Showing posts with label Tate Britain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tate Britain. Show all posts

Thursday 1 September 2022

Findings and Favours : #CorneliaParker at Tate Britain ~ Curating an exhibition for people who like their art explained (away) ?

Findings and Favours : #CorneliaParker at Tate BritainT

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

29 August

Findings and Favours : #CorneliaParker at Tate Britain
~ An exhibition for people who like their art explained (away) ?


This is a place-holder : whatever Normal Transmission is may be resumed some time soon ?


Prelude :




Main act :


#


Postlude :


More to come...
























Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Friday 31 January 2020

Blake at Tate : Some musings

Blake at Tate : Some musings

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

 1 February
Blake at Tate : Some musings






 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: ,

Saturday 7 October 2017

The Rachel Whiteread retrospective at Tate Britain - and why to visit again and again ! (work in progress)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

7 October

This is a first reaction (work in progress) to the retrospective show for Rachel Whiteread that has just opened at Tate Britain, Millbank, London



Now, and from previous occasions of looking at work by Rachel Whiteread, one is aware that she presents a vivid and ever-continuing appreciation of the inner materiality of the substances with which she makes it : they cry out, in the exhibition at Tate Britain (@Tate), to be perceived - as the case may be - as being porous, reflective, semi-opaque, etc.

 If we perceive form in her practice, but not how substance has influenced her in arriving at it, then we overlook what is intrinsic to it. For, porosity or the appearance of opacity are resolutely not merely optical qualities here, but ones that allude to the tactile nature of each piece, embodied in its capacity to look taut, pliant, rubbery, giving, and so on.


Penultimate weekend - closing chapters, three months on*... :





[...]


End-notes :

* Which is a surprise to realize - gigs or shows that live in one's head exist outside the mundanity of time ?




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Wednesday 10 May 2017

Tweets about #Hockney at Tate Britain

Tweets about #Hockney at Tate Britain (on 9 May)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

10 May

Tweets about #Hockney at Tate Britain (on 9 May)










Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , ,

Thursday 16 March 2017

The Turner Prize Tweets 2016

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

16 March











Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Friday 7 November 2014

Remember me, but forget my fate ~ Dido and Aeneas, Henry Purcell

This is a review of Mr. Turner (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

7 November

This is a review of Mr. Turner (2014)

Probably too much has already been written, spoken or just thought about Mr. Turner (2014) since its win for Timothy Spall at Cannes (as well as for cinematographer Dick Pope), and its nomination for the Palme d’Or. (And maybe it has not attracted much attention, but the scoring of the film is so intelligent, just even with the simple falling motif on alto sax (four saxes are credited), picked up by the strings.) So the unaccustomed aim here will be (relative) brevity :

The simple truth is that Spall, Pope and director Mike Leigh, amongst others, have collaborated on an excellently cinematic piece of work. Whether or not one wishes to interpret the composition of shots as somehow mimetic of Turner's painterly art and / or vision, the quality of them, and the care behind them, is profound : unlike some films, incidentally using this medium (as a way of reaching an audience with a story), the film is indissoluble from the story.

Just as, in Mr. Turner, we see the artist having confidence in his work* (declaring that he is leaving it, as a collection, to the nation : the collection that, indeed, we have at Tate Britain (@Tate)), Leigh likewise has every reason to be pleased with what this film looks like and says.


Whether the details of art history (or of biographical fact) are correct is for others to debate (to the extent that we can know). Others, for example, can research Turner's known relations with his father or his niece, or observe on what basis we can say what did happen with that daub of red paint at the summer exhibition (?) at The Royal Academy. The fact is that, with Spall (and others), Leigh has - as he said himself to Radio 3 Free Thinking's (@BBCFreeThinking's) Matthew Sweet - someone who can be seen to be sketching, applying paint to a canvas, scumbling.

Leigh has no need for Spall to be Turner through and through, researched ad infinitum, but a man such as we see could have happened to be such an artist, a man embodying an economy of means and words, who was J. M. W. Turner.

In fact, it is actually of no importance to the worth of this film whether there ever was a Mrs Sophia Booth in Margate - she could be conflation, or pure invention, for all that it matters. Even more vigorously and vividly than Daniel Auteuil does Marseille in Marius and Fanny, Leigh creates this Margate, the industry on the foreshore, the close quarters on land, the sails from the front windows : we believe that Turner would choose such a spot, such scenes, such a woman (as Marion Bailey becomes, in Sophia).


