Tortoise
things are going slowly, and badly, in the studio.
though, some drawing I’ve been doing for the Sauna Youth ‘Lists’ upcoming release & exhibition I’ve found interesting and fruitful. I had been thinking around a vague notion of my drawings as possible/failed lists of space, and then I read this…
“The role of the grid in defying entropy goes well beyond the physical. Creating order is a survival impulse against the death drive of gravity and entropy – or, at the very least, a mode of making the daunting demands of existing in time and space more manageable. The parcelling of space is an attempt to wrangle the infinite, thereby gaining traction against one’s inevitable union with it. Umberto Eco has recently cited the linguistic equivalent: making lists (which he also made the topic of an exhibition he curated at the Louvre.) ”We like lists because we don’t want to die.” A grid is a comprehensive list of all parts of space, with nothing left unaccounted for.” Tauba Auerbach
I got my photo taken by the well nice photographer Neil Gavin
and finally got my first Holga film developed about 5 years after being used, didn’t come out so great, but all the more reason to use it more, and I gotta get on and learn how to use my new Super 8 camera too, start making some films.
Space – The most recent frontier
“When I moved from my last place, my main objective was to find a space that was a workspace that I could live in, opposed to a live-in space that I could also work in” Leon Ransmeier
I’ve just moved in to a former care home in South West London. It was in a shitty state, but after ripping up carpets & lino, sawing up kitchen units, cobbling together found wood and a few coats of always reliable white emulsion, I’ve made myself a nice wee live/work space, and have started painting again after a short period without a studio. Damn it feels good!
Keltie Ferris
Earlier this year I posed a question to 12 admired painters: “What is the current state of abstraction?” Jackie Saccoccio Dec 18, 2009
A big question now is the sincerity/irony problem in abstract painting. In my own paintings, I think a lot about the structure of jokes to attempt to articulate some sort of intelligent middle ground that encompasses sincerity and “bitchiness” as Carroll Dunham aptly calls it. Jokes have to be true to be funny; they allow you to laugh at something sad or wrong. To ring true, they must come from an honest place, not simply from bitterness. Like a good joke, a great abstract painting has to come from a sincere place and be aware of the absurdity and complexity of that place as well as this world in order to avoid naiveté. Now we require of the artist some sort of distance from his/her work in order to see a bigger picture, but I would argue that it should still be from an honest internal spot.
In a larger sense, in an attempt to answer the question, “What is the state of abstraction today?” I compiled a list of various directions I see happening now, particularly among younger painters:
- Abstraction built on arcane folk references (numerology, psychedelia, your grandfather’s drawings): Interesting ideas with strange looks that have yet to be incorporated into the language of serious painting. Perhaps this art is the most personal but unambitious painting possible. It can thus be original and free, but sometimes it’s just small-minded.
- Abstraction built on phenomenology and perception: There’s very little of this right now in painting; rather it is more present in the type of sculpture in the New Museum’s Unmonumental show from 2007. I think the work of Gedi Sibony, for example, offers exciting possibilities to painters, where attention to texture and stillness speak volumes. Though very few painters are interested in this right now; off-hand I can only think of Mark Barrow.
- Abstraction as action: There are very few of us under 40 who are doing this. Some get included in this tiny camp but are actually part of the next two categories.
- Abstraction as action for the non-believers: By this I mean, Christopher Wool and his descendants. Or maybe Albert Oehlen did it first. Here there is a lot of distancing techniques from mark-making with a brush (spray paint, silk screening, Xeroxing, and other printmaking techniques). Sometimes it feels this simple: brushes and palette knives are for the believers; layers of prints and spray guns are for the critics. Of course it isn’t; Rauschenberg started with that sort of critique, but of course didn’t end there.
- Abstraction as messiness: This work is discussed in relationship to AbEx history, but is actually messy figurative painting, messy text painting, or messy landscape painting. Nonetheless, it is interpreted as abstraction, just because de Kooning still looms that large in New York. If it’s expressionist enough, mark-making can overpower any image, so that the picture is read mostly abstractly, especially by New York artists and audiences. Nothing confuses the discourse more than when AbEx is reduced to messy painting in press releases, blogs, and reviews.
