Art Kick

Yinka Shonibare MBE: Pop! Stephen Friedman Gallery 16th March - 20th April 2013

Originally published on This Is Tomorrow, April 2013.

A carnival of sumptuous colour draws us in to Stephen Friedman Gallery. Yinka Shonibare MBE has created his most ambitious sculptural assemblage to date: a life-sized re-imagination of Leonardo da Vinci’s fifteenth-century mural ‘The Last Supper’. Shonibare’s characters enjoy a lavish feast of oysters, wild boar, strawberries and champagne, dressed in chic Victorian suits fashioned from West African fabrics. Initially seductive and stimulating, the scene is, in an instant, repellent. Luxury begins to looks like extravagance. The protagonists have descended into lascivious, hedonistic behaviour. In place of Jesus, Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, reigns supreme, suggesting a comparison with the decadent final years of the Roman Empire. The air of imminent disaster is made all the more urgent by the decapitation of all characters present.

Shonibare’s exhibition ‘POP!’ provides a social commentary on the excesses of the financial industry and the pursuit of power and money that contributed to the current economic crisis. The artist does not shy away from dealing with the issues directly. In his series ‘Champagne Kid’ (2013) he arms his mannequins with empty bottles of Crystal and poses them falling unceremoniously from their wooden chairs. A certain anger and resentment comes across in his direct approach which will resonate with the viewer. 

Shonibare refuses to pander to antique Western expectations that, as an artist with roots in Africa, his art should somehow be concerned with specifically racial identity. Although initially appearing to adopt an African trope by using West African batik material in his work, Shonibare in fact makes a mockery of the idea. In reality, far from being a true signifier of African authenticity, the fabric has a chequered and international history. It only became popular in West Africa in the 1960s after being exported there by the British who had copied the design from its original manufacturers in Dutch Indonesia. Shonibare refutes ideas of cultural authenticity. He cuts the heads from the mannequins he dresses in the material in order to deny them racial identity. 

Instead, within western artistic tradition Shonibare’s work is deeply reliant on art history. Reconfiguring da Vinci, he makes a move to reclaim traditional Western art as his own. Elsewhere in the exhibition Shonibare creates his self-portrait in the style of Andy Warhol’s ‘Camouflage’ (1986). He uses patterns from his trademark batik textiles, as Warhol used military camouflage, to obscure his face. In both these theatrical reconstructions of art history, Shonibare questions art historical authenticity. Fake, fabrication and reproduction reveal art itself as a clumsy construction.

Shonibare addresses these big issues of power, identity and authenticity with his typical dose of irony and good humour to temper the blows. The exhibition is a fabulous visual feast as well as a welcome contemporary parody. Shonibare deals, tongue in cheek, with vital, relevant subjects and for that reason he is one of the public’s few heroes of British contemporary art. 

Silvia Bächli and Eric Hattan: What about Sunday? MK Gallery 18 January – 31 March 2013

Originally published on This Is Tomorrow, February 2013.

A snowman sledges around in the snow, on a kamikaze venture that sees him lose his carrot nose. Not to worry, he gets up and has another go. Hattan and Bächli’s playful video collaboration ‘Snowhau’ (2003), depicting a snowman that learns to sledge, is the first work that greets us at the entrance to MK Gallery. It’s an appropriate start to the artists’ cheeky, thoughtful and engaging joint exhibition. The two Swiss artists actually produce quite diverse artwork in their separate careers, but it is work that is neatly connected by common themes of brevity, wit and an air of melancholic reflection. Beautifully curated in the space, the resulting exhibition is more than the sum of its parts.

Of the two artists’ work, Hattan’s stands out. Finding intrigue in the banal, Hattan plays with the Duchampian found object. In the first space we see his ‘Round and Round’ (2000-2012), a video installation composed of several looped films of urban scenes. One screen follows the path of an empty white plastic bag swirling in the air. The video brings to mind a scene from the film ‘American Beauty’ when teenager Ricky Flitts finds endless beauty in the world through his film of a plastic bag dancing in the wind. Hattan prefers a less hopeful interpretation of this mundane moment, presenting the bag caught in a cyclonic gust destined only to travel around in endless circles amongst the urban debris. The artist sits this scene with other videos featuring repeated journeys through anonymous locations of urban banal. He creates a melancholic atmosphere of a concrete environment offering no hope of salvation. Appropriately enough, those familiar with the city of Milton Keynes will recognise a notorious underpass amongst the videos.

