Beautiful Photography 11/12/13

COURTESY @MPSinthesky
A beautiful photo of when the fog enveloped London

Chapman Brothers @ Serpentine

The Serpentine Gallery is hosting a free retrospective of the Chapman Brother's huge body of work. For those of you who love them, this is great for you - it has a little taster from a number of their series, including Fucking Hell and One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved. The room is scattered with their Klu Klux Klan 

inspired figures, and even though they are wearing stripped socks and Birkenstocks, they are still oddly menacing to be around. 

The Fucking Hell series inspired pieces are mesmerizing - it is so easy to stand in front of them for hours. You can see so much, and once you think you've seen it all, you see even more that you hadn't noticed before. The fact that there are several of these scattered around the room means you could be staying in the gallery for a dangerously long time. The best bit is trying to find the deformed creatures in amongst the savagely brutal scenes. The Chapman Brothers are clearly influenced by Nazi Germany and Hitler, with many of the tiny plastic character in the scenes have swastikas stuck to their arms. In 2008 they held an exhibition at the White Cube gallery of alleged watercolors by Adolf Hitler that they had drawn over, an interesting concept that I wish had been shown in this exhibition. 

Surrounding these huge cabinets of figures there are the artistically vandalised paintings from the One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved series, eerily staring out from their deformed face. I love this series hugely, I think it's such a clever idea to think that because they person has deceased and everyone they know has deceased and their portrait is being sold on, they are genuinely no longer loved. This is how the Chapman Brothers justify their vandalism, and it oddly makes sense. The portraits themselves are just so creepy, with missing eyes and melting faces and dissolving features. The ones that are of children are the scariest. And the saddest. 

Whilst its good to see the Chapman Brothers most influential works, it's also nice to see their clear influence from Goya. This has always interested me about the Chapman Brothers - their love of Goya. From the general feel of the room, it definitely has been influenced by it - dark colours and dark themes of war and death. /

This exhibition is open until February and definitely something that I would go back to to spend more time at. It is small but it is a beautiful little summary. 

AICA Lecture - Dawn Ades @ Tate 'How Contemporary Practices Engage with the History of Art'

I recently went to a talk at the Tate Britain, in collaboration with the AICA (International Association of Art Critics), that focused on contemporary practices engaging with history of art. The talk was lead by Dawn Ades, who is an art historian and curator, and who helped curate Manifesta 9 in 2012, the European Biennial of contemporary art. The talk was insightful into the ways in which we can bring contemporary art and historical art and context together, to deepen our understanding of modern art whilst also exploring the effects that historical art has had.

It is true that a lot of curators seem to divide contemporary art and historical art, deeming they have very little in common. This can be true to a certain extent, but I feel that it is beneficial to everyone to see the progression and influences in the art world together. When talking about Manifesta 9, Ades spoke about how the Biennial was set in an industrial coal mine complex. This bought up issues of the use of coal in art works, and the influences it has had, which became the starting point for the art that was bought into Manifesta 9. Most of it was contemporary, and it took great inspiration from things like the industrial revolution, coal being used as fuel (which lead on to nuclear power which was looked at in Claire Fontane's piece), and coal being used as a material itself.

I personally think, and always have done, that exhibitions that bring together old and new are the most informative and effective. They help you visually and symbolically understand the art works on show. Whilst this talk was very heavy to digest, the main message that they were trying to get across was important - segregation of contemporary and old isn't necessary, they can both work together and compliment each other.

Inside the Art World - Curators

Read this on Pi Media here

Last week I went to a great talk at the White Cube gallery (following on from the Gilbert and George talk) that explored the lives and start ups of curators. As this is a field I am very interested in going into, it was great for me. Andrea Schlieker (Director, White Cube), Paul Hobson (Director, Modern Art Oxford), Cliff Lawson (Curator, Hayward Gallery) and Anita Feldman (Head of Collections and Exhibitions, The Henry Moore Foundation) all spoke about their careers and their beginnings, opening my eyes to the wide variety of curating opportunities available, as well the skills and experience necessary.

