A major new retrospective dedicated to British artist Richard Long reflects on his relationship with the natural environment and his hometown of Bristol
Richard Long installing Muddy Water Falls, 2015. Photograph by Stephen Jackson
In 1963, when he was 18 and studying art in Bristol, Richard Long travelled to the Downs – a green expanse in the north of the city – and rolled a snowball through the pristine snow covering the ground. Long took a photograph of the trail he had made and quickly returned to his art class; the image he had created, and later submitted for a student project, was considered so provocative he was expelled.
Left: Muddy Boots Walk, 1991. Cut vinyl text. Image courtesy of the artist – Right: Muddy Water Falls, Richard Long, 2015. Image courtesy of the artist
Four years later, the young Bristolian produced A Line Made by Walking, hailed as the breakout moment both for Long and his particular form of conceptual art: land art. And yet it was in the quietly anarchic Snowball Track that Long first articulated a language that would see him become one of Britain’s greatest living artists.
Left to right: Manang Circle, Nepal 1983; Blowing in the Wind, 1981; Stones in the Andes, 2012. Images courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery
Recognising the profound connection between the artist and Bristol, the city where Long lives and works today, contemporary art gallery Arnolfini has given over its entire exhibition space to a major retrospective of Long’s work. It is a survey of pieces completed by Long over the past five decades, on all seven continents and using a wide variety of media, including photography, text and materials taken from the natural environment.
Boyhood Line, Richard Long, 2015
Central to the exhibition is an off-site work commissioned by Arnolfini that commemorates Long’s connection to Bristol. Boyhood Line is situated in the liminal space between the city and the countryside, where Long played as a child and later made his first exploration into the transient and organic mark-making that would come to define his career. The desire line it traces with white limestone rocks is not there to record the artist’s activities in the landscape, as much of his other work does, but to trace a path trodden by thousands of people who have walked the Downs over centuries.
Mud Walk, Richard Longg, 1987. Cut vinyl text. Image courtesy of the artist
Back at the Arnolfini, a room of text works – the most conceptual form of Long’s practice – greet the viewer on the ground floor of the gallery. Mud Walk, complementing the kinetic painting the artist made with river mud on an adjacent wall, records one journey produced in 1987.
Time and Space, Richard Long, 2015. Delabole slate. Image courtesy of the artist
Quoting from the work itself, the artist walked 184 miles “from the mouth of the River Avon to a source of the River Mersey, casting a handful of River Avon tidal mud into the River Thames and the River Severn, the River Trent and the River Mersey along the way”. The prosaic, pared down nature of this text establishes a key aspect to Long’s work: the art is in the action. In this case, the action is the walk that the text evokes, and not in the vinyl lettering cut out and applied to the wall.
Richard Long installing Muddy Water Falls, 2015. Photograph by Stephen Jackson
In their purest sense, Long’s works are an exploration of the possibilities of documenting time and space, as is suggested by the show’s title; Long’s art is generally a performance that can only be viewed after it has concluded. A work from 1975, unsentimentally named A Line Made in the Himalayas, shows a line of rocks stretching up a mountain. Photographic pieces like this, A Line Made by Walking and others, help to develop the imaginative aspect of Long’s text work by providing a visual record of his mark-making in nature.
Although it is easier to see Long’s presence in the environment in these images, just as in his text works or his stone installations in the gallery space, these photographs speak a poignant transience. They may last for hours or they may last for centuries, but eventually they will be subsumed into the landscape, remembered only by text and photographs.
Time and Space runs at Arnolfini in Bristol until 15th November 2015
PORT visits the London studio of Chinese artist Jacky Tsai, creator of Alexander McQueen’s iconic skull motif, to talk pop art, superheroes and life after working with the legendary fashion designer
Jack Tsai in his east London studio
Jacky Tsai is a master of cultural crossover. Born in Shanghai and now based in London, Tsai draws directly from his own experience of cultural integration to create artworks that bring Eastern and Western cultures face-to-face. Having arrived in London in 2004, Tsai quickly fell in love with the city. After studying illustration at Central Saint Martins, he began an internship at Alexander McQueen that would change his trajectory as an artist forever.
Stained Glass Skulls by Jacky Tsai. Image courtesy of the artist and The Fine Art Society
While at McQueen, Tsai was given a design task that resulted in the creation of the now iconic flower skull. “I think I was in the right place at the right time. They gave me a chance to prove myself and I didn’t just want to make the tea and coffee every day, so I tried my best,” he says. “It all happened in a very accidental way.”
Today, Tsai is conflicted in his relationship with a design so internationally celebrated that it has often overshadowed his achievements as an artist in his own right. “I created this beautiful piece when I was very young and, for a while, I grew fed up of answering questions to do with McQueen,” he tells me. “When Alexander McQueen passed away, all the interviews I gave were about him and not Jacky Tsai the individual.”
This summer, Tsai opened his first UK solo exhibition, which ran at London’s Fine Arts Society. For the show, Tsai combined the intricate grace of traditional Chinese techniques – lacquer carving, enamel cloisonné, and blue and white porcelain printing – with the vibrant immediacy of Western pop art, all revolving around an unexpected yet ubiquitous reference point for both cultures: superheroes.
