New touring exhibition Tainted Love positions itself somewhere between group show and group therapy. Twelve artists have produced work with the theme of obsessive, one-sided love. At least they will now have company.
“We’ve transformed the gallery with these partitions,” says artist and curator Corinna Spencer, speaking on the phone midway through the installation at Transition Gallery.
“So everyone’s got their own dedicated space to make their shrine. It isn’t a white box space. We’ve filled it with plywood. Loads of plywood.”
It is an ambitious project for a first time curator, especially given the touring element. After a stint in London the show moves on to Meter Room (Coventry) and Down Stairs gallery at Brampton House (Herefordshire).
“That is amazing,” says Spencer excitedly. “Because it’s an old mansion which is now a really gorgeous hotel and it’s in amazing grounds, so that will be quite an event”.
Obsessional love can take many forms and the show reflects that. Notes Spencer: “It goes from really simple small paintings by me and Annabel [Dover] to people who have installed work and completely filled the space. That was the range I wanted to go for, from really intense to really delicate.”
Visitors can also expect a range of detachment in treating attachment. “Quite a few people have gone for quite personal stories,” adds Spencer, “but other people have taken themselves out of it, like I have, and talked about someone else’s obsession”.
One of the more remarkable things about the show in east London is that what brought the participants together was not so much geography as virtual proximity in social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
“Three of the artists I didn’t know personally, so I was really, really chuffed when they said yes. I sent them an email saying ‘Will you be in my show?’” laughs Spencer. “They sent back emails saying ‘Yes, of course‘.”
This will not surprise anyone who has come across the affable artist and Twitter user online: “Several people I only met through social networking. I found out about their shows through the network and that’s how I met them.”
Nevertheless, Tainted Love is also reaching out to people in real life. Spencer hopes to engage art-loving teenagers and hopes to work with local schools during the Coventry leg of the show.
“The show in general is quite relevant to the allure of celebrity and that kind of thing is relevant at the moment,” she comments.
“Certainly teenagers will know about becoming an obsessional superfan of something or someone. I think a lot of people have been through that.”
Her own work is in the show and it was a series inspired by 2007 film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford which gave rise to the new show’s theme.
“That particular film I really loved and got really drawn into the relation between Jesse and Robert,” says Spencer. “Because it was kind of a love story and it turned really quite horrible.”
She recaps the tale of youthful idolatry and eventual murder and points out: “I thought that was a great starting point for paintings about that kind of obsession.”
Narrative and worship are two aspects to which Spencer’s intimate, icon-like works on postcards are ideally suited. And she tells me there are distinct advantages to making art on such a modest scale.
“Sometimes lo-fi stuff is more immediate because you can get it out there quicker and sometimes that’s a bit more interesting,” she notes. Remarkable what you can do with some plywood and a Twitter account.
Along with Spencer and Dover, the full list of Tainted Love contributors includes Alice Anderson, Kirsty Buchanan, Georgie Flood, Andrea Hannon, Paul Kindersley, Hayley Lock, Cathy Lomax, Alli Sharma, Mark Scott Wood. and Jessica Voorsanger.
Tainted Love is funded by Arts Council England and can be found at Transition Gallery until May 27. See gallery website for more details.
They say no one likes a sore loser. And I’ve no doubt in person that after the winner was announced in last night’s Turner Prize, George Shaw was gracious in defeat.
But shortly after Martin Boyce stepped up to claim the £20,000 award, it appeared to be paintings by Shaw which commented most directly on the evening.
You don’t even need to see these works to get the picture. Titles included ‘The Age of Bullshit’, ‘Same Old Crap’ and ‘Landscape with Dogshit Bin’.
BALTIC was heaving with metropolitan types. And it all at once seemed, no way could art’s most glittering accolade have gone to Shaw’s vision of dead end suburbia.
But the Coventry painter offered something so different, one gets the feeling this year’s Turner was his to lose. Perhaps ‘humankind cannot’bear very much reality’, as Eliot might have said of the panel.
Shaw’s exhibition was the last you came to after waltzing round the angular sculpture of Boyce, the heavy duty film rigs of Lloyd and the exploded soap factory of Black.