Curating is an important part of the art world. Exhibitions in museums and galleries depend on the creative thinking, intense research and important networking that curators deal with. Since the 80's there has been a new hunger to enter into curating, with the opening of galleries offering more opportunities, leading to an increase in curatorial courses. It is the curators job to 'visualise the chaos in our minds', as Schlieker so nicely worded it.

Anita Feldman, to me, offered the most interesting insight into curating. She studied at UCLA in California, before doing her graduate at the Courtald. Instead of working solely for a museum or for a gallery, she instead works for The Henry Moore Foundation, working with the art of just one artist. Whilst this may seem boring, it actually seemed like the best option - she gets to know her artist and works in great detail, and she gets to travel the world creating exhibitions for galleries everywhere. She can be involved with projects from start to finish, unlike curators who work with large galleries who may only work with the start or end of an idea. She recently finished an exhibition with the Gagosian Gallery, where she put Moore's huge sculptures indoors - this was a challenge but something that can be achieved due to the different spaces she is given to work with. Her next exhibition, Body and the Void, explores how Henry Moore changed the way the body and its surroundings are shown.

Taking a different route into the art world, Paul Hobson started his career by reading History at Oxford, followed by two MA's, the first being Arts and Management, the second, Aesthetics and Contemporary Visual Theory. He went onto run a contemporary art society that raised funds for the country to be able to buy new contemporary art, and has only recently taken the job as Director at Modern Art Oxford. in 2015 they will be holding their 50th anniversary, in which they will run a full year exhibition that will show key works from over the past 50 years, with complimentary pieces being bought in and out to give a constant feel of freshness. Hobson believes that this challenging show is the key to good curating - a good show, with great figures (whether they are known or not), and a variety of techniques.

The Hayward Gallery is part of the Southbank Centre in London, which spans 20 acres along the river. Having all this space available gives curator Cliff Lawson the ability to offer a variety of different shows - this is important to a gallery that has no permanent collecting, like the Hayward Gallery. It puts extra pressure on the curators there to create amazing shows that will bring in audiences. Lawson curated the hit exhibition The Light Show, that was regularly sold out. His humble beginnings consisted of studying his MA at no other than UCL, having studied English Literature in Canada and done work experience at the Museum of Anthropology. He has also been Assistant Curator at the Tate Modern - something which offered him a great amount of experience.

Curating is a great way to get into the art world - whilst it has its challenges, its also satisfying, can offer you great opportunities like travelling and being in a constant state of creativity, whilst also being academic in its research side.

What is an artist?

The honest authorship of an artist

I’ve been reading a lot about authorship for university recently and something has been bugging me. How can some artists put their name on pieces of art and get all the glory? What actually constitutes ‘being an artist? Is it having dibs on an idea or is it the physically making of the piece?

When I went to the Wallace collection they had two pieces by Rembrandt facing each other on either sides of the room – one is of his son, which looks a lot more like a typical Rembrandt than the portrait of himself, which seems very much like plainer. It was bought to my attention that one of them was done by his studio (so, other people) and the portrait of his son was done by himself. What I don’t understand is why the painting made in his studio is under his name. It wasn’t done by his hand, it was simply made by people who mimic and have learnt from his stylings, does that mean we should put everything that was created in the renaissance under the umbrella of Greek and Roman artists who inspired them? For the Renaissance is heavily based on this era, they coined the idea of the perfect male form and the use of marble sculptures, didn’t they?

And THEN I found out that it wasn’t just Rembrandt, loads of artists have done this in the past. Works that were commissioned during the Renaissance and up to the nineteenth century were often made in studios under the hands of others, and it’s not even an out dated practice. Almost everyone know that the work created by Damien Hirst is actually made by eager art students who are happy to help, the majority of his colourful dot paintings pretty much untouched by his own hand. Even his larger, more experimental ideas, like say cutting a cow perfectly in half, required the skill of someone who actually knows how to do that – not him.

