Artificialia in Contemporary Art

As a follow-up to last week’s post on fakery, bling and their historical counterparts, I have brought together images of some contemporary artists’ work. The works seem to share both a preoccupation with kitsch, and a warped synthetic Baroque sensibility.

Jessica Herrington

http://jessherrington.com/

See also her immersive installation Cave from her 2011 residency at WW Gallery:

http://wilsonwilliamsgallery.com/residency.htm

Lisa Selby

http://www.lisaselby.com/sculpture.html

Hew Locke

http://www.hewlocke.net/goldrush.html

Neal Rock

http://nicodimgallery.com/artists/neal-rock/

http://www.edelassanti.com/exhibitiondetails.php?ID=101

Nicky Carvell

http://www.nickycarvell.com/page2.htm

Don’t be Fooled by the Rocks That I Got.

Ever wondered what the connection is between J-Lo and Cabinets of Curiosities? Between Bling culture and Dutch still life painting? Why, it’s fakery and the synthetic, the unadulterated pleasure of material ostentation..

J-Lo and the Sumptuous Still Life

In the video for Jennifer Lopez’s song Jenny From the Block (2002), the narrative of authenticity, a common strategy for pop musicians to attempt to connect with their fans, is strikingly clear. It is an unambiguous attempt to establish herself as a ‘woman of the people’ – a notion so absurd that a gem-encrusted Blackberry case might seem more convincingly real.

The effort is quite unnecessary, since most of us aren’t too concerned whether our pop megastars ‘stay grounded as the amounts roll in’, but it makes a good micro-story, and that’s what most pop songs are. In this case the story is layered up with an unintentionally surreal and humorous incursion of ‘real life’ paparazzi images of the couple enjoying such normal everyday activities as sunning one’s buttocks on a private yacht (@01:20), or enjoying an expensive meal at a fancy restaurant (@01:40).

While J-Lo is ostensibly ‘keeping it real’, she is effectively still engaged in the act known as ‘showing off all your best stuff’ (thanks to Michael Seymour for this observation – from a discussion about the video for Snoop Dogg featuring Pharrell – Drop It Like It’s Hot).

The acquisition and subsequent flaunting of material wealth is of course a common theme in much hip-hop, rap and R&B music. To quote just one example:

“Talkin’ ’bout money, we could have a conversation
Top five tax bracket in the population
Hatin’ and I know they got a reason why
I ain’t got to wonder if I want to lease or buy
And i dictate how I’m gon piece the pie
I ain’t talkin’ about no muthafuckin pizza pie“

Muny, Nicki Minaj, 2010

A parallel may be found in the particular category of still life painting called ‘sumptuous still life’, which attained popularity in Northern Europe during the C17th. Here is an excerpt from an essay I wrote about it a while ago:

“Abraham van Beyeren’s Banquet Still Life, 1667  is a bountiful paean to this type of abundance. Luxuriant bunches of fruit languish in a sumptuous landscape of desirable items, tantalisingly displayed, almost begging to be devoured. This tableau seems to have a generative capacity of its own, an extraordinary agency to proliferate and flourish. This ostentatious display reeks of wealth and indulgence, and indicates a lifestyle of enjoyment and plenty. Copious amounts of juicy, fresh and plump looking fruit spill forth from baskets; draped cloth and a richly patterned Oriental style rug echo this sense of overflow and softness, as if the picture were erupting and spewing forth goodness from within. The red lobster, one of the ultimate symbols of culinary luxury, hangs over the edge of the table, its calcified, shiny redness gleaming insistently with an almost machined perfection. An oyster sits obscenely to one side, its gnarled ocean-formed shell and prone, silky, yet gritty interior so realistically rendered it seems to invite the viewer to slurp it from its housing, revealing the perfect smoothness of the shell interior for the very first time. The blackberries in the centre of the arrangement reflect the low light wetly and malevolently, like the eyes of spiders. A melon in the top left of the picture seems to be displaying its tightly packed innards, a neat slice having been cut away… Below, the peeled orange rind hangs down like skin, reminiscent of anatomical engravings in which dissected bodies seem to live, display themselves and proudly hold their flayed skin to one side to afford the viewer a better look at their viscera.”

