East End Review

Tag: Lewis Church

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
Ragnar Kjartansson, Barbican, review: ‘ethereal and endearingly dorky’

Lounging around: Take Me Here by the Dishwasher: Memorial for a Marriage, an installation by Ragnar Kjartansson at Barbican Art Gallery. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine New York and i8 gallery Reykjavík. Photograph: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

Every five years the artist Ragnar Kjartansson stands in a living room and films his mother spitting full into his face.

The four completed editions of this work, Me and My Mother (2000-2015), are featured in a solo exhibition of the acclaimed Icelandic artist at the Barbican where, through side-by-side television screens, you can see artist and mother age in their bizarre interaction.

It’s one of the less obviously spectacular works included here, but one which ably synopsises the levels on which the exhibition operates: humour, film, time and context, story, repetition and framing.

Kjartansson’s work plays with choral forms and polyphony, deploying counterpoints and harmony to create incredibly complex and rich films and performances. On the ground floor the musicians of Take Me Here by the Dishwasher: Memorial for a Marriage (2011) play in live interaction as they lounge on mattresses and couches, accompanied by a vintage film loop of the artist’s parents.

Music is a unifying theme throughout the show, both as the stuff of the installations and referenced and pictured in the paintings and images upstairs and down. The centrepiece of the exhibition is the nine channel video piece The Visitors (2012), curtained away from the live troubadours by the entrance but sharing some of the same spirit and communal feel.

Bath time: pre-installation image of ‘The Visitors’, an installation by Ragnar Kjartansson. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and i8 Gallery, Reykjavík. Photograph: Elisabet Davidsdottir

Created at Rokeby Farm in Upstate New York, each of the nine screens of the piece feature a single musician, removed from each other around the house but playing in unison for the hour the filmed performance lasts. On entry it is a gently swaying song, a complete and whole musical piece, but as you stay and move from one screen to the next the directional speakers pull out the individual voices and instruments in an intensely fascinating manner.

It is tiresome to reference Björk and Sigur Rós just because the artist is from Iceland, but there is something that links Kjartansson to these more familiar cultural exports. An odd balance between the ethereal and an endearing dorkiness, a cool that is un-ironic in a manner that might just be totally uncool.

Ragnar Kjartansson exhibition at Barbican Art Gallery. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine New York and i8 gallery Reykjavik. Photograph: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

This is best exemplified by my favourite piece in the exhibition, Guilt Trip (2007), where the Icelandic comedian Laddi wanders a ridiculously desolate and beautiful snowy landscape, firing a shotgun into the air and occasionally fumbling to reload it.

It sounds stupid, like an armed Mr Bean, but I found it incomprehensibly poignant and quite moving. The shotgun blast is so loud that once you’ve heard it then it seems incredible that you weren’t aware of it from the moment you entered the gallery.

Like many of the works on display it is hypnotic and strange but immediately relatable and faintly familiar. Visually Kjartansson references movies, television and the culture we consume on a daily basis, but plays with their presentation until they seem bizarrely remote.

On Saturday and Sundays throughout the show’s run, two women straight out of a period drama kiss whilst rowing across the Barbican lake. In the moment it makes sense, but try to explain it and you feel it run away from you.

There is an enormous amount to engage with here, to watch, and experience, and be taken in by. Kjartansson’s work doesn’t take itself overly seriously, but is an important intervention in the galleries it is shown in.

It is incredibly encouraging to see the Barbican continue to engage with performance, and doing it well. Presenting performance art in a sensitive and complimentary manner is often a challenge to galleries and museums (take note, Tate Modern) but here it feels as at home as any other form. Kjartansson, although perhaps an artist unfamiliar to many, is well worth your time.

Ragnar Kjartansson
Until 4 September
Barbican Art Gallery, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS

Two women kiss whilst rowing across the Barbican lake, an artwork by performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine New York and i8 gallery Reykjavik. (Photograph: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images)

July 18, 2016
Strange and Familiar exposes Britain through outsiders’ lenses

Akihiko Okamura

Strange and Familiar is an epic exhibition about Britain, in which photographers from around the world and from down the years offer a fresh eye to the look and feel our idiosyncratic island.

