ART STUFF ON A TRAIN 21-30

ART STUFF on a train # 30: ‘Late Light in Venice’


November 26, 2013

Bill Culbert at New Zealand 

Perhaps I should have gone to the Venice Biennale’s opening week, but I went instead during the last few days in late November. True, quite a bit has closed by then, but there’s still more than enough art to fill a long weekend – and you can look back at what the critics decided, and disagree. Two of my favourites were little-noticed large scale transformative installations which related rather closely to each other. Both made the most of not being on the main sites – so they were harder to find, but integrated more fully with the city. The essence of Venice is water meets light meets history, so there’s a certain logic to featuring fluorescent tubes in 18th century palazzos overlooking canals. Long-underrated veteran Bill Culbert lit up the eight connected spaces of New Zealand’s Front Door Out Back. Cupboards, tables and wardrobes were energised by being literally pierced by light, and in one room opening on to a canal-side terrace, the light seemed to have washed in with the floating detritus to form an everyday epiphany – though one which could also be read as a city jostling too close to the water. Pedro Cabrita Reis wasn’t Portugal’s official artist, but that didn’t stop his ‘collateral event’ a remote whisper being a highlight. The atmosphere was quite different, blending the work into the space rather than bringing the world so explicitly in. Reis set up a sort of double intersection, as the outlines of alternative rooms made by light cut through the palazzo’s dividing walls; and the artificial light cut through the natural light streaming in at the windows. It’s a pity on this evidence that Dan Flavin never had a solo show at the Biennale…

Pedro Cabrita Reis

ART STUFF on a train # 29: ‘The Lights Staying Off”


November 19, 2013

 

Creed, Martin. Work No. 227: The lights going on and off 2000 – previous installation at the Tate

Tate Britain has just purchased and is reshowing Martin Creed’s Work No. 227: The lights going on and off. This might have felt familiar enough to pay deserve minimum attention, but for two factors. First, the room was closed off as the installation wasn’t working – or, should I say, only half of it was working – the ‘off’ half. Five seconds on, five seconds off: how hard can it be? Apparently there was more to it than a blown bulb: attendants explained that they’d been entertained by daily visits from electricians seeking to correct an overheating problem. Second, Tate has just paid around £100,000 for the work. What has it got for that? Not, I suppose, the right to turn their lights on and off, but the right to attribute doing so to Creed. That brings in the essence of his work: a poignant desire to avoid mistakes by avoiding decisions. A door won’t be open or closed, balloons will half-fill a space, a drawing will last till the ink runs dry. Maurizio Cattelan, in 2004, thought Work No. 227 ‘looked like a mood swing’ with its ‘ability to compress happiness and anxiety within one single gesture. Lights go on, lights go off – sunshine and rain, and then back to beginning to repeat endlessly.’ Is it worth the money? First I think so, then I think not.

Creed, Martin. Work No. 227: The lights going on and off, 2000

ART STUFF on a train # 28: ‘Obsessive? Me?’


November 12, 2013

 

Peter Dreher: ‘Every Day is a Good Day (#1329)’, detail – oil on Canvas, 25x20cm 

Plenty of artists do pretty much the same thing most days. Normally that’s just the making of art – Frank Auerbach is famous for going to the studio every day of every year. Sometimes the output is also obsessive, when it tends to be a way of recording and meditating on the passage of time: the two obvious examples are On Kawara’s ongoing litany of date paintings, and Roman Opulka’s spending much of 1965 to his death in 2011 painting the numbers from 1 – 5607249. Those projects both incorporate time’s passage: the calendar moves on, the numbers get bigger. Opulka also increased the proportion of white in each canvas, and had hoped to reach an all-white 7777777. The German Peter Dreher (born 1932) is different, even though he’s been painting the same empty glass tumbler in the same conditions on a near-daily basis since 1974. There are 5,000 so far, and a sample of 144 (along with other work) can be seen at the Milton Keynes Gallery to 24 November. His USP is more a strategy of non-development. The subject is just the impulse for the activity, which Dreher considers to be exercises in abstract mark-making, albeit they always turn out to depict his glass. Hence the Zen title for the whole series ‘Every Day is a Good Day’, and hence Dreher’s statement that he ‘wouldn’t be all that upset if they were to disappear.’ Turns out he isn’t obsessive at all.

