installations
Yayoi Kusama: The moving moment when I went to the universe. Review by Carla Scarano.
Yayoi Kusama: The moving moment when I went to the universe
Victoria Miro Art Gallery
16 Wharf road, London
3 October – 21 December 2018
A daring exhibition of Yayoi Kusama’s work at Victoria Miro Art Gallery. The title itself plays on the double meaning of the word ‘moving’ evoking emotions and the movement of her repeated polka-dots that dance in the eyes of the viewer producing unsuspected depths and continuous motion on the apparently flat surfaces.
The exhibition develops in four sections. On the first floor of the gallery the visitors are allowed about a minute entry into the Infinity Mirrored Room. It is a mesmerizing experience of multiplied spherical paper lanterns with polka-dot patterns in a mirrored dark room. The lights shift colours from green to red, yellow, deep blue and bright pink communicating an overwhelming and reassuringly pleasant effect in the infinite repetition of the same motifs in a controlled space. As the title remarks, the artist’s (and the viewer’s) heart can dance, or play, in an illusion of infinity inside an enclosed space wishing to go beyond the limited vision.
At the ground floor of the gallery, Kusama’s pumpkins are displayed in paintings and in the painted bronze sculpture versions. They are in three colours: green, yellow and red, with black dots. Other paintings in the same room reveal a closer attention to the details of the dots, reflecting motion and evolution. As Kusama said, pumpkins speak to her about ‘the joy of living. They are humble and amusing at the same time’, they are ‘humorous’ and have a ‘human-like quality’. However, her pumpkins do not look like ‘real’ pumpkins we find in nature, not only in the colour but also in the shape. They look perfect, an image of a pumpkin, an example that becomes ‘The Pumpkin’ for the viewer.
The polka-dot patterns repeat endlessly in a reassuring rhythm controlling and limiting the space and giving, at the same time, the illusion of infinity revealing a highly crafted painting technique. They give a sense of suspension (dot, dot, dot…), a controlled suspension (but controlled to what extend?), which seems to be her core message.
The abstract entities evoked in the titles of some of her works (e.g., eternal soul, the heart dancing into the universe, I want to go to heaven) reveal unidentified places open to infinity and yet controlled by the artist in the accumulation and repetition of the same shapes. The viewer cannot be but fascinated by the illusion created and mastered by her art, the depth and movement of dots’ paths on her creations.
Among the visitors, there were families with children who were flabbergasted by the ludic quality of Kusama’s work, reminiscent of theme parks and playgrounds. But there is much more in her work for an adult eye, with her constant allusion to the tension between the finite quality of being humans and their infinite aspirations.
Kusama had a traumatic childhood; she studied painting in Kyoto and moved to the US in the late 1950s until the early 1970s, when she moved back to Japan. She is not only a visual artist, she is also a writer and produces performances, happenings and installations. In 1977 she chose to live in a psychiatric hospital and admitted that ‘if it were not for art, I would have killed myself’. She has reported to feel her soul separated from the body and to have hallucinations that she recreated afterwards visually in her paintings in an attempt to decipher and control them. In spite of her old age, eighty-nine, which does not seem to weaken her creativity and skill, she is extremely prolific; in fact, she is one of the world’s number one female artists. Her work has been described as a crossing between surrealism, minimalism, pop art and abstract expressionism. It certainly appeals to the public and has a primordial quality, translating her obsessions, which reflect the viewer’s obsessions, in an accessible language through self-assuring repetitions. She claimed that in her ‘nets’ of repeated patterns she meant to expand beyond herself in a self-obliterating process that allows her to access an imaginary unrestricted reality. What appeals the audience is also the sense of extreme freedom her work communicates, certainly a controlled kind of freedom but still beyond ordinary boundaries. In some way it reflects our free but surveilled society.
The exhibition continues into the beautiful gallery’s waterside garden, with the sculptures of the ‘Flowers that speak all about my heart given to the sky’. Nature and artifice merge in the constructed Arcadian scenery in the shadow of the cement and glass building of the gallery. A perfect match.
The last part of Kusama’s display, ‘My Eternal Soul Paintings’, is in Gallery II, third floor. They have a different philosophical and pictorial approach, large canvases with intriguing titles such as ‘A Corner of the Sky’, Beauty of Death’, ‘I Want to Eat the Sun’, or ‘Beyond the Heaven’. Large portions of bright colours and archetypical figures prevail on repeated patterns. Some of them look like primordial masks (‘Garden of Women in Blooming Youth’, ‘Let’s Stop the War’), others resemble organic elements (‘I spoke all about Peace’, ‘Hymn to Life’). The striking freedom of these works skilfully catches the eye of the viewers involving them in Kusama’s fantastical experience in an illusion of infinity where everything is possible, provided that it is also under control. Her work and her life shift between depersonalization and a solid grip to reality in a man’s world where she is leaving her indelible mark masterfully dottying around.
Carla Scarano © 2018.
SP-Arte, Sao Paulo. Review by Barbara Lewis.
SP-Arte
Bienal Pavilion, Sao Paulo,
April 11-15
Review by Barbara Lewis.
It’s testimony to the vibrant creativity and style of Sao Paulo that its international art festival – SP-Arte – can transform an object as potentially mundane and outdated as the tea trolley into a pinnacle of design.
A celebration of 90 years of the “carrinho de cha” – or tea trolley in Portuguese – took a commanding place in the design section of the sprawling exhibition in Oscar Niemeyer’s Pavilion Bienal in Sao Paulo’s Ibirapuera Park, the green lungs and heart of an outsized city of tower blocks and traffic jams.
The Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, to give the Bienal Pavilion its more formal name, since 1957 has been the headquarters of the Bienal de Sao Paulo Foundation, which organises the world’s second oldest art biennale. Venice’s is the oldest.
