Poetry and Politics: Francis Alÿs’s The Green Line

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Francis Alÿs, The Green Line, 2004

Francis Alÿs, The Green Line, 2004

I’ve written about Francis Alÿs going for a walk here before (that time in the form of his Pradox of Praxis for which he pushed a block of ice around the streets of Mexico City until all he had to show for his efforts was a rapidly drying water mark of the pavement) but this week, given the awful news from Gaza, it’s his 2004 work The Green Line: Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic that’s worked it’s way back into my mind.

I can’t pretend to have anything more than the most rudimentary understanding of the politics of the middle east but this is a work that at least helps with some basics by taking us back to the division of Jerusalem after the end of the Arab-Isreali war in 1948: the  green line drawn on a map of the city by Moshe Dyan.

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After dark: The Night Watch

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Francis Alÿs, The Nightwatch, 2004

Francis Alÿs, The Nightwatch, 2004

Encountering favourite works again by chance is always a real pleasure. My visit to the Exchange in Penzance while on holiday in Cornwall was brief but unexpectedly enjoyable. Apart from seeing the title of the show, I hadn’t really checked what was on before pitching up there (I also hadn’t checked what time the gallery closed, hence the brevity of my visit; why do I never learn?) so beyond thinking 3am: wonder, paranoia and the restless night sounded like my kind of exhibition, I arrived, as is so often the case, essentially clueless. In the main the works I liked the most were the ones I knew already but that’s hardly a problem when those works included some real favourites, especially Francis Alÿs’s The Nightwatch, seen here as a single channel video but sometimes shown as a bank of monitors. Francis Alÿs is probably one of my favourite artists (I’m fickle, it’s an ever changing list; but he’s usually on it, I would say) and The Nightwatch is one of the main reasons why.

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Direction of travel

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Richard Hamilton, Trainsition III, 1954

Richard Hamilton, Trainsition III, 1954

I often think my journey to work is a bit ridiculous. Like many people teaching in art colleges, I live in London but work elsewhere. On a good day* my commute is a four and a half hour round trip, give or take a bit. Though there is art in other cities – a lot in some places, but then Glasgow would be an even stupider commute for me – for me, being in London makes the most sense. (Plus, you know, I’m a Londoner. Always have been and probably always will be.) It’s just that I don’t happen to work here.

Like many of my colleagues, I accumulate piles of train tickets. Many of us seem to have vague plans to make a piece of work with them at some point. Whether anyone ever will, I don’t know (I’ve yet to see the evidence if they have). I know I haven’t (and, in all honesty, probably never will).

All of which means that there was one series of works in the Richard Hamilton exhibition at Tate Modern that really resonated: the Trainsition paintings. Hamilton taught at Newcastle for years but, it seems, stayed living in London. Suddenly my commute seems positively mundane. Unlike me though, Hamilton turned the experience into art. Well done that man.

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Missing, presumed art: Ceal Floyer’s Do Not Remove

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Ceal Floyer, Do Not Remove, 2011

Ceal Floyer, Do Not Remove, 2011

I would say I promise to stop writing about Ceal Floyer’s work soon, but, well, there’s at least one more post forming itself in my head so who knows really. She provides just the right mix of ideas, empty white space (usually, but of course now another post, about work that isn’t empty or white is starting to form) and playfulness to make sure I’m fully engaged. In consisting largely of rawlplugs, Do Not Remove reminds me quite a lot of (some of) Susan Collis’s work which I’ve also written about here ad nauseam. Plus, there’s a sign and I rather like signs (indeed I find myself slight surprised to find that I haven’t tagged loads of posts as ‘signs’ but I suspect that’s down to shoddy tagging rather than a lack of posts about signs).

