My favourite 50 albums of the decade

I couldn’t resist. Here are what I consider to be the 50 best albums of the decade (with occasional blurbs).

Almost certainly not the best, of course, but certainly my best, and definitely the most important to my musical evolution, these albums represent my musical heritage. What’s more, they have all enjoyed sustained listening bar those most recent which promise to with reckless abandon.

To avoid favouritism, i’ve put them in chronological order by British release date, and tried to represent every year fairly. It would appear, however, that 2002-2003 were particularly strong years… maybe hindsight is just getting the better of me.

___

Primal Scream – XTRMNTR (if pure energy was bottled and filtered through the MC5 and a dancefloor it would sound like this)

Sigur Ros – Ágætis byrjun (If I ever go to iceland I expect it to sound like this)

Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven

PJ Harvey – Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea

Low – Things We Lost in the Fire

cLOUDDEAD – cLOUDDEAD (If acid riddled white boys made hip hop..wait a minute)

Susumu Yokota – Grinning Cat (if the soundtrack to David Attenborough’s dreams was recorded, it might sound like this)

Osker – Idle will Kill (If Artur Rimbaud had written pop punk it would sound like this)

Roots Manuva – Run Come Save Me

Bjork – Vespertine

Converge – Jane Doe (If the end of the world was recorded it would sound like this)

Boards of Canada – Geogaddi

El-P – Fantastic Damage

Glassjaw – Worship and Tribute

Idlewild – The Remote Part

Norma Jean – Bless the Martyr and Kiss the Child

Interpol – Turn on the Bright Lights (If Joy Division were filtered through a NYC membrane, it would sound like this)

Isis – Oceanic (If the stormy sea was heavy music, it would sound like this)

Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Yanqui UXO (if modern day warfare was capable of beauty it might sound like this)

Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Fever to Tell

Four Tet – Rounds

Mogwai – Happy Songs for Happy People

Neil Perry – Lineage

Dizzee Rascal – Boy in Da Corner

Jeffrey Lewis – It’s the Ones Who’ve Cracked That the Light Shines Through

Jaylib – Champion Sound (If … only all collaborations sounded as good as this)

The Shins – Chutes Too Narrow         

Pelican – Australasia

Circle Takes the Square – As The Roots Undo (if there was a second shape of punk to come, it would sound like this)

Fennesz – Venice

Old Man Gloom – Christmas (if all my dreams came true, it would sound like this again)

The Arcade Fire – Funeral

Souvaris – I Felt Nothing At All

Bloc Party – Silent Alarm

The Decemberists – Picaresque

Sufjan Stevens  – Come on Feel the Illinoise

Soulwax – Nite Versions (if the perfect party was cystallized, it would look like this)

Animal Collective – Feels

J-Dilla – Donuts (If sunday afternoon summer drives was hip-hop, it would sound like this)

Hot Chip – The Warning

Joanna Newsom – Ys

Grinderman – Grinderman (if a mid-life crisis was rock’n'roll it would sound like this)

Battles – Mirrored

Justice - † (If BANGERS was a musical genre, it would all sound like this)

Portishead – Third

Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes

Gang Gang Dance – Saint Dymphna (If scientists recorded the future , it would sound like this)

Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavillion        

Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest

Health – Get Color (If there was a third shape of punk to come, it would sound like this)

___

and if push came to shove my top 5 would be

5.

Joanna Newsom - Ys

4.

Isis - Oceanic

3.

Old Man Gloom - Christmas

2.

Primal Scream - XTRMNTR

1.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Yanqui UXO

Outside is outside

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.

In this famous statement of 2003, Donald Rumsfeld deftly unlocked the challenges facing American politics with all the unknowingly unknown-ness of post-modernity. Especially now, under the auspices of that dirty word which the postmodern pioneer Ihab Hassan recently referred to as the G-word – Glooobalisation – might we find a trough of unknowns complicating humanity’s eternal search for truth.

It is in these same furrows that Omer Fast ploughs with his video works: exemplars of the thoroughly contemporary problematic of truth seeking. In the shadow of the technological overlords who exacerbate an already unfathomable expanse of existence as we don’t know it, simple questions of origin become impossible locks to unpick, and fascinating scabs to pick at.

Fast’s most recent work is a three part video-installation entitled Nostalgia, showing currently at the South London Gallery in Camberwell, in which a multifaceted and disparate tale unfolds out of a simple recollection of how to create an animal trap from sticks.

Omer Fast - Nostalgia I

Part I presents us with audio commentary alongside footage to illustrate this simple technique, whilst Part II depicts an interview between the artist and an African man seeking asylum in London from which this central recollection appears to have originated.

Using techniques similar to those employed in his 2007 video work The Casting – images of the interviewer and interviewee as well as their narrative are edited clumsily in and out of view/earshot, problematising the truthfulness of the narrative presented to us – the conversation appears awkward, nay falsified. We aren’t sure whether what we are watching is staged or not.

Omer Fast - The Casting

 The conversation veers in and out of poignancy as the artist probes into the man’s upbringing, giving rise to the very questions of known and unknown which I attempted to formulate earlier. Most tellingly, the man’s response to Omer’s request for information about the landscape outside of his childhood home achieves the perfectly simplistic response of

     Outside is outside. You know? Earth, trees, people, dogs…

Before describing the neighbours’ house more specifically as

     Normal! The same. It looks like our house.

