Juergen Teller: Woo! - The ICA, London

It’s always going to be hard to sum up the 20 year award-winning career of a photographer who’s enjoyed by tumblr as much as by Alisdair Sooke in The Telegraph and the high fashion brands of Marc Jacobs, Helmut Lang, Yves Saint Laurent, and Vivienne Westwood. But the ICA has managed just that by opening up their entire gallery space for Juergen Teller: Woo!. The show was recommended to me by a coursemate who was lucky enough to interview Teller a few days previously. Despite a horrible cold I made it along to the ICA and I can say it was absolutely worth it.

The exhibition is sharply divided along the lines of commercial and personal work. In an interview with the Guardian Teller states that “There’s very much a divide”, he seems to prefer the freedom of subject matter that personal projects allow, while recognising commercial work is important - it funds his personal projects, and allows him to meet new people.

This divide in his work seems to be reflected in the hang of exhibition. The grand downstairs and upstairs galleries of the ICA are dedicated to Teller’s personal projects. Here the photographs are all framed, hung sparsely, and some of the prints are vast, easily 3 metres tall. Its the downstairs gallery that houses the infamous 2009 nude triptych of Vivenne Westwood. Meanwhile the commercial work has been relegated to the small Fox reading room. Here the aesthetic is closer to his recognisable eclecticism, the walls plastered floor to ceiling with tear sheets.

Juergen Teller’s wide appeal and popularity comes from his distinctive anti-aesthetic: brightly-lit highly-saturated analogue photographs. But also from his ironic subjects; he photographs the absurd and mundane, as well as the sublime, sexual, and abject. Of course, his commercial projects are generally toned down, and I think that’s why my two favourite photographs of the show were both personal works.

One from the Louis XV series. A double portrait of his long-time collaborator and subject Charlotte Rampling playing a grand piano while Teller himself sits ontop of it naked and baring his anus.

The second, a snapshot of a dead octopus upturned on a bed, its tentacles and mouth pointing towards the camera, thoughtfully entitled Octopussy.

It’s been nearly a decade since Juergen Teller’s work has last been exhibited in a London gallery, so this show should be on the to-do list of anyone interested in contemporary photography.

Juergen Teller: Woo! is at the ICA, London until the 17th of March, 2013

@jclwilson

Royal Portrait / Royal Cockup

Nobody should be surprised that I didn’t like Paul Emsley’s portrait of the Duchess of Cambridge. Still, in the interests of art and blogging I decided I better go to the National Portrait Gallery and see it. Some writers and viewers have said it looks better IRL, but it really doesn’t. I honestly have little more to say about it than it looks exactly like a reject passport photo.

Down the corridor in a separate room is a series of portraits by Humphrey Ocean that are infinitely more interesting and worthwhile seeing. Since 2006 he has made quick goache watercolours of friends, family, and visitors to his studio. He insists on only spending 30 minutes on each, to allow the spontaneity of the portrait to show. Ocean says that he wants to give the impression ‘I was there and I was with this person’.

It is this essence of personality, immediacy, and individuality present in Ocean’s paintings, that the Kate portrait lacks. Awkwardly posed, lumpy, and in thick vivid paint, Ocean manages to give more emotion in the two dabs of Rose’s eyes - shown above - than Emsley does in the whole of the Kate portrait. Then again, it was always going to be difficult for a warts-and-all painter to remove the warts and all from a sitter.

These portraits aren’t photographic reality, but their unreality makes them more real and emotional than Kate could ever be. If the choice was mine, I would much rather have my portrait done by Humphrey Ocean than Paul Emsley.

A Handbook of Modern Life is at the National Portrait Gallery, London until the 1st of September, 2013.

@jclwilson

Shoot! Existential Photography - The Photographer’s Gallery, London.

Before I travelled back to Manchester for the Christmas holidays I went to see Shoot! Existential Photography, currently occupying the top two floors of The Photographer’s Gallery, London. The exhibition was one of the clearest and most thought provoking I’ve been to in quite some time. It is a fantastic exploration of the intimate bond between the history of photography and the act of shooting, and the violence involved in each.

