Review of Your Garden is Looking a Mess Could You Please Tidy it up at PayneShurvell

13/12/11

Your Garden is Looking a Mess Could You Please Tidy it up

PayneShurvell

4 November 2011 – 7 January 2012

PayneShurvell’s small gallery space is currently full to the brim with a mass of works by some big name artists, including Peter Blake and Bruce McLean, both hanging on the walls and strewn across the floor, loosely linked by the theme of cigarette packets and printed matter, or, rather, the disappearance thereof, in the age of radical digitisation and prohibition of tobacco advertising. The soundtrack to this exploration into the changing visual and cultural landscape is provided by Nicky Coutts’ Eastern (2010), a re-enactment of the final scene in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) by thirty non-professional actors in Tokyo. Playing on an eight and a half minute loop, the repetitive Western music soon begins to grate, but it certainly sets the scene for nostalgic flashbacks to the heyday of social smoking.

“Listen, while I tell you a story…” Rudolf Reiber’s artist’s book (Where the flavor is, 2011) is a compilation of texts from the many Marlboro cinema advertisements, themselves often featuring rugged cowboys riding high in the saddle across panoramic landscapes. Peter Blake’s one-off print, made especially for this show, and bearing the same title, also harks back to iconic advertising imagery, this time of Lucky Strike. Finally, in the 1980s, Niall Monroe worked as a tobacco pack designer for STAR, and his work of the same name displays a number of limited edition packets, culminating in the cult design, launched only in Switzerland, celebrating the fall of the Berlin wall.

But is all of this soon to be a thing of the past? Recent legislation in Australia means that from December 2012, all cigarette packaging must be plain and logo free. It is perhaps with this in mind that Marie-Jeanne Hoffner shot her short film in which she uses a scalpel to dismantle, scrape clean, and reassemble a Gauloise packet (Untitled, 2011). Dermot O’Brien takes this one step further by turning his Marlboro packet into an intricate and tiny model of the Bates Motel (Untitled, 2011).

The concept for the show comes from Andrew Curtis, an artist himself, but who also works in a print studio, and who is worried about the demise of this medium. Thus, other works included in the exhibition, which are not focused on the tobacco industry, include Greg Day’s Studland (2011), a large collage comprising ripped and torn posters from advertising billboards, and Gerhard Lang’s Unrecorded Leaf (2011), a series of five frottages made from leaves, each with a slight outline as if it were shaking in the breeze, purportedly exploring the interaction between man and his landscape. A leaf, after all, is the basis of all printed matter.

Perhaps the most innovative work, however, is Their Grassy Places (1971-2011) by Bruce McLean. In the 1960s, the Duke and Duchess of Bedford commissioned their gardener to use fertiliser to create their profiles on their lawn at Woburn Abbey, and a photograph of this was published in the Daily Mirror. McLean then bought the rights to this image and reprinted it in Studio International as an art piece. He later tried to resell this to the Daily Mirror, but they were not interested. For Your Garden is Looking a Mess Could You Please Tidy it up, McLean is inserting his print into a copy of the Daily Mirror bought for each day of the show’s run. He will then sign each of these as an edition. Whether or not the Daily Mirror will be interested now, who can say? Either way, what this peculiarly intriguing exhibition makes clear is that, despite the dying habit of handwritten notes, the homogenisation of books, newspapers and letters into online media, and the banning of cigarette advertising (not least following the actual death of three of the Marlboro campaign’s cowboys, two from lung cancer, one from emphysema), the interaction between visual and printed matter, and the potential for its exploitation, is far from dead.

