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.

Zhou Tao at Gallery TPW

Collector(s)

November 8 – 17, 2012

Curated by Siya Chen and He Cong

1256 Dundas Street West, Toronto

www.gallerytpw.ca

Sometimes when you’re far away from home you lose your way. And when home is split between two places, strangeness and familiarity abound and you find yourself an outsider looking in on the ‘strange’ rituals of those around you. You study your environment as if seeing it for the first time. And the old familiarity that you remember becomes traded in for loss and displacement.

This last week I’ve found myself in a lot of old places. Most notably, not London. I would dearly love to ‘follow the London art scene’ (and my heart is indeed there), but this is a moment to revisit old places and lay new memories, find moments of connection and allow myself to search.

And through the wonders of Facebook and international connections I came to the artist-run space Gallery TPW for a show of Chinese video artist Zhou Tao.

Chicken Speak to Duck, Pig Speak to Dog 

There are four videos shown on monitors of different sizes, mounted at different heights. The films range in time from 6 to 20 minutes, and all depict scenes and people from China. In Chicken Speak to Duck, Pig Speak to Dog (2005) a group of farmers are gathered together at night, the green night vision camera documenting their studious recreation of bird calls. The camera captures the swell of cheeks and pursing of lips as strange squeals and shrieks fill the darkness. I can’t help but laugh at such a cacophony of bizarre sounds coming from these serious old guys. I’m smiling already.

The next video to catch my eye was Mutual Exercise (2009), with its uncanny resemblance to a Jeff Wall photograph, made even more uncanny by the fact that it was set in China and definitely not a photograph, but I think infused with a similar sense of highly composed ‘naturalness’. 

Here the camera is fixed on a scene outside a building, onto what would probably be a parking lot. It’s framed by a house on the left side and windows and balconies above. Two men are playing a strange sort of game where one directs the slackened body of another into position, only to trade spots and be repositioned himself. Everything in the image remains still except for the movement of this curious dance, itself executed with an awkward gentleness. It all seems so considered, so composed, and for me, this means it holds my attention.  I feel the carefulness with which the artist has chosen and framed this situation. It is highly manipulated, but graceful, perhaps more revealing than a ‘real’ situation, and introducing a sense of strangeness to what would usually be an unremarkable setting.

As I watched the longest video, Collector (2011-2012) in the rear of the space, I started to think that this strangeness of viewpoint was what made me like the work so much. I did not feel like an outsider looking into an exotic world, but I felt the artist’s own sense of feeling an outsider in his own ‘familiar’ world.  I really feel the position he puts me in with his camera, where I become a silent watcher of small happenings and ephemeral moments. People are quiet, they move within their environments with a certain cadence and measure, not unlike a plant swaying in the breeze. They become beings on whom I look with curiosity and unknowing.

The video shows everyday occurrences. There are farmers working, a man walking down a path, torrential rains, a pulsating red tail light, a waiting man aimlessly knocking metal sheets, the torso of a young person gently gripped by the fingers of a lover. And in all of it I feel a sense of equal-ness, as if it all amounts to the rhythm of things on this earth, where our own motions and struggles are not independent of the environment we find ourselves in, but another part of the endlessly shifting movement of the world.

Detail from Collector (2011-2012)

If I were to step into a more critical frame of mind I would add that I thought the use of music near the end of this video made it all a little too sentimental. The small tableaus that the artist caught with his camera started to feel a bit trivialized, and I feared that I would start to see them as elongated filmic equivalents of national geographic photos.

Indeed, the last thing I’m interested in is looking at and admiring the ‘exoticness’ of a ‘strange foreign’ land. And of course that would have to be predicated on me feeling at home in my own, something that evades me today. 

At the end of the day, this work reminded me that even in the strangeness of what was once a familiar place, my new sense of separateness meant I could see more than I ever had before. Maybe it is only with a bit of distance that we can really start to see.

Front space at TPW

View of the CN Tower in the grey fog of November in Toronto.

ss

The end of the day.

The Turner Prize Exhibition at Tate Britain

Paul Noble, Luke Fowler, Elizabeth Price, Spartacus Chetwynd

2 October 2012 – 6 January 2013

Announced 3 December live on Channel 4

www.tate.org.uk

Viewer comments at the Turner Prize Exhibition

As I sit down to write, it comes to mind that, in considering the work of Paul Noble, Luke Fowler, Elizabeth Price and Spartacus Chetwynd,  and ultimately ‘making up one’s opinion’ concerning it, something is a stake.

