In advance of the big King's Cross move, drop by Afterall's offices in the Greek Street Annex of Central Saint Martins (Charing Cross Road) to take advantage of our back issue clear-out sale! Happening this week and next (23 March – 1 April). All back issues of Afterall journal from issue 10 onwards will be £2, exclusive to UAL students and staff! Also pick up our most recent issue, themed on education, and looking at Jean-Luc Godard, Catherine Sullivan, Group Material, Lina Bo Bardi and others, for the cover price. For more on Afterall and for the contents of our back issues, follow this link: http://www.afterall.org/journal/ We are also offering special student offers on subscription 20% off the journal cost (please come by or email us to get this offer). Please email contact@afterall.org with any questions. Afterall is a research and publishing organisation based in London, focusing on contemporary art and its relation to a wider artistic, theoretical and social context. Afterall journal offers in-depth analysis of artists’ work, along with essays that broaden the context in which to understand it. It is published three times a year, in collaboration with M HKA (Antwerp) and UNIA arteypensamiento (Seville), and in association with The University of Chicago Press.
Also everyone for the exhibition guide I going to need you to send me :
Your full name
The title of the piece
The materials
100 word max info about the work
A photograph
my email is samuelbromley@live.co.uk
Can you all send me this by Wednesday 30th March . I will need all this info in order to put the booklet together .
Hey guys I'm going to be putting the exhibition guide together and i thought it needed a title . Last year the exhibition was called The State of Sculpture . My suggestion for this year is SCULPTURE NOW. I was thinking how the idea of "what is sculpture?" has been hot debate in recent months with exhibitions such as modern British sculpture and the ICA debate. The title SCULPTURE NOW i was thinking shows were we think sculpture stands right now.
Anthony McCall: Vertical Works, Ambika P3, London, review
The idea of sculpture fashioned out of photons sounds impossible yet McCall's works beguile us with otherworldly beauty. Rating: * * * *
Anthony McCall: Installation view at Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2009)Photo: Giulio Buono. Sean Kelly Gallery, New York; Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne; Martine Aboucaya, Paris.
Artists have been obsessed with transcribing the effects of light for centuries. In the past 50 years, though, people such as Dan Flavin, James Turrell and the British artist Anthony McCall have started producing art made out of light itself.
The idea of sculpture fashioned out of photons sounds impossible — and yet that is the best way to think of McCall’s ambiguous output. His paradoxical forms of “solid light”, to borrow his own oxymoronic phrase, seem to defy physics — and yet there they are, beguiling us with otherworldly beauty.
McCall’s breakthrough occurred in the early Seventies. Frustrated by the limitations of video art, he decided to deconstruct film, and fashion something new. The result was Line Describing a Cone (1973), a juddering 16mm film projected onto the far side of the room. The film consisted of nothing but an animated white dot that slowly grew into a curving line and eventually became a circle.
This sounds a little dull — but the magic happened when light cast by the projector encountered ambient particles in the air, formed by the thick cigarette smoke that swirled around the era’s lofts and galleries. As light bounced off the motes of smoke and dust, an ethereal, ghostly cone, giving the impression of three dimensions, started to form and linger in the gloom. (Prohibitions on smoking in public ensure that McCall has to use special haze machines to achieve a similar effect today.) Line Describing a Cone, like the variations that followed, seemed to herald a new “in-between” type of art: part drawing, part sculpture, part film, part installation.
Until now, I’ve only ever encountered photographs of McCall’s work, which always has a sci-fi look, like something out of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. To really experience the full effect, though, it is essential to wander into the artist’s cones of light — and the four Vertical Works at Ambika P3 in London offer the perfect opportunity to do so for anyone, like me, who missed McCall’s exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in 2007.
Entering the hushed, pitch-black space, a few yards from the hurly-burly of Baker Street, is somewhat like walking into a futuristic church. Four digital projectors beam elongated wigwams of light from the ceiling into the haze-filled space below. Each projector creates a shifting pattern on the floor, forming the “footprint”, as McCall calls it, for the ever-evolving structures that hover in mid-air.
