contemporary monkey

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?

lots to say, not enough wood planks

Let’s say you’re trundling along to work on British Rail on a weary weekday morning, about 8:30, pressed up as politely as you can, to your like-minded human brothers and sisters, and you’re counting the stops to your final destination because, well, you can only hold your breath for so long.  Just as you’re quietly pronouncing judgement on the other sardines in the tin, out burst the words of wit from the mouths of one or two of your previously targeted victims.  Something random comes up in a conversation, like, “Why don’t they just do their job and fire me?”  Or possibly, “Standing at 30 mph will be the fastest I move all morning”.  But more probably, “Is your hand supposed to be there?”

And what happens, do you write these things down?  No, you don’t.  And you know why you don’t write these trophies down?  Because you’re not an artist (you’re on the 8:30 after all, while the whole of the artist-class is still happily dreaming during that avoidable part of the day).  Writing down, or even painting down, life’s found easter eggs is the job of the curious and enterprising artist….once they wake up, that is.

Take, for example, Bob and Roberta Smith, who are in this case, one artist/person.  Already the Human Resources people would have a problem with him…her…whomever, so the evidence of pure artist-hood is unmistakable.  Bob and Roberta Smith paint signs of anecdotes and slogans heard from the rest of the world.  Bob (to avoid confusion and lengthy copy, let’s use the masculine gender for reference) isn’t even a very good sign writer - he makes every mistake in the graphic design bible, such as not enough contrast between foreground and background, using enough type fonts to employ a London agency creative staff for ten projects, and the use of unwanted, cheap and not very “brand friendly” materials (banged up 2×4 planks, joined together).

He’s prolific, Bob, with his capturing the moment on oil and wood. At Beaconsfield Art Gallery, Bob’s finished up a year-long effort of sign-painting and sloganeering.  Beaconsfield is located in the Nine Elms part of London, and in their specific case, also physically supporting the 8:30 British Rail every weekday, along with every other late-running train that travels over the gallery.  Beaconsfield is 50% gallery, 50% cafe, filled with 100% wise-cracking artist customer base.  After grabbing a coffee, and feeling the sneer of the natives, one must endeavor to find the artist’s work.  In a first floor, disused theatre, about the size of a grammar school venue for a Christmas play, Bob’s made nine panels nailed (probably with rusty nails) to the wall, which are all part of a larger written story.  The artist has copied the content from a Guardian columnist who specializes in the tennis scene .  Steve Bierley was, at the time, on a somewhat alien assignment, covering something he normally doesn’t cover: art.  In his interview with the artist Louise Bourgeois, he summed up the difference between his familiar subject of sport, and art.  “You look at sport, you think about sport.  You look at art, and you think about yourself.”  A nice gem.  This sloganeering media might have some legs after all.

In another room which Beaconsfield has labeled “the Arches”  because it inhabits a trestle’s arch under the rails, Bob appears to be having a boot sale.  About a hundred signs are planted at every angle, on various made up pedestals, including staged on ladders, chairs, desks, and anything else happened to be in Bob’s way at the time.  Each sign itself is really not much to get frothy about, or even particularly noteworthy.  But painting slogans on lots of signboards, displaying them all together in a ramshackle under-the-tracks, hideout is something else.  Audibly layered with discordant and random, percussive music, played by Bob of course, the physical space you’re in becomes the art.  If there were comfy sofas and bar tables, this would be a vibey place for an after-work drink-up.  Maybe all misunderstood artist should think this way.  If an art piece means absolutely nothing to 102 % of the world, just make loads of similar pieces and amass a treasure chest of glory.  Even if it doesn’t work, think of all the cool party places we’ll have.  When I win the lottery, I’m going to buy one of these poor man’s cafe and art bar.  Forget the diamonds and flashy cards, think of all the strange and weird friends you could hang out with in your new art space?

olde worlde graffiti(e)

Some art galleries are better designed than others.  Indeed some are so well designed, they’re more appealing than the art presented inside.  Take the London’s Saatchi Gallery.  When it first opened, I wasn’t impressed much with the random pieces that Charles Saatchi called art, but the building’s flooring was visually and vastly impressive.  In fact, the Saatchi’s front desk at the time provided brochures featuring the flooring maker.  It was probably the most memorable thing to come out of the Saatchi Gallery since the Big Room of Oil.

