CONTINUOUS UPDATE OF MATERIAL based on the show at Transition Gallery, Unit 25a Regent Studios, 8 Andrews Road, London E8 4QN 10 Feb - 4 March 2017
ARTY magazine launch and evening viewing was Feb 2017
Art from Alli Sharma, Clare Price, Jonny Briggs, EJ Major, Kate Lyddon, Cathy Lomax, Adam Dix, Emma Cousin, John Banting and Kelvin Okafor
Writing by Matthew Francis, Joan McGavin, Stephanie Carey-Kent, Claire Crowther, Tamar Yoseloff, Julian Stannard, Saradha Soobrayen, Paul Carey-Kent, Emma Cousin, Cathy Lomax, Alli Sharma and EJ Major.
Curated / edited by Paul Carey-Kent
I am expanding my list of ear-related artworks below as and when I make new discoveries.
I am expanding my list of ear-related artworks below as and when I make new discoveries.
Installation images
The show is accompanied by poets' and artists' writings in a special edition of ARTY magazine, which also includes a suitably quirky roll-call of the ear's appearances in art.
WORKS IN THE SHOW
Cathy Lomax: Audrey's Ear, 2017
Oil on linen, 40 x 40 cm
Cathy Lomax is fascinated by the romance of cinema, and her paintings – which she often shows in groups - link iconic scenes to form visual narratives in which we suspect she’d like to take part. Here Audrey Hepburn’s gamine beauty updates Vermeer’s pearl earring, while taking us back to a time of glamour in which the excesses of celebrity culture seem no more than incipient. Is there a snake in the idyllic grass, though – or, rather, smuggled into her famous hair?
Oil on linen, 40 x 40 cm
Cathy Lomax is fascinated by the romance of cinema, and her paintings – which she often shows in groups - link iconic scenes to form visual narratives in which we suspect she’d like to take part. Here Audrey Hepburn’s gamine beauty updates Vermeer’s pearl earring, while taking us back to a time of glamour in which the excesses of celebrity culture seem no more than incipient. Is there a snake in the idyllic grass, though – or, rather, smuggled into her famous hair?
____________________
Clare Price: t.h.10, 2016
oil and acrylic on canvas, 31x36cm
If pareidolia most often stands for our tendency to see faces in the natural world, perhaps it’s aureidolia which leads me to see ear shapes in Clare Price’s abstractions, titled by a personal code and evoked a certain hesitant vulnerability. Or are those sound waves? Or are we inside the ear? Poised lyrically between trembling borders and invasive mist, they both seem to be listening to the other’s muted echo of geometric abstraction, so posing the question: what made the original sound?
EJ Major: Matiére Signalétique, 2017
Selected film stills
E.J. Major’s selected film stills set up visual parallels between Haneke’s La Pianiste and two other films, analysing the scene, as Deleuze proposes, not by traditional genres, but by what is intrinsic to the images themselves (their material as signals). A long take of Erika, the film’s central protagonist (a woman whose contrasting worlds are classical music and voyeuristic sex) recalls a moment of contemplation in Ozu’s Late Spring. Like the music interrupted in Haneke’s scene, says Major 'the suggestive function of the association is open'. Similarly as Erika enters a lift with her mother and bars access to a young man who has entered the apartment block behind them, is there something in the scene that we are not seeing? There's a visual echo of Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, but, says Major 'as one sheet of past is recognized, another, the sound, underwhelms the connection'. If in our mind’s ear we can hear the desperation in Schneider‘s voice as Brando chases up the stairs after her in the scene before the film’s tragic denouement, that suggests a darker side to Haneke’s filmic pun. Can we, Major asks, ‘see’ that? In looking, what do we hear?
If pareidolia most often stands for our tendency to see faces in the natural world, perhaps it’s aureidolia which leads me to see ear shapes in Clare Price’s abstractions, titled by a personal code and evoked a certain hesitant vulnerability. Or are those sound waves? Or are we inside the ear? Poised lyrically between trembling borders and invasive mist, they both seem to be listening to the other’s muted echo of geometric abstraction, so posing the question: what made the original sound?
____________________
EJ Major: Matiére Signalétique, 2017
Selected film stills
E.J. Major’s selected film stills set up visual parallels between Haneke’s La Pianiste and two other films, analysing the scene, as Deleuze proposes, not by traditional genres, but by what is intrinsic to the images themselves (their material as signals). A long take of Erika, the film’s central protagonist (a woman whose contrasting worlds are classical music and voyeuristic sex) recalls a moment of contemplation in Ozu’s Late Spring. Like the music interrupted in Haneke’s scene, says Major 'the suggestive function of the association is open'. Similarly as Erika enters a lift with her mother and bars access to a young man who has entered the apartment block behind them, is there something in the scene that we are not seeing? There's a visual echo of Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, but, says Major 'as one sheet of past is recognized, another, the sound, underwhelms the connection'. If in our mind’s ear we can hear the desperation in Schneider‘s voice as Brando chases up the stairs after her in the scene before the film’s tragic denouement, that suggests a darker side to Haneke’s filmic pun. Can we, Major asks, ‘see’ that? In looking, what do we hear?
____________________
Gouache on card - 48 x 63.5 cm (courtesy Austin Desmond Fine Art)
It’s no surprise, seeing this alluringly creepy painting, to learn that John Banting (1902-72) was associated with the British surrealist movement in the 1930’s. An animal’s skull seems to have retained not just some well-formed teeth, but a reptilian eye, the sensing tip of a porcine nose, a fleshy and implausibly human ear, and some vestigial system of circulation. Is that all that’s needed to talk ill of the dead from their own perspective?
____________________
Alli Sharma: from the Bats series, 2017,
each oil on board, 20 x 15 cm
Alli Sharma makes lush and openly sentimental paintings of objects or animals to which we might imagine ourselves relating: keepsakes and jewellery, for example, or cats and birds. Her series of bats tweak that somewhat, as few people see them in the same sweet light. Nor, I suspect, do they differentiate one bat from another too much, but what comes across in Sharma’s set is the attractive personality of different animals.
____________________
Adam Dix: The Collectors. 2013.
Ink and oil on paper - 72 x 52 cm
Adam Dix generates a haunting atmosphere with his 'oil as if it were watercolour' technique by presenting figures redolent of the past in would-be sci-fi landscapes. Here the peculiar ritualistic uniforms – was this Laura Ashley’s design for the Ku Klux Klan? – reveal no ears. Perhaps hearing has been outsourced in this ambiguous timescape, hence the prominence of a communications tower to which obeisance must, it would seem, be paid. The mystery is increased by the obvious question: what are they collecting?
____________________
Kelvin Okafor: Katherine's Interlude, 2016
Graphite, charcoal & black coloured pencil on archival paper 79 x 67 cm
It makes sense to hear, given the technical assurance of his graphite and charcoal portraits, that 30 year old Londoner Kelvin Okafor has been drawing people obsessively since he was eight. His ‘Interlude’ series captures fourteen of his rather good-looking friends - but departs from the usual convention of engaging through the eyes as portals to the soul. Instead, we are led to wonder what Katherine might be thinking – or hearing.
____________________
Kate Lyddon: The Shell-Like Loop, 2017
Oil on canvas - 30x40cm
A central orifice acts as mouth to a red head, ear to a blue head, and general entry and exit point for what Kate Lyddon calls 'a medley of fleshy dripping drinking body parts'. It's tasty enough to eat, judged by the knife and fork wielded as he tries to eat her while she drinks him in a disturbing interaction of fluids. If that feels like a collage of myth, medievalism and body trauma to arrive at an alluring grotesquerie, then it's typical of her work.
____________________
Jonny Briggs: Forward Slashes Series # 1, 2013
Altered family photograph, 15 x 18cm
Emma Cousin’s paintings have an engagingly up front personality, bordering on the comic but balanced by a good deal of painterly acumen. The colloquial and the art-historical play off each other here, as an absurdly literal interpretation of an everyday phrase is delivered with a hint of Tiepolo. How fool is Cousin being, though? There may be a barb in the title, should anyone be visually tin-eared enough not to appreciate what she’s doing.