The subtle inclusion in such paintings of coded references to mortality (in this case a mouse and an open pocket watch), fail to temper the unbridled flaunting of extravagance. Such admonitory references to the transience of life and the futility of aspiring to material wealth are  quite drowned out by the obscene luxuriance of its trappings.  The same could easily be said for the disingenuous protests of our superstar celebrities that fortune has not changed them.

Imitation Becomes Art

Great craftspeople are able to imitate nature to an astonishing degree of verisimilitude in any medium. The skill, time, cost and experience that goes into this are rarely given their due, and really should be viewed as an artistic category in their own right:

http://www.artificialrocks.co.uk/via @kentaro_london

You can see some more excellent photos of artificial sushi and other foodstuffs on this Flickriver blog:

http://www.flickriver.com/groups/sampuru/pool/interesting

In J.K. Huysmans’ A Rebours, 1884, his protagonist muses that it is preferable to ‘substitute a vision of reality for the reality itself..As a matter of fact, artifice was considered by Des Esseintes to be the distinctive mark of human genius.’ (p.22, Penguin Classics 2003 edition). Having pursued artificialia to the point of pathological obsession, Des Esseintes later goes on to amass a collection of lurid exotic flora, selected precisely because of their striking resemblance to false flowers, thereby further complicating and ridiculing the notion of the authentic.
But where things really get interesting is when the ersatz nature of such items is more apparent – neither imitation nor representation, there is something compelling about the copy which falls short of its mimetic ambition, or (as in the examples below) transcends it to become something greater.

 

All My Best Stuff

In the cabinets of curiosities, or Wunderkammern, of the Baroque era, specimens from the natural world (naturalia) were displayed alongside man-made treasures (artificialia), their rarity being the defning factor:

“It was this exceptional quality that justified the admission of the object into the collection … A certain school of psychological thought recognises in this craving for the unique the basic impulse that drives all collectors: the need to see reflected in the objects of their collections an exhilarating narcissistic projection of their own self-image.” (Cabinets of Curiosities, Patrick Mauries, 2011, Thames & Hudson, p.73)

In Jenny From the Block, and so many other popular music videos, there is a remarkably similar desire to ’show off all your best stuff’. In addition, it is the simultaneous presentation, and celebration of, the fake and the real, the act of careful selection and display, and the fetishisation of valuable objects which leads me to draw a parallel between contemporary pop culture and C17th cabinets of wonder and still life painting.

What would be on display in your cabinet? What would adorn your table of sumptuous goods?

Honesty

I have been invited to chair a panel discussion on the subject of honesty at the Royal College of Art Sculpture department this week, as part of the excellent Onion Discussions series:

http://peeltheonion.posterous.com/pages/onion-2-heterotopias-honesty

As a foreword to the discussion I felt it would be appropriate to show something authentic, something which is in some way revealing about myself. It is also as a humorous slant on the artist’s presentation.

 

Here are some images of work from my Fine Art Foundation. I made these studies of a plant, before I knew it was called Honesty. The theme of our coursework unit was ‘Sequence and Chaos’, and I remember coming up with some tenuous connection between that and the plant, by way of explanation for the studies. I was brought up on this by my tutor, and I had to admit that the real reason I was studying the plant was simply because I enjoyed the structure, shapes and tones of the plant and found rendering them in charcoal quite satisfying.
In art practice it is possible to make almost anything sound relevant to anything if you have a good explanation for it. But if we dig deeper and just say what we really mean, would the art world come apart at the seams? What do we have to lose?

