Quite simply, reviews of four interesting books...
Cornelia
Parker by Cornelia Parker and Iwona
Blazwick
Thames &
Hudson, 2014, £24.95
Paperback, 256pp, 360 Illustrations, 315 in colour
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| Cornelia Parker, Transitional Object II, 1996 - Net, hooks, thread and bags of lead |
Cornelia Parker
has developed something of a niche as a conceptual artist enjoyed by a wide
public. Three questions might asked of this substantial survey of her 40 year
career to date. Does it present her work successfully? Does it engage with it
critically? And, when looked at as a whole, what conclusion does it lead to on
her overall importance?
The first
question is easy to answer. This is a superbly designed book. Following
introductions by Yoko Ono and Bruce Ferguson, there are 360 excellent
illustrations, most of which come with extensive captions by Parker
herself. It’s like being at
an artist’s slide talk, and Parker is highly engaging as she explains her work
with a mixture of autobiographical reminiscence and unpretentious accounts of
her aims. We hear about her Anglo-German background; her early involvement
with experimental theatre; how she found her artistic voice in the communal
atmosphere of a Leytonstone squat in the 1980s; the appealingly self-sufficient
and non-commercial attitude which meant she had no gallery representation until
1997. Moreover, we get to see and hear about ephemeral or rarely-seen work such
a schoolhouse completely drawn-over in chalk; the artist throwing ‘words which
define gravity’ off the cliffs of Dover; and the mournful black tents which
followed the death of her parents. Parker’s
commentaries are interspersed with five essays by Whitechapel director Iwona
Blazwick which pull together common themes in an equally accessible way. This
varies the pace, and makes for a good balance.
How strong is
the critical engagement? Blazwick’s categorisations are useful: she discusses
the found object; the performative aspect in Parker’s work - most visible in
her use of Tilda Swinton as a sleeping sculpture (‘The Maybe’, 1995); how
Parker abstracts from the normal use of objects, such as by zooming in on
microscopic details or drawing a wedding ring out into wire; her use of
scientific knowledge; and the role of power structures. Blazwick points out
that Parker is notably good at persuading people and institutions – Army,
Church and State – to collaborate in surprising
ways, and summarises her as ‘fundamentally a sculptor who marshals
epistemology and polemics with an overarching and exceptional aesthetic’. That
ability to combine the practical, phenomenological and philosophical does
characterise her best work, but overall – as may be the aim - Blazwick point outs patterns rather than
evaluating merits.
'Room for Margins, 1998: from ‘Venetian Scene’ circa 1840-5, JMW Turner, N05482,1998
That leads to
the obvious third question: how good is the work? Much of it plays on the
modern tradition of the ‘found object’, which Parker takes in two particular
and original directions. First, she trades on the aura of their pre-history:
that’s not just any feather, but one which was present in Freud’s consulting
couch; that photograph was taken with Rudolf Hess’s camera; that fly died on a
Donald Judd sculpture. Second, the object becomes just one of many unstable
points in its own history, which may range from the formative (as in her
wittily menacing ‘Embryo Guns’) to the ghostly afterlife of an object
steamrollered, thrown from heights, shot or burned. One particularly elegant
transformative move was to show the canvas liners which backed some Turner
paintings as found abstracts, then return them to the Tate’s collection to be
reclassified as her own work.
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Pornographic Drawing (1996) Ferric oxide on paper |
All of this
comes across optimally in this book. That said, those tropes can turn
conceptualism into a fairly light game, close at times to autograph hunting.
The key, I think, is whether the nature of the investigation chimes with the
form taken by the work, and how successfully it taps into broader concerns.
Neither the grids made from wire drawn out of bullets, for example, nor ‘Stolen
Thunder’(1997-98), a series of rubbings resulting from polishing the tarnish
from famous people’s artefacts, amount to much beyond their origins; whereas
the beautiful ‘Pornographic Drawings’ (1996-2005), which used ink made from
videotapes chopped up by Customs & Excise, form Rorschach blots which pick
up on the psychology involved in understanding the tastes of others, and also
prove, as Parker says, ‘particularly explicit, betraying their figurative
origins’. It’s the same with the more substantial works: where resonant origins
and an appropriate and distinctive aesthetic combine to tap into what may be
our collective unconscious, the results are plangently memorable. The blown-up shed with its shadow play out of
terrorism (‘Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View’,1991); the squashing and
squeezing the breathe from old instruments (e.g. ‘Perpetual Canon’, 1994); and
the suspensions of charred churches with racially contrasting congregations and
causes of burning – ‘Mass (Colder Darker Matter)’, 1997 and ‘Anti-Mass’, 2005 –
all meet that demanding set of conditions. They also utilise what might be seen
as Parker’s signature moves: luring the viewer into seduction by violence, and
suspending objects tremulously on hardly-visible wires.