The works in the exhibition are varied, but the focus is on the photographic shooting gallery, a funfair attraction popular after the First World War: When the shooter hit the bullseye, they triggered a camera which took a photo of them in the act of shooting. The simple enjoyment of the shooting gallery at the funfair becomes an existential contemplation, the act of shooting the gun literally becomes the act of shooting a picture. The shooter, after they fire the gun and receive the picture, see themselves as their own executioner.

Of the whole exhibition, two artworks really stood out. First, the huge photographic collection of Ria van Dijk (pictured above), a woman who has documented every year of her adult life in shooting gallery photos since 1936. Her unusual autobiography shows the passage of time in her steady ageing and fashions - but in a very mechanical way. The slightly off centre angle of the photographs reminded me of a comment by Slavoj Zizek about the experience of seeing yourself from an odd angle. The confusion of realising that the idealised virtual image of yourself is not actually real.

The second work was Christian Marclay’s 2007 video installation Crossfire. A dark square room with full screen projections on each wall. A choreographed montage of what seems to be every single gunshot in Hollywood history. I stood in the middle of this room for the full 8 and a half minutes of this film. It was a very intense experience, with the pace of the action constantly changing with the flashes of light and rhythm of gunshots. The effect though was very different to that of the videos at Frontline: A Year of Journalism and Conflict of early 2012.

Shoot! Existential Photography is at The Photographer’s Gallery, London, until the 6th of January 2013.

@jclwilson

Dieter Roth: Diaries - Fruitmarket Gallery

The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh is currently a sanctuary away from the intensity of the various summer festivals. Last time I was there I saw Martin Creed’s playful exhibition. This year I saw the work of Dieter Roth (1930 –1998), a man who saw little separation between art and life and whose works drew on his own existence. This exhibition, Dieter Roth: Diaries, looked at Roth’s obsessive cataloguing and recording of his daily activities, in books, drawings, paintings, sculptures, assemblages and audio-visual installation works. This show is the first time Roth’s work has been seen in Scotland since Richard Demarco’s exhibition Strategy Get Arts at the 1970 International Festival.

The entire ground level of the Fruitmarket is filled with 128 Cathode ray TV screens forming Roth’s Solo Scenes (1997-8). The gentle curve of the installation allowed me to sit and observe every screen at once. In 1997, with knowledge of his impending death, Roth started to videotape nearly every aspect of his life. Each of the 128 screens shows a different video, in which Roth is the sole protagonist. However this isn’t simply a display of narcicissm - instead it feels much more voyeuristic. The camera is utterly still, and the videos are almost entirely silent apart from ocassional mutterings. Roth is being judged by the viewier as he is seen pottering around, drawing, naked after a shower, and sitting on the toilet.

The idea of a diary, of planning and recording was extremely important to Roth - he kept one throughout his life. The Fruitmarket displays a number of his diary books, some open - complete with delicate writing, drawings, scribbles - all dog eared. Upstairs another glass case displays the ‘copybooks’, facsimiles of diary pages, that Roth had made and bound, and gave to friends and relatives. Intimate and mundane articles, shared with others.

The upstairs room of the Fruitmarket also holds one of Roth’s more unusual forms of diary. Between 1975 and ‘76 (and returning to the project in 1992) Roth created a carefully catalogued daily archive of found objects less than 10mm in height. His so named Flat Waste (1975-6/1992) occupies rows and rows of lever arch files in storage cabinets. Contrasting with the meticulous record is the objects themselves which have an absurd Dadaist or arte-povera feel to them; receipts, napkins, letters, bits of fluff, boxes of film. A few of the folders are open and set up for visitors to turn through. The trust of behalf of the gallery reflects the openness of Roth.

Roth believed that by presenting his method to people he could act as a leveller, he abhorred the idea of art that would belittle viewers. This incredibly simple exhibition works because people can understand the artist, and his desire to share. It’s a shame Dieter Roth died in 1998, only a few years before the boom of the web. The art he produced feels very much like an analogue version of Twitter, and I am sure that he would have greatly enjoyed the micro-blogging and self-publishing tools available today.

