Phew!

I can finally see light at the end of this particular tunnel!  As next week’s deadline looms for submitting two essays  (forms of art historical writing and second debates and approaches  - great timetable scheduling by the university – NOT!) my two attempts are virtually completed.  I need to stop looking at them for a couple of days and then do final proofing and bind, etc.  I am still amazed and slightly shell shocked at just how much time, energy and social life such work takes up. 

I really enjoyed the forms of art historical writing essay.  I created a catalogue introduction for an imagined sculpture exhibition at the Serpentine gallery.  I think I got a little bit carried away with my former curator’s cap on as I actually went and measured the gallery and am submitting an accompanying floor plan and list of proposed works, as well as the text itself!

The second essay, on representations of gender in contemporary art, was more challenging as there may be potential overlap with my dissertation topic and I certainly do not want to peak too soon with that…..

Next week I will return the twenty books I currently have from the university library, clear my desk at home, take a deep breath and then wait for the next module to kick in….

Diary of a Fledging Art Historian (Part 1)

As the first term at university draws to an end, I am already exhausted with the weekly 4 hour return drive down to Reading and juggling full time work with full time university assignments.  I've already had an argument with one tutor and am still adjusting to the huge differences between academic and corporate life.   My art criticism aspirations have also come to a grinding halt as all my spare time is currently devoted to course work.  I have managed to see Josephine Meckseper at Timothy Taylor Gallery, Phyllida Barlow at Hauser & Worth and Edgar Degas at the Royal Academy, but no reviews on the blog, I'm afraid.

Despite all this, I do love being on campus and look forward to getting down there every week. Art History fascinates me, but I keep getting distracted by different subjects and issues, whereas everyone else seems to be focussed on their dissertation subject already.  At the moment I am broadly thinking about early 20th century sculpture by women artists or the use of soft sculpture by 21st century women artists, but have no idea what the Big Dissertation Question will be yet.......

Anyway, this term we have been concentrating on research methods, along with debates and issues which lay the groundwork for future modules and I currently have a 3,000 word essay on art and globalisation to write over the Christmas holiday - Seasons Greetings!!

Wilhelm Sasnal, Sadie Coles, London (9 June – 27 August 2011)

The cool, clinical and emotionless interior of Sadie Coles is a perfect backdrop for fifteen new paintings by Polish artist, Wilhelm Sasnal.  Displayed on its perfectly white-washed walls and devoid of any apparent cohesion or meaning, Sasnal’s work emanates an air of aloofness and general distain for any viewer.  His debt to Luc Tuymans is surely unquestionable with his use of washed out colours, faux-naïve brushstrokes and random, mundane subject matter (stylistic tools seen many times for many years at graduate art shows).

One of the few paintings with a title is first encountered when entering the gallery.  The Sun is a curiously anaemic painting.  It feels like a canvas on which the artist had begun a painting but then discarded.  Propped up against the studio wall and forgotten, sunlight from a window appears to have bleached the painting with some scorch marks of orange under-painting seeping through.

The pure abstraction of The Sun seems out of place with Sasnal’s other paintings here, being mainly figurative and landscape.  Monochrome or pastel interiors hang beside a brooding landscape and stark still lives, although depictions of mother and baby, either as fragmented sculptural pieces or a copy of a photograph (again defaced) hint at a deeper level of engagement with a particular subject matter.

The gallery handout clarifies his interest in themes of motherhood, the sacrificial nature of parenthood and the exploration of Catholic iconography in contemporary Poland in these paintings, which begins to explain their curious mix of dated signifiers.  It is a mistake though to think that all of Sasnal’s paintings in this show can be as easily categorised.  Subject matter and context seem less important to him than the manipulation and mastery of paint itself.  All the paintings are oil on canvas, the most traditional of artistic traditions.  From his sculptural and impasto handling in the ‘motherhood’ pieces, which are truly breathtaking when looking at them up close, to the confident and bravado handing of simple tonal palettes in Pigsty and still lives of a bucket and sponge Untitled, 2011 and bottle of medicine on a laptop Untitled, 2011, Sasnal quietly and confidently, seduces the viewer with his mastery with paint.  The seemingly random graphic pieces and studies of Seurat also included in this exhibition appear to be continuation of the artist’s declaration of his painterly dexterity.

With a forthcoming show at Whitechapel Gallery in October, it will be interesting to see how his work translates to a much larger space as that exhibition will be a survey his work over the past ten years.