Martin Parr, the British documentary photographer and photojournalist, has curated a show spanning from the 1930s to the present day, giving an outsider’s view of people and places that might otherwise feel familiar.

London and its citizens feature heavily, as might be expected, but so do the cities of the north, the mining villages of Wales, and some of the most isolated and intriguing corners of the British Isles.

Britain being one of the centres of culture in the world throughout the 20th century, the list of photographers who have placed it under their lens unsurprisingly corresponds to some of the biggest names in the history of the medium.

Giants like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank are included here, but their work is placed alongside less well-known or more recently-lauded artists, informing and strengthening the impact of iconic images and often-imitated styles.

Edith Tudor Hart’s images, which appear alongside Cartier-Bresson’s, for example, offer a counterpart insight into 1930s Britain, seen through the eyes of an émigré Jewish woman. Her self-portrait with a random shopper in a market mirror was one of the first moments of stand-and-stare wonder in an exhibit of infinitely fascinating images.

As the exhibition moves forward through time, similar pairings evoke a sense of the feel of an era or moment. Robert Frank and Paul Strand’s 1950s explorations of London bankers, Welsh miners and the inhabitants of the Outer Hebrides acutely demonstrate the gulf in lives and society across the country at the time, and the difficulty of moving between them.

The importance of the changes in medium, and the technical advances that occur throughout the exhibition’s span are as equally present as the photographers. Noticing the shifting grain and quality of different artists’ preferred cameras and film stocks is a fascinating aspect of the experience of viewing so many images so closely together.

Key moments in photographers’ use of new technologies stand out, most vividly when Bruce Davidson’s mid-1960s photos of Welsh mining towns explode into hyper-real colour, the pink smoke staining the images of cobbled streets and grey stone houses. Frank Hablicht’s sexually charged images of the swinging 60s are playful and mobile, the camera peeking up and out to offer a flavour of the motion of the bright young things portrayed.

Raymond Depardon’s images of 1980s Glasgow contain some of the most striking uses of colour in the whole exhibition, the flames of burning rubbish glowing against a grimy background, or the harsh red of a car popping against slate grey housing. In the downstairs section of the gallery we are offered work that is further away from the conventions of portraiture, landscape and photojournalism, including the intricate scrapbooks of Shinro Ohtake, and Bruce Gilden’s contemporary extreme close-up grotesqueries.

The exhibition pans around the upstairs gallery and the ground floor corridor rooms, built around a central library space that gives visitors a wonderful opportunity to sit and leaf through the books that many of the photographs are drawn from. It’s an opportunity to handle the images, to inspect them in your hands rather than squint between shoulders at the wall. The break this offers may also be welcome, as the exhibition is enormous and warrants a leisurely visit to see it all.

Parr has created a huge and expansive survey of Britain, and done so in a way that might provide real insight into the funny place that many of us call home. Like the best survey exhibitions, different parts will appeal to different viewers, and you and I will each come away with our favourites and less-favourites. But more importantly this show is an excuse to wallow in beautiful documentary photography, in still images of everyday life and mundane strangeness, in the swim of history and the artistry of its documentation.

Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers
Until 19 June
Barbican Art Gallery
Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS
Facebook event

April 8, 2016
Mario Cravo Neto: A Serene Expectation of Light – review

© Laróyè, 1980-2000 © Instituto Mario Cravo Netto / Instituto Moreira Salles

A Serene Expectation of Light, on display at Rivington Place in Shoreditch, offers excerpts from two series of work by Brazilian photographer Mario Cravo Neto.

For over 30 years, before his death in 2009, Neto produced striking images that reflect the complex blend of cultures that give Brazil its unique identity.

The exhibition features the monochrome portraits of the Eternal Now series (produced in the 1980s and 90s) placed alongside Neto’s later colour snapshots of urban life in Salvador, Brazil’s first capital and a centre of immigration and diversity from the first European adventures into South America.

The Eternal Now series profiles aspects of the Candomblé religion that fascinated the artist. Candomblé emerges from the history of Salvador and Brazil, from the mixing of Yoruba, Bantu and Fon beliefs from West Africa with Roman Catholicism and indigenous South American beliefs.

Candomble’s worship of orixás, ancestral spirits imported by the transported peoples from modern Nigeria, Togo and Benin, still provides a rich spiritual and cultural basis for a system of belief and worship that Neto himself embraced during his life. His images here show posed worshippers, objects and animals for sacrifice and ritual moments fixed in black and white.

