Modern Landscapes, 20th-27th November 2010

Exhibiting with Copperas GAP in a group show at the CompARTment space in the Open Market, London Road, Brighton, from Saturday 20th November to Saturday 27th November.

Fellow exhibitors are the founder members of the Copperas GAP collective, check them out on the website. Should be a good show!

Ooh er Missus

"The vicar's sponging his aspidistra again"...

Tate Britain with its Rude Britannia exhibition celebrates the satirical, silly, smutty and saucy in the nation's visual arts. Some great stuff but the overall effect was a bit like having a pub boor telling jokes then insistently explaining them. A tad unfair perhaps, but somehow the subversive wit evident in a lot on display is diluted by its being brought together on such a scale. A sneaky peak at Viz comic tucked into your Tolstoy probably has more impact than prolonged immersion in it, and historical contextualising does tend to detract from both the fun and any shock value.

The exhibition would make a good book (and of course it has), but as a show big portions of it felt like padding. As a book too, you would be able to avoid the people explaining the jokes to each other too "it's a lampoon, you know".

So, what isn't padding? The video piece that juxtaposed scenes of Bernard Bresslaw and Kenneth Williams in 'Carry On Up the Khyber' with sexually explicit Gujarati dialogue was full-on and direct. The double entendres become single entendres become robust sexual swearwords (but Simon Bates wasn't there to warn us it was a certificate 18 video); the images of 'browned up' pantomime gurning from messrs Bresslaw and Williams has an unsettling quality in this subverted context, twisted and wrong but much the better for it. Like the most effective humour it confronts taboos, and is crude and sophisticated at the same time.

Sexual swearwords - the best ones are aren't they? Even if Simon Bates would somewhat disapprove. He liked them too, really.

What else? Photographs of iconic moments of 20th century reportage recreated by residents of old folks homes. The Ruby-Oswald shooting, the napalmed Vietnamese, scenes of historical drama with a cast of pensioners in cardigans and slippers. Exploitative or inclusive, there is poignancy and absurdity in these images.

Jake and Dinos Chapman's 'Exquisite corpses' etchings. The old game of folding paper, pass the drawing - taking turns to fill in the heads, torsoes, groins, legs; as if Goya, Fuseli, Hieronymus Bosch and Gerald Scarfe were playing it.

Angus Fairhurst video performance: A Cheap and Ill-fitting Gorilla Suit. Good title that one, and the piece itself is cartoonish, slapstick, irreverent and wierdly moving - the gorilla suit (one of the iconic comedy costumes) deteriorates through the performance leaving a much less hairy inner man.

So, how much out of ten would I give this exhibition? ...er, I'd give it one. Fnarr fnarr. Etc.

Oldies but goodies at the Ashmolean

Visited the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and its current exhibition on The Lost World of Old Europe.

Classical and pre-classical civilization artifacts have always seemed potent objects to me, and this collection really had me fascinated, especially so as it was representative of a culture that was previously unknown to me: the un-named (as pre-text) peoples around the Danube valley from 5000-3500 BC. That predates even Ancient Egypt by a good millennium and a bit, and Stonehenge by maybe over 2000 years.

The 'Old Europe' tag by the way is correctly counter to Donald Rumsfeld's definition - he would have referred to Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova as New Europe, but hey, turn of the millennium geo-politics and prehistoric archeology probably shouldn't mix.

What impressed me most about this exhibition and this culture, was the really staggering sophistication and variety of imagery and techniques represented in the collected objects. Figurines of big-bummed women (a council of sunbathing goddesses), animals, great ceremonial drinking vessels beautifully designed for decoration or worship (what's the difference?); fired clay, jewellery in gold, copper and shells provide the Old European bling.

I can't help but be drawn to the abstractions and ritualistic imagery that occur in the design of artifacts from different cultures, and these Old Europeans had some great visual motifs up their sleeves: pre-paisley spermatozoic shapes recur, zig-zags, concentric rings, odd maze-like partitions and corridors of lines.

A new word to me: pintadera. This is a baked clay object with a pattern in relief, like a seal, used to print designs onto other pottery and fabrics. A lovely intact example had the handle sculpted to the shape of a tiny foot. 7,000 years ago these pre-Bulgarians were pretty nifty little designer-makers.

The other highlight of a trip to the Ashmolean right now is a selection of drawings and paintings donated from Howard Hodgkin's private collection of Indian art. These works from Mughal Empire (pre-British Raj) India all depict elephants: tamed, howdah-topped elephants in procession, on hunting expeditions, elephants that are comical, horny, dignified, majestic. The draughtsmanship is exquisite, the colours rich; these are lovely images. Old boy Hodgkin not only has great sensibility and ability as a painter, but he's got bloody good taste as a collector too.

