Art School Redux

Hey There! I know this blog is supposed to feature my musings on art and such, but I’m going to interrupt this with a little except from my personal life. I’ve recenty begun a life drawing class  at my local college, which incidentally is where I happen to work. It’s also happens to be the most artistic thing I’ve done in months, ever since the TAA debacle, in which I thoroughly embarrassed myself by making shite art. Anywho, it was immensely enjoyable, despite my limited scrawling ability and my (admittedly meagre) skills blunted by my own indifference. But yeah I enjoyed it, and reflected back on how few opportunities to do life drawing at Universtiy. The class was 2 hours and it really flew by. Our model (Devina) also suggested we partake in Tunick’s project in Salford, which I mentioned last month. Ha.

So it felt like I was back at art school for the evening which brought back memories, and when I got home I tuned into Goldsmiths: But Is It Art? On BBC4  which brought back even more memories, as we watched a likeable group of M.A. students prepare for their degree show. I actually applied to study Fine Art at Goldsmiths, back in the day, and sadly didn’t get in, so the corridors and rooms were ever so slightly familiar. Even more familiar was the general goldsmiths experience that pretty much mirrored my own. I watched in fond remembrance as the students rollered the walls white, suffered the indignity of an uninterested crit-group, translated what their tutors said into advice and generally panicked about life after art school. The show wasn’t nearly as confrontational as it’s title suggested, offering very little in the way of opinions on the artists or their artwork, allowing them to explain themselves, for better or for worse. Some of the work was good, and some was confused, and some of it was just rubbish. Which is pretty much any degree show experience.  The program was backed with a nice relaxing soundtrack, consisting of soft piano and post rock melodies. It doesn’t appear to be available on the iplayer, so you’ll have to actually tune in next week for the next part.

Speaking of Art school again, one of my tutors from Manchester Met, David Osbaldeston, has an opening on Thursday night at Castlefield gallery, Out of Time (The Light of Day / The Action of the Play). I’ve not seen his work in ages, but the billboard he had in Matt’s gallery a few years back (Your answer is mine, 2006) was really quite superb, and played with the representation of information and opinion, and the way it is presented. He was also an excellent tutor so you should go and check it out!

Oh wait hang on, that Goldsmith’s thing should be repeated on Sunday at 10PM on BBC4.

Links;

http://www.castlefieldgallery.co.uk/Default.asp?eKey=333&eP=1

Hot Naked Lowry Action

The American artist Spencer Tunick is coming to town to help the Lowry celebrate it’s 10th birthday. I’m actually surprised the Lowry is this old to be honest; to me it feels paradoxically younger and older than this, having very quickly gained a foothold in the cultural make-up of the city. It has already outlived the Urbis, which is strange considering The Lowry’s remote (compared to Urbis’s central) location. This is down to the Lowry having a much more defined and clearer purpose than Urbis, showcasing theatre, comedy, live music, as well as modern and contemporary art and photography.

The Base, Sydney, 2010

The Lowry has done an excellent job of being an excellent platform for the arts, but has never truley stood out. I don’t know if this is because of its “out of town” location means it appeals to suburbanites with estate cars out for the day, or whether it’s focussing it’s attention elsewhere. This is to change though, as Salford joins a list of (only slightly) more glamourous locations such as Sydney, New York, Buenos Aires and, erm, Gateshead, to be made the backdrop of one of American artist Spencer Tunick’s stunning nude installations.  
Tunick is renowned, literally world over, for these incredible pieces, in which large groups of naked volunteers pose in eerily still landscapes, usually in high profile, densely populated locations. The effect is to create a river of flesh, and to use the naked human body, for millennia a subject of art, as a material, with which to ‘paint’ on the landscape. The resulting photographs are calming, yet strangely troubling, and serenely raising questions about humans in relation to the landscape, as well as our individuality as human beings.


It is obvious that Spencer Tunick has been strongly influenced by film, as many of his pieces feel almost sci-fi in nature, and suggest our intrusion, interrupting some unknown narrative. 
But for this latest project, he claims his inspiration is Salford’s most famous son, L.S Lowry. It will be interesting how this manifests itself in Tunick’s work. Lowry’s work is sometimes seen as a simple celebration of the disappeared industrial north. Lowry’s masses of humanity are shown as part of the landscape, participating in it and changed by it. As opposed to Tunick’s who stand arranged on it, jarring with our expectations for those surroundings. Although both artists examine the human relationship to the environment, they do so in almost diametrically opposite ways. Tunick dehumanises the volunteers in his photographs, presenting them as an anonymous smear of humanity spread across a landscape, while Lowry’s subjects retain it through engaging with their surroundings. 

Daisy Nook (1946)

The landscape Lowry painted has almost disappeared, so where is Tunick planning to arrange his nudes? The landscape around The Lowry itself is distinctly post-industrial; all mirrored buildings and improbable architecture, and not hugely different from many other urban locations he has used in the past. Tunicks work is at it it’s strongest when the fleshy human tones contrast strongly with their surroundings, so hopefully he’s got somewhere good in mind, and not just in front of The Lowry. 