The pavilion also hosts the central exhibition of the annual SP-Arte, already as rich a cornucopia as most ardent art-lovers can digest.
Adding to the abundance, this year’s fair included for a second year running a section on the work of prominent architects who also design furniture – in homage to Niemeyer, whose ultimate chair in which to lie back and think creatively was also featured.
Among the living architect-furniture designers, Brazilian Bel Lobo gave us Bela, a striking wooden desk.
Its classic simplicity connected it with the beginning and end of the tea trolley line-up just across the pavilion, which, from Gregori Warchavchik’s 1928’s cart to Zanine de Zanine’s 1918 version, placed the emphasis on confident, stylish lines.
A criticism in the local and art press of the SP-Arte was that it was a bubble, ignoring a turbulent political backdrop in the month the nation’s first working class president was ordered to jail as he fights corruption charges, meaning he is likely to be barred from contesting elections later this year.
It is true the joy of an exquisitely designed object can lose its charm when its price tag places it beyond the reach of all but a few.
Less escapist – or perhaps still the indulgence of the privileged – was another novelty, this time in the performance space, where living installations brought together artists of varied backgrounds to act for the duration of the fair. The actor huddled next to the heap of dirt – or is it ashes? – and ceramic urns might have been as genuinely exhausted as he looked.
On top of escapism, another charge is that an arts fair branded international was overwhelmingly Brazilian, including only a handful of big-name foreign art studios, such as Berlin’s Neugerriemschneider, represented by a shiny steel structure of bikes and a mirror in which we “BEHOLD OUR FUTURE EXECUTIONERS”.
Should that be too bleak for your taste, Sao Paulo’s Marko Brajovic studio’s Eden Tree is a possible remedy. Commissioned by Perrier-Jouet, Eden Tree is a mirrored, golden multi-sensory forest, through which you wander and absorb magical music, as a kind of objective correlative of the emotion of drinking from the Belle Epoque Perrier-Jouet bottle.
With a great deal of luck, the world might have more to justify such celebrational moments when SP-Arte’s annual fair returns next April or even in time for the full biennale in September. In the event it doesn’t, art can still console.
Barbara Lewis © 2018.
“Indomitable Spirit” – an Exhibition at One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, by Jane McChrystal.
“Indomitable Spirit” – an Exhibition at One Canada Square, Canary Wharf.
Jane McChrystal.
Henry Moore enthusiasts could do worse on this rainy Easter Week than to head for Canary Wharf and see this exhibition, which tells the story of the creation of the Draped Seated Figure, now known as “Old Flo” (https://londongrip.co.uk/2017/12/old-flo-returns-to-the-east-end-of-london-by-jane-mcchrystal/), and her changing fortunes over the past fifty years.
There are some charming photos of Moore at work in his studio at Perry Green, Hertfordshire and a film of him directing Old Flo’s delivery by crane to the plinth on the Stifford Park Estate in 1963, which would become her home for the next thirty four years. Viewers will note a startling contrast between cavalier attitudes towards health and safety demonstrated in the film by the artist and his team and the extreme caution employed by workers in their hard hats and hi-vis jackets photographed during the carefully orchestrated operation designed to deliver her to Cabot Square last October.
For me, however, the highlight of the exhibition was a study for Shelter Scene: Bunks and Sleepers. Moore spent many evenings during the blitz observing East Enders as they sheltered from the bombs in the underground, before returning to Perry Green where he produced the series of moving drawings which became the inspiration for the Draped Seated Figure. The shelter scene is one of those drawings, and the original study on show in Canada Square conveys a depth of compassion and admiration for the unfortunate shelterers, which can never be captured in any reproduction.
Other people I viewed the exhibition with were struck by the dynamism of a finely worked maquette, which formed part of the preparation for the final plaster figure to be cast in bronze, and left an impression that the figure might pull away from her seat and walk off at any moment.
I think anyone who visits Indomitable Spirit will have a far richer experience of this monument to the endurance of Londoners during the blitz, than can be gained from viewing her “cold” against the backdrop of Cabot Square and its elegant fountains.
Indomitable Spirit, Henry Moore, Draped Seated Woman is on show until 6th April 2018 at Lobby, One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5AB
Jane McChrystal © 2018.
101st km, Further, Everywhere
A temporary installation in Bloomsbury Square is a powerful reminder of the work of exiled Russian poets in the last century More →
Rachel Whiteread, Tate Britain, London. Review by Barbara Lewis.
Rachel Whiteread,
Tate Britain, London,
Until Jan 21.
For an artist whose career is based on confronting the spaces we either ignore or deliberately avoid, the now-demolished BBC office that reputedly inspired Room 101 in George Orwell’s 1984 is perfect subject-matter.
Orwell turned a mundane office into a torture chamber where we are locked up with whatever we most dread.
Rachel Whiteread’s plaster-cast of the room’s interior before it was torn down turns it into a sinister, impenetrable bunker, bearing the scars of years of human activity for those who care to look closely.
The work is central to the Tate Britain’s display of three decades of Whiteread’s sculpture, which seems to take a god-like, dispassionate view of the traces we leave.
As much as any medieval skull and crossbones, it is a memento mori and yet Whiteread also manages to be uplifting, especially when we get the chance to see her works collected together rather than in isolation: her restraint is admirable; she gives us colour and occasional humour as well as absence of life; she strains our imagination and she balances the monumental with the intimate.
When not capturing the spirit of buildings before they are knocked down, Whiteread is busy exploring the insides of hot water bottles and enema bottles in her series of “torsos” cast in cold white plaster, wax or pink, dental plaster.
Instead of being comforting or curative, they have become “headless, limbless babies,” to use Whiteread’s own words.
