The Walk is the Work

I remember seeing a Richard Long piece a couple of years ago in Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery. One of his slate circles, in a badly lit room, out of any meaningful context and on scruffy parquet. I was shocked to see the piece was unkempt: the delicate gaps between the slates were clogged with fluff and dust, as though Mrs Mopp had come along and emptied the contents of her Hoover bag. I remember thinking that while the lack of space and funding was understandable there was no excuse for the sorry state of the sculpture. I hope things have improved; if not then given the West Country is the manor of Mr Long himself, the trustees should, frankly, go round and explain themselves to the artist. I shudder to think of the state of my favourites there: the Gaudier-Brzeska perhaps, or the Henry Scott-Tuke (thankfully that is at least behind glass otherwise it would probably be hung three-feet from the floor and covered in kiddies crayon).

This memory has erupted to the fore in trying to remember when I’ve seen Richard Long’s work before, and what I thought about it. I had not seen a big solo show up until now, so I have perhaps missed the opportunity to know the work fully. Or rather part of it, because Long’s work is made up of separate ways of working that feed each other. But I should have been more aware of him for he is all about landscape and territory and, crucially, man’s relationship to it. The work is about our place in the world.

Heaven and Earth opens with Heaven and with Earth on opposing walls (as if to get this minor cosmic binary out of the way prior to hitting the landlocked human condition with a bump). Two brand new wall-sculptures of huge i-Ching symbols described directly on to the wall by hand in River Avon mud that has splattered pleasingly onto surrounding walls and ceiling as though the interior space were struggling to contain the natural stuff of nature. We are then shot back in time with Long’s earliest documentation of his remote walks. Walking is central to his dialogue with the landscape; it is how he interacts and involves himself with it; it is also the walking that is the sculpture. What we see in the gallery is the documentation and the show gives the chance to see the early stuff - beautifully presented handmade records of the sculptural activity. Lines on maps connecting up routes or black and white photographs presented in a frame with a white surround and a short suggestive text: perhaps just a place-name printed underneath, or a brief description of the route, together with a plotted observation of trees, streams or stones. The documentation is the record of the sculptural involvement. It recalls the look of it, something of the scale of it; the sculpture has passed but it's surround and after-effect is offered up for our consideration. Towards the end of the show the documentation component is given over to huge, over-designed, shouty wall-texts; I am unsure about the text taking up entire walls but perhaps this is a brash update of Long’s 1970’s careful pencil captions for the 21st Century.

Long's other area of documentation is the book; and there are is a room of them as an aside to the exhibition, all beautifully designed in Long's stylish aesthetic over some fourty years. The catalogue too has been designed by Long and the free handout for the show, which folds out into a sort of poster and text piece, is as beautiful as the books in the vitrines. You can also pick up several nice paper things from the Long archive in the shop - in particular a lovely booklet called 'Five Six Pick up Sticks' from Anthony d'Offay in 1980 for the sum of two quid.

There's also a great room of indoor floor sculptures. Long was keen to show ‘real work in public time and spaces' in addition to the documentation of his walking sculpture so began making the floor pieces for which he is perhaps best known. The room is big but I couldn't help thinking it might have been better to show perhaps three with more space around them rather than five; it was great to see these works I just had some difficulty separating them. Perhaps the Tate is too small to show them together.

It occurs to me in thinking about this show that it is strange how cultural relevance can hit one unexpectedly. I have often been dimly aware of an artist, even seen work regularly, but failed to connect with the artist’s intentions and ideas until some unexpected time when it seems to plug into my current concerns.

Long’s investigative searching, his use and plunder of wild lonely swathes of Britain and of elsewhere, has fed my own explorations of landscape at a time when I am most ready to receive it, and more than I could possibly have hoped.

Richard Long at the Tate

The New Whitechapel

The Whitechapel has been lotteryfurbed. Nearly 20 million quid later the place is twice the size having expanded into the beautiful old library building next door. There's a big survey of Isa Genzken; I think its safe to say I responded to her early work better as I enjoyed the work downstairs and not the more recent work upstairs; I especially enjoyed the paintings; flat, explorations of surface in emerald greens, the paint having being dragged with some sort of squeegee over canvas laid flat and fixed on the rough unfinished concrete floor of the studio; catching the sudden jarrings of pattern in the flaws and shapes. They are strangely beautiful. The problem of making sense of surface and space continues in the concrete casts of non-space (fragments of the inside of a cupboard space or room), and the tall Manhattan skyscraper sculptures in coloured -deco-like resins and glass inspired by Manhattan skyscapers; the city also presented as models and scrapbooks - an investigation of place.

There is also an embarrassingly small show (given the strength of connection) of Gertler, Rosenberg, Epstein, Bomberg et all called The Whitechapel Boys; a tapestry Guernica in cow-muck sludge by Polish artist Goshka Macuga, fitting as the Whitechapel was the first and only UK exhibition of Guernica; however the colours are pretty grim: look instead at the vitrine of historical ephemera concerning the picture: - high-powered correspondence between the then owners, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Whitechapel Gallery’s requests to borrow the picture; I enjoyed Picasso's emphatic non communicated in brusque terms; this all long prior to the work being released to Spain in 1981. There’s a rotatation of Jurgen Teller portraits in the Lobby part of the John Kobal Award (one of which is a supremely unkind portrait of my friend David H half asleep and covered in fag-ash); two projects that plug into the neighbouring territory:- Social Sculpture, a sort of noticeboard of place and belonging, and Minerva Cuevas' S.COOP, a 'cultural experiment' exploring notions of community, commerce and exchange by way of a minted coin (the S.COOP) that can be exchanged for white ice-cream in Wentworth Street.