If I was being really cynical, and I am, I could say that Tunick’s work here is being co-opted as an advert for Salford and the quays regeneration (Mediacity is soon to be opening it’s doors), in the same way Vaseline used it to advertise their skincare products. Hopefully, this isn’t the case, The Lowry will be spurred on to doing more exciting and challenging exhibitions. 

Links for you...

http://thespencertunickexperience.org/oldindex.htm 

http://www.thelowry.com/ The Lowry

Ron Mueck in the Artist's Room

Ron Mueck (b 1958) is a hyperrealist sculptor, who your mum has probably heard of. The painstakingly exquisite sculptures of naked humans in awkward poses are some of the most striking and symbolic pieces of contemporary art to emerge from Saatchi’s influential Sensation show. His piece Dead Dad (1996) made him a household name, and he went on to have his monumental piece Boy featured as part of the Millennium Dome.


Mueck’s work is striking partly due to the scale, and his work is ostentatiously all about size. You find yourself using fractions and scale to describe things in ways you never would normally. And this is exacerbated to great effect by the other striking feature of his work, the realism. The fleshy hues and individual hairs on his ½, 2x and even 10x human bodies are honest and masterly representations of physical and social forms.


Wild Man (2005), is easily the most impressive of the three pieces on display. A bearded and scraggly haired man is blown up to 3x times normal size and is perched, uneasily on a stool, his body tensed and a worried expression on his face. His eyes fixed on something, if you stand in the right place, just behind you. The tension in his body, his nakedness and the title of the piece creates an air of apprehension. His oversized and ungainly body makes the embarrassment and sense of being scrutinized he must be feeling evident in quite a comic way. The comparisons to Gulliver’s Travels are easy and lazy, so I’m going to make them. It also makes our role in assigning judgement to his situation transparent. By diminishing us physically this serves to diminish us morally too.


As Mueck’s work is about the body, about our unconscious movements and intimate moments, it is very easy for almost anyone to relate to. This a strength of the work, and allows for the scale to instantly transport the viewer to exactly where he wants them to be. There is no confusion, when you stand in front of Mask III (2005), you’re instantly thrown back into childhood, to looking up at the warm and kindly face of this black matriarch. Even if, like me, you never knew a kindly black woman as a child and never had this happen to you “for real”, Mueck can still put you back into that moment, whether it’s one from his past of one from your own. Except this moment is frozen, and you’ve got forever to ponder the enigmatic quirks of the soft expression on her giant face. The title suggests that this is one of many personas the artist as a person must take on, so while this may or may not relate to an actual event, Mueck acknowledges that at times he must be the embodiment of motherly warmth. Either way, we experience what he wants us to.


The smallest, and my favourite, is Spooning Couple (2005). In this piece, a miniature couple lie together, but apart. Their bodies “spooning” as if in bed together. You approach them in the same way you marvel at the detail in a newborn baby; their tiny toes and fingers, their hair, their eyebrows, all perfect. Yet their pose suggests something not quite right. They are comfortable enough to lie together semi-naked, but they do not face each other, their tired expressions show them lost in their own thoughts, and makes it clear that we a looking at a delicate and intimate moment. We become unwilling voyeurs, forced to evaluate our own relationships in light of this new perspective on the couple. We have to look down on them, making our emotions and feelings for one another feel childish and inconsequential. In the same way we know a baby will grow up to learn to control it’s impulses and relate to those around it, we feel that of our foetal couple. I felt a pang of guilt about the relationships in my own life, yet was hopeful for them and myself afterward.


These tiny, yet intimate moments which are easily forgotten, puts me in mind of the hit American sitcom Seinfeld. Ostentatiously a show about nothing, it drew attention to the small, everyday moments that made up our lives. This made it, conversely, a show about everything. In the very same way Mueck’s work does this, changing our relationship to a particular moment through his use of scale.


The three pieces in this show are all excellent examples of his work, and the video on show in the room next door gives an insight into the work that makes one of these sculptures (and shows you how each hair is individually sewn into the latex). Mueck is obviously a master of his craft, and a brilliant and exciting one at that.
This is an excellent, though small, exhibition, which I’d recommend going to see at least twice. Go on your own and with your friends (if you have any).


At Manchester Art gallery until Sunday 11th April 2010

Xmas break

I'm currently gorging on xmas cheer here at tryharderfailbetter, so I'm too obese and drunk to visit any galleries or think about art. Hopefully I'll have something to say in new year. Yeah right.

Congrats to Eugenie Scrase though, and Matt Clark. A happy ending after all. Matt Clark was well chuffed his new studio had a window after a years of slaving away in the mount Doom below a railway arch. I wonder if the grimy, slightly claustrophic feel his art had will make way for a lighter and airier style? Who knows. But I'll keep my eyes peeled.

Merry Christmas and Happy new year to you!

Pre-match report.

