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through a quaint village nestled in the middle of England, with a name like, Chipping Bloodlet or something equally outdated, secluded away from the ugly world of commerce.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

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?