Culture Clash, Jacky Tsai. Image courtesy of the artist and The Fine Art Society
“I think each superhero symbolises a superpower from different cultures,” Tsai explains. “In the past, when China was a superpower in the world, we had a lot of Chinese novels that featured superheroes.”
Drawing from the superhero narratives of both cultures, Tsai created a series of intricate tableaux depicting the interactions and altercations of these mythical figures; Wonder Woman is wooed by the Monkey King, while Empress Wu is saved by Tarzan.
Left: Jacky Tsai – Right: The Romance at The Hamptons by Jacky Tsai. Image courtesy of the artist and The Fine Art Society
Besides traditional Chinese techniques, Tsai is influenced by Western cartoons and artists including Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, whom he admired as a young man. However, keen to avoid imitation, Tsai borrows elements of his heroes’ work and adapts them to his own experience to create a new pop art. “Pop art is something of the past, so we have to bring something new,” he tells me. “I’m trying to make pop art in a Chinese way with more detail and more craftsmanship.”
Tsai takes his role as a contemporary Chinese artist in a Western city very seriously, acknowledging a certain obligation to continue aspects of his cultural heritage. “I feel responsible to do that as a London-based Chinese artist,” he says. “I think I can bridge the East and the Western cultures in a Chinese form… a traditional form.”
Kissers by Jacky Tsai. Image courtesy of the artist and The Fine Art Society
While he owes much of his early success and artistic development to McQueen, Tsai’s debut London exhibition went some way to redress the balance of attention towards his other work, and was an important step towards establishing him as an artist in his own right.
“I don’t want to completely turn away from McQueen, because that experience made me realise I could do something special,” he says. “Before that I didn’t have any confidence, and my time there helped me to develop my aesthetic and to learn the way to make my art. I got so much from the McQueen skull, but I hope people can concentrate more on the new Jacky Tsai, or the future Jacky Tsai.”
Photography (Images of Jacky Tsai in his studio)Aldo Filiberto
Alec Soth comes from a long tradition in American photography. In his portraits of life in the contemporary Midwest he finds significance in the banal and everyday, echoing the pioneering work of the Depression-era photographer, Walker Evans. Like Evans and other American photographers such as Stephen Shore, Soth’s images aren’t made in controlled or staged studio environments, but in the field, as part of long road trips made across the continent, taking inspiration from the characters he meets and their stories in an act he describes as ‘a sort of performance’.
Soth’s sensitivity to narrative, articulated in his photobooks, demonstrate an artistic approach to the medium. Having set out with a rough idea of what he wants to shoot, Soth returns from his trips to organise his images into publications; Soth believes his photographs, when compiled and organised in a sequence, can evoke a sense of a place, a community and a way of life that is far more powerful than the written word.
On 6th October 2015, a major exhibition of Soth’s photographs, Gathered Leaves, opens at the Science Museum in London. The exhibition will survey Soth’s photobook work over the past 10 years as well as being the first time his latest project, Songbooks, has been exhibited in the UK. For Songbooks, Soth took on the role of community photographer for a fictitious local newspaper to examine the tensions in American culture – the desire for individuality against the need for unity.
PORT caught up with Soth to discuss the virtues of working slowly, the importance of his photobooks and what continues to draw him back to America
I originally wanted to be a painter. Besides the fact that I wasn’t particularly talented at it, I found I was unhappy in the studio. I wanted to be out in the world wandering around. I started doing land art in the spirit of people like Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy. I documented these with photographs. After a while, I realised I no longer needed to make the sculptures and could just take pictures.
What is it about America that keeps bringing you back to photograph the country?
On the one hand, America is big enough and varied enough to offer me endless paths to explore. On the other hand, I’m able to read and understand most all of the landscape of America. When I travel somewhere exotic, I’m afraid that all I’m able to see is the obvious.
How do you see your work: documentary or art? How do you understand the division between the two in photography?
I see it more as a spectrum than a division. Each project I do falls in a slightly different place on that spectrum. My most recent project, Songbook, has a more journalistic quality, for example, than the project that preceded it, Broken Manual. One of the things I love about photography is the way it can function on so many different platforms: museums and magazines, books, blogs, etc. I find it thrilling to work in different ways and on different platforms.
There’s a great photograph of you driving with a list of subjects to shoot taped to your steering wheel… How much of your process is planned and formulated before you open the shutter?
Research is incredibly important. I’ve never been an aimless wanderer; I need a map in order to get lost.
Why do you prefer working in books? What are the advantages of this medium?
The thing I love about books is the consistency and control. I like that you create a sequence with a beginning, middle and end that never changes. That said, I’ve become more enamoured with the idea of exhibitions. For me, there is an energy in real prints at full scale that is vital to the process. It is like the difference between a band’s album and a live show.
You started your own imprint, Little Brown Mushroom, in 2008. What do you think are the differences between working as a photographer and a publisher?