Hattan’s ‘(Yes I) Can’ (2012) takes the idea a step further. Instead of a plastic bag, the camera follows a crumpled empty beer can that the artist himself kicks down the street in front of him as he films. It’s a quirky humorous piece, but another gloomy gesture, referencing homelessness, drunkenness and despair in urban living. The grating, unrelenting sound of the can rattling down the city’s paving stones echoes throughout the rest of the gallery space.

Bächli’s Indian ink drawings of dandelions provide some light relief in the next gallery. With easy gestural strokes Bächli describes the flowers on flimsy rolls of paper that echo the fragility of the plants themselves. She makes subtle observations and has a light touch. In the Long Gallery several museum-style display cabinets collect together works on paper arranged into groups. We discover collections labelled ‘Women’ and ‘Homes’, each of which combine diagrams, sketches and photographs, working together to build up a theme. Bächli acts almost as an archivist, gathering together observations into interesting compositions that echo Hattan’s video installation in the previous space.

In their strongest moments, both artists’ work is characterised by a lightness of touch, the minimal gesture, creating a wistful air of reflection. There are, however, a couple of more heavy-handed works that appear. A strange obsession with lampposts seems to dominate Hattan’s work and a full-size street lamp has been pulled out of the ground and hung in the show. In its Milton Keynes setting, a city of a thousand identical street lamps, the focus seems more poignant than it might elsewhere.

Hattan’s ‘Boy Band’ (2005) is the star of the show. It is a subversive work engaging his typical sardonic humour. The artist has taken five pieces of everyday product packaging, turned the packaging inside out, and simply presented all five pieces in a row for the viewer, balanced on five wooden sticks. In itself, it’s a bold artistic move to make such a minimal gesture. However, as if to intentionally challenge the traditionalists even further, the artist brazenly presents a video next to the objects, showing exactly how easily he ‘made’ them. With the camera on full zoom as though it were watching magician at his art, the artist shows in detail, his very simple technique of taking a piece of ordinary packaging and turning it in on itself. The joke is on us.

This exhibition is brave programming from MK Gallery. It is the artists’ first show in the UK and it’s not an exhibition that will appeal to everyone. There was only one comment pinned to the comments board in the gallery and it complained of the exhibition’s ‘utter banality’. Actually, ‘banality’ is a fair summary of the artists’ interests, but if you’re willing to engage with the subtleties of their artworks, you will come across some pertinent observations in their study of the mundanity of contemporary urban life.

Details of upcoming exhibitions at MK Gallery are available on their website www.mkgallery.org

An interview with emerging artist Hanae Utamura

Hanae Utamura’s work combines a raw energy with a tightly scripted conceptual basis, two forces which play out to great emotional effect. In “Red Line” (2011) Utamura repeatedly runs back and forth towards the edge of a cliff throwing red paint in the face of a strong headwind acting against her. She is attempting to draw a red line in paint to connect the top of the white cliffs of Dover to the sea below. The work combines a visual drama with a dizzying sense of futility in the face of nature. Utamura has also made some poignant work in response to the damage caused by the Tsunami in her home country of Japan.

I met up with Hanae Utamura to learn more about her practice.

Kate Pantling: Your artwork can be understood instinctively and doesn’t rely on the viewer’s knowledge of artistic traditions. I wondered if this immediacy is something that motivates you?

Hanae Utamura: I wanted to create art about life in general, not just about art. I studied for my BA at Goldsmiths between 2002-4 and then went back to Japan and worked there full-time for five years. I had studied only art but my gaze was towards society and I decided that I could not say anything through my work without having my own experience of working life. In Japan there are a lot of “salary men” who work from early in the morning until midnight. These people became my focus and I wanted to make art that could reach them. I had an unconscious rule that I should not make any work during this period because my aim was to understand how these people were feeling. I think of this period as part of my artistic practice.

Kate Pantling: In the same way that you understand your working life as contributing to your artistic output, a lot of the work you produce today is performative. The energy and vitality in your work suggests a comparison with action painting of Jackson Pollock and the New York school of the 1950’s. Have you thought about that connection?

