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Monday 25 January 2010

The ICA -- use it or lose it

The ICA is one of my favourite London venues. It’s had an incredible history, staging a legendary discussion with the Situationists, exhibiting Throbbing Gristle’s Cosey Fanni Tutti’s controversial art about the sex industry (the original display is now on show at the Tate Modern’s rather dull Pop Life show) and, of course, that notorious Einsturzende Neubauten performance...

I’ve seen loads of great talks there (and, admitting an interest, helped put on a few). One fascinating evening saw a discussion between ex-Angry Brigade John Barker and ex-Weather Underground Bill Ayers. Another, a truly bizarre meeting of the late G.A. Cohen -- author of Why Not Socialism? -- and Slavoj Zizek. Unfortunately, I missed the night where satirist Chris Morris heckled Martin Amis for his anti-muslim comments.

As well as the talks and the great cinema (where else would you be able to see the new film of Coetzee’s Disgrace or the documentary about Derrida?), the ICA has one of the best bookshops in the country. I visit regularly for their large selection of the latest theory titles.

Last year, I was saddened to see the long-standing and excellent talks' organisers James Harkin and Jenn Thatcher leave, and this Saturday’s Guardian gives clues as to why this may have happened. It seems that the financial crisis has bitten deep and even more redundancies are expected -- there is a fear that the debt is insurmountable.

This is both an important cultural venue and a key independent bookshop in the life of the capital. Have you not been before? It’s just off Trafalgar Square , 5 minutes from Charing Cross Road station -- you can fit it in on the way to Buckingham Palace! I urge you to use it -- to lose a place like this would be a tragedy.

Rowan

Posted by Rowan Wilson
Tags: art, personal

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Monday 18 May 2009

Synecdoche, Stockport

Whilst Bridget Riley's Op Art looks to be utterly abstract it was, for Riley, grounded in real life. Following John Lancaster, Wikipedia defines Optical Art as "a method of painting concerning the interaction between illusion and picture plane, between understanding and seeing", but for Riley the first "picture plane" was the eye and it was immediately offered illusions by the world itself. Bend close to -- and concentrate hard on -- grass bending in the wind and, to be honest to reality, to paint what you actually see, you'll have to create something that looks a bit like Orphean Elegy I. It would be merely an amusing taxonomical gesture to rebrand Op Art as Realism, but it would perhaps be a useful reminder that the concomitant gesture, that of refusing to see Realism merely as Ideology, is an absurd taxonomical rigidity we'd do best to overturn. To think Realism is real -- or even a particularly good representation of it -- is a very major category error.

All art, sometimes despite itself, is symbolic, but mistaking the real for Realism is madness. In Wallace Stevens' Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself a sound is heard, "a scrawny cry from outside / Seemed like a sound in his mind." There is a dialectic between inside and outside, a dialogue, a tension: art negotiates that, plays with it. What a piece of artwork is, or represents, always ends up representing something more than itself: a picture of lines is really a picture of grass is really about nature or the world or perhaps something more political like "women and nature" or "women and nature and the world" -- this is an almost inevitable critical drift, one that we should be aware of and very cautious about. Note the way the drift occurs: seamlessly, what a picture is, or could be, becomes what it is about; representation is always already symbolism (as they'd no doubt say in the University seminar room). The smallest part -- that blade of grass, Whitman's or Riley's -- can refer to, can stand for, the whole; but, in truth, the pressure is too much to bear: it can't be the whole, and the whole itself can never be represented, so the urge to create is the certainty of failure, but also the very reason to carry on creating.

