ART IN BASEL : PARENTAL RELATIONS AND THE BLACK LIGHT COINCIDENCE

I was in Switzerland for the 41st Art Basel(16-20 June 2010), its several subsidiary fairs and events, and the always-impressive parallel exhibitions at the city's galleries (Barney, Orozco, Trockel, Rodney Graham, Basquiat...). There's too much to see, let alone write about, as a whole but it is possible to track an eccentric route through...

PARENTAL RELATIONS

Several interesting pieces had parent-child relations at their centre. This seemed appropriate not just because it was the weekend of Father's Day, but because the fair came in the wake of Louise Bourgeois's recent death: she was, accordingly perhaps, being widely shown - and difficult relations with her father were a famously driving force in her work.



The womb seems a good place to start: young British ceramicist Barnaby Barford works mainly by altering found ceramic pieces to create narrative implications. ‘Who’s the Daddy?’, his witty triple dance of the super-pregnant, was shown by David Gill Galleries at Design Miami/Basel, but was one of the least functional pieces there. I would think he is well placed to cross, in the manner of Grayson Perry, to the art side of what is not a very high fence these days.



Galerie Daniel Templon of Paris sold this eight foot wide Robert Longo charcoal drawing, ‘Untitled (Julie)’, 2009 from his ongoing series of cleavages. Longo, known for his virtuosic graphic style, has tended to concentrate on apocalyptic images, as in his sharks, explosions, guns and tsunami-like waves. Against that background, this baby’s comforter may be a metaphorical refuge for us all – but also gains an edge from the possibility that the appeal might be capable of less infantile (or should that be 'equally infantile'?) interpretation.



Ex-Turner Prize nominee Phil Collins’ ‘free fotolab’ (2007) at Victoria Miro is a nine minute slide show of found photographs. Collins obtained them in Belgrade by offering a free processing service for old rolls of film, in return for the right to use the images developed. Even allowing for his editing down, Collins obtained a surprisingly high proportion of intimate moments from this approach, not least between parent and child. But were we to be touched or troubled by such self-exposure?



Arch-conceptualist tail-twister Jonathan Monk was prominent in the fair, including a World Cup special which played on football shirt numbers by using one colour for ‘1’ up to eleven colours for ‘11’. For 'I Made My Sister Censor Heaven So I Could Show It To My Mother' (2010) at Copenhagen’s Nicholai Wallner Gallery, he apparently had said sister sew a shimmering circle of sequins to cover the genital zones of Jeff Koons and his then-future and now-ex Italian porn star wife in a copy of one of the notoriously explicit 'Heaven' series of photoworks.



Paris-based Americn artist Oscar Tuazon's big wild minimalism (to make up a term) has been very visible in London this year, with significant showings at the David Roberts Foundation and the ICA. His pine beam construction in Art Public, the show of big sculptures outside the fair, was called 'Dad' (2010). Quite why was a mystery, but child-parental relations always contain some unknowns...



The most striking videos I saw were the three by Icelander Ragar Kjartansson of 'Me and My Mother' (made every five years: in 2000, 2005 and 2010, shown by Reykjavik’s 12). They show his mother vigorously spitting on her wholly passive son. I was assured that, whatever the implication of guilt played out, relations between the two are excellent!



Louise Bourgeois herself (1911-2010) might best be represented by 'The Family', an archival dye edition on linen at New York’s Carolina Nitsch. It’s in the wavering watercolour style also seen in a spectacular set of flower paintings at Cheim & Read, and is direct and confrontational. Although from the 99th and last year of her life, it gives the impression that the childhood trauma of discovering that her English governess was her father’s mistress, which she said provided the impulse for much of her work, was with her still.



Antwerp-based Briton Becky Beasley has previously worked with shelving as a means of confusing art and its display, so it was no surprise that her ‘Shelves for Parents’ (at Office Baroque Antwerp in the Liste young art fair) were just that: two solid shelves of the right dimensions for her parents – who are in good health – to lie on and fit exactly. Or to be laid out on once they move from being living models to the most radical of still lives. Morbid or touchingly realist forward planning?



London's Rokeby had a subtle stand in Art Statements – which gives young galleries a chance in the main fair – as part of which German sculptor Bettina Buck built a booth within the booth, just a few inches smaller all round. In this piece from inside her reduced space, the hunting in her 'Hunting Scene (Dusk)'(2010) remained unseen: it was the image on a carpet which her dead father treasured, and which her mother recently gave to Buck - but which she has left rolled up, still poignantly sealed in its travel packaging.



Swiss multi-media jester Roman Signer shot a new gunpowder piece into the corner of his Viennese gallerist's booth. Martin Janda also showed an older piece, ‘Grosser Brockhaus’ (1992), in which - like Buck - Signer used a souvenir from his father's life: sixteen volumes of the Grosser Brockhaus encyclopedia which stood for parentally-approved authority as he grew up. Signer shot each book (the bullets are still lodged in them), slotted the white flag of surrender into the bullet holes in the manner of sails, and placed the flotilla on the floor for Freudian interpretation.



Cologne’s Kewenig Gallery showed a typical rigorous and obsessive drawing piece by the late German artist Hanne Darboven (1941-2009). ‘Hommage to my Father’ (1988) applies her method of marking time in literal and memorial senses to her father’s life, covering each day in it across a grid of 192 pages. The content includes application of her characteristic mathematical operation to every date in his life: for example, the date of her own birth, 29/4/41, would be ‘29 + 4 + 4 + 1 = 38’ (days and months are treated as a whole, but the year split into units). She thus takes visibly laborious time to consider time through the means – a calendar of sorts – of time’s measurement.

THE BLACK LIGHT COINCIDENCE

In the black light coincidence, several artists with diverse practices use black paint to cover up lights...



In Art Unlimited, Canadian painter Andrew Dadson had built a room with its back wall made up wholly of fluorescent lights - but had almost entirely covered the lights in black paint, so that the occasional escaping points of light conjured a night sky. A beautifully apocalyptic space for putting humanity in its place…



Swedish artist David Svennson (at Malmo’s Galeri Magnus Aklundh in the excellent yet too-little-visited Solo Project fair) showed ‘Black Tear (Lagrima Negra)’, which covers a Danilo de Rossi GLO glass ceiling lamp with black high gloss enamel auto paint. That somewhat mournfully turned a futuristic design’s illumination from within into a reflection out of, and maybe on the disappearance of, old world manufacturing industry.