In these terms, what is known is reasonably exemplified as that closest, that experienced: the most subjective reasoning for normality. Yet it also comments on shared experience in the form of basic living conditions, “earth, trees, people, dogs”… houses. Our experience of life is suddenly not so different from anyone’s. It is in the minutiae that differences occur.

The final part of the instillation compounds the problems, however. It is a complicated and cyclical set of stories – never ending – which appear to explain one another, yet which don’t seem perfectly unified. Using the animal-trap as their central tenet, it would appear that we have in fact walked into what Boris Johnson referred to as a giant bear trap in a famed episode of Have I Got News For You. Omer Fast treats us to the story of English Asylum seekers stealing their way into an unnamed West African country which might offer them better living conditions and the hope for a better life, and the trap becomes a telling metaphor. We have been treated to a discourse on authorship, and on what filmmaking is and can be etc.

This is the place of rewritten histories, as is art, and as are memories.

Omer Fast - Nostalgia III

The exhibition reminded of a similarly intriguing multi-platform video work by Lindsay Seers entitled It Has to Be This Way shown at Matts Gallery in Mile End earlier this year.

Linday Seers - It Has To Be This Way

Lindsay Seers - It Has to Be This Way

Centering around the above installation in which the main story was told simultaneously through two spectacle like video portholes, the work creates a multi-dimensional and multi-referential web at the centre of which is the story of retracing her missing sister’s steps.

Lindsay Seers - It Has To Be This Way

The work speeds through her sisters story by way of the history of Queen Christina’s ‘Roman Period’ (her sister’s research topic), alchemical meanderings (part of the historical story as well as an erstwhile paradigm for the artistic process, disturbed here by the inexactitudes of retracing memories and spinning yarns), her sister’s boyfriend’s letters and photos, and to add a wonderfully contrived level of falsification to the whole thing, an historian called M. Anthony Penwill’s take on the whole matter, recreated lovingly as a document to be taken away from the exhibition.

M. Anthony Penwill - It Has To Be This Way

To pen down the substance of this work seems impossible, and the above, laboured explanation appears to me a far cry from the fun I had participating in the work. One truly felt involved as the story unfolded, half murder-mystery, half existential treatise. The alchemical properties of the images which sat at the centre of the work – Seers developed the entire work out of a series of found photos – appears the perfect embodiment of the truthful/useful/useless-ness of images. As do Fast’s animal traps.

Lindsay Seers - It Has To Be This Way

Such self-mythological meanderings and uncertain histories appear to me similar to a sub-genre of historical memory I have recently become aware of. Most recently presented to me in a new book by Eduardo Galeano entitled Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, this genre appears to manifest itself as collaged presentations of history. The book intends to tell the story of the world by way of the most incidental yet extrapolatable stories of mankind, as short (sometimes just a few sentences) vignettes concerned at arms length with world events give a better picture of reality than the faceless presentation of facts.

The idea reminded me of Geert Mak’s majesterial In Europe, in which the Dutch journalist traveled through Europe to the sites of the last century’s most telling moments, retracing the steps of those affected by and proximate to it with personal manifesto, again presented in short vignettes. Truth is found somewhere inbetween the memories and stories of those affected by it, without ever going so far as to acclaim its own truth. Collaged expression appears most capable of rendering an approximation of a truth.

If outside is outside, and our experience is shared, the details are what make each of us different, and no-one’s truth is any different from, or any better than, or any nearer to the TRUTH than any other. We all make up the collage.

That’s MISTER Charles Darwin.

- As a result of receiving a mallard and a treatise on species variation from his friend Alfred Russell Wallace, Mr Charles Darwin formulated the argument that became his Magnus Opus, The Origin of Species.

- In response to the spectacles available to see at their home town zoo, the Providence RI band The Low Anthem found the inspiration for the joyously celebratory and naively awestruck title of their newest album, Oh My God, Charlie Darwin.

- In recognition of the 150 years that have passed since Darwin’s achievement, and with something of the eulogistic acclaim that marks the Low Anthem’s album’s nomenclature, an exhibition entitled A Duck for Mr Darwin now graces the University of Warwick’s Mead Gallery after its inception at Gateshead’s Baltic earlier this year.

-And in response to the happy coincidence of returning home to see my parents in Coventry where this exhibition was showing (YES, Warwick University is in Coventry shocker), and finding the Low Anthem’s album for just £5 at the University record shop, I am writing this now, in order to wax lyrical about both, as well as their forefather of influence.

(I have thus further attempted to understand what I previously distinguished as a local art history as the result of happy coincidence, of life marching on: spiralling through and beside cultural stimuli which throws itself at you/me/all of us, and which might and can and should become internalised, putting oneself at the centre… a blog would then become the most appropriate home for such a self-involved/self-involving/self-EVolving rambling as this… and I am able to almost see in this sea of self-centred stories something actually tremendously down at heel. Art history takes on the mundanity of the everyday, the product of evolution and of living, experience as base in the most transcendental way possible, and to be celebrated on terms equal to breathing…[stop the manifesto] ).

