patternsthatconnect

The Alex Hubbard exhibition at Simon Lee Gallery, London, entitled Eat Your Friends, just six works, two of them being videos and the other four being paintings, is absolutely wonderful.

The “title track” is a video that I just cannot help but read as a moving painting with sound.

Montage-like, there are at least three camera views, two look down onto a table top or the floor and one looks forward, and as they overlap actions in one descreet space seem to be taking place also in another. Here it is quite possible to be in two places at once. The actions include spray painting the words “EAT YOUR FRIENDS”, constructing a tower with large cups of take-away coffee until it collapses spilling the contents, and moving a cuboid frame around, “building” some temporary structure the purpose of which seems to defy the logic of building.

The paintings more or less coloured monochromes, made with fibreglass, and found objects: plastic bottles, syringes, broken bits of things, rubbish, the resin sticking the objects to the canvas and forming a high gloss surface over a stained acrylic base. I try to decide whether the objects are carefully placed or randomly scattered and I suspect it’s a bit of both. I study them and then wonder why I am studying them so carefully, what am I expecting to find? Yet I do keep looking, hesitiating to admit that they are beautiful.

Finding beauty and being fascinated is my response to the paintings and also to the two videos. I watch them both a few times (they are only about 5 minutes in length). They have narrative of sorts, something happens, and yet also nothing happens. BOTTOM OF THE TOP, like the first video, also uses text, this time not spray painted but possibly arrived at through cutting out the lettering and dropping it in place along the right hand edge of the frame (I so nearly wrote “painting”) over the duration of the video. That’s how it looked to me. And following what is being written, making sense of it yet it not making sense, is matched by the rest of the action,even whilst acknowledging some of the references, the most obvious one being Magritte’s painting Ceci N’est Pas Une Pipe, a pipe in the bottom left corner billows smoke across the picture plane throughout. In the top right an electric fan whirs and carnations are ‘fed’ through the mesh until, hitting the blades, they are scattered across the picture plane in the opposite direction to the smoke. This is what happens when the carnations hit the fan! Meanwhile the artist’s head wrapped in bandages(?) which he paints blue appears at the bottom. We see only head and an arm placing a fish and an eel and flowers above his head, moving them around and eventually cutting the fish and placing the flowers inside it.

There’s beauty here, amid lots of humour. I am reminded of some of those old black & white surrealist films but can’t quite recall a specific one, and action painting, abstract expressionism, neo Dada, are all in here too, as are art-historical/art critical ideas of constructivism, all overness, and Leo Steinberg’s “flatbed picture plane”, in other words modernism, post modernism, and I want to say post-post modernism (Metamodernism even). For all its humour, this work never seems to me to be parody or irony, or of it is ironic I get the sense that it is post-modern irony itself that is being parodied.

The art works in this show seem to blur the distinction between sculpture, painting, performance, and video as well as the ‘genres’ of figuration, abstraction and surrealism, and delightfully question our ways of making sense of art, non-art and everything else.

Eat Your Friends is showing at Simon Lee Gallery, London until 4 April 2012.

Mondrian, a keen social dancer, disliked the Waltz. It was romantic, emotional, and the rise and fall and sway seemed to denote the curved line. He preferred the Foxtrot and the rhythms and figures that would later become the Quickstep, modern, all straight lines, abrupt changes of direction, obtuse angles and speed. I could imagine that some social dancers like Mondrian might have expected the new dances to replace the Waltz for ever. However, rather than one replacing another they all carried on being danced, side by side, as it were. Today, no longer new, the Modern Waltz, Modern Foxtrot etc continue to be danced.

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) Composition C (no.III), with Red, Yellow and Blue, 1935 Oil on canvas, 56.2 x 55.1 cm Private collection, on loan to Tate © 2012 Mondrian/ Holtzman Trust c/o HCR International Washington DC

At the time (not long before Mondrian was in London painting, and dancing, with the Nicholson/Hepworth crowd),  I wonder if it could have seemed like abstraction might replace figurative painting. Now in the modern ‘modern world’ (metamodern possibly), both remain whilst newer art forms than painting are dominant. Like ballroom dancing, painting continues alongside more contemporary practices, and within the (in)discipline of painting representation and abstraction co-exist.

