Critical Practice paper 2Rosalind Barker Unit 2 part time Critical Practice Paper 2 ‘A Fruitful Incoherence: discovering, disclosing, and disseminating materiality in selected work of Anna Barriball, Michelle Charles, Chohreh Feyzdjou and Alex Chinneck ‘1
Barnett’s statement ‘I am often drawn to work that ‘speaks of its making’; where making is, in a sense, also its subject.’ (Barnett, 1998 p4) has focused my intended research toward materiality and making, incorporating a reflection on the choices of artists contemporaneously showing in London Exhibitions: Anna Barriball, Michelle Charles and Alex Chinneck. In stark contrast I will also review the materiality of the deceased youthful Chorea Feyzdjou(1955-1996) On page five of his introduction to the MA Drawing Course Handbook, Stephen Farthing discusses people’s first encounter with drawing when they are encouraged to make marks with wax crayons. ‘To fully understand this MA Drawing course it is important to step away from the idea that drawing started in the art room. It did not, it started the day you as a child stopped eating the crayons and started preferring the marks they made to their taste’ From this simple start, human artistic ingenuity has proceeded to utilise an infinite combination of possibilities. Picasso said ‘Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up’, my selected artists are highly inventive in their use of commonplace basic materials and processes, replicating familiar everyday objects and offering them to us for reappraisal. Keane expresses how humans are defined, ‘to an extraordinary degree, by their expressions of immaterial ideas through material forms.’ (Keane, 2005) Dooran defines ‘materiality’ as ‘the issues, themes, potentialities, and limitations that arise out of the materials employed in making.’ (Dooran, 2008 p30) These four artists avoid modern technological expression and concentrate on traditional, inexpensive materials that we think we know well, to coax, amplify and enrich what they are doing. The meaning of the work residing in and through its materiality complicates the process of negotiation between the artist, audience and what the material will and won’t do. Knowledge of materials’ ability to communicate meaning is embedded in all four practices. Anna Barriball At college Barriball was intent on trying to subvert the natural behaviour of wax, paper and fabric. (Spira 2011.p88) Farthings’ wax crayon, the weight, bulk, smell; the childlike glee of a first encounter with ‘brass rubbing’ or ‘frottage’ is exemplified through her sophisticated work. Barriball comments ‘that we can all do and remember engaging with and enjoying-colouring in, blowing bubbles, taking rubbings from coins, processes that take the pressure off making things, making ‘art’. (Bradley, 2011 p92) Her slight interventions create transformation of materials by using pencil, paint, tape, bubbles and breath in her drawings, sculpture, photography and video that question what is there, what we really see. This paper will concentrate on her replicated surfaces that become fascinating in their own right. “In her graphite drawings the textured surfaces of wood or brickwork are enveloped and transformed into another skin-like incarnation, darkly shimmering and alive with association.” (Clark, 2007). I had anticipated an encounter with Barriball’s drawn windows or doors, where the artists physical nearness and her repetitive graphite strokes rub the form and surface into being in what Bradley terms ‘materialised action’. (Bradley,2011.p27). There is claustrophobia in the smothered familiar objects of doors and windows squeezed into tight frames and replaced in a gallery to duplicate their domestic origins. Authentic in appearance, they have no function or substance. Bradley discusses that our desire for a way through the doors and windows depicted haunts Barriball’s work (Bradley, 2011 p26)
‘Door’ 2004 Pencil on paper
‘Brick Wall’ 2005 Pencil on paper One of Anna Barriball’s ‘window series’ was incorporated in ‘Silver’ at Frith Street original 17th century Gallery (17th October- 17th December 2014). In view of them being architecturally related pieces I anticipated interrogating a work of scale. I was optimistically expecting the ‘Silver’ to reference graphite.
