Paul Klee
at Tate Modern: Making Visible 2013/2014
Paul Klee 1921
No other artist of the twentieth century made marks, lines and doodles
sing with quite the same melody as Paul Klee. As a result, you’ll spend ages
peering at and poring over the witty, joyful masterpieces in this
career-spanning retrospective of the Swiss-German artist, watching Klee’s ideas
spring to life on canvas and on tiny sheets of paper that become flickering
constellations. It's hard to imagine now that his intricate, fantastical art
was regarded as 'degenerate' by the Nazis in the early1930s. At that time, Klee
was teaching at the Düsseldorf Academy. When he returned to his native Bern in
Switzerland in 1933, his work became darker in tone, reflecting the
deteriorating political situation and his severe illness – diagnosed as
scleroderma in 1936.
Blue Night 1937
The Tate's exhibition challenges Klee’s reputation as a whimsical
dreamer – famous for describing drawing as being like 'taking a line for a walk
– drawing attention to the rigour with which he recorded and catalogued his
work throughout his career. We can’t time-travel to enter Klee’s studio and see
how his works progressed but, in offering up paintings made in sequence, Tate
Modern’s show gives us the next best thing. Moving through the exhibition is
like seeing a series of snapshots of Klee’s working life. You’ll discover how
paintings developed in tandem or relay, like the Tate’s famous watercolour
‘They’re Biting’, which is flanked by three works that precede it and one that
follows. Or how they may have been revisited and reworked over time, like ‘Akt
(Nude)’, which Klee started in 1910 but didn’t finish until 1924.
Tate’s reappraisal sheds light on dualities in Klee’s character. He was
a talented musician (he played the violin, often to make ends meet) as well as
an artist. He was also ambidextrous, painting and drawing with one hand while
writing with the other. This stunning show also reveals that, while there are
elements of cubism, surrealism and pointillism in his work, he was, above all,
an individualist. It leaves you with a sense of creative, personal enquiry
about the world that is uplifting and truly inspiring.
Static Dynamic Intensification
Paul Klee at Tate Modern:
curator interview(Matthew Gale) from Tate Modern
Paul Klee is forever associated with his famously quirky description of
drawing as ‘taking a line for a walk’. The stories about the Swiss-German
artist that have stuck since his death in 1940 are similar eccentric. There’s
the tale of his first day of teaching at the Bauhaus in 1921, when Klee, then
aged 41 and already well-known in Europe, is said to have backed through the
door of the classroom, avoiding eye contact with his students, drawn two arcs
on the blackboard and declared: ‘This is the fish of Columbus!'
Another anecdote from around 1930 – by the American art collector Edward MM
Warburg – places Klee in his Dessau studio. When the artist’s beloved cat Bimbo
ambles across the still-wet watercolours they are admiring, Warburg tries to
shoo it away. Klee, however, just laughs and says: ‘Many years from now, one of
your art connoisseurs will wonder how in the world I ever got that effect.’
Steps 1929
These accounts are of a piece with Klee’s endlessly innovative and
apparently effortless paintings and works on paper, with their flowing lines,
glowing patchworks of colour and whimsical depictions of animal, plant and sea
life.
‘Klee’s work is always about what it means to be in the world, how to process
it,’ says Matthew Gale, curator of the first Klee exhibition in London for more
than a decade. Yet, behind the freewheeling genius there was another,
altogether more obsessive side to this modern master. Throughout his career,
Klee used a variety of numbering systems – made up of the year, month and day –
as a way of documenting his prodigious output. His apparently spontaneous
creativity, which led to a total of 9,000 works being produced during his lifetime,
was always held in check by this analytical approach to numbering his work. It
was his way of revisiting what he had made, making sense of quickfire artistic
impulse.
Featuring around 200 paintings, Tate Modern’s new show foregrounds this
characteristic, using it to delve deep into Klee’s creative processes. ‘The way
in which the exhibition is structured derives from Klee’s own numbering system,
which he started in 1911,’ explains Gale. ‘The purpose is to show the
incredible diversity of his production.’
Comedy 1921
Museum exhibitions are great at presenting us with end results – those
polished, cherished icons of art history. They’re often less adept at revealing
how those results came into being. We can’t time-travel to enter Klee’s studio
and see how his works progressed but – in offering up paintings made in
sequence – Tate Modern’s show gives us the next best thing. Moving through the
exhibition is like seeing a series of snapshots of Klee’s working life. You’ll
discover how paintings developed in tandem or relay, like the Tate’s famous
watercolour ‘They’re Biting’ (1920), which is flanked by works that precede and
follow it.
Tate’s reappraisal sheds light on dualities in Klee’s character. He was a
talented musician (he played the violin, often to make ends meet) as well as an
artist. He was ambidextrous, painting and drawing with his left hand while
writing (and signing the work) with his right. ‘I think cataloguing the work
allows him to have a structure,’ explains Gale. ‘This clear, orderly side to
him means he can open the door of his studio and range freely as his
imagination allows him.’
If Klee is underappreciated in Britain, Gale puts it in part down to fashion:
‘We’ve passed through a sort of dip in his reputation and I hope that we’re
going to inspire a new generation to look at Klee in a different way.’ It may
also be due to the juggernaut of art history. While Picasso will forever be linked
with cubism, Matisse fauvism and Seurat pointillism, Klee’s fame may have
suffered from a lack of ties to any particular art movement. ‘“Isms” aren’t
everything,’ says Gale. ‘I think the fact that Klee isn’t associated with an
“ism” can make him difficult to categorise, but I think that is probably also
the strong point in his legacy – that he provides an example of an incredibly
rich creativity that’s not pigeonholed.
