It ought, I believe, to be better known that The World of Interiors has excellent visual arts coverage, with a mixture of book reviews, exhibition previews and well-informed gallery recommendations. So I'd thought I'd gather up my own contributions here (all are exhibition previews, © The World of Interiors / Condé Nast Publications)
Gustav Metzger
at Ben Uri Museum (16 June - 17 Sept 2021) and Hauser & Wirth, Somerset (26 June - 12 Sept 2021)
The posthumous fame of Gustav Metzger (1926-2017) rests primarily on his idea of
‘Auto-destructive art’ and the way in which he himself proved a seemingly
indestructible and radical force well into his eighties: in 2015, for example,
his project Remember Nature exhorted
arts practitioners to participate in a Day of Action against climate change. Two new shows provide a chance to flesh out those headlines
by exploring a wider range of Metzger’s activist art.
 |
Painting on Cardboard, 1958 |
The Ben Uri Gallery concentrates on the contribution of
immigrant artists to British visual culture, and Metzger - born in Nuremberg to Polish-Jewish parents - was just 12
when he arrived in Britain on the Kindertransport. Most of his
family were killed in the Holocaust. After the war, he studied art – notably with David Bomberg, whom he
always acknowledged as his main teacher, despite a sudden split in 1953. ‘Becoming Gustav Metzger’ will feature early paintings in which
rebelliousness is visible in the speed with which he attacks not canvas but
cardboard, steel or plastic; and with knife rather than brush.
In the studio, 1960's
Metzger returned to drawing and painting this century, as the Somerset
exhibition shows, but first it takes the story through to the confrontational
step of spraying acid onto sheets of nylon,
making rapidly changing shapes in the dissolving material. The acid paintings
met the definition of ‘Auto-destructive art’ that Metzger published in 1962:
the creative process must happen in public, and should continue
independently once the artist has set it off; and the work must return to its
original state of nothingness within at most 20 years. Metzger’s aggressive
public action was of a piece with his activism in protest movements against
capitalism, consumerism and nuclear armament: he meant it to represent how society was heading towards its own doom.
Auto-destruction proved influential. Pete
Townsend of The Who attended a 1962 talk by Metzger before he started to smash
his guitars in concert; and Metzger organised Destruction in Art symposia in
London and New York – at which John Latham set fire to towers of books to
suggest that the cultural base on which knowledge rests was burnt out.
Liquid Crystal Environment, 1965
Metzger emphasised that Auto-destruction went with Auto-creation, as
when he called the found arrangements of rubbish in a clear bin bag ‘our folk
art’; or pointed out that an acid-burned sheet opened up a view of its
location. The immersive Liquid Crystal
Environment (1965) arrives at
a permanent auto-genesis by shining light through liquid crystals as they are
heated and cooled, projecting mutating colour patterns into the viewers’ space.
According to Metzger ‘We are desperately in need of
warmth as a fundamental element in human interactions. With Liquid Crystal it
is physically based on warmth, it is based on the transformation of one level
of warmth to another. This dialectic is central to the experience.’ Dialectic
is also key to Metzger’s art as a whole: he opposes and yet synthesises the
fundamental forces of creation and destruction as a means of raging against the
overriding threat to both - extinction.
Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty
Barbican Art Gallery, London - 17 May – 22 Aug 2021
Pourlèche Fiston, 1963
Jean Dubuffet’s adult life was unusually split: two decades during which he subjugated the attraction of art to a career in the family wine business in Le Havre, Algiers and Paris; then four decades of intense artistic activity from 1942 - not just painting and sculpting but theorising prolifically on his approach, provoking the establishment, and promoting and collecting the outsider Art Brut which inspired him. The Barbican shows 150 works split across 15 different strands, linked by how Dubuffet found strangeness in the real – through various techniques he characterised as ‘putting more and more obstacles in the way of conjuring up objects, with a view to making their appearance all the more dynamic when it happens’.
Limbour
as a Crustacean, 1946
For example, the earthy, naively-styled portraits from 1945-47 come from recollecting people’s characters more than their appearances (‘partly true to life, with a likeness cooked and preserved in the memory of Mr Jean Dubuffet, painter’). They use a mixture of paint, sand, gravel, coal dust, asphalt, frayed string and shards of mirror to make a thick paste, giving body to the subjects while hinting how their flesh will be reduced in time to mere matter.
The
animation of matter becomes more literal in the mid-fifties when Dubuffet,
anticipating Hirst by forty years,
incorporates butterfly wings into collages - some abstract or
landscape-oriented, some forming jaunty characters. He explained that he wanted
his different elements to ‘meld into everything around them like a sort of
continuous, universal soup with an intense flavour of life.’ 
Texturology
XXXVII (grave), 1958
For the ‘Texturology’ paintings (1957-59) Dubuffet, an admirer of Jackson Pollock, shook a loaded paintbrush over the canvas to cover it in delicate speckles which pivot between the micro and macro: they could be pieces of ground teeming with action beneath the surface, or galaxies and nebulae.
Spinning Round,
1961
In 1961 Dubuffet announced his intention to ‘start all over again’ by capturing life in the capital. The ‘Paris Circus’ works are colourful, frenetic, skewed visions of the developing consumer society – often hinting at its contradictions but also revelling in its joie de vivre. ‘I want’, he said, ‘my shops and buildings to join in a crazy dance.’
Domestic Site (Swordfish Rifle) with Head of Inca and Small Armchair on the Right, 1966
The long-running ‘Hourloupe’ series (1962-74) arose from colourful striped doodles Dubuffet made while on the phone, which he then applied to everything so that a graphic surface swallowed the world and blurred the distinctions between objects and people. He saw this philosophically, as introducing a doubt about the true materiality of the everyday: is it just a mental construct?
Jean Dubuffet with a work by Emile Ratier at the Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne, February 1976
Dubuffet,
then, achieved something akin to Surrealism’s way of estranging the quotidian –
but he had no need to plug into the subconscious. It was enough, Dubuffet
explained, to ‘let the artist’s mind, his moods and impressions be offered raw,
with their smells still vivid, just as you eat a herring without cooking it,
but right after pulling it from the sea, when it’s still dripping.’