____________________
Much of Jonny Briggs’ practice creates new versions of his lost childhood through re-enactments involving his parents. The results are typically both more real than expected (as they look Photoshopped but are not) and psychologically charged. Here an old photo of the family pet is subject to an edit which proposes a disjuncture of the senses. The eyes now rhyme with the long ears as if the dog were seeing through them in the absence of eyes from their usual place.
____________________
Emma Cousin: Falling on Deaf Ears, 2017
Oil on canvas, 70 x 50cm
Oil on canvas, 70 x 50cm
____________________
Clare Price: t.h.9, 2016
acrylic on canvas, 31x36cm
POEMS
Earring
I love the time of dangle-down -
my flesh in her flesh, my movements
her movements, my panorama hers -
the days when his whispers are mine.
I hate the time of jumbled up.
Unjewelled by the dark, I sweat:
why should she take me off by night?
What rumours are these about studs?
sorted it weeks ago
so I don't have to pour oil
down my ears. I do anyway.
'Twice a day, twenty minutes'
said Nurse Florid in April
and then quite dreamily
as if considering the eye of the needle
'April is the cruellest month.'
Then she heaved herself
around the Treatment Room
in a miasma of giggles
'Oh, I do love ears!'
shooting her syringe
towards the ceiling
like the cowgirl in a B-movie
who gives it hard
and takes it hard
and who, by the end, is just one of the boys.
When I walked out
of Nurse Florid's Treatment Room
in dazzling April
my ears were so clean
I thought of banging out
an Alleluia with the Baptists.
I miss Nurse Florid
and her peculiar oblations.
I do it for her mostly.
Cut by himself or by Gauguin’s sword?
The consensus seems that he did it himself
at the Yellow House, having threatened the friend
who was threatening to leave, whom he saw
as a traitor, a kind of a murderer.
Given to a whore or a young woman he knew?
Not a whore, but poor Gaby, whom a rabid dog bit.
The wound had been cauterized, scarring her arm;
her life saved by injections in a Paris hospital
that her job in the brothel helped to pay for.
And what became of the ear?
It made Gaby faint when she opened the paper,
saw what it contained. She dropped the gift.
It went to the hospital, I read, but couldn’t
be sewn back on. Since then, I don’t know.
*
Joan McGavin
______________________
Hearing aids
When she first got them she wore
them every day like a new
dress, twirling in the racket
and tumble of words like rain.
Now she delays putting them
in for as long as possible.
She likes the cool deep silence
of unravelling iced velvet.
Frank jerks his head and whispers
"Tell gran not to drink her ears”,
nodding conspiratorially
at the plastic snails coiled in a tumbler.
Far away as a pigeon up a tree she shouts
“I haven’t put my ears in."
We know she’ll drink her tea
then loop them up and over
between dry cartilage and
stiff grey perm into deaf ears,
pretending to switch them on.
Emma Cousin
Hear
I am reading a poem about silence
where Beethoven appears in the last line,
straining to hear his own symphony.
The waiting room is full of muffled coughs,
whispered conversations, the soft tread
of the intern’s surgery slippers on the tiled floor.
The doctor looks deep inside, probes a thin needle
into the inner chamber, applies suction,
I can hear a long roar, then pop. The room is full
of creeks and songs, a sonic hum
I've never heard before, the low tone of dog whistles.
I am Super Ear. The doctor’s voice resonates
inside my body. I carry his clear vowels home
and on the way I try to remember everything
I didn't hear, the thousand daily sounds
that just washed over, or disappeared,
in case I have lost something important,
a phrase that might have changed my life,
the music of a new language.
Tamar Yoseloff
____________________
Ears for the Eyes
We’re out riding, me and you in the New Forest, along a sandy track.
You stop: I see from your ears you have spotted a bird (or two) in the bush way, way ahead, beyond me. Your ears pricking forward, stalky and strained, say it all.
We wait – one of us patient, one of us tense. My legs pressure your sides, asking you to walk us on. Lowering your head, you acquiesce.
You like to scan the land, seeking threats, as when your wide-scoping eye finds the loping dog behind: no sounds find my ears, but yours, flat back, shout high alertso that I tense to your spring forward, your dismissing of the dog-foe, the kick across its bows.
And on we trot.
Yes, you are good at dogs. But not so snakes, masked under cover of heather edging our track. Snakes who, if there, quicken to trit-trotting hooves.
You start, you snort, you spook to the side. Your ears let me down, too quick for me, and sharp down I go, striking the track, vibrating your snakes away.
You wait, regarding me, as if to say it’s safe, it’s safe for you back on my back.
So on we trot.
Stephanie Carey-Kent
____________________
Hear in the Art
Jump red tick
Drum my rib
Jump red tick
Ear in the heart
Jump red tick
Sound me out
Jump red tick
Herd this us
Jump red tick
Bug lug vamp
Claire Crowther
'I saw a red tick and I have a friend with Lyme disease, which has kind of ruined his life except he’s anything but a ruined person, and the tick jumped and looked to me like a heart - shape, colour, jump-jumpiness.' - CC
the days when his whispers are mine.
I hate the time of jumbled up.
Unjewelled by the dark, I sweat:
why should she take me off by night?
What rumours are these about studs?
Paul Carey-Kent
____________________
Her Peculiar Oblations
sorted it weeks ago
so I don't have to pour oil
down my ears. I do anyway.
'Twice a day, twenty minutes'
said Nurse Florid in April
and then quite dreamily
as if considering the eye of the needle
'April is the cruellest month.'
Then she heaved herself
around the Treatment Room
in a miasma of giggles
'Oh, I do love ears!'
shooting her syringe
towards the ceiling
like the cowgirl in a B-movie
who gives it hard
and takes it hard
and who, by the end, is just one of the boys.
When I walked out
of Nurse Florid's Treatment Room
in dazzling April
my ears were so clean
I thought of banging out
an Alleluia with the Baptists.
I miss Nurse Florid
and her peculiar oblations.
I do it for her mostly.
Julian Stannard
____________________
A Charm for Earwigs
Witchy-beetle, forkin-robin,
no one heard you as you clambered
up the nursery slopes of pillow,
felt your way in heaving darkness
where a dreamer breathed siroccos,
scaled the north face of an earlobe,
stumbled on the antihelix
where the cartilage was ruckled
into an upended mizmaze,
teetered round its corrugations,
to the vortex where the tragus
overhung a bloodwarm grotto.
There was curl-room in the concha
but the scent of earwax drew you
through a straight and oozy burrow,
thrumming with a distant heartbeat.
First the walls were soft, then bony,
then antennae scratched a membrane.
Arrywiggle, horny-gollach,
you awoke me from my stupor,
rasping with a chitin stylus
on my mind’s long-playing vinyl,
ratcheting my taut tympanum
with your cacophonic tarsi,
set my ossicles percussing
with the clangour of rough music,
dustbins, copper saucepans, kettles.
Now I smear a linen poultice
with the pulp of roasted apple,
press it, wincing, on my pinna.
Malic steam pervades my chambers
to entice you with a perfume
sweeter than November compost.
Clipshears, codgybell, twitch-ballock,
lift your bristles from my eardrum,
let the sea of cochlea settle,
turn back from the labyrinth.
Matthew Francis
____________________
A Charm for Earwigs
Witchy-beetle, forkin-robin,
no one heard you as you clambered
up the nursery slopes of pillow,
felt your way in heaving darkness
where a dreamer breathed siroccos,
scaled the north face of an earlobe,
stumbled on the antihelix
where the cartilage was ruckled
into an upended mizmaze,
teetered round its corrugations,
to the vortex where the tragus
overhung a bloodwarm grotto.
There was curl-room in the concha
but the scent of earwax drew you
through a straight and oozy burrow,
thrumming with a distant heartbeat.
First the walls were soft, then bony,
then antennae scratched a membrane.
Arrywiggle, horny-gollach,
you awoke me from my stupor,
rasping with a chitin stylus
on my mind’s long-playing vinyl,
ratcheting my taut tympanum
with your cacophonic tarsi,
set my ossicles percussing
with the clangour of rough music,
dustbins, copper saucepans, kettles.
Now I smear a linen poultice
with the pulp of roasted apple,
press it, wincing, on my pinna.
Malic steam pervades my chambers
to entice you with a perfume
sweeter than November compost.