Peter Dreher: from ‘Every Day is a Good Day’ 1974-2013

ART STUFF on a train # 27: ‘Look, No Canvas’


November 5, 2013 

 Jonathan Gabb: ‘reverse sequence: on black (purple, rose, orange, green, red, cyan, indigo, violet)’, 2013

What’s a painting? The obvious answer is paint on canvas, or maybe better some kind of liquid which dries onto some kind of ground. But it’s possible to make something best considered a painting without using any liquid: take DJ Simpson’s router in MDF works or Sergei Jensen’s carpet pieces. Else liquid may be used without a ground, as in Lynda Benglis’ poured latex painting/sculptures or Piers Secunda’s objects and wall-hung reliefs formed entirely from industrial paint: he even uses paint to make the bolts which hold them in place. Glenn Brown has made paint-sculptures which push Auerbach’s portraits all the way to 3D, as well as flat photo-realist depictions of their thick impasto.One could add Eduardo Costa, Analia Saban, Paul Desborough and Wang Yuyang. So there’s a definite tradition behind the practice of emerging artist Jonathan Gabb, currently showing (to 16th Nov, with an artist’s talk on this Thurs, 7th) at A Brooks Art on Hoxton Street, an attractively adventurous and characterful artist-run space which occupies a former Victorian florist’s. Gabb’s bright work suits that lineage, as does the show’s title, ‘Opera Rose’, which is actually a type of electric pink acrylic paint. Gabb applies paint to rigid plastic sheets, allows it to dry, then strips it off to form ribbons which he hangs to seize space with pure colour.

 
Jonathan Gabb: ‘pink angel capturing the light’, 2013


ART STUFF on a train # 26: ‘Sex and Excess’
October 29, 2013 
 
Allen Jones: Chair, 1969

How much is more than enough? Allen Jones’ still somewhat notorious invitation to sit on a woman (Chair, 1969) sold for close on £1m last year. The acrylic on fibreglass in leather piece is an edition of six, and hardly a rare sighting. Overload was surely reached during October, though: I’ve seen it at Tate Britain (to demonstrate, as part of ‘Art Under Attack’, how well it’s been restored after an acid assault), at the Barbican (a good fit for the mostly predictable ‘Pop Art Design’), in Christie’s first exhibition in the former Haunch of Venison space (‘When Britain Went Pop!’) and in Luxembourg & Dayan’s booth at Frieze Masters. In the latter two its almost-as-notorious siblings, Table and Hat Stand, accompanied Chair.They still get a strong reaction. I’m pretty sure it’s the sex, not the art, which generates that, though a case can be concocted for Jones’ trio as the pop art equivalent of Richard Artschwager’s sculptures which pretend to be furniture, their apparent female submissiveness offset by the way they invade the viewer’s space. There’s nothing wrong with sex, of course, but you need to go to British Museum’s magnificent Shunga show (to 5th Jan) to see a more even balance of effect between it and art.

Katsukawa Shuncho, 1780

 

ART STUFF on a train # 25: ‘When Photos are Paintings and Paintings are Photos’


October 22, 2013 
Raid, 2013 – Oil and varnish on acrylic sheet in Perspex box frame

Visitors to the Max Wigram gallery often assume that James White’s still lives from hotel rooms and the interiors of boats (to 9 Nov), are black and white photographs. There’s the exacting and somewhat forensic grey-scale reproduction of glass and mirrored surfaces; a snapshot casualness to the choice of items and their composition; and a run-off of white as if a contact sheet has been cropped. Some future show should contrast these works with White’s photographs, which – even though they originate from his archive of source material for the paintings – look more like paintings than the paintings made from them. This results from their unnaturalistic colour and dominant use of a stylised ‘lens flare’ after-effect, sometimes set against solarised backgrounds.
The paintings, it seems, edit out the obviously painterly effects which the photographs are printed to exaggerate. Back at the paintings, that said, closer examination does show the brushwork on the unusual material of Plexiglas; an objecthood more typical of paintings is emphasised by the double layer of birch board on which they are set in Perspex box frames; and that white band starts to feel more like a way of revealing the nature of the ground – or even, it being placed where a signature might be expected, a jocular way of signing the work ‘White’. And it’s in the back-and-forths – between painting and photograph, between throwaway and exacting, between pointlessness and point – that the interest of White’s work lies.
Abstract thoughts 22, 2013 – photograph


ART STUFF on a train # 24: ‘The Correct Use of Gum’