She also repeatedly visits doors and windows from behind, so they trap rather than admit us and mattresses are not for sinking into, but for staring up at from the floor beneath the bed or for looking down on as they slump discarded and uninviting in a street.
The most sinister doors of Whiteread’s career are those on the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna, conceived as an inside-out, windowless library. The countless books, with their spines facing inwards, are unreadable and title-less, like the untold stories of the countless victims, while the massive double doors imply imprisonment, not access. It’s a deliberately stark contrast to the bustling cafes and elegant imperial buildings of the square where it stands.
The Tate Britain exhibition can only show us the Holocaust Memorial in a gallery of photographs of Whiteread’s international works, but it makes us feel the need to appreciate its high seriousness first-hand.
We might also be inspired to head off to east London to see the Whitechapel Art Gallery, where Whiteread’s frieze of gold-coated leaves on the facade is uncharacteristically pretty.
More immediate light relief is at hand in the Tate Britain’s airy, patrician Duveen Galleries – host to Untitled (One Hundred Spaces), comprising coloured resin casts of the underside of chairs. The solidified air bears the cumulative imprint of all who sat on them.
Outside the museum itself, we find the concrete cast of the inside of a Chicken Shed, strangely clammed up and dwarfed by the architecture of the Tate Britain.
It recalls the concrete sheds sited in remote landscapes, which Whiteread refers to as her “shy sculptures”, tucked away, waiting for passing visitors to come upon them and reflect on the impact that lingers when we have gone.
Barbara Lewis © 2017.
Art is Comic, MIMA, Brussels. Review by Barbara Lewis.
Art is Comic
MIMA,
Brussels,
Runs until December 31.
The Millennium Iconoclast Museum of Art (MIMA) in Molenbeek, an area of Brussels associated with breeding extremism, opened just after the 2016 terror attacks in the Belgian capital.
Housed in a former brewery next to a canal whose banks are lined with graffiti, MIMA takes its inspiration from Belgium’s tradition of graphic art, much of which is daubed on urban walls.
Art is Comic, billed as a light-hearted response to terror, is the latest exhibition to embrace rough, industrial brickwork as the perfect backdrop for popular artists with hundreds of thousands of followers and an outwardly casual attitude towards failing politics and social injustice.
As artists they are almost anonymous, hiding behind pseudonyms, and their works are more about location and the here and now than the timeless and enduring.
Straddling Europe from North to South, this exhibition brings together Joan Cornella from Spain and Jean Julien from France, HuskMitNavn from Denmark and from Belgium Brecht Evens, Brecht Vandenbroucke and the artistic duo Mon Colonel & Spit, who liken their art to the defiant scribbles found on school benches, in prison cells or on toilet doors.
For me, Brecht Vandenbroucke best fulfilled the exhibition’s brief to raise a smile and make grim reality more bearable.
His giant “foosball” player, towering above ranks of miniature men represents massive inequality in the game of life.
Vandenbroucke’s output also includes a cartoon of Sisyphus pushing his giant boulder up a hill labelled “My Choice” and a bubble caption on Edvard Munch’s The Scream “Where is Everybody?” It’s caustic, unsubtle and moderately amusing.
Brecht Evens, stretching a point, is compared to Mozart on the grounds that he adds layers of complexity during the creative process. His latest graphic novel the City of Belgium is a dystopian, exhilarating blur of taxi rides, intricate disco-dating scenes and sinister menace.
As we walk up wrought iron stairs, which for the traditionalist represent some of the gallery’s finest craftsmanship, to the top of the gallery, we enter the 21st-century daily realities as depicted by Joan Cornella, who apparently has 4.5 million Facebook followers, and Jean Julian who has 750,000 Instagram devotees.
I belong to neither fan club, but my attention was piqued by the spectacle of Joan Cornella’s grinning 21st-century man hanging by his neck from the gallery’s roof in the autumn sunshine, while Jean Julien’s metal people stare smiling or glum into their mirror reflections.
As a response to terrorism, it’s definitely wry and perhaps philosophical.
Barbara Lewis © 2017.
City Lights. Millennium Iconoclast Museum of Modern Art (Mima), Brussels. Review by Barbara Lewis.
City Lights
Millennium Iconoclast Museum of Modern Art (Mima),
33, quai du Hainaut,
Molenbeek, Brussels.
Until August 28
From stylised art nouveau temptresses to giant Tintin cartoons, Brussels has an established tradition of putting art on the outside of its buildings as well as inside.
The capital’s newest gallery in a former brewery in Molenbeek – the neighbourhood notorious as a breeding ground of the Paris and Brussels terror attacks – captures that spirit.
Situated on the south bank of the canal that marks the boundary between Molenbeek and the central district of Brussels, the MIMA has brought together five New York-based artists with international reputations as street and pop artists to paint on its walls.
One would have thought the founders of this inspired project could have tapped into Belgium’s own artistic array of “City Lights”, but it seems churlish to quarrel with the decision to import Transatlantic talent when the urban-industrial vibe that results makes so much sense.
At the April 15 opening, delayed from March because of the suicide attacks, the mood was upbeat as Brussels’ chattering classes made their way up from black, white and grey figures in a dingy undercroft to the psychedelic stripes of the loft space.
Beginning with what she described as a slightly sinister basement, the artist known as Swoon acknowledges influences including German expressionists, Indonesian shadow puppetry and travels.
Her artistic ideal, a note tells us as we descend, is to work beyond “legal walls” in pursuit of a “spontaneous, totally unsanctioned phrase running through our lives,” adding: “This is the place where the truth will be told.”
All that begs the question of whether she can tell the truth in a sanctioned basement where we come across her life-size, sometimes industrial, sometimes gothic portraits lurking in corners or behind pillars.
From their sombre, street-poor reality, we head up to the first floor where life suddenly seems to be about leisure rather than enduring.
