Taking stock

On another art crawl around London with Paul Carey Kent. Paul’s walks are now so popular that sometimes twenty or more people are trailing after him (he walks fast) from one gallery to another (and in all, he is known and greeted warmly). These walks are not just a way to see what’s on in London, but also a way for artists and writers to meet and compare notes, look at things together and sometimes have a good old fashioned argument about what works and what doesn’t. Paul always plans the itinerary in advance, and today, we are covering Kings Cross, Old Street and Bloomsbury.

Next door to each other, in Victoria Miro and Parasol Unit respectively, are new shows from Sarah Sze and Katy Moran. A dialogue emerges between the two artists (women of roughly the same generation) centered around collecting and assembling. Although Moran’s work is on the surface more traditional, focused on painting, it’s what she crams into her small-scale canvases that is surprising. Her titles suggest the bright and kooky world of cartoons, circus, the world in all its variety, and they give a hint that the paintings are more than they appear. From a distance, they are densely patterned, energetic abstract swirls, but only when you get up close do you realize that they contain multilayered collaged bits from books and magazines, often masked or veiled by Moran’s brush. Figures emerge from the chaos of paint. Moran turns the canvas around while she’s working, so everything’s turned on its head, and there’s often no clear way in, we just need to follow her down the particular maze she leading us through. 

I saw her work first at Tate St Ives some years ago, and while I liked it then, the new paintings seem to be richer, more worked, more complex – the difference between early Pound and the Cantos. Like opening an attic door and peering into the darkness and clutter, knowing you will find treasure.

Although there are silkscreen prints in Sarah Sze’s show (not so successful for me), she is primarily a sculptor, or more accurately, a compiler of installations. I was impressed with her Venice Biennale show in 2013, when she turned the United States Pavilion into the lab of a mad scientist, the strange assemblage actually snaking its way out of the building.

I loved the chaos and bustle, but also felt there was too much (and my photos capture certain individual elements I loved rather than trying to encompass the entire installation). 

Here at Victoria Miro, not everything works. The installation on the lower level seems without focus. The piece is called Still Life with Desk, and the individual elements don’t seem to add up to much, apart from maybe trying to get at what’s in the head of the artist or writer at the moment of creation. It’s the piece upstairs, Calendar Series, that impressed me and reminded me of the best moments of her Venice show.

The floor is covered in front pages from The New York Times, spanning a period of months from July to October 2013. Sze has doctored the cover photographs, replaced them with images that appear to be from the natural and celestial worlds, created an assemblage of three-dimensional objects to match the photos. The pages is lit with a series of desk lamps, each casting a small pool of light over its chosen page in the darkened space. I think of labs, libraries, archives, places of study or research, the object of the research perhaps newsworthy, but odd in its isolation, its difficulty to categorise in any satisfactory manner.

I’ve focused on those two exhibitions in detail, but we also covered the extraordinary Richard Serra show at Gagosian http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/richard-serra–october-11-2014 the disturbingly beautiful sculptures of David Altmejd at Modern Art http://www.modernart.net/view.html?id=1,4,1260,1261 and the gorgeous ‘tapestries’ made from old bottle caps and bits of metal by El Anatsui at the October Gallery http://www.octobergallery.co.uk/exhibitions/2015els/index.shtml . All worth catching.

Measuring the Universe

 

As I walked through the galleries at Tate St Ives on a sultry Friday evening last week (beginning in a room of stunning Gabo constructions) it seemed to me that the artists assembled were concerned in various ways with measurement: of distances, of shapes and forms, of human scale, of volume and air, of experience.

How does a person walk through an enclosed space, from one end of a room to another?  It’s just something you do, naturally, instinctively, one foot in front of the other, without thinking about it. In Martin Creed’s installation, Half the air in a given space, he has filled half the volume of the Tate’s curved gallery with white balloons, like cartoon clouds. The visitor is invited to move through them; it was surprising how resilient, how hard they were, every now and then, one yielding to enough pressure to burst. You had to fight your way through a solid, rubbery mass, your steps slowed, as you poked and kicked them into submission – the brilliant plot of some demented clown. When I was finally released at the other end of the gallery through a glass door, one or two balloons escaping in my wake, I smelled of rubber, like something slick and strange and my hair was standing on end.  But what I thought of was breath, the breath of a person walking, the breath of effort, the breathlessness of blowing up thousands and thousands of balloons (ok, I concede they would have used a machine for that). Charles Olson said that a poem represents certain laws and possibilities of breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as his listenings. In the gallery, muffled by those rubber cushions, all I could hear was the sound of myself breathing (as well as the sounds of fellow balloon-strugglers laughing and trying to find each other in the depths).  

