Richard Tuttle, Walking on Air, C1 2009, cotton with Rit dyes, grommets, thread, 2x panels

Richard Tuttle; Walking on Air, C3 2009. cotton with Rit dyes, grommets, thread, 2x panels

Richard Tuttle’  L’nger than Life, installation view, Photos taken from; http://www.modernart.net/

Now and again there is an exhibition that totally perplexes you because it asks the question; what is art? Richard Tuttle’s exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery does this, but unfortunately for all the wrong reasons.

Tie-die, the choice clothing embellishment of the traditional hippy could be the beginnings of a spectacularly different approach to an art exhibition. Here it seems that Tuttle, a well established ‘post minimalist’ artist has attached bits of died cloth together with grommets and then stuck them on the walls. Perhaps he employed young school children to produce them, which is honourable, but all in all the effect is rather disappointing and characterless.

Take ‘Walking on Air, C1’ for instance; an interesting mix of colours to combine and not asthetically displeasing; a sky blue cloth attached to a purple, white and red marble effect cloth. Then we have, (wait for it), ‘Walking on Air, C3”. This perhaps one of the most complex pieces being a green, red and white patterned sheet, joined onto a white sheet with a yellow splodge. But what is the point to it?

Richard Tuttle describes the meanings behind these works on www.artnews.org;

Tuttle describes his new work as being “in a syncretic tradition, where the equal and opposite can co-exist and the abstract and the real are not in a state of ambiguity.” Walking on Air represents for him an “expression of elation for the potential for a new beginning, the possibility to rebuild and discover a harmony for existing in the world today.”

http://artnews.org/gallery.php?i=166&exi=15334

Certainly he is getting at something here, a reconciliation of two seemingly disparate coloured cloths both totally unique and handmade (perhaps the way as humans our DNA is totally unique) united together to create a new start. The beautiful union of two bits of tie-died cloth! With this my friend, we could take over the world. Sorry, sorry, we could bring peace to the world. And the whole association with hippies, well, self explanatory.

But they just don’t speak to me. They are essentially an inspired idea but Tuttle’s most eloquent description does not translate into something tangible.

Am I missing the point here?  I probably I am. The Time Out review raved about how, “With work this good, this cogent and concise, how come it’s been almost 15 years since Tuttle’s last exhibition in this country?”

http://www.timeout.com/london/art/event/157146/richard-tuttle

And fair play to them, it must be me missing the tree hugger for the trees. (Bad joke)

Richard Tuttle at Modern Art Gallery till 10th of October - 23/25 Eastcastle Street, London,  W1W 8DF

The Main Man - Robert Hughes

Art as commerce is taken for granted these days, it is the product of a self-fulfilling prophecy encouraged even by artists, the very people who are meant to uphold its integrity. What is great about Robert Hughes perspective on it all is that he took into account the history of over 30 years of the relationship between money and art.
The 70’s budget filming which caught the frisson between Robert Scull and Rauschenberg was a magic moment. Delirious with rage at the mark up of his work auctioned off by the unscrupulous collector, R said something like “You should at least send me some flowers,”. This Sotheby’s auction in 1973 was marked as an unequivocal turning point shaping our art world today.

The thing is with Hughes, is like all 70 year old men, he has come to an age were things are ’not like it they used to be’ generally. Yet, his final words of warning, that art constantly has to justify its’ own purpose, and if the soul purpose is to respond to the commercial market, it will die, are telling words from a wise man. One day Hirst, Warhol, Koons could be out of fashion. You never know. It might happen. And then what will the collectors be left with? Sand in their hand. If you buy for pleasure at least you will always have something.
Compare this to the collapse of investment banking companies who have debased the financial market, and a clear analogy can be made.

But it is not all gloom and doom. Who knows about the New York art scene, but the London one is still banging with up and coming artists that create subtle work with multi-layered meanings, skilful and inspirational. Take Hackney Wicked, and Hackney in general as an exciting area of budding culture. The fact that the council are compulsory buying, rent has increased, and office blocks are making their way there in the event of 2012 is another matter.