Clipshears, codgybell, twitch-ballock,
lift your bristles from my eardrum,
let the sea of cochlea settle,
turn back from the labyrinth.
Matthew Francis
witchy-beetle, forkin-robin, arrywiggle,
horny-gollach, clipshears, codgybell,
twitch-ballock = dialect words for earwig - MF
____________________
and speaking of Van Gogh’s ear…
Most of the ear, or the lobe alone?
The latest thought is that most of the ear
was cut off by Van Gogh just before Christmas.
The latest thought is that most of the ear
was cut off by Van Gogh just before Christmas.
Cut by himself or by Gauguin’s sword?
The consensus seems that he did it himself
at the Yellow House, having threatened the friend
who was threatening to leave, whom he saw
as a traitor, a kind of a murderer.
Given to a whore or a young woman he knew?
Not a whore, but poor Gaby, whom a rabid dog bit.
The wound had been cauterized, scarring her arm;
her life saved by injections in a Paris hospital
that her job in the brothel helped to pay for.
And what became of the ear?
It made Gaby faint when she opened the paper,
saw what it contained. She dropped the gift.
It went to the hospital, I read, but couldn’t
be sewn back on. Since then, I don’t know.
*
I suppose it’s nowhere now
though, like Shelley’s heart, or Cromwell’s skull,
or Thomas More’s head, someone may have kept it,
decided they must garder cet object
précieusement
as a keepsake, a touchstone, an almost holy relic,
to be perfumed or bound in special linen
or buried by night in a secret place
away from prying eyes, researchers
and perhaps unbalanced future fans.
though, like Shelley’s heart, or Cromwell’s skull,
or Thomas More’s head, someone may have kept it,
decided they must garder cet object
précieusement
as a keepsake, a touchstone, an almost holy relic,
to be perfumed or bound in special linen
or buried by night in a secret place
away from prying eyes, researchers
and perhaps unbalanced future fans.
Joan McGavin
Note: Van Gogh was living with Gauguin in Arles when the famous incident occurred on December 23, 1888. Gauguin was a keen fencer, lending some credence to the suggestion that he might have sliced the ear off in a fight which was followed by a pact of silence. A diagram drawn by Van Gogh’s physician, Dr. Felix Rey, has recently been found, indicating that the whole ear was cut off. And the identity of the young woman to whom he gave the ear - saying the words quoted in French - has been established. JM
____________________
Marcus and Me
Marcus and me like to wear
three jumpers to school.
The teacher tells me to say
the word warm at least
seven times a day. But Marcus
says that warm is too small
a word, it moves away
too quickly like a mouse.
Marcus says that Anaemia
are little creatures, like lice.
He thinks he’s caught them
by sucking the daisy foam
off my wallpaper.
Mum might have it too,
her pale face and kisses
taste of copper coins.
She doesn’t mind Dad’s
barking. Will it kill her?
Like her too tight shoes or
an Asthma Attack? Marcus
sometimes hides outside
my parents’ room. His ear
to the wall, his finger scraping
the paint off the radiator.
When Marcus and me have
an earache we go to my mum
and kneel like a donkey, my head
sideways on her lap, catching
the splashes one drop,
two drops. Mum rounds up
the wild hair from my ear but
her thumb can’t shut out the thunder.
Marcus and me like to wear
three jumpers to school.
The teacher tells me to say
the word warm at least
seven times a day. But Marcus
says that warm is too small
a word, it moves away
too quickly like a mouse.
Marcus says that Anaemia
are little creatures, like lice.
He thinks he’s caught them
by sucking the daisy foam
off my wallpaper.
Mum might have it too,
her pale face and kisses
taste of copper coins.
She doesn’t mind Dad’s
barking. Will it kill her?
Like her too tight shoes or
an Asthma Attack? Marcus
sometimes hides outside
my parents’ room. His ear
to the wall, his finger scraping
the paint off the radiator.
When Marcus and me have
an earache we go to my mum
and kneel like a donkey, my head
sideways on her lap, catching
the splashes one drop,
two drops. Mum rounds up
the wild hair from my ear but
her thumb can’t shut out the thunder.
|
Hearing aids
When she first got them she wore
them every day like a new
dress, twirling in the racket
and tumble of words like rain.
Now she delays putting them
in for as long as possible.
She likes the cool deep silence
of unravelling iced velvet.
Frank jerks his head and whispers
"Tell gran not to drink her ears”,
nodding conspiratorially
at the plastic snails coiled in a tumbler.
Far away as a pigeon up a tree she shouts
“I haven’t put my ears in."
We know she’ll drink her tea
then loop them up and over
between dry cartilage and
stiff grey perm into deaf ears,
pretending to switch them on.
Emma Cousin
____________________
Hear
I am reading a poem about silence
where Beethoven appears in the last line,
straining to hear his own symphony.
The waiting room is full of muffled coughs,
whispered conversations, the soft tread
of the intern’s surgery slippers on the tiled floor.
The doctor looks deep inside, probes a thin needle
into the inner chamber, applies suction,
I can hear a long roar, then pop. The room is full
of creeks and songs, a sonic hum
I've never heard before, the low tone of dog whistles.
I am Super Ear. The doctor’s voice resonates
inside my body. I carry his clear vowels home
and on the way I try to remember everything
I didn't hear, the thousand daily sounds
that just washed over, or disappeared,
in case I have lost something important,
a phrase that might have changed my life,
the music of a new language.
Tamar Yoseloff
____________________
Ears for the Eyes
We’re out riding, me and you in the New Forest, along a sandy track.
You stop: I see from your ears you have spotted a bird (or two) in the bush way, way ahead, beyond me. Your ears pricking forward, stalky and strained, say it all.
We wait – one of us patient, one of us tense. My legs pressure your sides, asking you to walk us on. Lowering your head, you acquiesce.
You like to scan the land, seeking threats, as when your wide-scoping eye finds the loping dog behind: no sounds find my ears, but yours, flat back, shout high alertso that I tense to your spring forward, your dismissing of the dog-foe, the kick across its bows.
And on we trot.
Yes, you are good at dogs. But not so snakes, masked under cover of heather edging our track. Snakes who, if there, quicken to trit-trotting hooves.
You start, you snort, you spook to the side. Your ears let me down, too quick for me, and sharp down I go, striking the track, vibrating your snakes away.
You wait, regarding me, as if to say it’s safe, it’s safe for you back on my back.
So on we trot.
Stephanie Carey-Kent
____________________
Hear in the Art
Jump red tick
Drum my rib
Jump red tick
Ear in the heart
Jump red tick
Sound me out
Jump red tick
Herd this us
Jump red tick
Bug lug vamp
Claire Crowther
'I saw a red tick and I have a friend with Lyme disease, which has kind of ruined his life except he’s anything but a ruined person, and the tick jumped and looked to me like a heart - shape, colour, jump-jumpiness.' - CC
____________________
Her Earrings
Cautiously - is that the door? -
I quantify her habit:
three boxes with thirty four
pairs (admittedly five from me),
two lonely extras (one mine -
a parrot whose mate flew free
in high winds at Devil’s Dyke)
plus the six she always wears.
Eighty-odd, of which I like
especially the bamboo
drops which, looking so heavy,
yet fall light; the dangle-zoo
with lizards and swinging apes;
the yellow shells - with the surge
of the sea on tap, perhaps –
and the abstracts which make her
a miniature gallery.
But enactments talk louder
than taste; and more than suggest
that of all her adornments
I love this repertoire best –
for what do I tend to buy
as proof? And what does she wear
that I never even try
to take off? In ears we share
a mild imbalance - with which
we’re happy, being a pair.
Paul Carey-Kent
Cautiously - is that the door? -
I quantify her habit:
three boxes with thirty four
pairs (admittedly five from me),
two lonely extras (one mine -
a parrot whose mate flew free
in high winds at Devil’s Dyke)
plus the six she always wears.
Eighty-odd, of which I like
especially the bamboo
drops which, looking so heavy,
yet fall light; the dangle-zoo
with lizards and swinging apes;
the yellow shells - with the surge
of the sea on tap, perhaps –
and the abstracts which make her
a miniature gallery.
