Film in Space: Group Show selected by Guy Sherwin

15 December 2012 - 24 February 2013
Camden Arts Centre
Arkwright Road, London

http://www.camdenartscentre.org

Artists include: Angela Allen, Gill Eatherley, Louisa Fairclough, Steve Farrer, Nicky Hamlyn, Emma Hart, Dan Hays, Denise Hawrysio, Neil Henderson, Malcolm Le Grice, Lynn Loo, Rob Mullender, Annabel Nicolson, Simon Payne, William Raban, Lucy Reynolds, Guy Sherwin, Chris Welsby

On yet another grey and sprinkling-wet London day, in the quiet that descends after the rush and gluttony of Christmas, it was time again to look at some art. Enough with the sentimentalism of carols, the rich reds of poinsettias and the spiky greens of pine trees, and enough with the brash metallics of wrapping paper! 

Coming to the Camden Arts Centre to see this exhibition felt like a cleanse for the visual and emotional palette of ‘the season’. And what a pleasant afternoon. The gallery is calm, full of white walls, blonde wooden floors and arched ceilings. The exhibition is so empty that the one guard who’s there ends up following me and my friend around into each room (we were perhaps too well supervised!), turning on various pieces, even offering some information when asked.

Film in Space centres around the expanded cinema movement of the 1970s, when the selector, Guy Sherwin, started making films. Artists then were experimenting with analogue media to create works that were outside of the mainstream. And this exhibition combines many of these pieces with new works that use both film and digital techniques. It also attempts to capture the performative nature of much of this work, with a screening room showing footage of events involving projection and sound from the 1970s and more recently. 

Guy Sherwin, Paper Landscape (1975-), super-8 film, 
transparent screen, white paint, performer

Installation view with Stephen Farrer's Ten Drawings (centre)

The central space, containing smaller works that change every few weeks, is filled with the sound of 16mm projectors, and the air buzzes with a whir and a hum that is alternately agitating and calmingly monotonous. In fact, given the predominant use of analogue film in Film in Space, this sensation of movement and indeed flickering becomes a predominant feeling while I’m there.

It seems like an obvious enough thing to comment on, but everything is in constant movement - flashing, springing into action with the touch of a button, motors clicking and wheezing away. The physical apparatus of projecting the film feels at least a large part of encountering the work. Projectors sit on carefully built wooden stands and it seems almost magical that all these quickly pulsating images and loud ticks and deep thunks can possibly be coming from such a device.  I get a tingle of excitement pressing the glowing green button which starts William Raban’s Diagonal (1973), as three projectors spring into action, creating a vivacious and cacophonous trio. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Emma Hart’s Blind (2006/2012), in which a regular household blind moves silently and mechanically open and shut, creating gleaming and mesmerising striations on the wall behind.

There were some beautiful experiments with colour that highlight the optical sensation of viewing film, including  Guy Sherwin’s Painted Screen (1970/2012), and Dan Hays’ large painting of a screen, which recreate the ‘colourful’ grey of a monitor though thousands of small pixel-sized strokes of paint.

Dan Hays' painting

Although there were a few video works, what I really took from this exhibition was a sense of the physicality of film and the equally physical experience of viewing. A lot of it was abstract and almost hypnotic, and I felt less like my brain was challenged, and rather that my eyes were put to work.


It occurs to me that there is something deeply human about film, the way it’s structure depends on still images moving faster than the eye can perceive, giving the impression of movement. Or even the way it is about experiencing something in the moment, and placing oneself in the physical experience of the present.

As I made my way back to the Overground, and the grey of the still-overcast sky replaced the white of the gallery wall, and as the hum of the traffic and the whoosh of the train took over from the whir of projectors, I felt, simply, at ease. What a pleasant afternoon.

Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2012

27 November 2012 – 13 January 2013

Institute of Contemporary Art

http://www.newcontemporaries.org.uk

I want to preface my thoughts about the New Contemporaries exhibition by the following question:

What happens in an art system where the idea is privileged, and becomes central to the work of art?