ARTFAIL: Schadenfreude in Current Art Practice

Alluvium seems relatively insignificant when compared to the mass of bedrock, but it should be remembered that bedrock is comprised of many layers of alluvial sediment, built up and solidified over long periods of time.

As the excitement builds for Frieze week, and the London art world reawakens with a start after its annual summer slumber, let us pause to reflect. The swollen reservoir of rampant commercialism and social aspiration, buoyed up by a thousand private views, bursts its banks and engulfs the city in a dense and caustic alluvium. What better time to cast a sideways glance (in between peering over shoulders to see who’s who) at the machinations of success and failure?

Nelson from The Simpsons - Master of Schadenfreude

Distasteful, bilious, ignoble, shameful – and yet so very human. The deliciously dark humour of Schadenfreude is intensified by its base impropriety. Most of us have experienced that little rush of verboten pleasure on witnessing the failings of our foes, nemeses and irritants, and dare we say it, sometimes even our friends. Few will admit it, but feasting on the rotten banquet of other people’s mistakes is a peculiarly gratifying pastime, usually relegated to the sordid underworld of our private neuroses. ARTFAIL showcases some choice examples and in the process, muses on the bizarre admixture of self-confidence and vulnerability inherent in the pursuit of creative expression. Perhaps it could even push us beyond our own pride and pretensions to reach a truly honest critique of art practice, which does not negate the humanity of those engaging in it.

ARTFAIL 1 – Endearingly pathetic

This dejected creature was fashioned from paper towels, gaffer tape and clay; the beak is a cardboard cone, the eyes are an unidentified material. It was made as a component part for a work, which would have created the illusion of being submerged in a bucket of water. The viewer’s point of view would have been from inside the bucket, and the bird was to be perched on the rim of the bucket, looking in. By Subject 1’s own admission, the piece was ‘a weird idea’ and was abandoned when the bird model had turned out to be, in the language of damage limitation, ‘a partial success’.
Its desiccated, fragmented body disintegrated further as it was handled to be photographed. Light, delicate and still like a real dead bird, yet strangely lumpen and inelegant, it is an endearingly pathetic manifestation of an unrealised vision. Having breathed a kind of distressed, ineffectual life into it, Subject 1 could not bear to throw it away, and it was carefully, if not lovingly, replaced into storage in the studio.

ARTFAIL 2 – A mute reminder of dashed hopes
This studio experiment by Subject 2 was supposed to replicate the effects of a Magic Crystal Garden. Having pored over online DIY recipes, sourced the ingredients and dreamed of a world of crystallised abundance, the results were paltry. The colour had not taken at all. The sponge was far too large, holding so much moisture that the act of evaporation, key to the chemical process, was effected so slowly that the garden never grew. A week or two later, after many arrivals at the studio confronted by disappointment, Subject 2 desperately and wantonly poked their fingers into the sponge, leaving two gaping holes resembling hollow, mournful eyes.
The failure of this experiment was exacerbated by the sheer comical ugliness of the object, and by the fact that Subject 2 was simply too apathetic to clear it away. It remained atop a remnant of an old destroyed art work, a mute reminder of dashed hopes and a reflection of Subject 2’s own lack of tenacity and conviction in the idea.

ARTFAIL 3 – Bathetic Beefeater
Encapsulated in a flimsy purple mesh, this Beefeater soft toy stares vacantly from it’s synthetic prison, plush nose pressed up against unyielding plastic film. Its maker, Subject 3, states that it was an attempt to “undercut the pride of a national costume“. It was deemd a failure because it looked “too cute”. Subject 3 continues, “I think the toy was just too beautiful in the first place, and when you’re comparing it to something like an early Mike Kelly piece (using soft toys) you realise it’s best left to someone who knows what they’re doing. There was too much implied narrative, half-political, half-all over the place” The piece “just didn’t have the right balance of patheticness and humour”, and was duly relegated to the dust heap of failed art works. It is a grave reminder of the difficulty of creating something deliberately pathetic, and the fine line between humour and triviality in works of art.

