London Town

Gerhard Richter, Portraits.

This was an interesting show, I really liked the work. the way it was set out wasn’t anything special, it was separated into 5 sections each with a different theme; The Most Perfect Picture, Devotional Pictures, Continual Uncertainty, Private Images, Personal Portraits.
It was your standard high brow show with lots of ‘guards’ marching up and down making sure we behave. I was wondering if some people enjoy this. If they know themselves they’re going to behave, they won’t have a problem, maybe they feel protected from the ‘rif-raf’.
Anyway, my phone went off an I was asked to take it outside.

On my way out I noticed a Francis Alys show being put up in a cornered off room. I asked at the desk what was going on and they said it would be open to the public the next day. Yesss!

After the Nation Portrait Gallery I headed towards the Saatchi Gallery to see the Unveiled show a second time. There’s some really good work in this show, like sculptures by Diana Al Hadid and Kader Attia's 'Ghost'. I remember last time I saw this work there was a group of inner city school kids who really enjoyed this piece and were talking quite intelligently about it in their ‘street lingo’. This made me smile and slightly optimistic for some reason.




There are a few poor pieces. The sexualness of some of the paintings is almost childish. Maybe it’s because they are from a country where they feel sexually repressed and work like this would be forbidden. There’s a feeling of “look at me, aren’t I rude.” This sort of thing seems a bit out of date so it can’t be for that reason why Saatchi bought them. An art audience in London surely won’t be shocked by them; if indeed that is the effect the artists were going for. Perhaps it is their repressed sexuality that is intriguing rather than the subject matter in the pictures.



I got really excited about Francis Alys’s work and waited outside the gallery for it to open. I was the first member of the public to enter his exhibition which was cool, but I was expecting some photographs or videos of an interesting new performance.
Instead it was nearly 300 paintings of the same figure (Saint Fabiola) all done by different artists that Alys has collected for over 15 years. I would have really liked to have seen when he let the fox explore this gallery at night.




Although I was at first disappointed with the content of the show, it was a very interesting collection and composed really well. Whilst I sat down in the room for about half an hour writing notes and thinking, many people walked in just a couple of feet, then turned around and left for the Gerhard Richter show. This was interesting; they had clearly come here to look at portraits, but maybe not 300 of the same figure done by amateurs.


Mark Wallinger Curates – The Russian Linesman.
The stereoscopic photographs in this show were a great way for the audience to interact with the work. I was planning on doing something like this with binoculars and a video but I never ended up doing it.



Not everyone looked in all the view holes. Some just looked in a couple and moved on. I’m not sure how successful it is in that respect. It’s an interesting way to view the work because the viewer has to do something to see it, and as they are, they’re the only person viewing it at that particular time. For those who are willing, a real connection can be made between the viewer and the work.
There was another really good piece in a small room to the side of the show, a soundpiece was being played along with a video showing how sound effects are made e.g. closing doors, footsteps etc.
The old fashioned tape player was a sculpture in itself and next to it on a light box was a plan of the piece, separated in to sections on a time scale. Being in this room was like being enveloped in the whole process of making the piece.
The films along with these two pieces were enough to make this a really strong show in terms of connecting with the audience.

I like the idea of photographs outside the Temple Mill. It would be a good place to start the walk, and end it there too maybe. (From the temple up to the Park Row banking street and then back?)

It works well how Leeds is a financial city and is also home to an old factory modelled on an Egyptian temple.



I was originally thinking about wearing a suit, but Rory said that it would be too theatrical and it should be me being me doing the performance and at the time that made sense. Now I'm wondering if a suit would work, but I'm not sure why. I'm not pretending to be a banker but it feels like it would make sense. Maybe just being dressed in a smart shirt and trousers would be enough?





I’m not sure. I do know that I should do the ‘performance’ again, this time involving the ‘temple’ as well as the banks, but i'm undecided on what to wear.

The way i present the images of the 'Bank Blessings' is very important. The way I see it, there are two directions i could go down. I can present the imagery in a traditional ancient Egyptian style which would relate to the use of the heron, or I could present it in an executive “banking” style, a brochure or power point perhaps.