However be that as it may, the real leaps of artistic joy are to be had in Passports, a tiny show of a tiny selection of the British Council collection; an little known and misunderstood organisation that exists to promote British culture aboard forging international links (one of its main jobs is the Brit component of the Venice biennale). The title refers to the document accompanying each of the works setting out their foreign lendings and it is the first of five plunderings of the British Council collection of some 8500 (8500!) works, generally bought from Brit-trailblazers on the up. The show includes a superb Frank Auerbach, with not a single dull or wasted mark, a slab of hard-won Kossoff, a great Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash, and a great 60’s Hockney. There’s also a Peter Doig but you can’t have everything. It has been curated by Michael Craig-Martin, who also used the curation to launch a small attack on the British Council’s current lack of international movement and visability in The Observer (‘We must start sending our great art around the world again’ 29th March 2009); the comments taken on board, wrist duly slapped etc as reported in this months Art Monthly. I’ve visited a few times and I’m ashamed to say on my first visit I was in such a hurry to see my favourite Gilbert & George that I practically ignored Isa Genzken; racing through the galleries on a mission to see Intellectual Depression from 1980; that great, humanoid tree, caught in twisted angst against the dead-yellow ground; a summing up of mental exhaustion. In fact the room is a triumph; its just such a shame it’s such a small show small selection of a great collection; my overriding feeling is that Isa Genzken should have been given the downstairs space only, with the Passports given the entire upstairs for a mammoth celebration of a great collection of great work that is rarely seen en masse. Surely that would have been a far more fitting opening show for this new expanded public space?

British Council

Whitechapel Gallery

Michael Craig-Martin in The Observer

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Some Texts

Been very busy with new work and college, so apologies there has been nothing new to look at for weeks and weeks and weeks; amazing how time flies... or more correctly how time disappears... (I bet you were sick of the sight of that sodding tree stump...) However there follows a number of texts I've been working on and some references I've been considering for my course, on the themes of Englishness, landscape, and romanticism. Normal service resumes shortly; I am currently collecting my thoughts on the new Whitechapel Gallery.

The Territorial Imperative

"English writers and artists, English composers and folk-singers, have been haunted by this sense of place, in which the echoic simplicities of past use and tradition sanctify a certain spot of ground. These forces are no doubt to be found in other regions and countries of the earth; but in England the reverance for the past and the affinity with the natural landscape join together in a mutual embrace. So we owe much to the ground on which we dwell. It is the landscape and the dreamscape. It encourages a sense of longing and belonging. It is Albion."

Peter Ackroyd, from Albion, the Origins of the English Imagination

What Beauty is there in a Young Life Snuffed Out

The English Romantic tradition has it’s origins in the Eighteenth Century, but it was the Nineteenth Century when the notion of what we might call the doomed sensibility, the poet or artist at the beck and call of unseen forces, was at it's height, but I believe this peculiarly English notion is still in some ways alive and kicking and the following excerpt from The Times, concerning Heath Ledger's untimely death, illustrates not only a prime concern of the romantics of the past but also the impact of romantic imagination on contemporary culture.

"One image immediately sprang to mind when I heard that the actor Heath Ledger had been found dead on his bed in a New York apartment, surrounded by prescription drugs. The image was not from Brokeback Mountain or his other films, but of a much earlier picture: Henry Wallis's 1856 painting, The Death of Chatterton.

In that extraordinary painting, the poet Thomas Chatterton, just 17, lies sprawled across the bed in his garret. Through the open window, dawn is breaking over St Paul's Cathedral. On the table stands the bottle of arsenic, with which he has just killed himself.

Chatterton, penniless and starving, probably committed suicide in despair, although it is possible he was self-medicating for syphilis, and overdid the dose. Ledger, 28, already wealthy and celebrated, may also have killed himself by accident. There is a direct link between them: two gifted individuals, dead long before their time, destined, like butterflies, to live gorgeously for too brief a season.

The notion of the artist doomed to early death, bequeathed by the Romantics and most memorably depicted by Wallis, remains deeply embedded in modern culture. Ledger now joins the roster of the talented young, untimely dead: Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain.

Our relationship with movie stars is as intense and intimate as it once was with poets. Actors live other lives for us on screen. We live through them in other worlds, and we expect to grow old with them. When they die young, we are immediately reminded of our own impending deaths, and the need to seize the day."

Ben Macintyre, The Times, Friday 25th January 2008

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/ben_macintyre/article3247678.ece

Rupturing the Surfaces of the Given

"But, for all these artists [the Neo-Romantic painters of the 1930's], the pursuit of landscape was always something more than the quest for phenomena, or the appearances of natural and human forms. They were intent upon a transfiguration of what they saw: often, they laid claim to a religious or spiritual vision; always, they wanted to rupture the surfaces of the given with imaginative transformations. Landscape, for them, was an arena in which the subjective and the objective, the deeply personal and the richly traditional, could be mingled in new and previously unseen ways."