Hanae Utamura: One of my first works “Splashing Water at Trafalgar Square” (2010) involved spraying water on the ground in front of the National Gallery. I always think about energy and this work was a version of action painting. I was making an impermanent version in collaboration with the visitors’ footprints. This work aimed to deconstruct authenticity because it was not created by the artist alone. It was durational and ephemeral rather than a permanent oil painting.

Kate Pantling: This concept of fragility is an interesting one. The performance “Red Line” appears documented on your website as a video. Were you tempted to go back and revisit the site to see if the rain has completed the line you began making?

Hanae Utamura: The work is the action itself – it’s durational. I’m going backwards and forwards, pouring the paint against the wind. I wasn’t interested in re-photographing the site as I wanted to create a narrative without a clear ending. I’m very interested in the concept of myth. Today you can never get to the core of an issue. There are so many sources of information, in news stories spread on the internet for example, you can never know the true story. I’m also interested in Christianity and how the narratives of that religion have created art. The art object itself also has a power. That is one of my central concerns.

Kate Pantling: That concern is expressed in the materials that you use in your work which have an importance in themselves. The drawings “Ground Zero”, for example, are made with ash from the wood of houses burnt in the Tsunami disaster zone. How do you approach using materials in your work?

Hanae Utamura: I’m very analytical about my process and for me it is important to have a good reason to use a particular material in the work. The material has to make sense in the context of the work itself. I get lots of ideas from the materials themselves. When I was thinking about “Red Line” I initially considered using blood, but for some reason that collapsed the possibilities of the work. Using red paint was less literal. Red was symbolic and reminded me of abstract expressionist painting. Throwing the paint and painting with the force of the nature expanded the concept of painting itself.

Kate Pantling: There is a lot of interest in “expanded painting” at the moment with artists exploring how far they can stretch the boundaries of painting itself. Bringing another force into the process of painting adds a whole new dimension. From where does your interest in painting originate?

Hanae Utamura: All of my works come from my background in painting. As an artist, painting was my medium until I studied at Goldsmiths. For me, “Red Line” is making a temporal painting on earth. My works with plaster such as “Drop” (2012) are born from layers of actions, pouring plaster from the top of a wall, scraping the plaster, and lots of repetition to create an installation. I see these works as three-dimensional paintings.

More details about Hanae Utamura’s artwork and upcoming exhibitions can be found on her website at www.hanaeutamura.com.

Anthony Gormley’s Another Place at Crosby Beach

I had wanted to visit Anthony Gormley’s “Another Place” for some time but without much sense of what such a visit might be like. As a work set over a large expanse of landscape, minimal in its appearance and relying on a mastery of space and scale for its effect, before you see the work in person its impact really isn’t obvious.

The statues in question are familiar 6 foot 2 inches tall cast iron, simple models of the artists’ own naked body- here scattered along the long sandy beach at Crosby looking out to sea. The rawness and simplicity of the works first strike you when you come up close. You can connect with their stature, textures and heavy strength. But with the iron figures scattered over a two-mile area your relationship with the piece is necessarily time-based. At first, a tentative outsider, we begin to wander amongst the figures- touching them, examining them, familiarising ourselves with their quirks. What initially appear as an army of identical statues reveal themselves to be individuals with their own idiosyncrasies- some rusted by the tides, others with worn and delicate ankles, some sunken, some raised, and others whose features are all but obscured by parasitic crustaceans. Each man has his own personal histories.

Like some of the best examples of late 1960’s Land Art, the powerful dramatic interventions of Robert Smithson, Denis Oppenheim or Michael Hiezer, this piece pays a tribute to the natural environment in which it is situated. Due to the very shallow nature of the beach, the tide moves quickly across the sand and the area moves from completely exposed to completely underwater in a matter of hours. One figure you’ll be examining will be steeped in water at a moments notice. Gormley’s work though, offers a more contemplative, human interaction with nature than its predecessors. After examining the characters of the individual figures, we eventually find ourselves staring out to sea towards other sunken members of the group, finally participating in the same contemplative stance as the figures themselves. Gormley’s piece touches on that age-old urge to stand and stare into the abyss, to glimpse a vision of the sublime. 

