Monthly Archives: February 2012

Scrapyard sculpture

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John Chamberlain, Hatband, 1960

The automobile has a very particular place in American culture. It’s central to countless films and novels, helping to drive (sorry) the narrative. Though cars do appear in art – in photography, painting and sculpture – they are less prevalent here though from the minimalist sculpture of the mid-twentieth century onwards there was certainly a clear interest in using industrial processes and making work that defied expectations about the nature of sculpture in particular. Expectations about painting had already been shattered by minimalism and abstract expressionism.

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New York stories: pictures of Gotham

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Katia Liebmann, Gotham City, 1997

One of the aspects I enjoy the most when visiting New York is the city’s familiarity from film and television. No matter how often I visit – not often enough and never for long enough – the connection with the movies won’t ever completely fade. New York has played itself and pretended to be other, often imaginary, places. It’s great backdrop after all. Katia Liebmann’s 1997 series Gotham City uses New York as a backdrop to a series of masked self-portraits.

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New York stories: tales from the city

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Nan Goldin, Nan One Month after Being Battered, 1984

Nan Goldin’s pictures from the late 1970s and 1980s provide a unique record of a slice of New York life at a time when hedonism was giving way to tragedy. The body of work she titled The Ballad of Sexual Dependency focuses on those who hung out around the Bowery where a hard-drug subculture met an emerging gay scene.

As a student in Boston, Goldin had shown her work in the form of Cibachrome colour prints; moving to New York she switched to showing work as slide shows often with a soundtrack and shown in clubs. The pictures were made using available light and most have a snapshot aesthetic. They document sexuality, drug use, domesticity and the sometimes violent relationships of Goldin and those she hung out with.

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New York stories: walking the line

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Joel Sternfeld, Looking South at 27th Street, September 2000 from Walking the High Line, 2002

Most cities have their forgotten spaces, but it still somehow surprises me that the High Line, the elevated railway that carried goods through Manhattan from the 1930s until 1980 was allowed to decay for more than two decades in a city where space is at such a premium. Thanks to a campaign by New Yorkers eager to see the derelict tracks reborn as a park the future of the High Line as a public space now seems secure.

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A horse, of course

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Elmgreen and Dragset, Powerless Structures Fig. 101, 2012

If, in a public square in a capital city, you have an empty plinth intended for a statue of a figure on a horse then what better to put on it than a statue of a figure on a horse? After testing a lot of alternatives on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, the plinth that never quite got its statue, it should come as no surprise that the powers that be have yielded to the inevitable and installed the statue that was always meant to be there. Sort of.

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Tales from a (perfectly straight and very expensive) riverbank

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Andreas Gursky, Rhine II, 1999

More than a decade later, I still vividly remember seeing Andreas Gursky’s 1996 photograph Rhine for the first time. I knew Gursky’s work quite well – though it was, and is, always exciting to see them in real life – but I didn’t know this picture and there was just something about it. I still haven’t quite worked out what that something is but I do know that at that first viewing I stood in front of it for about 20 minutes, utterly mesmerised. Subsequent viewings of it and of Rhine II, made three years later and a subtle reworking of the image which has exactly the same hold over me and which is now the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction, having reached a price of $4.3m in November of last year, have been no briefer.

 

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Day-dreaming of sleep

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Félix González-Torres, Untitled (Bed), 1991

I love my bed. Most mornings while on my stupidly long commute, I find myself wishing I was still in it. So while I while away my journey day-dreaming of still being curled up under the duvet, here are some other beds both occupied and empty.

The bed in Félix González-Torres’s photograph is, in a way, simulataneously occupied and empty. The bed looks newly vacated – ready to welcome its occupants back before they have to face the day – but the picture is a memorial to the artist’s partner, Ross Laycock, after his death from AIDS. The crumpled sheet and pillows still bearing the indentations of the heads of those who slept there are both the trace of its occupants and reminder of the bed’s emptiness.The whiteness of the picture gives it a delicate beauty.

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Animal stories

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Paula Rego, Pregnant Rabbit Telling Her Parents, 1982

As the cliché has it, a picture paints a thousand words. I’m not sure how often that’s actually true – if ever – but Paula Rego certainly gives it a good go. There is frequently a personal element to the stories she tells though for me the pleasure more often comes from setting the background aside and letting the image do the talking. Casting animals in the roles of her protagonists mean that Rego’s stories often make me smile. In this respect a particular favourite is Pregnant Rabbit Telling Her Parents. Actual rabbits of course must spend a good deal of time pregnant, so their parents would be unsurprised by the news the painting’s title character is breaking – indeed Rabbit has a somewhat brazen, what of it look about her – but actual rabbits would also have rabbits as parents. In the world of Paula Rego that would be far too easy.

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Solid water

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20120222-161633.jpgRoni Horn, Well and Truly, 2009-10

The is a something visually confusing about Roni Horn’s Well and Truly, on show at the moment in at Punta della Dogana as part if the exhibition In Praise of Doubt. The work consists of a number of similar cast glass sculptures each of which looks like water, solidified – but somehow, inexplicably, as solid water, rather than ice – in the form of a low straight-sided dish (that is, as a short column with a slight rounding where the sides meet the base). The sides look sanded (though this is from contact with the mold during casting) but the tops, which dip slightly, are clear and reflect their surroundings.

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In the BANK

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20120222-123622.jpgBANK, Fax-Bak Service, 1998

Invigilating exhibitions is fundamentally pretty boring. There is a lot of sitting around, often without anyone to talk to. In the days before smart phones, laptops and WiFi made spending the time pissing about on the internet an easy option, you had to make your own entertainment. In 1998, while running Gallerie Poo Poo, the artists’ group BANK did just that.

There is always reading matter in galleries. If nothing else, press releases from other galleries arrive daily and it was to these that BANK artists Simon Bedwell, Milly Thompson and John Russell turned to while away long afternoons in the gallery. They were artists after all, and running a gallery; why wouldn’t they want to stay abreast of what was on and read about art? As is happened though, they didn’t much like what they read.

And so it began: The BANK Fax-Bak Service: Helping You Help Yourselves!

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