ARTFAIL 4 “It was just complete shit” (no image available)

Subject 4 describes the worst work they ever made, and its less than rapturous reception at an art school crit: “It was a life size figure kneeling down with a latex George Bush mask for a face. In one hand he held a string of sausages, and in the other a knife.  The arm holding the knife was motorised, so from behind it looked like he was masturbating, but when you approached the front you could see he was actually just trying to cut the sausages.  Needless to say, this was a pretty strange thing to have been brought into the world, not least because it was just complete shit.  Understandably I received a pretty rough ride when it was presented in the crit, with my only defence being something along the lines of “i was just playing with motors”.  Cringe inducing indeed.” Subject 4 continues, “Fast forward a few years and I’m still shitting out the odd piece of unbelievably awful work…The fact I have no images of these pieces is a testament to their worthlessness.”

ARTFAIL 5 – A Puddle of Milk and Coke
Subject 5 presents this bizarre experiment involving a revolting cocktail of milk and Coke. The Kinder toy containers bob aimlessly in said mixture. Subject 5 states that the main reason for the abandonment of this piece was that the eggs “wouldn’t float in the way I wanted”, since the intention was that only the tips should be visible. Subject 5 continues, “I wanted the stark blackness of Coca Cola or whiteness of milk” but found the effects unsatisfactory. This mixture is the result of an attempt to remedy this, “to experiment with in terms of tone/colour of the liquid” but by Subject 5’s own admission, “it just looked like gimmicky frothy coffee with some kinder eggs floating inside.” Its apt and striking resemblance to waste matter, heightened by the white bowl containing it, will surely not escape the reader.

In Summary

Most, if not all, artists harbour creative disappointments and failed works. Mistakes are natural, inevitable and useful. In a sense, everything we do is a failure- what other reason would we have to continue making work? In another sense, nothing is, as even failures have value – we probably learn more from them than our successes. In any case, the shame or embarrassment we might feel about our art failures is futile. Subject 5 observes, “that’s part of the process. You can’t polish a turd, but you can at least change your diet to make it smell a little sweeter.”

With regard to how we view others’ artistic misfires, Subject 4 admits, “I do very much enjoy looking at bad art. It fills you with a self confidence and enables you to briefly put your self-loathing and doubt to one side.”…“we should all embrace the crap out there.  We should laugh at it, look at it, learn from it, ridicule it and most importantly be thankful for it, because if nothing else, it makes us feel better about our own art, which is priceless.” Subject 5 succinctly sums it up thus: “I like to see crap because we all do it.”

The brave few that are willing to share their ARTFAILS show us humour and pathos, briefly lifting the veneer of creative confidence to reveal the Petri dish of complications teeming underneath. To confess our Schadenfreude, and to expose our own artistic failings, shows us not in our most favourable light, but as we really are, in all our curious humanity.

A Word in Your Shell-Like: Grottoes and the Overwrought

Descending into a dank airless passage, cold encrustations emerge from the gloom like a garden of calcified mould. Earthy darkness envelops you; a feeling in your gut tells you to turn back towards the bright daylight and fresh coastal air. The experience of exploring the shell grotto at Margate is immersive, haunting and unsettling, but it is also awe-inspiring and delightful.

http://shellgrotto.co.uk/

Its mysterious history is no doubt fascinating. It is, however, the imaginative and sensory experience of it that become distilled in the memory. The mind and senses are assaulted on a number of different levels. The dizzying and unknowable amount of shells used in its creation, the obsessive labour and time taken to set each one carefully into the walls and ceiling, the intricate forms of the shells themselves, and finally a question: why?