Peter Fuller, Images of God: The Consolations of Lost Illusions

The quote is in respect of a very particular group of British painters, however it seems to me to also apply equally well to freer landscape painting of this or any age, and in considering it I was reminded of Constable’s oil sketches. There is a often forgotten room of them at the V&A.

Constable's oil sketches seem to me to be closer to the actuality of life, closer to the real; than his finished paintings; there is something in the movement of the paint, the unfinished quality, the flux of it, that brings one nearer to an approximation of the experience of real landscape and real weather; yet they are packed with unreal actions and inventions. Perhaps a looming cloud that’s oddly coloured or, as in the picture here, a dark streaking of black, which we know doesn’t appear in the real view and was never before the artist’s eyes in this way, yet it brings us closer to an approximation of the experience of being in landscape than a photorealist view might.

Freely approximating the landscape, in not striving for a photorealist view, brings us closer to it; it assists us in understanding the effect of place: how a landscape can disturb and encroach. But I am also interested in how, in landscape painting, the picture plane has the potential to behave in front of the viewer. I am interested in the insertion of a device, or an area, that throws the real off course; this can perhaps be considered in a similar way to Barthes' punctum: the wound in the smooth plain. This device, or wilful guidance of the viewers eye, can be deliberate. It is possible to welcome the viewer into a painted picture plane and control, to some degree, where they go within it and where they experience shock; such unsettlement can, I believe, lead the viewer to consider the landscape on a far broader basis than would be possible otherwise. A broader consideration of their place in the world. For this reason I am interested in making an art that perhaps looks as once like traditional landscape painting but closer in one might experience the uncanny or the unsettling: the unexpected. I am also interested in artists who are unafraid to present a vision of the world where all might not be well. The shift of a balanced focus.
Although because of the nature of paint, and the wish to communicate excitement, the result can not alwyas be exactly foreseen, but it the intention that matters: a gesture of disruption. The slashing of a comfortable view.

Thinking about the notion of guiding the viewer reminded me of Noel Coward’s poem 'The Great Awakening', which I remembered from my childhood as deeply shocking:

The Great Awakening

As I awoke this morning
When all sweet things are born
A robin perched upon my sill
To signal the coming dawn.
The bird was fragile, young and gay
And sweetly did it sing
The thoughts of happiness and joy
Into my heart did bring.
I smiled softly at the cheery song
Then as it paused, a moment’s lull,
I gently closed the window
And crushed its fucking skull.

- It too lulls the reader into a false sense of security before delivering the shock of the poem; which is the crushing of the birds head at the end; which seems at once humorous but also I think illustrates how it is possible to guide or control the viewer, at least in an opening stage.

But in talking about the guiding of the viewer’s consideration we need to consider the imagination; because what we are talking about is the extension of the real by way of an invention.

But the element of imagination - the taking of the landscape beyond the real, the transfiguration of the landscape that Peter Fuller talks about, brings us into the realm of the romantic; the imagined; the hightening of the real experience through invention, and perhaps the expansion of landscape using imagination is more a typically English condition: the landscape traditions of other countries have been perhaps embedded in classicial mythologies and reworking of overplayed legend; the English landscape tradition could be considered to be said to have originated through an engagement with the landscape itself.

Constable Oil Sketches

A Parody of Englishness as an Artistic Vantage Point

In the early 1970’s Gilbert & George, who had already for some time been presenting themselves as ‘Living Sculptures’, produced a number of works that showed them walking in idyllic English countryside. The majority of the work took the form of composite black and white photopieces hung in clusters; the photography looked dismally old fashioned and stagey; they wore Edwardian-looking suits and carried walking canes. The whole looked like amateur photographs of a bygone age: an illusion of a now vanished England.

The persona Gilbert and George adopted in these early works was part of a broad personal construct the artists were developing at that time, which fed into their lives and relentless promotions of their art. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s they bombarded the art world with texts and announcement cards, most of which looked like invitations to a dance on a turn of the century cruise liner, or a Mayfair ball. They flirted with emblems of Government, and used symbols of Royalty and Freemasonary; cards for exhibitions urged the recipient do please get in touch, as though the card were an invitation to an Edwardian high-tea or the calling card of a bright young thing out of PG Wodehouse. They hand-signed their photopieces beneath a Royal crest, marking their joint signature with the year, as though each completed work were the passing of an act of Parliament; they used odd, stilted, over-enunciated syntax and overplayed politeness; a letter would look more like a note from the vicarage than a communiqué from within the contemporary art world; but perhaps this early distancing ensured their success; and all more interesting too when one considers the art world of that time.

But given they used themselves in so much of their work it is perhaps as though they needed to adopt the parody of Englishness to speak about the broader world,enclosing themselves in a protective construct that allowed them to keep their real personalities at a distance using the formality of manners; allowing them to begin to speak about difficult subjects.

To my mind the most successful of their works of this period were their first and last ever group of oil paintings –called simply The Paintings: they were a series of large triptychs carried out in 1971 of perhaps the sort of scenes one associates with the grand traditions of English art with the artists themselves in the mid-panels engaging with the landscape: leaning against a five-bar gate in relaxed, resigned pose or sitting in woodland; sometimes merely surveying the horizon, as though discovering alien territory for the first time - the mid-panels flanked by panels of foliage and landscape.

