contemporary monkey

Antony Gormley: Breathing Room III

When men imagine themselves driving cars; we usually picture ourselves in an environment that suits the particular model. A Bugatti Veyron on Germany’s Nurburgring with the landscape visibly blurred as we roar through the air. Inside a Mitsubishi Evo, we’re tearing up a dirt track off-road, sliding around sharp bends in the trails of Northern Europe. Tucked away in a polished Bentley, we maneuver quietly through a quaint village nestled in the middle of England, with a name like, Chipping Bloodlet or something equally outdated, secluded away from the ugly world of commerce.

The English: a fashion unto themselves

Ladies, when you shop for fashion, you’re likely picturing yourself wearing a black slinky dress at the next opening gala, or a comfy but fine leather jacket for a first date, or perhaps a massively large, conspicuous looking hat at a Derby Day lunch. Again, such a hat requires a suitable place; a town with a fitting name like Paisley-upon-Biscuit. Oh dear me, such is the life of the leisure class.

Back in the land of the cosmopolitan, when the artist Antony Gormley thinks of people, because he often does think of people, he prefers to put the human being in its/our proper environment. Given a comparative act of measurement, how do the average joe and jane bloggs stack up. Where do they belong, and is there really a need for towns like Chipping-before-Wenlock?

This man lives in a Chipping-upon-village

You might have encountered a Gormley sculpture, as he’s famous for installing human-type shapes in, mostly, the British landscape. Perched on top of buildings, rooted in rocky beaches, fondly overlooking English cities, even submerged in flooded cathedral crypts. Gormley was also responsible for One and Other, the idea of placing the public on the fourth plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square to give them their hopeful 15 minutes (x 4) of fame. If Gormley isn’t obsessed with modern man’s position in space, I don’t know who would be.

In London, at White Cube Mason’s Yard, Gormley reverses the perspective to work on the perimeters that instead surround the human in its habitat. He lets us maneuver about the place, providing an occasion for us to measure not only ourselves, but other visitors and how we compare with each other. Sealed in the basement of the White Cube, following endless stairs downward, filled with the sudden dread of thinking do I really want to walk back up, is an intersecting group of 15 white frames made of glowing, wooden scaffolding, taking over the whole of the room. Think of a Damien Hirst installation without the shark, formaldehyde, or the glass. And definitely without the the stupid title (”The Feeling of Looking Silly in the Mind of Someone Who Claims to be an Artist”). Also, very much larger than Hirst’s productions.

Hirst-Super-Mare

When I say glowing, I mean each 1×1 inch length of wood, joined to make multiple boxes, is painted with some sort of phosphorescence that glows for about 15 minutes, before needing a recharge. The recharge, as it happens, is a blinding bolt of white light from heat lamps concealed in the ceiling, flipped on for about 30 seconds. This of course suggests that viewers are all walking around in the dark when the overhead lamps aren’t on, bumping into each other if it weren’t for the brightly lit wooden posts giving off residual energy. Ugh, that light was on far too long. I probably looked horrible, and I know some of my fellow gallery-goers, who were until recently cloaked ghosts, could use a fashion do-over.

Now that the light’s are dimmed again, time to get on with the business of measuring ourselves. The installation includes my favourite activity in art: participation. Because it’s (nearly always) dark (ish), you have free clearance to touch things. Well, not people of course. You can fondle the structure as long as you don’t leave the sculpture wobbling, because the remonstrating Irish girl at the front will otherwise hurl her way toward you, possibly unsheathing a weapon, to “caution” you. Not that this happened to me, of course. I’m much more surreptitious. Still, visitors are encouraged to walk amongst the wood, as it were, and do their best not to damage anything on the way through the “pine forest”. Also, because this is the British Republic of Health and Safety and Please Pray that England win the World Cup, the sign at the front door says you’re on your own if you clobber yourself on the head. Clobbering oneself, however, would be a good use of the structure for personal measurement: “I guess I was too tall for that wooden timber, must be about 6 feet tall that beam. By the way darling, do you have a tourniquet?”

“Breathing Room III” (or 3, or Three, however you want to confuse your guests) as it’s entitled, is not only a probe for how we as humans fit in with the world - including other people in it - but it’s a great place where you literally cannot read anything; including any redundant titles or copy for the installation. My first instincts on entering galleries is to avoid what some over-ambitious young gallery employee might have written about the importance of the installation. It’s much easier, and more interesting, to get straight on with the art - minus the enthusiastic wordsmithing. Gormley’s site is one that must be experienced directly as an image and structure to be a part of. And if it’s in a dark room with other curious individuals, even better. The only things missing are beer and wine.