But enactments talk louder
than taste; and more than suggest
that of all her adornments
I love this repertoire best –
for what do I tend to buy
as proof? And what does she wear
that I never even try
to take off? In ears we share
a mild imbalance - with which
we’re happy, being a pair.
Paul Carey-Kent
LEND ME YOUR EARS
Or, rather, don't: here are is art which wasn't in the show, but which came to mind in putting it together and afterwards. Let's start with what I would guess are the three most famous paintings on the theme.
Hieronymus Bosch: Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1490-1510
Hieronymus Bosch: Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1490-1510
Two enormous ears, pierced by an arrow and cut by a knife, are prominent in the bizarre goings-on in Bosch's Hell. Interpretations of his symbols are speculative, but this contraption has been said to symbolise man's deafness to the New Testament exhortation: 'If any man have ears to listen, let him hear.' Sadly, Bosch's great triptych never leaves Madrid.
Johannes Vermeer: Girl with a Pearl Earring, c. 1665
Not many paintings have inspired a best-selling novel... I suspect it's the way the pearl earring echoes the eyes which makes this the most subtly erotic painting, a well as the most famous, to draw attention to the auricular zone.
Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, 1889
The outcome of the most notorious ear incident isn't far way - the Courtauld owns this painting - but arranging a loan might have been awkward... The latest research concludes that Vincent cut off the whole ear, so giving an automatic art reference to the various more recent sculptural treatments of an ear.
Kelvin Okafor: Identity Series - Ear, 2014
Kelvin Okafor is known for his stunningly achieved graphite and charcoal portrait drawings of his friends, such as the exhibition's Katherine's Interlude. Here though is a self-portrait which, paradoxically, shows only his ear, posing the question: how many people could you recognise from such a view?
The outcome of the most notorious ear incident isn't far way - the Courtauld owns this painting - but arranging a loan might have been awkward... The latest research concludes that Vincent cut off the whole ear, so giving an automatic art reference to the various more recent sculptural treatments of an ear.
Elmgreen and Dragset: Van
Gogh’s Ear, 2016, as installed at the Rockefeller Centre in New York
A readymade, if you like, a garden pool complete with ladder
and diving board, transplanted to a busy pedestrian plaza and stood upright.
The private was made surreally public and the
title adds a macabre touch: ‘like the myth of Van Gogh cutting off his ear in
despair’, said Elmgreen & Dragset, ‘the dislocated pool will hopefully make
people wonder ‘why?’’
Kelvin Okafor: Identity Series - Ear, 2014
Kelvin Okafor is known for his stunningly achieved graphite and charcoal portrait drawings of his friends, such as the exhibition's Katherine's Interlude. Here though is a self-portrait which, paradoxically, shows only his ear, posing the question: how many people could you recognise from such a view?
Vincent van Gogh: Ears of Wheat, 1890
There are actually two strands to van Gogh's ear works, as he painted wheat fields consistently during 1885-90: drawn to biblical parables, his empathy with manual labourers and colour in nature: 'Are we not ourselves very much like wheat... to be reaped when we are ripe?', he asked. This, from his late Auvers-sur-Oise months, is one of his most 'all-over' compositions.
Emmanuel Sougez: Three Ears of Wheat, 1929/30
While we're on cereal, Emmanuel Sougez (1899-1972) was a French photographer known for an intense metaphysical focus on still life objects, as in this monumental, almost architectural, gelatin print of three partial ears of wheat.
Meret Oppenheim: Giacometti's Ear, 1935
Oppenheim befriended Giacometti when she arrived in Paris in 1932, and may be referring to his use of cast body parts in the elegant construction of this ear from other elements. Comparison with photographs of Giacometti suggests, however, that is a far from accurate portrait in terms of his ear-shape, rather normalising the sculptor's own elongated form.
Salvador Dalí: Madonna, 1958
This is an unusual twist on Dalí's paranoiac-critical method of 'systematising confusion' by ambiguating images 'to descredit the world of reality'. For it is a dot abstract up close (which Dalí saw as molecular activity), as well as being both the Virgin Mary and an ear (the Pope's and the one cut from the high priest's servant during Jesus' arrest, in another doubling).
Guillaume Leblon: Portrait, 2016
I can't vouch for the accuracy of French artist Guillaume Leblon's portrait of his young son through the synecdoche of his ear, but I'd be surprised is such a tender portrayal were not accurate in its opaline rose glass. It gives rise to the thought: how many other parts could one use similarly without it looking rather more disturbing than affecting?
Francis Upritchard: from Wetwang Slack, 2018
Francis Upritchard's archeologically-styled installation at the Barbican's Curve Gallery (Wetwang is a a chariot burial site in Yorkshire) included a whole cabinet of ears appearing somewhat untimely ripped, complete with their decoration.
Francis Upritchard: from Wetwang Slack, 2018
Francis Upritchard's archeologically-styled installation at the Barbican's Curve Gallery (Wetwang is a a chariot burial site in Yorkshire) included a whole cabinet of ears appearing somewhat untimely ripped, complete with their decoration.
Typical of the American artist’s concentration on lone black
women: here she dreams – one might presume – of the sea as she sleeps in sumptuously-coloured
bed linen, built up on a black ground to maximise depth.
David Shepherd: Wise Old Elephant - unlimited print from his 1962 painting
This was the world's best-selling print in the 1960's, launching David Shepherd's career as a wildlife artist and conservationist. His commercial success was built on two failures: when, on leaving school, he travelled to Kenya hoping to become a game warden; and when he was rejected by the Slade on his return to England. Critical acclaim has eluded him, too, but few paintings have such a high proportion of ear.
Joyce Pensato: On the Way, 2008
Mickey Mouse probably has the most famous ears in popular culture, and many artists have used him. Joyce Pensato deconstructs pop art's cartoon icons by crossing them rather brutally with Abstract Expressionism. The battered energy of her charcoal and pastel here leads to a typical balance of humour and grotesquery.
David Altmejd: The Vector, 2022
It isn’t surprising to learn that the hare ears on this human have to be transported separately. Altmejd has adopted the hare as a presiding spirit, seeing it as the Jungian archetype of the Trickster. This yogic hare-man has started to dig a burrow out of what he’s made from as some sort of material-to-spiritual transformation seems presaged.
Gerhard Richter: Gilbert & George, 1975
Curious ear holding features here, from a sequence of portraits of G&G - Richter admires them - which combine multiple photo images to play identity against alienation. Richter didn't pursue the approach further, so this remains unusual in his oeuvre.
Morgan Wills: Listeners, 2019
Morgan Wills: Listeners, 2019
Given the
date, this suggests the anxieties associated with social media rather than Cold
War spying. Either way, the many ears suggest an uncomfortable degree of
surveillance.
Rachel Maclean: still from Germs, 2013
The ears are often striking parts of Rachel Maclean's many ways of dressing herself up to appear as the only actor in her super-saturated worlds. As a germ, appearing in parody adverts for killing them, does she have five hands, three of them oddly placed - or three hand-like ears, only one curiously located?
Cornel Brudaşcu: Composition with two figures hand and ear, 2021
Tai Shan Schierenberg: Tipping Point, 2019
Markus Vater: Ear, 2020
'I have always been interested in holes', says Markus Vater. 'The ear
is a wonderful hole. I like painting ears. It is somewhat strange, as paintings
themselves are quiet...'
Jonathan Baldock's witty ceramics push pareidolia to the limit as they merge masks with emojis. Only a minority feature ears, but here they take centre stage...
Suzanne Dworsky: Sea Breeze, 1978
This is from the American photographer's a set of close-cropped images of Cape Cod. What's nice here is the intimacy of focus, enhanced by the rainbow heart, and the implications teed up by the title: of action - through the blown hair - and sound: breeze, breath, waves.
Rachel Maclean: still from Germs, 2013
The ears are often striking parts of Rachel Maclean's many ways of dressing herself up to appear as the only actor in her super-saturated worlds. As a germ, appearing in parody adverts for killing them, does she have five hands, three of them oddly placed - or three hand-like ears, only one curiously located?