The question takes me back to the notion of the ‘overwrought‘, a term I coined in my MA dissertation to define a particular category of objects and sites. I define the overwrought as having, or relating to, the following:

• Labour-intensive endeavours
• Close affinities with the psychological processes pertaining to loss and time
• Acts of commemoration
• Death, memory and desire
• Sedimentary processes – things suppressed, compressed or amassed over time
• Visceral and generative qualities of the human body and nature
• Abundance, profusion and excess

The shell grotto at Margate is the epitome of an overwrought site; a closer examination of the stuff of which it is made might help elucidate further.

Gaston Bachelard‘s The Poetics of Space contains a whole chapter on shells, which is both a concise and elegant phenomenological study of shells, and an honest and human account of the wonder they inspire. He meditates on the “original amazement of a naïve observer” describing it thus:

“Is it possible for a creature to remain alive inside stone, inside this piece of stone? Amazement of this kind is rarely felt twice. Life quickly wears it down.” (p.107)

He continues:

“an empty shell, like an empty nest, invites daydreams of refuge.” (ibid)

These daydreams are of cosiness and self-sufficiency, the economical neatness of having one’s own bespoke dwelling, the ability to retract into a fortress of solitude at a moments notice – a fortress so robust that even the ceaseless and awesome power of the ocean does not trouble it. These daydreams are further enriched by the secret ergonomics of shells, the hidden recesses, which provide fertile ground for the imaginative and curious. Bachelard muses on “the contradictions of the shell”… “so rough outside and so soft, so pearly, in its intimacy. How is it possible to obtain this polish by means of friction with a creature that is so soft and flabby?” (p.115) My own description of the overwrought echoes this, stating that it is in part characterised by “the incremental influence of the miniscule on the seemingly immovable”.

Of those who have been fortunate enough to experience a seaside holiday, and spent happy hours examining the contents of rock pools, who has not wondered at the rubbery, gristly salty attachments fused to the inner cavities of a shell, interspersed with the pallid and vulnerable jelly of its flesh? Furthermore, any of those who are familiar with the sea who have succumbed to their own curiosity and forced open a living shell will understand the resulting deep pang of regret, the sudden awful consciousness of one’s own power over a smaller being. The painful remorse following the destruction of purity and innocence is described with devastating accuracy by Wordsworth in his poem Nutting. Stripping bare an untouched grove of hazel trees for their bounty of ripe nuts, he describes his guilty survey of the aftermath; the barren trees:

“…Deform’d and sullied, patiently gave up
Their quiet being”

http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/3297/

It is not only the curiosity of the individual shell that amazes the visitor to the grotto at Margate, but the sheer number of shells, which is of course but a tiny fraction of those on the beaches, in the oceans, and subsumed into the matrix of the earth on this planet. They provide a teeming abundance of resting places for tempestuous minds.

“…for one “living” shell, how many dead ones there are! For one inhabited shell, how many are empty!”  (Bachelard, p.107)

Another display of this plenitude may be observed in the shell garden at Jersey:

http://www.jersey.co.uk/attractions/shellgarden/

http://jersey.com/English/sightsandactivities/attractions/attractions/Pages/shellgarden.aspx

Perched on a steep hill, both playground and fortress, welcoming and foreboding, the shell garden is an astonishing modern day equivalent of the historic grotto. Entering it feels like trespassing in someone’s private fantasy world, becoming entangled in the web of someone’s lifelong dreams. Perhaps it is, along with the pathological obsession of the serious collector, an attempt to impose order onto nature, in some way to make sense of the unfathomable.

If the reader has the time and the inclination, Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield contains a brilliant and memorable passage depicting the stormy ocean in all its terrifying power:

http://www.enotes.com/david-copperfield-text/chapter-55—tempest

In any case, what better way to normalise and tether the power of the sea, than to create cosy seating places, tiny dwellings and inviting pathways, a microcosmic land of the domestic imaginary.

As I mentioned, ruminating on the wonder of shells has led me to revisit my MA dissertation. The text included close readings of Harmen Steenwyck’s Still Life: An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life of c.1640, and the Ossuary at Kutna Hora, Czech Republic, both of which were called to mind when considering the shell grotto at Margate.