A conservation talk I went to recently also spoke about how Allen Jones’ furniture pieces were made mainly by a variety of fabricators, ranging from mannequin specialists to clothes shops. He simply had the idea, the inspiration being a piece of work that is as far from the artists touch as possible. So therefore, because it was his idea it is therefore his piece of art, despite not creating it at all. It’s crazy to think that I could come up with an idea, pay someone to make it for me, display it in an art gallery, and then have it be sold to an art collector in years to come for thousands.

Obviously though, these artists have to have some repertoire with the art world in order to be able to mass produce these pieces under other peoples hands and have them taken seriously. Hirst basically dragged together the YBA’s and staged shows of his works in warehouses at a young age, catching the eye of Saatchi. Rambrandt was a highly commissioned and sought after Dutch painter, his demand necessitating other hands. But is there a point when an artist loses his title of being an artist? Surely the involvement and creation of a piece is what constitutes the term artist in the first place.

Another confusion of authorship and ownership of a work is when it comes down to photo based pieces. Ana Mendieta’s work is the best example of this I have seen recently. Normally she is the subject of her work, and by being the subject she needs help creating the piece, someone to take a photo or a video. Does this still give her the right to claim to be the author of the piece? She hasn’t taken the photo herself and she is the subject, certainly that makes her the subject of someone else’s photo? It’s all very confusing.

I find authorship a really confusing and grey area and I’m probably not going to write my next essay on it.

                                                          

Art of Repair - Lindsay Morgan Conservationist Talk @ Tate Britain

Lindsay Morgan has worked as a conservationist at the Tate for eleven years, and during her first week she was given the important and skilful job of working on Allen Jones' 'Chair', which depicts a woman with her legs in the air, dressed in fetish wear, and being a chair. In 1986, during Women's Week and an array of feminist protests, an unidentified woman threw two bottles of paint stripper onto the piece, leaving 30% of the body of the piece damaged, mainly on the face, in protest against the objectification of women. The damage was frightfully realistic in terms of looking like an acid attack on an actual woman instead of a glass fiber mannequin, and it required conserving massively.

Before conservationists start their work, they have to speak to the artist (if they're around). For example, when Tracey Emin's 'My Bed' was destroyed by two performance artists from China in 1999 by them jumping and having a pillow fight on it (creatively naming their piece ' Two Naked Men Jumping into Tracey's Bed'), Emin herself was bought in and interviewed about the best way to go about reconstructing her piece, in which she actively took part too. When Morgan interviewed Allen Jones about the best way to start the conservation, he was genuinely startled that someone would even attack his piece.

Jones had taken inspiration from Duchamp in the way that he wanted his art to avoid the 'fine artists touch' by removing the distance between art and people and turning it into something that the public can engage with. All of Jones' furniture pieces (which also include a hatstand and a table) were manufactured using fabricators, mannequin painters, leather manufacturers and wig specialists - Jones had very limited physical impact on the pieces at all apart from the original sketches. His work wasn't made with the intention to subject woman and portray them as objects - the use of fetish wear was simply a way of bringing art onto an erotic, accessible level, one that Jones thinks everyone can relate to.

Due to 'Chair' being away from the fine art touch of an artists and more towards manufacturing, Jones wanted to re do the whole thing from scratch as he worried retouching would make it artistic. As a conservationist, it was Morgan's job to try her best to salvage what was lost (when you see the sculpture you wouldn't even think twice that it had been re-done, the finish is flawless and symmetrical), however Jones things that the work has been redefined by the attack.

Listening to Morgan describe the perils and considerations of working in conservation opened my eyes to the amount of work that conservation entails, for example with Emin's 'My Bed', plastic deteriorate at a much quicker rate to paper and cotton, and liquids evaporate, making this a very hard conservation piece - plastics had to be infused with high levels of oxygen to slow down the deterioration protest, and everything has to be heavily catalogued, recorded and photographed for future use. Things even have to be bought in advance and stored through fear of them being discontinued and then the work of art being lost forever.

