A Clump of Plinths @ The Lowry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.