London Grip Poetry Review – John Greening
Stuart Henson reflects on the serendipity that led to the creation of a high-quality artist’s book from Redfox Press which combines photographic images with poems by John Greening More →
photography
East End Suffragettes: the photographs of Norah Smyth. By Jane McChrystal.
East End Suffragettes: the photographs of Norah Smyth
An Exhibition at the Four Corners Gallery, Roman Road
If you can get along to Bethnal Green in the next three weeks, I highly recommend a visit to this exhibition of photographs. They document a dramatic period in the history of the East London, when Sylvia Pankhurst moved in and set up the East London Federation of Suffragettes in 1914 at 400 Old Ford Road, which also served as home to her and her companion, Norah. The exhibition follows on from the recreation of the Women’s Hall at 400 Old Ford Road staged over summer last year at the Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archive (londongrip.co.uk/2018/05/east-london-federation-of-suffragettes-event-at-tower-hamlets-local-history-library-and-archive/).
Norah’s photographs show the splendid work ELFS carried out for the people of the East End during the First World War – running Cost Price restaurants for people suffering from food shortages, milk distribution centres for hungry babies and clinics for children with no access to free health care. They even set up a toy factory to provide women with the opportunity to earn a fair wage in decent working conditions. There are processions, pageants and anti-war protests. We also see how the Russian Revolution spurred Sylvia and other members of ELFS on to a wider socialist programme after women over the age of thirty won the vote in 1918.
Her portrayals of East Enders have a warmth lacking in the images created by other photographers who came to the East End to capture a spectacle of poverty and deprivation for the appalled gaze of those who lived outside. Her subjects engage with her as one who lives among them, looking steadily at the camera, without embarrassment or any obvious desire to please.
Four Corners’ exhibition offers us the rare opportunity to view important moments in the history East London history, captured as they occurred, which can usually only be seen at the International Institute of Social History (/www.socialhistory.org/) in Holland, where they are stored.
Contemporaries reported that Norah was every bit as energetic and capable as Sylvia Pankhurst, and yet her contribution to women’s suffrage is very little known. Likewise, there is scant acknowledgment of her place in the history of English photography.
It’s hard to say why this should be, but it could be something to do with Norah’s self-effacing nature, evident in the omission of any credits for the many photographs she published in the Woman’s Dreadnought, ELFS’ official newspaper. Such reticence was not par for the course. Christina Broom, the far more famous photographer of the mainstream Women’s Social and Political Union, etched her name on every one of her photographic plates. Nor was her philanthropic contribution commemorated, unlike that of other benefactors such as William Booth and Richard Green, even though she spent the entire fortune she inherited from her father on the people of the East End.
So far, visitor numbers have exceeded the organisers’ expectations and comments in the visitors’ book are full praise for this skilfully curated assemblage of a unique collection. Originally it was intended for display until 9th February but fortunately for potential visitors it can now be seen for a further week.
Norah Smyth’s photographs are on display at Four Corners
121 Roman Road, Bethnal Green, London E2 0QN
From 2nd November – 16th February 2019
Tues – Sat: 11.00-18.00 daily. Admission free. Closed Mondays.
www.fourcornersfilm.co.uk/East-End-Suffragettes
There is a catalogue to accompany the exhibition written by Carla Mitchell and Helen Trompeteler, which reproduces many of the images displayed and has been an invaluable source of information for this article.
Jane McChrystal © 2019.
Night and Day: 1930s Fashion & Photographs. Review by Barbara Lewis.
Night and Day: 1930s Fashion and Photographs,
Textile and Design Museum, London,
Until January 20.
In 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. In the world of fashion, shoulders broadened and the iconic 1930s shape became established.
The juxtaposition of fascism and fashion might seem frivolous, but Night and Day is earnest in that it takes style as the lens through which we can understand anew an era impossible to disassociate from the World War that followed.
It was also preceded by the stock market crash of 1929, meaning that looking good night and day was often a triumph of ingenuity over adversity and only the wealthy few could be effortlessly if guiltily elegant.
Even for them, the gaiety of the 1920s flappers gave way to more sedate and chaste cuts, just as in architecture the extravagance of art nouveau had already been pared back to the geometric flair of Art Deco, named after the international exhibition Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, held in Paris in 1925.
Another piece of style trivia we learn, or possibly are reminded of, is that the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, when gold discs were found sewn to the young king’s clothing, led to a vogue for sequins and sparkle that endured into the 1930s.