The effect is calm, meditative, otherworldly — as if McCall is expertly manipulating moonbeams, or somehow tethering the Northern Lights within a gallery.
All four works, presented in the UK for the first time, were made since 2004, shortly after McCall — who was recently commissioned by the Arts Council to create Column, a twisting spiral of cloud that will rise above the River Mersey as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad — began producing art again after a hiatus of two decades.
Whereas his work in the Seventies had a more conceptual bent, nowadays McCall says that he wants to evoke the human figure — an effect underlined by the titles (Breath, Breath III, Meeting You Halfway, You). As a result, the show strikes an elegiac note, because his substance-less structures are so spectral. They surely articulate loss and death: each is a record of someone’s passing, rather than their presence.
However you understand McCall’s Vertical Works, though — and they could simply be seen as the quintessential sculptural expression of our virtual information age — I urge you to visit them, for contemporary art offers few experiences as strange and poetic as this.
Until March 27. Information: 020 7911 5876. A related exhibition, 'Works on Paper’, is at Sprüth Magers London (020 7408 1613) until March 26. Alastair Sooke interviews Anthony McCall on 'The Culture Show’ on BBC Two on Thurs at 7pm.
BOUNCING OFF THE WALLS
Auditory spatial awareness and the perception of sound in architectural space
A symposium presented by CRISAP (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice)
to mark the release of an enhanced audio CD of John Wynne’s award-winning installation*
6 – 8 pm Wed March 23
Podium Lecture Theatre
London College of Communication SE1 6SB
Hugh Huddy (Writer and accessibility expert at the RNIB)
Discovering the fundamental role of movement in spatial hearing: how we use it to understand and navigate architectural space
Paul Bavister
(BFLS Architects and The Bartlett School of Architecture)
Surface, space, wavelength and memory: how materiality, spatial volume and sound interact to shape our perception of space, and our memory of it
Ross Brown
(Central School of Speech and Drama)
The aural body and the auditorium.
Signal and noise / engagement and distraction: the dialectical nature of audience
and a site-specific performance by
Bob Levene
“Her work resounds with a poetic sensibility that defies categorisation, but with a focus on the nature of perception and sound. Adopting pseudo-scientific strategies and anthropological methods of recording to analyse the ‘nature’ of things, she investigates time, distance and communication....” (McKinley)
*Designed by Fraser Muggeridge studio, this multimedia CD includes a movie by Pete Gomes and an essay by Brandon LaBelle, as well as a 45-minute recording of John Wynne’s installation for 300 speakers, Pianola and vacuum cleaner
All welcome | Admission free | Drinks after
For more information, contact Tobias Rupp <t.rupp@lcc.arts.ac.uk>
Rachel Jillions
UAL Research Management and Administration: Communications Section
University of the Arts London | 6th Floor | 272 High Holborn | London | WC1V 7EY
0207 514 2286 | r.jillions@arts.ac.uk | http://www.arts.ac.uk/research.htm
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The Zabludowicz Collection is delighted to present The Shape We’re In, a series of three exhibitions focussing on recent sculpture and installation by 22 emerging and established contemporary artists, including some of the most original artists making work today. Ten artists have been commissioned by the Zabludowicz Collection to make new works for The Shape We’re In, taking into account the unusual structure and unique opportunities offered by this tripartite transatlantic exhibition.
The Shape We’re In brings together over 100 sculptural works made over the past five years, many of which express a strong spirit of socio-political critique. The exhibition takes on a manifold structure, occupying various sites across two major art world hub cities. It reclaims spaces which have been left vacant by the recent economic downturn, such as vacant shops in Camden, London and an empty floor in a New York skyscraper. The exhibition’s title also plays on a commonplace attitude of self-conscious analysis and improvement inherited from the self-help movement, picked up on by many of the works which reference the media and popular culture.
Taking place across three idiosyncratic locations: the former Methodist chapel at 176 Prince of Wales Road, London, home to the Zabludowicz Collection; a number of vacant shops in the London Borough of Camden; and the 33rd floor of a skyscraper on New York’s Times Square, The Shape We’re In encourages the public to engage with works in new and informal ways. The three shows also emphasise the Collection’s ongoing dedication to context-specificity. Each will engage with local contexts and communities, responding to each exhibition site through a tailored programme of public events.