FAILE is the cultural partnership between Patrick Miller and Patrick McNeil. Their aesthetic, we are told, is post punkpop pulp images; they criticise mass culture and feed on it; they pan for gold in a massive societal rubbish dump of slogans and brightly coloured trash.
We experience a transient, conclusion-less moment of reflection staring at their giant lottery wheel of popular imagery across to the gallery windows beyond and then move on to MOMO, another pseudonym.
If these instances of his work were on the outside of the building, it would be more a case of interior design escaping on to the exterior walls.
“Conceptually and aesthetically post-digital,” MOMO organises colourful tessellations offset by great, swirling twists of wood and reminds us of the process of creation with a pile of offcuts lying on the floor, you could say reminiscent of a teenage bedroom.
From there, we emerge to the dazzling loft-space where Maya Hayuk bathes us in saffron, turquoise and fuchsia light.
She tells us she is “super-inspired” by the rhythms and patterns music can create in her mind’s eye and her references are multiple from Ukrainian folk art to Tibetan mandalas.
One could add in wax resists as dazzling colours burst from beside blocks of black.
With Maya Hayuk’s work, we reach the end of the temporary City Lights display.
The options now include browsing the permanent collection, again imported rather than home-grown, but still in the vein of democratic street and popular art.
Trespassers will be Forgiven (2012) lifts an otherwise unwelcoming gateway by Danish artist EB Itso.
Steve Powers, a New York Artist, who once wrote graffiti under the name ESPO (Exterior Surface Painting Outreach), gives us Dishes Do or Die (2011) as a comment on domestic slavery.
Dutch artist Parra’s Give Up (2015) is a giant ketchup tomato, sitting down as if in defeat with blue legs and red high-heels, while another Dane HuskMitNavn’s topical, political Policeman with Lighter (2010) is a law enforcer bending down to light the cigarette of a suspect slumped at his feet.
If none of this is to your taste or if you want to light up your own cigarette, the roof terrace beckons from where you can look across to the rest of the old brewery building, survey the city skyline or gaze down on to the canal.
There industrial barges chug by against walls also tagged with urban art that in the boundary-less, democratic world of MIMA has almost equal value with the works within.
Barbara Lewis © 2016.
How Close is Closer: the Work of Dayanita Singh. Ruth Rosengarten
How Close is Closer? Dayanita Singh: Go Away Closer.
Hayward Gallery, London, 8 October-15 December 2013.
I first came across the work of Delhi born artist Dayanita Singh in an exhibition and book, Myself Mona Ahmed (2001), a photo-essay about an aging eunuch transsexual (hijra) living in a graveyard in Old Delhi. In this extraordinary body of work – the book contains various different kinds of text alongside the photographs) – one sensed not only compassion, but a collaboration between the person in front of the camera, and the one looking through the lens. The photographs are black and white, their arrangement sequential, telling a dramatic story, but also portraying a life of poverty and loneliness. More than a sociological record of the role of eunuchs in Indian culture, it is a serial portrait, but its conceptual and material framework seemed to be that of the documentary photographer or of photojournalism: to tell by showing. I have, since then, sporadically followed Singh’s work, returning to it in my recent research on ‘the archival turn’ in contemporary art. I was interested in the projects Go Away Closer, House of Love and Sent you a Letter, which gave me a broader picture of a more idiosyncratic and keenly individual photographic practice. But none of these individual sightings of Singh’s work does justice to the sweep of her vision and the innovative uses to which she presses photography.
Dayanita Singh: Go Away Closer at the Hayward Gallery in London, is the first comprehensive presentation of this artist’s work in the UK. The paradoxical title, where proximity and distance converge, is a spatialised instruction, one that reveals what so many photographers desire, a gap and a closeness all at once. This instruction sets up a relationship between the photographer and her models on the one hand (even if those models are inanimate: rooms, windows, views, objects) and the photograph and its viewers on the other. It is in this spatialisation that Singh’s photographs come into their own. Not that the photographs individually are not works of great beauty, great mystery, great humanity. But it is in their spatialisation that a new medium emerges. Dayanita Singh calls it ‘photo-architecture.’ The photographs – and for Singh, these are the images captured using ‘old fashioned’, non digital cameras, initially printed on contact sheets – are the component parts, the building blocks of this new medium (as paint is the medium out of which those cultural artefacts we call ‘paintings’ are made). The individual photograph is just the beginning.
Dayanita Singh’s preferred mode of presentation for her work is the book. ‘The form of the book,’ she says, is a very intimate form. To me, it’s the best way to look at photography. I would rather give up on print quality, but I cannot bear the glass that comes between the print and me. So I love the book’ (all quotations by Dayanita Singh, unless otherwise stated, are from the book catalogue of the Hayward exhibition). The placing of the image on the page is always studied. She sometimes prints on the full page of the book, or more provocatively (and also more frustratingly) runs the photograph across the gutter joining two pages. On her website, she calls herself a ‘bookmaker working with photography.’ Looking at the works I have already mentioned, Go Away Closer (2006) is a novel without words, a mysterious, non-linear narrative constructed out of paired photographs: clothes, paintings, books, empty spaces, a street slick with rain, an occasional human presence – all sharp and still; you feel that the sequence is of the essence, but the book withholds any sense of a direct or literal or obvious meaning, so you can’t rephrase that sequence into words. The meaning, rather, seems poetic, dream like, intuitive. It leaves you not so much with a concept as with a feeling.
Sent a Letter (2008) is comprised of seven small photo-diaries held together in a plain box designed by the artist. The notebooks document her travels in India. These travels, she tells us in a fascinating and highly informative interview with curator Stephanie Rosenthal, were in the company of ‘friends with great minds – some of them not even friends, just great minds.’ Each book is a diary with particular, personal, coded allusions to a time shared; each is a letter sent to the travel companion, and its interlocutor is an intrinsic, if veiled, part of its meaning. ‘Secret’ is one of the words Dayanita Singh loves.
