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!

Brick dust in sunlight

OK, so it’s not everyone’s idea of an exotic mid-week break, and indeed, I was met with sniggers from a few friends when I mentioned I was off for a jaunt around Birmingham with Vici. I trust Vici implicitly when it comes to cities, as she is the great connoisseur of all things urban – and she is a fan of Birmingham. Besides, I’d never been, and in my nearly-thirty years of living in the UK, I’ve managed to visit most of the other major English cities. It seemed odd that the one I’d missed is actually closest to London, only an hour and a half by train.

I’ve always been attracted to ‘second’ cities (Antwerp is a good example – to my mind, far more interesting than Brussels). Their charms are not as obvious as in the grander capitals, but they are often edgier, friendlier, their architecture more challenging or unusual, their history more evident (in that they haven’t had the finance or the opportunity to modernise or ‘sanitise’ their public spaces). They are easier to explore, or at least smaller – coming from the great sprawl of London, I appreciate going to a city centre that fits on a single map.

But Birmingham gets a bad press. Perhaps it’s down to its architectural history – some of the great (or terrible, depending on your view) statements of brutalism have been erected there. The Bullring is now a swanky shopping precinct, but in the seventies it was notorious, the unfriendly face of urban planning. Even its name suggested somewhere alien, thuggish and claustrophobic. What remains is the glorious Rotunda, Birmingham’s diminutive version of the Shard – visible from just about anywhere in the city; from the top floor it offers an incredible panoramic view.

Often second cities retain the character that gets swept away in gentrification. Small industry has all but vanished from the centre of London. I remember when I was eight or nine travelling with my father through the darkened industrial spaces of Tooley Street, where there were still warehouses and printers, and how properly Dickensian it felt to an American child – and exciting. Those warehouses eventually made way for large-scale tourist attractions, such as the London Dungeon, and Tooley Street is now like most other roads in London, serving the consumer industry with the usual burger restaurants and beauty salons, and branches of Tesco and M&S.

But as we wandered through Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, you could hear the rush and whirr of machines making the pieces for sale in the area’s shops. These were real, operational factories, unlike the factory buildings of the Docklands and Shoreditch, now all luxury apartments. Gentrification is creeping here too, but it still feels like the place has managed to hold onto much of what makes it interesting.

I was reminded of Roy Fisher, Birmingham’s unofficial laureate, whose poems are both robust and beautiful at the same time. Fisher says of Birmingham that it’s a ‘nowhere’ as far as the rest of England is concerned, that ‘no-account bit in the middle’. Fisher talks about the city, in all its nondescriptness, as a place which wasn’t spoken about or written about when he was first becoming a poet. I’ve quoted Fisher here before, as he is, to my mind, a poet who writes about the urban experience like no one else. When he was writing his epic, ‘City’, Birmingham was in flux. But I can still feel the pull of the old as I walk over the cobbled streets of the Jewellery Quarter. Fisher writes:

Brick dust in sunlight. That is what I see now in the city, a dry epic flavour, whose air is human breath. A place of lines made straight with plumbline and trowel, to desiccate and crumble in the sun and smoke. Blistered paint on cisterns and girders, cracking to show the priming. Old men spit on the paving slabs, little boys urinate; and the sun dries it as it dries out patches of damp on plaster facings to leave misshapen stains. I look for things here that make old men and dead men seem young. Things which have escaped, the landscapes of many childhoods.

Wharves, the oldest parts of factories, tarred gable ends rearing to take the sun over lower roofs. Soot, sunlight, brick-dust; and the breath that tastes of them.

How amazing then to find a place like the Coffin Works, a museum dedicated to the history of Newman Brothers Coffin Furnishers, the last of a dozen coffin manufacturers to operate in the city (it closed its doors in 1999). It’s an extraordinary feat of preservation, a love song to a livelihood now finished, and to a way of commemoration which has also passed.

Two exhibitions around town emphasised the idea of memorialising / manufacturing. Fiona Banner’s glass scaffold at Ikon is also a ghost, something that exists and doesn’t, to paraphrase the artist. It suggests construction, but is nearly invisible, so that we think of how things are built, but we stand in a gallery that seems empty – we can see through the glass, into both the present of what is made (the glass is transparent, but still solid) and the past of the empty room.

Banner is also interested in cataloguing and assembling, and so her entire collection of Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft is stacked to form a column in the middle of the gallery, a precarious tower.

At mac, the filmmaker Atom Egoyan has installed Steenbeckett, a paean to celluloid. Two thousand feet of 35mm film is spooled and looped through pulleys around a darkened gallery, powered by an old Steenbeck editing machine. The film is Krapp’s Last Tape, in which Egoyan directed John Hurt. We can hear his disembodied voice through the noise of the reels passing through their elaborate mechanics. In another room is Krapp’s table, where he sits processing his box of recordings. There is something beautiful in the dusty technology, pre-smart phone. The ghostly echo of analogue.

In his monologue, Krapp talks about ‘those things worth having when all the dust has – when all my dust has settled’ and I think again of Fisher’s ‘brick dust in sunlight.’