Several artists are included in more than one iteration of the The Shape We’re In: Jack Strange’s painterly installation, Special Effects, a work which involves the direct application of the artist’s blood onto shopfront windows, will feature in a vacant shop in Camden and at 176 Prince of Wales Road, while Ethan Breckenridge and Sean Dack will exhibit two versions of the same sculptural installation in London and New York.
The Shape We’re In (Camden) presents Jacks Strange’s blood installation and neon sculptures by Dan Attoe and Tracey Emin in vacant shops around the local area. A Camden Council-led initiative currently encourages the occupation of unused properties in the borough, to act as a revitalising presence in economically depressed areas of the city. These works can be seen between 10am and 10pm daily, and to particularly striking effect in the evening.
The Shape We’re In (New York) features five artists who use sculptural practice to examine social interactions within man-made environments. Each artist has been invited to respond to a vacant space on the 33rd floor of 1500 Broadway, at the ‘picture postcard’ heart of New York City. Artists Sarah Braman and Nick van Woert will present new work alongside some of their existing work from the Zabludowicz Collection. Ethan Breckenridge and Sean Dack will exhibit a version of a work first seen at The Suburban in Illinois: a sculptural and audio installation which includes the visitor as an active participant, a version of which will also be installed in London. The Shape We're In (New York) includes work by Sarah Braman, Ethan Breckenridge, Sean Dack, Matthew Darbyshire and Nick van Woert.
The various context-specific manifestations of The Shape We’re Indemonstrate the Zabludowicz Collection’s international vision and its commitment to supporting younger artists through new commissions as well as presenting them in relation to works by more established contemporary artists.
The Shape We’re In is curated by Elizabeth Neilson and Ellen Mara De Wachter. It is accompanied by a publication with contributions from 25 writers, and designed by Sarah Boris. Limited edition artworks by artists in the show including Ethan Breckenridge, Sean Dack, Jack Strange and Nicole Wermers are available from the Zabludowicz Collection and online shop.
Visitor Information:
28 January – 14 March
Works visible 10am-10pm
46 Malden Road, NW5:
Tracey Emin
56-58 Leather Lane, EC1:
Dan Attoe, Jack Strange
A 20 minute journey on the 46 bus links Leather Lane and Malden Road.
04 March 2011 - 01 May 2011 This exhibition, the first dedicated to Pino Pascali in the UK, focuses on works from 1967 and 1968, the years in which Pascali became associated with Arte Povera, the radical trend in Italian art where everyday materials were used in resonant combinations and in which events in art and life appeared to converge.
The core of the exhibition is a series of works from Pascali’s one-person presentation at the XXXIV Venice Biennale in 1968. The show closed when the artist withdrew his work in response to student protests and the actions of the police. He died later the same year after a motorcycle accident, aged 32.
Using materials such as steel wool, coloured fun fur, feathers and straw, Pascali created visually exciting and texturally appealing sculptures, demonstrating his complexity as a maker. His creations propose a playfully serious reconstruction of the universe. In this exhibition is a hairy mushroom, a giant spider covered in blue fun fur, large-scale coloured acrylic brushworms and a shield pierced by eagles’ quills.
Contradictory notions of reality and artificiality come together in his use of synthetic materials and the prime natural elements of water and earth. Pascali also used the direct expression of his own body through performance and by manipulating the forms of his sculptures to set-up dialogues with the audience.
Pascali believed in tapping the alternative realities of myth, memory and the imagination expressed in play. He sought never to repeat the same work and thought that art should be superseded by new forms and ideas in the manner of a snake shedding skins. Although over 40 years old, this work and its restless energy are fertile ground for thought and imagination today.
SKMP2 (1968), a film by artist Luca Maria Patella and featuring a number of individuals associated with Arte Povera including Jannis Kounellis and Pino Pascali, will be shown in the reading room.
The exhibition has been initiated and selected by Martin Holman and is supported by The Henry Moore Foundation and the Pino Pascali Exhibition Supporters Group.