Words of comfort are this. If you assume that art is good because it is put in a swanky gallery with a large price tag. You are wrong. And you are also an ar**hole anyway, with the personality of cardboard. Yes it is unfortunate that money can distort or dictate what is put on display and revered. But the one thing you have is your own judgement; your own response to art and that is what you can be true to. If you set out to look for worthwhile art (in your own opinion) you will find it. There is enough of it out there in London to be satisfied.

All photos credited as: Installation view: Tony Oursler: High, Lisson Gallery, London 3 September, ­3 October 2008. Photo: Ken Adlard. Courtesy of the artist and Lisson gallery

Tony Oursler portrays a growing 21st century phenomena in a witty and sometimes dark surrealist manner. Delving into the cheap industries built around our modern life, polluting our society and our brains, the ‘quick fix’ highs that are part of everyday existence.

The Lisson Gallery has placed key old works alongside 16 new ones to present Oursler’s fantastic ‘all senses covered’ spectacles in the right context.

From Internet gambling, downloading girls on your mobile, to cigarettes and beer. A load of seedy junk, is summed up in Scratch which projects four film snippets rotating on three white panels. Someone scratching out an instant lottery card, a finger repeatedly pressing the delete button on a keyboard, a tongue swallowing some sort of prescription pill and a hand rearranging a sad lot of possessions which amount to a couple of keys, one family photo, some cigarettes etc.

These anonymous hands represent anyone’s hands.Mr Joe Blog’s hands, whose life is mundane and should really get out more.

The brilliant Winston,Camel,Salem,Marlboro is an arrangement of different sized columns each with a cigarette projected onto them, burning and un-burning. The ever-present addiction of the ‘three-minute-fix-life-killing’ beauty that is the modern day cigarette. Here it is in all its’ oversized glory. The unfaltering stupidity of the cheep fix exposed.

Sex and seduction too is part of our throw-away society. Cropping up in 121 a huge Magnum ice cream being seductively licked by tongue and lips (sex as advertising fodder), or Cherry Nokia a mobile phone with scantily clad girls prancing around (sex as a quick moneymaking scam). Remote, tacky and unsatisfying. Or the bizarre. Liquid, is a video of a woman with red liquid poured down her throat till she chokes and ungracefully splurts it out played in rewind on a loop. Or perhaps this film is more to with consumerism.

Consumerism is an issue constantly tacked by artists; here Oursler puts a sometimes eerie and sometimes cheeky spin on things.
Money talks or at least the queen does on a projected oversized ten pound note. “Fair exchange is all I ask” she garbles, “increased tolerance slowly over time”, if the queen could talk on a tenner I’m sure this is exactly what she would be saying.

But this is not the full story. You can’t neatly put these works pigeonholes without untidy bits falling out.

Interwoven in this general premise are some works that are perplexing and incomprehensible. Take ASL; floral wallpaper with a ghostly clown figure projected on it - talking in random broken sentences, a separate projection of an ear, and on the wall behind the huge profile of a woman’s green face also talking. Are they having a conversation? If they are only they can understand it. Oursler poses these questions with no real answer. Perhaps this conversation has no meaning and that is the point or not the point. If that makes sense. Perhaps as humans we search for meaning where there is none?

His use of projectors gives his work a purposely-illusive quality. If you walk in front of a projector your shadow breaks the picture up, it is all a front, a hallucination, a sham. Exactly like these cheap highs.

Is this possibly a comment on today’s subversive art too? There are several collages, which combine painting on wood, scratch cards, photos and LCD monitors. Beer fizzes up on one while the painting suggest money; one has the eBay logo and words from an email site painted on them and uses imagery of someone eating food seductively.
These are painted with the standard of a GCSE student – surely a purposeful thing? Is art not about consumerism too? Physically cheap products are combined to create what we call art and are sold for millions – perhaps the biggest con of all?

The brilliant art collective ‘Le Gun’ has opened up their world for one week only (so get down there sharpish!) to celebrate the release of their 4th illustration led magazine. In an old Shoreditch school, not far from their workshop within SPACE studios (as one of many collectives and individuals that SPACE support), they have created a three-part spectacle of illustration and installation.

