CHRIS FREMANTLE

Having been to the Rothko Chapel and having lived in Scotland for more than thirty years and spending the best (and worst) of that working with artists, this resonates… the older I get, the more I realise, “both this and that are true at once…”
http://connerhabib.wordpress.com/2015/01/27/the-question-of-light-tilda-swintons-speech-at-the-mark-rothko-chapel/

Joseph Kosuth’s neon works installed Spruth Magers. The banding on the photo is I assume a frequency related to the neon/camera interaction. This work in the basement made the Greek myths into daily appointments. Upstairs  the neon treatment of Freud’s proofs of the galleys was one of a sequence of manifestations of others’ works including artists (including Judd and Calvin and Hobbes), theorists (including Adorno) and scientists (including Darwin).

Whitechapel Gallery’s first class exhibition, Adventures of the Black Square. They take us for a very interesting walk following the black square in the 20th Century art, dance, design, architecture and craft. Particularly appreciated juxtaposition with David Batchelor’s Monochrome – 500 white quadrilaterals he’s found on his travels (and in the corner one screen showing the black ones).

David Blyth’s astounding exhibition at RGU. Exploring and exploding taxidermy. Stories of Cyril the Squirrel and the Blyth’s Fitch Ranch in Manitoba  in the 30s and 40s. Years of stripping back stories.

Check out @an_artnews’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/an_artnews/status/526811922512216066?s=09

A Literary Landscape in Russian Art at the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway. A selection of prints and drawings by students (who have done residencies at the Pushkin Museum perhaps a little like Hospitalfield?).  Quality classical drawing and printmaking skills on display from early 20th Century to present day.

Nemora at the Fine Art Society, Juliette Losq’ black and white ink and watercolour scenes of post apocalyptic greenworld overwhelming our cities. These paintings extend space through devices such as infiltrating a fireplace or surrounding a grandfather clock and also replacing its face. For all those attempts to question the frame and break out of the container (like the plantlife evoked in those overlooked and unplanned spaces behond retail parks)  it was the framed work Scumsucker (2011) which resonated the most reminding me of the space in which John Wallace’s Cinema Sark was exhibited a year ago during the first Environmental Art Festival Scotland: the undercroft of the M6 as it crossed the river Sark defining the border between England and Scotland.
Bernd und Hilla Becher at Spruth Magers. I wonder who decided on the composition of the groups of 9 images in particular? Was it the Bechers? The groupings are very subtle.
The Nakeds at the Drawing Room. Ought to have been inspiring and provoking in the way their Abstract Drawing exhibition was. Perhaps the failure is exemplified by a success. One of the standout pieces is Fiona Banner’s block of red text on a page (a print from Arsewoman in Wonderland I think). The text is a verbal description of a woman in a porn film. The description creates a clear sense of the artist’s eye travelling over and exploring the image (presumably frozen on a screen). It’s deeply personal and distinctive. It’s in no way salacious – quite the opposite – it wouldn’t make it into a volume of erotica. But the rest was in danger of sameness failing to extend vigorously into enough different spaces of drawing the human body. The are too many pieces that feel like sketches off the studio floor – the two small pieces by Beuys feel like that, though the Warhol drawings are revealing. But there are none of Gormley’s drawings using his own semen or any Duchampian work made with naked bodies and paint. Egon Schiele is at the heart of the thinking, but in a way he dominates the aesthetic too much and the conception not enough. The aim of the exhibition, to explore the space between the nude and porn, is really interesting but the curation doesn’t really stretch it enough. Schiele obviously made work for distribution as porn, so did Turner. I wonder who else did as well?