Charlie Brown and Snoopy as doctored by me

 

In Dorothy Cross’ video work Stage from the exhibition, the artist speaks to the actress Fiona Shaw (the fearfully flirty headteacher of a matriarchal all-girls school in the joyous Three Men and a Little Lady, to my mind) about life on the Galapagos where they visited on a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and Galapagos Conservation Trust residency, extolling the infinite possibilities and potential of life; successes contained within the word if,

          IF stops you being trapped where you actually are… you can dream from IF.

The same work opens with footage of a tortoise’s throat bellowing with every breath, like a leather bouncy castle wall announcing a child’s ricocheting from it in slow motion. Here, the tortoise still possesses all the majesty which Mr Darwin found in it, and the enduring potential of evolution.

Marcus Coates, meanwhile, finds something equally enthralling about the tortoise, as a video work entitled Intelligent Design shows an adult male tortoise failing repeatedly in his endeavour to mate with a female. The work says everything it needs to about such a ridiculous challenge to Darwinian common-sense.

Marcus Coates-Intelligent Design

 

Coates’ video work Human Report, also the result of a Galapagos residency, further exposes something of the fall-out of Darwinian theory, and the lessons unlearnt; impactful human interjections in nature’s beautiful narratives, and our inability to adapt appropriately or with any respect to out surroundings, as told by the Galapagos’ lauded friend, the Blue Footed Booby, reported on Ecuadorian television.

Elsewhere, anthropology-cum-ecology prevails in pieces by Ben Jeans Houghton, Mark Dion and Andrew Dodds, all of whom play upon the idea of the most artistically resonant if somewhat staid patterns of humanity; collecting, researching, compiling, repeating, (reviewing even)… a social commentary of sorts.

 

For me, Jeans Houghton’s work is particularly successful, displaying a conceptual playground in a shed. That is, his life’s collection of things, assorted into colour ranges and displayed, yes, in a shed. Reminiscent of

a)Darwin’s shed (at it’s most obvious), and

b) the leisure time of the jobbing enthusiast, this piece is like an ode to the hobby, the collector, the anal amongst us. It is an ode to what my mother calls the autistic spectrum of man. What’s more, it provides an opportunity for us to consider things as things, where “commodities” become different to the minutiae of pointless collections. In Darwinian terms, this is the celebration of those animals no-one gave a shit about till Attenborough exposed them as godly (see previous blog entry on the Vogelkop Bowerbird!!!)

The Low Anthem’s work might unintentionally be classified similarly: a stunning appreciation of that least noticed in society till we are drawn to us it once. Just as Fleet Foxes returned harmonies to the mainstream with last years eponymous debut album, and Bob Dylan reminds us of America’s grand musical heritage on his theme time radio hour (his comprehensive knowledge of 50 years of American musically sits just beyond my brother’s inane knowledge of 90s pop trivia on the aforementioned spectrum), so do The Low Anthem recall a bygone era, and an attestation of the remarkable tranquillity to be found in simplicity. Pioneer trails, bar-room balladry and the wind-scorched, buffalo-filled acres of a pre-industrial hinterland infuse songs such as the near-perfect To Ohio.

Throughout the exhibition and the album, my thoughts were directed toward a picture of evolution concerned primarily with ancestral descent, and what lay before us. Charles Avery’s work, alternatively, is characterised by his forward/sidewards glance at an imaginary island to which he is an intruder, a collector, an outsider and an explorer. He presents for us an ever-growing narrative exposing life on the Island, one both eccentric and adept as it trundles along by way of an irony-laden and tongue-in-cheek appreciation of post-colonial theory, identity formulation, postmodernity and victorian anthropology. It offers hope in a crazy world where the One-Armed Snake is both a threat and a gambling den. The metaphors are full and complex, yet as fun as fun can be.

Charles Avery

 

Returning to Dorothy Cross’ acclamation of the wonder inherent in if, my resounding response to both this exhibition and this album continues to be what if? What if we really did live in a world where Darwin’s theories truly had the impact on they deserved, and juvenile sniggering at a tortoise attempting to make love to another under the banner of intelligent design? was, rather, hearty laughter at a bygone time when people actually believed in creationism? What if the rampant commercialisation of everything made way for a more simple, local appreciation of the things closest at hand? What if the lessons of our ancestors were actually learnt?

Mark Fairnington’s beautifully painted series of animal eyes affected me most noticeably, as I stared into the glassy irises and found only the reflection of museum rooms. Fairnington painted these works not from life, but from stuffed models in the Natural History Museum, where these once-noble now stuffed and stuffy beasts stood motionless. As wonderful as the works are, it made me want to go out a look at real animals.

GO ON, GO AND LOOK AT A COW!

Mark Fairnington - Bison

Nature’s curators: the Vogelkop Bowerbird

I found my kindred spirit last night.

Watching David Attenborough’s Life on BBC, the life of the Vogelkop Bowerbird appeared to me a perfect manifestation of the purity of some of my deepest interests: colour, collecting, aesthetics, and having a partner with whom to share these interests and passions.

My beguilement was disturbed by the realisation that my girlfriend and my housemate were laughing at this little fella’s eccentricities, and, indeed, their comparability to my own.