‘Silver Sidelight with Fluorescent Orange’ 2014 Ink, paper, acrylic paint, acrylic spray paint on board. 61 x 51.5. cms. Installation view image by Rosalind Barker November 2014
Unfortunately, in this tiny sidelight the artist selected to use a uniform spray painted matt surface. The paper has been heavily manipulated, to undergo this transformation, not by graphite, but possibly wet moulding. Warped and coerced into an unfamiliar illusion of solidity ‘de-natured’, (Bradley, 2011 p26) yet the hand of the artist is not visible; her use of spray paint has subverted the impact and mechanised the outcome. The embodiment of this window from ordinary object into artwork now has a more mechanical, industrial aspect. Craddock’s comment is challenged that: ‘Barriball’s relationship to what she uses is almost domestic, very close to life, as she maintains our respect for the found object rather than the arbitrary quality of raw material.’ The material adoption of acrylic spray paint disrupts the connection to domestic spaces. The action ‘spray’ and colour ‘silver’ suggests industrial car paint, simultaneously adopting a link to cars sculptural qualities. Maybe this is the artists aim as Barriball notes that ‘Translation between two and three dimensional is the parallel language of drawing and sculpture, is an on going preoccupation. I am interested in creating a dialogue between the two and investigating and collapsing the space in between.’
Close up image by Rosalind Barker November 2014
‘Silver Sidelight with Fluorescent Orange’ is suspended in a white box, is a window and as in reality is framed. A window allows both distance and proximity to what is viewed but here there is a reversal of function. The dull ‘metallic’ smothered surface has no reflective or illuminative qualities; its silver spray paint absorbs our vision. The enigma is the viewer’s reflection in the glass showing our physical interaction, looking and watching fulfilling the demands of a ‘window’, we interact with the frame not the work. Gombrich in ‘the sense of order’ 1979 theorises that when a frame is appropriate we focus entirely on the artwork, the frame peripheral to our encounter. This representation of ‘Silver Sidelight with Fluorescent Orange’ further muddles the issue of being or creating an original. In Barriball’s practice of replicating surfaces because they are fascinating in their own right she is making the slightest intervention, for example by scarring the paper with graphite to rebirth the object. Barriball speaks of using her very fine pencil point to ‘carve’ the paper (Spira, 2011 p89) She expounds on the confusion of being inside or outside the drawings threshold, in a liminal space. However there is ambiguity in this painted ‘Silver Sidelight with Fluorescent Orange’, the intervention by the artist clumsily gone beyond a mysterious realism captured in her previous slight and successful graphite material transformation. Dooran has noted that materials can unite Artists from different perspectives by providing the common ground and impose a discipline on the results (Dooran, 2004) Barriball’s usual use of basic materiality is a provision of a second skin and we have diverse responses to it. While like a real living skin it seduces with a longing to touch and be intimate, enticing us from behind its protective glass ‘the work also arrests time by suffocating something’, (Richochet 7, 2013) and this trait is also exemplified in my other two female artists Charles and Feyzdjou. Michelle Charles It was happenstance that I encountered the solo show of artist Michelle Charles at the Gallery England &Co (‘Shape of light’ – 5th to 25th November 2014). The viewable gallery room from the street was filled with delicate images of flies on paper directly attached to the wall.
Window Installation view. ‘The Shadow of a Fly’ 2009-10 21 works on paper 11 x5 inches. Image by Rosalind Barker November 2014 On the opposite wall a row of books of uniform colours, were finely balanced suspended between two pins. Each book is presented upside down, minimalist glass forms of milk embellished on the covers. I was attracted in by the artist’s use of medium and potentially imaginative use of the objects.
The works on books Charles is presenting at England & Co. are part of a series entitled ‘Milk on Economics Books’ and feature an object which is part of the repertoire she has come to build over the years: the drinking glass, captured with a weightless, yet meticulous realism of mark.