Felix Gonzales-Torres Project, May 2020
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| “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1990 |
By the time Felix Gonzales-Torres (1957-96) arrived in New York
from Cuba in 1979, the clean, repetitive geometric language of 60’s minimalism
had been inflected by, for example, the tremulous presence of the hand in Agnes
Martin’s paintings and the organic variability of Eva Hesse’s serial
forms. Gonzalez-Torres's multi-media
works from his last decade added an emotional pull to the aesthetic. Take one of his ‘candy spills’ – endlessly
renewable individually-wrapped sweets piled into gallery corners. “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1990 derives its
poignancy from starting with an ‘ideal weight’ equivalent to that of Gonzales-Torres’s
partner,
Ross Laycock, before he fell ill with AIDS. It has three typical characteristics.
First, it draws attention to the gallery space, and allows
that to influence the form it takes. The Felix Gonzales-Torres Foundation’s new
site will emphasise that aspect by documenting numerous examples of how the
same piece has been installed differently. Gonzales-Torres invited such
adaptations – most explicitly, perhaps, with the beaded curtains and strings of
bulbs which he left curators to deploy as they wished – and now, in a special
global initiative organised by the Andrea Rosen and David Zwirner galleries, a
thousand people have installed “Untitled” (Fortune Cookie Corner), 1990, in locations
of their choosing.
 |
| “Untitled” (Fortune Cookie Corner), 1990 in Karen Ziegler Smith's home, 2020 |
Second, “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) lures the
viewer into participation – through the pleasurable and illicitly-tinged act of
eating the art.
‘Without the public’, said the artist, ‘these works are nothing. I need the
public to complete the work. I ask the public to help me, to take
responsibility, to become part of my work, to join in’.
 |
| “Untitled" (Perfect Lovers), 1987-1990 |
Third, Gonzales-Torres foregrounds the politics of gay rights.
The consumption enacts the loss of weight associated with AIDS – and hints
at how those in power ignored AIDS, hoping the problem would disappear like the
sweets… were the supply not ongoing. In 1992, the year after Laycock died, Gonzales-Torres used billboards to display a
photograph of two indented pillows on an unmade bed, implying the absence of
lovers and subtly but pointedly bringing gay sex into the public realm. The pairing of identical
battery-operated clocks – in “Untitled" (Perfect Lovers), 1987-1990
– similarly finds a romantic and elegiac place for queer subjectivity: the
clocks are synchronised in the knowledge that they will in time diverge.
 |
| “Untitled” (Double Portrait), 1991 |
Formally, the clocks are echoed in “Untitled”
(Double Portrait), 1991, one of the ‘stack’ works in which hundreds
of sheets of renewable paper make up a minimalist block which viewers can
remove: each sheet features an image of two
circles printed in lustrous gold. Other ‘anti-monuments’, as Gonzales-Torres
termed the mutable stacks, carry charged messages – such as the details
of 464 people killed by firearms during just one week in "Untitled"
(Death by Gun), 1990. Gonzales-Torres explained that he liked using newspaper
snippets ‘because you read it twice and you see these ideological constructions
unravel right in front of your eyes’. Look twice at Gonzales-Torres’s
beautifully condensed and affecting works, and what you’ll see unravel is how
white heterosexual norms represent just one way to construct reality.
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| "Untitled" (Death by Gun), 1990 |
Roy Oxlade at Alison Jacques, London
15 November 2019 - 11 January 2020
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| Yellow Profile, 1992 |
Many female artists are now being re-evaluated, often after male
partners overshadowed them: take this year’s London exhibitions of Dorothea
Tanning, Lee Krasner and Dora Maar. Something more complicated has occurred
with the reputations of Roy Oxlade (1929-2014) and his wife of 57 years, Rose
Wylie. Go back to 1970’s and Rose was little known – indeed, she had stopped
painting while she concentrated on bringing up their three children – but Roy
was an influential writer and teacher whose paintings were highly regarded.
By the time he died, Roy had slipped from view somewhat – whereas Rose had leaped
to prominence with shows at the Jerwood in Hastings, Tate Britain and the Serpentine
Gallery. Roy’s obituaries spoke of the danger that he would be remembered
primarily for his role in the partnership endearingly documented by the
award-winning film ‘Rose & Roy’ (2015).
Just recently, though, Oxlade has also had a widely admired solo
exhibition at what is now Hastings Contemporary. And perhaps we shouldn’t be
surprised that – having shared a studio in Sittingbourne, Kent for decades – the
couple’s virtues are similar: a wittily primitive way of painting which
crackles with spontaneity. Rose is the story teller, typically through memory,
film and the news. Roy applies his painterly language to the here and now:
what’s in the house and studio – including Rose herself.
 |
| Black Saucepan and Dish |
Oxlade’s second show in quick succession with Alison Jacques presents
paintings and works on paper from 1978 to 2006. Roy had a serious career: he studied
– like his contemporaries Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach – with David Bomberg,
and was himself an outstanding teacher and prolific writer. His paintings,
however, emerge playfully out of looking around the studio without
preconceptions and – in Rose’s description – ‘pushing the paint and then
finding the focus’. Oxlade said his paintings ‘start as a rectangle in a jumble
of art history I relate to’ into which he ‘puts some other stuff, some
characters, some actors - tables, pots, colours, easels, lamps, scribbles,
figures and faces to interact with each other’.
That often leads to cheerfully absurd irruptions. The ostensible subject
of ‘Black Saucepan and Dish’ is subsidiary to colour shapes which could be
food-related but may just be paint. Most of ‘Yellow Profile’ pushes similarly
towards abstraction behind the eponymous, but exceptionally summary, face of
Rose. In other works the figure of Roy’s
muse – sometimes upside-down, sometimes naked – dominates the objects named by
the title.
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| Potato, Rose c. 1982 |
Oxlade’s true subject is the process of representation, how that can
reveal the world anew as it simultaneously generates abstract pleasure and
balances of form. That method of discovery is rooted in drawing, which Oxlade
believed should be ‘unknown to the artist until it emerges, comes out as a
controlled wildness’. That’s consistent with Oxlade’s critical rejection of
most modern art – Matisse was one exception, praised germanely for his
‘synthesis of innocence with awareness’.
Oxlade, then, reaches an unusually well-informed brand of
unsophistication through the actions of drawing and painting. Let the
rediscovery of husbands proceed!
Song Dong: Same Bed
Different Dreams
Pace, London: 1 Oct – 5 Nov
Conceptual art can seem esoteric.
Will it consist of instructions rather than visible works, or foreground theoretical
constructs? It may – but Duchamp is the starting point, and his work tends to
be firmly rooted in the everyday: a
bicycle wheel, a bottle rack, jokes about sex.