Full Moon 1933
Klee was
certainly celebrated in his lifetime, with a solo exhibition at the
Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1921 and a retrospective at the Museum of Modern
Art, New York, in 1930. During the final decade of his life, Picasso and
Wassily Kandinsky came to pay tribute to the master in Bern, Switzerland, where
Klee took refuge after his work was deemed ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis and he was
dismissed from his teaching position in Düsseldorf.
By this time he had been diagnosed with scleroderma, a debilitating hardening
of the skin. Klee’s numbering of his work didn’t stop but his production became
erratic. In 1936, he produced just 25 works, while in 1939 he made more
than 1,000 paintings and drawings that ‘fell like leaves’ around him. The last
work he numbered in 1940, a leap year, is 366. ‘There seems something very
symbolic about stopping with that number as if he feels he’s completed that
year’s work,’ says Gale. ‘He clearly knew he was dying.’
While this casts a shadow over Klee’s later works, many of his final paintings
are defiantly upbeat, like the joyously rhythmic ‘Twilight Flowers’ (1940).
It’s this sense of playful enquiry about the world which Gale hopes visitors
will take away with them. ‘I think you’ll get a sense of the amazingly
productive journey he goes on, and go away inspired to make work yourself, in
whatever realm. Klee wrote, as well as playing the violin and painting, making
his own brushes and puppets for his son. His is not an exclusive sort of
creativity but one that encourages you to explore that creative part of your
life.’ Who knows, maybe you’ll even get the cat to take a line for a walk too.
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Marcus Coates has proposed to place a large replica
of ‘The Eagle’, a rocky outcrop situated in Brimham Rocks, Yorkshire on the
plinth; Trafalgar Square is almost entirely fashioned from stone, sourced from
all over Britain and manipulated into buildings, pillars and statues by the
will of architects, designers and sculptors. Marcus Coates plans to contrast
these symbols of rational progress with a huge replica of a gritstone outcrop
created hundreds of millions of years ago in Yorkshire by the natural forces of
ice, wind and rain. Its form suggests a face or a bird, as we automatically try
to make sense of the organic shapes that emerge and retreat as we walk around
it, and invest it with human qualities or mythical powers. It would be a
monument to non-human creativity and a totem of timeless, irrepressible powers.
David Shigley’s design, Really Good, is a 10-metre-high thumbs-up,
cast in the same dark patina as the other statues in the square; A giant hand
in a thumbs-up gesture, and with a really long thumb at that, must mean that
something, somewhere, is really good. But what is that something and where is
it? Is it Trafalgar Square? Or all of London? Or maybe the artwork itself? And
if it’s so good, why is that? Who says so? And will we agree?
Hans Haacke has created a skeletal, riderless horse that will
display the live ticker of the London Stock Exchange on an electric ribbon tied
to its leg; Instead of the statue of William III astride a horse, as originally
planned for the empty plinth, Hans Haacke proposes a skeleton of a riderless,
strutting horse. Tied to the horse’s front leg is an electronic ribbon which
displays live the ticker of the London Stock Exchange. The horse is derived
from an etching by George Stubbs, whose studies of equine anatomy were
published the year after the birth of the reputedly decadent king, whose statue
was abandoned due to a lack of funds. Haacke’s proposal makes visible a number
of ordinarily hidden substructures, tied up with a bow as if a gift to all.
Liliane Lijn’s proposal shows two identical kinetic cones made of
brushed anodised aluminium engaged in a mesmerising dance; Rather than one
imposing sculptural object, Liliane Lijn’s proposal The Dance features
the complex changing relation between two apparently identical objects. The
cone is a ubiquitous abstract form that occurs in mathematical, mythical and
astronomical systems. Here the cones also relate to the spire of St.
Martin-in-the-Fields, while their gleaming metallic surfaces recall the
machinery of space travel. Once The Dance begins, formal geometry
gives way to sensual movement and we become mesmerised by the energy of the
interaction.
Ugo Rondinone’s Moon Mask is an aluminium, abstract sentinel facing
out over the square; Ugo Rondinone’s MOON MASK, modelled expressively by
hand, enlarged, cast in aluminium, and fixed to a pole, would be an abstract
sentinel facing out over the square. MOON MASK seemingly refers to many
visual traditions – perhaps the folk art of an ancient clan or early 20th
century Cubism, which was itself influenced by African tribal masks – and yet
it makes no specific claims for its origin. The eventual work would inspire
free association, its three window-like apertures suggesting portals through
which cultural references and individual emotions can tumble at will.
Mark Leckey has designed a creature made of amalgamated
elements of the permanent statues in Trafalgar Square, including details from
the statues of James II, Admiral Jellicoe, the water fountain, and the Fourth
Plinth itself. Mark Leckey has riffed on elements
traditionally found carved in marble or cast in bronze, including scrolls,
coats of arms and a sword in its scabbard for Larger Squat Afar (an
anagram of Trafalgar Square).
“I believe the proposal reflects how we now approach the world in the 21st century. Because of current technology, objects and artefacts are no longer these fixed, permanent things. Instead we look at any sculpture, object or image and ask, what can I do with that? How can I change it to suit my desires?”
Is All art Religious? Is all Religion Art?
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Fourth Plinth Commission 2014
Exhibition
of Proposals for the Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square, London, to be exhibited
2014
St Martin-in-the-Fields 25th September to 17th
November 2013
Coates makes
videos, performances and installations that are in turn sublime and humorous,
asking audiences and participants to explore their imaginations in ways they
might not ordinarily. Communing with animal and bird spirits, emulating their
movements or transmitting their calls and cries, the artist attempts to answer
questions on how we can live in urban societies. His observations might strike
a chord with his audiences through metaphor, or through the sheer desire to
make sense of a disordered universe.