A salon style hanging on the first few walls gives an overview of the paintings and drawings of the separate Le Gun artists and their encompassing mind-blowing surrealist style.

The next section is a set of huge, some 10 meter long, ‘murals’ (in search of a better word). The collaborative artists have put their black pens to white canvas to create an unruly narrative. Crocodiles with cigarettes in their mouths, London scenes mixed in with jungle scenes, seascapes, drunken people, all are illustrated in the most incredible detail and with grim humour.

Climb through a cardboard door cut into a blank wall and you have entered the arts club made entirely out of cardboard. Walls, ceiling and floors, a mini grand piano, arm chairs, lamps, book-shelves EVERTHING! All illustrated by the collective in black marker pens, down to rugs and wooden floorboards. So cosy, and yet so cardboard!

This exhibition includes events that run each evening. Short films curated by the Independent Cinema Office, music nights including Strangeworks performance collective, and Soup session hosted by Jessica Antwi-Boasiako which is apparently ‘a cooking up of people, word artists and vegetables’, are just some of the goings on.

Last night a merry band of mistrals with trumpets led the parade from the opening to the after party in Cargo, so who knows what crazy goings-on to expect for the next week.

Possibly check the website I would imagine:
http://www.legun.co.uk/

Don’t miss this! You will regret it!

More pics coming. Hopefully of the cardboard paradise!

27th of Aug till 1 week later
Club row, Rochelle School,
Arnold Circus
Shoreditch
E2 7ES

Ominously called the House of Pain, and nothing to do with the Irish hop-hop band, Rousson has created a shed constructed out of individual canvases.
Most of the canvases are paintings done in the typical style of a different iconic artist, Picasso, Warhol, Pollock etc. Fontana, for instance has a slash through it, which ironically creates a smiley face. Or they are a painting which someway depicts the artist’s character or stereotype. As Rousson explained, taking drugs or having affairs with their models is the stereotype these artists have.

The blurb to the exhibition states that Rousson, ‘ironically debunks’ these modernist artists, ‘casting them as self-obsessed bricoleurs’ (‘DIYs’?? to the non-cheese brigade) ‘who’s great works echo the “low” aesthetics of amateur home improvement projects.’

But if this is really what Rousson has set out to prove this is not an aggressive enough a way of presenting it. It comes across as more of a pleasant pastiche, and Rousson’s own painting style is submerged within his subject’s style making it difficult to see whether the imitation is his own progression of the style or a direct take-off.
I overheard someone mentioning that ‘House of Pain’ could mean ‘House of Bread’ which the stable at Bethlehem was referred to at some point. This is going a little far for a collective collage of modernist paintings, some vaguely soft porn, but still, a nice idea.

The house has a slightly underwhelming appearance, and the concept is a little vacant, but still, perhaps this is the whole idea.

For anyone out there who is looking for arty things to go and see in September….

Don’t Miss

HOMELESS GALLERY 13th-15th Sept (weekend) three day event in the basement of Shoreditch town hall.

A spontaneous and free to all, exhibition of photography and related media.

Organisers have told me it will be a chilled out party atmosphere. Dj’s to play during the duration of the event.

The idea is that everyone (within the photography’s interest) will be able to hang their work there. So if you are a keen photographer, participate! There is no theme and no curator. A democratic event that offers an alternative to a carefully curated shows in a white clinic spaces. Here the presentation and interaction with the author is as crucial, Everyone will have to choose their own place and choose how to present it. It will be more an experience of a creative atmosphere, photographers can share ideas and an experience of an exhibition. All is in the hand of the artists!.

Photographers already set to participate include Jerwood prize winners and those who exhibited in the Photography’s gallery earlier this year.

Hanging will happen on the 12th (which is Friday). Saturday will be an opening/party/private view opened to all. Sunday and Monday will be still on. Participants will have to sign a registration form and agree to the terms and conditions.

Dates are: 13, 14, 15 September. Posters and flyers will be distributed around Shoreditch.

DATES AND LOCATION

12 - 15 September 2008

Friday 12 September, 10am - 9pm: hanging of the exhibition
Saturday 13 September, 12am – 10pm: open to public, private view 6-10pm
Sunday 14 September, 12am – 6pm: open to public
Monday 15 September, 10am – 8pm: open to public, take down exhibition 5-8pm

http://www.polishdeconstruction.org/node/225/

Basement Gallery
Shoreditch Town Hall
380 Old Street
London EC1V 9LT

This event is linked to Polish Deconstruction (see link to the right

Don’t miss

SEVENTEEN GALLERY’s new exhibition of Susan Collis’ work if you like minimal what are they REALLY trying to say, in a state of construction ‘de-instillation’, art.

10th Sept - 18th Oct - Preview on the 11th. 17 Kingsland Rd, E2

Don’t Miss

SPACE. Thomas Raat. 12 Sep- 26 Oct - Preview on the 12th. In ‘MUMU: Malice and Misunderstanding’ Raat explores the belief structures surrounding art manipulating them through plagiarism and prankster behaviour.

On a large black plastic sheet held together with tape, Raat constructs an anti-neonist pamphlet, its text lifted from an anti-neoist internet site. Large monolithic ‘T’ shaped sound sculptures play KLF music backwards. 101 black and white plastic paintings have been lifted from a neoist internet site and reconstructed in the gallery
space.

129-131 Mare St, Hackney.

Don’t Miss

Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chararin - The Day Noboday Died. PARADISE ROW. In June of this year Broomberg and Chanarin traveled to Afghanistan to be embedded with British Army units on the front line in Helmand Province. In place of their cameras they took a roll of photographic paper 50 meters long and 76.2 cm wide contained in a simple, lightproof cardboard box. In response to each of these events, and also to a series of more mundane moments, such as a visit to the troops by the Duke of York and a press conference, all events a photographer would record, Broomberg and Chanarin instead unrolled a seven-meter section of the paper and exposed it to the sun for 20 seconds. The results - strange abstract passages and patterns of black, white and variegated hues - all modulated by the heat and the light - deny the viewer the cathartic effect offered up by the conventional language of photographic responses to conflict and suffering.

St Matthew’s Hall, 2 Wood Close, E2.

Don’t Miss

Evren Tekinoktay at THE APPROACH, E2. A slightly pregnant man, her last exhibition here was good. An artist with depth.

6th September - 5th October 2008

Don’t Miss

at the TRUMAN BREWERY in September:

Ben Frost - Crapitalism. Pop art, street art combo in exhbition by artist who once faked his own death. 26th to 30th September. Preview on the 25th.

Sonia Blair - Playing with myself- 26 September – 5 October 2008. Preview on the 25th.

An exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Sonia Blair on childhood, memory and self-sabotage, on show.

Dray walk Gallery, Truman Brewery
(by entrance to Sunday Upmarkets)
Hanbury Street
Spitalfields
London, E1 6Q

Don’t Miss

THE BIG DRAW - Free festival combining artists and scientists exploring what it means to be human. Good for kids. In association with UCL uni. See http://www.thebigdraw.org/

include illustrator Steven Appleby drawing in response to the live music of beatboxer Nathan ‘Flutebox’ Lee, and workshops where participants can draw graphic scores for the premiere of a new choral work that will then be performed by members of the public together with Exaudi, one of Britain’s most exciting young new music groups.

The Campaign for Drawing, UCL and Bow Arts Trust present ‘Drawing on Life’, 26-28 September

© Stuart Semple

A LOVER I DON’T HAVE TO LOVE
Acrylic, Paint marker & Household Gloss on Canvas
179 x 122 x 8 cmNote: all hand paintedNO silkscreen

© Nathan James 2008. Super Duper Oil on Canvas

Stuart Semple has curated a group show aptly named MASH UPS that opened on Tuesday night with The Subliminal Girls playing indie rock and wine flowing in the Kowalsky Gallery, the DACS gallery space in Farringdon.

