Run Paint Run Run.

AND Festival: Tattoo Event by David Shrigley

2011-09-12T15:57:00.000+01:00

I’ve always had a soft spot for David Shrigley, ever since my older sister gave me some of his books when I was a teenager. Apparently my drawings were reminiscent of his, a fact I find rather worrying now. Mad, odd and very funny, Mr. Shrigley’s only crime is to spawn herds of half arsed wannabe doodlers without his uncanny and disturbing wit.

I’ve had tattoos for almost ten years now (do the maths, I started illegally young), and in that time have considered getting some odd images. The only thing that stopped me getting a tattoo of a bat when I was 20 was a terrible bout of tonsillitis coinciding with the appointment. By the time I was off antibiotics I had thought better of it.

Not that I think I would have regretted the bat, in fact I still think it would have been pretty awesome. I strongly believe that you live with your tattoos, and even if you wouldn’t get them if you had the chance over again, that’s no real reason for regret. I’m happy that I’ll be an old lady with wrinkly tattoos and dangly great earlobes.

For the upcoming AND Festival David Shrigley will turn his hand to the tattooist’s art at our favourite cards and nickknack shop, Utility on Bold Street. Well from the information of the Abandon Normal Devices website, I assume he’ll be designing the tattoos, and a properly experienced professional from Liverpool studio Tattoo studio Dermagraffiti will be doing the painful part (hopefully upstairs in their nice clean airy studio).

I won’t lie to you; my mouse did hover over the link to make an appointment. But then I reconsidered, where the hell would I want a tattoo like that? Wouldn’t go with my flowers and arty abstractions at all!

However, I understand the appeal. A few years ago would have leapt at the chance and I doubt I would have regretted it… and if it seems right to you now, I doubt you’ll regret it either!

Miro in Mallorca

2011-05-09T21:58:00.006+01:00

That’s it northerners, it’s not even May and our summer has already been and gone.

What now? Perhaps you’ll consider nipping down to London town for a zingy dose of Spanish sunshine, Miro-style at the Tate Modern... but then, looking at the pricey confusion of ticket prices for a train ride down south, you might like to think again.

How about jumping on a Ryan Air flight to Mallorca? I know it’s grim while on the plane, but it’s about the same price and time as a ride on a Virgin Pendolino from Liverpool to London. Set aside all the boozy beach front bars and sun-cancerous stretched of crowded sand - for a day at least (I know, they are so much fun!) - and hop on a 2€ bus from Palma to the Pilar and Joan Miro Foundation.

You won’t be disappointed! As well as an enviable collection of paintings by Miro in a standardly nice contemporary gallery space, this place offers you the chance to glimpse the work and workings of a true master of modern art beyond a stark gallery setting.

This is the place that Miro spent his artistic maturity, and his workshop is lovingly (although I cannot attest to any authenticity) preserved. Designed by the architect Josep Luís Sert, it’s wonderful to see a collection of paintings by Miro set among homely detritus of what was once a working artists studio. The paintings may not be considered by the art world to be “significant”, but I challenge anyone to say they are not intrinsically beautiful and essentially Miro.

This room might be as carefully curated as any formal gallery setting, and I’ll still assert that an artists biography isn’t never that useful for looking at art, but to see paint brushes, folders, stools and smocks stacked side by side with extraordinary canvasses, displayed so perfectly faux-casually, is a sheer pleasure.

Up the hill, past stunning views of the Mediterranean sea and shores of Mallorca, is another house. Purchased especially for Miro to work in, it’s walls are covered with the artist's scrawled doodlings and sketches. Together with pinned-up postcards and newspaper clippings, as well as tins, pots, jars and pans on shelves, these are delicious fragments of Miro's life and, if you are so inclined to think so, his thought-processes. Whatever the story or argument about the artist being made here, it’s fascinating.

So, if the South Bank is within easy reach for you, I’ll envy your trip to see what is undoubtedly an impressive and worthy retrospective, but this Spring I’ll hold tight to my trip in the Spanish spring sunshine to see where a master of modern art spent his later years working.

Photographs courtesy of my sister, mswredenfors.net/

The Crystal Palace

2011-04-07T20:40:00.006+01:00

You know those lists of contingency options we all keep? You know, what music to play at your funeral? What you would do if you won the lottery (despite not even playing)? If you absolutely, absolutely had to kill someone, who would it be? and, of course, what to say when Doctor Who eventually turns up and wants to whisk you off through time and space?

Oh, it’s just me then...?

Come on, If you could get the TARDIS to drop you anywhere in the world at a culturally significant point in history, what would you ask for? For me, there is only one option: Thursday 1 May 1851, to see the opening of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations at the Crystal Palace.

The Crystal Palace from the northeast from Dickinson's Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851, published 1854.

Characteristic of the finest Victoriana, the Great Exhibition was both an anomaly and typical of the time. What we understand as the “Victorian” style is actually a massive spectrum of appropriated and hybrid historical styles in modern techniques. The fact that the 1851 Exhibition included an “Engine in the Egyptian taste” (I shit you not) is almost too perfect to be true. This is what I find most fascinating about the Victorian world, the way it defiantly leapt forward, all the time anxiously looking to the past.

When we think of the Crystal Palace you probably think of faded grey prints in neglected corners. With a little imagination perhaps you could introduced some sparkling monochrome to the picture. But just think, as the exhibition opened, of the 293,655 panes of glass that comprised the structure glittering in the spring sunlight.

It’s easy to imagine the Victorian world with a muted palette of monochrome, supplemented by muddy ruby reds and holly greens, and apply this thinking to the Crystal Palace. What colour do you think the structure was? Grey metal or perhaps white like a tasteful conservatory? In fact, it was painted in the full range of primary colours. It was red on the undersides of girders and behind the gallery railings; yellow on the diagonal faces of the columns and on certain projections; blue on the concave parts of the columns. Positively, and gloriously, gaudy!

Within it must have been utterly and overwhelmingly dazzling, with the glass ceiling letting in so much light a canvas barrier had to be constructed to keep the reflected light from blinding visitors. Among the 100,000 objects on display there was a giant fountain made entirely out of glass, large chandeliers hung throughout the building, stained glass hanging up in sheets in their very own gallery... and not to forget the bloody Koh-i-nor! Doesn’t it sound fabulous?

The Crystal Palace persisted for many years, falling into disrepair, until burning down in 1936. In that period it was used again for the Great Exhibition of 1863 (we don’t talk about that one), as well as the world’s first cat show in 1897. However, I’d most dearly like to see it on that spring day in 1851, when it was opened by Queen Victoria herself.

So Doctor, if you are reading, pick me up tomorrow, about 12.30, and get me back in time to pop down to Matta's for some herbal tea and be back at my desk before my lunch break is over. Deal?

Lady Digby on her Death-Bed by Anthony Van Dyck (1633)

2011-04-06T22:39:00.000+01:00

I recently made a a few changes in my living habits, which have resulted in me sleeping like I have never experienced in my adult life. For weeks now, most nights I’ve fallen into deep, oceanic slumber that insomniacs can only dream of. It would be a happy consequence, if the tendrils of sleep didn’t linger throughout the day. A dullness and melancholia, somehow worse that sleep deprivation or hangover, haunts me.

Where am I going with this? I feel, perhaps, that this is an instance where a painting can describe, if a little abstractly, what I’ve been experiencing better than words. A kind of reverse ecphrasis. It might be a little self indulgently morbid, but when struggling out of bed this morning I found myself thinking about Van Dyck’s posthumous portrait of Venetia Stanley.

A little background first: The painting was commissioned by Venetia’s husband, Sir Kenelem Digby. The popular story is that her death was caused by excessive arsenic consumption, taken for cosmetic purposes, encouraged or aided by her shallow or ignorant (or Machiavellian) husband. I don’t know how much of this story is a Victorian construction, who loved a good cautionary tale, although the fact an autopsy was performed suggests there was some suspicion about Venetia’s death at 33.

Venetia Stanley, Lady Digby on her Death-Bed (to use its full name) was painted from drawings made two days after her death. I suspect this painting avoids truth in the photographic sense. There are no signs of rigor mortis or decay, her hands and facial features haven’t contracted. Nor is there any evidence of the plaster casts that were made of her face and hands or the hair cut from the head as a relic. In fact, the only indication she is really dead, and not sleeping, is the slightly open left eye, a subtle and morbid detail. Despite it's obvious beauty it is at complete counterpoint to Van Dyck's numerous portraits of strutting cavaliers and blossoming ladies. Is this a fantasy of death or of sleep?

However, these are just the facts, as far as you can call this smattering of historical titbits and opinion facts. Like many paintings by Old Masters - and indeed all art which is not of our era - we cannot suppose that our initial reaction and interpretation has any relation to what was intended or interpreted at the time. What I do feel free to ponder, is the haunting beauty of this painting and the immutable mysteries of sleep... Sorry, getting melodramatic, what's I'm basically trying to say is see that picture, that's how I feel at the moment.

Perhaps I should just cut out the Sleepytime Extra tea?

Venetia Stanley, Lady Digby on her Death-Bed, by Anthony Van Dyck (1633), is in the collection of the Dulwich Picture Gallery. According to their website it currently needs restoration to which you can contribute by ‘Adopting’ the painting... it’s a little more expensive than a baby panda though.

Glee - A Confession

2011-04-05T18:47:00.001+01:00

For someone who used her 4 years at university to grapple with the most esoterically, historically pointless subjects she could find - Victorian polar explorers, Crimean war memorials and mezzotints anyone? - I am completely intellectually lazy. I weekly rediscover, and then fight to conceal, the fact that I am the worst kind of Guardian skimming snob, misanthrope and hypocrite.

So, in an effort to move away from having to leave the flat to find something to write about, I’ve decided to fess up, come clean and interrogate some of my less surely held opinions.

First up Glee. I’ll freely admit I’ve said some pretty harsh things about this television show. It’s marketed as colourful, plasticy sub-High School Musical trash, and without watching it for yourself there is nothing to make you think otherwise. I only deigned to watch it because I was in a bit of a blue funk and was looking for the televisual equivalent of sitting in a bath with a bottle of gin and a massive bag of Haribo... and of course I was pleasantly surprised.

If you watch it you don’t need me to tell you that despite it’s many faults, it is thoroughly engaging and utterly endearing. Inside it’s sugary shell, it must be one of the most generous shows in terms of characterisation out there. Glee frequently accepts difference where other shows would have ponderously dwelt on it, instead agilely shifting the plot forward for more high jinx and toe tapping pop numbers.

Setting aside that the majority of the cast are offensively beautiful and talented - it is produced for US network television after all - and that it is often uneven in tone, inconsistent in plot and the (sometimes obviously and direly auto-tuned) music out of context is utterly execrable, I can no longer pretend I don’t have a massive soft spot for this show.

Now I’ve admitted this, does Glee no longer count as a guilty pleasure?

(However, you try to play the music in my presence, I’ll push you out the nearest fucking window.)

British Art: 1880-1950 @ Walker & Knowledge Lives Everywhere @ FACT

2011-03-31T22:15:00.005+01:00

Recently it’s seemed like nearly everything is geared towards children and their keepers. I’ve known since I started writing this blog that if I was chronicling my ongoing adventures with a small creature that had escaped from my womb, I’d be giddy with the fumes of incoming links.

I guess it makes sense, I think there are more of them than me. The yummy mummies undoubtedly outnumber the misanthropic singletons, or perhaps they just carry more legislative weight?

Tonight I’ve been to two very different new exhibitions in Liverpool, both of which are decidedly family friendly.

The Walkers new room, British Art: 1880-1950, makes brilliant use of the neglected space beyond their displays Victorian and Impressionist art. Showcasing some wonderful paintings by luminaries such as Jacob Epstein, LS Lowry and Lucian Freud, the display includes a particulary beautiful painting by Paul Nash, a long standing favourite of mine.

Together with complementary lighting and a sympathetic hang, there’s enough interactive claptrap to entertain the young and those who don’t have the attention span to simply enjoy looking at art. Usually I’d be vehmently against this kind of thing, but it is discreetly and well implemented enough not to distract from what is most important in the room - a fantastic, and very impressive, selection of British painting.

The British Art: 1880-1950 room in progress, from National Museums Liverpool

If you have neither children nor a well developed sense of social responsibility, Knowledge Lives Everywhere, the new exhibition at FACT, probably isn’t for you.

Downstairs a series of stridently playful interactive installations set the mood, highlighting the work of seven groups that work with FACT. I wouldn't say there was anything wrong with them, other than purely not being to my taste. I like art that seductive invites engagement, not demands participation to be appreciated. It feels like an invasion of my intellectual space.

Despite some flimsy rhetoric, as timely platform to publicise their community work, and to anchor their gallery space within that programme, it’s probably a great success for FACT... but as art its all a bit meh.

Anxious about the arts...

2011-03-30T09:31:00.000+01:00

Anyone else feeling a tad demoralised?

Yesterday, as Arts Council England announced it’s funding settlements for what are now National Portfolio Organisations, was pretty nerve-wracking. As it turns out the situation was not as dramatic as feared, but hardly encouraging for anyone who cares about the arts in this country.

When fantastic small groups like Urban Strawberry Lunch lose what little funding they did receive from Arts Council England, it puts the cuts to some of my favourite Liverpool arts organisations –for example 4.9% for the Everyman and Playhouse and 11% for FACT (both in real terms over 4 years) – in a rose tinted context.

The official announcements, the tweets of relief and outrage, the newspaper and blog scramble to assess the impact, was utterly overwhelming, especially for someone who isn’t used to thinking about things politically or mathematically. Thankfully, Seven Streets do a very good job of summarising the headline figures for Merseyside organisations.

When Liverpool City Council recently handed out a flat 20% funding cut for all arts organisations, the dialogue was often pushed in the direction that it was a question of either/or… that it’s education and public services against the arts. If you force even the most ardent artinista to weigh the value of a rape crisis centre against an arts centre, there is absolutely no choice. Yesterday this worrying rhetorical trend continued, with my friend and LIPA lecturer Maria Barrett commenting in a tweet: “'Arts Funding or NHS & education?' premise of #radio2 call in disgusting. Looking forward to 'TV Licence or food?' next week. #artsfunding”

I won’t roll out that trite quote from Winston Churchill about arts funding that is doing the rounds, but I will suggest to fuck over the arts is the effectively neuter any city outside of London. This didn’t happen yesterday, but feels like a step towards it. We will be discovering what the decisions announced yesterday really means for the arts in the follow months.

Let’s upgrade demoralised to anxious.

Farewell A Foundation

2011-02-14T18:09:00.002Z

Farewell A Foundation, we barely knew ye…. Well, I – still a fairly recent import to this city – did anyway.

With the news that A Foundation is now no more, I was initially reticent about joining in with the general wailing and gnashing of teeth, but like the proposed sell-off of the collection of Southampton Art Gallery, I find myself feeling both somewhat quizzical and absolutely disgusted.

Yes, not every experience I had within A Foundation’s industrial walls was gilded. I can count some of the most queasily gauche, self aware and un-self-conscious example of contemporary art that I’ve seen in recent years as elements in exhibitions at A Foundation.

But still, it’s a great shame that it’s been wound up with a whimper, noticed only by premiere Liverpool blog Seven Streets. Whatever the consistency of the work on display, Seven Streets are so right to recognise it’s programme as possibly the most dynamic, challenging and exciting in the city.

Beyond the clearly discernible tragedy for contemporary art in Liverpool, I’ve got two burning questions:

One. What the hell is the point of the Baltic Triangle now? Apart from CUC it has very little to tempt me, and it’ll take something very special to tempt me into the oppressive confines of the Novas Centre. Now, unless I'm buying a shed or getting my non-existent car painted, why would I go to the Baltic Triangle?

Two. What does this spell out for the Biennial? After Biennial Artistic Director Lewis Biggs’ volatile blog about funding cuts back in November – which made the organisations seem to be visibly floundering even before the axe has fallen – the closure of A Foundation can only seem like a body blow. The loss of such a space (in addition to whatever funding disaster it will have to pass through in the following months) will surely have a huge impact on what the Biennial can offer in 2012.

But right now I can only mutter and sigh and ponder what this means for quality visual art in Liverpool. I have no more information than Seven Streets, and I am very aware of the brutality of cuts that are painfully imminent and will be on going for the foreseeable future. Overshadowed by the nose drive the Liverpool Boat Show just took, this won't be the last asset to disappear from Liverpool's cultural ecosystem.

Anyway, bye bye A Foundation, I hope your legacy is more than a swathe of Big Society art students who couldn’t curate their arse from their elbow. Where else in Liverpool would I have been able to re-encounter Jacob Dahlgren’s Colour Reading Context?

What would be in your dream art collection?

2011-02-13T13:24:00.002Z

A Collector's Eye is an exhibition of paintings from the Schorr Collection assembled by a private collector, and it opens at the Walker Art Gallery next week. The exhibition promises to feature five centuries of art ranging from 15th-century devotional images to 19th-century French Impressionist landscapes. Old Master artists Rubens, El Greco, Delacroix and Cranach are included alongside Impressionists such as Pissarro and Sisley.

It’s an interesting departure from the on going trend for exhibitions based upon extremely didactic concepts, an emphasis on telling art as a heavy handed biographical or teleological story I've always round annoying. Some might find a basis in the personal tastes of a private collector problematic, but I hope the selection of works in an exhibition curated along these principals will be much closer to the diverse and changing relationship with art that most of us have.

The organisers also ask the question, what would be in your dream art collection? and I feel compelled to day-dream up an answer.

To start with, if we are allowed to get greedy, can I have a couple of the Marie de’ Medici cycle by Rubens (1577-1640)? If I had to pick just one, give me The Disembarkation at Marseilles (1622-25), deliciously dripping with allegory and bursting with bizarre perspective and plentiful cavorting sea maidens. In a skinny-obsessed world I find the expanses of doughy flesh positively refreshing!

I’d follow this with a healthy slice of Victorian life which a complete de-emphasis on the bloody Pre-Raphaelites. Give me some monkeys and polar bears by Edwin Landseer (1802-1873) and my favourite Polar pin-up Sir James Clark Ross (painted in 1834) looking young and dashing in a dead animal’s skin. Throw in some late J M W Turner (1775-1851) too, to dazzle and shimmer.

Next I would like to get a little patriotic and whimsical, and place the illustrations of John Bauer (1882-1918), Tove Jansen (1914-2001) and Elsa Beskow (1874-1953) next to each other - a delightful flock of trolls, fairies and woodland creatures. Equally whimsical, I’d compliment the visual dreams of Odilon Redon (1840-1916) with the Art Deco graphical delights of Edouard Benedictus (1879-1930).

What else? Getting a little more modern, let’s have a healthy serving of Graham Sutherland (1903-1980) and Paul Nash (1889-1946) - skipping over anything too war-focussed for some of their lovely organic-architectural fantasies.

I’d also pinch Eduardo Paolozzi’s (1924-2005) Collage from BUNK from the Tate Modern, and ship Frida Khalo’s (1907-1954) Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird over from the US.

To round things off give me Rodney Graham’s (1949- ) Rheinmetall/Victoria 8, and finally all on it’s own in a big blue room, in absolute pride of place, let's enjoy Henri Rousseu’s (1844-1910) languorous Sleeping Gypsy.

I could go on... but it’s a little akin to torture. Like most people my art collection is just a hodgepodge assortment of tattered posters and prints... *sigh*

Collector's Eye is at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 18 February to 15 May 2011

2010 in Art, Theatre, Film, Music and Meme

2011-01-01T12:58:00.003Z

Art

2010 started as the year that my anti-Bansky rant was distributed around London in The Blog Paper and continued with getting very pleasantly freaked out by Ron Mueck's Wild Man at Manchester Art Gallery, discovering Liverpool's Culturepool, becoming reacquainted with an old friend at the A Foundation through to my first ever Liverpool Biennial, which began in August with Laura Belém's Temple of a Thousand Bells.