Adam Patterson is a graduate of MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at London College of Communication. There will be a talk at LCC to accompany the exhibition – see below for details. Adam Patterson & Jean Claude Dagrou
Another Lost Child
Photofusion Gallery
17A Electric Lane
London
SW9 8LA
www.photofusion.org
4 February – 25 March 2011
Private View: 6.30 – 9.00pm, Thursday 3 February 2011
In 2008, photographer Adam Patterson began documenting gang culture in South London. In his aim to challenge the menacing, macho picture of gangs showcased in the media, Patterson spent over a year with gang members, capturing the vulnerability and humanity that the general public rarely see. Another Lost Child brings together this work with a new series portraying ex-gang member Jean Claude Dagrou, who has since relocated to Doncaster to live with is girlfriend. The exhibition also includes some of Dagrou’s own photographs and writing, capturing his transition to a new and different life.
Adam completed an MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at London College of Communication in 2008. His work has been exhibited at the Noorderlicht Photofestival 2009, the Royal Photographic Society and Foto8’s Summershow 2010, as well as being published in newspapers and magazines such as The Sunday Times, The Independent and Vice. He recently travelled to Chile to work on the BBC Panorama documentary that covered the rescue of 33 miners and is currently based in Northern Ireland working locally on a long-term project.
EVENTS Moments from a strange time – Documenting the Chilean Miner CrisisTuesday 8 March, 18.45
HOST Gallery, 1-5 Honduras St, EC1Y 0TH
Entry: £10 (£8 Host/Photofusion members)
Producer Andy Bell and photographer Adam Patterson, who worked together on the BBC Panorama documentary "Trapped: The Chile Miners Story", will be speaking about their six weeks spent researching and filming in the Atacama desert. They will be joined by Jonathan Miller, Foreign Affairs Correspondent for Channel 4 News, who arrived in Chile days before the rescue amidst the height of the media chaos. The event will be chaired by award-winning journalist and author John Sweeney, who has contributed to the BBC’s Panorama series as an investigative journalist.
A selection of stills and video footage from the Panorama project will be screened on the night.
Another Lost ChildWednesday 9 March, 18.30 London College of Communication, Elephant and Castle, SE1 6SB
Entry: £5 (£3.50 Photofusion members)
Adam and Jean Claude will talk through the process of making Another Lost Child, the role of the media and the subsequent publishing, alongside the international exhibitions of Adam’s work resulting from the project.
Chaired by Patrick Sutherland
For booking tickets to the events please call 020 7738 5774 or email gallery@photofusion.org
Technical drawing of the CL&M Pavilion, the home of If Not, Then What?
*DONT FORGET*
‘If Not, Then What?’ - an anti-cuts project creating new visions of the future.
A Chelsea Programme project, guest curated by Cecilia Wee.
Join us for the ‘If Not, Then What?’ project launch on Friday 4th March 2011, from 6- 8pm on the Rootstein Hopkins Parade Ground, Chelsea College of Art & Design.
Featuring the official opening of the specially commissioned Pavilion by artists Charlesworth Lewandowski and Mann, and the launch of Sophie Nathan’sbid to be the Post-Capitalist Party’s candidate for Mayor of London, May 2012.
The Eye of Go 2005 Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery
TrAIN Open Lecture
GABRIEL OROZCO: MOBILE WORK
| BRIONY FER, PROFESSOR OF ART AND HISTORY |
9th March, 17:15 - 19:00 Lecture Theatre - Chelsea College of Art and Design, SW1P 4JU (Atterbury Street entrance)
This event is free and open to all, but places are limited, so please RSVP to e.pitkin@arts.ac.uk
To coincide with the Tate Modern exhibition of the Mexican artist, Gabriel Orozco (Wednesday 19 January-Monday 11 April 2011), Briony Fer will discuss this artist’s work and debate key issues around the themes of the transnational with Oriana Baddeley.
Briony Fer is Professor of History of Art at University College London. She has published extensively on 20th century and contemporary art. Key publications include her books; On Abstract Art (2000), and The Infinite Line (2004), both published by Yale University Press. She has written on many contemporary artists, including Gabriel Orozco, Roni Horn, Vija Celmins, Ed Ruscha, Rachel Whiteread, and David Batchelor. Much of her research has focused on the work of the American sculptor Eva Hesse, writing for the 2002 retrospective of the artist, curated by Elisabeth Sussman, at SFMOMA in 2002.