At the dazzling summit of the social pyramid was Princess Elizabeth, captured by Cecil Beaton in a froth of net and diamante, decorously seated in her palace.
For mere mortals, glamour had to be contrived from domestic skills honed from reading women’s magazines, full of helpful tips. At the same time, department stores were also becoming established, allowing customers to browse unattended through racks of off-the-peg clothes bearing price tags and forcing shop assistants, previously accustomed to the personal service of the tailor-made, into new work practices. Today’s echo is the growth of online shopping, check-out robots and the collapse of the high street.
The shift away from the chic boutique also coincided with the advent of cheaper, patterned fabrics and synthetic materials rather than the embroidered silks and velvets that had gone before.
They provided the attire for the thousands upon thousands living in the new semi-detached suburban housing that shot up in the 1930s, replacing crumbling slums.
At the other end of the social scale, society photographer Cecil Beaton was signing the lease on his country home in Ashcombe, Wiltshire, where he would entertain his leisured guests and host fancy dress parties.
One of his outfits was a “rabbit coat”, worn at his “fête champêtre” in 1937. It has been recreated with egg shells and flamboyant felt flowers and guards the entrance – or is it the exit? – to a selection of 30 of Beaton’s 1930s fashion portraits. The original was made by stage costumier Madame Karinska and had accompanying breeches embroidered with beetles.
Most of the portraits he shot take as their theme the glamorous and make-believe. They include his famous 1936 photograph of Marlene Dietrich, which captures the strength of her jaw-line, echoed by the brim of her hat and continued by the sweeping gesture of her hands.
We also have a triptych “Charwoman to Dowager” on the art of retouching, showing how he slimmed down and rejuvenated his subject.
The two worlds – glamour and desolation – collide in his portrait of Vicomtesse Marie-Laure de Noailles, artist and patron, as she huddles in her fur coat among the ruins of the Paris Exhibition.
Her sorrowful expression may have been genuine, but is also stylised. One rare natural-looking shot is of actress, writer, model Iris Tree and another “bright, young thing” Nicolas Nabokov, who holds her tightly while she looks radiantly happy.
They stand out for their apparent disregard of formality in an exhibition that emphasises the pride of overcoming difficulty and keeping up appearances.
Another selection of portraits by Dorothy Wilding, Madame Yevonde and Paul Tanqueray, leading studio photographers in London, provides further testimony to the golden age of the glamour shot.
Vivien Leigh is luminous in a sapphire blue dress offset by a vase of tiger lilies. Even Washing Day, an advertisement for British Celanese fabrics, is a dreamy haze of soft colours against a summer sky.
Returning to the present, the similarities – and differences – are striking. Today’s women do not accept that their place is in the home. Still, however, they emulate the film stars. The difference now is that they want the brands they wear not makeshift equivalents. A decade after our own financial crisis, we have lost the 1930s willingness to find satisfaction from cutting our coat according to our cloth. The nagging sense left by this socially-aware exhibition – from which the evening gowns, plunging at the back, however elegant cannot divert us – is that the divisions between the have and have-nots, borne out in how they dress, are marked today, as they were in the 1930s, and anger is fermenting.
Barbara Lewis © 2018.
Fideles Oculi, Jennie Jewitt-Harris Exhibition. Review by WIlliam Marshall
Fideles Oculi
Jennie Jewitt-Harris at C & C Gallery, Forest Hill until 7 October
This is a remarkable exhibition: Jennie Jewitt-Harris’s intricate collages, built in many cases on a foundation of pencil and charcoal drawings of driftwood, are a delight to the eye. The huge range of material – fragments of press cuttings, maps, tickets, illustrations and many more – draw the observer into the works and compel them to find and build stories of their own. In one moment, one may be transported by a piece of map to a remote (or perhaps familiar) spot, and in the next be made to speculate about the lives of characters who have been frozen in time in a complex, alien, environment. Perhaps they are observers, too.
Jennie is a doctor and many of the images are suggestive of anatomical drawings. In ‘Jeopardy of Life’ the image suggests a human figure striding across a landscape, the sinews of the lower limbs taut as it leans forward under a burden of collage including figures that stare out at the viewer, demanding our attention and forcing us to view it ever more closely. ‘Seat of the Soul’ is an image of her husband’s eye, and draws us deep into the body, emphasising the unique role of the organ of sight in internalising our physical environment. In conversation, I learnt that while many people are willing for their internal organs to be used for transplantation after death, far fewer are willing to donate their corneas, the transparent part of the eye through which light passes into the retina, itself an extension of the brain, a topic that Jennie is researching for a PhD.