His dozen or so paintings brought you back down to earth here. There were gray skies and graffiti many would recognise as humble origins not a million miles from their own.
Too humble, perhaps, for a prize with international renown. So with those disgruntled titles, Shaw remains an outsider, his vision all the more powerful for not having won.
The 2011 Turner Prize was held at Baltic, Gateshead on Monday 5 December. Thanks to sponsors Nokia for an invite.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge, 1892-93. The Art Institute of Chicago, Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection
By elevating the point of view and catching performer May Milton as she surges past, Toulouse-Lautrec captures the unsteady excitement of a late night at the Moulin Rouge.
And unlike the paparazzi shots which litter today’s gossip pages, looking at this work leads to a feeling of inclusion. Perhaps that’s also thanks to the intoxicating shades of green.
When an art scene becomes synoymous with a nightclub, it generally reminds you just how exclusive both worlds can be. But this painting is like slipping through a post and rope barrier.
The short figure right opposite is the artist himself. Maybe that’s the price of admission, to recognise that the post-impressionist is at the centre of this work, and the centre of the world.
Never mind his achievement in painting. Just consider the disabled artist’s achievement in gaining acceptance with the beautiful people of Paris 1892, despite his ailments and appearance.
But even an artist in the right place at the right time and in the right clothes must remain something of an outsider. Hence the painting’s newly arrived viewpoint.
His depiction at the centre of a world famous club is also self-conscious. Toulouse-Lautrec is watching himself on a night out: a modern malaise he might just have invented.
This work can be seen in the UK until September 18 2011 at the Courtauld Institute, London. See gallery website for more info on their fantastic show about Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril.
Thanks for @FisunGuner for recommending this show. Her brilliant review on the arts desk will tell you more, and my own review of the entire show can be found on Culture24.
From the 20th century onwards, the beauty of much art is it has no need for the eye of a beholder. Conceptual works, in theory, place as much importance on the idea as the finished visual object. And while lots can be said about the dozen pieces below, the kernel of each is a thought of no more than 140 characters.
This is not to assume that simple ideas are the best. But it is possible that in a time of information overload, and web-based attention spans, they are the ones that travel best. If these artworks translate into tweets, it is only a sign of their power.
Benjamin Peret, Insulting a Priest (1926):
“A black and white photo of a surrealist poet harranguing a man of the cloth, as featured in a 1926 manifesto for the liberation of desire”
Robert Rauschenberg, Erased De Kooning Drawing (1953):
“After six weeks of careful erasing a heavily worked drawing by Willem de Kooning becomes a gold-framed piece of near blank paper”
Marcel Broodthaers, Femur of a Belgian Man and Femur of a French Woman (1964-5):
“Two human bones, one from Belgian man, one from a French woman, each painted in the colours of the flags of their respective nations”
Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs (1965):
“A folding wooden chair, a photo of the same (not by the artist) and a blown up definition of the word chair to be displayed as one piece”
Jannis Kounellis, Untitled (1969):
“A white-walled Rome gallery became a temporary stable for 12 quite mucky and fairly noisy live horses”
John Baldessari, The Commissioned Paintings (1969-70):
“Out on a walk, the artist took close up pics of a friend pointing at interesting things, then asked 14 sunday painters to paint the photos”
Adrian Piper, Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City (1970):
“The artist wears blindfold and gloves and pays a visit to a New York bar where the art world generally go to see and be seen”
Jørgen Nash, Decapitated Little Mermaid (1972):
“The head of Copenhagen’s most famous statue is cut off by (it is said) the Second Situationist International. The artist is a member”
Hans Haacke, Manet-PROJEKT 74 (1974):
“A proposal that a Manet painting be displayed next to panels giving details of all the work’s previous owners and their business activities”
Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting (1974):
“A suburban house is cut down the middle and undermined causing it to split and thereby open a rift in the social fabric”
Gavin Turk, Cave, 1991:
“For his degree show, the artist leaves nothing in his studio but a blue plaque with the words: Gavin Turk, Sculptor, worked here 1989-1991”
Sherrie Levine, Fountain (1991):
“Marcel Duchamp’s infamous urinal readymade has been recast in bronze to give it, at last, some respectability”
By now you should be convinced, some of the most important works of modern and contemporary art lose little from a lot of distillation. They might even work as tweets, albeit ones with plenty more to say.