I don’t consider myself a real publisher. Little Brown Mushroom is, for me, a sandbox to collaborate and play. I love working with real publishers like MACK that produce beautiful books and distribute them to a wide audience. I also like having another place where I can make small, cheap and playful things without worrying about the serious business of publishing.
What are the advantages of using an 8×10 camera instead of a more portable, compact camera?
An 8×10 offers a kind of slowness and precision of seeing that I really love, but equally as important to me is the way it renders space. It carves subject out of space. That said, 8×10 is extremely limiting and I have huge admiration for compact cameras and digital technology. My most recent project was all shot on a digital Hasselblad.
Gathered Leaves: Photographs by Alec Soth at Media Space, Science Museum, London runs from 6 October 2015 to 28 March 2016 and at the National Media Museum, Bradford from 22 April to 26 June 2016.
From a cluster of buildings nestled in the Tuscan hillside, comes the sound of cicadas, birdsong and trees rustling in the breeze. There’s a hubbub of voices and the sounds of industry – a rhythmic tapping of stone on metal. It’s timeless and universal, the sounds that rise up through the afternoon heat having accompanied man for thousands of years. That is until the scream of an American air force jet, stationed at a nearby base, punctuates the scene and I find myself back in a room above New Bond Street, London; the idyllic music of the Italian countryside is replaced by the rumbling of the city.
Emily Young has been describing life in the abandoned convent in Italy where she now lives and works, carving the monumental heads and bodies that have earned her the title of ‘Britain’s foremost living sculptor’. It is a fitting location for Young’s work to be produced. With a proximity to the natural world that she finds inspiration in, it is a close approximation in lifestyle to the timeless, universal appeal Young attempts to achieve in her sculpture. “If it’s not eternally true, it’s eternally out of date,” she tells me with a smile.
When we meet in London, however, more pressing matters are on her mind. We are sat in a room on the top floor of The Fine Art Society as Young’s exhibition Call and Response had just opened in tandem with a show of the same name in Venice. The city is in the grip of a heatwave and the windows have been thrown wide to tempt a non-existent breeze – the day before was the hottest July on record.
Emily Young, Head Shot. Courtesy of The Fine Art Society
“Yesterday was a horrible day to be a human in the city, everything will have to change,” says Young. As an artist who has focused on man’s relation to nature for over 30 years, her art has become politicised of late. Her calm, peaceful sculptures have been pressed into active service. Off the coast of Tuscany, 12-tonne heads carved from Carrara marble are being installed on a seafloor ravaged by illegal dragnet fishing. These Weeping Guardians will eventually form a 30km-long deterrent against destructive fishing practices, facilitating the restoration of the marine ecosystem.
Young’s environmental activism stems from a love of the natural world and humanity that she developed while travelling, well before she took up a hammer and chisel. Growing up in a household of writers and artists, decorated with the sculptures of her grandmother – a pupil of Rodin – it is no surprise that she exhibited a natural flair for art at school. She began a degree in fine art but left the patriarchal environment she found at the Chelsea School of Art in the mid-sixties to travel. Accompanied by a pair of American draft dodgers, Young set out for India overland.
“That trip was an awakening to art outside Europe,” she tells me. “When I travelled overland to India it was almost like going back to the Old Testament and what I found consistent with now was our relationship with our environment.” After beginning stone carving by chance many years later, finding a hammer and chisel in her house and working on a marble off-cut from her kitchen, she returned to this idea. “We would recognise our ancestors from 200,000 years ago. We would have been similar, had similar instincts. What could I make that’s also true for them?”
I ask Young about her creative process: “I found I was drawn to the graveyards, the area at the back of the stone yards for rejected pieces that have these great flaws,” she says. “The blocks people normally work with have six sides. I thought that was really boring because you killed the material, killed its history. I like the rocks the earth shuffles up for you, weathered over hundreds of millions of years.”
Stone carving is nothing new – in fact that is exactly its appeal for Young – but there is something original in her approach to the medium. Throughout history, sculptors have used stone as a way to realise their design – seeing the stone as a three-dimensional blank canvas on which to impose their idea, favouring the smoothest, most consistent block to work with. Young, on the other hand, prefers to let the stone inform her design.
“Working the way I do, these amazing secrets are revealed to you, which I see as taking a very feminine approach,” she says. Rather than a masculine, “imperialistic, colonising of nature”, Young lets the stone dictate its form. The result is half-finished, still raw. Young’s art never never hides its substance, its materiality, and there is an exciting play of polished, formed stone against the raw natural form that has formed over hundreds of millions of years.
To Young the imperfections in a piece of stone are part of its idiosyncratic personality, but this is not to say that Young does not spend hours gently working it into monumental heads or abstracted human forms. I ask her whether she draws from life or if there are any art historical precedents that have influenced her style. She acknowledges that there artworks that will have slipped into her subconscious, but she does not base her figures on real life. “I’m trying to get a look that anybody who has lived anywhere at any time on earth will recognise – two eyes, a nose,” she says. “The ancient Greeks, Michelangelo, they’ve done all that can be done in terms of anatomical verisimilitude. I want to do something that anybody will get and will show the nature and the material, wild and free.” But there is an expression on their faces, a personality? I ask. “The face is quiet, and often their eyes are shut because I want the viewer to have a moment to respond to the stone, to understand quietness in the stone, even though it may have been created in volcanoes and earthquakes,” she adds.