Writing in the Guardian, Damon Wise called Charlie Kaufman's new film, Synecdoche, New York, "an epic, wilfully obscure, splurge of surrealism." Central to the film is its meditation on art. After winning a MacArthur 'Genius' Grant, playwright Caden Cotard hires a huge, empty warehouse and begins to recreate in the minutest detail his own life (fans of Tom McCarthy's Remainder will, of course, be struck by how close Kaufmann's film is to that novel). What we are shown is that, taken too literally, mimetic realism slides fairly quickly into the surrealism that Wise bemoans. Indeed, what is noteworthy is that Cotard's re-creative drive, by being so devoted to Realism, loses all realism and cannot ever satisfy him of its truth. His attempt to get at the raw truth of things (too much Kant, not enough Nietzsche; arguably the opposite of the film's director!) by staging as event what happens to him in his life as accident makes his art -- and this film -- peculiarly preoccupied with death. Cotard's Realism produces non-realistic art that ruins his increasing unreal life. In the film, Samantha Morton's plays Hazel, the most important woman in his life. She lives in a house which is perpetually on fire. The symbolism is heavy-handed, but ambiguous -- like the film itself.

Coincidentally, Morton's directorial debut, The Unloved (a "film that gives a child's eye view of the U.K.'s government-run care system for orphans and children in danger") was on the television last night. It is a wonderfully moving drama (and great to see the gorgeous music of Colleen used to such brilliant effect) set, mostly, in the realist mode. Indeed, at times it was filmed to look like a fly-on-the-wall documentary. What made the film far more affecting than the usual "bleak, powerful, truthful, brave" (insert adjective of choice) drama of this type, and such programmes have a history going back forty years to the landmark screening of Ken Loach's Cathy Come Home, was its willingness regularly to slow the pace of the narrative right down and focus on a face, a tacky statuette of the virgin Mary, dust motes shining in a shaft of sunlight. (Morton is surely taking a directorial lead here from Lynne Ramsay in whose film of Morvern Callar she appeared in 2002.) The narrative of The Unloved was itself wilfully told only from the central character Lucy's perspective, so that much of what happened -- as it would have been to 11-year-old Lucy herself -- was ambiguous, odd, inexplicable. The film, then, was at its strongest when its realism was at its weakest and thus when the Real, in all its strangeness, was allowed room to show itself for what it was.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: art, film, philosophy

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Thursday 12 March 2009

Jacques Rancière and Indisciplinarity

Jacques Rancière and Indisciplinarity, an interview conducted with Rancière by Marie-Aude Baronian and Mireille Rosello from the University of Amsterdam and ASCA, translated by Gregory Elliott (via wood s lot; this being just one of the excellent essays on Rancière in Art and Research):

I try to problematise the categories that structure diagnoses of our present and debates about it. Thus, I’ve attempted to rethink democracy by refusing both its official identification with the state forms and lifestyles of rich societies and denunciation of it as a form that masks the realities of domination. Official apologists and Marxist critics basically concur in characterising democracy as a mode of government built on a society defined as a society of consumers. In opposition to this dominant view I’ve reactivated the real scandal of democracy – which is that it reveals the ultimate absence of legitimacy of any government. As the foundation of politics it asserts the equal capacity of anyone and everyone to be either governor or governed. I’ve thus been led to conceive democracy as the deployment of forms of action that activate anyone’s equality with anyone else, and not as a form of state or a kind of society. As regards aesthetics (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: art, philosophy

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Wednesday 18 February 2009

Altermodern

The Nicolas Bourriaud curated Tate Triennial, Altermodern, has been generating plenty of discussion – much of it negative. I’m the first to get grumpy with contemporary art, but to my surprise I enjoyed a lot of the Tate’s exhibition. Much of the criticism, such as Rachel Campbell-Johnston in the Times, Jackie Wullschager in the FT and Waldemar Janusczek in the Sunday Times, has been pitched very much against the artists’ and Bourriaud’s use of theory. In one sense one should be used to this with the mainstream press – they’ve always been scared of intellectuals that go beyond the merely middlebrow. But surely their art critics should be obliged to be at least a little up-to-date with the cutting edge in contemporary thought? Doesn’t that kind of come with the job description?