The upstairs neighbors at White Cube

Tom Friedman: funny man

Pubs are probably a fertile incubation space for art. All sorts of unhinged, but nonetheless possibly valid ideas begin life in a pub amongst friends, usually after at least four quick pints. Laced with alcohol, people say the most outrageous things which nearly always require proof of concept outside the fantasy world of your local pub. Proof that must come at a later time, because, well, everyone’s busy drinking and saying rubbish things at the moment. Remind them in the morning.

The artist Tom Friedman, I imagine in my mind’s eye, must be a pub drinker with several demented friends at the ready. The results of his imagination actually do prove something half-baked to be possible. I can imagine Friedman saying, “I’ll bet I can make anything out of styrofoam and a lick of paint.” To which his friends laugh uncontrollably, and bet him even more pints that he couldn’t. Then I can imagine Friedman having a staggering memory, and recalling the next morning his bet about making anything out of “…what was it…oh yeah, styrofoam and pints…wait it was paint. Styrofoam and paint. Right, I’ve got my day ahead of me….”

The results of his big night out (remember, the pub night out part is my addition to the story, not his genuine working habits) can be seen in a London gallery with a wide range of everyday items. When I first read about this in the May issue of Art Review, I must admit my eyeballs nearly floated back in my head. Another replicant from the ready-made moment 100 years ago wants to prove they can re-animate Marcel Duchamp. After reading the materials list, however, my mind was changed forever. You’d never know by looking at it, but what resembles strings, are actually paint fibers. A peeled banana, a breeze-block, a rose, a gavel, pencils, even torn cardboard - all styrofoam. Random objects arranged in haphazard compositions are not so much ready-made, as just-made. Friedman has persevered to construct a paper towel dispenser made of styrofoam that looks more like something out of Wallace and Gromit’s Big Day in the Toilet. Flowing from the mouth of the dispenser is a thin layer of paint made to look like paper towel. It’s a brilliant riposte to any artist who pulls a tin can out of a rubbish bin, calling it art because the ready-made represents man’s inhumanity to man.

Tom Friedman; user of everything

Tom Friedman, I’ve also discovered, is obsessive about finding beginning and end points of art, employing Buddhism in large measures to hunt down these mileposts. Based on his earlier works, he certainly has the monastic patience of a man in solitary. Friedman once started a day off with one toothpick, resolving then to create something more grand, with more toothpicks. 30,000 toothpicks later, his sculpture resembled a splintery galactic explosion. He stopped at 30,000 because, well, the project could go on indefinitely; and really, doesn’t 30,000 get the point across? Personally I would have stopped at about 100 toothpicks because I wouldn’t have thought to purchase the 30,000 to begin with. Also, I can’t imagine a project with 30,000 of anything in front of me. Think of the missed pub time.

Thankfully someone like Tom Friedman exists if for no other reason than assigning him the patience to wait out an idea and jumping on it before the flimsy idea floats off to the lost island of forgotten ideas. The search for the beginning of something; or maybe it’s the end of something else, was a key starting point for him. To Friedman, beginnings and endings can be the same thing. When he says that filling something up is the same as making it completely empty, it sounds like something the physicist Richard Feynman would say. Once when he,  Friedman, not Feynman, couldn’t quite figure out his next move, he cleaned out his studio, boarded up the windows, and painted the whole space completely white, with the intention of determining a new starting point for his art education. It must have been a personal, big-bang moment. The very next day, Friedman began focusing on one object each day in his freshly constructed clean room. On Day 1, a metronome; day 2, a plate; and so on. Each day he asked questions of the thing’s existence. What is it, what’s it called, why does it take up the space it does, what’s it doing here, why am I talking to it…He then asked questions of his relationship with the object as a viewer. He was playing you and me as gallery and museum groupie. For a time, Friedman did nothing but think about the object and himself in this universe of one small white room, like a mini-museum, seeking out his “point A”.  More importantly, hoping it led to something worthwhile, like “point B”. His process reminds me of the end of the film “Castaway” when the Tom Hanks character is literally at a cross roads to his future. The difference is that Friedman has more to think about than simply turning left or right. He’s got infinity ahead of him.

about as useless as a real one

Another of his projects involved a jigsaw puzzle. As he got closer to the end of seeing the final image, he pulled all the pieces away from “interlock” mode, separated the pieces with a few inches of floor space, and laid everything out in grid-like fashion. You couldn’t tell what the puzzle was a puzzle of, until you looked at individual pieces. Only then could you make the synaptic leap to imagine the bigger picture.