Dieter Roth: Diaries is at the Fruitmarket Gallery until the 14th October 2012

@jclwilson

Damien Hirst at Tate Modern

‘Damien Hirst is weird’

This is the reaction fellow contributor Laura gave when I said I was visiting the Damien Hirst retrospective at the Tate Modern. Months ago when I initially heard about the exhibition I was unsure whether to bother seeing it. Damien Hirst is far from my favourite artist, and his key works are so well known and reproduced that I seriously doubted whether seeing them IRL would allow me to consider them differently. It was only when a few friends invited me to a late viewing that I thought I ought to go and see it.

Viewing the exhibition at 9pm on a Sunday night we experienced it in a totally different way to most people. A friend who had seen it earlier had described queues stretching into the Turbine Hall, and said that actually viewing the artworks was nearly impossible. For us there were no crowds, the few people who were there clearly had a significant interest in the arts and I imagine they genuinely appreciated Hirst’s work. My friend George was one of these enthusiastic viewers, and he recognised I was less so. I have various problems with Hirst, which this exhibition only confirmed.

Hirst has always seen himself as a conceptual artist, however much of his work is marked by a sheer lack of concept. The low level of thought which has gone into its creation means the viewer will very rarely be challenged or forced to think critically. Like Thomas Kinkade’s work, Hirst’s is a very comforting art, easy to hate and easy to like. It is this ease of viewing that George actually finds appealing, for me, art which fails to make us think is the worst form of kitsch.

Hirst repeatedly works on the same weak concepts. The retrospective lacked variety, it felt like a single exhibition, rather than an overview of a lifetimes work. In repeatedly constructing pharmacy shelves, Hirst isn’t increasing the concept, merely his market value. The endless dot paintings are the archetypal Hirst work, mass produced and articulating one thought. Comparisons could be made with Mondrian, who likewise turned out dozens of similar abstract works, however seven decades have passed since Mondrian, and Hirst only appears to have just caught up. Perhaps though we should consider Hirst in context, the vapid vacuity of his work more suited to those halcyon days where the end of history was truth, not ideology.

The greatest problem I have with Hirst is what I see as an almost complete lack of irony. Hirst imagines himself a punk-artist or troll, operating some sort of accelerationist programme within the artworld. Instead, all I see is a sincere pandering to the ruling class and its various structures, institutions, and the state. Towards the end of the exhibition there is a room where Hirst has ‘ironically’ created new bejewelled versions of his classics. However I felt sincerity hadn’t been entirely eclipsed.

The few works I did enjoy were the ones involving living / dying animals - A Thousand Years (1990) and In and Out of Love (1991) - perhaps because they can’t be accurately replicated in images or videos. Even then though I felt that these works would be more suited to a Futurist exhibition in 1912 than 2012.

Ultimately it is the fame of Hirst supports and destroys him. The repetition of his works across all media is what has made him famous and justifies the obscene prices for his works, yet at the same time it devalues the art object. When I stood in front of the dead shark, it wasn’t the dead shark, but a dead shark, merely one of the hundreds of others I’ve seen in my life. I was glad that I went to the exhibition, precisely because it only confirmed my belief in the continual destruction of the artistic aura.

@jclwilson

En Plein Air - Autonomous Art Outside the Institution

In the March 2012 ArtReview J.J. Charlesworth writes a short piece on the problems facing political art and artists in the current climate. This post expands on the shorter one I wrote the other day.

Charlesworth believes artists are making some of the most political work in decades, yet at the same time many appear to believe that the political content is of no consequence, and seem surprised when their work is censored. Artists are now finding that galleries are not the spaces for critical works, as the institutions themselves blunt the effectiveness of their message. All over Europe radical galleries have publicly funded budgets cut by governments, or corporate sponsors are questioning their support of explicitly anti-capitalist art. Will the Tate produce anything genuinely radical whilst supported by BP? - or any other company for that matter.