In this context, the latest issue of Art Monthly (February 09; nothing available to read online, I’m afraid) is to be recommended, with no less than three excellent pieces that amount to a critical engagement with the issues surrounding the Tate’s Altermodern. There’s a wonderful interview with radical artist Francis Alys (not at the Tate, but one who could be indicated as an exemplary practitioner of Bourriaud’s earlier headline concept, Relational Aesthetics); a great piece by Dave Beech on the possibilities for critical art after Postmodernism, where he tackles Bourriaud’s concept of the Altermodern within a historical and theoretical context; and finally Maya and Reuben Fowkes on the relationship between art and theory, where they explore a curator’s relationship to art theory and how it can be used and abused.

Posted by Rowan Wilson
Tags: art, philosophy

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Thursday 15 January 2009

Book Cover Archive

Very good book cover porn (a "database of sortable, searchable, credited book covers") over at the Book Cover Archive -- oh, and they also have a blog (via The Book Oven).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: art, blogosphere, internet

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Friday 05 December 2008

On Hammershøi

Via A Piece of Monologue:

Much like Edward Hopper, Vilhelm Hammershøi often paints solitary figures that appear on the brink of some kind of narrative. There is also a keen attention to light and shade in austere, minimalist spaces that are characteristic of much of Hopper's work. But, for all their similarities, the two painters are of course worlds apart. Edward Hopper is a painter of Americana, of familiar twentieth-century settings and Hollywood everyman archetypes. While Vilhelm Hammershøi often paints faceless solitary women contained within a Victorian domestic space (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: art, blogosphere

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Monday 17 November 2008

On Francis Bacon

Via A Piece of Monologue, I note this link to Linda Nochlin, Milan Kundera and others on Francis Bacon, an article taken from the latest issue of Tate etc magazine.

Kundera says:

For a long time, Francis Bacon and Samuel Beckett made up a couple in my imaginary gallery of modern art. Then I read the interview Bacon did with Michel Archimbaud: “I’ve always been amazed by this pairing of Beckett and me,” Bacon said. “I’ve always felt that Shakespeare expressed much better and more precisely and more powerfully what Beckett and Joyce were trying to say.” And then later: “I wonder if Beckett’s ideas about his art haven’t wound up killing off his creation. There’s something at once too systematic and too intelligent in him, that may be what’s always bothered me.” And again: “In painting, we always leave in too much that is habit, we never eliminate enough, but in Beckett I’ve often had the sense that as a result of seeking to eliminate, nothing was left any more, and that nothingness finally sounded hollow.”

When one artist talks about another one, he is always talking (indirectly, in a roundabout way) of himself. In talking about Beckett, what is Bacon telling us about him­self? That he is refusing to be categorised. That he wants to protect his work against clichés. Next: that he is resisting the dogmatists of modernism who have erected a barrier between tradition and modern art as if, in the history of art, the latter represented an isolated period with its own incomparable values, with its completely autonomous criteria. Whereas Bacon looks to the history of art in its entirety; the twentieth century does not cancel our debts to Shakespeare (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: art

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Monday 15 September 2008

Futurists in the future

Hurrah! Following on from Wyndham Lewis at the National Portrait Gallery, Tate Modern is having a major exhibition of Futurist work next year. (Why is it so good to be an artist with right wing leanings right now?) And not only are Tate Publishing planning a catalogue, they will also be a producing a new edition of Umbro Apollonio’s Futurist Manifestos. The exhibition is in the summer, but the 100th anniversary of the publication of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto is actually in January 09.

All together: "Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggresive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap."

The re-publication is great news but it doesn’t address yet another out of print crime: almost all of FT Marinetti’s work (the Futurist il Duce) is currently unavailable.