Lucy Whitford, Chelsea School of Art, MA Fine Art Interim Show, 2012

The jumbled mix of approaches at the Chelsea School of Art, MA Interim Show, Part 1, speaks to the strength of the art school in encouraging their artists to pursue their own directions. Attending such an exhibition feels like being on a treasure hunt - a mix of styles struggle for attention but hidden gems shine through the confusion. 

The minimal and dispassionate appearance of “Penumbra” by Lucy Whitford betrays its deep emotional impact. Laid out scientifically and precisely, the sculpture at first presents itself as a clinical conceptual assembly. Selected organ pipes are held at arms length from the wall by metal fastenings. Sitting discretely below them, two plain concrete slabs are held up by metal stands - the spindly legs baring their weight hardly serving to accommodate them. A fragile organic structure sits delicately on one of the slabs, we feel its frailty on the heavy base.

Whitford’s combination of raw and simple materials, with precise placement and tidy construction brings a piercing emotional resonance to her work. These worn pipes speak of their histories - muffled choirs and heartfelt occasions are all locked up in their steely metal exterior.  The combination of fragility and strength encourages a feeling of vulnerability in the viewer, and the delicate organic structure is notably appearing only on one plinth, bringing to mind its absence on the second.

This is work which has a powerful impact on an intuitive level. Recently Whitford has been paring down her sculpture, and this work speaks of the resulting increased impact and subtlety she has brought to it. It is work which speaks of futility, fragility and loss with poetic metaphor. Her work is a breath of fresh air amongst the masses of self-reflective highly conceptual work we often see on the London art scene. It is work which resonates long after you’ve encountered it.

More of Lucy Whitford’s work can be see on her blog. The three Chelsea School of Art MA Fine Art 2012 interim shows continue with Part 3 opening on Thursday 10 May 2012 6-8pm, see the Chelsea website for details.

Emma Hart gives an interview ahead of her solo exhibition “TO DO” at Matt’s Gallery, London

Kate Pantling: Emma, you have said your work is concerned with freeing the camera from its association with the past. Could explain what you feel the constraints on the camera are?

Emma Hart: The British philosopher JL Austin noticed in “How to Do Things With Words” that although we had previously thought of speech as descriptive, there are some aspects of language that produce rather than describe reality, a famous example being the couple saying “I do” at a wedding ceremony. These words affect reality rather than describing something. So we always think of the camera as reporting on reality but can the camera produce a reality?

If we took the family album obviously you could talk about that in terms of it being a load of lies. You wouldn’t take a photo of anything sad happening and people will put on a false smile for the camera. So already the photograph is being used to set up a situation which is false. As well as that, it puts a demand on behavior, why do people really go to the Eiffel Tower? Probably it’s to get the photograph… so not only does the camera lie, it takes a snapshot of reality and presents that as the truth but it also makes us do things. So, for me photography is wound up with power and control and I’m interested in destroying all the preconceived conventions of photography.

Kate Pantling: In your work, the camera becomes performative, you’re letting the camera take over, what is your part in this? Are you stepping away?

Emma Hart: Maybe that’s how it really is, the cameras are in charge in the real world. So my relationship to the camera is a micro example of how cameras control. They function as if they’re above the world. The new work I’m doing integrates cameras into the work so they no longer hover above the world.

Kate Pantling: There is a relationship to humour in your work. Watching some of the videos of performances on your website some people are laughing because they’re in this moment of confusion.

Emma Hart: I’m interested in that moment of confusion as something powerful. The moment we don’t recognise something is the moment there is the most potential for change. I really don’t try to be funny, it just happens. I’d like to consider myself more absurd. In my work for Matt’s Gallery I want to try and get rid of playful humour and tip it into being absurd. I don’t really try to make things funny, it’s just what happens when you’re celebrating freedom.

Emma Hart’s exhibition at Matt’s Gallery will run from 28 September – 20 November 2011. You can see more of Emma’s work on her website http://www.emmahart.info/

Jaime Miranda at Chelsea College of Art and Design, PgDip Fine Art Interim Exhibition, May 2011

In this interim exhibition of work by post-graduate students of Chelsea College of Art and Design, Peruvian artist Jaime Miranda’s photographs stand out for their direct engagement with our city and the powerful challenge they make to our belief systems.

