QUESTIONS FOR COLCHESTER

Visiting Colchester recently, I was surprised to find in a fairly small place that it was over a mile from the railway station to the town centre. Perhaps that influenced my mind set, but as I strolled in there seemed to be quite a few features of questionable logic. Here are my questions for Colchester:

Does Lewis really bring his car to be serviced here?

          

Is it always good to be green?

Just how confidential are the secrets?

Since when did angels have tattoos?

        

Would Boards & Boarding be a better name? 

       

Will those flowers really suit a buttonhole?

    

Why should people have to copy statues? 

  

Wouldn't nature rather live outside? 

FLYING TO AND IN BASEL

Galleries at Art Basel naturally hope that works will fly off the wall (or out of the separate private sale rooms at the fair in a growing VIP trend). But questions are being asked these days about the environmental consequences of flying people and art around the world. Does the model need to change? With 290 galleries in Art Basel plus plenty of other fairs and institutions in Basel, you can probably home in on any trend – but as it happens I saw several interesting works which involved flight directly, as well as many flights of fancy...

Gregor Törzs: à la couleur – Wing Wing 2, 2017 at Persiehl & Heine, Hamburg, in Photo Basel

The separate Photo Basel fair was of a good standard, and featured these beautifully realised microscope-assisted images of cicada wings, printed on Gampi paper which buckles a little with moisture and takes on a wing-like texture. I had never realised, perhaps because they beat too fast to see in flight, that cicadas have such colourfully patterned wings.


Rebecca Horn: White Body Fan, 1972 at the Tinguely Museum

Rebecca Horn’s seminal performance, in which she fixed a pair of semi-circular wings made of white fabric to her body that unfolded when she raised her arms, was the starting point for exploration of many flight-related works within the restrospective ‘Body Fantasies’. Those included kinetic feather fans and a mechanical morpho butterfly, itself linking to Horn’s film ‘Buster‘s Bedroom’, in which an aging Diva keeps the souls of her former lovers as butterflies in a fridge.

Masahisa Fukase: Erimo Cape, 1976 at Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo in Art Basel



Taka Ishii showed a pretty comprehensive history of Japanese photography from the 60’s onwards spread across one large wall.  Among some 75 images was this silver gelatin print of a raven: a subject which Masahisa Fukase made famous through his book ‘The Solitude of Ravens’. That collects photographs from 1975-82 in which the often-shadowy bird stands as a symbol of Ishii's solitude following a divorce.

Pierre Bismuth: Abstractions in ‘Art Parcours’ (with Jan Mot Gallery, Brussels)



My favourite of the 20 special projects dotted around the old town sees the Belgium-based French artist make a nice political point by flying 15 flags around Munsterplatz. Each was an amalgam of a European nation’s flag and that of the nation from which they have taken in the most migrants. Not only do they question the shifting basis of nationhood, suggesting it is increasingly abstract, but the merged flags make for fresh and unconventional ensigns as they flutter in the breeze. So for example the two nearest above are  Switzerland/Somalia and Austria/Bangladesh.


Ugo Rondinone fall cloud, 2018 at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich/ New York, in Art Basel

      

Clouds fly, and this is clearly a cloud, albeit fixed to the wall. But its's rocky: made of sand, gravel, concrete to be precise, making implausible heavy of the driftingly light. Rondinone, Swiss but dwelling in New York, has previous in channelling clouds as evocations of romanticism , but tweaked towards modernity. These might suggest the clouds of ash which have sometimes prevented planes flying.



DK: Memories of Tomorrow: Remnants of the Ronne Ice Shelf, 2018 at Galerija Fotografija, Ljubljana in Photo Basel



The photographer known as DK showed work from his new photobook 'Scotoma'. Under such evocative theme titles as ‘Behind Eyelids’, ‘Memories of Tomorrow’ and ‘Darkening’, it seems to present near-abstract landscapes from around the world. In fact, the Slovenian photographer’s motto is ‘I don't travel to photograph. I photograph to travel’ – for everything is actually from close to his studio. Often, they’re cloudscapes. So not only does this image allude to the loss of ice, but DK’s practice is a carbon-friendly one which won’t contribute to the problem.

PHOTO LONDON: All the Nudes Not Fit to Put On Instagram

Photo London 16-19 Nov 2019: 

All the Nudes Not Fit to Put On Instagram

The nude is potentially difficult territory in the #MeToo era, the more so as almost all of the examples at Photo London are of women. Instagram doesn’t allow them anyway, so my stream’s choices from Photo London were landscapes and portraits. And yet I found myself drawn to several interesting nudes, mostly from the rear…

Gabriele Basilico: Contact, 1984 / 2016 at Galleria Valeria Bella, Rome

This is a recently printed composite version of what were originally pairs of photographs showing the impact of iconic Italian chair designs on a classical Italian arse. In this departure from trained architect Gabriele Basilico’s renowned core practice of photographing buildings, body modification meets abstract gridding via witty use of a printing process we’ve all experienced.