Really Good would be cast in bronze with the same dark patina as the other statues
in the Square, the comic extension of the thumb bringing it up to ten metres in
height. Shrigley’s ambition is that this will become a self-fulfilling
prophecy; that things considered ‘bad’, such as the economy, the weather and
society, will benefit from a change of consensus towards positivity.
Shrigley’s
daily tirade of satirical vignettes takes the British tradition of satire into
three and four dimensions. In his drawings and animations protagonists express
their dark impulses and are subject to the violence and irrationality of life,
while his sculptures are often jokes in 3D form, reflecting the absurdity
of contemporary society.
Haacke’s
early work employed physical and organic processes, such as condensation, in
what he called ‘systems’, until his focus shifted to the socio-political field
of equally interdependent dynamics. For the last four decades Haacke has been
examining relationships between art, power and money, and has addressed issues
of free expression and civic responsibilities in democratic societies. Haacke’s
practice is difficult to categorise, moving from object to image to text, from
painting to photography, at times of a provocative nature.
The shifting
shapes and interactions of The Dance are an extension of Lijn’s interest
in combining energy and matter, language and light. Her small and large-scale
kinetic installations often use technologies such as laser cutting,
programmable electronics and aerogel, a material used by NASA to capture
stardust. Lijn’s Poemcons and Poem Machines, rotating cones and
drums bearing evocative words and phrases, offer tantalising fragments of
meaning and insight, while ultimately falling apart in the mind.
Rondinone’s
preoccupation with time - at the cosmic scale as well as that of art history
and everyday experience - often finds form in abstract imagery intended to
connect the sublime with the everyday. His optically shimmering mandala
paintings, for example, re-use the geometric Buddhist symbol for eternity.
Elsewhere figures made from stacked, roughly hewn cubes of rock seem to express
an ancient sense of awe in the face of nature, while also offering a range
of contemporary readings from the psychological to the comical.
“I believe the proposal reflects how we now approach the world in the 21st century. Because of current technology, objects and artefacts are no longer these fixed, permanent things. Instead we look at any sculpture, object or image and ask, what can I do with that? How can I change it to suit my desires?”
Larger Squat Afar is an anagram of ‘Trafalgar Square’, and Mark Leckey’s chimera is
itself an amalgam of elements lifted from all the statues found in the square.
Details of James II, the water fountain, Admiral Jellicoe and the plinth itself
are enmeshed into a single figure, which, while appearing absurd illustrates
the compound history of both people and place. Fabricated using 3D laser
scanning and printing technology, Larger Squat Afar embodies the power
of the digital to overcome the physical and to fulfill the more monstrous
capacities of the human imagination.
Leckey
frequently looks to the mediated nature of public and private environments, in
which imagery is employed to transcend the mundane. Collage and animation
techniques are used in videos and sculptures, where the hidden is made
explicit, desires are expressed and obscure personal narratives are revealed.
It is digital platforms, above all else, that signal the contemporary for
Leckey, where even the inanimate object can appear to communicate to us at
will.
ARTIST
BIOGRAPHIES
Marcus
Coates
Born 1968 in
London. Lives and works in London.
Marcus
Coates makes videos, performances and installations that attempt to answer
questions about how we live in urban societies. He has had recent solo
exhibitions at South Alberta Gallery, Canada (2012); and Milton Keynes Gallery
(2010). Recent public art projects include Create London (2013) and Vision
Quest: a ritual for Elephant & Castle (2012). Coates has also performed at
Port Eliot Festival, Cornwall; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Kunsthalle Zurich;
Barbican Art Gallery, London; and Hayward Gallery, London.
Hans Haacke
Born 1936 in
Cologne. Lives and works in New York.
For the last
four decades Hans Haacke has been examining the relationships between art,
power and money, and has addressed issues of free expression and civic
responsibilities in democratic societies in his work. He works in many
different mediums including painting, photography and written text. He has had
recent solo exhibitions at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
(2012); MIT List Visual Arts Centre, Cambridge, MA (2011); X-Initiative, New
York (2009); and Akademie der Künste, Berlin (2006). Haacke’s work has been
included in four Documentas and numerous biennials around the world. He shared
a Golden Lion Award with Nam June Paik for the best pavilion at the 45th Venice
Biennale (1993), and in 2000 he unveiled a permanent installation in the
Reichstag, Berlin.
Mark Leckey
Born 1964 in
Birkenhead. Lives and works in London.
Mark
Leckey’s work explores the mediated nature of public and private environments,
often working collage and animation techniques into his video and sculptural
work. He has had recent solo exhibitions at The Hammer museum, Los Angeles
(2013); Banff Centre, Alberta (2012); Serpentine Gallery, London (2011); Abrons
Art Centre, New York (2009); and Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2008). Leckey
curated the Hayward Touring show ‘The universal addressability of dumb things’
(2013) and was awarded the Turner Prize in 2008.
Liliane Lijn
Born 1939 in
New York. Lives and works in London.
Internationally
exhibited since the 1960s, with works in numerous collections including Tate,
the British Museum, and the V&A, and FNAC, Paris, Lijn is best known for
her kinetic sculptures and her work with language and light. Recent exhibitions
include Light Years at Sir John Soane’s Museum, London (2011); Gallery One, New
Visions Centre, Signals, Indica at Tate Britain, London (2012); Ecstatic
Alphabets/Heaps of Language at MoMA, New York (2012); and Cosmic Dramas, mima,
Middlesborough. Recent public commissions include Solar Beacon, a sci-art
installation of heliostats on the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge; and Light
Pyramid, a beacon for the Queen’s Jubilee, which was commissioned by Park Trust
and MK Gallery, Milton Keynes.
David
Shrigley
Born 1968 in
Macclesfield. Lives and works in Glasgow.
