tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15254663455557765522024-03-13T14:13:51.870+00:00with one eye on the roadshort essays on art and cultureJames Merrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07624385352578202678noreply@blogger.comBlogger38125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1525466345555776552.post-48773906983361689242018-03-23T22:01:00.000+00:002018-03-23T22:01:52.517+00:00Your Interest in Tom Cruise<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">I was recently somewhat relieved to discover that the great AI threat to humanity has been overstated. It can be fooled quite easily I realised, simply by adopting irregular and unpredictable online behaviour. Switching on my phone one morning this week I am faced with a notification for a news item tagged “your interest in Tom Cruise.” I would like to take this opportunity to categorically state that I have absolutely no interest in Tom Cruise (unless it is related in someway to the downfall of that rich white fallacy, The Church of Scientology), and it took me some time to work out how Google’s algorithms had come to the conclusion that I had any desire to know what the diminutive Hollywood prat had been up to. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Eventually I remembered that one evening a few weeks ago, lost surfing a YouTube tangent, I had watched a video clip of Johnny Vegas being interviewed at some red carpet awards event. Now, I am willing to declare openly, here and now, that I do like Johnny Vegas. He has a brutal honesty and vulnerable openness to his comedy, and often says things that are so tragically truthful that I laugh out loud despite myself. But, standing in a line of celebrities being interviewed, who should Vegas be standing next to in the line, but pixie impossible Tom Cruise, and Vegas was saying to the woman interviewing him how she was only talking to him because she was waiting for Tom Cruise to be free. And also, I remember now, Tom Cruise was mentioned in the title of the clip.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">We all know how everything we do online or on any connected device is recorded in someway and fed into an ever-growing store of knowledge with which the big internet companies make their money selling this knowledge of us to advertisers. But it is reassuring to know that they haven’t quite got it right yet. Why else would I get adverts for over 50s holidays, or endless adverts for the thing I just bought and have no need to buy another one of? It helps I guess that I am not on Facebook and have no desire to join (I’m still in the majority. Five billion of us are still not on Facebook). But I suppose it does worry me slightly that in the future our lives, when they end, may be judged by our online history. And if I continue to avoid letting Google and Facebook know who I really am, by refusing to continually feed them real knowledge of what I am really interested in, my Amazon sponsored funeral may well have a large poster of Tom Cruise hanging over the coffin. This is the nightmare future I envisage. You have been warned.</span></div>
James Merrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07624385352578202678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1525466345555776552.post-79750749093671169972018-01-29T19:58:00.001+00:002018-01-29T19:58:45.470+00:00A Minor Revelation<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: justify;">
<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">It is the evening after a day out in Manchester and I am sitting at home spending some time with the new objects I returned from my trip having purchased. I slowly turn the pages on the Callum Innes catalogue for his 2013 exhibition <i>History</i> held at the Whitworth Art Gallery, which the gallery were selling off cheap in a sale, whilst listening to my new Biosphere album <i>Shenzhou</i>, when I am struck by a minor revelation. Callum Innes is known primarily for large minimal oil paintings in a high modernist style, but this exhibition was of a series of watercolours, a medium for which Innes is not normally associated. The twenty watercolours follow the familiar style of Innes, being comprised solely of large blocks of colour, in this instance squares where two colours have been applied one on top of the other and scraped back to create a semi transparent plane. The two colours used are visible around the edges of each piece where they have not been scraped back. The series as a whole acts as an extended colour study, exploring the results of combining different pairs of colours. The title of each piece tells the colours used, for example <i>Cobalt Blue Tone / Quinacridone Gold</i> or <i>Red Magenta / May Green</i>. The Biosphere record is a 2017 vinyl reissue of a 2002 album, named after a Chinese spacecraft. Every one of the twelve tracks on <i>Shinzhou</i> takes as it’s starting point a small section of music by Debussey, which Geir Jenssen has removed from it’s context, looped, and put through various electronic filters and reverbs to create a series of minimal ambient sound pieces, which serve as a musician’s study of Debussey. The minor revelation was my realisation that these two art works, although made in completely different media, are the same.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Both the watercolours and the music are, to first appearances, very plain. They both follow, and do not divert from, the application of one or two simple rules. Some may describe them as quite empty. They are flat. Pick any point and compare it to any other and it may well look or sound the same. Their tone does not change across each piece’s entirety. But, upon closer inspection, both the watercolours and the music share a deep and rich texture. The more time spent with the work, and the longer one looks, or the deeper one listens, the richer and more subtly diverse the texture becomes. This revelation of the similarities between these two art works led to another revelation about my own taste when it comes to art, music, books, film, culture generally, and even perhaps people. I don’t like work that shouts, or demands attention, which unfortunately is the majority. I like work that quietly goes about it’s business, seriously, attentively, with an open curiosity and pleasure in enquiry; work that does not immediately reveal it’s depths and richness, allowing the viewer/reader/listener the opportunity to peel back the layers slowly, over an extended period of time; art and music that gives more with every listen or view; art and music one can live with, that grows and develops with the viewer/listener’s ongoing interaction with it. I am not one for instant gratification. I find the greatest pleasures are to be found in quiet and continued contemplation. </span></div>
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James Merrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07624385352578202678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1525466345555776552.post-14511571519608658542018-01-25T22:10:00.000+00:002018-01-25T22:10:00.731+00:00John Stezaker, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Words I associate with the work of John Stezaker as I walk round his current exhibition in the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, include: cool (by which I mean contrary to hot, as opposed to fashionable, although some would say cool <i>is</i> fashionable), subtle, precise, calm, quiet (possibly silent), still, deeply-moving, considered, serious, wry, funny (especially the <i>Marriage</i> series). For those who don’t know his work, Stezaker creates collage in several growing series, and has been doing modestly for decades, usually by combining two images, sourced from promotional photographs of actors or scenes from old black and white films, postcards of landscapes and waterfalls, or simply cutting shapes or figures out of an image. Having the appearance of extreme simplicity, the work shows the artist’s hand and mind to be wholly present, although his physical intervention is minimal. The placement of one image over another is so precise it is clear that the vast majority of the work involved is in the looking for the right combination of images and the absolute correct placement, before very quickly sticking them down. There is an almost nostalgic visceral pleasure in the physicality of the work, the photographic prints, the postcards, the clear evidence of scissors and glue. Although you can understand Stezaker’s work from a digital reproduction, you get more from seeing the original physical work. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In the <i>Mask</i> series, where postcards obscure the faces of film stars, the forms in the depicted landscapes and waterfalls subtly mirroring the forms in the obscured face, Stezaker reveals to us the hidden depths behind the masks we present to the world, the existential anguish lying just beneath the facade we project, the turmoil under the thin and fragile surface. In the <i>Waterfall</i> series, where a postcard of a waterfall separates a leading man from his leading lady, we witness the impenetrable distance which separates us all from each other, even lovers. Stezaker tells us we are all inherently unknowable, yet intimately connected, islands. In the <i>Tabula Rasa</i> series, where one character in a scene is obscured by a white rectangle cut out in perspective to show the direction of the obscured individual’s scrutiny, the attention of everyone else in the scene being on the white rectangle, Stezaker demenstrates we are each a blank screen onto which it is others who project their ideas of who it is we are, or who we appear to be in relation to them. Or, conversely, is it only I that can’t see the real me? Am I in fact revealed only through the gaze of others? I only exist because I am seen by others. Through John Stezaker’s work I feel I know him, I feel a connection to him, I feel I understand how he thinks and how he feels, but, of course, I don’t. I know only his work, which is his mask, his projection, his tabula rasa. </span></div>
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James Merrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07624385352578202678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1525466345555776552.post-8121431273639843762014-05-13T20:08:00.000+01:002014-05-13T20:08:51.663+01:00Darren Almond, To Leave a Light Impression, White Cube, Bermondsey, London<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Full Moon photographs of Darren Almond evoke a sense of passing time. They show time in it’s immensity. Like telescopes looking out into space Almond’s photographs capture old time. The nature of photography is the capturing of light, and once light has been caught, it is already the past. This may seem obvious, but we don’t always think about it when looking at a photograph. With the photography of Darren Almond this is made explicit.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">All the photographs in this exhibition are of remote places, and almost always uninhabited. We don’t see any people. There is often running water, which due to the manner of production (extremely long exposures of up to an hour using only the light of a full moon) resembles cloud. Only the rock of the mountains is in focus, or the ice of the glacier, only the slowest moving things. The sky is usually grey as the clouds merge over time, yet more still than the water. Except in one photograph we see the arcs made by the movement of stars, evidence that we ourselves are moving through space.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There is occasional evidence of humanity: a railway track running straight up the middle of one image; a bridge in another; a sequence of photographs of standing stones. The photographs themselves are evidence of humanity and the existence of a technological culture. The photographs of standing stones span this entire history, the technology of one culture observing another. All these photographs are the human gaze at nature. Is it a dispassionate gaze? scientific? artistic? Are we looking at Arcadia? A utopian vision of a world without humans? A world before humans? A world after humans? </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">With these questions we return to the immensity of time. The moment of the photograph, this long moment, is but a blip. All is quiet but nothing is quite still. By capturing an hour in these beautiful images the artist shows us that the only constant is change. Even the mountains move.</span></div>
James Merrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07624385352578202678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1525466345555776552.post-54768533159283486862014-04-20T22:24:00.000+01:002014-04-20T22:24:50.466+01:00Pandora’s Promise, a film by Robert Stone<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-align: justify;">Nuclear energy has suffered from bad press. Ask people what the word nuclear evokes and you’ll probably get words like fallout, radiation, meltdown, armageddon, and nuclear winter. The nuclear industry is linked in the public perception to public health concerns such as an increased cancer risk, and to environmental catastrophes such as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. The popular fiction surrounding nuclear is of a future where vast swathes of the planet have been made uninhabitable by nuclear disaster, either as the result of malignant forces, be they terrorists or a renegade military, or by our own stupidity and greed. Ironically perhaps the images used to promote nuclear energy when it was first introduced in the 1950’s and 1960’s have become the same images which are now the stuff of nuclear nightmares: large glowing giants marching through huge power hungry cities; strings of electricity pylons crossing the landscape emitting powerful invisible rays; faceless scientists in lab coats assuring us that everything is better with nuclear power.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-align: justify;"> </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Robert Stone’s 2013 documentary film, <i>Pandora’s Promise</i>, sets about to debunk these myths. And it does this by interviewing at length environmentalists, scientists and commentators who in recent years have changed sides in the debate, from strongly opposed to strongly in favour. The interviewees include: founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue, Stewart Brand; Pulitzer Prize winner, Richard Rhodes; science writer, Gwyneth Cravens; and activists, Mark Lynas and Michael Shellenberger. From the very beginning the “fearlessly independent”</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">film contrasts the calm, scientific opinions of it’s protagonists with footage of emotional anti-nuclear demonstrations, juxtaposing the science with ordinary people’s anger and passion.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The structure of the film is simple. It outlines the arguments against one by one, being sure to present them as understandable concerns, and then carefully presents evidence to convince otherwise. It claims that people have been scared away from nuclear energy because of the very real dangers of nuclear weapons, and that people are guilty of confusing the two very different issues. It describes nuclear energy as a clean energy and a potentially unlimited source of electricity. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Many of the arguments put forward in the film are compelling. It talks of our ever expanding demand for energy, saying that, as the developing world catches up with the developed world, energy consumption is set to double by 2050 and treble by 2100. It tells us of the often unseen energy costs of the latest technologies. For example, when you take into account the manufacturing process and the servers needed to maintain everything it is connected to, an iPhone consumes the same amount of energy as a fridge. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The film makes the argument that the countries that consume the most electricity are the ones with the highest standard of living, which I can see makes sense as these are usually the richest countries who can afford better health care and have better access to water and food, but it then goes on to suggest that these countries have a higher standard of living <i>because</i> they consume more electricity, and that therefore it is a human right for developing countries to consume as much electricity as we in the developed world do. This argument strikes me not only as overly simplistic (there are many other factors involved with having a higher standard of living such as governments and companies controlling access to resources, a hangover from our Colonial past) but also as false logic. The sun is hot therefore everything hot is the sun. It doesn’t work. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The film acknowledges climate change as a reality and says we need to seriously cut-down on use of fossil fuels, stating that three million people per year die as a result of air pollution caused by the use of fossil fuels, primarily coal, but says that to expect renewables such as solar and wind to take up the shortfall is an impossibility. Their power generation capabilities are too sporadic (the wind does not always blow, the sun does not always shine) and they usually rely on natural gas (a fossil fuel) as a back up. The film goes on to suggest that the fossil fuel industry, which it describes as being incredibly cynical, has at times helped bankroll the anti-nuclear lobby because it knows that renewables cannot possibly pose a threat to it’s continuing dominance. The film’s conclusion is that only nuclear power can produce enough electricity to satisfy the world’s growing needs.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Finally the film tackles perhaps the biggest stumbling block to the population’s acceptance of nuclear energy: safety. Again, <i>Pandora’s Promise</i> aims to allay these fears. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the result of nuclear weapons not nuclear energy. Background radiation is naturally occurring and, we learn, increases with altitude. The current levels of radiation at Fukushima, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island are lower than those naturally occurring in the hills of New Hampshire, and much lower (up to ten times lower) than those passengers are exposed to on an air flight. Accidents which occurred at Fukushima, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island couldn’t possibly happen again as the technology has improved since then to make such accidents impossible. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Only fifty six people, as reported by the World Health Organization, have died as a result of Chernobyl the film claims. The film compares this number to the “one million” dead as claimed by environmental groups. Far from being a barren empty wasteland Chernobyl has a thriving local environment and many communities have moved back in with no apparent detrimental effects. Having worked in the past with an organisation providing life affirming and life improving activities for children from Chernobyl suffering from Leukaemia I do question these facts. If fallout from such an accident wasn’t as bad as we thought why do such organisations exist? And what constitutes an acceptable level of risk anyway? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? I don’t think anyone has ever been killed by a wind turbine or solar panel.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">No matter how ‘safe‘ nuclear energy production is, and I still have unanswered questions after watching this film, I still can’t get beyond the issue of waste. <i>Pandora’s Promise </i>attempts to ease fears regarding the waste issue also (although it doesn’t even mention it until two thirds of the way in): the next (fourth) generation of power stations produces very little waste, most of which can be recycled as fuel to produce yet more power, and the resulting unusable waste from this process is only dangerous for eight hundred years rather than the ten thousand years of the current (third) generation power stations. This waste, the film claims, can be, and currently is being, safely stored on site. But, even if we’re only talking hundreds rather than thousands of years, how can we predict what the world will be like in eight hundred years time? Just think for a moment what the world was like eight hundred years ago, and how alien the twenty-first century might look to someone from the thirteenth century. How can we possibly plan to keep waste safe for such an unknowable future? </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If we were certain of the stability of our future, as a planet and as a species, if we could count on an optimistic outlook for our science and culture, of the continuation of our ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’ way of life, then maybe we could be certain of the safety of nuclear. But I am not convinced. I am not convinced of the stability of our present, that our ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’ way of life even exists now, let alone being certain of an unforeseeable future hundreds of years hence. There are too many uncertainties to take the risk.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I think the main issue here is one of over-consumption. The idea of the whole planet consuming as much energy as we in the developed world do now terrifies me. We consume too much. Our systems are inefficient. We produce far too much waste. Most of our systems of energy use were developed at a time of apparent super-abundance. We had no idea how much population and demand was going to grow. Rather than bringing the rest of the world up to our level of consumption we need to seriously cut-back on our own. Without denying the developing world improvements in standards of living we need to find a sustainable middle ground. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Even after watching this film I still believe that we need to develop renewables. The sun is always shining somewhere. The wind is always blowing somewhere. Geothermal and tidal energy are never ending sources of power. Maybe we need to rethink how we access and distribute our resources. But also we need to develop micro-generation technologies. We need a revolution in energy production similar to the one that has been building in recent years in food production - locally sourced and sustainable. Ironically perhaps the very processes we need to be developing, such as small scale, micro-generation, permaculture, and mobile technologies, are being trialled most effectively in the developing world, in places that don’t have the huge infrastructure of the developed world. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This film is right in that we need a calm, reasoned debate on the issue of nuclear power, especially now as our government plans for the next generation of power stations. We need to look very carefully at the facts and not be overwhelmed by our often irrational emotions, and <i>Pandora’s Promise</i> certainly adds to this very important debate. But I do question some of it’s conclusions and it’s “fearless independence”. And many of the questions around nuclear power still, unfortunately, remain unanswered.</span></div>
James Merrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07624385352578202678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1525466345555776552.post-5635342266186405522013-02-25T19:57:00.001+00:002013-02-25T19:59:11.413+00:00Alex Hamlin Reclaims Contemporary Art for the Common Man<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
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A man sits on a chair in an
exhibition space in an art gallery. There is nothing remarkable about the man -
he is tall, Caucasian, mid-to-late 20s. There is nothing special about the
chair - it is the same as the chair on which the gallery invigilator sits at
the entrance to the exhibition space. There is a white circle with a three
metre radius marked with duct tape on the floor around the unremarkable man
sitting on the ordinary chair. This circle denotes the limit of the audience’s
physical relationship to the man. The invigilator ensures this boundary is not
crossed. The man sits there for six hours in two three hour sessions, from 10
to 1 and 2 to 5, with a one hour break in the middle for lunch, where he is
whisked off to an undisclosed location to keep him away from the influence of
his audience. Every so often the man picks up a piece of paper from a small
pile by his feet, looks at his watch and scribbles something on the paper, the
invigilator then walks over to take the piece of paper from him, at which point
a second invigilator enters the exhibition space to take the piece of paper
from the first invigilator. The first time I witness this I follow the second invigilator
to inquire about the paper. I am told it is a Certificate of Authenticity signed
and with a note of the time by Alex Hamlin, the man sat in the chair, to prove
that he was thinking about art. I ask how Alex decides when to sign them and am
told they are signed when Alex has a particularly inspirational thought about
art. I am then told the Certificates are for sale for £10 each. I buy the one I
have just witnessed Alex signing - it has a number one written on it in the
same handwriting as the note of the time. After the event I discover Alex has
signed a total of twenty one Certificates at an average of one every seventeen
minutes or so, although he signs more in the first half of the day than the
second, which suggests he is maybe tiring towards the end. All twenty one
Certificates are sold, the money raised going towards the costs of promotion
for the event and the subsequent production of the catalogue, of which this
review is to be a part. Over the course of the day I would estimate
approximately two hundred people witness Alex Hamlin thinking about art.<br />
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<i>Alex Hamlin Thinks About Art </i>is a complex work, there is much more
to it than initially meets the eye. It is terribly important to the piece to
stress that Alex Hamlin is not an artist. He doesn’t like art, or, rather, he
doesn’t really ‘get’ it. It frustrates him. He is a layman struggling to make
sense of an, in his view, elitist and exclusive preoccupation. He finds it
confusing, purposefully obfuscating, and, to be honest, largely irrelevant. The
remarkable thing about Alex Hamlin is that, after several conversations with
his friend, the artist Christopher Robinson, who is the curator of this work,
Alex agreed to expose his struggles to the public in a cathedral to the very
institution he felt challenged by. By performing this courageous act Alex
Hamlin has reclaimed art and the art gallery for the common man.<br />
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Alex Hamlin will be, I imagine,
unaware of the pedigree of his action. As the First World War raged nearly a
hundred years ago dada declared that art was to be for all and by all, an
unrealised ambition which has lasted throughout the history of the twentieth
century avant-garde. Alex Hamlin is only the most recent in a long tradition
desiring to wipe the slate clean in order to begin afresh. His innocence is
certainly refreshing as is his authentic curiosity and desire to understand.<br />
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Alex may well be right in his
honest critique of contemporary art - too much of it is needlessly obscure -
too much of it has its metaphorical head up its metaphorical backside (less art
for arts’ sake more arse for arse’s sake), and with <i>Alex Hamlin Thinks About Art</i> Alex uses the favourite weapon in
contemporary arts’ arsenal, irony, and reflects it devastatingly back on
itself.<br />
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
How do we know Alex Hamlin is
thinking about art? He could be thinking about that cute girl who just walked
into the gallery. At some point we, as viewers, must abandon our disbelief and
willingly enter into the game of the piece, and if we do we find more layers
and more depth. But did the work create that depth or have we invented it in
our own minds? What does inspiration look like? Is it as banal as a man sitting
in a chair? What makes a work of art? What, for that matter, makes an artist?