Dan Flavin Institute. Photo Chris Fremantle

Currently at the Dan Flavin Institute in Bridgehampton you can see an exhibition of cards and letters that Carl Andre sent to Sol LeWitt (press release here).
It’s pretty clear that they must have shared a sense of humour as well as an aesthetic.
There is on sequence of instructions for painting landscape (a card divided into a grid of six boxes -three by two – in each box is the name of one colour paired with the names of one of six other colours. Down the side of the card is written the word foliage). Following the instructions should lead to works which might remind you of works by Joseph Albers.
There’s another set of 16 cards each, in sequence, with three lines of the biography of Spinoza pasted onto them. 
There’s a set with different materials’ polar curves (something to do with algebra), again cut out of a University textbook.
This pretty much demonstrates a number of LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art such as “Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.” Sorry not to be here for part 2 in the winter featuring Andre’s poetry.

The new Parrish Art Museum just outside Southampton, designed by Herzog and de Meuron (of Tate Modern fame), is at once a challenging and also quite subtle piece of architecture. It aspires to sit in the landscape like the epitome of an agricultural building: larger maybe, more overtly using the materials of agricultural architecture such as sterling board and exposed concrete.  It’s very different from the quiet neoclassicism of the old Parrish. Sitting on a basically rectangular plot next to Route 27, the relationship to landscape dodges the otherwise generic retail architecture that prevails along every highway in the US. On the other hand the relationship of the car parks, oak trees and swales at the back of the building is good, and the quality of wildflower meadow also successfully differentiates this space from commercial, municipal and domestic lawns.  Fritz Haeg and the Harrisons would be pleased to see this, and perhaps it will slowly change the wider landscape.
Inside the overhanging roof creates a quality of light recogniseable from the best architecture in places with such strong summer sun.
The spaces suit Maya Lin and Denis Oppenheim, both with works installed this summer. Maya Lin’s explorations of aspects of landscape at different scales are compelling, whilst Oppenheim’s proposals for splash buildings are fun and funky, but keep your attention.
The building doesn’t seem to serve traditional painting quite so well. It is perhaps too austere for William Merritt Chase’s works on show. 
It’s quite an achievement for a small town (albeit with access to considerable wealth) to have produced a space which will be considered alongside the best small art museums in the world. But with great wealth comes great responsibility and it would be interesting to hear how this institution engages with all those who are excluded. It looks like it might have good environmental credentials, but it needs good social ones beyond the conventional work with schools – where’s the residency with the hispanic migrant working community that services the domestic and gardening needs of the Hamptons, or works with isolated older people in the winter?

There are two opportunities in Edinburgh in August to hear artists talking about working in healthcare (I’m going to be moderating the second of them). Both will touch on mental health contexts, but the second event will particularly focus on them.

Art and the Healing Environment
Sunday August 17th 1.30 – 2.30. Princes Room, Bonhams. Free entry.

The session will be Chaired by Dr. Donnie Ross, an ex-hospital consultant and medical director, and ex-chairman of Grampian Hospitals Art Trust, who also describes himself as a shed-builder, writer and artist – and who writes:

‘….the NHS is about healing but the elements of wholeness, compassion and creativity have been squeezed out by technology, rationality and hard economics …… there should be an intellectual and emotional dimension to hospital art projects which extends beyond the acknowledged essential and valuable putting of nice pictures on walls ….. to give the movement longevity & durability in the face of changing political and economic circumstances.’

Speakers:

Jan-Bert van den Berg – Director of Artlink, Edinburgh

Trevor Jones – Director of Art in Healthcare

Alexander Hamilton – Lead commissioned artist for Dignified Spaces at th New South Glasgow Hospitals

Robin Williams – Gallery manager at Edinburgh’s The Gallery on the Corner

Ian Rawnsley  – Artist and exhibitor in this year’s show

and

Artist as Healer: The relationship between art and the health service
Summerhall Festival 2014
21st August 18.00
Free

How can art contribute to our health? What part can it play in the clinical process?  What are the issues for artists and producers working in healthcare contexts?

Join Artist Maria McCavana, Producer Chris Fremantle and Dr Lindsey MacLeod, Consultant Clinical Psychologist specialising in Child and Adolescent Mental Health, as they discuss the role that artists can play in the creation of modern healthcare environments and the impact these can have on the patients that use them.