The Paintings have something of the quality of the amateur Sunday painter, as a painter one notices the colours are not quite right, perhaps the greens are too emerald, too hyper-real, and the colours look as though they are straight from the tubes, rather than developed in a way most professional painters would; they look a little like paint by numbers and were it not for the scale they would look like any picture one might find in a car boot sale; they are full of painterly errors, one even has a whip of dripped paint that flicks the air – but the mistake is left as is: the errors are accepted; it is as though Gilbert & George were intentionally concerning themselves with the unsophisticated, and while aping the traditions of English landscape painting in hamfisted fashion they are also challenging the proper painterly way of things; but the amateur intent lends the work a curious, disjointed strangeness; as though a non-artist were given a crash course in the romantic tradition then short-lived access to abandoned village and ordered to recreate what he found there.

We seem to be looking at the uncovering of a sensibility; there is a sense of glimpsed access to a parallel world, in much the same way as Martin Parr’s quietly invasive photographs of village fetes (up close and personal with the homemade jams); an investigation of the unsophisticated, the other. These works too seem to get close to a depiction of Middle England, or a Little England, that tells us all is perhaps not quite right. But are they are survey of a land that once was and is no more? A canny acknowledgement of a part of our history? Or are they a valid component of England as we know it?

Strangely, these works have only ever been exhibited twice, once in 1971, shortly after they were made, and once in the mid-1980’s. They remain sorely neglected and are not widely known; the paintings did not form part of the recent Gilbert & George show at the Tate and neither do they appear in either the original edition of the Complete Pictures or the updated edition for the Tate retrospective.

Perhaps this is because while the work uses an idea of England, and speaks of it, it also, in it’s painterliness, strongly references the English landscape tradition and while Gilbert and George are admirers of Constable, say, or Samuel Palmer, the referencing is perhaps more than the artists are comfortable with; in my view it would be typical of Gilbert & George to wish to edit their work of referencing of other art movements to keep the G&G story as uncluttered as possible for the viewer.

The Empty World

It's perpetual twilight in Tile Hill, the West Midlands estate George Shaw grew up in. It's also Autumn, about 4.30pm in the afternoon, and you can smell the gently rotting vegetation mixed in with a faint whiff of dogshit, and everyone's indoors. Shaw quotes The Smiths' song lyrics on the gallery's information sheet for his new show Woodsman, as well he might for the work is filled with the dark poeticism of this very British band. He paints the empty stillness of drab England: communal parks, garages, prefabs, primary schools. The shared spaces, the semi-urban edge of damp woods.

The estate was built in the 1950's/60's just outside Coventry, one of many government council housing initiatives of the post-war push. Like most of the industrial Midlands Coventry was a booming economy, and monies were flowing off the backs of the motor and aviation industries. It was just one of many new estates built to house the workers of British Leyland, Jaguar and Rover, but the city was hit hard by the decline of these industries in the early 1980's when Shaw was a teenager, and the subsequent recession of the 1990's compounded the desolation.

Shaw returns to the now faded estate infrequently, taking hundreds of photographs of places that were important (so many that I wonder if he now experiences the place at all other than from behind the arms-length of a lens), and it is these childhood haunts that find their way into the paintings, which are mostly large and photo-realist and painted with Humbrol enamel which itself has the association of childhood. But he now lives in the West Country, far from the gallery-hotbeds of Hackney and Mayfair in, I imagine (although I have no particular reason for thinking this), a sort of rural enclave with a view of the sea where he can get to grips with remembering his formative years in solitude. I understand George's need to remove himself from the landscape in order to artistically map it: I know from my own childhood explorations that it is difficult to investigate the peculiarities of memory unless you remove yourself in order to sort the fictions, which come thick and fast, as memory is layered over the distance of time, and of place. Memory also changes, and to use childhood and personal history as a subject is to wrestle with a moveable feast, constantly evolving. You have to be slightly obsessed with it.

And there is something obsessive about the paintings. They are painted in minute detail, the artist picking over the nuances of the photograph, copying flatness so that it is even flatter. The work is very still, and quiet. Each mark is tightly controlled: there is no shake of the hand, no emotional response to the landscape itself. The paintings are stoically blank-faced, and although naturalistic there is nothing natural about the work because there is nothing spatial about it. But perhaps that is how they are meant to be, because other than being uncannily still they are also devoid of life, which feels like a denial of people and of family, of formative personalities. The intention seems to be to allow them to be filled with a sense of sadness or loss, perhaps a sadness for personal place damaged by economic circumstance or sadness for people we are not allowed to see. Perhaps it is merely sadness for the passing of time.

Like most people, my memories of my own childhood are filled with the clamour of noise and colour and, importantly, people, but the only figurative inclusion to the show is the woodsman on the pub-sign of the same name on the exhibition invite card, but even that's been demolished. But peopled or not, flat or not, there is no richer seam than personal history.

George Shaw
Woodsman
Wilkinson, until 9th April 2009

Wilkinson

Let's Drift Again

Laura Oldfield Ford makes work about agitated urban space. The work is informed by walks or, in the psychogeographic tradition, drifts, but a drift is no ordinary walk, and it certainly isn’t an amble. It is the mindful, purposeful, watchful, vital movement of Man within the built environment, and a true psychogeogapher remains open to suggestion. The phenomena has it origins in a sort of political playfulness posited by Situationist originator Guy Debord to describe a process of gaining awareness of the predicament of the urban environment with a view to political activism. It didn’t quite come off as intended but nevertheless became an interesting construct or starting point used by a great many thinkers, artists and writers not least the current depoliticised coffee-table psychogeography of Peter Ackroyd (he never uses the term but is generally lumped in), and Iain Sinclair.

