becky hunter

Northern Art Prize, Leeds Art Gallery, 27 November 2009 - 21 February 2010
Shortlisted artists: Pavel Bϋchler, Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson, Rachel Goodyear, Matt Stokes

Rosalind Krauss’s two-part essay ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America’ (1977) argues convincingly that the art of that period was deeply, and not altogether consciously, conditioned by photography’s ‘implacable hold’. Rooms, the 1976 inaugural exhibition at New York’s P.S.1., is her now-famous example of this. Featuring works such as Gordon Matta Clark’s Doors, Floors, Doors (cut-outs from the building’s structure) and Lucio Pozzi’s P.S.1 Paint (abstract paintings colour-matched to original paint on the derelict walls), Rooms provided evidence of cropping, reduction, flattening, and the ‘point-to-point’ physical connections of indexicality. The 2009 Northern Art Prize’s shortlisted artists each present work that is structured, above all, photographically, demonstrating that this medium’s grip on the contemporary imagination has not loosened over the past three decades.

Pavel Bϋchler is the most experienced of the shortlisted artists. Informed by critical theory of photography, he has, for part of his multifaceted installation, taken mundane found objects – balls of many sizes and states of repair: a football, pool ball (no. 10), tiny bouncing ball and an even tinier transparent plastic sphere – and wedged them between lens and light source in an arrangement of Leitz projectors. The resulting overlapped circles of light are starkly poetic, but it is difficult to decode them or to move beyond the visual to the social content of the found objects. The flatness of the projected image is an understated counterpoint to the banks of bulky apparatus required to produce it. A small, playful piece, Il Castello (2007), places together two worn-down pencils positioned vertically, like two towers. What is left of the embossed brand names reads, from right to left, ‘Castell-O’, Italian for castle. This is an extremely economical architectural model. Both of these works operate within the territory of the index: in Eclipse light is physically oriented; the pencils perhaps refer to ‘work’ or even ‘handiwork’, having been physically depleted during the completion of an unknown task.

Rachel Goodyear’s drawings are usually understood as occupying a gap between fiction and reality; they have been written about in terms of the uncanny and the fairy-tale. But here they seem to continue the exhibition’s trend toward the photographic, with allusions to fashion photography’s darker side made via formal flatness and scaled-down dimensions. Many of Goodyear’s animal images, in particular, appear to have been clipped from National Geographic and Photoshopped into strange new arrangements. Stark distinctions between dark and light areas suggest the effects of a flash; in Darkness Coming (2008) the female subject’s bodily outline contrasts sharply with the rest of her flesh. In the beautiful and haunting Mating Call (2009), a graphite deer with pure white (flash-blinded?) eyes participates in indexicality. Hovering above the creature is a crystalline-frozen cloud, its breath: an index of its own bodily vitality. The artist’s distinctive touch in the pencil rendering might similarly index her own body

Both the duo Crow & Rawlinson and Matt Stokes work directly with film and video. Stokes, the Becks Futures 2006 winner, seems intent on reinforcing his ‘hot young artist’ status by producing a fairly traditional but glamorous film that allows gallery visitors to vicariously experience mosh-pit sweatiness. Shot in anthropological-documentary style on 16mm film, the cinematic big-screen installation, complete with an extremely noisy noise-rock soundtrack, promises a glimpse into the life-shaping intensity of subculture community. Though the film does not deliver the artistic or intellectual impact of some of Stokes’ earlier works, for example The Gainsborough Packet, it seems appropriate to predict a career in Hollywood or MTV for this film-maker. Crow & Rawlinson make more use of film’s potential as vehicle for thoughtful juxtapositions. The unassuming but powerful film Two Eternal Flames was the show’s standout piece for this reviewer. It draws upon classical and sacred myths, bringing together (via projection) torches burning in two distinct locations in Miami, USA: one represents US friendship with its neighbours, the other commemorates invasion. In an interesting move, another of the duo’s video works is displayed in a temporary booth centred in a space filled with selections from the Gallery’s paintings collection. The possible relationships between their four-screen work The Four Horsemen – Death (2009), a compelling piece that exploits the manipulative power of Photoshop-style digital editing, and the salon-style gallery hang are worth musing over.

Significantly, the Prize’s director Pippa Hale does not claim that the artists selected represent the best working in the North this year, let alone in the country. She prefers to characterize the exhibition - with another photographic reference - as ‘a snapshot of the sorts of artists that are practicing here’. While this is an honest acknowledgement of the subjectivity and, perhaps partisan, preconceptions involved in judging contemporary art, it does seem to downplay the value of the work on display as being less than exceptional, reinforcing an outmoded view of the North as culturally inferior to Southern or European cities. This ‘snapshot’ approach (a snapshot being defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘an informal photograph, taken quickly’) is of course an established visual art strategy. Sean McCrum, in his 1991 article ‘Snapshot Photography’, considers the inclusivity of this particular form, noting that ‘the receiver’s view is as creative and subjective in its construction of an image, as its maker’s’. And perhaps this is, after all, a valuable quality of the Northern Art Prize: a reflection and celebration of the supportive environment that exists for the arts in the North, rather than a reductive isolation of stars.

Postscript: If you do make it along to the show, spare some time for the much talked about the Victorian designed Tiled Hall gallery café.

Review now live at White Hot Magazine

For more information see The Northern Art Prize and Leeds Art Gallery

Compare and contrast? Other Northern Art Prize reviews: Guardian, Art Review, Culture24

PHOTO CREDIT: Pavel Buchler, Eclipse, 2009; Mixed Media; dimensions variable; Installation detail; Courtesy Leeds Art Gallery

Lecture critique: Briony Fer, Studiowork, 22 October 2009 at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

Briony Fer’s lecture takes place in the Fruitmarket Gallery’s upstairs space, in which several of Eva Hesse’s never-before-exhibited (nor intended by the artist to be exhibited) paper, wire and rubber test-pieces are on display without the protective cases or rope barriers normally associated with the artist’s fragile works. Fer weaves two main issues together: firstly, her primary impulse in researching Hesse’s test pieces, to question the status of these objects and the terms in which they have been assimilated into art historical discourse; secondly, to discuss her curatorial choice to show these ‘studioworks’, her term of choice, in a contemporary gallery rather than in a museum.

