Visited Exhibitions
Visited in October to December 2013 Ana Mendieta,Adrian Villar Rojas, Mira Schendel, Paul Klee, Daniel Silver, Jerwood Drawing Prize 2113, Dayanita Singh, Kara Walker, Bill Woodrow, Masterpieces of Chinese Painting. 2014 Exhibition visits are discussed in ‘context’, on pages with in the research folio. RA Royal Academy of Arts Bill Woodrow Visited 17th December 2013 Bill Woodrow retrospective of his Sculpture from his earliest sculpture created a year after he left Central St Martins up to work created for this exhibition. Arranged Chronologically I admit to moving through his early pieces quite rapidly with just a passing nod to their historical importance and a twinge of recognition. The Cut-out series appealed due to their creation from everyday objects, a new life and identity removed from their domestic habitat. They also resonate with my interest in three dimensional drawing and the subsequent creation of shadows. I enjoyed the deceptively simple forms created with dexterity and humour.
His most recent concerns with world events reveal his continuing experiments with media.
‘Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700-1900’ Victoria and Albert Museum Visited 29th November 2013 The exhibition is fairly dark and muted and the works glow bathed in delicate lighting. They are well spaced out and presented in vast glass cases that allow for large numbers of viewers to spend time gazing. The scroll paintings of real and imagined landscapes are intriging and we are able to appreciate their full entirety as the cases fill the entire length of the galleries.
‘Prosperous Suzhou’ 1759 Meticulous brushwork The V&A curators show us the individualism of Chinese painting over one thousand years, propelled by named artists of great repute whose personal style was of great influence. In the 12th Century the following was explored and is mirrored in Western MA drawing students 9 Centuries later: ‘Integrity‘ being a key buzz word for 1014 : ‘The literati aimed for perfection in disciplines of painting, calligraphy, poetry. Over time the theme developed into a philosophy about the integrity of the artist in an imperfect world’ One of the great joys and privileges of visiting this beautiful exhibition with my peer group of MA Drawing students was the amazing insight we were offered by our lovely Chinese students, they provided a wealth of anecdotes, appreciation and knowledge of their heritage. Replicated in the 1600-1900 Room where I noted ‘ Individualists combined learning and inspiration from other sources’ Ghost Amusement 1797 Luo Pin ‘The Human Body is unlike metal and stone. It decays like grass and wood; what is a human being?’ Ren Yi Portrait of Gao Yongzhi as a calligraphy begged 1887 The introduction of the profile was influenced by Western art and defied the Chinese convention for only full face individual portraiture . I made five pages of research notes during my visit to the Museum: 12th Century Song Dynasty ‘Baimiao – outline with no other colour or wash led to drawing being seen as painting’
Works on Paper Collaboration for a-n collaborative bursary 2013-2014 See separate blog entry for full collaboration detail. This exhibition subliminally influenced my second collaborative ‘Works on Paper’ collaboration in January 2014 February 13th 2014 My thoughts have revolved around qualities of paper that will respond independently when cut and therefore alter any preconceived outcomes. I am also interested in amalgamating my current MA investigations into traces, shadows and absence. Red media is the only confirmed aspect of the experiments. I selected to work on a roll of baking parchment because of its texture, that it is more cloudy than tracing paper creating a vague obscurity. It has a definite engineered commitment to retain its curl and it comes on a very long 4 metre roll. I cut the width into three vaguely equal portions. Two intensive days later I have ‘Culture Trace’ Red biro on baking parchment a continuous 4 metre paper work which has self selected itself to strongly resemble a Chinese parchment roll. The piece is figurative and is a collection of mixed size images partly traced and drawn from two months Sunday Times Culture magazines. The only limitations were that the size of figures fit on my 15cm wide roll and that they were full length figures. This actually limited my selection of imagery and I tried not to compose the parchment but work through each magazine in turn. They cross all cultural and interest boundaries, cartoons, book jackets and paintings feature amidst celebrities and historical imagery .