It is almost, in a rather Becketttian way**, as though Leigh creates the creating Turner as his creature, in which aim Leigh is in no way about what Ralph Fiennes worked to achieve with Dickens in his The Invisible Woman (2013). That film seems to tell his lack of moral courage and to rehabilitate him sympathetically in our eyes at the same time ; although Mr. Turner does share an era with when Dickens' illicit relationship took place, the mores here seem to be quite different.

Spall may be 5’8”, but the sense that Leigh’s framing and Pope’s camerawork give is of the presence of the man, his bulk in the scene, as what balances it and makes it complete*** - just as we see him, discovered as we follow two local women along a canal path at the start, working from the perfect point on the opposite bank for the view that he wants.

Or, for example, when Turner is on his way (to Chelsea ?), we are confronted with an assemblage of people, who are there for us to view as he strides past. The assurance in the construction of this film matches Turner’s confidence about what he was giving the nation :



Although it was tempting to use another quotation, No good deed goes unpunished, this review is titled with one from 'Dido's Lament' (from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas) : not for nothing does Leigh have Spall, feelingly if obviously not expertly, sing along to Miss Coggins' (Karina Fernandez's****) playing this number. As Turner reaches for the words (finding, as happens with even the best-learnt text, synonyms that fit the scansion), he is virtually writing his own epitaph.



Content with himself, as he strolls around the Academy show, being acknowledged, making comment, he is most of all a man who has a position that he knows - or knows himself by his position ? Having a daguerrotype made - and then persuading Mrs Booth to do the same with him - he is not the obedient subject, but exercising his intellect to understand the mechanism and the medium, rather than accepting what is presented, and how that is done.

And, there, Leigh cannot resist giving him prescience for our modern obsession with making / distributing images.


End-notes

* We also see that it could have been far from facile to maintain that belief, because of trends in fashion / art such as that which began just with the initials ‘PRB’, before The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood ventured its name…

The young John Ruskin (in a scene that some view as unforgivably disrespectful of him) cannot venerate Claude as Turner does, but seeks to worship Turner in his stead - the key point, other than that Ruskin is young, is that Turner's estimation of his own work does not depend on no longer valuing what went before : he likens Sophia to a representation of Aphrodite, he respects Claude for painting the sea 'from the land'.

** Thinking of the late 'novels', Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho.

Quick - leave him !

*** Not in the same way, exactly, as in the montage that closes Calvary (2014), but the closing shot is of absence, of grief. And, when we see the dying Turner, it has been arranged so that Sophia Booth, to his right, is in a shallow depth of field, and is the one in focus.

**** Another Leigh regular, along with Lesley Manville (Mrs Somerville) and David Horovitch (Dr. Price) - as was Spall himself, in the mid 1990s.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Saturday 20 July 2013

Shadows and surrealism in Caulfield’s career

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

21 July


Shadows and surrealism in Caulfield’s career


For copyright reasons, I have not embedded images, but, when possible, included links to where they can be found and, if the reader wishes, opened in a separate window from the comments that I make here.


Introduction

The five-room survey of Patrick Caufield’s work at Tate Britain is a comfortable one to take in, with 35 canvases that begin with the 1960s, the latest one being from the year of his death, 2005. (Caulfield is twinned, in terms of ticket, with an interesting three-room show for Gary Hume.)

Some of Caulfield’s paintings were known to me over the years from the Tate’s collection, but it was good to put them in a wider historical and thematic context, which begins with pieces that make a virtue of a kind of studied refusal to make the subject-matter stand out from the picture-plane (partly by not using shadow).


The first half of the exhibition


A quality of, and using, ‘flatness’

This ‘flatness’ (or absence of relief, of things in perspective) is typified by The Well (1966), where the bits of rock and masonry (with shadow) that one would seek to interpret as surrounding the well-head look, deliberately, strangely proud, as if they are somehow above it, because, although small, they have mass (where the huge dressed stones arranged to form the well do not). Significantly, too, for what I shall go on to explore, we are shown the least of the well, not even over the lip, let alone whatever water lies ‘below’.

The effect also haunts Concrete Villa, Brunn (1963), where the outline of the named building appears to be imposed on a grid of squares (none of which we can actually see complete) and made from the meeting, at right-angles, of tight pairs of parallel lines (a coded reference to parallel lines projecting to meet at infinity ?). The flattened depiction of the building itself makes it appear to be a polygon, rather in the same way that a perspectival cube drawn with just its edges can look like two triangles joined by a central square.