It will also be the year that technology and art finally coalesced - at least for me - and ended a history of uneasy tolerance and awkward plundering. In October I was enchanted by Rafeal Lozano-Hemmer’s installation Pulse Room (2006) at Manchester Art Gallery. I didn’t know it then, but Lozano-Hemmer’s work shares many of the delicious tensions and delights with earlier digital art pioneer Nam June Paik, as I found in December at Tate Liverpool and FACT.

Recorders: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer from Manchester Art Gallery on Vimeo.

Theatre

In October I did not want Slung Low Theatre’s almost unimpeachable Anthology at the Everyman to end. Brilliant in both conception and execution, I doubt I will ever forget the experience of standing in some university gardens just off Hope Street, holding a feather, in a sudden downpour, watching Eileen O’Brien tell her character’s heart breaking story. Yes, I shed a tear or two.

Honestly, I felt utterly bereft after my last one and envy those who got to experience them all. Short, often sharp, bite sized ghost stories, the experience was somehow more like a radio play than anything else and yet so much more.

Film

Although there were plenty of main stream cinematic treats this year - Scott Pilgrim, Another Year, The Illusionist - I need to maintain my status as a bit of an intellectual snob. My film of 2010 is Skelletons, a very British supernatural comedy that really did deserve to be a box-office hit. A cute, quirky and yet fairly psychologically dark film, the evidently low budget effects added to the charm and never once detracted from an adorably loopy high-concept storyline and well realised adorable characteris. Love Film/Amazon it now, bitches!

Music

Unquestionably my musical crush of the year is Janelle Monae. What make could you want from a beautiful, talented musician who crafts perfect pop albums drawing heavily from a spectrum of sci-fi, pop culture and high brow sources... that most importantly makes you want to dance round the office like a sexy robot loon. *Sigh* If you need more convincing, listen to The Archandroid on Spotify.

Honourable mention also has to go to Quatuor Ebène and their incredible album of film music Fiction (also available on Spotify).

Meme

It might have started in 2008, but with fucking bed bugs Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno and Seduce Me series came to everyone’s attention this year. Add to that a demented interview in Vanity Fair, where the interviewer seems to basically plead with Isabella to say she wants to shag animals, and my meme for the year is set.

Nam June Paik @ Tate Liverpool & FACT

2010-12-19T13:53:00.002Z

Something magical is happening in Liverpool... and I don’t mean the snow or the Christmas spirit.

Split across the Tate Liverpool and FACT, Nam June Paik is receiving a very well deserved retrospective. Even though he may not be universally well know, he’s a seminal artists, and there is more than enough artistic ammunition to prove this as gospel truth.

Nam June Paik seemed to consistently produce provocative, assessable artwork without having to belabour a theoretical or political point. It is refreshing and enjoyable, and most importantly not at all worthy or good for you! This is delicious visual and intellectual bubble-gum, sustenance without nasty roughage.

In the Tate Liverpool, you find yourself stumbling from delight to delight. In TV Garden, 1974, a room bristles with tropical plants and flickering tv sets and feels like something out of the Terry Gilliam film Brazil. One Candle, 1988 - a video camera focused on a candle, with the image broken down into it’s constituent colours and projected onto the walls - is as beautiful as an abstract painting and lead you to ponder the very nature of light. Also... Robots!

This is not to mention Laser Cone, 2001, over at FACT. If you are lucky you’ll be able to enjoy this experience without aged hippies yelping that how it’s just like acid... but even with that annoying accompanying chorus it is sheer magic.You'll have trouble tearing yourself away from Laser Cone, and not just because being battered and bruised from falling over on the ice makes it hard to get up.

It shouldn’t be startling, but to find an artist who so consistently worked with such dazzlingly originality, ingenuity and integrity with mass technology is just that. It has driven home to me (again) how utterly jaded I am about technology and art; why did I even need to remark on the synergetic skill with which Rafael Lozano-Hemmer wove the two together? Because most artists simply have not been as good as this pioneer!

Nam June Paik has reminded us that art can be magical.

Nam June Paik in collaboration with Norman Ballard
Laser Cone, 2001/2010
© Estate of Nam June Paik and Norman Ballard
Photographed by Stefan Arendt, LVR / Medienzentrum Düsseldorf

Goodbye Don Van Vliet

2010-12-19T12:50:00.004Z

If the name of this blog isn’t enough of a give away, the fact that I dedicated my MA dissertation to Don Van Vliet might indicate to you that I am a little bit of a Captain Beefheart fan girl.

With the recent death of Don Van Vliet (1941 to Friday 17 December 2010) I’m guessing a great number of copies of Trout Mask Replica are being dusted off. Now, don’t get me wrong, Trout Mask Replica is an alright album, just as his best known album it is rather overrated and frequently, even to my prog loving ears, unpalatable.

What’s probably not being said is that of this undoubted pioneer of mad, experimental rock music is that he was also an uncanny master of love songs.

Turn to songs like the adorable My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains (The Spotlight Kid/Clear Spot), the bitter sweet Too Much Time (again The Spotlight Kid/Clear Spot, sadly not on Spotify) and the glorious rolling broken hearted ballad Love Lies (Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)) and tell me I’m wrong.

A while ago, I put together a Beefheart Love Song playlist on Spotify, sadly missing some real gems that are not available.

... and, it might not be a love song, but little can beat the swirling, foot tapping magic that is Yellow Brick Road for sheer musical manifestation of joy.

Sound Relay ~ Long Night 2010

2010-11-20T11:49:00.000Z

Photo from Liverpool Echo - see more on LiverpoolEcho.co.uk

In recent weeks - perhaps prompted by budget cuts, perhaps by the many wonderful musical and artistic experiences I've enjoyed - I've been thinking about how art and music provide an essential intellectual life.

As much as I'll defend anyone's right to enjoy Eastenders and Don't Tell The Bride (I'm guilty of both), little beats an exhilarating cultural experience.

Bearing these thoughts in mind you would think that music in art galleries would be a heavenly concoction... and indeed, done in the right manner, it is.

On Thursday night. Ensemble 10/10's (yes, I might have a vested interest here) performance of Jennifer Watson's Reflections, set amongst Magdalena Abakanowicz's Embryology, was simply magical. A quirky, vortical cascade of sound led by a delicious sounding soprano saxophone (not a "fat clarinet"), the piece didn't fall into any of the discordant pitfalls of contemporary classical music.

However - proving there are no absolutes - the rest of the Sound Relay at Tate Liverpool was a very different experience.

Self indulgent art and self indulgent music are seldom of the highest quality. While clattering about the streets of Liverpool after a cacophony of musicians is a lot of fun, the same cannot be said about musicians making the same sound scattered about a gallery space.

The joy of an art gallery is that the environment is tightly controlled, curatorially judged, not to make you buy stuff but to encourage reflective gaze and thought or to create atmosphere and evoke feeling. On Thursday night people in the gallery space just did not know what to do with themselves, look at the fine art or cast awkward regard at the buskers, and it was seemingly impossible to do both. The atmosphere was both oppressive and fragmented, simply put a balance had been disrupted.

Yes, there was novelty in having musicians in the gallery, but novelty is not enough! I'm not casting aspersions on the skill of the Sound Relay musicians, but rather the premiss that it was a good idea effectively executed. Perhaps I'm just not a fan of noodling?

In conclusion, live music in art galleries, not a bad idea. Just needs to be as carefully executed as the fine art and as curated as the gallery space.

The illustration of Tove Jansson

2010-11-05T08:59:00.001Z

I was a lucky child. Unlike most of British children I wasn’t exposed the Moomins by creepy stop animated felt, Japanese cartoon interpretation or the slightly awkwardly written/translated novels. Looking at these versions of Tove Jansson’s creations, is it any wonder that illustrator Adam Cadwell included Moomin Papa in his list of childhood villains?

“It’s hard to describe but something about their vacant, piercing eyes and their emotionless, mouthless faces used to get me extremely worried and paranoid about what their true intentions were.”- Adam Cadwell

Fortunately for me, one my earliest memories is my mother reading to me in English - translating from Swedish - from Moomin, Mymble and Little My, the very edition she herself had owned as a child. This has recently be translated and reissued, and I feel so happy that British children will be exposed to this wonderful book. Yes, weird, but still utterly wonderful.

As adorable as the characters, narrative and prose created by Finnish-Swede Tove Janssson are, for me the real joy of the Moomins lie her original, delightfully quirky and innocently warped, illustrations. Like Maurice Sendak, or fellow Scandinavian Elsa Beskow, there can surely be little better than strange stories, exciting and engaging for the bizarre peril that permeates them, accompanied by beautiful illustration?

Anyway, what started me on this soliloquy of Moomin-love? Bury Art Gallery currently has an exhibition called Magical Moominvalley (23 October - 15 January 2011) celebrating Tove Jansson’s illustration. Get thee to Bury!

Recorders : Rafael Lozano-Hemmer @ Manchester Art Gallery

2010-10-11T19:02:00.002+01:00

Until recently art that was substantively digital or technological seemed to jump one of either two way. It was technologically awkward, light years behind the actual advanced grace of contemporary technology, or it was unengagingly aloof, endeavouring to divorce technology from the throbbing warm of the human experience.

Thankfully this dichotomy is now over, art has finally caught up with technology, and we have artist who are brilliant technologists... or perhaps the other way round?

Recorders, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's solo exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery (18 September to 30 January), brilliants elucidates the uneasy, but delicious, relationship between the body- and life-human and technology.

You are greeting by Pulse Index (2010), a work that perfectly embodies the playful, ominous, interactive ethos of the exhibition. The sight of your finger print, so ubiquitously human and essentially individual, enlarged in perfect definition, complete with tiny beads of sweat and grime magnified and glittering like pearls, is both delightful and viscerally shocking. It then flutters off to join the teeming, digitalised hoards of finger prints stored in the work.

As fascinating as all the installations are in this exhibition, none of the joyful wizardry evokes the sheer wonder and consternation of Pulse Room (2006). The tension that runs through many of the works, that we are all uniquely identifiable humans and yet share essential innately-human functions, is illustrated by a constellation of heart-beat-flickering light bulbs. Standing in the darkened room, as a light bulb pulses in front of you with your own heart beat, followed by watching your rhythm flow and dissipate across the room, is just thrilling.

Recorders reminds you of your humanity, simultaneously evoking your biological uniqueness and your puny organic commonness, like a kindly robotic overlord. This exhibition is delightful, if you are not too serious about art or technology. Ominous and playful, I feel as though Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's work is the first that I've experienced that accurately and beautifully portrays the mood, issues and joys of life in our ubiquitously- digitalised present and near future.

Recorders: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer from Manchester Art Gallery on Vimeo.

Biennial @ The Europleasure / Scandinavian Hotel

2010-09-19T10:20:00.002+01:00

As many people have commented, one of the wonderful side effects of the Biennial is the access to disused buildings, many that I've previously walked past without noticing. The Europleasure / Scandinavian Hotel, at the top of Duke Street, is one of those buildings.

You can't miss it now! At the front it is resplendent with Will Kwan's Flame Test and the words Touch and Go have been smashed into windows at the side.

I wouldn't have expected the real highlight of yesterday to be two completely dissimilar pieces of video art. We Wish to Inform You that We Didn’t Know, a three-channel video work by Alfredo Jarr, offers compelling and harrowing, but not gratuitously so, insight into the atrocities in Rwanda. Even if you are familiar with the details, the video articulates emotions and facets that perhaps no written or purely documentary account could manage.

The video element of Cristina Lucas' Touch and Go couldn't be more different. At counterpoint to We Wish to Inform You that We Didn’t Know, the video offers a 'making-of' view of the buildings smashed windows. Humorous, in the gentlest and most charming manner, it is a bitter sweet story of urban transgression set to a delightful discordant sound track.

The works in this location are part of the Biennial's Public Realm strand.

Biennial @ 52 Renshaw Street

2010-09-18T22:36:00.003+01:00

The old Rapid buildings along Renshaw Street have been used for a variety of interesting purposes recently, but the Biennials residency in the space will take some beating.

The vast and warren-like space is cleverly spotted with art works, some of them good, some of them, frankly, extremely questionable. Unlike most vacant shops I've seen used as galleries, the space has not been white washed to death. Instead the curator, Lorenzo Fusi, seems to have made the decision to leave much of the remaining odds and ends of Rapid's decor intact. Outré patches of painting work, tiles and wallpaper offset the carefully organised art works. These remnants add a intriguing sense of exploring an abandoned civilisation - with bizarre interior design habits - to the visit.

Although many of the art works are of dubious quality, there are some absolute gems. Saving the best till last, my highlights are located at the end of the long wander through the maze of interconnected rooms. N S Harsha's Sky Gazers blurs the lines of illustration/painting and installation, combining several simple and effective devices in a delightful manner. Go see it soon before visitors' dirty shoes and grubby fingers take their toll!

In the next room, after you pass through Sky Gazers, uneasily rests Free Post Mersey Tunnels. Let's just say, you know an art work is good when it makes you feel panicky... I know it shouldn't matter, but I do like that fact that a female artist, Rosa Barb, has created such a muscular and mechanically evocative work.

As one of my first Liverpool Biennial experiences, despite feeling sceptical about some of the works in the exhibition, I really enjoyed exploring what 52 Renshaw Street had to offer... even if that includes violent fez wearing goat sodomy.

John Moores Painting Prize 2010

2010-09-17T08:51:00.000+01:00

I like painting... in fact, in my own dorky-white-middle-class way, I'll admit privileging it over most other art forms. The simple equation art = painting may be wrong, but it feels so right.

With this off my chest, you can imagine I was quite excited about the John Moores Painting Prize. 45 paintings picked by artists and curators with impeachable credentials, a prize with prodigious reputation in the staidly resplendently-Victorian Walker Art Gallery. Delicious!

However - fetch your torches and pitchforks - the exhibition left me feeling underwhelmed. Where I expected 45 of the best paintings that Britain has to offer - hoping for the bleeding edge of practice and thinking - instead it felt like a gazeteer of contemporary painting. One of every flavour. Each may be a technically brilliant painting with feet firmly in their own artistic and intellectual precedence, but this doesn't seem to be enough.

I'm not bothered that all the winners were white and male, I am bothered that the first prize winning prize painting, Spectrum Jesus by Keith Coventry, is deadly dull. There is something too dreary about it for words.

The other prizewinners, at least, are much more interesting and vital paintings. Bottom line, they make you feel something! Nick Fox's Metatopia, a resounding riff on Neoclassicism and Victorian visual culture, is a brooding, and yet delightful, work. For me, it feels like more than just trek down an established painting path.

As much as it might lack a certain vibrancy, the exhibition is a comfortable essay through contemporary painting, impeccably curated by Sir Norman Rosenthal. I'd call for the John Moores Painting Prize to be more adventurous, but I really have no idea where these adventures in paint are to be had. Have all the old bastions of painting been breached?

Perhaps it is contemporary painting in Britain that lacks vitality? Or perhaps, more likely, once again I find myself out of step with contemporary taste and artistic practice...

Laura Belém's The Temple of 1000 Bells @ The Oratory

2010-08-20T08:00:00.006+01:00

If I needed reminding - and I don’t! - that it’s less than a month till the 6th Liverpool Biennial, last night was a special preview of Laura Belém's The Temple of 1000 Bells at the Oratory.

The Oratory is the small, square, classically-pillared building down from the front of the Anglican Cathedral. I've always thought that there is something restrained but slightly distorted about 19th Century funerary sculpture, and the light coloured but monumental stone of the sculpture counterpoints Laura Belém's incorporeal installation.

The sight of a thousand individually created glass bells hanging in the central light well is both beautiful and intriguing. It’s everything it promises, a diaphanous suspended layer of glass objects, each in the same form but each visibly distinctive. Quite simply, The Temple of 1000 Bells is lovely to behold.

If only it had been left as that! A simple and arresting installation with an evocative title would have been much preferable to final form of The Temple of 1000 Bells. From speakers around the room emanates a voice, telling a story in that overly earnest, childrens’-programme-on-Radio-4 type manner. Accompanied by some half-arsed hippy, hypno-meditation type music, it's unbearably twee. Seriously peoples, “a symphony which cannot be described in words” is not audibly conjured up by a few plinks on a bloody xylophone!

Hmmm... the only option seems to be to recommend ear plugs.

Endurance @ Merseyside Maritime Museum

2010-08-14T15:36:00.002+01:00

Stuff the A Team, the only display of hyper-masculine tomfoolery I have any time for right now is down at the Merseyside Maritime Museum.

I grew up with the sagas of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Huntford’s book on Scott and Amundsen pretty much held the place a bible might have taken in a religious household. Polar opposite of the heroic, but ultimately unforgivable, bungler Scott Falcon Scott stood Ernest Shackleton. Steadfast, tenacious and just kick-arse, Shackleton is a colossal but approachable figure.

Preening martyrdom on the ice was not for Shackleton. How is it not possible to admire a man who achieved so much and could still wryly say "Better a live donkey than a dead lion"?

If you do not know the story of the Endurance (or should I say the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition?), look it up. It’s is an incredible story of persistence, survival, practicality and, yes, heroism on the ice. Frank Worsley's book Shackleton's Boat Journey is particularly fantastic.

And perhaps the best part of the story? That it rests in the period when photography in such harsh conditions was becoming possible while remaining a true technical and photographic feat. That these laboriously created glass plate negatives remained unscathed is remarkable in itself. In a digital age, when we are so used to images being composed from intangible data, the physical nature of these negatives is almost extraordinary to regard.

Words cannot convey what Frank Hurley’s lucid photographs manage so eloquently. The strange and beautiful nature of the ice, the startling vision of the Endurance caught in the ice flow and the inscrutable Edwardian explorers, I love all of it.

I may be a polar exploration fan girl, but I will fight anyone who says this is not visual story telling at its very best. It is wonderful to see photographs I know from books displayed so prolifically in this compelling exhibition.

Trash Humpers @ Wolstenholme Creative Space

2010-08-09T19:31:00.004+01:00

For a film that features bin fucking, baby doll abuse and hippy murder, Trash Humpers is a surprisingly dull experience.

Presented on Saturday night in the earnestly edgy Wolstenholme Creative Space, screened from VHS on a pile of knackered TV's, the setting and medium for the evening was actually rather pleasant. I'd gladly pay a fiver to go to a showing of the Twilight Zone in such a manner... or even better Doctor Strange!

But the film itself? Over indulgent hipster shock fare. To call it pornographic, hell to call it shocking, is to dignify it. Nothing that Harmony Korine put in his film, in either style or content, came near to the sight of a drunk girl sitting in her own piss on Wood Street.

Not even the demented posture it strikes or the directors hipster credentials can raise this film above masturbatory pubescent scheme. It is just too boring to be vilified or event found that offensive. Yawn.

Having A Do @ St Luke’s Church

2010-08-02T18:39:00.002+01:00

Keep it simple, stupid. Who hasn’t been assaulted by this exhausted phrase? It might make me want to obstinately elaborate, but that doesn’t stop it being irrefutably true.

Fab Collective might have a stated passion for capturing the city of Liverpool and its residents in their pictures, but seem to miraculously avoid those acceptable stereotypes we are so familiar with. With beautiful, almost brutally honest, photographs, sparsely curated by only one loose theme, they have created something brilliant.

It’s all too easy to be abstract and hoity-toity about art. Setting aside the high-art sensibilities I do love to lug about, Having A Do is simply a small collection of brilliant photographs adroitly, and often tenderly, illustrating the many agreeable ways we celebrate. Unique and defiantly ungentrified, "The Bombed Out Church" is the perfect venue for this stubbornly simple but perfectly realised exhibition.