This is a second drawing and in this one the 4 metre roll has only drawing on the pieces that show, the hidden, enclosed part is devoid of any marks, does this matter? Does the secretiveness of the work offered in this format enhance it’s appeal for the viewer? Is the presentation escalated by the addition of cotton binding? Is it’s importance magnified by the addition of red wax impressed with my finger print? Pain and sympathy in the work of Kara Walker, Lotte Reiniger and William Kentridge Kara Walker ‘We at Camden Arts Centre are Exceedingly pproud to present an exhibition of Capable Artworks by the Notable Hand of the Celebrated American, Kara Elizabeth Walker, Negress’ Visited 31st October 2013
I first saw Kara Walkers work exhibited at Zoo part of the Frieze Art Fair in 2006 but my memory was of fairy tale narratives depicted as silhouettes? At Camden Arts the initial impact and simplicity of the silhouettes re enforced the childlike quality of perceived innocence until the viewer focuses on the subject matter. The violence depicted with cartoon humour escalates as you pass through the drawing rooms to be of nauseating proportion in the final video. I have worked as an Accident and Emergency sister in central London, dealing with the aftermath of bomb, knife, gun and mechanical trauma but the extreme nature of the violence in this ‘simple’ silhouette video disturbed me. I think the problem for me is the potential to incite racial hatred in the portrayal of this particular ‘story’. Walker is quite open that the images convey a mix of fact and her own fiction. In all the portrayed sexual violence towards the male slave not ‘just’ castration but the severing of the male penis, truth or fiction? “Walker is less an artist of history, whether racial or artistic history, than a historian of fantasy.” —Kevin Young ‘The historical setting for much of Kara Walker’s work is the American pre—Civil War antebellum South. While this is the backdrop for many of her scenes, Walker does not represent a necessarily truthful depiction of history. Fact, fiction, and fantasy are intertwined; exaggerated truths and fictionalized events parade as history lessons that viewers must unpack, sort out, and ultimately decide which elements are true. Through this scrambling of “truth,” The artist is also commenting on the way that official history, particularly that of African Americans, is just as constructed as her stories’. Further research led me to this video about her ‘uneasy relationship’ with her own imagination.In the two minutes she comments on how her paper cut outs are based on 19th Century characters,negroes and pickaninny amalgamated with characters from her own imagination. The work is meant to be ‘ironic’ in its real and exaggerated violence. The interesting thing the work is about, is ‘how easy it is to commit atrocities’. ‘If a girl like me can think this stuff….then what…I would rather make the work than keep it inside than get …..strange” On her ‘Uneasy relationship with her imagination’ I was obviously focused on the mechanism of production of the silhouettes and the hang plus a curiosity about titles as I walked round the exhibition:
Kara Walker refreshed memories of some of my earliest childhood books and I wondered having found my old copy from the 1950’s if it was still available in our politically correct world? Research showed it has gone full circle and has now been reprinted in its original version. The technique and colours of the drawings, my excitement and dread, the exotic location all flooded back but it was the memory of odour of the book and my childhood home that overwhelmed all my other sensations. I then remembered films seen in my childhood and finding them on you tube became convinced that Kara Walker is the right age to also have watched the numerous silhouette films of Lotte Reiniger and that this is the source of my conviction that Walkers films were sourced in fairy tales. Lotte Reiniger 1899-1981 Charlotte ‘Lotte’) Reinger was a German silhouette animator and film director. ‘She was born in Berlin to cultured parents, and from an early age showed an exceptional and, it seems, self-taught ability to cut free-handed paper silhouettes, which she used in her own home-made shadow-theatre. The ancient art of shadow-plays, as perfected above all in China and Indonesia, she adapted it superbly for the cinema. From the first, Reiniger was attracted to timeless fairy-tale stories for her animations. Aschenputtel (Cinderella) and Dornröschen (The Sleeping Beauty) (both 1922) were among her earliest subjects. The avant-garde artist and filmmaker Hans Richter, a lifelong friend, wrote of her that “she belonged to the avant-garde as far as independent production and courage were concerned,” but that the spirit of her work harked back to an earlier, more innocent age. Jean Renoir, another close friend and passionate admirer of her work, described her films as a “visual expression of Mozart’s music”. Indeed Mozart, and other operatic themes, often provided her with subjects, as in such films as Carmen (Germany, 1933), Papageno(Germany, 1935), Helen La Belle (1957, drawing on Offenbach) and A Night in a Harem (1958, drawing on Mozart)’. Philip Kemp Cinderella 1922 watch? Hansel and Gretel 1955
Hansel and Gretel watch? All these thoughts of the racial divide and the shadows it casts over peoples lives made me return to look at the drawings of William Kentridge. ‘William Kentridge discusses how artists draw upon tragedy as subject matter for their work and how drawing itself can be a compassionate act’.