Mixing styles of representation

In Still life with Dagger (1963), Caulfield is more explicit than in The Well as to the different ways of showing the elements of his composition, and has chosen to mix them. He has a jug as an outline (plus Cubist adjuncts), whereas the weapon of the title is painted full colour in semi-relief, but the beads of the necklace next to it, which loop around the handle of the jug, although they are made to project, light reflecting on the real object would, have the grey hue of the double-delineated flat surface. If we just look at this work without analysing it, it should still give a sense of disjunction, even of disquiet, because the conventions have been muddled.

Another work in this room makes us curious, wanting to know what Bend in the Road (1967) conceals, as the lie of the land and the curve suddenly hide the road ahead (if not at, then very near, the vanishing-point). Although, at one level, we may be conscious that it is Caulfield constructing, or marshalling, this terrain, we may be more caught up in our curiosity – that questioning spirit is part of our reaction to later works, wanting to know what lies beyond that door, window, staircase…

If we forget, however momentarily, that Caulfield determines what to show us (and how), as he does with the limited palette (two main colours here, plus dark outlines), we will have a frisson of being denied in and by this work, and that is its raison d’être, to challenge us and our expectations of painting. Just as the luscious mould on fruit and cheeses in a Dutch still-life might direct us to re-contemplate such everyday objects, Caulfield gives us a blind bend in the road to stop in front of and just wonder : if we will not give ourselves up to that, we will not get it, not get the point.


A response to René Magritte ?

That makes these works sound didactic, but they are not, for they are playful at the same time in the way, say, that Magritte is, even if the curator does not cite him as one of Caulfield’s influences. Portrait of Joan Gris (1963) in this room, quite a well-known one, reminds us of Magritte, with its uniform blue background, relieved only by almost floating irregular geometrical gestures either side of the solid Gris, figuratively rendered (although he could equally seem like a cut-out – please see below). No one could say that Gris or Magritte made jokes in art as such, but they utilized compositional ideas to underlie what they were doing – Caulfield likewise.


The figure of Gris, the easily missed man on the balcony in Villa, and a monochrome waiter in After Lunch (1975), leaning in from a recess, are the only figures whom we see, who do not really occupy these spaces, but are in them : only Gris is fully depicted as if living, because the waiter is bored and absorbed, in terms of colour, into his space, and the man on the balcony is just a tiny reminder that this villa is ‘a machine for living’.


Expectancy in these works

When I say that they do not ‘occupy’ the works in which they appear, there is not the same expectancy, as in other canvases such as Foyer (1973), as to where people are, what is happening, but the waiter has done with his activity at lunchtime and is just quiet, the man on the balcony is dwarfed by the building and its construction even as, reading his paper, he pretends not to feel that he is – and, even if the men have further to say, they do not say it. (Even Office Party (1977) gives us the trappings of the office, e.g. the typewriter, and of the party, bottles and glasses, but no one partying, just the saints on the front of the building opposite.)

It is characteristic, then, of Caulfield that he chooses these largely unpopulated spaces, these moments perhaps between (or under*) the moments, a bit in the way of glimpsing a fully lit room as one passes a house, where one can see what is there and where other lit rooms extend, but no sign of the human life that usually gives rise to all this (and for whom all this would then exist). Each of the pieces in this exhibition has, if not always a very strong one, a personality, an identity separate from those whom we hypothesize could shortly enter it.

That, too, is a cognate feeling in Magritte’s canon, even if it does not mean with Caulfield that a train will rush out of the fireplace, or someone on horseback from the wings : each interior (they are largely interiors, or semi-interiors) appears to have a self-awareness – almost a self-consciousness – that, despite the absence of a human observer, it exists. Put another way, the rooms have a presence that it is not dependent on the motive force of human beings, and this Caulfield paints.

Even if it probably oversimplifies, Cubism is nowadays often purported to be a response to, and demonstration of, Einstein’s theories about relativity, whereas the word ‘surreal’ is blithely, in common parlance, applied to anything a bit strange, without reference to the stated aims of The Surrealist Manifesto (or the practice of those in the movement). At this stage in his career, Caulfield is not moved by his interest in Braque to distort dimensionality quite in the way of a Cubist still-life, and Dagger does not closely resemble the work of that school. However, he does give a dream-like sensibility to these rooms, not unlike the feel of the exteriors of, say, Giorgio de Chirico and Paul Delvaux.