Found in New Guinea, the Vogelkop Bowerbird, or Amblyornis inornata, appears to have a taste for the finer things. When building his Bower – the hut which the male Bowerbird builds in which to attract mates – the Vogelkop variety goes to great lengths to decorate the interior of it with colourful items and curiosities he has collected.

Ranging from moss, flowers and fruit through to fungi and shiny beetles, the Vogelkop Bowerbird’s creation is a collage of pure form reminiscent of Matisse’s Snail, especially if the below image from the Collaertsbrothers’ photostream on flickr is to be believed, although i’m not sure I do. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/collaertsbrothers/)

Henri Matisse - The Snail

 

© Collaertsbrothers on flickr

The aesthetic eye inherent in such behaviour appears a telling evocation of the wider intelligence of animals and their response to and appreciation of the worlds around them.

I love the wholesomeness of such an approach to courting, whereby the Vogelkop distinguishes itself from other Bowerbirds in its search for the remarkable or original. The colours are diverse and plentiful, and the items are eccentric. In the program, one of them even manages to steal a snickers wrapper from the cameraman to add to his bower which appeared strikingly pop cultural, reminiscent of one of Picasso’s early synthetic cubist collages, or the advertising hoardings which constantly seek to sell us love/ beauty/ happiness in the form of products

Pablo Picasso - Still Life with Chair Caning

 

Except here it is not a product being sold, but an idea: an aggrandisement of the curious in life aimed squarely at finding a partner. Unadulterated expression. I thought contentedly of the times my girlfriend has humoured and/or shared my enthusiasms, showing her my collections of postcards, or things found in library books, or old newspapers from important dates, or decrepit used trainers, or my witterings about the oddities I often spend all day amusing myself with.

Finally, I feel the activities of the Vogelkop Bowerbird also warrant a very serious comparison with the work of Tony Cragg, whose collages of the thrown away detritus of our every day appear to not celebrate the inanities and colours of life as at first they might seem to, but rather to expose the un-naturalness of our consumptive habits. The Bowerbird’s elation is our neglect and greed.

Tony Cragg – New stones, Newton’s Tones

I hope that my hoarding and my aesthetic eye for things whether of monetary or aesthetic value remains imbued with an excitement for things plain and simple. Moreover, I hope my excitement for and interest in the inane can manifest itself in something pure, and which I might be able to share with the special someone closest to me even if no-one else.

http://node2.bbcimg.co.uk/iplayer/images/episode/b00js8cz_640_360.jpg

The marginalised, marginalised?

When dealing with outsider art, respect is due. Nay, respect is essential. But so is egalitarianism. The danger has always been to treat the savants and unexpected genii of the outsider world with something other than the same deference usually saved for normal artists. It is, of course, only the market’s imposition on the fruits of artistic labour, and the artist’s heed of its overbearing weight which differs between those artists slave to it and those removed from it…

And it is in this light that I approached three recent cultural exponents of the outsider cause: the opening of the new Museum of Everything in Primrose Hill, the Koestler Trust’s 2009 Art By Offenders, Secure Patients and Detainees exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall, and a wonderful opportunity to see Mr Daniel Johnston performing at the splendid Bloomsbury Ballroom.

Firstly, the Museum of Everything. Just around the corner from the tea rooms, bistros and cocaine residue of this illustrious corner of NW1 lies a treasure trove of outsider art – the collection of filmmaker James Brett – which has been promoted to the public as not only “London’s first ever space for artists and creators living outside our modern society”. The result is less than respectful.

The curatorial decision seems to have been to make the space, you know, kooky, like these kooky fellas on show. All slanted walls, badly drawn name signs and cobbled together display rooms both using and enhancing the space’s industrial backwater ambience. Unpainted/badly painted walls, breeze block walls and jutting out wires and bricks make for a space knowingly different… but not outsider. A gallery space doesn’t have to go this far to mark itself as distinct from the white space of the contemporary gallery. Indeed, one of the most celebrated and complete collectiosn of Outsider Art – the collection of Mr Art Brut himself, Jean Dubuffet, in Lausanne – is a perfect embodiment of this. At no point does this gallery impinge on the work it is celebrating, but rather takes a back seat letting the Dargers, the Scotts and the Gills take over. Similarly, the Whitechapel’s Inner Worlds Outside exhibition of a few years previously fully respected these works by placing them alongside their contemporaries illustrating the interaction of the arts in recent history outside of a framework potted with distinctions. The Museum of Everything seems to knowingly plays upon its difference from contemporary art at a time when the latters’ association with money and greed threatens to devalue it further than the market itself has managed.

As such, I left this new museum dejected, even having seen a wonderful collection of artists all worth noting and celebrating. The calligraphic meanderings of Dan Miller, for example, 

Dan Miller

or the troublingly post-propaganda Soviet ramblings of Alexandre P. Lobanov 

Alexandre P. Lobanov

On a more positive note, however, the museum’s decision to ask noted artists to write about its exhibitors was a fantastic one, and one which salvaged some sort of favour in my eyes. I was particularly fascinated by not only the speakers they chose, but the apparent linkages. Jamie Shovlin’s relation to Charles AA Dellschau’s stunted historiography, Tal R’s appropriate evocation of Judith Scott’s luxuriously colourful abstractions, and even Pete Townsend’s celebration of the extraordinarily powerful drawings of Donald Pass.