Teheran-born, Berlin-based Dutch artist Navid Nuur, who transforms found materials in richly unexpected ways, had taken the tube out of the light fitting in Plan B’s booth at Liste, painted it black and leaned it against the wall as a kind of negative absence. Nearby was a tower made of boxes of washing powder with the fronts cut away to reveal their white and whiteness-promising powder. Not that he would call ‘Light Licker’ (2010) site specific, preferring to describe his work as ‘interimodules: a temporary in-between form between the outside space and myself’.



All of which reminded me of Glenn Ligon’s neons, which are painted black on the front to blacken language while allowing a halo of light to emerge around the words. I didn’t see any of those in Basel, so I'm cheating slightly by including an image of 'Warm Broad Glow' (2005), which incorporates a phrase from Gerturde Stein to complex historical and sociological effect.



It was left to the ubiquitous Ryan Gander (four galleries in Art Basel, a new film in Art Unlimited, lecturing in the citywide Art Parcours event, holding his baby at Liste, in which his wife’s Limoncello gallery was participating) to make the most radical anti-neon statement by personally smashing a neon text whihc said 'Flashes of Beautiful Thinking', and titling the resulting piece ‘The Danger of Visualising Your Own End’ (at Japan's Taro Nasu in the Volta fair).



Nor was that all: I flew back via Frankfurt, where MMK is showing a 900-part Hanne Darboven piece and the Kunstverien had an excellent survey of the work of conceptual photographer Sven Johne. His newest series, ‘Harbours’, uses a post-production version of the black light idea: it includes five photographs of a waterside city at night in which Johne has achieved an eerie effect by painting in black over all the light sources – such as windows and streetlamps – which had featured in the photograph.

COALITIONS

I kick off with three shows of abstract paintings, all of which feature combination of elements in one way or another, and follow that with representational cobinations: of times in Emma Bennett, of spaces in Shara Hughes, of other sculptures in Nick Hornby. Anton Henning, come to that, seems to several artists rolled into one... It's all very suited to the new coalition Government.


Virus Revamp

Michael Stubbs @ Laurent Delaye, First Floor, 11 Savile Row – Central
To 24 July: www.laurentdelaye.com

Internationally-established abstract painter Michael Stubbs hadn’t exhibited much in Britain for a decade before recent London showings for his drawings and then his prints. Logically enough, we now see his main events. Stubbs uses graphic stencils, pours of household paint and tinted floor varnish to make multi-layered combinations of signs and veils. No brushes required! - though I did see what looked like a cheeky little bit of sponge-swirled paint in two recent works. The paintings are dynamised by two main strategies: first, exploiting the ambiguities between where the paint appears to be in pictorial logic, and where it is in the actual layering; and second, by teetering on the brink of getting too complicated. Obviously I think it does all gell successfully, including in one painting which throws in a mirrored surface for luck, or else I wouldn’t be recommending the show! Nice little catalogue, too, in which John Chilver writes of the 'heady collision of risk and style'.


Wall of Light Pale Yellow Pink

Sean Scully @ Timothy Taylor Gallery, 15 Carlos Place - Mayfair

To 3 July: www.timothytaylorgallery.com

How much development is required to keep a practice fresh? My initial impression on walking into the latest continuation of Sean Scully’s long-running ‘Wall of Light’ series was: a little bit more than this. They’re still very beautiful, to be sure, but all eight grandly-sized oils still follow the established formula: translucent rectangular blocks of modest colours allow us to sense, and sometimes glimpse directly, a more vivid ground - which provides an inner, perhaps spiritual, glow. But only in the last couple of years has Scully painted on aluminium and alu-dibond (in which the metal is coated with a formica-like material). This gives the paintings an extra sheen and does more to emphasise small accidents, sub-shapes, and the individual strokes of what are often very large brushes. In ‘Wall of Light Pale Yellow Pink’ we also get a framing effect created by exposed aluminium. Enough, I think, for us to go on savouring Scully’s subtle structures and speculating on the emotional states underlying them without feeling we are mired in repetition.


Waiting for the Future

C Morey de Morand: Rewired @ Possin Gallery, Block K, 13 Bell Yard Mews (behind 175 Bermondsey Street) – London Bridge

To 26 June: www.poussin-gallery.com

Collette Morey de Morand is exceptionally international: a Franco-Russian who studied in Canada and New Zealand before settling here in the 70’s - and painted some of these works during a residency in Berlin. She’ s one of several geometric abstractionists currently demonstrating that there’s a surprising amount of variety left in such an apparently narrow genre. Hans Hoffman, Bridget Riley and Patrick Caulfield are the most visible references in this extensive show, but Morey de Morand strikes a consciously anti-Mondrian stance – though he’s obviously in the mix – by choosing to work mainly with secondary colours. They’re fractured paintings of urban mood and personal history, teed up by titles which tend towards the mock-portentous (‘Truth is Permanent’, ‘Consolation for Our Mortality’), and which put together a wide mix of shapes and motifs both within and between paintings. I liked the rather neat use of carefully-delineated sections of bare canvas to suggest, perhaps, reluctant exposures of vulnerability; and found myself pleasurably drawn into the whole interplay of elements. The excellent catalogue helps, too.


For Want of Sleep

Emma Bennett: Death & Co. @ CHARLIE SMITH London, 336 Old St (above The Reliance) – Hoxton

To 3 July: www.charliesmithlondon.com

Emma Bennett’s new series of large paintings, show ships in dark waters, apparently sailing into the space of the canvas, their cargoes of fruit and flowers spilling overboard. Each provides a quadruple dose of visual seduction: a glowering lamp black void; realistic images sourced from Dutch golden age painting; an abstract expressionist intervention in furniture polish which also reads like a wave; and the striking effect of combining those three apparently disparate elements. That also brings together four different timescales in one image: the 17th century of the source paintings, the 20th century of the abstract gesture, the 21st century of their combination, the eternity of the void. Appropriately, then, the works are allusively titled from Hardy, Eliot, Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath, and Bennett sees the ships as representing individual journeys through life. All of which could be portentous, but ther is an easy humour, too, in the playing off of differing scales. All in all, these are probably the richest new paintings currently on view in London – but the beauty of them is that, although they may sound complicated, they are immediately and straightforwardly alluring.