Her argument, that the works do count as ‘the thinnest art’ by ‘the narrowest of margins’, likened by Fer to fragments of Elizabeth Bishop’s writing, that ‘barely counted as poetry’, relies upon wide-ranging and sometimes disparate-seeming evidence. This includes careful visual and technical description of Hesse’s works and working processes (stitching, folding, to make interesting spatial formations), to demonstrate that the studioworks are as formally and technically complex as canonical Hesse sculptures. Theoretically, she draws upon Bataille’s ‘base materialism’ and Catherine de Zegher’s research on relationships between drawings and objects, suggesting the studioworks are closer to being drawings than sculptures.

Comparison to the work of Hesse’s contemporaries, such as Bochner, and to the recent art of Orozco brings up issues of failure and awkwardness in the status of the studioworks, and leads to discussions of their original display conditions, documented in 1960s studio photographs. Structurally, the lecture is an example of ‘starburst’ thinking, producing a range of ideas, theories and examples around the studioworks, rather than each new concept necessarily linking to and informing subsequent points. Stylistically, Fer’s acute sensitivity towards language is evident, in word-play around multiple meanings of ‘testing’, ‘work’ and ‘mess’.

This critique will address the significance of Fer’s lecture in three ways. Firstly, by looking at her curatorial response to Hesse’s test-pieces in the light of other Hesse exhibitions. Secondly, by assessing the persuasiveness of Fer’s use of theories stemming from Bataille’s informe. Thirdly, by briefly noting the similarities between Fer’s ideas and other recent feminist approaches. Each aspect will be discussed alongside relevant material from Fer’s own scholarship in order to position this lecture within her research interests. Fer has published extensively on the dissolution of modernism and on drawing, minimalism, surrealism, objecthood and the art historian’s role. Specifically, this essay will consider her prior work on surrealism and the throwaway, the importance of the studio in postmodern art, and objecthood.

Fer’s research on, and exhibition of, Hesse’s test-pieces, instead of the artist’s drawings or canonical sculptures, demonstrates her intent to break new ground, to introduce new material, into Hesse scholarship. Framing these works, and the lecture, in a contemporary gallery context reinforces Fer’s argument that the studioworks are indeed works of art, even suggesting that her construction of them has pushed them out of their status as test-pieces and produced them as new works of art, with relevance to contemporary interpretive frameworks and art practices. This concept of production of a new art work is described by Bal, 2003, in her essay on Walter Benjamin’s notion of translation, in which she views Bernini’s Saint Teresa as being translated, and therefore re-produced, its hidden potential released, by Louise Bourgeois’ Femme Maison sculpture. This idea of translation also suggests movement: perhaps the movement from the studio, or archived documentary photograph to the gallery, and research lecture slide, is enough to tip the studioworks into the realm of art.

In defending her decision not to use protective barriers, Fer says that she wanted to show the work ‘without it looking like a reliquary’. This challenges the traditional curatorial approach criticised by Lee, of SFMOMA’s 2002 Hesse retrospective, where most work was placed in vitrines or cordoned off, therefore dramatising ‘the question of medium’ and decay. On Tate Modern’s version of this survey, Nixon, 2005, notes that ‘an open cube set on the floor is not adequately represented by a closed cube set on a platform’; the museum setting framed Hesse as a historically significant artist (subject to protective museal constraints) rather than as an experimental young artist in the ‘studio milieu’. Fer’s own interest in the studio is first codified in a chapter on Hesse as a studio artist in her 2004 book, The Infinite Line; though she does not discuss any test-pieces, she notes that in Dorothy Beskind’s 1967 film of the artist in her studio, many works seem to be adaptable, often changing in formation, and that many more works were filmed being made than are now seen in canonical Hesse exhibitions or publications.

This idea of flexibility, multiplicity and instability converges with Nixon’s comment that ‘Hesse continually devised new ways of making and displaying work’; Nixon goes on to criticise the trend of the ‘photographic superego’ that dictates curatorial decisions away from Hesse’s flexible approach in an attempt to exactly recreate the documented past, as in the 1993 Yale Hesse survey. Fer’s choice of a contemporary art setting, minimal protection, careful embrace of the works’ physical condition without attempts at restoration, and deliberate rejection of 1960s photographic installation precedents (she contrasts slides of these images with her much looser curating style) demonstrates a desire to continue Hesse’s experimental, destabilising approach: a fresh curatorial methodology. Fer translates Hesse’s work for a 2009 contemporary art audience well versed in post-1960s theory.
One such theory, first documented as a renegade surrealist concept in 1929, but later developed as a post-structuralist interpretive framework by Krauss and Bois in their 1996 exhibition ‘L’informe: Mode d’emploi’, is Georges Bataille’s informe, or ‘formless’, an anti-modernist, anti-idealist notion defined by base materialism: ‘devolutionary, regressive, low’. Hesse’s open cube, Accession, 1968, with its repetitive, but organic, structure was included in this exhibition; Krauss, 1997, comments on Hesse’s participation in horizontality (a key element of the informe’s lowness) reading her large-scale, collapsing sculpture, Seven Poles, 1970, as a critique of Jackson Pollock’s return to verticality. Fer’s interest in the informe’s ‘baseness… to trigger rot and decay’ extends into much of her published scholarship, for example she relates Agnes Martin’s late 1950s relief work ‘to an aesthetics of the thrown away’.

In her lecture, Fer combines her interest in studio-practice’s proliferation of never-exhibited experiments and models, as seen in Beskind’s film, with an extension of Hesse’s interpretation through the informe, to include its ‘mess or art waste’ aspect – Fer directly references Bataille in her lecture here. Keeping interpretive options open, she uses word-play, saying that the studioworks ‘mess with our minds, mess with neat categories’ but also literally compares works, such as partial papier-mâché casts of balloons, to detritus on the studio floor that might just as easily be thrown out as preserved and valued as art. However, this move (translation?) is not wholly convincing. While Bataille brings heavyweight art-theoretical cachet to Fer’s analysis, Hollier describes his ‘real practice of imbalance’ as ‘a real risk to mental health’; connection to mental illness through biography is something that much recent Hesse scholarship has rejected; Bataille, with his dark political and ethical connotations might simply be too extreme to apply to an ambitious New York artist in the 1960s. Writing in 1995, Fer made a more subtle and persuasive use of surrealist concepts with regards to Hesse, writing that the distanced or ‘skewed relationship to the object’ comes from surrealism, but that the effects of this relationship are ‘neither simply reparative nor simply – at the other end of the scale – desublimatory.’