Laura has bravely, and freely, adopted the term and she describes her process as “subjectively mapping the city in its intensive state of movement and flux”, the explorations laid bare in her fanzine Savage Messiah (which as a platform title doesn’t work for me as in my mind it is inextricably linked with H.S. Ede's biography of Gaudier Brezska), currently on issue ten and the bedrock to her work. The zine is based on the down and dirty, black and white, xeroxed DIY post-punk aesthetic, with high-contrast grainy photos, urban drawing and inky type, owing a great deal to the snarling energies of punk and the people who fed off it. Each issue investigates a district, documenting observations of London as a place of disaffection. Remember the scene in Derek Jarman's Jubilee where the glamorous pretend punk is crucified on a lamp-post on a deserted street of burnt out cars while feral children dance round her wrapping her in barbed wire in a cruel imitation of a maypole dance? This is Laura's territory. London as a place of social unrest; London psychically damaged beyond repair.

For her new show London 2013 Drifting through the Ruins Laura has made over a hundred drawings of East London’s Olympic zone, that swathe of the lower Lea Valley currently being pulled to bits in preparation for the most expensive party attempted by UK Government, but the drawings imagine the space post-Olympic, a state of urban abandonment and failed optimism; no-go wastes overrun with rats and gangs. A place in trouble now that the natural histories are submerged and the lay of the land lost forever, sealed in a matrix of new transport systems and glass and steel.

Places vent energies that work through people, creating micro environments, and there are several micro worlds presented here: Angel lane to Balfron Tower, Altab Ali Park, Loot Asda/Burn Barratts, Rave Enforcer vs Pitchless and so on. Beautifully drawn in ball point pen on watercolour papers, they are fragments of human stories of the economic effect of this zone of upheaval, of estates, pubs, shopping streets, communal space, London foliage, filled with indistinct tracings and nervous energy, free marks and spurts of garish luminous colour. Some include people going about their daily business or swaggering gangs, some are quite devoid of human life but you know they were there, once. The implied trace of recent presence is key in these works as Laura considers each drawing a palimpsest - an old word for an eraseable tablet - so that the putting down and scraping off reveals the echo of earlier observation, perhaps half realised, the multi-layering coming together in the final work to reveal a layered truth and insight.

But the hang bothered me. Sadly all the works are hung together along one long wall of Hales Gallery in a huge composite block so that it impossible, other than by using the picture guide (15 drawings, 3 across, 5 down' etc) to tell where one piece ends and another begins. I like the power of the wall, but the individual works, which are sensitive and each comprising some 12-15 drawings, are lost, and I would have preferred to see them hung separately. For me the most successful of the drawings are the ones with space in them, where the fragment of place is allowed to hang in the air on the page, rather than crowded in by immutable energies, but there is room for both. These drawings exist in and out of time, being both informed by the present and the echoes of the near future, but they are not warnings of potential urban despair, of what might happen, in fact quite the opposite: the turmoil is presented as a fait accompli, and to borrow from Lud Heat "...in this air certain hungers were activated that have yet to be pacified; no turning back"...

Now, I should really at this point declare my interest when it comes to so-called psychogeogphical drifting, or London's hidden energies, because for nearly fifteen years my work was entrenched in the haunted London of the aforementioned Lud Heat, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem and Hawkmoor. I made dramatic, pantomimic paintings of besuited skinheads set against backdrops of Tower Hamlets Cemetary or Limehouse Reach. I painted Spitalfields aflame, East London's spooky churches, and tormented rough trade. My supporters included the late great Dan Farson (who made Limehouse famous and is now scarcely remembered), Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd who, in an essay for my show East End Paintings in 1994, was kind enough to write "there are few painters who have so well divined the true life of the city and, by an act of astonishing intuition, have been able to unite the past and present, mythology and reality, in artistic communion". But five years ago I decided I'd had it with the London thing: I wasn't operating entirely out of myself and I was dissatisfied that my work was informed by the fictions of others. My work is still very much about place but I now paint the landscape of my personal history, and I am a Shropshire Lad, not a London one, but if I'm still painting place through a filter of fiction, in much the same way a smashed mirror casts a shatter of fragments over the reflection of a familiar room, then at least they are my fictions and not someone else's.

So at first I wanted to turn away from this work, finding it at violent odds with my own London love affair, now dismally over, and my own understanding of what psychogeography has turned into, but I am left with a rankling that while Debord would baulk at my claiming that term for my own fog-bound Limehouse driftings (should I have been brave enough to do so), in Laura's political offensive he would almost certainly recognise his original intentions. Laura is right to adopt the phrase as her work has a rightful claim on its original meaning.

Laura Oldfield Ford
London 2013, Drifting through the Ruins
Hales Gallery, until 14th March

Hales Gallery

Savage Messiah

The Decade of Bad Art

There was a lot that was bad about the 1980s. Bad hair, bad clothes, bad TV; some very bad mainstream music. What people forget however, and what this small display demonstrates, was that was also some very bad painting. UBS Openings: Paintings from the 1980s comprises a scant survey of the resurgent figurative movement that was happening largely in New York City but also semi-spontaneously in Italy and Germany in that bad-taste decade.

