contemporary monkey

ground zero for paradise

While the popular cry for the slow demise of Earth has been heard from every person, state, corporation, and politician for the past two decades, the Garden of Paradise appears to be handling it like a tough old grandmother. Think of a place on Earth that sees minimal human imprint. A green, square patch of pure, awe-inspiring, not a Rainforest Cafe in site, natural hunk of land. It’s still out there, despite the over-worked contortions and knee-jerk spams from the doomsday machine that is global media. Sure, plenty of bad news, with oil spills, mud slides, slowly advancing tsunamis, over-fishing countries, land-pillaging corporations, because that’s what sells subscriptions and page impressions. While the fear mongering certainly has a foundation, it’s good to see that ever-present Nature still presses mankind between thumb and forefinger, no what matter what we throw at it. The Garden of Eden, it appears, has seen tougher foes than the likes of us.

The artist Sergio Vega thinks he’s located the original Garden of Eden: ground zero for paradise on Earth. Using a document called, “Paradise in the New World”, the coordinates for which are said to be located in Brazil, Vega films the natural and makes a comparison with the unnatural (that would be you and me). The state of Mato Grosso has been claimed as the centre of all Earth’s beauty, which, if you believe Wikipedia, that non de-foresting but sometimes questionable web site, translates to “thick woods”. I reckon the Amazon is as good a place as any to call the centre of beauty as we know it.

In Vega’s current exhibition at Birmingham’s IKON Eastside, entitled, “Paradise: Real Time”, he underscores nature’s influence on one of its dependents: man. Through multiple, and very large, high definition video images, it’s apparent that the mother of all form, line and colour holds sway over us in not only what we build, and how we build it, but what we do when we’re not busy destroying each other. Tower blocks in urban landscapes mimicking palm forests. Brightly saturated clothing imitating tropical birds, and Birds of Paradise. Bee-like tribal dance rituals stirring up mini tornado clouds of dust. My take away is that, while the human race endeavors to suck the life out of the planet, we often don’t recognise the force of strength coming the opposite way. I found the scenes to be a very positive, and pleasantly refreshing take on the Man versus Nature debate that usually leads headlines. Unfortunately, the gallery notes would have you believe otherwise - another reason to consume art before the usual suspects lead you in their pre-determined, and biased, direction.

Local wildlife wearing Brazilian football jersey

It’s one of only two problems I had with this exhibit. In its gallery notes, IKON Eastside magnifies a “deterioration of the area’s natural beauty” when contrasting the side-by-side images. While certainly a valid, if not stale, viewpoint, it shows a true dramatic pessimism to emphasize what’s wrong rather than what’s right. The gallery notes chose to reflect despair and cynicism: “Rainforests, animals, insects and rivers - all filmed in real time - are projected across multiple screens around the gallery, juxtaposed with scenes of urban development, logging and local poverty.” After viewing beginning to end, I must admit not seeing any scenes of logging, or very much deforestation in general. If anything, the point made was toward the results from human progress, somewhat uninspired compared with natural beauty. As for poverty, it saw it more as a screen-shot for the natural way life is led in the Amazon, rather than an emotional tug for someone who isn’t donned with a Ralph Loren Polo shirt, clutching a chilled Coca-Cola, perched on a pink Vespa. Set closely adjacent to each other, the urban versus nature video images, if anything, suggests a dominion over mankind. More awe-inspiring than distressing.

The second problem with the exhibition is its overuse of the phrase: “Real Time”. The video wasn’t at all in real time, it was simply real, filmed in another time. It obviously reflected something that already happened, possibly recently, but who knows. Still, I think the artist missed a trick by NOT having a real time camera, or two or three, placed in choice areas that beam back real time images countering the urban with the natural. I understand this system would only work in a few time zones left and right of the Amazon, but even if delayed by half a day, the scenes would be closer, and truer, to our own daily lives, than what’s being claimed in the gallery.

But those are the only two problems I had with the piece. Let’s continue with the positive vibes and simply say it’s satisfying, finally, to see nature winning an innings or two. Even if we know the opponents (again, that’s you and me) to be more determined.

Ikon Gallery's summer offering of everything

Ikon Gallery violated one of my pet peeves from cultural institutions by organising a retrospective of its own existence. Ordinarily the realm of magazine publishers through distribution of anniversary issues, releasing new content is fairly non-existent. It’s like going to your granny’s 90th birthday where she recounts her memories of every year. In the end, it provides the average citizen a good reason to give it a miss. Especially in the summer.