This month, if you find yourself at the top Bold Street with half an hour to spare, Having A Do is well worth a look.

Intuition @ Whitworth Art Gallery

2010-07-30T11:11:00.000+01:00

Outsider Art is interesting because of its inherently problematic nature. In the same way that you can never really safely define art - earnestly asking “But what is art?” is simply unforgivably gauche - you can’t plot the boundaries of Outside Art. Even to define it by the artists’ faculties or training is to wander into crude, and restrictive, waters.

Intuition at Whitworth Art Gallery tests, and yet does not plot, the limits of an art form which has always sat uncomfortably at the periphery of the contemporary mode. Gloriously bursting with all forms and styles of Outsider Art, this exhibition forces you to redefine your artistic context. It is easy to lose track of time among the obsessive, riddle-like form and the clumsy, but somehow precise, energy of the works means this exhibition is crackling with strange electricity.

Perhaps then, it is much wiser to define Outside Art by the impact it has on the viewer? Always unsettling in the manner it strays from the well plotted paths of fine art and evoking, often, equal measures of disquiet and amusement. However, even this loose statement about affect, rather than cause, hampers understanding. It's a conundrum that has no absolute answer.

The Whitworth Art Gallery do a wonderful job of displaying this collection of work, creating, instead of something sensational and titillating, a restrained, thoughtful, thought provoking and delightful exhibition. I doubt any other institution could have done such a brilliant job of exhibiting the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection.

And, at the end of the day, how often do you get to read “The shoes are made of bread” about a work of art?

Picasso: Peace and Freedom @ Tate Liverpool

2010-05-24T18:57:00.001+01:00

Pablo Picasso, Lobster and Cat, 1965

Ah! Picasso, a deeply flawed man and an exceptionally talented artist. The Titan of 20th Century art is receiving an indubitably deserved solo exhibition at Tate Liverpool. Picasso: Peace and Freedom explores Picasso as a political artist... e.g. a dirty commie.

One of the joys of Picasso’s prolific output and the Tate’s ability to draw art works from the finest collections across the world is that in every room is an unfamiliar work. However different they may be, such as the Lobster & Cat, the use of line, form, colour and painterly texture always manifest the power of Picasso. A whole room is devoted to Picasso’s serene doves and a large space filled with posters and lithographs, the abundant variations on themes feel both delightful and generous.

The framing of Picasso as a history painter is rather awkward, but there is absolutely no denying the pathos and power of his depiction of war. His doves are just gorgeous, his sleep eyed ladies sensuous and the plentiful snatch singularly un-erotic. Peace and Freedom, at it's heart, is simply Picasso on blockbusting form.

So while some wonderful choices are made about how the works are displayed, the counterpoints and repetitions of themes, devices and images are delicious, I feel there are some small but intrinsic flaws in the argument that the exhibition attempts to make. Great artists do not necessarily make great political figures, and this exhibition seems to shy away from this important distinction.

Pure artistic magic... if you insulate yourself from a slightly over zealous attempt to form a new hagiography.

Filip Gilissen, Il mattino ha l’oro in bocca? @ Liverpool Biennial

2010-05-15T09:49:00.003+01:00

I’ve always known that I was a primodial-magpie, but last night Il mattino ha l’oro in bocca? proved that everyone else is as well.

Part of Light Night and launching the 2010 Liverpool Biennial, the Artist Filip Gilissen's installation turned, for one night only, a ratty warehouse on New Bird Street into an idolatrous, shimmering exposition of Midas dreams.

My inherent love of gold overcame cynicism, and combined with my dorky ability to always be early, mean that I managed to stumble through the first half of the installation before queues formed.

The concepts behind the installation might be deceptively simple, but like most art that has moved me recently, it was a triumph of elemental ideas and well-executed all-encompassing practice.

Disorienting, magical, sinister and slightly erotic, like an artistic equivalent of a roller-coaster, the installation seemed to suspend sequential moments, so you become uncertain if many minutes or just a few seconds has passed.

The finale, later that evening, a highly anticipated yet miraculously unexpected explosion of dense, effervescent gold and smoke, was spellbinding. Magical, elemental and ominous, I felt like an oracle trying to discern ancient truths by gazing into the swirling smoke and glitter. Il mattino ha l’oro in bocca? begs an ancient, classical context in order to speak about it. Reactions in the crowd were rapturous and joyful. The sense of elation was palpable, and this was swiftly followed, once the shimmering plumes had died out, by an disorientated, artistic kind of post-orgasmic chill.

Like any art that utilises so fundamental devices and plucks antediluvian heart strings, it’s completely open to interpretation. To link this work too closely into it’s stated role as a tribute to Felix Gonzalez-Torres can only damage our experience of it by inviting comparison. I want to scream “step away from the explanation!” I for one want to keep the memories, barely comprehended, in my hind brain. An ecstatic eddy of gold is enough for me.

Strokes of a Brush @ Victoria Gallery & Museum

2010-05-08T15:38:00.003+01:00

It’s been a while since I was able to enjoy a wander round an art exhibition almost completely alone. It’s one of the things I miss about being unemployed, the freedom to visit cultural attractions at weird times of the day mid-week, when even the pensioners are not marauding.

So to visit the gorgeously stripy-gothic Victoria Gallery & Museum on a Saturday afternoon and be utterly undisturbed by other visitors was a rare treat.

Strokes of a Brush, an exhibition of contemporary Chinese calligraphy, sits comfortably askance among the neighbouring displays of renaissance prints, early Victorian animal paintings and Russian Icons.

At times the simple and restrained correspondence we expect from calligraphy, at others bursting with bolts of expressive energy, and touching on tart counterpoints in between, this is a nicely curated exhibition of very beautiful works on paper.

With such a variety of art on display and in such elegant surroundings, although an empty gallery might be a not-so-guilty pleasure of mine, isn’t it slightly wrong that this place is so empty?

A World Observed @ Manchester Art Gallery

2010-05-03T15:05:00.001+01:00

If you are looking for a visual world of comforting nostalgia and non-threatening prettiness, you need to look no further than Manchester Art Gallery’s A World Observed 1940 - 2010: Photographs by Dorothy Bohm.

Not that there is anything wrong with that, it’s a simple exhibition, telling a simple story in a simple way. There is nothing wrong with beauty or simplicity in art, but in this exhibition it's damped down by a heavy handed helping of sentimentality. Dare I say it?... it's just too bloody feminine.

There is too little depth and intellectual sustenance in either Dorothy Bohm's photographs or how they are presented in this exhibition. It feels too habitual and nostalgic to evoke anything other than a vague saccharine atmosphere. Following on from two stunning, exciting and moving exhibitions, this feels like a retreat into an artistic comfort zone.

Now, for some this might be technically proficient and visually attractive photography, but for me it just completely lacks punctum. Good photography is not always brilliant art.

At the end of the day, it might be a pretty exhibition, but it feels too nostalgic and pedestrian to excite or move me. It's high brow kittens in baskets.

Haruko Maeda @ The Bluecoat

2010-04-14T22:06:00.001+01:00

Sometimes I think that if a piece of art does not have a hefty chunk of renaissance, or earlier, provenance it’s frankly not worth looking at.

Out of all the many works I saw at the Bluecoat last week, Haruko Maeda’s stood out. I have always found Momento Mori completely compelling, both visually and in conception, and her two works utilised it so effectively. After an evening listening to Mahler’s songs about dead and dying children, they cannot help but spring to mind.

What is so special about Maeda’s utilisation of what is essentially a pretty ancient and elemental artistic idea? As well as infusing her works with that difficult to achieve balance of grim reality and bittersweet joy, she also manages the task of technically dealing the works from which she takes her lead. I doubt that many artists showing at the Bluecoat now could approach this style with such confidence and accomplishments. Her Self Portrait manages to look both deftly worked and individual.

Refreshingly timeless in a sea of clumsy contemporary art.

The two works by Haruko Maeda are currently at the Bluecoat as part of Global Studio.

You can see more of Haruko Maeda's work on her blog.

Saatchi Online: Northern Stars @ A Foundation

2010-04-11T18:03:00.003+01:00

Does anyone else find it absolutely hilarious that the art organisation which has an absolutely filthy monopoly on the British art scene also runs a website who’s mission is to “democratise the traditional hierarchies of the art world”?

In counterpoint to visual generosity of The Economy of the Gift, another gallery at the A Foundation currently houses a show called Saatchi Online: Northern Stars.

I wrote yesterday about feeling dispirited with contemporary art, and it’s exhibitions like this that causes me to feel so dispirited. I mean, it seems to be trying to convince me that painting as a contemporary art form has reached an utter dead end.

Although all the pieces are all technically sound, there is so little energy and life to them. This whole exhibition feels completely contrived and finite in both conception and execution. Amy Moffat’s Steadfast Fool is frankly dull and pointless to look at, and Ruth Murray’s Katamari, with it’s wretchedly plastic use of paint, seems like a hamfisted amalgamation of trite kitsch and psychology.

I know the vast possibilities of painting are no where near exhausted, as these works seems to suggest, so why were these works selected for this exhibition? I think I know the reason: these are not works for an audience of art lovers, this is a cleverly selected exhibition for an audience of art buyers. Perhaps it is true that bad taste and big money go together like Nigella and Charles.

Jacob Dahlgren, Colour Reading Context @ A Foundation

2010-04-10T15:23:00.001+01:00

Jacob Dahlgren, Colour Reading Context

Often the best things in life are the tiny moments of kind serendipity, those friendly coincidences which are inexplicable and joyus. As in life, so in art.

In the summer of 2005 I had just finished my first year of my undergraduate History of Art degree. The feeling of generally being completely dispirited with contemporary art, which I still carry with me now, was particularly intense.

In Malmö Konsthall I witnessed something which convinced me of that contemporary art could have the understated power and beauty I was seeking. Very much like the moment I recently had with the Ron Mueck exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery, I felt bolstered and reassured.

To wander into the A Foundation, 5 years, 4 moves of city and 2 degrees later, and find the very same installation feels quite marvellous and miraculous.

Jacob Dahlgren’s Colour Reading Context is simply gorgeous. It’s constituent parts may have changed, but it was instantly recognisable as the same piece of work. I worry that to describe it could only detract from it’s effect. The variation of colours, texture and forms is breathtakingly beautiful. Like gazing at the colour charts in a DIY store, the repetition and slight variations of colour is hypnotically soothing. As at the Malmö Konsthall, I felt that to stand in the centre of the installation could be a near magical experience, all the more enticing because it is denied the viewer.

This work perfectly demonstrates that an installation, even if it is quite theoretically and technically simplistic, done well can be an absolutely splendid experience.

Art can be miraculous!

(... it can also be very, very shit, but let’s leave that discussion for another blog post.)

Run Paint Run Run @ Ignite Liverpool, March 2010

2010-04-10T08:36:00.013+01:00

Ever wondered what me ranting about art looked and sounded like?

Now you can find out! Last month I took part in Ignite Liverpool, and the thing was filmed for posterity. Part of Global Ignite Week, Ignite Liverpool was a fun and fast paced event where presenters shared their personal and professional passions, using 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. A complete departure for little old me who has never spoken in public before...

You can watch more videos of Ignite Liverpool presentations on Defnet Media's YouTube Channel. The evening received write ups in the Liverpool Echo, Liverpool Daily Post and on fellow presenter Adrian McEwan's website (as well as a few other places, I'm sure.)

The next Ignite Liverpool is from 6-8pm on 15th April at the Contemporary Urban Centre... This time there will be beer. Subjects cover everything and anything that can be shoe horned into the subjects of social, political and technological, so don't think it's all be mad art rants. Can't wait!

Spencer Tunick in Manchester & Salford

2010-04-04T11:29:00.001+01:00

Some art is so uninspiring it’s difficult to approach it with anything other than an exhausted sign. Think canvases purchased in Next or wretchedly nostalgic paintings of toffs waltzing on windblown beaches. Unfortunately because of the democracy of art, meaning that anything anyone designates as art counts as art, we can’t remove what should be a carefully applied title.

I’ve found the news that Spencer Tunick is bringing his own brand of large scale installation to Manchester and Salford so dreary it’s taken me weeks to get round to writing about it.

Like Bodyworlds, the 4th Plinth and Shelley Jackson’s SKIN project, I can see what is so appealing about Spencer Tunick’s work; All these projects have a few key elements which I think makes them both so bewitching to the public and really quite shit art.

The rhetoric of the real human body is clearly becoming one of the artistic tropes of our times. This makes the works instantly approachable and accessible to everyone. Where other art might be arranged along social, historical or even more abstract theoretical lines, the body is universal... However, this use of such a massive and elementary device often seems to sweep aside the nuances which makes really brilliant art.

That is the problem when the human body is the sum of an artistic work - it seems to encourage a rather formulaic approach. Contemporary art is not like cooking, just because you find a recipe that works doesn’t mean you should repeat it ad infinitum. With the new Spencer Tunick commission, even if it does add new elements to the artist's repertoire, I am certain that we know exactly what we’re going to get. Asides from the initial tacky thrill of nudity, this was an incredibly safe and predictable choice.

I’ve always felt wary of participatory art. Although there is something interesting about the theory, it’s substance is so often much more dreary, dull and poorly executed. The appeal for the participant always seemed an odd combination of wanting to lose you’ve individuality and desperately trying to get a fleeting taste of that arrogant cocktail that fuels artists. Participants should bare in mind, as Jonathan Jones writes, “Participatory art is a denial of talent.”

Although I do recognise that the images Spencer Tunick produces are momentarily arresting, they’ve always seemed more like the substance of a classier kind of amusing postcard. The additional element that this upcoming installation is a response to the works of L S Lowry, the other great producer of postcards from Manchester, just exaggerates this sense.

So... will you be taking part? With the certain knowledge that anything I write has absolutely no effect on public opinion, there is no doubt that the Spencer Tunick installation in Manchester and Salford will be widely considered an exciting and successful work. If you would like to take part, you can registered your interest on the Lowry’s website here thelowry.com/tunick

The Handmaiden @ Metal

2010-02-28T23:04:00.005Z

Thanks to Culturepool, my exploration of Liverpool's art offering continued this Saturday. Finally, after 6 months of living in this city, I got on a train to Edge Hill and went to see what was going on at Metal.

The Handmaiden, by Leo Asemota, seems to be a kind of temporary crystallisation of the artefacts of an as yet unperformed performance piece. It's a difficult little exhibition. There is a certain Beuys-esk static charge between the four vitrines. The waxy density of a ceiling joist cast in palm oil and a tumbled pile of sheep's wool certainly evokes a resonance with the German's focus on lard and felt.

Although I'm still not entirely sure what I make of the work, I rather liked it in an abstract and unfocused way. Bite-sized, it is packed with delicious and nutritious layers of meaning. Part of a long term project, it teases you with glimpses of its own provenance and hints at what is to come. It's only failing is a certain inexpressive frigidity, but this is perhaps the inherent problem with the form and meter of this type of art.

Metal, which is located directly on one of the platforms at Edge Hill station, is a wonderful and welcoming space - in the future the short train ride will not seem such an obstacle.

Wrong Love @ A Foundation

2010-02-14T16:58:00.002Z

‘Art’ and ‘party’ are not mutually exclusive. In-fact, putting on a brilliant party is probably very similar to putting together a great exhibition. To be successful both require skill, knowledge and forethought. Similarly both fail when they disregard the importance of the audience/party-goers.

Unfortunately Wrong Love, which promised so much - in both the art and party senses - delivered very little. On arrival I quickly began to feel disappointed and underwhelmed, and nothing I saw or experienced dispelled this.

To call the aesthetic at this event ‘student’ would be to dignify it. It was frankly, for the most part, completely shoddy and amateur. Apart from a few things - for example the confessional booth and a tired feeling but nicely executed array of taut skin coloured tights - everything looked like it had been thought up at the last minute over too many pints of organic cider and then hastily thrown together. Staying in with a cup of tea and a copy of Why Cats Paint would have been a far more edifying and exciting experience.

You would have to live in a complete middle class vanilla bubble to think that anything at Wrong Love was particularly subversive, transgressive or even remotely exciting. Where was the emotional and visceral thrills I felt I was promised? Thinking about the kind of thing I expected/hoped to see, nothing came even close to much older works, such as Rocky by Paul McCarthy.

Even the sight of some poor boy’s bum-hole hair - which he presented while in some kind of yoga position, daubing himself with fake tan stick - provoked nothing more than concern for his health. The building was very cold.

In the events’ and the organisers’ defence I did only stay just over an hour... However, nothing I saw inspired me to feel like staying longer. After being disappointed by the art, the poor DJ, put off by the freezing temperature, not even the modestly priced bar could convince my friends and I to stay longer.

What have I learned from this experience? For someone who works in marketing I should know better, you can seldom trust the hype. On the upside, I’ve found out that the A Foundation has a very nice space and look forward to seeing some hopefully more successful art there in the future. Also, young people have some very interesting haircuts these days and beards are definitely trendy again.

Facing East @ Manchester Art Gallery

2010-02-09T21:23:00.003Z

Bharti Kher’s The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own (2006)

Wow. You wait forever for a good exhibition in Manchester and three come along at once. After everything I saw this weekend, it would be so easy to forget Facing East at Manchester Art Galle ry.

However after far too long snarling and snarking about the display of contemporary art in my old home town I feel it is important to recognise when I think is a job very well done indeed.

Facing East: Recent Works from China, India and Japan is a perfect study in how a brilliantly selected and presented contemporary art exhibition should feel. Despite having a distinct theme and purpose, the exhibition manages to illuminate the tropes that link the art works without being overbearing or didactically simplistic. The images and objects spark off each other without interfering in the viewers enjoyment.

This is what makes Facing East so splendid: it is so purely enjoyable without being patronising. Each of the works are in different ways delightfully fun, while maintaining the intellectual art hot sauce that I think viewers deserve. Where they are post-modern and ironic it is without smugness or complacency.

Ravinder Reddy’s Gilded Head manages to hit all the buttons: it is beautiful, other worldly and forces you to pause to take it in. It might pale a little in comparison to Ron Mueck’s Mask iii in the next room, but it is still a stunning piece of art. Similarly resonating with a powerful combination of pathos and joy, Bharti Kher's sculpture of a sprawling elephant, skin crawling with spermatozoa-esk bindi, makes you hesitate for an awkward moment in a similar manner.

Isn’t this what brilliant art should do? Gently and thoughtfully force you into a temporary kind of contemplative arrhythmia? Arresting, thought-provoking, thoughtful and fun, I feel once more reassured that these elements are not too much to expect from a display of contemporary art!

Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin @ IWMN

2010-02-09T07:59:00.002Z

I should probably preface what you are about to read with a word on my viewing habits. In many ways I’m a bit old fashioned. I wandered around this exhibition steadfastly ignoring the multimedia displays and just looked at the photographs. Does this mean I may have missed out on some precious nuance to the exhibition? Possibly.

Much of the photography featured in Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin at Imperial War Museum North is almost deliciously beautiful and evocative. There is a depth and velvet richness to McCullin's black and white photographs that is reminiscent of the inky generosity of mezzotint. The genius of the master-craftsman is evident in the way pain, anger and sorrow is so carefully framed in these truly emotive images.

Beyond the horrifying moments that these photographs portray, there is a somewhat unsettling interplay between their substance and meaning. It is as though the artistic brilliance of these photographs reveals the fallacy of the documentary photographer. It would be wrong to ascribe these photographs a morality or clarity of purpose beyond any other method of depicting a scene. The documentary is not an unbiased beast, like an essay it is the application of an argument to a subject - I feel as though this needs to be kept in mind when looking at Don McCullin’s photographs.

Undoubtedly, an exhibition of startlingly brilliant photography.