This 1995 article also discusses the impact of feminism. While Fer acknowledges Lippard’s affirmation of feminine subjectivity in Hesse’s oeuvre, she asserts that what is now needed is ‘the radical possibility of a more precarious subjectivity’ evolving out of feminism. Fer’s interest in the studioworks stems from their connection to the unstable and precarious; her lecture does not mention gender, sexuality or the body, instead focusing on materiality, language and the viewing subject’s (including the puzzled art historian’s) ‘testing’ experience of the pieces. This approach has similarities to Anne Wagner’s reading of Hesse’s work as deliberately destabilising gender categories; like Fer, Wagner then reads a surrealist aesthetic into Hesse’s work: the ‘fantasmatic and the hyperbolic, the absurd and the irrational’. This destabilising approach is becoming typical in Hesse scholarship – even where femininity is foregrounded - as demonstrated by Applin’s and de Zegher’s Fruitmarket lectures, concerning Hesse’s female contemporaries’ conflation of bodily and machine-like imagery and Ettinger’s matrixial (non-binary) psychoanalytic theory respectively.
As Charles Darwent writes, ‘by asking the question, “Are these artworks?”… the Fruitmarket’s show cannot help but answer it.’ Fer’s lecture seems similarly fated to answer in the affirmative due to its gallery context, and well-established theoretical approaches. However, in a 1995 book review Fer praises Foster, for working against ‘the easy assimilation of practice to theory or theory to practice’ in his refusal to force all objects of a certain type into a certain theoretical framework. Similarly, Fer’s disparate ‘starburst’ structure, resistance to tying up loose ends, and embrace of contradiction, may be seen not as a weakness but as an awareness of several possible means of enquiry, and a reluctance to limit the works to a codified textual interpretation at this early stage in their life as works of art on show. Her lecture’s structure appears to mirror her interpretive attitude to the test pieces: she said that the works ‘test us as viewers’, and that she felt pressed to create ‘sample terms’ to describe these exploratory objects; perhaps the lecture was yet another test, for Fer, or for the audience.

Fer’s lecture is relevant to museology and conservation studies as well as art theory. The contradiction involved in raising what is quite possibly studio-waste to the level of, admittedly ‘precarious’, fine art, is also closely related, at least metaphorically, to the ongoing debate on the separation of Art History and Visual Culture, through its questioning of the value and status of these ‘sub-objects’. In this way, the integrated exhibition and lecture are both provocative and significant, as announcements of the studioworks’ debut into art historical, and contemporary art, discourse.

This essay was written for a seminar on my current MA History of Art course.

I fell in love with you when I saw you dancing. Your towering, skinny tallness; the glossiness of your just-shaved jaw; your hands in awkward fists punching the air and out to the sides, you were marking territory and counting time. You always danced in the same spot, a little to the left of the mirror-ball so that its sparkles kissed your right cheek, glittering down your neck.

I was the kid in the lighting booth in the corner of the hall. Self-conscious back then, I never took my eyes off you. In step with the scrunchin’ bassline and zingin’ synths your feet in silver trainers made shiny diagonals while some girl’s dainty white pumps zig-zagged in time. I trained the yellow spotlight on your shoes and the cuffs of your jeans, wishing I might be that girl.

Flicking out your arm you caused another glittery rush, bending ninety degrees at the elbow and up, up, up like the second-hand of an alarm clock. Then two hands at once, in synch, out of synch, bending from the waist, swivelling and popping, spirals of disco light bouncing off your hips - you were the Sixth Form robotics champion, making like a machine while the rest of the school, all neon and black, body suits and baggy pants, stood in a circle and clapped you on.

Shrinking the spotlights to the size of tip-toes, I made my first move in deep blue. When you spun, I spun; when you jumped, I flashed up the wall and met you just as your feet hit the ground, then widened the pools of light so each of your feet had its own halo. You slid your silver shoes along the floor and raised your arms high above your head, so that you made an upside-down Y shape; I slid my halos along with you, changing them from blue, to purple, to red, to white. Swinging a third light into the mix, I beat a pink pulse on your chest.

After that night, I swear you used to glance into my corner sometimes and I’d run the spotlights under your ankles: you would hopscotch through them. Red, blue and yellow splashing your cool white jeans; spinning circles on the floor in primary colours, criss-crossing like Venn diagrams, hovering patterns on the wall behind you.

This story was included as a gallery wall text in James Johnson Perkins’ solo exhibition Meteoric Toy at Durham Art Gallery, 2008.

PHOTO CREDIT (wall text): Lucy Adlington, 2008, her Flickr page. For a larger image, click here.

PHOTO CREDIT (disco ball): Peter Griffin, Public Domain Pictures

Elsner writes that ‘the desire to attain’ the ‘fundamental grounds of meaning in art’ is crucial for art history, even if this goal is unreachable. This focus on desire might be the most accurate answer to Peters Corbett’s question, asking why canonical art requires specialised attention, though Elsner does not probe this desire’s origins. Preziosi sees this desire as ideologically motivated, viewing history as ‘a mode of writing addressed to the present… to the fabrication and maintenance of modernity’, which could be viewed as having negative or positive implications.

Agnes Martin’s grid paintings have strongly provoked this desire (that itself deserves more research), resulting in many scholarly articles. The absence of iconographic content and emphasis on material, composition and line in Martin’s work directs towards approaches that link specific formal details to social, intellectual or autonomously artistic narratives through mediating theories ranging from semiotics to psychoanalysis. Interestingly, an ethical dimension - with similarities and differences to Norton’s explicit conflation of the aesthetic and ethical, cultural values of a work of art, discussed in Preziosi, 1992 – still has a strong presence in many articles on Martin’s grids. For example, Rosalind Krauss, 1992, appears to locate Bataille’s politically and ethically charged informe within Martin’s grids; much has been written on the status of abstraction as a withdrawal from political engagement; also, Martin’s paintings have been discussed by Yve-Alain Bois, 1986, as non-provocative enough to be part of the Cartier collection, which (in research done by the activist artist Hans Haacke) arguably contains no art that poses ethical or curatorial problems, creating a ‘greasy screen’ of cultural cachet to cover up corporate corruption. The history of this ethical strand, and the status of art objects as evidence or ‘carriers of value-systems’, is worth exploring in greater detail as problematic leaps are often made to link formalist works with their culture of origin.