Close Up ‘Milk on Economic Books’ image by Rosalind Barker, November 2014 Berger associates the kind of weightlessness that attends the act of drawing and how the support inhabits a space between the page and object; ‘It is there that the discovery can take place’. The marks emerge as a fullness or presence above the flat surface. (Berger, 2007 p5) He could almost be describing Charles’ technique used to produce the illusion of refracted light, reflections and shadows in a glass. Like Barriball, Charles is responding to found objects. Edwards reflects ‘the books Charles works with are all old economics texts, dead theories that once prophesied a land of milk and honey…. surrogate images of human presence…. The closeness and contact leads the viewer to a chain of connections between the self and decay.’ (Edwards 2001)Care and nourishment for body and mind is implied by drinking the milk and reading the book but the minimal nature of the media marks imply fleetingness.
Michelle Charles ‘Every Fly has a Soul’ 2007 Water based paint on paper Series II 11 x 5 inches Across the gallery, I was drawn to the simplicity and complexity in both concept and material in her ink drawings of a momentary glimpse of a houseflies shadow. There is awareness of the artist’s hand, which simultaneously made the mark and disturbed the object. There is pleasure in reading this conversation between representation and the visual sensation of fleeting colour and mark. The drawings are in series but could stand-alone, united they are the shadows of a potential ‘plague’ of flies; the grotesque, individualized made poetic and beautiful. In Charles selection of material Dore makes a connection ‘Her fragile ink-marks seem to correspond to the short lines of William Blake’s poem: Little fly “Thy summer’s play my thoughtless hand has brushed away” (Ashton 2008) Furthermore Charles title selection is both poetic and emotive, ‘Every fly has a soul’. Initially Charles appears to be considering inanimate things but they are only momentary glimpses of objects in motion, a fly resting, milk observed between delivery and consumption. Their elusive qualities are captured with deft minimal marks, which explain both their solidity and transience. As the viewer we imagine our body swatting the fly and drinking the milk, while perusing the book and drifting into reverie. Guy Brett in the conclusion of his essay about Charles’ Painting what is not there’ suggests that the Artist rekindles the active and reciprocal relationship between paint and the ‘thing’ painted “ an extension, really, of the sense of touch – whose quality has been lost in the avalanche of photographic and digital imagery.” All my selected artists have the hand of their creator very much in evidence and this dictated my desire to write about artists whose work I could ‘see for myself’. Chohreh Feyzdjou It is my concern with the avalanche of media images in the arts that informed my attempts to locate and physically view my next artist Chohreh Feyzdjou. Unfortunately my primary research intentions were thwarted; secondary to books my initial sensory encounter with the ‘Product of Chohreh Feyzdjou’ was not in a gallery but via video engagement on YouTube. The video shows a whole house stuffed from cellar to attic, installed as a commemoration in 1989 by Galerie Patricia Dorfmann, (Echghi, 1998 p134). Sgraffito, scratching through a black wax covering to reveal the base layer of exuberant wax primary colour as a child is remembered, when encountering the black massed objects of Chohreh Feyzdjou. An exiled Iranian Jewish artist (1955-1996) recycled her oeuvre of paintings and objects, transforming them in the final years of her life into blackened relics shown as installations.
‘Product of Chohreh Feyzdjou’ Installation views
Dorfmann, describes an introverted wealthy exiled artist who had no desire to exhibit or sell her work; this resulted in the amassing of a proliferation of diverse creativity. While recycling her old work she was using black gum to paste drawings, studies in perspective and paintings onto paper, she had the idea of covering every element of her work in black pigment to create coherence. (Jantjes, 1998 p122) Rolling it so it was partially hidden, she proceeded to materially transform and re-package her entire life as an archive. Echghi observes that in destroying all her old work she demonstrates a will to lose everything but also resuscitates it by the creation of something new; ‘nothing is lost’. (Jantjes, 1998 p 134)
The YouTube video is immersive; the sheer volume of smothered indistinguishable artefacts is overwhelming, feathers, bone, wax, hair, coconut fibre, thread and waste cotton cloth all loose their individuality or meaning. Using just her hands and avoiding all technology and tools she began to create her ‘products’ (Jantjes, 1998 p131) In an interview Feyzdjou recounts when I started making these wax objects and people kept asking me what they were, I couldn’t explain. So I said “products of Chohreh Feyzdjou; …it didn’t mean anything to them. So these objects, which are already bizarre, became even more bizarre”(Barnett/Jantjes, 1998 page 126) All recycled work was then given the ‘Product of Chohreh Feyzdjou’ tombstone like label. The abundant ‘product’ labels in the video prove unreadable, tainted by the materials of their contents.