The quality of Jennie’s work is attested to by her having two of her artworks hanging at this year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. It certainly deserves to be more widely known. As does the C & C Gallery, situated at the back of a bar only a couple of minutes away from Forest Hill rail station, on the London Overground as well being served by as main line trains from London Bridge and Victoria.
William Marshall © 2018.
AOP50: Images that Defined the Age. Review by Jane McChrystal.
AOP50: Images that Defined the Age – Celebrating 50 Years of the Association of Photographers
The Foyer, 1 Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5AB
Zelda Cheatle, acknowledged as a leading photography expert among European curators and gallerists, has selected some iconic images created by members of the Association of Photographers over the fifty years since its foundation, and for once, the “i” word is right and fitting when applied to the work on show.
The AOP was set up in 1968 to publicise the work and protect the copyright of photographers active in the worlds of fashion and advertising. Its members include Duffy, John Claridge, Jillian Edelstein and Terence Donovan whose work appears in the exhibition.
The advertising industry enjoyed a kind of golden age during the years covered by the exhibition and some of the images on display encapsulate the power of memorable campaigns with which they were associated.
Take an early example, the Pregnant Man, made by Alan Brooking in 1969 for the Family Planning Association in association with the pro-abortion campaigner Helene Grahame. The copy asked the male viewer whether he’d “be more careful” if he was the one to get pregnant. It made an enormous splash.
The idea of a man getting pregnant! Billboards all over the land asking men to think about using contraception! Naturally it was the subject of an outcry in the press, which guaranteed the power of its impact at home and abroad, prefiguring the kind of hoo-ha Saatchi campaigns would go on to stir up in the 1980’s.
There are two world-famous portraits in the exhibition made by Jillian Edelstein while she was documenting the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa between1996-2002.
The first is of Nelson Mandela at a point in his life when he was probably perceived as a kind of secular saint, but who was, in fact, going through the all too human breakup with his wife Winnie. The second is of Desmond Tutu, captured in characteristic mirthful mode, showing the persona developed in his childhood home where he was called upon to protect his mother from his father’s violence. I believe they both capture something exceptional behind the usual public face, which accounts for their lasting power.
Campaigns delivered on billboards across the nation, in print and on two TV channels had enormous reach. We didn’t really have the chance to see anything else. The rise of digitalised marketing and digital imaging have revolutionised the way in which advertisers get their message across to us. It’s possible, then, that AOP50 is one of a kind. You can see it until 1st June.
Jane McChrystal © 2018.
Louise Dahl Wolfe: A Style of her Own. Review by Barbara Lewis.
Louise Dahl Wolfe: A Style of her Own
Main gallery,
Fashion and Textile Museum,
Until Jan. 21.
These dark winter months, when accounts of inappropriate advances are rocking Westminster and Hollywood, are the perfect time for seeking light and sanity in the clean-cut, calm glamour of fashion photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe.
Dahl-Wolfe (1895-89) trained at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she acquired a grounding in human anatomy and colour that would inform the rest of her career.
Whereas the portrait photographers who went before her tended towards the formal and unnatural, she understood the impact of male versus female anatomy on movement and poise and she made colour resonant, not random.
The exhibition begins with some of the 86 covers she created for Harper’s Bazaar. Stand-outs include Lauren Bacall in the 1943 pose that won her her first movie part.
She stands in front of a door with a frosted glass panel marked with a cross and the words American Red Cross Blood Donor Service. Through it we see the shadowy figure of a nurse, while Bacall stares out dreamily with vivid red lips and a red bag with all the connotations the colour carries.
Another favourite for me is Clothes for Studying, also 1943. It portrays a college girl with a sweetly earnest expression in a tweed suit with tortoiseshell buttons. As proof of her credentials beyond her sense of style, she carries a book on aircraft and another on the Fundamentals of Mechanics.
Move on 10 years, war is over and the mood is celebrational as Queen Elizabeth II is crowned. The angle for Harper’s Bazaar and Dahl-Wolfe is: Clothes for Summer Everywhere. Her model Jean Patchett kneels gracefully as if before royalty in front of the Moorish tiles of Spain’s Alhambra. She is wearing a yellow shorts suit and a yellow hat, a triumphant shade offset by the orange, black and turquoise of the tiles and intensified by yellow flowers.
Dahl-Wolfe’s appreciation of designer elegance was enhanced by her understanding that life was the opposite for much of the population, for instance in 1930s Nashville.