A line about orange

I’m a guest on the Poetry School blog today

http://campus.poetryschool.com/a-line-about-orange-thoughts-on-poets-and-painters/

Dance of death

Listening on the radio this morning to harrowing accounts from men detained at Guantanamo Bay brought back images from the recent Michaël Borremans exhibition Black Mould (at David Zwirner in Mayfair).

I went to the private view on a sultry summer evening; on entering the gallery I was immersed in darkness. The normally white walls had been painted a greenish black, the tinge of illness; against them, Borremans’s small paintings, figures against a yellowy beige background, seemed to gleam. But that lightness became a burden – a neutral, almost antique space in which the viewer felt something terrible was about to happen. This was down to the figures themselves – the light background drawing the eye into an even greater darkness – a series of hooded men (I say ‘men’ but the gender was indeterminate). Their black cloaks were based on a Japanese Bunraku costume given to the artist, but most powerfully evoked the cloaks worn by prisoners tortured and abused at Abu Ghraib. I thought too of the KKK, the judge passing a sentence of death, the prisoner heading for execution.

Even more chilling was that the figures were not stationary in their robes, they were portrayed in movement. It appeared they were dancing. Borremans’s title came from the name of a band, Black Mold (the artist was listening to one of their albums as he worked on the paintings). Their music is reminiscent of early Stooges, or the Swans – lugubrious thrash punk. Once you have heard them, the terrible dance of death makes more sense.

 There was a play on ‘mold’, the idea of something regular that one must break out of, and ‘mould’, a fungus dotting its spores of death over the surface of things. While these figures were uniform in their uniforms, they were also subverting expectations of their evil stance in their joyous dancing. They were at the same time horrible and comic, that strange unsettling mixture that Borremans has often captured in his work.

The paintings stay with me, and creep up, as they did this morning. Haunting, yes, but the executioner is having a laugh under his dark hood.

Wunderkammer

Readers will know that I have been immersed in the fabulous Joseph Cornell show at the Royal Academy for the last month, as I have been running a course called Containing the World in Words. With Cornell’s dream boxes crowding my imagination, I took some time off to head to Venice for the Biennale (and the Redentore festival, which falls conveniently near my birthday). I discovered the city crammed with vitrines and glass cases of every description, marvelous wunderkammers stuffed with incredible objects. Cornell had travelled with me, and remains a guiding force for a new generation of artists concerned with collecting such things that represent their age, and preserving them for future generations.

Of course, Cornell is no stranger to that city (or at least his works aren’t; he famously never travelled beyond New York) as four of his magical boxes grace the mantelpieces in Peggy Guggenheim’s palazzo. His fortune-telling parrot winks from its perch, and a ghostly palace twinkles in mirrored gloom.

And over in another magical palace, the Tre Oci (the neo-gothic fantasy conceived by the artist Mario de Maria), Mark Dion presents several installations around the idea of taxonomy. Included is one of his ‘cases’, filled with finds dredged from the canals and lagoon of Venice. It resembles the heavy furnishings of the old-fashioned museum; Dion is of my generation, so will recall being dragged to such places as a child, institutions lined with great expanses of dark wood display cases, most of their treasures behind doors and panels and inside drawers. What I love about Dion’s cases is that they are thrown open, and so their contents are immediately visible – the museum exploded. The stuff of the canal, just broken bits and bobs, is presented as a rare find (just as Cornell made his dime-store materials into precious and coveted objects).

Another element to Dion’s work is one of ecological preservation. In this he is akin to herman de vries (who insists on spelling his name in lower-case letters ‘to avoid hierarchy’), the artist chosen to represent the Netherlands this year. Like Dion, de vries collected objects from the lagoon and the city for his Biennale installations. His background as a horticulturalist is evident in the series of framed plants and flowers, like those you might find pressed in a book as keepsakes. Unfortunately we were unable to get to the second part of his show, held on the deserted island of Lazzaretto Vecchio, which housed a plague hospital in the sixteenth century; there are known to be at least 1500 skeletons of plague victims buried on the island. This must have been a very poignant experience, as de vries work for me is concerned about the human mark on the land. 

The human mark on the land is most evident in Fiona Hall’s stunning installation for the Australian pavilion. Hall plunges us into darkness, her museum cases dramatically spot lit, like the theatrical presentation of the Renaissance Wunderkammers. But like de vries’s meditation on death, present under the feet of those who make it out to Lazzaretto Vecchio, Hall is telling us that humans may soon only exist as a museum exhibition. Lining the walls around her elaborate displays are a number of clocks, faces painted over with skulls, scythes, and other symbols of death. Their ticking and chiming becomes an eerie reminder of our brief time on earth. In the cases are the objects of human endeavor, such as atlases, but also headlines that scream the truth of global warming, the destruction of the natural environment. Standing in the centre of an octagon of cases, we too become part of the ghastly installation. We too are museum pieces.

Which takes me back to Cornell, who, in his temporary residence in London, has reminded me to find wonderment in even the smallest tokens. So much of his work is also about time, and how, if we not careful to preserve the past, the great achievements we might have made will inevitably be lost.