These are huge questions and <i>Alex Hamlin
Thinks About Art</i> forces us to ask them again.<br />
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<i>Alex Hamlin Thinks About Art </i>complicates the understood
relationship between artwork, artist, viewer and the institution delivering the
artwork to the viewer (the gallery). If Alex is the artwork, it asks, who is
the artist? Is there an artist? Does Alex become the artist through his
performance of the piece? At what point? Before? During? After? But if Alex
becomes the artist doesn’t that undermine the whole premise of a non-artist
reclaiming the gallery space for the common man?<br />
</div>
<i><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">Alex Hamlin Thinks About Art</span></i><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">
forces us to conclude that as soon as we think we have it nailed, a definition
of art or the purpose and meaning of art, someone, usually an artist but in
this instance unusually and refreshingly a non-artist, comes along and does
something to throw it all up in the air again. The word ‘art’ it would seem (and
the thing it signifies) is permanently malleable, forever in flux, and will
always remain so. To think about art is to think about our relationship with
the world and our understanding of reality and to consider what it is to be a
conscious being who thinks. For a human being these are the biggest questions
one can ask. As is: “I wonder if that cute girl wants to go for a drink when
I’m through here thinking about art?” </span>James Merrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07624385352578202678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1525466345555776552.post-83104876900893734322012-11-02T16:03:00.000+00:002012-11-02T16:03:51.777+00:00Richard Hamilton: the Late Works – National Gallery, London
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri;">To enter the
world of Richard Hamilton’s late works is to enter a self-contained closed
world of reflections and mirrored fragments. Endlessly self-referential, works
reappear in other works, which themselves refer back to yet other works. To
view them is to participate in a post-modern game through art history. And it
is a thoroughly enjoyable game to play.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri;">The first works
we see are paintings where the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing has been
transformed into a vast cathedral, sparsely populated by female nudes and tiny
reproductions of earlier Hamilton works. These two paintings (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Saensbury Wing</i> (1999-2000) and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Charity</i>), like many in the exhibition,
reference a painting in the National’s collection, Pieter Saenredam’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Interior of the Grote Kerk at Haarlem</i>
(1636-37). And with these paintings we are introduced to all of the main themes
of the exhibition: interiors, paintings in the National Gallery, the female
nude and other works of Richard Hamilton.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lobby</i> (1985-87) a hotel lobby is painted
with unwavering verisimilitude, the planes within fragmented by carefully
rendered mirrored surfaces. It is a meticulously measured photo-realistic
painting. The only ‘painterly’ marks are to be found on the flowers in the
foreground and the painted paintings reflected in the two large mirrored
columns. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lobby </i>reappears in a later
work, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hotel du Rhone </i>(2005), where it
hangs prominently on a wall in a digitally rendered collage of a hotel room
being hoovered by a naked chambermaid.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>The
contents and layout of the room bring to mind Hamilton’s most celebrated image,
probably the most famous collage in art history, </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Just what is it that makes today's homes so
different, so appealing? </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">(1956).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Other
than <i>Lobby</i> and <i>The Saensbury Wing</i> not many of these works could
be described simply as paintings, although Hamilton did refer to them as such.
They are mostly digital mash-ups incorporating elements of painting, collage
and photography and finally printed onto canvas. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Hamilton’s
nudes are always beautiful young women and it is in two more of these nudes
that we find the final preoccupation of this exhibition, and a major
preoccupation of Hamilton’s career. <i>Descending Nude </i>(2006) shows the
same woman four times, three times reflected in a mirror walking down a flight
of stairs, and the fourth facing the mirror. In <i>The Passage of the Bride</i>
(1998-99) the female nude is reflected in the glass of a section of Marcel
Duchamp’s <i>The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even</i> (1915-23),
otherwise known as <i>The Large Glass</i>, which is seen hanging on the wall of
another domestic interior. In the nineteen sixties Hamilton played an important
role in the rehabilitation of Duchamp’s reputation in the art world, not least
by remaking many of Duchamp’s works and bringing them to a new and wider
audience. Duchamp blessed this project, even going so far, in typically
Duchampian manner, as to sign Hamilton’s versions of his work. Another
Duchampian aspect to Hamilton’s work is the delight he takes in replicating his
own work on a smaller scale, as in Duchamp’s <i>Box in a Valise </i>(1935-41).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
clumsiest aspect of Hamilton’s work on show here are the titles, bad puns and
unsubtle allusions, as if he hasn’t got the confidence in his audiences ability
to ‘get’ the references. And one or two of the works are considerably weaker
than others. I wasn’t entirely convinced by <i>The passage of the angel to the
virgin </i>(2007), Hamilton’s updating of a Renaissance favourite, the
Annunciation, for example. But these are minor quibbles. The exhibition is
worth a visit alone for the opportunity to view Hamilton’s last work, <i>Le
Chef – d’oeuvre inconnu – a painting in three parts</i> (2011 – printed 2012),
which will probably pass into Hamilton legend as his last, great, unfinished,
masterpiece. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Hamilton
was working on <i>Le Chef…</i> for the final eighteen months of his life and he
described it, according to this exhibitions catalogue, as his <i>Etant Donnes</i>.
This is a slight exaggeration. Duchamp worked on his final piece in secret for
twenty years when everyone thought he had given up art, releasing it only after
his death as a way of upsetting Duchampian scholars from being able to sum up
his life’s work into a neat little Duchampian shaped compartment. Hamilton’s
final work doesn’t really deviate from the well-trodden Hamilton path. It is a
nude, a particularly beautiful one. It references, and indeed collages, a
number of old masters. And it is a digital mash-up of photography, painting,
and collage. Based on a short story by Balzac, <i>Le Chef…</i> tells of a young
painter trying to paint the perfect nude, produce the epitome of beauty and desire,
but when he shows his work to a couple of other painter friends all they see is
a mess of paint except for one beautifully rendered foot. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri;"></span></div>
James Merrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07624385352578202678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1525466345555776552.post-31836774966358869662012-11-02T14:39:00.000+00:002012-11-02T14:39:01.597+00:00Thomas Schutte: Faces and Figures - Serpentine Gallery, London
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri;">Thomas Schutte
has been producing a wide variety of art, from architectural installations and
mixed media sculptures to ceramics and drawings, for more than three decades.
This current exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London concentrates on one
of Schutte’s major preoccupations, the human face and figure, drawing on work
from the last fifteen years. It is perhaps surprising then, due to the eclectic
nature of his practice, that this show has such a traditional feel, being made up as
it is primarily of sculptures in bronze, steel and aluminium, and drawings in
ink, pencil and watercolour.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri;">It is to the
drawings that I am most drawn. There is a quiet, calm seriousness to them, a
misleading simplicity. They do not shout for attention. They quietly, calmly
and seriously get on with what they do. Often Schutte will draw the same
subject many times over a period of months or years, modifying his materials
aloing the way, some in ink, some in pencil, some with crayon added, some with
watercolour added, with the result that his drawings frequently appear in series. On
show here are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Luise</i> (1996), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mirror Drawings</i> (1998-99) and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Paloma</i> (2012). It’s as if through
repetition Schutte is acknowledging the ultimate futility of drawing, it’s inherent
failure to capture the true and complete spirit of a subject, as well as his
own limitations as an artist, and by use of repetition he can somehow get
closer to that unobtainable absolute truth.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri;">In some of the
drawings there is a real delicacy of touch. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Henri</i>
(2012) for example is a very simple and beautiful line drawing in pencil, which
has two occurrences of red crayon. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Untitled</i>
(2006) is an ink drawing of a male face where the ink is thick and black on the
right of the picture but the lines, and consequently the face, on the left
disappear into the whiteness of the paper. And in another <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Untitled</i> (2006), the subtlety of the line and delicacy of the face,
this time female, is contrasted by a thick block of bright orange on the neck.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri;">The majority of
the sculptures on display, I’m afraid to say, fail to move me. They include
a series of expressionistic bronze heads, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wichte
(Jerks) </i>(2006); an imposing armless figure with solemn deep cheekbones cast
in dark rust coloured steel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vater Staat
(Father State) </i>(2010); a long haired and bearded sunken faced bronze, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Memorial for an Unknown Artist</i> (2011);
all beautifully executed with expressive features, but failing to move me in
the way, say, the sinister figures of Juan Munos do, a comparison most explicit
in the two large sculptures outside the gallery, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">United Enemies</i> (2011), two pairs of figures, again armless, with
poles for legs, bound together and uselessly straining against each other
desperate to pull themselves apart. (When I was viewing these I was delighted
to find them both crawling with ladybirds, an unexpected incongruity and
pleasing unintentional addition to the work, the bright red dots against the
pale blue of the bronze.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri;">My two favourite
of Schutte’s sculptures, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Walser’s Wife </i>(2011)
and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Frauenkopf mit Blume (Woman with
Flower) </i>(2006), are both female heads, both resembling the heads of buddhas
with smooth Asiatic features and rough textured hair tied up in a bun. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Walser’s Wife </i>is upright whereas <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Frauenkopf…</i> is lying on its side. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Walser’s Wife</i>, the most striking of the
two, is aluminium painted with gold and purple lacquer, which plays tricks with