‘Having witnessed first-hand one of the twentieth centurys most contentious struggles—the dissolution of apartheid—William Kentridge brings the ambiguity and subtlety of personal experience to public subjects most often framed in narrowly defined terms. Using film, drawing, sculpture, animation, and performance, he transmutes sobering political events into powerful poetic allegories. Aware of myriad ways in which we construct the world by looking, Kentridge often uses optical illusions to extend his drawings-in-time into three dimensions.’ Pain and Sympathy Watch? In a now-signature technique, Kentridge photographs his charcoal drawings and paper collages over time, recording scenes as they evolve. Working without a script or storyboard, he plots out each animated film, preserving every addition and erasure.
Dayanita Singh ‘Go Away Closer’ Hayward Gallery Visited 31st October 2013 ‘The play with the real and the fictional is what I am interested in’ ‘This is what my work really is, it’s the dream; its that time between waking and sleeping, when things collide’ I am sure I have written very similar sentiments about my work in statements for exhibitions. I have worked with Museums on site-specific projects: ‘Museums give prestige to objects not venerated objectified or valued in their own century and culture. The Museum curator gives the everyday and the discarded, presence, position, Museums can contain the anomalous, the odd and the monstrous. I am fascinated by what counts as worth preserving or archiving, for my Museum project I selected cut hair remnants as my subject matter and medium that I then preserved, archived and reinvented in ‘A Hairy Story….’. Ros Barker 2010 Museum Bhavan the collection of museums by Dayanita Singh really appealed to me as a new way of presenting art. The large handmade structures each holding up to 100 photographic images, have many computations for display. I wanted to play with the whole room of them and felt envious of the artist’s ability to edit, archive, sequence and order the display. The museums can form small chambers with chairs and tables for reflection or can be amalgamated into a labyrinth. It reminded me of playing with my large dolls house when I was a child, the power to order all rooms and dictate their function, no rules, endless speculation, experimentation and fulfilment.
The concept of Museum as display and storage, the objects in storage hidden away waiting their turn to be shown is beautifully addressed in Museum Bhavan but I would like to think about the potential of this aspect to develop. Names from Museum Bhavan ‘Museum of little ladies’ ‘Museum of Vitrines’ (Wall boxes) ‘Museum of Chance’ ‘Museum of Embraces’ ‘Museum of Men-recent’ Museum of Photogram’ There was a ‘file’ museum and ‘Sent a letter’ box ended concertina on a high shelf. Was this the subliminal influence on ‘Straight’ my first ‘Works on paper collaboration ‘ drawing of December 2013?
Klee ‘Making Visible ’ Tate Modern Visited 23rd October 2013 “A line comes into being so to speak, it goes for a walk, aimlessly, for the sake of the walk” I selected a good time to visit, the audience not too dense, the works are tiny and domestic in size quite unexpected in a male artist. ‘Blockbusterisation’ for Klee has not taken effect yet. I assumed the hang was to allow access to anticipated crowds and the works felt sparse, stretched over too many rooms. After the exhibition I read that the curator Mathew Gale aware of the tiny scale being short on visual impact decided to hang them far apart to encourage the viewer to approach each one with heightened attention. There is an introductory panel in each room but otherwise there is sparse labelling or interpretation.
Gale also elected to hang the exhibition in chronological order as they were painted or drawn giving the viewer an insight into development of Klee’s ideas and imagery. We saw small adjustments rather than sweeping changes. I hadn’t seen a Klee since his exhibition at The Hayward so a few surprises were in store. The tiny size and flatter, muddier colours than the familiar illuminated and luminous images in books with the exception of ‘Fish magic’ 1925 were displayed.
The Twittering Machine I found appealing the whimsical, sometimes quite grotesque or satirical nature of the imagery. This show replicated an on going issue I focus on, the obsession with online entry for the vast majority of exhibitions. The displacement between the printed/online image and the art works reality. Drawings being particularly difficult to capture with a true representative image. This ongoing discussion was initiated when I co-curated an open submission exhibition and I was rather bewildered by the physical appearance of our ‘selections.’ Size, colour and texture wildly differed from our expectation In his final year while very sick with a wasting disease he made 1,253 works, his final output was emotionally numbing .
