Elmgreen and Dragset in the sunshine

The sun is shining for a change and the sky is a robins egg blue. What a glorious day for a launch of the new sculpture on the Fourth Plinth.  Arrive to see the Elgreen and Dragset contribution slightly apprehensive as I like their work and was not too sure of the Marquette that had been shown for the competition. 

Boris Johnson is nowhere to be seen (small blessings) and in his place, I am told, is Joanna.  I wonder Joanna who?  To my delight it is Joanna Lumley, the only person who apparently you should know by simply their first name.  She has the job of removing the rather ominous looking hangman’s noose that will allow the draperies to come away to reveal to duos handicraft.  Later she poses happily in front of a phalanx of press photographers.

Elmgreen and Dragset have a lightness of touch that I admire.  And this work Powerless Structures is no different in that respect. A young boy sits astride a rocking horse, glinting in the sunshine.  The work initiates a thought provoking conversation with the traditional man on horse monument at the other  end of Trafalgar Square. Elmgreen and Dragset pinpoints the moment we live in.  No heroic acts here just hedonism and fun.   The horse does not pretend to be gold – it is gilt.  It seems to  imply all that glitters is not gold. It has a surface though and the sculpture particularly succeeds in the detailing of the horses mane and suspenders.

In the past I have enjoyed Elmgreen and Dragsets work in mixed shows.  I remember with particular pleasure a work commissioned for the Trusardi Foundation that I saw in a mixed show in Florence.  The piece,  Massimiliano Gioni told me was a bureaucratic nightmare when it was installed initially in the uber conservative Milano.  The foundation had all the necessary permissions and the mayor’s approval before they installed in the middle of the night so that the work Short Cut, (2003)

would appear to have appeared in the fashionable Galleria Vittorio Emanuele as if by magic.  Much to their surprise the car soon had a 700 euro ticket for illegal parking (strange in a pedestrian precinct). 

Back to Trafalgar Square though, and the mayor has obviously done his work because there are no meter men in sight.  I like the way the horse is cantilevered seemingly effortlessly over the edge of the plinth.  It is a work in the round and demands to be circumvented.  Children will love it and their parents will too.  It is the perfect choice for the Olympics and the visitors who will pour into the city.  We live in rocky times and we need to ride through the stormy and sunny times, never forgetting to have a bit of joy along the way. 

Yayoi Kusama

I have almost forgotten how to do this art of the blog as too much looking and thinking has over taken me so I have decided to up load some pictures to share in lieu of too much writing.

Here is the wonderful Yayoi Kusama from when I interviewed her in Victoria Miro Studio.  Loved meeting her after seeing her wonderful show at Tate Modern.  She was every bit as intimidating as I thought she would be.  Was careful to respect what the gallery told me about not comparing her to other artists such as Damien Hirst for instance.  Thought I should also stay away from her craziness as well but she kept alluding to it. The doctors tell me to do this to help my mental condition was a recurring theme.  It brings back to mind the crazy interview that Damien Hirst did when he kept asking her whether making paintings made her happy and she kept saying, ' I do this to keep from jumping off of tall buildings.'
No doubt that Yayoi was ahead of her time.  Looking at her dates she was ten years ahead of body parts from the wonderful Louise Bourgois and three years ahead with wall paper from the equally wonderful Andy Warhol.  Can't fake the dates!!! Wonder if she was a man if people would be more respectful of how great an influence she has played.
Look at her slide work and imagine Gillian Wearing was not looking at her.  Her dolls and that Sarah Lucas did not see it.  Her spots and...........
The difference is the authenticity.  Her motivation was to stay as healthy as possible and others......

Ettore Spalletti : the minimalist maximist

Ettore Spalletti, the minimal maximal.

‘Ettore is about capturing the light – the sky.  Trapping it and giving it to you’.  These are the words of collector Giulio di Grapello as we stand in front of his work by Ettore Spalletti, Italy’s most venerable minimalist artist.

I had seen works by Spalletti, at art fairs but had missed his large show in Milan when Lia Rumma had chosen to open her new gorgeous space with his work.  A strange choice I had felt as Lia Rumma also showed Anselm Kiefer, William Kentridge and Marina Abramovic, all bigger names on the international market place.

His niece Benedetta Spalletti has Vistamare,  a gallery in Pescara and had arranged for me to be collected from Rome -so how could I say no.  I was exhausted from an intensive series of studio visits and meetings in Turin and sitting in a car seemed the least strenuous activity.   Driving almost due east from Rome is an experience in itseld as one traverses across Lazio into Abruzzo and the landscape of Italy, the rugged semi mountainous terrain, passing long chains of spinning wind turbines and little else barring pine forests, save the occasional medieval village clinging to the inhospitable rocks.