your eyes reflecting different colours depending on the angle of view. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Frauenkopf…</i> is the more familiar and
traditional green and brown of bronze. But it is detail that makes these
sculptures compelling. Both contain intentional imperfections around the eyes. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Walser’s Wife</i> has two small tears,
solidified drips of lacquered aluminium, falling uncannily from her upper
eyelids. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Frauenkopf…</i> has a lump
underneath the left eye and a dent underneath the right. Her whole face sags ever so slightly
in the direction of gravity’s pull, giving her features a barely noticeable yet unnerving asymmetrical
skew. Both pairs of eyes, in representations of an otherwise idealized yet
realistic style, are just deep grooves, devoid of eyeballs or pupils and
therefore of emotion. It is in these minor deviations from verisimilitude that
we are apparently purposefully separated from the same truth that Schutte seems
so eager to obtain in his drawings. </span></div>
James Merrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07624385352578202678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1525466345555776552.post-82078207129567639372012-08-22T20:17:00.003+01:002012-08-22T20:17:53.075+01:00A Cut Through Time<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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In 1964, two years before a
chance encounter turned her into an instant celebrity and altered many people’s
perceptions of her art, Yoko Ono performed for the first time what has probably
become her most famous work. In <i>Cut Piece</i>
Ono sat on a stage in a traditional Japanese female pose with a pair of scissors
next to her and invited members of the audience to step forward and using the
scissors cut parts of her clothing from her. She repeated the performance in
2003. The films of these two performances are currently on show at the
Serpentine’s Ono retrospective facing each other in a small room alone. It is
striking when viewing these two films together how time and circumstance can
alter a performance as outwardly simple as this.</div>
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The 1964 film is black and white
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stage is young and beautiful and looks vulnerable and unnerved. She gazes
blankly into the mid-distance passive and immobile. To view the film is an
uncomfortable experience. As a viewer (voyeur) we are complicit in the
sexualised violation of a young woman. The glee with which some of the male
participants literally cut strips off her is incredibly disturbing. <i>Cut Piece </i>(1964) is a powerful work of
feminist propaganda. Ono once said of it: “this is what all women go through
every day.” It discusses sex, gender and power relations brutally and
explicitly. It is a stunningly successful work of art.</div>
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By contrast, <i>Cut Piece</i> (2003) is a very different performance. Professionally
filmed and in colour the subject is a completely different woman. Ono is now
old, famous and very powerful. The vulnerability has all but gone. Only through
the strange transgressed taboo of seeing an elderly woman being stripped nearly
naked does the work retain any emotional power. Ono is at all times strong and
in control. The performance is more a celebration of Ono’s celebrity than a
radical work of art. It has become the equivalent of an aging rock band playing
their greatest hit to a stadium of devotees. You can take nothing away from the
artist for having written such a classic song, but you really wish you’d seen
it performed in a small club back when it was fresh and exciting and youthful.</div>
James Merrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07624385352578202678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1525466345555776552.post-61397728117691327312012-07-27T14:58:00.001+01:002012-07-27T14:58:48.790+01:00Light and Colour, Up Bubbles All His Amorous Breath<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
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<b>Turner Monet Twombly: Later Paintings, Tate Liverpool</b></div>
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<br /></div>
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This is one of those summer
blockbuster shows and, as such, had it been in London, the galleries would have
been heaving and the visit would have been an unpleasant experience of jostling
and aggravation. But this is Liverpool, I am in a provincial Tate, it is a
beautiful day outside and the steady but far from overcrowded stream of
visitors are in friendly and conversational spirits. This is also one of those
conceptual shows, hung around a usually ill-conceived idea dreamed up by a
curator, where the merits of the works on display are sacrificed for the good,
or often not-so-good, of the concept. Thankfully, in this instance, the concept
works and the curator, Jeremy Lewison, has done a remarkable job.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Three painters, separated in
time. Monet was only 11 years old at the time of Turner’s death and Twombly
wasn’t born until two years after Monet’s own death. All three in their own
times were derided as ‘daubers’, challenging received notions of what a
painting could, or indeed should, be. The exhibition concentrates on the mature
work of its subjects at a point in their respective careers when their
reputations and public profile were assured, and it opens with a grand
statement.</div>
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<br /></div>
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To the left as one enters is
Turner’s <i>The Parting of Hero and Leandro </i>(1837),
to the right facing it and equal in scale and ambition Twombly’s <i>Hero and Leandro (to Christopher Marlowe) </i>(1985),
and on the wall at the back, between the two, Twombly’s painting in four parts <i>Hero and Leandro</i> (1981-84). And this is
the exhibition in a nutshell: conversations between painters 150 years apart
with similar aims and shared concerns and themes. The conversations continue
throughout: Turner’s paintings of Waterloo Bridge face Monet’s paintings of
Waterloo Bridge; Turner’s sunsets face Monet’s sunsets; Monet’s water lilies
face Twombly’s peonies; and on; and on.</div>
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<br /></div>
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The most successful conversation,
to my mind, and the one I returned to again and again over the course of my
visit, was between a series of Turner’s small oil-on-board seascapes
(c.1840-45) and Twombly’s epic <i>Orpheus</i>
(1979), which share a minimal palette of off whites and creams and the splicing
in two of the picture plane by a muted horizon line. <i>Orpheus</i> has been placed such that it dominates the largest room of
the exhibition. Possibly the wittiest conversation was between Monet’s <i>Water Lilies</i> (after 1916) and Twombly’s <i>Petals of Fire</i> (1989) where Twombly’s
diptych of smears and drips of black, red and white, seems to be mocking Monet
across the decades, goading him for being the acceptable face of modernist
painting.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Now, I must admit that I was not
a fan of Monet before I came to this exhibition. I was excited at the prospect
of Turner and of seeing how Twombly fared in proximity to an undeniable master.
And I must also confess that my opinion has not been greatly changed. I find
Monet’s use of colour to be gaudy and somewhat vulgar in a polite kind of way.
Although he does improve when he allows himself to copy Turner and to soften
his palette, as in <i>Morning on the Seine,
Giverny</i> (1897) or <i>Waterloo Bridge,
London, at Sunset</i> (1904).</div>
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<br /></div>
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The star of this show is
undoubtedly Twombly and I don’t think I was alone in coming to that conclusion
on the day of my visit.<i> </i>I suspect
most people came for either Turner or Monet, having little or no prior
knowledge of Twombly, and if nothing else this show, through careful and
considerate curation, has done wonders towards furthering the acceptance and
understanding of contemporary painting in the view of the average art going
member of the public. I heard several visitors comment that when they first saw
the Twombly’s they ‘didn’t get it’ but the longer they spent with them and saw
the connections with the more acceptable paintings of Turner and Monet the more
their appreciation grew. And vice versa, by placing Turner and Monet in
proximity to Twombly it becomes clear (especially with Turner) how radical they
were in their own time and how common acceptance is something that only comes
about with the distance of hindsight.</div>James Merrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07624385352578202678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1525466345555776552.post-28318885684739909122012-02-13T16:28:00.000+00:002012-02-13T16:28:29.454+00:00A Scanner Absurdly<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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The other day I came across an
article in the Metro that appealed to my sense of the absurd (<i>Rookie PC chases himself for 20min in CCTV
bungle – </i>Wednesday, 8<sup>th</sup> February 2012). The article describes
how a probationary plain clothes police officer was seen by a CCTV operator to
be “acting suspiciously” in an area “that had [recently] suffered a spate of
break-ins”. The officer was then contacted by the operator and asked to pursue
the suspect, which he did for twenty minutes unaware that he was trying to pursue
himself and unable to understand why, despite the fact that, as he was
constantly being told by the operative, he was “on the heels of his prey”, he
could see no sign of the fugitive.</div>
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<br /></div>
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I am reminded of a novel by
Philip K. Dick, 1977’s <i>A Scanner Darkly</i>,
made into a film in 2006 by Richard Linklater, in which an undercover drug
enforcement officer is asked to follow and apprehend a suspected drug dealer by
superiors who fail to realise that the drug dealer is the undercover persona of
the police officer.<span> </span>The novel, and
subsequent film, through the metaphor of a fictional powerful psychedelic drug
known as ‘Substance D’ or ‘Slow Death’, is a classic paranoid exploration on
loss of identity and multiplicity of personality. A person, Dick is saying, is
not a single coherent identity. We are each of us capable of being many
different and often contradictory people depending on context and circumstance.
The mask we wear at work is probably not the mask we wear in our own home, or
with our own family, friends or acquaintances, and sometimes that contradiction
forced on us by social conventions can have debilitating consequences to an
individual’s sense of self.</div>
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<br /></div>
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The imaginary tale of Dick has a
much darker and starker conclusion than the real life story in the Metro, which
ends with a sergeant entering the CCTV control room and recognising the suspect
and police officer to be the same person to much hilarity. But the story does
highlight I feel how the world, with the aid of new technologies, has come to
resemble a science fiction more absurd than anything invented by a novelist. <span> </span></div>James Merrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07624385352578202678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1525466345555776552.post-72464697475579188752012-02-10T13:22:00.000+00:002012-02-10T13:22:56.262+00:00Still the Same<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
I feel compelled to write in response
to the recent furore in some of the less contemplative areas of our print and
digital media in reaction to an incomplete new work by artist Sam Firth. The
film <i>Stay the Same</i>, as reported in
the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and Scottish Sun earlier this week, involves
Firth filming herself standing still for ten minutes every day at the same time
and in the same place, in front of a loch on the Knoydart Peninsula in Scotland.