(See Alexandre Singh's 'Casual Magick' overhead projector piece - really nice and simple, but very considered and works really well)
http://www.artreview.com/artistInResidence

Each idea is very different and i have to think carefully which to go for.

I need to look at my work anthropologically. Anthropology is the study of human beings everywhere and throughout time. It asks interesting and useful questions like:

"How has the evolutionary past of Homo sapiens influenced its social organization and culture?"

Alfred Gell was a British social anthropologist whose most influential work concerned art, language, symbolism and ritual. Gell's theories offer new possibilities for the cross-cultural study of art, which can be applied not only to the art of small-scale oral societies but also to Western art history.

From what I gathered from this, if we understand more about other cultures we can find similarities between theirs and ours and create art that communicates to a wider audience. Appealing to other cultures is very important since globalisation and now "altermodernism".

I finally got round to doing my backlit projections. I borrowed a projector from the AV dungeon, bought some tracing paper, stuck it to the inside of my bedroom window and set up the projector.




It was relatively easy to do; I hadn’t used a projector before and managed to set it up quite quickly.




I really wanted to do this because it was a way of showing work to a probable none art audience.



This is the view from the window I was projecting from. I know it looks like a futuristic, apocalyptic nightmare, but it’s only Holbeck in the background. The big blue building is an office block, with quite a few people working late. The building to the left is the rest of the apartment block.


The projection is also visible from the road… just.

This is quite a subtle piece as it’s quite high up perhaps hardly visible. I’m not sure whether it worked very well because I’m not sure if anyone saw it. If they did, it would only look like an abstract, fuzzy distortion which is kind of what I wanted.



After messing around with it and playing different videos I decided that the one that worked best was the none figurative, flickering distortion video. There is no dialogue or human interaction, it is what it is; a minimal, colourful moving image.

I do quite like the idea of it being subtle and perhaps unnoticeable.

Anyway I left it on late into the night (as my audience got smaller and smaller) until the noise and heat from the projector became too much to sleep next to.

Whether anyone got anything from this projection is a mystery. For it to work better (by which I mean reach a larger audience), it would have to be on a lower floor or done on a larger scale.


An artist that does large scale projections well is Ross Ashton. He projects images onto large buildings. They are often very celebratory and architectural. They reach a large audience because there’s often a large crowd there to see something else, e.g. the Queen’s golden Jubilee, Edinburgh Military Tattoo, St Patrick’s Day.



I like his stuff but it’s not really what I’m going for. It’s very broad, but I suppose it has to be if it’s part of a large celebration, most of which are televised. The audience most likely isn’t into art, or at least isn’t there for the art, and want something obvious and beautiful.

In this “performance” I use the heron to refer to the ancient Egyptian belief system. The heron symbolises a god which brings prosperity. At one time, the shape of a heron was worshipped as a shrine to a god, now it’s used as a deterrent to keep herons away from ponds. This interested me, and relates to how different people interpret things differently. This is a slightly extreme example as the two different perceptions of the shape are separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years.

I thought it would be interesting to use its sculptural symbology in a religious context once again. It was once believed to bring prosperity and because of the current financial climate I felt the need to explore this. I blessed the banking system with a visit from an ancient god.
It wasn’t important whether people who saw me understood what I was doing, that’s immaterial. It’s about me believing that this bird, this religious act will solve the recession.
This raises questions about belief. The fact that it’s a belief system that no longer exists is important because it’s obvious to an outsider that it won’t work. It wouldn’t have the same effect if it was a blessing from an existing religion because enough people would believe it would work. The piece becomes about the futility and impracticality of belief.

I got quite a few funny looks because it was so out of place for a high street. If I were doing this on a Friday night on the Otley Run it would have had a completely different affect. One reason being because I’d be surrounded by people more elaborately dressed and would look relatively tame in comparison. Another reason being (which is closely linked to the first) I would be viewed by a totally different audience. It’s all about context.