By the time we arrive I am exhausted but perk up as the light changes as we get near the sea. I am unprepared for the intense heat though when we arrive and meet the charming Benedetta.

She suggests a light lunch first and we The restaurant though brings back that Italian spirit with a lunch of sea food so fresh it is actually breathing on the plate. 

We linger over our lunch enjoying the large lumps of watermelon arranged like sculptures on the plate – they know I am in the arts after all -and crisp white local wine.  It is late when we drive up into the mountains alongside Pescara into villages that are old fashioned in the way that only Italian villages can be. 

Spalletti has only been in his present studio for two years, a large industrial shed on the outskirts of another small village near to his home.  He moved in initially for more working space and then started to install it into a quasi museum, crowding his working area into a small space at the back Benedetta says as we swing into a drive way past an enticing open door. 

The outside window frames are painted a bright blue the only clue that there might be something different inside than a shed of goods for some retail shop.  Inside one enters a totally different retinal world. 

Having thought that all Spalletti was merely about columns of colour – in the same sensibility that one thinks that all John McCracken is only about steles, one is soon disabused of this prejudice.  Here is a room full of subtle ideas and experimentation.  Yes, colour is essential to all that Spalletti does, but it is about surface that he is thinking, and it is colour like no other.  Unlike McCracken the surface is not shiny but smoothly textured, capturing the light and its nuances.  It recalls in some ways those wonderful pure pigment works of Anish Kapoor from a distant past.

We settle to chat in a small office. I am facing a small painting that at first glance looks blue like the sky.  While we sit there for over an hour, I observe it changing in hue constantly, going from a glowing blue to a glowering grey and back again as the light varies through the near by window.  It is a barometer to the eyes, but also when my eyes relax within its surface I start to discern nuances, discovering forms that leads to that realisation that Spalletti is not merely a minimal painter but also could be considered a figurative painter.

On a shelf nearby a wonderful small work, a cross, the upright in pure gold shining brightly the perpendicular elements short in rose.  I ask about the work and Spalletti  says it was commissioned  for a show in a museum in Bologna that has a bishop on the board.  He asked several artists- Paladino, Kosuth to do works with the cross. I love the piece.  Its simplicity with the vertical gold  element rising strongly in the centre,  the rose receding.  It is about power and beauty and in its simplicity is deeply moving.

On the whole Spalletti uses several signature colours, blue, gray and rose.  I ask about the rose and he says that ‘it is the colour of skin and now’.  And he needs to say no more, especially in another room when I later see an early work, a painting of a nearby mountain in rose and rose, which when I look at it dissolves into the profile of a sleeping woman. 

When Spalletti walks me round the room he shows me sculptures, one a floor piece that is the length of a stride, another a column which again relates to height.  There are experiments in groups of columns of varying heights playing on their installation in a country of antiquity.  Upstairs on a balcony I come across an early work, shiny black pebbles- circular like stepping stones.

Downstairs are a group of marble works, several of which are onyx works, two slabs laid simply on top of each other, seemingly different from each other but the same, only the light penetrating the works highlighting their difference and the properties of light.

It is the daring simplicity of the work, the allowing of the materials to literally shine through that is so beautiful.  Within these narrow parameters is continual exploration. Recently Spalletti has been using gold to frame the works. More recently the gold has entered into the inside of the work.  Gold and its reflective qualities is something that he tells me he has ‘only been using since 1992’ and it is a material that he is constantly discovering with.

Spalletti is investigating the breaking of the painterly surface as it ventures into sculpture.   This is clearly defined in a room that he created for a show earlier.  It is like entering a Turrell installation, a total experience as the thickness of the wall panels change around us and each is cut into a different shape and thickness.  Standing within this, one becomes suffused with the colour of the sky and the sea and pure aliveness.  When I ask about the relationship with someone like Turrell he smiles and says some collectors have him near to their Turrells but that as far as he thinks.  He is not interested in his relationship with other artists. 

I ask if he has been to the Venice Biennale and he says that he does not need to go.  ‘Venice is beautiful but it is for the young’.  He is happy here in his studio where he works because he wants to. 

Mastering the materials

I have a love affair going.  It is sadly, not with a large cuddly man, but with a small town in Italy, Pietrasanta. I often come here to recharge my batteries as it has the most perfect piazza in the world to watch the world go by, and that also houses the Bar Michelangelo, aptly named for this town where Michelangelo apparently worked and where a small chapel nearby on a hill top has a view of the hole where legend has, he removed his marble piece for the David.

