The Lives of Other's: Miroslav Tichy @ Wilkinson Gallery

Miroslav Tichy's work is shown at Wilkinson Gallery at the moment. (Press release here)

1. Being John Malkovich.  It is disturbing, how close one gets to "being Miroslav Tichy" when walking the show. Apparently, Tichy photographed those images for himself. Thus the honesty of voyeuristic experience in them. The images look like stolen moments, quick ones, where there is no time to set up the camera. Just the moment. A glimpse of nudity. A glimpse of smile. A glimpse of a shoe.
The photos do not look precious - one could find them on the basement floor, gnawed by mice, flooded, marked with age and surroundings. A discarded collection. One of those albums or photo boxes I get from house clearances.
2. Would one photo be enough? No. This show is a book - one page does not make a book ( I do know somebody who would most certainly ague otherwise :-) The images flow from one into another and build up a the whole. Page by page, photo by photo, around the perimeter of the gallery.
3. The Lives of Others is a wonderful German film about surveillance in East Germany.

Denise Hawrysio @ Camberwell

I do not usually write about things that happen at college (I should, shouldn't I?).

Yesterday we had a talk by Denise Hawrysio (here is a link to more info from Margaret Cooter) and I was also lucky to have a tutorial with her afterwards. She is such a nice person! It was great to see her cringe about some of her early work - don't we all :-) It was great to have a chat about explaining/not explaining the work to the audience. She gave me a great confidence boost!
Oh - and I love her last altered book project "Spotlight". On the whole, most of the work she showed seemed to be about setting the conditions/rules for the work to appear and then displaying the result: cutting out faces, letting prisoners fill the books, allowing chemical reaction to erode the pages.

Beyond photography: Clarisse d’Arcimoles @ Degree Art

At the moment Degree Art has got a fascinating exhibition by Clarisse d’Arcimoles. Worth a trip to the East End.
Clarisse is a photographer, but the exhibition was not exactly what I expected of a photography exhibition. It is not one of those perfectly lit, high gloss, expensively framed, large format selection of land/city/seascapes, that fill the art fairs. Clarisse's work is intimate and homely. She recreates and documents the past (no wonder I loved the show). There are photos from her family albums (a kind of now and then arrangements), there is the story of the last resident of the demolished block of flats, there are her travels in India. I had an impression, that Clarisse functions first as an artist, and then as a photographer. I will certainly be keeping my eye on her.

Since graduating from Central Saint Martin’s just over a year ago, d’Arcimoles’ work has been enthusiastically received with exhibitions and awards in the UK and internationally. She is currently exhibiting in Newspeak: British Art Now Vol. II at the Saatchi Gallery. Clarisse d’Arcimoles immortalises, revisits and re-imagines through her work, taking memory and the passage of time as her material. Through this conflation of the past and present the results fluctuate between emotionally charged relics and documentary objects. D’Arcimoles’ delicate handling of her subjects challenges authenticity and artificiality in a bid for both nostalgia and reality.

Clarisse d’Arcimoles: Un-Possible retour and other recent works will include new and recently acclaimed photography, film and installation by d’Arcimoles. Un-Possible retour is a photographic series in which the artist reconstructed snapshots from her family photo albums. The works share the simultaneously poignant and comic atmosphere of The Good Old Days, a sustained investigation through notebooks, photography and film, into the life of Jimmy Watts, the oldest resident of the Market Estate in Holloway, demolished last year. The film will be shown in a reconstruction of how the artist displayed the film in Watts’ flat, custom-built for the exhibition. 16 impressions sous plastique is a collection of self-portraits of d’Arcimoles in a series of hostels and hotel rooms while travelling across India. The intimate environments are generic yet personal in their brief occupation, defined by the detritus of previous tenants or sterile anonymity, accompanied by unlikely commentary and recommendations. These celebrated works will be accompanied by new and previously unseen works.

If there is cinematic poetry...

"Music articulates forms which language cannot set forth" - Susanne Langer (from G. L. Hagberg Art as Language. Wittgenstein, Meaning and Aesthetic Theory)

"Music articulates forms which language cannot set forth" - Susanne Langer (from G. L. Hagberg Art as Language. Wittgenstein, Meaning and Aesthetic Theory)

If there is cinematic poetry, this must be it. Do watch it to the end, if you have not seen it before. And get yourself a copy of the film - Spirited Away.

This must be the most beautiful scene from any film. Chihiro boards this train. It's a spirits' train - she is in the spirit land, trying to rescue her parents. The train only runs one way. It travels through the vast spaces of water. The music is sublime. So atmospheric.
I have travelled once on the slow train in winter across Lithuania. And this is how it felt. The land was vast and white; the stops seemed all in the middle of nowhere; the people were silent, pensative and carried baskets and old cases. I could almost hear that music!