See www.charliesmithlondon.com/press-release-2010-06-03.pdf for my interview with Emma and essay on this show.


Choose Your Angle

Shara Hughes: Show Me, Because You Can’t See @ Museum 52, 52 Redchurch St – Shoreditch

To 30 June: www.museum52.com

American painter Shara (say ‘sharer’) Hughes is an Atlantan who has suffered from labyrinthitis, which is a dizziness caused by inflamation of inner ear system responsible for balance. That makes one kind of sense of the hyperactive multiplicity of spaces, perspectives, textures, colours and references which come improbably together in her unreal interiors. It’s not a necessary explanation, though: Hughes says she started painting them 'because I needed my own space: the paintings are my home', and they work just fine as hurly-burly rooms brimming with content and an apparently naïve mania for pattern. Their motifs include oddly-placed patches of night sky; woodcut effects; fires; swimming pools; flying fragments; scissors; Pollock; Bacon; Bronzino; Matisse; and Shara’s splendidly-named dog, Chicken Nugget. The combinations are spontaneous and, hence perhaps, fresh. The book on the table in ‘Choose Your Angle’ is the wryly-titled ‘How To Control Almost Everything’: Hughes gets nowhere near that, but the work feels all the better for it.


'I never wanted to weigh more heavily on a man than a bird'(Coco Chanel)

Nick Hornby: Atom vs. Super Subject @ Alexia Goethe Gallery, 7 Dover St - Central

To 9 July: www.alexiagoethegallery.com

No, the author of ‘Fever Pitch’ and ‘About a Boy’ isn't a sculptor on the side. Rather, the other – younger – Nick Hornby has a solo debut in which he blends typically three sculptures (all in full and to scale) into one by virtualising a merger on computer, then turning the result into gleaming white marble resin. Hornby’s ‘trybrids’, to adopt the term in Ossian Ward’s catalogue essay, come in two strands which take advantage of Alexia Goethe’s contrasting spaces: relatively conservative combinations of portrait busts to make composite muses upstairs; and more radical mergers downstairs. For example, the headless body and legs from Rodin’s ‘Walking Man’, the full sweep of Brancusi's ‘Bird in Space’ (which one side-view ingeniously resembles) and the negative space from Hepworth's ‘Form III’ come together under a title which almost lists those components but is a quote from Coco Chanel: 'I never wanted to weigh more heavily on a man than a bird'. Any number of associations can then be brought to the sculptural elements plus title quote. Is it that Rodin failed to value Camille Claudel as a sculptor rather than a mistress, Hepworth wasn’t given her deserved equal billing with Henry Moore in her lifetime, and Brancusi’s striving for the ideal form reminds us how art in practice falls short in such matters as equality - just as in everyday life, in which differential expectations about appearance and weight are flagged by Chanel’s quote? Perhaps, but Hornby – who chooses the components for their meaning as much as their form – says he is also interested in the origins of ideas, amateur genetics, the balance of the cooked and raw (he cites Levi-Strauss and the trickster tradition), the synthesis of genders, and more...




Anton Henning: MASTERdote AntiSINGER @ Haunch of Venison, 6 Burlington Gardens – Central

To 10 July: www.haunchofvenison.com

If there’s an antidote to Wagnerian excess in Anton Henning’s group-like show, then it’s yet more excess as he takes Wagner’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, to extremes. There’s room after room of the German’s characteristic environments, chockfull of psuedo-Impressionist-Cubist-Constructivist-Expressionist paintings-come-parodies-of-paintings in every genre; sculptures (some made of paintings); videos; furniture (some pretend, some lit from within); collages; drawings; kinetic work; painted windows etc etc, all in what might be termed the ‘good bad painting’ style which combines the knowingly slapdash with absurd subject matter. I particularly liked the super-vanitas-cliché whereby a set of double-sided paintings on a central axis are spun round by the action of fans so that we see skull and face successively and by way of bonus cool the viewer in the current hot weather. Overwhelming fun, then, but to what end? The press release says that Henning is pursuing ‘an anitidote to the norm’, which is ‘dependent on his ability to act in opposition to himself’. He has his own abstract theme-shape, the curlicue he calls a ‘Hennling’, which may represent how the path of artistic progress has turned into a wild loops which revisit everything but get nowhere. So this is probably meant to be an overblown and self-contradictory show which is part of its own problem – but it’s still easy to be… a fan.


Sam Plagerson's 'Natural Beauty', 'Blonde' + 'Denim Shirt'

New Symphony @ Simon Oldfield Gallery, First Floor, 9 Henrietta St – Covent Garden

To 17 July: www.simonoldfield.com

Simon Oldfield’s handily-located new space opens with some fizz by bringing together four interesting young sculptors. Tim Ellis, who also fares well in Saatchi’s recently-opened ‘Newspeak’, makes slippery assisted readymades in which it is difficult to be sure just what he has changed. Douglas White’s new work uses cacti as a found material as effectively as he has previously used burst tyres and tree roots. Katie Cuddon makes clay-based sculptures which seem to catch the formal residue of the body as affected by psychological and emotional states. Sam Plagerson follows up his stand-out work in Bloomberg New Contemporaries to riff on the way everything is converted to image in contemporary culture: he turns generic magazine-sourced pictures, cropped to form the modern equivalent of the classical fragment, back into perverse objects which actualise the distortions of media presentation. Overall, it’s a stimulating mini-survey.




Bruno Pacheco: Three Orange Trees, a Box and some Gloves @ Hollybush Gardens, Unit 2, BI House, 10-14 Hollybush Gardens – Bethnal Green

To 4 July: www.hollybushgardens.co.uk

Lisa Panting and Malin Ståhl’s gallery isn’t the easiest for the first timer to track down, as you have to ring up to the first floor of an unpromising-looking building of factory units and wait to be collected. But Lisbon/London based Bruno Pacheco’s oddly resonant paintings are worth a little effort - which you’ll also have to make inside, as he presents them in deadpan manner as objects of no more note than the architecture. ‘Opposite the three industrial windows there is a painting…’, says the press release, leaving you to make sense of the same orange tree shown three times in different light, an empty cakebox with abstract modernist tendencies, and a ‘black rectangular table, holding a sketchbook that contains 18 works painted in acylic on paper, portraying yellow household gloves’. Is that a fortnight of the artist’s washing up, or are the gloves there to pick the 18 oranges from the tree and put them in a cakebox?