Neto’s images from this series reflect an almost obsessive focus on the minutiae of human bodies, fine wrinkles and liquid beaded on skin, texture and the interaction between objects and humans.

With Rooster. © Laróyè, 1980-2000 © Instituto Mario Cravo Netto / Instituto Moreira Salles

The studio set-up of these images appears informed by Neto’s earlier practice as an installation artist, the models carefully posed and the images framed for formal effect as much as the impact of their subjects. His images linger on the flick of a feather as a chicken is held, or the congruity of dappled patterning between a tortoise shell and the painted skin of a celebrant.

It is a shame that the installation in Rivington Place has not served these images particularly well, their black and white formality muddied by overly harsh lighting, and the resulting reflections from the heavy glass of the frames. The irritation of this unexpected problem spoils somewhat the first section of the exhibition. From a quick glance at the comments board, I can see that I was not the only visitor to find this frustrating.

Neto’s colour images though, which make up the second section of the exhibition, are well displayed in a double grid of bright squares. These images are still fleshy but more spontaneous, with traces of motion that are absent from the studio portraits of The Eternal Now series. In one of these vivid, less posed images a young woman floats partly submerged in a pool, her body made unfamiliar by the play of light on the water.

Neto’s colour is as stark as his black and white, whether the wet red of watermelon slices in the yellow sun or the deep blue pattern of the tiled street as boys play. Again, textures are the key visual element, an obsessive focus on the contours of surface and body, and the bleed between background and foreground that connotes a passing snapshot of daily life.

The interaction between the two series is well signposted, the exhibition feeling like a brief glimpse into a huge and impressive practice. It contains work by a fascinating artist, whose subjects and life were indivisibly linked.

A Serene Expectation of Light is at Rivington Place, EC2A 3BA until 2 April
autograph-abp.co.uk

March 11, 2016
A celebration of the body: the work of performance artist Poppy Jackson

Poppy Jackson performs Hay Barn in Rosekill, New York. Photograph: Maria Foque

In November the artist Poppy Jackson made headlines around the world when her performance piece Site, which she presented at the SPILL 2015 festival of performance in London, provoked extensive media coverage. Jackson sat naked astride the gable of Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel across two days in four-hour stints, a durational performance that was observed by the crowds that gathered in the courtyard and those in the surrounding buildings. A single tweet from a worker in an office looking over the performance snowballed into extensive tabloid coverage, international news stories, and television appearances for the artist and her work. As I wrote in a previous piece for the East End Review, media interest overtakes and obscures the art all too often in such situations. I met with Jackson to discuss the piece, her wider practice, and what comes next after a brush with viral fame.

Lewis Church: Before we talk specifically about Site, could you speak a little bit about your artistic background, and your practice as a whole?

Poppy Jackson: Well my mum is an artist actually, so I’ve always grown up with her making paintings and prints and helping her with exhibitions. That has been a really big influence, inspiration, and a huge source of support. During high school and A-levels I decided I really wanted to do art, although mainly painting and drawing rather than performance. It wasn’t until I went to Dartington [College of Arts] in Devon that I began seriously making performance. My 2D work also continued in tandem with the performance, and the paintings and drawings have also always been on the subject of the body. Eventually it just made sense to experiment using my own body, and so the paintings got bigger and I was using my own body to do them, painting with my hands and my hair. It then became more about the process of making a work and what was going on physically than about just the body.

LC: There seem to be a number of artists in the UK right now who are returning to the body. Do you think that has something to do with how our lives work now? With the mediation and fragmentation of social interaction?

PJ: I think so. It is a good way to return to a really basic form of communication with each other, to return to the body. It’s also to do with a lot of the jobs we are doing. I now spend a hell of a lot of time on the computer, writing applications and things. So to really feel present in your body and using that is the best antidote.

LC: Are there artists working in the UK at the moment with whom you feel a strong kinship, in terms of your strategies, and the concepts you are working with?