Images:

Rudolf Reiber

Where the flavor is

Artist’s Book

2011

Dermot O’Brien

Untitled

Laser cut card, Marlboro packet, adhesive

2011

Bruce McLean

Their Grassy Places

45 newspapers containing a screenprint signed and specifically dated by the artist

Edition of 45

1971-2011

Review of Irrational Marks: Bacon and Rembrandt at Ordovas

13/12/11
Irrational Marks: Bacon and Rembrandt

Ordovas

7 October – 16 December 2011

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) and Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606-1669) lived over 300 years apart, and, on the surface, there is not much similarity between their work, so one might well wonder why Pilar Ordovas has chosen to inaugurate her new gallery on Savile Row with an exhibition looking at the connections between the two artists. A small show, comprising just six Bacon paintings (amongst them, two triptychs and one diptych), one Rembrandt, and then a number of working documents and related items, it is, nevertheless, worth a visit, and her well reasoned premise for the link is not actually as tenuous as it might at first seem.

The inspiration for the exhibition came back in 2006 when Ordovas was handling the estate of Valerie Beston, who had looked after Bacon during his time with the Marlborough Gallery. Amongst the items, Ordovas found a photograph, a facsimile of which is included in this show, taken by Irving Penn in June 1962, and depicting Bacon in his studio, with a pinned up, crumpled, and paint-spattered image of Rembrandt’s Self Portrait with Beret (ca. 1659) in the background.

It is well known that Bacon took a lot of inspiration, sometimes quite directly, from a number of his artistic predecessors (perhaps most notably Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, ca. 1650), and his collection of books, photographs, and reproductions filled his studio like a treasure trove. In his interviews with David Sylvester, recorded between 1962-1985, Bacon discusses his art historical interests quite candidly. Martin Harrison, in his essay in the catalogue to accompany this exhibition[1], suggests, however, that the opinions and preferences expressed in this source might well be interpreted in a distorted manner, since Bacon was often looking back in retrospect, rather than expressing his attitude from the time. His admiration for one artist, though, can be seen to remain constant – and this artist is Rembrandt.

Bacon held Rembrandt’s self-portraits, of which there are around sixty, shared between the media of paint and etching, in especially high regard, and spoke in depth about the Self Portrait with Beret in particular, extolling the fleeting application of paint, lack of intricate detail (the work is thought to be unfinished), and what he termed the “anti-illustrational” aspects, such as the deep shading around the eye-sockets, making it appear as if there were none. According to Sylvester, it was from looking at Rembrandt that Bacon learned “how to use an extremely restricted range of colour, how to dissolve forms into space and how to destroy the picture-plane.”[2] In his own words, Bacon praises the late portraits of Rembrandt for being those in which “he made a tightrope walk between appearance and caricature.” [3] In the film clip from an interview with Sylvester[4] being shown in the gallery, Bacon goes on to describe Rembrandt’s style in the beret-clad portrait as “the same as Abstract Expressionism [but] much more exciting and much more profound” because he is trying to record an actual fact, namely, that of self appearance. Certainly, his dark palate, thick brushstrokes, and gestural use of colour to highlight contours, are far from the naturalistic precision of his ancestors. Although the concept of a psychological portrait is not contemporaneous with Rembrandt, it would seem that Bacon would like to attribute something deeper than a pure physical likeness to the Old Master’s work, and, certainly, this attempt to capture something of the true character of the sitter was a goal of Bacon himself.

Notoriously antagonistic towards the prevailing tendencies towards Abstraction and Expressionism, Bacon was dedicated to the figurative in content, if not typically in style. His portraits are mere sketchy suggestions, with distorted figures, areas of bare canvas, strange box-like objects, and a vividly non-naturalistic palate. Indeed there is an undeniable likeness between his paintings and their subjects – perhaps more so than in some photographic style images – but, to my mind at least, this is achieved more through his abstraction and distillation of character than through any careful and planned mark making. Irrational marks they may be, but how else could the irrational character of these artists be so succinctly portrayed?

Whilst one cannot attempt to draw too many conclusions from this small comparison, and whilst it would certainly be out of place to attempt to infer too great a likeness between the two artists’ works, the many photographs and reproductions of Rembrandt’s work that Bacon had in his studio, various of which are on show here, and the obvious attention he paid to them, evidenced by the paint smudges and finger prints with which they are besmirched, do suggest that there is a connection which, until now, has been largely overlooked. As such, as well as simply to enjoy the contorted and agonised Bacon self-portraits and, of course, the glory of there being a Rembrandt hanging amongst them, a visit to this new Mayfair gallery space is to be recommended.