Construction and artifice

In Lunch, as if it is an external view (although it seems to be a painting partly behind a fish-tank, complete with blobby goldfish of a Matissean hue, but not delicacy), there is a wholly naturalistic scene, of a typical Bavarian (or Austrian) castle on a lake, which extends, in photographic detail, into the distance.

Apart from the fish, and a lozenge highlight bottom right (which seems to represent light entering with steps down from the restaurant), this is the most diverse range of colour in a largely blue canvas : two near-parallel slanting lines, as if of shadow in the lower and upper reaches (a slightly different, cooler shade above from below), divide the area left to right, and give way to a lighter colour where the waiter’s head emerges.

Topographically (as will be found with other paintings such as Springtime : face à la Mer 1974), the space is difficult to construe : the fish-tank is supported by a long box on a trestle between whose legs, at the right height, one would be able to look through, just as – if it were not too high – the panelling above and behind the painting gives way to a decorative top-board, beyond which we see the roof-space, columns, probably suspension-wires for overhead lamps. This is where the waiter is standing, leaning over the uppermost of the ranch-style boards that partition off that region.


As already implied, he almost appears to be part of the furniture, inert, though seemingly contemplating whatever is ahead, which is unseen. Is what we see, with a table, chairs, a cooking-pot, the kitchen part, and he would normally be serving dishes that are reached over the partition, and then take them into the restaurant proper (unless it is the dining-room of a wealthy private house) ?


An Escherean perspective ?

Countless viewings, the most recent a thorough one, have not exhausted this painting, with its juxtapositions of shadowed portions, stylized fish, and the confusing verisimilitude of the painting that could be the world outside. Here, and remembering Concrete Villa, one almost wonders whether one is looking at solid enough lines of construction that lead to an absurdity, as in M. C. Escher’s impossible spaces, most notably Waterfall, whose waters turns out to be feeding themselves. That is certainly the feeling with Springtime, trying to be sure where steps lead, and how the world inside the building (though we have a feeling of interiority, I believe it to be false on the evidence) can fit together with this view.

Escher’s etchings have a sense of holding reality at bay that fits with these works seeming to hold enquiry at an expectant arm’s length, more so than with the relative stasis of Braque’s or Léger’s compositions, although they do embody what one might call structural tension (or difficulty). So, with Dining Recess (1972) there is familiarly a circular table with six egg-cup-shaped chairs loosely arranged around it (one can see, but only by considering the circles of the bases of table and chairs, that there is human imperfection, not rigidity, in this set-up).

All but the pale, lemony glow of a lamp that has shape but no depth and an indeterminate blue through a high-up window or skylight** (which could be either a certain type of dullish daytime, or a luminescent night sky without stars) is rendered moderately flatly in a sort of slate grey with a chocolate tinge to it, so that one’s eye is drawn to the ‘hotspots’ of the globe of light and to the sky above. Is the electric light really quite dim that it does not seem to illumine and create shadow, or is the uniform greyness (of a kind that Beckettt maybe described in his rotunda pieces, and in All Strange Away and Company) in this non-directional way somehow its product ?

The light being there draws us and draws out questions, as to whether, say, the space is lit before supper, after the table has been cleared, or just as part of the downstairs lighting of an evening, and the latter sensations are implicit in the painting’s form : we can make the view have meaning, and have a feel for where this recess is from the clues (even if the architecture confuses**), but it resists us, it is non-committal, and will not confirm our notions. Again, a sort of challenge to us about what we believe, what we imagine, but without shouting at us that we make those assumptions all the time.



The second half of the exhibition


Still life reinvested ?

In later work (displayed in Rooms 4 and 5), Caulfield has not so much revisited as reinvested the still life. In Still Life : Mother’s Day (1975) and in Braque Curtain (2005), shadows are silhouettes with a life and lively colours of their own, and one struggles to divine a source and direction of light that would act in this way. Again, that disturbing effect as of Dagger, but this time more strongly, where the puzzle is more explicit, and where the bright blue shadows of Mother’s Day, rather than being cast by light shining on those objects, almost seems to project the objects (there is the same appearance in Curtain).


Faux-collage

All of this made more intense by the faux-collage of what appears to be a cut-out rose applied to the fish-bowl, but in fact is painted – a juxtaposition a little like Magritte’s huge flower in a room, or an apple in front of the head of a suited man. Which is why I relate to using a style that makes a flower resemble a cutting from a magazine as a surrealist impulse, because there is that dislocation again.