It’s quite interesting how all these people in the street won’t have had the foggiest what I was doing or what it meant, but this doesn’t matter. The pieces are the photographs taken from the performance; these will then be subjected to a totally different audience. These photos still need explaining though, it’s not immediate what this piece is about, compared to my ‘Dreamdish’ and ‘Urban Bird Boxes’ which were pretty self explanatory.

There seems to be a trend of healing emerging in my work. I seem to have an impulse to make things that are somehow beneficial. The bird boxes take the noisy traffic sounds and turn them into calming birdsong, the Dreamdish heals people as they watch their TVs by bringing their attention to the filtering of the media and the Bank Blessing attempt at healing the economy.
I was wondering where this attitude fitted in with the greater scheme of art. I read that a modernist attitude was to right the wrongs of the world, which got me slightly worried. I thought that my concepts might be over fifty years out of date, but Marcus Coates does similar work about shamanism and belief so perhaps it’s an “alter modern” attitude, which was more comforting.

Art Fashion

What's in fashion at the moment? Like music and clothes, art has fashionable shifts. Do art magazines govern what is fashionable in art or do they simply report on what is already in fashion?

I noticed in Venice Bienalle in 2007 that there was a lot of taxidermy used.

At the same time in Leeds at PSL there was an artist, Kelly McCallum that used a lot of taxidermy.

In this months Modern Painters there is a whole article on taxidermy so I'm guessing it's still relevant a couple of years on. This seems to show that this particular magazine isn't governing the current trends, but drawing our attention to them.

Art magazines are aimed at a specific audience of contemporary art lovers who want to be kept up to date with what's going on globally. If I wanted to target this audience I would make a note of trends in the magazines and channel my practice towards it. Taxidermy could fit in nicely with my practice. Instead of using a plastic heron coming out of my briefcase, a real heron could work better. It could target the "art mag" audience, but alienate another audience. if I'm to use the briefcase in the public realm for a performance many people may be offended by me walking round with a dead animal as it has all sorts of connotations such as hunting and animal cruelty.

Instead of jumping on the taxidermy band wagon I think I’ll stick to the plastic herons as it has a more light hearted, comic effect which is what I’m going for.

In London a few weeks ago I looked round some commercial galleries. It was a type of gallery which I hadn't been in before; it was like a shop, hoping that every person walking through the door was a potential buyer. The art itself wasn't even very interesting, like something you'd expect to find in Frasier Crane's apartment. The exterior of the galleries looked like a shop window, but the staff weren't as stand offish as I expected, even when we asked how much each item cost, knowing that we wouldn't be able to afford. It was a side of art that I wasn't familiar with and hadn't had much experience with, but it is there.

This piece has stuck with me since going to Kendell Geer's show at the Baltic last year. It'd be interesting to see how this piece would work in the public realm. Obviously no council would give it the go ahead, but it would be interesting to see the reaction of the public. The public is made up of many different people and so it would be received in many different ways. some would be offended because they have been brought up to think that swearing is offensive, some would be offended, but not like it because they think it's trying to be controversial for the sake of being controversial and some would enjoy it and get something meaningful from it. A wide range of views from a wide range of people.

A way to do something like this without the hassle of getting permission and risk assessments is guerrilla projections or graffiti.

Berlin was excellent for this. Large scale graffiti art on the sides of buildings without any permission and seen by a huge audience, some will like it, some will hate - different people, different views. This is different to projections because it's permanent (more or less) and probably ticks off the local authorities a lot more, although Berlin seemed to be pretty relaxed about it.

It's interesting because many of these artists probably haven't had a traditional art education and wouldn't be able to get their art in a gallery, yet their work is seen by more people. The difference being people choose to go to galleries to look at art but graffiti is thrust upon everyone which changes the way it is received. Some of the ones in Berlin were very impressive though.

There's a video on YouTube by the same artist that did the one above but as a stop motion animation that moves all over Buenos Aires and Baden.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuGaqLT-gO4

Very impressive, but they didn't half make a mess...