House of Love (2011) is a work of ‘photographic fiction’ produced in conjunction with Aveek Sen, the writer and the photographer following parallel trajectories, with the recurring motif of the Taj Mahal, that transcendental house of love (and loss). Singh sold the book herself, taking a cart through the art fair in Delhi, and this additional journey adds to the nuances that the notion of spatialisation takes on in her work. (In interviews, she has regretted not having been able to take a cart to the Venice Biennale this year, where her work was shown in the German-Pavilion-at-the-French-Pavilion, alongside that of Ai Weiwei, Romuald Karmakar and Santu Mofokeng). In the book, she gives a new twist to the Anaïs Nin’s notion of a spy in the house of love. Nine sets of colour and black and white photographs are arranged as interconnected ‘stories’, and again, the narrative is oneiric and digressive rather than coherently linear. The images fill the entire, square format; often penumbral or nocturnal, they slyly elicit the collusion of the viewer. We too become lovers here. Perhaps ‘seduce’ would be a better word than ‘elicit’, since they issue an invitation that is never properly fulfilled: the invitation to knowledge.
It is not that Dayanita Singh withholds knowledge. Rather, in her acute sense that our perception of images is affected, altered and indeed conditioned by the structures through which we view them (books, vitrines, drawers, files, albums), she presents the subject of her photographs as never entirely knowable in a coherent or definitive sense. Go away closer. And the fascination with archives, as both containers and as systems for the categorisation and storage of things made of, or printed on, paper – is palpable. Yet one feels, all the while – in the photographs of heaving bookshelves, piled surfaces, bundles of stuff – the extent to which the archive as a conceptual structure strains under its own categorical rigour. In the words of art historian Sven Spieker, ‘the grid and its trash, the archive and what it stores, emerge at the same time so that one cannot easily be subtracted from the other.’[1]
Several contemporary artists have worked with this notion: Hans-Peter Feldmann, Susan Hiller and Jeff Geys spring to mind, with historical precedents in the work of Aleksandr Rodchenko. But in diverse ways, Singh makes of the archive not only her subject, but also her form. The first (archive as subject matter) we see most clearly in the recent book project File Room, ‘an elegy to paper in an age of the digitization of information and knowledge.’ With the bookmaker’s love of paper, Singh visits the labyrinthine archives of Indian courts and municipal offices, and presents us with a range of images that seem like the realisation of a Borgesian dream (or nightmare), where despite all efforts at organisation, categorisation and ordering, the world of paper, like that of nature, tends to disintegration and chaos: entropy, in a word. It is, of course, also a portrait of the bureaucratic underpinning of a society in transition, possibly in permanent transition, between the obsolete and the modern.
The second (archive as form) is materialised in the exhibition itself. One extensive space in the Hayward Gallery is given over to the Museums, custom built wooden storage-and-display shelving structures, free-standing bookshelves into which where black and white photographs are slotted according to themes: museum of furniture, museum of machines, museums of men, museum of chance, museum of photography. Altogether, there are seven Museums, and Dayanita Singh is running with the idea. ‘Now with the Museum structure, I’ve made what might be called a giant book, but I am unwilling to fix it at that.’ Taking as her point of departure the fundaments of editing (selecting images and finding the sequence in which to run them), Singh finds structural – and yes, architectural (‘I would hesitate to use the word “sculpture”, she says) – forms in which these ‘books’ might be presented to a wider public. Each Museum contains a larger number of images than might be displayed at any single time, and so each display is simultaneously curated and impermanent.
But there is more. Where Orhan Pamuk created a fictional Museum of Innocence in Istanbul in order to give material ‘proof’ of something that never existed (the narrative it traces is a fiction fashioned by Pamuk himself, published prior to the institution of the museum as the novel The Museum of Innocence, 2008), Singh plans to bring these museums to her own home, to live among them. She plans to get rid of some of her existing furniture. The idea of merging the home with the work of art has its own history (Kurt Schwitters springs to mind, but many others have been charted in a recent book by Kirsty Bell[2]), but again, Singh brings to it a style and sense that are her own. This house/archive/museum will entail constantly excavating and re-configuring the archive of her own work, opening it to the public at each full moon. ‘Every month or every week you can invite someone to re-edit, say, the Museum of Chance… The Museum keeps changing the images it shows you, but you always know there’s more.’ She plans an ongoing catalogue with an editor, and, she adds, ‘my bedroom could accommodate an archivist-in-residence.’ (It is not everyone that wishes for an archivist in residence in her bedroom). The re-editing and re-purposing of photographs, allowing them to wander from one context (book, display, Museum) to another hyperbolises the notion of impermanence and re-contextualisation.
If Dayanita Singh allies herself with photographers whose principle vehicle is the book (the exhibition Home Truths, curated by Susan Bright for The Photographers’ Gallery and The Foundling Museum and running simultaneously to the Dayanita Singh show, includes the book work of Fred Hüning, making no concession to the exhibition format), the notion that she is ‘not a photographer’ or that, as she claims, photography represents only ten per cent of her practice is, perhaps, a little disingenuous. Each of her photographs evinces a manifest, almost bodily delight in composition (especially in what is excluded from the frame), in the evanescent quality of light, in all that photography can bring to view that may not be seen by the passing ‘eye’, so to speak. There is composition in even the most apparently casual work (and not one of these works is truly casual), and there is always a sense of the emotional temperature that each photographic image can generate.