For London Design Festival this week, Young has installed a sculpture trail at the NEO Bankside. Six monumental heads join three already installed at the site, facing the Tate Modern. It is part of Young’s programme of bringing nature into the urban environment, of reminding the city’s inhabitants of the organic world that we live and depend on. They shouldn’t be out in nature,” Young explains. “They should be seen, in the streets and public galleries. I want to wild the city.”
More than giving nature a relatable face that we can empathise with, drawing us in to witness the half-finished, marbled, fissured stone, Young’s latest work forms a poignant connection with Weeping Guardians, the monumental submerged heads off the Italian coast. Projections show that if sea levels rise by 10m, much of south London would be submerged and Young’s Southbank heads would join their Italian cousins beneath the sea.
Throughout Young’s work there runs a unifying seam. Her philosophy of wonder at the natural world, an adoration of time, humanity and the churning earth beneath our feet is a kind of mystical pragmatism. On the surface her rationalisation of the title of the exhibition split between The Fine Art Society and a monastery in Venice, Call and Response, seems to echo a New Age mysticism. But when I meet her, there is nothing supernatural in Young’s understanding of the world. Just as she describes her perfectly circular discs of stone, not as abstract forms, but as “moons and suns”, Young’s work is, quite literally, down to earth. Her method and medium may have ancient antecedents and, if compared to the glitz of controversy in the contemporary art world, she could appear naive, but her work resonates poignantly as we begin to reevaluate our relationship with our planet.
Emily Young’s sculpture trail at NEO Bankside on London’s Southbank runs until the 18th October and Call and Response at the Madonna dell’Orto church in Venice runs until 22 November.
Port visits the Guggenheim Bilbao to meet the curator of a sweeping new retrospective of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work
Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1984. Photograph by Lee Jaffe, Copyright, All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of LW Archives
Brooklyn born Jean-Michel Basquiat will be remembered as one of the brightest lights of the 1980s art world; a complex and charismatic figure who transformed from renegade street artist into New York art collectors’ darling in only a few years. “His art is about royalty, heroism and the street, but the works are like trojan horses,” says Dieter Buchhart, lead curator of Now’s The Time – this summer’s wide-reaching Basquiat retrospective at Guggenheim Bilbao.
Organised in partnership with Art Gallery of Ontario, the expansive show charts Basquiat’s short but prolific career; more than 100 drawings and paintings – all created during a 10 year period – are scattered across six rooms inside Frank Gehry’s architectural masterpiece. Jazz, hip-hop and audio clips of Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech play over the tannoy inside the gallery, nodding to the musical influences and political movements that contributed towards the development of Basquiat as an artist and cultural commentator.
Beginning with one of his early works, UNTITLED (CAR CRASH) (he was hit by a car when he was seven years old), the retrospective traces Basquiat’s meteoric rise from the early years as a street artist under the SAMO collective, through to his fascination with royal motifs and depictions of African-American cultural icons, collaborations with Andy Warhol, and his personal battles with death, drugs, and fame. Port’s Deputy Editor, Ray Murphy, travelled to Bilbao to speak to Buchhart, who dispels some common myths about the young Brooklynite and tells us why Basquiat’s work holds more relevance now then ever.
Ray Murphy: You’ve said that the difference between this show and previous Basquiat shows was twofold: one is that it expands on his collaborative side, which we see in his work with Warhol, and the other is that it looks closely at the linguistic references in his work. Why are these two ideas important to you?
Dieter Buchhart: I think by going through classical galleries that are divided into six theme groups before you enter the exhibition gives you the tools to analyse Basquiat’s collaborations in a different way. To Warhol’s grey/black canvas, for example, Basquiat added a white square on which he drew a glass and wrote ‘milk’ – a synonym for whiteness against Warhol’s ‘blackness’. There’s an extreme duality and polarity that he creates, which extends into Basquiat’s interest in history – not just black history, but the development of colonialism, slavery, racism and the permanent currency of racism in our society.
RM: How does this relate to what’s happening in contemporary society?
DB: This issue is huge at the moment in Europe. You have only to think of the refugees travelling by boat, how they are mistreated and how Europe is failing to find one coherent policy of how to deal with them. The political systems are presenting these refugees as people just fleeing a system of economy, who want to have a better life, and totally misinterpreting their situations. These are people who really need our help and support as many of us Europeans got after the Second World War.
Think of what happened in Paris a few months ago at Charlie Hebdo, how institutionalised these racial issues are and how they result in breeding extremists. So I would say in many ways this exhibition takes on a greater relevance in Europe then when it was first exhibited in New York.
RM: Basquiat is often thought of as being ‘frantic’ and ‘wild’ by art critics, when he was, in fact, composed and poised as a painter. Do you think an underlying prejudice caused these misconceptions?
DB: Definitely, and he was aware of these prejudices against him and his family. There was a quote from him about that: “They have this image of me as a wild monkey-man.” He was considered and highly intelligent, but there was this cliché of being ‘urban’ and from the streets. And it’s a cliché that worked then and still works now, to some extent.