Of course this relates to the history of conceptual art, and its legacy within contemporary art today. But it’s a necessary discussion to have when I notice that the majority of the work physically in front of me at the exhibition seems to be lacking in physical presence, or affective content. I didn’t really ‘feel’ much about most of the work, and I’m trying to figure out what this might mean, and what it says about the values of contemporary art today.

Focusing on the idea has often been portrayed as ‘freeing’ the artwork and the individual from the perceived burden of subjectivity. But at the same time it’s hard not to get the idea that ideas can constrain.  I see foregrounding the conceptual and the ideological as having more to do with ignoring and denying, rather than being free of, the physical world of the body, of time and of culture.

Ideas have a natural way of arriving fully formed and with their own boundaries. They are concrete. And this is why we love them - for their strength. They possess a stability that is so firm that one can build whole societies from their foundations. They can be written about, clearly expressed though words, are definable, and thus eminently pleasing in a fully-imagined, spherical kind of way.

So what does it mean if art should rely on this? Perhaps what you get is a lot of rather controlled art, where the physical object shows no weakness, no wavering in trying to understand itself, and absolute confidence that it has ‘thought of everything’. An idea is impenetrable, and there is really only one way of thinking an idea, because it is already a thought, and actually doesn’t provide much food for thought because the thought has already been thought.  This is exhausting, and I dare say a little boring. 

I want uncertainty. I want complexity and questioning. I want the inability to put something into categories, or to box it in. I want un-containability and refusals to give straight answers. And opposite to this is ideology, with its neatly wrapped-up answers and inevitable simplification that actually serves to imprison mental creativity.

Let me return to what I really wanted to say about the show. Quite simply, I really enjoyed the video art at New Contemporaries this year.

Salome Ghazanfari you make me salivate over silk boxer shorts!

Still from 

Salome Ghazanfari's Boxer (Young Marble Giants) (2011) video, 7 min 20 sec

Still from Boxer (Young Marble Giants)

Evariste Maiga you told me through your body and your movement about your past and your present!

Still from Evariste Maiga's 

Improvisation, pain and joy (2012) HD video, stereo sound, 6 min 15 sec

 Evariste Maiga's video on display

Tony Law you undermined the innocence of beauty, where the endless strolling and stroking of railings by these pretty girls was exposed as way for them to luxuriate in their own sadness and inconsolable neediness.

Still from Tony Law's  Strolling (2012) single-channel video, 3 min 24 sec (looped)    

Simon Senn you somehow managed to orchestrate what could be described as a reality show(!) in Soweto, South Africa, complete with prize money, casting auditions and passionate rehearsals for the final performance.

Still from Simon Senn's Meadowlands Zone 1 (2010) HD video, 12 min

Simon Senn's video on display

Whenever there are moving images there is always a fluidity which resists control. Although, of course the artists may have spent copious amounts of time editing, they inevitably have had to accept what the camera has given them. Maybe they liked the expression on the face, but the background was not exactly perfect. Maybe the camera jiggled, but they were on location at a live event, and nothing could be done about it. They had to accept it, and they were, I’m sure of it, unable to control quite how everything went.

And that, that leaves me mesmerised. I watch, trying to make sense of everything I see, my logical facilities trying to classify and assign patterns – which of course it can never quite do as the images, frame by frame, keep slipping away into time.

It’s not that you can’t do this with other art, with painting, with sculpture or installation, it's just that it doesn’t seem to be too popular here at New Contemporaries.

Everything is very composed, very harmonious, and as a result, leaning towards looking like an aestheticized design-magazine worthy apartment. Everything matches. Is this good curating, or savvy art marketing?

In the lower space, there are silk curtains fluttering against the breeze. There are inoffensive (and subtly-coloured) paintings adorning the walls, mostly abstract though, no troublesome subject matter. In fact, when you start thinking along these lines it becomes scary when you realize that there is also a minimal table with expressive, roughly hewn vases on it opposite a kitschy ceramic figurine of a squirrel.

Perhaps it’s the fault of the selectors, but these seem very cautious choices. And it’s leaving me with the impression that this year’s graduates are a profoundly unambitious bunch that just want to provide tasteful living-room friendly art work.