PJ: Definitely. When I moved to London I met the performance artists Bean and Benjamin Sebastian, and became an Associate Artist at ] performance s p a c e [. So that venue has definitely been a kind of home for me. And there are so many artists who have been through that space, whose work I’ve witnessed and been so massively inspired by. Sinéad O’Donnell, Alastair MacLennan, Mark Greenwood, Bean and Benjamin themselves, Hugh O’Donnell. Even if it’s not work that I think is like what I do, to witness somebody going through a raw act of communication using their body is an incredibly special experience.

LC: I’d like to stay away from the publicity and tabloid reaction to Site and think more about the artwork itself. What do you do during the piece, and what do want the audience to see?

PJ: In Site I was in position on a building that people could move through, an inhabited building. People could use the architecture themselves to look around the piece, climbing the interior stairwell for example, to look down on my body and see where I was positioned amongst the buildings. It was a public space, and you could also see me on the roof from the street. I think it’s extremely different when you witness it live because the people there with you go through an experience as well. They have some kind of empathy, they can feel the temperature even with their coats on, and so as a live experience you can kind of tell what the performer is going through.

The idea had been cooking since about 2010 when I did a sketch, using my menstrual blood as paint on the paper. I didn’t know that it was going to happen on architecture though, as I didn’t yet know what that steeple shape was. I did a version of the piece called Hay Barn in Rosekill, New York, where I was on an amazing 1940s hay barn looking down. Myself, Jill McDermid-Hokanson and Tif Robinette curated the weeklong festival ESSENTIAL DEPARTURES, where fifteen artists (some of whom had never made performance work before) delved in and created incredible work in 100 acres of wild land. My piece there was a very similar action physically, but actually very different because the isolated context was completely opposite to Site in London.

Site by Poppy Jackson. Photograph: Marco Berardi

LC: Obviously the piece has reached a huge number of people, far more than you might have originally expected. But to go back to the actual audience who were there, what were you hoping that they would experience or take away?

PJ: I was hoping it would be a very positive experience, but also something that would critique the fact that a naked body is a problem in our culture. A celebration of that body on its own terms is not something that we usually see, especially in public space. All of the female bodies that I normally see in public spaces are trying to sell something, or shown in a way that is really alien to how I feel about my body. There is this connection between consumerism, capitalism and the female body, where the body is devalued by being the thing that sells something, like a blank canvas. I was trying to critique all of these things and cut through them by placing a real body there. I don’t want my work to just be an attack or to just point out negatives though.

LC: How does that relate to performing on the roof of Toynbee Hall? I read that you were thinking of the radical history of Toynbee as being something that contributes to that feeling of challenge, but also as something positive.

PJ: For sure. Toynbee was built as a radical centre in the 1800s, to train future leaders so that they had the potential to bring about social change. I think the legacy of that and the special energy of the place remains, especially when you think about its social role now with local women’s groups for example, and the input of ArtsAdmin, which is based in the building. It’s amongst local businesses and flats in the East End and I wanted the performance to be seen by a non-arts audience as well as the festival audience. I also used to work down the road so this location has personal significance too. I’ve always had a job on the side, like most artists do to fund their practice.

LC: Has the experience of Site affected your plans for the future, and what you might do next? I remember when I talked to you during the festival that you said it had almost become two pieces, the media reaction and the performance itself.

PJ: Exactly, because there were people who’ve only seen the piece through the media coverage, and they’ll be thinking completely different things from someone who was there and witnessed it. One thing I’ve got to think about now is the side effect of this work, all the media attention, and how that affects the next piece. It’s something I’ve really got to think about. Even I only know my experience of it, I don’t know what it was like for those witnessing it from the stairs or on the ground. It has become two related but distinct pieces, and the documentation like the photographs and video, are very different from the performance. I think that if people witnessed it live they’d see that actually it was a very quiet piece, that it was very still, and really wasn’t about trying to shock anybody.

I think maybe doing the piece again live will provide another way for people to witness the work. It’d be great to do it again, but I’ll leave a little while to process everything before I return to it. I have some really good sites in mind, but I want to go back to painting before that. I go through cycles with performance, I return to painting and then back again. I’m working on a series of paintings at the moment, pieces that link very strongly to my performance work.Then I plan to return to Site.

