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?

Jean Tinguely

Do you ever wonder what artists were like when they were young; when they were a mere five paintbrushes high?  I had a visit to Tate Liverpool this past week, where an exhibit for Jean Tinguely had been in place for a few months.  Tinguely is the perfect artist for men, or as women would say, for boys.  In the 1940s and 50s, Tinguely constructed kinetic sculptures made from bits of metal, electric motors, and some cardboard.  His machines revolved, turned, pivoted, spun, rolled, drew, and even painted, for no other reason than just to move or make marks.  Tinguely was young at heart, and interested in amusing himself first.  His concepts had no other purpose, no bigger reason, than just to exist.  In a 1960’s filming of the construction of one of his mechanized events, a television interviewer asked him what he was trying to express.  Tinguely refused to be caught up in meaning, and said he did it only to express himself.  More artists should be so forthright about the real purpose of their work.  If nothing else, it keeps the curator-speak at bay.

Although difficult to prove, I can imagine Jean Tinguely must have spent tireless hours constructing robotic mechanisms from Meccano (Erector Set in America).  Mecanno was invented in Liverpool during Victorian times, and the city is also the site of a recent James May video which documented the making of a Meccano-built bridge over a canal.  The historical centre of the universe for mechanized rigs seems to be focussed at Liverpool’s Albert Dock these days.

The mechanized artist for the 1950's

Most of the Tinguely’s machines at Tate Liverpool couldn’t be turned on, which was a great shame.  Restoration goes on for a great many oil-based masterpieces; why can’t someone replace a motor, or strengthen a steel joint?  Still, if you have an active imagination, the guts of the machines are visible enough for recreating the motion in your head.  Which is exactly what I did, and enjoyed the show produced in the theatre of my mind.  Those pieces that did work reminded me of watching a factory; like one of those industrial films where cars are snapped together on assembly lines.  This was the real stuff of boys.

Supposedly Tinguely built his mechanisms with the possibility that part of it might not work as predicted.  This bit of predisposed, random chance provided the machine with its own unsupervised form of life, eliminating the artist to at least some extent.  Tinguely didn’t mind this, and in fact knew it would upset the hierarchy in art-dom at the time (1950s).  In this way, he’s the Everyman’s hero.

a mechanized artist - one that can swim

Expressing himself was Tinguely’s main concern, which, in many respects, is what we humans do every day.  For me, Tinguely formalized what art is all about.  It’s something that any one of us does, nearly every day of the week.  If anyone asks what you do for a living, you could always say you’re an artist, and you wouldn’t be lying.

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.

JMW Turner

I have a new art theory: the big difference between 19th century art and that of the 20th century are the parties.  It’s a tale of two Tates, in this instance, and ultimately it serves only to fortify the boundaries between centuries.  We’re just better at entertaining ourselves today than we were in Victorian times.

“Turner and the Masters” at Tate Britain is a subdued, thoughtful, quiet, whispered event.  I saw a security person reprimand a scholarly gent for delivering a reproachable glare to an underling.  So much musing and rumination going on.  And this was a Friday (Friday day, but still, you’d think everyone would be looking forward to a big weekend of ripping up the garden or cleaning guns for a field day of clay pigeon shooting and other horsey things).  Manners were the rule of day at Tate Britain, and you’d have to blame it on the Turner exhibit.  There was a mass of teenagers in the Duveen’s galleries above, but none skipped downstairs to the Turner exhibit.  The £12 entry fee was steep enough no doubt, but you’d think there would be just one old lady accompanied by a caring grand daughter.  Nope, just old ladies and old men being cared by more old ladies and old men.  I could have been at the dog races, and the crowd wouldn’t be much different.

The curation itself was very insightful, and a successful means to reveal the life of Turner, the man.  I learned a lot about Turner’s inadequacies, competitive streaks, and other incapabilities to gain some true insight into why geniuses do what they do.  It was a very impressive and learned time, and I imagine many others would have enjoyed it as well.