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I’d also recommend the other UZArts discussion which will focus on Human Rights,

Artist as Activist: The relationship between art and social change
Summerhall Festival 2014
22nd August 2014 18.00
Free

UZ Arts Director and Director of Sura Medura Artist Residency centre, Neil Butler in conversation with Sri Lankan artist and human rights activist Chandraqupta Thenuwara about his life and work. A leading peace activist before, during and after the Sri Lankan civil war, Thenu worked with Neil Butler on the 2007 concert ‘Sing for Peace’, which brought together prominent Tamil, Sinhalese, Burgher and Muslim singers to share the same stage. Thenu has continued his work as a human rights activist in post-war Sri Lanka, maintaining a constant critique of the Sri Lankan war and its aftermath. Thenu will be visiting the UK as UZ Arts Artist in Residence in Glasgow, living and working in the city throughout August and September

Went to Laboratorio on West Nile Street for coffee and art. So appropriate for the Commonwealth, Last To Win brings some memorabilia from Italy to Scotland relevant to this specific moment. Apparently in the late forties the Italians had a special black jersey for the rider who came last in each stage of the national cycle race. Just to further explore the good humoured stereotype I can imagine that Chris Biddlecombe must have spent quite a long evening drinking grappa in the bar in Genoa where these treasures normally reside. I can see the owner behind the bar grizzled and smiling, wide as he is tall, telling Chris about the various objects on the walls, and then slowly being charmed into the into the idea of lending them to Scotland as a reminder of trans European connections and the joy of losing.

Radical Geommetry at the Royal Academy is pretty quiet on a Saturday afternoon. I came because I’m interested in Carlos Cruz-Diez and his use of colour and optical effects (but the largest piece is in a room where you can’t stand back far enough to appreciate it). Anyway the reviews have tended to be concerned in whether South American abstraction was derivative or an interesting thing in itself. If this is derivative then what becomes of Jim Lambie when you are looking at Otero’s Colourhythm 38 of 1958?
But that might be unfair because Soto’s maquette for a mural (1952-53) probably became something like the piece of cast concrete public art outside Charing Cross Station in Glasgow – very dated. Could and should that sort of work be revitalised in the way Alex Frost has with mosaic (another 70s public art classic)? Yet the concerns of these artists (abstraction, interaction) remain relevant today, the aesthetic largely retains its power and South America has gone on contributing to ideas of what art can be (eg Ala Plastica, Grupo Etcetera).

Alison Watt at Perth Museum and Art Gallery. The two rooms contain works from art school (Glasgow in the 80s) to 2014. The most recent piece has an almost photographic tonality and gloss to it. The interpretation is good, drawing out the renaissance (Titian), neoclassical (Ingres) and modern (Fontana) reference points.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez 1927-2014

Em Strang asked us to highlight a Weekend Workshop of creative writing, discussion and walking in October in Cumbria. Check it out – you’ll be in good hands.

Francois Matarasso offers an excellent articulation of the importance of art as “a way of knowing unlike others” and of the passion associated with that. He goes on to make an important point – other ways of knowing are also distinctive and equally valuable, “I believe that art is a way of knowing unlike others, but that doesn’t make it more important than the others.” His conclusion seemed to me to highlight something fundamental to collaboration and working with other ways of knowing, which we sometimes call ‘interdisciplinarity’. He says “To value one kind of experience, one glimpse beyond the selfish and material, does not require a rejection of all others. Life is not a zero-sum game. The heart is capacious.” When he says “The heart is capacious” he implies the critical thing, which is that to collaborate or work across disciplines requires acknowledging that the other way of knowing that you are engaging with is equally valid, and moreover, that you need to make space in your heart as well as your mind to love the other way of knowing as well. This is so evident in the practices of artists working in social and ecological contexts. It is absolutely obvious when you think about it that Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison for instance love and value the ways of knowing of ecological scientists.

Photo Chris Fremantle

Hamish Fulton at Maureen Paley.

and I think Fulton has a good sense of humour.