In Still Life…, a directional shaft of diffused light mustily penetrates from the top left corner of the picture, like the soporific and timeless light filtered through the high small windows in Baroque churches. Many of the objects in Steenwyck’s picture are empty containers, their cavernous interiors morbidly echoing the vanity of human endeavour.

The Ossuary is a crypt underneath a church, containing around 70,000 human skeletons, which have been exhumed from mass graves. They have been assembled into a masterpiece of Baroque fantasy, in various different arrangements:

http://www.ludd.luth.se/~silver_p/NewSedlec/index.htm

It is a magnificent, intensely charged and strangely timeless memento mori installation. It exemplifies how Baroque Catholicism introduced decorative exuberance into the once pragmatic task of disposing of human remains.

The auricular style of the Baroque (auricular: Of or relating to the ear or hearing) reached its hysterical and pompous apex in the Rococo obsession with shells and extreme decorative excess. Since the grotto at Margate predates these periods, and the shell garden in Jersey comes some 300 years later, it may be concluded that, while closely related to the Baroque and Rococo, the overwrought transcends stylistic and historic boundaries. These sites demonstrate how obsession, devotion and artisanal labour can become something poignant and wonderful, their disquieting beauty suffused with meaning.

The following quote from Shell Houses and Grottos (Hazelle Jackson, Shire Books, 2001, p.14)  serves as both a summary and an admonitory tale of the psychological dysfunction of such overwrought pastimes:

“In the 1780s Admiral Sir Harry Burrard-Neale employed his former coxswain to create a shell house in the grounds of Walhampton House, Hampshire. It is said that, on completion of the work, with nothing more to live for, the coxswain drowned himself in the Solent.”

Paper Cuts – KO’d by a Photograph

As digital technology increasingly pervades every aspect of modern life, one could be forgiven for yielding to its onslaught and relegating older media to the dusty shoebox of history. It is easy to forget or underestimate the alchemical, indexical power of old photographs. When they act upon you, the abyss between much digital media and a meaningful emotional experience yawns wider. I was painfully and forcefully reminded of this recently, on viewing for the first time some photographs of a loved one as a child. Like Proust’s involuntary memories, plunging the narrator into a spontaneous and heady fug of remembrance, these delicate and innocuous pieces of paper dealt a blow so violent to my emotions that I felt my insides had been rent asunder. As I carefully sifted through them, the bustle of the room fell away into nothing; I was transported into a world not of representations but of relationships: the trusting innocence of a child looking up at its mother for approval; the full and boundless pride of a mother in her baby. The impact was so devastating that on returning to reality, I was intoxicated, reeling with discomposure. Unable to speak, I found myself seeking an empty room in which to weep uncontrollably, scarcely knowing who I was or why I was there.
You cannot choose when a photograph will wound you; you can only allow yourself to succumb to its sweet agony and hope that the current ways we record our lives will provide our descendants with similarly potent fragments of our existence.

One need only to look at this website for further evidence of the power of family photographs: http://dearphotograph.com/

(via Phil Illingworth, who posted the link on his Facebook page this week) http://philillingworth.blogspot.com/

Fine Art Pheromones 2 – continued musings on this year’s art degree shows in London.

