Sag Harbor Whaling Museum
The Whaling Museum at Sag Harbour, Long Island, is a remarkable cabinet of curiosities. There isn’t a hierarchy and there isn’t a narrative or simple message. Located in the former Masonic Temple, a remarkable building originally built as a home, it contains a wide range of products of 18th and early 19th Century whaling industry as well as aspects of town history. From a cabinet of walking sticks with ivory handles, to memorials made of whale vertebrae, to the tools for carving up the carcases, all the ephemera of the industry is represented – and it’s not all scrimshaw. But in amongst this is also the stuff of seafaring: the medicine cases, the shackles for punishment and the ships logs. There are even Inuit artefacts collected by sailors, and a display indicating the relationship between the indigenous Americans, their own whaling, and the Europeans arriving on the Island. We are so used to the managed learning of museums, that this looks like an installation by Mark Dion. In fact the Museum should contact other museums to do with whaling and make a publication of whaling ephemera from different parts of the world – I found a list of museums connected with whaling at Whalecraft (there are a number in Scotland).
What art have I seen?
This Land is (Y)our Land at CCA, Glasgow
Walking with a pepper plant, free with the exhibition, but actually a specific responsibility, in the smur, going right left right left right left…
Sauchiehall Street
Pitt Street
Bath Street
Douglas Street
across Blytheswood Square Garden
West George Street
West Campbell Street
St Vincent’s Street
Wellington Street
Bothwell Street
Hope Street
into Central Station
I like the zig zag, knowing its not actually any shorter than straight down Sauchiehall and onto Hope, but the pattern is more interesting.
Is it psychogeography, a derive, or systems thinking?
Berne, Switzerland?
Working at the University of the Arts, Berne
Presenting The Artist as Leader and doing a workshop with 2nd Year Graphic Design students.
Two visits. In the first (27 May) I find:
“Calculation and work. Trial and error, first on paper, then as a model, then eventually as a prototype on a scale of one to one, that is the method of the practical scientist Renzo Piano and his people. The design process oscillates between tinkering and totalling, the simplest hand drawn sketches and the most high-tech computer drawings are used. The search party takes side turnings, longer routes, gets itself out of dead ends, but every step takes them closer to an as yet undefined goal. The detours are necessary – they ensure that no short circuits, no apparent short cuts, lead to a rash, un-thought-out result. Anyone who commits himself too soon, locks himself in. Piano’s people approach their task like a team of researchers on thin ice.” p.24 Benedikt Loderer, Monument in Fruchtland in Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Short Guide. Hatje Cantz, 2005.
Also Dream and Reality: Contemporary Art from the Near East. The curatorial concept is very strong comprising firstly, contemporary works; secondly, elements of material culture chosen from an anthropological collection; and thirdly, a selection of works by Paul Klee. But in practice, as an experience, its not very successful. It’s not that the Klee works aren’t relevant. It’s not that the anthropological works aren’t relevant. Some of the contemporary art is very good. But in this category there are too many video works. But let me tell you about the three really good pieces. Firstly The Walid Raad/Atlas Group work that seems to be called either Untitled 1982-2007 by Walid Raad, or We Decided to Let them Say “We Are Convinced” Twice by the Atlas Group. Secondly the series of carpets by xxx variously titled. When you first walk down the stairs you see a collection of four carpets which are not quite hung in the same way as for instance the carpets in the Burrell in Glasgow. Then you start to question what you are looking at and you realise that they are modified, reconstructed into new forms, subtley different from the normal. Finally, the chair. I thought it was simply a chair with a small booklet chained to it which might elucidate one of the videos. The book started with a short text which explained that in both Europe and in Cairo there are lots of plastic garden chairs, but where in Europe, when they break they are thrown out, in Cairo they are repaired. A sequence of approximately 20 images of various repaired plastic garden chairs followed. The text suggested that visitors to the exhibition should treat this chair very roughly because the museum had agreed to repair any broken chair in the same way that the Egyptians were repairing their chairs.
For me this work articulated the potential for the arts to highlight the infection of one culture by another culture, and the potential for that to work in both directions. Asking the museum exhibition, conservation and curatorial staff to firstly assume that a piece of plastic garden furniture is an important cultural object, and then to suggest that it should be repaired in a very explicit way, is just great. Asking the people visiting the exhibition to treat an artwork roughly (though sadly it was not showing any significant signs of wear and tear), is brilliant. Definitely a sort of Fluxus Score or an Allan Kaprow happening, read through a post-colonial distorting mirror.