The gallery above contained Lucio Fontana’s canvases and structures, slashed and shot full of holes, as if the artist was hell-bent on destroying whatever perfection he might create— although Fontana did not consider his holes, his interruptions, to be a form of destruction. A hole is an intervention, something which disrupts, but not necessarily in a negative way. You want to touch it, to stick your finger in it. It suggests the hand of the artist, a bit of a joker, winking at the viewer. But the hole has (excuse the pun) deeper connotations. Jeanette Winterson, writing about Barbara Hepworth, said

Holes are also tunnels or worm-holes making a route through time … The hole is a way back and a way forward. The hole is also the space occupied by the air we are breathing now, by the sunlight that has taken eight minutes to reach us, and by the starlight that is two thousand years old. In the space inside, or rather through, the sculpture, time is both present and meaningless – and that is time’s true nature, it does and it does not exist …

Moving away from Fontana, I found myself in a room full of Margaret Mellis’s driftwood constructions; another way of looking at proportions, associations. Mellis trawled the shore for pieces of wood – the remains of larger structures; dissembled, worthless – and by bringing them together made something new. That’s what poets do too – find connections in what is seemingly random.  So I was particularly pleased to hear Telfer Stokes, Mellis’s son, quote her as saying that when she was able to make such connections, to see how a construction might come together, it was like reading a really good poem. Each construction is like a window framing multiple landscapes; the landscape of the beach where Mellis found the constituent parts, the landscape of the boat or crate or tool that once was whole (now ‘hole’), the new landscape she’s made from such simple means, and which means more than the sum of its parts. It is hard to say why they are so beautiful, so complex and compelling; maybe it has to do with all the hands that went into making things, things which were destroyed then constructed anew.

And to move from Mellis’s constructions to Agnes Martin’s bands of soft colour – almost non-colour; just shade, tone, light – on canvas made perfect sense. As Martin said, like crossing an empty beach to look at the ocean. And there it was, outside the gallery, just waiting for us …

http://www.tate.org.uk/stives/

The title of this post comes from an installation by Roman Ondák, which invites visitors to have their height measured and recorded on the gallery wall:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNiwsDnzFiw

The show Margaret Mellis – Structure and Colour is also showing at the Wills Lane Gallery during the Tate Summer season: www.willslanegallery.co.uk

The listening sea

To St Ives, with its twisting cobbled lanes and whitewashed cottages, for a retrospective of the artist Peter Lanyon. Unlike Hepworth or Nicholson or Gabo or most of the artists associated with the town, Lanyon was born in West Penwith. It was the landscape of his childhood, one he ‘knew in his bones’, according to John Berger. Berger says of Lanyon’s painting ‘Trevalgan’:

It is a painting, not of the appearance, but of the properties of a landscape: properties only discovered when one knows a place so well that its ordinary scenic appearance has long been forgotten.

And so into his landscape. From St Ives we drove along the coast to Zennor, stopping in the churchyard to find the graves of Patrick Heron and Bryan Wynter. We continued along to Gurnard’s Head, and made a visit to the pub, where WS Graham and Roger Hilton used to drink all night and then beg the long-suffering barmaid to cook them breakfast in the morning. Then to places I knew from Graham’s great poem-eulogy to Lanyon, ‘The Thermal Stair’: Levant and Morvah, with their worked-out tin mines that loom like ghost castles along the cliffs; Botallack, St Just, and then inland over the bleak, bleached-out wintery hills to Lanyon Quoit, that strange, ancient structure. These were the landscapes Lanyon painted, but as he said, ‘I paint places but always the Placeness of them.’

And we could find Lanyon’s palette in the landscape: the grey of slate, of smoke, of the sky on the verge of storm; the green of algae, of spring fields, of the ‘jasper’ sea (to steal a phrase from Graham); the white of chalk, of cloud, of wave-caps; the brown of cliff edge, of burnt heather. Once he took up gliding, his colours changed, became brighter, faster; racing blue, pure white, occasionally a bold strike of red as he reached higher and higher, not content with the familiarity of the ground, the contours of the land he knew so well. Gliding enriched him as an artist, but also brought about his early death, at the age of 46, in 1964.

Back to Graham’s poem, one of his most haunting and lovely, where the poet asks for a ‘thermal to speak and soar to you’, his dead friend. So many of Graham’s poems are about the search to find clarity through language, and here, he finds a common ground between the writer and the artist:

The poet or painter steers his life to maim

Himself somehow for the job. His job is Love
Imagined into words or paint to make
An object that will stand and will not move.

The poem is the object which will stand, as will Lanyon’s paintings and sculptures. These works ‘stand’ for a way of expressing landscape and our ‘stand’ as humans in the landscape. For Lanyon, the West Penwith coast wasn’t just a place of beauty, but a place of particular industrial history, the dark history of tin mining in the region. Lanyon talked about making a ‘pilgrimage from inside the ground’ to represent the lost mines, the dead miners. Lanyon said: ‘Images in painting do not stand for things. They are things.’

Tacita Dean writes of the shift in Lanyon’s work after he took up gliding: ‘his paintings begin to lose anxiety and something of the heaviness of earth and the old land.’ It was in the sky, she says, that Lanyon found his ‘elsewhere’. Graham understood this too. It was what they shared, an intimacy with the land, and the constant struggle to find a medium, and a ‘stand’ within that medium, to express how they felt.

Graham’s call to Lanyon is transformed into a tolling bell at the end of the poem:

Remember me wherever you listen from,
Lanyon, dingdong, dingdong from carn to carn.
It seems tonight all Closing bells are tolling
Across the Dutchy shire wherever I turn.

http://www.tate.org.uk/stives/exhibitions/peterlanyon/default.shtm

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=7508