Cornel Brudaşcu (b.1937), one of the mentors of the ‘Cluj School’ group of younger figurative painters, has a way of using free-floating body parts to produce – at least initially - a more natural, less surreal or disturbing effect than one might expect. Yet I wonder…
Dale Adcock: her slag heap form, 2022
Looks like ants are fetching the sounds from this dream / nightmare ear. As for the title, Adcock chooses them at random from a list of phrases that appeal to him, so nothing auricular should be expected!
Tai Shan Schierenberg: Tipping Point, 2019
Painting big enough (this is 1.8m wide) to highlight the abstract aspects of his sculptural portraits, Tai Shan Schierenberg sets up the potential for a violent confrontation which looks set to be a clash of ears as much as fists.
Juul Kraijer, Untitled, 2006
A bronze sporting not earrings but earringlets to make up a surprisingly plausible and appropriately classical-looking style.
Jesse Stecklow: Cornspearacy, 2022.
Jesse Stecklow frequently employs the
ear as a symbol for information collection, and corn, setting up the link
to ‘ears of corn’. Here, two ear prints are affixed to glass cylinders, each
containing a readymade corn bottle filled with high fructose corn syrup.
Wendy Mayer: Teapot with Ears, 2019
Wendy Mayer's ceramic is a rare case of ears which cannot hear and yet are useful. Obviously the handle is a plausible visual pun, but the spout also reads that way to me - suggesting the ear's canal externalised.
Markus Vater: Ear, 2020
Jonathan Baldock: from the series Maske, 2020
Euan Uglow: Marigold, 1969
Typically, this night painting reaches what Lawrence Gowing termed Uglow's ‘subversive traditionalism’ by forcing close examination through the process of measurement. Unlike any other Uglow work, though, Marigold features a black model - and centres on her ear.
Suzanne Dworsky: Sea Breeze, 1978
This is from the American photographer's a set of close-cropped images of Cape Cod. What's nice here is the intimacy of focus, enhanced by the rainbow heart, and the implications teed up by the title: of action - through the blown hair - and sound: breeze, breath, waves.
Clive Hodgson: Untitled, 2014
Only in the context of the other works is this abstraction likely to appear auricular. Hodgson certainly had no such intention, but its typically prominent signature (calling knowing attention to its making) might then make it a self-portrait of sorts, so I relate it to van Gogh, whereas the following has more of a Vermeer connection...
Jonathan Monk: Pierced Portraits (#22) (Woman with gold earring), 2004
In typically mischievous style, Monk has simply pushed a red drawing pin into a series of found vintage drawings of women, a violent subversion referencing Fontana, playing with the differing realities of image and object, and suggesting some sort of rebellious intent to this mid-20th century subject's earwear. Or is it just that the drawing is sold?
Zulu Ear Plugs
Traditionally, an ear piercing ceremony – and subsequent
training of the lobe to take bigger plugs - was a gender inclusive rite of
passage and was universally applied throughout Zululand since a person whose
ears were not pierced was said to remain foolish and childish and good for
nothing. The design of such plugs peaked in the 1940’s-50’s, when they were
made from colourful Marley floor tiles sliced into small segments, with each
piece then painstakingly pinned to the sides of the wooden plug.
John Deakin: Francis Bacon, 1960
Bacon commissioned his drinking partner Deakin to take photographs he then used as source material, including many of George Dyer - the three of them even holidayed together. He was drawn to the double exposures Deakin sometimes made, and fed some of those effects into paintings.
Kyle Barnes: Reflection, 2022
This is actually oil on canvas painted from a photograph of a model
covered in liquid: ‘the subject appears to be reborn’, according to Albemarle
Gallery, though less empowered readings are surely possible. But it does
emphasise the ear in an interesting way.
Milton Avery: Self-Portrait, 1941
An ear-prominence prize for this self-depiction by Milton Avery (1885-1965). He did have big ears, but they certainly don't leap out in quite this way in the typical photograph. Are they burning with something being said about him elsewhere?
Shona Heath: EYE
EAR YOU, 2022 - photo Tim Gutt
This collaboration with MIMBRE acrobats on the streets of Hackney surely wins the 'Best Ear Costume' prize. It was conceived by leading set designer Shona Heath. Ruby Gaskell – who says she is fond of ‘bendy shit’ – is performing within. Eye, Nose and Mouth were just as
good, but less relevant here…
Georgia O'Keeffe: Red Hill And White Shell, 1938
Not so much a word in your shell-like as a suggestion that the landscape might be listening to us, just as we should listen to it. That aside, one of O'Keeffe's best meldings of geometry and colour in the guise of representations in which the body never seems far away.
Alex Dordoy:
Sleepwalker, 2015
Sticking with shells, this super-delicate application of
acrylic and watercolour to a slipper oyster suggests fragile record of night
movement, playing on the closeness of the ear to the site of dream formation –
and consistent with Dordoy’s wider infection of apparent abstraction with
natural forms and narratives.
And staying with the ear's listening function, hear the pinkness of the bell suggests an analogy between clapper and anvil, while the floating through the air is a famous feature of rock in some of Magritte's work, takes on the logic of the medium of sound.
Karen Kilimnik: Alectrona, goddess of the sun + beach - yellow marble statue, Versailles with Princess Caroline bows, 1987 and Giant earring, 1987-2018
The Magritte was one kind of giant - and punny - ear-ring. Here's another: Karen Kilimnik's pastel drawing has a velvet bow and rhinestone earring attached, then reprised in combined sculptural form in Velvet, foam, hand-blown glass and steel at a height of 130cm. Fantasy and reality are somehow out of kilter.
Srijon Chowdhury: Ear
(Good), 2022
This ear by the Oregon-based Bangladesh-born artist is over three metres high, and the somewhat Blakean goings-on within are taken from his own previous work, retrospectively re-sensed in a series which includes equally monumental eyes.
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This - rather more beautiful than the average ear
photograph - is from the Finnish photographer’s ‘Healing’ series which he sees
as ‘investigating
our need for spirituality and redefinition of society and humanity as a result
of that’. In which context it does suggest some sound beyond the ordinary is
reaching the listener.
Wendy Saunders: Untitled (Head in Four Colours), 2018
Wendy Saunders' head is sufficiently close to abstraction that the pink add-on could be a displaced mouth or rotated eye in the spirit of Picasso, but an ear is the most likely reading. The fourth colour is a red stripe on the side not visible here... Unfortunately one of the last works she made before her untimely death in 2019.
Veronika
Pausova: Playing the Organs, 2021
Czech born Toronto-based Veronika Pausova uses various isolated body parts – based here on her own ears – to create semi-abstract spaces where the interchange between the physical and cognitive plays out.
Colin Crumplin: Ear (Evander Holyfield), 2000
This references perhaps the second most famous ear wound in sporting history - Mike Tyson taking a chunk out of Evander Holyfield's ear in 1997. It also illustrates Crumplin's unique process of matching a semi-randomly generated abstraction with a found image which he then paints in realistic manner - it often takes him years to find a match, so this was pretty quick.
Asger Carlsen: Black Digital, 2015
New York based Asger Carlsen digitally distorts and collages his original photographic material, which he presents as large black and
white prints. If this looks like a lump of clay, it's human clay merged it's surroundings, a self-portrait in which Carlsen's nose and a oddly central ear merge with architectural features from his home.
Nancy Fouts in performative mode, all ears at Chelsea School of Art, circa 1970. Fouts (1945-2019) made her name in advertising in the late sixties before returning to the gallery scene this century.
Nancy Fouts in performative mode, all ears at Chelsea School of Art, circa 1970. Fouts (1945-2019) made her name in advertising in the late sixties before returning to the gallery scene this century.
Nickey Deeley: Petal Ear Horns for deep listening, 2021
Carrying on the performative mode, New Zealand based Nickey Deeley extends her powers consistent with her declared preference for 'rural psychedelia'. Maybe they could also act as Dumbo-style wings...
Rosie Gibbens is another performance artist, known for misinterpreting and exaggerating body parts. This, though, is her ear-relevant 2021 advert for a list of recommended podcasts to wile away the locked down time of the covid pandemic.
Oli Epp: ‘Blue Notes (Ellsworth’s Muse)’ 2023
It’s typical of Oli Epp to replace ears with pods, as if technology has taken over and also suggesting a sound track we are left to imagine. Mouths tend to get most of the attention, as he also hides the eyes of his exactingly slick portraits of post-digital characters.