Kunstmuseum Berne (28 May)
Tracey Emin (I missed it in Edinburgh, so it was great to see it in Berne).
“Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” Guerrilla Girls 1989.
If women are going to be naked in the museum then Emin tells us something about her experience of being a woman.
Walking through the gallery away from a video about being in a band, suddenly I heard screaming, screaming that hit me in the solar plexus. My immediate reaction was that someone in the next gallery was in deep, deep anguish. The pop music and the screaming.
In the sequence of polaroid or photobooth works it seems that Emin is saying “If you are going to look at my body, then you are going to see it as I see it, feel it as I feel it.”
There is a display of small images of early, post art school work that Emin destroyed. The pictures are presented like a collection of family photos. You can see that she has been deeply influenced by Edvard Munch. Someone also mentioned Egon Schiele. There is a work which reminds me strongly of Louise Bourgeois.
Conclusion: it’s a game of consequences – the statement is ‘if’ ‘then.’
Kunsthalle Berne (29 May) Zhang Enli
Second visit to the Zentrum Paul Klee (30 May)
Paul Klee: Carpet of Memory
It didn’t feel like an historical exhibition. It was overwhelming, both in the beauty of the images and in the variety of tactics of the visual. It’s not just a lot of squiggles. The one image which was apparently simply a series of dabs of colour on a dark surface was infact a broadly applied impasto, overlayered with watercolour, and the dark colour was used to heighten the shapes of the watercolour dabs.
Conclusion: he asks which tactic will I apply here?
The sculpture park behind the Zentrum – five works – twisted and beaten coreten steel and cast bronze.
What art have I seen?
Celebration of Art – 30 years of the Maclaurin
Maclaurin Galleries, Ayr
Originally posted 3 April 2006
What art have I seen?
‘Bungalow Blitz’ and ‘Ant Farm’ at The Lighthouse in Glasgow
Originally posted 20 March 2006
What art have I seen?
Simon Faithfull at Stills and Fred Sandback at The Fruitmarket
Originally posted 18th March 2006
What art have I seen?
John Latham at Tate Britain and Ugo Rondinone at the Whitechapel
Originally posted 18 February 2006
What art have I seen?
Richard Demarco’s Strategy Gets Art at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
Originally posted 1 February 2006
What art have I seen?
Thoughts on Altermodern
Our icons
Our detritus
Our living spaces remade exactly as they are
Our failed utopias
new ways of seeing old images (Spartacus Chetwynd’s baroque p#rn)
Experiencing experiencing culture (recording reading a book)
Activism aestheticised
Every sort of involvement from discussions with the curator becoming art to volunteers performing songs
Heroes with young turks
Suicide
The impossibility of nature (Ackerman and Coates)
Reproduction – what does it mean? (the singing faces and the Simon Starling)
What art have I seen?
Yorkshire Sculpture Park – collecting Alec Finlay’s circle poems, part of his letterboxing project – visiting James Turrell’s skyspace in the deer shelter.
What art/reading?
The Martha Rosler Library (and Anton Vidokle‘s talk) at Stills, Edinburgh.
Vidokle, founder of e-flux and Producer (?) of the Martha Rosler Library as an e-flux project, explained the origin of the circulation of the Library. Vidokle described being in Texas, visiting Marfa, seeing Donald Judd’s library (below) of some 10,000 volumes, and not being allowed to pick one off the shelves because everything has to be kept exactly the way Judd had it – a ‘permanent installation’ in his terminology. So Vidokle is talking to Rosler about another project and relates this story. She offers Vidokle her library as a public resource. Vidokle gets excited about the idea. The Martha Rosler Library opens in the e-flux storefront in New York. Stills, Edinburgh, is the last venue, the seventh stop, in what has become the circulation of the Library.
Vidokle referred to the difficulty in thinking about authorship in relation to the Library. It is curated by the venue – obtaining shelves, setting them out, accessorising; it is his idea and he thinks its art; it is Rosler’s Library and she doesn’t think its art; and of course each of the books is authored in the literary sense. We enter a dialectic between form and content. It certainly offers the possibility of a Borgesian treatise, but I think something else is also going on.