In fact, it is a double one, the first being the sharply contrasting technique, the second that some of the simplicities of style, used as a matter of choice, may have blunted one to the scope of the artist’s technical mastery. In other words, since he gives us a bowl by its stylized outline (rather than a bowl that, with effects of shade and reflection, looks like a real one), do we tend not to credit that the painter can paint, and thus assume that he must have used collage, whether it is flowers around a doorway that we cannot see into (Entrance (1975)), or detail in a grand portico ?

Flowers are a key theme of painting-as-collage in this exhibition, whether the striking display in Entrance, or the chopped-off study of tulips. Otherwise, it is paintings (such as in Lunch or Interior with a Picture (1985 – 1986)), or fabrics (a Morris & Co. one in Green Drink (1984)). They are part of what makes interiors feel like a still life, pregnant with what might have happened beforehand, or be about to happen.


Lamp-shades

Another part – which gives rise to the title of this account – is lamps, and Caulfield has made series of the same simple scene at different times of day. Here, I do not know whether there are companion pieces, but Window at Night (1969) uses the device of a pendant light, hanging where it is crossed by the first intersection of a three-wide by five-deep paned window, a red cone with a yellow highlight at the lower aperture.

The room itself, with the outline of a corner top right, is wholly orange : as has been commented before, however, the lamp casts its light uniformly, and maybe we are distracted from this by the window furniture, the open transom, and the silhouettes of items on the window-ledge. Window is not, if we do not allow it to lull us by not thinking with and through what Caulfield has done, a representation except in stylized, Caulfieldian terms.


Heightened expectancy

Again, with the possibility that (the outline of) a person might enter, a degree of tension, then, as with that bend in the road, Gris faced by what seem like mobiles, or these expectant interior views such as Dining / Kitchen / Living (1980). In that latter work, we see, left to right, the three named living-areas. On the table in the centre, a mixed rendition of styles that render the scrapbook-style oval, brown casserole with lid, again making us think that it is cut out, and the food (which looks unreal, in some way, as food in some other canvases does, if not hyper-real and cut out, in other cases, as with some chicken bread-crumbed breasts).

Evidence that someone has been here, as in Goldilocks. Once more, except that we are inside rather than out, the sensation that someone might come in at any moment and surprise us. Except that this is a canvas, and what makes us enter into it ? What draws us into it, as in Window, what keeps us aloof from Foyer, hesitating at whether we are interested, and what shuts us out, if we just look quickly, at it or at Well, and ask what the point is ?


Shadow and the light that cast it

Some later paintings provoke us as to what they might mean in a different way, with lamp-shades that interact by superposition and against the laws of physics with the cone of light that they project. It has already been commented that Braque Curtain’s shadows (which is shadow, though, and which the light ?), unless there really are two table-lamps in the split-level aperture, challenge our understanding if we look at the detail.

Nearly top left, the jaunty outline of the shade of a standard-lamp, but no shadow, no light projected above or below, and in its own little patch of complementary colour. Far left, a large, bold pattern, as if a large oddment of material is hanging, a gesture, in dividing the space, that reminds me again of Magritte’s use of pattern and texture, and a complete foil to the sombre black and light orange of the lamps. If this is the title’s curtain, then it separates off from the world where we do not know what is casting what, or what relates them.

Several works, including Bishops (2004), take this playfulness in a different direction, with what is the lamp, and what is the light that it casts (I could have said earlier that light and darkness co-existing was a Magrittean preoccupation in a series of paintings called The Empire of Lights), and they all seem to formulate a series of ruminations on this question, although it was not, on this visit, one that for me was pressing to follow – or even to try to engage much with.


Shadows, light, and construing spaces

In other works again, such as Hemingway Never Ate Here (1999), fathoming the space is not straightforward : bottom right, there is a black right-angled triangle, indicating that (unless it is trompe-l’œil, as our examination may require is to think) there appears to be a corner, in which case the lower part of the wall below the dado-line (or that part of it) must slope backwards. If it does slope, where the dado turns a corner and stops is where a built-in table (looking for all the world like a hovering tray) is home for a partly drunk beer with lime (which I wrongly took for a fading candle at first, as I had not entered the idiom), an apparently empty cup and saucer and a larger piece of lime (?) on the saucer. (Above the dado, a decorated cow’s head, complete with horns, which inevitably makes of think of the titular Hemingway.)