A section on the impact of the Great Depression includes a self-portrait of Dahl-Wolfe nude lying face down, as if wounded or even dead on a bare wooden floor with a stair banister pole to the left of the shot suggesting the possibility of a fall.
Alive and enduring, the denizens of Tennessee include Mrs Ramsay in a 1931 study at her log cabin in the Smoky Mountains. She sits next to a plate of gourds, knobbly and resistant, reflecting perhaps the character of the sitter, who wears a 25-year-old hat with a flowery decoration incongruously girlish above the weather-beaten, seen-it-all face.
Another study in the harshness of things, At Alfred Starr’s Theatre, the Bijou, shows Starr, the theatre manager, sitting in his empty theatre surrounded by rows of seats with tattered covers. He too is tattered and wild-looking in filthy trousers and dust-covered boots.
Dahl-Wolfe’s studies in grim realism are paired with her efforts to capture the true essence of the stars of Hollywood and high society and she had access to them all.
Vivien Leigh, in her dressing room, for Gone with the Wind, is tiny and perfect in layers of taffeta. Yves Montand, in his Paris studio, is all Gallic shrug and mischievous, gesturing hands. Orson Welles looks out through eyes that speak intelligence, purpose, burning ambition, from in front of the storyboard from Heart of Darkness. Christopher Isherwood and WH Auden are captured in Central Park, New York, angular, edgy, together and yet a discreet distance apart.
As this is London’s only Fashion and Textile Museum and this year marks the 70th anniversary of French fashion house Christian Dior, this first major retrospective of Dahl-Wolfe in Britain includes a section on Dior.
The four dresses spanning a 1947 white evening gown to a 1967 mini-dress are beautifully made, but not his dreamiest.
More engaging are Dahl-Wolfe’s photographs of the Paris fashion scene.
Wider Shoulders, Wider Sleeves: the opening day for trade buyers of Dior, 1956, has a dry wit as the model Barbara Mullen, haughty in black Dior, outclasses the mere mortals waiting meekly on a classically Parisian staircase, lined up for entry, clutching their invitation cards.
Dahl-Wolfe also photographs Dior himself with artist Christian Berard at Dior’s mill house outside Paris.
Her wry joke is to avoid photographing Dior designing or surrounded by models wearing his gowns. Instead, Berard looks on as Dior plays patience, even then exuding style.
Barbara Lewis © 2017.
The Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy, 2017, Burlington House, Piccadilly. Review by Jane McChrystal.
The Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy, 2017, Burlington House, Piccadilly
A stock image of visitors to a private view of the Exhibition, 1965, shows ladies in hats, who wouldn’t have looked out of place a decade earlier, gathered around a conventional portrait of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II by Peter Greenham. This is not Swinging London.
Today, the Summer Exhibition is not regarded as much of an event and the arts press tends to treat it with condescension. Maybe journalists have a residual image of ladies in hats when they review it, or are influenced by an air of fustiness and amateurishness which hangs over its reputation.
It’s seen as fusty because all the exhibits are selected and hung by the Royal Academicians, who are also allowed to submit six pieces; amateurish, because any member of the public is entitled to enter two works a year for the consideration of the selection panel.
This year a friend, who is training in the art of print-making, was kind enough to ask me to go along with her to the exhibition. Although the prospect of viewing 1,200 works was daunting, we decided to jump in and see what we’d find.
On the whole, the curators have given the works the space they need and brought a coherent approach to displaying them in relation to each other, which provides the viewer with a largely satisfying experience. Gallery I is the only room where so many smaller prints and paintings have been hung together they induce sensory overload.
Galleries IV and VIII were curated by Ann Christopher, whose selection of paintings, prints and sculpture in Gallery VIII produces some disturbing effects not normally associated the rather frothy image of the exhibition. For example, Tim Shaw’s Defending Integrity from the Power that Be consists of two scarily life-like, but oversized cloth human figures with their feet planted on curved, metal blades, whose mouths have been stuffed with money and taped shut.
Tim Shaw’s ‘Defending Integrity from the Power that Be’
Ann Christopher’s sculpture, Silent Journey in Gallery IV left the most lasting impression of the exhibition. The work is cast in bronze, covered in a green patina and shaped like an elongated, horizontal Zulu shield. Its surface is lightly pitted and scored across the width, with a long, thin rod of shiny, twisted aluminium passing over it at an angle. The final effect is one of great elegance and tranquility.