---

[1] Martin Harrison, ‘Irrational Marks: Bacon and Rembrandt’, essay in exhibition catalogue of the same name, Ordovas Gallery, 2011

[2] David Sylvester, ‘The Paintings of Francis Bacon’, The Listener, 3 January 1952, p29, cited in Harrison, op cit

[3] Transcript of Bacon interviewed by David Sylvester, December 1971; Hyman-Kreitman Archive, Tate Britain, cited in Harrison, op cit

[4] Sunday Night Francis Bacon. Interview with David Sylvester. BBC Television; dir. Michael Gill, 1966

Images:

Francis Bacon (1909-1992)

Self-Portrait

oil on canvas

35.5 x 30.5 cm.

Painted in 1972

Private Collection

© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2011

Rembrandt Harmenz. van Rijn (1606-1669)

Self-Portrait with Beret

oil on panel

30.7 x 24.3 cm.

Painted circa 1659

Musée Granet, Communauté du pays d’Aix-en-Provence

© CPA, Musée Granet.

Working document: Fragments of Rembrandt, Self-Portrait at the Easel, 1660, from the book Rembrandt by Tancred Borenius, London: Phaidon Press, 1952 and leaf from book, A Pictorial History of Jazz by Orrin Keepnews and Bill Grauer Jnr, London: Robert Hale Limited,1955 (pp.79/80)

Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, Francis Bacon Archive (Reg. RM98F1A:79)

© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2011

Francis Bacon (1909-1992)

Study for Self-Portrait

oil on canvas

152.4 x 140 cm.

Painted in 1964

Private Collection

© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2011

Review of Laurel Nakadate at the Zabludowicz Collection

12/12/11

Laurel Nakadate

Zabludowicz Collection

29 September – 11 December 2011

www.zabludowiczcollection.com

Oops! I did it again

I played with your heart, got lost in the game

Oh baby, baby

Oops! You think I’m in love

That I’m sent from above

I’m not that innocent!

(Oops! I Did it Again, Britney Spears, 2000)

On the surface, Laurel Nakadate’s collection of video works portray a young, sexy American idol girl, dressed in little more than the skimpiest possible bikini top and shortest shorts, chewing gum, dancing about provocatively to her walkman or stripping with and for ugly middle-aged men with whom she seems quite clearly to have the upper hand. But scratch the surface and is it really as casual and playful as it seems? And if there is exploitation here, who is exploiting whom?

Nakadate’s first UK solo exhibition at the Zabludowicz Collection brings together a large body of her filmic and photographic work from over the past ten years, and also includes a couple of specially commissioned pieces. For I Want to Be the One to Walk in the Sun (2006) and Stories (2005), two of the longer films in the collection, Nakadate travelled across America, hanging out at truck stops, gas stations, and other less than salutary locations, looking to meet men with whom she could go home and make her work. Sometimes this would involve teaching them simplified versions of strip poker, live on camera, other times just asking them to follow her in the dark in a disconcerting style. In between encounters, she is seen in a maid’s outfit, with a dog humping her leg, and pole dancing around lampposts and a support on the porch of a weather-boarded chapel, to the soundtrack of Neil Young’s Heart of Gold. Nothing but a sexual being, the spiritual emptiness and loneliness are resounding.