Tracey Emin: Love Is What You Want, Hayward Gallery (18 May-29 August 2011)

I have fallen back in love with Tracey Emin.  It has been a rocky relationship over the years.  Like many people, she first came to my attention in 1999 through the media frenzy surrounding My Bed, which formed part of her work short listed for that year’s Turner Prize and video footage from a Channel 4 television programme she took part in two years before showing her inebriated and barely coherent before stumbling off set.  The image of Emin as the loud-mouthed, out-of-control party girl was born and alongside Damien Hirst, the ‘enfants terribles’ of the Young British Artist phenomenon, unwittingly gained fame and notoriety beyond the confines of the art establishment.

I thought My Bed was inspired - ballsy, daring, disgusting and totally compelling.  I got annoyed when I read it had been the target of protest by two misguided art activists.  I got even more annoyed when Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-95 was singled out for criticism and seen by many as an insignificant loss to contemporary art when it was destroyed in a fire at an art storage warehouse in 2004.

My interest in her waned though as I saw much of her subsequent work as too derivative of other artists – the pregnancy/abortion work too Mary Kelly, the blanket series too Louise Bourgeois and the neon signs too Noble and Webster.  While acknowledging and celebrating her post-feminist credentials and lineage, my judgment had been unconsciously clouded by the adverse publicity that surrounded her.   I failed to recognise the very serious and totally committed artist Emin was, and remains today.

Love Is What You Want totally revised my opinion about Emin, as I am sure it has for many other people who like me will be experiencing her work personally for the first time, rather than from reproduced images.  Spanning a career of nearly twenty years and embracing the full range of media available to contemporary artists, even the Brutalist architecture of the Hayward Gallery, which normally dominates and sometimes distracts from the work in its exhibitions, seems to have come out in support of Emin.  It provides the perfect austere and slightly clinical backdrop for her work.

Dark and disturbing family histories set the direction of Emin’s personal and artistic journey.  In a letter from her father, which he wrote to try to stop her excessive drinking and to which Knowing The Enemy was her response, Envar Emin describes his seduction and loss of virginity by the wife of his employer.  At the time she was twenty-four, he was twelve and a half.

In Conversation With My Mum, Emin asks “what is it that you could live through that you thought I could not” after exposing her Mum’s own history of infidelities, children by different men and her constant declaration throughout Emin’s upbringing that she has never wanted her daughter to have children of her own.  “I just prayed that if you ever did get pregnant you told me in time so we could get you an abortion”.  As has well been documented, Emin was raped when she was thirteen.

It is no wonder then that Emin’s ambiguity and ambivalence surrounding sex, pregnancy and abortion inform and continue to permeate throughout her work.  They still pack a powerful punch.  It is a shame though that from her entire output, these works grabbed all the headlines when other works, such as the family memorabilia, almost devotional pieces (May Dodge My Nan, Wimsey and Emin & Emin, for example) are as equally compelling.

Emin also has a wicked sense of humour, which can be seen throughout the exhibition and which she uses to great effect (Emin’s Army, Cat Watching and Running Naked).  Her most recent work shows no sign of diminished rigor and she appears to be working more sculpturally and monumentally.  I am curious to see how her subject matter evolves or changes as she enters her fifties and sixties as it does she does seem fixed on a specific timeframe in her life.

British pop diva Paloma Faith wrote a song called “Do You Want the Truth or Something Beautiful?”   In the work included in Love Is What You Want, Tracey Emin gives us a bit of each and sometimes both.  Obviously, the rawness of Emin’s work will be not be palatable to everyone, but I believe her artistic legacy will far outlast and outweigh her notoriety and deservedly so.

New Art MK: Eight Artists from Milton Keynes, MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, Bucks (8 July-18 September 2011)

A rarely held group exhibition is currently on at MK Gallery and even when displaying the work of eight artists, it retains its trademark curatorial starkness.  I can already hear readers of the local newspapers complaining the gallery is still too elitist, even though the aim of this particular exhibition is purposely to demonstrate the range of artistic talent in Milton Keynes.  Even so, the exhibition firmly resists becoming too populist and the casual viewer may still struggle to connect with much of the work on display. 