Chloé Jafé: from the series I give you my life, 2014-2017 at Akio Nagasawa Gallery, Tokyo

                          

The surprising name in a very Japanese booth is as French as it sounds, but Chloé Jaffé lives in Tokyo and is sufficiently integrated to have worked in a hostess club and met a boss who agreed that she document the women associated with – they cannot be part of – the Yazuka organised crime syndicates. They were typically keen that Jaffé photograph their ‘irezumi’ tattoos, made painfully over years by hand with a wooden handle and a needle: they are a source of pride, still associated with outsider status, not fashion, in Japan. As such, they represent a strong commitment to their gangster partners.

Danielle Van Zadelhoff: Paradise (Adam and Eve), 2016 at Project 2.0 Gallery, The Hague

The surprising colour here isn’t down to Photoshop, but the use of grey light to suggest an early renaissance tonality. Add the jocularly genital foliage and fantastical freckles, and the Amsterdam artist’s life-sized first couple make for an original spin on one of the oldest subjects. Though perhaps it carries the contemporary question: what are we doing with the garden now?

Alix Marie: French Kiss, 2014 at Roman Road, London

             

How many people is that? It takes a moment to realise that a man is smuggled into that hair in one of the London-based French artist’s explorations of how to represent bodily intimacy. It’s as if he’s being consumed. No wonder Marie has said: ‘I am investigating the similarities between skin and the photograph: both surfaces, both fragile, both filled with secrets and taboos’.

Edouard Taufenbach: Impression Nue de Dos from the series Spéculaire, 2019 at Galerie Binome, Paris

Edouard Taufenbach shows cut-ups of photographs from the collection of anonymous images that film director Sébastien Lifshitz has been gathering for several decades. They feature bodies in leisure, pleasure and desire,and are shaped to the form Taufenbach finds in the original. He introduces movement and complexity, here with the suggestion of multiplication in a bathroom mirror. The erotomane transvestite Pierre Molinier is bound to come to mind…

ART COLOGNE AT THE DOUBLE

Art Cologne – founded in 1967 and so the first of the modern-style art fairs – had a lean time in the 2000’s but has recovered its status somewhat. This year 57,000 people visited 164 galleries - one floor of 'contemporary' and one of 'modern' - and features included special stands for collaborative pairings between galleries or between artists. Actually the fair as a whole was big enough anyway that you can find two interesting examples of many things pretty easily. For example:

The multi-colour combination

Heinz Mack: Untitled, 2018 at Samuelis Baumgarte Galerie, Bielefeld 

There's always plenty of Heinz Mack and of lots of super-colourful abstraction at Art Cologne, but only in recent years have they intersected. The 88 year old, though famous for exploring light and movement, puts colour to the fore in his recent 'chromatic constellations'. 

Hany Armanious: Untitled (Snake Oil), 1997-2019
at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Everyday glasses form the moulds into which Australia’s 2011 Venice representative pours a ‘hot melt’ of synthetic resin which he calls ‘snake oil’ – ‘a substance with no real medicinal value sold as a remedy for all diseases’. I guess ownership wouldn’t improve your health, but you can contemplate an alluring interplay between plinth glasses and their internal casts, with the stem acting as transition point between shapes which look intriguingly different when inversion, substance and colour are added.

The active artist's self-portrait

     

Nil Yalter: tour de babel / tour de beauborg, 1979 at Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna.

Nil Yalter has the best institutional show currently up in Cologne, her retrospective the Ludwig Museum. That has many intricate installations inhabiting the positions of the disadvantaged: this is simpler. It depicts her - as is common among young artists - waiting in the Pompidou Centre's restaurant to help make ends meet. But she serves up just the museum's escalator logo... and what can a brand sustain?

Pieter Laurens Mol: Index (Bold Version) 1981/2017 at Galerie Parrotta - Cologne / Bonn

If any of the works in the fair could explain why Dan Graham was laughing (in a soundpiece by Christian Jankowski, hidden between stands and in the general hubbub) it was set of works by the Belgian artist. Here Laurens Mol invokes Mondrian by proposing that his structure may be what is needed to stabilise his own creative processes – though he looks more likely to follow Bas Jan Ader (another Mondrian-user) into the water.

The curious figure


        

Kim Simonsson: Mossgirl with Feather Bonbons, 2019 at Galerie Forsblom, Stockholm

It’s actually ceramic in the middle of this forest-coloured fantasy by a forest-dwelling Finn. Simonsson’s practice all stems from a tale he has created in which feral children face power struggles in a forest community somewhat parallel to Golding’s Lord of the Flies. But it’s the feathers which make the piece fly, though quite how they are bonbons I'm not so sure...

Alona Rodeh : Jester, 2017 from the Project ‘Safe and Sound’ at Christine König Galerie, Vienna

This figure, sporting a high vis version of a Greman firefighter's uniform, is the fool from tarot from a body of work by the Berlin-based Israeli which explores the material and visual culture of safety, drawing parallels with fashion, clubbing, theatre and architecture. The striking feature is the scythe as head, suggesting that the jokes could give way to violence. 