What lies on the other side of the canvas (the dado takes us roughly halfway across) is initially straightforward, a bracket, though not clearly for what, in relief that resembles a treble-clef. The main feature, though, is a large and bright-yellow emission of light that colours the bits of wall under the bracket and of the short section of wall where the dado ends. One might infer that it emanates from the white full-moon shape seen at the top of this seeming doorway with a curved top, or may be from the white object on the level with the tray, but I am unsure : it could be more likely, given how the shadows look, that the source of the light is invisible, in the space, but hidden behind the arch...

Perhaps, also, since we can make out treads (the first with the leach of the light onto it) on the left of the canvas, stairs go up in the direction of where the bracket is (which would then be – if it were not utterly flat, and in relief – a place to hang a basket). The quadrilateral actually seems to be the actually base of a built-in surface, with a window to the left of it (we catch a hook or bracket’s shadow, which looks wooden, and above it could be a thin curtain-rail), and we see to the right of it the top left-hand corner of what looks like a big piece of furniture (not in style with anything else). This could be the entrance to the building, in fact, as the shadows indicate a floor-level recess.

That exhausts my fathoming this work just now – it is deliberately puzzling, deliberately different from the (apparent) simplicity of others such as Window or Foyer, and, unless one can catch it just right, with a willing and accommodating eye, it will frankly make no sense. None, anyway that is easy enough for a casual stroll around a gallery, although it is really no more complex than Villa, but Caulfield has rendered shape in colour, in perplexing light and shadow.


Touches of Dalí in an interior with Magrittean curtains as radiating light ?

Another puzzling work, with which I shall seek to make a finish, is Reserved Table (2000). Much of the upper left and right part of the surface has been rendered with a crenellated comb, as if it were decorative render for ceiling or walls. (Here, the ceiling is not rendered, or distinguished from the walls, and is of a pashy midnight blue.) To the left of the canvas, arcs of light again, the upper one white and in the shape of a cone with one-quarter of a circle inverted on the top, the lower one slightly creamy, and starting conically, but ending with a claw.

We will have taken in the lobster before then, which this shape echoes. In one sense, it is not out of place somewhere that the title suggest is a restaurant, in another it used more decoratively, oddly just placed there, which implies that it is dead (and reminds me of Dalí’s Telephone (1936)). It is, at any rate, on a narrow ledge in front of what appears to be an almost egg-shaped mirror, showing perhaps the other side of it (although we see more of a reflection than the height and position of the putative mirror suggests :

Maybe it is not a mirror, but a black canvas with a depiction of part of a lobster at the bottom. It could even be a serving hatch, because the lobster on the ledge may not match this one, and the egg-shaped space is set into a rectangle that it delineated as proud by a shadow down the side of it, and it is not impossible that the light seen to the other side represents what comes from the kitchen.

As to the table, apart from a curled, metallic bracket, it appears to float, or, rather, it has a seemingly floating tablecloth, in whose starchy material is impressed the form of a circular top. The curves and billows of the cloth are a distinct contrast to the sheen of the rendered, arched alcove above : it is a contrast, because the cloth, as with the shape that balances it on the left-hand side, is very bright so as to seem hyper-real again, and the shadow under the table / cloth seems vague and indistinct, which is a beautiful touch.

As before, a table that has been reserved, but which is not set – were the diners very careful, or is it infra dig in such an establishment to have the table laid on arrival ? The cloth radiates cleanness, as does the whole space, and it is these highlights and juxtapositions of colour and shade that create yet another sense of something that, presumably, is about to happen…


Brief conclusion

In summary, I believe that the painterly qualities that I have discussed are indicative of influences beyond the recognized ones of Braque, Léger and Gris. In particular, I suggest that Caulfield has used some of the techniques of those who, at some time or other, were admitted by André Breton to the role of the Surrealists, notably shadow for disturbing effect, along with the creation of places that, by their patient emptiness, draw our attention to the immanence of their occupation.



What the papers thought...

The Guardian was favourable (about this and the twinned exhibition), The Independent and The Telegraph were less keen.

Caulfield's friend, David Hare, has some things to say about his work that I find perceptive.



End-notes

* An important collection of Russell Hoban’s stories, essays and other pieces is called The Moment under the Moment.

