patternsthatconnect

For me, the best thing about Warwick Arts Centre is The Mead Gallery. However, it is also an arts venue with dance, film, theatre and music performances. The Warwick Dials, art work by Richard Wentworth, could easily be mistaken for real dysfunctional clocks.

Well that’s what they are!

When I was an art student, many years ago, our Aesthetics tutorial group were encouraged to read Against Nature by JK Huysmans, one of those books that I find stays with you for a long time, in that it keeps coming back to memory. I do not know how much that is to do with the brilliance of the book and how much the brilliance of the tutor.

When I was visiting Nottingham Contemporary recently I saw a copy in the book store and wondered why they had it there. Then, when I saw the Klaus Weber exhibition, it became clear.

Sun Press (Against Nature) contains layers of allusion to the natural, and our idea of it. A heliostat on the roof concentrates the sun’s rays to print A Rebours (Against Nature) by JK Huysmans in the gallery below. The ultimate natural force is harnessed to slowly reveal a book that was explicitly a break with the 19th century Naturalist style of literature.

An alternative translation of the book title is “Against the Grain” you can read the whole book here.

Visiting the Klaus Weber show at Nottingham Contemporary the other day I realised that one of the things I like a lot about Nottingham Contemporary is that the gallery attendants talk to you about the art, if you want them to.

I noticed that in this piece one of the heads was missing…

…and I had fallen for the artist’s little joke when I asked the attendant of it had actually been stolen or damaged or if it was part of the piece. You guessed the answer! I asked if she had met the artist, which of course she had, and was able to tell me all about his visit to the gallery.

The exhibition, showing until 8 January 2012, is in two parts: If you leave me I’m not coming is Weber’s solo show, whereas Already there! is  Weber’s selection of artifacts from the Science Museum, The Ashmolean Museum, Berlin’s Bode Museum, Archaeological and Zoological collections of University College London and art works mostly from the Tate collection.

Already there! represents our tentative understanding of ourselves – belief systems since discredited or abandoned. The exhibition is perhaps a memento mori of our own scientific and social systems – now the apogee of human achievement. In the future our own artefacts will be just as charged and curious Weber seems to suggest – part of another natural process of decay.

(from the notes on the exhibition web page)

As well as the heads already mentioned If you leave me I’m not coming includes Bee Paintings, looking like abstract paintings of dots and blobs they are actually the record of bee performance,

every year when the bees first leave the hive they perform a ‘cleansing flight’ when they excrete, preferably on clean white surfaces. In this casethey have obligingly decorated Weber’s canvases.

In the little video I have posted here the Bee Paintings can be seen behind the Large Dark Wind Chime (Arab Tritone). What would usually be a small garden ornament, cheerfully making audible the natural force of the wind, is here a gigantic object set in motion by electirc fans and tuned to the “devils music” or the “tritone”. Click on the video clip to hear it.

The video starts with Weber’s massive “windscreen wipers” constantly clearing away the artificial rain that pours down the inside of the gallery window.

We had done some walking ourselves, in Derbyshire, and I had also recently seen Marek Tobolewski‘s work at Tarpey Gallery, where he seemed, in part, to be taking Paul Klee‘s advice about “taking a line for a walk”, so walking had already become a bit of a theme, when my brother and I visited the Whitworth, Manchester.

As well as the Flailing Trees and the film(s) 1395 Days Without Red, we saw Projections: Works from The Artangel Collection, art work by Francis Alys, Atom Egoyan, Tony Oursler and Catherine Yass. And there were walking themes! High Wire, 2008 by Catherine Yass features a four screen video presentation of a walk on a very high wire, (the wire stretched between two tower blocks at The Red Road Estate, in Glasgow) by Didier Pasquette.  I was on the edge of my metaphorical seat (I was actually standing at the time) as he edged his way onto the wire, walked about half way and was then forced back by the buffeting wind. The four videos showing different views, from different perceptual positions, includes one filmed by the walker, a camera being attached to his head. They are each dramatic in different ways, each supplying a different description.

Different too are the walks described by Francis Alys in his Seven Walks, 2005. Whilst I view I am walking, retracing his steps in my imagination as I look at various documents and maps recording walks in London made by the artist, for example walking only on the sunny side of the street, or on the shady side of the street. I find I get engrossed and fascinated as I study drawings, notes, lists, and photographs, along with photocopies that seem connected to the walks through something similar to the psychoanalytical technique of free association. It seems a lot like what happens whenever you take a walk, you free-associate as you go. Ideas, images come to mind only to be replaced or built upon by others vaguely related to the sights, sounds and feelings of the ‘external’ walk.

There are videos too, The Nightwatch is an installation of multiple CCTV screens, placing the viewer in the perceptual position of security personnel at the National Portrait Gallery, watching an urban fox make its way through the labyrinth of galleries. The fox’s walk is also documented as a storyboard and drawn on a plan of the galleries. Seeing this line taken for a walk, I free-associate, remembering Paul Klee and Marek Tobolewski.

In the video Railings, a man walks through the Regency squares of London, drumming a stick along the cast-iron railings, the walls, the pillars at the doorways of the Georgian (?) houses, even at one stage setting off a car alarm. Screened in trio, with a staggered timeframe, like a round, the rhythms become a cacophony, an auditory record of the walk being shown visually.