Documentation of Site is available at spillfestival.com/spill-tv
poppyjackson.co.uk

January 13, 2016
To treat naked artist Poppy Jackson as a joke is to dismiss something powerful

Performance artist Poppy Jackson. Photograph: Manuel Vason / DARC

The artist Poppy Jackson has sparked something of a tabloid controversy around her performance Site, taking place as part of the 2015 Spill Festival of Performance.

In the piece Jackson sat, naked, across the gable of Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel. She stayed there for four-hour stints, across two days. Jackson was just about visible from the street (if you happened to be looking up at the right moment), although in order to really see her properly the audience gathered in the Toynbee courtyard, and lined the stairs inside the building.

On the first day, someone working in an adjacent building tweeted a photo, asking ‘What’s happening?’. Several news organisations then picked up the story, prompting a slew of sensationalist articles and the familiar below-the-line griping in the comments section.

Right now at #toynbeehall. What’s happening? #nakedwomanonroof pic.twitter.com/dg0ydtAzi1

— Raquel Rodrigues (@raquelwatdahell) October 30, 2015

Spill has circulated a press release detailing Jackson’s intentions, and Lyn Gardner has since written in the Guardian about how the piece fits in to the rest of the festival and a longer history of performance art. Artists like Jackson are asking questions, in a language that most might not be used to, but they do so not to provoke needlessly.

The city has become a prescribed place, our public and shared spaces monetised, corporatised and gated off. Jackson’s dignified sitting, against the cold and the stares, highlights to me just how boring the streets and buildings of the city have become. I’m glad she was there, and that I got to witness it. Art is not limited to oil paintings of horses.

For me though, this is not a story about a piece of art, but about the ‘journalists’ that spend their days trawling Twitter for clickbait to bump up website traffic. ‘Can (insert newspaper here) use your picture?’ appears hundreds of times under the original tweet, a sadder indictment of current reporting than of the state of the art scene in London.

Art, theatre and performance critics are being scrapped, whilst newspapers desperately scrape together lowest common denominator articles. Sensitivity to experimental work is lost when it’s presented in such a reductive way. Artworks that are trying something new, or that maybe require a different kind of engagement from its audience, are written off as a joke.

Look at the two pictures that were originally tweeted, really look at them, and you can see the beauty in the image. Across the roofs and red brick walls of that corner of East London, Jackson sits quietly, dignified and statuesque. Amongst the moss, ivy and tiles her body stands out, a little fleshy intervention, a different perspective on the space. What’s happening is an art piece, a piece of art. You might not like it, you might hate it, you might think it’s funny, or you might not care. But to treat it like a joke is to dismiss something powerful.

@LewisAChurch

November 3, 2015
The Fantasy of Representation at Beers Contemporary – art review

Sad Tommy by Andrew Salgado. Courtesy of Beers Contemporary

The current exhibition at Beers Contemporary, The Fantasy of Representation, combines emerging painters with familiar masters in a show that celebrates the representational and figurative strand of contemporary art.

Curated by Andrew Salgado, the exhibition argues that figuration, the painting of things, can be as inventive and avant-garde as any example of abstraction (the painting of forms, shapes and colours). Here Salgado displays the work of some 20 artists, and his own, in support of his argument.

In the accompanying essay Salgado writes against the assumption that although representational painters should be influenced by abstraction, abstraction has no responsibility to take on the lessons of those painters who paint objects, people and landscapes.

The art historian Edward Lucie-Smith notes in support that abstract work can be just as predictable and tiresome as any picture of a river or tree. They are right, of course, and it is unjust to assume that just because an artist chooses to include representational content in their work that it is less advanced or adventurous than the work of an abstract painter.

Suregum by Scott Anderson. Courtesy of Beers Contemporary

The combination of the techniques of abstraction with carefully chosen subject matter and recognisable references has produced some of the most interesting work of the 20th and 21st century. This point is explicitly made by the inclusion of a Francis Bacon sketch on paper (Head Drawing), a distended head that illustrates exactly how engaging the balance between technique and content can be.

The material qualities of the paintings on show are one of the most immediately striking aspects of the exhibition, and it is fascinating to examine the craters, peaks and thickness of the paint. Looking into the Sun (Kings Blue) (2015) by Daniel Crews-Chubb is such a dense lather of materials pasted to the canvas that I found myself staring at it for quite some time.