Miranda photographs a project space he has created for himself in a secret location under a pier on the banks of the river Thames. Working with the space as his studio, Miranda carves into the wooden remains of a pier, which stand out of the ground like reminders of a past civilisation. Working at low tide he makes himself at home, being pushed out by the river itself when the water rises to cover his creations. With the business centre of Canary Wharf towering over him as a backdrop Miranda, in his carvings, seeks to reignite a connection with the city around us by working directly on its features.

Using the traditional tools of a chisel and hammer Miranda carves into the wood, to reveal its hidden personality and spirit. He peels back the accumulated moss and chisels away at the structures as though he is only intervening to set free a face that always existed within it. It is as though Miranda serves only to uncover the hidden energy and personality beneath the surface of the structure, revealing a spirit that has in recent years become obscured.

Miranda taps into a different, perhaps more primitive, more direct relationship with nature and a society’s deeper connection with its surroundings. In these photographs nature emerges with its own force and the wooden structure becomes a totem to a lost society and belief system. Miranda highlights our contemporary disconnection with nature and our ignorance of its power and personality.

Floating above Miranda, working at his sculptures, is that powerful British emblem of business and the capitalist agenda, Canary Wharf. In the business world there is no space for Miranda’s excavations. Time itself has become a commodity and capitalist priorities surpass concerns with the natural environment around us. The buildings float above Miranda’s head almost as a threat and we are made aware of their controlling power in our world.

Miranda comes from Peru where capitalism has had a huge impact on the local way of life and environment of the people seen, for example, in the commodification and loss of large sections of the Amazon rainforest. In these photographs Miranda addresses one of the centres of that ideology and seeks to question its dominance. He sets up a narrative whereby our relationship to the natural world has changed. He asks us to look at how we live, at our concept of time, at our concept of nature and he questions how we arrived there. 

Kate Pantling, May 2011

For more of Jaime Miranda’s works see his website: http://showtime.arts.ac.uk/jaimemiranda

Cory Arcangel, Beat the Champ, The Curve (10 February 2011 - 22 May 2011)

Archangel adopts the unique corridor space of The Curve to present a chronological sequence of projections of 10 pin bowling video games continuously throwing gutter balls. As we progress through the space, we move forward chronologically, from the bleeps and flashing cursors of 1970s games through to ever more sophisticated technology. Although the graphics and player guiding systems progress, the gutter balls continue to roll. We are faced with ever more elaborate expressions of exasperation from the characters on screen. The irony of a population engaged in playing a physical sport in a virtual world is not lost on Arcangel. He uses this piece, and the feelings of frustration and futility it provokes, to question our habits and use of technology.

As we continue to move through the piece, the speed and power of play rises to a crescendo and we are immersed in a deafening cacophony of artificial sounds. It’s a dizzying experience to be surrounded by such noise in combination with repeated images of failure. Our thoughts move from the specific to the abstract in considering the wider implications of the dominance of American culture.

At the somewhat anticlimactic finale of our journey, we are confronted with a line up of the tiny consoles responsible for creating the bewildering environment in which we find ourselves. With a critical touch, Archangel leaves visible a small circuit board delicately inserted into the game controllers. The circuit board takes the place of the game player and sends signals to the game consoles of a player repeatedly failing to hit his target. Far from a passive documentation, the exhibition reveals itself to be a live demonstration of failure taking place before our eyes. The line up of consoles recalls the inevitable progression of technology, new models replacing old, rendering previous consoles out of date and inadequate. In fact all of the consoles used by Arcangel are out of date such that in this exhibition, even the most recent models are exposed as hopeless and pathetic.

In his intervention with the machines Arcangel critically engages with his medium, the 8-bit video game. He also refers to the tradition of “glitch art”, a type of net art which has developed an interest in subverting the proper functioning of web pages and programmes. Arcangel’s work, along with glitch art, net art and some other new media art has a tendency to come across as crass and one-dimensional when presented in the gallery space. The crude arrangement of Arcangel’s work in the contemporary exhibition “Here Comes Everybody” at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin renders his work hollow and unsatisfying. What elevates “Beat the Champ” is the fact the work was conceived specifically for The Curve’s space. More so than traditional art forms, new media art demands astute and careful curation. The present exhibition is conceived as a journey on which we encounter stages of effect and realisation. It’s this site-specific conception of the work that gives Cory Arcangel’s work an unexpected but very welcome sophistication.