This is not surprising, since Dayanita Singh has always lived with photography. One of the things this exhibition shows us, in its incorporation of documentation not as supplementary, but as inherent to the idea of the exhibition itself as a medium, is that Dayanita Singh’s mother, Nony, was a consummate photographer. Nony Singh documented her family’s life, dressing her two young daughters up for the photographic event, charting the hotel rooms she visited, observing her sister and cousins, excavating found family photographs (most intriguingly, her husband’s girlfriends before he met her).[3] Her daughter’s exhibition at the Hayward pays homage to her, shines a light on her and publicly accepts the baton, a little like Vivan Sundaram’s The Sher-Gil Archive (1995-7) and Re-take of Amrita (2001) acknowledged a dynastic link (Sundaram digitally reworking photographs taken by his grandfather, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil), while disturbing the dividing line between family archive and installation art.
It is perhaps not entirely random that these different practices are geographically associated: Singh points out that in India, archives are often custom designed and custom made. In a cultural context that still boasts rich artisanal traditions, the storage and display of objects is not standardised. There is also what art historian Geeta Kapur has described as ‘the poetics of displaced objects’, whereby installation art in countries ‘of the Third World as opposed to the cool signs thrown out by Western artists,’ is marked by different, arguably warmer traditions of spectatorship, and is connected with traditions of handicraft, but also of magic.[4] But of course with photography’s continued address to ‘the real,’ magic is touched upon, glanced off, returned to: it seems that Dayanita Singh constantly re-invokes that ‘making strange’ that excellent classic photography has always done, enabling us to see the well-worn and familiar in a new light, as if by magic.
The exhibition ends where my journey with Dayanita Singh began, with Mona Ahmed. Dayanita Singh has produced a video portrait of the eunuch, for twenty five years her friend and model. Here is an excerpt from the wall text: ‘For some time now, I had been playing with the Mona work, trying to find another form for the work, something that could be a true portrait of Mona. I always felt that in almost twenty five years of photographing her, I had never been able to do her justice, [to] her uniqueness. Finally I found the form with the moving still image, which is a still … portrait of Mona, listening to her favorite song. At first she appears like someone who has just woken up, then she gets the song and finally she becomes the song.’ In the twenty five years that Mona Ahmed and Dayanita Singh have known each other, Mona has become a famous hijra, perhaps herself a tourist attraction. In black and white, and with the movie camera fixed on the prone head of Mona Ahmed as she lies fairly still, we watch for the smallest inflections on her face: listening, recognising, following, singing along.
The titles of the works are telling: against the earlier Myself Mona Ahmed (where the photographer identifies with her marginalised model), we now have the equally weighted binary Mona and Myself: terms that are separate (go away) but yoked together (closer). Although it is still always Dayanita who aims the camera at Mona and not the other way round, this work reveals the mutuality of the two protagonists. There is no doubt that what we see is a trusting exchange. It is a portrait of great intimacy, and such intimacy chafes against such huge public projection in a way that remains interesting rather than problematic. Where, it asks us, is the boundary separating a private photographic record (a private photographic act) from the public display warranted by a work of art? The huge projection occupies a stairwell: we see the pores and individual hairs and light falling on the skin of the aged Mona Ahmed, the oddly fleshy, asymmetrical mouth, the cupped hand – all this we see filmed with the precision of one of Singh’s still portraits of her. This (literally) moving portrait, this portrait-in-time, is heart stopping for the way in which the protagonist colludes with the artist, preventing our empathy and compassion from slipping into pity, but disallowing any prurient exploration of her private life.
Ruth Rosengarten © 2013.
[1] Sven Spieker, The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: MIT Press, 2008, p. xi.
[2] Kirsty Bell, The Artist’s House: From Workplace to Artwork, Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press, 2013.
[3] See Nony Singh, The Archivist, with texts by Aveek Sen, Sabeena Gadihoke and Nony Singh, Delhi: Dreamvilla Productions, 2013.
[4] Geeta Kapur, ‘Dismantling the Norm,’ in Apinan Poshyananda (guest curator), Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions, New York: Asia Society Galleries, 1996, p66.
Minding Matter: Daniel Silver’s ‘Dig’ in its contemporary context. Ruth Rosengarten.
Minding Matter: Daniel Silver’s ‘Dig’ in its contemporary context. Ruth Rosengarten.
It is always interesting to pinpoint the moment when one becomes conscious of a change of mood or orientation in contemporary artistic practices. In the midst of so many articulations of the interconnectedness of art and architecture or art and activism; of the material and conceptual repercussions of photography moving from an age of technological to one of digital reproduction; of the links between individual and collective practice, with all the attendant jargon of ‘global connectivity’ and ‘multimedia platforms’ afforded by the seductive ubiquity of the internet, something has emerged that offers quite a different tonic. This ‘something’ might be termed ‘mindful matter’: it is materialism with a twist, or with a new twist.
Early in the twentieth century, German art historians were discussing visual art in terms of a sweep that ranged from optic to haptic responses: poles of perception that address sight and touch respectively, but in a rather abstract fashion. But the new materialism is anything but abstract. It is synthetic, inviting the convergence of forms of address that would previously have been considered oppositional. It taps readily into a strand of contemporary philosophical thinking that aims to dissolve the ontological distinction between organic and inorganic, between the vitally human and the inanimate thing. Invoking a Nietzchean conflation of soul, mind or ego with the material body, it has variously, and sometimes contentiously, attracted to itself labels such as ‘posthumanism’ (Donna Haraway) and ‘vibrant matter’ (Jane Bennett). In the wake of advances in the natural sciences and technology, and prompted by changing conceptions of material causality, philosophers and theorists of culture and science alike have begun to explore the limits of human agency, in particular in human interaction with – or exploitation of – nature (transformed from ‘virgin’ to always-already acculturated). The separation of mind from matter, or human rationality from chaotic nature, was hyperbolised in Descartes’ notion of the cogito, figured as radically separate from the corporeal substance of the material world. For Descartes, ‘I think’ stood in opposition not only to ‘I am,’ but also to ‘it is.’ But the ethos of the new materialism is anti-Cartesian in its eradication of this dualism, preferring instead a ‘monological account of emergent, generative material being,’[1] exploring the characteristic shape of human embodiment in relation to a perceptual field that is always situated in relation to that particular body (my body). From this embodied point of view, the world is always my world.
