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.

“…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.

In the June 2009 edition of Icon magazine, the Swiss architect Valerio Olgiati responds to a question regarding his working method.  Olgiati claims he begins every project by talking.  The people in his firm discuss a project and its specific needs and environment for hours, sometimes days, until the focus has revealed itself.  During this time, nobody draws or sketches anything.  He likens his process to exactly the opposite of art, with its highly engaged system of the process.  Artists simply paint or draw and hopefully something comes out of the studio.  Olgiati doesn’t bother with all that, and waits until the essence is argued, wrestled, or cajoled into existence.  Then someone goes away and draws the ideas onto paper…presumably in a cloistered room, far far away.

Someone in art should give this a go.  In their heads, artists tend to stay jailed inside their own points of view, even though they may have unearthed a mass of data on a subject.  But as most of us know, living in the wide wide world of different lifestyles and opinions ensures that, at one point, our points of view change as we live our lives.  Wouldn’t this be a productive method for art as well, where supposedly people with talent (artists) engage with supposedly people who have less talent (us) to create, at first, a discussion, before the artist feels well and truly prepared for a first attempt.  I’m not such a process-driven person that my life could always function like this, I wouldn’t get anything done otherwise, but somebody should try this.  Give and take happens in the real world anyway, and artists are in no position to fortify themselves in a tower for critical acclaim.

The architect Adolph Loos thought along the same lines, stating, “Good architecture can be written.  One can write the Parthenon.”  And if one had honest colleagues, one could plan a city.