Royal College of Art, continued…

Other highlights of this year’s RCA show included Peter Walsh’s insane video piece Demo, a firm favourite with many, which documented his personal tour of protest sites and the media technology used to broadcast from them. Talking directly to camera is always going to result in confessional intimacy, but doing it with such gushing reverence to the things he describes is both comical and endearing. In addition, of course, there are serious issues raised by the open analysis of the machinations of the media, especially in the act of reporting on political action. Walsh’s adolescent excitement about the various models of camera and sound equipment deftly – and genuinely – balanced those out, cleverly using their weight as an anchor for his madcap monologues.

http://peterwalsh.info/videos.html

Nicholas Pankhurst

Another artist who displayed an unabashed adulation of his materials was Nicholas Pankhurst. His thick, layered paintings seem to display a deep emotional engagement with the materiality of paint and the painted gesture. Yes, they are clogged, heavy and slightly awkward- but they are snapshots of a love affair with paint which will probably only grow in its complexity and fervour.

http://www.rca.ac.uk/show.aspx?contentid=512941&dept=Painting&Level1=511825&Level2=512913&Level3=512941

Too many other interesting works were on display this year to list individually, including a great deal of confident, self-aware and smartly executed works across the ‘disciplines‘. From sculpture, Fiona Shaw’s retro art Sci-Fi cave, A Thousand Centuries ( http://www.fiona-shaw.org.uk/work.html ) and Carwyn Evans’ serene row of cast wall-based sculptures were personal highlights, as was Sam Williams’ highly amusing video work. His piece in recent show KnowHow at Campbell works cemented my appreciation of his wry, low-fi commentary on modern life and its absurdities.

http://www.carwynevans.com/

http://www.samuel-williams.co.uk/

http://www.campbellworks.org/content/knowhow

The incorporation of the Testbed space into the degree show presentation was a smart move; hopefully next year it will be less of a ‘printmaking and photography’ area, and more of a mixed show like the rest of the Battersea site.

Goldsmiths BA
One memorable piece from this year’s Fine Art BA show was a metal and corduroy structure, suspended from the ceiling. I can’t tell you who it was by, and Google was (astoundingly) unable to help, so a description will have to suffice. Part pavilion, part oversized 70’s lampshade, the piece alluded to the encounters which might take place underneath its clothy canopy, providing a space of potential communication. It seemed to imply a social functionality, in that suggestive, provisional way that much current work does, but the use of a warm and slightly uncool material such as corduroy neatly offset this.

Abigail Jones

In the same room, a series of drawings by Abigail Jones displayed in rows on the wall provided a pleasing contrast with the sculptural and time-based works on show. A scrappy, feverish intensity and richly suggestive narratives characterised these works, which were cobbled together from everyday incidents, snippets of media reportage and current affairs material, including new items, commentary and pastiche. These elements were drawn together with spontaneous and loose collage, painting and scrawled notes. This makeshift, DIY social commentary, which in places felt slightly embarrassing, seemed like a serious ongoing attempt to take control of the constant onslaught of mediated and received information and re-imagine it using very basic, handmade methods. A valiant attempt at an extremely problematic task.

http://atasteforperfection.blogspot.com/

Royal Academy Schools
It is not the first time, and surely will not be the last, that someone has commented on the ‘slickness’ of the Royal Academy Schools show. Even the ‘dirty’ work here looked clean, for example Laurence Chalk’s installation in the end room. Three fairly mundane objects, a pair of sunglasses, some tangled fishing line and an empty milk carton, were suspended in artfully distressed Perspex vitrines atop banged up plinths; the whole scene framed by a kind of stage-set futuristic apocalyptic silver flooring. A series of cast leather jackets on the wall didn’t really add anything to the piece for me, but the wilful scrappiness made the work stand out from the crowd at the RA.

http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/raschools/archive/#photos=gallery_%252Fgallery.html%253FLgalleryHandleId%253D509

Another piece which stood out for me was Amy McDonough’s presentation of bizarre short films. Refreshingly     idiosyncratic, they combined a demented pathos with dreamlike narratives, tapping in to a half-remembered cultural past and blurring it with a cleverly constructed sense of authenticity.

http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/raschools/amy-mcdonough,520,GAS.html#photos=gallery_%252Fgallery.html%253FLgalleryHandleId%253D520