Song Dong, the most euphoniously named of the Chinese artists who came
to world attention in the 1990’s, is a conceptual artist of that type. He doesn’t
separate art from life, he merges them. Song - who still lives in the hutongs
of Beijing where he was born in 1966 - has, for example, shown 10,000 items
hoarded by his mother. ‘Waste Not’ laid out a whole life reduced to poverty by
the Cultural Revolution.
Song’s show of old and new work
at Pace will turn on such mundanities as food, water and shelter. His 1999
self-portrait photographs have the frankly quotidian title ‘Eating Drinking
Shitting Pissing Sleeping’. A new version of ‘Eating the City’ is an urban
panorama made of sweets and biscuits, which visitors will be invited to consume
over the first week. ‘The smell and taste is really delicious’, says Song, ‘but
it’s bad for you… It is an illusion. It is not really food. People use desire
to build up the city, but they also use desire to destroy the city’.
The real life destruction
involved in development will be the focus of the ‘Usefulness of Uselessness -
Varied Window’ series, which gives fresh life to windows rendered useless by
their buildings' demolition. Song arranges them with coloured mirror inserts to
make striking abstractions. The wistfulness will be amplified in
‘Different Dreams on the Same Bed No. 3’ (2018), in which household objects are
presented behind salvaged window panels. We are invited to look into the pasts
of those displaced by a vision of the future.
The flux of existence is evoked
by the ‘Mandala’ series (2015), in which intricate patterns are made from
pulses, seeds and spices. Song refers to
the Tibetan Buddhist ritual of constructing such circular images from tiny
pieces of crushed stone, only to sweep them up once complete. That’s in tune
with his own practice: ‘Writing diary with water’ relates to his having written
in water daily on the same stone since 1995. The stone may – Song says – be
‘thicker by the day’ with his thoughts, but there’s nothing to see.
Song’s conceptual play makes us
aware of how we are constrained. We might be reminded of the feminist slogan
‘the personal is political’ – which holds that individual experiences can be
traced to one’s location within a system of power relationships. We can see
Song Dong’s varied and prolific practice as showing, not how male power plays
systematically into women’s lives, but how state power runs through the day to
day in the context of China’s fraught political history and sudden
modernisation. Taken that way, ‘Waste Not’ critiques Mao; the water diary is a
cautious medium, as it cannot fall into the wrong hands; and ‘Eating the City’
and the window constructions call attention to what is lost in the current
leaps forward.
Turner Contemporary, Margate: 26 Jan - 6 May 2019
There are plenty of ways to make bad art, but two of the more reliable ones are to strive visibly for a poetic effect; and to seek too directly to address a topical issue. The Scottish artist Katie Paterson graduated from the Slade in 2007 with a piece which transcended those traps: for Vatnajökull (the sound of) you could call a mobile phone to be connected to the live sound of a rapidly melting glacier. The means were economical, the poetry revealed rather than insisted on, the message a natural function of experiencing the work.
Over the subsequent decade, Paterson has pulled off such combinations repeatedly. Indeed, she seems so full of them she has taken to making Sterling Silver wall texts: ‘an ice rink of frozen water from every glacier’, ‘a beach made with sand from hour-glasses’ or ‘a place that exists only in moonlight’ (from Ideas, ongoing). Perhaps these works will only ever be imagined, but if actualised they will be unmistakably Katie’s.
The logistics of Paterson’s realised projects are scarcely less challenging than the Ideas. No wonder she calls on experts in science and technology to collaborate. For Campo del Cielo, Field of the Sky, 2012–14, a meteorite was cast, melted, re-cast into a new form, and then returned to space by the European Space Agency.
History of Darkness (2010-ongoing) is a slide archive of thousands of images of darkness from different times and places: the void meets infinity and the iconicity of Malevich’s black square alongside the comic twist that the pictures all look the same.
There’s a touch of humour, too, in 100 Billion Suns, 2011: the 3,126 known gamma-ray bursts in the Universe (which can burn 100 billion times brighter than our sun) are reduced to 3,216 pieces of appropriately coloured paper to be fired from a confetti cannon.
Candle (from Earth into a Black Hole), 2015, is a scented white candle that burns down over 12 hours to create a journey through space via scent: old stars smell of petrol, for example, and interstellar clouds of mothballs.
The Turner Contemporary retrospective will provide the best chance yet to assess what difference it makes not just to read about Paterson’s investigations of our place in the universe, but to experience them physically. And it comes with two extras: Katie will choose some 20 of Turner’s watercolours to intersperse with her work – expect some of the late near-abstractions which share her taste for the ethereal; and Margate will be one of 25 coastal locations for a project which picks up on the connection of sand with time.
For First There is a Mountain, participants will sculpt beaches into thousands of sandcastles using buckets in the shape of mountain ranges, evoking geological erosion and showing, in Paterson’s words ‘the extraordinary existing in ordinary things, everywhere’. That might be the underlying theme of her monumental yet understated practice, along with how we are part – an insignificant part in cosmic terms - of something bigger, and ignore that at our peril.
Lee
Bul: Crashing
HAYWARD
GALLERY Southbank Centre, Belvedere Rd, London SE1
30 May-19 Aug 2018
Sternbau No. 32, 2011
South
Korean artist Lee Bul has shown little in the UK, despite a 30-year
international career during which, as the Hayward’s retrospective
will reveal, her work has developed with impressive logic. Bul, born in 1962,
had a traumatic childhood. Her parents, intellectual dissidents in the Korean
dictatorship, were constantly harassed and forced to move house. This led Bul
to feel a disconnection from society, which fed into her confrontational early
performances in which she used her body as a battlefield where political and
social issues – including expectations of women – collided. She hung
upside-down, bound and naked, to talk about the experience of abortion; and
made unannounced street appearances dressed in freakish fabric outfits that
appeared to be sprouting body organs (Cravings,
1989).
Sorry for suffering–You think I’m a puppy on a picnic?