Showcasing young artists with a similar message of late-noughties anxiety towards mass culture, using a mish-mash of different media, their art ties in nicely with Stuart Semple’s neon pop-art revival paintings. Two of which are exhibited here.

The new artistic generation of today like all mid-twenty-odds are the generation teetering on the edge of the new ‘communications world’. As Semple explains, “this generation is unique as it’s the last generation that will remember before the home computer, mobile phone, music video, mass marketing and instant archive that is the internet.”

Casting a nostalgic eye on a simpler time, when lime green cycling shorts were all the rage, Nicky Carvell uses life-size cutout images of East 17 boy band supreme as the focus of her work. Poor Brian who’s tragically humorous act of running over himself by his own Merc is immortalized in her work Peace from the East (Brian ran himself over).
Here, posing with hand on goatee, with his oversized baseball hat Brian is laid flat on the floor half covered by a large asymmetrical shape distinguished as the car by a Mercedes sign.

Heartthrob Tony is the subject of another work, where he can only be described as having been disemboweled – that is if multi-coloured tubes descending from his mouth are his internal organs. Nice. Who knows maybe this is what his insides really look like?
Smash hits would probably have something to say about this if it was still going.

Elsewhere there are the spaced out digital videos from Adham Faramawy, the industrial collages of Piers Secunda and the ‘post’ pop art paintings of Nathan James. All have used neon colour, which is a noticeable trend for artists right now, especially used in paintings. It is as if neon paint had just been discovered, like when day-glow fabric was invented – suddenly everyone wants to use it. Certainly this must have a connection to the nu-rave fashion trend, although it is just about coming to an end (well certainly if you live in Shoreditch it must be) it is alive and well in contemporary art. And as a 80s’/early90s revival, nu-rave brings us nicely back to what this exhibition is all about.

Secunda’s work uses only molded household and floor paint. Here the chunky pieces, bright pink, green and blue, are hung up on what look like coat hooks. Suggesting the absence of a core substance - the bits of paint being the veneer to something no longer present, his work suggests loss, but also a release from the normal restraints of painting. Interestingly Racheal Whitread has some of his work in her collection and you see a connection between their thought processes.

Nathan James’s paintings have the graphic design details in some areas like Fiona Rae’s recent stunning work, with stylized portraits of pouting women (perhaps Koons?) and Lichtenstein-esc cartoon letters running in the foreground. Very now.

A group show which sings to today’s generation of retro loving cyber hippies.

MASH UPS

16 July - 12 September 2008
Post pop fragments and détournements
Curated by Stuart Semple

Monumental outdoor sculpture from the Hannah Barry Gallery.

Opening tonight (Monday 14th July- 6-8pm):

14 - 20 JULY, open daily 12noon - 6pm
Level 10 , Peckham Rye Multistorey Car Park, 95A Rye Lane SE15 4ST

Michael Allen, James Balmforth, Tom Barnett, Thomas Brock, James Capper, Nathan Cash
Bobby Dowler, Christopher Green, Oliver Griffin and Henry Stringer, Nicholas Jeffrey
Shaun McDowell, Robin Shepherd, Matthew Stone, Edward Wallace

Guys….

Gay Bingo the East End phenomenon which has been going for three years now (at the T Bar and Old Truman Brewery in Shoreditch) is doing an art influenced session this Saturday at the ICA.

Here’s what they say:

The ICA is delighted to present the underground extravaganza that is Gay Bingo. Hosted by cult drag performance artist and raconteur Jonny Woo, expect to be wowed with songs, dancing, fabulous gutter couture and, of course, lashings of bingo – aided and abetted by Ma Butcher on the number cruncher and DJ John Sizzle on the decks.

A very special art theme is the name of the game at this one-off spectacular at the ICA, with art influencing the music, performance and bingo calling. So dress up and be prepared for some fierce art attack competition from a very glamorous crowd.

Saturday 12 July 2008

Doors 6pm, Bingo 7.30pm until late

Comments below - please let me know what you think if you make it.