David Batchelor at the Fruitmarket and Ian Hamilton Finlay at Ingleby Gallery with ECA Art, Space and Nature

Reposted from www.publicartscotland.com

It’s common place to see elements of exhibitions spilling out of galleries (so-called off-site projects, and don’t get me started on that terminology).  But artists who work in public sometimes spill into galleries (although documentation of sited work doesn’t always make for good exhibitions).

Culture Hijack, curated by Peter McCaughey of GSA, and Ben Parry, PhD candidate at UWS, takes on this most slippery subject extremely well.  The artists in this show are pranksters and activists from across the world (including Japan, India, the US, Canada and a fair bit of Europe).

These artists take on the city, the streets, regeneration, consumerism, bureaucracy, capitalism, neo-liberalism: politics.  They’re at home in a pedagogical space concerned with urbanism and inhabitation.  And it’s therefore very apt that it’s in the Architecture Association and also all over the city.  The issues raised are the issues that embroil architects and planners as much as cultural theorists and artists.

Photo: Ben Parry, 2013, temporary intervention Bedford Square, London, for Culture Hijack Exhibition

And the exhibition points the spotlight at the blurred, constantly moving, shape of these practices.  Right outside on Bedford Square there’s an installation by Tatzu Nishi that has the formal elegance of sculpture and sometimes turns into the absurdity of a good happening.  He captures the circularity of the building industry: tearing down and piling up.

Inside, in an installation that borrows it’s language from outdoor exhibitions and temporary conferences, are a lot of videos, one of the best being by Tushar Joag, who spoke at the CCA in Glasgow last week.  In his piece a bunch of wide-boy London window cleaners join Tushar (in hisUnicell Public Works Cell boiler suit) to perform the cleaning of the Olympic landscape.  A bunch of trained performance artists could not have got into the spirit of ‘cleaning’ the vistas of the east end with more energy and sense of the dance of life.

Video: Tushar Joag collaborating with Gaze a Glaze.

In another space, created by scaffolding tubing and banner fabric, a solitary figure on a handcar travels the train tracks of a German city (Matthias Wermke & Mischa Leinkauf’ In Between).  It’s a beautiful moment of living on the edge, not angry, not ironic, just playful.

On the same day at the Barbican was the official launch of the evaluation report on the Cultural Olympiad, saying that some 43 million people had experienced this four year cultural programme leading up to the Games and that it had succeeded in raising Britain from 5th to 4th on the list of nations as desirable brands.

As the international-sporting-event-with-cultural-programme bandwagon moves on towards Glasgow we need to make sure that we question it, poke fun at it and make sure it doesn’t bulldoze anything that really matters (like a community or an allotment).

Culture Hijack is at the Architectural Association, Bedford Square, London and around the city 26 April – 25 May 2013

Chris Fremantle

Satire is alive in Scotland!

Donald Urquhart and Gerry Loose Orchard at the Scottish Poetry Library

Nancy Holt at Haunch of Venison, London

Chris Dooks, Morag Deyes, Rob Close, Lianne Hackett and I were taken for a walk around the Ayr by Kevin Bell (Surveyor at J&E Shepherd). These are some images Chris Dooks took, particularly in the vicinity of Plot 9.

Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Lavoro at the Simon Lee Gallery

and John Burningham: an illustrated journey at the Fleming Collection.

Thursday 10th March I attended an anatomy lecture at Glasgow Sculpture Studios.  As part of Christine Borland’s Cast from Life residency and exhibition, she had invited Quentin Fogg, a member of staff of Glasgow University’s Anatomy Department, to lecture.  He gave a fascinating introduction and history of the development of Anatomy from a visual perspective, focusing on the evolution of drawing and representation.

Joyce Cutler-Shaw has just announced her exhibition ‘Body Narratives‘ at the New York University Health Sciences Library.  Like Borland, directly tackling the assumption that everything about anatomy is already known, Cutler-Shaw is opening up the issue of representation, realism and the body.

Can we really be sure that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house?

Lucy Skaer at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh