East End Review

Tag: Art and Design

Guerrilla Girl power! Feminist ‘masked avengers’ come to East London to take on art world

Going ape: the Guerrilla Girls. Photograph: Andrew Hindraker. Courtesy of the Guerrilla Girls

Massively influential feminist art pioneers the Guerrilla Girls once stated that “the world of artists is great, but the art world sucks”.

This conviction has shaped their project since their formation in 1980s New York, with the group challenging those in control of major museums and galleries to present and champion more work made by women and by people of colour. Their art names and shames with statistics, graphs and appeals to equality, plastered on galleries, projected onto buildings and splashed across cities on advertising billboards.

This month a new exhibition from the group opens at the Whitechapel Gallery. I sat down with two members of the group, Frida Kahlo and Kathe Kollwitz (the members use the names of deceased female artists), to discuss the new show, their recent work and the current state of the art world.

Your new work which opens at the Whitechapel Gallery is in part a revisiting of the 1986 poster ‘It’s Even Worse in Europe’. Is representation in the art world still worse in Europe than in America?

Frida Kahlo (Guerrilla Girl): Let’s just say that it’s different in Europe. Visitors to the exhibition need to come and make up their mind about that. We wanted to gather some statistical information from the mouths of the museums themselves, and then show how these European museums present themselves.

Revisited for Whitechapel Gallery exhibition: the Guerrilla Girls’ 1986 poster ‘It’s Even Worse in Europe’. Courtesy of the Guerrilla Girls

On the difference between America and Europe, I was wondering if New York in the 1980s influenced the way the group started to make work?

Kathe Kollwitz (Guerrilla Girl): We are both founding members of the Guerrilla Girls, and what we saw in the beginning was that it was almost impossible for women or artists of colour to have their work shown in commercial galleries. There was a very vibrant alternative scene, which was fantastic, but there was so much other discrimination. If you look at a poster we made in 1985 poster that lists how many museums had shows by a woman, it was one at best. Usually it was nothing. We thought that was completely ridiculous. We knew so many great artists who were women, women-identified or people of colour, and it was total discrimination.

There were demonstrations where people would walk around with picket signs, but nobody cared. The art world wants to pretend that everything is perfect, that art is a meritocracy and that the institutions and the galleries know best. We knew that wasn’t the case, and we realised that there had to be a way to talk about this that would change people’s minds and get their attention. So we started blaming one institution after another. When our posters hit the streets in May 1985, all hell broke loose. The powers that be were really pissed off.

FK: We also noticed that whilst women and people of colour were making some advances in the larger world, they were not making them in the art world. Even though it always wants to think of itself as avant-garde and ahead of it all. It even took the form of theory, because gallery owners and curators would say that women artists and artists of colour just didn’t make work that’s good enough. What that revealed was that they had a very narrow view of history. They were still dealing with a history of the art of white men, not realising that you can’t tell the history of a culture without all the voices included in the story. It was embarrassing that the art world was that far behind.

Several of the institutions that you protested against early on have now shown or acquired the work of the Guerrilla Girls. Were you ever concerned that by including your work they’re trying to dodge some of the critique within it?

KK: Absolutely. When this first started happening about ten years ago it really was a moment of truth for us. We had to sit and talk about it and think about how we were being used by these institutions. Does getting our message out to big audiences mitigate the fact that we are definitely being used by them? Our goal from the beginning was to get our message out to as many people as possible, and so we realised that we had be in the museums as well. We still love the street best though, we started on the street and still do things there.

FK: And we’re back on the street here in Whitechapel!

KK: That’s our favourite place to be. But whenever a work appears in a museum we get tons of comments and emails from people saying that they didn’t know this stuff before. So the message we’re talking about, our institutional critique and attack on the system of art (which is more and more billionaire-controlled) really needs to be there.

FK: And it’s not as though we’ve accepted every one of these invitations. We have never accepted any form of censorship from an institution. There is always a moment of truth when we present the work to the institution and they gasp! That is an important moment in itself.

Do institutions ever try to explain themselves to you?