Bruce Nauman: Westermann's Ear, 1968
Bruce Nauman cast the ear of the artist HC Westermann, then surrounded the greenish plaster with a rope which both echoes the loops of the ear and can be read as the completion of a head to make a portrait which might well characterise his friend as a good listener.
Pourea Alimirzaee: ‘Pech Pech’, 2022
This ear-pecking watercolour, says the Iranian painter, recalls him
coming across a figure in Ghana walking outside with a bird peacefully resting
on the shoulder. Alimirzaee likened the bird to a second consciousness
‘sitting on your shoulder and repeating in your ear, how to be, to think, to
behave.’
Karel Appel: ‘Mouse on a Table’ 1971
Karel Appel gives sculptural form to a typical
character from what one might call the CoBrA–pop of his 1970’s work. This ‘object-painting’
is lively from the front, but I prefer the rear view, in which the eyes in the
back of the mouse’s head appear in its ears, which probably do act in much that
capacity.
Lee Simmonds: 'Untitled (snails)', 2023
The shell-as-ear trope is particularly convincing in this painting. Simmons applies abstract colour as a randomised base and works on that until something figurative emerges – here the underlying green playing an evident role from forest to shell to water.
Alexander Calder: ‘The Whirling Ear’, 1958
This was installed in the middle of Brussels in 2000, where
it carries on turning slowly – one revolution per minute – as if listening to
the hub of the city. That makes it one of the most mobile of Calder’s stabiles,
or one of the most stable of his mobiles, I’m not sure which.
Fernand Teyssier (1937-88)
is an interesting figure in the little-remembered new figuration in France in
the 60’s-70’s. Some sort of chain of logic operates here: saws have
teeth, connecting them to mouths, and ears listen to mouths. Before you know
where you are, you’ve sawn off an ear…
Justin Fitzpatrick: 'A Whisper in the Cloister', 2019
Whereby whatever was said quietly - seems to be causing agitation by getting louder. Could it have been a rumour of scandalous behaviour, consistent with previous work by Fitzpatrick's which has revisited Aquinas' views on sexual sin?
Votive
offerings were presented to a god, either in the hope of a cure or as thanks
for one. They were made in the shape of the afflicted body part – in this case
a person’s ear.
Hannah Beerman: Handlebars, 2022
Hard not to read these handles as ears, the more so when Magdalena Blazinska, looking with me at this cute combination work at Claas Reiss gallery, mentioned that the same word serves for 'ear' and 'handle' in Polish.
Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: Les rumeurs de New York, 2010
Ivorian artist Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (c. 1923 – 2014) made many serialised drawings on cardstock, one set of which is multi-eared invocations of rumours from around the world. I saw this one in situ and in Trump's Stormy Daniels time...
Tony Cragg: We, 2016
This is a somewhat atypical Tony Cragg, given he's known for suggesting the face only on careful examination of his 'Rational Beings' series. It's very much the royal we of self-portraits, with 250-odd cragg-heads built into a giant cone-head. It may well have more ears than any other sculpture. So much listening power put me in mind of...
Nedko Solakov: Ears, 2016
Nedko Solakov tells stories which may or may not be literally true, though he has said that he didn't invent his youthful involvement with the Bulgarian Secret Service. That inspired his Top Secret installation made just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which gained attention at Documenta 12 in 2007, and lies behind this combination of aluminium casts and text as we approach Documenta 14.
Pat Steir: Self-Portrait, 1987 onwards
Returning to the multi-ear, Pat Steir, best known for her waterfall paintings, has reprised her 1987 self-portrait drawings on several occasions: she has a team - to depersonalise the self-portrait form - draw ears and eyes in black pastel 'as if the walls of the room were inside of the skin of a person', linking this to Buddhist notions of the self.
Juusepe de Ribera: Studies of Two Ears and of a Bat, late 16th century
This study in red chalk and wash suggests the connection between ears and bats which 'Ears for the Eyes' explores in full. It includes the motto FULGET SEMPER VIRTUS - Virtue Shines Forever - which makes for a trickier connection to pin down...
Pat Steir: Self-Portrait, 1987 onwards
Returning to the multi-ear, Pat Steir, best known for her waterfall paintings, has reprised her 1987 self-portrait drawings on several occasions: she has a team - to depersonalise the self-portrait form - draw ears and eyes in black pastel 'as if the walls of the room were inside of the skin of a person', linking this to Buddhist notions of the self.
Juusepe de Ribera: Studies of Two Ears and of a Bat, late 16th century
This study in red chalk and wash suggests the connection between ears and bats which 'Ears for the Eyes' explores in full. It includes the motto FULGET SEMPER VIRTUS - Virtue Shines Forever - which makes for a trickier connection to pin down...
Femmy Otten: The discomfort of rationality, 2016
Dutch artist Femmy Otten mixes mythologies and eras liberally, and there's something of Gaugin's sculpture in this oil on burl wood face-of-sorts. The theme of ear inversion recurs: has the mind gone beyond normal physiognomy as well as its awkward rationality to reach a transcendental space of dream colour?
Eva Kotátková: image from Anatomical Orchestra, 2014
The Czech Eva Kotátková explores how conditions constrain the individual. She says the installation and performances of Anatomical Orchestra explore 'an ill or disabled body, one whose senses are not functioning, as a result of which the body becomes a partially empty shell not able to fully use its potential, or one missing sense becomes replaced by another that’s far more sensitive and developed' - as when a blind man develops enhanced hearing.
Aideen Barry: from Self-Portrait, 2021
Barry's lockdown-inspired Self Portrait suggests the distancing architecture of Zoom by dividing her self across a nine channel moving image installation with nine channel sound by Stephen Shannon presented on nine identical wall mounted monitors. Here's the ear.
Georgina Starr: still from Quarantaine, 2019
This is from a film in which ‘two young women, who start out as strangers but soon become
friends, follow each other down a metaphorical rabbit hole into a mysterious
parallel universe’. Looks more like a metaphorical earhole here…
It wasn’t obvious how this related to Mendick's Goldsmiths installation about love and gothic horror, unless it's just that a dandelion-stuffed ear
has its own mad lack of logic, but I liked it anyway.
Can you call it a pun, to find a letter in something? Of course, G is also for Gear, which may be a background pun you can just about H is for Hear...
Peter Liversidge: Proposal for Kate McGarry, 2017
Peter Liversidge works from written proposals which set out his intentions for a show: for Kate McGarry he opted to make work inspired by pareidolia - our tendency to read images into abstraction. One wall of many photographs parodies that somewhat, as mouth and eyes are blatantly imposed rather than found - indeed, one pair of eyes reads as ears.. .
John Baldesarri: Beethoven's Trumpet (With Ear) Opus # 133, 2007
This stick-your-head-in sculpture was inspired by Beethoven's own collection of ear trumpets, and is silent until the viewer speaks into it - then a random section from a late Beethoven quartet is heard. It's as if a communicative link has been made, yet if this is the composer's deaf ear, then the surreal absurdity extends from how it looks to what it does...
Ed Paschke: ‘La Chanteuse’, 1981
In this typical work of the Chicago imagist, his
colour-heightened version of a projected image from a vast collection of
clippings gives us a couple who seem affected by TV static. The man is primarily
defined by his listening ear, while our view of the singer focuses just as
logically on her mouth…
John Baldessari: Ear Sofa; Nose Sconces with Flowers (in Stage Setting) at Art Basel, 2017
Baldessari gets a double appearance, consistent with his frequent isolation of unglorified body parts within his wider project of investigating the power of context in shaping meaning. Here, I guess, he is also listening to Dali's lips sofa.
Nicolás
Guagnini: Hard of Hearing, 2013
Deleuze –
see EJ Major for more on him – developed the concept of the body without organs
to represent depth over surface. Argentinian Nicolás Guagnini prefers organs
without bodies: heaps of ceramic penises, noses and ears. This installation of ‘Heads’
and ‘Hard of Hearing’ at the Lars Friedrich Gallery in Berlin gives the
impression that all might have been stolen from ancient statues, consistent
with Guagnini’s general appetite for cultural plunder.