Professor Oriana Baddeley is Deputy Director of TrAIN and Associate Dean of Research for CCW.
You might be interested to see what you might be doing just a year down the line.
Robert was a Sculpture student from last year, and is on the first year of a Pg Dip at Byam Shaw. He was a mature student, having already been in advertising for 10 years, which is why he was able to skip BA and do a higher level of study. He was in the V and A show earlier this year, and it looks to me as if he is doing some really interesting stuff. He's also included in the work section much of what he did on Foundation, including final show work, and his Obstructions piece.
Dear Adrian I am a writer for Arts London News, the UAL newspaper, and I was wondering if you could help me. Do you know of any students who would be interested in having their art featured in a piece I am writing about space? As you may know, the Kepler telescope has recently discovered planets in other solar systems which could possibly foster life. It would be great if I could get some art students contributing to help raise awareness in our arts-based university by drawing upon their creativity to illustrate how life in space might be like.
...if you are interesed let me know (Adrian) on Monday and I'll forward details
A couple of us were thinking of organising an interim crit either on the wednesday or friday of next week. This would be a good opportunity at the half-way point for us all to formally put forward what we've made so far and receive feedback!!! The whole idea is that we will only have some sort of model, but at least it will let us all get together to reflect on the project so far etc.
If you're interested let me or Abby know. I will but up a sheet in the studio on Thursday so I can gauge interest and hopefully we can confirm it early next week.
If anyone has any suggestions let me know.
Rob
Monday, 21 February 2011
CRiSAP and Sound Arts & Design present
A talk by film editor, sound designer
Larry Sider
Wednesday February 23 at 2.00pm
Performance Lab (M108 Media Block)
London College of Communication
Elephant & Castle, London SE1
Larry Sider is Director of the School of Sound and was previously Head of Editing, Sound and Music at the National Film and Television School (UK). He is a film editor and sound designer who has worked for thirty years in documentary, animation and fiction. Most recently, he created soundtracks for Patrick Keiller's Robinson in Ruins and the Quay Brothers', The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes. Past projects include Patrick Keiller's London and Robinson in Space, and Street of Crocodiles and Institute Benjamenta by the Quays.
He has taught at numerous schools including the Royal College of Art, IFS (Köln), European Film College (Ebeltoft), California Institute of the Arts, Surrey Institute of Art and Design, Maurits Binger Institute and Bournemouth Media School. He is co-editor of Soundscape: The School of Sound Lectures 1998-2001 and The New Soundtrack journal.
His talk is entitled "Sound Changes the Image: considering the film soundtrack as a construction integrating sound, music and image".
So that everyone is aware, Emilie, Me and Sid are going to be creating/keeping track of a studio plan. Over the coming weeks, if everyone could start to think about where they want to place their work that would be great! We anticipate everyone's ideas are going to change, so don't worry.
For this reason, as well as the studio plan, we are also going to be putting up a 'checklist' or 'table' next to it. This will record details about your piece which may be helpful for others to know about, ie dimensions, whether it needs power, use of sound etc. It would be good if everyone could try and update this weekly/ as you think about it. It is so that we can at least start to keep track as a group.
If anyone has any other suggestions let us know! awesome
Someone asked me last week what critical theory is...my short answer is its something that you will become more familiar with during the three years of your BA. However, for those who can't wait, you might be interested in the following...
hello there this is being screened at the New Gallery, think its free which is well, great, addresses everything with an explosion of amazing imagery and does not take itself too seriously. gemma
its next tuesday, at 8pm,
dont want to be dramatic but think it will will mind boggling (in a good way)
In Exchange - 50 years of Art Practice and Pedagogy
Lethaby Gallery, Southampton Row.
