Neurodiversity promotion on Exhibition Road
Came across this inspiring installation on Exhibition Road in Central London. It highlights neurodiverse researchers in the leading institutions (Imperial College, Science Museum, V&A, Royal College of Art) along this key street. The graphics are engaging and the individual examples highlight the importance of neurodiversity in research.
What art have I seen? Köln Skulpturen Park
Köln Skulpturen Park makes evident several key moves used by sculptors creating outdoor works
- Reflection – we have an Anish Kapoor mirrored disc, a Dan Graham pavilion and a Tom Burr work of black reflective panels
- Fairy tales – two of the pieces added to the collection recently (video here) evoke traditions and archetypes Mary Bauermeister’s arrangement of tree stump seats into a space for a different way of spending time in nature and Guan Xaio’s Old Eggs and the Catcher which seems to allude to folk stories
- Repurposing – Dane Mitchell’s Post Hoc, two fir tree mobile phone masts, take a piece of infrastructure and repurpose it to tell a different story, in this case of loss.
- Buildings – the focal point of the park is Suo Fujimoto‘s white concrete structure. The ‘building’ surrounds a tree. The act of looking in and looking out both create frames with which to appreciate the leafy environment. Of course, much like the Farnsworth House, you need a certain level of privilege to appreciate the views without being concerned about the functionality of the building.
Mies van der Röhe said
When one looks at Nature through the glass walls of the Farnsworth House, it takes on a deeper significance than when one stands outside. More of Nature is thus expressed – it becomes part of a greater whole.
Fujimoto’s piece is the sculptural version, framing and organising nature. It even has works installed in and on it.
Lois Weinberger‘s intervention made a few years ago is one of the more radical ‘pieces’. Very much in contrast with the formality of much of the work (di Suvero, even Fischli and Weiss), his trench, in reality a bulldozer driven in a straight line for 100m cutting through paths and leaving spoil heap at the end of the line, offers a different aesthetic. Related to Robert Smithson’s various experiments with entropic processes, and with Gordon Matta-Clark’s cuts, but this is negentropic – it is focused by emergence, its aesthetic is what happens when we stop controlling nature. Its counterpoint is Karin Sander‘s piece of plastic grass inserted into the equally managed grass.
The curatorial approach is in some respects more radical than some of the artists’ works. As I understand it each new exhibition, comprising some temporary works and some new permanent installations, is focused by a previous work. This year’s exhibition refers back to the Weinberger’s piece. This iterative accumulative approach forms a nice counterpoint to novelty as a curatorial approach.
What art have I seen? The Circle of a Square and The Effect of a Butterfly
Henrik Håkansson’s exhibition with The Modern Institute.
Strange exhibition including video of butterflies flying in Håkansson’s garden filmed using a very high speed camera. The huge structure holding the not very large screens is a curious installation. The wall-based works use historic Joseph Albers’ prints composed with butterflies captures and preserved by Håkansson as a young man. Donald Judd is also present in another wall based element.
I remember Håkansson’s piece in Radical Nature – a tree tipped over on its side. In the end whilst Håkansson engages with living things in different ways, it doesn’t feel like he draws attention to interdependence (other than perhaps ironically). As David Antin put it,
“The idea of an ecological art is the idea of an art that articulates dependencies, its own condition for existence or those of the world” (David Antin, ArtNews Nov. 1970 p. 90).
What art have I seen? In Relation to Linum
Christine Borland’s exhibition at Climate House, Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh
RIP Siah Armajani
An inspirational artist architect who understood the possibility of philosophy and learning embodied in art.
https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/siah-armajani-dead-1234569516/
Failure talks
A recurring theme has been failure. This has resulted in publications (paper in iJade written with Dr Gemma Kearney, Business School, Robert Gordon University) and talks (principally for the Scottish Graduate School in Arts and Humanities Summer School 2016-18 presented with Elizabeth Reeder, Creative Writing, University of Glasgow).
Recently I’ve prepared the talk in four segments which can be watched online.
Pt 1 focuses on the prescriptions and fables that surround failure. Pt 2 draws on the research Gemma Kearney and I did into Gray’s School of Art staff perceptions of failure in their own practices and teaching. Pt 3 draws on Elizabeth Reeder’s talk for the Summer School as well as on Gert Biesta’s art pedagogy to discuss methods and desires. Pt 4 highlights some of the references and discusses them briefly.
