patternsthatconnect

Walking towards Model Studies the Thomas Demand exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary, and having forgotten whose work was on show, I felt sure that I was walking towards an exhibition of abstract paintings.

In fact, they are large photographs of small architectural models. The scale tends to flatten out the space and to produce large areas of lightly modulated colour, hence the resemblance to American abstract paintings of the 50s and 60s. When you get a bit closer the space in the photos becomes more apparent, it reminds me of the space in a cubist paintings now. I can imagine the artist bending a craning to get into the tiny models attempting to experience it for himself, in a way similar to the cubist modelling of space, as experienced in time.

Demand is known for his photographs of life-size models, made by him, of architectural interiors like the Oval Office, paper models which are destroyed after being photographed. In these new works the models he photographed were made by the architect John Lautner (1911 – 1994), and discovered by Demand in the archives of the Getty Research Institute when he was artist-in residence there.

In this short video clip he talks to Alex Farquharson, the Director of Nottingham Contemporary, about how he found these models and about his interest in the status of the model: far from being a diminution of reality modelling is our way of perceiving the world and communicating our experience of it to others. (In NLP we think of models and modelling in a similar way. We make models of how people do what they do well so that we can teach it to others.) It occurred to me that these photographs, themselves 2 dimensional models, document the process of modelling. They show us something of how in modelling we alter scale, freeze time, distort space in order to ‘understand’.

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.

I visited Nottingham Contemporary knowing that I was unlikely to find any abstract painting. Maybe it is not contemporary enough, as it rarely ever features in shows there. Not that the Klaus Weber exhibition wasn’t hugely interesting. Though reluctant, I found myself fascinated by it. (More on the show another day.)

Perhaps it was partly because I was looking for abstract painting, and partly because I wasn’t finding any, that this sign I saw on the walk away from the gallery towards where I had parked my car, became the most interesting “abstract painting” I had seen that day.

unconsciously created, by more than one person.

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.

Thank you art dog for reminding me to dig out my own yellowed copy of Beyond the Crisis in Art by Peter Fuller.

You reminded me of the crisis that this book provoked in me, a welcome crisis, but one that took years to resolve.

I have long been a fan of the Sharkforum and resident artist/critic Mark Staff Brandl’s take on the present state of art criticism. This is by way of a practice run to ‘scope’ the afore mentioned ‘art criticism now?’ agenda I love that word ‘scope’ you’d think we were shooting bears..maybe we are…certainly foxes… His latest project involves asking artists to write about their practice and its theoretical basis as a challenge to the curren … Read More

via CONTEMPORARY ART CRITICISM

I have been foolish enough to dig out my copy.

In the book there is an article on John Hoyland, I only realised in reading it again that Fuller is reviewing an exhibition that I saw, and liked, at the Serpentine in 1979.

I was interested to re-read the article along with the catalogue because Hoyland has come to mind for me recently in a visit to Leeds Art Gallery, in a viewing of some art in a workplace,

and in reading Peter Dickinson‘s interview with him in the latest Turps Banana.

Whilst Fuller is largely negative towards Hoyland, he appreciates what he thinks the artist repudiates:  the allusion to content beyond the painting, “touching upon intimate areas of psychological (rather than purely perceptual) experience”.

ArtReview: Summer 2011.

In the new ArtReview there is a short article by J J Charlesworth about the new contemporary art venues in the UK, including

Nottingham Contemporary

The Hepworth Wakefield

and the Turner Contemporary in Margate (no photo as I haven’t visited it yet).

The Turner and
Jerwood spaces are just two of the latest additions to a process
that began, in the southeast, with the refurbishment of Bexhill’s
elegant 1930s modernist gallery and auditorium, the De La Warr
Pavilion, in 2005, followed by the rebuilding of Eastbourne’s
Towner Art Gallery in 2009. Meanwhile, all across England, a fleet
of shiny new art-barns have recently opened or are about to
open: Nottingham Contemporary, the Hepworth Wakefield,
Middlesbrough’s MIMA, Colchester’s relocated Firstsite.
The name of the game here is regeneration, a game
everyone in the English regions has been desperately keen to play.

He doesn’t mention The Public in West Brom’ probably because it is not strictly a contemporary art space,

but it was clear at my recent visit there that it was all about regeneration. A walk into town confirmed this all the more. I couldn’t get away from notices about who was funding what and about efforts to improve the area. There were even banners or posters about the local police. I had begun to expect ‘Big Brother is Watching You’.

In the article, Charlesworth argues that updating the cultural infrastructure forms an attempt to attract affluent residents. I can imagine that this may be so for Margate more than I can for Wakefield, or West Brom’ and I wouldn’t necessarily put Nottingham in the same  ‘need for regeneration’ category. Whilst he mentions all the new contemporary art spaces, and there’s a really good photograph of The Hepworth, the article is more about Margate than the other venues.

Nevertheless, the regeneration and ‘inward investment’ (for Nottingham) themes are evident, and I agree with him that

while art can help
create a vibe of cultural rejuvenation in a place, changing people’s
expectations of where they live, it can do very little about more
substantial issues of investment, infrastructure and economic
development. So the danger is that while millions are spent on
ambitious arts venues, this distracts from the more substantial
problems faced by places such as Margate. Because real
infrastructure, rather than ‘cultural’ infrastructure, does count.

future investment will be needed just at a time that it is likely to be switched off!

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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