Monthly Archives: September 2012

Hairy tales

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Kiki Smith, Untitled (Hair), 1990

Though the degree to which hair can disgust is undoubtedly lessened by being mediated through photography or print, it nonetheless has a certain hold for me at least. I think it’s the connection with fairy tales and a sense that it’s in some way magical. I know nothing of spells at all apart from the opening lines of Macbeth but there’s hair right there, as far as I recall, so my mind makes that connection whether or not it would be borne out by, you know, actually looking stuff up. And of course, hair can stand in for the body. And in this lithograph by Kiki Smith, I think I’d argue that it stands in for both the artist and the process of recording in that the hair becomes a kind of drawing. Indeed, in this image the hair is Smith’s; the print is one of a folio of work in which Smith used imprints and photocopies of parts of her hair, face and neck as the basis for making prints.

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Delicacy and disgust

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Mona Hatoum, Hair Necklace, 1995

At first glance, especially through the window of an expensive jewellery shop*, Mona Hatoum’s Hair Necklace might appear to be delicate beads made of spun metal thread. A closer look – or knowing the name of the piece – would immediately give the game away though and this delicately beautiful necklace would immediately become somewhat less appealing. A single string of beads as a necklace isn’t exactly unusual. And the idea of carrying a lock of a loved one’s hair in a necklace, specifically a locket, is hardly new. Combine the two ideas though and you get something rather less commonplace and much more interesting. Hatoum’s hairball beads are undeniably beautiful. There is an extraordinary filigree delicacy to them. Nonetheless, those odd stray ends disturb. And the realisation that this is hair – real hair – inevitably offsets the aesthetic appeal.

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Drawing with light

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Wolfgang Tillmans, Freischwimmer 26, 2003

The relationship between painting and photography is has also been explored by Wolfgang Tillmans in work made over the last decade or so. For Tillmans the work starts and ends with photographic process, but in making the images the fundamental notion of photography as drawing with light is used to make images that feel much closer to painting than photography. These are large-scale, painterly abstract pictures are made without a camera; the photographic paper simply records the light Tillmans directs at it.

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Ironing out the details

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Gerhard Richter, Detail (Red-blue), 1970

The relationship between painting and photography lies at the heart of Gerhard Richter’s practice, from paintings made from found photographs to photographs of paintings made from, yes, photographs, this is territory Richter has explored more thoroughly and from more directions than perhaps any other artist. The Detail paintings, started in 1970, explore the nature of painting and the way in which we so often experience the complexity of the painted surface rendered smooth as a photographic surface. In these paintings, Richter has taken small details from paintings made with a heavy impasto and reproduced these, massively enlarged, as smooth painted surfaces. In Detail (Red-blue) a small area of heavily textured paint is represented as a three metre wide painting.

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Veils of abstraction

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Untitled (1 July 1994)

Gerhard Richter, Untitled (1 July 1994), 1994

The end of summer is in sight and everything is starting afresh. It might sound odd, but Autumn always feels like the start of something new to me. Certainly, it’s the time of year when my thoughts turn to what to show a new intake of students. Some things don’t change much of course, but there are always works I’ve come across recently (many of them probably written about here already) or things I know well but now want to talk about differently. I’ll need to get my art history hat on pretty soon but before that I get to show a random selection of art to help get some ideas going and, with luck, defy a few expectations and destroy some preconceptions. All of which means that in a way I’m quite surprised to find myself trawling through Gerhard Richter’s Overpainted Photographs, but it’s a body of work that somehow always seems relevant.

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Night and day

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Langlands and Bell, Air Routes of the World (Day), 2001

Air travel baffles me a bit. I sort of get the physics of the thing (not really, that baffles me too, but I get that it works) and rationally I know that everything’s really tightly controlled and monitored but looking up at the vapour trails on a clear day or watching planes coming in to land at Heathrow what I really don’t get is how the planes avoid each other so consistently. In a way, I suppose the sky is bigger than it looks but even so… The vapour trails don’t lie: that’s some complex dance going on above us.

In the hands of Langlands and Bell, air routes become a map of the world that effectively talks of global communication rather than geography. Mapping the world – or a section of it – according to where planes fly shows which cities are of global importance but with a few oddities in the mix in the form of hub airports which countless people pass through en route to somewhere else.

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The other side

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Mark Wallinger, Threshold to the Kingdom, 2000

If there’s a hellishness to When Parallel Lines Meet at Infinity that makes it possible to see  Mark Wallinger’s journey through the underground as a journey to the underworld, then his work Threshold to the Kingdom can be seen as representing an altogether better passage to a different world. The journey here is a simple one – through a set of automatic doors into the arrivals hall at London City Airport – but it is made in slow motion and to the accompaniment of glorious choral music which gives the arrival an uplifting feel. Some are greeted by friends, others pass through to continue their journey alone but there is a feeling  of calm even when it briefly looks like paths might converge and collisions occur.

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In the round

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Mark Wallinger, When Parallel Lines Meet at Infinity, 1998

While I’m still on a transport theme, however tenuous some of the connections have been, it seems relevant to ponder a work by Mark Wallinger that I saw in his Whitechapel show however many years ago that was (yes, yes, Google would know) and which has stayed in my mind but refuses to quite come into sharp focus for me. What I remember is a wall sized video projection of the view from a Circle Line tube train as it went round in circles. Standing watching the tracks as we travel forward along them is a slightly giddying experience. There’s no sense of separation. And there’s always something slightly vertiginous about a wall-sized projection; the lack of the framing device of the wall around the edge of the projected image means there’s a strange sense that this is a world we could pass directly into.

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Sailing nowhere

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Yinka Shonibare, Nelson's Ship in a Bottle, 2010

Yinka Shonibare MBE, Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, 2010

Vehicles? Mention of the fourth plinth? Those who have been paying attention could probably have predicted Yinka Shonibare’s Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle as the subject of my next post. And here it is. (Those now thinking the next one will be about Elmgreen and Dragset’s haven’t been paying attention quite long enough though; I’ve written about that already.) I’ve liked quite a few of the works commissioned for the fourth plinth – the plinth in the North West corner of Trafalgar Square in London originally intended to host some general or other on a horse, I think – but Sonibare’s is definitely one of the ones that I enjoyed the most. It’s the sort of work I couldn’t resist going to have another look at when I was nearby, the sort of work that unfailingly made me smile even on the greyest day.

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On the road

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Jeremy Deller, It is what it is, 2009

Though I’ve mentioned this work in a previous post, it seems pertinent to make it the subject of a post now given that, like David Černý’s Quo Vadis, the basis of the work is a car as a signifier of world events. The car in Jeremy Deller’s It is what it is, was destroyed in a suicide bomb attack in Iraq in 2007. The mangled wreckage here, as is often the case in media reports of war, stands in for the destruction of human life, in this case the deaths of thirty eight people. Though we are all too used to seeing images of such vehicles, finding oneself confronted with the real thing is a wholly different experience. Deller has gone beyond this though and taken the wrecked car on a road trip around America, using it as a catalyst for discussion about Iraq.

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