October 15, 2013 

Alex Hoda: Schliere (Streak), 2012, Michelangelo marble – 160 x 74 x 28 cm 

Alex Hoda’s show at Edel Assanti (to 26 Oct) features marble sculptures of chewing gum. That fuses two well-established tropes: blowing something small up big to make us look at it differently, which Claes Oldenburg was first to exploit systematically; and using precious material – and the labour of production – to elevate the worth of something casual or valueless, which, for example, Sue Collis does particularly subtly. Jeff Koons’ balloon dogs or Urs Fischer’s giant aluminium versions of squeezed lumps of clay offer combined approaches. What’s more, the art use of chewing gum is pretty-much a tradition of its own. Alina Szapocznikow’s 1971 series of ‘Photosculptures’ monumentalise pieces which she chewed. Adam McEwen has used wads on canvas to refer to the bombing of German cities in WWII, contrasting the understanding of gum-chewing child and gum-arranging man. Hannah Wilke dotted herself with vulval chewing gum 'wounds'. Dan Colen has made enough ‘paintings’ with gum that he has an established process: ‘I pay people to chew the gum. Students get 50 cents for each piece. Then we take the gum and make it dirty with street shit. I want it to be both elegant and real’. Which leaves us with the question: has Hoda taken established tropes in fresh directions, or is just an ersatz follower of others? The visceral impact of a five foot-tall gob of marble gum spat straight on the wall certainly feels like something new.

 
From Alina Szapocznikow’s 1971 series of ‘Photosculptures

ART STUFF on a train # 23: ‘One Thing on Top of Another’


October 8, 2013

Hannah Maybank: The Penultimate Visitation, 2009

Life: it’s just one thing on top of another. And some sense of that is captured in two shows – within 200 yards – which come at the imagistic equivalent from opposite directions. The first applies then strips away layers away to reveal what’s hidden; the second over-determines the layes then selects which ones to emphasise. A ten year retrospective at Gimpel Fils (to 11 Oct) reprises how Hannah Maybank covers her canvases with variously-coloured acrylic over latex, then peels them partially back to reveal landscapes in which the curl of the surface operates both sculpturally – as shadows, branches, leaves – and metaphorically: where else do you find the past, but hidden beneath the present? At Hamiltons (to 1 Nov), the Swedish photographer Jacob Felländer gives us fifteen views out of the same window in New York. That may sound unpromising, but these are big, multiple photographs made by the slowed winding of an analogue camera, and Felländer has added paint and charcoal to bring selected aspects of the negatives to the surface, rather as you might heighten the pentimento of first thoughts covered over yet still visible in a painting. If space can drift over time, Felländer had wondered, thinking of the movement of continents, then could he capture time drifting over space? That one thing on top of another can have its attractions.
 
Jacob Felländer: Pentimento Study #6 (detail view), 2013

ART STUFF on a plane # 22: ‘The Big Three in Amsterdam’

October 1, 2013

The photo urge and The Nightwatch

What exactly is gained by confronting great art in typical museum conditions? The usual hierarchy of fame applies at the Rijksmuseum, leading to a permanent ruckus around Rembrandt and Vermeer. Plenty want themselves photographed in front of The Nightwatch in the established manner of tourists concentrating on proving in future where they were in the past, rather than experiencing the present moment. More mysteriously, perhaps, many want their own straight photos of the work, which will be unfocused, ill-lit and partial up against what’s readily available on-line. The Mona Lisa, of course, tops the fame rankings, so you see it at such a distance behind its bullet-proof glass in the Louvre that it’s harder at first than at second hand to assess the plausibility of the theory that it’s a self-portrait in drag. Back in Amsterdam, most of the vast Rijksmuseum is stunning, but few bother, for example, with the Adriaan Coorte’s side-roomed set of meditations on particularised fruits: yet surely many would be drawn in – just as with Vermeer – to their peculiarly modern intensity. Maybe what’s sought isn’t the art, but a connection with its maker. What better, then, if you’re in Amsterdam, where – though he lived there for just one of his 37 years – van Gogh’s aura is taken to reside, than to see all the paintings in a 3D film sequence? You’re pretty much in the room with him, and no-one else will be standing in the way…

* Trip courtesy www.holland.com , www.artsholland.com and the Movenpick Hotel, Amsterdam


Poster advertising van Gogh in 3D

ART STUFF on a train # 21: ‘Pierdom’

September 24, 2013

Teignmouth Grand Pier, Devon, 2011

I do like a good typology. They have a fascination of their own, whether they’re art or not. Plenty have looked to be art as well since the prime example of the Bechers, who brought a rigorously consistent formality to their black and white shots of industrial structures: consistent angles, slightly overcast conditions, no human traces, taken from a ladder or platform. Yet there’s an alternative, seen in Simon Roberts’ just-published book Pierdom (and linked exhibition at the Flowers Gallery to 12th October) showing all 58 British seaside pleasure piers and the sites of some of the similar number lost since their 1910 peak. Roberts varies the angle, distance, extent of surroundings shown and role of people so that the individual geographical and social contexts of the piers are given full scope rather than being subsumed into regularity. That works in its different way, and suits the subjects’ wide range of current vibrancy, from community and tourist hubs to ruined husks. The consistency is in their Victorian engineering: boards over light gothic ironwork on screw piling. The collection also drew me pleasurably into recalling which I’d actually seen – starting with Hastings, where I grew up, the pier shown in its recent, seriously fire-damaged state. Maybe I should declare an interest, but actually I could think of better ways of spending £12m on my home town than reconstructing the pier.