It doesn’t seem as if it’s the time for petty likes and dislikes or small critiques of particulars, there are larger questions and greater concerns at the centre of this show.

Today, what matters to us the most?

What do we want to matter in the future?

It is like a political campaign staged by four parties with their own vision of what art should be, what it should value, and what it should celebrate.

Just as Romney and Obama campaign desperately and viscously for their ideologies, and their constructions of the future, every artist of great stature has, with their life and career as evidence, invested their whole selves in creating a vision of what art can be.

And ‘believing in things’ is something we perhaps have a hard time doing anymore; distinguishing one thing from another and dedicating our lives to it. In this way, these artists are heroic figures, and I come to the prize with great seriousness, as it is, at its heart, about belief and vision.

Behind whom would I stake my future?

There is Paul Noble, with his massive, sprawling, intricate graphite renderings which become a world unto themselves. This is work about personal investment of time in the studio, dedication to a laborious and confined physical practice where the steady growth of marks become evidence to their own vitality. The obsessiveness of his work, and the rigidity of his perspective (literally) demand to be taken seriously, while the content, the strange word-shaped houses with crudely drawn plants seem to me quite childish, as if the maker of this work imagined that through drawing it all he would control it and render it harmless, or at least smaller than him.

To like this work is to identify with the lone artist working at his craft, to support the investment of time in creating a personal world based on surface. It truly is not of this world, and I imagine that this fantastical element is a comfort zone for many.

Next, there is Luke Fowler. His film, All Divided Selves (2011) is based on the life and work of famed Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing. It is non-sequential, highly subjective and over an hour and a half long while reaching no broad conclusions.  All of these things should test the viewer’s patience, but instead I found myself captivated by the layering and overlapping of source material and Fowler’s refreshing treatment of how society classifies and deals with mental illness.

From old recordings and film clips we hear the voice of Laing, slowly intoning with great intensity and feeling his belief that the world we find ourselves in is often strange and harsh, a place where we are completely dependent on the families and communities to shepherd us and shape our emotional lives.  There rises a thesis about the possible causes of schizophrenia and a deeply human proposition that each of us has a diverse experience of living and that there should be a dignity and a respect for the way each responds to the world and lives their life.  Although Fowler focuses on Laing’s generation, it is clear that we continue to live in an age of standardization and regulation, with little tolerance for behaviour outside the norm. Each of us has probably experienced the pain, confusion and silence surrounding ‘mental’ issues, perhaps even had our own experiences of feeling less than ‘normal’ or less than ‘sane’.

Fowler’s film is powerful and generous for me because it does not try to solve, discover, analyse or otherwise control its subject, but allows us to take in its message and ponder it without demanding that we accept the artist’s ‘definitive’ vision of how to respond. I get the sense that the non-linear structure, piecing together of source material and original footage by the artist, mean that we will all take different things from the film, and thus feel more able to relate to the content.

It is a strange transition to make from Luke Fowler’s film to Elizabeth Price’s work, The Woolworths Choir of 1979 (2012).  Both use video, and old footage, as well as retelling a story from the past, but the method and address to the audience could not be more different.

As opposed to Fowler’s effortless weaving together of many strands of material, Price’s video is highly ordered and carefully crafted with the precision of a car advert. There are passionate swells of music that feel so sweet and intense, but otherwise crisp snapping and clapping guide the viewer’s attention. 

The text overlaying the video tells us where to look and what to see; sharply directing my gaze and hijacking my train of thought. I feel pulled and pushed; highly conducted. I sense in Price’s work a love for the medium, an attention to detail and a perfection that is exhilarating, yet at times oppressive.  Sometimes there is great pleasure in having such a managed experience, other times it produces a rising frustration, especially after having spent over an hour lying down on a carpeted floor languidly absorbing Fowler’s film. Also, the story that Price’s work was based on was more culturally specific and, in the end, less easy for me to invest in personally.

Viewer comments

Then there is Spartacus Chetwynd – the anomaly. A complete change in tone and content. There is spectacle, and costumes and scuffed blow-up slides. The space seems haunted by the memory of past and future performances. Things are haphazardly put together and craft appears secondary to experience and intention. Theory and words find their place amongst this strange theatre (even if they seem a bit separate) indicating grand intentions. I am intrigued by the proposition that her work can create a new world, and serve to topple old structures, if only for the duration of her performances. 

