or rapid economic globalisation.” This might be something you would have read a decade ago in the financial section of the newspapers. Again, how is this effective? Why this, now?

Finding more Huang online from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis turns up an earlier exhibition from 2005. From the Walker’s gallery notes: “Huang Yong Ping has created an artistic universe comprised of provocative installations that challenge the viewer to reconsider everything from the idea of art, to national identity, to recent history.” Does it really challenge us on national identity? Haven’t we always been challenged on national identity, either with or without art? Or is this simply a workshop or lab for a Chinese artist trapped behind a wall of political singularity for decades, trying to make sense of a world newly released upon the senses? This specific piece, in my mind, shows more discovery of self placed inside western modernism – one person’s poetry – than a challenge to the rest of us on our national identities, or recent histories. Come on Huang, keep up…

Joan Miro: Still Life with Shoe

For anyone planning a visit to London this summer, two bits of news. First, the weather is cooperating immensely here, with the sun and warm weather arriving alarmingly early. The locals are going mental because they know this means one thing: it’ll be chilled and raining from May through August. It’s like spiders before earthquakes with Londoners, they can sense imperiled doom close at hand.

The second bit of news has to do with getting yourself indoors for shelter. Happily, Tate Modern is whipping up a good sturm und drang inside with the first Joan Miro retrospective in 50 years. The exhibition goes from 15 April until 11 September; or as we say in the middle bit of England, throughout the rainy season. The Tate-ettes have stoked a story throughout the exhibition that closely marries Miro with not just one war, but several conflicts. His art is infused with Catalan pride during a time when Barcelona was on the brink of war, soon followed by Hitler’s war on Europe. Trouble seemed to nip at his heels throughout his long career.

Imagine you’re in Miro’s shoes. First, you’re fleeing the family because they don’t understand that making art is a whole lot more interesting than sitting behind a desk, adding up numbers. (Of course these days the successful contemporary artist must be whip-smart in both functions, bank statements being a weapon of choice). So you sod off out of town to find your future, leaving the local Catalans to pursue separatism for themselves, probably cursing the country’s leaders in their own language. Meanwhile, you just smartly document the injustice from a safe distance, in a place so uninhabitable, the emotional pain you’ll feel in this backwater of the world won’t be much different than the suffering incurred by the angry and bloodied peasants back home. You know, Paris.

There you help start the surrealist movement with the other poets and painters, creating a singular style to the movement based on Miguel Primo de Rivera‘s repressive control over the Catalan people. You’re probably drinking loads of cheap bordeaux on the Seine too, so it could be worse.

A section of a part of a series: Miro's Barcelona Series

After a while you’re thinking of making a return trip home when, what do you know, guess who marches into the picture. Right, it’s Franco. So it’s a nip back to safer grounds in late 1930′s Paris where you paint one of your masterpieces, “Still Live with Old Shoe”, amongst other pieces reflecting the fury of emotion against General Franco’s army. So you’re plenty anxious, building up your own private anger, and then guess who decides to drop by for a visit? Fabulous, it’s Hitler. How is an artist supposed to work in these kinds of conditions! The only way this story gets worse is if Stalin becomes your next door neighbour.

Time for a holiday. The far reaches of France that isn’t anywhere near Paris, and daringly close to the sea in case you need to leg it over the water to England, is Normandy. This is where you find yourself on holiday when the Nazis overrun France, and you decide it’s not a bad place to do some work either. In fact, it’s a haven for painting your Barcelona Series, which, while showing at the Tate Modern, is the first time all 50 pieces have been in the same room. With all the negative angst rolled up in in brushstrokes, it’s a miracle none of the characters are jumping off the canvas beating the Kaka out of each other.

Normandy is also where you start a long series of paintings called The Constellation Series until you decide to live in “internal exile” on the Spanish island of Mallorca. Surely one can find piece on this plot of land in the Balearic Sea.

Joan Miro: one of many stars in his Constellation Series

After the dust settles, Miro continues his itinerant life with frequent visits to New York and Paris after the war. It’s in these two cities, not Spain, where the world discovers Miro and his importance in Surrealism. That’s what war is especially good at, hiding creativity.

The last punch in the nose for Miro occurred after his death, in the destruction of his “World Trade Center Tapestry” which was annihilated in the New York terrorist bombing of 2001. Miro’s legacy doesn’t seem capable of avoiding aggressive conflict. It’s like he’s a magnet for trouble.