Parker has,
then, made a wide range of always-diverting works and a number of reverberant
classics. It’s more than most achieve, and well worth this fine record… and
worthy, too, of the extensive retrospective which makes Parker the biggest
artistic presence in the jamboree of shows which the newly reopened Whitworth
Gallery has been able to fit into its extended space in Manchester.
PRIVATE - Mona Kuhn
Text by David Campany, 112 pages, 74 color plates
29.7 x 31 cm, Clothbound hardcover with dust-jacket
Published by Steidl, 2014, £38
Available from the Flowers Gallery, which represents Mona Kuhn in the UK
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| Private (cover) |
Mona Kuhn was
born in São Paulo of German descent, and lives in Los Angeles. She’s known for
relaxed, intimate nudes and meditatively spacious landscapes infused which vary
width of apertures, depth of field and degree of focus
to suggest the fleeting nature of perception. This, her 6th photo book, is a tour de force which covers those bases
and more. The title is actually in mirror writing, being derived from a
photograph of the back of a glass door. It suggests, then, that we are in a
place of privileged access. What is that place? Not some celebrity’s
world uncovered, but the stilled gracefulness and blurred implications of
Kuhn’s distinctive aesthetic, handsomely presented in a 31 x 30cm
format. It’s the result of two years’ travel in the California and Arizonia desert, described by Kuhn as ‘a personal journey, weaving together the desert’s
beauty with its brutal sense of mortality’. Another implication of that reverse
word title is that Kuhn is inside the human condition, looking out – to see the
desert as a metaphor. Or as David Campany has it in his accompanying text:
‘the desert’s seductive threat is always there of course. It menaces from the
edges.… The sun is coming to devour everything and take the mystery with it’.
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| Daisy |
That text aside, the book consists
of the 74 images, the pointers of their individual titles, and the flow and
implied narrative of the sequence. On a picture by picture basis, Kuhn sets off
little transformations, detonated by her titles: trees read as smoke, their
shadows as ‘Antler’; a rock is seen to ‘Howl’; a flag seems sadly alone, an
interior with wallpaper stands for the ocean floor. People drift through with
resonant names: Jet, Blu, Gigi and Daisy. That last is the title given to the
image of a woman who may be so named, but is covered by a lace-like pattern of
flower shadows which may also be the eponymous reference. Light, shadows, and
refraction are recurrent, and they combine with the desert trope of the mirage to
feed into intricate fragmentation of figures. When light is absent, it seems willed
and unnatural. ‘Most homes I have been inside had their curtains
closed’, says Kuhn, ‘people get tired of the heat, you start feeling the
weight of light, it becomes heavy… Some of the desert people I met prefer to
live in darkness’. The landscape and its people are dominant, but are also
still lives and several beautiful photographs which act as abstractions (e.g.
‘Mesa’, ‘Patina’ and ‘Outside Winslow’).
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| Composition 1 |
The book’s most obvious movement is through light
and colour. It opens with ‘Stain’ which evokes a Chinese landscape
drawing, but actually shows wallpaper sullied by
water, and so somewhat ironically tees up the move to a desert
landscape. It also initiates an undercurrent of menace, picked up directly in, for example, ‘Black Widow’ (in which the
spider is tattooed on a hand shown up close), spider webs, a zoom in on a scarred
torso, and a gecko ‘Contained’ within an architectural framing. Consistent
use of the golden brown of a well-tanned skin links bodies with landscapes,
interiors and geometries. Half-way through, dusk falls and we move into dun
browns, the sun absent save for its effects (‘Sun Rot’ shows the inside of a
window covered against the sun, which has atrophied the protective layer). We
pass into morning, to find Blu coming round from sleep and Sibyl – be that name
or role – sitting poised, grey-haired, naked, and tattooed with foliage.