David
Shrigley’s work draws on the British tradition of satire, creating drawings,
animations and sculptures that reflect the absurdity of contemporary society.
He has had recent solo exhibitions at Bradford 1 Gallery (2013); Cornerhouse
Gallery (2012), Hayward Gallery, London (2012); Yerba Beuna Centre for the
Arts, San Francisco (2012); and Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow (2010). Shrigley’s
Sort of Opera: Pass the Spoon was performed at Tramway, Glasgow, and Southbank
Centre, London (2011 – 12), and he has been nominated for the Turner Prize
2013.
Ugo
Rondinone
Born 1964 in
Brunnen, Switzerland. Lives and works in New York.
Ugo Rondinone
is a mixed-media artist whose work explores themes of fantasy and desire. He
has had recent solo exhibitions at M Museum, Leuven (2013); Art Institute of
Chicago (2013); Common Guild, Glasgow (2012); Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens
(2012); and Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau (2010). Rondinone has created public
commissions for the Rockefeller Plaza, New York; the IMB Building, New York;
and Louis Vuitton, Munich. He represented Switzerland in the 52nd Venice
Biennale (2007).
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Is All art Religious? Is all Religion Art?
God is Dead
Signs in Peckham
Christopher Clack
2011
Art as a Facilitator of Society.
Is all Art Religious?
Is all Religion Art?
These two over-simplified questions are not reversals of one
another.
In the first question
the term Art refers to not just those creative expressions of a society in
which all basic needs are met and there is time for recreation and
self-expression, but to the practices which have been associated by a
structured society to basic needs as well, such as the astrological
agricultural practices of the Ancient Egyptians. This requires a suitably developed social
structure which has had time to contemplate non-material explanations for
material or natural phenomena. Art in
the first question might also encompass methods which today are regarded as
occupying a field completely separate to Art, for example mathematical models
of the universe or alpha-numerical sequences of purported significance, the
most common, useful and contemporaneous of these, I propose to be the study of
Fractals, mathematical sets whereby patterns are the same at every scale or
nearly the same at different scales, vaguely comparable to infinite regression.
To be Religious, as the first question is phrased, does not
require that something is part of a formal structure or a recognised
Religion. The term encompasses a variety
of spiritual, ritualistic and pseudo-scientific phenomena which have parallels
across many societies, such as astronomy, idol worship and deification. Symbolism is a common theme in Art and
Religion.
In the second question, Art is a similar concept, but
whereas some Art is obviously apparent as itself, the paintings and mosaics of
churches around the globe for example, the term encompasses the written and
spoken word, the staging of events as managed theatrics, music and decorative
visual arts. In this second question
Religion does refer to formal structured religions.
It requires that all human beings have similar cognitive
processes and respond in predictable ways.
Neurotheology (a term from Huxley’s novel Island) is the study of the
brain and Religion, and the search for the God Spot. Responses to Religious stimuli are monitored,
but as the extent of any spiritual experience is entirely subjective and so the
studies are no more in depth than showing correlations. There has been research into an evolutionary
history for religion. Nicolas Wade, a
British science writer for the New York Times wrote,
“Like most behaviours that are found in societies throughout
the world, religion must have been present in the ancestral human population
before the dispersal from Africa 50,000 years ago. Although religious rituals
usually involve dance and music, they are also very verbal, since the sacred
truths have to be stated. If so, religion, at least in its modern form, cannot
pre-date the emergence of language. It has been argued earlier that language
attained its modern state shortly before the exodus from Africa. If religion
had to await the evolution of modern, articulate language, then it too would
have emerged shortly before 50,000 years ago.” (N. Wade. Before the Dawn.
Penguin Books 2006 .p.8 p.165)
It may be that religion conferred an evolutionary advantage
on those who followed it and it may therefore have been naturally selected
for. Advantages of religion may include
social cohesion and thus the elaborate and expensive (in terms of time, money,
danger etc.) individual religious practices and ceremonies show the extent of
an individual’s commitment to a group (Sosis, R.; Kress,
H. C.; Boster, J. S. (2007). "Scars for war: evaluating alternative signalling
explanations for cross-cultural variance in ritual costs". Evolution
and Human Behavior 28 (4): 234–247).
It is impossible to argue that Art is
cheap. One need only to wander into a
moderate village Church in the U.K. and if it was constructed before The
Reformation (the actions of Martin Luther in 1517 are seen as the starting
point in this) then it will have been constructed from and decorated with
expensive and elaborate materials. There
are famous examples around the globe of elaborate sacred sites.
There is, once we acknowledge the historical
significance of Religion even if it is not as evident today, a lot of power
tied up with, not only the physical wealth of, but also the administration of
Religion. In England the Bible was not
published in the language of the population until, at the earliest, the tenth
century, but it was not translated into Modern English until the early
sixteenth century when John Tyndale produced his widely distributed
version. This was also the first
press-printed Bible. Thus the work of translating the most important
theological ideas to the masses was in the power of an Elite. The use of visual representations of
interpreted scriptural messages was commonplace and thus Art was the language
of Religion. It is easy to believe that
those holding such sway over the masses would not wish to relinquish it but to
reinforce it through elaborate and mysterious ceremonies and so an
understanding of stage craft would be beneficial.
Today, in the UK, we inhabit an
increasingly Secular society and yet our brains are no different from those of
our forebears. Religion may be distant
from our lives but Art is almost inseparable from it. Unless we live in the most remote Crofting
community, I would suggest that daily life is awash with music, design,
architecture, photography and film. It
may be that sculpture and mass produced pictorial Art is not everywhere but it
is not hard to find and fine examples of original works, such as paintings and
sculpture have to be sought out by an individual but there is designated government
funding to make these works available to the public.