Monday 24 January – Friday 4 March 2011 (Gallery opening times: 10-30am -5.00pm Monday-Friday (closed Thursdays) Closing event: Wednesday 2 March 2011 6.00 – 8.00pm
In the run up to Central Saint Martins' relocation to Kings Cross later in 2011, the Colleges Lethaby Gallery will host In Exchange, an ambitious project that engages with the past and present art practice and pedagogy at Central Saint Martins from 1960 onwards.
From 24th January to 3rd March, In Exchange will offer first and second year students from the BA Fine Art's 3D pathway the opportunity to make work in the gallery that responds to historical documents, photographs, film and ephemera – including archive material recently brought to light as part of a programme of research into the radical pedagogies that have evolved in Fine Art at CSM over the last 50 years.
For those who are able to contribute any personal archival material that will help us build a time-line, we have copying and scanning facilities in the gallery. Please contact Anthony Davies for more information - a.davies@csm.arts.ac.uk
ENJOY READING WEEK ALL OF YOU. YOU HAVE BEEN WORKING REALLY HARD, AND YOU DESERVE IT!
a talk by 2010 Turner Prize winner
the first Turner Prize for work in sound
Susan Philipsz
The Street Lecture Theatre
London College of Communication
Elephant & Castle, London SE1
Susan Philipsz will talk about the Turner Prize, her recent Artangel piece in the City of London and her Modern Art Oxford commission at the Radcliffe Observatory.
"At the heart of Susan Philipsz's ephemeral installations lie the infinite possibilities of sound to sculpt both the physical experience of space and the intangible recollections of memories."
"The work for which Philipsz was commended, an installation titled "Lowlands," involved recordings of her singing an oft-covered Scottish song, "Lowlands Away," being played by the river Clyde in her native Glasgow. Her plain, natural, casual (i.e., largely untrained) voice seemed to emanate from nowhere and everywhere. It echoed against a massive bridge structure, and mixed in with the sounds of the environment."
"Songs as memorials; the presence of the past in empty spaces"
The Journal of Photography&Culture,in partnership with the Photographers Gallery and the Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC)
Writing Photography 5
Dr Tim Thompson: The Importance of the Image in Forensic and Crime Scene Science
Book Now
15 February 2011 19:00
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An evening with the Journal of Photography & Culture.
This year-long Writing Photography series investigates different approaches, both creative and academic, to writing about photography.
Drawing on examples, this talk discusses the role the photograph plays in defining forensic science; the influence it can have in the application of justice; and the impact of forensic images in the media.
This talk hopes to provide an interesting exploration of this under-discussed area of the medico-legal context.
Dr Tim Thompson is Senior Lecturer in Crime Scene Science in the School of Science & Engineering, Teesside University. Thompson has published and edited peer-reviewed journals and books on a range of subjects. He is a practicing forensic anthropologist who has worked at home and abroad in a variety of forensic contexts.
Ok guys and girls we shall be going to the Modern British Sculpture exhibition on the 2nd February. Planning to meet outside The Royal Academy of Arts at 1pm.
Letme know if you are coming , we might be able to sort out getting a group ticket which will cost less.
Ether tell me or facebook me .
Good luck one and all for Wednesday
i am quite excited about the gabriel orozco (mentioned by the csm ba sculpture tutor, forgot her name) exhibition at tate modern, his work and writings have been very inspiring to me and i suggest you all (or *we* as a group or, uh, entity) go and see it whenever time allows. he used to work a lot with damian ortega - i assume most of you have been to see "the independent" at barbican's curve gallery already.
anyway click click click here for a review of orozco's tate exhibition (from the independent). there is/was also an interview with him in today's metro (of all f**king places), it's available to read online on the metro website but i barely understood how to navigate it so BLAH. either way, if that wasn't enough, the same very orozco is also showing work as part of the final act of whitechapel gallery's "keeping it real" series called "material intelligence" (more info to be found if you click this different coloured text) - this isn't on until mid march but still should be good, i've been to the other instalments or whatever you want to call them (mona hatoum has an installation up there at the moment if that's of any interest to anyone) and it has been very pleasuring.
anyway, that's me done wasting space on here. see you all tomorrow!
best, jonas
Modern British Sculpture: empire of the oddballs
Inspired by artefacts plundered from around the world, Britain's sculptors, from Moore to Hepworth to Hirst, let their visions run riot. Adrian Searle applauds a heavyweight new show
Certainly not wilting ... a Royal Academy visitor takes in Adam by Jacob Epstein. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian
Modern British Sculpture opens with a model and some photographs. The model is a three-quarter-size replica of Edwin Lutyens's 1919Whitehall Cenotaph. The photographs blown up on the surrounding walls depict the controversial but largely decorous naked and semi-naked figures with which, in 1908, Jacob Epstein once decorated the exterior of the British Medical Association building on the Strand, and which were removed before the second world war.