This loneliness comes across again in Love Hotel (2005), for which Nakadate spent a week alone in Tokyo, staying in various short-term establishments intended for amorous liaisons. To the soundtrack of Bonnie Tyler’s Angel of the Morning – “then slowly turn away, I won’t beg you to stay with me” – she acts out love scenes with an absent, invisible lover. Particularly poignant also is the line: “I’m old enough to face the dawn.” For is she? There is something naïve and childlike to her performances, despite their obvious sexuality. In Greater New York (2005), for example, shot in the wake of 9/11 and capturing “small personal moments,” visions of her dancing to a backdrop of fireworks (a recurrent motif in many of her works: “… I attempt to find beauty in the world. […] Fireworks are so grand, and perfect, and then, only moments later, so wholly disappeared”[1]) and scenes of natural innocence, such as squirrels frolicking in the park, Nakadate cajoles a baby bird, quite obviously dead, to get back up and return to life. Similarly touchingly, Exorcism 3 (Dancing in the Desert for Britney) (2009) contains a performance carried out on the Salt Flats in Utah, about which Nakadate explains that she “danced as an attempt to exorcise Britney Spears’ sadness. I wanted to spare her…” Yet how genuine is this childlike simplicity, when, at the same time, she steadily holds the viewer’s – voyeur’s – gaze?

Britney is clearly an influence on Nakadate. Another work, the three-channel installation Oops! (2000), shows the efforts she made to teach men she met through random encounters to join with her in dancing to this song. In preparation, she watched MTV eight hours a day for a week to transcribe and learn the choreography. She then also bought a Hello Kitty boom box to take with her to the men’s homes. To return to the lyric with which I began: “I’m not that innocent!”

Good Morning Sunshine (2009) stands out from the other works in the exhibition, not only because it is scripted (and without musical accompaniment) and stars three girls (selected via an open casting call on Syracuse, New York) rather than Nakadate herself, but because there is a chilling role reversal. Repeating the same scenario three-times over, once with each girl, Nakadate, armed with her camera, and taking on a sinisterly seductive male role, enters the bedroom, wakens the sleeping beauty, and gradually gets her to stand up and strip: “You know you’re the prettiest girl, right? […] Let me look at you. […] Show me your feet. […] What’s underneath your shirt? […] Don’t be nervous…” The girls, silent for the most part, with the occasion shy smile or nod, stand coyly, equipped with teddy bear, looking uncomfortable, but complying nevertheless. They are being manipulated and groomed, watched and exploited, devalued.

In amongst the films, spread across two small back rooms upstairs, are 365 A4 photographs comprising 365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears (2010), produced between 1 January – 31 December 2010, during which time Nakadate photographed herself crying on a daily basis, purportedly to “deliberately take part in sadness each day.” But these shots – some naked, some not, and ranging from lying on her bed or in the bath, to standing before the mirror, to travelling by plane or train – capture so much more than sadness. They are moments of anguish, desolation, and despair: revealing the cruel truth behind the performances of sexual bravado and laughter. Stripped bare, we see a vulnerable girl with a lack of self worth, seeking meaning, seeking belonging.  Listen again to the lyrics of her carefully selected background songs: in Lessons 1-10 (2002), where Nakadate films herself acting as an art model in a man’s house, dressed as a school girl, in provocative lingerie, or spread eagled naked across the desk, Patsy Cline croons out You Belong to Me. Beyond words, however, is the choice of Satie’s haunting Gymnopédie for Where You’ll Find Me (2005), which reenacts the death and crime scenes of a number of young girls across America, sometimes stripped, beaten and bloodied, always alone. Who will miss them? Will they be noticed when they are gone? Once again, the desperate longing to be loved is apparent, this time to the shocking extent of seeking solace in death.

In an interview for Art Talk![2], Nakadate says: “there’s nothing more pathetic than a chance encounter that you try to turn into something real.” Sometimes, however, it takes such extreme action to distract you from the emptiness you feel inside; sometimes it is all you believe you are worth. Don’t be fooled by the superficial cavalierness of Nakadate’s films. Certainly, she is “not that innocent”, but, equally, there is much more to her overt sexual provocation than meets the eye.

---

[1] From the wall text accompanying 51/50 (2009), a three minute film of Nakadate dancing in front of fireworks, to the soundtrack of Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy.