ARTIST ROOMS Ron Mueck @ Manchester Art Gallery

2010-02-05T18:27:00.002Z

When was the last time art brought a tear to your eye?

The Ron Mueck exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery has restored my faith in contemporary art. It's easy to become disillusioned and begin to accept art as simply an enjoyable cultural habit. Today I have been reminded that art can be transcendently brilliant.

Wild Man is possibly one of the most wonderful things I have ever seen. It is stunning, astonishing, astounding, awesome ... I could go on listing words of this nature till the cows come home and never find one - whether a single word, several combined into a phrase or amalgamated into a new word - that satisfactorily described the effect that it had on me. Putting aside my faithful thesaurus, all I can say in that it moved me in a way I can only just begin to describe.

The huge, perfect-imperfect, feral form has an unsettling and almost intoxicating power in its stillness. Despite the palpable sorrow in the figure's eyes, there is something joyful and fearful in the oversized perfection of the form. It was like the slightly nauseating effect that minutely perfect photorealistic painting has on me, but amplified so many times.

Why did it make me tearful? These works are not crudely shocking, nor melancholic, but possess something else, something poignant and inexplicable. Perhaps they were almost the confused tears of a bewildered child? It’s times like these that I want to kick myself for not being Roland Barthe.

Urbis has Left the Building @ Urbis

2010-01-24T16:22:00.000Z

The final Urbis exhibition, Urbis has Left the Building, manifests the same symptoms as many shows I have seen at Urbis. There is no argument, no nuance, no exciting interplay between objects or images. Just one side of the story is told, and hammered home with every item and every curatorial technique to hand.

Reading Jonathan Jones' blog on criticising institutions, I feel reassured that I'm right to notice that Urbis has never provided the intellectual jungle gym I am looking for. Even the exhibitions which should have been delightfully jam packed with objects and images, just used them to heavy-handedly support one rhetorical point of view. Urbis may have presented little seen aspects of popular culture, but when they were told with such stifling hagiography how could we expect the vibrant, complex and conflicted nature of popular culture to emerge?

So what? This exhibition is the story of Urbis told in the Urbis style. It's boisterous and blustering, a perfect essay in corporate PR. Relying on exhibition posters to tell it's own story, it does serve to remind me of everything I have experience in that glassy wedge.

The first exhibition I went to at Urbis was the advertising one in 2008. It was unquestionably terrible, a bit of professional propaganda which rightly had no place in a publicly funded building. Looking at the poster for the D&AD Advertising & Design exhibition I felt like pointing a finger at it and shrieking "SHAME! SHAME!" in a manner combining both Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and an early American puritanical witch hunter.

If you love Urbis, Urbis has Left the Building is a one dimensional retrospective you might enjoy. But if you are looking for an honest, thoughtful and thought provoking exhibition, go somewhere else. Urbis may have tried to do something incredibly difficult, but that is no justification for the dangerous simplifications it habitually employed.

Am I sad to see it go? A little... the failure of Urbis may discourage future attempts to present popular culture, it's perceived successes perhaps encourage simplistic, dictatorial curatorial practises and, as I've previously commented, sets a dangerous precedent for how we deal with cultural institutions when they don't meet predefined standards of success.

Bored of Banksy...

2010-01-21T18:40:00.003Z

There is nothing quite like fame to influence how we interpret art... apart from perhaps knowing how much it cost. The problem with the former is that reputation often has little to do with the actual quality of what is perpetrated in the name of art. Often indistinct and always inescapable, our obsession with artists personal history and reputations distort, and sometimes positively obstruct, the way we see.

Our at once both clingy and contentious relationship with Banksy is a perfect case in point. He’s been floating high on his vast profile, inflated by huge belches of hot air from the media and middle class, for a decade or so.

The problem is that his profile is several time more interesting than his art. At the core his art actually has very little substance. When you’ve identified the, frankly not very well concealed, tropes it can - a bit like a Terry Pratchett novel - get a tad boring. Think about your favourite Banksy piece and count off these factors: It’s dependent on simple visual gags, a peripheral understanding of some basic art concepts and a rather churlish teenaged set of politics.

On the street Banksy catches the mainstream audience eye because the works sit in a context of street painting that is still essentially highly exclusive, expressly holding meaning for a tiny marginal group of people, and, unlike Banksys, has little regard for traditional aesthetics. To 99% of the population graffiti is the kingdom of the blind, Banksy just happens to be the one eyed man.

That doesn’t mean he’s up to sitting at the proverbial grown up table. In the gallery or the print fare he is like a clever teenager who’s been allowed to stay up past his bedtime. His gallery works are almost comforting in the way they both manage to be ever so clever and yet cleave to the well established Banksy form. They only hold our attention because of his reputation, because we are all the artistic equivalent of rubber neckers at a grusome car crash. We look to Banksy because we want that tart taste of controversy and novelty. However, when he hold so closely to form, surely whatever controversy his exhibitions might hold quickly disperses? What is exciting about art that always manages to perfectly meet our expectations?

If you look at his original print works, and the prices they fetch in the auctions and print fares, it becomes pretty clear that he is simply replicating one aspect of Warhol’s career without one ounce of Warhol’s brilliance. More so than Warhol, Banksy proves variations on a theme can only be applied for so long before becoming insufferably stale.

So although Banksy is still consistently popping up in the news - images appearing over night on walls all over the world, purchased at some ridiculous price by whatever celebrity we are supposed to idolise now, jealously being vandalised or white washed over by thick thumbed councils - isn’t it time we got over him? Come on! lets all makes a critical resolution for the New Year and try from now on to extract the artist’s reputation from the art and actually look at what is in front of us?

You liked this! It was published in The Blog Paper No. 3

Image by Walt Jabsco used under a Creative Commons Licence - check it out on Flickr

Aubrey Williams: Atlantic Fire @ Walker Art Gallery

2010-01-18T08:02:00.003Z

Does great art need to defy or define the period it was created in?

When mooching in the Walker Gallery, it's always hard not to stop and gaze at the Turner located just by the glass doors to the Special Exhibitions . A shimmering, gleaming seascape, it is both a magical abstraction and a perfect evocation of an effect of heat, light and water.

Turner is basically the definition of great art, so it's both tempting and slightly cruel to compare anyone to him. However, I've found it difficult not to dwell on this comparison when visiting the recently opened Aubrey Williams: Atlantic Fire.

Aubrey Williams, Hymn to the Sun IV, photographs from National Museums Liverpool flickr page.

Aubrey Williams' paintings are both very beautiful... and somewhat kitsch. What stops them being sublime is an unfortunate combination of muddy and electric colours which lends them a certain 80s air. I know this is an inherently ridiculous criticism, but it bothers me. Where I want his miasmic coral like colours and forms to shimmer and billow, there is an rubbery quality somehow reminiscent of marbled paper.

But can I really criticise paintings made in the 80s for looking like products of their time? I feel uncertain on this point. At the end of the day, not everyone can be Turner.

Reinventing William Blake

2010-01-13T18:31:00.003Z

‘And who was this William Blake? A wild sort of painter, was he not; or a poet of some kind; and at any rate, a strange sort of man?’*

Blake, Blake, Blake. If he's the archetypal British artists it seems to be at the expense of so many other British artists throughout the ages.

The problem for rabid art bitches like me is that you can't dismiss the man. Although mired in a sea of preconceptions and substantial accusations of Blake's paucity of theory, skill and sanity, his contortion of the human form and mangling of the British language are rather exciting. Perceived in so many ways to be the teenaged pinup of a mad artistic genius, this authorship of the man in the most offensive thing about him.

Just as the Frida Khalo we know is a creation of second wave feminist art history, William Blake was created by the Victorian generation that followed him. The smoothing of Blake's hymns into the form of Jerusalem we know now took place in the Edwardian period and can be directly traced back to the work of Blake's Victorian lobbyists.

The Tate's purchase of 8 prints, some of them only exhibited once before, will be getting the teenager in every art fan tumescent. But it's also bringing out a lot of tired truisms and urban legends about the man. I would not argue that we should attempt any impossible mission into the impenetrable mists of time to discover the "real Blake", just perhaps accept a slightly more tempered approach to the man.

At the end of the day, is it really acceptable that respected and widely circulated sources such as the Guardian air the largely dismissed fantasy that Blake "sat naked in his London garden with Catherine, emulating what he saw as the lost innocence of Adam and Eve" as fact?

*John Camden Hotten caricaturing general public understand of Blake in, Review of ‘William Blake; A Critical Essay’, Illustrated Review, 1:13 (1871:Apr.), 436.

Rothko's Seagram Murals @ Tate Liverpool

2010-01-12T08:49:00.002Z

It may be old news, but there is something magical about Rothko's Seagam Murals. Although magical is not quite the right word, it's too light and sparkly for a sequence of works which are muscular, dense and crackling with some serious psychological juju.

I've never been a fan of the Tate Modern in it's current form, it's a big ugly, hard edged, over branded art box. But, when I lived down south I used to almost religiously visit the murals, which, like Chris Ofili's wonderful The Upper Room, are dripping with a powerful cloistral quality. You can't really look at these works, just point your face in the direction of the painting and bath your brain in their amazing hues and textures.

Now at the Tate Liverpool, a smaller, more colourful but still hard edged venue, The Seagram Murals have found a situation which is not only appropriate but even better than the Tate Modern. The industrial pillars, flagstone floor, gently vaulted roof lends a delicious industrio-spiritual flavour to what was previously simply a dimly-lit grey room.

A visit to see The Seagram Murals is like a visit to see an old friend... if that old friend is a succulent and slightly unsettling art experience.

Bleakest snow scenes? The Victorians did it best!

2010-01-06T15:44:00.002Z

My intellectual crush on Jonathan Jones can only grow. What else can I do when his most recent blog resonates with my artistic interests even more than usual. However, I do have to disagree with his choice as the bleakest snow scene.

I’ve written more words than I care to think about scenes of ice and snow, spent months of my life studiously dissecting the representation of Victorian polar explorers. These silly men who set the trends for the equally silly Edwardian explorer Robert Falcon Scott have always fascinated me. The most famous and bloody of the Victorian explorers is John Franklin, who through being unprepared to the point of delusion managed to star in a story bursting with death, misadventure, cannibalism and powerful Victorian rhetoric. This gristly story left deep scars on the Victorian psyche, and these scars show in numerous snow filled paintings.

Mr. Jones picks a scene of massacre as his bleakest snow scene. It’s a powerful painting represented a horrendous scene, but can it really match the subtle, painful hints of disaster that appear in Landseer’s Man Proposes, God Disposes? Here Landseer makes masterful use of artistic techniques that we are more used to see manifesting themselves as nauseating Victorian pathos. Russell Potter wrote a brilliant blog post unpicking this interesting painting on Visions of the North.

Honourable mention must also go to Thomas Smith’s They Forged the Last Link With Their Lives in the National Martime Museum. (I’m not sure why they’ve changed the name of the piece since I wrote about it three years ago, since it categorically couldn’t represent Franklin). The painting shows the last surviving men of the ill fated expedition dead and dying in a bleak and hopeless tableaux. Unquestionably, when considering the now generally accepted accusations of cannibalism between the survivors, it does work as a piece of propaganda, but it also shows the end of an almost unimaginably terrible narrative.

For people in the North West looking for a scene of snowy bleakness which could rival the streets of Manchester, a trip to the permanent galleries in the Manchester Art Gallery might be in order. This time not about explorers, but about Napolean’s retreat from Moscow. A narrative scene over flowing with the futility and bleakness of war, I find Adolphe Yvon’s Marshal Ney Supporting the Rear Guard During the Retreat from Moscow almost mesmerising. The detail is compelling, the moment when you notice the naked corpse - presumably stripped of his clothing by frost bitten comrades - is positively shocking.

So that’s it. Three paintings which both perfectly demonstrate the Victorian taste of macabre scenes set in frosty snow swept wastes and will perhaps lend a little context to our current snowy predicament!

The 39 Steps @ Playhouse Theatre

2009-12-29T08:12:00.000Z

It seems I can only write intelligently when I’m snarling like a beast. Give me something nice and fluffy to write about and I’m like Lennie from Of Mice and Men. I might adore it, but I’ll probably accidently crush it’s skull.

The 39 Steps is dangerously near perfect, a gloriously playful panto for the grown ups. To do anything other than gush happily to the point of being incomprehensible would be to damn this play with light praise.

That’s it. It’s so good it’s actually fried my critical faculties... could I sue?

Urbis

2009-11-30T08:23:00.002Z

It probably says something about my myopic view of the world that I could never really get with Urbis. To me it always seemed a soulless space with a paltry veneer of art and heavily edited culture splattered on the inside. This might well be because I've spent a lot of my time in the intellectual company of very dead, fairly bearded white men, with the result that I can often feel out of touch with the prevailing views on arts and culture.

My issue with Urbis is that it never provided me with the intellectual sustenance I was looking for... though to be frank, few exhibition do. I'm like a man who has been spoiled by a doting mother and excessive pornography, it is unlikely I will find a lady who will live up to my expectations. Little short of the Great Exhibition of 1851 will please me.

This view hasn't changed with the decision to forcibly inject the National Football Museum in Urbis' glassy shell. I'm not going to retrospectively become horrified by football's ascendancy into a cultural space. In some ways it's a bit of a relief: I'll never feel that I'm somehow letting down the middle class art lovers side by my reluctance to subject myself to the cultural fare Urbis offered. It's football, and, like tripe, no one will mind if I turn my nose up at it.

Looking round Urbis on a rainy Sunday afternoon, it became clear to me that perhaps I should apply the same logic to the attitude of display that currently infuses the space. Audio-visual interpretative displays and blown-up photographs for me have always had a supplemental purpose - yet with Urbis they are the mainstay of both major exhibitions currently on display. The suggestion of smugness, which so offended their CEO, is not rescinded: the exhibitions remind me of nothing more than complacent secondary school text books, which the key difference that there is apparently no attempt to present a unbiased argument. Both the TV and Hip Hop exhibitions feel celebratory to the point of being blinkered.

However, I do understand that many people love the place, and with this in mind it's clear to see that the major issue with the Urbis decision is that it smacks of the same dangerous logic which inspired Southampton Council to attempt to sell art to fund a Titanic-themed tourist attraction. Economic decisions cannot be ignored when planning culture, but the public floundering over it the future of Urbis makes it seem that there has been no planning for something to take its place.

Just as the exhibitions seemed to sit superficially in the surroundings of that god-awful arrogant buildings, perhaps when removed from it they could take on a new subtleness and nimbleness? When I was 19 I wrote a plan for a building-less Gallery of Popular Culture - even then I knew that a building would hamper rather than help a curatorial idea which attempted to pin down something so ephemeral. I still have the document somewhere... if you're interested.

Angels of Anarchy @ Manchester Art Gallery

2009-11-16T22:17:00.001Z

With a whimper my review of the Angels of Anarchy show at Manchester Art Gallery has gone up on their beautiful micro-site, you can take a look at and disagree with my vacuous opinions here.

The Rise of Women Artists @ Walker Art Gallery

2009-10-24T12:58:00.005+01:00

Lady artistes seems to be in vogue at the moment. Angels of Anarchy is making waves over at Manchester Art Gallery, and, apparently timed to coincide with their Bridget Riley micro-retrospective, Walker Art Gallery presents The Rise of Women Artists.

Though prominently asking questions - Does the gender of an artist matter? Should artists be labelled? Are decorative arts any less significant than paintings? - this exhibition stoically refuses to make any kind of argument. It is like a rather earnest, rambling, but not well developed, discussion of the possibilities art holds for the fairer sex.

Frankly, for me, the whole thing got off to a pretty poor start. Right by the entrance, a corner of tapestry seems to imply needle work was automatically creative art and the women who practised this craft automatically artists. To begin an exhibition with such a un-nuanced and wrong footed statement doesn’t inspire. At the end of the day, even though undoubtedly some women found creative output in stitching dainty napkins, isn’t it a bit like stating that all children working in Primarni sweatshops are somehow fashion designers?

Laying aside the oppressive curatorial notes, this is both a beautiful and pointless exhibition. Beautiful, because it brings together an incongruous collection of art and objects from a broad selection of periods and practises, with nothing more than the impossibly broad remit of gender. Pointless, because it evokes one of my favourite types of gallery space: those small regional collections where works are placed together without the stifling dependency on movements, periods and themes. Art for enjoyment, rather than didactically forced interpretation.

If this exhibition serves to illuminate anything, rather than the subject of females who make stuff, it is the tension between art and culture. Teapots and needlework may not be art, but they are certainly cultural objects. Neither, I'm certain, is it historically accurate to designate the decorative arts as women's work. It’s just unfortunate that this delicious oscillation has to be sidelined by a clumsy faux-wave-feminist essay.

Fantasies, Follies and Disasters: The Prints of Francisco de Goya @ Manchester Art Gallery

2009-10-22T16:41:00.005+01:00

There is perhaps only one thing which could rival my post Manchester Blog Awards hangover this morning for sheer warped horror and disturbing folly.

I mean, of course, the prints of Goya.

On my last visit to Manchester I ducked into Manchester Art Gallery, and managed to edge my way into the crowded Fantasies, Follies and Disasters: The Prints of Francisco de Goya.

I remember when I first saw one of his prints, perhaps during my first year at university. It was like I could not comprehend what I was seeing. It’s odd that I was so shocked, one of my earliest art memories is pawing over a book of Hieronymus Bosch paintings in late toddlerhood. So why are these prints so much more shocking?

We all know that the playful horror of his prints are embedded in a very real social/historical/political situation. The scenes are not purely imagined, for all the strange witches and winged creatures. There is a reality to the images which seems to smash against reason, threatening the comfortable solid institutional surroundings of Manchester Art Gallery. They are the falling man of the 17th Century.

The medium lends Goya’s representations further hysterical power. It’s one thing for an unsettled mind to set down on paper something so horrifying, but to carefully create for reproduction is something else. It is just too calculated to figure into our current understanding of artistic practice. Just as the images undermine our faith in society's innate goodness and stability, they rankle against our snug understanding of the consumable nature of reproductive art. These images are not for bedroom walls and postcards to relatives, unless you are a member of the Adams Family.

The Chapman Brother’s gruesome micro-sculptures Disasters of War are the perfect addition to this compulsive exhibition. The toy vignettes of Goya’s horrifying scenes lend to the unsettling atmosphere. It is like thinking for one moment you glimpsed a severed finger in a packet of pink wafer biscuits. It’ll be a while before you’ll be completely happy tucking into pink wafery goodness. You’ll never be able to look at a toy solider casually again, and the idea of old men marking out historical battles with tin figurines takes on a bloody, calculated air.

This is not an easy exhibition, there is something car crash like about it. You leave feeling as though you have been rubber necking. It seems to reveal the innate instability of society, lifting the skirt of our comfortable lives and revealing a rotten, rickety pair of legs beneath. It is both compelling and compulsive, and has left me thoughtful and moved.

Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2009 @ The Cornerhouse

2009-10-18T20:57:00.003+01:00

The aspect which links all the works in Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2009, currently at Cornerhouse, is a certain lack of depth. It feels like a vaneer of art, rather than a well rounded exhibition. To me it is apparent that the content we are presented with is not art as practise, or art as product, but art as produce. It’s the equivalent of a biggest vegetable competition at a country show. There is only so much you can be impressed by a marrow, how ever bloody big, shiny and perfectly formed it is.

The issue is that New Contemporaries feels like a very glossy degree show, which in many ways is exactly what it is. The best bits are attractive competent demonstrations of art by rote, like Barbara Wolff’s photography/painting/textile works. The gauche and embarrassing reaches it’s pinnacle in Hannes Ribarits painful video The Void, but is supported by numerous works which are simply just utterly unimpressive.