Beginning on 22<sup>nd</sup> June last year she intends to repeat this process
for a full twelve months after which time she will edit the sixty-odd hours of
accumulated footage into a short twenty minute film. <span>The film has been funded
by a jointly awarded grant of £10,000 from the British Film Institute and
Creative Scotland which are both publicly funded bodies.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
With headlines such as: “<span>Woman paid £160 an hour from public money to stand still by a loch</span><span>” (Daily Telegraph 6/2/12), “</span>Taxpayers'
money spent on giving artist £160 an hour to stand motionless beside a lake
(sic)” (Daily Mail 6/2/12), and “<span>Money for nothing</span><span>:</span><span> </span><span>Filmmaker’s £10k grant to stand beside loch</span><span>” (The Scottish Sun
6/2/12) it is clear where the focus of the fracas lies. The issue is two-fold: a
lack of understanding of art in large portions of the general population, and
the question of how do we place a value on art. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span>In this case the second
point is the easiest to deal with. The £160 an hour mentioned in the headlines
is the actual time spent filming. The project itself lasts a year, much more than
a year when pre- and post-production are taken into account. £10,000 for over a
year’s work does not sound like a particularly high wage to me. In fact,
according to the report <i>A Minimum Income
Standard for the UK in 2011</i>, published in July last year by the Joseph
Rowntree Foundation, “</span>a single person needs to earn at least £15,000 a
year before tax in 2011, to afford a minimum acceptable standard of living.” (<span>www.jrf.org.uk/publications/minimum-income-standard-uk-2011</span><span>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span> </span><span> </span><span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span>The issue of
understanding is much harder to address. Like any specialism there is a
language to art. If you are not conversant with the language you will find it
difficult to comprehend. In order to comprehend a language you would be
expected to make a certain amount of effort.</span><span> You can’t, for example, expect to understand the intricacies of quantum mechanics
without putting in some work on the subject. It is the same with art. Sam Firth’s
film, in an incredibly simple and elegant way, addresses a diverse range of complex
concerns, such as identity, place, time, change, and aging. By placing herself
so directly into the film she becomes the subject of the work as much as the
landscape behind her and her relationship to it. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span>It is a work with numerous precedents. The discomfort of staring silently
into the intrusive lens of a camera is a subject explored most famously by Andy
Warhol in his <i>Screen Tests</i> of 1964-66
and much more recently by Noah Kalina. Kalina took a photograph of himself
everyday between </span>January 11<sup>th</sup> 2000 and July 31<sup>st</sup>
2006 and uploaded the result onto YouTube (<i>Noah
takes a photo of himself everyday for 6 years</i>) where currently it has been
viewed over 22 million times and has inspired many other similar films. The comparative
artistic merit of the two works is another, though not entirely unconnected,
debate, but the fact that a work like Kalina’s can go viral on the internet and
yet a work like Firth’s can cause such indignation says much about the
hostility towards and misunderstanding of the art world shown by large
proportions of the population. And this misunderstanding isn’t helped by the
lazy and ignorant journalism shown this week in the reaction to Sam Firth’s
film <i>Stay the Same</i>. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">See
Sam Firth’s work at http://staythesamefilm.com/</span> <span> </span><span> </span></span>James Merrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07624385352578202678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1525466345555776552.post-18150990921068726562011-12-31T20:17:00.000+00:002011-12-31T20:18:40.032+00:00Materiality, Surface and Illusion<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
If anything links the diverse approaches seen in the work of
Gerhard Richter currently on display in an extensive retrospective at Tate
Modern it would be materiality, surface and illusion. One thing pretends to be
another - a photograph is a painting - a sky is a sea. <i>Seascape (Cloudy), </i>(1969), offers a view it would be impossible to
see, the horizon being below eye level. Some of the early work appears crude (<i>Himalaya </i>(1968), <i>Folding Dryer </i>(1962)), and the dry brush scraped over wet paint
becomes a little tiresome. In the first few rooms there is a sense of relief
when one comes upon a painting which uses colour – there is only so much grey
one can take. And even the first colour chart is poorly executed (<i>192 Colours </i>(1966)). But the sheer
variety of styles, often painted alongside each other, shows Richter to be a
painter exploring all aspects of his chosen medium with the attention of a
serious artist. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Richter is not an artist with clearly defined ‘periods’
depicting linear progression, he moves from one approach to another and back
again with seeming ease, merely adding to his oeuvre over time – photo-realism,
abstraction, abstract expressionism, figurative, landscape, and with his Grey
paintings and colour charts the introduction of random processes. The colour
charts improve with a switch to enamel paint (<i>4096 Colours </i>(1974)) where the surface becomes flatter and more
pure. In <i>Double Pane of Glass</i> (1977)
a change of surface (glass as opposed to canvas) transforms the quality of the
paint (oil) and therefore the surface of the painting and the quality of the
brushwork. A change of tool (roller as opposed to brush) does the same (<i>Grey </i>(1974)). Richter’s approach is that
of a scientist changing a single parameter of an experiment to see the change
in outcome. This is most clear in the <i>Grey</i>
paintings.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There is something very clinical about even his ‘loosest’
paintings. The meticulous nature of the work makes the minor deficiencies more
apparent, imperfections on the surface (cracks, blemishes, a thumb print,
staples and folded canvas visible on the sides of unframed paintings) break the
illusion momentarily, offering the work a fragility and impermanence that they
otherwise seem to be denying. And across the two canvases of <i>Moonscape II </i>(1968) the colours are ever
so slightly wrong.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
By abstracting photographs almost beyond recognition as he
does in <i>Tourist (With 1 Lion)</i> and <i>Tourist (With 2 Lions)</i> (both 1975) is
Richter trivialising an event (the mauling of said tourist by lions), or guarding
the viewer from the horrible reality, or does the fact you have to work harder
to ‘see’ the image heighten the horror? Similar could be asked regarding his portraits
of Nazis and the <i>18<sup>th</sup> October
1977</i> series.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The <i>Cloud </i>paintings
of 1970 are beautiful and manage to avoid the slight frustration felt by his
other smooth surfaced photo-realist paintings. Richter’s most iconic painting, <i>Betty</i> (1988), also achieves this. This
painting, a portrait of his daughter, could be regarded as Richter’s <i>Mona Lisa</i>, except we are denied her
beauty as she is facing away from us and once again all we can do is wonder at
the surface, stepping closer in an effort to break the illusion. This is the
one painting that looks no different to its often seen reproductions. This is
the slight frustration of which I speak – the reproductions (photographs of
paintings of photographs) are always smoother and flatter than the actual
paintings and so the ‘real’ painting, being merely a painting, although a
marvel, is almost always a slight disappointment.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The only work on display here where the audience isn’t aware
of the surface is <i>Mirror</i> (1981)
(which, as the title suggests, is a mirror hung in the place of a painting). Here
the viewer looks beyond the surface to see only themselves. The relationship
between viewer and work is made explicit in <i>Mirror</i>,
the artist is saying look at my work, or indeed any work of art, and you will
see only yourself.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the 1980’s Richter, an artist always at odds with
fashion, momentarily joins in with the popular style with his large brash
abstracts. The abstract paintings have everything the majority of the photo-realist
paintings lack – texture, thickness, and vibrant colour. Interestingly, Richter’s
early abstracts (where he blows up and reproduces details of other paintings)
retain the smooth surface of the rest of his oeuvre. His 1980’s landscapes
however <i>are</i> a disappointment, well
executed but uninteresting. They are reasonable paintings of badly taken
photographs, neither good photographs nor good paintings. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In his 1990’s abstracts Richter starts to cut into the
surface of his paintings, revealing other surfaces beneath, other potential
paintings, partially revealing also the processes behind the work.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the late 1980’s Richter, who has spent so much time
replicating photography in paint, began a series of small scale works applying
paint directly onto photographs, personal family snapshots and portraits
obscured by often a single brush stroke. Providing respite from his monumental
paintings these ‘sketches’ are simple, quick and intensely beautiful. There is
an apparent casualness to them unseen anywhere else in his body of work, almost
as if he simply picked up the photograph to wipe his brush clean (I know this
is not the case and these pieces are far from casual, but they successfully
give that impression). These pieces are direct, they contain less illusion than
much of his work, they are not paintings manifesting as photographs, or vice
versa, they are what they are, a photograph daubed with paint, the successful
merging of two media Richter has spent so much time questioning and separating. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Maybe he finally realises the limits of painting with <i>September</i> (2005), in which he obscures a
painting he had begun, depicting the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre as
they were destroyed on September 11<sup>th</sup> 2001. It is a modest painting
but it shows his failure. His painting of an atrocity fails to evoke any of the
powerful emotions - dread, fear, awe - that the photographs of the event so
successfully induce. Why did he abandon this painting, deface it and then choose
to exhibit the defacement? Is he, after a lifetimes work pushing at the limits
of painting, acknowledging his failure? Is there nowhere else to go? Is the
photograph of the painting, no matter how wonderful the paining is, always
going to be better than the painting itself? This, ultimately, is the question
we always return to with Richter’s work. </div>James Merrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07624385352578202678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1525466345555776552.post-74799151132132510392011-11-03T21:13:00.000+00:002011-11-03T21:15:17.725+00:00When It Ceases Dripping From The Ceiling<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
It was reported today that an artwork by Martin Kippenberger, on
loan to the Ostwall Museum in Dortmund, Germany, was last month damaged beyond
repair by an over-zealous cleaner. The installation, ‘<i>When It Starts Dripping From
The Ceiling</i>’, is described by France24.com as “a tower of wooden slats under which a rubber
trough was placed with a thin beige layer of paint representing dried rain water.” The
cleaner apparently mistook the beige paint as a real stain and conscientiously
scrubbed it “until it gleamed.” She
failed to recognise that what she had wiped clean was an integral part of an
artwork which insurers estimate to be worth over $1 million.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Maybe Kippenberger would be flattered that the unfortunate cleaner
was taken in by the verisimilitude of his work. Maybe the late Kippenberger’s
talent was so great that she, a humble cleaner, believed in the truth of his
stain, and did only what she was paid to do which was to clean it. Maybe the
private collector who loaned the work to the museum will be grateful that
through her innocent actions the cleaner has proved the worth of the piece,
even though by unconsciously causing this damage she has reduced its value
immeasurably. Or maybe the cleaner isn’t so ignorant after all and her actions
were a conscious and piercing critique of the artwork in the vein of the man