12-day performance, 1990
There are plenty of reasons for artists to be interested in architecture, even if they didn’t train that way – like, for example, Francis Alÿs, Pedro Reyes and Tomás Saraceno. . There’s the character of building materials, for a start; think of Carl Andre’s emphasis on the qualities of brick. Then there are the aesthetic crossovers between two parallel streams of modernist practice – the frequent starting point of Ellsworth Kelly’s intense simplifications. Other artists might delve into the psychological effects of the built environment (Bruce Nauman’s charged appropriation of the corridor, for example) or its echoes in history or society (Cyprien Gaillard’s explorations of the consequences of architectural failure). And, as we all grew up in architecture, there are links to personal histories, too (a motorway bridge is the designated portal to childhood memories in the work of the 2008 Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey). The Polish artist Monika Sosnowska engages with all five of these strands.
In other whole-room installations, Sosnowska’s distortions can appear unconstrained by gravity, as if to mock the aspirations of soaring towers. Recently, she has mixed these large-scale interventions with groups of smaller works. That throws more emphasis on the construction materials used – concrete, steel beams, reinforcing rods – and how they are warped and misplaced (by, incidentally, fabricators who normally make the same objects ‘straight’). Sosnowska subverts the functional logic and underlying geometric aesthetics of market vendor’s stands, which seem to have been kicked in for Untitled, 2012, or Stairway, 2010, which bristles insectoidally while leading nowhere. Untitled, 2015, works the other way round: a plant seems to be overtaken by built elements, inverting how nature colonises an abandoned building.
Dix was known for his exacting technique, typically drawing ith egg tempera before applying mutiple layers of oil. 'He was the only Old Master
I ever watched using this technique', said fellow painter George Grosz. Yet his much freer watercolours are just as accomplished in a different way.
JOHN MINTON
'A Centenary' runs at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester -
1 July - 1 Oct 2017
John Minton (1917-57) is known – though he’s hardly famous nowadays – for his troubled, abbreviated life and as a leading neo-romantic, one of a loose group (often taken to include Sutherland, Piper and Nash) who sought to return to symbolic and visionary evocations of the English landscape tradition.
Minton was highly productive and wide ranging. He was a particularly fluent draughtsman with a natural sense of design which made him an influential illustrator. There are surrealist aspects to the peopled landscapes of the 40’s. His precise and somewhat angular portrait style was different again. A late move towards history paintings saw him take on increased complexity and scale. He wasn’t notable, despite that range, for formal innovation. Minton believed that the choice of subject was ‘paramount’, calling for ‘a love of certain things’ that was ‘no souvenir, no memory, but the thing itself made again in paint’.
His own most fertile subjects, built on the many drawings he made when travelling, were exotic and homo-erotic. His 1950 trip to Jamaica was particularly productive: he responded to the tropical colour and the chance to depict semi-naked black bodies with an understated, but undeniable, charge of desire. Yet Minton also discerned ‘a disquiet that is potent and nameless’ – and palpable in Jamaican Village, 1951. Ultimately that’s what makes Minton worth re-examining: he was a natural existentialist, one who laid his self bare through instinct rather than theory.
VICTOR PASMORE: TOWARDS A NEW REALITY
Djangoly Gallery, Nottingham 26 Nov- 19 Feb 2017; Pallant House, Chichester 11 March - 11 June 2017
The story of many 20th century painters turns on their passage from a relatively conventional representational mode into the mature abstract style for which they become famous. On the face of it, Victor Pasmore (1908-98) fits the expected narrative particularly well. Born in Surrey, his progress was slowed by the sudden death of his father in 1927, which forced him to earn a living as a civil servant rather than attending art school. Nonetheless, by the time war broke out in 1939, he had established himself on an amateur basis as a painter of assured landscapes, figure and still-life, and was a respected figure in the London art scene focused on the Euston Road School.
Anne Goodchild, the curator of this survey of Pasmore’s work from the 1930’s to 60’s, says that ‘nothing seemed to suggest the radical change in direction his work was to take’. Yet, though it was very much against the London current of the time, that’s just what we do expect, looking backwards. Who, after all, who would remember Pollock or Rothko had they stuck to their early academic styles? What the 50 works brought together in Nottingham demonstrate is that Pasmore, more unusually, was a significant and original painter both before and after to his move to abstraction, and made many of his finest works in the transition.
The great spiral motif series of 1948-51 bring full abstraction to paintings organised as if they were landscapes. These gave way to reliefs constructed from preformed industrial materials, embracing the machine age to ambiguate their space with quiet drama. Still, there’s room for doubt: they are in debt to the Bauhaus and, as John Berger said at the time, ‘remain slightly funny – looking like bathroom fittings’.
Georgia O’Keeffe at
If such work was
about Bul herself being rendered half-human by the constraints of society, then
the sculptures which followed were of half-human forms. Her surreally inspired
series of Monsters (1998-2011) could
have emerged from a metamorphosis gone wrong. The female Cyborgs (1997-2011) posit humans
reaching perfection by merging with machines – yet their missing limbs and
heads suggest that the ideal is far from achievable, even before they mutate
into deviant hybrids of flora, insects and machines (Anagram,
1999-2005).
Cyborg W1-W4, 1998
In 2005 Bul’s
focus moved on from inventing fictive bodies to realising imagined
architectures. The larger environments expand Bul’s interest in spaces for the
body to inhabit to encompass the whole of society. They’re built with liquidly
baroque exuberance, but are ruins, consistent with a further failure of utopian
aspiration. Instead of sculpting half-humans, Bul now pulls the actual bodies
of viewers into the labyrinthine mirrored structure of Via Negativa II (2014) and fragments them into otherness through
multiple reflections.
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| Via Negativa II, 2014 |
There are echoes
of Modernist buildings in these works, which will set up resonances with the cleanly restored Brutalism of the Hayward, the exterior of which Bul’s work will partially
envelop. Bul is interested in ‘how people in the past envisioned their utopian
future’, albeit from the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard’s point of
view that grand narratives of progress and liberation are no longer possible. Stenbau No. 2 (2007), for example, is
directly based on Bruno Taut drawings of implausible glass cities in the Alps;
and the metallised zeppelin balloon of Willing
To Be Vulnerable (2015-16) points up the failure of that particular fantasy
of travel.
 |
| Willing To Be Vulnerable, 2015-16 Installation view of the 20th Biennale of Sydney, 2016 |
We might also think of JG Ballard’s vision of achieving completeness
by being subsumed into technology, as in his 1973 novel Crash, which is driven by how flesh meets metal in car accidents. Perhaps
that’s why Bul has characterised her way of synthesising ideas as achieving
‘Crashness’. Bul’s paintings, too, are semi-organic, for she uses hair, leather
and other animal materials: velvet manufactured from the excrescence of
silkworms, the mother-of-pearl which shellfish secrete.