It is a town that also hosts the studios and foundries that over the last centuries have produced great sculptures.   I have come this time for an opening of a show by members of the Royal Society of British Sculptors who have lived and worked in this town. 

 The show is held in the cloisters of a church off the piazza. There is wonderful work here.  The star work for me, not surprisingly, is a large work, Struggle by Helaine Blumenfeld, an artist who has been working in Pietrasanta for many years.  Her work shows the potential of the material illuminating both its strength and fragility. The material’s translucent quality can be  seen through the precarious thin-ness of the stone – without losing its internal inherent strength. The piece highlights this artist’s technical prowess without losing the vital appearance of spontaneity.  There is nothing apparently highly labored here, just fluid curves and gracefulness.  A wonderful work highlighting an artist in her prime.

Walking into the cloister is another processional work that shows promise, by Lars Widenfalk, a Norwegian artist.  Here in a play on the caryatids a row of half size figures, their scale not belying the strength demonstrated in their large and muscular hands.  Their bodies are left raw- reminiscent of the wonderful Michelangelo Slaves while their heads, detachable from their necks in a  recall the now headless caryatids.  I like the work in its situation, ushering us the viewer into the central area.

A permanent work by the entrance by the long term resident Gonzalo Fonseca reminds you of the power of materiality with its stone looking like a large meteorite that has fallen to earth, sad and melancholic in its darkness.

I have seen lively and promising drawings of lively birds by Almuth Tebbenhoff In a restaurant in the centre of the town.  Her piece in the Goodwood Sculpture Park of graceful seed-heads has always been a favorite of mine.  Here her work seems to be looking at the same subject from inside out.

There is plentiful figurative work here as well including the Dutch artist Eppe de Haan whose work highlights the beauty of the stone in its seemingly minimal interventions with the materials purity struggling with the sensuality of form exposed in a tantalizing glimpse of torso or bottom.

The show held in the cloister area exposes the struggle inherent in coming to terms with this material that is so magical yet so palpably difficult.  It is a tussle that is not always pretty and there is some work here that reflects the difficulty, turning hard stone into something resembling marshmallow fluff.   But what makes this show well worth seeing is the variety of work that is being made with a rigour and a desire to create something in a material that is difficult and challenging and while not always successful reminds one that the life of an artist is not only about self obsession and parties but about the need to make something of substance and beauty and in rare cases as in Blumenfeld’s work both.

A Visit to Michelangelo

Maria and Michelangelo Pistoletto brought the factory buildings housing Cittadellarte in 1992.  It marked their return to the village where Michelangelo had been born before moving as a child to Turin with his parents. He was no stranger to the arts, his father was a classical artist and painting restorer.

When I return to Biella in 2011 I am escorted on a tour by Lucca a young man from Biella who truly loves what the Pistolettos are attempting to do with the foundation. If I were going to be slang ridden I would say he has drunk the sects kool-aid.  He shows me the shop telling me earnestly that everything is sourced from ethical sources and as much from Biella as possible.  These include the dresses made from one of the Pistoletto’s twin daughters made from recycled clothes. I find later it is truly a family affair when I am told that one of the daughter’s husbands  is the director of the  foundation.

Lucca takes me onto the roof of the foundation to show me how swollen and almost torrential the river is after the recent heavy storms.  When the Pistolettos brought the factory, many factories in the area  had fallen into disrepair,  he tells me that now there is a move on to repair them to keep up with the foundation, something really positive for the area. 

Here we have a view of the beautiful small town of the Germanic looking city with its pastel colored buildings and graceful spires.  The factory itself is incredibly beautiful.  Upstairs the roof ceiling has hammer beams and trusses around the edge that make it appear more like a church than a factory for making woolen fabric – its initial use.  Maria Pistoletto tells me later that the open space was for drying the cloth as it was windy in the summer when the sun was at its strongest.  There would be hundreds of fabric pieces hanging here she says.

One floor down is the gallery to Pistoletto’s work, including some of the ‘minus pieces’, Pistoletto’s arguably most important pieces including the cube of infinity that has been permanently installed in a hospital for oncology in France as well as some of the more powerful mirrored piece, the self portrait made of atomized stars and the barred cage like images as well as some of the structures made for the group works. 