Dorothy Cross: Red Baby, 2021
A pillow is carved from a block of Damascus Rose marble, based on Cross’s own childhood pillow and with an ear nestling at the centre where a head would leave an impression. The geological veins, in the Frith Street Gallery's words ‘run towards the ear presenting what seems like a pulsating body of stone’.
Susan Rothenberg: Mouth to Ear, 2001
Rothenberg may be best known for her horses, but bodily fragments frequently feature in her range of archetypes. The effect here is to reduce the act of listening, somewhat disturbingly, to its essence.
Penelope
Slinger, I Hear What You Say, 1973 - photographic collage on card, 24 x 19 cm
Penelope Slinger’s anarcho-feminist collages from
the 1970’s fell out of view in Britain for 40 years after she emigrated to the
US in 1979, but – championed by Riflemaker - have recently featured in several
shows. This striking self-portrait
is from the series ‘Eat My Words’ (1971-77), which also features eye in mouth
and mouth in mouth combinations but not, I think, any attempt on ‘eye in ear’.
I felt ears of this quality should be included here, though why they should belong to a notably serene, bare-breasted Mary Magdalene is unclear.
Jana Euler: " " , 2016
German painter Jana Euler has a way with compellingly experiential body images. Here, in one of a coruscating series of paintings on the theme of the absent centre (and with an absent centre of a title for each in the set) , she collapses a body around a void which pivots on the ears.
David Altmejd: Small Loop with Focus, 2017
The Canadian's 2018 show with Modern Art consisted of white plaster-like reliefs enacting transformation and creation, often with hands making the work of which they were part. Here, though, what look like the conversion of man to floppy-eared dog seems to end up being heard rather than molded.
David Salle: Tennyson, 1983
Over to Salle himself: 'The red shapes at the painting’s left and right edges, like a band encircling the painting from behind, an embrace. Who is Tennyson, and what is he doing here in the sand? The carved ear - what is it listening to? The picture is quiet; a painting tuned to its own frequency'.
Aly Helyer: The Forbidden Ear, 2017
Aly Helyer's distorted and oddly-coloured apparent portraits draw us in to doubts about whether we can pin down a unified self - and in this case an ear seems to arrive from some other place - illegitimately, judged by the title - to complement the Picassoesque line-up of the eyes.
Jonathan Baldock's installation at CGP's Dilston Grove project space tweaked the formative psychodramas of childhood. It included a version of the candles his grandmother used to make, big enough that you almost lose the delicately waxed ears, which are at full human size (indeed Baldock told me he sought out especially large and prominent ears to cast).
This typical Tillmans, perhaps the simplest image in my selection, scores for the casually intimate portrayal of the slightly downy aspect which hints at the ear's nibblability - if that's a word...
(found by) Mauro Bonachina: Untitled, 2018
This move into further intimacy is one of the many striking images, one per day, sourced and posted by the artist Mauro Bonachina on his Instagram account. And each connects up cunningly to the next in a chain of wit...
Mariechen Danz: Lungs, 2018
Berlin-based Irish artist Mariechen Danz's practice centres on performative explorations of how the body is represented in different cultures, epochs, and fields of knowledge. These glass lungs are made at a scale to reinforce their resemblance to ears to suggest the whole body's involvement in our perceptions.
Louise Bourgeois: Rejection , 2001
Louise Bourgeois made
sculptures of ears, sure. But she also made heads in which the absence of ears
acts as an autobiographical reference to not being heard. From the great series of fabric heads she made in her made in her 80's - 90's.
Jana Euler: " " , 2016
German painter Jana Euler has a way with compellingly experiential body images. Here, in one of a coruscating series of paintings on the theme of the absent centre (and with an absent centre of a title for each in the set) , she collapses a body around a void which pivots on the ears.
David Altmejd: Small Loop with Focus, 2017
The Canadian's 2018 show with Modern Art consisted of white plaster-like reliefs enacting transformation and creation, often with hands making the work of which they were part. Here, though, what look like the conversion of man to floppy-eared dog seems to end up being heard rather than molded.
David Salle: Tennyson, 1983
Over to Salle himself: 'The red shapes at the painting’s left and right edges, like a band encircling the painting from behind, an embrace. Who is Tennyson, and what is he doing here in the sand? The carved ear - what is it listening to? The picture is quiet; a painting tuned to its own frequency'.
Aly Helyer's distorted and oddly-coloured apparent portraits draw us in to doubts about whether we can pin down a unified self - and in this case an ear seems to arrive from some other place - illegitimately, judged by the title - to complement the Picassoesque line-up of the eyes.
Prunella Clough: Ears, c. 1990
Prunella Clough was good at converting apparent abstraction into simplified figuration by means of a title. Could this shapely scenario, here with more subtly blue-tinged lobes than Helyer gave us, alternatively have been titled 'tree'? As it is, my question is: one person or an ear each from two?
Jonathan Baldock: Candle from 'There's No Place Like Home', 2017
Jonathan Baldock's installation at CGP's Dilston Grove project space tweaked the formative psychodramas of childhood. It included a version of the candles his grandmother used to make, big enough that you almost lose the delicately waxed ears, which are at full human size (indeed Baldock told me he sought out especially large and prominent ears to cast).
Wolfgang Tillmans: Outer Ear, 2012
This typical Tillmans, perhaps the simplest image in my selection, scores for the casually intimate portrayal of the slightly downy aspect which hints at the ear's nibblability - if that's a word...
(found by) Mauro Bonachina: Untitled, 2018
This move into further intimacy is one of the many striking images, one per day, sourced and posted by the artist Mauro Bonachina on his Instagram account. And each connects up cunningly to the next in a chain of wit...
Richard Deacon: Tall Tree in the Ear, 1984
This two part sculpture isn't so much tree and ear as, according to Deacon, a title which fits the work as 'the shiny metal could be aerial and the blue could be sky or water, and the shape could be an ear or whatever, and the height is the height of the tree'. But it was 'the difference between the inside and the outside as the material gathers on the inside' that he thought was the interesting bit - which does suggest how what we hear isn't simply what arrives.
Ad Minoliti: The Ears, 2018
Argentine artist Ad Minoliti often lays geometric shape over human imagery to alter its context. This reverses that rather, putting ears over an abstract painting which could also be a room. There's typically a sub-text of queering traditions, though I'm not sure how that operates here...
Ad Minoliti: The Ears, 2018
Argentine artist Ad Minoliti often lays geometric shape over human imagery to alter its context. This reverses that rather, putting ears over an abstract painting which could also be a room. There's typically a sub-text of queering traditions, though I'm not sure how that operates here...
Woody De Othello: Great Soul, 2023
Even given this figure has three legs, that's a lot of ears. If, that is, it is a figure - De Othello's surreal japes are domestically inspired, and that could be a multi-handled vase on a stand rather than a humanoid.
Olafur Eliasson: cover design for Peggy
Gou’s album ‘I Hear You’,
Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson is a close friend of the Korean house DJ and producer Peggy Gou: he directed - and dances in - the video for her single '1+1=11', as well as designing the ‘ring of ears’ on the album artwork.
Pieter Hugo: Escort Kama, Enugu, Nigeria, 2008
This is from South African photographer Pieter Hugo's 'Nollywood' series, for which he asked a prolific director to help him work with actors from the world's third largest film industry - Nigeria makes 1,000 films a year. The scenes are staged melodramatically as myths in which everything is exaggerated - here including the ears - yet that could be just the documentation of a highly theatrical movie.
Roger Ballen: Dersie and Casie Twins , Western Transvaal,1993
Yet perhaps that wasn't such an exaggeration... It's hard not to focus on the ears in the most famous of Roger Ballen's images of rural white South African communities in the apartheid years, which focused on the failure of the regime to treat equitably even the whites who didn't fit the agenda of the privileged class. One was working inside, one outside when Ballen came across them, hence the contrast in shirts.
David Lynch: still from Blue Velvet, 1986
Cathy Lomax, who invited me to put together 'Ears for the Eyes', combines the worlds of film and painting, so it seems only fair to conclude with the most famous cinematic organ of hearing: Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) discovers a severed ear in Blue Velvet's opening scene, and it triggers a journey into the seedy underbelly behind suburban appearances. You never know where an ear will lead...