Dan Peterman: Rathole

The Ground Around: Idylls, Earthworks and Thunderbolts @ Vilma Gold, 6 Minerva St – Cambridge Heath

To 11 July: www.vilmagold.com

This impressive group show, curated by Charles Asprey, is themed around the artist’s drive to look and delve down – whether at the ground, under the world or just beneath the studio floor. The clear match between Paul Nash and Carol Rhodes is one highlight; likewise, and more surprisingly, that between Prunella Clough and Wolfgang Tillmans. The most striking installation is of objects found by Manfred Pernice: a large metal ocean bouy washed up in the gallery and an even heavier plant box complete with vegatation. But my favourite works are from the studio. Isa Genzken’s ‘Basic Research’ (1989) is – uncharacteristically – an oil painting, made by spreading a canvas on her studio floor and pressing down paint so that it picked up an impression of the rough surface and materials. The result looks equally like a microscopic view or an ariel map, and is in keeping with Genzken’s primary interest in acting as a receiver of the world. And environmentally concerned Chicago artist Dan Peterman has made casts ‘in concrete with incidental debris’ of rat burrows from underneath his working space, suggesting a comfortable acceptance of whatever might naturally undermine his working practices.


Hannah Starkey: Untitled

Tour Feature: People often ask me what I would recommend as an afternoon’s tour of current exhibitions. A stroll along Redchurch Street and hop to Bethnal Green is currently rewarding. Walking east, that would include Richard Slee’s witty ceramics @ Hales, Joby Williamson’s Post-It Note show @ Tintype, Shara Hughes’ packed spaces @ Museum 52 and the diverting group show ‘This is England’ at the new Aubin Gallery (64-66 Redchurch St). Then catch a bus to Hollybush Gardens for Bruno Pacheco and finish at Herald Street, notably for Hannah Starkey’s coolly-composed takes on seeing at Maureen Paley.

Still showing from previous lists:

Tacita Dean to 23 June, Marc Quinn to 26 June, You've Gone Too Far This Time to 25 June, Lisa Yuskavage to 26 June, Clay Ketter to 27 June, Shana Moulton to 3 July, Rana Begum to 3 July, Matias Faldbakken to 3 July, Anthony Caro to 6 July, Steve McQueen to 18 July.

www.newexhibitions.com gives full address and opening time details of most shows

TEN FOR THE FUTURE

Gelitin @ Carlson: 22.6 - 15.7

Zhong Biao @ Olyvia Oriental: 23.6 - 3.9

Jane Bustin, Keven Finklea, Matt McGee & Estelle Thompson
@ Eagle Gallery 24.6 - 24.4

Pierre Soulages @ Bernard Jacobson: 24.6 - 1.9

Nothing is Forever @ South London Gallery: 24.6 - 5.9

Pavel Pepperstein @ Regina: 30.6 - 2.9

Straw Dogs @ Spring Projects: 24.6 - 30.7

Olga Chernysheva @ Calvert 22: 1.7 - 29.8

Liane Lang @ Squid & Tabernacle: 2.7 - 24.7

Tanabata (Japanese show) @ Maddox: 7.7 - 7.9


Photo credits: relevant artists and galleries

HIDDEN IN FULL VIEW AT 176

'Hidden in Full View' @ the Anita Zabludowicz Collection, 176 Prince of Wales Road - Chalk Farm - Sunday 6 June @ 3pm Free, but booking via www.projectspace176 is recommended.

These are the notes for my tour of a selection from the 217 works from the Zabludowicz Collection in 'The Library of Babel' at 176, as covered on 6 June.

I'll pretty-much ignore Borges, fascinating as he and 'The Library of Babel' may be. Instead, I'll experiment by applying a rigorous schematic to nine works from the collection. There are, of course, other ways to look at them, but it’s interesting to see what happens with a constraint – an approach which can work well in art itself. I do anyway believe that the best contemporary work is quite often amenable to the following three stages of examination:

1. We are struck by a feature which initially draws us in to wondering: just what is that?

2. We explore further and understand what's been done, and how – we get, if you like, ‘the trick’

3. We then ask: what thoughts lie behind that? That's a key stage, because if the work simply provides a trick for its own sake, it won't satisfy for long.

Often we have to probe to get to levels 2 and 3, even though there's nothing we can’t actually see. They are hidden in full view.




Foyer: Susan Collis ‘I dreamed I had it all’, 2007

1. Susan Collis is a not-all-that young – she was late starter – British artist who has come to prominence in the last four years or so. She shows with one of my favourite galleries, Seventeen. Her work often provokes initial puzzlement as expressed by the question: 'where’s the work?' Thus, when you walked into her first major show at Seventeen Gallery in 2007, it seemed you had got the opening time wrong. There was a stepladder covered with drips of paint, more drips on the floor, a broom, fixings on the wall with nothing attached to them… it seemed the previous show had just been taken down and the gallery was being whitewashed ready for Collis's installation.

2. But things were not what they seemed. Careful inspection revealed that the paint drips were carefully inlaid mother of pearl, the rings and marks on the table were, according to the almost biblical list of materials, made of diamond, pearl, opal, howlite, fossil coral and magnecite. 'I dreamed I had it all' (which is from a 176 edition, and not strictly part of The Library of Babel)has an extra ‘where’s the work?’ effect, as the screw in the wall is, to put it mildly, unobtrusive. It’s made with hand-cut garnet and black onyx.

3. So there is a kind of sculptural trompe-l'oeil in play. But that isn’t Collis's primary interest – in fact, though it’s fun, it’s a bit of a distraction. Her main interest is in issues of value. Making something of nominal value out of precious materials is one way of making the dichotomy between the worthless and the valued. Her laundry bags, hand-drawn in biro, make that point without precious materials - ludicrous labour to produce something commonplace. The invisibility also relates to the idea of hidden labour in consumer products. I also like the way in which her paint splashes make something which looks spontaneous and accidental out of a process which is the very opposite.




Work 21: Jason Savalon: 76 Blowjobs, 2001

1. Chicago-based Jason Salavon (born Indiana, 1970) has worked as a programmer in the video game industry, and is known for his use of custom computer software to manipulate and reconfigure media and data. He admits to having “weird nerdy fun” manipulating the computer. Obviously something of that sort is going on here, but up close this is a somewhat vague image.