If Art is not required as a religious
tool anymore and, in general, the population is turning away from Religion,
then why should Art retain any importance to us? Is it a way to access the same basic emotions
associated with the human condition and the universal practical issues of
living in a society? As we academically
turn towards scientific explanations for material phenomena, we cannot accept
the teachings of Formal Religion, but we retain a need for what it provided us
with.
Art was a facilitator for this in the past exactly as it is now.
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The Reith Lectures 2013
Playing to the Gallery by Grayson Perry.
I have been following the career of Grayson Perry since the very moment I saw him on television in the early nineties. I was a schoolgirl, attending a convent school in a Cheshire village and contemporary art was not part of my life.
I saw Grayson Perry, as Claire, accepting the Turner Prize (of which I had never heard) and a different side of what might be sensible appeared to me. It wasn't a conscious decision to follow Mr Perry and it is only in recent years that I have gone out of my way to seek out his work, his exhibitions, but whenever he was mentioned I was interested.
He is a fascinating man. He has the confident authority of most successful artists, but he always seems to be lacking the arrogance of many of his peers. He might be odd, he might be married to his psychoanalyst, he might be many things, but I believe that he is a fascinating and humorous man ans I was was delighted when I heard he would be giving this year's series of Reith Lectures.
The following is not a transcript of the lectures but a summary of what I gain from listening to them.
1. Democracy has bad taste.
Grayson Perry inhabits the Art World. As an artist and lecturer and commentator on contemporary arts, he does not consider himself an expert but must indeed be a close approximation.
As an insider of the this rarefied world and in giving these lectures he tries to encourage people to engage with physical places where art is to be to found and to be comfortable.
Speaking primarily with regard to the visual arts, Grayson Perry considers museums, commercial galleries and the more introspective, historical artist-dealer-collector relationship. He dissects the 5.3million visitors per annum to the Tate Modern, one of the U.K.s most popular tourist destinations. These visitors have been split into categories, some of whom, Grayson argues, would be impossible to keep away and these include the 'Urban Arts Eclectic' and the 'Mature Explorers', but he addresses himself to the 36% of visitors categorised as 'Dinner and a Show' or 'Fun, Fashion and Friends'.
During the discourse, Insider, Mr Perry, recognises the intimidating nature of the gallery environment and tries to address this by providing the imagined visitor with a methodology of approaching the art to which they will be exposed and how to judge it on an alien scale of merit.
The issues of judging art and of deciding upon its quality are addressed as one and the same things, in most respects. For example the popularity of a piece of art does not mean it is of quality but an historically significant piece or one of aesthetic sophistication may become very popular and therefore valuable and will inevitably be of quality.
As humans looking at art we will all have many similar responses and many of these can be cultural. Several Russian artists surveyed the preferences of the public, across several countries, as regards contemporary art and discovered that most people prefer the colour blue. This is of course of no help to anyone but it is interesting nevertheless.
There is a language which surrounds the discussion of art which may be alienating to the general public and also unhelpful to artists themselves. An analysis of the website of art gallery press releases E Flux showed it contained very few nouns; Art English. This is a In the hundred years leading up to the 1970s, Grayson Perry argued, art became very self-conscious. This could prove debilitating to artists and being such a subjective problem it has led to the search for an empirical way to prove Quality in art (such as The Venetian Secret Hoax).
Clement Greenberg stated that art is always tied to money, as a luxury item this is hard to dispute. The more expensive a work of art, the more renowned it becomes and therefore the more influential. Strangely, Perry notes, that in the gallery situation, pieces are often priced according to their size, although this factor is removed by the time the work reaches the secondary market.
So, if the value of a work of art is an unreliable indicator of its quality, what remains?
Here Perry raises the important issue of Validation. As a scientific paper undergoes peer review before journal publication, so a work of art is first validated by peer review before being placed in a gallery. The status of this gallery is of great importance and is enhanced by Validation from serious critics and then collectors and dealers, dealers themselves being one of the important factors in this process as their reputation dictates the placing of the work for sale and the likelihood of it being picked up by a serious collector, thus adding kudos to the work of the artist.
Finally the public have the chance to Validate the work. Numbers of visitors to a show are measurable and an important source of information available to curators, perhaps one of the single most important. Gallery and museum curators decide what goes onto display to the general public and this over time should help to stabilise the prices for an artist, thus giving collectors more confidence in their investments. With humour, Perry notes that bank vaults are stuffed with Silver, Wine, Art and Gold (S.W.A.G.).
To finish this study of quality and validation, Grayson Perry, notes that Political Art is largely outside of this process. If the message is agreed with by enough people, they will enjoy the message of the art. It is interesting to consider how many artists keep their political and artistic endeavours entirely separate. He ends this first lecture with a quote from Alan Bennett "you don't have to like it all".
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Frieze Art Fair London 2013
Although completely overwhelming, the enormous tent that is Frieze contains many wonders of the world. Somethings stop you in your tracks by virtue of surprise, amazement or bewilderment. My personal low point consisted of four people standing beneath a black sheet; they had head holes but I spent more time contemplating my very reasonably priced sandwich (it's the drinks that hammer one's pocket). My high point was a series of miniature sculptures made of cardboard and plastic. Other people will have very different opinions and that is the joy of the sheer vastness and variety that is Frieze. Also, Frieze cannot be done in a day and I was there for around four hours so I can only present very edited highlights.
Sou Fujimoto, a Japanese architect (born 1971) designed the temporary Serpentine gallery Pavilion in London. His miniature models of architectural space were fascinating, drawing the viewer in close and having an almost weightless quality.