Tom Friedman may be my new comedy art hero, even if he doesn’t think his work is supposed to be amusing. But there I am, just me staring at his objects, asking questions like, why is this here, what’s its purpose, what’s it doing near me, why am I laughing?

Eberhard Havekost; every heard of him? Me neither. Knowing who he is, at this point, is unimportant as he’s unlikely to be remembered by anyone in say 10-20 years. But Eberhard Havekost deserves a look, if only to be example-boy for What’s Wrong With Contemporary Art.

Let’s get the process out of the way first. Eberhard Havekost (I just love saying the name, for no other reason than it sounds like a maker of pencils), takes a photo snapshot of something. Usually anything. The snapshot is then filtered through Photoshop. For those of us who use Photoshop quite a bit, know not to touch any of the filters because filters are simply for the technophobe, the blind, and the creatively bereft. Unless of course you’re eight years old, then it’s brilliant because it’s subversive in a childish sort of way, and it puts you well on the road to revolution. But if you’re not eight, like most of us, using filters is sentimental at best, and sad and overwrought at worst.

After the Photoshop filter dabbling, Eberhard Havekost moves onto, believe it or not, painting! Eberhard Havekost paints, using his newly Photoshopped photo, on canvas. Just like real painters. To some extent I see the irony in the process; like old media taking back the streets from new media, and hey, if you think you’ve got gestures down Mr. Photographer, you just haven’t seen an Eberhard Havekost. This seems to be a trend amongst Germans. Gerhard Richter does it, and because some folks refer to him as the 20th century’s greatest living artist, his work is probably a magnet for others to photo copy. How ironic (or does that, because I’ve found it to be ironic, make it no longer ironic - I never know with these things). Usually in these instances it’s a big pissing contest between art and photography.

Richter's "Reader"...image of an image.

Anyway, we digress; back to Eberhard Havekost. I bring up the subject, not only because, again, I like saying Eberhard Havekost, but that I’ve just popped into London’s White Cube recently in hope of all hopes to find something that captures the imagination. Instead, I found Eberhard Havekost. After about 15 minutes inside, I make haste to the handy leaflet at the front of the room. It starts off:

“The point of departure for my paintings”, Havekost commented in a recent interview, “is an emotional quality or a factuality - in other words, something I can feel.”

Whenever art people say things like, “point of departure” it means they’re the type of person who searches for an explanation to every part of their lives and woe betide the unlucky person standing next to them. Here’s my own example: “The point of departure for my breakfast this morning was a strange and vacant sort of empty feeling I witnessed in the pit of my stomach.” While most of us are getting on with life, and finding art in the everyday magnificence of life itself, others have nothing better to do than to seek out meaning in the minutia.

To get right to the art, here’s a glimpse of Eberhard Havekost at The White Cube:

Eberhard Havekost: they all look like this

There are nine of these trees, and they all look the same. It’s almost not worth the bother to put a nail in the wall for any of it, really. The point for Eberhard Havekost is to photograph a tree in winter, from different angles, at night, and then apply a Photoshop filter. He then uses theses abstract images, and effectively paints a realist image of the blurred image. Let’s pause to hear from the White Cube’s web site: ”

“… increasingly Havekost uses the photograph as a starting point or base structure.”

[For anyone before Andy Warhol, we would have called that either copying, or just being lazy. Here it's euphemistically called a starting point.]

“…a material quality distinct from the photographic original.”

[Um, yes, that's why we call it painting, and not alt-photo.]

“The resulting atmosphere is spooky and surreal: the trees sway and droop, the greens hang like thick ooze from the pendulous branches.”

[Spooky and surreal? Really? My first thoughts were: monochrome, grey-green, dull, multiplicity for no real reason. I'm not sure this is even art school material.]

“The tree is, of course, one of the oldest motifs in Western art: with ‘Gast’, the artist has created a proliferating forest that seems to haunt this rich history, a gang of spectres that persist in provoking awe and wonder.”