Donald Pass, untitled, 1984

 

I encountered similar problems at the Royal Festival Hall attending the 2009 Koestler Trust exhibition. Again, the work was fascinating and, at times, truly exceptional, not to mention largely devoid of the clichés and inanities of contemporary frieze-art. And, in fact, the exhibitions’ place on the Spirit Level of the RFH is well chosen and well-curated – by inmates of two women’s prisons as it turns out. Unfortunately, the Southbank appears to then kick itself in the foot by repeatedly failing to advertise the work sufficiently. In none of the flyer stands, of which there are many, can be found leaflets promoting this exhibition, and on encountering the few works which sit on the main concourse, you would be hard pushed to realise their were more works to be found downstairs. Such a wonderful opportunity to see the work and minds of these artists deserves better.

Particularly noteworthy were two works, one by an inmate from HMP Brendon, Bucks listed only as Michael entitled Is Masculinity Inevitable?, and another anonymously exhibition by an inmate from HMP Shotts, Scotland entitled Yours Sincerely, The Tabloid Press.

Is Masculinity Inevitable? , Michael, HMP Brendon, Bucks

Is Masculinity Inevitable? (detail)

 

Yours Sincerely, the Tabloid Press, Anon, HMP Shotts, Scotland

 

Both – though not necessarily proficient in high-art terms – exhibit a developed ability with their materials, whilst picking apart some of the more interesting questions which must reoccur within penal institutions. Masculinity is presented shot through with metaphors both expected and ambiguous, from matadors to molecular science, history lessons through to contemporary history. The result is a seeming meditation on the complexity of the human condition, exemplified in a way the tabloid press would be hard pressed to believe never mind appreciate. The second work, subsequently, embodies a more immediate and impassioned response to the Paparazzi’s approach to the accused and their families: slobbering, scrupulous and stoic in their hounding and, impressively, with more than one face as the sky curdles and surroundings haemorrhage.

Here is the world of the penal outsider, stripped of dignity and attempting to claw some back in paint and pen. Rather than working “outside our modern society” as, supposedly, are the outsiders of the Museum of Everything, here we find men and women working AS A RESULT OF modern society, or so they seem to say… There are few declarations of dissatisfaction with the results of their choices, and their position in society, but dissatisfaction with society – civilization in Freudian terms – abounds. The confines of the RFH appear an appropriately cultured and Liberal surround to showcase such views within.

And so finally to the admirable and incredible Daniel Johnston, whose surroundings at the Bloomsbury Ballroom appeared the perfect final resting place of my week of outsider art: triumphant, elegant and perfectly social. Here was a setting neither outside nor aware of its relation to culture.. this was HIGH culture, and brazenly so… and Daniel Johnston shone in the spotlight bearing all his fragility and fears as a badge of pride. 

Daniel Johnston w. David Tatersall of The Wave Pictures.

 

Starting off with just a guitar like a babe-in-arms for company, Daniel walked on stage nervous and awkward. He played a few songs to rapturous applause, and for the moment, I was uneasy. I am a big fan of Johnston’s music, but the response seemed almost out of kilter with the reality of Johnston’s rickety attempts at renditions. What’s more, I couldn’t hold in the feeling that the applause lay somewhere between appreciation and encouragement, and the awkward patronising sound of pity…

Yet as time went on, Johnston grew in stature. Never relaxed, but certainly enjoying himself and allowing himself a joke or two, songs such as Living Life and Bloody Rainbow, sung with accompaniment, were joyful and enchanting, and the final rendition of True Love Will Find You in the End couldn’t have been better judged.

And it was with the accompaniment of support band The Wave Pictures for this and indeed the last five or six numbers that Johnston truly came into his own. Their enjoyable brand of indie lounge rock sloped away behind him, providing the occasional glimmering solo, and most memorably a crunching and riotous embellishment of his track Rock N Roll, as Johnston yelped over the guitars his lyrics about how rock n roll, and more specifically the Beatles gave him something to live for as a young man with extreme Bipolar disorder. And as he screeched

        That Rock N Roll, it saved my soul

 one couldn’t help but feel glad it had, and that it was doing the same for a room full of people.

 **

In the Wave Pictures’ accompaniment of Daniel Johnston I witnessed the most disarming spectacle of the week. Three young musicians clearly alongside a hero, a hero with extreme difficulties who had to leave the stage to collect himself more than once during the concert. Yet playing alongside him they appeared to experience all the joy one would expect of such an opportunity. Almost goading each other on to rock out more heavily on Rock N Roll, they enjoyed every second of their evening with him, and so did he it appeared.

Similarly, the inmates given the opportunity to show their work by the Koestler Trust, and those invited to curate the exhibition, were treated with nearly all the respect due to them as artists standing alone.

Yet in the Museum of Everything, we have the ability to witness the work of some of the most interesting and truly wonderful artists of the last century or so, celebrated endlessly since Dubuffet and Hans Prinzhorn first acknowledged the proffers of those working “outside of society” decades ago, presented as the misfits hundreds of people have worked painstakingly to put an end to… it’s a disappointing rendition of an inspiring collection, and a continuingly important insight.