2. In fact, '76 Blowjobs' comes from one of the main strands of Salavon's work, which is to overlay multiple photographs so that the result is a visual amalgamation – examples being the ‘averaging’ of tourist photos and of the looks of playmates across each decade. Actually he precedes Idris Khan, who is better known in Britain, in using this technique – but applies it quite differently. This is from that body of work: it simply blends 76 blowjob scenes from pornographic sources to make a vague average, resulting in the softest possible hardcore.

3. Savalon himself has said that he aims ‘to distill the complexity of life to make it more understandable.’ In fact he makes it all look rather uncertain and unspecific. I would sooner read into the project as a whole some commentary on the generic and interchangeable nature of our experiences. But what I like about this particular image is how, led by the title, it looks as if it could be made out of smoke: it could have been a construction from 76 shots of smoke – blow jobs of one sort – in order to make a blow job of a different sort, and that in turn makes 76 ‘small deaths’ into one large one. That is reinforced by the Sean Dack video, visible in the background, which does show smoke…




71: Jim Lambie: Psychedelicsoulstick # 30, 2001

1. Glasgow-based Jim Lambie (who shows with The Modern Institute in Glasgow and Sadie Coles in London) uses eccentric materials. He picks stuff up from market stalls and jumble sales, manipulates such items as records, trainers and handbags. There’s a punk glamour, very rock ‘n’ roll feel to his work, which has been termed 'pop alchemy'. Even with that background, though, this seems a mysterious object.

2. Psychedelicsoulstick # 30 is from a series of bamboo sticks around which thread has been wrapped to capture discarded items like watches, guitar plectrums and cigarette packets. So those typical Lambie materials are present, but hidden. I’m reminded of two artists strongly associated with the 1960’s: Andy Warhol, who made ‘time capsules’ - boxes into which he shunted all the trappings and detritus of his life – and Joseph Beuys, the shamanistic German artist, one of whose symbols was the walking stick.

3. Lambie is interested in bringing the experiences of countercultures and music in particular into the gallery. We see that most clearly in the ‘gallery to disco’ move of his ‘Zobop’ series, which makes psychedelic floors of stripes with tape, mapping the architectural space while overwhelming it. Here there is the suggestion of a chrysalis, plus the Beuysian ritual, plus the time capsule, plus the title ‘Psychedelicsoulstick’. It all points to how hidden elements have power, and to the ongoing power in our lives of the artistic and musical cultures from the past – of their near-ritualistic importance to our lives now, how we're largely the sum of such influences…




53: Damien Roach: Chapter 1: Appearance and Reality, 2007

1. Damien Roach is a very varied, conceptually-based young British artist. He chooses not to have a British gallery at present, but is represented in Dusseldorf and Brussels, where I recently saw a three room installation of his which apparently had the same set of works in each room until you started to look more closely… Clever stuff, then. And here we have the cover of Bertrand Russell’s ‘Problems of Philosophy’ along with some alphabetically-ordered lists of words.

2. The title gives us a fair clue about what is going on: Roach has rearranged Chapter 1 of the book, so we see the right words but in different order. Interestingly, that idea has been explored by other artists recently, albeit to different ends: Kim Rugg’s rearrangements of newspaper front pages, and Simon Popper’s alphabetical version of Joyce’s Ulysses. This work is particuarly close to the Borges story 'The Library of Babel',whihc decribes the hopelessness of trying to find meaningful answers in a library which contains every possible book, ie whihc would therefore include not just this rearrangement of Russell's book, but every other one.

3. One of Russell’s central philosophical concerns was how to break down the world as it appears to its basic underlying constituents. He pursued that through, for example, an attempt to demonstrate how set logic underlay mathematical truths in the forbidding 'Principia Mathematica', and an analysis of the primacy of sense data in a logical construction of objects in ‘Our Knowledge of the External World’. Roach has satirically applied Russell’s techniques to his own analysis, breaking down Russell's text into its constituent parts - only to reveal that it is then senseless: it was the manner of combination which constituted the meaning. Perhaps we can read across to a critique of any attempts to reduce art-making to the formula of its elements.




96: Luke Rudolph: Portrait Number Eight, 2009

1. Luke Rudolf graduated from Goldsmiths College only last year, and his first solo show is on now at Kate MacGarry. This is typical of the work in that show, which looks – at least up close -like a complex, multiply-layered abstract painting combining various painterly languages - drips, taped-off hard edges, metallic effects, prominent brushstrokes - and uses both acrylic and oil. A kind of compendium of mark-making.

2. We see the trick pretty soon, though, as pointed to by the title ‘Portrait Number Eight’. It's pareidolia, if you want a word for it: Rudolf forces together the visual language of abstraction and the figurative tradition of portraiture by exploiting how easily our tendency to recognise a face can be triggered. They are, though, generic faces, not based on particular individuals, so they aren't really portraits or abstractions. Here there's a clownish look to the mouth and ears, complementing the somewhat comical treatment of the abstract.

3. This painting is, I think, simple fun. But it's also about the history of art. It uses the clichés of both figurative and abstract impressionism – combining them vigorously enough to make them fresh – but reverses the typical move whereby the artist abstracts from a representation. Instead, the mannerisms of abstraction are used to construct a representation; as if to point out how the artist himself is never rendered abstract, however much his paintings may be.




134: Marc Quinn: Garden2, 2001

1. Marc Quinn (born 1964) is a ‘YBA’ best-known for his frozen 'Self' series (from 1991) and for putting Alison Lapper on the fourth plinth. I find him uneven, but I like his current show at White Cube (though few people seem to - see Paul's Art World for why I do). These - 5 from a set of 8 hand-varnished pigment prints - look at first glance like a set of photographs of flowers, which indeed they are – but what else is going on?

2. 'Garden Squared' has frozen origins, linking it to 'Self'. They are photographs of Quinn's 'Garden' (2000), a real botanical garden of 1,000 plants and flowers from all over the world, which was preserved in full bloom by immersion in twenty-five tons of liquid silicone kept at a constant temperature of -80˚ Celsius. The flowers in it could neither grow nor perish. Quinn claims to have found a Permaprint inkjet print process which freezes and fixes the frozen garden in turn – this time as an indelible image.