[Oh right, that's where the spooky and surreal come from. Now I'm with you. Still, it isn't spooky, and it isn't haunting. It's really just navel gazing, and dull. If you want to navel gaze, Mr. Eberhard Havekost, find something of higher value to society, like the CERN particle accelerator, or unravelling cryptic Mayan symbols, or, what makes Jaffa Cakes so good.]

“Havekost enacts a process of de-materialisation and re-materialisation, from thought to object. And when confronted anew, the process is reversed again: the painting now provokes a range of interpretations and associations in the mind of the viewer.”

[I don't know if you know this, but that's what "us viewers" do with all art.  Reinterpreting your work isn't a mind-boggling, just-stumbled-upon theme that you've opened our eyes to.  We ALWAYS do that.]

Generally I see what Mr. Eberhard Havekost is doing, but the result is fairly vapid in intellect, and aesthetically mute.  Focusing on subject matter, and “filtering” is the point of being an artist, and rendering an interpretation is the enjoyment of the viewer. Welcome to life as we know it Mr. Eberhard Havekost, how does it work on your planet?

Primary competition for the average museum

Lately, the over-busy mega-populated, push-to-shove city of London has been overloaded with single artist shows at the Tates; Arshile Gorky and Van Doesburg at the Big Smokestack, Henry Moore at Old Tate.  After being blitzed through the eyeballs with a supermarket full of Pop artists a few months ago at Tate Modern, it’s a relief to have a quiet rendezvous with an individual artist while nobody’s looking.  The solo artist exhibits are especially useful, not to mention more interesting and comprehensible, for those who have few chances to visit museums and galleries because, well, the pub is just that much closer to work.  But hear me out, denizens of the Lamb And Flag.  Discovering the early life of the artist, along with their first works, their collection of weird and debased friends, and the scrapes with the law and/or disease that accompany a lifestyle so destitute, is not a million miles away from the danger inside The George and Dragon.  If nothing else, it’s a mysterious window into a fighter’s life.

The Pop Art show presented earlier by Tate Modern, by comparison, was merely one big jug of Kool-Aid after another.  While enjoyable in the way that someone from Texas might enjoy a gun show, weaving the web between Andy Warhol and the copycat artists who followed, doesn’t produce much in the way of historically memorable moments.  It was just a big day of fun with colour, noise and packaged goods…and a reminder you have to buy more stuff on the way home.  At the Pop Art show you get a sense of the life and times of the population (albeit with an ironic and scolding attitude).  At the same show, however, you don’t get a sense of the artists and their motivations.  I could have been in Las Vegas and met with the same, quasi-depth of philosophical arguments.  Honestly.  I have those sorts of friends.

Arshile Gorky: a man without name and age

With the single artist shows, however, it feels like someone’s told you an important story about someone you thought you knew enough of already.  It’s like reading the obituaries, but without the gloomy mandate.  Did you know that nobody knows Arshile Gorky’s age when he passed away?  Even he didn’t know what year he was born.  His mother died of starvation without, apparently, telling him his age, and he didn’t think to look it up before producing a passport.  As professional, Gorky was fierce in his erudite education, and copied the modern masters proficiently.  Left with few choices, Gorky’s work shows evidence of Picasso’s point of view, the bioforms of Joan Miro, and the colour composition of Cezanne.  At one point, however, he found his individual voice, and became what he’s know as today: the link between the European Moderns and America’s Abstract Expressionists.

Theo van Doesburg was rule-committed...

Opposite Gorky on the third floor at Tate Modern, was the mammoth exhibition of the European Avant Garde in the 1920’s and 30’s.  This exhibit is easily an afternoon of standing on your poor feet, searching for the nearest bar just to have a time out, before recovering with an obvious nap.  Theo Van Doesburg seems to be at the centre of not only the de Stijl movement, but, as I discovered, secreted amongst the Dadaists as well.  That probably explains the largess of the show.

...until he wasn't.

Van Doesburg was also at the apex of the moment in time when art turned into design.  He was inclined to be rule-bound on form, line, and colour.  That is, he was rule-bound until he wasn’t, like when he used the name I K Bonset to write for Dadaist publications.  At the time, in the years after the apocalyptic First World War, re-creation of a better world was in the air.  In the re-build, or Population 2.0 as I’m sure some over-zealous PR person must have wanted to call it, modern life was clipping along swiftly, providing wide berth for artists to not only create art, but to imagine new architecture, furniture, visual graphics, films, even music.  Entire design industries owe at least a slight nod to Van Doesburg and his avant-gardian pals.