At the Indiscipline of Painting  exhibition at the Mead Gallery some of the abstract paintings on show question the relationship between abstraction and representation. The show as a whole explores the endurance of abstraction (arguably Mondrian’s invention), specifically concentrating on international abstract painting since the sixties. There is an international element to another abstract painting exhibition that opens in February: Mondrian//Nicholson in Parallel at the Courtauld Gallery where the relationship between the these two artists and their work is the theme. For a few weeks the Courtauld exhibition and the Mead Gallery exhibition will be showing in parallel, a short train journey apart.

Seeing them in parallel may give us a detailed view of abstraction since its early days, what has happened and what is now happening to it, especially now that we no longer think of the adventure in terms of linear progression.

At the Indiscipline show, Bernard Frize’s wonderful painting for example, has little continuity with Mondrian, other than its abstractness, neither in the way it looks nor in its attitude.

Bernard Frize, Suite Segond 100 no 3, 1980, Alkyd Urethane lacquer on canvas162 x 130 cmCollection of the artist, courtesy Simon Lee Gallery, London

Has Mondrian’s utopian purity been replaced by its opposite? Instead of painstaking corrections in the search for harmony we have a chance placing of colours skimmed from the top of the paint cans. Mondrian’s dislike of the curve was not shared by other early abstractionists, for Nicholson the circle starts to look like an image of purity, but not here. For Frize it even has a referent, the paint can. Also, long gone is the insistence on red yellow and blue with black and white, and whereas Mondrian and Nicholson thought of their art as ‘spiritual’ and somewhat lofty, Frize’s seems entirely ‘material’ and approaching the trivial. It is matter of fact, mechanical perhaps, yet not quite resigned or cynical. I still have the sense of searching, discovery and playfulness (or possibly gamefulness) that seems to me to be part of what makes abstraction continually new, interesting and endurable. In ballroom dancing, though the steps and figures of each dance were invented long ago, their repetition in each new performance continues to demonstrate the impossibility of repetition. Though I have heard it said that the ‘language’ of abstraction has now been invented, it is still very much alive.

Mondrian//Nicholson in Parallel is showing from 16 February 2012 to 20 May 2012, and The Indiscipline of Painting is at the Mead Gallery until 10 March 2012.

Regular visitors to this blog will recall that I have been thinking about the prefix ‘meta’, as in ‘metamodernism’, and that I have also been experimenting with patterns that emerged from a drawing method involving the rotation of four stretchers arranged in a quad.

Gregory Bateson used the prefix ‘meta’ quite a lot. He was interested in metacommunication in his double-bind theory of schizophrenia, where a metacommunication is a communication about the way in which a communication is to be received. He was playful with metaphors, asking “what’s a meta for?” and showing that they are fundamental to the way humans think and behave. He was interested in metapatterns, proposing that

The pattern which connects is a metapattern. It is a pattern of patterns…

My interest in patterns is only playful, they are possibly visual metaphors. Here is quadrant one of a quadrant I am calling ‘part one’.

Fable, Part One, Quadrant One, Drawing, 3" x 3"

It’s a work in progress.

By the way, the film about Gregory Bateson entitled An Ecology of Mind is coming soon to the UK, the promise of a February 2012 tour is showing on the website, dates to be announced!

When I wrote about George Shaw’s painting The New Houses, the other day, I suggested that it is a meta painting in two senses: 1) It is a painting within which there are three other paintings, and 2) It is, in my view, a painting about the process of painting.

George Shaw The New Houses 2011 BALTIC presents Turner Prize 2011 © BALTIC & the artist Photo: Colin Davison FILENAME: SHAW

I was using the prefix meta a lot like we do in NLP (Neuro-Linguistic-Programming) where it usually means “on”, “above” or “beyond” and includes “about”. For example a meta model is a model of a model and a meta comment is a comment on a comment: “now that’s an interesting comment”. We could continue to add meta comments: “now that comment about the other comment being interesting was also interesting” etc etc. This painting has a similar structure.