The final episode of School of Saatchi is on tonight, bringing this year’s term to a close. I’ll be tuning in at 9 to see who the winner is. If it were about being the best artist, Matt Clarke would be the one packing his bags and looking for hotel rooms in Saint Petersberg, but as it’s about being a personality, It means Saad and Eugenie are still in with a very serious chance. Even though Eugenie still breaks my heart each time she smiles, I don’t think that is quite enough for old man Saatchi, although I’m sure she’d be a winner at gallery openings around the world. Saad also proved he is capable of holding the public’s attention by having a tempter tantrum when Matt Colishaw laid into his work, and his major tiff with Suki. Sam Zealy and Ben Lowe look a little out of their depths, especially after last weeks historical art challenge, and poor Suki’s work is far too painstakingly meticulous. She’ll hopefully do well after the show though, as there seems to be a bit a sea change away from flashy spectacle going on within contemporary art, especially after the credit crunch and financial collapse.

Anyway I’ll be watching, and in the spirit of competition, my odds are, Matt Clarke 2/1, Saad 3/1, Eugenie 4/1, Suki 7/1, Ben about 8/1 and, as some disaster seems to be about to befall Sam in the next episode, he can be the outsider at 10/1.

But what do I know? I thought Roger Hiorns would win the Turner Prize.

Some kind of weird amateur builder.

Another week, another episode of School of Saatchi for me to witter about In the same way that the extreme gravity around a black hole distorts the space-time continuum, extreme wealth too, has this curious effect, distorting the perception of reality surrounding it. Just look at Dubai. Saatchi’s unseen squillions have created this weird little bubble of unreality around the six. This time around saw the intrepid bunch of potential-art-superstars make large scale public work, which is about as realistic a career trajectory for the average artist as Eastenders is a realistic portrayal of the East end of London.

The work they produced was pretty good though, I thought, what I could see of it that was distorted through my tears of envy. They were split up into 3 different teams, and in their couples sent to Hastings to make some public art in two weeks. Public art is notoriously hard to get right. Not even a seasoned like pro Gormley can get it right all the time, I mean, how shit was that forth plinth thing? Also, Martin Creed turned up, and then left again (ha).

Suki and Sam made a cool looking geometric looking sculpture out of mirrored acrylic, inspired by radar reflected they saw affixed to boats. Their original (slightly mental considering the time frame) plan was to have one  floating out at sea, and one on the shore acting as a turbine powering a telephone link out to sea, which would relay the sound back to the shore, a logistical nightmare that makes my head hurt. In the end they left it on the shore in an old rowing boat. I though this was a bit of a disappointment, as it would have looked pretty serene floating out on the horizon, reflecting light back to shore in the same way like the real ones did with radar. It probably would have been lost in the glimmer of the sea, but if it would have been big enough… Anywho, here’s a pic. 

I found the sculpture they made really visually appealing, not sure about the boat though.

Saad was paired up with Ben who made “Ghost Huts” inspired by the net huts on the beach. I thought this was a good looking piece of work that worked very well in its location. It was inspired by a chance meeting Saad had with one of his friends who lived in Hastings. This was the piece that the public liked the most, although it was quite flat as a piece of ‘conceptual’ art.

Nice, but, what more can I say?

Eugenie Scrase and Matt made probably the most, interesting piece. A kind of visual pun, based on the architecture of disappointment, found in zoos, by mocking up an empty and suitably dilapidated animal enclosure. I liked what they made, although probably wouldn’t have got the visual cues as I haven’t been to a zoo in years and years. Knowing me it would have taken sitting on a train a few hours later for me to “get” the piece. I liked their fake rocks though. I liked it before they finished, when it was a just mass of angular shaped wood and grey sacking. I did laugh when Matt said he’d spent more time measuring the doors to the studio than making the piece, although I’d have thought Saatchi could spring for double doors.

 

This was the piece Saatchi said he liked the most, so my money’s now on Matt Clark. Although, as the voiceover pointed out, Saatchi pretty much went totally against what he set out at the beginning. Like I said last week, what Saatchi considers good work is maddeningly vague. What he considers conceptual isn’t really conceptual either, but that’s for another night.

Sadly for me, Eugenie Scrase was irresistibly good looking in this again. Luckily for you, there was no Emin, so you can have a look at her smiling in the sun as opposed to whatever it was Emin was doing with her face last week. 

Forgot to mention this on the end of yesterday's mega post. If you want to watch a more hopeful and measured view of the current art scene on TV, I recommend Where is Modern Art now, which is available via the link below.

Its part of the Modern Beauty season the BBC is running, which School of Saatchi is too. In Where is Modern Art now the art historian Dr Gus Casely-Hayford, presents a wander through contemporary art, trying to get a sense if art has changed, or where it might be going. He interviews Anthony Caro, Grayson Perry and Michael Landy. And is worth a look just for this, although Dr Casely-Hayford makes an engaging guide, his enthusiasm and knowledge evident throughout.

You'll have to be quick though as I think it goes down soon.

Click, click, click!