Had they conspired to do so, exhibiting institutions in London could not have come up with a wider array of shows that explore the relation between tactility and visuality, and that so variously probe materiality, not as brute stuff, but as embodiment, where sight, touch, movement, affect and language converge, also bringing in their wake a range of potential affective responses on a compass between revulsion and delight. Marisa Merz at the Serpentine Gallery (28 September – 10 November 2013), touted as ‘the only female artist affiliated to the radical 1960s art movement, Arte Povera,’ won the Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement at the 2013 Venice Biennale. She shows work that cuts across distinct media such as painting and sculpture, and that eschews the classical modernist distinction between figuration and abstraction, whimsically and idiosyncratically inviting both visual and tactile involvement and associations. At the Hayward Gallery, a retrospective of Cuban artist Ana Mendieta (Traces, Hayward Gallery, 24 September – 15 December 2013) brings to light not only her famous Siluetas, but also some lesser known works and practices, always ephemeral and poetic, that privilege the body’s action upon, in and with landscape and matter, heavily charged with symbolic and ritual intent.
The Whitechapel Gallery (Situation Absolute Beach Man Rubble, 2 October – 15 December 2013) disgorges Sarah Lucas’s obsession with sexual organs and attributes as eroticised, fanciful and sometimes repellent part objects. Using food, fabric, stockings, found objects, photography, and more traditional art materials like bronze and plaster, Lucas hilariously and unsettlingly invokes an idea of human sexuality as polymorphous and hermaphroditic. Exploratory and idiosyncratic, her works not only invite a tactile response, but also display a consummate feel for materials. A different kind of address to materials and the senses and a different kind of heterogeneity of practice is explored in the first major solo exhibition in the UK of young Colombian artist, Oscar Murillo’s ( South London Gallery, 20 September – 1 December 2013). Murillo, whose work has already generated great hype, has emptied his studio into the main gallery space. The traditional paraphernalia of the artist’s studio, together with the material vestiges of specific social situations, are processed, reprocessed, translated and transformed. The artefacts of culture are dismantled and mashed to re-emerge as new form, generating new practice. The exhibition seems to be not so much a destination as a station in the ongoing processing of culture in culture.
And finally, young Argentine artist Adrian Villar Rojas, whose career has already been meteoric (he has shown at MOMA PS1 in New York, at the latest Venice Biennale and the latest Documenta), has inaugurated the new Serpentine Sackler Gallery with Today We Reboot the Planet (28 September – 10 November 2013), a monumental installation dealing with a post-anthropocene vision of symbiotic plant and animal life on our planet, where all forms of culture (in all senses of that term) are levelled. Working with a large team of collaborators to which he refers (in utopian fashion) as a ‘society,’ the artist has created pieces out of mud, clay and brick, drawing together ecological, environmental and political concerns with science fiction, quantum mechanics and popular culture. Somewhere between workshop, laboratory, dugout and nuclear shelter, a clay-walled space contains some 2000 objects, a huge variety of sculpted and organic elements. This panoply suggests a hypothetical scenario, a post-apocalyptic time when our knowledge and the institutions in which we deposit our hopes and beliefs no longer hold sway or, indeed, mean anything. Michelangelo’s David, toy kittens, bones, plastic water bottles, pieces of soap, vegetable matter, and the fossilised body of Kurt Cobain: the whole planet, the artist suggests, might be a readymade, compostable into new configurations in some unknown future.
Deferring always to another site of production (a traditional brickworks in Rosario, Argentina), this exhibition represents an enormous and theatrical gesture in the face of the purely conceptual or virtual. The work collides with the aesthetics of primitivism, brutalism and the archive (to all of which it appears to allude) on the one hand, and post-production processes / screen technologies on the other; eschewing both the white cube and the black box. The gigantic, straining, crumbling elephant wedged against a beam, squashed into a heartrending, persecuted, ‘downward dog’ position, offers a frankly tender view of its massive derriere. This beast startlingly conjures contemporary concerns, bundled into – or emerging from – abundant, heaving, embodied presence.
As in the work of Adrian Villar Rojas, ‘matter’ in the work of London-based artist Daniel Silver, comes freighted with concepts. But while the prior invokes the intersecting worlds of ecology, labour and geo-politics, Silver explores the encounter of artistic practice (more specifically, of sculptural practice) with archaeology, literally materialising – giving body to – Freud’s use of archaeological metaphors to describe the workings of the psyche and of memory.
On Grafton Way, close to Tottenham Court Road, a plot of undeveloped land now belonging to University College London Hospital was once the site of an Odeon Cinema. Unusually for a piece of prime London real estate, it is abandoned and disused, and I doubt whether many would unintentionally have come upon it as the location of the latest project funded by Artangel, a London-based organisation that has commissioned and produced a range of notable, indeed ‘landmark’ site-specific installations, as well as some projects for film, radio and the internet. Rachel Whiteread, Ilya Kabakov, Steve McQueen, Brian Eno and Laurie Anderson, Michael Landy, Kutlug Ataman, Francis Alÿs, Janet Cardiff, Susan Phillipsz, Roger Hiorns and Clio Barnard are among the many beneficiaries of this far-reaching project.