Hastings Pier, 2011

Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?

ALISON GILL: TO SEE A WORLD

ALISON GILL: TO SEE A WORLD - CMS, GENEVA, Dec 2013 - April 2014

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is one of the four experiments on the outskirts of Geneva at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN* in Geneva, where a scientific community of 6,000 work at the furthest edge of sub-atomic knowledge. The sophisticated 27 kilometre, 4 metre diameter tunnel in which protons are smashed together at close to the speed of light is itself a stunning sight, well captured by Michael Hoch’s cross-section photograph installed at life size in the entrance hall behind the artist in the shot above, taken during the installation. To See a World was in a hall directly above a tunnel access point.

* from the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire

CATALOGUE TEXT BY PAUL CAREY-KENT

An exhibition on this site is bound to raise the question of the differences between science and art. Alison Gill is a good choice in that context: she trained as sculptor, teacher, has studied psychoanalysis, and has taken a keen interest in scientific and mathematical matters – as illustrated by the drawings of knots which she is showing alongside her sculptural installation.

Knots of Increasing Complexity (detail, no. 65)

The way Gill operates bears comparison with the position taken by the American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000). He came to prominence by opposing the well-established distinction between analytic and synthetic truths. Previous orthodoxy held that the former, such as ‘2 +2 = 4’, are true by virtue of the meaning of their words and terms, and remain true come what may; whereas the latter, such as ‘snow is white’, require the evidence of extra-linguistic facts in the world.  This might be seen as paralleling the contrast between the logical investigations of a physicist and the artist’s more instinctive pursuit of meaning. Quine held a holistic view under which the truth of a particular statement depends on its position in the surrounding discourse of statements, and in which statements might be located on a continuous field. Imagine that field as a circle, with the external world surrounding it: synthetic statements would be towards the edge, readily affected by observation of the external world; whereas analytic statements would be found towards the middle - it’s not that they can’t be changed, but that a great deal needs to happen to produce an effect so far from the periphery. To illustrate how that might work, Quine himself suggested that as a result of all the developments in physics in the 20th century, there’s a plausible case for replacing classical logic by quantum logic. 

So, in Quine’s view, there aren’t the sharp divisions we might expect between types of knowledge; and he claimed that it’s the whole field of knowledge, not just single statements in isolation, which are to be verified. All scientific statements are interconnected, and we should judge the truth of the explanatory system to which they give rise. Contemporary art operates similarly, in that almost anything can be presented within the framework of art, and the effect and meaning of any one work often depends on its place in the whole nexus of art’s history and current practice.

It makes sense, then, that Gill’s work brings together interests in topology, the physical sciences, psychoanalysis, folklore and, of course, art; yet does not treat those as different in kind, but as points of equal interest on a continuum. That makes it appropriate to suggest an affinity with Blake, who was writing at a time when poetry, philosophy and science felt like part of one large project of enquiry.  The discipline of sculpture suits this approach, given that, as Gill herself says, ‘it is dealing with matter and its absence, material both seen and unseen’; and that leads her into what she calls ‘the dimension of not knowing’.

So how does the work which Gill has made for CMS at CERN fit in with this? In the six sculptures which make up Stranger Than Paradise, magnetised objects hang in steel frames with dimensions taken from Giacometti’s early Surrealist works. They operate in abstract terms, but also reference scientific modelling, and in doing so they alternate between micro and macro levels. Just what are those cratered balls with blind alleys, tunnels and holes? Atomic particles? Planets? Or people in relationships? Gill points to the potential narrative of those relations through the sub-titles of these pieces, all of which incorporate a fairy tale which can also be read as linking to one of the six particles which are quarks in the Standard Model: Sleeping Beauty (Beauty/Bottom); Rumpelstiltskin (Strange); Tom Thumb (Down); Rapunzel (Top); Frog Prince (Charm) and Magic Bean (Up).