This show left me feeling unaffected and slightly bored. Yes, often technically brilliant and theoretically solid, but lacking something important in both its components and composition.

Bridget Riley Flashback @ Walker Art Gallery

2009-10-12T08:16:00.000+01:00

So disgusted was I by the hoards of painting photographers that I forgot my primary purpose for wandering down to the Walker on Sunday. Although I fully intended to have a good ol’ explore, I mainly wanted to see what was going on with the Bridget Riley exhibition.

Now, I’m not a particular fan of Riley. She’s one of those archetypal artists, like Rothko, that you cannot escape having encountered during secondary school art class. “This is Op Art,” Ms. Bull would dutifully explain,”doesn’t it make your eyes go funny.”

The first thing I noticed was that the exhibition was startlingly small. The reading room, come biography gallery, was at least half the size of the space dedicated to the exhibition itself. Although containing some wonderful large scale canvases, the number of sketches and studies makes me feel as if the curator desperately needed to take up space. This isn’t particularly endearing when it was quite a small space to begin with.

However, just because this does not feel like the major exhibition we’ve been promised, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go. The whole thing works as quite a nice little taster of Riley’s catalogue. The scintillating, depth-less beauty of her canvases work well when compared to each other.

Riley’s trademark hypnotic abstraction is pleasantly incongruous in the wonderful trad-collection of the Walker Art Gallery.

(... and I only saw one person taking a photograph of a painting, and they looked suitably, forgivably sheepish.)

Photography in Art Galleries

2009-10-11T15:06:00.004+01:00

Today I went to have a pleasant Sunday afternoon wander around Walker Art Gallery. I adore this type of gallery, the comforting provenance of the place and the encompassing and incongruous collection makes me feel right at home.

Standing in the sculpture gallery, surrounded by sinewless alabaster bodies with globular unfocused eyes, watching a small oriental man photograph everything in sight, I had an almost disorientating sense of déjà vu. I was momentarily transported back to that odd time two years ago when I worked as a gallery assistant at Gunther Van Hagens' Body Worlds. Although photography was strictly forbidden, it was a constant battle with the public. They seemed compelled the touch and photograph the bodies, often becoming quite combative when challenged.

A little later, while having a wander through the John Moore’s winners, three Spanish tourists were systematically photographing every painting in the gallery. Barely pausing to look at what they were snapping, they moved briskly from painting to painting, capturing each in shoddy digital renderings. Another room, another person was photographing, and in the next the same again. On this early Sunday afternoon, the photographers seemed to out number the lookers.

Now, Walker Art Gallery allows photography. I have no issue with that decision. I know how almost impossible it is to stop people. What I question is why people feel the need to almost systematically photograph every painting their eye falls upon?

It has become a fact of our contemporary age, that when disaster strikes, people film and photograph. The statement that photographers felt compelled to place the camera between themselves and the unfolding horrors, such as during 9/11, has become a truism. Is it this which makes people feel they must photograph every painting on display? Like disaster, must art be mitigated by the lens?

Perhaps I have become a very angry person. I felt a deep disgust for those who could not refrain from touching the corpses, and this disgust is mingled with pity for those who seem unable to look at a work of art. I doubt these people are taking away their photographs and tenderly looking at them later. What else can these photographs do but evoke the experience of looking at the artwork and if they barely looked at the art work, what is the point of it all?

Britain has become very good at shedding taboos, bum sex and homosexuality are positively trendy. I’m a fan of both. A permissive society is generally understood to be a good thing. However, just because it’s allowed by rule, like ugly men with far right politics, does it mean we shouldn’t frown and say something? Personally, I’d like to thump both photographers and fascists round the back of the head, but I probably won’t. I think we should all just participate in a campaign of frowning and hushed mumbling, just so those pesky photographers understand what they are doing may be technically okay, but so they feel like the twats they are.

Let’s create a new taboo: the casual painting photographer. Who’s with me?

Apichatpong Weerasethaku's Primitive @ FACT, Liverpool

2009-10-02T08:11:00.001+01:00

It would be easy to become preoccupied by the screen which shows rhythmic blasts of lightening smashing into the ground, spitting down in domestic scenes of village, graveyard and temple. Taking over one wall in FACT's Gallery 1, even if you make a concerted effort to study the other scenes depicted on the other walls, the white flashes draw you back. The screen showing young men firing semi-automated weapons through windows at unseen targets verges on the mundane when placed next (as it is) to those violent cracks of light and sound.

I guess this is just one way in which Apichatpong's installation touches on the idea of the Primitive. Skipping between perception of past, present and future, this work is both grim and playful.

In the gallery, dominated by a structure which oscillates between being an eminently practical thing to hold video projectors, guard tower and spaceship, you can create your own narrative from the films we are presented with. Instead of following a narrative prescribed by the author, the viewer can become editor, swapping our attention between video feeds and creating something for ourselves. It's a simple and generous device, I like it.

Upstairs in Gallery 2, the Primitive (Nabua Song) seems disposable when compared to the fantasy documentary A Letter to Uncle Boonmee. Displaying a intriguing circular narrative that puts Tarantino to shame, this film tells a story in whispered hints. It is a softly spoken work. Good for a Sunday afternoon after your cat has just been run over.

P.S. Look out for the ghoul.

P.P.S. Doesn't Damien Hirst sound like a twat in the Radio 4 Front Row promo.

DJ Spooky - Rebirth of a Nation @ St. George's Hall

2009-09-26T19:13:00.003+01:00

Ah, Abandon Normal Devices. Possibly the first arts festival that I've got into the swing of without having to violently guzzle every free glass of wine going. (Though I did partake of a can or two of imported Chinese lager.) Perhaps it works because it doesn't take itself seriously - The opening film being HumpDay, a hilarious and every so slightly titillating movie about two straight best boy buds contemplating bum sex with each other. That cinematic experience was greatly improved by the small, saried, cackling Indian woman sitting next to me.

However, despite being a unspoken movie buff, this isn't a film blog. I will not be inflicting a rambling critical discussion of the visual mind fuck which was a midnight showing of the narrative mash-up Mock Up On Mu.

I am going to allow myself a little study of DJ Spooky's representation and remixing of that Ku Klux Klassic The Birth of a Nation. I got quite excited about this event - It was free and in a big shiny, arrogant Georgian monstrosity. Additionally, after many years of closely held animosity, I'm changing my opinion on video art.

Rebirth of a Nation manages to overcome my crumbling defences, sweeping away my issues with video and chronological art that demands attention for an extended period of time. Although, the word 'demand' is not applicable when you are held utterly transfixed.

For almost two hours I was held in mesmeric awe. Suspended, torn between that dangerously sexy racist rhetoric, which inspires both revulsion and compulsive viewing, and the soothing and troubling rhythmic remixing of those familiar images. Although I have never watched the original 1915 blockbuster, the style and imagery are utterly unavoidable in popular culture.

Although presented in a building which was probably built with the proceeds of slavery to an audience of mostly white people, the film was not presented in an overly political context. A few gentle words about context from the soft spoken and handsome DJ Spooky and that was it. Thank fuck. The unspoken context added a delicious air of the uncanny in the regal surroundings of the Hall, with faux-renaissance statues watching on as the light from the projector glints off the gold gilt surroundings.

This made it all the more troubling and beautiful. It would probably be easier to create a violent opposition to the politics of the original, but what we have is something which is all the more delicate and powerful for that delicacy.

Buy Art Fair 2009 @ Urbis

2009-09-24T08:33:00.006+01:00

Here a thought for you - Could the Buy Art Fair, 24 - 27 September at Urbis, have picked a worse night for its preview/opening night?

I blagged my way into last years affair, which was spectacularly uninspiring. Obviously I'm not the market, not having the cash, bad taste or cultural desperation that seems to be the prerequisite for these things. I remember being pretty underwhealmed by a fairly lazy commentary on Art Fairs; hadn't someone paid for a pitch and then stuck a real estate sign in it?

Anyway, what are you going to do if you don't have the pecuniary fluidity or profile to receive an invite to tonight's preview (last year they were selling open night tickets for a tenner or so).

In Manchester:

Angels of Anarchy open at Manchester Art Gallery.

In Liverpool:

FACT has a birthday.

There is a whole cool buncha stuff to do for the Abandon Normal Devices.

Anywhere:

Watch Eastenders.... Oh! That Lucas is a bastard, right?

Most of these things will be continuing over the course of the Buy Art Fair (God bless the Iplayer!) so your spoilt for choice. Unless of course you really want to buy some rancid pastel naked women or neon flowers that look like O'Keefes without being so offensively vaginal.

Colour Chart @ Tate Liverpool

2009-08-23T13:03:00.006+01:00

When I started writing this blog, I thought I was in Manchester to stay. Less than a year later, an unexpected but pretty awesome, sequence of events has led me to relocate to Liverpool.

While I was flat hunting I went to have a nose around Tate Liverpool and it's very appealing sounding Colour Chart exhibition - a welcome break from viewing dishwater dull execu-flats.

The whole setting of Albert Docks is pretty unfortunate, a snarled tangle of pedestrianised bits and one way streets, which equalled cyclist hell. Why do traffic calming measures always bring out the worst in motorists?

Anyway, Albert Docks feels like a pretty odd place to put this gallery. The other Tates stand with architectural arrogance that reflects the institutional prowess and self confidence. Tate Liverpool is bunged into a colonnade with nasty tourist shops selling overpriced gewgaws and leather sofa packed chain wine bars.

Inside it feels more like a Tate, and with not a lot of time on my hands I went straight to the top floor to see Colour Chart. I'm saving the rest of Tate Liverpool for another day... like a kid hiding sweeties from themselves.

It's a wonderful exhibition. At the best moments the profusion of colour creates an ambience I last experienced in the Rothko room at Tate Modern. At the worst it feels a little stark and dehumanised. But in some ways this scintillation between states is exactly what you need and expect from an exhibition based upon such an utterly abstracted art concept. It's hard to find the right critical phrases to apply to such a beautiful monster of an exhibition, apart from that is is both marvellous and enthralling, stepping between the simply delightful and the sublime.

Perhaps the unusual downplaying of figurative images allows the viewer to experience things in a new manner? Although we are used to seeing non-figurative art, it is not often in such a focused presentation.

Beyond what is a marvellous and enthralling exhibition, the commercialisation of the show is a little annoying. There are so many things to purchase from the shop, so centrally displayed on the website, that it feel a little too much like a shopping opportunity. We do love colour, but the endless merchandising is just a little too much for me. When did shopping become such an integral part of a visit to a art gallery?

Seriously, Southampton Art Gallery, what are you thinking?

2009-08-07T17:13:00.003+01:00

Being from Southampton is a strange burden. On the whole it can look like a pretty shitty place, full of small minded bigots, ketamine fuckheads, bad retail and worse memories.

However, the further away you get, both physically and chronologically, a certain nostalgia seems to set in. If you read Owen Hatherley's blog, you'll notice that a certain wistful tone worms its way in when he writes about Shirley High Street. Southampton has nice parks, at times ace charity shops and a Waitrose right near my parent's house. Ah, Portswood. It also has a somewhat kick arse art gallery.

Southampton Art Gallery, in both its building and its collection, is certainly the jewel in what can be considered the rather rusty crown of that dilapidated port town. It's collection is both varied and comprehensive. From my childhood visits everything I understand and love about art stems. There is not a thought or feeling I have in relation to art that can not be traced back to the place. Beyond what I experienced in my home, beyond what I was shown by my artist mother, Southampton Art Gallery is what I model my relation with all other institutions. I'm not saying its right, or useful, but it's frankly the truth.

That is why I'm distressed and pissed off when I discovered that Southampton Art Gallery is intending to sell off some of it's collection to fund a shitty heritage museum. Fuckit, they'll probably call it a Local History Family Experience Centre, or something else equally twee and meaningless! It's not a case of "robbing Peter to pay Paul"; the inevitable editing and re-presentation of Southampton's history, almost certainly coupled with stultifying didacticism, could never equal the value and immediate personal impact that those lost works of art could deliver.

Southampton needs an identity beyond West Quay, the Saints and the Titanic. As well as setting a dangerous precedent for regional collections throughout Britain, it undermines any cultural ambition that Southampton could ever hope to foster.

As usual, Jonathan 'intellectual hunk' Jones says it better - http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2009/aug/06/southampton-art-sale

If you one of those who believe in the possibilities of democracy, sign the petition - http://www.gopetition.co.uk/petitions/save-our-collection.html

Yours sincerely,

Appalled in Rusholme

P.S. If anyone from Southampton Art Gallery is reading this, you seriously need a better website.

Everyone Loves Gormley

2009-07-23T19:13:00.001+01:00

Antony Gormley from Manchester Art Gallery on Vimeo.

Trade City @ CHIPS

2009-07-09T15:14:00.002+01:00

Finally getting round to writing something which is not about the Cornerhouse.

New Islington is a weird place. For cyclists it moves between two extremes, beautiful quiet roads with lovely new surfaces to dual-carriageway, bumper-to-bumper-traffic, broken-glass hell. It's not an easy place to get to, even if it's just a few minutes walk from the Northern Quarter.

However, this awkward combination of untenable luxury flats and knackered social housing is actually quite a suitable context for Trade City (4 - 19 July). This is the first exhibition from Contemporary Arts Manchester, a new, not-for-profit consortium of arts organisations from across Manchester.

A rather tired looking set of objects and audio visual installations are sprawled around the space, the unused and incomplete space on the ground floor of the improbably named CHIPS. Even though I may be fully conversant with the theory behind the pieces, "site specific" piles of building materials or rubbish stuck to the walls, for me at least, needs a little more pizazz if they want to be more than the sum of their parts.

However, there is something hopeful and virile about the rather disorderly and earnest way that the exhibition is (not/group) curated. Though I don't really like most of the stuff that the exhibition contains, there is a maturity which cannot be denied.

This is a classic case of something not just being my cup of tea.

Jeremy Deller's Procession: An Exhibition @ Cornerhouse

2009-07-09T14:51:00.006+01:00

Quieten down and listen carefully, pay attention you at the back! You are going to hear something very special which doesn't happen very often.

I bloody love the current exhibition at the Cornerhouse.

Jeremy Deller's Procession: An Exhibition (9 July - 23 August) is the friendliest and most inspiring thing I've seen this year.

Sadly, I missed the Procession itself - sea swimming and getting sunburned in Anglesey was my consolation prize - but the if it was anything like the exhibition it must have been really something. The slightly manic, ethnographic, nonsensical atmosphere in the galleries of the Cornerhouse was invigorating. At the opening the attendance of participants from the Procession itself meant that the sea of faces was different to the usual Cornerhouse crowd. The banners were fascinating and the photographs beautiful. The inclusion of the recreation of that Bury Cafe had an even weirder than expected effect on the gallery space.

Where POI was lovely and wistful in the best bits, Procession: An Exhibition is just sheer joyful and perfectly odd. How often does that happen in an art gallery?

'Nuff said, go and see.

Jeremy Deller’s Procession: An Exhibition OR "Everything That Happens Will Happen When You're Away"

2009-07-03T10:38:00.003+01:00

I woke up this morning with the words of the Eno & Bryne song transmogrified into "Everything That Happens Will Happen When You're Away"

And It is kinda true, apart from summer exuberance - never mind the sweaty red faced damp grimyness of summer in the city - means that no event is just an event. Events all must have a full gamut of meta-events, otherwise how do we know they've happened?

I'm pretty annoyed about missing Jeremy Deller's Procession. The combination of nutty frivolity and hefty provenance makes very appealing. Although, I can't help but think that a parade like this is the perfect opportunity for some creepy Cape Fear/I Know What You Did Last Summer type shenanigans. If anything happens along those lines, let me know.

However, this parade is not just a parade. For those intent on spending the weekend in rain swept Wales, the Cornerhouse is presenting Jeremy Deller’s Procession: An Exhibition (Thu 9 July – Sun 23 Aug). Curated by The Salford Restoration Office, the exhibition will bring together a collection of objects from Deller's Procession.

Luckily, the exhibition looks to be just as playful, obscure and thoughtfully flippant as the event it is spiralling off. The inclusion of a full size replica of a cafe in Bury - which I'm rather sorry I won't get to see as a float - which will apparently be serving tea and cake is a master stroke. Is there anything which isn't better for the addition of tea and cake?

( I'm looking at you, Yorkshire. )

Whatever! Criticism is not a democracy...

2009-06-26T07:48:00.001+01:00

If you haven't worked it out already, I have a fairly sweaty intellectual crush on Guardian blogger Jonathan Jones. He managed to mirror so many things I feel in my voluminous gut - plenty of instinct there - and be so wonderfully succinct with it.

Once again he's done it with his spot-on post "Art criticism is not a democracy"

Jones writes :

"The reason so much average or absolutely awful art gets promoted is that no one seems to understand what criticism is; if nothing is properly criticised, mediocrity triumphs. A critic is basically an arrogant bastard who says "this is good, this is bad" without necessarily being able to explain why. At least, not instantly. The truth is, we feel this stuff in our bones. And we're innately convinced we're right."

POI: Moving, Mapping, Memory @ Cornerhouse

2009-06-08T07:00:00.004+01:00

Yukari Yoshikawa

Despite the British summertime deciding to stab the nation collectively in the back with this shitty weather, and a yummy dose of anonymous bitchiness, my previous state of pessimism about art in Manchester has somewhat lifted.

I feel a little bad for writing rather brutally about the last few thing I've seen at the Cornerhouse. It is perhaps too easy to blame the institution for what it contains. However, art by it's very nature is always going to be hit or miss with individuals.

The first of a series of Editions, a new Cornerhouse scheme to introduce us to new and experimental art, POI: Moving, Mapping, Memory is a very mixed collection of work, all tracing path around ideas of how we map and remember time.

For a subject which could get really bloody stale rather quickly, POI for the most part nimbly avoids the worst pitfalls and in places introduces really innovative ideas.

Here I don't mean the same-old-same-old wearing a t-shirt with the word "INNOVATION" on it. No, actually innovation! and with out being depressingly clunky like a 90s era website.

Joel Porter's Ubiquitous Interactivity is a lovely introduction to the exhibition, although it unfortunately needs to be explained a little too much. Toying with the number of IDs we now have to carry which contain RFID chips, the work relies on participants to wave a card - either their own or provided by the artist - over a scanner, which then triggers changes on an opposite screen. These smashed together images are both attractive, eerie and playful.

Unfortunately the first gallery is dominated by a video projection which is accompanied by a soundscape which manages to be both obnoxious and generic. To be an artist, or indeed a curator, is famously about making choices. Why do, so often, people make the same bloody choices about what works of art sound like?

Fortunately, the use of sound is much more evocative and lovely in Gallery 2.

Yukari Yoshikawa's Colour and Colours has to be experienced, beautiful and hopeful, this work for me makes the exhibition. It draws you in with a flirtatious, powerful but not un-nerving, use of sound and colour. It intriguingly hints at narrative and an almost ephemeral, yet palpable, sense of something "more". Very simply, it is a visually and mentally delicious experience.

Instantanes ( Marseille ) by Eimer Birbeck is in principle very simple, but in reality rather an appealing and vivid auditory manifestation of the streets of Marseilles.

Upstairs, Andrea Zapp's Google Gaze, textile renderings of urban scenes, do not stand up well against the playful, and often beautiful, interactivity and dynamism of the other works in POI. Equally, An Exploration of Consciousness by Richard Charnock - e.g. that rabbit thing - seems a little overly complex and clunkily implemented when considering the actual result.

In an exhibition where some of the objects are, each in varying measures, joyfully playful, smoothly interactive and verging on beautiful, the low points are not spectacularly low. The lack of politics and aggressive intellectualisation - as seen in State Legacy - means this is a really assessable exhibition, and perhaps a good introduction to what can be done with digital methodologies in terms of art.