Indeed, the only verdant vegetation in the book is on her, or on wallpaper - until
the last image: we end with bouquets of roses, the book’s brightest colour
note, and yet pastel and muted for all that.
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| Mirage |
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A People on the Cover - Glenn Ligon
Ridinghouse 2015 £15.95
Softback 24 × 17 cm
144 pp, Design by Joseph Logan
Glenn Ligon has had a significant British presence of late: major solo shows at
Thomas Dane and the Camden Arts Centre in 2014, and now a wide ranging curation
of the artist who matter to him, at Nottingham contemporary ('Encounters and Collisions',
3 April - 14 June. This unusual book shine the light on some of the background
of an artist who identifies himself strongly as black and gay.
Essentially it presents a view of how black Americans were seen and saw
themselves through the medium of the book cover - which is to say photographs
of covers - during Ligon's own formative period of 1960-78. Such covers are,
logically enough, well-suited to the book sized presentation, and the result is
handsome. Ligon arranges his choices thematically, starting with portrait
covers showing how, as he puts it 'with the rise of the civil rights black
power movements, beauty was seen as an arena in which the battle for equality could be fought’. We
see, for example, LeRoi Jones, Gill Scott-Heron, Toni Morrison and James
Baldwin – a particular touchstone for Ligon. The book goes on to consider
synecdochal images - shots of parts of the body showing how in Stuart Hall's
words, it was used "as if it was, and it often was, only cultural capital
we had'. Then come images of assertion and revolution incorporating Malcom X,
Chester Himes and Dick Gregory; and graphic cover styles which Ligon links to
his own powerful use of words in his art. The trenchant red on black lettering
on the cover of The Fire Next Time is what first attracted him to Baldwin.
Finally,Ligon looks at how writers set themselves the task of imagining the
narratives of African American history in new ways.
The result is an evocative visual history, but also a very personal one. Ligon
opens with a memoir of boyhood explaining the role played by books in forming
is self-identity, and points to the particular importance of the covers to him,
as he was typically ordering by post from catalogues absence of well-stocked
bookshops in his Harlem neighbourhood. A People on the Cover is a quick read:
one could say it is not too substantial, but it is refreshingly original and beautifully pitched.
_______________________________
Purtroppo Ti Amo: Federico Pacini
Editrice Quinlan,
2013, €32
There are three ways of looking at
Italian photographer Federico Pacini’s impressively produced Purtroppo
Ti Amo (Unfortunately I Love You): as a collection of individual
photographs brought together to advantage, as 58 diptychs of two photographs in
(almost exclusively) landscape format, or as one work made up of 116 photographs.
The first view certainly yields some strong and unconventional images. One
could say, though, that they seem to borrow the tropes of various others:
William Eggleston, Stephen Shore and Luigi Ghirri come to
mind.
It’s the dual view which brings
Pacini into his element. Each double page spread makes connections between the
two images, whether that be through paired subjects (two photographs with bus
stops, chairs, windows…), a visual match (often of shapes; or where clothes on
one side pick up the colour combination of a car opposite; or the
raised sodium of a streetlight among trees and metal structures reflects the
raised orange of a tarpaulin with trees and very different metal
structures) or a conceptual one (the sign ‘Blades’ paired with the graffiti
‘Hate’; a medieval drapery set against a modern tarpaulin, Jesus implicitly compared
with coca cola).
That might make it a book of paired
photos, but themes also connect between the diptychs. Pacini was born (in 1977)
and lives in Sienna and most of what we’re shown is the Sienna the
tourists don’t see (or at least don’t take in and remember): vending machines,
waiting rooms, patches of wasteland, parked cars, suburbia, glimpses behind the
scenes of small businesses. When we do see the expected cathedral, Piazza del Campo and the Palio horse race which takes place
there, it’s
only indirectly (reflected in a shop window, or as a model) or second hand
(seen in a poster or photograph shown in an interior) and is often out of
season and distorted. As, not surprisingly, religious references also course
through the portrait of this decidedly Catholic town, it’s possible to think
that the air of a place not quite at its peak contains a suggestion that that side
of life is a hangover past its time. That’s why, perhaps, it’s unfortunate that
what Pacini loves is in decline.