But there are things happening in the world right now! Why don’t I see any of it here? Like real-life cuts, and strangulation to artistic expression through large-scale assaults on the affordability and value of a liberal arts education. I want artists to challenge and provoke, and occasionally leave the world of concepts for the messiness of life. We’re all just too polite.

It was at this point that I decided to ask for the price list. You’ll be happy to know it’s all quite affordable and, even for a recession year, I suspect business will be good. 

Miroslaw Balka at Scrap Metal

Heaven

October 27 – March 30 2013

Scrap Metal Gallery

www.scrapmetalgallery.com

Note: This is my last blog from Toronto, I’m back from travelling now and I’ll be posting London shows by the end of the week.

Approaching Scrap Metal 

I’m starting to think that some majority of cool contemporary art is to be found in the most unassuming of back alleyways. This also probably accounts for the delight I feel when discovering world-class work in a back enclosure a few streets off of definitely-not-in-the-least-bit-swank Lansdowne Avenue in Toronto.

I’m speaking of Scrap Metal, the art foundation set up to show work from the collection of Samara Walbohm and Joe Shlesinger. The exhibition on now is entitled Heaven and it’s an immersive installation by the Polish artist Miroslaw Balka. The last time I saw an installation by Balka was in 2010 at the Tate Modern, and in my head, I’m quietly reeling (Tate Britain to tiny alleyway in Toronto!) The scope and scale are tremendously different of course, but all this makes me excited for what’s happening in Canada.

Heaven is composed of 68 lengths of twisted Perspex coated with a colour-tinted reflective coating. They have been suspended at various heights throughout the space, in an orderly but rather ad hoc way, with simple pieces of fishing line holding each in place.

The rods are quiet and glistening and startlingly elegant. As I step into the space I notice that the minute air currents generated by my movement have started the plastic hypnotically twisting, the effect of which is either beautiful and dazzling, or borderline cheesy holiday mall  decoration.

Caught in the reflection

Stepping nearer to one of the pieces, I notice that my now golden reflection has been strangely rotated 90 degrees. I have the impression of constant small movements and sparkles of light throughout the space, and the Perspex strands starts to feel vaguely disorienting as the optical illusion of each twist gives the impression of corkscrew rising and falling to a silent rhythm.

The nature of this feeling evoked by the movement and the glitter and the way the work fills the space is rather unobtrusive and non-specific. I imagine it would be very easy to spend time with this work, and bask in its small, measured movements and dream-like atmosphere. I thought of party streamers, giant icicle decorations, wind chimes and all sorts of benign and pretty things. This is not the usual territory of Balka though, and sure enough there is a twist in the story, which comes in the form of the explanation.

This ‘heavenly’ work is actually composed of 68 rods which ‘suggests the difference in years from when the Nazi’s introduced the “final solution” for European Jews to when Balka created this work’.

Oh my. How does one assimilate such a piece of information? The installation goes from a rather gentle aesthetic experience to one tinged with uncertainty and apprehension. And I think the real heart of the work is in this sudden switch, this overturning of initial impressions through knowledge, where perception is (literally) turned on its side.

What one once saw as a peaceful place becomes filled with dread and immediately there arises a powerful sense of guilt. You were ignorant, you did not know, you did not realize, you were charmed by the simple beauty, and you were even playing amongst this memorial to death and destruction…where is your humanity?

I’m remembering now some key bits of information from Balka’s biography. He is only in his mid-fifties, not even alive when the holocaust happened, and many years shy of this grim anniversary, as well as being non-Jewish, however his entire body of work is heavily immersed in the history of his place of birth. There is constant reference to the savage destruction and painful memories of a past that was not ‘his’ but is inescapably his.

The world moves on from even the most painful things, it is just the way it goes. But in Balka’s work you get the sense that the residues of the past, and the stories that our ancestors tell us, persist - across generations and far beyond their origin. I find myself thinking ‘if only this were a thing whose beauty could just be enjoyed’. But it is not so simple, and as a viewer I suspect that the artist wants us to feel how, for him, ‘heaven’ has become impossible. Under the weight of guilt even the most beautiful things are crushed.