Slade BA
Some years gel together more than others, and I suspect that this was a year that worked well together. Similar concerns were visible throughout the show, but one felt that they had been approached from a decent scope of viewpoints, rather than a cul-de-sac of self-referentiality. Large sculptural installations and small, careful drawings, for example, seemed to be de rigueur. The obligatory art clichés were present and correct, (welded steel frames, potted plants, blobby formless lumps of clay, crystals..) but in some cases has been deployed effectively as well as knowingly. One mixed-media installation (unfortunately I didn’t note the artist’s details), contained a good example of this. The piece included a large flat screen monitor in a horizontal orientation, with a dirty great splat of clay dumped on its screen. The cracked screen showed a sort of dysfunctional jerky LCD nightmare of seemingly random pattern and colour, which was in itself a rather beautiful subversion of our dominant culture’s obsession with high-end media technology.
Finally, Heidi Smith‘s work was my personal favourite. Her pimped-up makeshift glamour wagon was amazingly flamboyant and over the top; the accompanying photographic works, an interesting body of work in their won right, might perhaps have been better shown separately.

http://heidismith.co.uk/art-work/

Goldsmiths MA
Throngs of shiny-faced, self-aware and talented young people, most of whom are not only to cool for school, but probably too clever as well – all rammed into the exhibitions spaces at Goldsmith MFA show private view, beer in one hand, vintage leather in the other. The rooms were hot; corridors were navigated using the classic PV shuffle and a tight-lipped smile of acknowledgement to your fellow art viewer as you squeeze past them, as close as you would on the tube at rush hour. Under such conditions, it is almost impossible to get a favourable impression of all the work on show. A sound strategy might be deploying a human shield or two, positioning yourself between them and spending a maximum of a few minutes on each work.
Despite these circumstances, and thanks to a friend with a nose for what might interest and/or distress me, I managed to get round the whole show and to develop a serious art crush on one artist’s work. The artist in question is Lisa Selby:
http://www.lisaselby.com/
Her work consisted of some concise and knowing mediations on the age-old format of ‘objects on plinths in white space’. They seemed to function as an open eulogy to sculptural processes and the sensuality of materials, evident in the gorgeous ridges on the clay animals, residues of the casting process. In addition, the work neatly cross referenced mass-produced objects and materials, such as toys and upholstery foam, with the human body and a more traditional sculptural language. Both Karla black and Samantha Donnelly spring to mind.

IN CONCLUSION

Having had more time to digest the sights and sounds of this year’s crop, and to catch the Goldsmiths MFA show, I feel I have a fairly comprehensive overview of the emerging London art scene.
I say emerging, but what does this really mean?  J.J. Charlesworth has written an incisive and irreverent essay for the ICA, which deconstructs our accepted idea of the ‘emerging artist’.

http://www.ica.org.uk/18217/Essays/Not-about-institutions-but-why-we-are-so-unsure-of-them-by-JJ-Charlesworth.html

Two major points from this text are better summarised in his own words:

“…the paradoxical aspect of such formulations of art as ‘emerging’ is that responsibility for art emerging is assigned to itself, or to any other agency other than the institution which in fact enables its emergence… Emerging art only emerges if powerful institutions allow it to”

He goes on to state:

“…the case should be made for an institution which is argumentative, that openly discusses the choices it makes and the art it chooses to represent.’

He was, of course, referring to the ICA itself and to the gallery system in general, but shouldn’t we apply the same level of critique when discussing our art schools? How can the same criteria apply to the evaluation of the work from different institutions, if we fail to acknowledge the differing circumstances under which those works were produced? In acknowledging those circumstances, we may well expose information and interests, which it might be more convenient to quietly ignore. But in doing so without judgement or bias, as far as this is possible, we may be able to get closer to a form of critique which transcends, or at least encompasses, institutional specificities such as location, reputation, branding and use of language.
In light of the current prevalence of institutional critique in art theory and practice, it seems appropriate to call for more awareness of such issues in the annual deluge of criticism and commentary surrounding art degree shows.

END