But somewhat ironically for a show on representation, the content of the painting barely registered over its material qualities. This is the Achilles heel of the exhibition, and perhaps even of modern representational painting in general.

Hand for Horace Greeley by Aaron Holz. Courtesy of Beers Contemporary

Often the content (what the painting is of) is really quite boring. Doe-eyed women, topless men with a far-away stare in their eyes, the light on a lake – these things feel overdone and far less interesting than how they are painted or exist as objects. Surely truly great representational work, like Bacon’s, exists in the interaction between what is represented and how it is portrayed.

Too much of the work here falls down at the level of content. The clumsy religious theme in Sverre Bjertnes’ The New State (2015), for example, is so overdone that it becomes very difficult to appreciate the skill involved in his painterly technique. Its Hieronymus Bosch-esque landscape, with flat and stretched purple hills cluttered with crucifixes, had me questioning what I could possibly be expected to draw from it. Haven’t I seen these images of psychedelic and unsettling Christianity a hundred times before? What the paintings are of often feels secondary or superficial when comparison to how they are painted.

I think that some of this triteness stems from the unwavering focus on gallery painters, when there is all around us (especially in East London) much more interesting representational work. Walking to the exhibition, I passed street art that I found more poignant, political and urgent than many of the canvases on display. Despite the small size of the exhibition, it could have included so much more that engages exactly with those concerns it identifies – the way that representation can be just as (or even more) current than abstraction.

For all that the exhibition does correctly, and the interesting work it includes, it strays into cliché at points, and rarely looks outside the walls of the gallery or the cliquish art world, towards work that might be just as able to challenge the supremacy of the abstract.

The Fantasy of Representation is at Beers Contemporary, 1 Baldwin Street, EC1V 9NU until 19 September
beerslondon.com

August 27, 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
AA Bronson: Hexenmeister – radical artist’s first London exhibition

Studio, 2015. AA Bronson. Courtesy of Maureen Paley, London

Bethnal Green’s Maureen Paley is the setting for AA Bronson: Hexenmeister, an exhibition by Canadian artist AA Bronson. The work is on display across three rooms, with each room corresponding to the three strands that characterise the artist’s long and varied career: as a radical collaborator with the group General Idea and others; as an artist invested in spirituality, shamanism and the occult; and as a curator, archivist and writer engaged with the many iterations of gay life and subculture.

Though small, the exhibition offers an illuminating insight into the work of an artist who has consistently highlighted new ways for art to be made and distributed, and who continues to challenge orthodox notions of sexuality, ageing and authorship.

As a young man in the 1960s Bronson embraced the hippie ideal and dropped out of his university architecture course in order to create alternative structures for living and creating. Alongside friends and fellow art-school dropouts he formed a commune, free school and underground newspaper in Vancouver, open to all and working on the basis of collective decision making.

This early experience of working within the framework of an open door, consensus-based system led on to his now famous work with Jorge Zontal and Felix Partz in General Idea.

A type of collaborative artistic identity, General Idea allowed Bronson, Zontal and Partz to share their lives and art, becoming, as Bronson remembers, “one person” over their 25-year collaboration. The three artists, living together and working as one, produced countless paintings, sculptures and installations, as well as public art in the forms of billboards, posters and prints.

Red (2011) by AA Bronson and Ryan Brewer. Courtesy of Maureen Paley, London

From 1987 this public work in particular began to react to the AIDS crisis that was then decimating the gay communities of their New York base, raising awareness of the disease and highlighting the ignorance and negligence of contemporary societal institutions.

In the ground floor white cube that displays Bronson’s collaborative work here in Bethnal Green, the black canvas Black AIDS (prototype) from 1991 reflects this period of General Idea’s work. In the solid black painting an AIDS logo is hidden and unseen within the block of negative colour, its message as obscured and unreadable as information then was.

When in 1994 both Zontal and Partz died of an AIDS related illness, Bronson emerged as a solo artist, at first engaging with his own sense of loss and directly with the horror of the crisis. His work of this time has lost none of its potency, nor has Bronson mellowed in his commitment to artistic expression.

In 2010, the censorship of a film by David Wojnarowicz caused Bronson to request that his deathbed portrait of Partz be withdrawn from the Smithsonian exhibition ‘Hide/Seek’, in solidarity against censorship and the prejudice around work that fearlessly engages with AIDS and its legacy.