who urinated in Duchamp’s urinal. </div>James Merrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07624385352578202678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1525466345555776552.post-68546495955823457002011-08-19T09:45:00.001+01:002011-09-08T13:26:29.913+01:00Just Do It<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<i><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Just Do It: a Tale of Modern Day Outlaws</span></i><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">, a new documentary by Emily James is one of those films which leaves you in turn feeling inspired, fired-up, angry, ready for action, and then guilty that you are not doing enough in your own life to address the issues it raises, realising you do not have the courage of the young people it depicts to do battle with the unfair and unsustainable capitalist system they are fighting. The film follows for a year a group of people (mostly young although one of the most amazing characters is the middle aged Marina whose personal revolution began with a desire to serve everyone tea) involved with the environmental direct action groups Climate Camp and Plane Stupid. Emily’s camera follows her protagonists to the G20 summit in London, to attempts to shut down a coal fired power station, to setting up a camp on a roundabout outside a wind turbine factory in which the workers, threatened with redundancy due to a lack of government funding for sustainable energy, are staging a sit-in, to a suburban village threatened by the expansion of Heathrow, and to the COP15 climate change summit in Copenhagen. It is unashamedly sympathetic to its subjects and their cause. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I guess the reason I felt guilty was that I used to be involved in the protest movement back in the mid-to-late 1990’s, and the film made me realise how far I had travelled from that idealistic anarchist of my youth, who thought nothing of hitching the length and breadth of the country to attend demonstrations and Reclaim the Streets parties. I can’t say I was ever as involved and committed as the people depicted in James’ film, but I believed in it and wanted to do something about it. I truly believed I was part of a generation that was going to change the world.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I want to mention two questions raised during the viewing of this film: one was in the film itself, and one was in the Q and A session held after the screening with the director. The question in the film was put to Marina. She was asked: ‘Do you think what you are doing is futile?’ To which there was a very long pause while she thought about it, struggling deep within herself to come up with an honest answer, which was eventually: ‘well I can’t do nothing. It may be ultimately futile, but I have to do something.’ And it was clear over the course of the film the vast difference in scale between the two sides in this battle: huge global corporations, banks, governments and police forces against a rag-tag (though well organised) fleet of colourful, carnivalesque pacifists. I know who is right. But I also know who is winning.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The second question was put to the director after the showing: ‘how did the arrests and subsequent legal proceedings affect the protesters and did any of them regret getting involved?’ The director replied that one of our heroes, Paul, was arrested five times over the course of the film and spent the following year and a half attending court dealing with the legal ramifications, the result being an increased reluctance to place himself in the line of fire and a dropping off in his activism. She also stated that she thought the way protesters were dealt with in court was specifically designed to demoralise them in just this way. This is the tragic truth when these noble courageous young people challenge the system.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Which brings me back to my own experiences. A number of things led to my own retreat from activism, other than getting older and settling in to a ‘real’ job. I was arrested at a Reclaim the Streets party in Bristol in 1997, which in itself was no terrible thing, I was held in a cell for a few hours until the party dispersed and released without charge, but it did make me a little more cautious. It was at the G8 summit in Cologne in 1999 where the size of the foe became apparent. There were snipers on roofs listening in to conversations amongst the crowd with high powered directional microphones attached to their rifles and huge numbers of police on the streets armed to the teeth. I became quite paranoid. But the final nail was the march against the war in Iraq in 2003, when between one and two million people marched in protest at an unjust and illegal war. The realisation that so many people could say no to something and be completely ignored led I think to the so called apathy many people felt in the next few years towards politics. I justified my retreat as a change of tactic, making the changes in my own life rather than actively going onto the street to protest, I told myself. But really I just became more cowardly.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">I understand, as I have experienced it, the feeling one gets in a crowd of people all shouting at the same enemy. It is a constructed situationist moment of authentic life, where the reality of the spectacle is temporarily exposed, yet remains ultimately futile, and it stands in stark contrast to the riots which so recently manifested on the streets of several cities in England, which were of a more spontaneous and ugly spectacular nature. Although I can empathise with the hopelessness of the perpetrators of those riots, I cannot agree with the nihilism of them. Whereas the direct action movement is a positive and life affirming howl against the crimes of global capitalism, the riots which so recently scarred our streets are a direct and logical result of the greed and despair caused by it. </span></div>
James Merrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07624385352578202678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1525466345555776552.post-62244398677225783832011-08-09T15:37:00.001+01:002011-08-09T15:50:08.083+01:00Constellations - Gathering Dust<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:donotpromoteqf/> <w:lidthemeother>EN-GB</w:LidThemeOther> <w:lidthemeasian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:lidthemecomplexscript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> <w:splitpgbreakandparamark/> <w:dontvertaligncellwithsp/> <w:dontbreakconstrainedforcedtables/> <w:dontvertalignintxbx/> 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mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-style: italic;">Constellations</span>, an exhibition on at the Cornerhouse in Manchester until 11<sup>th</sup> September, brings together four artists who all deal with the ephemeral and the transitory. The exhibition is split over two galleries with two artists in each gallery. The first gallery shows the work of Kitty Kraus and Takahiro Iwasaki. Kitty Kraus shows one piece and Takahiro Iwasaki shows four. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:100%;" >The piece by Kraus, <span style="font-style: italic;">Untitled</span>, is a repetition of a previous work first shown in Berlin in 2008. It comprises of a light bulb encased in ink filled ice which over the course of the exhibition melts to leave a black inky trail on the floor. It sits somewhere between sculpture, intervention, installation and drawing, where the artist controls the initial parameters and leaves the work over time to make itself. Although in itself quite pleasing and fitting the mood of the exhibition it is the least interesting piece on show. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:100%;" >The works of Iwasaki are all mini landscapes constructed from everyday objects. In <span style="font-style: italic;">Out of Disorder</span> (three of Iwasaki’s works are so named) tiny towers and buildings rise out of landscapes of socks, towels, dust and hair utilising the threads and fibres of each material. And in <span style="font-style: italic;">Differential/Integral Calculus</span> the landscape is made up from carved erasers and electrical tape while it is filled with telegraph poles made from technical pencil lead. The works in their materials and subject matter are a metaphor for the human struggle to construct solid objects of permanence in an ever changing natural wilderness. But the fragility of the works and their towers is a reminder that nothing human beings will construct is ever going to last forever, except for maybe the detritus, the socks, the towels, the dust and hair. Just consider the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, an incident which the work of Iwasaki rather abstractly and unexpectedly brought to my thoughts.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:100%;" >It is in the second gallery of <span style="font-style: italic;">Constellations </span>that, to my mind, the best work is contained: two works by Katie Paterson and one by the best known artist in the show, Felix Gonzalez-Torres. In <span style="font-style: italic;">Earth-Moon-Earth</span> an automated piano plays an altered version of Beethoven’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Moonlight Sonata</span>. For this work Paterson translated a portion of the <span style="font-style: italic;">Sonata </span>into Morse code and transmitted this translation to the moon. The signal was then reflected by the moon back to earth losing some of the information on the way. The version of the Sonata played by the piano in the gallery is the result of this process, with gaps where the information is missing. With this process of reduction Paterson has composed a new piece of music. Watching the ghostly player-piano I found myself wondering: where did the missing notes go? Is there somewhere individual musical notes floating through space waiting to be intercepted by someone or something? How far will they travel? Our picture of the universe is incomplete, just like Paterson’s Moonlight Sonata.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:100%;" >In <span style="font-style: italic;">100 Billion Suns</span> Patterson replicates a Gamma Ray explosion with a confetti canon and thousands of small coloured circles of paper that look like the residue of a hole-punch. The array of paper on the floor of the gallery resembles a star map with a mixture of dense and thinly distributed patches of colour. The precise physical force of the canon results in a random dissipation of matter resembling the seemingly random dissipation of stars in our galaxy. Paterson succeeds in her use of simple recognisable objects to make us consider the cosmic.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:100%;" >Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ posthumous contribution to <span style="font-style: italic;">Constellations </span>is a re-showing of his 1991 <span style="font-style: italic;">Untitled </span>paper stack, large scale reproductions of a photograph of the surface of water, an ephemeral moment captured and mass produced, which visitors to the gallery are invited to take away. This work balances perfectly with Paterson’s with its uses of reduction and again random dissemination. The paper is disseminated depending on who goes to the gallery, where they live or choose to exhibit it - if they exhibit it at all. There could be many copies of this image rolled up, sitting in corners, gathering dust. For those that take one, the image is a physical embodiment of memory, a reminder of their visit to this exhibition. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:100%;" >Other than Iwasaki’s all the works on display are the result of some random process instigated by the artist. Choosing the initial parameters and the process, the artists have all taken a step back from the work, allowing the process to unfold of its own accord, thus distancing themselves from the result. Only Paterson’s work directly relates to the title of the exhibition, Constellations, although Kraus’ work could be seen as a drawing of the inky black night sky, but the curators Karen Gaskill and Michelle Kasprzak have succeeded in creating a quietly contemplative exhibition from the work of artists who use the small and the everyday to provoke thoughts of the grand and the cosmic.</span></p> James Merrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07624385352578202678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1525466345555776552.post-41383542409518409772011-07-06T11:03:00.005+01:002011-07-06T11:18:50.621+01:00Either and/or Or?<meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 12"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 12"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CROBINS%7E1%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><link rel="themeData" 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.MsoPapDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; margin-bottom:10.0pt; line-height:115%;} /* Page Definitions */ @page {mso-footnote-separator:url("file:///C:/DOCUME~1/ROBINS~1/LOCALS~1/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_header.htm") fs; mso-footnote-continuation-separator:url("file:///C:/DOCUME~1/ROBINS~1/LOCALS~1/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_header.htm") fcs; mso-endnote-separator:url("file:///C:/DOCUME~1/ROBINS~1/LOCALS~1/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_header.htm") es; mso-endnote-continuation-separator:url("file:///C:/DOCUME~1/ROBINS~1/LOCALS~1/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_header.htm") ecs;} @page Section1 {size:595.3pt 841.9pt; margin:72.0pt 72.0pt 72.0pt 72.0pt; mso-header-margin:35.4pt; mso-footer-margin:35.4pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; font-family: georgia;">In the preface to his book <span style="font-style: italic;">Either/Or</span> Soren Kierkegaard, through the name of another, speaks of a deception. <span style="font-style: italic;">Either/Or</span> is a two volume work, written under three pseudonyms, the <span style="font-style: italic;">Either</span> being written by the aesthetic ‘A’, the <span style="font-style: italic;">Or</span> written by ethical idealist ‘B’, and the whole presented to the reader by its impartial and equally pseudonymous editor Victor Eremita. <span style="font-style: italic;">Either</span> is a series of essays extolling the philosophy of a young romanticist, <span style="font-style: italic;">Or</span> is a series of letters written as a critical response directly addressed to the author of <span style="font-style: italic;">Either</span>. Kierkegaard regularly published his aesthetic works under a number of pseudonyms, saving his own name for his religious philosophy. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; font-family: georgia;">Kierkegaard says of his use of pseudonyms that they are more than a mouthpiece for his own views, “behind each pen name lies a “subjectively actual personality””<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.do#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:11;" >[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>, a view that sounds very similar to Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s use of ‘heteronyms’. Over the course of his writing career Pessoa utilised over seventy names, preferring the term ‘heteronym’ to the more familiar ‘pseudonym’, “since they were not merely false names but belonged to invented others, to fictional writers with points of view and literary styles that were different from [his own].”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.do#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:11;" >[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; font-family: georgia;">Fernando Pessoa’s most celebrated book, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Book of Disquiet</span> (a series of reflective vignettes, or Texts), was ‘written’ by Bernardo Soares, who, in Text 193 of that book, says: “I am, in large measure, the selfsame prose I write...I’ve made myself into the character of a book, a life one reads.” Another of Pessoa’s heteronyms, the poet Alvaro de Campos says “Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.do#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:11;" >[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; font-family: georgia;">One of the reasons Pessoa, an intensely private man, used heteronyms, was to hide, from the public and from life. But it was also a philosophical stance, as he believed each person to be capable of holding many contradictory thoughts and opinions, and he didn’t want his works to be limited to the one self. Each name provided him with a different voice. He wrote, through Soares: “Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.do#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:11;" >[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> And again, Alvaro de Campos: “Be what I think? But I think of being so many things!”