The Art of a Life Adapting, published in Leonardo
‘Drawing 2016’, pen (Sharpie), found object, sculptural object, 2016. (Photo: Fergus Connor)
Statement ‘The Art of a Life Adapting: Drawing and Healing’ just published in Leonardo Vol 53 No 1. You can find an earlier version here. Drawings are here.
There is a lot of talk about adaptation in relation to the climate crisis, but there is also an increasing recognition that cancer survival rates mean that a larger proportion of the population is and will be living with the long term consquences of cancer treatment. This has been highlighted by the EU Horizon programme, “The EU has already placed the needs of survivors as one of the key pillars of its Beating Cancer Plan and has now launched a consultation aimed at identifying where research is needed most.” (‘Treating cancer is only part of the journey’: the overlooked needs of cancer survivors, online.)
The role of arts and cultural practices, as well as approaches to understanding adaptation conceptually and practically, all need further consideration (see recent blog on climate adaptation). We know arts & culture has multiple contributions to make, including:
- offering forms of autonomy in palliative care, as explored in the ‘Tracing Autonomy’ project by Prof. Ben Colburn of University of Glasgow, Jeni Pearson and Kirsty Stansfield of the Art Room in the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice in Glasgow.
- playing a role in ’emotional regulation’ (Daisy Fancourt’s recent research provides significant evidence), but there are also issues around ‘uncertainty’ which also connect climate-related adaptation with cancer-related adaptation.
- opening up ways of ‘living with uncertainty’, which medics recognise as an important part of their professional practice, but is equally significant for patients.
Adaptation and failure
Greenhouse Britain installed at the Feldman Gallery in New York City
Ten years ago I was working with the Harrisons on Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom. They insistently focused on ‘adaptation’ although Defra, who were funding the work, wanted the focus on ‘mitigation’. Now public policy is addressing adaptation (cf Climate Ready Clyde) as well as the Cultural Adaptation project (which I’m helping to evaluate as part of my work as a Research Fellow at Gray’s School of Art).
Mitigation is easier to plan and measure. How much reduction in carbon dioxide emissions has this initiative achieved?
Adaptation might be based on strengthening infrastructure and systems, but the shape of the challenge is timescale for knowing whether it has worked or not – this might be a decade?
So understanding what failure means in this context is important. In particular the challenge is that methods and approaches with known outcomes can seem attractive (less likely to fail) but can only deliver what is already understood. Embracing change must mean also embracing failure as a possibility.
The voices speaking as the projection of sea-level rise onto the island of Britain plays out ask,
Will it be enough?
As the most extreme model suggests
to halt the juggernaut of the ocean
if carbon use is stopped
almost all at once
almost all over
in the next 10 years?
Later they ask,
Would it be enough?
To begin now
a transglobal discourse in which
the Global Domestic Output
is discussed
agreeing all efforts be directed to commit
1% of the Global Domestic Product
to the reduction of the carbon surge
to near zero
in order to reduce
the ocean rise?
And again later,
Would it be enough?
to transcend economic thinking
and begin creating
a domain
of ecological thinking
that regenerates
the great carbon-sequestering
world systems
that operate in the forests
and the oceans
while leaving
ancient carbon stored
as coal and oil
in their present inactive states?
This repeating pattern of ‘will it…?’ / ‘would it be enough?’ asks about how we imagine risk of the unknown, risk of failure.
The issue of failure and why it matters in experimental projects is explored in this blog from the Cultural Adaptations project (including more on failure from previous publications).
What art have I seen? Hamish Fulton
A Decision To Choose Only Walking at Parafin.
Fine selection of work – the itemisation of walking around many Kora suggests more committed Buddhism. Fulton talks about the time it takes to get into the ‘quiet mind’ at the start of a walk.
The statements “I am a contemporary artist, not a mountaineer. I have no knowledge of Alpine-style climbing and I see no reason why I should paint a ‘good likeness’ of any mountain. I employ words but I’m not a writer. I am a walking artist and I record all my walks in word form…” 60 years of clarity…
Abstract for Guest presentation: “The work is a chant and was made to be read aloud.”
Title: “The work is a chant and was made to be read aloud.”*
Chris Fremantle and Anne Douglas
Abstract:
Helen Mayer Harrison (1927-2018) and Newton Harrison (b.1932) are pioneers in bringing together art and ecology. Their work is combinations of text and image, always intended to ask us to put ecosystemic health and wellbeing first in all our decision-making. More timely than ever, their works speak to improvisation and offer ways to think about adaptation.