KK: Not really. If they’ve invited us they’ve opened themselves up. They’ve invited us to critique them, and they are well-meaning people. Many people working in institutions are trying to change them. Although lot of museums think they’re doing better than they really are. In our exhibition here at the Whitechapel we have one whole section asking whether US museum practices are polluting Europe. And the answer to that was pretty much a resounding yes!

FK: In the US most of our museums are private with non-profit status, but they’re still run by art collectors. That tendency to let galleries and museums be manipulated by wealthy collectors starts in the United States. And of course, in some parts of the world, the only places you can go and see contemporary art is in an institution wholly owned, run and controlled by oligarchs.

To what extent is humour an integral part of what the Guerrilla Girls do?

KK: I think it’s a really important part. From the beginning we never wanted to do political art that says ‘this is terrible!’. We wanted to twist it around and present it in a completely different way. Humour is really great for that, because it’s disarming. You sneak into people’s minds when they laugh at something. We’ve always thought that if you laugh at something it means there’s a better chance to convert you.

Anonymity is obviously also important to the identity of the group, but what I’ve always liked is that you are present whilst anonymous, that you appear in person wearing your masks. It’s not like an internet anonymity completely removed from a physical reality.Is the face to face aspect as important as the visuals?

FK: It is, but it is tiresome. It would be fun to appear as ourselves, but I’m sure that you’re more interested in us because we’re wearing these masks. It does say something important about the world that to be taken seriously as a feminist in the art world you have to wear a gorilla mask. It’s problematic in many ways but it’s something that worked for us early on and we’re kind of stuck with it. We’re not speaking as individuals, we’re speaking as members of a subclass of angry guerrillas!

KK: It’s interesting, because people think we’re performance artists, but we’re really not. We do a very particular kind of political art that is sometimes spoken, sometimes graphic, sometime video or outdoor banners. But our masks make us performative.

FK: There’s a long American tradition of masked avengers. They’re anonymous but they have a public presence. We’re in that tradition.

During my research for this interview I came across a member of the group saying that progress is always two steps forward and one step back. Do you think that accounts for the wider climate of political regression we’re living through, with Trump, Brexit and everything else?

FK: Absolutely. The patriarchy is not going down quietly. The patriarchy is going down angry, and I think you can see that everywhere.

And having now been making such influential work over such a long period, do you see your influence in other groups or activist collectives? Are there any specific groups that you’ve noticed carrying on your work, or work like it?

KK: We do hear from a lot of people who say that we influenced them. We get all kinds of letters every year from all kinds of people, all over the world, every gender and from many, many different countries saying that they are using our work as a model for their own.

FK: I tend to think that we’re all riding on the same wave. We’re running a complaints department at Tate Modern every day from the 3–9 October, for example, and we’re inviting everyone to come complain about all kinds of issues. We’ve invited a lot of groups to come and bring all of their incredible work. It isn’t just about art, come complain about politics, social issues, economic issues, personal venting, whatever people want to come and do.

Influential: Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? poster. Courtesy of the Guerrilla Girls

What have been your biggest victories?

FK: To get other people to count for us. All of a sudden we see people in the press commenting about the representation of women and artists of colour in exhibitions. It’s great when someone else does your dirty work for you.

KK: Certainly our most influential work, the poster that asked whether women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum, really changed a lot of things. It’s a perfect example of what we do. After seeing that poster, if you really read it and it gets inside your brain, then you can’t go to a museum and look at things the same way ever again. We try every time to do something that is unforgettable in some way, and that one works.

Could you imagine a time when the Guerrilla Girls will stop making work? Perhaps because you felt the art world had changed enough so that you weren’t needed anymore?

KK: Well that’s never going to happen. There’s the whole world of culture that needs to change, including film and television, which we’ve done some work in. Firstly, I want to say that you’re talking to us today but we’re not the entire Guerrilla Girls. We’ve always been multi-generational and diverse in a lot of other ways, and we are now as well. I guess it really depends on how it goes on. It’s amazing that through incredible passion and steadfastness of argument we’ve lasted this long.

FK: I really doubt that millennia of patriarchy will be wiped by 150 years of feminism. I think we need a little bit more time to figure it all out.

Guerrilla Girls: Is it Worse in Europe? is at the Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High St, E1 7QX until 5 March.

whitechapelgallery.org

October 5, 2016
‘Mr Robot’ seeks to revolutionise art with autonomous paintings

‘Mr Robot’: Architect Jens Pedersen

Why do fish school or birds flock together, and how can replicating this behaviour be of use to humans?

A collection of black random squiggles that last month adorned the walls of a café on Lower Clapton Road may hold the answer.

Said squiggles are the world’s first ‘autonomous paintings’, made by miniature robots and part of 28-year-old Danish architect Jens Pedersen’s research into self-organising behaviour.

“The reason why fish school and so on is essentially down to these really dumb rules, but through interaction these rules form global order or harmony,” says Pedersen, an architectural consultant who came to London as a student in 2010.

“I have looked at a lot of these systems digitally, figuring out how they work and now I’ve got to the point where I want to do them physically.”

The handiwork of Jens Pedersen’s robot creations. Photograph: Jens Pedersen

Making a robot is not as difficult – or expensive – as one might think. Pedersen uses a toy called Bristle Bots (“basically just the head of a toothbrush”), which he hooks up to a battery and a tiny vibrating motor normally found in old telephones.

“It’s super crude, you just take the toothbrush, dip it in paint and it starts moving around. The paint itself alters the canvas and that alters how the other robots interact with the canvas, so it becomes this feedback between how the other robots have moved around and the other robots adjust their behaviour,” says Pedersen.

Naysayers may at this point declare: ‘That’s not art!’ But Pedersen points out that applying paint randomly, as the robots do, is a technique reminiscent of some of the greats.

“Some of my friends who’ve seen them say it’s a little bit like Pollock and there’s that element of randomness in that I can’t replicate,” he says.

“It’s a different technique to introduce randomness into art and leave the quality of it to the beholder.”

Getting robots to make art for you smacks of automation gone mad. Where’s the creativity and what’s the end goal, I ask.

Pedersen says he has a “running joke” with himself that one day 2,000 robots like this could populate and explore the surface of Mars. His reasoning harks back to two opposing theories of robotics.

“A US university made this huge robot that calculated every step it would take to make sure it was accurate,” he says.

“Every little step would take a day, so it would move slowly.

“But then other people were hypothesising about these little robots that had an awareness of where the other guys were and would adjust their behaviour accordingly.

“Those robots would be really cheap and really dumb, but they would be able to cover more ground faster than the big highly intelligent robot.”

Mars and other worlds tomorrow, but for now Lower Clapton and a brief foray into the art world is excitement enough.

“It’s very interesting and I’ve thought a lot about it,” Pedersen enthuses.

“In a way if we make the grand parallel to how art has developed over time I think the use of robotics is a natural step – maybe not the use of robots but certainly the use of robots as a technique.

“So this could be seen as a purely technique driven progression within the field of art rather than just to say ‘I’ve made these little robots that can paint’.”

jens-pedersen.dk

October 5, 2016
Yayoi Kusama, Victoria Miro gallery, review: ‘Infinity in a pumpkin’

Portrait of Yayoi Kusama. Photograph: Noriko Takasugi

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama reflects on the cosmos and something beyond the physical in an exhibition of new work at Victoria Miro galleries.

After negotiating a snaking queue to get in, I was met by a spectacular display of sculptures, paintings and installations – including mirrored rooms and pumpkins galore.

“Pumpkins have been a great comfort to me since my childhood,” the artist explains. “They speak to me of the joy of living.

“They are humble and amusing at the same time, and I have and always will celebrate them in my art.”

This collection of mirrored environments, sculptures and paintings reproduces some of the intense mental states the artist has encountered since childhood.

Mirrored, polished bronze pumpkin by Yayoi Kusama

Kusama gets you to see infinity in a pumpkin. The new installation All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins is a room full of mirrors populated by florescent yellow plastic pumpkins. When the viewer steps inside, their reflection makes them repeat into eternity.

Pumpkin Mirror Polished Bronze is a sculpture that has all the sheen and polish of a Harley Davidson, with a complement of matt polka dots. These dots, a hallmark of her work, are an utterly democratic unit of expression, something anybody could create themselves.

Another mirrored room, Chandelier of Grief, is centred on a chandelier rotating in the centre of a hexagon. Looking up is like viewing a constellation of stars or cherry blossoms.

As those queuing are ushered in, most were armed with their mobiles. Kusama’s work lends itself to shared experiences – as opposed to the feeling that someone else has intruded into your own personal experience.

All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins. Installation by Yayoi Kusama

Inside the mirrored rooms, one senses a shift from the personal, individual experience inside an expansive sublime plane, to what is ultimately a communal experience.

The queuing and the amount of time one is given inside the mirror rooms (I was allotted less than three minutes!) impresses upon you the fact of this shared experience, providing a heightening of the senses as you try to grasp as much of an impression as you can.

Yayoi Kusama: Sculptures, Paintings and Mirror Rooms
Until 30 July
Victoria Miro, 16 Wharf Road, N1 7RW
victoria-miro.com

July 5, 2016
Emerging Tower Hamlets artist creates buzz with bee paintings

Selection of works by Giulia Marras including ‘The lines of my garden’ (top left)

An emerging artist from Limehouse has won international recognition, with her work being displayed in New York City.

Giulia Marras, who combines her art with a part-time job and an English-language course at Tower Hamlets College, is formally trained in ceramic art, and painting is for her a sideline.

Yet it was her painting ‘The Lines of My Garden’ that was selected for display in #twitterartexhibit 2016 NYC at the Trygve Lie Gallery on East 52nd Street in Manhattan. She has also recently been approached by a gallery in Chicago which is interested in her work.

Marras is originally from Sardinia and has had her work exhibited in a number of galleries in Italy. Paintings in one of these shows caught the attention of the international art world and led to the connection with the New York gallery.

Living and working in London has been challenging for Giulia Marras, but this experience has also provided a source of artistic inspiration that spawned her recent collection of paintings: “When I arrived in London I felt like a fish out of water as I could not speak any English, which made things harder for me. These feelings gave me an idea about a new range of paintings I could work on”.

Following her success in Italy and the US, Marras is hoping to show her work here, and ultimately to open her own art space.

“I would love to see my work exhibited in the galleries around London, but the cost to exhibit is very expensive. Ideally I would love to have my own gallery one day with my own ceramics laboratory”.

In the meantime, Marras’s focus is on perfecting her English and further developing her art.

June 22, 2016
Why Homerton Hospital art room is the picture of good health

Art curator Shaun Caton in Homerton Hospital, surrounded by art made by patients with acquired and traumatic brain injuries. Photograph: Russell Parton

If you’re looking for art, a hospital is not the most obvious port of call. But along the labyrinthine corridors of the Homerton hangs a vast and diverse collection – the envy of any Shoreditch gallery.

Hawk-eyed visitors will spot works by twentieth-century masters among the paintings, drawings and photographs by established artists. But next to canvases by Henry Moore, Burt Irvin and Bruce MacClean are brilliantly original collages and stunning abstract paintings that are far less easy to identify. This is because they are created by true ‘outsider artists’ – the patients themselves.

“People often say that the work by the untrained artist is better than the one by that celebrated Royal Academician,” says the hospital’s art curator Shaun Caton.

We meet at the front of the hospital for a trip to the Regional Neurological Rehabilitation Unit (RNRU), where for over 20 years Caton has been running art workshops for those with traumatic and acquired brain injuries. Patients may have suffered a stroke, a brain aneurysm, been hit on the head or involved in a road traffic accident. Caton aims to bring them back to health through activities that inspire their creative potential.

“This is the only ward that has every single room filled with art made by patients,” says Caton as we enter the RNRU. “As you will see it’s just not possible to display it all – there are around 3000 works, and that’s only the ones on paper.”

Although there is a sizeable collection of art in the hospital by established names, Caton is more interested in works by unknown and untrained artists. We approach a door through which lies the “nerve centre” of the operation, and duly enter.

To step inside Homerton Hospital art room is a bit like entering a secret garden. Abstract paintings of swirling patterns or of strange creatures seem to cover every surface, jostling for space with painted models, knitted fish, handmade books and collages. Paints, brushes and easels fit wherever they can, the makeshift shelves visibly buckling under the weight of art – each piece with a unique story about a person with a serious head injury.

Eclectic: a selection of artworks made by Homerton patients. Photograph: Russell Parton

Caton calls the room the “power house of the creative imagination”, and the title is not misplaced. In the 20 or so years of its existence, nearly a thousand artists from Hackney and the East End of London have volunteered their services here.

“We have had sculptors, collage artists, poets, writers, artists who make inventions with machines and installation art, we’ve had sound artists, photographers, print makers, recycled book artists, artists who make art using recycled bus tickets – it’s endless the imaginative scope of things we can introduce here,” Caton enthuses.

The art room started as an experiment to engage patients with behavioural problems, but it soon evolved. Now it treats patients with speech, language and memory problems. Some are semi-paralysed, others may not know the day of the week.

“My job if you like is to find things that suit people’s potential but push them a bit further,” Caton explains, showing me a handmade book filled with patterns, text and collages.

“Let’s say we’re trying to encourage someone to concentrate better, well something like this which requires cutting and placement and judgement and colour will stimulate the brain to work with the hand and the eye to improve coordination.”

One patient, a man from Bethnal Green, had been diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome and had paralysis in his hands. He wanted to paint watercolours and spent all his time in the art room trying to get the feeling back in his fingers. Caton strapped the brushes in his hands with surgical tape and guided them over the paper.

“At first we made what some people would consider to be meaningless scribble, but as time went by he started to regain control of his movements, and was able to execute quite precise designs and illustrations which led to compositions and paintings of a very high standard,” Caton recalls.

The patient, who had no formal training, exhibited his watercolours in the hospital and went on to become an amateur artist once discharged.

Patients are referred for very different reasons: a physiotherapist may want a patient to strengthen their wrist and finger muscles, or a psychologist may refer a patient to improve their social skills.

Most hospitals practise some sort of art therapy, but this is very different: art at the Homerton is used to tackle a wider range of conditions that are not merely psychological. The success of the art room has led to the hospital piloting a similar service for patients with dementia.

Caton’s approach is less rigid than the one-to-one confines of art therapy. Workshops at the Homerton encourage collaboration and social interaction, and cater for several patients at once.

But what really makes it unique are the activities and the range of stimuli used to inspire the patients. We listen to a piece of sound art sent in out of the blue by an unknown composer called Lowell Johnson. It’s an atmospheric urban soundscape, a kaleidoscopic collection of sounds that mirrors the chaos of the mind.

“When you play something like that to a group, people respond to it in a variety of ways. It will automatically trigger conversation and remind people of things, but it’s also probably going to inspire them to make an artwork,” says Caton.

“We’re leagues ahead of other hospitals in that respect. They might just do some paintings of butterflies or some block paintings but we try to provide meaningful activities that are truly extraordinary.”

Bright future: Caton aims to inspire patients’ creative potential. Photograph: Russell Parton

Caton has refused interviews and is wary about talking to journalists. In an age of cuts, hospital art is often seen as being a waste of money.

“Those people need to come and visit this facility and meet the patients and see the evidence for themselves about how this can speed up their recovery programme by improving sense of well being,” he says.

The budget for basic art materials, as well as for framing, mounting, storage and cataloguing the art works is very small. This means Caton has had to raise funds by holding exhibitions and selling greetings cards designed by the patients.

“All these guys who come here and offer their services and time and talent are not being paid,” Caton insists. “They’re not even been paid a cup of tea, I provide that out of my own money. And I provide the biscuits as well, because that’s the way I think it should be.”

Through cuts and all kinds of adversity, the art room has kept going, which Caton puts down to having to be resourceful, and not leaving the lights on.

The situation changed in September, however, when the street artist Stik donated £50,000 by selling off 100 original prints of an NHS-themed mural entitled Sleeping Baby, which is on display in the hospital courtyard.

Members of the public camped out over night, queuing around the block to take home one of the limited edition prints, made by an artist who himself used to volunteer at the hospital.

Hospital mural: ‘Sleeping Baby’ by Stik located in the inner courtyard of the Homerton. Photograph: Stik

In a speech at the sale, Caton said: “In this hospital there are many patients who need something to focus on, so we offer them art workshops, not just as a recreation or past time, but to help them gain control of their lives again.