The Wallace Collection in central London is another example.  The collection itself seldom gets any press.  “Hidden gem” is the tag usually attached to it, Odd Bag of Camp might be another phrase for it, but either way, it’s not always on one’s tour of contemporary art galleries and museums in London.  But as Damien Hirst has just moved in, art lovers are suddenly interested.  The Wallace Collection is a hodgepodge of bombastic Rococo style furniture, mantle pieces, French porcelain, and other collectibles, most from the 17th and 18th century.  If you’re interested in modern or contemporary art, you’d hate this stuff.  More than Jeff Koon’s basketballs, you’d hate this stuff

The gallery is filled with olde worlde trinkets that appeal mostly to 80 year old grandmothers and 8 year old granddaughters.  To the rest of us, it’s the Las Vegas of the art museum world.  It’s not my cup of tea, but to house so much of this eye candy in one place is impressive.  Whomever Wallace is, his or her collection is exhaustively consistent…and eye splitting.  I give it due credit, though, as it’s much more focused than the family collectors featured in Art + Auction magazine, who seem to hammer together a variety of styles and periods of history into one collection.  With the Wallace Collection, there is no doubt: the older and bolder, the better.

Dutch + Bacon + Hirst = Dull

Which is why the Wallace Collection is a peculiar place for Damien Hirst’s new attempt at creating art through his newfound friends, the paintbrush and the canvas.  Possibly he sees The Wallace as an inspiration to historical standards and now’s the time to shed the burden of putrefying animal carcasses.  Every one of his paintings, however, is a direct retrograde of somebody or something else: Francis Bacon’s chalk lines, 1990’s digital compositing, Dutch historical vanitas symbolism.  Running out of people to copy, Hirst even remakes himself using his own shark jaws, dots, and skulls from previous sculptures.  The whole scene felt more like an art school critique room than any sort of mature work by an established artist.  I guess that’s Damien, done.

Beyond the paintings, however, and much more importantly, is a Hirst contribution more profound, more substantial, and ultimately more significant to the art world.  In his effort to hang his canvases, Hirst has had to hang fresh wallpaper behind them.  The silvery, silky Victorian fabric fits the style of the interior perfectly, but also introduces a modern take on an old idea.  I found the wallpaper to be more visually absorbing than any of Hirst’s work.  It’s a damn shame most of the fabric is covered by someone’s mediocrity, but I suppose that’s the price of seeing new art.  We all have to do our bit by enduring the desperate in order to get at the quality.  I don’t care what Hirst does in the future, but whatever it is, he can show his next exhibition in my apartment if he needs a venue.  (Note to Hirst: the interior style of my apartment is mostly modern minimalism, and the wall colour could do with a little warming up.)

Attention all aliens from extragalactic nebula outside Earth’s Solar System (third planet from our sun, in the Galaxy called the Milky Way). Consider this a human plea for what was at one time, righteously ours, and to many people, fondly remembered.  We would like to have our Russians back please.  The ones that were on Earth before the black hole of what was known as the Soviet Union, where those of us on the outside were completely blinded by a lack of hard data, while those on the inside were vacuumed up by your molecular-level, cell-parsing tractor beams.  There are 180 million of them - you can’t miss ‘em.

Before the Frost of Irrelevancy: Kandinsky

For those of us Earthlings devoted to the subject of art, and who were forced observers from beyond the Iron Curtain (look it up, it’s too depressing to describe here), there are more than 70 years which cannot be accounted for.  It’s during this massive time void that we suspect you’ve taken our most significant Russians and hoarded them for yourselves.  For this self-serving act, we can’t blame you, but we’d like them back now.

Prior to our Western Earth Year of 1917, our collection of gifted Russian artists included Kandinsky, Chagall, Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy, and more.  Now we’re left with the heap that’s thrashing about the walls inside the London art gallery, Calvert22.  Gutov, Khanyutin, Zakharov, are all speaking visual gibberish to us with no claim on story-telling.  These androids seem to be using your indecipherable language on us, and have yet to master the ability to communicate with what we call “Homo Sapiens” or “man”.  Maybe you can make sense of this twisted jabbering, but they might as well be speaking Martian to us (ref: Mars, the fourth planet in our solar system, with no life form…the reference to Martian language is a obviously a glib remark, because, oh forget it).  Let’s make it a straight swap: you give us our soulful, complex, but engaging Russian artists back, and in return you can have what ever’s inside Calvert22.

Video seems to be their choice of parlay with us, possibly because of your presumption that all human beings drink a form of electricity through reflected-light screens and energy-emitting monitors.  Only some of us, e.g. Paris Hilton, Pamela Anderson and Peaches Geldof, are able to accomplish such a feat, but assume that most of us cannot.  What’s more, your Russian replicants seem to enjoy duplicating each other’s work by using our black and white video format to shed light on their bleak, cheerless, barren land, with a life short on human emotion.  If that is indeed the point of their art, they had me at ten seconds of the first video.  The rest of the works were simply superfluous.  Next time, have your automatons draw straws and send down a single humanoid, armed with just one of his human videos, limited to 15 seconds in length (preferably shorter).  Oh, and can you beam down the latest human that resembles Kandinsky, or Malevich so we can remember what Russian artistic talent was like, before your photon-separating magneto-pulse device chemically reduced our Russians to their component parts.  You’re going to be in a lot of trouble if you can’t put them back together.

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.