Modern British Sculpture
Royal Academy of Arts,
London
Starts 22 January
Until 10 April
Details: 0844 209 0051
The mocked-up Cenotaph is pale, serious, and somehow irrefutable. I have long thought it a great sculpture, with its slightly inclined vertical planes, which, if projected, would meet a thousand feet above the earth's surface. Photographed in grainy black and white, Epstein's high-relief sculptures are naked, grubby with London soot, ruined temporary plaster figures.
Temporary like us. This space has the feel of a mausoleum, a place of death and commemoration. Then, through a doorway, we are tantalised by things displayed in spotlit gloom: a black basalt Easter Island figure, an ancient Egyptian baboon, a phallic woman carved by the overheatedEric Gill. Is this going to be a fun show, or what?
British British Sculpture Sculpture is the title of the essay by curator (and recently appointed director of Tate Britain) Penelope Curtis that opens the catalogue. The same title adorns the essay by her co-curator, British sculptor Keith Wilson at the end of the book. Is it me, or is there an echo in here? One cannot but wonder to what degree this exhibition indicates Curtis's future direction of Tate Britain. It tries to tell one among many stories of modern art, in a limited space, and is no worse for bringing less well known artists and works to the foreground, while ignoring others. And who needs another coffee-table pop-up sculpture show and catalogue of the usual big names?
The show is full of echoes: of ancient African, Egyptian and oceanic art, Greek sculpture, the fragile clatter of Chinese porcelains and Bernard Leach pots, the pomp of Victorian Britain and of the imperialist mindset that filled the British Museum with artefacts from other cultures and other times, influencing generations of sculptors.
Britain bought, looted and collected from the world, wherever navy and empire went. Artists in their turn – Moore to Gill, Barbara Hepworth, the almost forgotten Maurice Lambert and Leon Underwood – stole from the treasure horde in the British Museum, as well as from their European peers. Their demonstrable craft and frequent self-regarding preciosity is wearying. They wished to be original, but mostly turned into mannerists.
Less is Moore
And what, in this entire exhibition, could be more modern or more timeless than the 4,000-year-old neo-Sumerian stone, a great, grey, carved weight like a giant, weather-smoothed pebble, whose form is neither more or less than that of a sleeping duck? It declares without trying those perennially ancient and modern dicta about "truth to materials" and "less is more".
Going through the show I thought less Henry Moore would be good, too, but I suppose he is unavoidable. The Sumerian duck also finds an echo, much later on, in a single-bar electric fire whose backplate has been snipped into the form of a yellow fish, a tench swimming in the grate, byBill Woodrow. Next to the Woodrow is a small, worrying sculpture by the late Lucia Nogueira, a polished Coke can connected to a length of rubber tubing. It's almost nothing, but takes on a disconcerting air of human plumbing, a desperate surgical experiment in connecting insides and outsides, the world with the body, and a thing to a wall. Nearby,John Latham does something inexplicable with plaster, paint and books. Its like a head exploding with ill-digested words.
Also included here are a few more recent examples of key European and American art – a Jeff Koons basketball exactly half-submerged in a fishtank stands near a huge Damien Hirst vitrine. This is just an aside about influence, but there's a real conversation going on between Carl Andre's 1966 Equivalent VIII, his once-notorious bricks, Richard Long'sline of white lumps of chalk from 1984, and a 1966 work, a wall-bound cast of a patch of London wasteground, which itself includes stray bits of brick rubble, by the Boyle Family. But maybe it's too nice, too neat a conjunction.