As for low points, the nasty soundscapes in the first gallery and the rather disparate and unconnected organisation of the top gallery spring to mind.

It would be easy to point out that I can be ruthlessly critical. However, in my defence, I refuse to be pointlessly celebratory. POI: Moving, Mapping, Memory is not perfect, but it's a happy step in the right direction.

( If that direction is keeping my fascist sensibilities happy.)

The Cutting Room Experiment - a final word on the matter ...

2009-06-06T13:58:00.008+01:00

Encouraged by a rather creepy comment, I've decided to finish my commentary on The Cutting Room Experiment.

If you are interested the winning ideas can be viewed here.

I've decided to reappraise and reassert my expectations of the Arts & Crafts stream of The Cutting Room Experiment.

For the record, I had no problem with the Experiment it's self, rather how people's paltry, and frankly depressing , imagination manifested through it.

It would be easy to point to me and demand I do something about it. However, I didn't spend years of my life studying art and culture, pumping up my critical muscles at expense of everything else, to become a mere-participant. I am a historian, not a failed artist.

My own idea - submitted on a Bank Holiday afternoon after being plied with rose-aye wine - was whimsical and, yes, fuelled by a vague sense of competitiveness. Which I believe is exactly what the organisers hoped would happen.

The Experiment itself will almost certainly be considered by all involved a success, however for me its been a poignant demonstration of our apprehensions and stultifying precognitions about art.

It was a hot coal that I refused to pick up, but that doesn't mean I can't be dispirited by no one else rising to the challenge.

Image from flickr here, used under a creative commons licence.

EDIT:

I think I have the power to predict the future.

The Social Lives of Objects @ Castlefield Gallery

2009-05-31T12:25:00.005+01:00

Summer is here, bringing with it a new lightness and fanciful feel to the Manchester art scene.

Along with the upcoming POI at the Cornerhouse, the darkly frivolous The Social Lives of Objects at the Castlefield looks set to riff off ideas and concepts I'm an absolute sucker for. I'm susceptible to anything which manages to be really joyfully playful and still gracefully retain it's intellectual credentials while being friendlily intelligent. Barthes is my touch-stone when judging things on this aspect.

We all know that excessive stuff is both the suffocating cancer of life in a post-modern age and the absolute bloody joy. My own irrational affection for old mugs and defunct gewgaws makes me a hellish person to live with. I'm constantly frustrated by my own avarice.

If you find any of the above reflected in yourself, you'll certainly find it mirrored in the complex but playful telling of the stories which surround our relationship with objects. This exhibition features a fresh and exciting collection of work by three artists based in Manchester and London, Hilary Jack, Lisa Penny and Dallas Seitz.

The Social Lives of Objects opened on Thursday 28th May and runs until the 19 July 2008. There will be a tour and discussion on the 18th June, 6 - 8pm. Contact the gallery to book.

Opening Times: Wednesday to Sunday 1pm – 6 pm

Website : www.castlefield.co.uk

Art at The Cutting Room Experiment OR Why I Am A Fascist

2009-05-24T12:26:00.008+01:00

Having been successfully bribed with beer, I am writing a blog about the Cutting Room Experiment.

The Cutting Room Experiment will - to quote their own word - use "the power of the web together we will produce the most groundbreaking event in Manchester. In 12 different themes 12 different flash mobs will be created involving genres such as art and design, dance, science to classical music."

It'll be interesting to see if any artists or curators take up the opportunity to do something with a bit of artistic substance, rather than producing smug and recycled concepts.

One of the major issues as I see it is that a lot of people have given up trying to have distinct opinions on what is art ( let alone what is good art ), in fear of being labelled some kind of fascist. I've been waiting for some tosser to roll out the twee attitude that flash mobs are "Art" in reference to this project, when clearly that is a deluded and undiscerning position to take.

So what is currently mooted to take place at Cutting Room Square in terms of art ( & it's estranged sister 'craft' ) on the 20th of June?

Looking at what is on there right now ( as of 12pm 24/05/09 ) the two most popular options are predictably ones which make me, at first glance, want to spit; 'knitters unite' and 'big hands.'

'knitters unite' is the most popular, and despite my prejudices, probably the least inappropriate one, since it is the "arts & craft" stream. I had thought the trend for hipster knitting had subsided, but apparently I was ( as usual ) wrong.

At Futuresonic the other week I found the way in which the building was dressed with little knitted bojangles rather sweet, so this could actually be the most visually engaging project mooted in the arts & craft stream.

'big hands' however...

"Fitting with cutting rooms heritage as a space to cut large pieces of material, a finger painting on a piece of canvas of epic proportions. A team of a few hundred people could surely create something monstrously good. Messy, fun and with a lasting impression. The work could be donated to the Art gallery or some similar trust."

Everyone's thoughtless scrawl is worthy of being called art now? It brings to mind that ouroboros of modern art: modern art looks like a child could have painted it = if it looks like a child painted it = modern art.

Oh! that lucky art gallery! Even the misplaced capital A suggests a slightly shaky grasp on what art is.

A recent blog by Johnathan Jones ( who else? ) states that the public cannot be trusted to commission art. Equally, as I fear the Arts & Craft stream of the Cutting Room Experiment will prove, they can be trusted even less to take a multi-authorial hand in it.

Why do I have a problem with this? Cause right now it seems that Manchester is incapable of plotting a course between uber-brow and sickeningly twee-tastic; both of which often are insufferably self assured and self reverential.

With a wider view, it often seems that a lot of public art at the moment sometimes doubt that the public can think about art abstractly and intelligently, apart from only in the most hackneyed and rudimentary manner.

If this has pissed people off, then prove me wrong. The deadline for idea submissions is 29 May 2009. I'd like to see something which was intelligent, and not so patronising in it's inclusiveness and intellectual crudeness. This could be an opportunity to do something wonderful, a clarion call, a chance to prove all the curatorial elite wrong.

But will it be?

http://www.cuttingroomexperiment.com/

POI: MOVING, MAPPING, MEMORY

2009-05-20T16:32:00.004+01:00

Just recieved a really sweet "save the date" email from the Cornerhouse about POI : Moving, Mapping, Memory, their next exhibition which runs 5 to 28 June 2009.

"POI explores the exchanging of points in time, or places in space, giving us the chance to review the world around us through innovative media art works. The installations investigate our shifting existences, both physical and digital, and the ways we perceive, shape and interweave the environments we inhabit. The narratives created ultimately comment on our surroundings, from a social, historical and technological perspective."

Sounds pretty interesting, but a tad uber-brow, which is what exhibitions at the Cornerhouse seem to be tending towards at the moment. Anyway, with my current immersion in the digital perhaps I'll be able to get a better handle on this one, as opposed to the slightly overwhelming politicised/intellectual efforts involved in State Legacy.

Futuresonic Art v1

2009-05-15T10:33:00.006+01:00

One and a half days into Futuresonic, and before heading off to the second day of the Social Tech Summit at Contact, I thought I would write something quickly about some of the art I've seen.

The main arts hub is the The Environment 2.0 Art Exhibition at Cube Gallery on Portland Street. Although there is a basket load of interactive musical fun nonsense on the lower floor, the stuff that caught my attention and provoked my latent childlike fascination were in the top gallery.

Firstly, it is impossible to ignore Scenocosme's Akousmaflore. Located just inside the gallery, these musical plants are almost additive. Wiggle you hand next to them, or gently tug on the hanging strands, and the plants emitted electronic jangles and twitters in the most charming way. It is like being in some magical garden.

However, I did find them ever so slightly menacing. Has anyone red Day Of The Triffids recently? Didn't the Triffid's emit some seductive hoots and whistles to tempt humans into reach of their stingers?

Recently I've fallen back in love with Joseph Beuys, perhaps thanks to Cat and Girl. Also, I quite like trees. I mean, saplings. They are so cute. Like baby tress. Am I getting broody over flora?

It is for these reasons that I really liked Ackroyd and Harvey's Beuys' Acorns installation. Yes, I know it's just 300 saplings grown from acorns from trees planted by Beuys, but there is something beautiful and intriguing to see this number of plants in a gallery space. The miss-matched pots give it a lovely sense of careful/carelessness.

When I picked up my delegate pack on Wednesday I cycled home, and sat in my kitchen with my housemate's going through my freebees. I've not been to many of these junkets, so I find these kind of packs pretty interesting. In the bag was a plain matchbox, and upon sliding it open I almost threw it across the room. For a split second I thought it contain a dead bug, or worse, a live on.

However, it was really a dinky little paper cockroach made out of old Futuresonic programmes. In the Cube there are thousands of them, swarming along a ledge on the staircase. Oddly, I can't find any info on who did this glorious buggy installation.

The photographs are by my good friend @samscam, who has some great photographs of Futuresonic over on his Flickr account.

I better be off, throw myself at the Social Tech Summit. Blogging is my new excuse for staying in bed.

A Clump of Plinths @ The Lowry

2009-05-09T08:19:00.006+01:00

You know when it's time for the Turner Prize when the TV stations roll out Vox Pop footage of 'joe public' gormlessly carping about the inequities of modern art.

It's easy for the half informed, middle brow, middle class to sigh and roll their eyes at the wilful ignorance of the man on the street.

Unfortunately, sometimes you just have to agree with them.

I thought Sarah Staton's 'A Clump of Plinths' - which is the second of a series of commission to fill the Promenade Gallery at the Lowry - was going to be pretty interesting. I liked the name, it was playful, thoughtful and very of the moment.

Instead I was confronted with something which was completely underwhealming and almost amusing in it's ineffecaciousness.

The artistic concepts which run through this work are pretty unsophisticated: the use of domestic materials, texture, colour, pattern and space. It's a litany of what get's shoved down your throat at sixth form college.

At best it looks like clumsy 50s garden sculpture, at worse something put together by Linda Barker during a particularly disastrous episode of Changing Rooms.

I know the blocky uniformity of some of the pieces are meant to cast our attention onto the space around the objects. However, just as good art must stand up to scrutiny, when art is trying to make us consider gallery space, the gallery space needs to be equally well considered. Staton's sculptures place within the Promenade Gallery is just not up to this examination.

The washed out colours of the exhibition and the equally washed out Salford light does not create an evocative or visually interesting experience.

It just feels a little too much like a trip to Wickes.

Transformations 2: ‘A Clump of Plinths’ by Sarah Staton, Sat 2 May 2009 - Sun 13 Sep 2009

Lowrys @ The Lowry

2009-05-08T15:39:00.004+01:00

I have a dirty little secret.

I have never visited The Lowry before today. With a day off work and a recently made list of the must visit art institutions in Manchester, I decided today was the day. I got on my bicycle, braving wind and rain, and cycled to Salford.

I have never paid that much attention to L. S. Lowry, just allowed him to skirt the edges of my artistic consciousness in the way that ubiquitous but visually unappealing artists can. I have idly wondered why he received so much attention when much more exciting artists of the period, though being well know, are not universally vaunted in the same way.

However, after my trip to the Lowry today, I was left with thoughts about the matrix of understanding that his work ( and all art ) sits in - the very substance of one artists place in the construction of art history. Lowry is probably a useful one to look at when attempting to reveal the invisible, but ever present, practises of editing and creating which take place when an artist is discussed, presented and placed within a simple art/historical context.

Much has been written about how the Lowry has the biggest collection of L. S. Lowry's paintings. Recently, when i was reading 'Stealing the Mona Lisa' I read about L. S. Lowry's secret paintings - hidden till discovery after his death - which are dripping with sexual violence. I half hoped to see some of these today, as a nod to a comprehensive representation of his production.

However, unsurprisingly they were not on display among the numerous other paintings.

I read too much Pratchett as a kid, and the concept of people only seeing what they wanted to see is therefore very familiar to me. It is also true that objectivity has little place in art. Knowing about these hidden works I saw hints of darkness in his paintings, but just as these may be ignored by the viewer seeking nostalgia, they may equally be a product of my feverish brain.

I know the thing I want would be no more an accurate representation of Lowry as a artist, but it would perhaps be fun to shake people out of their comfortable complacency.

I know these paintings were not paintings that Lowry wanted to make public, and in turn are probably suppressed by the estate. Suppression may be a too thorny word, but by not displaying them within what presents itself as a comprehensive collection of his work it is clear that editorial decisions have been made. Especially since these galleries are organised along biographical/chronological lines, the artist as biographical figure, not as commercial artists, is ever present, making the leaving out of the non-public works even more problematic.

With the millions of pounds and tonnes of rhetoric which are invested in the Lowry, it would be impossible to present aspects of Lowry's artistic production/psycho-sexual machinations which would contradict the status quo, the traditional, twee regional simple idea of the artist, on to which people can project what they want.

Lowry as a man holds little interest to me, whatever he did to work out his sexual frustrations interests me in only the laziest and tawdiest sense, but the way in which public cultural attitudes and editorial decisions are played out around his artistic production are more clearly discerned than usually.

Desiring Necessities @ John Hansard Gallery, Southampton

2009-05-02T11:48:00.002+01:00

Unless you follow me on Twitter you either don’t know or don’t care that my home town is the rather unfortunate city of Southampton. When I was younger I had a complete and utter lack of affection for this place, and left, working my way as far away from the town of my birth by attending increasingly northern academic institutions.

I seldom go home, despite nostalgia somewhat returning in my old age. However, it does indicate something if I still refer to my parent’s house as home.

Owen’s recent column in BD on the flawed infrastructure planning of this retail dominated port town actually evoked a strange sense of longing for this city in all it’s prim and grimy facets. So, yesterday – after a surprisingly obstacle free train journey down from Manchester – I went for a cycle around to see my old haunts.

Undoubtedly where you’re from shapes you, and I realise now that I perhaps did not give Southampton due credit for shaping some of my artistic sensibilities. The Southampton City Art Gallery, as well as being a beautiful building, houses a large collection of Graham Sutherland paintings. Sutherland will always be a touchstone for me when it comes to thinking/feeling about art. Perhaps this civic art gallery has shaped what I think/feel about art institutions.

Anyway, I digress.

My mama cajoled me into attending Desiring Necessities at the John Hansard Gallery. This small gallery is located in the heart of the excessively landscaped Highfield Campus of the Southampton University.

I was wary at first, since Desiring Necessities looked like it was going to be one of those overly curated beasts which clumsily miss-handles popular culture in the gauchest of manners…

… and wonderfully, I was pleasantly surprised.

The art writer Michael Bracewell - who writes in the free catalogue ( downloadable from here ) - hit the nail on the head why this exhibition appeals so deeply. In his opening words he summed it up as being, “Personally important but perhaps not academically respectable.”

Dealing with veins of iconography running through popular culture, the curator Ilaria Gianni manages to tread a very fine path. This exhibition almost completely avoids the pitfalls that often cripple exhibitions dealing with similar themes. Delicately constructed, the works lie together nicely, neither jarring each other or drawing their interconnectedness with too broad strokes.

A still from Susanne Burner’s video 50,000,000 CAN’T BE WRONG

Thoughtfully approaching usually gnarly subjects; nostalgia is examined without straying into schmaltz, cultural anxieties without hysteria and deals with popular culture in an intelligent and delicate manner which still manages to be powerful and oddly respectful.

Bracewell – who has rocketed in my estimation, despite rather clumsily name dropping Morrisey – touches on other aspect which makes this exhibition so evocative and compelling, that these artists manage to deal with popular culture without trying to trump it. It’s a fact - Bracewell quoting someone and I miss-quoting him - that artisans working in popular culture are often more sophisticated than the artistic types that mimic them. This is something which was never better illustrated than the often clumsy State of the Art : New York at Urbis.

Why do I like this exhibition so much? Evocative of the hidden rivers of meaning/language/text that runs through culture, it approaches subjects without having to tie them down too forcefully. There is something experiential and not dictatorial about it that I really appreciate.

The definite highlight of the exhibition is Susanne Burner’s video 50,000,000 CAN’T BE WRONG, depicting scenes of modern hysteria, audiences and crowds to a sound track of ghostly music. This hypnotic video could perhaps completely reverse my oft-stated attitude to video art. It sets the tone of the entire exhibition, melancholic and suggestive of something more, without having to state or explain itself.

Hopefully when I return to Manchester I can find the time and energy to write some more about what’s happening, but for the time being my excursion down south has been well worth it.

State of the Art : New York @ Urbis

2009-04-22T15:05:00.006+01:00

I am behind the times in nearly all senses of the phrase, finally getting myself down to Urbis to go see State of the Art : New York today.

If I had to imagine a parody of a collection of quintessentially New York-ian art - based upon, having never been there, poorly remembered adverts from Art Forum and far too much CSI : NY - it would look almost exactly like this exhibition. Almost entirely State of the Art: New York consists of a ugly mish-mash of hip-hop imagery and trite clumsy pomo heavy rhetoric.

You can just imagine the types of people who made this stuff, people for who cool was a career choice. The US equivalent of those people who end up living in Hebden Bridge with unused AGAs and fixed gear bicycles, probably an undiagnosed STI or two and writing smug self-referencing nonsense for the weekend supplements.

If this was an episode of CSI: NY I know exactly what would happen. The beautiful cool artist is actually plagiarising the work of his/her lover with the collusion of the shady gallery owner, who is probably trafficking crystal meth in pop culture referencing art works. The lover kills the artist in an appropriately artistic manner, the greedy gallery owner looks to make a killing as the value of the artists work sky rockets, but is revealed to be a drug smuggler and the lover gets to live out his/her days in solitude indulging their artistic urge in the comfort of the the prison cell. The squinty eyed guy says something twee and everyone else pisses about with tech looking pretty to the tune of whatever the cool hunters are saying will be the "big thing". The Who plays.

Anyway, unfortunately, it's not an episode of CSI : NY. It's another smug and achingly cool exhibition at Urbis.

I should have been an art critic in the fifties. When modernism was actually modern. Just imagine the things I would have said to Greenberg....

P.S. Just in case you were wondering ...

State Legacy @ The Cornerhouse

2009-04-20T16:02:00.005+01:00

Why does every exhibition at the Cornerhouse have to be read like an essay?

I mean seriously, I find myself leaning towards graduate group shows and single commercial offerings to escape the endless, mind-chilling didacticism the Cornerhouse seem hell bent on producing. Sometimes my award winning brain-eye combo just wants to look at things.

A while ago a friend said to me ‘when was the last time you saw something really great at the Cornerhouse?’ and I had to think. I did contradict her, since the last thing I had seen was Masaki Fukihata’s ghostly playful solo show ‘The Conquest of Imperfection.’

However, ‘The Intertwining Line’ came along and I had to shamefully eat my defensive words.

Not to say that I don’t like some of the elements of State Legacy, but it feels as though they are elements, not distinct art works. The title gives it away I suppose, ‘Reseach in the Visualisation of Political History.’ It’s not for the looking, that title says, it’s for the brainy ones with doctoral degrees.

It’s a clever essay, with some lovely works of art in it. Sui Jianguo’s Raising Speed on the Railway, generously occupying the whole of the top gallery, is certainly hypnotic. There is something absorbing and tinged with that futile Dickensian humour about a train rushing around and around a testing track.

The very act of watching a train - unless you are an anoraked locomotion aficionado - especially when its projected onto a wall under the egis of art and cultural investigation feels almost tragicomic.

It's all a bit like watching motor racing on a hangover. Perhaps, for me at least, that sums up the whole of State Legacy. There are nusiances to this which you’ll never get and are essential to the enjoyment of the event.

This exhibition, this essay, suffers from occupying uncomfortable space between art and cultural politics. It's too worthy, too educational and it's position is too clearly stated and too forcefully held.

Give me something nice to look at ...

Th'Arctic and State Legacy

2009-03-25T15:29:00.006Z

What does April hold?