[2] Viewable on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMDNAlw3b-I, accessed 10/12/11.

Images:

Laurel Nakadate

Still from Oops!, 2000

3 channel video

3:33 minute loop

Edition of 5

Courtesy the artist, Zabludowicz Collection and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

Laurel Nakadate

Still from Oops!, 2000

3 channel video

3:33 minute loop

Edition of 5

 Courtesy the artist, Zabludowicz Collection and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

Laurel Nakadate
From the series 365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears, 2011
September 4, 2010
Ink Jet print
8-1/2 x 11 inches
Courtesy the artist, Zabludowicz Collection and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

Laurel Nakadate
From the series 365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears, 2011
February 9, 2010
Ink Jet print
8-1/2 x 11 inches
Courtesy the artist, Zabludowicz Collection and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

Review of Dara Birnbaum at the South London Gallery

10/12/11

Dara Birnbaum

South London Gallery

9 December 2011 – 12 February 2012

As someone who is notoriously sceptical about the extent to which video works ought to be considered art, Dara Birnbaum’s multi-channel installation, Arabesque (2011), being shown for the first time as the centrepiece of her solo exhibition at the South London Gallery, certainly convinced me of the possibilities. Born in New York in 1946, and trained initially in architecture and painting before becoming a pioneer in the burgeoning field of video art, Birnbaum’s works span over three and a half decades, from the early 1970s to the present day. Thus, whilst Arabesque amply fills the main gallery space, with its haunting soundtrack echoing through the corridors, bookshop, and café, it is put neatly in context alongside her oldest surviving installation, the black and white two channel work Attack Piece (1975), as well as eight small screen works from around the same time, all on display in the upper galleries.

Concerned with the relationship between the camera, the subject, and the viewer, as well as with gender stereotypes and women’s roles, her early works are a mixture of performance, politics, and psychological portraiture. Everything’s Gonna Be… (1976), for example, which is showing on a small monitor with its own headphones, presents a narrative about various US presidents and their affairs or encounters with girls, whilst, next door, six small screens run in parallel, Six Movements: Video Works from 1975, each a chapter on its own, and each a different length, some with sound, but none with headphones. With one long bench down the middle, and three screens on either side, the viewer becomes embroiled in the tension, distracted by the repeated scraping of a chair in Chaired Anxieties: Slewed, and the heavy breathing from Addendum: Autism, in which Birnbaum, performing her own work, rocks back and forth, eyes wide open and darting about in fear, paranoid, swallowing hard, panting, distressed, like a wild animal. On the opposite wall, in Control Piece, the movement is slower, but the exploratory hand creeping across the screen, the messy hair, and the psychiatric patient appearance are equally disturbing. Surrounded and entrapped, the viewer feels watched, unable to escape, unsettled to the extreme.

Attack Piece, as its title would suggest, is also fraught with tension. One screen shows slides, abruptly jolting and clicking through their sequence, whilst the opposing wall is filled with images from a handheld video camera, at times too blurry to make out, but mainly of Birnbaum herself, armed with a still camera, and filmed by her male collaborators (including David Askevold, Dan Graham, and Ian Murray). The whir of the motor and the motion sickness inducing jerkiness make it hard to watch, but the holiday snapshot set up, with 1970s clothes, hair, and cars, entice the viewer with an enrapturing fascination. I do wonder, however, quite how different my perception of this seminal work is from that of the contemporary 1975 audience.