PS. Apparently the magnificent soundtrack to this magnificent film is by Joe Hisaishi - one more name to add to my favorite Japanese artists, alongside Araki Takako, Yohei Nishimura and - of course - Hayao Miyazaki.

London Art Fair: Aliki Braine's altered landscapes for big walls.

Big landscapes! That Australian man would be oh so happy! Except that Aliki Braine's landscapes are punched, so I am not sure how they fit into the category of "lovely pictures".

Aliki is interested in how a photograph can be transformed into an object and uses destructive techniques to disrupt her otherwise pastoral landscape images. Often cutting, drawing with ink or punching holes into the negative her violation of the pristine surface of the photograph forces the viewer to look towards the texture of the photographic paper and opens up a new understanding of the photographic process and image making. For Aliki the hole puncher acts in much the same way as a painter's brush, enabling her to make a mark on her photographic canvas. (From Troika Editions website).

PS I have just realized, that I really do like artwork with absence.

London Art Fair: Sankeum Hoh pearls up the language.

Sankeum Koh at Hanmi Gallery. There is something about things that look like language, but we cannot read. A possibility of language. Removed language. Empty shapes. Fired books.

Sankeum KOH’s works involve the meticulous assembly of pearl beads or steels balls to create an illusion of blurred texts, sourcing from newspaper columns, books, and poetry. Koh transforms the literary words into fragmented visions. She draws upon the viewer’s frustration of not being able to read the cryptic codes leaving the viewer to question what it is they are actually ‘reading’. Her works aim to challenge the validity of such texts in newspapers and question the dogmatic approach of its readers.

London Art Fair: Clay Ketter, Klaus Staudt, Valeria Nascimento.

Clay Ketter had a few impressive pieces called Golf Coast Slabs. Very powerful pictures, that look like abstract photographs at first. On a closer inspection it becomes clear, that they are actually traces of homes: the homes swept away by the hurricane Katrina that hit the American Gulf Coast in 2006.

His work on the surface has a beautifully minimalist aesthetic, but the real interest lies beneath the layers in a "truth to materials" approach and the perfection of the process.

Klaus Staudt. Loved it! Reminds me of this fog.


Valeria Nascimento plays with porcelain (like me, then!)

London Art Fair: Diana Taylor and Rowena Huges

Diana Taylor and Rowena Huges must have been my favorite. Diana seems to be working with memories and fragmentation. Unfortunately, I cannot say much about them: the ladies at Room Artspace did not happen to be the talkative ones (hm... except with each other).

"Hidden Spaces" sketchbook exhibition: sharing a vitrine with Grayson Perry.

Everybody knows Grayson Perry. Even my daughter (10) knows the potter who looks like Alice (in the Wonderland) and makes vases with penises. OK, she may not be an average ten year old. She does get dragged around galleries a bit. However, it did impress her, that I had to share a vitrine with the Grayson Perry!

Danny has assembled this really interesting exhibition of sketchbooks, that were shown at Camberwell for a week. I brought in mine just as he was arranging the others, therefore, I had a chance to flick through some amazing - I mean really amazing - and creative sketchbooks.

Dannys own sketchbooks are quite remarkable. He uses old books and works on top of them: a kind of pamplicest. Stephen Cooper's and Janet Bradley's sketchbooks are very "there": bright, bold, full. Natalie Yaxi brought bound volumes of junk mail. Grayson Perry, Christa Harris and me contributed "pocket" sketchbooks, used for casual notes and scribbles. I flicked though Perry's book yesterday. It was full of Jesuses and Marys and churches. A few rabbits on the bikes, a few babies, a few pretty girls. A hint of darkness. A fire. Some writing. It was not much different from his ceramics. However, I am tempted to say, that I enjoyed the sketchbook more, than his vases (and I do love his ceramics!). Is it because it is so much more immediate? More personal? Like looking into the person? Like getting to know the person.
(I suppose aesthetics of the work is the same, but content changes from personal to public).

Hidden Spaces Exhibition
For most artists sketchbooks have been spaces in which to rehearse and experiment without the pressure
of the outside world. This removal of audience creates a non judgemental, safe environment which
stimulates explorative play which in turn can feed the creative process. Many artists have told me they
consider their sketchbook work as important as final published works yet have never exhibited or shown
this work before, this still surprises me. The purpose of this exhibition is to bring together sketchbooks from
a range of successful practitioners that for the most part have never been exhibited.