The eight artists featured are all drawn from finalists for the 2010 MK Community Foundation Arts Bursary Award (“CFABA”), which is designed to give an emerging artist the chance to further develop their skills and/or give them the financial freedom to concentrate on a new body of work.  Caroline Devine was the overall winner.  Whilst this is absolutely a valid group to select from, I am sure there are other contemporary artists in the region who are equally talented and committed but who have missed the opportunity of having their work shown in MK Gallery because they did not apply for this particular Award.  Perhaps there is still an argument for the gallery to hold at least one annual open exhibition.  The high standards of the gallery would still be maintained by virtue of its final selection (as it has been from their final selection from the CFABA candidates).

Having said all that, I am very pleased to see this exhibition here and first out of the starter’s block upon entering was Jamie Chalmers’ Spam Stitch series - small hoops of embroidery hung throughout the gallery.  Titles from spam emails usually immediately deleted and forgotten replace usual “Home Sweet Home”-type mottos with amusing effect.

The Cube Gallery was taken up with Caroline Devine’s sound installation Recording Contract Recordings (vertical slice).  In her artist statement Devine says she is concerned with the spaces within and around sounds and that her installations explore the spatial aspects of sound through the use of multi-channel speaker arrangements.  The disembowelled stereo speaker components suspended from the ceiling and unsettling, indecipherable sounds between random legal jargon-filled sentences being emitted from ground level speakers featured here, create a haunting and perplexing installation.

Photography was the focus in the Middle Gallery.  Frazer Waller’s Carbooting series and Stuart Southwell’s Grotesque Identities squared up against each other like boxers in opposing corners.  Waller’s portraits of enthusiasts from all walks of life - those selling off a variety unwanted and unloved paraphernalia and those snapping up the same items, now transformed into bargains and must-haves, easily out classed Southwell’s more laboured musings on identity and Western cultures.

Unfortunately Jason Smith’s video of photographic stills from a 2008 performance piece and his Excavation series drawings positioned between the Middle and Long Gallery, were somewhat obscured on the day of my visit by activities taking place around the children’s art trolley and blocking access along the main corridor.  This discourage anything more than a brief pause around that area.

In the Long Gallery itself Emma Wilde’s charming, quasi-naïve drawings of the suburban environs of Bedford and Lauren Keeley’s contemplative abstract oil paintings confidently take ownership of the gallery’s largest space.  Kamil Szkopik’s photographic portraits, while beautifully shot seem more fashion editorial than fine art enquiry.

Throughout the exhibition, information about the artists was limited to edited versions of their statements on the reverse of the exhibition guide.  While further investigation on the gallery’s website revealed more detailed summaries, it would have been interesting to know a little more about them while visiting the exhibition itself.

Overall though, it was Emma Wilde’s little drawings and Lauren Keeley’s oil on canvas board paintings, which spoke to me the most.  Confidence and authority quietly resonate throughout their work.

Less successful for me was the photography of Stuart Southwell and Kamil Szkopik.  Tackling similar subjects of the conventions of identity within society (and although both are very technically accomplished) the visual outcome of their explorations and over-constructed statements failed to engage or impress.  Szkopik in particular points out that none of the models in his photographs are airbrushed using computer software, but all of them are beautiful and youthful and his compositions are highly theatrical and staged.  They are also softly focused and have filters applied, subtly manipulating the images, which is why I do not really understand the intent behind his work in relation to the rhetoric used in his artist statement.

On 18 August MK Gallery is holding an ‘in conversation’ event as part of its related events connected to this exhibition, where the artists involved will talk about their practices and the cultural climate in Milton Keynes.  This is a date I have in my diary to attend and so may well change my opinions on some of the featured artists once I have heard them speak more in depth about their work.  Knowledge is power for an emerging art critic…

Then and Now: Graduate Art and Design Exhibition, Banbury Museum, Oxfordshire (25 June-16 July 2011)

I have to confess that my expectations were low when I entered a small, badly lit gallery at the back of Banbury Museum which was showcasing this year’s art and design graduates from Oxfordshire School of Creative Arts.  Fourteen graduates were featured and covered the range of courses at the school - Fine Art, Graphic Design and Illustration, Design Crafts and Photography.

The Fine Art Department was ably represented by two painters showing great promise – Annabel Windor* with her street scenes series and Tricia Brant’s portraits*.   I could see their future work easily featured in the BP Portrait Award or Threadneedle Prize.

However, it was the work of graduates from the BA (Hons) Graphic Design and Illustration course which really stood out.  Olivier Porte’s campaign raising awareness on Alzheimer’s for a research institute in Paris was haunting and poignant and thankfully lacked naivety or heavy-handedness.  His sepia-toned TV advertisement “Everything I ever knew is gone” was very touching and really should be broadcast immediately.