There was a Basquiat show at a traditional auction house in New York and they made a background of graffiti to hang the works on. I mean, come on! We should be over that. When you abstract this image of the artist from his works you discover a very intellectual, conceptual artist who had developed his own artistic language. Sure, he was a very erratic and energetic person – ask any of his friends, when he came in a room it was taken over by his personality. That’s one thing, but it’s separate from how he worked as an artist.
RM: What do you think was going through Basquiat’s mind before he died? Some of the paintings from his final year (1988), for example Oreo, are very reflective. It seems that he might have been assessing how his friends and his contemporaries viewed him.
DB: Oreo is an extremely powerful work, almost a final statement. It’s a highly complex painting and so many people don’t understand it. They think it is just a beautiful work and never understand what it really means. They think about the cookies and might even think about Warhol’s use of brand names… They don’t realise how much he has achieved by this work being integrated on the white wall of a white collector. He did this with a lot of works but he is sensitive here of being the subject himself, of being the ‘Oreo in a way’.
Port meets former White Cube Bermondsey director Sara Kay, whose non-profit organisation POWarts aims to support women working in the art industrySara Kay wearing a Ladies’ Parmigiani Fleurier Tonda 1950
The Professional Organisation for Women in the Arts (POWarts) was set up in 2008 to advance women in the business of art. The non-profit was co-founded by Sara Kay, a curator and gallerist from New York, who was recently honoured as a ‘woman of excellence’ by Swiss watchmakers Parmigiani Fleurier. Kay’s impressive career has seen her hold positions including director of White Cube Bermondsey in London and Jan Krugier gallery in her native New York. In receiving the award, Kay joins an esteemed group that features film giant Nadia Dresti, restauranteur Hélène Darroze and entrepreneur Sarah Wiener. Port caught up with Kay in London to talk childhood dreams, Old Masters, and supporting women in the business of art.
How did you get into the art business?
My mother is an artist and when I was a child she put me in every single art class possible. I didn’t tell her how much I disliked it because I just wanted to make her happy that I was in art school. Eventually, I got into an animation class and was so stressed out that I finally said ‘Mom, please… I can’t do this anymore. I can’t be an artist anymore’. But I told her, I love business and I love art. So I was a little girl and I wanted to be an art dealer. I don’t even know how I even understood it, especially the commercial side of it. I had it in my head that I wanted to work for Christies and many years later… I did!
You specialised in Old Masters at Christies. What did you learn about them while you were there?
Learning about Old Masters never ends. That’s what’s wonderful about them. The debates over attributions that are constantly changing, the research that it takes, the amount of looking that it takes. I had a great mentor there and a lot of my clients were mentors too. Collectors of Old Masters are connoisseurs, they are very serious about it.
One of my clients was the late Jan Krugier, who had one of the greatest collections of Old Master drawings in Europe. At one point, he asked me to go join his company in New York. I didn’t really want to leave Christie’s’ lovely little department of Old Master drawings, but it was also an amazing opportunity to go and work for him. He was the agent to the Picasso estate and I got to work directly on that, as well as Jan’s private collection and the amazing inventory of Impressionist and Modern pictures he had amassed over decades. It quickly became clear that I couldn’t turn down the job.
Did working closely with the Picasso estate change your views on him as an artist?
Yes it did. Of course I knew about Picasso before, but it became my life when I was working with the estate. We had the largest collection of Picasso in private hands at the time, so it became everything. What I saw and learned was invaluable. It was a fantastic experience.
How did you end up working for the White Cube gallery in London?
In 2008 Jan passed away. We kept the gallery open in New York for two more years, but eventually both the gallery in New York and the gallery in Geneva had to close. At that point I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. Having worked there with that collection, with that man… where do you go? I thought I had to go in a different direction and to work in the area of contemporary art. That’s why I moved to London to join White Cube. I’d never worked with living artists, so it was a completely different experience. It sounds very basic and simple, but coming from Old Masters was a great change.
After White Cube you helped set up POWarts. What is the aim of the organisation?
It’s very specific – we’re all in business and we’re all in the business of the visual arts, but it’s education and business orientated, so we don’t actually talk about art. Talking about art is easy for us… I don’t need another resource to talk about art. A lot of us studied art history or conservation, so we don’t have MBAs. The art world is not like finance or legal where there’s a defined path. For us, there are a million opportunities and it’s very much undefined. This means that we also don’t have typical resources. If you work for a gallery you may not have HR, you may not have a retirement plan and you may not have the things larger companies in other fields do.
Our mission is three-fold. The first part of our mission is education in business, the second part is to have peer groups and mentor groups to be used as a platform to leverage from and the third part is community service.
Can you tell us about this emphasis on community service?
I’m really lucky: I’m educated, I’ve had all the opportunities, I sat with Picassos. Life is good for me. But for many women life is not great. I feel a responsibility to do something because if women are not going to look out for other women, I don’t know who will. The third part of our mission is to align ourselves with other non-profit organisations that support women and to get our members involved with these organisations.