1 Danny Aldred
My sketchbooks represent a process centred around the enjoyment of collage and the final completed
books on the most part have inadvertently become finished pieces in their own right. As a child Brian
Eno described his enjoyment of collecting fossils from the beach and described this process as ‘beyond
thinking’, when I am collecting material and making my sketchbooks I can relate to this comment.

2. Janet Bradley

3 Stephen Cooper
This selection of some 60 drawings is taken from a total of 300 drawings executed over four consecutive
days in Paris. The project began on the Eurostar journey from London and was completed during the return
journey. The drawings shown here were made in my hotel room, many between 2 and 4 in the morning
when I deliberately worked in complete darkness and was unable to view the paper. The subjects come
from memory and are concerned with science, brain function and consciousness. I have made drawings
in hotel rooms across the world for over 15 years but never “blindly” in this way or as intensively. They
represent a synthesis between collaged images and the process of drawing and thinking - a kind of collaged
drawing. I am interested in the unity of this process. My intention is to publish my drawings in various hotel
rooms in a series of books as well as to use them as a basis for a new body of painting installations.

4 Margaret Cooter
Crossing through, I become the last and only person to read this journal - having written it more than 10
years ago. The viewer is spared the moans, fears, doubts, exhortations, and trivia; dissolved or cancelled,
un-written, they are buried but have been ceremonially honoured. The insights, plans, ideas live on,
elsewhere; all content has been transformed.

5 Egidija Čiricaitė
My favorite sketchbooks are not the project books, but the handbag sketchbooks used for random thinking,
drawing and visual experimentation. I compile them using whatever is available at hand at that instant:
pens, soot, menus, weeds, tickets, etc. Those sketcbooks imprint the moment; they are directly linked to
the past through the existencial traces of the time and space where they were produced.

6 Andrew Foster
A sketchbook for me goes beyond an object, a sketch or a finished piece. Its simply about an attitude to
visual exploration. Its a place where you can allow yourself to visually be sick, without any pressure, pre
conceptions or boundaries from yourself or others. Its an intellectual space to play with intent.

7 Christa Harris

8 Charlotte Knox-Williams
I stopped making sketchbooks, and instead re-applied the principles or functions of these across my
practice. This folded drawing is a part drawn from a wider inter functioning conglomeration of work that
includes film, text, performance and installation.

9 Grayson Perry

10 Stewy
The selected sketch books were created in Toulouse, France in 1994. Between life drawing lessons I
explored the streets for three months making pen and ink architectural drawings, collages, photos,
collecting, food packaging, wallpaper scraps, tickets etc.

11 Natalie Yiaxi

Alicia Martin: overflowing books

Alicia Martin does installations of cascading books. These are the more understated work : all that tension of crack splitting apart and busting open.

ESSAY. Biblioclasm. Araki Takako.

Look what I have found! Araki Takako!

Araki Takako is an internationally acclaimed ceramic artist, particularly well-known for the "Bible" series on which she has been working for more than twenty years. Araki is an atheist, but her father was a Zen priest. The prolonged and painful death of her brother, a faithful Christian, from tuberculosis, focused her doubts on the value of religion. She sees the bible as both a symbol of Western culture and a symbol of the vanity of Christian belief. Her obsessive metaphorical work sparked by her brother's death serves as an eulogy on the powerlessness of faith. The brittle decaying Bibles are composed of layers of thin fragile clay sheets which she has silk-screened with text. Their decaying fragility contains its own message that ultimately the Word is ephemeral. Araki devoted herself to the family profession of flower arranging until 1952 when she began to study painting. From 1960 to 1961 she studied sculpting in New York before returning to Japan where she studied in different pottery centres. Her reputation for sculptural ceramics was established in 1979 when she received the grand prize at the Japan Ceramics Exhibition.

I find her work very powerful. That same feeling I get when looking at Oscar Munioz videos. She produces a statement without being aggressive.
There is stillness and a meditative quality in Araki's ceramics.

Oscar Munoz: how to be political and metaphysical

I have only just come across Oscar Munoz. Prof. Catherene Ewes suggested him at the tutorial yesterday.
I find this work terribly alluring. The subject is sensitive. The performance is simple. It could be political and metaphysical at the same time.

In Columbian artist Oscar Muñoz’ “Re/trato,” a 2003 video projection that was displayed in the Latin American exhibition at the 2005 Venice Biennial, a hand repeatedly tries to paint a portrait on the concrete sidewalk. As soon as the brush finishes one part of the painting, the other part begins to disappear. The artist paints with water, and the hot sun evaporates the image before it is completed. The portrait can never be seen as a whole. This work uses an ethereal material--water--to address the transitory nature of human existence. Munoz also uses appearing and disappearing portraits in his artworks as a metaphor for the numerous people who have mysteriously disappeared in his native country.