The sacred made real, the real made sacred

The greatest achievement of the new exhibition at the National Gallery, The Sacred Made Real, is its presentation of the 17^th century Spanish attitude to religion as more than just gory, sordid and self-lacerating. Instead, Christ’s death becomes full of both sorrow and hope. Retribution and redemption. The overstated ennui symbolic of Spanish Catholicism becomes instead a sustained and deeply felt meditation on the subjects of death, suffering, and injustice. The Christian fables become metaphoric and worthy, the emotions worth feeling and remembering. Anyone and everyone will be moved by this exhibition’s startling presentations of distress and anguish, and Christ’s narrative might be seen as the lesson it was originally intended as.

It is the success of these super-realistic works that they inspire emotion in their audience in and of themselves, and looking around this exhibition, even as an atheist, I found myself relating to the works, responding to the storylines delivered in canvas, wood, and paint, not to mention human hair and ivory, even where they were their most brazenly and shockingly sacrificial and Christian.

Pedro de Mena – Christ as the Man of Sorrows (Ecce Homo), 1673

 

In the above work, for instance, the brutality depicted – blood running down Christ’s back from the lacerations and from the crown of thorns – provokes heartfelt compassion. For me, the presented allegory oscillated within my anguished attempt to place my sincere reaction to it with recourse to my deepest problems with the Christian faith and the inherent cruelty of so many of its parables. 

Similarly, Francisco de Zurbarán’s Crucifixion inspired from me an empathetic and tangible response, but as the wonderful accompanying film illustrated at the end of the exhibition, the artistic genius behind it advances the cause enigmatically. Shown in the image below in a mock up of its original setting, the work was originally positioned in a portico of an office, viewable from a window to the right and above… painted with a light source matching its intended light source, the painting looks not only sculptural but life like as the body hangs in its niche privately and forlorn.

Francisco de Zurbarán – Christ on the Cross, 1627

Marcel Duchamp – Étant Donnés, 1946-1966

The attestions of reality reminded me awkwardly of Marcel Duchamp’s great final work Étant Donnés,a work enshrined similarly in privacy, pain, suffering and the unknown. Comparing them feels tantamount to something worse than blasphemy, and yet the comparison seems to hold. It imbues the work with a physicality beyond parable. 

Indeed, just as other works in this exhibition remind of either Ron Mueck’s hyper-realist works, or the self-congratulatory airs of trompe-l’oeil, the whole exhibition became for me again and again an inroad into ways of thinking about non-Christian art, modern art, modern life. Comparative art history with me at the centre enabled me to understand and appreciate the message. The brutality of Christ’s passion became no more enigmatic of suffering than the young woman’s in Duchamp’s masterpiece.

And so, beyond the un-missable and emotionally wrenching manifesto of the exhibition itself, here are a few of my own personal reflections on particular work to be found therein.

***

As one might expect, it was the Velázquez works which truly stood out in the exhibition, and one particularly gave in to my internalised art historical dialogue.

Diego Velázquez, Immaculate Conception, 1618-19

Salvador Dali – Christ of Saint John of the Cross, 1951

In this painting of the immaculate conception, I was struck first and foremost by the surrounds. I remember visiting the Prado in Madrid with my cousin Judith and her Madrileño husband Pablo many years ago. Pablo shared with me some of his and his artist father’s insights into the collection. I particularly remember him drawing my attention to Velázquez’s skies and asking me to keep them in mind, as we walked back out into the Madrid sun and gazed upwards. I was astonished to find one of Madrid’s proudest secrets, and further proof of Velázquez’s talent. Indeed, the skies of the Castillian countryside are oft-referred to as Velasqueños in the master’s honour.

The comparison of the idealised classical world at Mary’s feet and the earthly grounding of the Velasqueño sky makes me for an interesting juxtaposition. Similarly, I thought of Dali’s Christ from the Scottish national collection and wondered about the roots of its details; whether the lake and mountains, or the clouds were Catalunyan. I have long been fascinated by the sheer detailing of Dali’s greatest works, and his declarations of their origins in dreams. I wonder where reality takes hold in this work, and where it took hold in the dreams of this surreal master.

***

Another work in the exhibition, Alonso Cano’s The Vision of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, also caught my eye. It was unavoidably reminiscent of the Murakami work I had seen a week earlier in the Tate’s Pop Life exhibition, Milk,

Alonson Cano - The Vision of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, also known as ‘The Miracle of the Lactation’, 1657-1660

Takashi Murakami – Milk, 2009

 

and this comparison helped me think about the importantly maternal elements of Mary’s character in the bible, and what this stands for more broadly, alongside the improbably maternal elements of this vulgar take on Japanese and contemporary culture. The distinction is startling, and apparently a shocking indictment on both parental and maternal respect in a society ravaged by pop culture.

What they and all the works mentioned above have in common is a distillation of the exhibition at hand’s title. The sacred made real. As I approached the works and my thought processes as they arose from it, it appeared to me that, similarly, and maybe more particularly for an atheist, what the exhibition, and the works viewed out of context achieved was an attestation of the sacred nature of reality. The maternal, the paternal, our brethren, humanity, all of these things are absolute in our lives. Such artistic accomplishments as are on view here only serve to heighten the importance of life, and the recording of it. The talents on offer testify to the need for glorification of the every day, and one one’s trials and tribulations are no more important than another. We are all in this together.