** If we stop to consider what we see of the inside of the roof, it is not certain that we can construe it : I am unsure whether it is like an Escher, where the lines deceive, or whether it was not intended as it looks, with a sloping roof that disappears into a space where our eye cannot follow.




Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sunday 7 April 2013

Lessons from Merz

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

8 April

On my fourth visit to the Kurt Schwitters exhibition at Tate Britain (Schwitters in Britain), I shall probably conclude having looked at everything, and might even manage some time with the ‘Kurt-inspired’ installations by Laure Prouvost and Adam Chodzko.

Four visits ? Yes, because, unlike those of the Roy Lichtenstein retrospective at (Tate) Modern (Lichtenstein : A Retrospective) these works, in my experience, need time to be appreciated, and also space. As a Member of Tate, I have my admission free and at will, without the need for a ticket, and I can accordingly pace my viewing. (With the Arshile Gorky exhibition at Modern, I misjudged a little, and needed to travel down for the Friday, Saturday and Sunday of its closing weekend.)

What I have learnt (so far) is :

(1) One can have no appreciation of the pieces in Room 5 (Hand-held sculptures) from photographic images (I have seen such)

(2) In fact, without having them endlessly rotate on a turntable (not least because some are fragile, or, maybe, unstable), I believe that filming some of the works revolving would have benefited the typical visitor’s appreciation of, for example, Chicken and Egg, Egg and Chicken, Untitled (The All-Embracing Sculpture) and Speed (all dates to come)

(3) There are various reasons, some to do with the effect of shadow on Schwitters’ constructions (both on canvas and paper, and these free-standing ones), and others to the fact that he has, for example, vividly painted planes of Chicken and Egg, Egg and Chicken that are not – almost necessarily with a three-dimensional object (although there is more to it than that) – visible at all times

(4) In fact, the moving image as an interpretive element is under-represented in the show (whereas the installations both use film) – we do not, I assume, have footage of Schwitters reciting the Ursonate or any other of his poems, stories, etc., which is why we have the well-known three-by-three grid of photographs of him performing the former (plus audio)

(5) I have not yet done more than pass through Prouvost and Chodzko’s parts of the exhibition, but it does beg the question why their work, even if it is a response to his, is part of the show about Schwitters – how interesting are commissions from 2011, as against, say, some reactions in artwork that are contemporaneous to his time in Britain (seven years, after all), or even reporting Hirst’s inspiration to go to art college because of Schwitters’ collages ?

(6) What we do have, which I suggest is more of archive interest, are the photographs of the Merz Barn that were taken in situ by the team led by Richard Hamilton, and we have an almost excessively full chronology* of the failure to save the remains of the Merzbau, and of the near-failure to preserve the Merz Barn, both before and after the Hamiltonian survey

(7) I criticize the inclusion of a film-loop of those photos for several reasons : (a) they include rulers whose scale is never made explicit, (b) it is also not clear what the – often enough – poor-quality images (usually too dark) depict, because there is no over-arching shot of that wall of the Merz Barn, except in the course of the loop (which, of course, one cannot consult), and (c) a large-scale quality image of the wall as it can now be seen in Newcastle-upon-Tyne would show far more (or one could even have had a touch-sensitive one that would project a choice of images, being various levels of close-up or one of the ones from the survey)

(8) There are two large plaster pieces (a little like columns, as displayed, but resembling shapely newel-posts, or legs), which, I understand, were found in the Merz Barn, and which are ‘displayed’ in oblong Perspex boxes, placed against the wall, so that one side is invisible – unlike the four Perspex cubes that contain the hand-held sculptures, one cannot even walk all around them, and so film of them being either rotated or circled would give more sense of their curves, their construction, and their continuity with the smaller pieces

(9) But enough of all these observations for how the Schwitters show could have been better or different, because so many visitors (typically for a gallery) are doing themselves no favours by appreciating the works on canvas, wood, cardboard or paper without standing back from them

For I believe that Schwitters used the bus-tickets, say, or newspaper clippings, pieces of packaging, corrugated card or paper, gauze or net purely for their visual effect – if, after we have seen a shape mutedly through a piece of net, we will not see it close to, and we will not see the composition by knowing that that part of it is paper, that part oil-paint on the paper, that part a piece of stone adhered to the surface

(10) The exhibition contains some examples of his use of pointillist marks in landscape and abstract work, but, again, we do not get the best from Seurat by being so close that we see what the painting is made of, but not how the technique is meant to work and be viewed – same with painters such as Sisley or Pissarro