- Abstraction as a follower of the Germans: black and silver, sometimes mimicking photographic processes, somewhat understated and self-hating. A lot of pointedly small abstract painting clings to this in hopes of not seeming macho or confident, God forbid.
happy new year
‘Freya & Anna’, 2009
“As a young artist you don’t know what you are capable of, you don’t know where something is going to take you, you can succeed or you can fail. It’s very exciting and it fills you with energy. Everything is an adventure.”
Thomas Nozkowski
2009 has been a good year, thankyou to everyone who has made it so.
visible invisible
Visible Invisible: Against the Security of the Real
25 November 2009 – 7 February 2010
Artists: Cecily Brown, Hans Josephsohn, Shaun McDowell, Katy Moran and Maaike Schoorel
“… in the presence of a painting, it is not a question of my making ever more references to the subject … Rather … it is a matter of contemplating, of perceiving the painting by way of the silent signals which come at me … from its every part, which emanate from the traces of paint set down on the canvas … to form a tightly structured arrangement in which one has the distinct feeling that nothing is arbitrary …”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
This is a brilliant exhibition, not least because it provided me with my first experience of Cecily Brown’s paintings, which thankfully lived up to my highest expectations. Katy Moran’s paintings are always a pleasure, Shaun McDowell’s work was exciting and made me want to play with oil sticks, and Maaike Schoorel’s paintings are a quiet challenge to the other artists excesses and definitely worth some extended looking time. I spent a long time at this exhibition and will be returning frequently.
There are also a series of artists talks to accompany the exhibition. I have my tickets.
Thursday 10 December, 7pm
Gallery talk: Maaike Schoorel in conversation with Pablo Lafuente
Pablo Lafuente is a writer, Managing Editor of Afterall and Associate Curator at the Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Oslo. He will be in conversation with the exhibiting artist, Maaike Schoorel, to discuss the guiding principles behind her work.
£5/£3 concessions
Thursday 7 January, 7pm
First Thursdays event: Katy Moran in conversation with Tom Morton
Tom Morton is a Curator at the Hayward Gallery, London, Contributing Editor for Frieze, and Co-Curator (with Lisa Lefeuvre) of the British Art Show 7, 2010- 2011. He is also the author of one of the catalogue essays that accompanies this exhibition. He will be in conversation with the exhibiting artist, Katy Moran, to discuss her work in the context of the exhibition.
£5/£3 concessions
Thursday 21 January, 7pm
Gallery talk: Shaun McDowell in conversation with Hannah Barry and Ben Eastham
Artist Shaun McDowell will discuss his work in the exhibition with Hannah Barry, Director of the Hannah Barry Gallery and Ben Eastham, Head of Publications. McDowell’s paintings have been exhibited since 2006; his first major solo exhibition was held at the Hannah Barry Gallery in May 2008.
Free
Painting…fucking love it.
open up your ears, the BBC is here
listen to Howard Hodgkin talk about what kind of a painter he is, his process of painting, learning painting techniques and the history of painting, the difficulty of adding a title to his paintings, the scale and development of his paintings, the influence of Matisse & the ideal life of an artist.
listen to Bridget Riley talk about the influence of the North Cornish coast, why she became a painter, why she turned to abstraction, learning from Seurat, finding the basis of colour, the stripe, rhythm, pace and orchestration, pictorial space, the renaissance painters, Mondrian and Francis Bacon, doing life drawing again & the difference between figurative and abstract art.
listen to Lucien Freud talk about his dislike of using professional models, painting plants and still lives as opposed to portraits, his lack of interest in the response of his audience & the influence of artists of the past.
listen to Francis Bacon talk about the element of chance in his work and the frequent destruction of his paintings, religion and the Popes, the futility of humanity, art as a game, art as a distraction & the glazing and framing of his pictures.
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