A Local Art History

On Tuesday evening, Malcolm Bull (Andrew W Mellon Foundation MA Visiting Professor from Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford) gave a talk at the Courtauld Institute of Art entitled World Art and Art World, part of this semester’s series of lectures grouped under the epithet “Globalisation and Contemporary Art”.

The premise was as follows:

… this lecture explores ways of mapping world art as a unified field, and the implications for current debates in art theory and political aesthetics.  

Bull started by considering the possibilities of truly and successfully navigating an art world (*shudder*) where the breadth of artists available for our indulgent eyes at manifold Biennials and galleries across numerous borders, as well as their interwoven histories, subjectivities and understandings of EVERYTHING, made for a web of knowledge limitless in its scope. This art world, he said, becomes problematic in its size, and unable to fully contain, before reasoning that a theory which made use of this reality was necessary for forward momentum into this interconnected world. 

He followed this by suggesting two courses of action, one which he disparagingly termed a LOCAL ART HISTORY which explored only those factors closest to home and which continued to indulge itself in the simplest cases of cause and effect, and another course which sought to address the infinite…

Using Franco Moretti’s treatise of 2005 Graphs, Maps, Trees as a case in point, Bull compared these paths to the distinction between comparative literature and world literature, before going on, as far as I could tell, to attempt to break (dumb) down the hierarchy of major selling and important artists in the world right now into a single static graph and a few hollow titbits removed from reality into the seedy realm of theory.  A graph, furthermore, of little value to the non-economic historian, or to the art historian plagued by a passion for the subject.

Bull seemed to decide that the opposite to LOCAL ART HISTORY was following Moretti’s lead and attempting to explore the unlimited ramifications of a truly global art history by reducing art history to a graph exploring artists instrinsic value and monetary value by way of data provided by two websites on one specific date… (the result being that Bull identified Western Artists as still more powerful in the global art market, but that changes were beginning to take place… no shit Sherlock!) And while he did address reason that a fully interactive and transitive graph would be needed to fully appreciate the changing nature of said art world, he only served to undervalue art’s beauty in my eyes.

 Having said all that, the basic point was, I feel, a valid one. How do we map a globalised world. What is the difference between art world and world art, and how do we place ourselves in the matrix. What is the value, beyond the monetary, of scribblings from Mozambique to a young man from Coventry who has studied European Modernism.

I responded in the opposite direction to Bull. I saw value in a LOCAL ART HISTORY, but not the one he proposed. I envisaged an internalized art history, one created from within, gravitating towards and around one’s self… One understanding and respectful of the near before the far, but appreciative of the possibilities provided by international communications and travel.

I saw no reason for worry, and I will continue to delve into the world at my fingertips as the first world I have… the only world I have.

The local as distinct from the global appears increasingly important to contemporary discussions of science and technology-based studies and directions of intent, so why not in the arts.

If the world is too large to map, why place one’s self anywhere other than in the known, and work out from there, tentatively, and with the utmost respect to one’s backyard…

I don’t know what this means just yet, but it feels right.

Here’s is Bucky Fuller’s dymaxion map to help us appreciate the vastness surrounding us and our insignificance, but also our equalitarian value.

Halloween

YEAH!

Aqua Tower, 430 East Waterside Drive, Chicago, IL

Isn’t she a beaut!

The perfect marriage of Chicago’s iconic cubular verticality and its placid bedfellow, Lake Michigan, has emerged courtesy of the delightfully named Studio Gang, Jeanne Gang’s Windy City based architectural practise. Interested parties are waxing lyrical about “the largest skyscraper built/designed by a woman”, whilst sniggering about the insinuations of its phallic pomposity. I care not one jot, and I’m not going to speculate about the organic undertones of the design which may or may not expose the masculin sterility of the hard-edged modernist stalwarts who stand shoulder to shoulder with this treasure.

Indeed, I repeat with concern the lovely story of Ms Gang’s decision to impress the building with irregularly spaced windows so as to make birds aware of its presence, thus discouraging them from crashing head first into her… i don’t want to make these decisions sound maternal or feminised… the building deserves more than that.

What I am interested in is her aptness in a city of right angles, and at a particular moment in history.

at a time when the verticality of power structures appears devalued even if only in the public eye (ie, the revolution doesn’t appear to be expected just yet!). At a time when falling ice shelves and underwater disturbances threaten to raise sea levels and inflict Tsunami’s on defenceless coast lines. At a time when the public conscious is increasingly aware of its own impact on the geography of our planet, and the difference a little attention to nature can make.

The waves of this building appear to ripple up and out of lake Michigan with a syncopation reminiscent of jumping in puddles, and it is in such youthfully endearing activities that I want to find enjoyment again.

Puddles by M. C. Escher

As autumn falls into place, I want to fill hours kicking dry leaves into the ether, wrapping scarves around my shoulders and the shoulders of loved ones, enjoying nature’s stripping of itself in preparedness for a new start, in the hope that society might begin to follow suit. I see the building as an accidental manifestation of a more simple appreciation of things, where concrete becomes warped wood, glass becomes a still pond, and steel the framework of a decision to look at things differently.