For me, though, the real star of the show is Arabesque, and it would not be an exaggeration to say I could have sat there all day watching it over and over, being carried away on the melancholic chords of Clara Schumann’s Romanze 1, Opus 11, juxtaposed against her husband Robert’s better known Arabesque Opus 18. The screen on the right shows footage from the 1947 film about the couple, Song of Love, a melodramatic silent biopic about their relationship and her nursing him through his phases of depression and madness; the three left-hand screens show edited clips, taken from YouTube, of girls performing these works, overwritten with extracts from Clara’s diary, expressing her passion, grief, loneliness and feelings of inadequacy:

“… And I believe that a quieter life would leave me too much time for my grief…”

“… People fall in love with things they know in their heart they can never have…”

“… I need the love which beautifies daily life – if that were to go my life would go with it…”

“… Words always seem so feeble compared with what I feel. Feeling is so many-sided and words have but one side…”

But music and art achieve here what words alone cannot. The work explores and articulates the intensity of a range of relationships: between lovers, between a musician and his/her instrument, and with oneself. The passion these engender reverberates across the entire gallery, and accompanies the visitor for the rest of the day, stirring joy and pain, happiness and tears. If that doesn’t qualify it as art, I don’t know what does.

Images:

Arabesque (2011) 

Film still of pianist Iris Weingartner from Arabesque (2011) taken with her permission from YouTube. 

Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York - Paris

Addendum - Autism (1975) 

From Six Movements - Video Works from 1975 

Single channel video, black & white, mono, 7' 20 

Edition of 10 

Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York - Paris

Attack Piece (1975) 

Two channel video installation, black & white (transferred from film & slide footage) 

2 mono audio, 7' 40" 

Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York - Paris  

Photo: John Berens

Arabesque (2011) 

Four channel video installation, four stereo audio, 6' 30" 

Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York - Paris  

Photo: John Berens

Review of Paul Noble: Welcome to Nobson at the Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street

26/11/11

Paul Noble: Welcome to Nobson

Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street

10 November – 17 December 2011

Oh to be inside the mind of the artist! Or, in this case, maybe preferably not… For Paul Noble’s mind must be a very peculiar place indeed. He has spent the past 15 years envisaging and designing Nobson Newtown, a Brave New World where Heaven (2009), enclosed in high brick walls with deterrent shards and empty plinths, has no way in or out, whilst Hell (2009) seems welcoming, with its art deco fencing and open gates. The concepts behind this dystopia are as skewed as the artist’s unsettling perspective, and the towering sketches (Welcome to Nobson, 2008-2010, the centre piece to the exhibition, is a massive 452 x 715 cm) loom over you, a mixture of empty space and intricate detail.

Drawn in gentle graphite, these architectural plans are precise and elaborate. No detail is overlooked. From the shadows of the fences to the toilet rolls and bin bags, the stones in the walls, each individually engraved, and the geometric accuracy of a² + b² ₌  c² (2009) in which two enlarged slides, taken from the Escher-like playground area of the town, are placed in opposition to one another, forming perfect Pythagorian triangles. But if you look too closely, prepare to be disturbed, for this is a perverted vision. Balls and chains, manacles and hand-shaped paddles hang from the bare branched trees; a strange, dark, hooded sculpture lurks sinisterly outside the walls, a phallus protruding from his head; and inside the spookily empty space, worm-like creatures toil away in the bleak futuristic towers.

The main gallery is entered through a beaded curtain, heavy and foreboding, swallowing you into the labyrinthine world. The visitor is immediately dwarfed, not only by the size of the beads and the scale of the sketches, but also by the two monumental marble sculptures standing guard (Three, 2011 and Couple, 2011). Pink-tinged, with translucent red veins, they loom overhead like giant erect penises. Intimidating and unnerving, elements taken from the sketches made real in the here and now.

The most disturbing work of all, however, is undoubtedly Ah (2010). Hanging in a separate side gallery, along with a strangely ritualistic wooden bell, hung with carved hazelnuts (Wooden Bell, 2011), and the outline of a figure composed out of charred stones (Stone Figure, 2011), this Gordian phantasm concatenates all the most perverse elements into one debauched scene: pipes with faces; roving eyeballs; piles of excrement with limbs engaging in anal intercourse with one another, whilst simultaneously self-pleasuring and eating hotdogs with legs of their own; Orwellian pigs; horses with teeth and hats; guns; cannons; scarcely disguised Swastikas… Engraved at the centre are the words: “One hand on the plough, the other on the sword.” Is this the motto of Nobson Newtown? Where heaven is evil and hell enticing, a place of purgatory, from which there is no escape? By now I felt I’d hedged my bets long enough, and it was time to make my get away whilst the going was still good. 