There's nothing nice about the Hirst, with its flyblown, abandoned picnic-table lunch, a barbecue with rotting steaks, maggots and flies heaving among the charcoal, the cow's head leaking blood under a chair. The horror! The horror! At least the Koons is clean. Nearby, a small Urs Fischer sculpture dangles in mid-air, half an apple and half a pear conjoined at the end of a length of nylon fishing line. We are being reminded, once again, what British art owes to both the past and to bloody foreigners. Fischer's sculpture is forbidden fruit. But we've all tasted it now.
Jubilee Memorial to Queen Victoria, 1887' by Alfred Gilbert. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian
What connects Albert Gilbert's Jubilee Memorial (1887) to Queen Victoria andPhillip King's mad, somehow Batman-like, purple Ghengis Khan (1963) in a room called The Establishment Figure? Is it form (both are essentially conical) or inadvertent sculptural stupidity (both are comical), or is it that both Queen Victoria and Ghengis Khan were emperors? Gilbert's Queen ignores Ghengis Khan, and stares unamused through a doorway towards the huge balls and semi-engorged penis of Jacob Epstein's Adam (1938), in the next gallery. Phew, you say, and go for a quick restorative lie down on the hessian-covered bench that, a wall panel tells us, "is here to offer temporary repose to a wilting public". Adam's certainly not wilting. The text goes on to inform us that the bench disrupted "the quite different aesthetic occasion of Anthony Caro's solo Whitechapel exhibition in 1963". What's with this arch wit? Who needs it?
But we do need Caro, and his great, bright-red steel work from 1962,Early One Morning, has a gallery all its own. I always think of this as a figurative composition – a cross-like figure at one end, a sort of red blackboard or mirror at the other, with various complications occurring inbetween. This reading is of course antithetical to the high,Greenbergian modernist terms that Caro adhered to when he made the sculpture. But there's no accounting for what an audience might think, ignoring an artist's intentions. Once, Caro was seen as the world's most radical sculptor. Then minimalism and arte povera came along, with their mutually incompatible boxes and grids, their poetry and images. British art learned to live with them all.
What – and whom – is omitted or ignored is as interesting as what is included. Certain important aspects of British sculpture are missing altogether. What of the Geometry of Fear, Britain's answer to French postwar existentialism and angst? There's none here. No tortured bronze and steel. No British pop sculpture, no systems art or British backing-into-minimalism-via-constructivism and other routes. There's noEduardo Paolozzi, no Elizabeth Frink, another thankful omission. Tony Cragg is here, but not Richard Deacon, neither Anish Kapoor nor Antony Gormley, no William Tucker, no Rachel Whiteread. Perhaps they are dispensable to the story of British art's struggle with modernity. We move instead away from sculpture as a fully embodied object, or one that wrestles with big ideas and grand themes, towards fragility, impermanence, an anxiety of making things that count.
Modern life is empty
In any case, it isn't always easy to distinguish major from minor, the canonical from the curiosity, mainstream from backwater. There are millennium-old Chinese ceramics here that could have been made yesterday, and new things that look antedeluvian. And nothing ages quicker than the temporarily modish. Liam Gillick meets Julian Opie (Ah! The gleam of aluminium, the emptiness and disaffected estrangements of modern life!) and a little Rebecca Warren homage to Helmut Newtonand Robert Crumb – all legs and bums and vulvas. Some things were never meant to co-exist, but they do.
For much of the past century – let alone beyond – British art has been secondary on the world stage, however Moore, Caro and Hirst have been lauded and reviled. We are good at taking other people's radical advances and extreme positions and taming them, effecting peculiarly diplomatic compromises on unruly foreign extremes. We Brits domesticate other people's art. We are good at oddball individuals though – from Gill to John Latham, Richard Long to Sarah Lucas to Richard Wentworth – whose own takes on modernity and their times are as distinctive as they are eccentric. They also, this show posits, might be important in ways some of their better-recognised and more lauded peers, smooth operators on the international stage as they may well be, are not. In the end you have to ask yourself what matters. Modern British Sculpture is only temporary. One day it will all be old.
'...a multitude of soap bubbles which explode from time to time...': Pino Pascali's final works 1967-1968
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