Though Bul’s themes are serious, indeed rather
melancholic, they give rise to complex and rich combinations of shinily seductive
materials. The public may be perplexed as they ponder the
half-human, the concept of the self in the modern era, and our attitude towards
the future – but they will also be wowed.
LEE BUL:
CRASHING runs 30 May-19 Aug, Mon, Wed, Fri-Sun 11-7, Thurs 11-9 $ PAUL
CAREY-KENT is an art writer and curator based in Southampton – you can follow
him on Instagram at www.instagram.com/paulcareykent
Monika
Sosnowska: Structural Exercises
Hauser
& Wirth, London: 1 Dec 2017 – 10 Feb 2018
There are plenty of reasons for artists to be interested in architecture, even if they didn’t train that way – like, for example, Francis Alÿs, Pedro Reyes and Tomás Saraceno. . There’s the character of building materials, for a start; think of Carl Andre’s emphasis on the qualities of brick. Then there are the aesthetic crossovers between two parallel streams of modernist practice – the frequent starting point of Ellsworth Kelly’s intense simplifications. Other artists might delve into the psychological effects of the built environment (Bruce Nauman’s charged appropriation of the corridor, for example) or its echoes in history or society (Cyprien Gaillard’s explorations of the consequences of architectural failure). And, as we all grew up in architecture, there are links to personal histories, too (a motorway bridge is the designated portal to childhood memories in the work of the 2008 Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey). The Polish artist Monika Sosnowska engages with all five of these strands.
 |
| Untitled, 2012 |
 |
| 1:1, Venice Biennale 2007 |
Returning to her native country in 2000 after
studying abroad, Sosnowska criss-crossed Warsaw, photographing the architectural
impact of the upheavals following on from 1989: hasty, and largely cosmetic
renovation alongside neglect, dereliction and – sometimes regrettable –
demolition. Those images formed the
source for a sculptural practice which plunged viewers into changed spaces
alluding to the dramatic post-Communist reshapings of city and society. For 1:1, at the Venice Biennale in 2007, she
bent and buckled an enormous and awkward black-steel frame, based on models for
postwar estate housing, to jam it into the classical structure of the Polish
Pavilion. It should look, she said ‘as if two buildings have been constructed
in the same space and have to live in symbiosis, or rather to parasite on each
other.’ Such a potentially uncomfortable
cohabitation suggests how the present cannot entirely escape its past.
 |
| Stairway, 2010 |
In other whole-room installations, Sosnowska’s distortions can appear unconstrained by gravity, as if to mock the aspirations of soaring towers. Recently, she has mixed these large-scale interventions with groups of smaller works. That throws more emphasis on the construction materials used – concrete, steel beams, reinforcing rods – and how they are warped and misplaced (by, incidentally, fabricators who normally make the same objects ‘straight’). Sosnowska subverts the functional logic and underlying geometric aesthetics of market vendor’s stands, which seem to have been kicked in for Untitled, 2012, or Stairway, 2010, which bristles insectoidally while leading nowhere. Untitled, 2015, works the other way round: a plant seems to be overtaken by built elements, inverting how nature colonises an abandoned building.
 |
| Untitled, 2015 |
At Hauser & Wirth, Sosnowska’s forms will
emerge from fabric of the gallery – exploiting a particular advantage of
architectural art: it can be integrated seamlessly into its setting, turning
site specificity into a natural state. Sosnowska’s surreal and edgily comical
parasites will be like larvae burrowing out from within, threatening the very
stability of the building and, by extension, society. ‘Architecture arranges,
introduces order, reflects political and social systems’, Sosnowska has said,
‘My works are about introducing chaos and uncertainty.’ That purpose acts as an
analogy for the personal and social impacts of where we live and have lived,
for how – as Sosnowska has said – ‘Architecture creates life, in a way’.
Structural Exercises at Hauser & Wirth, London - Photos: Alex Delfanne.
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| Untitled, 2017 at Hauser & Wirth |
Portraying a Nation: Germany
1919–1933
Tate Liverpool 2017
Otto Dix: Self-Portrait with Easel, 1923 - mixed media on plywood
The combination of August
Sander (1876 – 1964) and Otto Dix (1891
– 1969) contrasts a painter and a photographer to generate a richly varied
overview of Germany’s glamorous yet troubled
Weimar period, forever set in position by the tragedies which came
before and after. Both sought to depict
its people objectively, but there is another contrast here between Sander
operating ‘from outside in’, and Dix working ‘from inside out’.
August Sander Photographer (August Sander), 1925
Sander, a mining apprentice who
discovered his passion when asked to guide a visiting photographer, operated
commercially before embarking on his life project ‘People of the Twentieth Century’
from 1910 onwards. He cycled round Germany seeking archetypes which he
classified into seven sections, such as farmers, skilled tradesmen, and women.
That schema fitted with a contemporary fashion
for physiognomy, the belief that character and circumstance could be read into
people’s faces. Sander recorded his subjects, typically with direct eye
contact, against whatever background was convenient. He believed truthfulness
depended on rapport, and seemed able to put people sufficiently at ease for
private individuality to break through their public facades. Not everyone looks
good - but, said Sander, ‘I never made a person look bad. They do that
themselves’.
August Sander: Turkish Mousetrap Salesman c.1924–30
The pox-marked ‘Turkish Mousetrap
Salesman’ (1926) illustrates the dignity afforded the lowly. He is poised yet
seems fearful, drawing us into dark eyes behind which it is easy to imagine a
troubled life as we speculate from outside in.
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August Sander: Young Teacher, c 1928
The village schoolteacher looks
somewhat stiff in the jacket and tie indicating his relatively high status in a
rural community, but his dog – ready to bound into the woods – has a potential
energy we might read across to his master, even if we don’t ask: is he a future
Nazi?
Dix trained at the School of Arts
and Crafts in Dresden, then volunteered and spent the war fighting on several
fronts. That, together with reading Nietzsche, reinforced his bleak view of
humanity. Nor did lack of money help: ‘I
have no need of recognition from the narrow minded middle class’, he asserted,
‘but I do need the narrow-minded money’.
Marriage to the wealthy Martha Koch helped, as may be suggested by how
he looks to her in Sander’s photograph of the couple.