In later solo work Bronson also explores spirituality, manifested in his interest in the magical and occult. The large format photograph Red (2011) demonstrates this performative interaction with his own history and historical gay identity as he wanders the cruising woods of Fire Island as a red-painted apparition, documented by his collaborator, Ryan Brewer.

Placed alongside Red and at the centre of the exhibition is Treehouse (2015), a tent with a frame carved from a single ash tree and walled in hand-woven linen. This new work rises up out of dirt in the gallery floor as an inviting private space of reflection or a place for potential performance.

The third room reflects Bronson’s parallel and interwoven career as a curator, editor and archivist, best exemplified by his founding of the NY Art Book Fair in 1995. The room displays the Bronson curated mini-exhibition Queer Zines, a spread of self-produced and independent magazines that deal with gay life, sex and communities across Europe and America.

Alongside often-explicit images and descriptions of their sexuality, these zine writers document scenes, party spaces and artists to reveal the links between gay and queer lifestyles and punk, lo-fi and other DIY subcultures.

As Bronson himself writes: “They reveal a community in constant communication.” In much the same way, this exhibition showcases an artist in constant communication with the radical, the challenging and the subversive.

AA Bronson: Hexenmeister
Until 31 May
Maureen Paley
21 Herald Street, E2 6JT
maureenpaley.com

May 14, 2015
Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector at the Barbican – review

Smart cookie: Andy Warhol’s cookie jar collection. Image courtesy of the Movado Group

Artists are, perhaps unsurprisingly, particularly partial to objects. That is the key idea behind the Barbican Art Gallery’s new exhibition, which displays the personal collections of Damien Hirst, Hannah Darboven, Rae White, Sol LeWitt and others, interspersed with occasional examples of the artists’ own work. These are the objects that inspire their art, that are displayed in their homes and studios, and that give them pleasure.

The exhibition bursts with all kinds of cheap, expensive, big, colourful, tiny, old, new and drab things, from records to masks, signs and stamps. It is a reminder that art rarely comes from a deep centre of genius or spontaneously from nothing, but more often from an exploration of aesthetic inspirations and from personal iconographies built up over time.

It is a display of deeply personal objects, often suggesting an obsessive need to accrue more and more variations on a theme, such as Martin Parr’s Soviet space dog memorabilia or Andy Warhol’s famous collection of cookie jars. At points the exhibition resembles the best junk shop ever, and no doubt each visitor will pick out their own favourites. I was unavoidably drawn to the vinyl collection of artist Dr Lakra, the display of which features the covers of the best kinds of thrift store records; Nostalguitar!, Sounds from Exotic Island and more.

Dr Lakra’s collection of album covers. Photograph: Dr Lakra

These covers fill a wall alongside the artist’s Mexicalia and tattoo-infused sketchbooks, with select tracks blaring out through the gallery. Like a junk shop though, the quantity of the objects is occasionally more impressive than the objects themselves, and what might appear a treasure trove of infinitely-exciting ornaments is, on closer inspection, a set of things that are individually tatty and kitsch. But perhaps that is at least partly the point, as these are objects of personal significance rather than explicitly artistic endeavours.

One recurring problem with the Barbican Art Gallery exhibitions is their size, and it does feel as though Magnificent Obsessions is one or two rooms too large. Fatigue sets in, especially with such a dense collection of objects. Of course though, any exhibition like this is essentially a collection of collections, with things brought together by one artist now put together with more by a curator. It’s a difficult proposition for a gallery to reconcile these different elements, and to do so in a way that maintains the pace. Moving through the gallery it can be difficult to tell where the collections meet, and the edges of the show are indistinct.

Eye opener: Prosethic eyes from collection of Hiroshi Sugimoto

Piles of packing crates are heaped in one corner of the ground floor, and whilst it’s quite a nice stylistic touch (showing the process of bringing the collections together) I did briefly wonder if they just hadn’t been packed away. But on the upper floor where these packing crates are used as a plinth on which to display some of Peter Blake’s objects, the ‘fragile’ warning stickers highlight that, although some of these objects aren’t the ‘art’ of the artist, they are equally as precious.

Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector is at Barbican Art Gallery, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS until 25 May
barbican.org.uk

March 10, 2015