Jyll Bradley's "Airports for Lights, Shadows, Particles"

Are light boxes sculptural, photographic, a combination of both, or a medium so little used there’s nowhere to put it? Liverpool’s Bluecoat Gallery is showing a Jyll Bradley survey of works, including units that are photographical, sign-like images that work best in the dark. She gets the idea from advertising light boxes, which of course are lit for night use, giving advertising a 24 hour per day life. Mostly the work is back-lit photographs, but a few embed typography in the photo composition, adding aesthetic texture to the work, along with personal moments of memories. The medium reminds me a lot of motion graphics from the last 10 years, or even Picasso’s use of text as art form.

So what does Bluecoat say about Bradley’s use of light boxes? From their website, an over eager attempt: “Exploring ideas of identity, Bradley employs the form and dynamics of commercial display, such as advertising light-boxes. Light acts as a protagonist, drawing together the photographic, the literary and the sculptural to create reflective spaces for inquiry into artistic choices, belief and love.” To ask a piece of realism to feed inquiry into love seems a little demanding, but, never mind.

So it’s light as protagonist, is it? What happened when video was first used as a medium, was that “light as actor” too? And what of reflective light onto painting, or sculpture? It’s probably safe to say that light plays an obvious role for all visual art. Otherwise, we all couldn’t find our way down to the old gallery to see any of the stuff now could we?

A box full of love at the Bluecoat

From this exhibit, it seems to me that Bradley’s light boxes – not light – are worth jangling on about. Bradley isn’t Jackson Pollock in her quest to find the purpose of a medium. She’s after a realism, even if it’s one of poetry, not an abstraction of idea. Her photographic style has more in common with Dorothea Lange’s documentary photos, and to this day nobody’s ever thought of sliver halide on photosensitive paper as protagonist, creating inquiry into artistic choices, belief and love. That would be cruel, wouldn’t it?

The Bluecoat comes closer to the nib when comparing Bradley’s light boxes with tombs. I thought of Bradley’s work more as a designed piece of furniture – a coffee table with its own, built in, coffee table book. I suppose it depends on what mood one is in before entering the scene: depressed, and they’re purpose-built for a funeral. Looking to prop one’s feet up, and they’re a lovely table.

According to the exhibition copy, Bradley “found a companion in the night’s reflected lights, in particular advertising light boxes. For her they mirrored a youthful sense of the excitement of urban, shimmery spaces, and the possibility for self-discovery.” Light boxes seem to have tweaked Bradley in a very personal way, and maybe this is why she chose the medium. A poetic resemblance to her innocence; the farm kid being overwhelmed by big city trappings. Maybe it created a new world, Bradley’s new order.

More likely, the medium of light boxes are one of choice, and I suspect an artist would say the same thing: it’s simply a format they find works best for them. We haven’t gotten to the point of abstracting the light box form like Jackson Pollock would have done for paint, so why don’t’ we call it what it is: another medium that allows art to be seen in the dark, where for one part of the day someone has our complete attention. Kind of like fireworks.

Remember me?

Come Olympic time next year, will London art addicts be gritting teeth and holding cynical breaths as the endurance race begins? Chancing upon the line-up for Tate Modern in the next 18 months, I see five months of Saatchi showmanship will be placed firmly in front of international Olympic visitors in the form of a Damien Hirst retrospective. How many other trophy symbols do you suppose we’ll have to wade through before surfacing in 2013?

Meantime, over at org sister Tate Britain, surely someone is being sacked for not thinking of this kind of romance first. What were they thinking, exhibiting Henry Moore three years too early? Quick, somebody find all the Barbara Hepworths you can think of, and let’s rain sculpture upon London’s Hyde Park. For the rest of the citizens, they can pull their weight too:

The City: Every business person, especially bankers, are required to crown themselves with that tired cliche, the bowler hat. Even the women. Just for good measure, carry a full length umbrella along with yourself. No £20 auto-extend, fit in your briefcase, vibrantly coloured short umbrella will be tolerated. Lastly, hirsute yourself up by growing a funny mustache like Charlie Chaplin – the original YBA.

The Restaurants: I don’t care how you do it, but every restaurant with a patisserie chef must present at least one Anish Kapoor styled dessert on its menu. Failure to do so will result in a surprise visit by Tracey Emin, who will sort out the sweets for you.