August Sander: The painter Otto Dix and his wife Martha,
1925-26
Dix, who was among the ‘New
Objectivity’ artists seeking to depict the decadence and hypocrisy of post-war
society, relished the chance ‘to shock those with weak nerves’ by focusing on
social extremes. His paintings of prostitutes, for example, can be seen as
exposing the base instincts behind the conventional ideal of love, with that
standing in turn for the realities behind all aspects of life - and death.
Otto Dix: Woman on a Leopard
Skin, 1927 - mixed media on canvas
Otto Dix: Servants Girls on Sunday, 1923: watercolour and graphite on paper
It was Dix, not Sander, who
claimed that ‘The essence of every human being is expressed in his ‘exterior’… In
other words, exterior and interior are identical.’ Yet when his most iconic images pin down a
character for inspection, he purposively distorts that exterior. A woman on a leopard skin rug, unhealthily
pallid yet muscular and devilishly keen-eyed, stares brazenly, perhaps
accusing, back at us: we feel Dix is
working from inside out to show not as a straight transcription of her appearance,
but as his concentrated assessment of her being. Where Sander communicates the
humanity in the humble, Dix celebrates, even as he critiques, the grotesque. Putting the two together draws attention to
dualities exaggerated in Weimar Germany, but present in all times.
'A Centenary' runs at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester -
1 July - 1 Oct 2017
John Minton (1917-57) is known – though he’s hardly famous nowadays – for his troubled, abbreviated life and as a leading neo-romantic, one of a loose group (often taken to include Sutherland, Piper and Nash) who sought to return to symbolic and visionary evocations of the English landscape tradition.
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| 'Children by the Sea' 1945 |
That seems correct of his life: a melancholy undertow feeds, albeit
sweetly, into the work – even though he was born into comfortable
circumstances, and at 26 his grandfather, director of DH Evans, left enough for
Minton to act as the ebulliently generous funder of his friends’ entertainment (when
passing the department store in a taxi he’d yell out of the window: ‘We’re
spending your money, darlings!’). After being denied conscientious objector
status, Minton had a quiet war – but his brother was a fatality, which affected
him deeply, the more so as his father and elder brother had already died young.
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| Time Was Away – A Notebook in Corsica, 1947 |
He didn’t seem terribly conflicted about being gay – a sexuality shared
with many of his circle of artists – but he never found a lasting relationship.
His liaisons included six years living fractiously with Keith Vaughan, and two
with the East End wrestler Ricky Stride, the latter indicative of taste for
transgressing the class as well as sexual norms of the time. Despite commercial
success and the admiration of his students, Minton seemed unable to settle,
travelling almost obsessively around the Mediterranean and Caribbean when term
was out. He was alarmed by the nuclear threat and out of sympathy with the
emerging agenda of abstract expressionism. He drifted into alcoholism and
committed suicide at 39.
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| Landscape Near Kingston, Jamaica, 1950 |
The art, on the other hand, doesn’t really bear classification as
quintessentially English, and is more uneasy and libidinous than nostalgic and
romantic. True, Minton admired Blake and Palmer, and used ruins as a favoured
trope even before the war made them omnipresent. Yet he spent most of 1939 in
Paris, and more enduring influences
proved to be de Chirico, early Picasso and three French-based artists, also
known as neo-romantic: Christian Bérard and the Russian-born Eugène Berman and
Pavel Tchelitchew.
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| Fishing Boats in Corsica, 1948 - lithograph |
Minton was highly productive and wide ranging. He was a particularly fluent draughtsman with a natural sense of design which made him an influential illustrator. There are surrealist aspects to the peopled landscapes of the 40’s. His precise and somewhat angular portrait style was different again. A late move towards history paintings saw him take on increased complexity and scale. He wasn’t notable, despite that range, for formal innovation. Minton believed that the choice of subject was ‘paramount’, calling for ‘a love of certain things’ that was ‘no souvenir, no memory, but the thing itself made again in paint’.
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| Jamaican Village, 1951 |
His own most fertile subjects, built on the many drawings he made when travelling, were exotic and homo-erotic. His 1950 trip to Jamaica was particularly productive: he responded to the tropical colour and the chance to depict semi-naked black bodies with an understated, but undeniable, charge of desire. Yet Minton also discerned ‘a disquiet that is potent and nameless’ – and palpable in Jamaican Village, 1951. Ultimately that’s what makes Minton worth re-examining: he was a natural existentialist, one who laid his self bare through instinct rather than theory.
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| Self-Portrait, c 1953 |
VICTOR PASMORE: TOWARDS A NEW REALITY
Djangoly Gallery, Nottingham 26 Nov- 19 Feb 2017; Pallant House, Chichester 11 March - 11 June 2017
The story of many 20th century painters turns on their passage from a relatively conventional representational mode into the mature abstract style for which they become famous. On the face of it, Victor Pasmore (1908-98) fits the expected narrative particularly well. Born in Surrey, his progress was slowed by the sudden death of his father in 1927, which forced him to earn a living as a civil servant rather than attending art school. Nonetheless, by the time war broke out in 1939, he had established himself on an amateur basis as a painter of assured landscapes, figure and still-life, and was a respected figure in the London art scene focused on the Euston Road School.
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| Pasmore at the Festival of Britain, 1951 |
Anne Goodchild, the curator of this survey of Pasmore’s work from the 1930’s to 60’s, says that ‘nothing seemed to suggest the radical change in direction his work was to take’. Yet, though it was very much against the London current of the time, that’s just what we do expect, looking backwards. Who, after all, who would remember Pollock or Rothko had they stuck to their early academic styles? What the 50 works brought together in Nottingham demonstrate is that Pasmore, more unusually, was a significant and original painter both before and after to his move to abstraction, and made many of his finest works in the transition.
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| Snow Scene, 1944 |
Pasmore’s 1930’s work is attractive but in thrall to its
post-impressionist sources. By 1942, though, he had forged a personal style. Snow Scene, 1944 is typical with its
atmospheric calm counterpoised by vertical rhythms without reducing what
Patrick Heron called ‘the vital communication: air, light, space’. Pasmore
could have pursued such lyrical use of abstract patterning within
representation to become a figure equivalent to, say, Sutherland or Piper. Pasmore could have pursued such lyrical use
of abstract patterning within representation to become a figure equivalent to,
say, Sutherland or Piper. But in 1948, he discovered a painting made up only of
coloured squares by Paul Klee – not essentially an abstractionist – and
‘decided straight away that this was the objective point from which I could
start again’.