Charlesworth further believes that the radicalism we are seeing is merely a mirage. He states the West isn’t seeing the groundswell of organisation and mobilisation that would be expected of a crisis of such intensity. He sees art as essentially a sublimation of peoples’ revolutiuonary ideas; though art appears to become more radical, it is impotent as no action is taking place.

Essentially this is a criticism of the institution. The suggestion being that artists have to work outside the gallery or academy if they want to produce genuinely radical art. Similar arguments have been made for general political activism; whether it is desirable, or even possible, to work outside of institutions and social relations. Liberals have been criticised by the left for attempting political reform via the parliamentary system, the argument being that reform is impossible when the parameters of debate deliberately restrict radicalism. The Occupy movement has come under criticism from those on the right as well as left for essentially working within capitalism: Louise Mensch’s notable jibe at the protesters was that they couldn’t complain if they benefited from the results of capitalism, in their case, a cup of coffee. The response is that existing outside of capitalism is impossible, as capitalism is a set of social relations, not a ‘thing’ one can opt in and out of.

Unlike capitalism, it is genuinely possible to escape the gallery system. Working outside the institution in order to produce radical art has a long tradition in art history: The Impressionists, arguably the first modern art movement, was created by a disparate group of rebels who organised an art group based on the cooperative principles of a bakers’ union. They understood that the academies and the Salon would not tolerate the radical art they wanted to create. By working en plein air, literally and figuratively, outside of the academies they produced some of the most enduring works of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The reason Charlesworth fails to recognise a radical resistance is precisely because it is not working within the institutions. Instead of the the massed and easily identifiable movements of workers that the modernist 20th century saw, we are seeing smaller networks of radicalised people, relating to the precarious worker of post-Fordism. Forming and deforming on an ad hoc basis, but remaining in contact via the web and IRL; this anarchist or autonomist approach contrasts with the ‘traditional’ hierarchical and rigidly structured Leninist or Trotskyist party of the left. This decentralised form of organisation is not well recognised by the media, consider how the anti-workfare protests, largely organised by Boycott Workfare, were linked by the BBC and others to the SWP’s Right to Work front. With a lack of coverage (which should be expected as they are institutional media), it results that these new forms of political organisation are difficult to recognise.

We see a similar organisational form appearing in the Arts. The most radical contemporary work is being created by groups working outside the institution, groups such as Auto Italia, the DSG, and to a less political but more practical sense The Photocopy Club. Formal groups need not even be formed, individual artists, linked by the Internet are collaborating together on an ad hoc basis.

What differentiates these groups and links from institutions? What I am suggesting is not that organisation itself is wrong, but that the organisational form of the institution is wrong. The institution demands an orthodoxy in order to sustain its form, and orthodoxy inevitably results in an inevitably reactionary artform. It is only through autonomous networks that art can be made truly radical. Artists looking to create emancipatory art should look outside the gallery and in the plein air.

@jclwilson

Tacita Dean at the Turbine Hall

Tacita Dean’s 11 minute silent eulogy to celluloid at the Tate Modern presented a problem when writing this review; would it be categorised as a film showing or an art exhibition? By virtue of its title and medium the answer should be obvious, however the work is much more complex. I believe it would be better described as an ‘experience’; exhibiting qualities of both cinema and gallery installation.

The art object is defined by its physicality, whether it be an oil on canvas or bronze sculpture, in contrast the film is a series of projected images, the celluloid itself is of no concern, existing merely as a helpful medium for the recording of such images. Dean’s oeuvre however has been defined by its attempts to address the physical nature of the film. The labour of carrying rolls of film, of meticulously cutting and sticking and the time spent contemplating and processing, cause, in her words, analogue films to made and seen quite differently to digital.

Various features have been employed throughout the exhibition, as in Brechtian theatre, to deny the seduction of the viewers senses, here in order to remind us of the physical nature of film and the process by which it has been made. I was made constantly aware, by the tracking holes visible on the projection, that the images flashing before my eyes had been carefully thought about, captured, and edited. The lack humans in the film prevents empathy, the lack of sound forces us to listen to the environment around us, I was reminded that I was merely an observer, uninvolved in the narrative.