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Page after Page

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Ceal Floyer, Facsimile, 2011

Ceal Floyer, Facsimile, 2010

What made me start thinking about Ceal Floyer’s work was the idea of emptiness and of the work making the whiteness of the space. And in that respect the work that came to mind was from an exhibition I saw at the Lisson Gallery rather longer ago that I first thought. It seems on the whole improbable that it’s three and a half years since I saw Facsimile – though the evidence is unambiguous – given that it remains very clear in my head. The projection – almost completely white – fills the wall. It takes a while to get the significance the slight trace of movement that constitutes the image: the video is of a fax machine; the paper being passed through it seemingly blank. If the fax is sending rather than receiving a message, there could of course be all manner of important information on the other side of the page but there is no visible trace so it reads as a transmission of emptiness. In the days when fax machines were commonplace – and I don’t know about you but it must be years since I’d sent a fax even in 2010 when Floyer made the work – it seems entirely possible that I regularly got confused about which way up to put the paper and send page after page of nothingness to confused (non) recipients but the deliberate whiteness of Floyer’s Facsimile is intriguing. I find myself enjoying the emptiness rather than wondering what message I might be missing.

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The white stuff

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Ceal Floyer, Monochrome Till Receipt (White), 1999 (2009 version)

Ceal Floyer, Monochrome Till Receipt (White), 1999 (2009 version, Tate)

This wasn’t what I expected to write about next. In fact, when I thought about writing about Ceal Floyer’s work it wasn’t this work that had popped into my head but, once it had, it wouldn’t make way for anything else. Regular readers will know that I do tend to like work that’s white to the point of almost vanishing into the wall and that I find the strategy of showing a tiny work on a big empty wall appealing. It must also be fairly apparent to anyone that’s read more than a few posts here that I do like work that makes me smile. When these two things coincide, so much the better.

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Technology tower: Chris Marker’s Silent Movie

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Chris Marker, A Grin without a Cat at the Whitechapel Gallery, 2014

Chris Marker, A Grin Without a Cat installation view

I guess it’s seeing the two within a week or two that means that Richard Grayson’s Nothing Can Stop Us Now reminded me in a way of Chris Marker’s Silent Movie which is included in the Whitechapel Gallery exhibition Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat. The connection is a simple but somewhat tenuous one: both works feature five monitors. In Grayson’s piece, these run in a horizontal line across the front of the space using the full width of the building. In Marker’s Silent Movie the monitors are in a vertical tower. The tower is a bolt together structure which is both the simplest solution to housing the monitors and also, in its industrial simplicity, somewhat constructivist in feel.

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The power of song: Richard Grayson’s Nothing Can Stop Us Now

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Richard Grayson, Nothing Can Stop Us Now, 2014

Richard Grayson, Nothing Can Stop Us Now, 2014 (video still)

There’s something about the image on the Matt’s Gallery website to promote Richard Grayson’s Nothing Can Stop Us Now at Dilston Grove that makes me think of The Apprentice. I guess it’s the slightly upward camera angle and the way the group are gathered in front of a building that immediately suggests high finance. The five people in question – Leo Chadburn, Bishi, Laura Moody, Tom Herbert and Sophie Ramsay – are the performers in Grayson’s multiscreen sound and video installation at Dilston Grove, a former church in Southwark Park. The image is a screenshot from one of the five screens that see the performers congregate outside locations that of cultural, political and financial importance. That the act of gathering outside such locations now speaks both of solidarity and protest and of competition and capital and the power of the media is interesting in the context of the work.

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Drawing on the past

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Turk Frottage 2009

Gavin Turk, Frottage, 2009

Though he’s made a pretty wide range of work in between, I was interested to find that my altogether half-arsed research for the previous post threw up an image of a recent work I didn’t know and whose existence surprised me. Frottage, made in 2009, close to two decades after Cave, is a rubbing of that same blue plaque. I’m guessing of course (yes, yes, I know, research is good but sometimes the path of least resistance is just so much more appealing) but I rather suspect this is a work made in order to use the title and the amusement to be gained from using a term that is technically correct in art terms but which also has sexual connotations. And why not?

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Marking territory

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Gavin Turk, Cave, 1991 (installed at the RCA)

Gavin Turk, Cave, 1991 (installed at the RCA)

The oblique reference to cave painting in the title of that last point was entirely to allow me to segue somewhat untidily from wall drawings to Gavin Turk’s Cave, an English Heritage style blue plaque that formed his degree show when he finished at the Royal College of Art in 1991. The show essentially consisted of an empty studio with a sign declaring that ‘Gavin Turk, sculptor, worked here 1989–1991’.

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