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Spiral Motif in Green, Violet, Blue and Gold: The Coast of the Inland Sea, 1950
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The great spiral motif series of 1948-51 bring full abstraction to paintings organised as if they were landscapes. These gave way to reliefs constructed from preformed industrial materials, embracing the machine age to ambiguate their space with quiet drama. Still, there’s room for doubt: they are in debt to the Bauhaus and, as John Berger said at the time, ‘remain slightly funny – looking like bathroom fittings’.
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| Relief Construction in White, Black and Indian Red, 1961 |
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| Mural Relief 1958 at Staff Centre Pilkington Glass Works St Helens |
Georgia O’Keeffe at
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| My Last Door, 1952-4 |
Various curatorial agendas might underpin a survey of Georgia O’Keeffe. Does she justify her status as far and away the most expensive female artist at auction (£29m for Jimson Weed/White Flower No.1, 1932)? Are her flowers sexual surrogates – a reading she consistently rejected, but which Alfred Stieglitz influentially asserted on the back of their passion as a couple? Is she making a case for female empowerment? Was she, secluded in New Mexico for her last 37 years and more fêted outside the art world than within it, an outsider artist of sorts?
Tate looks to put all that aside in favour of the question that matters: how good a painter was she? That hardly any of O’Keeffe’s pictures are normally in Europe underlines what an exceptional chance this 125-work retrospective provides for Britons to make a broad judgment. O’Keeffe had a long and productive life: 1887-1986, covering 17 US presidents. Yet she remains famous mainly for a small minority of her 800-odd canvases: flowers and animal skulls, with their surreal aspects open to erotic or existentialist interpretations. Those, though, are just two among many subjects that resonated with her, and which she abstracted in order to isolate their essence. Indeed, she pushed that agenda much further with her less familiar motifs: desert landscapes, the pelvis, views from an aeroplane (e.g. Sky with Flat White Cloud, 1962) and 20 versions of a wall with a door in it and paving stones in front (such as My Last Door, 1952-4).
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| Sky with Flat White Cloud, 1962 |
O’Keeffe said that she actually
bought her rambling home in Abiquiú, New Mexico ‘because it had that door in
the patio, the one I’ve painted so often. I had no peace until I bought the
house’. That suggests the critical importance to her of an observational starting
point, of working from the outside in – as opposed to her fellow New Mexican isolate
Agnes Martin, who worked from inside out to distil the feeling of a place. The
catalogue makes much of the anticipations in O’Keeffe of Abstract Expressionist
and Colour Field painters, but one can see why Clement Greenberg didn’t buy into
what he called her ‘pseudo-modern art’: O’Keeffe was coming from a different
place. The same place, pretty much, as Ellsworth Kelly, as she herself
acknowledged. But where Kelly dispensed with surface effects to investigate the
painting as sculptural object, and pushed on to a point at which his works’
origins in the world became fully hidden, the mature O’Keeffe retained both painterly
inflexions and explicit and eponymous subjects.
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| Pelvis I (Pelvis with Blue), 1944 |
What all those near-empty subjects
lend themselves to is the projection of infinity, and the effect is reinforced
by the way in which O’Keeffe moves directly from foreground (the bone of the
pelvis, say, in Pelvis 1, 1944) to
distance (the sky seen through the gap in the bone) with no middle ground. Where
the flowers pitch us into a vortex, the more abstract works open out our
perceptions. For all their differences in approach, much of O’Keeffe’s best work
turns out to arrive somewhere not so very far from Rothko and Martin.
GEORGIA O’KEEFFE runs until 30 Oct, Mon-Thurs, Sun
10-6, Fri, Sat 10-10
Dan Flavin in Birmingham 2016
There’s something of a paradox at the heart of Dan Flavin’s
work. He’s famous for arrangements of commercially available fluorescent light
units in four standard lengths and ten standard colours - pretty much all he produced from 1963 to his
death in 1996, and all you’ll see at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery (13 April – 26
June). Flavin insisted on his work’s literalness, saying – as cited by the
show’s title – ‘It is what it is and it
ain’t nothing else’. And yet, in spite of his simple and consistent means,
complexities accumulate.
First there’s the sheer variety of effects Flavin was able
to generate once liberated – as it seems – by self-imposed constraints. For
example, Pink out of a corner (to Jasper
Johns), 1963 uses just one unit to disrupt our perception of space by
eliminating the darkness from a corner. That contrasts with the chromatic
riches of untitled (in honor of Harold
Joachim) 3, 1977, for which the corner placement gives Flavin the room to
mount six vertical fixtures facing back onto six horizontal fixtures facing
forward, so that hot pink and yellow stands against a cool penumbral glow of
blue and green – while both colour zones bleed to the side. Differently again, the
comparatively austere series dedicated to the utopian revolutionary spirit of
Vladimir Tatlin explores the many possible configurations of seven white units
to build architectural effects.
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| Pink out of a corner (to Jasper Johns), 1963 |
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| untitled (in honor of Harold Joachim) 3, 1977 |
Then there’s the matter of pinning down exactly what we’re looking at. Is it sculpture, drawing, painting in light, installation or just the functional means of illuminating the surrounding space? The primary aspect varies: untitled (in honor of Harold Joachim) 3 has many of the qualities sought by colour field painting, whereas Untitled (to Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein on not seeing anyone in the room), 1968, shows Flavin as one of the first artists to think in terms of whole room installation: it illuminates a space from which we are barred, deflecting our attention to the architecture, and to the play on Lichtenstein’s 1961 painting I can see the whole room! ….and there’s nobody in it! The voyeurism of Lichtenstein’s man looking through a spyhole transfers to us.
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| Untitled (to Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein on not seeing anyone in the room), 1968 |
Those examples also illustrate the role played by Flavin’s titles, which alternately refer us to possible parallels, suggest meanings personal to Flavin, or make dedications to other artists which hover between homage and dry self-awareness of the potential for overblown comparisons. After all, Flavin’s style of “monument” – hence the quotation marks round those to Tatlin – has inbuilt impermanence: they can be turned off at any time and their parts need regular replacement. Is there also a spiritual aspect to Flavin’s eloquence? Light has a central symbolic role in the history of art, and even if he hadn’t trained as a priest before taking against religion, one can read Flavin as evoking ecstatic or transcendental states, whether divine, meditative, trippy, or even – as Pink out of a corner may suggest - sexual.
