More on Alex Hubbard’s video painting

I have become very interested in Alex Hubbards’ work, having first seen a painting of his at the Indiscipline show at the Mead Gallery, his work was also one of the a subjects of discussion at the event with Bob Nickas entitled The Trouble with Harry, at Mead on 3 March 2012, where the show Eat Your Friends at Simon Lee Gallery, London was recommended and I got to visit it last week.

Since then, and since writing a few posts on Hubbard, I have been looking him up on t’Internet.

There’s this great video on youtube and an interesting artforum article by Fionn Meade, as well as a film review for Hubbard’s Cineapolis 2007, at Dinca.org where Andrew Rosinski refers to the work as

…a ruinous slapstick video painting in two minutes, a performance impelled by the cathartic concept of if it feels good, do it. A static one-shot, filmed from above, captures rummager Hubbard’s madcap actions of cutting, pouring, balloon burning, and paint feathering.  A tactile, prop-driven film that hits the bill down, smacks up the viewer, and slakes the cinematic thirst. If you’re looking for the ne plus ultra of ’00s video art and performance, take a big gulp from this plastic container.

He also includea a link to more at Ubu. Where they say

Playfully destructive and rigorously formal, Alex Hubbard’s tabletop videos — shot from above in a single take – blur together painting, performance, sculpture and video into humorous and disorienting narratives.

Mondrian, my wife and Alex Hubbard

My wife kindly agreed to come with me to see the Mondrian/Nicholson in Parallel exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, London

She isn’t massively interested in art, but I thought that she might quite like the Mondrians. Imagine my surprise when she was totally underwhelmed. Partly she was bored, and more than that she just didn’t seem to ‘get it’. I have come to think of those paintings as traditional but her reaction showed me that they remain challenging. In fact, the fact of abstraction can continue to be challenging, even now 100 years since its birth.

I had planned to visit the Alex Hubbard show at Simon Lee the next day and I anticipated her finding that even more of a challenge. After all, the paintings are virtually monochromes with plastic rubbish embedded into their glossy surfaces, and the videos could be seen as making no sense. But she was fascinated by the videos and watched them with me a few times and she thoroughly enjoyed looking at the paintings.

This work is, to my mind, much more contemporary and much more challenging than the Mondrian and Nicholson paintings, yet she could connect with them and enjoy them. Partly she was attracted to the colours, it had not occurred to me how decorative they could appear. She was also sure that the embedded pieces of rubbish were selected for their colour and carefully placed. At the time I disagreed with her, but now I am beginning to think she may be right.

Mondrian/Nicholson in Parallel is showing at The Courtauld Gallery until 20 May 2012 and Alex Hubbard, Eat Your Friends is showing at Simon Lee until 5 April 2012

Alex Hubbard Exhibition: Eat Your Friends, at Simon Lee

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.

Alex Hubbard “Horse Camp No. 1”

At The Indiscipline of Painting show at Mead Gallery I am finding that it is the works that didn’t necessarily grab me on first viewing that I am becoming more and more fascinated with, now that I have been to see the show a few times. By the way, this exhibition can take many visits and still have lots more to give. If you’ve only been the once, go again! If you haven’t yet been, it’s on until 10 March 2012. If you just cannot get there at all then the catalogue is excellent.

Alex Hubbard, Horse Camp No. 1, Image courtesy of Simon Lee Gallery

Alex Hubbard is possibly known more for video and performance than for painting (?) and seeing the videos does seem to shed light on the painting as it is less a visual investigation, more a product of a performance. It looks like the horse-shoe/’C’ shapes were sprayed repeatedly at random through a stencil onto a yellow ground, the stencil eventually breaking down from overwork. Made horizontally (some of Hubbard’s videos have the appearance of tabletop paintings, reminding me of Leo Steinberg’s “flatbed picture plane“), a layer of fibreglass has been added, and coloured resin has been pushed into it, apparently you get about 30 minutes to do this before the resin dries. Hubbard has said elsewhere that

The mechanics of me pushing resin into the fiberglass before it dries becomes the gesture, one that looks painterly but is borrowed from the labor of making the thing.