To be fair, San Francisco’s MOMA is doing the same thing this summer, with the vast space of the museum devoted to its collection. Entitled, “75 Years of Looking Forward”, SF MOMA sneaks around the obvious reference to the past by assuming the collection was made for future generations. A neat trick, but it’s the same result as that of magazine publishers: an easy, and less interesting, content generator.

Usually these things are “activated” as they say in not very good art-speak - produced, as the rest of humanity would say - for revenue producing purposes. If National Geographic magazine, for example, has a 125th anniversary issue, other than the ad sales people who are thrilled beyond belief to have an accelerator to reach their target, it matters much less to readers. Because museums don’t profit much from this type of strategy, my guess is that someone at gallery central had a brilliant idea that didn’t pan out at the last minute, and the historical closet was raided for second-best ideas.

The Ikon summer show, entitled “This Could Happen to You: Ikon in the 1970s”, is Part Two of what probably retroactively became a bigger idea. Part One, as no doubt it will now be called, was a show exhibited in 2004 based on Ikon as a seed of an idea: “Some of the Best Things Happen Accidentally: the Beginning of Ikon”. Extrapolating to the future, my guess is that, sometime around 2015 we’ll see something like “Life Under Thatcher: How the Ikon was Plunged into Darkness”.

When these sorts of things pop up, in whatever medium they exist, my strategy is to blitz through the the event like Hitler in 1930s Poland. It won’t be important to remember the artist, because, like 95% of contemporary artists, most were forgotten in the memories of the public about 5 years after their arrival. Instead, I found two over-arching themes for this show: 1. drugs and 2. stuff.

The Ikon adds too much intellectualism into the drug addled days sandwiched in between the revolutionary 1960s and consumerist 1980s. Describing an animated piece by Ian Emes for Pink Floyd, the exhibition guide reads, “…it chimes in with a kind of abstract painting that came to the fore in the 1970s, hard-edged, flat and large-scaled, essentially formalist in its proposition.” Um OK, but really it was all about the drugs and watching the colours bleed and dance and bounce around our brains. Oh to be young and naive like the kids in the galleries these days.

“Stuff” was represented throughout the exhibition via not painting, but not sculpture either. The result of two floors of exhibits suggest the typical 1970s artist had tired of traditional art media. Canvas that is more sculpture than painting; medical equipment that bears no relation to its title; spray guns loaded with paint in place of brushes; drug-induced images resulting from reflections off a car bonnet; variants of the colour green on horizontal canvases. And of course the Pink Floyd animation, with, oddly, individual cells on display (something you’d more likely see in a Disney/Warner Brothers store of the 1990s).

An Ikon recap for those who have a summer to be using up, and have no time for indoor activity: drugs, stuff, materials, history, remembrance, waiting for part three, and when do the hallucinogenics kick in, are my take on 1970s art in Birmingham. Sounds like the 1970s generally.

Xu Zhen is at least one part of MadeIn. Or not.

Can you ever really know someone, a country, or a culture? Armed with the worldwide inter-webby thing, a plane ticket to just about anywhere, and a credit card that purchases just about anything on the planet, you’d think our capacity to be global pals of the highest order is a cinch. What is it we don’t know? Want to meet people from all over the world, but don’t have the wherewithal? Line up a four week holiday to South Africa in June and the world comes to you. Constantly wondering what all the hub-bub is about of, say, the politics in Georgia, shifting borders in Armenia, or football teams of Togo? An iPhone in your pocket is all you need to pull down as much data as your battery allows. But honest data doesn’t make it easy to grasp the details.

This month at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery is a show from a Chinese art collective called MadeIn. There is a large amount of work in the gallery, so the term “collective” could mean a small Chinese village of 200,000. And this is exactly the point MadeIn are making in their show called, “Seeing One’s Own Eyes”, how much of the world is understood through cliche. MadeIn’s work enables the platitudes of the Middle East, including the sympathies of the region’s locals, with the caricatures of the “tourists” (that would be us westerners with our ample supply of guns and ammo).

In one section, enclosing about 8-10 mixed media works, each about 8 feet by 15 feet wide, reflect someone’s interpretation, or subjective opinion, of the current realm of the Middle East. American’s like me will see this as one more smirk at our country’s muscularity, bullying, short-sightedness; just more censure that the world piles onto every American, as if we’re all standing shoulder to shoulder against the world. And while the trite remarks might be somewhat warranted, it’s becoming an increasingly old story. I was mostly annoyed.

anti-American? or anti-indolent?

However, while the work uses mixed media, the images are painted cartoon-like, suggesting less than earnest comments. The images reflect what someone in Shanghai might perceive the Middle East to be from thousands of miles away, viewed through a skewed lens of the Chinese media, knowing it’s probably not completely true. The proposition is one that hints toward our inclination to shape subjective, even lazy, views into absolute fact.