Further confusion as to whether this is a display or film was brought about by the work’s sculptural qualities. The vertical format film is projected onto, rather than a screen, a vast monolith which stands a few metres from the end of the hall. It gives the work a presence that flat screens lack. I walked entirely around the projection, and was prompted to consider the aspects of film behind the camera or screen, the physical objects and labour we often forget about.

Dean shows us that film is a physical process, she celebrates the virtues of the medium. However this is in the context of the waning use of film and rise of digital cameras, the entire intention of this work is to remind us of the dying art of sooting on celluloid. Dean asserts that this isn’t a piece of nostalgia, as the very act of creating it shows the art isn’t dead.

Dean is trying to inspire the viewer by pushing the limits of celluloid, by shocking us she hopes to attract our interest. I saw parallels here with the avant-garde soviet film directors. Indeed the flash cut montage interspersed with tracking shots of steps instantly reminded me of the Odessa steps sequence in the Battleship Potemkin. However, the similarities I saw with the soviet directors made me question whether, if all that contemporary artists can do is regurgitate tropes from the earliest days of cinema, then perhaps film is indeed dead, or at least, stagnant.

For Dean though, my concerns for the medium are irrelevant, the importance of celluloid lies in the fact that, ‘its a beautiful medium, a different medium’. Though with the recent fall of Kodak, I worry whether this medium will last long.

@jclwilson

Frontline: A Year of Journalism and Conflict

This small exhibition of documentary photography, organised by Sky and located in the embankment level of Somerset House, summarised the state of mainstream journalism in 2011. There were no ‘art works’ as such, rather it presented select broadcast footage of five key events; the Egyptian, Syrian, and Libyan uprisings, the English riots, and the capture and killing of Gaddafi.

Technological progression over the past decade has lead to a huge increase in the quality and quantity of video footage captured. However perhaps the greatest change has been in the proliferation of viewing platforms, which has fundamentally changed how we consume news. The idea of the headline, a 6pm summary of events, has been replaced by live coverage. Images of corpses are no longer held for front pages but sent immediately to our handsets. The exhibition attempted an approximation to this experience through the different sized screens scattered around the small rooms.

For anyone alive today, the events of last year will be unforgettable. However in contrast to the violence, rage, and utter brutality that has occurred, all the footage seemed a little too palatable. The carefully chosen stills and artfully framed figures seemed perfect for the evening news or front pages, but lacked the immediacy of the raw footage or reportage taken by the rebels and reactionaries - the people actually involved. I believe anyone who has watched the film Syrial Killing or followed events live on Twitter will agree.

I questioned the intentions behind the publishing of these images. Being broadcast by Sky, a corporate entity, these images were published in order to sensationalise and sell, not to agitate. It is in the MSM’s interests to support the status quo, i.e. the situation that keeps them in their privileged position as news provider. State and corporate media will always report with a bias against dissident activites. The images of the English Riots were certainly presented differently to the ‘legitimate’ arab uprisings, there was little sympathy with these protesters.

I felt a certain disparity between the message the exhibition intended, and the facts it appeared to present. Being organised by Sky, it was no doubt designed to show off the quality of their journalism and the importance they play in covering events. However at the same time the exhibition’s reliance on mobile phones and DSLRs suggested that the technology that will ultimately make centralised news broadcasters defunct is already in the hands of the people.

@jclwilson

Edinburgh Festival

Early on Friday morning I’ll be travelling up to Edinburgh for a few days to visit the festival.

I’ve got a huge list of places to visit; all the art galleries, the Filmhouse Cinema, the new Forest cafe, and of course the festival sites. I’d appreciate any advice on other places to visit and hangout though. This’ll be my 10th consecutive year visiting, but I still feel I haven’t properly explored the city.

This year I’ll be staying in a city centre flat rather than at Mortonhall, so I’ll be able to stay out later and avoid the £20 taxi. I’m hoping to take quite a few photos, as well as some Super 8 footage.

If anyone wants to meet up then send me a message.