100 today

Well, according to blogger this is my centennial post, so I suppose I'd better make a hooha of it? Though perhaps that would defeat the achievement a little, so I'm going to try and talk about the ICA instead.

I had my first trip to the Institute of Contemporary Arts yesterday, and if recent reports are any suggestion, possibly my last. The institute was recently bailed out to the tune of £1.2million, and a further million of job and salary cuts are planed. The chairman (him off of newsnight review) claims he is "confident" of the ICA's survival, but based on my experience yesterday I'm no overly sure why.

The current exhibition "For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn't there" is, as it's embarassingly long winded title hints, pretty much the closest to a cack handed tabloid parody of a inaccessible contemporary art show as I have ever seen. This is, somewhat impressively, no fault of the art on display itself, but entirely how it has been curated.
The high points of the work were many, two beautiful etchings ("Vari oggetti su un tavolo" and "Natura Morta") by Giorgio Morandi, a chaotic wall of thoughts, style instillation by Matt Mullican, an animated puppet sculpture by Peter Fishchili and David Weiss (who also had 2 other works in the show) which sat right on the border between being adorable and really bloody creepy, and some fun collage sculptures by Patrick van Caeckenbergh.
My personal highlight (although the Monandi's were probably on a par) was by Dave Hullfish Bailey, a large instillation of a half built roof (or at least possibly a roof) made out of a mad very Blue Peter-ish mix of wood, card, string and wool, all hooked up to a trailer. The title, "When there was nothing left to see we looked for a place where we couldn't be seen doing it" is, needless to say, just a little on the long side which does have the effect, much like the shows title, of adding an air of pretension, but, here I think its far more justifiably descriptive, you're looking at something from halfway through a story, and though its probably down to my own bias for narrative things, I like that very much.
The last piece I'll mention was the best known piece on display, and also the most telling one. A bound engraving of the "Ferrante Imperato" museum in Naples, from 1599.

this one

Not a museum in the modern sense, but a "Cabinet of Curiosities", a vast mish mash of natural and cultural artifacts removed from any context and without any explanation. Basically, the ICA show in a nutshell. It's an interesting idea, if you remove explanations and justifications from a gallery you change the way people look at work for the better, you force them to interpret things on their own, and the result, if not a greater understanding of what they're seeing, is a far greater enthusiasm for it.
Unfortunately, it hasn't quite worked out that way, the collection here has also picked up on the failings of the cabinets of curiosity, the fact that they existed not so much for the enjoyment and apreciation of a viewer, but, for more reason than any other, to show how wealthy, well travelled, and educated the collector was, and the collections themselves were often no better organised than most junk shops, but without any of the satisfation of being able to pick something up and take it home. The works in the ICA show are indeed impressively broad and eclectic, but they're also piled high, the sound from film pieces interrupts the mood of others, instillation rooms have framed pictures stuffed into the corners, and you can't be overly sure where one thing starts and another finishes. You more or less have to battle against the assault on your senses to get a feel for anything, and had I been there off my own back, and not part of a group, I don't think I would have been bothered to.

At a time like this any shows the ICA put on are inevitably going to be seen as reflections of the institution as a whole. I can only hope they have enough time left to put on something which shows itself in a much better light than this did, if indeed, there is a better light than this.

My Art Year

Well, it’s nearly over.
I was going to use this post to give a detailed run down off all the art I saw and took care of in my gallery job this year, but after 5 or so aborted attempts at that I’ve come to the conclusion that trying to write an art review up to 7 months after you saw something is nearly impossible, so perhaps something much more general would be a better idea?
Well, this year I’ve looked after 7 works by 3 artists, 2 of which I was lucky enough to be able to be involved in the making of, and 1 of those I featured in.
Not too bad then, after basically just passing time for the last few years I’ve more or less thrown myself in at the deep end with this stuff. My art knowledge has always been ok, but my involvement pretty much non existent, so to be suddenly be faced with a huge warehouse with a 6 ft deep red hole dug in the middle of it and then asked “what is it about?” by a series of people is a pretty steep learning curve.

Hopefully now as I go on I’ll get into the habit of writing down reviews of things, be they fine art, illustration or otherwise, as I go, and hopefully anyone reading this won’t be too bored by it.

to next year!