Years ago, when Clement Greenberg was charting the ‘progress’ of visual art towards the flattened picture plane I seem to remember that, as well as glorying in the replacement of the window-on-the-world with abstraction, he also recognised it as a loss. (It is a loss that many painters have since been unwilling to make, hence the return with a vengeance of figurative painting since modernism.) At the Whitworth today I saw sculpture, figurative painting and drawing both traditional and contemporary, prints, photography, video, film and conceptual art documented in a variety of ways and there was ‘sound art’ too. What I didn’t see anywhere on my Whitworth walk was an abstract painting and though there was much to enjoy, and I did enjoy it, I experienced this conspicuous absence as a great loss!

Visiting Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, can’t be done without bumping into these upside-down weeping willows, 21 in all, set in concrete, an art work by Gustav Metzger, entitled Flailing Trees.

An example of ‘auto-destructive’ art, it will self destruct in who knows how many seconds. Well, it was made nearly three years ago and one of the trees has fallen. That happened about three weeks ago.

Should I be slightly embarrassed by the fact that my introduction to Jean Genet came through the 70′s hit single by David Bowie?

Nottingham Contemporary have a show about him (Genet, that is, not Bowie) running until October.

It is divided into two parts or acts. Act One is an installation by Marc Camille Chaimowicz entitled the Courtesy of Objects, featuring Alberto Giacometti, Tariq Alvi, Lukas Duwenhogger, Mathilda Rachet and Wolfgang Tillmans. I recognised the Genet I knew a bit about, in this exhibition which is about his early life, his books, his homosexuality, his friendship with Giacometti etc.

I did think it a little strange to see Giacometti featured. In my view, he is the major artist here and I wondered if I would simply have preferred a solo show. (Check out this blog about one such show).

Act Two, entitled Prisoners of Love, brings together work by André Acquart, Emory Douglas, Latifa Echakhch, Mona Hatoum, Glenn Ligon, Abdul Hay Mosallam, The Otolith Group, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Carole Roussopoulos, Gil J Wolman and Akram Zaatari. And this was the Jean Genet I knew nothing about. He had engaged in a lot more political activism than I had realised, including the events of 1968, and his support of the Black Panthers.

I found the second part of the exhibition the most interesting and I learned a lot about Genet. I am not sure how much of it I read as ‘art’ though. I felt more like I had visited a museum than an art gallery.

There also seemed to be something incongruous about looking at (wonderful) Emory Douglas Black Panther posters and other images inciting revolt, viewing Gil J Wolman’s ‘Scotch Art’ prints of May ’68 in Paris, watching the Otalith Group’s film set in Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, and then taking a short walk down the steps to drink expensive tea and coffee on the nice terrace of the posh restaurant.

What better to do on a sunny day than to go and visit your local contemporary art gallery (mine is Nottingham Contemporary)?

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I set out on my quest to see some abstract paintings in Nottingham. I found art even though I didn’t find abstract painting. (Actually, I found it quite by chance on my way to the railway station.)

The Hopkinson gallery is on Station Street in Nottingham and is currently showing work by a student collective Strength in Numbers. I wandered in, and saw this piece that I liked.

by Jess Buckley, showing at T.B.C. Hopkinson Gallery, Nottingham

I commented on how much I liked it, and found that I was talking to the artist, Jess Buckley. I liked the humour of the piece. Jess told me that the pressure to be creative all the time can be too much and that you have to be in the mood to make art. Sometimes you’re just too happy. I wondered if another piece might be “too sad to make art” or “too busy to make art”. I asked her if anyone is making paintings any more and she said not many are doing that. For her, painting is more like a hobby, when making ‘serious art’ she is unlikely to paint. Is she too happy to make paintings, or too happy not to make them?

She believed that there would always be a place for painting even though it was not being done much by many contemporary artists.  I said that there was something painterly about her conceptual piece, well she had painted the wooden letters, and they looked like they were layered with different coloured coats of paint showing through the uppermost layer.

we talked about performance art, and sculpture. The sculptural pieces in the show were the remains of performances.  Joe Hindle’s performance apparently featured a boxing match where the opponents once having entered the ring, with all the theatricality of a real boxing match, sat down to play Jenga. Just seeing the ring, and the scattered Jenga blocks it was obvious what had happened. I wondered whether the performance was strictly necessary, maybe what was left over was enough.

What was left after a performance, by Joe Hindle

I speculated that a painting, and especially an abstract painting is also the remains of a performance. I really did want to see an abstract painting. It may be true that there will always be a place for it, but there aren’t many places actually showing it. (I have an idea for a performance: take a trip to find abstract paintings on view, documenting where you go and how far you have to travel to see any.)

Jess brought my attention to the painted pieces in the room.

One was a ‘reconstruction’ of a Picasso (Crying Woman). I think it was by Darren Ralphs. Painted in planes, each plane on a polythene (?) sheet, hung one in front of the other, so that the planes showed through. it was a cross between painting and sculpture.

There were two other paintings, by Rosie Burnett, slightly more like conventional paintings. If I remember the label rightly, it read something like: “perhaps that’s what a family is … a collection of individuals who miss the same spaces”. The paintings were of interiors. They were nicely done, and then I got annoyed that I couldn’t read them properly because I kept seeing my own reflection. They were painted on ‘acrylic glass’. (Is that the same as perspex?) I became interested in how they had been fixed to the wall and I couldn’t work it out, any more than I could work out why they had been painted on acrylic glass.

I asked Jess if I could take some photographs of the work for my blog and she was happy for me to do so. We talked about intellectual property and copyright and she said that she thought all art was copied from something else that had gone before it.  I agreed.

When I photographed this display cabinet and asked if it was part of the show I think I already knew the answer. Of course it was not.

not an exhibit

Then, leaving to meet my train, although my desire to see abstract paintings had been thwarted, I felt glad that I had stumbled across this exhibition.