Ann Christopher’s ‘Silent Journey’
There are some immediately recognisable pieces, such as Tracy Emin’s neon sculpture, Never Again! and Michael Craig-Martin’s brightly coloured, untitled acrylic of a lap-top corner, which hang in the Wohl Central Gallery.
Tracy Emin’s ‘Never Again! ‘
Sir Michael Craig-Martin ‘Untitled (Yellow Laptop Fragment)’
Another of Craig-Martin’s protégés, captures a spirit of summery joy in her gouaches All the Fairies, My Goblins, Bring me Her Heart and Sleeping Giant in Gallery III.
Fiona Rae’s ‘Sleeping Giant’
My enjoyment of the prints on display was enhanced by having a companion who is familiar with the artists who make them and the techniques they use.
She drew my attention to Hughie O’Donoghue’s Departure. O’Donoghue, another graduate of Goldsmith’s College in the 1980’s, was born in Manchester but spent his child-hood holidays on the West Coast of Ireland, where he developed a life-long preoccupation with themes of history, identity and loss.
Departure is a mixed media work showing a huge, spectral boat coming towards the viewer on a breaking wave. The only human presence is a small face at the window at the side of the cabin. The work evokes a collective memory of the millions of Irish, who left the home country to free themselves from famine and poverty in search of a better life, but it also resonates clearly with the desperate flight of Africans and Syrians across the Mediterranean today.
Hughie O’Donoghue’s ‘Departure’
When the Royal Academicians put on the first summer show in 1769, they declared an intention to show the work of all artists of merit to the public. Much of the work on display in 2017 exhibition is of a high standard and seems continue in the tradition established by its originators.
Without forming part of the avant-garde, the exhibition still provides plenty to stimulate and even challenge the viewer, while the strong presence of the YBAs and their mentor Craig Martin is a good illustration of how yesterday’s sensationalists can become absorbed into the mainstream and eventually promoted to the top of the art establishment.
The Summer Exhibition runs until 20th August
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/summer-exhibition-2017
Thank you to Nicola Scott and Caroline Hotblack for their help with this review
Jane McChrystal © 2017.
London Grip Poetry Review – O’Brien
Ryan’s Return: Brian Docherty takes a thoughtful and observant stroll through Sean O’Brien’s sombre version of West London More →
Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition, Jewish Museum, Brussels. Review by Barbara Lewis.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Curator: Pascale Falek Alhadeff
Jewish Museum, Brussels
Until Aug. 24.
WEST GERMANY. 1962. West Berlin. The Berlin wall.
In May 2014, a gunman believed to have links with radical Islamists opened fire at the Jewish Museum in the Sablon area of central Brussels , killing three people instantly. A fourth died in hospital.
A year on, armed soldiers stand guard at the museum of Jewish culture and its history in Belgium and visitor numbers are still low.
That ought to change after the museum’s old-fashioned display is revamped in a two-year refurbishment beginning after the summer.
Until then, those who make it past the security checks are rewarded with a pleasantly crowd-free exhibition of the extraordinary output of France’s Henri Cartier-Bresson, hailed as the founder of photojournalism and “the eye of the century”. That is true in the fullest sense of the words, given his exceptional ability to see the telling detail, or, in his own words, to seize the fact related to “the deep reality”.
The Jewish Museum said it decided to hold the exhibition as the natural sequel to exhibitions on Robert Capa and Chim Seymour, Cartier-Bresson’s colleagues at the agency Magnum Photo, founded in the aftermath of World War II.
Whether he has lighted on a stray dog, an orphaned child or a great artist, Cartier-Bresson can make us feel we have entered their worlds and shared their significance.
The selection of 133 crystal-clear, black and white photographs conveys the massive range of Cartier-Bresson’s subject-matter over five decades — from Mexico to Madrid, from the poverty-stricken to luminaries, such as Sartre and Matisse, and from harrowing moments of history to child-like humour.
Presentation that is simple in the extreme lets the photographs speak for themselves. The only commentary consists of a few biographical notes and quotations, in keeping with Cartier-Bresson’s own unadorned approach: he used a small Leica, never a flash and insisted his pictures were not cropped. On some of them, you can see the edge of the film poking above the picture frame.
Himself from a bourgeois family, whose wealth allowed him to attend art school and gave him the freedom not to work in a bank, as he put it, Cartier-Bresson’s prime subject is the reality of the ordinary man. To make himself as invisible as possible, like a hunter stalking his prey, he often wrapped black tape around the camera’s chrome body to make it less conspicuous.