3. This is a play on the vanitas tradition of Dutch still lives with flowers, designed to remind us of the transitory nature of life. Those paintings were often made over several months in order to include ‘impossible’ combinations of flowers which did not bloom at the same time. Quinn exploits modern international growing methods and freezing technology to make such scene both possible and potentially permanent. Is the result perfect flowers with the enchantment of a continuous spring, or yet another deplorable example of the artificial replacing the natural? We might also make links to genetic engineering and global warming.




182: Martin Boyce: Telephone Booth Conversations (1) , 2006

1. Martin Boyce, who showed for Scotland at last year's Venice Biennale and is represented in Glasgow by The Modern Institute, provides us with the curious site of a payphone booth in a gallery display. Such a booth was becoming rather dated, wherever located, by the time this was made in 2006. It’s no surprise, perhaps, that there is no telephone present, not even a non-functioning one; nor that there are signs of graffiti. Evidently the titular reference to ‘conversations’ is ironic, at least at the literal level. So what’s it doing here?

2. It’s not just any old phone booth found or reproduced. The vocabulary that Boyce has employed is derived from his discovery of a photograph of the concrete trees designed by the Martel brothers for the Art Deco exhibition held in Paris in 1925. According to Boyce these trees “represent a perfect collapse of architecture and nature”. From them he extracted a grid template that has since become the basis for his practice – from sculpture to typography. Thus, once you’ve seen Boyce’s work, you can recognise the distinctive quadrilateral forms which make up the structure of the booth.

3. Boyce is interested in the legacy of modernism corrupted by use and abandonment. Typically, the combination of such elements as trees made from neon, upended benches, slanted waste bins, suspended lighting and phone booths creates a modernist theatre-set, suggesting the marginal zones of the modern city – perhaps a playground at night. Here we have an extract from such installations, which fits neatly with the violence implied by the surrounding works (featuring a bullet hole and a car crash). I think Boyce achieves a futuristic look, albeit derived from the past, which could be read as somewhat gloomy: our futures will be rooted in our pasts, and the old patterns of decline will affect them, too. That, I think, is the kind of conversation to which Boyce refers, and which we might have in front of the work.




186: Anne Hardy: Cipher, 2007

1. Anne Hardy (born 1970) is represented by Maureen Paley. This is on the face of it a photograph of a curious room in a state of some decay and disarray. The erstwhile occupants seem to have been carrying out some obscure sports-related activities. Maybe it's the hiding place of a dangerous obsessive of some sort: 'Cipher' suggests the symbol or secret system of a cult. Perhaps those weights have ritual uses.

2. Hardy is, however, one of those artists (like Thomas Demand and James Casebere) who doesn't photograph reality, but makes a construction which she then photographs and destroys. In her case, she fills her studio in Hackney with objects, typically sourced from the streets or markets round about and implying some seamy narrative prequel. Moths of labour are involved. She never shows the inhabitants directly. The results are desolate and somewhat unnerving.

3. There is underlying concern with deception and the nature of reality. What if, in the manner of Plato's cave, what we believe to be the world is actually a stage set constructed by an omnipotent artist? Or else Hardy might be commenting on how people manipulate their own environments; on how we make assumptions about people from where we find them; or on the real life of the objects to which she gives an alternative life, most of which are rescued from the excessive disposals of a society in which a third of supermarket food purchases are thrown away uneaten. She also reases with potential meanings: what system lies behind the numbers which look like markers from a crime scene? We want to acribe a meaning, but suspect there is none.




183: Vik Muniz: Origin of the World, After Courbet (from 'Pictures of Soil'), 1999

1. Vik Muniz is a Brazilian artist (born 1961) who grew up in the poverty of Sao Paulo before escaping to America in 1983 - after, as Muniz tells it, getting the air fare from a rich man who paid him to keep quiet after shooting him in the leg during a fight in which Muniz was not involved. This is, as we are told, a version of Courbet’s famous / notorious ‘Origin of the World’(1866), and is made out of soil, which Muniz then photographed. So it is, like Hardy's work, a reconstruction; but if there’s a deception, it doesn’t last long, and soon gives way to some wonder at the technical feat involved.

2. Muniz is intensely interested in capturing the past, and in how photographs can misrepresent it. His early work actually links rather neatly to Luke Rudolf’s, as in ‘The Equivalents’ he fabricated and photographed elaborate cotton-ball sculptures to simulate the recognizable images suggested by passing clouds, so playing with the double illusion of photography and clouds, and perhaps suggesting similarities between them. He has worked with a range of unorthodox and transitory drawing materials, which he then turns into a lasting photographic image. 'The Sugar Children' (1996) and 'Pictures of Chocolate' (1997-98) are notably resonant.

3. The Pictures of Soil series tends to show people, reinforcing the moral and religious overtones of soil as the substance from which life emerged and to which it will return – and this particular image makes that point of origin very clear. That links it to the vanitas tradition also explored by Mark Quinn. There is also an tonally different play on the idea of an 'earthy' or 'dirty' picture, which relates it to Savalon. Add the element of trompe-l'oeil which parallels Susan Collis; the breaking down of the image, as referred to by Damien Roach; the bringing of what was once a controversially modern work into a current language, not unlike Boyce's use of modernism - and we can see this is a very rich work which pulls matters together and seems a suitable place to end.

JUNE AT THE DOUBLE

You may have noticed some of the 268 Indian elephants dotted around London as an event to raise funds for charitable assistance for their survival. Few are by artists, but this neatly street-themed street elephant by Rana Begum is in Berkeley Square, and is a nice complement to her exhibition just a few yards away at Bischoff Weiss. I didn't see any elephants in the 'Library of Babel' show at the Anita Zabludowicz Collection, but don't let that put you off attending my tour of it on 6 June @ 3 pm: see www.projectspace176.com


Luis Tomasello: detail from Objet Plastique No. 925, 2009

Rana Begum: Installation shot

Luis Tomasello @ The Mayor Gallery, 22a Cork St - Central

To 11 June: www.mayorgallery.com

Rana Begum: Fractured Symmetry @ Bischoff Weiss, 14a Hay Hill - Central

To 3 July: www.bischoffweiss.com

I link these two excellent shows because the veteran Argentine Luis Tomasello, whose first substantial British appearance this is, and young Anglo-Bangladeshi Rana Begum share common concerns. Both make geometric work which straddles the line between painting and sculpture, which alters in appearance as the spectator moves around it, which exploits the way in which reflections can provide a mysterious source of colour, and which consequently loses much of its point in reproduction. That may sound a lot of similarity, and shows how the same issues are revisited and reinterpreted across the generations, but the works are nonetheless very different. Tomasello, who is still active at 95, emerged as a kinetic artist in the 1950’s alongside Jesus Rafael Soto. He makes hidden colour bleed from under multiple repeated shapes, and also exploits how the same colour can appear different depending on its angle compared with the light source (those are all the same yellow above). Begum’s work comes from the energy of the streets, but gives that a transcendental twist: in these works, by making the frontal view all-white but with mysterious hint of some ‘unplugged’ light; and by the colours blooming and changing as the viewer-as-pedestrian passes by. The comparison between Tomasello and Begum is striking, and the galleries are only some 200 yards apart...