This archive is not purely visual; strangely via video we engage our other senses, auditory, olfactory and tactile, questioning what this would smell like, what this materiality would feel like, wet, dry, sticky, hard or malleable. In ‘The Architectural Uncanny’ Vidler discusses how the ‘the effect was one of the disturbing unfamiliarity of the evidently familiar’ he is describing the external normal appearance of ‘Poe’s The House of Usher’ while once inside the very stones of the house ‘reeked’ of the ‘smell of the grave.’ Is this the smell we are deprived of or imagine and why would we be drawn to touch? The rough materiality of Feyzdjou creative process is relished by the artist, speaking in an interview with Barnett in 1995 ”…. the tactile qualities are the only thing that determine the materials I use, and black allows me to concentrate on this, in a way that I can’t with colour. When I use wax, for example, I like the fact that it is warm, malleable and soft-like an animal…. It’s like a dance, a dialogue with materials.’ Tactility, making and materials are central to its effect, but like Barriball leave the viewer frustrated by their inability to respond to their tactile invitations. The only method of confirmation, touch, is denied to the gallery and video viewer. In viewing the work surprisingly the colour scale ranges through hues of brown not the anticipated concentrations of black. Leili Echghi in conversation with Jantjes explains the black coating let one see-through.’ It was a black that was almost grey or brown, which worked without contradicting the light. It was black as referred to by Beckett. He talked about black as’ light black’ or’ obscure grey’ it is a light black that reminds one of the neutral colour of being. Of the void, that is the source of all existence. It is a promising black, like the negative in photography, which promises colours’ (Echghi, 1998 page 132) Cadenet later in 2008 confirmed Echghi prophecy of colour, as we shall address later in this paper.
Feyzdjou installations have an anthropological look, messy, bitty remnants and a murkiness that simultaneously disturbs, attracts and repels. Is this a strange form of conservation and classification of her past, her half hidden, half revealed memories prepared in readiness for her imminent, expected death. Is it linked to her Iranian roots, i.e. an Eastern concern for hiding, enclosing, wrapping especially for females. It could also be viewed as a successful attempt to translate in its unedited entirety, even the mediocre, into an installation ‘masterpiece’ in a hedonistic bid for museum status and immortality via this objectification. This premise is further supported as Feyzdjou simultaneously created hundreds of coded, serialised archival documents regarding content, labelling and her preferred arrangement; that was ripe for study and resolution.
The physicality of the material has become the main theme of her work, uniting her history, concepts, creativity, and emotional artistic production. These objects were intended to become ‘a still life’ (Schwenger, 2006 p 100) forever fixed and unchangeable by the artist’s death but like discovered tombs they were exhumed. In 2002, the National Centre for Visual Arts acquired the entire deceased Feyzdjou oeuvre and workshop for the French state. Art historian Anne Cadenet was employed to excavate and use archaeological techniques to identify, restore and conduct an inventory of the thousands of objects on behalf of the custodians. As a result we can now both see and answer what the work was before it was altered. ‘ I turned archaeologist ‘ says art historian Anne Cadenet. Fabric sculptures secreted in black trash bags, were restored and revealed. Cadenet confirmed, “It notes that in fact, the creation is self powered from previous designs’ (Dorfmann, 2007)
Corresponding with Feyzdjou time at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (1975-80) rag sculptures worked in cloth, thread and wire are both soft and harsh they summon both childhood dolls and visceral human suffering. They conjure material and emotional association with Louise Bourgeois soft sculptures.