Mira Schendel (1919-88) Tate Modern Visited 25th October 2013 Wow, a Brazilian artist previously unknown to me. Painter, poet, sculptor of European, Italian Jewish extraction. Her work is ultra delicate, pensive and quirky, all qualities of immense interest to me in my practice. In 1964 she started drawing and monotyping on rice paper creating a body of 2,000 drawings. The exhibition blossomed for me once this change in practice occurred in Room 6. Why? The presentation.‘Graphic Objects’ created for the Brazilian pavilion of the 1968 Venice Biennale. Is recreated in Room 7. The rice paper drawings became monotypes exploring her use and exploration of often multiple languages. Schendel addresses concepts of belief, being and nothingness and the “void” The text have neither front or reverse so can become “anti-text’. Schendel said “that while pursuing transparency as an issue I arrived at the object” Delicate white on white text marks with multiple media clamped between clear acrylic sheets floating in space. Their floating appearance fragile but energetic. I have experimented with clamping delicate drawings between glass to emulate floating hangings but suffered slippage of the cards. I wonder if acrylic has a better grip or the ‘float’ is archived by the multiple tiny screws around the edges
Selected reminder notes.
Graphic Object 1967 Variants 1977
Still Waves of Probability (Old testament 1 Kings 19) 1969 Nylon thread Installation at Tate modern exemplifies her mix of mystical vision, and the combination of rigour yet simplicity in her work. The shadows created by the installations in Room 6, I questioned why the single papers were reflecting as narrow graph like variable density shadows, it didn’t appear to be connected to the lighting or the work. I can only surmise it is connected to the paper/acrylic ‘sandwich’ which has created some sort of prism? Then in ‘Little Trains’ Room 8 she states “What really counted was the light/shade cast on the wall, as a continuation of some of my drawings- which were always made on those transparent, ultra fine papers”  Little Train 1965 Japanese paper and nylon
So my reaction to this work is sparked by her interest in shadows as extensions to drawing, one of the most important issues achieved in my life cycle metal drawings for ‘The waiting Room’2008
Jerwood Drawing Prize 2013 Jerwood Space 7th October 2013 76 Drawings by 76 artists Talk and Interview with Michael Craig Martin and Charlotte Mullins, the judges of the Jerwood Drawing Prize. I had visited the exhibition the week before and bought and read the catalogue. I found the talk expressed no evolution of thought from the personal individual introductions in the catalogue. The talk was very tightly managed and abruptly concluded. However it was interesting to follow the process of reducing 3,ooo drawings to a long list of 190 to a final selection of 76. They were both united on the fact that the selected drawings ‘had a voice’…. they communicated in some way. They couldn’t necessarily say why- they just loved/ wanted it. They were not necessarily technically proficient but they expressed passion, compassion, and honesty. Mullins expressed a view that her selection showed what a drawing could or should be but the judges had had a consensus and there were few ‘wild cards’ Drawings had to feel contemporary. The word ‘integrity’ was generously used. ‘As a viewer does this work alter me, my mood, my expectation?” They edited out both obsessive, repetitive drawing that didn’t connect with the world and ‘paintings’. They pushed the boundaries of what drawing could be by the inclusion of performance videos. Craig Martin spoke about the difficulties of being an artist and about maintaining honesty and integrity in the work. I was surprised to find out that the judges don’t curate the hang, having selected the work they don’t see it again until the private view. on my first visit I had questioned decisions made about the claustrophobic grouping of the smaller works that I felt diminished their individual presence. Lindsay Connors
 Important, Act Now, 2013 Scalpel drawing on found envelope, 32 x 23cm
I felt that the videos this year were very innovative.
 Neville Gable, Experiments in Black and White V11, 2013 Video
Marie von Heyl, Interior (Utopia) 2012 Video 11th October 2013 I found the clarity of Tanya’s review of the Jerwood talk on our second visit more stimulating and likely to provoke discussion. She also had valuable insights into the process selection as a previous judge. It answered one of my previous concerns about the importance of the collaborative process between image and title. The judges do not know the name of the work or the artist during the initial cull of 3,000 drawings to a 190. Tanya asked us to consider the variety of grounds, how is it made? How is it shown, consider the methodology of display. How is the material integral to the work? How and why should they cross? What makes a good drawing? Consider that the function of art, its primary object is to speak. Consider you are the first viewer to each drawing, how well is it communicating? Is there viewer seduction? Could it “Sing better?”
Svetlana Fialova, Apocalypse (My Boyfriend Doesn’t Care), 2013 The winner (above) was discussed. It was felt confident. There was no hierarchy in the drawing. The paper was covered, all corners having equal intensity in the narrative and mark making. The quotes and references were all about ‘now’. The selection of drawing media coloured felt pens and biro was ‘now’.