We’re also trying to reach the point where we can provide resources as well. When you’re working in a luxury business you often have access to greater wealth and power. We have access to these things and we should use them for good.
What does it mean to you to receive Parmigiani’s Woman of Excellence award and why are initiatives like this important?
When I founded POWarts it was never about me. It was never about us as individuals. So when I get an award like this it doesn’t feel like it’s just mine. For me, it’s about this organisation. Yes, it’s about my achievements, which is lovely, but what’s more interesting for me is that this organisation is thriving and is being recognised. That’s wonderful.
I also love the fact that Parmigiani celebrate very normal women; I’m not a supermodel, I’m not in film, I’m a kid from New York that worked really hard, had a clear vision and went for it. I want to keep doing that, so when I have support like this it certainly gives me an extra boost.
Silas Adler discusses his visual collaboration with American artist Charlie Roberts
Charlie Roberts’ painting of rapper Chief Keef
I was first introduced to Charlie Roberts at an art fair in Copenhagen, two years ago. The first pieces of his I saw were big drawings of American football players, slightly naive in their style. But he can also paint photographically – he’s good enough to do both. He probably started as a photographic painter and then developed the style he’s now using, and the kind of pieces we have collaborated on. At the time I couldn’t afford to buy them, so that was that, for the time being.
About six months later, he came back to Copenhagen to put on a show of wooden sculptures. At the same time he produced a handful of A4 drawings, a lot of them in relation to sex, drugs and hip-hop, and sold them for £50 a pop… I bought four of them. We got chatting and he just seemed really keen on doing something together; he really likes when his art leaves the gallery space and actually gets ‘used for something’, as he put it.
I wanted to create a fabric with him because, to me, it was interesting to see how his art would look like as clothing material. For that, you need a really good mill, someone who can take on a challenge as it’s very complicated to replicate the colours, and the mix of colours from a painting, and then you can make it into a fabric.
There are a few different pieces made out of that fabric we’ve constructed ourselves, but we also have 10 exclusive suede jackets that Charlie hand painted. They’re art pieces in a way, more us collaborating with him than the other way around. The print you see here is the rapper Chief Keef. Charlie painted him in a room full of naked girls and here he is taking a photo of them on his iPhone. I absolutely love the hoodie that we made out of that print.
In the final instalment of our three-part series, William Kherbek surveys the New York exhibitions highlighting the link between technology and art
Lynn Hershman Leeson – Origins of the Species at Bridget Donahue, New York
The sense that the future of visual cultural has an irreducible digital component is palpable in London’s art scene; in New York, the legacies of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting still loom large. In a city as wired as New York, you don’t have to look long before the New Aesthetics find you. At Pulse Art Fair, Jamie Zigelbaum’s interactive work Pixel physicalised the sometimes overwhelming human-digital interface by presenting the viewer with a screen bearing an instruction to ‘please touch’. When the viewer obeys, the screen changes colour with retina-frying velocity – it’s like being mugged by a James Turrell piece.
Lynn Hershman Leeson – Origins of the Species
Also notable at Pulse was Ova Satellite, a video work by Peruvian artist Alessandra Rebagliati. At first, it resembles a thousand holiday videos you’ve seen before – tourists on beaches, nature as a backdrop instead of an ecosystem – and is soundtracked by a karaoke-style rendition of Beatles hit Ticket to Ride. Amidst the revelry, a turtle is seen flipping its painful way along a beach towards the sea, trying to catch the tide. The advance of technology, as rapid as the turtle’s advance to the sea is laboured, is a key concern of the artist. When I spoke with Rebagliati, she stressed the paradoxical way technology can connect and isolate simultaneously, particularly in her own life as an artist.
“I’m so dependent on technology,” she tells me. “I wouldn’t be able to do all of the logistics for the work without a smartphone and Whatsapp.” However, Rebagliati also acknowledges that such potential carries with it a capacity for darkness. “It’s going to change so much in the future as well, and I’m really so curious,” she adds. “I want to be here to see it, and I want to be a part of it, but I want to be sure it doesn’t ruin my life.”
Ova Satellite by Alessandra Rebagliati
The New Museum’s 2015 Triennial, organised by Lauren Cornell and Ryan Trecartin, was largely concerned with the interface between digital technology and art and, as with any show of 51 artists, it was something of a grab bag. Among the standout works was a powerful video by Shadi Habib Allah centred on Bedouin commercial and smuggling networks, which aptly questioned the fetishisation of digital networking through the use of sharp, but oblique, camerawork and poetic dialogue. Every piece in the exhibit nodded towards emerging technologies or social discourses, but, curiously, it was the lo-tech works that somehow resonated more with me.
Eloise Hawser’s delicate origami swan, which was perched on a stolid grey wave of roller door shutters, could have been made any time, but the tensions such a work highlights in its impassive limpidity seemed to speak more urgently to the present tense than some of the more ambitious, multimedia extravaganzas on show. Sometimes, an Oculus Rift can blind you to what’s happening right before your eyes…
Lynn Hershman Leeson – Origins of the Species
Kerry Doran, a writer and event producer for the New Museum’s NEW INC. project, believes the digital realm influences visual culture by helping to redefine time and labour. “We are constantly producing ‘content’ for corporations and speaking through companies to our ‘friends’ or followers, always building our brand under the guise of ‘connecting’,” she says. “It’s no wonder mindfulness has become such a craze; we are always thinking of the next rather than the now.”