The Harrisons worked together in a fifty year partnership drawing on their skills as researchers and artists to engage different publics across the globe in understanding the entangled nature of rising temperatures, loss of biodiversity, sea level rise among other issues. They pose the question of how we as a human species among many others will cope with these changes.
Reading (or re-enacting) the Harrisons works is a process of exploration of experience and meaning distinct from critical writing (which we have also done).
We will perform a selection of texts chosen from three periods of the Harrisons’ work. We will introduce each of these readings with a view to developing a shared discussion on what the arts contribute to the current environmental crisis.
Theatre Studies, University of Glasgow, 5.30 pm 23 Jan 2020
Bios:
Anne Douglas is an artist and researcher. She has focused over the past 25 years on developing research into the changing nature of art in public life, increasingly in relation to environmental change. She has published extensively on artistic leadership, improvisation and participation exploring the function and poetics of exemplary artistic practices, including that of the Harrisons, the latter in collaboration with Chris Fremantle. She is a professor emeritus from Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen and continues to develop and support practice led research through the arts at doctoral and postdoctoral levels.
Chris Fremantle is a Research Fellow and Lecturer as well as a Producer for art projects across health and environment. He has worked as Producer on the Harrisons’ work Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom (2006-09) and more recently as Associate with On the Deep Wealth of this Nation, Scotland. Together with Anne Douglas, he has written on the practice of the Harrisons. Chris established ecoartscotland in 2010 and has been Chair of the Art Focus Group for the Ramsar Culture Network since 2016. He studied English and Philosophy and has a Masters in Cultural History.
* Harrison, H.M. and Harrison, N. 2001. From There to Here. San Diego: Harrison Studio
What art have I seen? Young Turner
Turner’s Perspective Diagrams
Banbury Museum’s exhibition from the Ashmolean of Young Turner and Oxford. Includes a sequence of diagrams used by Turner for his lectures on perspective.
What art have I seen? Hal Fischer, Dike Blair and more…
Hal Fischer’s Gay Semiotics and Other Works. Several different series exploring gay culture in San Francisco – life on a street bench over 24hrs; the archetypal attire of particular groups, the key signals. All b/w photos with text, some done as almost scientific textbooks.
Also at GoMA Fiona Tan’s Disorient and a group exhibition Domestic Bliss
At the Modern Institute Dike Blair at Osborne Street and Matt Connors Figure at Aird’s Lane. Quality painting in both cases. Connors’ visual games with abstracts playing with colour and scale, a game to see the connections.
And revisiting Nick Cave’ Until at Tramway where there was also Zadie Xa’s Child of Magohalmi and the Echoes of Creation and Fred Moten and Wu Tsang’s Gravitational Feel.
What art have I seen? Max Ernst on the first floor and Richard Serra on the third
Max Ernst: An Invitation To Look
The Artist’S Career Surveyed In A Private Collection
Un/fortunately only three of the fifteen works because of another event, but came away with the catalogue.
The show features fifteen works from an exceptional private collection, covering Ernst’s entire career from 1925 to 1971, acquired largely in the 1950s and 1960s by a prominent Italian collector and friend of the artist.
Of course the question of ‘how to look’ is vital. All the works in the exhibition involve different methods used by Ernst in addition to drawing and oil on canvas – frottage, collage, grattage, and gesso relief.
Upstairs in a different dealership is a selection of Richard Serra drawings – examples of several different series. These test the edge between drawing and sculpture; the surfaces are as dense as Chestnut tree bark. The one exception, a looping line spiralling across the page is more like a stream and banks of accumulated sediment.
What art have I seen? Fife Arms
Louise Bourgeois, Spider
Had lunch and a bit of a look around
What art have I seen? Rijksmuseum
Medieval and Asian art.
Saint Elizabeth’s Day Flood (1490-95) amazing record of a flood in 1412 caused by storm surges in the North Sea https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio/155667–r-s/collections/elisabeth-panelen-dordrecht?ii=0&p=0
Also ‘A Lohan’, carved wood from China before 1400AD. “This is Ajita. He concentrates fully on listening to the reading of a sutra, a scripture that conveys the Buddha’s teachings.”