See Bischoff /Weiss site shortly for my interview with Rana.




Bryne & Lau: TEOTWAWKI @ FOLD, 32 Fortesque Avenue – London Fields

To 16 June: www.foldgallerycom

Kim Savage and Sharrine Scholtz are generously hosting a show which contemplates the obliteration of their gallery - for Jamie Lau and EA Byrne’s first collaboration, which goes under the acronymic title for ‘The end of the world as we know it’, centres around a model of FOLD as threatened by a huge boulder suspended above it. TEOTWAWKI’s tightly-related works explore not disaster itself, but the tension and dread which precedes it, and the cultural construction of that state: there’s also a collage of pre-apocalyptic scenes from Hollywood movies; adjusted versions of warning posters; and a sculptural explanation of the impact zones of a nuclear bomb. All of which may suggest a rather heavy visit, however appropriate to the zeitgeist of global warming, terrorism and volcano ash. But not at all: from that absurdly targeted comical rock onwards, Byrne & Lau balance our instinct to panic against our equal tendency to laugh such threats off. Best go soon, though, just in case the world goes first.

I am taking part in a panel discussion and catalogue launch for this show at Shoreditch House on Tues 8 June from 7 pm – email me on paulcareykent@googlemail.com if you would like to attend.

Leviathan

Clay Ketter @ Bartha Contemporary, 136B Lancaster Rd – Ladbroke Grove

To 27 June: www.barthacontemporary.com

This small but wide-ranging show, a hundred yards from Ladbroke Grove tube, will make you want to see more of the mid-career Swedish-based American’s work. Ketter constructs socially-charged photographs, paintings and sculpture at the intersection of art and architecture. He is perhaps best known for images of houses destroyed in Hurricane Katrina, photographed from such a high vantage point on a ladder that they are returned to their origin in architectural plans. There’s one of those here; plus the pre-construction elements of a doll’s house, flattened and blown up big; and a delightfully chaotic yet controlled installation wall. But the biggest works go higher than any ladder: two huge – and hugely enhanced – satellite images of contrasting American communities, both with an island-like independence and self-containment, rendered as lightjet C-Print diasecs ten feet wide. ‘The Garden Revisited’ brings a biblical feel to the baroque patterns of an affluent commuter town in Virginia in which the only small houses are for those who work in the supermarket at its centre. Opposite that, ‘Leviathan’ shows a less well-to-do settlement in the Mojave Desert in Colorado, where the residents work in the southern half, which consists of factories. A large team of software specialists have spent their nights altering all sorts of details under Ketter's direction, and it's fasciating to speculate on what's real and what isn't in front of the full scale works.


Still from Whispering Pines 9

Shana Moulton @ Gimpel Fils, 30 Davies St - Central

To 3 July: www.gimpelfils.com

Gimpel Fils presents episode 9 in New York based Shana Moulton’s ‘Whispering Pines’ series of short films, along with ‘Puzzle Saga’, a theatrically-presented three screen installation which fills most of the gallery and incorporates elements of episode 10. Moulton, who grew up on the Whispering Pines mobile home park in California, has been playing her alter-ego, Cynthia, for a decade now and says the series – which ought to be better-known in Britain - is likely to have just the finale to come. Cynthia is an anxious, unspeaking and isolated hypochondriac whose stories combine mundane activities with the comically surreal as she searches for fulfillment through consumerism, self-help, and new-age remedies. If I tell you that much of ‘Whispering Pines 9’ sees Cynthia wandering around with no apparent legs, wearing as a hat the virtual version of a footbath which she tries to pass off as a valuable Native American bowl, you’ll get some idea of the winningly kooky style with which she sends up how we search for purpose in our lives.


'Given' @ greengrassi

'Untitled' (detail) @ Faggionato

Lisa Yuskavage @ greengrassi,1a Kempsford Rd - Kennington

To 26 June: www.greengrassi.com

You've Gone Too Far This Time @ Faggionato Fine Arts, 49 Albemarle St - Central

To 25 June (not weekends): www.faggionato.com

Lisa Yuskavage currently features in two shows well worth seeing. First, her own solo presentation at greengrassi, which might be described as ‘provocation as normal’: distorted women presented in candy colours with an aesthetic which exploits the sensuality of oil paint to mix registers wildly: the repulsive with the sickly sweet, the girlie mag with the classic nude. The effect is uncomfortably powerful, especially in 'Given', in which various balls lie around to parody the breasts and stomach of the pregnant main subject. You can also see Yuskavage in gentler, watercolour mode – albeit with the bizarre subject of rabbit suckling - as a part of Faggionato’s well-chosen stock show ‘You’ve Gone Too Far This Time’. That brings together eight artists’ representations of the body: Kiki Smith’s five elements of body tissue from tissue paper and George Condo’s typically oddball ‘Nude on Purple’ also stand out.


Poster Sculpture

Matias Faldbakken: Known to Few, Unknown to Fewer @ Simon Lee Gallery, 12 Berkeley St – Central

To 3 July: www.simonleegallery.com

This could be the bravest show in London now… The Norwegian artist (and cult novelist) Matias Faldbakken, who makes a fetish of negativity and destruction of meaning, presents not rubbish – that would be an old provocation – but twelve bin bags. They’re in their mint, grey, folded state; seriously framed to emphasise their supposed desirability and art status; and bear unobtrusive acronyms and graffiti-like marks which themselves only pretend to meaning. Did he know what he was doing? A scattering of bottles of liquor allows us to suppose not. But my favourite work here is of 3,000 male fashion posters bound tightly enough to stand as a sculpture, and so buckled by the pressure that the front image is little more legible than the other 2,999. So much, one presumes, for the power of the image in mass production – but the buckling makes for an attractive aesthetic, albeit one which Falbakken would probably reject along with everything else.