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"monument" for V. Tatlin1964
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Is Flavin’s art, then, so straightforward? The Ikon provides
a chance to decide whether we go along with his self-assessment - and the
show’s own curatorial emphasis, or would sooner advance the counter-cliché ‘wishing
doesn’t make it so’.
Phaidon's Ellsworth Kelly Monograph
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Yellow with Red Triangle, 1973
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This timely doorstep of a monograph (Phaidon £75, 368 pages, 350 colour illustrations, five contributors, 3 kg) provides a comprehensive overview of the painting and sculpture of the late Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2016), known for a 70 year production of rigorously colourful forms which brought him fame without ever quite placing him centrally in the story of art. Lead author Tricia Paik, assisted by Kelly’s collaboration and the availability of his archive, lucidly explains his development and critical reception over four chronological periods (leaving a quartet of renowned writers to focus on themes). Her account of 1923-48 sets out Kelly’s background as a shy, stuttering boy from New Jersey, keen on bird-watching and drawing, who spent 1944-45 in the ‘Ghost Army’ of camouflage experts which deflected the German intelligence through such ruses as inflatable tanks. 1948-54 saw Kelly remain in France just as the New York art scene was taking off, facilitating the development of an independent style which came to maturity in New York City, 1954-70. Recognition was slow, but substantial by the time – in tune with his love of nature – he then moved upstate.
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| Blue Curve, 1994 |
Kelly has often been miscast as a follower of Mondrian or as a minimalist. Yet Grünewald, Audubon and Picasso meant more to him. With none of Mondrian’s spiritual bent, the wellspring of Kelly’s art was always the world from which he abstracted shapes with the aim of catching the essence of an ‘already-made’. “My paintings don’t represent objects,” he said, meaning that he avoided graphic depictions of what he saw, “They are objects themselves and fragmented perceptions of things.” That’s the logic of multi or joined panel works, such as Yellow with Red Triangle, 1973; and fits how , for example, the relationships of form and colour in Kelly’s snapshot of a paper cup squashed underfoot can be traced to the typically voluptuous Blue Curve, 1994.
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| Spectrum V, 1969 |
Three main achievements emerge. First the sensuous derivation of abstraction, while avoiding the expression of the artist’s own hand which one might expect to go with that, is Kelly’s own. Second, he has a way with clarion colours. There isn’t a system (“I don’t know what I want”, he said, “ my eye does”) but as Richard Shiff points out in his essay, Kelly seems unusually able to ensure that his colours reach uniform saturation within such works as the Spectrum series or Yellow with Red Triangle, with its equal colour values. Third, as Gary Garrels explains, Kelly took masterful account of how his paintings engaged with the wall which formed their ground, and with their setting as a whole. That led him increasingly into sculpture and majestically-scaled intersections of art and architecture.
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Ailanthus Leaves I from Suite of Plant Lithographs, 1966 |
That third achievement points to a limitation of this volume, as illustrations tend
to make Kelly’s paintings look more like the minimalist works they aren’t. The
spatial encounter with Kelly can’t be fully captured on the page, of course, though
a higher proportion of installation views might have helped, plus perhaps a
section on the plant drawings. Those, which Kelly made for over 60 years, provide
a parallel history of how looking fed his simplifications. This book, then, is
no substitute for the work - but if you want to make the most of experiencing that,
here’s how.
Alexander Calder at Tate Modern
The work of Alexander Calder (1898-1976) has rather disappeared in plain view: we’re used to the fact that every major museum has one of his famous mobiles, but find it easy to pass by without feeling particularly challenged. Tate Modern’s new show seeks to remind us of the radicalism behind making the sculpture move for us instead of us moving round the sculpture. It excludes the static ‘Stabiles’, which feature monumentally in many public squares, and the vibrant gouaches. Nor are there any films or re-enactments of how Calder employed his sculptures in dance and opera. The focus is determinedly on work interacting with the viewer: a substantial selection of Calder’s 200 mobiles, and the wire sculptures which led up to them.
The Brass Family, 1929
Calder was born – in Pennsylvania – into a lineage of sculptors, but delayed following in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps, training as a mechanical engineer before something of an epiphany on a naval voyage to Guatemala in 1922: the sight of the sun and moon rising and setting simultaneously on opposite sides of the ship started him painting, and he enrolled in art college in New York. That awakening stayed with him; the basis of his work, he said, remained ‘the system of the Universe’, in that ‘the idea of detached bodies floating in space… some at rest, while others move in peculiar manners, seems to me the ideal source of form’.
Red and Yellow Vane, 1934
Calder’s second source of fascination, arising from a journalistic sketching assignment in 1925, was the spectacle and choreographed action of the circus. He re-enacted its sequences through the 70 models of Le Cirque, 1926-30, which he housed in a suitcase to facilitate travelling performances. Calder had begun using wire to bring his drawings of animals into space: Le Cirque uses this technique within its mixed media, and separate, larger works employ just wire. The Brass Family, 1929, is typical of those, both for wittily exploring the analogies between the balance of acrobats and the balance of sculptural weight, and for an erotic edge which led Calder to describe himself as ‘more ‘Sewer-realist’ than Surrealist’.
Triple Gong, 1948
Those two inspirations meshed with the influence of the artists he met in 1920s Paris: Miró and Arp played a part, and Duchamp proposed the term ‘Mobile’ – but it was a visit to Mondrian’s studio in 1930 which led Calder to turn his love of motion and play towards abstraction. Now, too, his feeling for the interaction of the skies returns to temper those ludic instincts with an intimation of elemental energies. There is a long tradition of sculpture in movement – in religious processions, for a start – but Calder was the first to make sculptures perform by themselves. The restless mutability of his mobiles might stand for the experimental approach driving his art as a whole, which varies immensely across an oeuvre of 16,000. The most celebrated mobiles are delicate metal structures suspended from the ceiling, painted in primary colours and designed to move gently with the airflow like clouds drifting by (as there are no fans, the curators have taken pains to ensure that visitor movements will be sufficient to create the right degree of draught*). Other mobiles, though, are fixed to the wall or mounted on bases – such as Red and Yellow Vane, 1934, which is also simpler than most. The Tate’s show, then, is a chance to assess afresh the variety of spatial and kinetic effects Calder achieves through his universal circus of orchestrated movement over and around us.
* This was a preview: as it turned out, Tate failed miserably in this aim, delivering an embarrassingly static show
© The World of Interiors/The Condé Nast Publications