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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, 25 November 2009
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.
On Monday was the first in a new series about contemporary Art, called School of Saatchi, in which Charles Saatchi, the notorious advertising mogul and art dealer, searches for a new darling of contemporary art to champion. Helping on this quest are Britart bête noire, Tracy Emin, Art critic and TV favourite Matthew Collings, typically preposterous Art collector Frank Cohen, and Kate Bush, a curator who judged the 2005 turner prize, and did not create eighties chart hits, Wuthering Heights and Hounds of Love.
From the get go its made clear this programme isn’t really about art. In case you were wondering, it’s about Charles Saatchi’s incredible ego. Despite him not physically appearing in the show, every other sentence is praising him in some way, extolling his (undeniable) influence on the art world. Everything on the show is defined by Saatchi, even going as far as describing one of the other judges, Frank Cohen as the Saatchi of the North.
The prize is to appear at a Saatchi show in Moscow called Newspeak, which is not to be sniffed at. It’s a better prize than working for Alan Sugar. The format of the show is very similar to that of the apprentice, the group of wannabe art stars are given an unmanageable task to do in a short space of time, and judged on it, and the winner gets the prize. In this though, as the art world is so heavily dependant on networking and exposure, even those who don’t win will be a good few steps ahead of their peers, unlike the apprentice in which the contestants are roundly mocked and spat back out into the real world.
The show starts with an X factor style 2-minute presentation in front of the judges, in an abandoned warehouse. Various “how can that be art?” types are wheeled on and off for our amusement. There’s a guy who copied out War and Peace by hand, and some emails crumpled up into a ball. A couple of painterly painters are rejected too. Each of the contestants is also asked why what they’ve brought along is art, and are looked down on when they fail to answer such a complicated and loaded question on the spot, in front of a judging panel and TV cameras. Tracey Emin shouts down most of them, and already her role seems to be the Simon Cowell of the group, brutally dismissing the contestant’s attempts.
The criteria of what makes good art seems maddeningly vague from the start. Some of the artists that get past this first stage fail to answer this question properly, if at all. When one of the artists reverses the question onto the judges, they completely dodge it. Does the artist’s ability to explain himself or herself really affect the quality of the work? There’s also bizarrely few people at the audition. Considering around 2000 people a year graduate from art courses in the UK a year, and the career of an artist being uncertain at best, why were there only about 20 interviewees? Out of these 12 are selected to go through.
The first task they are set is life drawing, which of course, being conceptualists and not illustrators, they are rubbish at. The judges sneered at the lack of drawing skills they possessed, and I’m sure everyone at home did as well. This is used as a stick to beat them with later on when they are reduced from 12 to 6.
The twelve selected, that get enough airtime for me to form an opinion of, are listed below.
Saad Qureshi makes installations and videos and is from Pakistan. His work reflects this, and he goes on and on about it. He’s naturally charming and is profiled the most. His work is very art school, and not particularly good, although I like his titles.
Eugenie Scrase is the resident love to hate of the group chosen, ridiculously young at 19 and cute as a button, she is there to enrage the viewer by saying things like "there's no need for artists to study Life drawing" and producing "difficult" quasi readymades. Tracey fawns over everything she does, while saying Skills are really important. Where do you stand on this Tracey?
Suki Chan seems to be the most mature and, well, best, of the assembled group, the piece she shows at her interview, called interval II, is beautiful, and has the gods of olympus unanimously agreeing with her. Tracey Emin says it reminds her of things she's seen before, but can't remember who (the answer is Jeremy Deller's Turner prize piece) I think she'll be the winner, but this being a TV Docudrama, probably will drop out or burst into flames or something more exciting than that.
There are three painters in the group of twelve; one of them is dismissed outright. Another, Ben Lowe is an interior designer who hasn't been to art school. He's a normal bloke, nothing wrong with that, I expect him to be presented a fish out of water, a beacon of sanity amongst the “wacky” conceptualists.
Samuel Zealy presents quite interesting sculptures that dance with physical laws, relying on clever tricks, playing with our associations and the functionality of objects. He's the opposite of Eugenie really as Emin hates him. Bit of a likeable buffoon. There’s a fantastic scene where he explains why he made a decision about one of his pieces, and Emin’s face kind of folds in on itself, and she has a face like thunder. As below.
Rhys Himsworth presents a machine he's built that can draw, a pretty fantastic bit of engineering, he also presents a clear idea of what he will do with the 10 weeks with saatchi, which involves perfecting his design. Unfortunately for him, 10 weeks of someone hunched over a computer isn't particularly good television so he gets the boot.
Matt Clark presents a very swish and polished installation, enclosed in a chipboard box, which is very atmospheric, and evokes ideas of obsession and compulsion. He's kind of ripped off Ilya Kabokov though. And I don’t like that.
Saatchi is presented as a kind of omnipresent Lord Voldemort figure throughout, although never shown on screen, he is referenced constantly, and the voiceover constantly reminds you of his wealth, power and influence. Maybe it will turn out he’s been magically grafted onto the back of Emin’s head, like in Harry Potter. That would make for one hell of a finale.
In this first program, Matt Clark, Ben Lowe, Saad Qureshi, Samuel Zealy, Eugenie Scrase and Suki Chan make it through to the second round. One thing I noticed about the winning 6, is they are much more “photogenic” than the losers, and much more “based in the south of England” who I really felt for at the end of the show. To have something presented to you so tangibly close and then whipped away as entertainment feels wrong. I suppose it’s nothing new but that doesn’t make it less cruel.
Although this program is ostentatiously about Contemporary art, it’s really about Charles Saatchi first, entertainment second and Art is probably about eighth or ninth place, after subjecting people to Tracey Emin.
What with the Credit crunch really hammering the price of contemporary art, and lots going unsold at auctions, Saatchi hasn’t really been hitting the headlines. If Saatchi isn’t hitting the headlines he’s losing influence over the “art world” and his particular brand of art loses some of its value.
The last decade in art has been characterized by astronomic prices justifying a frenzied driving up of prices. With the credit crunch and the realization that most people in the world of finance were applying the principles of surrealism to investment banking, by making up impossible shit, there’s been a shift away from the idea that the market is always right. Maybe the work these impossibly large sums bought was in fact a load of old shite? By making this programme Saatchi is perpetuating the idea that this is the art that matters, and the opinion with the fattest wallet is right. And there is nothing else. When there quite clearly is.
Of course it’s not about art, which it isn’t, it’s about a TV programme people will watch. And as if to heighten the bizarrely unreal “art world” the program presents, next week’s task is produce a piece of large scale public art. I shit you not.