The science of Stranger Than Paradise is too simple to deceive. Everyone understands magnetic force. Yet a residual air of mystery does remain whenever bodies act without visible cause. And if the objects do stand in for people, they put me in mind of how behaviour can appear to come from nowhere, even the extremes which are seen in those early Giacometti sculptures.  Our speculation as to causes will be rooted in psychology rather than science. That might set us wondering, though, whether the former might eventually be reduced to the latter through an ultimate understanding of the chemistry and physics of the brain, just as the sculpture’s interactions can be explained by magnetic and gravitational laws.

What are the shapes, by the way? Gill explains that they all began from either the sphere or a Russian doll, and that, too, provides an appropriate combination of contrasts: they start from either perfect rationalism, for which read science or maths; or from a sequential concatenation of myth, from art or religion.


 

Detector (Kissing Gate) also uses the invisible force of magnetism, but to rather different effect – to influence the opening, closing and turning of a sculptural circle which becomes a portal. Here again the art and non-art references come together. This is a gate, a potential point of entry to alternative experiences, including, perhaps, the magnetic attractions of romance.  It also looks like a bicycle wheel removed from its context, which summons Duchamp’s first readymade. The sculptural placement of string across a hole brings Barbara Hepworth to mind. But its pattern takes us back to Gill’s interest in topology: it’s a ‘Mystic Rose’ produced by linking equidistant points around a circle to each other.

 

Space Matter Problem (50 x 40 x 20) completes Gill’s set of CERN pieces. It takes off from cast forms of some banality: a carry-on suitcase designed to fit the stated maximum measurements allowed by airlines, and a star-shaped perfume bottle. Those are subjected to changes in the manner of a scientific experiment in form: the plaster casts are folded, fragmented, have holes cut into then and have been thrown down stairs. They’re covered in chemical indigo – the colour traditionally used for night skies in illuminated manuscripts – and peppered with starry traces of mica. The multi-form results are arranged   according to scale on tables which are actually the art-meets-maths-meets-academia surface of blackboards with chalk grids.

There’s a fiercer energy implied here than in the magnetic pieces, and the damaged suitcase may suggest that an on-plane explosion has occurred. But that’s not out of place: there is an obvious violence to the Hadron Collider’s extravagant electromagnetic enforcements. And the evolution of the atom bomb will always lurk behind such experiments. Gill’s own thesis on Giacometti's Surrealist work was called ‘The Poetics of Destruction’, and a quotation from that picks up on the connection between destruction and desire, another holistic aspect of reality: ‘Giacometti sought to understand reality and to survive it. He worked in the hope of grasping the whole of his vision. This was his desire. Bataille viewed 'destruction of what is there before the subject' as the premise for 'the enactment of desire'. He wrote ' Art since it is constantly art, proceeds in this by successive destructions. Thus in so far as it liberates instincts, these are sadistic.'

Alison Gill shows us that, whether or not you can ‘hold infinity in the palm of your hand’, you can pause in the course of momentous scientific investigations to take in another perspective on the haunting unity of what surrounds us.


See also:  www.alisongill.com

PHOTOS: Michael Hoch

MARIA MARSHALL: VOLUNTARIE SERVICE

MARIA MARSHALL: VOLUNTARIE SERVICE

Paul Carey-Kent presents a studio show at 102 Gifford St, Kings Cross

8 - 31 Oct 2013

‘Our voluntarie service he requires,
Not our necessitated, such with him
Finds no acceptance, nor can find, for how
Can hearts, not free, be tri'd whether they serve
Willing or no, who will but what they must
By Destinie, and can no other choose?’

John Milton: ‘Paradise Lost’, Book 5

You won't find much art which references Milton these days, but Maria Marshall's world is - like that of ‘Paradise Lost’ – one of sharp contrasts and elemental battles. For all the surface calm of exacting production, it’s that sense of what lies beneath which gives her films their edge. They’ve often focussed on her own children as a means of presenting the innocence which covers the realities to come with a sheen of beauty and ignorance. In structured loops we see her son Jacob at two, apparently smoking; a boyhood enactment of murderous intent; the smile of Jacob again, who is revealed - as the camera pans out – to be wearing a straightjacket.

Installation view

The intensity of those scenarios was brought into focus earlier this year by a twelve film museum retrospective in Belgium; and Marshall has just completed the feature-length Super-Ego Shootout, which ingeniously ties her body of work into narrative and interrogative structures. Voluntarie Service provides a more concentrated selection, yet one which extends to less domestic treatments of her themes, and adds painting and photography to film; and the striking food factory venue makes for an atmospherically integrated installation which felt rather like being deep in a ship.