This blog entry is being put together to the sound of The Fall, in an attempt to understand why so many artists claim, or are said, to draw or paint to the sound of Mark E Smith’s timeless band.
Usual conditions for producing these musings are, for the record, a joyless silence. There seems to be a need to isolate thoughts in order to put words down on a page or screen, for me at least.
But apparently, not so for artists, and at least three reasons suggest themselves for choosing The Fall over the many thousands of competing soundtracks: lyrics, rhythm and modus operandi.
Smith says in the Tate film (above) that his lyrics are open ended, but the reverse should be argued. Fall songs are packed with concrete nouns, names and places. Things get nailed down and perhaps visual artists relate to that.
However, the band’s krautrock(abilly) rhythms can easily be understood to help with long periods in the studio. The Fall lay down some of the busiest grooves in rock. One imagines that disciplined, purposeful lines and brushstrokes are the result.
The other apparent reason to paint to The Fall is their anti-muso stance. As Smith says, he tells musicians what to do and constructs the tracks like an engineer. Who wouldn’t want to work with pictorial elements in the way he works with instruments?
So there you have it, the wide appeal to artists of a unique band, as written while listening to the music itself. I’m sure it could have been finished in half the time without this racket, brilliant though it may be.
Your Future, Our Clutter by The Fall is out now on Domino Records.
It must be tempting for an artist to think the painted, drawn or sculpted subject has a life beyond the canvas, page or block. This was maybe the original impulse of art – with cave paintings as an invocation for the success of the tribal hunt.
Most paintings of beauty could be viewed the same way, as attempts to make desires real. Once we strove to possess mammoths; later we strove to possess landscapes and nudes. The artwork could be a talisman for calling ideal situations into being.
At a stretch this can also explain why artists have painted hell, or suffering, or war. Desire may be the only motive power of the mind, in which case we have more sadistic or masochistic desires than we generally know.
An artist can even yearn for a god. In The Creation of The Birds (1957) Remedios Varo summons one up from her own imagination or perhaps some esoteric text.
This painting is not all that different from a classical sculpture of a god of antiquity or a later western representation of the Christian God, or his son, or any other of the saints, etc.
Varo invokes her goddess through paint. Fine brushstrokes focus the mind. Inventive details (prism, violin string, and paint machine) make the desired being plausible. It is a prayer, or perhaps a spell, or is there any difference in terms of art?
The Creation of the Birds is on display in the show Surreal Friends, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, until 12 September.
James White, Burgerbox, 2010. Oil and varnish on birch-ply in Perspex box frame. Image courtesy Max Wigram Gallery.
Like many a great still life, this one by James White is a dazzling piece of representation. But the scene represented is at one remove, painted from a photograph. His use of black and white draws attention this fact, as skilful as the reproduction may be.
The result is a literal sort of photo-realism. It shows things just as they stand in the artist’s studio, yet gives emphasis to how they have been framed by a camera lens. This seems ad hoc. Perhaps it is, although the smoothly applied oil paint and varnish brings gravity to the incidental scene.
White’s depiction of a burgerbox and half bottle of water belongs to a genre which historically likes to celebrate food. But instead of a carefully composed picture of domestic abundance, we are given here takeaway packaging, bottled water and a bag of sugar.
In a way he is expanding the thematic range of painting, getting real about his subject matter along with its mere appearance. But the gesture is also ironic. Considerable time and effort has gone into the rendering of some everyday detritus and the work is displayed in a perspex box which elevates the content even further.
Perhaps that is what painting has always been about, aggrandisement in one way or another. This it can still do better than a camera, and look, it can even immortalise a snapshot if that is what you want it to do.
James White – New Paintings is at Max Wigram Gallery, London, until 17 July 2010.