An amazing explosion of colour and skill was demonstrated by an artist selected by the Tina Kim Gallery, New York. This eye catching North Korean hand embroidery on silk by KyungA Ham (b. 1971) had many passers by stop.
Entitled Greed is Good, the pattern was so dynamic that it took a closer inspection to believe it was a hand embroidery.
The
Egyptian born artist, Wael Shawky (b.1971) and represented by the
Sfeir-Semler Gallery of Hamburg and Beirut, is mostly known for his
videos of mythical journeys, featuring some animation and puppetry. Two
of the marionettes from his Cabaret Crusades to Cairo were displayed.
Made of ceramic, wood and paint, the two characters were very
charismatic and, in their glass cabinet, invoked the activity of their
journey.
The Johan Berggren Gallery displayed the "creative debris" of artist Ryan Siegan-Smith (b. 1982) who has worked under various names, including Leeroy the Duck and Allen Mothchart. He works by accumulating visual aide-memoirs in order to recall number sequences using mnemonic techniques. Although the numerical sequence itself seems somewhat irrelevant, it is the celebration of the techniques of the type of mind which wants to learn such sequences wherein lies the interest. There is no way of discerning which visual clues relate to which numbers, but the very fact that they have working significance to an individual encourages contemplation.
Johanna
Calle (b. 1965) selected by Casas Riegner produces works based on her
native Colombia and the fragility of the environments. The series
Conflicted Land is composed of pictures of trees native to Colombia, the
photos being cut out from aerial photos which are taken to police the
growth and illegal felling of these precious resources. The images are
simple and engaging but it is not too far a stretch to relate to the
social and political issues she tries to emphasise.
Working
in film and photography, one of the most arresting displays was that of
Marcus Coates (b.1968), selected by Kate MacGarry. His very high
resolution prints onto rice paper of animals were superb. What raised
then above the standard of fascinating photography or animal portraiture
was the way in which they had been made three dimensional. Not only
was there a fantastic depth to the photos and the colours themselves,
but the paper had been creased and crinkled into sculptural forms which
emphasised the shape of the subject matter. Thus a photo of an ostrich
became a 3D sculpture of a picture of an ostrich, an effect which
continued whilst looking down the side of the print.
Korean
artist Yeesookyung (b. 1963) has many varied pieces in the Saatchi
Gallery all following the theme of the Translated Vase. By using broken
ceramics and reassembling them into a completely different form, she
draws on the Japanese tradition of 'fixing' broken ceramics, using
precious metals, so that the vessel is not only made stronger but so
that the repair becomes part of the history of the vessel. I didn't
find that Yeesookyung quite achieved this resonance. The parts of the
vessel were too obviously broken to create a matching set (colour,
design, size) and they were cemented together, the join then being
over-painted by 24kt gold. This was imprecisely done and highlighted to
me the gulf between Yeesookyung's work and the fine craftsmanship of
the traditional inspiration.
Li
Songsong (b. 1973) selected by Pace, has a fascinating collage,
multi-canvas style. It invites inquiry. It is a whole made of
harmonious and yet overlapping components. The colours are wrong, the
style is coarse and there is an element of the random thrown in, but the
whole resolves into an almost photographic image. When he paints a
person, the result is portrait like, even if each thickly painted canvas
is difficult to resolve.
There
were some standard favorites represented at Frieze, including Damien
Hirst and Takashi Murakami, which were great fun to see, although
already familiar and recognisable at twenty paces. New to me was the
work of Tony Cragg (b. 1949) the 1988 Turner Prize winner. I was
enchanted by his sandstone-esque sculpture, made from metal and
seemingly beyond scale. He is an artist I will enjoy investigating
further.
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Sir Anthony Caro
One of the 20th century's most influential British sculptors has died of a heart attack as he approached his ninetieth birthday.
Likened by many to Henry Moore, a generation before him, for his worldwide influence, Caro first came to the art world's attention in 1963 at the Whitechapel Gallery His 1963 sculpture Early One Morning was an abstract, brightly coloured sculpture which showed Caro's background in engineering and put forward a new movement in how sculpture was presented.
Sir Anthony Caro was the recipient of many prizes, including the Lifetime Achievement Award in sculpture. He was knighted and given the Order of Merit and was the subject of a 2005 Tate Britain Retrospective.
Interestingly, he was also one third of the design team behind London's Millennium Bridge.
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The Reith Lectures 2013
Playing to the Gallery by Grayson Perry.
I have been following the career of Grayson Perry since the very moment I saw him on television in the early nineties. I was a schoolgirl, attending a convent school in a Cheshire village and contemporary art was not part of my life.
I saw Grayson Perry, as Claire, accepting the Turner Prize (of which I had never heard) and a different side of what might be sensible appeared to me. It wasn't a conscious decision to follow Mr Perry and it is only in recent years that I have gone out of my way to seek out his work, his exhibitions, but whenever he was mentioned I was interested.
He is a fascinating man. He has the confident authority of most successful artists, but he always seems to be lacking the arrogance of many of his peers. He might be odd, he might be married to his psychoanalyst, he might be many things, but I believe that he is a fascinating and humorous man ans I was was delighted when I heard he would be giving this year's series of Reith Lectures.
The following is not a transcript of the lectures but a summary of what I gain from listening to them.
1. Democracy has bad taste.
Grayson Perry inhabits the Art World. As an artist and lecturer and commentator on contemporary arts, he does not consider himself an expert but must indeed be a close approximation.
As an insider of the this rarefied world and in giving these lectures he tries to encourage people to engage with physical places where art is to be to found and to be comfortable.