As usual the Cornerhouse is a source of interesting but perhaps overly cerebral sounding art.

Luckily for them Th'Arctic appeals to my illogical obsession with the polar regions. Th'Arctic is a live art project by artist Rebecca McKnight. In April, Rebecca will attempt to become one of the first British people to ski up to 300 miles pulling a pulk (sledge) from Resolute to Gris Fiord, the most northerly Inuit community in Canada. It kicks off today and runs until the 24 April.

I tried to form an opinion on the Cornerhouse's upcoming State Legacy exhibition, but it felt like far too much actual work. I'll let you know what I think when I've gone and had a decent gander about.

Rock 'n' Roll @ Library Theatre

2009-03-04T07:06:00.003Z

The other week I went to see Rock 'n' Roll at Library Theatre, for absolutely nothing thanks to A Night Less Ordinary. Admire my youthful skin and uncanny ability to hunt down free stuff.

This feels like a play which is waiting for a television adaption. The quick cuts ( scene changes ), masked by the projection of album covers on screens and snippets of dad-rock ( montages, innit! ) are practically begging for it. Though it was a valiant attempt to provide something a little more punchy, presenting bite sized bit of action, the result was sadly a little unwieldy and ponderous.

Essentially Rock 'n' Roll is a pleasant play, firmly middle-brow but wearing high-brows coat. However, it really is a play for Dads. Dads of Manchester, what did you think?

What's probably less suitable for Dads was my trip to see some great Avant Garde cinema at the Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds, thanks to Olsen. People may have noted my hatred of video art, but somehow, when staged in an amazing old cinema my usual vitriol was defused. True, there was a certain amount of wank and silly self indulgence, but we all know that's par for the course with any thing wearing the mantel of art.

Fridays trip to Manchester Art Gallery: Parthenocarp, Da Vinci and random design stuff

2009-02-24T11:04:00.008Z

Last Friday, after failing to find someone to accompany me through twitter, I went to see the Da Vincis in Manchester Art Gallery.

Some of my favourite art displays are within institutions which take their pattern from older institutions and collections. I don't look back on the time I lived in Oxford with much fondness, apart from a few glorious summer days spent in Headington Hill Park and some nice evenings in The Star. However, I do miss having the Ashmolean, the two Science Museums, as well as naturally the Pitt Rivers, handy.

This is perhaps why I like Manchester Art Gallery, there is a certain quirky eclecticism which I find is often missing from more contemporary civic art institutions. ( *cough* Urbis * cough*)

The sequence of rooms in which the Da Vincis were placed reminded me of pleasantly lethargic afternoons spent in Ashmolean.

First, is the room with Paul Morrison's Parthenocarp installation. There is something wonderfully generous about the staging of this painting, the expanse of floor you drift around as the image looms above and to the left and right of you. You are engulfed. It is unsettling, not in an unpleasant sense, but because it levers you out of you comfort zone, tipping you slightly off kilter and into a new position that takes a moment to get used to. Space is always at such a premium, it's glorious to have a bit of room to have an intellectual stretch in.

Parthenocarp is like a theatre back drop, and despite being a beautiful amalgamation of images, is oddly lacking depth and reflects attention onto the the inhabitants of the gallery.

There is a rather lovely collection of photographs of Parthenocarp going up on Manchester Art Gallery's Flickr page.

After a short queue, they let you into the Da Vinci room. I really don't have that much to say about these. They are beautiful drawings, and there is always something tremendous about being near something so old and of such repute. I like the skulls. I liked the darken, hushed room. A bit like being at the death bed of a Victorian matriarch.

I honestly have to say the second high light of my visit, after my dip into Parthencarp, was spilling out into a design gallery I have never seen before. Though there was far too much interpretative silliness, big shiny things stating the eye-bleedingly obvious, it was just the type of engrossing collection of objects which you found in the Ashmolean.

Apart from done better. Nice and shiny. The beautiful and the odd jostled together, and there were more than enough teapots to keep me happy.

All Manchester needs now is some really bizarre anthropological collections. But it is a happy realisation that for most things, for old art, for new art, for design and for tonnes of stuffed animals, Manchester easily kicks Oxfords arse.

Which I guess is me stating the bloody obvious.

Manchester: 1 / Oxford: 0

Love Lies Lost @ Royal Exchange

2009-02-14T08:57:00.005Z

My current mood re: Valentines Day is essentially: blah, so what?

I'm not generally an anti-love harridan - as opposed to any other type of harridan - so why should I find the trails and travails of singledom any worst today? Lovey dovey couples and false corporately sponsored gesture of affection are bloody annoying any day of the year.

Frankly, it's nice to have a year free from worrying about what to get who, when and how to do it, although another ceramic ghost would be nice.

However, I do feel somewhat fortified against this bullshitty day by my recent trip to the Royal Exchange to see Love Lies Lost.

What a gloriously rude and crazy play, despite the slightly wavering and mental accents. Luckily I don't think the Canadian accent is well known enough in this country to really bother most of the audience.

Beautifully paced, the plot unfolded in a way which was both pleasing and unexpected. At moments hilarious, the emotional moments were not marred by pendulous sentimentalism.

It's also fun trying to spot who will not return after the interval.

So, Love Lies Lost: it's a fresh, ribald and intelligent play, drawing it's comedy from an unusually dark and thoughtful place. I'd definitely recommend it if swearing and fucking on tables doesn't bother you.

Subversive Spaces @ Whitworth Art Gallery

2009-02-08T15:42:00.007Z

George Shaw, Scenes from the Passion: The Swing, 2002/3

On Friday night I breezed into the Whitworth, without invitation, my blaggers gait set to maximum. People diligently studied the pictures in the foyer, despite them being the same exhibition from the Putting on the Glitz opening.

People buzzed about happily - “Nicholas Serota is here!” There was a real fizzle and spark in the air about Subversive Spaces at the Whitworth Art Gallery. Fizzy wine was flowing, cup cakes with ‘EAT ME’ and ‘KILL ME’ were doing the rounds.

It took a few minutes, and a glass of fizz, before I realised I could enter the exhibition.

This might be ( to a certain extent) an art blog, but I’m personally I’m pretty discriminating about what I like. Some people might say punitively so. Surrealism is not one of the things I like. It’s too cerebral, and the product of it - dare I say it - are mostly rather ugly and exclusive. This blog is becoming a list of my preconceptions and prejudices.

Anyway, Subversive Spaces. If you like surrealism and being all Freudian you’ll bloody love this exhibition.

Anna Gaskell, Untitled ( Hide) 47, 1999

To be honest, I was never going to be the choir about this exhibition. However, I do think there is something wonderful about how jam packed Subversive Spaces is, and among the rather tired objects there are some really remarkable objects.

For every two things I thought were tired, trite and pretentious, there was something which I found moving. As much as I hate Dali, I am always stunned by the photography of Brassaï. The paintings of children’s play equipment by George Shaw are really evocative.

Anyway, as I wandered out of the exhibition I realised that the opening speeches had started. There was Nicholas Serota giving a speech. Nicholas Serota! He’s even cooler than Lawrence Llwelyn-Bowen or Mark Lawson!

How did such a boring man get so far? I could tell you some details of his speech, but his droning monologue was of such a cadence it drifted right through my mind with out a single phrase taking permanent hold.

So anyway, fizzy wine, cakes and minor art celebrities. What an evening!

I’ve yet to see Kinderzimmer, the toast of the exhibition. The “major” new commission by Gregor Schneider. Will let you know.

Witness: Women War Artist @ Imperial War Museum North

2009-02-06T09:45:00.005Z

Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-ring by Dame Laura Knight

Normally I bristle at overly curated shows, find the minute directions cloying and the didacticism claustrophobic. I am not praising the white box method, but I do seem to have set myself quite firmly against current habits of display.

However, what is clear is that when things are done well it’s a whole different ball game, as is the case with Witness: Women War Artists exhibition at Imperial War Museum North.

The tightly, but not aggressively, controlled space and the selection of images combined symbiotically, meaning I was genuinely drawn into and moved by this exhibition.

Worth it for the paintings related to the second world war alone, the sheer number of amazing paintings is actually quite stunning - highlights including the stunning The Dock, Nuremberg, 1946 by Laura Knight, A Shell Forge by Anna Airy and numerous prints and sketches of war time life.

Linda Kitson though - blah...

Witness: Women War Artists opens today and continues until 19 April 2009.

February's Manchester Social Media Cafe

2009-02-03T21:29:00.007Z

Tonight was another cracking Social Media Cafe at the Northern. Despite fleeing the scene early due to lurgy and missing the best bit of the boozing and schmoozing, I really enjoyed Adrian Slatcher’s presentation.

Titled “From yahoos to Yahoo - from Ulysses to UGC,” it was a rather enjoyable meander through experimental and innovative literature and the ways it points to our current informational age and future.

As a nineteenth century junky, his talk nicely bookended the period of my obsession, drawing together the fantastical, social commentary of Swift with the queer rantings of Burroughs.

As a pure bread geek, it was refreshing to mingle in the comic vision of Douglas Adams. Once the idea that the Hitchhikers Guide prefiguring Wikipedia was mooted, like all the best observations, seemed stunningly obvious. Sadly, I couldn't show off my geek cred and get a Neal Stephenson discussion in there.

It was nice to have a break from the corporate solutions and down ‘n’ dirty geekery which was on offer in the last Social Media Cafe. ( Not that there's anything wrong with either of those!)

To be frank my slightly fever tinged brain was wandering off on an excursion - wondering whether current browsing habits could be applied to the behaviours see in Poe’s ‘Man of the Crowd.’ I think the internet makes us all flăneurs.

Thanks to Adrian for a refreshing, gently academic and thought provoking presentation.

The New Inn @ Common

2009-01-28T16:00:00.005Z

I'm rather distracted by my new found speed, thanks to my new bicycle.

The article about Jim Medway's new exhibition at Common, The New Inn, is finally up over on CityLife.co.uk

The New Inn opens tomorrow - when I was in Common last week to interview Jim it was looking like it'll be shaping up to be something pretty damn awesome. Hopefully I'll get to swing by tomorrow, at at least sometime this weekend, to have a gander at the finished product.

Interspecies @ Cornerhouse

2009-01-26T11:24:00.003Z

If - like me - you haven't had a chance to see the opening of Interspecies at Cornerhouse all is not lost. My good friend Samscam was there with his trusty SLR and got some rather awesome photographs - including the soon to be legendary lady with pig!

Check them out over on Sam's Flickr page.

Jam Packed & Marmalade Fuelled

2009-01-21T10:08:00.005Z

You turn your back for one moment, indulged in one or two duvet days - and all of a sudden everything creeps up on you. It’s both incredible and depressing.

In my minds eyes the future is where everything and anything is achievable, every art and social event firmly pencilled in with the rest of my life commitments - the present where I am floundering, trying not to over sleep, over indulge in discount wine and over spend on bicycle fripperies.

What am I trying to get at?

Well, mostly that EVERYTHING is happening over the next few weeks, and to make matters worse they are bunching together on the days when I’m working over in Oldham.

Tonight is the first Moves Night at the Greenroom. My capitalisation, not theirs. This is an industry event where artists involved in the Moves09 festival can show “work in progress.”

Tomorrow, it is the opening of the new show - Seeing Beyond - at the Chinese Arts Centre, featuring photography with a medical themes.

It's indicative that I've been spending too much time thinking about the internet that I find it both amusing and frustrating that the Centre comes so far down the results when you type 'Chinese Arts Centre' into Google.

Next week? Kicks off with monkeys at Cornerhouse on the 24th. The end of the week is equally jam packed. New play - Absolutely Frank - opens at the Oldham Coliseum, Jim Medway presents his reimanginging of Common and the ever popular Critical Mass.

Not Part of NYE 17/01/2009

2009-01-18T16:30:00.002Z

Saturday night’s Not Part of NYE at the Dancehouse Theatre, Oxford Road, was a disappointment. Although the organisers may been good naturedly providing a venue for Manchester’s unsigned music, theatre, comedy and film makers, they basically failed to provide for anyone who wasn’t a performer or related-to/friend-of/fucking a performer. I was there with friends to see the Hatstand Medicine Band after a cracking experience with the folk train - and for once in my cynical life approached an evenings entertainment with high hopes and good make-up.

Perturbed by the strange sweaty bar, and confused by why it was so packed, my companions and I brought ourselves drinks and entered the main auditorium. Seated comfortably we caught the tail end of a compère. Then the reason for the bar being so rammed was revealed - despite no other indication - we were informed there was no drinks to be had in the auditorium. Without complaint we left and went looking for the art.

First I should make it clear that my buddies and I are all veterans of many an art opening - I have got drunk in galleries almost as many times as I have visited galleries. It’s not big or clever - but it’s an unacknowledged fact that art exhibitions nearly always go better with a glass of wine on hand. The art works were pretty desultory, illustrative teenaged things which would be instantly, laughingly rejected from Amelia’s Magazine. I did spot some rather attractive looking canvases on the other side of the room, but before I could investigate I was asked to leave because of the offending glass of wine I was holding.

Without a mutter of dissent we agreed to shuffle off, but before we were even half way to the door the messenger was accusingly carping about “being shot” - I have no idea if I said anything to this apart from perhaps attempting a placating smile. The messenger then produce a pure bred cubic zirconia gem of a comment - “You understand we have to be careful with such beautiful art works...”

My rights to being an art critic may be self proclaimed, only based upon a paltry four years in academia - but if I can be trusted to stumble about the Royal Academy with a glass of bubbly, with trust fund chinless-wonders galavanting about to the left and right, we can be trusted by the temporary exhibition in a rehearsal room at the Dancehouse.

At this point it became apparent that the only place you were allowed a beverage in an open container was the bar area, but not once did anyone mention this. I know it may be a condition imposed by the venue - but it should have been made clear when we brought the tickets, or at least some prominent signs, not by grumpy and misleading attendants.

We wandered into the second auditorium to see , what turned out to be rather sexist, short film, and made the rookie mistake of sitting near the front. Without warning a stand up comic appeared and promptly took cheap, lazy shots at everyone near the front. The next guy, St Joseph, was a real mixed bag. His anecdotes were overly drawn out and laboured, although the occasional bizarre ranty gem did appear. I have a theory that he needed the impetus of hecklers to riff off, at the end basically inviting heckles which did not appear - apart from my valiant defence of the cute girls who work in Rusholme Lidl which spurred him onto a rather eloquent soliloquy about a strange women who works in Morrisons in Didsbury...

Wandered back to the main auditorium for Trudy and Judy, which similarly was at moments hilarious and others painfully laboured.

What else?

I know this must seem rather rabid and cruel, but I lack the generosity that the organisers of this event seems to expect from it's audience. I approached the evening with, for me, an unusually positive attitude and was rather disappointed.

There should be a place we new acts can take place, but if you are going to charge so much and hype the event up in such a way there should be better organisation and, dare I say it, some scraps of customer service. Although the staff were only rude a few times, combined with a few pathetically low quality and pretentious acts, it combined to something which was mostly an rather unpleasant evening.

Luckily, despite feeling fatigued by the near constant drivel and shuffling from room to room without the comfort of booze, the last act really pulled out the stops. Despite uneven and uncomplimentary mixing, Dr. Butler’s Medicine Hatstand Band were great. They have brilliant stage presence and were, as they were with the Folk Train, a joy to behold and be-ear.

Additionally, to rescue what could have been a dire waste of eight quid the compère who welcomed them onto the stage and demanded encore was the most charismatic and amusing comic I witnessed that evenings, despite rather shambolically seeming to have a rather lose grasp on what exactly was happening. I didn’t catch his name, but he was a charming fella with a luxuriant head of ginger hair. What’s his name?

What am I trying to get at? Essentially I don’t like anything that tries to be too smugly cool and inclusive. The Impressionists may have been rejected from the Salon, but that does not mean that everything in the Salon des Refusés should share their notority.

Also, the Dancehouse may not be the best venue for this type of event. If there had been a more liquid supply of booze things would have slipped along more smoothly. I would have had much more fun, and been much more forgiving, if this event had taken place in a squat or similar type of venue.

A quick ( and incomplete ) round up of January events...

2009-01-11T18:42:00.006Z

Working life is taking some adjustment after the long months of unemployment. Loving the new job, but missing having all that time and energy to spend on mooching and art perusing.

Lots of arty and media related stuff to put in your diary going on in Manchester this month. This short list is a combination of some great looking new stuff and a few goodies continuing on from last year.

Tuesday the 13th is the beginning of the University of Salfords's MA Contemporary Fine Art Show. This show case take place in three different venues over nearly a month.

The show is centred on the Chapman Gallery with further work showing at the Allerton Annexe on the Salford Campus, with an outpost at one of my favourite venues, the Nexus Art Café.

Wednesday the 14th is the Social Media Cafe at the recently refurbished Northern.

On Thursday the 22nd a new exhibition opens at the Chinese Arts Centre. Seeing is Believing features the work of video and photographic artist Eric Fong.

Laura White's If I Had a Monkey I Wouldn't Need a TV - which I wrote about for City Life - continues at the Castlefield Gallery until the 25th of January.

Speaking of continued exhibitions and City Life - the lovely exhibition of paintings by Nicoletta Ceccoli continues at Richard Goodall Gallery until the 31st of January. My temporarily misplaced preview piece is up on the City Life website.

The awful Intertwining Line is finally over, and the much more exciting looking Interspecies takes over the galleries at the Cornerhouse on the 23rd.

Jim Medway - who I only discovered this weekend has a massive canvas in Manchester Art Gallery - is transforming Common Bar in the Northern Quarter. Starting on the 29th of January, it sounds pretty ace and his last exhibition/revamp of common looked great too. Check out pictures of when he turned Common into a record shop on his blog here or join the facebook event here.

A Feverish Collection of Links

2009-01-04T12:54:00.003Z

Christmas is over, although tinsel and festive songs still linger on like a week long hangover. Santa shaped chocolate is discounted in Lidl, and resolutions are postponed by behemoth super-colds. Rolling around in my sick bed, name brand tissues seem like sheer decadence and any complicated thought about art is pretty much hopeless. The most complex thought processes have been reduced to how much I hate dolphins and pandas, as well as worrying about why I dreamed about marrying Mark Lemarr.

If you're musically uncouth and uncool ( like me ), you may be wondering what you missed out on last year . The ever pleasantly rock'n'roll John Alison presents a round up of 2008's top albums.

What visual art not to miss in 2009? Art highlights of 2009? None of it in Manchester, we need to up our game. This city is great, but we can be a bit too bloody smug and complacent. All I have to say is Urbis.... Gah!

Heatherwick - of the curse of the B of the Bang - strikes again. Another dangerous piece of sculpture with a corporate sensibility, as capitalism ( hopefully ) finally cannibalises itself, it's interested that the most popular, dangerous and boring iconographic pieces - which could easily be a brand logo - are beginning to be considered eyesores and dangers to life and limb. ( This may be the fever talking....)

Despite liking Blake from a visual point of view I hate everyone's attitudes to the deluded nincompoop. Recreating his silly 1809 exhibition is pretty pointless, since everyone's intellectual hard-ons - as well as 100 years of chronological distance - will prevent any useful deductions being made. It's just another chance for silly artists to look smug and touch each others bums. Trust me, they'll use it as yet another excuse to dement themselves into thinking they are modern manifestations of Blake, then inflict more substandard art on us and then crow about being an misunderstood artist when they are presented with the rejection they deserve.

Did I mention I don't like artists?

P.S. Jonathan Jones says 'Cheer Up'

Happy New Year

2008-12-31T17:10:00.005Z

By The Time You Are Real @ RGG

2008-12-23T07:00:00.005Z

This seems to have slipped in between the floorboard of the City Life office, so here's the preview/review piece I wrote just before the opening of the, frankly lovely, Nicoletta Ceccoli exhibition at Richard Goodall Contemporary.