A painting of a painting of a painting or four squares of four squares of four squares

I have been posting about metamodernsm lately and I note that the metamodernists (Nadine Fessler, Robin van den Akker, and Timotheus Vermeulen) use the prefix meta to mean something slightly different than in my usage above. In explanation, they quote the online etymology dictionary on meta:

prefix meaning 1. “after, behind,” 2. “changed, altered,” 3. “higher, beyond,” from Gk. meta (prep.) “in the midst of, in common with, by means of, in pursuit or quest of,” from PIE *me- “in the middle” (cf. Goth.miþ, O.E. mið “with, together with, among;” see mid). Notion of “changing places with” probably led to senses “change of place, order, or nature,”

and they emphasise “the movement with and between what we are doing and what we might be doing and what we might have been doing” and downplay the “reflective stance, a repeated rumination about what we are doing, why we are doing it and how we are doing it”, which I think has been more common.

For them it signifies oscillation or a constant repositioning

Meta- does not refer to one particular system of thought or specific structure of feeling. It infers a plurality of them, and repositions itself with and between them. It is many, but also one. Encompassing, yet fragmented. Now, yet then. Here, but also there.

In relation to the modern and the postmodern, metamodernism is historically beyond whilst also oscillating between those two positions.

It’s already old news that the British art award, the Turner Prize, 2011, was awarded to Martin Boyce.

Martin Boyce Turner Prize 2011 Installation view BALTIC presents Turner Prize 2011 © BALTIC & the artist Photo: Colin Davison

The Telegraph didn’t seem to like it, claiming it was a ‘slap in the face to popular taste’, and I even had the impression that they would have placed him last of the four nominees, the others being George Shaw, Karla Black and Hilary Lloyd. The Guardian, whilst not unappreciative of Boyce’s work, criticised the decision along similar lines, and like The Telegraph, preferred George Shaw who apparently, until very recently, was the bookies favourite to win. I must admit to liking Shaw’s work, the three paintings of his I saw at the British Art Show 7 were wonderful. However, I don’t know about popular taste, The Daily Mail (unsurprisingly) liked none of it, failing even to recognise the merit of Shaw’s paintings, complaining only that one of his titles had the term ‘dog shit’ in it.

What I notice about the prize winner Martin Boyce’s work is that he seems unashamed to be really interested in modernism, drawing heavily on its visual language and bringing the viewer’s attention to ways in which its aesthetic has changed over time. And it’s not all post-modern irony either, I get the feeling that it is genuine interest. I know I am filtering for it, but it could be fair to say that he oscillates between sincere appreciation and irony. Yet, seemingly, only a minute or two ago, admitting such interest would have been considered passé. Even abstract painters that were once decidedly late modernist have felt the need to distance themselves as much as possible from the modernist moment. This new found approval of modernism along with the oscillation between sincerity and irony may be indicative of  a new ‘cultural dominant’, or specific stage in the development of modernity, that some have labelled Metamodernism.

Here’s a link to the Tateshots video about Boyce’s work, where his enthusiasm for the cubist/constructivist concrete trees that have supplied the visual language for his art since 2005 is clearly in evidence. Every element of the installation shot above references those concrete trees, or the shapes he ‘abstracts from’ them, including the ventilation grills on the walls. I wonder if there is also a sense in which his abstractions of (modernist) abstractions are also meta modernist, in what I think is a different use of the prefix ‘meta’ than strictly the one that the Metamodernists have in mind?

In Luke Turner‘s Metamodernist Manifesto he says “oscillation is the natural order of things” and he, along with Robin van den Akker, Nadine Feßler and Timotheus Vermeulen, sees this oscillation ( “between a modern desire for sens and a postmodern doubt about the sense of it all, between a modern sincerity and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy and empathy and apathy and unity and plurality and purity and corruption and naïveté and knowingness; between control and commons and craftsmanship and conceptualism and pragmatism and utopianism”) as an indication of the emergence of a new cultural dominant – metamodernism.

I feel sure that I am mixing metaphors as I attempt to question the naturalness of oscillation by referring to a business simulation known as the Beer Game, invented, I believe, at M.I.T by Jay Forrester and referenced by Peter Senge in the opening chapter of his book The Fifth Discipline.

Four ‘players’ take up the positions of Factory, Distributor, Wholesaler and Retailer, making up a production and distribution system, the product being crates of beer, represented by coins or counters, that make their way from the factory, to the other sectors and ending up as sales to external customers.

There are some system conditions: no communication takes place between the sectors other than the placing of orders and the receiving of product (silence), and there are delays in production and  transportation as well as in processing the orders. Orders are made by external customers and they are re-acted by each sector concluding with the factory that places orders with its own workforce. The decision-making required by each sector, at the end of each week, is how many crates of beer to order from their supplier upstream.

The activity spans a simulated year, at the beginning the system is stable, customers are ordering 4 crates of beer per week and each sector has 12 crates of beer in their respective inventories. Each sector aims to minimise costs by keeping inventory down at the same time as preventing backlog.

In conducting this simulation (as I have done with groups over 100 times in the last two years) we always find that when external customer orders are stable, the system becomes unstable, with sometimes wild oscillation, (as well as amplification: the oscillation pattern becoming more pronounced the further upstream you go).  A flat line could represent the orders from customers whereas this graph shows the oscillating pattern of orders placed within the system.

Getting back to the Metamodernist Manifesto, if we were to think of orders from customers as the external environment or  ‘nature’, we might conclude that oscillation is an artificial experience. It is not the ‘natural oder of things’ so much as the invented and exaggerated response to external stimuli. We do it to ourselves (that’s what really hurts, apologies Radiohead).

Then again, we could say that it is ‘natural’ in the sense that it is the repeated and predictable response: it seems to come naturally to us.

Maybe what I am saying is that although oscillation may indeed be ‘the natural order of things’, the natural order of things is not itself natural. Whilst the territory is flat, our maps oscillilate wildly.

What is Metamodernism? is a question asked at Notes on Metamodernism, edited by Nadine Fessler, Robin van den Akker, and Timotheus Vermeulen. Here is part of their response to their own question:

We understand metamodernism first and foremost as a structure of feeling, which can be defined, after Raymond Williams, as “a particular quality of social experience […] historically distinct from other particular qualities, which gives the sense of a generation or of a period.” Metamodernism therefore is both a heuristic label to come to terms with recent changes in aesthetics and culture and a notion to periodize these changes. So when we speak of metamodernism we do not refer to a particular movement, a specific manifesto or a set of theoretical or stylistic conventions. We do not attempt, in other words, as Charles Jencks would do, to group, categorize and pigeonhole the creative work of this or that architect or artist.  We rather attempt to chart, after Jameson, the ‘cultural dominant’ of a specific stage in the development of modernity.

Having said all that about not a particular movement or a manifesto, artist Luke Turner has written a Metamodernist Manifesto as follows:

I love the (im)possibility of it, and that it leaves me feeling unsure about whether to take it seriously. It is almost as if the manifesto could itself be seen as an example of the metamodern. It seems to oscilate between sincerity and irony, setting out on a course that is destined to failure but doing it anyway. I think it may offer a basis for further consideration, debate, and practice, and in future posts I will act as if it does, and see what happens.

I have posted from time to time about modernism and post-modernism (by the way I love that reference in the Simpsons where PoMo is defined as “weird for the sake of weird”).

I came across an excellent write-up at timmarshall20 of the postmodernism exhibition currently showing at the V&A.

And thank you Abstraktion.org for your recent blog post, bringing my attention to a term that is new to me “metamodernism” ( I met a modernism once and it changed my life) and to the WordPress blog on this very subject at Notes on Metamodernism.

In his review of the V&A show, Tim Marshall highlights the ‘past-ness’ of postmodernism, so if metamodernism might be taking its place, what might it look like?

It is an attitude that oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and sincerity and a postmodern irony; between grand narratives and personal life stories; between science and mysticism; between critical distance and affect; and between concepts and craftwo/manship. It is an attitude that says, as Jerry Saltz, of all people, once put it: “I know that the art I’m creating may seem silly, even stupid, or that it might have been done before, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t serious.” It is an attitude also that says, following the legacy of that increasingly important artist Bas Jan Ader, “I know I will fail, but that is the point: to try in spite of”.

(From What is Metamodernism at Notes on Metamodernism, edited by Nadine Fessler, Robin van den Akker, and Timotheus Vermeulen)

At Abstraktion.org they ask if Metamodernism might point the way forward for abstraction, quoting at length from Luke Turner‘s Metamodernist Manifesto I don’t know the answer, but I like the question, and I sense that it is one I will be thinking about a lot.