I had come here years before when I had been in Turin for Artissima and had sat through a recreation of an early work by Pistoletto from the 60s where people with strange head dresses made of geometric shapes had met and conversed in  quasi ponderous texts about utopia.    Coming to Biella and Cittadellarte one gets to see the Utopian theory in practice. 

Understanding Pistoletto one needs to really come here, to see how his practice has come full circle in some ways with the breaking of the mirrors, a performance that has been made several times now, most memorably for me in Venice.

It is a strange week to be here as well.  As events around the world seem to be ramping up.  First in the middle-east and Libya moving into Japan with the earthquake and natural disaster.  Suddenly the world seems a more fragile place – a place where new solutions will have to be found.

Pistoletto is clear that culture is the answer.  It is only through culture not through government that science and the arts can find new solutions.  Hence his symbolic tables that he installed in Philadelphia in the shape of the Carribean or the Mediteranean.  Here people will sit on different chairs and through sharing of ideas will come up with new solutions to add to the ones we all ready have.

It seems here, as if anything is possible – the buildings repaired and functioning with young and enthusiastic artists coming from around the world, the café turning out yummy food and the river in full torrent. I sit through an extraordinary film by Egyptian Artist Waly Shawty that will be in the next Documenta.  All the sets, costumes were made here in the foundation while the puppets came from a collection in nearby Turin.  It is spell binding, the puppets appearing life sized and more potent in their roles of crusaders than any actors could have been.  Through the artifice the artist rams home the truth that no war, even religious wars are good.

 

I sit at a table across from a flu ridden Pistoletto prophetically facing a mirror work with a noose in the middle of it.  If we don’t do something soon as a world, much more sinister things will happen to us.  Ignore these signs at your peril.

It should have been much better!! British Sculpture

The most annoying thing with the terrible show at the Royal Academy is that it occupies the space that means another show on British Sculpture won’t happen-or at least won’t happen in the near future.  It is such a dis-service to British sculptors that the curators should hang their heads in shame.

So where did it all go wrong?  Was it that it is an idea that clearly works better as a book than an exhibition? As a book it could have little images throughout and the pairing-ness that goes on in the exhibition could thus become thought provoking rather than irritating. Perhaps it is because it is curated by two curators-one an artist and one a scholar the ideas don’t seem to come together coherently either.

The idea that generations of British sculptors, as their peers in France, could be influenced by the exoticness of the dark continent would be worthy of exploration if only it did not mean the inclusion in the first few rooms of artists such as Leon Underwood, Eric Gill and Gaudia Brezka. These artists are clearly, as the late critic David Sylvester would say, were mere major minors.  I fear they may well prove to be decorative footnotes in an art history that looks at the influence of the primitive on the great continental sculptors, Brancusi, Matisse and Picasso. 

Jacob Epstein’s Adam is undeniably a great work, and it is wonderful to see it after emerging from the cluttered room of the historic works but I would put forward the argument that it owes more to the artist’s assimilation of modernist architecture and Cubism than it does to sculpture from the British Museum.  Unflinching in its enjoyment of materials, and carving and unflinching in its depictions of a man with his manly impressive tackle intact.  It might have been a perfect place in the juxtaposition game played here to place an Antony Gormley figure opposite, an artist who does not appear in the exhibition at all.  Instead for some really inexplicable reason we have the Snake of Henry Moore that because of its phallus resembling head I assume is there only to remind woman what snakes men really are?!

Moving on to the core of the show we are told that Anthony Caro’s piece shown here is not really risk taking for being on the floor but owes more to Moore and Hepworth than to modernism.  Why we need to de-emasculate Caro in order to support this theme is beyond me.  The choice of Early One Morning is odd too.  While it again is a great work, it would make far more sense in this context to show one of the great rusted steel works of the 60s which show that England was capable of producing works of strength and power capable of taking on any of the Americans like David Smith through to Richard Serra. 

Again and again the right artists are chosen with the wrong works or the right artists are just omitted. Tony Cragg is represented by Stack, a work from 1975 which I fear, while an interesting work, has been chosen merely as a link to the recreation of the Schwitters Merzbaum in the courtyard and a quasi way of demonstrating his importance on artists like Rachel Harrison.  Better to have shown Cragg with a tower piece, or a selection plastic work where he demonstrated the hunting gathering tendencies that along with sorting were to have such an influence on decades of other artists from David Bachelor through to Gabriel Orozco.  And for that matter why not have the contents of the Merzbaum not the silly recreation in the courtyard.  It is here in the UK after all.