Ways of Seeing: Echolocation
Of all the
mammals, bats are probably still considered the most unpopular. Nevertheless, they
are also one of the most extraordinary and we are fortunate to have 18 species
in the UK.
Using a high frequency system called echolocation, bats are able
to see in the dark by using their ears. Echolocation works in a similar way
to sonar. Bats make calls as they fly and listen to the returning echoes that
bounce off objects or prey to build up a sonic map of their surroundings.
They emit sounds through an open mouth, at a frequency too high for adult
humans to hear, and use their ears as receivers. A bat can tell how far away
something is by how long it takes the sounds to return. Individual bat
species echolocate within specific frequency ranges that suit their
environment and prey types so we can distinguish different types of bat using
bat detectors. Most bats, including the well-known pipistrelle and long-eared species, operate in
the range 40-50 kHz, but British bats are spread from as low as 20 kHz for
the Noctule Nyctalus noctula to 110
kHz for the Lesser Horseshoe Rhinolophus
hipposideros.
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The volume of
calls also varies. The Brown Long-Eared bat Plecotus
auritus is our most distinctive species, medium-sized with very long ears. The
ears are nearly as long as the body but when at rest they curl their ears back
or tuck them away completely under their wings, leaving only the pointed inner
lobe of the ear (the tragus) visible. Sometimes called ‘whispering bats’, they have
developed a very quiet echolocation system, which is inaudible to moths and other
prey, but not to them, thanks to the evolution of their own enormous ears.
Alli Sharma
Images of Sound
Where is the ear?
One thing, it is rarely singular. Humans, like most animals, tend to have a pair. A set, in the case of humans, of strange appendages protruding more or less obviously from the head connected to inner canals which facilitate the transmission of vibration and sound signals to the brain, the organ of exchange.
When I hear what you hear do we imagine the same? If I shut my eyes and listen to the voice of John Pilger, I see Clive James. You? What separates what I hear from what I see? For Gilles Deleuze what is more interesting is their interrelationship and to impose a separation is to falsify experience. For a hearing person you might say. To some extent yes, but the deaf community also talk of an awareness of condensed inner speech. A voice that can be heard in the mind may not sound the same to all.
Gilles Deleuze calls sound signals, like visual signals, or any other stimuli for that matter, images. A more accurate description would be images of
sound as it suggests both matter and its memory in a constant state of becoming. This becoming-nature of things is the continuum of being. Deleuze’s conception stems from Bergson whose materialist philosophy collapses the typical dualities of Western thought, subject and object, body and brain, reality and the virtual, image and its perception. In place is a coexistence of tenses within an unfolding present, never static, never given and received in equal measure but giving and receiving together, all at once and at the same time.
Deleuze saw in cinema a means through which to envisage thought. Despite
perhaps the dark theatre, movement and time do not stop whilst a film plays,
though it may feel like they do. Cinema, far from being a closed set, simultaneously
implicates what lies outside. This movement implicit in the Whole breaks down
the separation between spectator/actor, real/imaginary, sound/vision,
fact/fiction. The brain is the organ of exchange with which we receive,
interpret and create simultaneously. The Whole becomes the Open where nothing
rests. Cinema, Deleuze suggested, is an externalization of the narrativization of life that we do with our eyes, ears and minds all the time.
I’m still wondering, where is the ear?
EJ Major
Beautiful Ears
The peculiar looking openings on the sides of our head are
not obviously attractive and exactly what constitutes a beautiful ear is not as
easy to define as an eye, mouth or nose. The main aesthetic ear worry is that
they are too large, oddly shaped or protruding, and surgery (referred to as
otoplasty or pinnaplasty) to ‘correct’ the position of ears is one of the most
commonly performed cosmetic procedures. The tradition, it seems, is for ears to
be discreet. Sometimes as Madge Garland in her book The Changing Face of Beauty points out, women’s ears vanish for a
century at a time, hidden by curtains of hair in the Victorian era or under
coifs and hoods during the Tudor era.
When ears are on show their primary beauty function is as
a receptacle for jewellery, which is usually attached by piercing the ear, one
of the oldest known forms of body modification. Faces are
our identity and an earring, as the piece of jewellery that sits closest to our
face, can be seen as a kind of frame. In the grand tradition of nonsensical
beauty advice, theories about which earrings you should wear abound. The
website jewellerypassion.net states that
• Long
earrings optically elongate the face and neck. They are suitable for women with
round faces and short necks.
• Earrings
with geometric shapes sharpen the features. If your features are angular, you
can soften them by wearing round or oval earrings.
• If
your face is long, small round earrings are the ones for you, while ladies with
the square face type should go for long, dangling earrings.
• Large
earrings are great for faces with small features. Massive ones should be worn
without a necklace.
•
Brunettes can bravely wear earrings with
brightly coloured gems, while blondes should stick to the light-coloured ones.
•
Young girls can wear earrings of any material,
while mature ladies should only wear jewels fashioned out of precious metals
and stones.
Luckily most people take no notice of such unscientific rules,
a position exemplified by Elizabeth Taylor, who had what could justifiably be called
a jewellery addiction. Taylor’s earrings, which came in all shapes and sizes
and were often made from the most precious materials, really do seem to
accentuate her classical looks and beautifully coloured eyes. ‘I’ve always
loved dangling earrings’, she recounts in the book Elizabeth Taylor: My Love Affair with Jewellery, ‘I wanted a pair
of what I call chandelier earrings… I tried on these long earrings and the more
I swished my head back and forth, the more they twinkled… I was smitten…. And
these were paste – not even real diamonds.’ A couple of months later back in
New York, Liz looked for her earrings. She eventually found them but, she told
her then husband Mike Todd, they felt different. ‘He chuckled and told me he
had taken the paste ones and had them made up with real diamonds.’ Thus the
Mike Todd diamond ear pendants were born.
Image
of Liz with earrings
In the endless search for
newness, where everything has been done to eyes, cheeks and lips, the humble
ear has taken on a new role in the world of high fashion. At the 2014 Paris
Fashion Week ear makeup became a micro trend. ‘Designer Anthony Vaccarello sent
his models down the runway with graphic, inky lobes... Makeup artist Tom
Pecheux was going for a quasi jewellery look. Kind of like a second-skin ear
cuff’, wrote Lauren Valenti at marieclaire.com. Pecheux’s black lobes were influenced by Douglas Gordon’s photograph series Three Inches
Black, which shows a finger tattooed entirely in black as though it has
been dipped in ink. To create his graphic black ear look Pecheux coloured in
the bottom half of the models' earlobes with a liquid liner pen. Then reported
Sophia Panych at allure.com, ‘to make it look more luxurious and less aggressive,
he covered the liner in a chunky, iridescent black glitter.’ Pecheux’s ground breaking lobes made
the ear a legitimate site for makeup and in Spring 2016 superstar makeup artist
Pat McGrath created a silver statement ear for Louis Vuitton, while at Opening
Ceremony Yadim applied full glitter ears to her models.
Image
of Black ear makeup
So far so ornate but away from the exaggerated
other-worldly looks of the high fashion catwalk the ear has also featured in
the ridiculous world of reality star self-obsession where the make-up ideal is
less Leigh Bowery and more perfect CGI mask. In early 2016 it was reported that
Kylie liked to apply makeup to her ears. Contouring, for the uninitiated, is a
makeup technique that has become something of a Kardashian trademark. It is
akin to painting and involves applying different coloured products to the face
to emphasise shadows and highlights. Kylie later revealed that she didn’t actually
contour her ears, rather her makeup artist applied foundation to them so they
matched her face rather than the red carpet.
Image
of Kylie Jenner’s ear
This is where makeup application drifts from artistry to
pointless self-obsession. In February
2016 the Daily Mail reported on two models experimenting with contouring each
other’s ears. Charlie Lankston described the results: ‘I just went with trying
to emphasise the existing shadows, in the same way that I would do when
contouring my face. However, while the results were visible - upon very close
inspection - both Lindsey and I surmised that the entire process of actually
applying the make-up to the ear took a lot more effort than either of us would
care to take on a normal everyday basis.’
Cathy Lomax
Emma Cousin reading at the opening