Vidokle located his recent projects (unitednationsplaza, Night School, Pawnshop, etc and his involvement in the cancelled Manifesta) in creating an ephemeral/transitory and mobile/ circulating space for attention. He understands contemporary art as constantly drifting into the spectacle whilst striving to ferment political/social change. He noted the underlying current of social change in art going back over 150 years – he referenced Manet and Courbet inheriting the radicalism of the French Revolution. The aesthetic is increasingly a powerful force, whist participation in the political is weakening – Vidokle is concerned with art that can operate differently.
The Martha Rosler Library evidences the importance of politics to some contemporary artists – you will find distinct slabs of literature on marxism, women’s issues, theory, philosophy, architecture, radical history, and so on. But more to the point it would appear that Martha Rosler is an artist who understands reading, thinking, informing, research, theory, intellectualism, radicalism, to be part of what it is to be an artist.
In fact I would go so far as to propose, and I think Vidokle hints at this with the title Martha Rosler Library, that this is like the Presidential Libraries, and in fact Artists’ Libraries should be recognised to be of equal importance and value to the life of nations. We certainly need to recognise the importance of the artist as ‘public intellectual’. To know why this is a bad idea you only have to look at the Artist Placement Group Archive recently bought by the Tate, and now functionally inaccessible. You need to register as a bona fide researcher; make a booking to use the Research Centre, and then you find that because this Archive isn’t catalogued you have to request specific items in advance – how can you request specific items in advance if the archive is uncatalogued? You have to know what you are asking for before you ask for it – the unexpected, the exploratory, the serendipitous is impossible.
But this Library, some 7000 books, is different and does something important, and maybe it does exactly what Vidokle set out to do. It is a spectacle but it draws you into spending time, paying attention and even having conversations. Vidokle has constructed an experience out of a couple of tons of matter, matter which is so fascinating that, more than gold or diamonds, it stops you in your tracks, draws you in, sits you down, and takes you into the heart of what really matters.
Deirdre McKenna and Kirsten Lloyd at Stills both commented on how long people were spending in the Gallery (far more than they would with photography exhibitions). Vidokle said that in Berlin there was a hard core of people who spent 3-4 hours every day in the Library for weeks. Now, of course all Librarians will tell you that people spend hours libraries – some of them old people keeping warm, some doing research, some just hiding. So people coming to the Martha Rosler Library get sucked in, pick up a book, sit down, start reading. Even if they pick up a sci-fi novel (and there is a shelf of them too) they are spending time in a cultural experience. And the same is true of a public library.
This is a particularly good library for those interested in contemporary art and the political – its probably better than most individuals have, and it may be better than most art schools have. Its very clear that it is an individual’s library and has that particular degree of focus. So the person spending time in the Martha Rosler Library might be radicalised. But I suspect most of the people visiting will be arts professionals (just as Vidokle acknowledged that the 50,000 subscribers to e-flux probably amount to a list of those seriously (professionally) involved in contemporary visual arts).
So if this Library does what other libraries do and keeps people for longer, and if it is a radical collection being looked at by people who are by and large au fait with a radical agenda, then why is it important?
Maybe its important precisely because it does exactly these things. Because the ‘event ‘ of the Library being in Edinburgh draws people concerned with contemporary art and social issues to spend time paying attention – reading and having conversations with colleagues, acquaintances and strangers you run into. And exactly why is this important?
I think it comes back to ‘elitism’. The more a group develops a common language, a shared set of ideas, an iterative discourse, a cliquish mentality, the more powerful it can become, the more likely it is to change the world, to take over, to mount a coup, to become a junta.
I spent two or three hours in the Library – I read two of Rosler’s book works, an essay by Lawrence Alloway on Feminism. I looked at a text on aesthetic education and on engaged artists in California. I talked to a guy from the Arts Council, Deirdre and Kirsten, Becky, Rachel and watched others. I met lots of people at Vidokle’s talk. It seems to me that art does not have to be something uniquely different: it can be something already well known, but do it with great attention. Why is this art, not just a library? Actually its a library made by an artist for other artists.