(and we thought Masaccio was good) https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search/objects?q=wood+figure&s=chronologic&p=1&ps=12&st=Objects&ii=10#/AK-MAK-1727,10
What art have I seen? Gathering by Alec Finlay
Finlay, Manifesto for Walking
Alec Finlay’s exhibition Gathering at W OR M in Aberdeen opens up a relationship with the Scottish environment (that which is around us whether urban, rural, forest or mountain top) as a space of walking and hutting, but also of re-wilding and in which to make poetry. We think of mountains and forests in the sublime tradition of art, but Alec gives us this in everyday and contemporary terms. He uses games and the domestic, even children’s toy blocks, to engage us. His form of concrete poetry, poetry to exist in the world, in workplaces and domestic spaces, is quirky but not precious.
Finlay, Timeline of Re-Wilding
Audiences and… pt4
Lucas Ihlein’s short essay on blogging and how he uses it as part of a situated practice (whether in local communities or communities of interest) opens up interesting questions about exoticisim and neighbourliness, seeing the familiar and how to make it strange, as well as the use of a blog as a form of interaction.
Audiences and… pt3
Reflecting on what it means to put someone at the centre of making art… Projects Director for ArtLink, Alison Stirling’s thoughts published on the Creative Scotland website.
The more they work together, the more the person at the centre benefits; the clearer the idea the more the person at the centre benefits; the more artists and thinkers are involved, the more the person at the centre benefits; the more time they spend learning from each other, the more the person at the centre benefits.
What art have I seen? Mladen Miljanović
Utopian Realism at W OR M in Aberdeen, the first solo exhibition by Mladen Miljanović in Scotland.
Miljanović’s work is surreal (inc a video of his tutor at Art School being fitted with Lie Detector equipment before being interrogated and beaten by the Secret Police). But the performance, which involved Miljanović handcuffed to a pillar in the middle of the space for the duration of the opening, is possibly the strangest thing I’ve ever experienced. I’ve read about pretty strange stuff in London and elsewhere in the 60s and 70s (shutting audiences into spaces, etc) but this was a personal first.
But how do you make something real and meaningful in a Gallery? Miljanović said he couldn’t show the work of his Teacher being arrested and interrogated and stand around being the celebrity artist – if he showed the work he had to ensure it wasn’t just entertainment. The performance ensured that the exhibition was inflected with a shared experience.
Of course the fact that he instigated the arrest and had organised the filming, all without his teacher’s knowledge, multiplies the strangeness.
Richard Fremantle, RIP
Obituary for my uncle Richard Fremantle, thanks to my cousin Peter for making this happen.
Audiences and… pt2
Another piece of writing that has stayed with me comes from Matt Baker, Orchestrator at The Stove in Dumfries. In 2010 he wrote a piece entitled ‘A serious attempt to unravel public art’ about how all public art needs a door. He expressed it more elegantly. Read it here. And there is a pdf Sacrificial Materials: A serious attempt to unravel public art (deep breath).
Audiences and… pt1
I had an interesting conversation recently. Someone said to me. “I get irritated when I ask an artist how they think the viewer of the work will respond to something they are working on. They often say that they are making the work for themselves. When I ask them whether they want people to see the work, they say Of course. When I ask them who, they say People.” We are here talking about studio based work, work that is made and then shown, but this brings up larger issues.
And there is a truth that anyone making work in a studio in the end is making something to a personal agenda. And neither of us were thinking that making art was a form of marketing where a clear sense of the intended audience, segmented and analysed, was central to the process. Working in public places is almost always a negotiation.
So I’m going to be exploring this question, drawing attention to writing that I think helps address the question, “What is the relationship between the artist and the audience, participant, collaborator, co-creator, etc?” There will be a series of posts and they’ll all have the Title “Artists and…” Some may just be links to other pieces of writing – where relevant I’ll provide pdfs too.
The first is from Anne Douglas’ forthcoming publication in the Connected Communities Series for Policy Press.
Anne recently wrote, speaking of Allan Kaprow and John Cage,
…they shared the question of where creativity begins and ends – with the composer, with the performer and/or with the audience? This shift in the power of creative agency is poignantly evidenced at this early stage in Cage’s 4’33” (1952). The performer sits at the grand piano but does not play it. Instead the ritual of a classical performance frames ambient sound creating an environment that is sensory and, importantly, draws the audience, performer and composition together in a shared space connected through listening. The conventional hierarchy in which the (active) composer generates material that the performer (as mediator) realises to a (passive) audience gives way to new configuration. The listener, who could be composer or performer or a member of the audience, becomes the creator of his/her own singular experience of sound.
Douglas, A. 2019 Redistributing Power? A Poetics of Participation in Contemporary Arts. Bristol: Polity Press.