Speaking primarily with regard to the visual arts, Grayson Perry considers museums, commercial galleries and the more introspective, historical artist-dealer-collector relationship. He dissects the 5.3million visitors per annum to the Tate Modern, one of the U.K.s most popular tourist destinations. These visitors have been split into categories, some of whom, Grayson argues, would be impossible to keep away and these include the 'Urban Arts Eclectic' and the 'Mature Explorers', but he addresses himself to the 36% of visitors categorised as 'Dinner and a Show' or 'Fun, Fashion and Friends'.
During the discourse, Insider, Mr Perry, recognises the intimidating nature of the gallery environment and tries to address this by providing the imagined visitor with a methodology of approaching the art to which they will be exposed and how to judge it on an alien scale of merit.
The issues of judging art and of deciding upon its quality are addressed as one and the same things, in most respects. For example the popularity of a piece of art does not mean it is of quality but an historically significant piece or one of aesthetic sophistication may become very popular and therefore valuable and will inevitably be of quality.
As humans looking at art we will all have many similar responses and many of these can be cultural. Several Russian artists surveyed the preferences of the public, across several countries, as regards contemporary art and discovered that most people prefer the colour blue. This is of course of no help to anyone but it is interesting nevertheless.
There is a language which surrounds the discussion of art which may be alienating to the general public and also unhelpful to artists themselves. An analysis of the website of art gallery press releases E Flux showed it contained very few nouns; Art English. This is a In the hundred years leading up to the 1970s, Grayson Perry argued, art became very self-conscious. This could prove debilitating to artists and being such a subjective problem it has led to the search for an empirical way to prove Quality in art (such as The Venetian Secret Hoax).
Clement Greenberg stated that art is always tied to money, as a luxury item this is hard to dispute. The more expensive a work of art, the more renowned it becomes and therefore the more influential. Strangely, Perry notes, that in the gallery situation, pieces are often priced according to their size, although this factor is removed by the time the work reaches the secondary market.
So, if the value of a work of art is an unreliable indicator of its quality, what remains?
Here Perry raises the important issue of Validation. As a scientific paper undergoes peer review before journal publication, so a work of art is first validated by peer review before being placed in a gallery. The status of this gallery is of great importance and is enhanced by Validation from serious critics and then collectors and dealers, dealers themselves being one of the important factors in this process as their reputation dictates the placing of the work for sale and the likelihood of it being picked up by a serious collector, thus adding kudos to the work of the artist.
Finally the public have the chance to Validate the work. Numbers of visitors to a show are measurable and an important source of information available to curators, perhaps one of the single most important. Gallery and museum curators decide what goes onto display to the general public and this over time should help to stabilise the prices for an artist, thus giving collectors more confidence in their investments. With humour, Perry notes that bank vaults are stuffed with Silver, Wine, Art and Gold (S.W.A.G.).
To finish this study of quality and validation, Grayson Perry, notes that Political Art is largely outside of this process. If the message is agreed with by enough people, they will enjoy the message of the art. It is interesting to consider how many artists keep their political and artistic endeavours entirely separate. He ends this first lecture with a quote from Alan Bennett "you don't have to like it all".
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Frieze Art Fair London 2013
Although completely overwhelming, the enormous tent that is Frieze contains many wonders of the world. Somethings stop you in your tracks by virtue of surprise, amazement or bewilderment. My personal low point consisted of four people standing beneath a black sheet; they had head holes but I spent more time contemplating my very reasonably priced sandwich (it's the drinks that hammer one's pocket). My high point was a series of miniature sculptures made of cardboard and plastic. Other people will have very different opinions and that is the joy of the sheer vastness and variety that is Frieze. Also, Frieze cannot be done in a day and I was there for around four hours so I can only present very edited highlights.
Sou Fujimoto, a Japanese architect (born 1971) designed the temporary Serpentine gallery Pavilion in London. His miniature models of architectural space were fascinating, drawing the viewer in close and having an almost weightless quality.
An amazing explosion of colour and skill was demonstrated by an artist selected by the Tina Kim Gallery, New York. This eye catching North Korean hand embroidery on silk by KyungA Ham (b. 1971) had many passers by stop.
The Johan Berggren Gallery displayed the "creative debris" of artist Ryan Siegan-Smith (b. 1982) who has worked under various names, including Leeroy the Duck and Allen Mothchart. He works by accumulating visual aide-memoirs in order to recall number sequences using mnemonic techniques. Although the numerical sequence itself seems somewhat irrelevant, it is the celebration of the techniques of the type of mind which wants to learn such sequences wherein lies the interest. There is no way of discerning which visual clues relate to which numbers, but the very fact that they have working significance to an individual encourages contemplation.
The
work of Elaine Sturtevant (b. 1930), selected by Gavin Brown's
enterprise, was interesting as it was unlike anything else I
encountered. It was understated and simple and did not seem to be
'trying'. The basis of Sturtevant's work is repetition but subtle
changes she applies to her work mean each piece is unrepeatable, for
example, her hand-pulled black and white photography.
Tony Cragg
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Sir Anthony Caro
One of the 20th century's most influential British sculptors has died of a heart attack as he approached his ninetieth birthday.
Likened by many to Henry Moore, a generation before him, for his worldwide influence, Caro first came to the art world's attention in 1963 at the Whitechapel Gallery His 1963 sculpture Early One Morning was an abstract, brightly coloured sculpture which showed Caro's background in engineering and put forward a new movement in how sculpture was presented.
Sir Anthony Caro was the recipient of many prizes, including the Lifetime Achievement Award in sculpture. He was knighted and given the Order of Merit and was the subject of a 2005 Tate Britain Retrospective.
Interestingly, he was also one third of the design team behind London's Millennium Bridge.
Paper Wink (1999/2002)
handmade paper, aluminum and wood
Anthony Caro
Anthony Caro
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Patch the Teddy in the Florian Coffee Shop, St Mark's Square, Venice. April 2013.