Posted by Rowan Wilson
Tags: art

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Friday 05 September 2008

Notebook porn -- beyond the Moleskine

Stationery love: notebooks notebooks notebooks! And yet more at blackcover.net. (Via Scott.)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: art, blogosphere

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Tuesday 19 August 2008

Josipovici on Hammershoi

Just spotted this from last week's TLS but no link I'm afraid. Seeing as I've dissed Bolano, who Mark's a fan of, I should mention that one of his favourite writers, Gabriel Josipovici is writing on the incredible Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershoi, currently being exhibited at the Royal Academy

Posted by Rowan Wilson
Tags: art, gabriel josipovici

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Tuesday 19 August 2008

Don Paterson

A recent discovery thanks to the exhibition of Alison Watt's beautiful paintings of tangled, swooping fabric at the National Gallery. The accompanying catalogue includes a poem by Paterson which led me to his excellent collection of aphorisms A Book of Shadows. Honest yet theatrical, cutting and arrogant, self-deprecating and witty, they are a joy. Delivered with concision and ruthless perception, they are often combined with the delivery of a good stand-up comedian. To be honest I've not registered the aphorism as a literary form before and Paterson self-consciously foregrounds the form within this book. Does anyone know any other good aphorists?

NB: I saw Alison Watt at a recent book launch and recognised her but had no idea where from. Always in these situations my assumption is that I've seen the person on The Bill. Which is odd, as I haven’t seen an episode in over five years.

Posted by Rowan Wilson
Tags: art, authors

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Thursday 22 May 2008

Berger's Ways of Seeing

John Berger's Ways of Seeing is up on YouTube (thanks Rowan).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: art, internet

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Tuesday 20 November 2007

Beckett and van Velde

Mick Finch reviews Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (via This Space):

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of their encounter is the degree of difference in each man's presentation of their world. Van Velde's nihilism weighs heavily upon the reader and this is not alleviated by his repeated claims that laughter is the only true response to the existential conundrum. Beckett, on the other hand, embodied such a response in both his life and his work and laughter is a product of his writing, not a subject.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: art, internet, samuel beckett

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Tuesday 23 January 2007

Proust and Vermeer

A Proust/Vermeer dissertation at the Essential Vermeer site (via Moleskine Modality). Quoting from Anthony Bailey's study, The View of Delft:

Through Vermeer Proust meditated his own end. In May 1921 the exhibition of Dutch painting at the Jeu de Paume was attracting crowds, drawn to see among other things, Vermeer's View of Delft and Girl with a Pearl Earring. According to George Painter's biography of him, Proust had read in the Paris press articles on the Vermeers by Lèon Daudet and Jean-Louis Vaudoyer. At last he decided he had to go and see them. At nine one morning, a time when he is usually just going to sleep, Proust sent a message to Vaudoyer asking him to accompany him to the Jeu de Paume. Leaving the apartment he had a terrible attack if giddiness, and recovered from it and went on down stairs. At the exhibition, Vaudoyer steadied the writer's shaky progress towards the View of Delft. Proust was apparently revived by Vermeer for he managed to go on to the Ingres exhibition and then to lunch at the Ritz before returning home, though according to Painter he was still 'shaken and alarmed' by the attack. He never went out again.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: art, authors

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Thursday 09 November 2006

Melinda Gebbie

T'other week, I published Ismo Santala's fantastic interview with Alan Moore here on RSB. Today, I'm publishing Part II: an interview with Melinda Gebbie. Melinda is Alan's partner and the artist behind Moore's latest book (16-years in the making this) the Lost Girls.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: art, rsb

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Thursday 09 November 2006

TJ Clark interview

There is a good, chunky TJ Clark interview over at Brooklyn Rail (The Painting of Modern Life, Farewell to an Idea and most recently The Sight of Death; and, as part of the Retort team of writers and political activists, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War):

“Yours is not a book in which darkness is winning” ... Well, I guess I agree with that judgment, taking The Sight of Death as a whole. Though obviously the book does look certain kinds of darkness more fully in the face than anything else I have written. It’s not called The Sight of Death for nothing! I think (or I hope) that you and other readers come away from it without a sense of terminal glumness because you’re carried along by the simple, central pleasure of looking that drives things forward—and the astonishment at what one or two pictures have to offer, if you give them half a chance. This pleasure and astonishment are unnegotiable. Nothing the world can do to them will make them go away. And yes, I agree: the world does plenty. Pleasure and astonishment seem to me qualities that the world around us, most of the time, is conspiring to get rid of. Or to travesty—to turn into little marketable motifs. It amounts to the same thing.

