Naked if I want to

In a 2008 issue of Cabinet magazine, Alan Jacobs writes of the connection between nudity and shame, beginning with Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Eden: http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/31/jacobs.php. He concludes that even the strategically placed fig leaf is not enough to protect us from ‘exposure’:

Exposure cannot really be undone; what is revealed remains, in memory and image, even after it has been re-hidden. The words of the man and woman are transparently evasive. Likewise, the fig leaves merely call attention to what they are meant to hide, and in fact are another kind of evasion, another way of passing the blame, this time not to a creature or Being but to a part of the body, as though the sexual organs acted of their own accord — even though sexuality clearly plays no part in the story, in either its prohibitions or its rebellions.

In 1912, the artist Egon Schiele was arrested for sexually abusing a young girl. At the time, Schiele was painting striking portraits of some of Neulengbach’s local children, most of whom were poor and virtually homeless, and Schiele gave them shelter and a sense of purpose; this enraged the local bourgeoisie. When the police arrived at his studio to arrest him, they also seized a number of ‘pornographic’ drawings. Although the charges of sexual abuse were dropped, the judge found the artist guilty of exhibiting erotic drawings, one of which he burned publicly in front of the assembled courtroom. Schiele was imprisoned for a month.

What the good people of Neulengbach really objected to was an artist who flagrantly depicted not simply the body, but its sexual organs, the part that is to blame for our sins. Schiele’s nudes are posed so that we see them from the feet upwards, as if we are crouched over them, their faces furthest from us, sometimes hidden or cropped from the drawing, so we are forced to focus on their centres of desire. They open their legs, finger their vulvas, so that we might see inside the ‘secret cave’, as John Updike said in a piece for the Schiele show at MoMA in 1997; they are not so much exposed as laid bare.

Six years after his brief imprisonment, Schiele would die at the age of 28 after contracting Spanish flu. Nearly 100 years on, his drawings are acceptable to polite society; in the pampered halls of the Courtauld, where they are currently on show, they are viewed by well-healed elderly ladies in cashmere twin sets. Of course at the beginning of the 21st century we are nearly blinded by the easy pornography that is just a mouse click away.

So they have lost the power to feel illicit; have they lost the power to shock? Compared to Paul McCarthy’s new paintings on display just a few miles away at Hauser and Wirth, they are pretty tame. McCarthy uses photographic images from hardcore porn, which are superimposed onto paintings of figures engaging in extreme sexual acts. His palette captures the stained hues of bodily fluids. Hauser and Wirth have blacked out the huge glass windows that face gentile Saville Row, so that entering the gallery is like entering an adult shop in Soho. McCarthy wants us to be shocked, disgusted. The paintings are ugly, his figures are grotesque. This has always been one of his motives as an artist, to present the body as a hideous object, ejecting foul liquids and odors.

But this is not Schiele’s aim. His palette often suggests bruised flesh or blood, but this is the body electric, to quote Whitman, the soul firing the skin from within. There is love in Schiele’s portraits, sexual love, but also something more – a respect for the living, breathing, procreating figure. There is also pain; the body is twisted, bent into tortured shapes. When we do catch a glimpse of a face, the expression often betrays this pain. Schiele depicts himself so often as a Christ figure, his arms outstretched, his gaunt body splayed open. His work was misunderstood, derided, burnt in public – it is not surprising he made this connection.

Somehow, even in pain and discomfort, he manages to convey beauty. It’s difficult to say why; perhaps it’s empathy; we are also naked under our clothes; our carefully constructed outer layers do not betray what’s beneath, the secret cave, the dark core, not only of our bodies, but of our emotional terrain.

On the trail

A lovely Friday evening in late September, and we are on the Art Trail around Bermondsey, hosted by ARTHOUSE1, in conjunction with the London Sculpture Workshop and Drawing Room. All three venues are within shouting distance of each other; a stone’s throw away from White Cube, but it’s a different world entirely once you cross the Tower Bridge Road. Gentrification has been slower to creep across the unofficial boundary between new and old Bermondsey, so there have been opportunities to create new models for galleries and studio spaces. This colonization reminds me of Berlin, a city where both domestic and ex-commercial spaces have been commandeered for art. In this corner of Bermondsey there is a spirit of experimentation, a desire to give both artists and viewers a different, perhaps more intimate and lively, kind of experience.

In a recent article in the Weekend FT, Edwin Heathcoat discusses the phenomenon of the ‘domestic gallery’. As he explains, this is not a recent trend; before the days of the public gallery, museums were established in the homes of collectors. He goes on to say:

Artists have rediscovered the pleasure in displaying their work in the more human context of the domestic interior, on a scale that we can relate to more easily and in an environment less cool and disengaged than the white painted loft or the raw concrete of the pseudo-industrial.