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.do#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:11;" >[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; font-family: georgia;">Is Pessoa’s deception then more honest than Kierkegaard’s? Kierkegaard’s deception is most clearly carried out in Victor Eremita’s preface: “I, who [has] simply nothing to do with this narrative, I who am twice removed from the original author.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.do#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:11;" >[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> And again, “I am neither an author nor a professional literary man.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.do#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:11;" >[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> But, like Pessoa, Kierkegaard’s work also contains a confession: “During my constant occupation with the papers [of <span style="font-style: italic;">Either/Or</span>], it dawned on me that they might be looked at from a new point of view, by considering all of them as the work of one man...Let us imagine a man who had lived through both of these phases, or who had thought upon both. A’s papers contain a number of attempts to formulate an aesthetic philosophy of life...B’s papers contain an ethical view of life.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.do#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:11;" >[8]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; font-family: georgia;">Kierkegaard seems to agree with Pessoa’s view that a self is comprised of many selves, and that each self may carry within it contradictory beliefs. This, surely, cuts to the quick of what it is to be a human being. We are all of us a mass of contradictions. And the ‘I’, this seemingly singular identity we so stubbornly cling to, is the sum of these contradictions. This can be expanded, I believe, to include the creations of human beings, such as the work of art and the text. (Again this can be extended to encompass the whole body of an artists’ work or the entire oeuvre of the writer.) Why should the work of art or the text be considered to be the work of a single author? Surely a large part of the point of a work of art is to explore and expose these contradictions, these multiple selves. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; font-family: georgia;"><span style=""> </span>In his seminal essay on authorship and authenticity, Roland Barthes states “…a text is…a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”<a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.do#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:11;" >[9]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style=""> </span>Our work is the culmination of all we have read or witnessed or lived. It follows that this is an ever evolving process. And the same, I believe, can certainly be said of the self.</p> <div style="font-family: arial;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->
<br /><hr size="1" width="33%" align="left"> <!--[endif]--> <div style="font-family: georgia;" id="ftn1"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.do#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:10;" >[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span><span style="font-family:georgia;">Howard A Johnson, quoted in his Foreward to the Princeton University Press 1971 paperback edition of </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: georgia;">Either/Or</span></p> </div> <div style="font-family: georgia;" id="ftn2"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.do#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:10;" >[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-family:georgia;"> Richard Zenith, from the </span><i style="font-family: georgia;">Table of Heteronyms </i><span style="font-family:georgia;">in the Penguin Classics 2002 paperback edition of Fernando Pessoa </span><i style=""><span style="font-family:georgia;">The Book of Disquiet</span><o:p></o:p></i></p> </div> <div style="font-family: georgia;" id="ftn3"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.do#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:10;" >[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-family: georgia;"> Quoted in Richard Zenith’s Introduction to </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: georgia;">The Book of Disquiet</span></p> </div> <div style="font-family: georgia;" id="ftn4"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.do#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:10;" >[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <span style="font-family: georgia;">Text 396, </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: georgia;">The Book of Disquiet</span></p> </div> <div style="font-family: georgia;" id="ftn5"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.do#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:10;" >[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <span style="font-family: georgia;">Quoted in Richard Zenith’s Introduction to </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: georgia;">The Book of Disquiet</span></p> </div> <div style="font-family: georgia;" id="ftn6"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.do#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:10;" >[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-family: georgia;"> Preface to </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: georgia;">Either/Or</span></p> </div> <div style="font-family: georgia;" id="ftn7"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.do#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:10;" >[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <span style="font-family: georgia;">ibid</span></p> </div> <div style="font-family: georgia;" id="ftn8"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.do#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:10;" >[8]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <span style="font-family: georgia;">ibid</span></p> </div> <div style="font-family: georgia;" id="ftn9"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.do#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:10;" >[9]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <span style="font-family: georgia;">Roland Barthes, </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: georgia;">The Death of the Author</span></p> </div> </div> James Merrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07624385352578202678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1525466345555776552.post-49633150155923815852011-05-06T15:25:00.004+01:002011-05-09T16:30:40.485+01:00What's it all about?<div style="text-align: left;">Last night I watched Wim Wenders new film about late choreographer Pina Bausch at the cinema. It reminded me of how good art can provide me with such pleasure. The film <span style="font-style: italic;">Pina</span> follows <span style="color:black;">the ensemble of the Tanztheater Wuppertal, the dancers that Bausch worked with for the last twenty odd years of her life. The majority of the film shows the dancers performing their contemporary form of dance not only in the theatre itself but out in the streets and landscapes surrounding the area. There are interviews with the dancers interspersed throughout, but during these interviews the audience is looking at the silent face of the dancer whose voice is heard speaking.</span><br /><br /><span style="color:black;">The dance that Bausch worked with is very physical. In her ensembles performances there is no clear plot, no direct story or narrative, there is no definitive meaning. Like all successful art it is about nothing, and it is about everything. There is joy, pain, suffering, the intricate interplay of relationships, power, control, love, loss, none of which is explicitly stated, all expressed through movement and the human body and all interpreted by the viewer. It is simultaneously funny and serious, meaningful and pointless, profound and ludicrous, and it is always obsessive.</span><span style="color:black;"><br /><br />I am reminded of a scene in the film <span style="font-style: italic;">Factotum</span>, a fictionalised account of the life of Charles Bukowski, where Matt Dillon’s character Henry Chinaski is in the office of his boss and his boss has discovered that Chinaski is a writer and is working on a novel. The boss asks Chinaski what his novel is about. Chinaski replies “Everything.” To which the boss asks “Is it about...cancer?” Chinaski: “Yes.” Boss: “How about my wife?” Chinaski: “She’s in there too.”</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div>James Merrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07624385352578202678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1525466345555776552.post-34616640173081992222011-04-16T16:15:00.003+01:002011-04-16T16:55:18.848+01:00Places, Strange and QuietAs a film maker Wim Wenders has been somewhat hit and miss. Early works, such as <span style="font-style: italic;">Alice in the Cities</span> were remarkable, and mid-career <span style="font-style: italic;">Paris, Texas</span> beautifully shot and enigmatic<span style="font-style: italic;"></span>, whereas the more recent <span style="font-style: italic;">Until the End of the World</span> is truly awful, badly scripted, badly acted, unconvincing, confused, sprawling and self indulgent. Even<span style="font-style: italic;"> Wings of Desire</span>, which I used to rate as one of my favourite films, upon a recent revisit I found to be problematic and a little awkward, containing moments of true poetry and deeply resonating beauty but coupled with elements of farce and ridiculousness. But I still rate his work interesting enough and his grasp of the visual strong enough that when hearing he had an exhibition of photographs at the Haunch of Venison in London I thought it would be worth a look.<br /><br />Spanning the duration of his film career <span style="font-style: italic;">Places, strange and quiet</span> is an equally hit and miss affair. Some of the images are striking but many are simply average. The strength in most lies in colour, bright and bold primary colour. But the misses are such that when he does produce a successful composition, such as his shot of a street corner cut neatly into three bands of colour - the right hand third is red, the top third of the rest is bright blue, and the remainder a sandy yellow, you feel it is merely the happy accident of an amateur.<br /><br />The photographs are large in scale and considerately spaced throughout several rooms. One of the best images is of an empty outdoor stage in front of which lies row after row of bright red plastic chairs, a palm tree growing out from the middle of them to the right of the image. Another is of a disused and delapidated ferris wheel standing alone in a wide expanse of waste ground, misty low hills on the horizon. On the opposite wall of the gallery is the same ferris wheel seen from the other side and close up, through which a tired looking housing estate can be seen in the background. One of the strongest technically is of an old car in what could be a desert or simply a quarry with a dog standing on the roof. The dog is a pure black silhouette, wild and threatening. This is one of the few photographs in the collection to inspire an emotion other than melancholy.<br /><br />The subject matter comprises mostly of abandoned places and forgotten things, objects that have seen better days and lost their usefulness. Some suggest narratives, such as the woman in the red dress standing before military battlements and the wall pockmarked with bullet holes that have since been painted over in red (Wenders is obviously drawn to red). But most are simply mundane. Many, unsurprisingly I suppose, have the sense of film sets about them, stumbled on accidentally by an opportunistic collector of images. There is no accompanying information, none of the photographs are provided with titles or indications as to where they were photographed, but it is clear that these images have been collected over a long period of time and from all corners of the globe.<br /><br />I'm not saying Wenders' photographs are bad, I have seen plenty which are worse and one or two of them are exceptionally beautiful, I just wonder if he would have been given such a large and prestigious exhibition with the interest that this garners if he didn't already have a reputation as a respected film director to back him up.James Merrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07624385352578202678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1525466345555776552.post-8372499133361434692011-03-26T17:41:00.009+00:002011-07-06T11:21:19.829+01:00Nothing Much Happens<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> 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<w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="33" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Book Title"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="37" name="Bibliography"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="39" qformat="true" name="TOC Heading"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: left; font-family: georgia;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:100%;" >I am rather fond of films in which nothing much happens. <span style="font-style: italic;">Police, Adjective</span>, by Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu is such a film. In it the main protagonist, a policeman by the name of Cristi, spends most of his days alone, outside in the cold, desolate urban Romanian landscape, following suspects and attempting to be inconspicuous. The case he is on concerns a teenager suspected of supplying hashish to his school friends, a petty crime, but one which carries a potential prison sentence of seven years. Cristi is troubled by his conscience. He sees his target as just a kid who smokes a bit of pot, who poses no harm to society, but Cristi's superiors want the teenager arrested. <span style=""> </span></span></p><div style="text-align: left; font-family: georgia;"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: left; font-family: georgia;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:100%;" > </span></p><div style="text-align: left; font-family: georgia;"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: left; font-family: georgia;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:100%;" >The majority of the film shows Cristi in silence pursuing his victim along city streets a discreet distance behind, hands in pockets, head hunched, long grey shots where nothing much happens. When he is not walking Cristi is standing outside buildings, smoking cigarettes, waiting for his target to emerge. We discover his character through his movement and body language. Other scenes show the drudgery of the Police offices, meetings Cristi tries to avoid, paperwork and bureaucracy he can't avoid. It would be tempting to describe <span style="font-style: italic;">Police, Adjective</span> as Kafkaesque, because it deals with bureaucracy, but that would be too easy. This is not as sinister as Kafka, merely bored people going about their daily routines, keeping busy with meaningless tasks because that is what they have to do to earn a living. </span></p><div style="text-align: left; font-family: georgia;"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: left; font-family: georgia;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:100%;" > </span></p><div style="text-align: left; font-family: georgia;"> </div><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: left; font-family: georgia;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:100%;" >Our hero attempts to delay the inevitable sting operation by trying to prove the kid is not the supplier, it’s his older brother, who is out of the country at the moment, and they should await the brother’s return before acting, but in a crucial and brilliant penultimate scene where Cristi faces his Captain and his conscience we learn through a Romanian dictionary the meanings of the words ‘conscience’, ‘law’, ‘moral’ and ‘police’, and Cristi is finally convinced he has no choice but to carry out the sting. <span style="font-style: italic;">Police, Adjective</span> is a beautifully shot, superbly paced study of absurdity and bureaucracy and the traps in which we all allow ourselves to be placed within our ordinary everyday existence.