Notices on e-flux documenting the circulation of the Martha Rosler Library
Stills (Edinburgh), Site (Liverpool), Institut national d’histoire de l’art (Paris), unitednationsplaza (Berlin), Museum for Contemporary Art (Antwerp), Frankfurter Kunstverein, and at e-flux (New York)
Others thoughts:
Cluster Blog
Letterature di svolta
Artopia – John Perreault’s Art Diary
What art have I seen?
Slave City by the Atelier Van Lieshout and I Dig, I Look Down by Mithu Sen
What art have I seen?
Robert Morris at Monika Spruth Philomene Magers
I remember seeing work at the Fattoria di Celle that were quite like these, using encaustic. The felt Stars and Stripes surmounted by Eagles are deeply political. The work fit into rooms like altars in side chapels. The textures are a bit like ornate classical picture frames, but the textures are made of the remains of machinery and war, and the impressions of hands punching and ripping at the material.
What art have I seen?
What art have I seen?
Communication Suite at the Wolfson Medical Building, University of Glasgow
New site specific work by Christine Borland (who also curated the exhibition), Aileen Campbell, Alan Currall, Alastair McLennan, Kirsty Stansfield, and Clara Ursitti, complimented by work by Abramovitc/Ulay, Breda Beban, Mark Dion and Douglas Gordon.
What art have I seen?
Patricia Cain’s exhibition Drawing Construction at the Lillie Gallery in Milngavie
What art have I seen?
South By South West – Maclaurin Galleries, Ayr, and Dick Institute, Kilmarnock
What art have I seen?
Psycho Buildings: Artists take on Architecture at the Southbank Centre, London
I also saw some stuff at the Tate including Nahnou Together Now and a great display on drawing with Landy, Tyson, Emin, etc along with work from the collection.
Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom
Greenhouse Britain: (2006-2008). I had the pleasure and honour to work with Helen Mayer Harrison, Newton Harrison and David Haley, . The project developed new thinking about the impact of climate change on the island of Britain.
Producing and Project Managing > Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom
What art have I seen?
Alison Watt‘s exhibition Phantom following her two year residency at the National Gallery
Short video on Guardian website.
What art have I seen?
Ally Wallace‘s Multi-Module at Scotland Street School Museum
Multi Module (2008)
and
Jacki Parry’s The Towers of Babel at the Maclaurin Galleries, Ayr
What art have I seen?
Gavin Renwick‘s Home Office at the Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee.
Gavin invited me to participate in the last discussion in the series.
What art have I seen?
Donald Urquhart’s Invisible Ideas
at the City Arts Centre Edinburgh
What art have I seen?
Keith Tyson at Haunch of Venison
A Breath of Fresh Air: Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden and Douglas Percy Bliss at the Fine Art Society
Jeff Wall at White Cube
Sol LeWitt
born September 9, 1928; died April 8, 2007
Sol Lewitt at MassMOCA until 2033
What art have I seen?
ONCE, a collaboration between Dalziel + Scullion and Craig Armstrong
The Earth Turned to Bring Us Closer – Dalziel + Scullion
Memory Takes My Hand – Craig Armstrong
What art have I seen?
Anselm Keifer’s Jericho at in the RA Courtyard and Aperiatur Terra at the Whote Cube Mason’s Yard.
Stunned by the power of art – a new contemporary art gallery inserted into open space in Mayfair! Definitely not regeneration. And more than just money, though it was not cheap.
What art have I seen?
At the Photographers Gallery, London
Bound for Glory, America in Colour 1939-1943
and
Bert Teunissen – Domestic Landscapes
Sokari Douglas Camp – Sweeping
Sculptures by Sokari Douglas Camp at
Camberwell College of Arts, London
26 July – 13 September 2006
Nigeria comes to London. Well actually Nigeria and London have been together for many years. Sokari Douglas Camp CBE! Sokari Douglas Camp is an artist, and more precisely a sculptor. Sokari Douglas Camp lives in London. Sokari Douglas Camp was born in Nigeria, and more precisely in the Niger Delta. We need to be precise to avoid confusion.
The exhibition Sweeping is a group of recent work across a range of scales.
Positioned on the forecourt of the College, and visible to passers on the Peckham Road, is Asoebi Women (2005), made as part of the Africa05 season and shown at the British Museum. Of course its also the eponymous ‘water feature’ for Ground Force – thus essentially and at once Nigerian and British.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in Purple Hibiscus, describes the women at Christmas in rural Nigeria: “They all looked alike, in ill-fitting blouses, threadbare wrappers, and scarves tied around their heads.” (p91) This sheds a light across the work, one confirmed by Sokari in the text in the catalogue. Poverty and making do are key.