It’s not that the place was lacking a crowd.  Each room was filled with more gray hair than a Cotswold village.  Anymore and it would have seemed like a Sunday morning in church.  The type of people at this event were what one might call traditionally British: older, certainly middle age and beyond, and mostly white.  Maybe even all white.  All if this is unfortunate because it was a great chance to get inside the head of Turner; to see what professional competition and the pressure of history does to a man.  Plus, all those Turners next to all those Rubens, Canalettos, Claude Lorraines.  This is what art education is supposed to do - place the subject in historical perspective.

Pop Life at Tate Modern

Still, if you not going to throw a good party, don’t expect anyone to come.  At Tate Modern down the river (and frankly, on the happening side of it as well), they were doing just the opposite.  While the Millbank-induced sleep session at Tate Britain was in full snooze for its afternoon nap, Tate Modern had the pedal to the metal.  All sorts of age groups and colours were thumping about “Pop Life”, and the ticket price was no more than the Turner exhibit at £12.  Pop Art, as a subject, is always going to be more of a party than landscape painting will ever be; and for that day, more people learned about Pop Art than Turner’s art.  Tate Modern made you feel like you were in Warhol’s Factory alongside his contemporaries, while Tate Britain made you feel like you should be studying something important under a tree.  Because Pop art is really about people, it’s more entertaining to look at art about yourself than art about someone from 150 years ago.  I guess that’s why pop art is so appealing to artists in the first place: it comes with its own built-in customer base.  Like buying a photograph of yourself going down a roller coaster.

In the end, no matter how much you know about art, or how “good” the art is, it’s the parties that get folks to come down.  It’s a shame that Tate Britain couldn’t have thrown a better one.  Maybe the next Turner exhibit should be a big drunken barbecue; the contemporary landscape art happening of our day.

I don’t quite understand the idea of trompe l’oeil, the french phrase for fooling the eye.  Other than the obvious: to prove you can make something so good it fools others into thinking art is reality, it seems to be more science than art.  To be accomplished at it is to be technically skilled, and enormously patient at your special ability.  But that also describes people who make Ferraris.  You’re proving your own virtuosity. Although you could be having a laugh at fooling other people.  Like the roadrunner and coyote in Warner Brothers animation, where the coyote paints a tunnel on a solid face, only for the roadrunner to make the trick a reality.

This week I made my way to see this sort of thing firsthand in Sheffield.  I’ve never been to Sheffield before, itself a trompe l’oeil of English pastures from the Victorian era.  The show was called “Out of the Ordinary” at Sheffield’s Millennium Gallery, and focused on craft usage in contemporary times.  Among the handful of artist was a Japanese person called Yoshihiro Suda.  The short biography of him is, “He creates hyper-realistic flowers and weeds from wood.”  I get the irony, but isn’t that like carving the perfect pebble from a rock.  Or to use the Ferrari analogy, making a car out of a new refrigerator.  His flower “sculpture” was protected by walls and a security rope where you couldn’t get any closer than about 12 feet.  I was beginning to doubt the quality.  How good can it be if I’m standing across the room to look at it?

Yoshihiro Suda

Trompe l’oeil comes up in the Autumn issue of Tate Etc. magazine as well, where a section of the magazine is devoted to the history of fooling the eye, back to the early 15th century.  Back then the point was to make it as realistic as possible because until then, I guess, nobody did it.  The article continues to 20th century artists like Rene Magritte, Duane Hanson, Andy Warhol.  I remember seeing my first Duane Hanson “statue” of an overweight tourist.  It was more creepy than sublime, but nonetheless it made me flinch, which is what good quality art is supposed to do.  Let’s add that to the list of results from trompe l’oeil: in addition to be impressive by way of its craft quality, it can creep you out too.

In the same article is a reference to a work at the Venice Biennale: a mural by Thomas Demand called “Clearing”.  It’s a very large photograph of the very thing it’s supposed to hide: the forest behind it.  This one goes one loop further though; it’s a photograph, of a sculptural stage, of a photograph of trees.  A long way to go, right?  The sculpture is made from 280,000 separate pieces of coloured paper, constructed by 30 people working for three months.  That IS a long way to go.  Apparently not only do you need the technical mastery to do these things, you have to have a lot of friends, or a lot of money.

Thomas Demand: Clearing

Discoveries this week are this: trompe l’oeil requires loads of patience, technical ability, friends, money and a sense of humour.  All this work to prove one thing: you can do something better than anyone else.  Just like making a Ferrari.