Hodgkin Zings

Recent paintings by Howard Hodgkin are on show at the Modern Art Oxford gallery, in an exhibition called 'Time and place'. The old boy is getting better and better, his work becoming bigger, smaller, looser, purer, rawer.

For this traveller, footsore and soulweary, his paintings were a real pick-me-up. Halfway round the show walking into the upper gallery, I couldn't quite stifle the slightly undignified art critical response: 'Gawd, I'm going to cream my pants; fucking gorgeous'. The direct cause of this half-stifled profanity was from being faced with a series of four very large paintings on unprimed plywood. The second one. I want. Badly. It is titled 'Where the deer and the antelope play' (the other three in the series also titled from lines from the song 'Home, home on the range'). As a series from left to right they can be seen as chapters in a visual essay on landscape painting, from the literal - blue sky above a horizon, to the suggestive - scattered daubs of blue or green, broken, sparse, punctuating the surface.

'Where the deer and the antelope play' is closer to the literal end of the scale than one normally associates Hodgkin. A view (presumably a remembered American landscape, the rural idyll of the song being referenced), seen possibly from a sheltered or interior space. A sunlit field below vibrant reds and blue. That sunlit field is the honeypot: its zingingest yellowgreen almost too much for the eyes. Painted for that sudden alchemic lighting that slams its subject closer, throwing the viewer forwards from a shady spot into the light towards its subject. For me it is that moment when passing through a shady wood you are confronted with a patch of brightness ahead, almost too bright, shimmering, appearing unreally close, where the sun has burst through the canopy of cloud and tree-cover.

There are over twenty other paintings on show in addition to the centrepiece big four and nearly all evoke weather and landscape as their obvious themes, and as ever with Hodgkin, the emotional memory associated with them. The titles reference this more literally too: Mud, Leaf, Sky, Big Lawn.

I know Hodgkin finds the term beautiful to be an insult when applied to his paintings, but fuck it, Howie baby, I think they are fierce, challenging, difficult, often violently emotional and increasingly raw, potently immediate, but these paintings are gorgeous.

In contrast to the massive scale of the big four, there is an exquisite miniature titled Leaf. A single brushstroke, a fluid folding sweep of green on board, trace of oil separating deliciously from the pigment into the grain of the surface. It evokes the purity and simplicity of line of great Japanese woodcuts. It is also interestingly quite conventionally framed, though you can see even so that his brush licks the inside edge of its borders.

A Hodgkin trademark is the layering and reworking of paint over not only the canvas but its frame. Here there are several paintings that subvert even that, and also attest to Hodgkin's looser more immediate style, where he has painted his framed works on the reverse of the frames. It is as if in need of something to paint on, he has seen an older painting hanging on the wall, and simply turned it round the other way and got to work. Sounds simple, but I find that quite a lovely idea, though a tell-tale twist of hanging wire would perhaps be too much. I resisted the urge to sneak a peak at what was on the other side.

I came back a few days later, and loved all of these paintings again, more.

Trip to the countryside

So, nature boy, what have you seen?

I have seen a fox. I startled the fox, but it didn't seem very startled. The fox looked more as if it was calmly retimetabling a dinner appointment.

I have seen the bunny that the fox wanted for his tea. The bunny looked like Thumper but deader. Prepped for Reynard, a crimson medal proud on his puffed chest; a transfer of lippie on cotton wool. If you caint say nuthin nice, don't say nuthin at all, unThumped his last. Reynard said nuthin at all: actions, words, volume.

I have seen pylons linked across the landscape, noticed their shiny bits, not just their matte grey bits.

I have seen swans and their ugly cygnets. I gave them no chance to break my limbs with a single beat of their wings.

I have seen butterflies, that I played chicken with. I am the king of butterfly chicken, but I don't always win. Some butterflies force the lose-lose/win-win/tie, like the computer playing noughts and crosses in WarGames: Mutual Assured Indestruction. Nick Berry plaintively sang 'Every Loser Wins'. He was wrong.

I have seen dragonflies, but dragonfly chicken is different. Dragonflies, even the flirty blue ones with their winking lingerie wings, exist in a different temporal plane, flitting, jaunting in and out of vision and space. They have probably visited far off times and places in other dimensions in the time it takes one oaf-stride to land desire-pathwards.

I have seen a mallard that, effortful flapping, rushed skywards, said 'Duck!' and thought of Groucho Marx (me not the mallard).

I have seen Wind-in-the-willowsy riverbanks and checked them here and there for submerged bodies, peering up at me, naked probably (the bodies and me), but didn't see any. I didn't have the dredging equipment or the dredging inclination to explore deeper, more thoroughly.

I have seen horses (2). One trying to open a fence, failed. The other trying to eat grass, succeeded. This is nearly a joke, but isn't one. Except of the 'it's funny cos it's true' variety. Not all true things are funny, ask unThumper.