Henry Moore relaxing after work

Finally, in Henry Moore at Old Tate, a broad mix of materials is presented with impressive results.  Moore could have been the multimedia specialist of his day.  It’s not often when a sculpture artist has a large collection in one place, and in this case, it provided a sense of variety in materials.  Having that sort of well-explored, primal education is like learning to make ice cream by trying out every possible flavour.  Think how good you would be at making ice cream.  Think how big you would be.  Maybe that’s how we got to Pop Art in the first place.  It’s all making sense.

decode: oneDotZero

Surely, this means War!  The Victoria and Albert Museum, the traditional bearer of arch conservatism in London, the safe-house for fine arts and antiques, has fired a Victorian cannonball at the young, art-drunk pirates across the river at Tate Modern.  So, it is with pressed trousers and starched, button-down shirt, I managed a clean and not so proletariat taxi to the West End.  My initial reason for a V&A visit was a view of the new Renaissance Wing, otherwise, I wouldn’t have thought to visit the Big Shed of Old Man Art.  At the front door, however, I was spirited in a different direction by the V&A’s latest design show, “Decode” which is a collaboration with the digital arts force: oneDotZero.  So, in the forefront of the V&A’s normally dusty, historical collection, was a lively contemporary show, which, normally, is released on DVD, to a select group of art futurists, technology enthusiasts and general digit heads like myself.  How very dare they assume righteous enthusiasm for the art of our time!

I say war, but really I mean sneaky, underhanded. tunnel-building, get ‘em while they’re not looking, volley of contemporary art flung mildly (West End style) in the face of the young thugs on the south side of the Thames.  While Tate Modern were busy building massive empty steel boxes, reminiscing on mid-century Pop sentimentalism, and gearing up for a 100 year, look-back on the glorious days of de Stijl, those ruthless ninjas at the V&A caught us off guard with their own digital stealth.  What happened to knowing one’s station in life?

digital use of non-digital media

These sorts of easily-consumed shows are usually a museum’s amuse-bouche for the main course further inside, so I wasn’t expecting complex or deep.  Watching others wander in and out of “Decode”, however, was like watching stag and hen crowds coming leaving a Broad Street bar.  While none of the exhibits were overtly deep, all were engaging enough to divert attention away from other sections of the museum (if not other museums).  Every Tom, Dick and Harry, not to mention Jane and Joe Bloggs, seemed to be occupied with a sense of joy and play.  As regular V&A attendees know, merriment is a word that is rarely put to use in an official brochure.  But then, such human impertinence is invariably closely shadowed by its arch enemy: The Fun Cops.

William Wiles, in Icon magazine says of the show, “Decode is a lot of fun, but is it anything more than that?  There’s plenty of sideshow candyfloss (cotton candy to Americans)  - where’s the design nutrition?”  He says that because people in attendance are having a rollicking morning interacting with the exhibits, and apparently that isn’t allowed in his particular land of art.  Children, mind your manners.  Need I remind you that you are a guest of the Victoria and Albert Museum?  Tut-tut.

Wiles goes on to say that, “the text refers more to art than to design… But really the work is in a new field; digital crafts.  It’s the 21st century equivalent of William Morris wallpaper.”  So what if it is?  Is van Gogh the 19 century equivalent of William Morris because he was adept at working paint?  Is Michelangelo the 16th century equivalent because he saw his final figure in the marble before arming himself with hammer and chisel?  Craft is only dull if the final product is dull, and as far as I could tell, nobody in Decode was laughing and cavorting from dullness.

From mid-20th century, most art was created with one person in mind: the artist.  Toward the end of the 20th century, about the same time the world wide web broke down social barriers, Relational Art synthesized what was already known by the technologists.  If you don’t involve people, they’ll come anyway.  The V&A seems to understand this, and, every once in a while, reminds itself not to take itself too seriously.

Anyway, if sensing joy is a sign of candyfloss, then Anish Kapoor is the fast food captain of carnivals.  Most Kapoor exhibits draw a crowd of smiles and worthwhile chatter amongst the groundlings and commoners.  It doesn’t have to be cryptic, profound, or ironic.  Sometimes effective art simply makes a difference in people’s daily lives.  Otherwise, why do it?  More importantly, why engage with it?