The cunning repurposing

Šejla Kamerić: Blanket (Keep Away from Fire), 2019 at Tanja Wagner, Berlin

The Bosnian artist collected labels from her friends’ new and old clothes to make up a painting of sorts which trembles attractively with the breeze of your passing. Apparently the recycling of unwanted clothing on an international scale is a significant part of Bosnia & Herzogovina’s economy, so there is a political edge to the personal stories represented. That said, I was asking myself this: how fire resistant would a garment be if made from the labels advising on fire resistance?

Carlos Garaicoa: Puzzle Columnas, 2018 at Galeria Continua San Gimignano, Beijing, Les Moulins, Havana

In one of those simple ideas one is surprised not to have seen before, the Cuban artist takes a photograph of an abandoned building. That appears in ghostly mode at the back of a puzzle which he has made from the same image, leaving it incomplete to presage the building’s ongoing decay along with any metaphorical echoes.

The all-green painting which is not what it seems

Naufas Ramirez-Figuera: Scales, Variation #4, Nephrit Jade, 2016 at Sies + Hoke, Dusseldorf

I didn’t think it likely that Naufas Ramirez-Figuera, a Guatemalan known for his performances, had suddenly turned to straightforward abstraction - and so it proved. This isn’t the painting it seemed from outside the stand, but a carving of jade. The aim – in a set which also includes gold and obsidian – is to call attention to the valuable materials plundered by the invading Spaniards to such an extent that their traditional use in native South American rituals was prevented.

                   

                     

Jiri Dokoupil: Green Porn – Dedicated to Georgia O’Keeffe, 2008 at Galerie Andrea Caratsch, Zurich

              

Only up very close was it obvious that this large green field – again, not a painting, this is an inkjet print - was made up of thousands of pornographic images in repeating patterns. Surprised? Not really, as the Czech-German has developed sixty processes, most famously the use of soap bubbles, to make paintings. But why the dedication? Dokoupil admires O’Keeffe, and refers to the popular view that her flower paintings have sexual underpinnings. She always denied that, so it’s a doubly provocative tribute. 

Art and the mobile phone

Joëlle Dubois: Bad Post-Sex Habit at Thomas Rehbein Gallery, Cologne

The Belgian painter complains that ‘communication between people today is increasingly becoming superficial, fleeting, impersonal and anonymous’. Hardly news, but her gleaming little acrylics under resin take the thought in charmingly witty directions by showing phones inappropriately used: not just after sex, but during it too, alongside all sorts of other activities from yoga to eating, They proved a big audience hit in a bright yellow booth. 

Michelangelo Pistoletto: Smartphone - seated woman and standing man, 2018 at Giorgio Persano, Turin

I guess it had to happen: Michelangelo Pistoletto’s latest mirror pieces bring the viewer into the zone of figures with mobile phones. So here is my self-portrait, taken the same way of course, together with gallery staff who appear to be rather less thematically communicating with each other in pre-digital style.

DIVERSIONS AT THE OTHER ART FAIR

'Uneven' is a  generous way to describe The Other Art Fair (14-17 March in Brick Lane): there's plenty of bad and stale art. But the concept of meeting artists in front of their work is a good one, and it gives a showcase to some of the many without gallery representation. My guess is that most people would find a few artists from the 140 who appeal. Any rate, I found ten who interested or entertained me: here are five of them in front of their work, and me in the midst of another piece.

Jo Hummel (Stand 111)

Jo makes collages which use playful systems, such as joining up to edges, to arrive at a language which generates a satsifyingly painterly aesthetic. When I asked her for a picture, she propounded the interesting theory that the explosion of online images and Instagram in particular has put visual art in a position parallel to that of music when radio arrived.

Alice Palmer (119)

Alice plays art, textile and fashion backgrounds into politically-driven machine knitting. Here a confusion of black and white (that would be ‘no deal’ and ‘remain’ I suppose) leads to a dizzying confusion into which the word ‘Brexit’ has been smuggled; while her partner Josh poses before a view of himself as a revolutionary.

Joshua Blackburn (62)

Joshua has photographed 350 of London’s extant 450 launderettes – all as they are with no interventions – in the face of the ongoing reduction in these characterful and social spaces. Some surprisingly colourful examples caught the eye...

Nicolette Bénard (30)

An artist has to eat: I found Nicolette snacking in front of her series of starved-looking dolls got up in bobbly constructions. On the one hand Barbie is imprisoned, as if by body image – on the other hand, you get the feeling she’s enjoying herself in these vibrant  balls of hand-rolled textile…

 

Lene Bladbjerg (88)

Neat, you may say, the fragility of butterflies made out of razor blades, suggesting sharp conclusions to the brevity of life – but isn’t that simply combining two of Damien Hirst’s best-known streams of work? Of course: but Lene’s usages precede Damien’s by some time…  And she's designed her own themed dress: we await Damien's.

Beccy McCray: Full Circle

The fair's special attractions included this literally immersive installation in a greenhouse. The massed results of holes punched in unrecyclable papers - hence the preponderance of shiny stuff - reflect on waste, but also struck me as a rite for the passing of any need to ready paper for filing in our digitalised lives. Mainly, though, this was confetti-style fun.

I also liked Walter van Rijn (66), Etienne Clément (132), Delphine Lebourgeois (27) and Nayla Tabet (147). That makes ten entertaining diversions, even if my hit rate was modest...