On hearing of a death

Don't normally do obits, and this isn't going to be one. But Frank Sidebottom has passed. I repeat Frank Sidebottom has passed. (This is a personal reference - I was in a Times Square record-mega-store when Barry White's death was announced in this way on the store tannoy). Morbid humour envisions Frank Sidebottom playing at Barry White's funeral, and vice versa. Perhaps Mr. Sidebottom will get a full Jacko send-off, mourners donning the papier mache Sidebottom noggin, a mourning party of little Franks around a bulbously top-heavy coffin.

Rilke's strip of reality on hearing of a death: the burst of sunshine and real trees seen more clearly. What do you see when someone, anyone, dies? Celebrated talented people die, as do the uncelebrated talented, the celebrated untalented, and the uncelebrated untalented. Even cartoon characters unreal in a real world, die.

You know they do. They really do.

Mark E. Smith in a papier mache head. One of those bonkers one-offs. Absurdist comedy, chants, songs, visuals from the child's intersection between delight and nightmare, uncanny inhabiting of a persona wholly unaccountable but wholly grounded in a sense of place. I sound wanky now, but if you have love for the North West that produced The Fall and The Smiths, and Eric Morecambe and Half Man Half Biscuit, then Frank Sidebottom is up there too, nasally twanging on over his bontempi keyboard.

Even to a southern ponce kid, who had yet to live in the North West (I later did for a few years), seeing Frank Sidebottom invade kids' TV in the 1980s, there was a lunatic mixture of eccentricity and groundedness; this wasn't Timmy Mallet whackiness. This character was about something, represented something, a certain kind of entertainment, (his performance style stripping the cruelty from the patter of a working-mens-club M.C., mashing musical comedy of George Formby tradition through a post-punk meat grinder), but also the concerns of where he sprang from: the weather, the football, the music, the telly, class, family, the local shops: not the voice (no such thing), but definitely a voice of the region. Timperley has lost its bard.

Out of ungrasp, in unjump

Out of ungrasp, in unjump.

New large painting exhibited during Open Studio weekend at Trafalgar Studios. All new paintings will be updated on my website soon. http://www.henryrowsell.co.uk/

Eno's you know... (77 Million Fondant Fancies plus 2 Horses)

So, Brighton Festival has been and gone for another year. Another cycle now of vaguely thinking: should've made more effort to see more things, take part in events, savour the focus on arts in the city. Personally I felt that this year when I was in town there was a tad less liveliness to it than I can remember, less people on the streets with arty-spends on their agenda; belt-tightening all round, a firmer grip on purse-strings, reducing the public appetite for things less essential. A blazing hot weekend just now, and the long queues for ice-cream and the ladies loos on the beach, put the efforts of the rest of an arts-focussed May in perspective. The Sun God rules this town.

Anyways, as a recovering arts-apathy recidivist myself, I made it out for a few things. Brian Eno, this year's Brighton Festival guest curator/director, had two visual arts installations that I saw.

The first, 'Berlin Horse' at the Lighthouse, 8 or 9 mins of video set to some ambient plinky from Mr Eno. The visuals are not Eno's, the film is a piece by Malcolm Le Grice originally made in 1970. A horse trots round and round. This simple footage and the central image is abstracted by various effects, degrading the picture quality: filtered flaring colour, superimposed negative-positive tonal changes, solarised over-saturated colour changes. A different older newsreel sequence of another horse tearing round pulling a cart is edited in; shifting tones, colours and abstraction continue. I loved it. Beguiling, beautiful, profound, a lovely example of film art dealing with the fleeting sense of image, time, movement. And reminds me too that horses without jockeys look ace.

77 Million Paintings at Fabrica. Big number, big art. A digital light-show mosaic of changing abstract colours and images. The mosaic tiles are essentially flat screen tellies of different ratios, HD of course, twelve slots in a geometric sun/flower pattern. The overall effect of the installation aims towards Zen, but the instant reference is stained glass window. The space and setting bring religion (the Fabrica gallery occupies a deconsecrated regency church), not the monumentality of a cathedral-cavern (St Paul's London, Siena, St Peter's Rome etc) that a scale up for the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall could supply, more like the reverence and intent that Larkin reflects on in his Church Going: a serious house on serious earth.

When I popped in, it was perhaps too brief a visit. It is intended to be an immersive experience; there was an array of comfy seating in the dark: Stoner TV. I stayed for a 10 minute sequence of iterations, and found its ever changing stained glass a beautiful thing. A selection of fondant fancies on Burberry. An abstract collage inspired by Carle's Very Hungry Caterpillar (a watermelon and salami montage). Stade Francais rugby jerseys prismatically referenced by Roland Garros' fanciest TV directors. It was slick, tuned to consumer tasteful, where even an apparent potential for clashing colours doesn't result in anything that really clashes. Ad colours: acid yellows (shiny cars) unreal caramels and plastic purples (new biscuit promos). The fluid changes after a while wash over you, the mosaic composition was static, and I felt I needed more (or maybe I just got the un-analog munchies), it lacked drama. A digital sleeping aid for a 21st century Howard Hughes in his senility. Mr Eno's version of those screensavers linked to your media player that bounce-slide-morph around in response to the changing frequency of the music being played, or a bouncing graphic equalizer display panel, the LED green bars piling up and down. (Eno does actually flog it as just such a product).

Overall made we want to dig out one of those old school cardboard kaleidoscopes, reset via a shakeable tube of glass beads and a turnable lens.

Billy as Andy

Not entirely convinced by Billy Childish at the ICA. Recent paintings are on show and a selection of other artifacts (he's a full-on artist-poet-musician combo) for a bit of biographical fleshing out. I'm not sure how long it had been since I had visited the ICA, and as I waited outside for it to open was reminded of a friend's description of it as essentially a civil servant's club, an arty (why not arty?) backdrop for a liquid lunch. I had also heard the ICA ethos casually described as 'militant amateurism', which suits Mr Childish too it seems.

Childish as a painter, has some obvious influences: Van Gogh, Matisse; his Fauvist, expressionistic autobiographical paintings are thick swooshing smearing attacks on unprimed linen (using a perimeter of bare linen as a framing device). There are self-portraits, the odd still-life, other works from photographic sources, poems that have a nice line in black-humoured self-laceration; they have an oomph, accompanied by an apparently accidental delicacy. The oomph comes on as a tirade on modern life (and on modern art), on his own sense of self, his need to create. Intent on this confessional careering career, the artist is presented through a lot of the work as like someone picking themselves apart, and putting the parts back together again, at least the overtly visible parts. There is spelt out in his work, something saying "There are false prophets, but I am real, I am true, whose side are you on?". Not entirely convincing, but pathological?

One of my favourite lines from NYPD Blue describes Andy Sipowicz's struggle to cope with daily life: "It's like he's a watchmaker, takes himself apart and puts himself back together every day". Billy Childish has the disadvantage of being (at least partly) non-fictional but I think it's fair to say that even with a commitment to an admirably amateurist aesthetic (that does have space for self-deprecation) he is packing a lot more ego and pretension than Sipowicz.

There are interesting things here, some paintings have a lovely glooping life to them, some poems and text genuinely funny and moving, and Childish is an interesting and sincere fella no doubt, but the personality push that the whole show creates, well, I think my hard-wired cult resistance kicks in. I'm left thinking: wilful eccentric Billy barking away, dismissive of, but really just as self-celebratory as the cooler, more cynical YBAs of his generation.

Nash as Johnny, nice painter

Went to see the Paul Nash exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

A mid-century (20th) English painter known for war paintings (he was an official war artist in both World Wars), this exhibition 'The Elements' focusses on the theme of nature. The paintings on show (and to an extent the photographs selected to support the nature theme) reveal a dark symbollically oriented sensibility.

The symbolism and imagery mixes English visionary (think Blake) with English contemporary (contemporary that springs to mind being the Famous Five / Swallows & Amazons era) across English landscapes. So amidst rolling downs and woods; birds: hawks or owls; mirrors, felled German bombers, furrowed fields, generally seen at salmon-skyed sundowns or in moonlit nights.

Along with the visionary symbolism, perspective and scale are tipped and skewed; there is a modernist flattening. Some Cubist influence is evident and Cezanne-esque treatments of planes, perspectives and vistas. Arrangements of natural and man-made objects become still-life in landscape, objects could be monoliths or miniatures.

The paint itself is sometimes quite thickly, always deliberately applied. Nash's palette: autumnal greens and browns, cool blue, brick red, muted pinks, rather earnest greys. Straight lines dominate, accentuating conflict between nature and man - sea walls, ordered piles of logs, gates and promenades, frame-like structures incongruously standing atop of hills, perhaps no more incongruous than Neolithic interventions on the landscape like Stonehenge.

I have always tried to keep a distance from autobiographical interpretations of any artist's creative output, as that can exaggerate the linkages between a sensationalist interpretation of any artist's life and their art, fetishising Van Gogh's mental illness is the big example of that. So I don't know whether the unsettling/unsettled quality I see in Nash's work is over-reading. Being a painter myself and recently taking a pretty good look at my own mental health, I can see how intrinsic one's sense of mental well-being can be to one's creative side, though not always in ways that invite obvious interpretations.

As to Nash it is accepted that war, death and depression did inform the progression of his work. What I see in that charged unsettled quality brings to mind (rather flippantly I know) the landscape watercolourist Johhny Nice Painter played by Charlie Higson in 'The Fast Show' who would merrily lay out a gentle picture of unmarred rolling hills and woodland, before noticing something dark, seeing in those dark places the bleakness, the despair, the void behind and underneath, shadow taking over the canvas - "Black! Black!". Nash's work at the Dulwich seems to balance at that tipping point. It is as if the canvases are taken away just as Nash is reaching for that tin of black...

LiverpudliArt

Was up in Liverpool over Easter, hadn't been there for a while and wanted to check out some of the art galleries. As it turned out it was a bit of an exhibition change-over week oddly enough. You'd have thought that new shows opening over the Easter weekend would be crowd puller PR but apparently not a view shared by the galleries.

Went to the Liverpool Tate Gallery, where a Picasso show is due to open soon, but current shows have been hanging for a good long while. One long-term exhibition called "This is Sculpture" filled half the gallery space. Wandered about it with an old art-school mate; we kept having to point at pictures on the wall throughout the show and mention that "well, actually that is painting". Curators evidently desparate to prise recognisable 2-D Picassos etc into the show, (and fill up all that wall space). Plays into the hands of the old saying that sculpture is the stuff getting in the way when you're looking at the pictures on the wall. The Picasso sculpture on show seemed happily selected for comedic value to gift the gallery attendants the line "Please keep your hands off Picasso's Cock".

In the same show Jeff Koons' '3 Ball Total Equilibrium' was all wonky. Apparently visitors nudging it wonks the suspended basketballs up and down, so some of the meaning of the piece is subtly sabotaged with scally subversion; a bit of localised contextualising siting the piece perhaps.

One fun piece was a lightshow dancefloor for visitors to walk and dance on with headsets with disco playlists. Had a little holding-the-coats-waiting-at-the-bar kneehalfbouncesway to " Who's That Lady?".

The other major show whilst they're waiting for the Picassos (lost in an ash cloud somewhere off the Mersey shoreline perhaps) is Afro Modern which brings together an array of works with black culture in the 20th century (and 21st) as its theme. An impressive array of challenging works arranged chronologically (which is an understandable though unimaginative curatorial decision). The most arresting and moving thing that I saw was a video installation by Kara Walker, which has been exhibited fairly widely since 2005, 8 Possible Beginnings, or: the Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture. It depicts brutal and surreal images of black American experience, the central scenes are of slave exploitation on a Southern US plantation presented in a beguiling combination of techniques: cut-paper silhouettes, flickering vintage style film quality, work songs, Uncle Remus story-telling; full of symbols, flowers, phalluses, male pregnancy, and images of sexualised and grotesque violence.

Another interesting piece of video art was installed at FACT as part of an exhibition looking at life in conflict zones, MyWar. The piece called 'They shoot horses' (screengrab pic at the top) runs video of a danceathon by two trios of young Palestinians in separate rooms to cheesy upbeat disco pop. "I Believe in Miracles (Don't You?)". For 7 hours apparently! Falls into the category of an artwork with an "Oh right, now I get it" moment when you read the who-where-what explanation. Otherwise without the context it's just 6 people dancing, which is still good; their rug-cutting moves beat my bounce-sway big-time.

Thought I Saur You... (in the Rusty Hook)

Went to Crystal Palace Park to check out the Victorian dinosaurs. Drawings above somewhat improved by a 2-year-old nephew's penmanship.

Never seen them in the 'flesh' before. Like many before me I loved dinosaurs as a kid, read up on them and the Victorian fossil finds and these life-sized recreations (including the lovely Iguanadon nose-horn/thumb-spike inversion alluded to in Alex's directional marks on the second drawing).

Jurassic Park can go piss up a rope as far as I'm concerned (a mosquito-embalming amber rope). The proper jobs here are great: unDisneyfied thump-weighted real things. No carnivalist birds-of-paradise display colours, these are proper Britosaurs, grey-green winterlizards, made for fixing their deadeyed gaze through fog and drizzle. Gotta love 'em.

Mental health. Modernity. Media... and Murder, at the Movies

M directed by Fritz Lang (1931) was a recent treat enjoyed at the NFT/BFI Southbank.

A major highpoint in film is M. M for Murderer (or Monster) it is in essence a serial killer movie, and was shown as part of a month-long 'Psycho in Context' season. The season represents a filmic family tree for the Hitchcock movie; M has the family role perhaps of an elderly, stylishly disturbing great uncle.

The film is challenging but with a lightness of touch (apparent in the occasional use of ironic voice-over, much like a mockumentary) in how it tells its tale: a city's children prey to a pyschopath who whistles, buys balloons and sweets, as well as acting out far more depraved instincts.

One of the film's strong suits is the way it draws witty parallels between the city's police and its underworld. A council of leading criminal figures is amusingly compared with high-level police meetings, as are their respective organizational methods, and relative operational efficiency as the criminals form a shadow police force to track the killer.

It is full of memorable moments: the shots of a child's ball bouncing and a loosed balloon (leaving a child's abduction and murder off-screen); hands and voices appearing out of shot; the set-piece of a chase through the streets and ensuing man-hunt through an office block; the chalk 'M' marking out the killer on his overcoat; the show-trial beneath the city.

For a film about child-murder it also has some genuinely funny moments, with more laughs than you might expect. One of these comes from the incongruity of a gross-out, under-the-desk shot capturing the wonky bulk of the police detective leading the case from an eye-wateringly unflattering angle. Lang's movie maybe is making the point here that the police (and implicitly the city's other elements - the press, the shadow-police/underworld, local politicians, public health system, citizenry) should not be seen head-on as objective arbiters of social control and justice.

The killer himself, played unforgettably by Peter Lorre, is ultimately a sympathetic character (pitiful at least), identified as a victim of not just his own deviant compulsions (he is evidently schizophrenic), but by a society that doesn't understand how to treat his sickness, a society that is all too ready to succumb to urban paranoia, mob-rule and vigilante justice, whipped up by a hysterical press. Clearly still plenty of resonance with media witch-hunts that have occurred in the more recent past. Norman Bates was spared both the News of the World front-page and the death penalty.

Earth, wind and fire...and other Brit Pop artists

Popular, British, elemental (earth, air, fire, water, aether) JMW Turner, genius of light, forefather of impressionism, special effects dappler and smearer, call him what you will, he's some kind of painter. I hadn't seen the Turner Collection (in what was the Clore Gallery) at Tate Britain for many years, so having been up there to see the Chris Ofili show (Brit Plop not Brit Pop), I had some time to soak it up.

What was most interesting (and predictable) was how much more drawn my (and surely most modern) eyes were to the more abstract works. Some of these are in fact more abstract as they are unfinished; many of the paintings on display are rescued from Turner's own recycling bins and Rothko-esque catflaps. His 'finished' narrative historical epic works are impressive in their own way but comparatively humdrum; his greatest works to the modern eye are those where the objects are barely recognisable, shimmering water-light-fire-air. The chromatic and tonal choices in his most audacious paintings are incredible, but he is not just a master of the subtleties of light, the mark-making is imaginative and beautiful in its variety and combining of textures: ethereal scumbling, weighty daubs and smacks of impasto, instinctive scraffito by fingernail and brush-end, willing the paint to shine-crack-sparkle-bleed.

Then when you see the 'Grand Style' narrative paintings that were all the rage and earned JMW his considerable coin, you half wish he hadn't succumbed to tradition and sales ever and had pursued the mad swirls of the elements constantly. Can't really call him a sell-out, but: "hey Joseph Mallord William you SELL-OUT!"

Another current highlight of a trip to Tate Britain was seeing Douglas Gordon's 'latest'. Gordon is the artist behind '24 hour Psycho' (the Hitchcock movie slowed down and soundless), and the film 'Zidane: a Twenty-First Century Portrait', a feature film/moving image artwork that follows Zinedine Zidane's every step in real-time of a football match, analysed in great detail here. So Gordon is definitely not a one-trick pony but he certainly plays with the concept of reproduction and repetition, ready to re-do, re-enact, in a different space, at a different speed. His text installation at the Tate Britain, 'Pretty much every word written, spoken, heard, overheard from 1989...' , is an interesting case. From what I can gather he has installed variations of much the same work a few times before. Does that reduce it to by-numbers glibness?, is that repeatability part of it? - phrases, words that form part of the artist's creative world-view, perhaps, or is it simply the same as when any exhibition or series of works goes on tour where the curatorial decisions alter the surface effect of how it is viewed, the sequence of hanging etc. Anyways, I enjoyed it, it engaged amusingly with the space, has an off-key comedic edge that is both somewhat dark and throw-away. It has variations and reworkings of stock pop-song phrases, riffing on trashy cliches with shifts of emphasis and perspective. It is apparently staged to interact with concepts of good and evil and a selection of the Tate's religious paintings of the Sublime hung in the adjoining gallery space.

I've just found out that the Zidane movie was shot by a camera team lead by the brilliantly gifted cinematographer, Darius Khondji, a contemporary genius of light. Maybe Turner today would be a cinematographer. The fucking sell-out.

Sorry, have we met? ...it's déjà vu all over again

Letter from an unknown woman (1948) directed by Max Ophüls - restored and re-opened at NFT/BFI Southbank. A trailer here. Starring Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan, Letter tells a Viennese tale of aching love, staircases, pedal-powered backdrops of journeys that go nowhere and the pretty lies that you tell to others and to yourself.

