What art have I seen? Re(a)d Bed
James Pryde, ‘The Red Bed’ (1916)
One of the challenges in creating work for hospitals and healthcentres is that there really isn’t any place to experiment.
If you want to in some way engage with our health and the institutions which deal with us when we are sick, pretty much regardless of artform, it is tricky. Quite rightly healthcare professionals control access. Hospitals aren’t really places for experimentation. You probably ought to know what you are doing if you are going to make art in places where people are sick, recovering or dying.
So the exhibition Re(a)d Bed in Edinburgh’s City Arts Centre is an important correlate to the major Art and Therapeutic Design programme currently being installed and otherwise integrated into NHS Lothian’s new Royal Hospital for Children and Young People, Department of Clinical Neuroscience and Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in Little France, Edinburgh.
The works in the exhibition are the result of residencies and fellowships intended to provide developmental opportunities for artists to explore issues and create new and challenging responses to in particular the neurosciences context. Key to this programme has been the partnership between Ginkgo Projects, public art and design managers, and New Media Scotland/Alt-W. The exhibition comprises both some historical items as well as new works by artists, craftspeople and designers. Full documentation can be found on the New Media Scotland site here. Gavin Inglis’ in progress graphic novel exploring functional neurological disorders, Stacy Hunter’s questioning the depersonalisation of the clinical environment, asking what objects could make it more personal again, Sven Werner’s audio work on becoming invisible… These and the others are all important vectors through healthcare experiences and environments, experiments that need to be done, ideas that need to be tested and prototyped.
Beyond Walls provides more information and regular updates.
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? Beuys Utopia at the Stag Monuments
Joseph Beuys: Utopia at the Stag Monuments at Galerie Thaddeus Ropac.
So what is the difference between Kienholz and Beuys? Both are constructing with everyday materials including furniture and other stuff selected for symbolic import. Both are speaking to the social. Kienholz’ Nativity or Beuys’ Feldbett?
Kienholz is utilising the detritus of urban society to assemble installations that comment on religion, race and sex. Beuys is using the most basic materials to provoke our understanding of the larger significance of life – fat, felt, electricity, ovens, clay, etc.
Beuys’ work suggests the potential for social transformation. Kienhol’ work on the other hand is mostly stabbing at hypocrisy with satire.
What art have I seen? Ed Kienholz and Speigelgasse
Ed Kienholz at Blain/Southern. Boy Ed could be offensive. The ‘Black Leather Chair’ Proposal is really ‘in your face’ nasty, especially in the wording – see here.
I rather like proposals as a format (e.g. Peter Liversidge and Lee Lozano) and I didn’t know Kienholz had adopted that strategy. I also didn’t know about pricing method – a sum for the written proposal and plaque, a little more for a drawing, and then a sum to be agreed for realising the proposal.
Also saw Speigelgasse at Hauser & Wirth. All Swiss artists, following the influence of dada…
What art have I seen? Gi cont.
Mitchell Library contains two temporary library related projects:
A public library of and for listening by Anneke Kampman and Katherine MacBride
Invitation to Forms with Kate Briggs, Joseph Buckley, Francis McKee, Vivian Sky Rehberg, Sarah Tripp, Nina Wakeford and Brighton Upton-Trust
What art have I seen? Gi
Deniz Uster’s Citadel at the Briggait, along with Nadia Myre’ Code-Switching and Other Work.
Rosie O’Grady’s May Day at the House for an Art Lover.
Duggie Fields at The Modern Institute
What art have I seen? Will Maclean
Will Maclean’s Narratives at the Fine Art Society, Edinburgh
What art have I seen? Ross Birrell The Transit of Hermes
Ross Birrell’s Transit of Hermes at the CCA, Glasgow http://www.cca-glasgow.com/programme/ross-birrell-the-transit-of-hermes
Failure (ceramics)
“Anyone working with ceramics requires a wealth of knowledge, patience, and painstaking skills, but also the ability to cope with failure—using it to grow as artists.” Read the rest here
What art have I seen? Séan Hillen
Séan Hillen’s Melancholy Witness: Images from the Troubles at Kamera8. Also on show works from the Irelandis series.
What art have I seen? Séan Hillen
Séan Hillen’s Melancholy Witness: Images from the Troubles at Kamera8. Also on show there works from the Irelandis series.
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? Vertigo Sea
John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea at the Talbot Rice Gallery.
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’.
What art haven’t I seen? Martin Puryear
Went to Parasol Unit. Really looking forward to seeing Martin Puryear’s work. Not open yet.
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? Life of John the Baptist
Faith
Andrea del Sarto’s Life of John the Baptist at the Chiostro dello Scalzo. Last here 18 years ago. Just as good.
Salome’s Dance
What art have I seen? Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden
Detail from The Emperor
I have a particular love of artists’ personal projects (Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta, Charles Jencks’ Garden outside Dumfries) and Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden is no exception. Quirky and deeply personal under a veneer of playground fun.
The Devil
Fascinated to read that Tinguely did a lot of the welding for the armatures and that the ceramics were largely made, fired and glazed on-site.
The Moon
What art have I seen? Piero Gilardi
Piero Gilardi’s ‘Nature Forever’ at MAXXI, Rome http://www.maxxi.art/en/events/piero-gilardi/
The rules of hospital art: ‘If you can’t clean it, you can’t have it’
The ambitious programme for the new Children’s Hospital in Dublin here highlighted in the press with the importance of maintenance, “If you can’t clean it, you can’t have it”. Clearly this strategy aims to focus on the needs of the patient and is being led by the Youth Council. They want a building that doesn’t look like a hospital, but can they use the constraints of cleaning and maintenance creatively? For more on that thought read my blog on the London Arts in Health Forum.
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.
Daniel Dennett on the Dignity of Being Wrong and Art-Science of Making Fertile Mistakes
“The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them — especially not from yourself. Instead of turning away in denial when you make a mistake, you should become a connoisseur of your own mistakes, turning them over in your mind as if they were works of art, which in a way they are. … The trick is to take advantage of the particular details of the mess you’ve made, so that your next attempt will be informed by it and not just another blind stab in the dark.”
https://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/05/29/intuition-pumps-daniel-dennett-on-making-mistakes/
What art have I seen? Aleksandra Mir
Aleksandra Mir’s Space Tapestry: Earth Observation and Human Spaceflight at Modern Art Oxford as well as Kazem Hakimi’s Portraits from A Chip Shop (also at the Fire Station).
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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