This is certainly the case with ARTHOUSE1, one of the domestic galleries Heathcoat mentions in his piece. ARTHOUSE1 is a late Georgian townhouse, a reminder of what the area would have looked like in the days before the encroaching new builds and warehouses. A sandwich board outside is the only indication that we are in the right spot. Once inside, we climb the stairs to find a modern, clean gallery space occupying the top floor. Rebecca Fairman, the curator, has brought together two artists whose work is complimentary: the ceramicist James Oughtibridge and the painter, Ione Parkin. Parkin’s work particularly impresses me, in its scope and themes (often referencing the natural world, or the landscape of deep space). In the brief talk she gives, she mentions her interest in the alchemic properties of certain materials. In some of the works on paper she has employed powdered copper, to give the surface a jagged and metallic appearance. These works have names like Tundra and Land Mass, suggesting elements of landscape within the abstract.

(Since my visit, a new show has opened with works by Kim Norton and Alexandra Mazur-Knyazeva: www.arthouse1.co.uk)

From ARTHOUSE1 we walk down a side street and into the empty tarmac lot surrounding several vast warehouses. There are still light industrial units and storage facilities in the area, hidden-away places that secretly service the city. One of the units houses the London Sculpture Workshop, a not-for-profit space that provides sculptors with 2500 square feet of working area, and facilities, support and equipment that might not be available to them otherwise. The range of equipment is impressive, many items donated to the Workshop or bought cheaply from defunct businesses. Artists can book space when they need it, and can work in just about every medium with a variety of materials, from clay and bronze to sheet metal. We were shown works in progress, and also photographs of an open day, where local residents were invited into the building to create their own art. It is an incredible place, which allows artists, who may not have the support of an art school or the money to source specialist equipment and supplies, the freedom to think beyond such limitations.

www.londonsculptureworkshop.org

From the LSW, we retraced our steps to Drawing Room, the one venue on our walk that I’d visited before, on the occasion of their brilliant show Abstract Drawing, curated by Richard Deacon. The current show The Nakeds is on a similar scale: ambitious, challenging, provoking, with a mix of established artists, such as Tracey Emin, Marlene Dumas, Joseph Beuys and Egon Schiele (anticipating the show of late nudes about to open at the Courtauld), alongside less familiar names, including the extraordinary Maria Lassnig, whose work has spanned the twentieth century, and Stewart Helm, whose voyeuristic drawings of men meeting in parks at night are unflinching and strange; as viewers, we feel we are participating in this illicit act.

Many of the drawings in the show confront our ideas of what it is to be ‘naked’, which conjures ideas of isolation, desire and shame, and is perhaps distinct from the more artistic associations of the ‘nude’. It is a world-class show, curated by David Austin, an artist, and Gemma Blackshaw, an art historian, and their intelligence and consideration of the subject is present in their choice of artists, their juxtapositions, and in their catalogue material.

Drawing Room also has a library, a small shop (selling fabulous books, including their own publications), and a programme of talks, films and courses to accompany each show. Based on the two exhibtions I’ve seen, I would say they are one of the most interesting and innovative art venues in London at the moment. More people need to venture beyond Bermondsey Street and seek them out.

www.drawingroom.org.uk

Dark Blue Square

 

St Ives remains with me even now I’ve returned to the urban hub of Stockwell – the hard beauty of the landscape matched by the clarity of the artists who depicted it. So with the landscape still very present, I was saddened to read of the passing on Sunday of Breon O’Casey, one of the last of the generation of St Ives artists apprenticed to Hepworth at Trewyn. It is of particular interest to me that O’Casey came from a literary background – his father was the playwright Sean O’Casey, a contemporary of Yeats. It is perhaps too easy then to say that his paintings have the feeling of small moments arrested in time: birds captured mid-flight, landscapes reduced to the elemental (a field in spring, a group of circles resembling a cairn or pagan stones, a constellation suspended in a night time sky). There is the exuberance of the French painters he loved, Braque and Matisse, but in the restrained and earthy palette of the Penwith School.

It was only a few months ago that I went to a show of his work at Somerset House. I didn’t actually know it was on; I’d just come from the Courtauld where there was a show of Cezanne’s sketches for The Card Players (an interesting transition, as it happens). It was a bleak winter day, flat grey and featureless; the sort of day you get in London in January and February, when one day blends into the next and seems to go on forever, and you are just waiting for a small sign of spring. And O’Casey cheered me, with his simple birds and flat squares of pure colour – the sort of painting that looks simple enough (well, maybe to those who can’t paint) but which is pared down and spare and studied, like a poem by Charles Simic. Difficult to accomplish without being twee or shallow. But O’Casey’s work is resonant, meaningful.

Take for example this painting, one of his many stylised depictions of birds, the title of which is Dark Blue Square. In that title there is a statement about proportion, measurement; I think of the way the sky is viewed from the ground, slivered between buildings or trees. It is a portion of sky, like the painter’s own patch. But then it appears in the bottom left of the picture, not at the top as we’d expect, so maybe our bird is swooping over a lake or reservoir. There is a paler shade of blue just touching its body – a shadow, a memory of light. The two brown columns that hold it are like tree trunks, or legs. A simple juxtaposition of shapes and colours, the colours simplified to brown, white, blue. But it’s the blue O’Casey wants us to focus on, bright and vital against the dark brown, the bird just passing through.

It’s like the last soldiers of the Great War, all those artists of that generation passing. They brought us modernism, which might feel like old hat now, but they were pioneers then (with Hepworth cracking the whip). And the work still feels valid and exciting.