The big Frieze

It is overwhelming, often overblown, sometimes infuriating, but it is still London’s great annual art event, and always worth the effort of struggling through the crowds. There were many things I loved at this year’s Frieze, but for the purposes of this post, I will concentrate on works that referenced notions of the book.  

To begin in the main fair. I’ve seen the work of Hans-Peter Feldman before, and admired his playful take on collecting and grouping – sometimes to the point of obsession, perhaps in an effort to achieve completion, or at least to impose order in chaos. The Barbara Wien gallery presented his piece ‘Françoise Sagan, “Bonjour Tristesse”’, a series of colour photos pinned casually to one wall of the display, depicting the disembodied hand of a ‘reader’ holding up Sagan’s book. The reader is outdoors – there is a bush behind him (it looks like a man’s hand) and sunlight catching the green leaves. Each photograph shows a double-page spread, and with the time and inclination, a viewer could read the entire book, although perhaps Feldman’s goal is to invite us to consider the simple pleasure of reading a book (a sad book at that, about the blossoming and disappointment of a teenage girl) en plein air. Perhaps too, Feldman is interested in the book itself – its materiality, the presentation of text and language, the paper (presenting one paper medium through another paper medium).

The Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck is interested in art as stage set. In addition to his installation work, he makes sculpture and film that pitch the viewer into fantastic worlds, often quite dark. But his installation for the Marianne Boesky Gallery, ‘The Silent Library’, is pure white; once you step inside you are surrounded by clean, empty, clinical spaces. There are shelves, furniture, amazing tableaux on the console tables of birds surrounded by fruit and plants (still lives of still lives) – all white. Even a white ashtray with white cigarette butts. The spines of all the books are white, and so any notions of meaning or language are rendered impossible. It recalls grand libraries in stately homes where the leather-bound volumes were not so much there to be read, but to provide a kind of insulation from the outside world. But I was also reminded of the pure white rooms of Kubrick’s ‎2001: A Space Odyssey, and the notion that there is something alien, slightly threatening about such whiteness. Joan Mitchell, who hated white, said: ‘It’s death. It’s hospitals. It’s my terrible nurses. You can add in Melville, ‘Moby Dick’ a chapter on white. White is absolute horror. It is just the worst.’

At Travesía Cuatro’s stand, Spanish artist Elena del Rivero’s delicate set of pencil drawings on handmade paper presented a series of ‘letters’, incorporating borrowed texts from writers. Her interpretation of Emily Dickinson renders her words as spidery handwriting, forming a circle – words that bend over on themselves, like voices speaking at the same time. A circle is also a continuum, a wreath, a ring, an opened mouth. By calling these drawings ‘letters’, del Rivero is addressing her chosen authors as well, giving their words back to them in another guise. The lightness of the mark on the paper is like a whisper – and so the drawings are like diary entries, very intimate, very personal.

Over at Frieze Masters, there were works by Ed Ruscha – Gagosian created an entire wall of his books and text pieces, winks and nods towards plainspeaking America. At Timothy Taylor there were destroyed books by John Latham – beautiful, like the ruins of some great library (in the wake of the wholesale destruction of ancient monuments, I see his work in a new light).

But a new discovery this year was the American artist Michelle Stuart, connected to the Land art movement of the 60s and 70s. Parafin presented her ‘ledgers’, sculptural ‘book’ works that contain objects from specific locations. Her ‘Bat Palace Book’ seals earth and feathers from Tikal, the Mayan ruins preserved in the Guatemalan rainforest. The book itself feels like an ancient object recovered from the site, its weathered pages like wrinkled skin. I found her books very moving. Even closed and behind glass, it felt like their pages held great secrets waiting to be revealed.

Eau de Cologne

Just back from a weekend in Cologne, where the extraordinary Joan Mitchell retrospective is currenly showing at the Ludwig Museum. I am still processing the experience of seeing so much of her work in one place, so more on that in the new year.

In the meantime, my impressions of Cologne. I know I normally have much to say, but I’m in a contemplative mood at year’s end, so I will simply post some of my images.