He Both Young and Strong connects us most directly to Marshall’s most widely shown stream of work. Her other son, Raphael at ten, plays the cowboy. He leads a horse through long grass, made up with stubble, his eyes cast down as if burdened beyond his years with the hard-bitten, cynical weariness of a man who’s seen too much.

The two films chosen both reference the hidden by means of paradoxical contrasts of image and sound - and the way the soundtracks merge is a whole other battle or reconciliation. The fresh, biblically-named surfer Matthew seems to walk across water to a medley of sounds which undermine the paradisiacal backdrop: trains, helicopters and the insecure whisperings of a much younger boy, ‘Where’s my daddy?’ – a casualty of war? The other prominent sound is the conversation of dolphins: wiser than us, perhaps, for all Adam’s dominion?

Lullaby combines the menacing rhythms of a boxer, moving in and out like the tide and apparently intent on assaulting the viewer, with the chime of a music box. A sweet counterpoint – unless that’s what the viewer might hear when coming round from a knock-out punch.

Maria Marshall with Bleeding Eye, 2013

Marshall’s paintings, previously shown only in Greece, are cinematic performances which – for all their independent energy – serve here to amplify her themes on an appropriate scale. Three seas and one eye are shown from two substantial ongoing series.The Bleeding Eye sets up the viewer viewed, the painting doing to us what we’re meant to do to it – so echoing the viewer boxed at, especially given the titular blood. It triggers the evil eye, surveillance, the all-seeing God, Eve’s discovery of shame. Yet there’s also the meditative and empowering aspect of a mandala.





The sea, of course, takes Matthew out deeper, perhaps dangerously so. Maybe a little more Milton is in order: ‘into this wild Abyss the wary Fiend/ Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while, / Pondering his voyage; for no narrow frith/ He had to cross’. The sea can symbolise so much relevant to Marshall’s concerns – immersion, freedom, infinity, mirroring – while on a more formal level her obvious pleasure in sheer liquidity gives the painting a self-reflexive quality, a quality shared with Bleeding Eye: paint flow as flowing water, looked at as looking. The three seas provide contrasts of colour and emotion, which can be read across to the three representations of male stereotypes: cowboy, boxer and surfer.

If you think there’s a God, how do you solve the problem of the evil He allows? One line of argument says that you must believe in free will – as the angel Raphael explains to Adam in the quotation above - and in the existence of a comparably mighty Devil. There are two equally powerful sides to reality, and we must make our choices in the context of the uncertain outcome of that clash of the would-be omnipotent. ‘Paradise Lost’ memorably dramatizes those necessities, and one reading of Marshall’s work – as its antimonies ricochet around this selection – is as a modern demonstration of that Miltonic drama.

See www.mariamarshall.com

ANYWHERE GOES IN DECEMBER

Jost Münster: Spring

Christmas, I hear, is coming. I’m tempted to ignore it on the basis that biennially would be quite enough, but maybe it’s the odd years it should fall in…. so I’ve even kicked off above with a Xmas card of sorts, one of several thoughtfully intuitive paintings made on cut-up bits of another bigger painting in Jost Münster’s show at Tintype – which, aside from looking ahead to the next one, isn’t conspicuously seasonal. Given that Father Christmas used to be dressed in green, might there not be an era at some point for the red tree? I kick off with two shows located in shops suitable for the acquisition of art and non-art gifts, followed by another rare location. And it's an indication of how fast things move around that I've featured none of the first six spaces in their current locations before...

Paul Housley: ‘They Bloom at Night’ at Belmacz, 45 Davies St - Mayfair

To 13 Dec: www.belmacz.com/gallery

This, described as ‘an idiosyncratic overview of the artist’s work from the past 18 years’, is indeed a curious but stimulating mix - even before you get to the jewellery shop setting of Belmacz: mid-nineties cartoonish additions to pre-existing images and a thoroughly nailed teddy bear (what would Grayson Perry say?) are followed by a long gap to Housley’s recent plays on the art of painting (Is it like building a house of cards? Are the results always self-portraits? Even if they take off from Picasso?). And something faintly seasonal about these brushes as flowers as candles rather appealed to me…

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Opening the Shutters: An Exhibition of Contemporary Photography in the Bishop’s Palace @ Mallett, Ely House, 37 Dover St - central

To 21 Dec:  www.mallettantiques.com

Installation shot with Jacqueline Hassink

And now for something completely different… Not the Monty Python reunion, but a chance to see contemporary photography in the super-plush setting of the palace built as the London residence of the Bishop of Ely in 1772 and unaltered since. It’s resplendent with Mallett’s antiques and high end modern design, installed as if in a dwelling, and now with the bonus of a substantial room-each showing from seven of the Jules Wright / Wapping Bankside’s photographers. Three suit the 18^th century setting especially well: Peter Marlow’s full set of 42 Anglican cathedrals by echo;  Edgar Martins’ Cosmonaut Training shots by counterpoint; and Dutch photographer Jacqueline Hassink’s measured views out of windows into Japanese gardens by parallel escape from the modern world.  