Medium has changed drastically in the 20th century too - no longer are oil paintings, marble and bronze the staple diet of a conservationist - sculptures are made from multiple things such as chocolate, fat, dead animals or foliage, and these things are more than a struggle to maintain. For example, Damien Hirst's 'A Thousand Years' is quite clearly not made of the same flies and cows head as it was in 1990, and it is a conservationists job to make it as similar to the original as physically possible.

Moral questions of conservation are bought up too with this new found medium and the controversial themes addressed in art. When poised with the question why she repaired a piece that was degrading to women, Morgan answered by saying she hasn't not repaired a piece, thinking of them simply as exciting projects, however she knows of someone who walked away from a project when he found out that human skin was part of the piece. These issues of disturbing materials such as blood and flesh, as well as issues such as feminism, sexualisation, racism and religion are things that conservators are faced with everyday.

Contemporary art has bought new, exciting challenges into the field of art conservation, and has made the area more interesting and appealing to young people who are keen to get into the art world. Our ever changing opinion of art makes conservation a perfect field for those who want to be a part of the cataloguing of history and play a vital part in not letting us forget the past.

Art Under Attack

I finally got round to seeing the Art Under Attack exhibition that everyone has been going on about and I was genuinely really impressed! I love history a little bit more than I love art, and this exhibition was so heavily invested in the historical side of iconoclasm as opposed to the aesthetic side that every room was interesting and gave a new perspective to the idea of iconoclasm - even the way the exhibition was set out massively helped it, splitting the room into three colored sections of religion, politics and aesthetics.

The religious rooms came first (understandably as this is what you first thing of when you think of iconoclasm) and they gave a good insight into the reasons behind the English Iconoclasm (the reformation, Henry VIII and Edward VI) and had an large number of examples ranging from smashed stain glass windows to scratched out faces of saints in panel paintings. The really striking image you see by Girolamo de Treviso, 'A Protestant Allegory', upon entering the room, where four protestants are smashing rocks down on the pope who is using his body to protect holy items such as texts and relics, is particularly poignant in describing the generalised attitude of the British public, and the artifacts surrounding the picture of physical proof of this.

Despite the religious element in the exhibition being the biggest, this isn't what engaged me the most - the middle area of politics was, to me, the most interesting, showing the destruction of pillars, statues and commemorative architecture of certain leaders in large scale black and white photographs, alongside a remaining and damaged part of the statue and an explanatory wall writing of who the statue was of and his influence within Britain. This part of the exhibition was incredibly informative, in particular the huge photo of Nelsons Pillar in Dublin in 1966 after it had been attacked by the IRA, showing the whole bottom of the pillar covered in rubble. Having news reports playing next to clearly showed the impact it had, giving the original photo more depth and understanding.

Surprisingly, I particularly enjoyed the Suffragettes too. It's really interesting that art was used as a way of political uprising - the attack on art clearly showed how much people invested in art works, as attacking it if no one cared about it would have been a waste of time. I found it really interesting how violent these women would be too - one of the earliest attacks was in 1913, and these continued reoccurring until 1914, with violent attacks by people such as Mary Richardson on the Rokeby Venus at the National Gallery (resulting the a two week closure, followed by them closing for 3 months after another attack). Women were becoming suspects in the art world - they were asked to leave their things at the door to avoid attacks - some of them were with meat cleavers.

There was a particularly funny piece in this room too from Blast, a small magazine, in 1914 which spoke directly to the Suffragettes. You don't mind being called things?

Art is a powerful way to get your message across. Whether it's through destroying art to cause outrage or by making the art to be particularly potent itself, art is a great way to ensue political ideologies.

Art being powerful is also a main point of the last room in the exhibition - Aesthetics. This is a room of art that has been created through a means of destruction, my favourite piece being by the Chapman brothers with their ongoing series 'One day you will no longer be loved', where they purchase old paintings and then paint over them, showing the portraits in them to be decaying, old bodies, and explaining both the reason and the title by saying that they subjects aren't loved anymore because their portrait was sold on and discarded and reworked. These paintings for me are incredibly eerie, and knowing that they are original portraits that have been painted over made me feel a bit weird, clearly because it's ingrained in me that once a work of art is completed it should probably never be touched again.