Happy Christmas!

Invective against invective

I started this blog over three years ago to consider the intersections between poetry and art, and my personal impressions of the two. I generally post about things I like, and a few kind followers occasionally comment or share on Twitter. My last post, which dealt with what I consider poor public sculpture, received more comments on Facebook than any of my previous posts. Many people joined the thread to agree or post their personal favourite bad statue. A few people posted to defend the main subject of the piece, Meeting Place, the colossal sculpture of a kissing couple towering over St Pancras Station. A few of the defenders had a go at me for being ‘unromantic’ and ‘snobbish’; the latter I find particularly interesting, and I will come back to that in a moment. Although I defended myself on both counts, I didn’t mind, because I enjoyed the debate the post created. I have always maintained that I blog chiefly for myself, as a way of making a record of things that strike me (and sometimes those ideas feed back into poems) but it would be disingenuous if I didn’t say I’m pleased people read it, and feel the urge to comment.

Although the name of my blog might suggest otherwise, my posts tend to spring from a positive reaction, so I am fascinated that the one which has received so much attention stems from the negative. I wonder if it’s easier to be negative, or if there is a greater public reaction (mainly excitement) to dislike; certainly we remember bad reviews more than good ones, as the reviewer is often trying to build a memorable metaphor around negativity. The most famous literary example is Mary McCarthy railing against Lillian Hellman: ‘every word she writes is a lie, including and and the’. Only a clever writer could attack another writer by digging down into the minutiae of her syntax. Hellman’s reaction was to take out a multi-million dollar lawsuit against McCarthy. I’m not sure many people read either one of them now, but most people know the put-down.

We all know what we don’t like, and that dislike, indeed even hatred, often elicits a more passionate response than love. Certainly more visceral. Dislike can allow for humour: I will always remember Laura Cumming, the Observer’s art critic, saying that Antony Gormley’s Event Horizon sculptures were like ‘Action Man on top of a wardrobe’. I don’t agree with Cumming’s take on Gormley, but she is such an intelligent writer, and always manages to underpin her criticism with reason, that I always read what she has to say (and the Action Man dig did make me laugh).

Perhaps it is more difficult to express love or admiration without being clichéd or obvious, perhaps it is more difficult to pin down why we like something, why it moves us. Like seems to me to be a slower more considered process than dislike, which is something that hits you quickly. I didn’t have to look at Meeting Place for a long time to decide I hated it – my hatred was immediate and complete. To say why I hated it might be a slower process – finding the right words always is. But to say why I like something – in the case of my blog, often a work of contemporary art – is freighted with not just my personal inclinations and prejudices, but a whole warehouse of cultural baggage.

I am not an art critic (and I’m not sure what experience you need to be one). I have a undergraduate degree in art history, so that gives me a certain amount of knowledge, or at least background. Despite that, I find much academic art writing, and certainly the curatorial ‘art speak’ commentary that sits alongside most exhibitions these days, very off-putting. I am not sure if it’s the writing that exists around art – more likely the vast quantities of money, and possibly the difficulty of the art itself – that leads to the perception of elitism. To go back to Paul Day, the artist behind Meeting Place, he seems to be arguing that his work is a stand against elitism, in its appeal to ‘universal values’. Does it then follow that expressing a dislike for the sculpture is a kind of snobbery, an embracing of elitist ideals? Can we ever like or dislike anything without carrying our entire upbringing and education into the decision?

Perhaps not. But there are other artists that my education tells me that I should like, who are held up as great masters – Renoir and Rubens for example – that I absolutely hate. Something about excess, about colour, the mounds of flesh in Rubens, the profusion of pink in Renoir. Is that just down to taste? And how is taste constructed? Why do I love Joan Mitchell or William Scott? Some things grab you, channel into the already-existing patterns that you’ve established for yourself of what is beautiful and moving, and some things don’t.

And this is where language comes in. The project is not just to like or dislike, but to work out the words to express those reactions. It is subjective, but hopefully it might occasionally chime with others.