My own desire towards art history comes from an art practice, involving making material, visual responses to modernist painting amongst other artefacts. An important issue, touched upon from at least two angles in the course readings, regards the ways in which art practice itself opens up interpretive frameworks. Firstly, Preziosi outlines Norton’s Ruskinian principle that technical training, for example in watercolour and drawing, is foundational to an understanding of art. My background in contemporary practice, rather than focusing on formalist connoisseurship (criticised by Preziosi), reinforces the point that even a strictly formal work of art is made by a person with a mind, a body, friends, interests and conflicting motives, opening up social, philosophical and psychological interpretations. This also privileges the question of each methodology’s implications for continuing contemporary practice, reflecting back to Peters Corbett’s and Preziosi’s interest in the motivations behind the study of art history, including the construction of the present, which for feminist practitioners writing on Martin (e.g. Pollock) is a key goal.

Secondly, while Norton’s cross-referenced archive, organised to coerce visual connections between objects, is rightly criticised by Preziosi, modern and contemporary art has developed after and within this tradition of artists consciously, visually and conceptually, drawing upon, extending and questioning previous art. Rather than tracking a deterministic evolution of styles, a critical examination of the extension and critique of Martin’s practice by artists such as Hesse, Darboven and Laskey, might be a method to gain insights into Martin’s work, viewing Martin’s grids as living participants in visual discourse rather than as questionable documentary evidence.

Useful Articles

Bois, Y., ‘The Antidote’, October, 39 (Winter, 1986), 126-44.

Chandler, J., Davidson, A., and Harootunian, H., ‘Editors’ introduction: questions of evidence’, Critical Inquiry, 18: 2 (Winter, 1992), 297-99.

Elsner, J., ‘From empirical evidence to the big picture: some reflections on Riegl’s concept of Kunstwollen’, Critical Inquiry, 32: 4 (2006), 741-766.

Krauss, R., Bachelors (Cambridge, 2000).

Peters Corbett, D., ‘Visual culture and the history of art’, in Caroline van Eck and Edward Winters, eds., Dealing with the Visual: Art History, Aesthetics, and Visual Culture (Burlington, VT, 2004), 17-36.

Preziosi, D., ‘The question of art history’, Critical Inquiry, 18 no. 2 (Winter, 1992), 363-86.

This piece was written for a seminar on my current MA History of Art course.

IMAGE CREDIT: Cardboard grid outdoor photograph, Becky Hunter (to see more of my work please have a look at my art page).

In the centre of a single iris are blue veins, never straight, never repeated, never the same thickness all the way down. She knew this because she had been drawing them day after day. She traced their lines into her notebook, carefully measuring tiny angles, tiny distances, minute creases with her fingers and eyes. The iris, a living natural thing, suspended by the leaves wrapped around its flower, in a narrow clear vase. Each morning and each evening she drew the petals with thin, faint pencil marks leading down to the innards where the blue veins disappeared further down into the stem. Black stamens dangled upwards and she tried to match their flexibility in her marks.

She made the drawings to learn to pay attention. Each single line a minute or two where life passed her by, where she had attended to something very particular in a stiller kind of life. A flower could of course be guessed at or imagined, but could only ever be known through looking - at its tissue thin skin, miniscule swerves, spider-leg columns, never making assumptions or predictions, protecting against distractions, to eventually learn a specific and very different rhythm to the natural stroke of her thumb and forefingers holding the pencil.

She had lain the faint drawings on every surface in her room. She lived with them like you live with a frost, thin white and grey patterns traced. She moved slowly, opening and closing doors gently, for one gust can waft a sheet on to the floor, risking footprints. She knew each piece of paper was already marked with thousands of her undetectable fingerprints. The trail of silver-grey irises had become a path through a hundred slightly different kinds of space. Drawings that captured the crisp form of the iris appeared to fix depth into the page, making a pin-pointed space that reared up or fell away from view with perfect perspective. Others felt their way, making space tactile or emotional, or awkwardly compressing the flower on the paper’s surface, disfiguring, crushing space and form alike as in a black hole.

She was tilting her finger and thumb to follow the curve of a petal when an electronic chime announced the first guest. It was her birthday. She had planned to sweep the drawings up into piles to make room for laying the table. The irises in their vase would have made a nice centrepiece and set off the blue serviettes. But the drawn irises still floated on their curling paper lake on every available surface; a delicate ecosystem of observations, some painstaking, some clumsy, some ripped and a few just finished. She dimmed the ceiling lights and pulled the curtains to, a little dazed, ushering in, smiling.

The birthday group assembled on the floor, balancing pink fizz in glasses on their knees. Mark had brought a cake with white layers of icing. She switched off the standard lamp as the white candles were lit one by one, a slow count to thirty. Her room and her friends and her own hands, sleeves and skirt turned black and white and grey. The spaces behind them grew full, then flat, and then full again with shadows that ballooned and burst. Layers of paper lay heavy as law and dainty as icing sugar by turns.

‘I won’t blow them out yet.’

They waited, humouring her.

‘Here. I shall serve each of you.’

She pulled herself off the floor and her shadow slid up the wall. She pushed the small stack of plates behind her and shifted over, kneeling above the iced cake. Facing them, she made two swift cuts and wiped a smear of wax off the knife with her cuff, ‘James, this is for you, don’t burn yourself,’ handing him the first slice. She cut another seven large pieces until each guest cupped a share of the sugary lamp in their fingers. Melting candlewax and butter icing smelled old fashioned, rich and serious.

Thirty inch-high sources of light illuminated eight faces, making their foreheads dark and their lips light. The drawings behind them were made dark grey as each held three or four flames protectively near their own body. She kissed each of her friends on the cheek as the flames burned low. Katy’s voice began softly, ‘Happy Birthday to You…’ They sang until the room was entirely dark and their hands decorated with cold rivulets of wax, white lines tracing the contours of their knuckles. Then the crumbly business of eating without plates, scattering the floor with blossomy chunks of cake, clinking of glasses, shifting of limbs and slowly rising voices as the lamp was switched back on.