Inside the Gallery are two larger than life size works – a pair of figures, Accessories Worn in the Delta (2006), and a single figure Teasing Suicide (2004). Various other smaller scale works are also included – at least one of these is a maquette, but all stand on their own.
Sokari Douglas Camp works in welded metal. She is immensely skilled as well as provocative and reflective in her work. She addresses Britain and Nigeria, Peckham Road and Port Harcourt. The exhibition is full of life and death.
The statement offered with the exhibition illuminates this.
‘Sweeping is about management, order, facing up to the truth. As we sweep, we whisper things to our chores – I think I do that with my sculpture. I work on things that disturb me, take ordinary experience and turn it into a surreal picture. But life is surreal.’ (Press Release)
But this statement is more interesting if you read it in the catalogue. It goes on:
‘…and women take it in their stride. We tolerate the most extraordinary things.’ (Catalogue)
The last statement, missing from the press release, adds a completely new, feminist perhaps, dimension. It becomes less ‘art world’, less distant, more present, more personal.
The process of making sculpture is about telling, or perhaps admitting, the truth. What results from telling the truth as you make art is a new understanding – a heightened awareness.
The Bus, the maquette for the Living Memorial to Ken Saro-Wiwa states ‘I accuse the oil industry of the genocide of the Ogoni’ Its a very unsubtle statement. Other works in the exhibition open up the personal psychological experience in much richer ways. The Bus speaks to the public shared space. It asks “Which bus are you on?”
The figure, Teasing Suicide, that confronts you as you enter the gallery is holding an AK47 pointing in its mouth. I interpreted it as a female figure. I interpreted the pink paint covering the head and shoulders as the consequences of squeezing the trigger. But the work is also one of the most beautiful. Sokari Douglas Camp is immensely skilled at working with metal, and the imagery cut into the body of the figure is just stunning.
The large pair of figures, also I think female, entitled Accessories Worn in the Delta, are loaded down with AK47s and ammunition. They face each other, but they are like caryatids rather than in a personal confrontation.
One of the smaller works, the Coca-cola Ladies (2004) also is a curious configuration. A group of perhaps eight tall figures of women surround a slightly more vulnerable figure in the centre of the group. The figures are made from mild steel, the head dresses red, crushed and cut coke cans. The eight are linking arms, and the whole assemblage is moving purposefully. There is almost a praetorian sense to the group. Making sculpture out of found materials such as coke and beer cans has become a ‘traditional’ activity in Africa, but the psychological strength of this work is huge.
Sokari Douglas Camp’s work is infused by her cultural inheritance. There is no possibility of failing to recognise the colours, patterns and shapes in the work. The short film Sweeping, perhaps just a ‘study’ of the idea, highlights the action focusing on repetition and pattern in the dust. In the background is a house. The front wall of the house made from concrete blocks pierced with a simple repeating pattern – you know – the sort also used for garden walls. In that, as much as in the patterns left in the dust by sweeping, you can see the importance of the cutting and drawing through the steel.
Each work contains a psychologically complex situation – standing, protecting, confronting, crying, killing – genocide. They are personal responses to human experience. My instinct is that the human experience is rooted in Nigeria, and it stands as a challenge to London – Nigeria is conflicted, but Nigeria is strong. It also asks the person in Peckham “Have you experienced anything like this?” to which the answer is probably “Yes.” Just as the Bus, and PLATFORM’s whole remember saro-wiwa project, aims to make what happens in the Niger Delta a reality to people in London, so all Sokari’s work seems explore the idea that ‘ We tolerate the most extraordinary things’.
What art have I seen?
Mark Neville’s exhibition, Port Glasgow, at the Dick Institute, Kilmarnock, of his public art project in Port Glasgow. Saw David Harding and Gair Dunlop. David was just back from filming in Mexico. We talked about Ivan Illich.
What art have I seen?
Material World – Sculpture from the Arts Council Collection at the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow
What art have I seen?
Ron Mueck at the Royal Scottish Academy building, Edinburgh
and
Marijke van Warmerdam at the Fruitmarket after a very good lunch
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