Apropos Afflicted Powers, he goes on to say:

Well, you’ll guess that there’s an aspect of this that drives me and the other Retorters mad! I wrote Afflicted Powers with an economic geographer, Michael Watts, a novelist who was once a defense lawyer fighting it out in the California prison system, Joseph Matthews, and an historian of past and present capitalist enclosures, Iain Boal. Not exactly a Situationist (or even palaeo-Situationist) line-up! Obviously our book takes advantage of certain Situationist concepts and hypotheses, and tries to apply them to current politics. And yes, we do think that the power of the image, and the control of appearances, are more and more part of the very structure of statecraft (and resistance to statecraft). We think the established Left suffers—suffers badly—from an inability to think about the new conditions of social control, and social struggle ...

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: art, internet

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Thursday 05 October 2006

Rancière reviewed

I seem to be on a bit of an art kick at the moment. Jacques Ranciere's The Politics of Aesthetics (Continuum) arrived a few months back but, despite being such a slim volume, I've not yet got around to reading it. This review, from ArtNet by Ben Davis (via continental-philosophy.org), makes me think I should bother sooner rather than later:

The 66-year-old French philosopher Jacques Rancière is clearly the new go-to guy for hip art theorists ... Rancière has the undeniable virtue, for the esoterica-obsessed art world at least, of being something of an odd duck. A one-time fellow traveler of Marxist mandarin Louis Althusser, Rancière split with him after the May ’68 worker-student rebellion against the de Gaulle government, feeling that Althusser, a partisan of the Stalinized French Communist Party, left too little space in his theoretical edifice for spontaneous popular revolt. Against this background of disenchantment, Rancière set out to explore the relationships between philosophy and the worker, rethink ideas of history and try to construct a progressive theory of art.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: art, philosophy

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Thursday 05 October 2006

Old Penguin book covers

Widely noted (see e.g. GalleyCat), but worth bringing your attention to: Joe Kral's collection of old Penguin book covers. Bootiful.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: art, internet

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Thursday 05 October 2006

Schama's Power Of Art

Coming this autumn on BBC2 is Simon Schama's Power Of Art:

Historian Simon Schama recounts the remarkable story of eight moments of high drama in the making of eight masterpieces:

Caravaggio's David With The Head Of Goliath; Bernini's Ecstasy Of St Theresa; Rembrandt's Conspiracy Of Claudius Civilis; Jacques-Louis David's Marat; Turner's Slave Ships With Slavers Throwing The Dead And Dying Overboard; Van Gogh's Wheatfield With Crows; Picasso's Guernica; and Mark Rothko's suite of paintings for the Seagram Building restaurant, the Four Seasons in New York.

Yesterday, the book of the telly programme (Power Of Art) arrived here at RSB Towers. It is big and bright and colourful, just as you'd expect. Now, I was pretty fond of Schama's A History of [the kings and queens] of Britain when it was on the telly. Yup, it was very partial; yup, it felt like a schools education programme; but it was punchy, and I found Schama to be a charming presenter. Not so Waldemar Januszczak! Writing in the Sunday Times last weekend about Schama's new book, Januszczak finds the historian "excruciatingly vain" and that "television’s demands for legibility, sexiness and pat conclusions have duly infected Schama’s prose":

Pumped up, partial and untrustworthy, this constant singling out of the best this and the most achieved that adds up to some very lazy art history.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: art, book news

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