She was still smiling, on a carpet island inhabited for one night by good friends. All these tense emotions contained in the finest pencil lines, the boundaries of flowers, an ox-bow lake almost hemming them in. She sat quietly, let Mark and the rest talk and make jokes as they went back and forth from the kitchen, fetching things left to cool in the fridge, opening a window to smoke under. They took care with her drawings, sometimes stopping to look at one, studying it the way you can study a human face, the face of someone you care about. Slowly her friends left with bear hugs at the door.

On her own again, certain of the drawings seemed different. Perhaps those that had been looked at the longest; definitely some of the most awkward attempts appeared stronger, more resilient. She laughed out loud, delighted that the marks she had called ‘disfigured’ were gracefully strange and restless. She laughed again, glad that her drawings were like little babies, somehow growing in response to being paid attention.

This story was written in 2007 in response to some of Hermann Hesse’s short stories, including The Blue Flower, in which his writing seemed to me to take on an incredible slowness in giving much time to look at things and think aloud about what they might mean.

Hesse Extras

Herman Hesse life and art
Novalis, a romantic poet
Full text of Hesse’s Siddhartha on Google Books

IMAGE CREDIT: Wildness in the nature reserve, Durham, Becky Hunter.

During the 1970s (and ongoing) rethink of values and methods in the humanities, stylistic analysis and certain kinds of formal discussion have been avoided, because of the dangerous implications of their grand-narrative determinism and ‘celebrations of national heritage’. The ‘history of the image rather than that of art’ is associated with ‘visual culture’ studies on the politics of representation. However, since the 1990s, formalist and material analysis has made a self-conscious comeback in academic art history.

For Yve-Alain Bois, 1996, ‘attentive’ formalism allows for a close understanding not only of the object, but also of its ‘historical specificity’, in a way that a focus on mere image cannot. With a different theoretical/methodological starting point than Bois (in psychoanalytic, feminist criticism) Mignon Nixon, 1998, writes that ‘the relation between media images… and [Lacanian] theories of subjectivity as constituted in the image… now seems overdetermined’. Determinism may now be seen as less associated with formalism and more with image-politics. She argues that treating all art works as ‘images’ does not reflect what artists are actually doing, particularly in abstract, bodily or ‘subsymbolic’ work, such as Mona Hatoum’s hair grids, but also in photographic works. Thirdly, Carrie Lambert, 1999, argues that Yvonne Rainer’s 1960s deliberate rejection of dance poses that photograph dramatically was a rejection of the ephemeral but spectacular, constructed television image of Vietnam, in favour of grounding in the body’s materiality. In each example, ‘the historical specificity of abstraction’ and of other modes of art practice that do not fit neatly into the category of ‘image’ (perhaps even in a ‘struggle’ against the image), becomes the focus of inquiry.

This course’s readings have contributed to a process of mentally reframing Rosalind Krauss’ ‘The /Cloud/’, 1992, the complex essay that convinced me that Agnes Martin’s ‘classicism’ is still a rich subject for art historical analysis. Rather than being limited as a ‘reductive’ textual treatment, as criticised by Anderson and Zemel, the essay appears to be a deliberate experiment in reconnecting with Alois Riegl’s formalism, while remaining aware of the filter of a century of radical reassessment in the discipline of art history. As suggested in the previous paragraph, with Martin’s works’ abstraction now so carefully described, Krauss might be said to have provided the tools for historical questions to be asked of Martin’s work. In particular, as Bois suggests, to ask what made it possible or significant for this type of work to be made in 1960s New York – and suggesting (as in Yvonne Rainer) an ethics of abstraction that deliberately remains image-less.

A further point made by Bois, and echoed in several recent papers/articles that focus on materiality (for example, Jeffrey Weiss, ‘Cy Twombly’, Artforum, 2008; Catherine de Zegher, ‘Bandage and Binding (Matter and Mater)’, Eva Hesse: Studioworks Conference, 2009), is the formal singularity of each work of art. This return to the physical uniqueness of the work of art must be, in part, an attempted solution to the problem of why art history should be a distinct discipline, but it also responds to the weaknesses of image-analysis, such as a tendency to generalise. Lambert’s and Nixon’s articles each mention Martin, suggesting that the material and formal analyses of her work (begun by Christina Rosenberger, Griselda Pollock, Kasha Linville and Krauss) have much unlocked potential.

Useful Articles

Anderson, F., ‘Review: Bachelors’, Leonardo, 33 (Cambridge, 2000) 329-30.

Bal, M., Bois, Y., Lavin, I., Pollock, G., and Wood, C., ‘Art history and its theories’, The Art Bulletin, 78 no. 1 (March 1996), 6-25.

Lambert, C., ‘Moving Still: Mediating Yvonne Rainer’s “Trio A”’, October, 89 (Summer, 1999), 87-112.

Nixon, M., ‘After Images’, October, 83 (Winter, 1998), 114-30.

Stieber, N., ‘Architecture between disciplines’, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 62 no. 2 (June 2003), 176-77.

Zemel, C., ‘Review: Dada’s Girl’, The Women’s Review of Books, 73 (Old City, 1999), 24-26.

See MOMA for Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A.

This piece was written for a seminar on my current MA History of Art course.

IMAGE CREDIT: Agnes Martin, Faraway Love, 1999; Acrylic and graphite on canvas; 152.40 x 152.40 cm; © Estate of Agnes Martin/DACS, London 2008; Photo: A Reeve.

The work of a conservator involves close observation; scientific, technical and analytical skills; knowledge of labelling, marking and classifying conventions; microscopic attention paid to fluctuations of, for example, moisture or chemical compounds. In his article on photographic representation of the Turin Shroud, Georges Didi-Huberman, 1984, notes that close-up focus on materiality – a formless, physical stain seeping into the canvas weave, as opposed to a distanced, photographic screening - ‘compromises the hermeneutical process’ of traditional theological interpretation.