Images: Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery

Review of Jonathan Lasker: The 80s at Timothy Taylor Gallery

24/11/11

Jonathan Lasker: The 80s

Timothy Taylor Gallery

19 November – 23 December 2011

Jonathan Lasker builds his paintings up like a collage. Matt backgrounds in pastel shades, smooth and merely decorative, provide the backdrop for frenzied black scribbles, vertical and horizontal lines which run away with themselves into frantic knots, overlaid in turn by thick and vibrant scrawls of primary reds and yellows, squeezed from the tube with only the slightest touch of the brush. Celtic knots, spaghetti tangles, balls of wools – repeated motifs detached from their background, gestural scrawls, a cacophony of voices. With titles such as When Dreams Work (1992) or Heavy Mental (1985) these works do indeed both evoke and elicit a screaming rush of thoughts – the noise of the mind, undeciphered, purged directly on to the canvas. Optical confusion, eye ache, mental exhaustion. And then the peeling back of shapes, like a Matissean cut-out, revealing a calm beneath. Biomorphic shapes, or “blobs”, flowing from one image to the next.

In their press release, the gallery suggests that Lasker’s paintings make us aware of how we look at art, by emphasising the paintings’ constituent elements, most notably the differentiation between figure and ground. I would suggest they do much more than this, making us aware of the differentiation – and overlap – of visual and verbal vocabularies and thoughts, of the conscious and the subconscious, the rational and the irrational, of conception and perception[1], and of silence and noise. Prepare to leave this exhibition with your head whirring and thoughts racing.

---

[1] The contrast between conception and perception was raised by Shirley Kaneda in an interview with the artist for BOMB 30/Winter 1990, available at http://bombsite.com/issues/30/articles/1276 (accessed 24/11/11).

Images:

Jonathan Lasker
The Big Picture (1988)
Oil on canvas
96 x 132 in / 244 x 335 cm
(T007764)

© Jonathan Lasker; Courtesy, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

Jonathan Lasker
Cosmic Shorthand (1988)
72 x 102 in / 183 x 259 cm
(T007763)

© Jonathan Lasker; Courtesy, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

Review of Gesamtkunstwerk: New Art from Germany at the Saatchi Gallery

21/11/11

Gesamtkunstwerk: New Art from Germany

Saatchi Gallery

18 November 2011 – 30 April 2012

With Germany’s ever increasing strength as the political and economic powerhouse of Europe, it is perhaps timely that the Saatchi Gallery’s latest offering should be a survey of contemporary German art, showcasing some 24 artists from or based in Germany, who, although perhaps little known in the UK, are making it big on the continental European arts stage. The title of the exhibition, Gesamtkunstwerk, can be translated as a “total, ideal, or universal work of art”, or as a “synthesis of different art forms into one all-encompassing masterpiece”. The term, first used by the German writer and philosopher K. F. E. Trahndorff in 1827, has been assimilated into the study of aesthetics, although it is perhaps best known for its Wagnerian associations, after the composer used the term to describe his ideals of artistic integration. Accordingly, an underlying theme of this show is the ongoing academic battle between a narrow concentration on art history and a wider, if somewhat undefined, field of visual culture, whereby the distinction between high and low art forms is lost, and anything image-based becomes worthy as an object of study. German post-war culture and society, politics and the media, consumerism, gender – all of these topical themes bear their mark on the show’s contents, which, in short, offers a rollercoaster ride (in the case of Zhivago Duncan’s Pretentious Crap (2010), quite literally) through the broken images and discarded scraps of every day life.