Yohei Nishimura: fired books

I have been to the National Arts Library at V&A recently. I have got this essay to write and V&A offers access to the most fantastic collection. For free. AND your are allowed to photograph.

So - I was sitting there, getting slowly depressed for I was finding nothing relevant to my work. This is when I came across Yohei Nishimura. V&A has one of his fired books in their collection.

''The open & closed book: contemporary book arts'
Yohei Nishimura
Published by Yohei Nishimura
Tokyo, Japan, 1993
Height 17 cm x width 11 cm x depth 5 cm

This work by Yohei Nishimura is one of a series of bookworks that are the result of the artist's experiments of working on various objects by firing them in a kiln, 'At a certain point, I tried to fire books coated with clay as I believed that was the only way to keep forms of paper without turning them to ashes. Then I found a curious fact that not only a part of the book coated with clay, but also a part without, still conserves a form'. In this case the artist has fired a copy of a catalogue of an exhibition held at the V&A entitled 'The open & closed book' (1979). The original work is shrunk, the wrappers are a stark white and the pages are fused together.



Well. I thought it was the most beautiful piece of bookworks. Fragile. Tactile. Simple. The book is gone. Infomation is wiped out. Just the shape remains. Somehow it resembles the air of Rachel Whitread work. The ghost of a book.

Yohei Nishimura has given me onto some ideas for the future. Let's hope I get access to the ceramics studio!

Pocket the clouds

Kupferstichkabinett at White Cube

Kupferstichkabinett: Between Thought and Action 8 Jul—28 Aug 2010

White Cube Hoxton Square is pleased to present Kupferstichkabinett: Between Thought and Action. Looking at the pivotal role of drawing in current practice, the exhibition features over 200 works on paper by some of the most significant artists working today.

The German term 'Kupferstichkabinett' describes the special collection of prints and drawings within a museum, 'kabinett' originally deriving from the small space within a castle where personal collections were kept by the wealthy and aristocratic. These regal compilations of art on paper were generally encyclopaedic in scope and served as the precursors to public museum collections.

As a medium, drawing covers a range of attitudes in art, from the immediate, intimate and subjective to investigative, analytical and narrative. Joseph Beuys described it as 'a thinking medium', both as a catalyst for processing thought, and as work in its own right. This selection of drawings and prints traces a range of subjects, including: 'Ideas Generation', where artists use the immediacy of drawing as a means to prepare and refine a concept; 'Systems, Architectonics and Abstraction', in which predetermined rules, structures and methods govern the form of the image; 'Expressions of Anatomy', where intimate portrayals of the figure assume a central position; 'Graphic Narratives / Surreal Legacies', featuring imagery from the fantastically bizarre to the comically illustrative; and 'Historia', which examines how drawing has been used to question the role of photography in the mediation and construction of historical memory.

Kupferstichkabinett: Between Thought and Action features work by 55 artists, including Bruce Nauman, Lucian Freud, Antony Gormley, Raqib Shaw, Gabriel Orozco, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Gary Hume, Luc Tuymans, Georg Baselitz, Miroslaw Balka, Tracey Emin, Mona Hatoum, Damien Hirst, Anselm Kiefer, Julie Mehretu and Rachel Whiteread, amongst others. A fully illustrated catalogue, with a text by the exhibition's curator Susan May, Creative Director, White Cube, will accompany the exhibition.

Walls covered with fine examples of profound scribling. I did enjoy it so much. There is a certain immediacy in drawing; there is energy pouring out. You cannot achieve that with printing: the process of printing involves a mechanical barrier between the viewer and the hand of an artist . Looking through the glass.

Center: Anthony Gormley, Breathing Room, 2007

Fred Tomaselli, Portrait of Marjorie, 1995

Center: Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Steps), 1994
This one is shown the other way round in the catalogue. Is that intentional?

Then... my battery went flat again: all I have is those pathetic mobile snaps of the remaining favorite bits.

Anselm Kiefer, Unfruchtbare Landschaften, 2010

Tobias Putrih, QR/x3, 2007
The intimacy of this one is fantastic! The viewer cannot see the work from the distance, because it is so light. But as one comes close, and gets to see the lines, they loose the overall picture. The viewer is left with the fragment.

Darren Almond, Impression, 2010, Thumb press relief on silk-screened paper
Berlinde De Bryyckere, 2002








I have even invested £25 into the exquisitely produced catalogue! It's a shame, not all the drawings are included into it and not all of the artists are represented there.