Kate Pantling, March 2011

For visiting information see the Barbican website:  http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=11621

Jake and Dinos Chapman “Exquisite Corpse” series at Tate Modern

“Exquisite Corpse” is a game that was invented by the Surrealists in 1925 as a means to allow the artist’s mind to roam free and explore the unconscious. It is a pictoral version of the game “Consequences” in which players take turns to draw sections of a body before folding the paper over and passing the paper on to the next player. The Chapman brothers develop the Surrealists’ invention in their set of twenty etchings. To create their version they prepared ten head sections and an assistant covered their contribution before they exchanged plates and worked on the next sections of the body.

The Chapmans’ “Exquisite Corpse” etchings however markedly differ from the surrealist works created using the same method. Whereas many of the Surrealist works are pastel or pencil drawings, the Chapman brothers revel in the precise detail afforded by the etching technique they adopt and produce a more grotesque and sometimes darkly comical effect. The minute details of the etchings are both repellant and engrossing at the same time. We cannot help but peer more closely at meticulously rendered details which include deformed and mutated human genitalia and dripping blood and wounds.

Georges Bataille effectively describes this idea which is apparent in their work: ‘The painter is condemned to please. By no means can he make a painting an object of aversion. The purpose of a scarecrow is to frighten birds, to keep them away from the field where it stands, but even the most terrifying painting is there to attract visitors.’ (Bataille, Georges “The Cruel Practice of Art”) We can’t help but admire at the same time as being revolted by this series. 

There is another disturbing contradiction in the fact that these grotesque monsters are presented as having originated from a playful childlike game. Some of the images are made from childish marks and features which contrast with the more adult scenes. Contradiction and unease is central to the effect and intention of these works. The Chapman brothers have said “We want to slow down acceptance of our work so you can’t just absorb it and move on, and anything you can’t resolve your response to is transfixing.”

As much as they are horrible, these images are also ironic and humorous, their details playing on unlikely juxtapositions and surprising the viewer: one of the monstrous creations is wearing a watch. The Chapman brothers have described laughter “as a convulsive reaction; “convulsion is that inability to make a rational response or where the linguistic response is woefully inadequate”. Here they adopt this approach to laughter making the viewer uncomfortable, we smirk nervously at the details which contrast uneasily with grotesque and violent content.

Kate Pantling, January 2011

The series is currently on display in the “Poetry and Dream” section of Tate Modern. Do check their website before you visit as they rotate their collection frequently: http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/explore/

Rachel Whiteread at Gagosian Gallery (7 September - 2 October 2010)

The Gagosian Gallery space on Davies Street is a single white clean rectangular room, devoid of any distractions.  The cuboid gallery space sets up an interesting play with the sculptures of this exhibition which are carefully, diagrammatically, arranged inside it.  We enter into a meditational space where the formal simplicity of the sculptures is given prominence and resonance. 

The show presents new work by Rachel Whiteread.  It is work which rethinks a theme explored in one of her best known pieces “One Hundred Spaces” exhibited in the Sensation exhibition in 1997- that is the creation of a cast of the space beneath a chair.  This time, instead of using resin, Whiteread makes her casts from stone and concrete and even a plaster composite.  This experimentation with material creates blocks which have a more palpable presence. One which is less ephemeral, more balanced and contemplative.   

Critics often note that Whiteread’s work suggests the notion of absence; we think of the person who is suggested but missing from the sculptures created.  These more recent sculptures seem to me to be more ambiguous.  All of the sculptural works on show are untitled.  Whiteread leaves the viewer to project their own interpretation onto the works.  We walk around the pieces and our relationship with them is brought to the fore.  Whiteread sets up a poetic and playful dialogue with the viewer in rendering an immaterial space concrete, playful and poetic. 

Whiteread’s interest in the exhibition has moved from the individual casts to the relationship of the casts to each other.  This interest is reflected in the curation of the show itself which has a successfully strong formal layout.  The coloured casts are placed down the centre of the rectangular space and are neatly balanced by white casts at either end.  The sculpture creates its own rhythm through the space of the gallery. 

Kate Pantling, September 2010

For more information see the Gagosian Gallery website: http://www.gagosian.com/artists/rachel-whiteread/