I can’t leave without commenting on the over-zealous copy from the exhibition guide suggesting that MadeIn is a Chinese collective, that pretends it’s a Middle Eastern collective. Ikon Gallery state that Xu Zhen, a single man, is indeed MadeIn, which in itself pretends to be a Middle Eastern Art Collective. That’s more than a bit optimistic, as firstly, I don’t think one has to go that far to make the point about cliche which they were successful in constructing. Secondly, no visitor is going to think that, so why even make it up? It’s not like MadeIn needs to be more than once removed to prove their point. In fact, if you’re going to the trouble of inventing another layer, why not keep inventing layer; why stop at two? Why not suggest the Chinese artist Xu Zhen is pretending to be a Chinese artist collective, which is pretending to be a Middle Eastern Collective, which in itself is pretending to be an American collective, which might really be a British collective, pretending to be Chinese. Isn’t it all so circular and mind-bending, and self-reflective and black-hole-like? Who’s got drugs?

like Amiga, but with paint

In October of 2009, the internet turned 40 years old.  Not the web, or as some would call it, the Google machine; I mean the internet, developed by ARPANET for the US military to withstand a Soviet nuclear missile attack.  Images on the internet arrived later, around 1990, when the CERN Institute developed the world wide web. I bring these dates up because they seem so long ago; the wow factor hasn’t been palpable since the late 20th century.  Or so I thought.

Digital art, while not widely accepted by the art buying public (i.e., merchant bankers), is widely followed by a global audience.  Its gallery, however, is mostly online so you’d have to know where to look to find it.  Even with limited appeal, however, there it is; raging wildly and completely toward the Next Big Thing.  Digital styles vary from futuristic, technology-pushing 3D imagery coded to audio, fireworks, and probably even orgasm, to something completely not that - sentimental remembrances of 8 bit digital: the old space invader imaging.  If you missed the digital art revolution, you were probably buried under a rock, or possibly banished to whatever the equivalent of the art gulag would be.  Crawford, Texas maybe.

Semyon Faibisovich isn’t from anywhere near Texas, at least not topographically.  He’s from Moscow.  But the digital distance between he and Crawford’s most popular citizen isn’t that far.  Faibisovich at one time painted in the realism style, but traded canvas for film in the past two decades.  During this time, the former Soviet Union was crumbling beneath the merciless weight of its arch enemy: Conceptual Art.  While Faibisovich was off conceptualizing, digital photography was busy happening.

Faibisovich is being shown at the IKON Gallery in Birmingham, where he’s uploaded (OK, hung) large format images on the IKON’s walls (or as I call them, old-style screens).  He’s back painting large formats using very small source material, and he’s done most of it within the past few years.  Walking around the Moscow district of Razgulyai, he’s captured what passes for life by way of a mobile phone camera.  As most of us know, camera phones today are terrible at reproduction, but handy when you need it.  Like when your friends are throwing shots of high octane alcohol down their necks at a Spanish bar and the moment Must Be Recorded.  Nobody pretends the quality is going to be any good, with the results eventually getting sucked down the drain of the digital dark underworld of forgotten photos.  Or maybe that’s just me hopin’ and wishin’.

Faibisovich seems to have just now discovered the technological fault of the ubiquitous comrade of the proletariat.  Starting with highly-pixellated mobile photographs, he then distorts the image further through either Photoshop filters, or his own paintbrush.  The result is the digital equivalent of Monet or Renoir.

just prior to the introduction of digital photography

Pixellation isn’t new to art. Digital artists have used old fashioned computer images to achieve a kind of distressed or atavistic effect.  Faibisovich is simply doing what the impressionists and post impressionists did, but with some help from a mobile camera phone.  It’s like he’s just discovered the 20th century world of pixels through photography and manipulation.  This doesn’t seem contemporary to me.  Faibisovich is just someone who’s playing catch-up with the rest of the world, and thinks he’s on to something. He’s like the Brendan Fraser Neanderthal character in Encino Man (California Man to British People).  The content is only interesting from one point of view, and it isn’t ours.

What I found more curious was the amount of manipulation that varied among the works.  Some sections of the pieces Faibisovich has left alone, where the final enlargement is magnified relentlessly from the original source.  Other bits were recorded over with oil, which to me would suggest that he must have had a reason for supplementing some bits and not others.  What were those reasons?  As I’ve said before, knowing why an artist does something can be more interesting than the way he does it.

In fact, let’s make a rule: art can only be called contemporary if it feeds the creative spirit of our time…events within the last 10 years.  If it’s just catch-up art, then maybe the work is best suited for the museums.  Or the nostalgia bin.

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.