Let's examine the big three C's:- Chia, Clemente and Cucchi. Sandro Chia's Three Boys on a Raft has the colour and texture of a wet woolly jumper on a drizzly day in Llandudno and frankly I had better colour sense when I was 8. Francesco Clemente's Self-Portrait is lazily executed with no discernible impetus or excitement for the personality, it is flat and unsearching and not what one could call the result of emotional inquiry. Enzo Cucchi's supposedly Homeric odyssey is horribly, clumsily painted and actually rather silly in a serious art context: like bad prison art, or something from an art therapy class in a home for the mentally ill on the outskirts of Basingstoke. The only difference is size: but making it big does not a work of art make.

Then there is the king-pin of the New York darlings, Julian Schnabel. Apparently Humanity Asleep (above), one of his awful smashed crockery pictures (which needless to say, like everything in the show is about ten-foot wide), was influenced by William Blake. Stop right there. This is exactly the sort of padding-out I detest when it comes to this tribe of pretenders, and Julian Schnabel is, to my mind, a talentless individual who happened to be in the right loft with the right size painting in the right market conditions at the right time. Will anyone talk about him in 200 years? Will they buggery.

And I'm not going to start on David Salle; I will however remark in passing that My Subjectivity is singularly awful, and the right-hand panel of the young girl in sickly green downright creepy. It looks like it was painted by someone who spends a good deal of their time in restaurants heavy-breathing over a waitress young enough to be their Granddaughter.

So what's good? Well, I very much enjoyed the early Basquiat who, in thankful contrast to the aforementioned, was driven and angry and made works filled with personal meaning. He also unleashed blistering comment on both historical and contemporary America, and Tobacco vs Red Chief is no exception. It is a picture of a wooden North American Indian Chief figure, a commonplace advertising device that used to be found outside US Tobacco shops, but placed in his demarked space of teepees and sprayed with blood his fistful of cigars becomes the currency received for relinquishing the lands he stands on. Basquiat shined at opening up uncomfortable subjects but he also made pictures that looked great; they followed all the painterly laws of balancing weight, space, texture, emphasis, milli-second calculations all over that built up an instinctively realised and considered whole. He knew what to leave out, which is more important then what you put in, and he knew when to stop. There is not a bad mark.

I also enjoyed seeing Bazelitz's Adieu from 1982, two human figures pinned like butterflies in a case, characteristically upside down, writhing on a chequer-board of jaundiced yellow, with such a freeness to the paint I was reminded I must put a bomb under these little landscapes I am doing, so tight and close-knit is the paint becoming.

So how did Schnabel and the Three C's who, it seems to me, have little or no natural painterly sense or ability, become so celebrated? I believe the paintings were so vacuously bad you could say whatever you like about them, thereby providing raw material on which curators' could hang their hyperbole in a time when dollars were burning holes in pockets. Furthermore, they produced work of impressive size with which it is easy to bombard the viewer. They often included mysterious imagery and referencing that somehow enabled a sense of them being intellectual outsiders (but paradoxically within the safe confines of the New York party set), which somehow married up to people's expectations of the mythic idea of the artist. With the exception of Jean-Michel Basquiat, these are not blazing lights who remind us what it means to be alive: they are as dull and as straight as your average financial adviser. But perhaps this was how America liked it's artists for a time, with Basquiat cannily added to the mix to show fair-play.

UBS Openings: Paintings from the 1980s
at Tate Modern until 13th April 2009

Tate Modern

Landscapes of Loss

Alfred Sisley was born in France but to English parents, who sent the young Sisley to London to study business. This sounds like a cruel fate but his parents did him a great service because instead of studying hard to become a banker Sisley kept bunking off to hang out in the National Gallery, entranced by what he found there. Sisley returned to Paris four years later determined to become a painter, and undertook an apprenticeship in the studio of Charles Gleyre, who also taught Renoir and Monet. The rest, as they say, is history, as Sisley, along with his classmates, rapidly captured the imagination of the cultural public with their experimental plein air painting (and as Frank Auerbach once said "artists often come in gangs"…).

Sisley in England and Wales is a small show of two distinct groups of pictures Sisley painted over two visits to England. The first, in 1874, shows the bustling Thames (now ghostly quiet), and sun-filled Regattas at Molesley and Hampton Court palace. The pictures are light-hearted but Sisley was a dab-hand at finding a challenging view and the paintings are filled with interesting perspectives and spatial explorations such as the gently curving Road from Hampton Court to Molesley and Under the Bridge at Hampton Court. The paintings also include hints of industrial progress: water plumping stations, wiers and dams, as though Sisley wanted to show the beauty of the countryside but wanted also to present the viewer with a modern view. However whereas these paintings seem light and carefree the paintings resulting from his second visit, which was at the very end of his life, choke the throat.

Sisley’s parents disapproved of his relationship with his partner Eugenie and cut him from their will. In 1897 the couple headed to England to marry in secret docking first at Southampton and travelling to Cornwall, before tying the knot in lonely circumstances at Cardiff Registry Office, settling at Langland Bay for a time so that Sisley could get to artistic grips with the ragged peninsula at Gower.