Tacita Dean: Craneway Event @ Frith Street Gallery, 17-18 Golden Square – Central

To 23 June: see www.frithstreetgallery.com for screening times

Tacita Dean’s new film portrait follows the late Merce Cunningham rehearsing his dancers, without music unless you count floorboard creaks and percussive feet, in a disused Ford assembly plant overlooking the San Francisco Bay. It’s a strikingly beautiful combination of light and movement, helped by wide windows, streaming sun and reflective floors. Outside, birds and passing ships punctuate and parallel the inner action. Although edited down considerably by Dean from 17 hours of footage, it remains a fairly testing 100 minutes long with less dance action and fewer choreographic insights than you might anticipate. There is logic to the length, which matches that of the eventual performance, gives us some feel for the dedication required of dancers, and makes for a meditative pace in which a sneeze seems startling. Nonetheless, although ‘Craneway Event’ is screened at set times, feature-film-style, I suspect many people will get what they’re going to get from half an hour.


Two Reclining Figures


Henry Moore and the Chelsea School of Art @ Chelsea Space, 16 John Islip St – Millbank

One view of The Coral Reef in its previous installation

To 12 June: www.chelseaspace.org

Mike Nelson: The Coral Reef @ Tate Britain

Ongoing: www.tate.org

There are two tales of problematic installation at Millbank currently. Tate Britain’s ongoing big show is of Henry Moore. Over the road at the University of the Arts’ Chelsea Space – in what is the 33rd exhibition arranged there by Donald Smith –you can find a diverting history of Moore’s ‘Two Reclining Figures’, 1959, as owned by the Chelsea School of Art. It ranges from the planning bureaucracy required to relocate it to the practical difficulties of shifting such heavy pieces as imagined in Dudley Sutton’s poem ‘Don’t Do Any More Henry Moore’. The sculpture itself is presented as if in transit. What now seems Mike Nelson’s increasingly seminal series of rooms 'The Coral Reef' was originally shown at Matt’s Gallery in 2000 and then at the Venice Biennale in 2001 (and Nelson will be in the British Pavilion in next year's edition). It's great to see it appear as a recent acquisition - even if, to Tate Britain’s embarrassment, it opened a couple of weeks later than the advertised 17 May due, I was told, to ‘health and safety issues'. Evidently, heavy weights are not the only problem to affect installations…

Blood and Spit

T.V. Santosh: Burning Flags @ Aicon Gallery, 8 Heddon St - Central

To 12 June: www.aicongallery.com

Kerala-born, Mumbai-based T.V. Santosh brings a striking aesthetic to his commentary on media distortion by computer-manipulating source images from the news so that they appear in the negative and scarified by crosses; blowing them up big; and then painting them in a searing palette dominated by orange and green. He maximizes the intensity and reinforces the urgency of the underlying stories by working with just one layer of pure colour on a white ground. Here those characteristic oils are complemented by more intuitive monochrome watercolour treatments, and two white fiberglass sculptures which incorporate ominous messages scrolling past in neon. ‘The Last Command’ does so in a cell-like structure made from cast bones which Santosh says reference South Indian and Czech churches, in both of which bones are sometimes used to decorate the walls. If the medium is the message, he implies, then it may be time to panic.

Untitled (mg-10-5293)

Michelle Grabner: Flapjack @ Rocket, Tea Building, 56 Shoreditch High St - Shoreditch

To 19 June: www.rocketgallery.com

You go years without a good show made up entirely of circular abstractions, then hot on the heels of FAS Contemporary’s ‘Tondo’, another one rolls along… Chicago-based painter Michelle Grabner has worked small, but here she goes big with some of the eight tondos shown being over six feet in diameter. All are black grounds marked with thousands of dots of varying strengths of white, which spiral out to form intricately vibrant patterns. They’re done by hand, with no pre-planning and certainly no computers. The surprisingly wide variations come from such factors as Grabner’s mood, the time of day, and the amount of paint on the brush. You might be reminded of saucers, constellations or aerial views of hats – but probably not of flapjack, until you learn that in America it is a type of pancake.


William Tillyer: Helmsley Sky Study 8A

Tour Feature: People often ask me what I would recommend as an afternoon’s tour of current exhibitions. Right now, the galleries near the Royal Academy have a strong hand: not just Bischoff/Weiss, Simon Lee, the Mayor Gallery and Faggionato as above, but also Richard Hamiton's shit and flowers at Alan Cristea, Nick Hornby at Alexia Goethe, Anton Henning at Haunch of Venison and the final part of the four show restrospective of William Tillyer at Bernard Jacobson. That last includes a brand new set of cloud paintings, made directly onto (in fact, squeezed through the back of, then worked additionally from the front) metal lattice screens. That is a way of substituting what Tillyer sees as the 'passive receiver' which is canvas with an active component, playing its part in what is then simultaneously painting, object, window and modernist grid.

Still showing from previous lists:

Erwin Olaf to 4 June, Leigh Ledare to 5 June, Jennet Thomas to 6 June, Alex Hudson to 6 June, The Library of Babel to 13 June, William Tillyer to 19 June, Michael Samuels to 19 June, Marc Quinn to 26 June, Anthony Caro to 6 July, Steve McQueen to 18 July.

www.newexhibitions.com gives full address and opening time details of most shows

TEN FOR THE FUTURE

Emma Bennett @ CHARLIE SMITH London: 4.6 - 3.7

Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom @ Squid & Tabernacle: 4.6 - 26.6

Michael Stubbs @ Laurent Delaye: 4.6 - 24.7

Oscar Tuazon @ ICA: 4.6 - 15.8

PINTA Latin American Art Fair @ Earls Court 4-6.6

Matt Calderwood @ Maria Stenfors 9.6 – 24.7

Merlin James @ Mummery & Schnelle: 9.6 - 31.7

AGGTELEK @ Crisp: 9.6 - 17.7

Miho Sato @ DomoBaal: 11.6 - 19.7

Analia Saban @ Josh Lilley: 11.6 - 17.7


Photo credits: relevant artists and galleries