MuZz (volume 1)

Is this the start of a beautiful Friday review slot? No idea.
But it’s a friday again, college commitments have meant I’ve actually managed to not draw much random unrelated stuff this week, and there are other drawing filled books which I’ve read and enjoyed, so, permanent position or no, here we are again.
There was a period in my life a few years ago where I had ambitions to be a comic book nerd, I like pictures, stories, and have a particular leaning towards science fiction, so it seemed a good move for me. Well, sprawling and impenetrable as the comic book world is, I never quite made it, but I did pick up a few interesting things along the way. One of these was the work of illustrator Foo Swee Chin (or FsC), who, when I first found my way to her work, was illustrating a comic called “Nightmares and Fairytales” for Slave Labor Graphics (possibly better known as “the people who published Johnny the Homicidal Maniac”). The comic was... ok, but what drew me in to reading it and kept me there were the drawings, ostensibly “manga” in style, they were also surreal, energetic, elegant, and like any good drawing, seemingly effortlessly executed.
FsC left “Nightmares and Fairytales” after the first two series, and thus so did I, and it was a while before I spotted her work again. Firstly, in the form of a small number of self penned “one shot” comics published by Neko Press, and subsequently in MuZz.

MuZz, is an, as yet, incomplete comic series, and a confusing one. The basic plot follows a character called “Farllee”, who we first meet when she awakens, disorientated and with no idea of her own identity, or history, on a train. The train, we learn, is headed for the city of “MuZz” the place all imagined personalities go when the people who imagine them die. I won’t delve too deep in to the plot, other to say Farllee stands out as peculiar even among the bizarre array of half formed creatures that make up those around her, and this makes their trip to MuZz a very turbulent one, and their subsequent arrival cause a great deal more trouble, as the residents, and leaders, of the city try and figure out who, and indeed what, Farllee is. The book hangs it narrative around the framework of dreams and wondering imaginations, so utter chaos is par of the course. Is it good? Hard to say really, being so far only volume one of, I don’t know how many. But, what it definitely is, is beautiful. You’re reading someone's imagination in full flow, and it’s a vast imagination, every image is wonderfully conceived and designed, and there are enough ideas featured to form the groundwork of several books. I can’t admit to having gone back and reread the text since I purchased it, but I can barely pass it on the shelf without picking it up and revisiting the images.
I wouldn’t suggest MuZz to anyone interested in a narrative, but for lovers of imagery I can’t recommend looking into the work of Foo Swee Chin highly enough myself, and MuZz is her work in its most undiluted form.

The Arrival

Whether this marks a progression into a greater degree of wordiness on this blogs part I'm yet to know, but if you're sitting comfortably I'd like to talk for a bit today rather than offer a picture.

Having been pointed in it's direction a few weeks ago and never following it up, yesterday I finally read Shaun Tan's "The Arrival". Published nearly two years ago now "The Arrival" is an entirely (I'm not counting the title) text free novel, which follows a single nameless character during his emigration and settlement in an unfamiliar country. Unfamiliar not only to the character, but also to the reader, as the the nation, it's flora, fauna, language and customs are all creations of Tan. This has the effect of meaning the narrative does not simply retell the story of an immigrants arrival, but recreates the experience of it. Our protagonist has to struggle to navigate a world where even basic tasks, from food shopping to unskilled labour, although recognisable, function in wildly different ways than thous we know. His only guides through this world are a series of fellow settlers, people who have already undergone the transition into being citizens of this peculiar nation, who retell, or at least, remember, their own journeys, escaping from invasions, wars, and hardships. Quite what the character we follow is escaping from is left deliberately obscure, expressed only as a widely interpretable metaphor, which, like the books word free pages, and black and white images, is all the more effective for it's vagueness.
At just shy of 120 pages of images, and no text in sight, it might seem odd to use the term "novel" to describe Tan's book, but the pictures used to tell this story are so finely detailed, not in a technical sense (although the drawing are beautifully rendered) but in a narrative one, each single visual page would take several in text to adequately describe it.

"The Arrival" is one of thous books which is just on the cusp of being something I'm almost a little angry at for not being my own work. But I'll forgive it this small failing, as even in the 24 hours since I was able to read it, it's made me think very much about both how I do, and how I would like to, present and use my own work.
Whether you work with images or words yourself, if your interests are artistic or political, or if you just really like a good book, I would gladly and stongly suggest you give Shaun Tan's "The Arrival" a read.