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Meekyoung Shin: Unfixed @ Korean Cultural Centre, Grand Buildings, 1 - 3 The Strand - Trafalgar Square

To 18 Jan: www.london.korean-culture.org

Bodily functions are all over contemporary art, but how many shows do you go to at which visiting the loo is a major part of the art experience?  All three toilets in Meekyoung Shin’s all-soap retrospective contain Buddhas made of soap on which you're invited to wash your hands.  The main space has examples which have been exposed to such treatment in various museums for a few months each, to varying age-evocative effects, the most severe citizens being the Brummies who rubbed away the whole head. Interesting, and part of a large and impressive - though rather shoddily-installed - retrospective.

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Katy Moran @ Modern Art, 6 Fitzroy Square - Warren Street

To 20 Dec: www.modernart.net

Rock Face with a Face, 2013

Katy Moran’s third solo with Modern Art sees her use an impressive variety of collage modes out of and into which her distinctive painterly language goes back and forth with something of cubism’s alternation between thought and play. Different works feature thick accretions of cultural scraps,  like an art history notice board put through a shredder; painting over found paintings, one with its frame framed anew; multiple layers piled into sculptural effect; and cut-ups of canvas used as spatially complex sites for mark-making. Add titles which teasingly hint at what we might see, and you have fascinating set of proposals to explore. 

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Urs Fischer @ Sadie Coles HW, 62 Kingly Street - near Carnaby St

To 18 Jan: www.sadiecoles.com

Urs Fischer? At the level of individual works, I’m not so sure. But he’s a master of the total show installation, and sure enough he makes the most of the wide open opportunity to bring fairytale surrealism at scale to Sadie Coles’ newly-acquired former dancehall space. There are really only two works: several versions of the same reclining clay figure, in various states of decay as if they’re stages of his self-melting candle sculptures; and a veritable rainbow 'Melodrama' of 3,000 big fat ceramic water drops / icing drips / pears / commas in colour-coded sectors of blue, green, purple and pink.

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Marcel Broodthaers: Décor: A Conquest and Bricks: 1966-1975 @ Michael Werner Gallery, 22 Upper Brook Street - Mayfair

To 18 Jan: www.michaelwerner.com

Installation shot of Bricks: 1966-1975

Two crisply baffling strands of Marcel Broodthaers’ (say BROT-hairs) influential practice when it’s decades since London had even one? This combination of brickworks downstairs (seriality in multiple registers of fake, real and both) with a two room guns ‘n’ leisure environment upstairs has to be seen. File the latter, a version of Broodthaers’ exhibition at the ICA in 1975, alongside the recreation of 1969’s ‘When Attitudes Become Form’ under the growing business of  revisiting shows past. Curious fact: Broodthaers and Shakespeare both died on their 52nd birthday.

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Jerzy ‘Jurry’ Zieliński : Paintings 1968-77 @ Luxembourg & Dayan, 2 Savile Row – central

To 14 Dec: www/luxembourgdayan.com

The Smile, or Thirty Years, Ha, Ha, Ha -1974

More pep in your pop with this revelatory show of the little-known Jerzy ‘Jurry’ Zieliński  (1943-1980).  His sharply delineated combinations of Communist, graphic and Pop iconographies include, for example, plenty of full lips, but differ from American treatments:  the colours are darker, the presentation not quite sleek (partly the effect of what materials were available in 70’s Poland) and political ambiguity is always close, potentially critical but with a sense of anticipating future nostalgia.  Does ‘Hot’ show an abstracted pattern of flames, or a protester who set himself on fire? Is the ‘XXX’ on those lips a celebration of the regime’s 30^th birthday, or a stitching over of free speech?

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Universal Fragments: Conversations with Trevor Shearer @ Large Glass, 392 Caledonian Rd – Caledonian Rd & Barnsbury

To 14 Jan 2014: www.largeglass.co.uk

Installation view: Jean-Luc Moulène ‘Model for Diving’ (2007), TREVOR SHEARER ‘Mental Exercises’ (2002) Plaster casts, and ‘Yellow Painting’ (2011).