To support this work is to identify with the chaotic, the unfinished and wild energy that is at the heart of performance.  I am most aware of Chetwynd as a character, and the show as deriving from her charisma, energy and life. The heart of this work for me is about believing in the ability of humour and play to disrupt and reveal power structures of society, a tradition that is deeply rooted in our history, yet always threatening to be forgotten. In a time of crisis and recession, when faith in the big organising forces in our culture is at its weakest, Chetwynd’s work, and the collaborative nature of her performances, offer hope and energy to the cause of resistance and change.

These are the visions I see before me. Each is worthy of attention and makes their case with exceptional strength, but for me the more space the artist gives to the viewer’s experience, the more engaging the work.

I can’t stop thinking about Luke Fowler’s film (and I even wrote this in the comment section at the end of the show!). Seeing it has really caused a shift in the way I see the world and consider those around me. It’s left me feeling more open to others, more tolerant of their individuality and I guess of myself. I didn’t ‘learn’ from it, it gave me the space to explore and to be open to new ways of thinking and seeing, and for that, it gets my prize: respect, admiration, gratitude.

I am all for art that changes the world, and sometimes that ‘world’ is within me. This art matters.

Tenderflix Film Festival 2012 at Tenderpixel

Premiere: Thursday 1 November

Friday and Saturday 2-3 November, 2pm – 6pm
10 Cecil Court, London

www.tenderpixel.com

With films by Justin Ascott, Helen Benigson, collectif_fact, Calvin Frederick, Stephen Gunning, Tom Jobbins, Kim Kielhofner, Kim Stewart, Matthias Tharang and Sean Vicary

Tenderpixel 

It was partly by accident that I found myself on Cecil Court, coming to pick up something for a friend, but I was glad it led me to this small gallery space in such an unlikely location to find small gallery spaces. But I’m always drawn to a bit of competition, and tonight’s ‘Tenderflix’ festival, which also screens Friday the 2nd and Saturday the 3rd of November, presents 10  videos selected by a jury, with the only criteria being that the work be under 10 minutes.

So there was variety, and small portions. Like visiting a delightful wine and cheese sampling, my palette was intrigued but never bored, my artistic appetite piqued but not stuffed. You had the sense that these were ‘tasters’ from each artist, first impressions that communicated a little about the interests and style of each.

There were almost-empty cityscapes and drab buildings with rubbish blowing poetically in grey concrete corners (Ascott), contrasting with beautifully overcast horizons of Welsh countryside and fluttering sunlight against darkened cottages (Vicary).

I was transported into virtual reality spaces, encountering a mix of sterile architectonic environments threatening to swallow up the last human woman (Stewart), to computer game landscapes and war fields where the men run around with guns, while the blank-faced cgi damsel silently declares: ‘Boys I don’t want to be saved’ (Benigson).

Sometimes I found myself falling into an abstract space of sound and movement, caught in an accelerating digital kaleidoscope of colour, whose drama and style would have made an amazing opening credit sequence for a movie (Frederick).

Other times I found myself listening to a story, told though the eyes of a young boy’s embellished remembrances of adolescent heroism (Jobbins), or a dramatic dialogue constructed entirely of movie quotes, with heart-pounding trailer music to boot (collectif_fact).

Screening room downstairs

The most visceral and arresting video for me was ‘Dream Scream’ by Stephen Gunning, which pared archival footage of women receiving primal scream therapy, their bodies rigid and convulsing and their eyes wide with terror, with the agitated, rhythmic staccato of Italian football commentators excitedly calling the goal.

Another strange and quietly alarming work was Matthias Tharang’s ‘Strength -Through Joy’. Shot against the green fields of an idyllic Swiss valley, pretty girls with long brown hair and short white dresses laugh and play with giant red bouncy balls, their giggling excitement unceasing and growing ever creepier, becoming sickeningly juvenile and even threatening.     

Still from Matthias Tharang's, Strength Through Joy

I had to leave before the champagne was cracked and the winner was announced, but as with most competitions, it’s not the end result that matters so much as the entertainment of the chase, and the potential of each to inspire us with their fight.