He, Stefan, a habitual chaser of women, a wasted talent, instinct shallow almost empty, undeserving the misplaced love from she, Lisa, the woman at 3 different stages of her young life, projecting onto his, if not blank, then vague canvas imagining a romance that for him was just one of a series of endless meaningless conquests. This is a beautiful witty movie tinged with delicious sadness, the dark ironies of unrequited love, of life's echoes, rhymes and circles. The film could be re-titled 'Love on a Staircase', from the opening to the end, stairs feature in beautiful long tracking and swooping crane shots; exquisite fluid movie-making that glides the viewer along.

To see both sides of this non-romance, the deceptions practised and the compulsive need to overthink and deceive oneself, you might ask of yourself, which of the protagonists do you act more like at different times? It is so risky to love anyone. You wonder how one beautiful memory can sustain an inner life, provide the oxygen for an illusion of reciprocal love. A neutral observer can see the lies when the deluded can not.

It is almost two stories - the delusion of one, the decline of the other. Their stories only barely intersect in actuality. But for one fleeting seduction he is oblivious to her existence (just one of many); her infatuation (he is The One), continues beyond any reality. His practised charm slipping into self-hatred, but both are destined to lose.

The knowing coyness of the earlier seduction reminds me of Joan Fontaine again a few years before in Suspicion (1941, Hitchcock) and her falling for another charming wrong'un, Cary Grant admiring her ucipital mapillary.

Ding dong dung

Went to see Chris Ofili at the Tate Britain, a mid-career retrospective of his painting career so far. The man who single-handedly increased the market value of elephant dung. I remember when Ofili's early work hit the headlines, saw the Turner Prize show in 1998. A trailblazer part of the YBA generation, but notably a YBBA (Young Black British Artist - Ofili is from Manchester with Nigerian parents) at a time in the 90s when there were very few black graduates from British art schools. He was 'the shit'. Those name-making early works were vividly coloured and patterned canvases presented standing on piles of elephant dung and included piles of dung glued to the surface.

Now what I didn't realise was that he milked the dung-wave dry for another 10 years or so. I can see what he was doing, tapping into raw materials of Africa, disrupting the picture surface with the incongruity, the assault against the other imagery - racial and sexual stereotypes in collage, bead-like application of shiny resin bright colours. Bling and dung. But I couldn't help feeling going through the array of his 90s work that his working practice must have become somewhat a tired gimmick, trapped by his own signature: right I've finished the painting, now where shall I stick the shit?

I was reminded of how with late Picasso's his actual signature got bigger as his efforts on the canvas got weaker. Buyers were paying for that signature, regardless of what else was in the frame.

It was interesting to see the evolution of Ofili's work post-dung. An interesting transition I thought was a series of green and red paintings where the dung pile protrusion was used pictorially - the dung over-painted and beaded placed to depict an elaborate beaming sun in scenes of African paradise. There was a maturity to this work; maybe when you've been an enfant terrible (and what terrible infant doesn't daub shit on any available surface), this is the next stage: first you make the shit ugly, then you make the shit beautiful to beguile people, then you leave the shit alone.

The Caribbean influence (Ofili has relocated to Trinidad) comes through in more recent dung-less paintings, also a Matisse influence comes into view. Glazes, darkness, and no protruding elephant dung. There is less audacity, less verve perhaps in the colours, less an obvious challenge, more atmospheric, more tuned into nature, climate and light, people and things half-seen in the twilight. Transferrring to Trinidad is bound to affect how you work, and it seems to me that these tall canvases aren't all completely successful, somehow not fully realised, but they are still seductive and mystical, self-seducing perhaps, as they again steer towards Afro-Caribbean stereotypes - a different time and place though, here perhaps of the colonialist kind, exotic, sexualised, by the mystical twilight quality of an outsider making home in the tropics.

Calle me, Calle me any, anytime

The Sophie Calle exhibition that was on at the Whitechapel. Bit late on blogging about this, as it has now been and gone from London, and onto the Netherlands.

The centrepiece exhibit is the installation 'Take Care of Yourself', a collaborative exploration of male-female relations triggered by the artist receiving a break-up letter (in fact an email) from her lover, ending in the words 'Take care of yourself'. In Calle's words:

"I asked 107 women... chosen for their profession or their skill, to interpret this letter. To analyse it, comment on it, dance it, sing it. Exhaust it. Understand it for me. Answer for me. It was a way of taking the time to break up. A way of taking care of myself."

So what we get from Calle, and her all-female collaborators is a multi-faceted dissertation on the "It's not you, it's me" break-up line; a mass of different readings from a mass of different women, dissecting, expanding, shooting holes through, and in some cases physically digesting the letter.