What’s this? We’re fairly used to the humble’s homages to the famous, but here such luminaries as Miroslaw Balka, Jean-Luc Moulène and Tonico Lemos Auad put forward their own works as tributes designed to resonate with those of an artist of whom you may know nothing: Trevor Shearer (1958-2013) was an influential teacher but chose to show his own work very little. Yet it fully justifies his company: whether casting a basin from graph paper filming the hop, skip and vanish of a water drop on a hot plate; or pulling off the sculptural trick of seeming to hide behind the wall, his work is subtle, grounded and precise. 

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Anna Barriball @ Frith Street, 17-18 Golden Square – Soho

To 21 Dec: www.frithstreetgallery.com

Night Window 1, 2013

 

Anna Barriball (stress the first syllable) keeps finding direct ways to capture doors, windows and walls with a direct literalness which somehow effects a paradoxical denial of their essential functions. Here frottage drawings are floated on fluorescent backings; images taken looking out at night make for a colourful shadowplay of video windows; silence turns to image as a pencil is poked through acoustic tiles; and, best of all, inked glass is floated in water and pressed against paper to yield a photogram-like impression of a rain-swept series of 'Night Windows'.

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Comrades of Time | Comrades of Time @ Cell Project Space, 
258 Cambridge Heath Road

To 22 Dec: www.cellprojects.org

Magali Reus: Parking Jogs, 2013

Boris Groys’ eponymous essay claims the video loop as prime exemplar of how the only contemporary infinity, after God, lies in the  repetition through which art can be ‘with time’ – its comrade – rather than ‘in time’. I couldn’t readily connect that to this film-free show, but there does seem to be an interesting double deconstruction of the media of art (made abject) and of the self (made elusive) in such works as Nikolas Gambaroff’s latex casts of his own paintings; Wade Guyton’s cross (the self as voter in a digital print pushed so hard it breaks into the painterly); and Magali Reus’  use of three ceramic bus seats, one flesh coloured, the other two newly wrapped in plastic, to say something about the self and something about colourfield abstraction. 

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The Edge of Painting @ The Piper Gallery, 18 Newman St – Fitzrovia

To 30 Dec: www.thepipergallery.com

Onya McCausland: Support

The Piper Gallery’s refreshing USP has been that it features only artists who’ve had a 40+ year career and are still active, which makes them all at least twice as old as Megan Piper herself.  Here curator Tess  Jaray qualifies, but her inventive choice of work which relates to painting without fitting its traditional definitions includes such whippersnappers as Martin Creed and Rana Begum as well as rule-compliant John Stezaker and Tim Head. I like Support, in which young Onya McCausland polishes away the wall to make a fake shadow which, as I read her title, could be holding up an off-kilter chalk-covered McCrackenesque plank just as that form could be holding up the wall.

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Nostalgic for the Future @ the Lisson Gallery, 27 Bell St - Edgware Rd

To 11 Jan: www.lissongallery.com

Haroon Mirza: Preoccupied Waveforms, 2012 

The Lisson Gallery is already looking back from the vantage point of its 50^th anniversary in 2017. Some high quality (notably Cragg, Floyer, Wentworth) and the pairing of early and late works from each artist lift ‘Nostalgic For the Future’ well above a routine group show of gallery artists, but the main reason to visit is the basement, turned over in full to Haroon Mirza’s composition ‘Preoccupied Waveforms’: electro-percussion; TV as instrument; acoustic barriers as sculpture; and an abstract light-work, fan-blown through a smashed-through wall. These merge to make a mesmerising cyclic environment suggesting how, just as systems are broken down, they can come together afresh.

Francisco Nicolas @ LAMB arts, 27 Cork St – Central

To 22 Dec: www.lamb-arts.com

Sobre El Filtro de le Realidad, 2010

This one week pop-up is the first solo show here for Spanish painter Francisco Nicholas, who arrived in London last year. His English is still a little scratchy, but the paintings generate moody atmospherics and a sense of enquiry, as Nicolas pitches the potential realities of painting and geometry into colourfully layered dialogues – obscuring, tinting and heightening each other in what could pass for Ben Nicholson meeting Rene Magritte. Sometimes he integrates a photographic element, too, as in Filter on Reality with its painted sky and digital sea. Oddly, he says, his palette has brightened since he swapped Iberian sun-shine for British cloud-gloom. 

Images courtesy of the relevant galleries + artists +  Mats Nordman‏ (Fischer) + Alex Delfanne (Shearer)