</span></p>James Merrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07624385352578202678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1525466345555776552.post-78098318919764880082011-03-15T21:20:00.006+00:002011-03-15T22:11:14.476+00:00Why?On the 7th August 1974 Phillipe Petit walked a wire stretched 450m, 1340ft, or 1/4 mile above the ground between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York, an illicit act which had taken many months of careful planning and the help of several accomplices to achieve. After 45 minutes and 8 crossings of the wire suspended high above Manhatten Petit stepped back onto the roof of one of the Towers to be immediately arrested. One of the arresting officers, interviewed straight after the event, was noticably moved by what he had witnessed and admits on camera that although illegally carried out he thinks it to have been an astonishing and wondrous act.<br /><br />A film, directed by James Marsh,<span style="font-style: italic;"> Man on Wire</span>, uses interviews with the protagonists, contemporary photographs and film footage, and reconstructions to tell the tale of the heist like build up to Petit's incredible wire walk. I recently watched <span style="font-style: italic;">Man on Wire </span>a second time, the first being last year at the cinema when it was initially released. It is a beautiful film of a beautiful act.<br /><br />In the film Petit, a street performer from Paris, refers to himself as "a poet conquering beautiful stages." The word 'death' occurs frequently throughout, Petit says the act was "framed by death". As does the word 'passion'. "If I die," he states, "what a beautiful death, to die in the exercise of your passion." There is a fire in his eyes and a seemingly limitless energy to the man as he tells his story. Those close to him are visibly touched by the experience, a number of them weeping at the recollection. His girlfriend of the time, Annie, says "everyday was a work of art to him", and his American accomplice, Albert, says of when he saw Petit practising on a wire "he had an ageless mask of concentration...he became a sphinx." A childlike joy and a childlike seriousness pervades the group of collaborators.<br /><br />The images of the wire walk itself (there is no surviving film footage, only photographs) are so intensely poetic, the fragility of this tiny human being surrounded by the vast expanse of air and the enormity of the steel and glass of the Towers themselves, that the first time I saw the film I thought to myself 'no matter what I produce in this life as an artist I will never create anything so profoundly beautiful as this act.' One of the most common questions Petit has been asked regarding his wire walks is 'why?' Why does he do it? Why does he risk his life for something so apparently pointless? His answer to this question is an answer only a true poet or artist would offer or maybe even understand. His answer is simple: "There is no why."James Merrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07624385352578202678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1525466345555776552.post-13820091894289731092011-03-14T16:56:00.006+00:002011-03-14T17:27:58.961+00:00Someone Needs To Tell the Upper Echelons of the Art World That There's a Recession On<span style="font-style: italic;">I found this essay in a notebook the other day, written back in December. Although publishing it here highlights my inability to keep up with the 'now' of electronic media, the issues it discusses are still pertinent and will remain pertinent for some time to come.</span><br /><br />Someone needs to tell the upper echelons of the art world that there's a recession on (<span style="font-style: italic;">America's gallery giants open British front in the modern art 'arms race', </span>the Observer, 12th December 2010). As in all walks of life this seems to be a recession only for the poor and already underprivileged. While the rich keep on getting richer the gap between the celebrity artist and your average artist keeps on getting wider and wider. An increasing number of millionaire artists hang out with billionaire gallery owners as the majority can't afford to focus solely on their practice, second jobs taking up more of their energy and time.<br /><br />I thought all this big art market stuff had disappeared along with the fading memory of the over-rated and overblown YBA's to be replaced by a new generation of quieter, more serious, introspective and interesting internationalist artists (see Chris Townsend, <span style="font-style: italic;">New Art from London, </span>Thames and Hudson 2006). But no, it seems commercial galleries such as Gagosian and Pace, and owner/dealers such as Jay Jopling and Dasha Zhukova, continue to increase their revenue from and control over the art market, snapping up more 'name' artists for their 'brands'.<br /><br />Although this can be said to be good for those few living artists who benefit (the Martin Creeds, Zhang Xiaogangs and the Keith Tysons. It is worth noting that many of the artists these dealers are dealing with are dead (Bourgeois, Rauschenburg, deKooning, Rothko) and many of the living ones aren't short of exposure (Koons, Hirst, Emin, Gilbert and George)), the question is: is it good for art? Is it even about the art? For although some of these galleries do put on some good shows (one of the most moving exhibitions I have seen in the last couple of years was Richard Serra at the Gagosian in Kings Cross, London) I do wonder about the motives of those involved.<br /><br />Too much of the contemporary art world is about being seen and being seen to be seen in the right circles. There is too much emphasis on the opening night and not enough on the art. I am sure the galleries I am discussing won't be suffering from the impending cuts to the arts budget, whereas said cuts may prove to be the end of the line for many grass roots and artist led initiatives. The question I wish to pose with regard to these circumstances is: how should we artists respond to the challenge of this inevitable crisis?James Merrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07624385352578202678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1525466345555776552.post-85089364442970104692011-03-12T14:16:00.008+00:002011-03-16T11:02:26.163+00:00Into Eternity - Communicating with the FutureThe film <span style="font-style: italic;">Into Eternity</span>, a documentary by Scandinavian film maker Michael Madsen, explores the Finnish nuclear authority's efforts to deal with their rapidly accumulating nuclear waste. Their plan has been to bury it deep within Finlands ancient bedrock. The facility, lying 500 metres underground at the end of 5kms of tunnels, is set to be completed early in the 22nd century. It is designed to safely contain the radioactive waste for the 100,000 years that it will remain hazardous. The film maker addresses the viewer as a voice from the past, our present, with a message for an imagined civilisation far in our future, a warning to stay away from this place, to leave the ground and its invisible dangers undisturbed.<br /><br />The first challenge of the facility is to design something which will last more than ten times the length of anything human beings have previously built. The second and more difficult challenge is how to communicate the danger of the place to an unknown and unknowable future civilisation. In the last 100,000 years many civilisations have risen and fallen, many languages have been developed and lost. How do we communicate with a society of which we can predict nothing? That our own will still be existing 100 millenia from now is unikely. Any warning we leave, if the people then are anything like us, is likely to be ignored, dismissed as superstitious nonsense. They will dig regardless. How can we convince them to leave well alone?<br /><br />The film states there is probably only 100-150 years worth of uranium supplies. Nuclear energy is a finite resource. Something which can provide energy for such a short span will have consequences far further into the future than we can project. Why mess with something we cannot possibly control? <span style="font-style: italic;">Into Eternity</span> with its long slow panning shots of endless tunnels and stark blank laboratories is a beautiful, poetic, terrifying and very real warning to us here and now.James Merrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07624385352578202678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1525466345555776552.post-46013813057539022242011-01-17T17:34:00.001+00:002011-01-17T17:36:44.459+00:00The Time Travelling DespotReading an article this weekend on the people’s uprising in Tunisia (<em>Gang violence taints celebration of Tunisia’a Jasmine Revolution</em>, The Observer 16/1/2011) I am struck by an intriguing image.<br /><br />“In central Tunis people began ripping down the ubiquitous portraits of Ben Ali [the ousted leader] that have adorned public buildings and roundabouts for years. ‘I called him Tarzan’ said a printer watching two men pull down an awning of the Tunisian despot. As the first picture came down another one was revealed behind it and another after that. But the older Ben Ali got the younger he looked in each portrait, revealing the vanity of a man who liked to be filmed in soft focus and have his wrinkles airbrushed.”<br /><br />Firstly, there is the idea of a physical journey back in time, of peeling through literal layers of history, the newer images on the top gradually revealing older and older images underneath. But there is also a reversal going on here. As the subject grew older his vanity grew equally larger and technology was utilised to make him have the appearance of looking younger as the images move forward in time. So with these images we have time seemingly moving in two opposing directions simultaneously, both backwards and forwards.<br /><br />This raises obvious questions of authenticity suggesting the newer images to be less authentic than the older ones. This apparently retrograde use of technology highlights very strongly a concern of contemporary technology and culture, particularly within the realm of the rich and powerful, common not only among political leaders but also among celebrities – a futile desire to remain forever young which goes against the inevitable truth of the aging process and of course eventually death. This is nothing more than a vainglorious mans unobtainable desire for immortality.James Merrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07624385352578202678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1525466345555776552.post-1701928030161417642010-12-14T17:36:00.002+00:002010-12-14T17:39:36.856+00:00Birth on Google Street ViewIn Germany the introduction of Google Street View has provoked an interesting response. As in other countries there are many people not happy about it. Numerous complaints have been made concerning the internet giants’ invasion into the German peoples’ public space. Some, however, have seen it as an artistic opportunity. As reported in the Observer on 28th November (<em>Birth on Google Street View</em>) some very striking images have been appearing on the German streets.<br /><br />On Hubertusallee in the Berlin suburb of Wilmersdorf a live birth can be witnessed. A woman in a purple dress lies on the pavement, her parted legs, knees up, angled away from the camera, a woman in black cradling her head while a man kneels in front of her holding a small baby aloft. Another man stands a little way off, his left arm raised, right hand to his ear speaking animatedly into a mobile phone. The image looks too clean and carefully composed to be real. The story informs us that no birth was ever reported on this street indicating that this is probably an elaborate piece of street theatre.<br /><br />To me this looks like a new form of artistic intervention, the clever utilisation of a new tool to create memorable images and disseminate them to as wide an audience as possible. Apparently this is not an isolated incident. Many such scenes have been appearing all over Germany. This is another example of how the internet is changing the creative industries in ways which its designers could not possibly have foreseen. It is also an example of how artists (because I consider the anonymous culprits to be artists) continue to respond to new technologies in imaginative and unexpected ways in order to create new forms of expression and new forms of art.<br /><br />This is one of those moments where, as one interested in issues of contemporary art, I can only look on in admiration at the intelligence and subversive wit of these performances and say humbly: I wish I had thought of that.James Merrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07624385352578202678noreply@blogger.com0