(11) As to the materials that Schwitters used that derive from reproductions of works in national collections, there are some cases (Room 3 contains some) where one is quite clearly meant to see that he is transforming or subverting a representation of an identifiable original, which is entirely consistent with the assertion that he made in 1919 :

The word Merz denotes essentially the combination of all conceivable materials for artistic purposes, and technically the principle of equal evaluation of the individual materials


(12) Schwitters goes on to make his meaning quite plain – and I like it that he talks, along with paint, about things as if there is a harmonious democratization :

A perambulator wheel, wire-netting, string and cotton wool are factors having equal rights with paint


(13) For this reason, I reject the curatorial interpretation put on his use of a copy of G. F. Watt’s Hope in c. 63 old picture 1946 :

The inclusion of an advertisement for Dr Scholl’s Foot Comfort Service brings the lofty symbolism of the original painting, positioned upside-down and overlaid with scraps of paper so that it is barely recognizable, down to earth


Well, if Watt’s painting is inverted and so overlaid maybe it is not meant to be recognizable, and could there, therefore, not be any ‘bringing down’ except in the recognition of a student of art history ? As to the advert, I see no greater significance in the wording than in that of many a scrap used in other collages (‘Merz’ itself is an appropriated fragment, after all) :

The person who looks at a bus-ticket in one and ponders its provenance might as well be in London Transport Museum as the Tate, because I believe that Schwitters’ eye is good, a self-reinforcing belief, because I stand back from his paintings, find a harmony in them, and that, if I put my thumb up to remove a detail, the painting is no longer balanced – it is interesting to get close and see how he achieved it, but just doing so is mistaking means and end


All in all, although some things could have been done differently, I am glad to have had this exhibition to visit, and, when I am not hearing inane comments on Schwitters or his art from other visitors (which makes me run a mile), or avoiding their proceeding to a painting that had looked ‘free’, or even their deciding to stand in my way, I can fondly hope that people have the chance to get to know his work better.

Not everything works as effectively as the select few that really do sing, but almost all have something to say, and it is a joy to become aware of his works of portraiture, landscape, and – in the flesh – sculpture.

Viva Kurt !


End-notes

* I refuse to say ‘time-line’.


Posted by at 5 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

Wednesday 3 April 2013

Epiphany : Questions in a comment

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

3 April

I am taking this space to start respond to various questions posed in a comment on Epiphany : my visit to Tate Britain II

I have now watched Turner Prize Video artist Elizabeth Price wins and BALTIC Bites - Elizabeth Price, and they should inform my answers



(1) I am unfamiliar with Beckett. If I were to listen to Words and Music, or watch Quad, what influences would be mirrored by Price?


(2) Did it not feel odd to spend so much time on the recreation with the burning furniture?

I can't say that it did.

After all, how do you convey the notion, the terror, of a fire without showing it, and the whole work is only around 20 minutes.

I don't even think that it could be mistaken for a re-creation. At that time, I believe less had been appreciated about how different substances in furniture burn, and how a source of fire might ignite other items.

I took the footage used by Price to be from filmed combustion tests, where the nature and spread of fire was being analysed. I have already commented on the use of two panes : for me, Price located, in this material, the bewitching, hypnotic quality of fire, as against, elsewhere, the destructive one.


(3) With Choir and with the information on the church architecture interspersed, did the fire seem like a sacrament?


(4) The description of the parcloses reinforced an absent focus on the parishioners. How did the film make you feel?


I take it that these belong together.

I watched the film twice through in succession, and therefore knew how CHOIR related to the other two parts of the film the second time.

In my vocabulary, a parclose is merely what I would call a rood-screen or, in other church traditions, an iconostasis (although, in that case, not serving to separate the choir from the rest of the church, but designating, by opaque panelling decorated by holy images, a place limited to the priest).

I am not sure how describing any of the church architecture stressed an absence of parishioners, since there was no one in this part of the film (unlike the distorted moving dancers / singers of the second part, into which the clicks, beats and handclaps drew us).

As I realized that the second section was moving towards giving detail of a fire in which people had been trapped and died, I felt uneasy. We did not see them. We saw the aftermath, and heard from those who had been outside. They were traceless, numberless dead.

They could have been trapped in the choir of a church, and, with no way out (except, perhaps, smashing the windows and climbing out), burnt to death.


Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)