His approach to covering the Coronation of George VI in 1937 was to turn his back on the monarch and focus on the subjects watching from London’s Trafalgar Square. One who is particularly the worse for wear sleeps off his excesses on a bed of abandoned newspapers, ignored by the rest of the public, which gazes on with varying degrees of deadened indifference.
Cartier-Bresson’s unerring, compassionate eye manages to capture inherent ridiculousness and dignity; when mocking, he is also warm. However messy his subjects, his sense of composition – again best summed up by borrowing from his eloquent words, as a “marvellous mixture of emotion and geometry” – gives them elegance while avoiding romanticism.
The non-chic bulkiness of the protagonists in his 1938 study Sunday on the banks of the Seine is as much an homage as a parody of the impressionist painters’ idealised versions of similar scenes.
The indulgence of Cartier-Bresson’s rather sweaty picnickers is summed up as the click of his camera catches a man in braces and a bowler hat pouring out wine into a glass.
Equally, he captures with precision the electrifying horror as a former Gestapo informer is indentified in 1945. The woman handing over the informer has the air of a savage animal baring its teeth. The woman informer is a cross between surly and guilty-looking as she stands before an official, who is stern to the roots of his razor-sharp hair parting, while the crowd has the air of being ready to surge.
Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moments” make everyone an actor, regardless of how small their role.
He conveys the overwhelming significance of the 1948 cremation of Gandhi by showing the scale of the crowd: a sea of people, like extras in a film, above which a few rise by clambering into a tree to get a view.
And then there are his portraits of those who actively shape their world.
The photographs on show at the Jewish Museum include the famous 1944 portrait of Matisse in Vence, southern France, absorbed in the task of depicting his beloved doves.
There is also Sartre in 1946 Paris, smoking his pipe and staring out, one eye wilder than the other, and Giocametti crossing a Paris street in 1961. His coat is pulled up over his head as the great sculptor retreats from the rain just like an ordinary citizen – or is it in fact the ordinary citizens that behave like the great through Cartier-Bresson’s lens?
Barbara Lewis.
FRANCE. Paris. Maeght gallery. Swiss painter and sculptor Alberto GIACOMETTI. 1961.
Nautilus and EU presidencies
One of the more unlikely joys of Brussels life is the rotating EU presidency. Every six months, a different member of the 28-strong European Union takes on the task of presiding over policy-making.
Apart from the chance to influence the debate, the effect is to provide a platform for the nation’s qualities. For the citizens of Brussels, it’s a chance for a cultural mini break without the expense and inconvenience of braving the airport.
Until the end of June, Greece is at the helm. For the Bozar arts centre in central Brussels, that is the spur for a series of events to explore the country’s music, cinema and visual art and remind us there is more to Hellenic civilisation than unmanageable debt.
Above all, it is a nation surrounded by the sea, inspiring odysseys and migration and providing a rich harvest from ancient times to the present day.
Nautilus, or Navigating Greece, which runs until April 27, juxtaposes artefacts dating from hundreds if not thousands of years B.C. with modern art, including installations and breath-taking photography of the shimmering sea, a world away from grey Brussels skies.
It’s a mix of ancient dolphins and Poseidons and Aphrodites and footage, at once timeless and contemporary, of weather-beaten fishermen hauling in a silvery catch. Modern-art heads of horses made from drift-wood ride the waves alongside rhytons, or ritual drinking vessels, from the feasts of the classical era.
The exhbition begins and ends with the refracted light and sound of the sea, lashing against the shore.
Apart from the salt smell, one obvious omission is a confrontation with the Greek problems of today that EU member states have spent countless hours struggling to solve.
That, however, is coming soon, when from March 26 to August 3, the Bozar hosts an artistic response to Greece’s economic and financial gloom: No Country for Young Men.
Also in March, the Bozar presents a new wave of Greek film-makers and in May the annual Brussels music festival Balkan Trafik will demonstrate to audiences Greece’s profound influence on western culture, the organizers promise.
Then, later this year, Brussels moves on from the Greeks to the Romans as Italy takes over the EU presidency and the European capital’s cultural agenda.
Barbara Lewis © February 2014.
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.
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London Grip Poetry Review – John Harvey
July 22, 2019 by Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • books, photography, poetry reviews, year 2019 • Tags: books, photography, poetry, Thomas Ovans • 0 Comments
Thomas Ovans is captivated by John Harvey’s skilful evocation of fond memories More →