Damián Ortega, Congo River, 2012
I seem to be looking at a lot of art made from other stuff at the moment. The journey from Bruce Lacey’s assemblages and robots at Camden Arts Centre to Damián Ortega’s sculptures at White Cube Mason’s Yard is a short tube ride and a big conceptual leap. Both exhibitions include sculpture made from ordinary objects but the two shows feel worlds apart.
Bruce Lacey, Boy oh boy. Am I living?, 1964
The Bruce Lacey Experience at Camden Arts Centre is by turns funny, moving, charming and even a little bit irritating. The exhibition, co-curated by art historian Professor David Alan Mellor and artist Jeremy Deller, offers a comprehensive view of Lacey’s inextricably linked life and work. Bruce Lacey, a performance artist before the term was in use, has hung on to his inner child – and exhorts us to do the same – and used it to make work that is, well, more bonkers than most art. But in a good way.
Andy Goldsworthy, Snowballs in Summer, 2000
Snow is one of my very favourite things. I might not like the inconvenience of it and I’m not keen on the slip hazard aspect but that fades into insignificance against the way it looks. So snow as art is something I might reasonably be expected to love, right? Well, as it turns out, not necessarily.
In the run up to his exhibition at the Barbican in 2000, Andy Goldsworthy brought thirteen giant snowballs to London, placing them around the city to be discovered on midsummer day. The snowballs, each weighing approximately a ton and approximately 2m across, had been made in Scotland during the previous two winters and kept in cold-storage in readiness. Embedded in them were reminders of the rural landscape from which they originated which would become more apparent as the snow melted leaving behind the twigs, pebbles, sheep’s wool, barbed wire and so on.
Anya Gallaccio, Intensities and Surfaces, 1996
Using ice as a building material for making art is pretty much always going to end in, well, if not tears, then puddles. In California that outcome will be comparatively speedy but in a London winter the process takes a bit longer. Anya Gallaccio’s Intensities and Surfaces, made in Wapping Pumping Station – the clue’s in the name: a former pumping station in, yes, Wapping, in London – took the form of a large scale ice construction at first glance not dissimilar to one of Allan Kaprow’s ice enclosures. But Gallaccio’s block was solid; it was also lit slightly from within (not apparent in any of the pictures I’ve been able to find of it but I’m almost certain I’m not misremembering) and with a block of rock salt within it and possibly, I think, layered between the ice bricks.
Cerith Wyn Evans, Astrophotography…The Traditional Measure of Photographic Speed in Astronomy…’ by Siegfried Marx (1987), 2006
Thinking about Kris Martin’s Mandi iii and its futile attempts to communicate information reminds me about Cerith Wyn Evans’s chandeliers, one of which – the snappily titled Astrophotography…The Traditional Measure of Photographic Speed in Astronomy…’ by Siegfried Marx (1987) – was in the Fade In/Fade Out exhibition at Bloomberg SPACE. Unlike Martin’s piece though, Wyn Evans’s did communicate its message, alebit in a way few could read without assistance. Astrophotography…The Traditional Measure of Photographic Speed in Astronomy…’ by Siegfried Marx (1987) is not just the title of the work but also of the text it is painstakingly spelling out in morse code.
Kris Martin, Mandi iii, 2003
Writing about Bruce Nauman’s Days yesterday put the idea of sound and the way information is communicated firmly in my mind, so coming across a leaflet for Fade In/Fade Out – a show I saw at Bloomberg SPACE a few years ago – while sorting through a pile of random paperwork felt like a very good coincidence. There were a few great pieces in the exhibition, but the work that’s stayed with me most clearly is Kris Martin’s Mandi iii, a station information board loudly and relentlessly updating to make sure we have up to the minute information. But as the flaps clicked over the lack of information remained; every surface on the board was plain black.
Tracey Emin, I didn’t say I couldn’t love you, 2011
I’ll start by owning up to the fact that I wouldn’t have gone to see She Lay Down Deep Beneath the Sea, Tracey Emin’s exhibition at Turner Contemporary in Margate, if there hadn’t been a couple of other things on show outside the gallery that I particularly wanted to see. Over the years, Emin has made quite a lot of work I really like but most of it has been video and, with a few exceptions, I’m not crazy about her drawings, prints and paintings. But I was there so it would have been foolhardy not to take a look. I’ve seen enough of Emin’s work to know that at its best it can be genuinely affecting and that sometimes even the small, almost throw-away, drawings can be funny and occasionally hit a nerve or tell some sort of universal truth.
Jake and Dinos Chapman, Great Deeds Against the Dead, 1994
I’m sure there are other examples out there, but it seems to me it’s comparatively rare for reworkings of existing art to involve the move from two to three dimensions. Painting to photography, yes; printmaking to sculpture, no so much. But with a long-standing fascination with Goya’s portfolio of etchings The Disasters of War, that’s the approach Jake and Dinos Chapman took when making their sculpture Great Deeds Against the Dead.
Alfred Stieglitz, Fountain by R. Mutt, 1917
In 1917, Marcel Duchamp bought a urinal, signed it in an assumed name of R. Mutt – the urinal had been bought from the J L Mott Ironworks – and submitted, with the title Fountain, it to the Society of Independent Artists in New York for inclusion in their annual exhibition. The rules stated that work by any artist who paid the fee would be accepted but the committee rejected Fountain. Much debate ensued. Eventually the board of the Society of Independent Artists – of which Duchamp was a member, but who in the main didn’t know he had submitted the work – decided that the work would be hidden from view for the show. Duchamp resigned in protest.
Fountain was photographed by Alfred Stieglitz but was subsequently lost. I think the prevailing view is that Stieglitz threw it out after making the picture.
Damien Hirst, The Battle Between Good and Evil, 2007
Without wishing to seem obsessed with either Damien Hirst, the titling of work or the programme at White Cube’s Bermondsey space, having written about Hirst’s paintings (terrible) and Nauman’s films (great) the completist in me thinks it worth writing about Hirst’s installation in 9 x 9 x 9, the final gallery space in the Bermondsey building.
The work takes the form of two beach balls – one black, one white – floating above a black and white square basis, held aloft presumably by a fan within the base. This is a playful work but my enjoyment of it was offset by wondering firstly how it would look in colours that said beach ball more assertively and secondly by wondering how it would look all in white. As it happens, on both counts, Google is my friend here.
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