Where Chicago might appear in one instance the perfect vertical manifestation of the American and indeed Western push upwards and forwards with pomp and grandiose flamboyance, this Odalisque sits amongst her brethren shiveringly aware of her own immortality; heartbreakingly conscious that in her puddles can be seen the reflections of a world taller than it deserves to be.

**

Will Alsop appeared to have a similar idea when building The Public

but on reflection (geddit!!), West Bromwich might not have been the ideal place to start a metaphoric evo-revo-lution.

The cartography of Grayson Perry

Victoria Miro’s current Grayson Perry exhibition is an absolute must see. Not only for the acclaimed new work Walthamstow Tapestry - of which a detail appears below – but  also for its wider presentation of his ability, his ideas and his attitudes. I left this exhibition convinced that here is an artist worth noticing and taking notice of.

detail from Walthamstow Tapestry by Grayson Perry

Although I have long been a fan of Perry’s ceramics, and consider him one of the few truly worthy winners of the Turner Prize in recent times, this exhibition stood out for me as both exciting and important. This was all the more remarkable when considering I went in expecting not to like the work… neither the image above, nor the guardian’ write-up of the piece dampened my whistle one jot. To be blunt, the tapestry, whilst certainly a grower, is perhaps the least interesting work on show.

In the main space of the Victoria Miro gallery one finds a number of large crowd covered canvases, decorated with rich colours used subtley on neutral grounds. People and animals interweave across the canvas with no apparent canvas, as though seen from above in a barren field. Hoards of elephants dash across one, whilst the crowds unfurl banners of colour in another. Remarkably un-Perry like, these works appear Middle Eastern in origin, akin in composition to something like Indian manuscripts, such as the V&As Akbarnama by way of Where’s Wally?, and are joyous if somehow unwantonly restrained… nothing of Perry’s exuberance and flamboyance appears in them, yet in them we find the perfect mediator before confronting the Tapestry et al next door in the recently built extension above the neighbouring Parasol Unit.

Entering the room, one finds the tapestry stretching away to one’s left and thus somehow unremarkable, as was my first impression of meeting Picasso’s Guernica at Madrid’s Reine Sofia gallery. Its size and detail, however, make it only fully enjoyable up close and at length anyway, so any initial disappointment soon seeps away.

The work, whilst it is probaly fair to call it either obvious or overly brash in its cynical portrayal of modern society (brand names, cartoonish stereotypes, life thru death cycle depicted as an allegory remindful somehow of Victoria Wood’s creations), somehow strikes a note. The stereotypes are endearing, not to mention amusing, the pronounced evocations of birth, life and death are more palatable than, but remindful of the popularism of Beryl Cook, and the figures each tagged with the names of brands, divorced from their logos, become a fractured narrative of a day in the life of E17 by way of Bayeux…

detail from the Bayeux tapestry

…and I think this is the best way to approach the work. What at once might seem a corny, sentimental and juvenile use of brands as “bad”, employing the oft-stated and oft-disparaged that, like, we are all just brands man! (See Slipknot fans tattooing barcodes on themselves… “we’re all products of the system”) becomes instead a simple and indicative commentary on this same argument loaded heavily with sarcasm and irony.

idiot

The same is true of two more works in the same room which I enjoyed even more. Firstly and most particularly, the older work Print for a Politician, linked below to a zoomable reproduction courtesy of the Guardian, in which a Warhammer-like fantasy narrative occurs on a similarly role-play landscape in which small colonies/groups of people battle against one another whilst jostling for space and for power it would seem. The groups of standardised social sections ( journalists, communists, racists, catholics etc, through to more absurd groupings which I fail to recollect) appears divided and encumbered with fear or another whilst all gathered together on a small island contained within the image (but for the tabloids who, hilariously, fire rockets aimlessly from a ship removed from this microsociety!).  The labels could be contrived in anothers hands, but in Perry’s the commentary is both facetious and cutting. I was overjoyed to read that this work is, in fact, owned by the House of Commons.

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Arts/Arts_/Pictures/2006/03/31/perry_big.jpg

Another work whose title I forget makes an island of a man with Perry’s head in its apposite place, similarly delineated into groupings of conflicting parties. Humorous confrontations abound, each represented by small buildings analytical of said groups purpose. The result is a wonder to behold, and the cartographic nature of the works makes them subtley if not subconciously somehow trustworthy and informative, not to mention instructioning and inciteful.

Numerous pots enrich the exhibition, and show off Perry’s flair for juxtaposition and confrontation even within the sphere of ceramics. You will find yourself laughing heartily at his commentaries on societies both new and old.

Finally, in the upstairs space of the main gallery, a series of small floor works depicting groups of simple mundanities cobbled together, bananas, cucumbers etc if my memory serves me well, gathered inside tissue paper, and at the end of the room a wonderful pair of floor works made of splintered wood layered ontop of one another, one natural, and one painted a glowing gold only viewable from above. The simplicity is a joy to behold, and a celebration of everything playfully denigrated next door.

You never feel lectured to, but again and again, you find yourself nodding along in agreement, much like a good Charlie Brooker or David Mitchell article.