“The things that go on in these workshops enhance their concentration, their motor coordination and their general sense of well being. And so the money raised will enable us to buy much needed equipment, materials and really push forward with these services.”

We sit around a table on which there are at least 100 individual art works. The storage racks behind me are falling to bits, on the verge of collapsing under the weight of paper. With Stik’s donation, Caton will finally be able to invest in cataloguing and archiving the art for the benefit of future generations.

It is not an unreasonable ambition. The Bethlem Gallery in Beckenham is home to a fascinating collection of art by mentally ill patients, and in the 1920s the German psychiatrist Dr Hans Prinzhorn amassed a vast collection of his patients’ art that is famous the world over. Why not something similar at the Homerton Hospital for patients with brain injuries and dementia?

“I’d like the general public to know about this collection, what it’s about, who it’s been created by and why we are even bothering to maintain this for posterity,” Caton says. “I feel it should be maintained, because it’s an unknown universe of creative potential. A lot of people in society have an innate hidden creative talent, which can be teased out through art. This is a testament to it.”

A model for others: Caton’s workshops aim to help patients ‘gain control of their lives again’. Photograph: Russell Parton

December 14, 2015
Tube workers show station mastery with Out of Uniform exhibition

‘John Lydon’. Pencil drawing by Michael Haynes

There are around 3,500 train drivers working on the Tube, and an estimated 20,000 people working for London Underground as a whole. Who are these mysterious, uniformed people? And what do they do when they’re not under the ground?

This month an exhibition called Out of Uniform showcases art made by London Underground employees.

Held at Fill the Gap gallery in Leytonstone, the exhibition is named after an art collective founded by David Nevin, a station supervisor and artist, who back in 2010 realised that more and more of his colleagues were artists on the side.

“I have worked side-by-side magicians, musicians and PhD environmentalists not to mention a clairvoyant,” says Nevin.

“But the most common previous life that caught my ear, eye and heart were the artists. They have a common story of people needing to make a living to support a family and their creative passion.”

The exhibition contains a wide variety of art, from glorious landscape photography to paintings inspired by dreams. The first Out of Uniform exhibition in 2010 was a roaring success, with the response overwhelmingly positive, and Nevin is hoping for a repeat performance.

Fill the Gap gallery is a converted office space just outside Leytonstone station, and is run on a voluntary basis by a trio of tube staff who are also members of Out of Uniform.

Out of Uniform: Artists Working for London Underground is on until 5 December.

Fill the Gap, Church Lane, E11 1HE (next door to La Parisien café, Leytonstone station)

‘Rooster’ by Jason Alex Hill

‘Snow is Not White’ by David Nevin

Landscape by Susana Malleiro

December 4, 2015
Re-Defining Beauty at Leyden Gallery: taking a fresh look at the naked male form

Painting by Nude for Thought artists (l-r): Martin Ireland, Neil Groom and Richard Dickson

What is wrong with the naked male form? From Monty Python’s The Life of Brian to The Full Monty, men’s rude bits continue to be exploited for comedic value, their innate beauty hushed up and kept firmly behind closed doors.

But a group of male artists seeks to change all that, by holding an exhibition that reconsiders the raw form of the naked male body and reestablishes the tradition of the male nude as an object of beauty and bearer of meaning.

Re-Defining Beauty, which opens at the Leyden Gallery this month, provides a contemporary take on traditional art historical portrayals of the male nude form.

Inspired by the British Museum exhibition Defining Beauty, which looked at the origins of representing the human body in art, the week-long show features a range of mixed media art works that question terms such as ‘beautiful’, ‘powerful’, and ‘masculine’ in relation to the male form.

Nude by Brian Dennis

Artist Martin Ireland founded Nude for Thought after becoming frustrated at the tendency for life drawing groups to use mainly female models.

In 2004 Ireland created a life-drawing group that used male models exclusively.

As the popularity of the life drawing sessions increased, discussions arose about the relevance of the male nude in 21st century art.

Many of the artists had experienced difficulty in exhibiting male nudes in commercial galleries, or were rejected when entering paintings of the male body in open competitions.