I wonder at the inclusion of Richard Hamilton and Victor Pasmore’s work at all.  They are neither key sculptors after all and the work depicted is a three dimensional painting not a sculpture after all. Again and again the curators have included works that should have been left out.  Trying to artificially squish performance into sculpture with the inclusion of photographs by for one illustrate a stretch too far.

Comparing British artists to their American brethren here simply diminishes the work of the Brits.  Why was a weak work Chalk Line by English romanticist, Richard Long, chosen at all, and to really emasculate it place it near to Equivalent VIII, Carl Andre’s.  Iconic work?  The aesthetics of these two artists are far apart and here are put together crassly seemingly because the works are both rectangular showing again a lack of understanding on the part of the curators in their placing them cheek by jowl. 

Damien Hirsr, Let's Eat Outdoor Today

Damien Hirst is represented with Let’s Eat Outdoors Today, a large work from 1990-91, that is again undermined by placing it near to Jeff Koons, One Ball 50/50 Tank (Spalding Dr. J Series) from 1985, a seminal work.  Here Hirst survives with his reputation intact largely due to the fact that the Koons piece, rather than demonstrating ‘ the high production values that would cause a rupture with young British artists’ woefully here has condensation on the inside of the tank and a rather sad and deflated looking basketball, a far cry from the usual crisp and impressive works we associate with this series. 

Again and again we question the selections- why we have Cragg and Bill Woodrow here but no Richard Deacon?  Where is Shirazez Housiary?  Anish Kapoor, the aforementioned Antony Gormley?  Why do we have Sarah Lucas, again represented by Portable Smoking Area, another weak piece but where is Tracey Emin or Simon Starling? 

The most surprising work for me Line 3’68 is by the wonderful late Barry Flanagan. Something that chimes in my mind with Gabriel Orozco’s Lintels, a wash line piece constructed of lint from launderettes in New York and then mounted onto washing lines, a wonderful piece in his show that recently opened at Tate Modern. If you have a few hours to spare I recommend visiting this triumph rather than throwing your money away on this disappointing melange. 

installation shot of Lintels by Gabriel Orozco

Scariest is to think that Penelope Curtis, one of the two curators, is the new recently appointed Director of Tate Britain. Perhaps this explains the terrible re-hang at Tate Britain.  I fear for the future reinstallations north of the river.

In these difficult times

Anish Kapoor, Shooting into the corner

I am walking into the British Council reception for Anish Kapoor, recently returned from his triumphant openings in India.  In order to get to the front door I have to pass under banners with the familiar British council logo waving happily alongside those for jaguar cars.  `I ask Julia Peyton Jones, director of the Serpentine Gallery if she thinks the cars belong to Anish and she says in her most dulcet tones, ‘in these difficult times’,   I repeat this to curator Hans Ulrich Obrist who is walking in beside her.  We decide that it could be the subject of every email being sent out from every arts organization worldwide at the moment. 

Anish Kapoor, To reflect an intimate part of red

Delicious martinis aside, the reception to honor Anish Kapoor, an English treasure went according to plan with speeches by William Hague, talking about the strengthening of relationships between countries through culture,  which would lead to stronger trade as well.  It was only when the marketing director of Jaguar got up to speak that true eye rolling was seen in the small audience.  Is it really appropriate to toll the virtues of a new car in the midst of a group of dignitaries that includes among others the head of the foreign office and foreign secretary.  I would love to see Anish in the context of India, however so I hold my peace. 

George Stubbs, Mare and Foals in a River Landscape

I remember this moment when I hear that there has been a new post created for Judith Nesbit, a Tate Curator.  In future she will be in charge of forging new partnerships, a buzz phrase you frequently hear today alongside the sharing of skill sets.  Usually this means sending people to foreign climes to install shows of European work while frolicking by the pool. 

Sir John Everett Millais, Dew-Drenched Furze

I have nothing against sharing culture with countries too poor to be able to have expensive museums- bravo to the Victoria and Albert and their Blackpool incentive -  but it seems to be that in this day and age it is our national treasures going to countries rich enough to have their own treasures and in a sense we are often imposing our national taste. Do the following works Thomas Gainsborough Sunset: Carthorses Drinking at a Stream circa 1760, George Stubbs Mares and Foals in a River Landscape 1763-8, John Constable The Grove, Hampstead 1821, Joseph Mallord William Turner The Golden Bough 1834 and Sir John Everett Millais Dew-Drenched Furze 1889-90 really sit well in Oman for instance. Tate Britain has lent  them as part of the beginning of a long term relationship.  Let’s clarify what this relationship is and then make some decisions based on whether the country thinks it is a good idea.  These works belong to us  after all.