Six scenes of the circus drawings. 1976. After Feyzdjou death Barnett tells of accompanying Chohreh to her installation in Le Monde d’ L’Art. Located openly within the installation, Feyzdjou revealed a small wooden box, inside a drawer she revealed hundreds of drawings mounted on postcard size card, beautifully coloured in oil pastels, they were quirky, fantastical, humorous, erotic figures and strange animals. Barnett linked them to exotic Persian miniatures or the drawings of Marc Chagall. ‘Layers and layers of seeing and not seeing, exposed and unadulterated postcard size drawings hidden in drawers’ (Jantjes, 1998. p125). Entitled ‘Le tiroir des dessins’ They were concealed just like the work inside the rolls of canvas but here the unknowing visitor ‘only had to ask’ to have the intangible work and memories of these highly personalised drawings revealed.
Sketchbook of thirteen self-portraits 1998
Echghi discusses how she looked like her work, a strange familiarity, ‘wrapped in a kind of mystery that distanced her from us ‘(Jantjes/Echghi, 1998 p 135) and one has to question if this revealing of her work by Cadenet was always intended, like a playful game of hide and seek. We are back playing with our childhood wax crayons but this time with the sgraffito, we have the exotic colour fully scratched and revealed beneath the black wax skin. Our wax crayons and links to the stirrings of childhood creativity observed in the practices of Barriball, Charles and Feyzdjou reveal a preoccupation with the physical act of making while capturing or smothering something elusive before it disappears. Finally we will examine a contemporary male artist and his wax crayons influence. Alex Chinneck I encountered Alex Chinneck ‘A Pound of Flesh for 50p’ on my way to The Jerwood Drawing Prize exhibition. A young British male artist, his oeuvre is concerned with reality bending architecture.
‘A pound of flesh for 50p.’ Image by Rosalind Barker “With surrealism and spectacle the experience delivers an illusion of architectural scale that transforms each day,” Alex Chinneck. Chinneck collaborated with chemists; wax manufacturers, builders and engineers to produce eight thousand non identical wax bricks, cast in paraffin wax with added terracotta sand that mimicked the colour, texture and irregularity of brick walls. A house was constructed on the site of the old candle-making factory in Southwark Street replicating and celebrating both its scale and appearance. Celebrating the rich heritage of Bankside, Merge Festival for 2014 was themed on art and science. ‘A pound of flesh for 50p’ engaged with the science of melting points.
Initially I assumed that although November, the elements and weak sun were impacting on the wax house causing it to buckle and ‘melt’ over the thirty-day project. However research revealed the artworks appearance, duration and changing shape, controlled by extensive structural engineering, was entirely orchestrated by hand held heating equipment in a classic process of sculpting material to shape form. This process was necessary to control the descent of the roof, but allowed the wax it’s mesmerising ability to warp and create unpredictable fantasies of dripping stalactites during it’s thirty day demise.
We have moved from Barriball’s graphite bricks, via Charles and Feyzdjou, returning to Chinneck’s bricks of wax. All artists have a primary concern in their selection of material, usually the mundane and overlooked. Everything looks familiar but remains in doubt, touch as a method of confirmation is denied. We know there is illusion and trickery, they makes us dither between wanting to touch not just the surface but to relish the creative making experiences of the artist, our fingerprints over theirs. While there is a danger, a dirtying of our own hand, ultimately we desire to put on our school aprons and play, joining the four artists as they attempt to successfully materialise the intangible.