But say you did stumble upon Daniel Silver’s Dig (12 September – 3 November 2013) as if coming upon the site of an archaeological excavation in the midst of this bustling city. You find yourself walking along a rickety boardwalk into the tenebrous, echo-filled, cold, disintegrating remains of a building, with its eroded concrete walls, its stagnating puddles of rain water and its cavernous underground level, its now open spaces all imparting the evocative magic of an urban ruin. Arrayed on trestle tables and on the floor in families – objects grouped together according to their similarities – are pieces that appear to be fragments, worn and broken parts of ancient artefacts. The first pieces you come upon as you enter the room are the most fragmentary and are covered in mud, as if newly unearthed and not yet processed or mended. As you proceed through the space, you are faced with more complete, almost identifiable objects. In various shades of white, these bring to the installation all the layered art-historical connotations of that colour, its immersion in the history of bone, marble, porcelain.
Daniel Silver has alluded to growing up in Jerusalem, a city under repeated excavation, as well as to the time he spent in that other archetypal site of excavation, Rome, which for Freud (as for many others) was the ‘Eternal City’, paradigmatic in the temporal layers it contained. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud speaks of the remains of ancient Rome ‘dovetailed into the jumble of a great metropolis,’ existing in the soil ‘beneath its modern buildings’. He notes that this imbrication of different periods exemplifies ‘the manner in which the past is preserved in historical sites’. The city of Rome, then, materially manifests the ways in which ‘what is past in mental life may be preserved and is not necessarily erased’. In Silver’s Dig, the allusion to Freud’s Rome, and therefore to digging down into the unconscious, is melded into the intimation of Freud’s London, for the artist invokes the famous collection of archaeological artefacts that Freud kept in his consulting rooms in Hampstead.
Often bearded (like Freud himself), made of marble, clay and plaster, the truncated or incomplete standing and lying figures hint at garden gnomes, ancient gods, mythological hybrids, toys representing aliens or mutants bridging the gap between the feminine and the masculine, the animate and the inanimate. This is not so much Adrian Villar Rojas’s post-apocalyptic world, as a projection and materialisation of some inner state. They are strange and unsettling objects of phobia or desire.
While we might be tempted to invoke Freud’s idea of the uncanny here, with its specific concern with the ways in which the animate and the inanimate inhabit each other, in fact these works do not seem to provoke that shudder that Freud referred to as the unheimlich, the un-homely feeling of the strangely familiar. This may be because the confusion between animate and inanimate seems to have already happened long ago, rather than being given to view (as if) for the first time. The multiple/serial effect of the images is a distancing device, and Silver’s insistent reiteration of materials traditionally linked with sculptural practice and his exploration of the connotations of these materials, invoke something already entirely mediated.
These figures also bridge another gap – between the status of an object as original and handmade on the one hand, and as the outcome of a process of mass production on the other. Finger marks left in clay or pressed into drying plaster erode the figures’ descriptive and referential capability (sometimes a whole face is erased by repeated jabs), and suggest the origin of these figures in manual processes. Nevertheless, the similarity and repetitiveness of the figures themselves, within each ‘family’ group, and the visible marks of ridges remaining after the removal of the plaster mould (where in traditional sculptural practice, this trace of the making process would be sanded down) send contradictory messages. For they allude, on the one hand, to the serial production of cheap toys, and on the other – as in Oscar Murillo’s installation – to the processes whereby an artist transforms matter into art work in the studio.
Steps on scaffolding lead one down to a lower level, a kind of basement, and here, solemn, larger-than-life, bearded heads occupying tall plinths stand in brackish pools of water. The atmosphere is desolate and funereal. At the bottom end, possibly illuminated by the autumnal sun, standing upon a plinth is a bust of Freud, apparently in marble, but with its features imprecise, as if made of wax or ice cream and beginning to melt, but also reminiscent of the foot of the sculpture St Peter in Rome, worn and smoothed by having been so frequently touched. In this way too, by being so eerily smoothed over, the head elicits a haptic response. 
Nearby, upon a divan (more Le Corbusier than Freud) lies Freud himself in state, under a pile of morphing heads that allude to the figures in the room above, but that also mine a rich sculptural seam, from Diana of Ephesus to the fragmented and multi-breasted/phallic figures of Louise Bourgeois, or Sarah Lucas for that matter. This highly charged, evocative form (or multiplicity of forms) simultaneously suggesting death and polymorphous eroticism, is granted sculptural coherence by the use of plaster as a binding and unifying material, transformed from deliquescent to frangible.
Whether smooth or rough, the product of subtractive processes like chiselling or of additive processes like modelling clay and then using plaster moulds, Daniel Silver’s figures bear the traces of facture, the signs of how they were made. Such signs contradict the apparent ‘foundness’ of the objects, constantly reminding us that the whole premise of the work’s staging is faked, a fiction. These are the opposite of objets trouvés.
Like other practices I have mentioned here – in particular that of Oscar Murillo and Adrian Villar Rojas – these works declare the procedures that brought them into being, and in their restless, vital physicality, they refuse to coalesce or cohere into singular forms with monolithic meanings. If they are imposing, they are also indeterminate and incomplete, apparently always in the midst of becoming. In triangulating archaeological excavation, psychoanalytic transaction and the labour of the artist (himself), Daniel Silver suggests that the nature of the ‘dig’ is as much psychic as material; that the psychic and the material are not so much interdependent as aspects of the same thing.
Ruth Rosengarten © 2013 – ruthrosengarten.com
[1] Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (eds.), ‘Introducing the New Materialisms,’ in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2010, (location 112 in the ebook).
Chihuly: Reflections on nature. Review by Carla Scarano.
September 9, 2019 by Carla Scarano • added recently on London Grip, art, exhibitions, installations, sculpture • Tags: art, Carla Scarano, exhibitions, installations, sculpture •
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