You can download the book from the Connected Communities website
What art have I seen? Land of Lads, Land of Lashes
Rosemarie Castoro, Land of Lashes, archival photo, 1976
Land of Lads, Land of Lashes at Galerie Thaddeus Ropac. Rosmarie Castoro, Wanda Czelkowska, Lydia Okumura. Three different contexts (NYC, Poland, Brazil). Deep formal sculptural concerns bringing in expressionist, minimalist, humorous, bodily aspects. Interesting in comparison to Lee Lozano – the catalogue of the recent retrospective of Castoro suggests similar interest in lists, instructions and texts. Okumura’s spatial works relate to Sol Lewitt but also to Fred Sandback and are more dynamic than Lozano’s large paintings.
What art have I seen? More Christo drawings and collages
More Christo and Jeanne-Claude, this time at Repetto Gallery. Drawings are all attributed to Christo, though the installed projects are Christo & Jeanne-Claude. One public installation in the Serpentine Lake, one public exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, two commerical gallery exhibitions simultaneously (Stern Pissarro and Repetto).
I hadn’t realised before that some of the drawings are collages including fabric and string. In particular Wrapped Wall has fabric stapled to the image which is then drawn on, so some of the creases are ‘real’ and some inscribed – remarkable. The more you look at these works, the more they give you.
You can see in the 1976 The Pont Neuf Wrapped collage below that there is fabric inserted into the image – the media are listed as “Pencil, fabric, twine, photograph by Wolfgang Volz, wax crayon, pastel, charcoal and map.”
What art have I seen? Positive Geographies
John Blackwood and Svetlana Popova talking about Liminal engaged in the discourse of Aberdeen and the last bathhouse in Berlin.
What art have I seen? Lee Lozano
Lee Lozano Slip, Slide,Splice at the Fruitmarket Gallery. I bought her Notebook republished by Primary Information years ago, partly because I like scores and instructions and partly because we were working on Calendar Variations and I was looking for artists working with grass.
What art have I seen? A Global Table
A Global Table at the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands (thanks to the snow-cancelled flight.
It would be great to be part of one of the conversations that happen around this table periodically.
; or tell you about the ‘policing’ of relationships between Dutch men and indigenous and mixed women in the Indonesian colonies; or explores the batik business in which the Dutch as all good merchants do took from the Africans all sorts of designs and then sold them the materials. These and other works in the exhibition all revealed or described situations, where Shelley Sacks’ piece opens up a dialogue. In her work no simple moral position is offered. Rather we are asked to engage with the lives of the banana farmers.
Sadly the complimentary part of the exhibition focusing on Food in Still Life painting had been replaced at the Museum. It had been replaced with paintings on the theme of humour. Actually this is an interesting juxtaposition. The exhibition blurb is,
Naughty children, stupid peasants, foolish dandies and befuddled drunks, quack doctors, pimps, procuresses, lazy maids and lusty ladies – they figure in large numbers in Golden Age masterpieces. The Art of Laughter: Humour in the Golden Age presents the first ever overview of humour in seventeenth-century painting.
These paintings offer a moral commentary on society. They do this with beautifully rendered scenes containing jokes and knowing winks. Sex is alluded to through visual language of hares and skewers and the audience is captured by knowing looks. Scenes are ripe with meaning and compositions juxtapose meaning in revealing ways. Not all the contemporary works dealt with their subject matter with such finesse.
What art have I seen? Hamburger Bahnhof
Several amazing Robert Rauschenberg works.
Also major pieces by Joseph Beuys at the Hamburger Bahnhof including ‘Tallow’ originally made for Skulptur Projekte Munster and now in the collection. Caroline Tisdall’s description is much more evocative than the one on the archive website.
What art have I seen? Workspace at W OR M
Had my hair cut by Workspace’s Jimmy. Workspace has temporarily relocated to Peacock’s W OR M on the Castlegate.
Detail of Dunfermline life
What art have I seen? Mark Dion’s Theatre of the Natural World
Mark Dion’s Theatre of the Natural World at the Whitechapel, enjoyed with Reiko Goto and Tim Collins.
What art have I seen? The Land We Live In – The Land We Left Behind
The Land We Live In – The Land We Left Behind at Hauser & Wirth, Somerset. Enormous exhibition curated by Adam Sutherland.
This exhibition is in parts a bit like a rural museum managed by volunteers with cases of curiosities (models of bird feathers probably ten times life size, a doorstop homage to Robert Burns, various other tchotchkis). The first room you enter had a number of artists’s projects that explored food production. Another had strange hybrid works including an applebarn doubling as a confessional. The end wall of that room had a video piece which included a shocking segment of a cow being killed with a bolt gun in an abbatoir.