1 ‘A Fruitful Incoherence’ ‘The title borrowed is Susan Hillier’s writing, and proposes an alternative reading of accepting the apparent irrationality of the visual experience as a way to enlightenment; that art offers an adventure into the unknown, or an engagement with the unfamiliar, in order to disclose, discover and disseminate information about the here and now.’ (Jantjes, 1998 p8)
BIBOGRAPHY
Quoted texts plus other reading that shaped or contributed to the thinking behind the final paper.
The structural challenges behind the artists ‘melting house ‘installation. http://www.nce.co.uk/features/the-structural-challenges-behind-artists-melting-house-installation/8671908.article POLLOCK D. Anna Barriball The List Issue 693 1 February 2012 SEARLE Adrian Being here now Review of Documenta 11 The Guardian 23.07.2002. WHITING David ‘The Uncanny Room: Pitshanger Manor’ Crafts Magazine No 179 57-8 N/D 2002 http://www.craftscouncil.org.uk
WEB
AZADEH A. ‘Chohreh Feyzdjou encountering a dead artist.’ ‘Interhuman’: blog writing her artist residency at Fabrica. 03.03.2014 BARNES C. Materiality, effort, and ‘stuff’: In defense of things. Artist website paper 2009. http://www.craigbarnes.co.uk/work/materiality-effort-and-‘stuff’-in-defence-of-things/ BRETT G. Material and Consciousness Grippo’s Vision 2007 http://wwwtandfonlinecom.arts.idm.oclc.org/doi/full/10.1080/09528820701433562 CHINNECK Alex http://www.alexchinneck.com CIOB Magazine of the Charted Institute of Building. 25.09.2014 ‘ Laing O’Rourke builds ‘melting’ house for arts festival http://www.construction-manager.co.uk/news/laing-orourke-builds-disappearing-house-arts-festi/ DOCCUMENTA 11 Chohreh Feyzdjou Documenta 11 Kassel Germany 2002 universes in universe http://universes-in-universe.de/car/documenta/11/frid/e-feyzdjou.htm DORFMANN Patricia. www.patriciadorfmann.com. The Curb.2007. DUPREEZ A. (Im)Materiality: On the matter of art 2008 Academia.edu.html FULLEYLOVE. Rebecca ‘The Graduates 2014’ http://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/alex-chinneck-4 HONG J.Material, MaterialityArt History 2003 MERGE FESTIVAL http://mergefestival.co.uk/merge-events-2014/2014/9/19/alex-chinneck-a-pound-of-flesh-for-50p-the-melting-building MILLS C. Materiality as the Basis for the Aesthetic Experience In Contemporary ArtBy Christina Mills MA Art History 2009 CHARLES Michelle http://www.michellecharlesart.com
VIDEO GALERIE PATRICIA DORFMANN. Chohreh Feyzdjou Video Exposition Novembre – Décembre 1992. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K97ei-MK_zo ILLUMINATE productions for Merge Festival ‘Building a wax house’. Behind the scenes. Angie Dixon. https://vimeo.com/111283510 Video ILLUMINATE productions for Merge Festival ‘A Pound of flesh for 50p’ melting process over 30 days
VISITS
England & Co showing Michelle Charles ‘Shape of Light’ Solo Show (6-25th November 2014) 90-92 Great Portland Street, Fitzrovia, London W1W7NT ‘What Remains II’ Susan Hefuna a Group Exhibition at Rose Issa Projects (11th November – 19th December 2014). 82 Great Portland Street, Fitzrovia, London W1W 7NW Anna Barriball ‘Silver’ at the original Frith Street Gallery, 60 Frith Street, Soho Square.25th anniversary visual retrospective of gallery Artists. (17th October – 17th December 2014). Alex Chinneck ‘A Pound of flesh for 50p’ 40Southwark Street London SE1 9HP
E-mail exchange CPAC Bordeaux France DGAC-MUSEE-CAPC Envoyé: lundi 24 novembre 2014 15:58 À: -DGAC-MUSEE-CAPC Objet: Chohreh Feyzdjou Frith Street Gallery info@frithstreetgallery.com |