It was from those discussions that Nude for Thought was formed. The group, which brings together painting, drawing, sculpture and performance art, held its first exhibition in Southwark last November.

“Is there a place for the male form in contemporary decorative art,” a statement on the group’s website reads. “And if so, who will look at it through fresh eyes?”

Nude for Thought is at Leyden Gallery, Leyden Street, E1 7LE from 3–7 November.
leydengallery.com

November 3, 2015
‘Renaissance man’ Stik raises unprecedented £50,000 for Homerton Hospital

All smiles… Stik poses with a fan. Photograph: Russell Parton

People from as far afield as Manchester descended on Homerton yesterday in the hope of buying one of 100 original Stik prints, which the artist was selling to raise £50,000 for his local NHS hospital.

Some had camped out through the night and by midday the queue was snaking around the back of Homerton Hospital.

All proceeds from the sale were for the hospital’s neurological rehabilitation unit art room, to help expand the hospital’s arts workshop services for people with brain injuries and for those suffering from dementia.

The limited-edition prints were of a sleeping baby, a replica of a mural by Stik recently unveiled at the hospital.

Competition for the prints, which were on sale for £500 each, was so fierce that a queue member had introduced a raffle ticket system to stop people from jumping in.

“He’s one of us, a regular joe, a down-to-earth guy,” said Ali, from Hackney, who had been queuing since 7.30am, ten hours before the sale was due to start. “50 grand to give away like that, it’s really generous.”

Superstar status… Stik infront of a print of Sleeping Baby. Photograph: Russell Parton

When Stik arrived it was to the type of mobbing usually reserved for a superstar. Dressed in a leather jacket, shades and a t-shirt bearing one of his iconic stick man figures, he certainly looked liked one too.

Sean Caton, who has been Art Curator at Homerton Hospital for 20 years, said it was the most momentous day in the history of the hospital’s art department, and described Stik as “astonishingly generous” and a “true Renaissance man”.

“In my opinion it’s unprecedented and I think he’s a hero,” Mr Caton said.

“In this hospital there are many patients who need something to focus on, so we offer them art workshops, not just as a recreation or past time, but to help them gain control of their lives again.

“The things that go on in these workshops enhance their concentration, their motor coordination and their general sense of well being. And so the money raised will enable us to buy much needed equipment, materials and really push forward with these services.”

Those who missed out on a print were offered free posters of Sleeping Baby, printed in Pantone 300, or NHS blue.

“I want to show that we have been left holding the baby,” said Stik.

“We created the NHS, we love it and won’t let it be sold off.

“I want to encourage everybody at the Homerton Hospital to keep doing good work. This is my local and it’s kept me healthy and alive for a long time as it has done for lots of people in this area. The work people are doing here is incredibly important.”

Prints at the ready… Photograph: Russell Parton

September 25, 2015
Dance of death on London Fields mourns state of the arts

Dance of death…’The Keeners’. All photographs by Tim Bowditch, courtesy of Florence Peake and Space Studio

The piercing cry of a group of mourners is an incongruous spectacle on a bright September afternoon in London Fields.

And so passersby, some walking dogs, others mid-jog, gathered in curiosity last Saturday whilst five women, dressed in black, emitted spine-chilling wails as hunks of clay slipped through their fingers onto a glossy mirrored dancefloor.

Mourning with clay… ‘The Keeners’ by Florence Peake. Photograph: Tim Bowditch

Amid occasional strains of the cello, the mourners performed their dance of death. Holding bright pink scarves aloft, they flopped to the floor and shrouded their heads, before rising again in angry defiance.

Baffled onlookers may have felt relieved to learn that these vocal lamentations were part of a performance based on the Celtic custom of ‘keening’, where professional mourners in Irish and Celtic traditions grieve the losses of others on their behalf.

Keening dates back as far as the sixteenth century, and involves one or a group of women reciting or singing verses about the deceased, often to physical movements such as rocking, kneeling or clapping.

Artist Florence Peake devised the public performance, which is to form the basis of the inaugural exhibition at Space Studios’s new gallery next month.