Whilst it is great to see the exploration of the rural in art and craft, the curation in the end felt conventional rather than radical. It’s a question of balance – the room with the food production projects was too modest and the room with the arty installation pieces was too overblown. The shocking video was just shocking. In about 1970 Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison exhibited, as part of a group show at the Hayward Gallery, a portable fish farm. This led to a storm of protest because they proposed to kill and eat the fish at the end of the exhibition. What were catfish, a staple food in the US, were carp kept as pets in the UK. The Harrisons’ scale of production was also more interesting – enough to produce a feast. The food production in The Land We Live In might keep a family in lettuce for a couple of weeks – it’s is certainly not enough to supply the Gallery restaurant. That installation should have been a whole room producing vegetables and fish for the restaurant. How would we have felt seeing the fish swimming around and then having them killed for our lunch?
We had too much ‘big art’ and not enough big ideas.
What art have I seen? Soutine’s Portraits: Cooks, Waiters & Bellboys
Courtauld Institute Soutine’s Portraits: Cooks, Waiters & Bellboys
What art have I seen? From Life
From Life at the Royal Academy – centred around Jeremy Deller’s Iggy Pop Life Class it also included the brilliant film by Cia Gou-Qiang – One Thousand Youngsters Drawing David.
Tended to agree with Timeout review that it was not brilliantly curated – last two rooms a bit of a guddle. Better to have more of Michael Landy’s portraits and fewer other bits and pieces.
Tim Rollins, 1955-2017. RIP
I had the great pleasure to participate in a workshop led by Tim Rollins and organised at the Talbot Rice Gallery in conjuction with is exhibition. He was inspirational, a preacher for art and a leader of people.
Obituaries
Artnews – http://www.artnews.com/2017/12/27/tim-rollins-artist-activist-thrived-collaborated-dies/
Vice – https://garage.vice.com/en_us/article/7xex4y/tim-rollins-dies-at-62
No Maintenance?
Sheila Ghelani’s Checklist of Care
http://sheilaghelani.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/checklist-of-care.html?m=1
RIP Linda Nochlin 1931-2017
Obituary for this incredibly important Feminist, Art Historian and Theorist whose influence on artists can’t be underestimated.
What art have I seen? Dada Africa
At Musée de L’Orangerie ‘Dada Africa: Sources et influences extra-occidentales’. Also Monet’s ‘Waterlilies’.
What art have I seen? Istanbul Biennial
Pedro Gómez-Egaña’s ‘Domain of Things’ amongst others in a former school
What art have I seen? Jac Leirner
At the Fruitmarket, Edinburgh. Art made from the everyday. I think that resistance affects how long a piece of wire can connect a socket to a bulb?
What art have I seen? Soul of a Nation
Soul of a Nation at Tate Modern
Lorraine O’Grady, ‘Art is…’ (detail) 1983
Compelling exhibition bringing together many distinct groups of artists (East Coast, Los Angeles, Abstraction, Graphic Design, etc) tackling vital and complex questions starting in 1963 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Aspects such as self organising galleries are common to many artists groups. Addressing lynchings and the bombings of churches not so much. You couldn’t have a more complex exhibition on ‘representation’.
David Braine 1940-2017 RIP
I was one of David’s amenuenses in the late 80s also living in Greenlaw Court for nearly 3 years. The obituary in the Catholic Herald pretty much says it all.
What art have I seen? Piero Gilardi
Piero Gilardi’s ‘Nature Forever’ at MAXXI, Rome http://www.maxxi.art/en/events/piero-gilardi/
What art have I seen? Collection Gori
Gori Collection of site specific sculpture on World Deep Listening Day.
What art have I seen? Dreamers Awake
Dreamers Awake must be the largest exhibition comprising only women artists that I’ve ever seen – good on White Cube for mounting it. As the reviewers have said, Surrealism is very much associated with men but this shows that it’s a thread running through the 20th and into 21st Century.
What art have I seen? Random Archive at Bury Art Museum
Random Archive at Bury Art Museum – excellent, challenging and provocative installation including the rant above.
Drifts into the permanent collection, elegantly curated mix of new and old including Paul Scott’s ceramics. One wall has work from a life drawing class which would appear to take place in the space (evidence in the form of easels). In fact there are tables for art classes pretty much everywhere intimating a very used and animated space.
CHRIS FREMANTLE 
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