Lynn Hershman, Room of One’s Own, 1990-1993
“For more than forty years, Hershman has been making works that turn the tables on the technologies of surveillance”
Doran also highlighted how the web is altering the notion of ‘creation’ and ‘creators’ in ways that upset traditional understandings. “The Internet supposedly promises that work is more visible there than if it were being shown in a gallery. However, images can be remixed and re-appropriated more easily because of this,” she suggests. “Artists are also providing content for platforms, like any other user of a site like Facebook, Tumblr, or Instagram. This transfers the rights of the image into the company’s hands before the artist even has a say. Participation is obligatory.”
This dichotomy of giddy liberation mixed with doom-laden foreboding reared its head in a number of other recent shows in New York. Among the most forward-looking was Saya Woolfalk’s ChimaTek: Hybridity Visualisation System. Its narrative centred on a human-plant hybrid species known as Empathics. The works included a hypnotic video that could best be described as a quasi-balletic infomercial. Woolfalk’s optimistic vision, informed by intersectional feminist theory and speculative fiction, was a lot more bright-eyed than a powerful retrospective of the work of the artist, Lynn Hershman Leeson, whose work was displayed at the inaugural exhibition of Bridget Donahue’s gallery.
Looking through the peephole in Lynn Hershman’s Room of One’s Own
For more than forty years, Hershman has been making works that turn the tables on the technologies of surveillance. In a piece entitled A Room of One’s Own, a diorama/sculpture/video/performance/installation, the viewer is invited to gaze into the intimate space of a woman. Behind a viewing aperture, the viewer sees a mini-flat complete with bed, shoes, and a mirror, in which the viewer/voyeur meets their own reflection. From a screen at the back of the ‘room’ the Germanic voice, which the viewer must assume is the flat’s resident, directs some of the most difficult questions one can ask to the viewer: ‘Who are you? What do you want?’.
In the work Bio Printer Ear, viewers see Dolly the sheep, Snuppy the Afghan dog, a glowing bunny and summer squash that will probably see out the next ice age, displayed among other bioengineered marvels with the dates of their creation plastered in lustrous high-finish images on the north wall of the gallery. The ambivalence, as in so many other works I saw, is clear: the future may be bright, but only if you like glowing bunnies.
Dr. Irene Cioffi Whitfield looks at the turbulent life of neo-expressionist artist Jean-Michel Basquiat
Photo by Paul Tschinkel, 1980s
In 1984, when London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) hosted an exhibition dedicated to Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 – 1988), he was already an art world superstar. Today, most of his works – which were largely ignored by major museums – are held in private collections and achieve astronomical prices at auction. His position as one of the most innovative artists of the 20th century art is assured. “I think I know I’m going to be famous and I think I’m going to die young,” he once told childhood friend, Al Diaz. Basquiat, in his wildly intuitive way, and while still a teenager, knew exactly what was in store.
Basquiat was an explosive genius that worked at breakneck speed, as if gripped in a hurricane of creation. During his short life, which was extinguished by a heroin overdose at the age of 27, he produced nearly 2,000 paintings, drawings and sculptures, many of them on a gigantic scale. His themes were suitably grand: royalty, heroism and the streets. His artistic enterprise took in high and low and everything in between, and his ambition for personal legacy knew no bounds – he wanted to be king of the contemporary art world and he achieved this in his lifetime.
In terms of academic art history, he ascended to the highest echelons of painting practiced by Goya, Picasso, and Anselm Kiefer. The Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta of 1983 is one such work. Multilayered in context and content, its complex meaning speaks across generations. All of Basquiat’s subjects are expressed in his singular and electrifying style – a brilliantly coloured mix of punk, cartoon, classical, linear, linguistic, and symbolic notation. Like the jazz musician Charlie Parker, who was one of Basquiat’s cultural heroes and features in his paintings, the artist’s extraordinary access to the ecstatic and destructive powers of creation extracted a terrible price on his perishable human life.
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung once described the dangerous psychological dynamics of creative energy, when he said: “The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might, or with the subtle cunning of nature itself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle.”
Akin to the ‘big dreams’ revealed to shamans by the unconscious, Basquiat’s painted images mirror both his tumultuous inner life and the complex collective world he lived in. His inner and outer vision matured in the nexus of New York City in the late 1970s and 1980s – a time of economic bust and boom and the terror of AIDS, then a relatively unknown and deadly disease. Out of this collective political, social, economic and psychological depression, new and expressive art forms took hold.
A zenith of punk, new wave and neo-expressionism emerged from the underground scene made up of creative individuals now nostalgically known as the ‘Downtown 500’. Basquiat was a central and mercurial figure in that vibrant clique, which included Andy Warhol, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, William S. Burroughs, Patti Smith, Blondie, Madonna, Talking Heads. It also included the gallery owners Leo Castelli, Annina Nosei and Mary Boone, who fuelled the skyrocketing downtown art market. It was a potent alchemical mix, and, for Basquiat, both life-giving and life-taking.