In stark contrast to the paintings of 1874 these later works were made at a time of great emotional strain and personal difficulty. Not only were the couple effectively outcast, they were both dying; Alfred had throat cancer and Eugenie cancer of the tongue. Given the circumstances it is hardly a cause for surprise that the Welsh landscapes are made of sterner stuff that the Molesley Regattas of some 20-years earlier. In Sisley's hands, Welsh Coast (Penarth) and Cliff at Penarth are places of futile contemplation, imbued with Sisley's heavy heart, and Storr's Rock at Rotherslade Bay becomes a summing-up of the violence of life, an immoveable, tangible mass of tumultuous emotion. This work is Sisley's emotional life laid bare, shipwrecking itself on lonely coves and violent outcrops, and that these paintings are his final reckoning of the world only strengthens that palpable, plummeting sense of loss.

It's free to get in, and the brilliant catalogue is only 6.95, but you might need to take a hanky.

Sisley in England and Wales
at The National Gallery until 15th February 2009
and at National Museum Wales, Cardiff 7th March to 14th June 2009

The National Gallery

Brion Gysin at October Gallery

“I may write only what I know in space: I am that I am”
Brion Gysin, Notes on Painting

Brion Gysin was interested in the juxtapositon of word and image, and he developed a unique visual language combining repeat-image calligraphics (he studied Japanese and Arabic as a young man), photo-based work, collage, and some of the most extraordinary landscape painting of the Sahara and Tangier. But his calligraphic investigations were central to his art and at the end of his life a patron donated studio space in order that Gysin could make one final work: a large ten-panel calligraphic piece inspired by a Japanese makemomo or folding book called Calligraffiti of Fire.

The work is some 16-meters long and designed to be ‘read’ from right to left (i.e. in Eastern picture space). It begins with Gysin’s personal sigil that ignites panel one before racing in blazing solar yellows and oranges across a further nine canvases; the glorious yellow colours vibrate into the room and that the end panels have to sit at angles to the middle of the piece in this installation only adds to the dancing, life-enhancing journey of Gysin's signature.

A chance to see Brion Gysin's work in the flesh is rare in any event but a chance to see Calligraffiti of Fire is rarer still. The work does not belong to a public institution and has been shown only once since it's original exhibition at Galerie Samy Kinge in Paris in 1986. Sadly, it’s current home is a Parisian bank-vault.

Gysin was dying with emphysema when he made the painting, which was not only his last but his most ambitious. Once he had finished Gysin proclaimed it "THE picture of my lifetime", and I like to think of it as his joyful summing up. It's on until 7th February 2009.

Brion Gysin
Calligraffiti of Fire
October Gallery
24 Old Gloucester Street, London WCN 3AL

http://www.octobergallery.co.uk/


There are also a number of smaller paintings and calligraphic pieces in the exhibition, in particular a great roller-and-ink and photo college Burroughs in Tangier (1974).

October Gallery are also screening the new Nik Sheenan's new Gysin documentary FLicKeR on 31st January.
See also Burroughs Life-File at Rifemaker (until 17th January) and the Royal Academy GSK Contemporary Season Burroughs Live (until 19th January).

The Damned and the Saved

"The show is divided both between the two venues and the classical themes of 'Portrait' and 'Landscape'; Standpoint will be peopled with souls in transport or torment and here at studio1.1 we will present their various hells and/or Edens. The onus as ever is upon the viewer to judge."

The Damned and the Saved is an exploration of modern morality shared between two gallery spaces. I have a portrait of a stranded young soul at Standpoint in the company of Chris Humphrey's screaming souls in rivers of flame, Cathy Lomax's Mary Bell paintings and Matt Lippiatt's occupied body-bags among other participants.

Respite (salvation?) from these figuritive unsettlings can be found several minutes walk away at Studio 1.1. Michelle Fletcher's lushly sinister painting of a forest glade dominates the front gallery space and Tom Wolseley's film 'Mountain Harmonica' reminds us that all may not be well in the rural idyll. My landscapes are in a small back room next to Andrea Gregson's sculpture 'Lair': the twigs seeming to reach over and into my paintings, dragging them into the room and allowing them to be something other than painted improbabilities.

The Damned and the Saved asks us to judge modern moral predicaments or at least be mindful of age-old notions of good and evil as we find ourselves before yet another Christmas in front of the TV. It's on until 21st December.

http://www.standpointlondon.co.uk/
http://www.naimad.co.uk/studio1-1/

Chuck out the Chintz

Have you ever been to the Guildhall Art Gallery in the City of London? The chances are you haven’t. In fact, I don’t think many people have judging by a quick gin-sozzled straw-poll in the pub last night (I refuse to say ‘survey’ - it sounds suburban) and neither had I until an acquaintance of mine was talking about the G.F. Watts show the other day in terms so urgent I thought I’d better go and see what all the fuss was about.

The Guildhall are showing the holdings of the G.F. Watts’ Museum (just outside Guildford) which are on holiday while the place undergoes a lottery-furb and the first thing that strikes is the unfinished self-portrait of the artist aged 17 immediately to your left as you enter, a bit like being given the opportunity to say a cheery 'Hullo!' to the artist on the way in. It's one of those confident portraits of talent too young, and reminded me of Samuel Palmer’s great teen self-portrait, only less intense. On into the exhibition proper and in the first room I was captured by the painted sunlight of Fiesole, Italy (above) dappling across deep rolling fields below a changable sky and creamy yellow clouds. But the joy was shortlived as the picture is unfortunately hung opposite a picture of Victorian children so emetic I am surprised I didn’t decorate the floor.