‘Lanugo’ Graphite In considering what is drawing? I discussed ‘Chelsea Girl’ with Tanya. Found on a Chelsea street, silver paper displayed on black ink, mounted within an oval mount mimicking a typical ‘studio’ portrait. We did not dispute the artists found silver paper being acknowledged as drawing but Tanya had read it as mapping, cartography/ geography. So had the artist communicated her intended ‘female portrait’ in the ‘drawing’?
‘Chelsea Girl’by Sharon Leahy-Clark from The Jerwood catalogue I leave the last word to the artist : I found this fragment (of unknown material) on the pavement near the Thames in Chelsea and immediately saw it as a portrait sketch. Drawing is integral to my work. I am fascinated by the immediacy of mark making and, for me this can mean either actively using materials to draw or, understanding a puff of cloud, a stain, fold, or tear as a drawing. There is no boundary to drawing — it is ultimate freedom. The only intervention I have made in this work (bar placing it on ink on paper) is my belief that it is a portrait.
Daniel Silver ‘DIG’ Site specific for Artangel. Visited 9th October 2013 Having visited ‘Today we Reboot the planet’ earlier in the day with it’s similar themes of archeology I had huge expectations. The approach to the site was intriguing but I did not connect with ‘DIG’ it underwhelmed me and I was saddened that this was regarded as his most ambitious presentation to date.
The leaflet made over inflated grandiose claims for the work, unmatched by what we were presented with. ‘Considered together over two floors, DIG lays out a trajectory of our relationship to the sculptured figure through history, from the puzzle of the incomplete fragment to the enigma of the unearthed deity.’ I found the replication of crude plaster cast objects weakened by their multiples of identical shapes frustrating. In ‘DIG’ I question the identikit nature of the offerings as if some factory conveyor belt of crude objects had been discovered or was that the point?
I came away questioning the cost of the project and if ‘PLACED’ would have been a more appropriate title to ‘DIG’ .I felt like I had just visited the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom film set.
The film was on a few days later , iPhone still captured with TV on pause.
December 2013 I visited the Bill Woodrow retrospective and read this in the publicity: “In his ‘Fossil’ series, from 1979, Woodrow presented consumer items, such as telephones, as fossilised remains, embedding them in plaster to look as if they had been unearthed in an archaeological dig. These works were a comment on the disposal of objects and the waste of materials that this represented, as well as the conflict between the natural and technological worlds, and the extent to which one exploits the other.”  Bill Woodrow ‘Standing Stones’ 1979
Same mechanism of display resulting from a very different concept.
‘Today we reboot the planet’ Adrian Villar Rojas at Serpentine Sackler Gallery. Visited 9th October 2013 The inaugural exhibition of Adrian Villar Rojas is an installation created during his two-month residency. Responding to the two hundred year complexities of the buildings historical uses from its origins as a gun powder store culminating in its new extension by Zaha Hadid to create the gallery. (Ref Zaha Hadid on Imagine July 2013)
‘Today we reboot the planet’ is a full assault on all the senses. The concept and magnitude of the elephant caught between the technology of his creation and the tradition of clay as media is spectacular. The smell, the sound as you move over the hand made floor, the tactile nature of everything. The whole building has been transformed into an immersive sensory sculptural work. In the created ‘museum’ there is an abundance of oddities, objects crammed onto the shelves. So many intriguing amalgamations of natural and found objects in both minute and enormous clay and metal sculptural forms. Interspersed with living sprouting potatoes. I really respond to the artists choices in his display of this element of the installation .It has a museum quality that resonates with my practice but it makes you question the type on museum, is it historical, scientific, a fictionally created civilization or the remnants of a film set? I came out blown away with the abundance of this mans conception and skillful delivery of his amazing vision.
I later watched an interview with the artist where he discussed the concepts that ‘Human culture is a ready-made’. This installation is the end of the human era, what was left behind at the end of the world. He fossilized human culture, Kurt Corbain as a fossilizing memory. Clay is never stable, all the cracks and disintegration are times effect on the piece and it started two weeks after the installation was completed. February 2014 Featured artist in Parkett No 93 Mi familia muerta (my dead family), an enormous life size whale stranded in a forest, for the 2nd Biennial of the End of the World in Ushuaia, Argentina. Unfired clay, cement, burlap, wood.
In 2011 he showed at the Venice Biennale in the Argentinian Pavilion “Now I will be with my son, the murderer of your heritage’
Ana Mendietta Hayward Gallery Visited 31st October 2013
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