Peake, a painter and choreographer who lives in Walthamstow, learnt about keening from her Irish mother-in-law, but has abstracted the tradition and applied it to what she calls the “commodification and instrumentalisation of art by the corporate world”.

Reciting ‘losses’… ‘The Keeners’ by Florence Peake. Photograph: Tim Bowditch

During the performance, the keeners stood behind a microphone to make lamentations about the state of modern culture. “It makes me angry so I had to leave. In the mix of city, dereliction, hedgelands, industrial landscapes and space, will we all just get squashed?” they recited in ghost-like monotone.

In total, the dancers mourned around 40 ‘losses’, all of which were submitted by the public. These ranged from angry outcries against gentrification in East London (see above), to the loss of Iggy Pop as a countercultural icon due to his willingness to advertise car insurance.

“Some of these losses are just beautiful and some really funny,” says Peake.

“One I find particularly amusing was the loss of someone’s usual cruising sites to the Grindr app.

“Then there are a lot about education, about parenting and the loss of unsupervised childcare, of children being able to play on the streets and things like that. And the loss of arm pit hair.”

Onlooking… ‘The Keeners’ by Florence Peake. Photograph: Tim Bowditch

London Fields was chosen for the performance due to it being common land (Lammas Rights for grazing animals).

The performance will form the basis of exhibition The Keeners, held at Space Studios’ brand new gallery space on Mare Street this month, which according to Artist Commissioning Manager Persilia Caton will comprise “another transformation of the losses”.

Peake is the first of four artists commissioned by Hackney arts organisation Space for their 2015/16 season. Each of the artists will be producing work that engages with Hackney’s past and present, and there will be a concerted effort to show art more publicly, outside of the traditional gallery setting.

Florence Peake: The Keeners, from 1 October, Space Studios, 129–131 Mare Street, E8 3RH. spacestudios.org.uk

September 22, 2015
Art review – Jazz by Thierry Noir: instrumental street artist comes to East London

Jazz: installation image at Howard Griffin Gallery

Thierry Noir is the artist most famous for the cartoonish and colourful illustrations that he painted directly on to the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s. Elongated faces with cartoon lips set against blocks of bright colour were vivid splashes of paint against a concrete symbol of communist drabness and repression.

As a political statement, and a template for the street art movement that he partly inspired, Noir’s graffiti stood as a powerful assertion of creativity in opposition to oppression. Berlin at the time was a bastion of culture, its art and music immensely influential, and the time forever associated with the punk and avant-garde rock that its natives and many expatriate artists made in the interzone of the western part of the partitioned city.

For Jazz, at the Howard Griffin Gallery, Noir turns to this legacy and music more generally for inspiration, drawing his familiar figures strumming guitars and pounding drums on canvases and pieces of cardboard, packaged and ready for sale. Alongside the framed visual works and the 3D sculptural versions that are placed throughout gallery, Noir has also collaborated with artist-luthier Chris Tsonias to produce musical instruments that are shaped and painted like the figures from his paintings.

Under a large canvas reminiscent of a cartoon musical version of Matisse’s La Danse (1909) the apparently playable musical instruments are arranged in place with prices available on request. The concentration of images and the attention to detail on show is impressive, but like so much street art, when it’s taken out of its public context and placed in a gallery something fundamental is lost.

It’s an installation that is reminiscent of Keith Haring’s Pop Shop (1986), and Noir’s visual cues – brightly coloured block flat drawings of stretched heads and stooped postures – cover the gallery’s ceilings and floor, and the walls that hold the individual art works.

It is true that Noir shares much with Haring, in political resonance, bravery and bold style, but also in relentless marketability. For all of Haring’s cultural activism, his images are now plastered all over the t-shirts in Uniqlo. For all of Noir’s statements of liberty and artistic freedom, the opening drinks are poured from his own branded Hennessey bottles, the corporate sponsors of the show.

This is art from which the street has been stripped, and when that happens all that’s left are the images. Whilst impressive and immersive they are a little empty when placed in such a relentlessly commercial and sanitised environment.

Jazz by Thierry Noir is at the Howard Griffin Gallery, 189 Shoreditch High Street, E1 6HU until 26 July
howardgriffingallery.com

July 10, 2015