Upon entering the exhibition in gallery one, you might well be forgiven for thinking, however, you had mistakenly arrived elsewhere. This is a quiet room, at odds with rest of the gallery. Dimly lit, it is filled with wooden carvings and plaster sculptures by Markus Selg, displayed on plinths, and recalling the imagery of the classical era. Trauernde (2008) would not be out of place in a church, and Betender (2009), a kneeling white plaster figure, has a crib-like air to it, not just from its backbone of straw.

Proceeding through into gallery two, however, you remember where you are – this is, after all, the Saatchi Gallery, not the British Museum! Met with a cacophony of colour and pattern, André Butzer’s large canvases of street art style imagery depict highly impasto, hollow-eyed amoeba, recognisable icons of modern day life, or, as Butzer himself describes them, just “the kind of things Donald Duck would do when he paints”?

Another artist who plays with the concept of iconology is Julian Rosefeldt in his Global Soap (2000-1). A series of four headshot composites, taken from international TV soap operas and compiled according to expression, these studies of modern day melodrama reference German art historian Aby Warburg’s (1866-1929) systematic investigation of religious painting, and, Rosefeldt hopes, present the contemporary counterpart in an age where “soaps have taken over the function of the church.”

Celebrity life is further picked up by Kirstine Roepstorff in All Possible Experiences (2006), a collage in which she intersperses foil stars and newsreel images to create a map of the modern day media constellation. Another work by the same artist, You Are Being Lied To (2002), which, from a distance resembles an idyllic Garden of Eden scene, with trees, grass, water, flowers, and glitter, is, upon closer study, a rambunctious display of masculinity, with motorbikes, boats, fighter jets, sports and barbecue paraphernalia.

Josephine Meckseper counters this androcentric display with her politically engaged, feminist installations, confronting and reappropriating consumerist advertising imagery relating to the role and place of women. Shoes, stockings, fashion magazine adverts: a true 1950s woman’s closet, but, diffused with critical commentary, including a photograph from a demonstration with placards bearing “Fight the new Colonialism” and a toilet brush, her non-complicit standpoint becomes quite clear.

Charred remains feature heavily throughout the exhibition as well. In Dirk Bell’s Abgrund (Abyss) (2008), a gently painted grisaille of a naked figure, lit by a real neon light, the subject is half hidden behind a charred net curtain, and stands upon a ledge with shards of broken mirror and charred human bones. On the opposite wall, Friedrich Kunath’s First Life Takes Time Then Time Takes Life (2010), presents seven frames of ostensibly the same still life composition, consisting of a piece of toast leaning against a pineapple-shaped ceramic vase, albeit with the toast becoming progressively burnt from image to image – perhaps a warning of the continual destruction that so easily goes unnoticed in the world when you do not keep a close eye out? Finally, Thomas Helbig’s Jungfrau (2005) and Vater (2005) are riotous sculptures built from all manner of found (and burnt) materials: animal jaws and teeth, an eagle’s head and wings, an elephant’s trunk, and various delicately beautiful legs and arms, remains from classical antiquity. These works are so disturbing that I left the gallery hallucinating such monstrosities were emerging from the underground escalators to drag me down to their world!

More every day detritus is utilised by Ida Ekblad, who embeds “the discarded remains of contemporary culture” into wet panels of concrete. Isa Genzken, on the other hand, turns her castaway items into totemic sculptures, incorporating snapshots of her own and others’ pasts: toy cowboys and Indians, retro chairs, dolls, Christmas decorations… It is her polyptych, Kinder Filmen I (2005), with its mirrors, coloured strips, holograms and warning tape, all overlaying exquisite Renaissance images, which might, however, be seen as a summation of the whole exhibition. Colour, vibrancy, image, modern media and classical beauty, it epitomises the question of what precisely is the object (and subject) of art today. You will certainly leave this show with something to think about.


Images:


André Butzer Ahnenbild 2411 (2006)
Oil on canvas
280 x 460cm

Isa Genzken Geschwister (2004)
Plastic, lacquer, mirror foil, glass, metal, wood, fabric
220 x 60 x 100 cm


Courtesy the Saatchi Gallery, London