The second room is, thankfully, more balanced, with a great trio of gothic Victorian dramas, Irish Famine, Found Drowned, and Under the Arch, and, just for good measure, a six-foot Satan. As if this wasn’t enough, and just as you find yourself time-travelling into a fog-filled land of gas-lamps and ticking clocks (it's OK I don't expect you to share my penchant for dramatic reaction) there is another dazzling landscape, with curling clouds and hulking mountains scraping the heavens: it’s ‘In Asia Minor’, and so am I, realising, by this point, that far from being a dusty old Victorian painter Watts is a strong painter of place. I believe his far flung locales. I'm just not sure I can say the same for some of the figures.

Moving on, the big room holds further greats. Psychedelic slabs such as Sower of the Systems and After the Deluge, followed by Sunset on the Alps, Mammon Dedicated to his Worshippers and Obama’s fave picture Hope (or as G.K Chesterton would have it ‘Despair’ - but no matter - it’s beautiful). The mysterious The Ghost Ship is barely there, emerging from the snowy blizzard with the chill of a M.R. James and, in the last room, a wonderful landscape of the Isle of White... But I’ve rarely been in a show that needs editing as much as this: I want to take all the forementioned pictures, and put them in a large white gallery with plenty of space around them. They are crammed in to what amounts to a Rotary Club function room and too much of the work is the schmaltz that makes people give Victorian painting a wide berth. The duds are in danger of diminishing the greats.

While you're there, the permanent collection is worth a look, but a shock awaits on the landing as you’re confronted with 9-foot of chaotic Constable that assaults in too narrow a space. I took a few steps back and nearly went over the glass barrier into the downstairs area below (like Lee Remick going over the banisters in The Omen). The landing should be kept for small works and the Constable moved downstairs where you can get ten-feet away from it. There are some great pictures by Landseer, including the Well-Travelled Monkey which will make you smile and The First Leap which you will want to hate for being chocolate boxy but your inner taste-police will be scrapping like two cats in a sack as you fight to stop liking it. Popping back in to the Watts' show it occurred to me that the same can not be said for the chintzy duds.

Moments from the Marmite

For the second Marmite Prize for Painting, held at Studio 1.1, each entrant had to submit a painting and a drawing, the rules stating that 'no judgements will be made as to what the words painting and drawing mean to you'. The shortlisted paintings became the show but ALL the drawings were included in the catalogue which is handy if you're interested in what several hundred artists are currently concerning themselves with. It's published by Susak Press and it's a fiver. Hours of fun, I promise.

I also took part in the first Marmite show at Residence in 2006 where all the work was hung upside down in tribute to Baselitz. This year the hang was up along the top of the walls, snug against the ceiling and the RSJ's- hence these are largely photographed from below. My landscape is at the top.

My favourite thing in the show was Richard Bateman's small landscape picture (above, second from bottom). Richard makes a weekly pilgrimage to London Zoo to draw the cages and pens, minus the animal inhabitants, returning to the studio to paint architectural spaces filled with after-images of captivity and confinement. "I’m thinking about the brutality of keeping an animal in a cage and, from there, the brutality of life generally." It's a cracking picture, and having seen it a few times in the last few days (in the gallery's storeroom, at the opening, on Saturday afternoon taking these photos) I have to say I have become mildly obsessed. Now I've even got photos of it to keep looking at too... but it IS a picture that creeps up on you. It has a stange power and far from being drowned out by the two large works it was sandwiched between was so punchy it rather seemed to suck out their strength. So there you have it. Richard was my winner, but not the official one. The prize returns in 2010.

The Marmite Prize 2008, Studio 1.1, ran 25-30 Nov
Oliver Kossack presented The Marmite Prize 2008 selected by Liz Neal, Michele Fletcher and Milly Thompson to runner up Eve Peasnall for her painting 'Sexy Weeper', runner up David Drey for his painting 'Logs and Axe', and the winner, Dai Roberts for his painting 'IAO'.

http://www.naimad.co.uk/studio1-1/
http://www.marmiteprize.org/
http://www.susakpress.com/

"My Heartland, Heartland, Heartland"

This is 'My Heartland, Heartland, Heartland', painted for 'Awbopbopaloobop', Transition's show of new work informed by song lyrics.

I chose Heartland by the Sisters of Mercy. It's from about 1984 and the b-side to Temple of Love. It was one of my favourite songs as a teen and I used to listen to it on my walkman on the school bus travelling through this very landscape.

I've been playing a few old tunes while making these small personal pictures, but Heartland in particular has become something of a talisman. I think it's expansive doominess has bolstered my investigations or at least helped remind me of being a teenager in these big natural spaces. It's a sort of romantic goth lament, and when I listen to it I see leaden skies, twisting mud-tracks and distant hills. My mind travels over endless fields from above like a sweeping camera hurtling through the air, and I smell utterly un-London smells, like moss and mud, and all very definately on the edge of rain, as it often is near Wales.

A goth-rock b-side probably seem a strange soundtrack to be echoing through Housmans 'blue remembered hills' but not to me, to me it seems entirely appropriate. But then that's the surprise of working with personal memory, throwing up as it does 'a crowd of twisted things'.

Show coincides with a special rock'n'roll edition of Garageland.
Awopbopaloobop
15 Nov - 21 Dec 2008
www.transitiongallery.co.uk