contemporary monkey

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.

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.

Penone: "Breath of Leaves"

It’s only a pile of dried, grey brown leaves, swept into a mound, placed in the middle of Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery.  They’re not particularly impressive looking leaves either; small and perfect shape, lacking in personality.  They’re from the box tree, offers the Ikon employee sitting near the sculpture.  He goes on to say that the artist wanted to use box leaves for their size and light weight, and allegedly, wherever the sculpture goes, so go the same leaves.  That day it occurred to me the gallery employees might be a worthwhile source of un-tapped knowledge of contemporary art.

The Ikon Gallery was showing an exhibition of sculptures by Giuseppe Penone in June.  Left on my own, which is what many galleries do to wanderers from the outside, I would not have been able to even make a guess why the artist did what he did.  At the pile of leaves, however, I made the decision that it was the gallery’s job to help me understand why last Autumn’s tree trimmings are called art.  Turning around, I glanced by a few of the other equally baffling sculptures, and returned downstairs to the manned front desk. The willing person there pointed me in the direction of the show’s programme, in addition to retrieving a more specific Penone exhibition guide.   He also provided me a brief one or two lines to think about while traveling through the show.  After sifting through the Hammurabi-like code of marketing copy for the gallery,  Penone’s point became more straight-forward.  In it’s most basic form, Penone’s discovered that the boundaries between people and nature are a fluid border, sometimes not obviously visible.  I returned to my first position: the dead pile of leaves, which was adjacent to two, similarly looking boulders.  (I learned later that one of the rocks is a man-made replica of a river boulder, which, itself was carved by nature over thousands of years.  The replica was made in a few months, but Penone’s point was, even if you could do it, why would you?  My question exactly.  I like Penone.)

I enlist my new-found friend, still perched on the chair near the heap of leaves, for more banter about leaves, rocks, branches, anything that seems to make sense at the moment.  To my surprise, the guy is happy to thrash out some meaning with me.  Together we sort through theories, insights, even wild guesses, for about five of the pieces that are within eyesight.  He seems to have been well-prepared for the artist (”he” doesn’t have a name tag by the way, so I have no idea what to call him).

Together, we reckon that the leaf mound is Penone’s canvas, and his body, the brush.  His is the form imprinted onto the pile of leaves, just as a kid would do after a father has raked a large pile from under an Autumn tree.  It looks more like good fun than serious art, but Penone adds to the shape by blowing sideways while he lies chest-down in the stack.  A half-conical valley is the only imprint left from his effort, and indeed the work is called, “Breath of Leaves”.  Nearby are photographs of Penone’s warm breath in an Italian winter forest.  Each breath develops its own shape, and the still photographs capture only one instant of each puff of warm wind.

Birmingham's Ikon Gallery

My guide and I went on for twenty minutes more, and during our discussion, I realized that he must have been waiting in a sort of limbo for a curious person like me who isn’t intimidated to ask questions.  Later he tells me that the learning centre upstairs is showing a video that Penone himself made where he explains why he does what he does.  Interviews by the artist aren’t common enough in my opinion, so after having left my guide to chat with another curious mind, I dashed up to the video room.

Penone describes using his breath as an invisible sculpture. By capturing his warm  exhalation in a chilly forest, he suggests that plant life is not much different: branches and roots instead of arms and legs, expiring oxygen through leaves rather than carbon dioxide via the mouth.

I was inside the Ikon gallery for nearly two hours - about four times the length that most shows can be consumed inside this smallish gallery.  Enabling all the resources of the Ikon, however, I was able to enjoy myself much more, and learn a great deal about the exhibit than I would had I only read the exhibition guide.  I don’t know why galleries or museum don’t encourage their people to come forward to discuss the current programmes.  If the folks are there only for security, the gallery should employ people to circulate while engaging the public.  The repeat business would certainly increase.