In the second instalment of a three-part series, William Kherbek examines the New York art attempting to seek out responses to urban space
Jonathan Calm, Scudder Towers Down, 2008
At this year’s Pulse Art Fair in New York, one of the special project pieces was a video work by Jonathan Calm entitled Scudder Towers Down, comprised of slow-motion video footage of the controlled implosion of a housing estate. Watching it, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the episode of the HBO drama The Wire in which a hated housing development is demolished to the cheers of residents.
Once upon a not-very-long-ago time, starry eyed and socially aware architects planned utopian projects in which communities would not simply dwell, but where they would have all the conveniences of modern life, shopping, laundry, recreation and green space. What went so wrong that these projects ended up becoming a byword for deprivation, disenfranchisement, and, as many notorious estates in the US and UK attest, found associations with violence? The answer, it seems, lies not in our star architects, but in ourselves. Something such utopians didn’t appear to count on was how little human nature was likely to change just because it was housed differently. Indeed, few stopped to consider the resemblance of such projects to another well-known example of architecture wherein all of a person’s needs are met by the state: prisons.
The tendency of human beings to exclude, to create hierarchies, and to put problems out of sight so that they can slowly fade out of mind, is now impossible to ignore. New York, which is facing a housing crisis that rivals the problems of London, presents one of the great crises/opportunities available to artists concerned with examining the contemporary urban condition.
A show at New York’s Gagosian Gallery brings together works by the late sculptor, John Chamberlain, and French industrial designer, Jean Prouve, and looks back to the ‘good old days’ of better living through urban planning. Chamberlain’s twisted metallic totems served as an elegant counterpoint to astonishing Prouve creations like the Villejuif Demountable House – a construction originally intended to create an IKEA-style ready-to-assemble schoolhouse.
In many ways, Prouve’s vision is completely distinct from the fixity of housing projects like those shown inScudder Towers Down. The optimism his work embodies feels equally distant from the contemporary urban political discourse, so there’s a winsomeness inscribed in such works that Prouve, the clear-eyed solution seeker, would probably have hated. But, history seldom confers the legacy an artist seeks for their work.
Charlotte Becket, Curdle, Beyond 1.1
In Beyond 1.1, an exhibition currently running at New York’s Tanja Grunert Gallery, Charlotte Becket’s Curdle suggets mobility was not conceived as the prerogative of the city, nor its residents. Becket’s work, a kind of kinetic sculpture of geometric forms, was not a million miles from something Toby Ziegler would do. It is something like a geometer’s nightmare, a multisided automated black mass, reshaping itself in a corner of the room as a motor whirs noisily away: part boulder, part trash-monster. Humourous, yes, but also deeply evocative of a conurbation where refuse always seems to be taking over. It invoked the character of New York’s downtown scene of the 1970s – a marriage of the low-fi and sci-fi sensibilities of Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson.
“I am interested in the slippage between place and experience, and the collapsing boundary between tangible physicality and hallucinogenic perception,” Becket told me, reiterating the importance of geography in the structuring and conception of her piece. “Geographic structures speak to temporality, mutation, beauty and violence and are totally indifferent to our existence,” she added. “We impact our environment, but it always finds its equilibrium, even if we can no longer survive in the circumstances we’ve created.”
“We impact our environment, but it always finds its equilibrium, even if we can no longer survive in the circumstances we’ve created.”
Gregor Neuerer, Various Tones, Cathouse FUNeral
Space is at a premium in New York, and in Manhattan in particular. Over the river in Brooklyn, Gregor Neuerer‘s show, Various Tones, at an erstwhile funeral home-cum-gallery called Cathouse FUNeral was a meditation on colour in space. The show consisted of a number of large canvases placed over the gallery walls, forming a room within a room.
The panels were varying shades of green, greens Neuerer encountered in public spaces from billboards, adverts and the like, many for health products or services. Neuerer’s literal green room had the ominous insinuation that everything’s supposed to be good for you and was both eerily calm yet menacing – do something healthy or else, it hinted. The emerald shades were anything but organic, yet they had an ecology of their own; the smooth and rough melding of various hues against one another seemed to generate a palpable physical tension.
Sebastian Lloyd Rees, Vendor, Room East
The work of the city itself was a key feature of Sebastian Lloyd Rees’ exhibition Vendor at Room East in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Vendor could be thought of as a material haiku composed of the ephemera and efflorescence of urban life, including shipping boxes, lottery tickets, flyers, shop adverts, all presented in a deliberate but deadpan fashion, veering just on the right side of pretension masquerading as anti-pretension.
The weathered hoardings in the upstairs gallery behaved like a simultaneous manifestation and critique of the ‘found object’ culture that a lot of post-recession art embraces. In their deformations and discolourations caused by urban pummeling – from both humans and mother nature – the hoardings espouse a terse eloquence that, in being presented without comment or artistic manipulation, only grows with attention.