It's dark, chilly and icy; The media is near hysterical with crisis and turmoil, it's all too tempting to utterly withdraw from the world. Put the heating on ( forget the cost, we're all going bankrupt anyway!), pull the duvet over your head and lose yourself in a fantasy world.

In these grim and grisly times, By The Time You Are Real - the new exhibition at Richard Goodall Contemporary - is a welcome break from reality.

Featuring seventeen paintings by the highly acclaimed Italian artist Nicoletta Ceccoli, the exhibition has already, still days before it's official opening, almost completely sold out.

This is Nicoletta's largest exhibition to date. As an artist she has established a loyal following through her book illustrations, and demand for her work is at an all time high. Preoccupied with illustration work, the artist had to snatch time between commissions to complete the paintings for this exhibition.

Richard Goodall explains, " We started talking about the show about a year ago. She's very busy with book illustrations - she does lots and lots of book illustrations - and she had to fit painting in between her book illustration assignments. "

"I eventually got the final one last week, which represents about six months work."

The images are rich and luscious, each one over flowing with careful detail. Doe-eyed, porcelain-skinned girls inhabit a supernatural world, shared symbiotically with equally captivating and perfectly rendered creatures. Traditional logic is thrown to the wind, as these images work to their own enchanted rules.

Although many people assume that these images are digitally produced, they are in-fact meticulously hand painted.

Why do these paintings draw such praise and attention from all quarters? Like the paintings themselves, the answer is more complex than it initially seems.

"I dunno," muses Richard Goodall, "it's a nostalgic thing maybe, people see bits of their youth in these. Then there's that edginess about each one. The is a little bit of an edge, some are a little bit dark, and some are very light-hearted. There is a lot of humour in them.”

These paintings may be in a childish idiom, they have a very thoughtful and adult sensibility.

“The palette that she uses is so very delicate.” Richard continues, “Literally everyone who has seen them thinks they are wonderful.”

By The Time You Are Real, the paintings of Nicoletta Ceccoli runs at Richard Goodall Gallery from the 13th of December 2008 till the 31st of January 2009.

Richard Goodall Gallery - Contemporary Art, 103 High Street, Northern Quarter. Open Wednesday - Friday 11am - 5pm, Saturday 12 - 4pm

Image Hide and Seek by Nicoletta Ceccoli curtsey of RGG

Interspecies @ Cornerhouse

2008-12-17T14:59:00.002Z

Time is passing at a terrifying rate! Just got the heads up about the next exhibition at Cornerhouse. Hopefully it'll be an improvement on the current one, The Intertwining Line.

Titled Interspecies, it previews at the Cornerhousem on the 23rd of January 2009 between 6 and 9pm. This touring exhibition of new commissions and existing works by artists collaborating with animals is organised by The Arts Catalyst

Artists taking part include: Beatriz da Costa, Antony Hall, Ruth Maclennan, Rachel Mayeri, Kira O'Reilly , Nicolas Primat

This exhibition, marks the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and brings together a group of artists who actively question the sovereignty of the human species over all other animal species.

Sounds rather interesting, and all the better for the possibility of monkey involvement.

Exhibition runs:
Sat 24 January - Sun 22 March 2009
FREE Entry

Hi Ho, Hi Ho...

2008-12-16T08:47:00.004Z

It's off to work I go.

With nothing else to comment on I'll leave you with some links.

Jonathan Jones on the end of his ( art critics ) love affair with Damien Hirst. Spookily, the original article I read about this a week or so ago on the BBC website has disappeared.

Does the powerful tentacles of Hirst have the power to silence the BBC?

A survey once again reveals what we all already know, we lie about what books we read to impress people. Duh...

As usual, when the papers writes anything about comics they are several years too late - see the Independents article on Manga.

Speaking of comics, the lovely Paul Gravett sent me an email yesterday thanking me for my review of The Leather Nun & Other Incredibly Strange Comics, and telling me about a wonderful Comica event. Comica is a yearly comics festival in London, but one off events take place throughout the year under that name.

Coming up next year is Adrian Tomine's first UK appearance. Despite being on so far away in London, it's still rather tempting. Details on Paul Gravett's website here.

Anyway, I'm off to Oldham.

Pre-preview of 'By The Time You Are Real' @ RGG

2008-12-10T15:17:00.001Z

With my City Life hat on I've just been for a nose round the Nicoletta Ceccoli exhibition at Richard Goodall Gallery. It may have still all been mostly on the floor, but was still pretty enchanting. Can't wait till Saturday to go and have a look at it once it's properly hung.

Internet Art @ The Tuttle Club

2008-12-09T21:44:00.004Z

Manchester's Social Media Cafe, in it's second outing at the Northern last night, was a bit of a mixed experience. Although an absolute blast from the networking, drinking pear cider and comparing moo cards end, the organised part of the evening was a little indecisive.

The key speaker was Heather Corcoran from FACT, the Foundation of Art and Creative Technologies, in Liverpool. Her talk about media arts and social media was a little mumbled and meandering, but she did highlight some potentially interesting projects and artists working on the internet.

Disappointingly, I just wasn't quite sure what the destination was, and unsurprisingly it didn't shake up much discussion afterwards. It was like being at a not-very good university lecture, where the person speaking is obviously passionate and well informed about the subject, but doesn't seem to know where they are going with the talk.

All this said, there are some interesting links to nose around on Heather's delicious page.

Self confessedly I'm not a massive fan of most video or digital art. I did quite like things such as Umbrella Zombie Datamosh* or You're Not My Father, but other things seemed a little lost on me. Wikipedia may be telling me Olia Liane is seminal, but I have the feeling that in the warren like interior of the internet perhaps I am only stumbling upon the most dated of her work.

So... Comme ci, comme ca.

* even if that damn Umbrella song in the bane of my existence.

Brrrr....

2008-12-08T12:21:00.003Z

I have had a weekend typically free of any artistic thought. I rolled around Manchester, just missing out from doing anything interesting by a few minutes. It is only remarkable for the sheer amount I have slept, mucked about with bicycle punctures and politely refused to buy knock off DVDs.

Not really connected to much, but tonight is the Manchester Social Media Cafe, which I shall be attending. Not absolutely certain what it's all about, but I'm sure if I turn up and observe though my large gollum like eyes everything will be revealed to me.

Also, my mate Brian Gorman's recent small press comic, Borderliners, is Pick of the Month over at SmallZone.co.uk

In Art?

The Nicoletta Ceccoli exhibition opens at Richard Goodall Contemporary on the 13th of December. Watch this space for the inevitable Citylife.co.uk preview piece.

P.S. Does anyone has a 54cm bicycle with horizontal dropouts going spare?

More Jonathan Jones

2008-12-03T14:50:00.007Z

My fan-girl intellectual crush on Jonathan Jones continues. This interview with Mark Leckey, conducted shortly after getting the Turner Prize, cements my admiration for the chap.

"Leckey started by saying off-camera "I've got a problem with you - I don't know if it's going to make for a good interview." I replied that it would make a great interview, so we got stuck in."

I know I'm being rather lazy and just reposting stuff by a better ( and proper ) journalist, but frankly don't want to leave my bed until someone brings me a fur coat... and a new bike... with chains on the wheels.

Almost slipped off mine twice yesterday in the ice.

The Turner Prize... not really...

2008-12-02T17:40:00.005Z

I gave up caring about the Turner Prize a long time ago. In fact, before I even gave that much of a crap about art. Back when I just liked pretty pictures, wanted to bathe myself in aura that went with artistic practise and hated - at the time, other - art students with a passion.

I was too young to be swept along in the YBA explosion of the nineties, and my art consciousness emerged in the vacuum left afterwards. I just pootled around, reading the set texts, wandered round art galleries and never aligned myself with any school of thought, apart from liking the power reception theory gave me.

Basically, the aim in completing various Art History qualifications was really to gather to tools to crush those pompous twats with fashionably teased hair, vacant eyes and perky little noses.

( Incidentally, learned I passed my MA, with a decent margin, last week... and before you ask have no intention of doing a PhD. )

I wanted to, and still want to a certain extent, crush them. I refuse to believe making crap gives artists any kind of magical, unobtainable, insight.

Anyway, this whole line of thought was spurred on by reading Jonathan Jone's assessment of this years Turner Prize in his Guardian Blog.

Out of the many professional art critics around, i think he is the one I can really get behind - Combining a certain popular, practical, audacious thinking about art with the theoretics to back it up, without getting bogged down in them. His writing is pleasantly unfashionable and free of bullshit.

I wonder if he would be my friend?

Follow me on Twitter

2008-12-02T06:09:00.005Z

There is a spectre haunting Manchester...

.... It is the spectre of paid employment.

This has spurred me on to master the latest, wildly popular, social networking tool. Probably indicates how marvellously uncool I am to talk about it in these terms.

Like a toddler, I learn best through play.

Want to know what I'm upto day-to-day? Want to accidently turn up at the same events as me, so you can buy me large glasses of chilled white wine?

No - it's not facebook, follow me on Twitter. Linky to the righty.

Reality Hack @ Urbis

2008-12-01T22:23:00.007Z

Are you Christmas-ed out yet? The farcical queues in Paperchase and the Post Office making you want to tear your eyes out?

I'm on the downward swing into Scrooge-osity, and however much I adore fairy lights, need a seasonal antidote.

Luckily, the new photography exhibition at Urbis looks like it could be just the boy for the job.

Opening tomorrow and called Reality Hack, the exhibition consists of a series of newly commissioned works from experimental photographer Andrew Paul Brooks, documenting his journeys behind the scenes of Manchester.

First glance seems to indicate that it'll be riffing of that contemporary surreal atmosphere which made me fall in love with the Jamie Baldridge exhibition at Richard Goodall. ( Incidentally, you still have a few more days to go see that, since it is finishing on the 7th.)

More images can be found on Andrew Brooks website, and a there is a more in depth feature over on BBC Manchester.

If I Had A Monkey I Wouldn't Need A TV @ Castlefield Gallery

2008-11-28T00:11:00.004Z

They might have misspelled my surname, but - once again - it's pleasing to have something up on the City Life website.

My review/preview of the Laura White exhibition, If I Had A Monkey I Wouldn't Need A TV, is up on the website here.

New Exhibitions: Laura White's If I Had a Monkey I Wouldn’t Need a TV @ Castlefield & Philips Art Gallery Christmas Exhibition

2008-11-27T10:16:00.006Z

Today is the opening of If I Had a Monkey I Wouldn’t Need a TV, an exhibition by the sculptor Laura White at the Castlefield Gallery, as well as the opening of the christmas exhibition at the Philips Art Gallery.

I don't know what the Philips Art Gallery exhibition is like, though I look forward to their usual pleasantly un-hip choices.

However, I went down to the Castlefield Gallery earlier this week to write a preview for Citylife.co.uk

Combining sculptural forms with images in a chaotic riot of colour and form, this is a absolutely lovely exhibition. Seldom does something so cerebral, with such a suffocating mass of theory behind it, turn out to be so beautiful, whimsical and ever so slightly sinister.

There is an intensity and detail to the sculptures which I haven't seen since Kim Adams' Bruegel-Bosch Bus in The Art Gallery of Hamilton.

You can really lose yourself in this collection of sculptures. Preview opening tonight, If I Had a Monkey I Wouldn’t Need a TV runs until the 25th of January 2009.

A ( not so ) Quick Guide to Arts About Manchester

2008-11-22T12:38:00.016Z

Manchester is an incredibly vibrant, exciting and eclectic city, and its art scene reflects that. However, in a city as large and diverse as this, with several distinct areas just within the city centre, it can get a little overwhelming.

To counteract this and to help you get the most out of this city has to offer, here's a brief guide to some of the major and not so major galleries around Manchester.

From the big internationally acclaimed civic institutions through to small artist led galleries and emerging artists cropping up in unlikely places, from the wilds of the Northern Quarter to the cosy enclaves of university campuses, artistically, Manchester has something for everyone.

Civic Galleries

In terms of big civic galleries, there is a plentiful supply. Manchester Art Gallery has a great collection of art, with over 25,000 objects. The gallery has a particularly fine and extensive collection of Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite painting and objects on permanent display, including the seminal painting by Ford Madox Brown, Work. But the gallery is not restricted to the nineteenth century, with a collection spanning six centuries, it also has a significant examples of eighteenth century and contemporary works. Whether you want to gaze upon William Blake or Lucian Freud, there is something for you.

Located on Moseley Street, just opposite the central library and St. Peters Square - as well as on the very edge of China Town - Manchester Art Gallery is housed in two fine Victorian buildings. These building are joined together with a stunning glass atrium and stair well area, designed by the award winning architect Sir Michael Hopkins, and opened in 2002 to critical acclaim.

The atrium itself has been used as a space to display art work, as demonstrated this summer by these amazing sculptures by Korean artist Choe U Ram.

Current temporary exhibitions include the block busting Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision, which is accompanied by a display of Pre-Raphaelite Works on Paper from the Collection.

Totally different but equally exalted is Urbis, which stands out in the middle of Manchester's shopping melee pit like neatly crash landed spaceship. Striking up into the ( often) gloomy Manchester sky it looks like a cousin of the Pompidou Centre with it's guts tucked in.

Incredibly trendy, Urbis styles itself as a " exhibition centre about city life." The current exhibition displays the political works Emory Douglas, the first and only Black Panther Minister for Culture.

Housing a popular cafe, a top floor restaurant which offers unequalled views of the city, as well the painfully cool, seasonal bar The North Pole located in an adjacent marquee, Urbis is a social, as well as cultural, hub.

The Cornerhouse, nestling next to the Oxford Road Station, has, along with its cinema, book shop and bar facilities, three floors of dedicated exhibition space.

Unfortunately the quality of the exhibits can be quite variable, positive reaction Masaki Fujihata exhibition was undermined by the current exhibition, The Interwining Line.

The downstairs cafe-bar area, which affords an unrivalled people-watching panorama across the hurly burly of Oxford Road, currently features stills from the Academy Award nominated animated film, Persepolis.

Not to be forgotten is the Chinese Arts Centre in the Northern Quarter. The Chinese Arts Centre is the international agency for the development and promotion of contemporary Chinese artists.

Commercial Galleries

Sometimes it's fun to see how the other half live, and even more fun to pretend to be them. Not everyone has the dosh to take a trip to a commercial art gallery as a customer, but that shouldn't stop you having a good nose around. The city centre has several interesting commercial art galleries, most notably the two Richard Goodall Galleries in the Northern Quarter and the Philips Art Gallery on Tib Street.

Richard Goodall Gallery's first location is on Thomas Street, which claims to be the UK's leading fine art photography, limited edition silk screen rock poster art and low brow art emporium. To you and me that's very expensive posters and toys. Still it's nice to see what the über trendy lot spend their money on.

The more recognisable arty face of RGG is the Contemporary Gallery, located in a specially built, state of the art building on High Street in the Northern Quarter. In real terms it's just by that weird set of flats with the old market facade and just opposite Sweet Mandarin.

Currently on show are the stunning photographs of Jamie Baldridge , recently reviewed for Citylife.co.uk, this exhibitions finishes on the 7th of December. This crowd pleasing show is to be followed by an exhibition which promises to be even more popular, in the wildly sought-after illustrator Nicoletta Ceccoli's largest exhibition to date. The galleries' flickr photostream gives a good sense of what the gallery space is like and what kind of exhibits they put on.

Although not nearly on the scale of the Richard Goodall Galleries, the Philips Art Gallery is worth a visit. Hidden away on Tib Street, this tiny, charming space is always full of a broad and interesting selection of art. The displayed work are refreshingly unfashionable, ranging from contemporary representative and impressionist works, through to fifties and vorticist paintings. Their Christmas Exhibition opens on the 27th of November and runs until the 20th of December.

Artist Run Galleries

There are two great artist run galleries, the Castlefield Gallery and International 3. Opening this week at the Castlefield Gallery is a solo sculpture exhibition by Laura White called If I had a Monkey I wouldn't need a TV.

University Run Galleries

Moving away from the city centre and up Oxford Road, the universities unsurprisingly provide a couple of great art venues. Manchester Metropolitan University has a sequence of gallery spaces on it's All Saints Campus, such as The Holden Gallery, which recently housed the Third Manchester Artists' Book Fair. Continuing the bookish theme, this gallery currently contains an exhibition called Reflective Stories, displaying examples of sketchbooks and journals from all levels of art practitioners. Reflective Stories continues to the 12th of December.

Just up the stairs and around the corner from the Holden Gallery is the criminally under used Link Gallery. The gallery currently contains works by current and former students of the Interactive Arts course, in a practically named, Interactive Arts Alumni Exhibition, recently preview on Citylife.co.uk.

Any discussion about the arts around Manchester with out mentioning the Whitworth Art Gallery would be deplorable. This stunning red brick Victorian building is located on Oxford Road by Whitworth Park and is part of the University of Manchester.

It is home to some of the UK's finest collections of art and design including modern and historic fine art, prints, textiles and a rare collection of wallpapers. It's current and eclectic season of temporary display includes the stunning Putting on the Glitz, a celebration of burnished wallcoverings - an exhibition opened by Laurence Llwelyn-Bown earlier this month - and cloth & culture NOW, an unrivalled textile art exhibition featuring works from artists hailing from through-out Europe and Asia. Cloth & culture NOW is closing December 12th.

Arty Pubs

These are just a few examples of the more traditional places you can find art around Manchester. If your looking for more edgy, atypical art there is a whole plethora of less typical places to try. For example the recent Illuminations exhibit which was held in a disused building on Whitworth Street West.

However, its the city's pubs, bars and assorted drinking holes which often turn up trumps. Common in the Northern Quarter has a frequently changing decor supplied by emerging artists and illustrators. Strange Manchester staples of Odd and Odder have always had arty feel, and now Odder holds monthly exhibitions, providing an opportunity for local artists and designers to exhibit their work for free.

The famous Matt & Phred's Jazz Club in the Northern Quarter currently has on display a selection of images entered in the Shot Up North photography awards.

If you like your art with a little more narrative, you should head over to The Lass O'Gowrie. This classic Victorian pub, just off Oxford Road by the BBC, has a changing display of comic book art in the snug, currently featuring Adrian Salmon's Cybermen comics for Doctor Who Magazine.

Art Resources

This is only representative of a tiny selection of venues to see art around Manchester and as the end of the year approaches, old exhibitions taken down and new put in their place, this information will date very quickly.

However, do not despair, since Manchester is served by some great arts resources.

The first is the Arts List, covering every genre of visual and performative art, this is the definitive listings for the Manchester area.

Another useful resource to keep an eye on is Citylife.co.uk. Though the arts section is still, somewhat, in development, it promises to improve quickly. The online version of the Manchester Evening News supplement, it provides previews, news and reviews about entertainment and arts around the city, as well as competitions.

The Art Guide is seemingly a resource with yet untapped potential. Formerly the Castlefield Gallerys e-flyer, it provides details of many grassroots arts activities, as well as links to various arts organisations and collectives in the North-West.

There are probably many other great venues that I've failed to include, and if you feel I have left something significant out, be reassured it was not out of spite and please let me know via comments.

Fin

... for now.

All images in this posting are used under Creative Commons, and sourced from Flickr.

Manchester Art Gallery by Zaw Towers.

Urbis by Max Blinkhorn

Cornerhouse by Zaw Towers.

Whitworth Art Gallery by Chupacabra Viranesque.

Self Congratulation

2008-11-20T21:20:00.003Z

I have my first ever byline in the print copy of City Life tomorrow. It's an rather edited down version of this preview piece about the Interactive Arts Alumni exhibition at The Link Gallery at MMU.