In stark contrast in mood, but by no means lacking in complexity or sophistication, Alix Jeambrun’s witty “Food & Memory” fabric and stitch work and Libby Cramp’s “Souvenirs & Memories” collages celebrating her love of adventure and travel dominated the space.

There was some work on display which unfortunately wasn’t as strong as these artists and are unlikely to progress much further in their art career.  I do not know if the Oxfordshire School of Creative Arts participates in London’s yearly Free Range Art & Design Show for graduates, but I hope that it does because the strongest of these young graduates deserve much better exposure than the Banbury Museum has given them.



** My apologies if surnames are wrong, I could not read my own handwriting on my notes - very unproffessional and embarrassing so definitely won't happen again!

Immortal Coil, Jeannelise Edelsten, Berkhampsted School, Berkhamsted, Herts (27 June-1 July 2011)

Tucked away in a meeting room within the west wing of a prestigious private school in Berkhamsted, where Graham Greene once studied and whose leafy grounds and Gothic buildings would sit comfortably in a scene from a Harry Potter film, “Immortal Coil” is the culmination of a year’s residency at the School by artist Jeannelise Edelsten.

I first saw Edelsten’s work many years ago when she had just finished the first year of a higher national diploma in art.  Her piece, “For the Greater Good”, instantly grabbed my attention and stood out as being far superior to the rest of the students’ work.  A beautifully ugly handmade wooden cabinet with rusting door and what appeared to be aged identity cards, tackled monumental ideas around torture and murder.  Having seen attempts by many first year art students who fail miserably to produce successful pieces when grappling with the duel problem of finding their own visual language and choosing major and universal issues, the confidence and power of execution of Edelsten’s work made a more than refreshing change.  I did worry that her individuality and development might be stifled in an institution that was ill-equipped for students wishing to explore any form of installation or large scale sculptural work and was a little disappointed to see her work become smaller and smaller when I returned to each subsequent end of year show to see how she was doing.

However, her commitment to her artistic journey since that time and her unquestionable craftsmanship which flourishes in her work, continue to impress.  I love her exacting attention to detail, ability to combine materials to their greatest visual effect as well as the level of patience required to make her series pieces and I have featured her work in two exhibitions I have curated.

Equally skilled in printmaking, Edelsten combines the use of the medium alongside manipulating ceramics to explore notions of displacement, which is at the core of her working pratice.  As a French national, she sees the cracks which appear in her work as a metaphor for the resilience she has needed to integrate and adapt to English life.

“Immortal Coil” is a quiet, contemplative exhibition and reflects her total immersion in the School during here residency – its history, its architecture and the lives of the students currently there.  The School’s extensive archive became a rich source of inspiration.  Along with some examples of her preparatory sketches and initial watercolour studies, twenty-three small, square paintings using cloth, casting slip and varnish on wood sat on glass shelves on the floor, propped up by vintage books.  Each painting is a symbolic interpretation and representation of the School’s House system.  House names such as “Loxwood”, “Ashby” and “Old Stede” become codified and morph into organic symbols borne from a combination of Edelsten’s imagination and fascination of genetics.  In some, a heavy dose of word play and humour can also be seen.

The paintings were complemented by a series of twenty-three camera-less photographs using fibre-based photographic paper which seem like aerial architectural photographs and a further twenty-three porcelain objects, further manipulations and representations of the House symbols.

The most interesting aspect of the exhibition for me was how a set of wooden drawers were used to display the individual porcelain House pieces.  The combination of materials and placement and display of the drawers themselves evoked a strong sense of academia, antiquity and a love of collection and conservation, themes which have also appeared in Edelsten’s early work and which fit and adapt perfectly to her residency at the School.

By her own admission, Edelsten’s career as an artist is a constant struggle for time and creative autonomy with the demands of family and financial commitment.  After nearly six years of studying and exhibiting in local galleries and spaces, she sees this residency as an important indication of the success of her endeavours to date.  Berkhamsted School has bought the entire series of paintings to permanently display in one of its public rooms.  Many of the individual photographs and ceramic pieces have also been sold.  Edelsten is satisfied that the body of work she has produced during her residency successfully maintains the integrity of the ideas and concerns which underline her working practice as well as adapting and evolving within framework of the residency.  I am inclined to agree with her.