This refusal of conventional hermeneutics is also a key part of Christina Rosenberger’s scholarly approach to Agnes Martin’s paintings and drawings. She aims to combine ‘examinations of paintings, analysis of materials, archival research, oral histories and traditional art historical research’, including looking at conservation reports and paying detailed attention to the objects themselves. She suggests that Martin’s paintings have been talked around so repetitively, ‘overlooked’ as material objects, because they are ‘so difficult to reproduce’; their delicate markings and varying visual effects are almost impossible to photograph convincingly and so the artist’s writings and interviews (constructing ‘what Martin wanted us to see’) often frame the debate in place of visual/material analysis. Rosenberger’s use of her background in conservation research therefore has several implications for the study of art history. Both received wisdom (the association with landscape, the sublime, solitariness) and explicit artistic intention, as well as dependence on photographic reproduction, may be challenged or qualified through comparison with what is actually, physically there.

However, the issue is more complex than this. Mythologising the artist, or over-dependence on notions of artistic intention in the conservation process, as well as reification of the decomposition of unassuming materials, must also be dealt with. For example, an art historian’s critical perspective might have been useful in mediating between conservators and the artist Robert Rauschenberg in the conservation of decayed cellophane tape holding together an early collage. The yellow-brown patina of age had to be preserved, according to the artist’s wishes (which in US copyright law must be adhered to), while the function and structural integrity of the tape was improved using new adhesives. As a result, the tape acquired new art historical significance and the artist created new meaning for his work.

Alistair Rider, 2009, provides an alternative model: he treads a careful, philosophical and art historical path around the physical condition of Eva Hesse’s latex, cheesecloth and paper sculptures. While Pamela Lee sees SFMOMA’s presentation of Hesse’s disintegrating latex works in protective boxes as dramatising ‘the question of medium for Hesse’s art’ at the expense of other contextual or historical factors, Rider finds meaning, and rich historical potential within this decay. For him, the degrading of these materials (physical ‘fragility’ such as the darkening and cracking of latex in No Title, 1969) suggest a ‘precariousness’ that is refracted and intensified throughout his discussion of Hesse’s artistic relationship with Richard Serra. Acknowledging that academics working on earlier periods must routinely deal with the meaning (or the obscuring of meaning) in a work’s material composition and aging process, perhaps including the darkening of varnish on an early modern panel painting, Rider uses the precariousness associated with Hesse’s materials as a metaphor for Judith Butler’s notion of precarious vulnerability in humans, asserting an ethical claim on us, ruining our autonomy. He then applies this concept of ruined autonomy to the intersection or integration of Hesse’s and Serra’s work in a series of sketches made by Hesse of a group of Serra’s balanced metal sculptures, in which the sculptures are drawn as opened-out and off-balance, ‘disarming their threat’.

Neither artist’s vision is autonomous in this sketch, and new readings of both artists’ oeuvres, informed by the other, begin to emerge.

Useful articles

Baldwin, A. M., ‘The Wayward Paper Object: Artist’s Intent, Technical Analysis, and Treatment of a 1966 Robert Rauschenberg Diptych’, Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, 38 (Autumn-Winter, 1999), 411-28.

Didi-Huberman, G., ‘The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain)*’, October, 29 (1984), 63-81.

‘Harwood Museum of Art. Press Releases. New Mexico’ [Press release for Christina Rosenberger Gallery Talk on Agnes Martin, 11 August 2006].

Lee, P. M., ‘Eva Hesse: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’ [Exhibition review], Artforum (May, 2002).

Rider, A., ‘Precariousness from front to back’ [Conference Paper], given at the conference, ‘Eva Hesse: Studiowork’, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 21-23 October, 2009.

Sack, S. P., Tahk, F. C. and Peters Jr., T., ‘A Technical Examination of an Ancient Egyptian Painting on Canvas’, Studies in Conservation, 26 (1981), 15-23.

This piece was written for a seminar on my current MA History of Art course.

IMAGE CREDIT: Becky Hunter, stretched piece, 2001.

Studioworks promotional video

ARTIST ROOMS: Agnes Martin, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
6 August - 8 November, 2009

Writing on the dancer and choreographer Yvonne Rainer’s deliberate rejection of photogenic poses in the 1960s, Carrie Lambert focuses on the absence of image as an ethical practice. Lambert reads Rainer’s incremental dance moves as a refusal of the ephemeral, but spectacular, triumph of the constructed television image: specifically, constant media depictions of Vietnam. Instead, the materiality of the body as a safe place, a retreat, is sought, a place that keeps on moving, slowly. These ideas came to mind when viewing the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s recent exhibition of some of Agnes Martin’s late abstract paintings. Perhaps these ideas on the politics of withdrawal will resonate with some of Agnes Martin’s late works.

All eight of the paintings have a forceful physical presence that, if one wanted to be deliberately and provocatively reductive, could be termed masculine. In contrast to feminist art historian Griselda Pollock’s experience of Martin’s work, recorded as ‘contemplative, withdrawn, unbombastic’, for me these works are, for some reason, more than a little disturbing. This is perhaps due to their larger-than-body breadth, thick-set square shape, and solid metal frames that reflect sharp lines of silver light and produce a thick, black shadow all the way around the canvases. Viewing is demanding and, to some extent, painful. While from a distance there is a vague sense of atmosphere, up close, details continually pull at the eye to move on, making it impossible to take in more than a small section at once. Rather like Rainer’s anti-camera pieces of choreography, part of the challenge does come from each painting’s resistance to being grasped as a whole image. However, there is a greater sense of unease within the paintings.

For example, in attempting to contemplate Faraway Love, 1999, there is a marked contrast between the horizontal direction of the hyper-sensitive pencil lines that mark each pale blue band’s boundary (along with the horizontal current of those pastel bands), and the multi-directional, plump textured strokes of primer that operate in patches, underlying the blue wash, yet in seeming defiance of the flowing linearity of the painting’s structure. Similarly, in Untitled No. 5, 1998, watery vertical brushstrokes create an inner conflict within the regular horizontal spaces. In both works, and indeed in all of the horizontally-based, pastel paintings on show, a sharp, anxious tension is integrated into the visual field, and into the viewing experience, through this contrast or conflict of directions. Briony Fer, writing in the catalogue to the 2005 Drawing Centre 3 X Abstraction exhibition, which featured Martin’s drawings, comes close to describing a near-violent core in the paintings’ effects. While she focuses on the subjective experience of boundlessness that ‘invites a contemplative gaze’, at one point Fer makes a sudden switch to mechanical, even aggressive, terminology, to observe that a painting by Martin ‘bolts the viewer to it.’