Calle has previous of course, in turning her life into art, and other works are shown here too. These often involve her ceding control of her life to some extent: letting others write rules for her to live by - fiction writers, tarot card readers - but she, certainly her collaborators are in control here. They slice through this unnamed man, his every word is picked apart, becomes evidence in the case against him. Not just every word but even every letter - the email is signed off with an X. Is this a kiss, an initial, or a code-name, a sign for 'ex', a symbol of mystery?

Was strangely reminded of this exhibition again while reading 'Rabbit at rest' (the fourth and last in Updike's Rabbit Angstrom series) where the Angstrom family, having been laid bare by Updike for over 30 years, play out the last strains of group attachments and individual isolation, male ego, female scorn. Both Calle's work and Updike's novel are comedies, rich in detail and insight, and human, both take the mundane and make it sublime. No spoilers here, but this from 'Rabbit at rest', on a family trip to a nature park staring out at flamingos on a lake, their odd one-legged stances, their upside-down-drinking scooped bills:

And they stand marvelling, the four human beings, as if the space between farflung planets had been abolished, so different do these living things loom from themselves. The earth is many planets, that intersect only at moments. Even among themselves, slices of difference interpose, speaking the same language as they do, and lacking feathers, and all drinking the same side up.

For me this excerpt gets at that self-reflective instinct with which art of any kind scores its deepest points. You look at a context outside of you and you think about yourself, it speaks to you. It’s different, the distance makes you think about togetherness. Distance (and togetherness) you feel when looking at something wholly (sacredly) weird and separate, how that can’t help but reflect back on what you do recognise in and among your own weirdly separate but connected existences. You feel the weight of ingrained (genetic?) impulse to recognition of something you don’t entirely trust or would ever consciously choose to belong to, but deeper down you know you do. Feeling part of a broader collective through pondering the granular specifics of someone else’s private life.

It is probably consistent that the insights of literature are brought to mind at this exhibition, (oh hang on, it’s vice versa ain’t it), as Sophie Calle is a literary artist. It is an exhibition you have to read, is about reading (interpreting), as well as the less tangible sensation that this apparent glimpse into someone else’s private world is like getting to know characters in a book. The overlapping layering up of readings creating a distilled essence of a moment, not everyone’s idea of a good read, but there are lovely insights here.

A schoolgirl’s reading of this worldly man’s words includes this veneer slicer:

He says he would have like things to have turned out differently.
That means they are going to turn out badly.

Haunted somewhat by the exhibition, as I am now by Updike’s Rabbit, I bought the catalogue – it is more than any other really the book of the exhibition, every word and performance reproduced in a chunky 40cm of glossy hardback.

I re-read ‘Exercises in Style’ by Raymond Queneau, a gift from a friend, destined to be recommended to other friends, present and future. Another comedy, and like Calle’s ‘Take Care of Yourself’ a succession of readings and treatments from a single starting point. ‘Exercises in Style’ is an odd read: 99 different versions of the same rather pointless story, entertaining and instructive; it is either a more trivial work than Calle’s or a more profound one, (or both), depending on your mood at the time.

From TwennyOhNine to TwennyTenn...[with dismembered snowmen]

So, it's 2010. Or TwennyTenn as I think I'll be calling it.

Another year gone, and a decade into the current millennium, but I won't be doing any lists of Noughties' this or Noughties' that, 2009's this or the Decade's Most- that. So there. Now I like a list as much as the next man* but I don't go big on the ones that squeeze things into decadal or annual packages, or ones that insist that we stay alive until we've worked our way through all of its entries in some macabre, tick-boxing procession towards justified death.

...I did however once (it would have been in the 1980s) select teams for a (sadly imaginary, and even more sadly impossible) football match between 1970s Movies Stars and 1960s Movies Stars. At least the teamsheets were lists of 11 (no subs allowed in this one-off game), so avoided the other basic list-urge to round up or down to units of 10. It also naturally involved some considerable reflection about player eligibility, positional suitability, balance of the team, formation and strategy. I think I opted for 4-4-2 for the 1960s team against a more fluid 1-4-3-2 sweeper system to allow Elliott Gould to play libero for the 1970s 11.

Anyway, what has happened recently is that I have moved my art HQ to a new studio: Trafalgar Studios (AKA Trafalgar Works). Good light, good space, bit bloody cold at the moment, but very much looking forward to putting in the hours there to get TwennyTenn up and running painting-wise.

* [footnote] List of 11 things (according to a quick, but expert, search on Google) that other people like as much as the next man:

• Peace
• A bag of crisps
• [being on] the side of mankind
• A bit of hip-hop vernacular
• A nice dose of schadenfreude
• Music
• Jesus
• The latest version of FIFA or Call of Duty
• Fight Club
• A good quiz
• A good slice of tomato