Attention Michel Roux: a possibility for a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream

The Mayor: For just one month, the Boris Bikes will be deflated, unhinged, folded down, and stored in Boris’ secret lair to make way for the throwback, un-bendy, Routemaster buses. Only, these buses shall exist in a Rachel Whiteread like form: negative space filled with concrete. This of course renders the buses useless – just like real life – but will nonetheless be emblematic and representational of the YBA movement. It’ll feel like the 90′s all over again.

Graffiti Artists: All street artists are required to paint/draw/tag in the style of Thomas Gainsborough. While still an illegal act, any graffiti closely resembling a Gainsborough will generate discounts to your fine and/or jail sentence; not to mention greatly add to your odds at the Oscars.

I’m expecting contemporary progress to come to a screeching halt around January 2012. Just when I thought this Kate and Wills thing would spring the British consciousness out of it’s mired existence of a post-recession mud pit, I now see it was a trap all along. I suggest planning your art adventures outside London; with Liverpool, Bucharest, Berlin, New York, Los Angeles all producing biennials, along with Documenta in Kassel. Otherwise, it’s a marathon of tired cliches for 366 days.

Elephant Magazine: Hefty in weight, formidable in memory

The elephant in the room is literally a thick-ish magazine called Elephant that’s been jammed amongst other publications in my apartment for the last three months. I’ve finally gotten around to reading/addressing this Elephant (Issue 5, Winter 2010/2011), and found two parts of the book seemingly at odds with one another; both attempting to answer a question of priority. Which comes first, the idea or the image?

As usual for me, I started with the back of the publication, where most magazines’ identity and personality are invariably placed. “The Internet and the Nile” is a kind of parable told after someone’s (Marc Valli) realisation that the production of art is the result of an engagement with geography. He uses an historical event for comparison (a visit to the Nile by Flaubert and how this affects the seeds of modernism). Valli submits an opinion that artists have it wrong if they think an idea produces an environment, when surely it’s the other way around. An idea cannot be propagated from the head, it takes the whole body and history of the person to arrive at something original. OK, I think at the time, I’ll go along, sensing Valli’s opinion is a bit didactic and surely an artist like Richard Dadd, who spent most of his disturbed life in an asylum (serves him right, as he, ironically, killed his father) and painted from experiences inside his head. Come to think of it, Valli’s opinion also doesn’t explain the magical universes of science fiction writers, or digital game creators. Maybe Marc Valli is just being an old man about the whole thing.

The Art of Collage by Ana Ibarra for Elephant Magazine

Flipping to the front half of Elephant – the trunk, as it were – is a 50 page section focussed on the subject of collage, comprised of about 20 interviews with collage artists. It’s a shallow, but interesting pool of notions remarking on the process of collage work, with a lot of the same questions asked.  When queried, which comes first, the idea or the image, the common theme seems to go something like this: if one gets paid for the work, idea is primary; while work unencumbered with the dual pressure of deadline and dollars, images flow  first. Probably neither method is better than the other, and in fact, both modes together make a nice, well, collage, of collage-ing, don’t you think?

Anyway, bringing the story full circle, i.e. back to Valli’s idea of originality. He writes, “Novel and original works of art are not born out of one’s head, but out of one’s whole being, out of one’s whole belief system, out of one’s entire experience of the world. Ideas should come out of experience – not the other way around.” When I’m inside a controlled environment of a gallery, such as Tate Modern’s turbine hall, or Alfredo Jaar’s “Marx Lounge” (Liverpool Biennial), or Antony Gormley’s “Breathing Room 3″ (London’s White Cube), the environment certainly makes me think about something. I don’t know if my whole “belief system” is onsides at this point, but the physical and geographic experience is palpable to the point of having an emotional or even intellectual effect. That’s not to say that geographies can’t exist in the mind either. Has Marc Valli ever tried magic mushrooms, mescaline, or other hallucinogens? Hasn’t the history of western literature risen on the foundation of mind-altering ingredients? Has Valli ever met Hunter S. Thompson?

Antony Gormley: not nearly the Nile, but fairly close to the Thames.

The mind of the collagist, it seems to me, is similar to that of the Surrealists. Their work is one where an image is chosen subconsciously, then ripped from its original context and given new meaning. I doubt even the artist knows for certain which takes priority. For all they know, they’re finishing a jigsaw puzzle. If that’s true, it must mean that the human imagination has its own playground that isn’t a million miles away from an adventure on the Nile, or any other remote physical location.