Half of the works in the Artist Rooms show are titled; there seems to be no rule, nor date range, guiding the selection of which works are linked with words and which remain nameless – perhaps an equally loaded state. Swooning, optimistic titles such as Faraway Love, as well as Happy Holiday and I Love the Whole World, both 1999, and Gratitude, 2001, feel somewhat hollow, ironic or downright unpleasant, in the face of such sturdy, but tense and difficult, abstractions. Fer again provides some illumination, in contesting that ‘Martin is much cannier about language that usually thought’. She notes that there is a peculiarity in the manner in which the words relate to the work, suggesting a ‘dissonance’ between the title and the work, rather than a straightforward descriptive or explanatory connection. Considering the titles in this lateral way opens up very different dialogues with the named works, in which tones of disappointment, denial or anxiety might be detected.

A standout in the exhibition is Untitled No. 4, 2002, a grey painting, far murkier than much of Martin’s well-known oeuvre, perhaps recalling earlier, denser, darker, oil on canvas works, such as The Dark River, 1961. Darkness aside, its most obviously unusual feature is its composition. Comprising eighteen vertical stripes - marked with heavy, uneven graphite lines, overlaid imprecisely with thicker painted lines that at some points blend into the canvas weave and at other points blot out the pencil marks – verticality as a central motif, rather than the producer of tension, is a crucial surprise this late in Martin’s practice. Rather than appearing at all conducive to contemplation, it is very difficult to find in this painting the atmospheric boundlessness of the horizontally-focused paintings or of Martin’s trademark grids, whose geometry does seem to dissolve into blanket-softness at a certain viewing distance. However, viewed up close, Untitled No. 4 is fascinating in its preservation of the signs of failure. Technically, the application of thin acrylic paint is clumsy, wobbly, loose, demonstrating a distinct lack of the tight control that exposes conflict, as described earlier. Like a watercolourist, Martin seems to be using the white, exposed canvas as an active element in this work. However, much of the coarse-grained material has been overworked, leaving tiny white and grey clusters of scars, resembling paper after it has been erased from one too many times. Anxiety in this work is meshed with an acceptance of failure.

Unfortunately, photographic press image rights were available for only two of the eight of the paintings on show, and there were no images accessible, either on postcards or in catalogues, of the enigmatic Untitled No. 4. This however furnishes a final comparison to Rainer’s dance ethic. Like Rainer’s works, Martin’s paintings are notoriously unreproducable photographically, leading to fixations on their supposed delicacy and pale quietness, framed by repetitive information on the artist’s life and writings. However, in the flesh, like the dance, the abstract painter’s works are experimental and assertive in their materiality, both in their size and thickness, and in the variety of painterly techniques employed. Perhaps Martin too has sought refuge in the physical work of art, though the reasons behind this withdrawal – political or personal - remain the subject for further research.

Review now live at White Hot Magazine

For more information, see the Scottish National Galleries website and Tate’s Artist Rooms project

Compare and contrast? Other Artist Rooms/Agnes Martin reviews: The List, The Telegraph, Edinburgh Festival, MAP

IMAGE CREDIT: Agnes Martin, Happy Holiday, 1999; Acrylic and graphite on canvas; 152.40 x 152.40 cm; © Estate of Agnes Martin/DACS, London 2008; Photo: A Reeve

Dance With Camera, Philadelphia ICA, Sept 11 2009 – March 21, 2010

What does it mean to dance with the camera? Jenelle Porter, curator of this first large-scale investigation of choreography made for the screen, focuses on the way in which interdisciplinary practice has ‘demolished creative traditions and hierarchies’, impacting on fine art, cinema, dance and even MTV videos. Using John Cage and Merce Cunningham’s inclusive, ‘anything goes’ methodology as a jumping-off point, this extensive exhibition of film, video and photography (with an additional screening programme) deals with key issues in video dance, involving the notion of an informed collaboration with the camera as stage, audience and co-performer.

Faithful to its anti-hierarchical stance, the show’s design places chronologically disparate works in historically flexible relationships. Kelly Nipper’s recent, formally balanced, self-portrait stills are displayed alongside Mike Kelley’s complex video work; both diagonally oppose Eleanor Antin’s 1973 Caught in the Act: balletic photographs and a film documenting their production. The show’s layout offers the viewer a vital role in producing an individual, selective narrative, perhaps reflecting upon Cage’s interest in chance. The light, plastic stools scattered across the gallery, to be picked up and set in front of any video-screen, augment this open approach.

Cunningham and Charles Atlas’ seminal Fractions I, 1977, works sensitively with the camera’s multiple functions, merging the camera’s specificity with the choreographer’s authority through persistent focus on the corporeal. Using live-feed video in stacks of on-set monitors, performers’ actions are repeated from various angles and distances; dancers’ bodies are obscured, doubled or extended during their interaction with the live footage. The film exploits the qualities of early video and the camera’s interference with the performance, as dancers’ figures become grey forms that pull in and out of focus, articulating the depth of the studio against the flat screen, their movements emphasized by a blur or halo effect.

Flora Wiegmann negotiates the conflict between choreographer and camera by both pushing and questioning the notion of non-hierarchical collaboration. For Adaptive Lines, 2007, the dancer responded to each specialist colleague’s decision (on location, costume, soundtrack, direction) by restructuring her choreography. Harsh editing, 360 degree views, speed fluctuations and varying light conditions and grains reinforce the precise strength of Wiegmann’s movements; the dancer’s body appears powerfully immune to temporal or spatial constraints.

Like Antin’s film, in which photographer and dancer work with touching amity while maintaining professional distance, Tacita Dean’s 2007 reinterpretation of Cage’s 4’33’’, reveals a human presence behind the camera. Cunningham’s nuanced seated performance – shifting positions only to mark the three movements of the piece - is recorded on 16mm film. The cinematographer integrates into his own camera’s stage-space by recording his reflection in a greasy studio mirror; his arm position alters in time with the dancer/choreographer’s infrequent movements. The camera itself is therefore humanised through the activation of its operator’s body, becoming dance-partner rather than being a monocular, imposing documentary device.