Kathryn Moores
Drawing.
Journey.
Before
photography, drawing and painting were the only means of recording a
scene or an image accurately. For this purpose drawing can be
extrapolated to include the processes leading up to the production of
prints in earlier times.
Now, with the benefit of the photographic discipline, drawing has expanded its application.
It is still of the utmost importance to have a grasp of the fundamentals of good drawing practice, through life drawing and still-life, as this skill underpins much of the creative processes of sculpture and design; however, drawing can be free from the constraints of gravity and so has, some could argue, a more liberated approach to creativity. It also informs the artist as to what they are distorting from reality as it is an education in perspective and correct proportion.
Selected Life Drawings by Kathryn Moores. Charcoal and paper 2013.
The concept of Journey as a drawing project is very broad.
The artist Mark Bauer (1975) uses the traditional black and white look of photography to record his journeys to different places, for example, a Sanatorium.
HB Sanatorium Kreuzlingen Schloss Bellevue 1988 Mark Bauer
It is still of the utmost importance to have a grasp of the fundamentals of good drawing practice, through life drawing and still-life, as this skill underpins much of the creative processes of sculpture and design; however, drawing can be free from the constraints of gravity and so has, some could argue, a more liberated approach to creativity. It also informs the artist as to what they are distorting from reality as it is an education in perspective and correct proportion.
The concept of Journey as a drawing project is very broad.
The artist Mark Bauer (1975) uses the traditional black and white look of photography to record his journeys to different places, for example, a Sanatorium.
pencil and paper
I
cannot view the destination of a journey as being the same as a
journey; this being a necessity for any human wishing to visit
anywhere. In the past I have traveled with an unusual companion, a toy
of my daughter's, in order that she might feel connected to my having
traveled. These inanimate teddy bears took on a superb preciousness
whilst traveling, such was my concern at losing them, and their
appearance in souvenir photographs lend a particular sense of the
personal to otherwise generic scenes.
Patch the Teddy in the Florian Coffee Shop, St Mark's Square, Venice. April 2013.
Kathryn Moores
Green Bear on the Isle of Wight Ferry for Cowes week 2013
Kathryn Moores
Another way of approaching this concept of taking items for a journey is in the most basic; what do we normally take on a journey but our suitcase? The personal items are contained within the suitcase (unless they are as precious as the above and must be kept in hand luggage all the time).
Komi Tanaka took a suitcase on a journey to Rome and photographed the suitcase in various locales. These pictures, referenced to a tourist map, and displayed alongside the adventurous suitcase, formed an installation at Frieze 2013.
Komi Tanaka We Found Something When We Lost Other Things 2012 unannounced action
The
return address on the suitcase as it was left on corners in Rome was
always the gallery where Komi Tanaka was exhibiting, hence it was also
advertising for his show and a commercial endeavour. I would have been
interested in the record of interactions of the public with this
'abandoned' suitcase in these days of terror alerts and fears of
abandoned bags. This is why I prefer to travel with a teddy bear.
Drawing can always, an this is the most important factor besides recording things for posterity, enter the realms of the unreal. The abstract, the multi-coloured, the distorted; all of these are the everyday of contemporary drawing. Colour is the main feature in the works of Chadwick Rantanen (American 1981), for example, whether he is working in sculpture, installation or drawing.
Multicoloured drawing by Chadwick Rantanen above carbon fibre Loop. Frieze 2013.
Drawings from the imagination appeal to my aesthetic as photo quality reproductions of a scene seem to be outdated.
An imagined journey, with similarities to the disbelieved journey of the Venetian Marco Polo (1254 - 1324) who introduced the Europeans to the cultures of Asia and China and was widely discredited as preposterous, seems a likely drawing project. Even today, with his inclusion of some facts (paper money) and the omission of others (Chinese foot binding practice) there is no consensus as to whether Polo ventured on his journey or simply compiled his narrative from hearsay.
The act of traveling on a journey gives a sense of movement which might be interestingly caught by the discipline of drawing. The blurred exterior passing by the high speed train carriage window, where the train is given a sense of immobility and all motion is external. The characters in the carriage also become important, absorbed in their own journeys and making it a solitary and yet communal undertaking. .
Kathryn Moores
Another way of approaching this concept of taking items for a journey is in the most basic; what do we normally take on a journey but our suitcase? The personal items are contained within the suitcase (unless they are as precious as the above and must be kept in hand luggage all the time).
Komi Tanaka took a suitcase on a journey to Rome and photographed the suitcase in various locales. These pictures, referenced to a tourist map, and displayed alongside the adventurous suitcase, formed an installation at Frieze 2013.
Drawing can always, an this is the most important factor besides recording things for posterity, enter the realms of the unreal. The abstract, the multi-coloured, the distorted; all of these are the everyday of contemporary drawing. Colour is the main feature in the works of Chadwick Rantanen (American 1981), for example, whether he is working in sculpture, installation or drawing.
Drawings from the imagination appeal to my aesthetic as photo quality reproductions of a scene seem to be outdated.
An imagined journey, with similarities to the disbelieved journey of the Venetian Marco Polo (1254 - 1324) who introduced the Europeans to the cultures of Asia and China and was widely discredited as preposterous, seems a likely drawing project. Even today, with his inclusion of some facts (paper money) and the omission of others (Chinese foot binding practice) there is no consensus as to whether Polo ventured on his journey or simply compiled his narrative from hearsay.
The act of traveling on a journey gives a sense of movement which might be interestingly caught by the discipline of drawing. The blurred exterior passing by the high speed train carriage window, where the train is given a sense of immobility and all motion is external. The characters in the carriage also become important, absorbed in their own journeys and making it a solitary and yet communal undertaking. .
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