While the competing hierarchies of art, film and dance are not entirely ‘demolished’, dancing with the camera will continue to stimulate a compelling, productive tension within contemporary practice.

For more info on the show and screenings/lectures see the ICA’s website.

MAP Magazine is a quarterly, international contemporary art publication based in Scotland.

Jeff Koons: Popeye Series, Serpentine Gallery, 2 July - 13 September

Writing in the November/December 2008 issue of Frieze, associate editor Dan Fox described a theoretical parallel to the economic ‘credit crunch’ to be found in contemporary art. Labelling it the ‘content crunch’, Fox defines it at as the realisation that ‘meaning in your work only resides there on credit and that all the chatter around your career has been about everything but the art itself.’ Despite Jeff Koons’ ongoing use of personal narratives, sky-high price tags and pop-cultural borrowings, one would be ill-advised to apply this concept too swiftly to the artist’s oeuvre. Not only has Koons in the past made iconic visual statements – picture his stainless steel Rabbit, 2003, or topiary Puppy, 1992 – in 2005 he was elected as a fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, demonstrating heavyweight artistic status.

However, in its press release for Koons’ Popeye Series exhibition (the artist’s first major UK solo show) the Serpentine Gallery courts reference to the current recession in a way that demands a response, in terms of economics and in an examination of actual content. According to the press release, ‘in this current period of economic recession, [Popeye] is a fitting character to rediscover and explore’ because the cartoon sailor was invented back in 1929 during the Great Depression. Yet while the retail price of a top Koons has reportedly halved since the current economic downturn, the artist’s reputation was built during the 1980s boom and his mass/consumer-cultural motifs are usually thought of as less subversive and more celebratory of our banal and surface-driven preoccupations.

The Serpentine exhibition displays a mixture of imposing, headachey-bright oil paintings and coloured aluminium and steel sculptures modelled after inflatable swimming pool accessories. Of instant appeal in the first gallery is Moustache, 2003, a black ‘moustache’ shape, styled in the manner of a wrought iron gate, suspended on chains and flanked by trademark aluminium ‘inflatable’ toys. Part of the work’s pull comes from the visual breathing space allowed by the black (in place of loud colour) and the moustache’s linear design that demarcates real spaces in the gaps between the lines. This is one of the only works in the show that interacts with the space of the gallery itself. Perhaps as a result of a fairly recent art school education, I feel more at ease with sculpture articulating existing space, rather than defiantly asserting its own form, as much of Koons’ work does (more on that later).

The paintings, such as Popeye, 2003, generally provide no place to rest. Distressingly, the eye roams across the computer-generated evenness of the painting’s surface; the experience is a little like looking at a Pollock, except in place of a modernist psycho-spirituality there is the popular and banal. Cartoon figures; naked female bodies; clothing; motifs borrowed from nearby sculptures (shiny, inane lobster); Popeye and Olive Oyl; are spread alongside what seem to be carefully scanned and copied gestural, painterly, wash marks. To return to the question raised earlier of the ‘content-crunch’, perhaps Koons, with his references to Dali (lobster, moustache) and gestural, expressionist painting, is calling in the art-historical backup. As a sculptor friend recently pointed out to me, during a recession there is a greater demand from patrons and buyers for meaningful, cultural capital. If Koons can’t provide this through the conventional means of the fetishized artist’s touch – even his oil paintings are fabricated by assistants – then careful linking of his work to art historical traditions with cultural cachet may perform a similar role.

However, this review may not yet end on such a tired note. A recent interview with Koons by the (UK) Guardian’s Jonathan Jones revealed a very different side of the artist, prompting a second, gentler approach to the show. Koons talked candidly with Jones about his relationship with Italian porn star La Cicciolina and the subsequent, painful, legal problems regarding custody of their child. “That estrangement from his now teenage son has become part of the meaning of his art… When his son was born, he became interested in the simple shapes and colours of the baby’s first toys.” Rather like Julian Opie’s interest in the simplest of linear signs apparently emerging from watching his young daughter play with cartoon and simplified figures, it appears that Koons hoped to make art that his own small child could relate to. Said Koons: “I was trying to make art that my son could look on in the future and would realise I was thinking about him very much during these times… that he can look and see my dad’s thinking about me, but to also embed in these things something that is bigger than all of us.” Interestingly, the silent, tense gallery atmosphere of Popeye Series was broken by a small child’s delight at a sculpture I might otherwise have overlooked. A totem of sorts, it comprised a stack of orange-brown, identically grinning monkeys of the type you might find on chocolate packaging. The gallery attendant, the mother making chimp noises, the child in the buggy and I smiled and laughed and suddenly the works seemed to have a social function other than as commodities.

A third approach, suggested by a painter friend, would praise Koons for his ‘unashamedly sculptural’ sculptures, alluded to earlier. In his article on the ‘content-crunch’, Fox opposed shallow, content-less works with art that attempts to tackle ‘serious, long term, aesthetic problems.’ Since the idea of sculpture in the expanded field was documented in the 1970s, the value of sculpture itself has been thoroughly questioned, to the extent that many artists who self-consciously try to extend ‘sculpture’ today seem embarrassed to produce anything so straightforward as an assertive material object. For Koons to unabashedly dive into this serious, aesthetic issue, producing metal objects that are not only representational (the rubbery, weightless characteristics of inflatable beach toys, exemplified by Acrobat, 2003-09, right down to the seams, tucks, and deflated wrinkles are convincing) but also self-contained, suggests that there is far more to his work than pop-cultural mirroring. Taking into account his engaging personal narratives and formal defiance, perhaps there is more beneath the surface of Koons’ art than even the artist himself would usually admit.

Review now live at White Hot Magazine.

Compare and Contrast? Other Koons: Popeye Series reviews - Guardian - Telegraph - Independent

Update (3.12.09) - now also available in print version in White Hot vol. 2! Click here to for more info or to purchase

IMAGE CREDIT: Jeff Koons, Caterpillar Ladder 2003, polychromed aluminium, aluminium, plastic, 213.4 x 111.8 x 193 cm, c. 2009 Jeff Koons.