Highlights from A Few Dangerous Days in the Yorkshire
Sculpture Triangle: Day 1.
Tired of the silliness of Turnitin, and dogmatic beliefs
about referencing, I’ve taken a break from the bit of academic
institutionalism I’m tied to for a little money in my retirement and am back in
Yorkshire and tonight sitting in a Leeds hotel. Here are the highlights for
today, where we stuck to transitory exhibitions because of a ‘man-flu’ (bad
cold) I’m nursing.
Yorkshire Sculpture
Park
I thought at first of describing the 3 exhibitions today,
but I think it is better to pick out moments. In the Bothy Gallery, 3 new
artists (Tom Lovelace, Miriam Austin and Sam Belinfante) explored perception of
what we call ‘nature’ and the surprising discoveries within it of artifice and
imposed human (and sometimes ‘inhuman’) orders. My attention was called to a
25-minute HD video installation of a rehearsal of a rehearsal – the Mechanicals
from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The
aim is to explore the sensory confusions in the language of the mechanicals in
a way that takes as more than a joke, but sensory overload was certainly the
order of the day – not least in the play with water as theme in all 3 artists,
all exploiting the ‘scenes’ from the Sculpture park itself.
However, to the main exhibition: Alfredo Jaar. At the portal of this exhibition us ‘The Garden of
Good and Evil’ and we approached it from its non-explicated end, that away from
the Gallery entrance and thus had no props to our perception of it in the form
of explanatory and context-giving notice boards. Aisles of living trees in pots
ordered but taking no notice of their ordering in their invasion of the spaces
that separate them, you would encounter large steel & concrete structures
in the form of enclosed and semi-enclosed boxes and bars – the most naked being
small prison cells but all foreboding of unnatural constriction – or is ‘evil’
an abomination of nature or a function of it. One we ignore at peril.
Jaar’s work, whether looking at Chile or Vietnam disturbs
because it tests the level of our tolerance of seeing. Many of his most telling
photographs and their multi-modal transformations within large imposing and
threatening installations, where images emerge from the ambient darkness are of
people looking at horrors and reacting, that we, as viewers, cannot see. And
then there is the ‘Sound of Silence’. Approached via a wall of unbearably
bright light, you go beyond that wall to find behind the box that bears it the
entrance to a totally enclosed ‘cinema’. Here the story of ‘Kevin, Kevin Carter’
is told on slides mainly of one lines, sometimes one word of a story, flashed
so that they gain he intensity of a poem and at its centre a photograph of a
vulture and a child and at its cruel end the play of ethical issues that mount
into torture and implicate all artists as well as commentators about the
responsibilities which ‘observation’ puts us under. No spoilers here – they matter.
‘A Hundred Times Nguyen’ has a similar theme – in a huge gallery
sets of 4 different frontal shots of a single Vietnamese refugee (the same 4 in
each hanging) are toured until at the end we are confronted by the variations
of order of the shots in the pictures. But the effect is not in seeing this but
in the ease with which we do not see these differences – how Nguyen is
obliterated in multiplicity, in refugee status where such is a matter of huge
numbers. In films, Jaar talks about what the aesthetic is and what it hides but
also how resistance to it may be as morally futile as remembering it is not
self-sufficient. To use a cliché – an art for our time.
Then to:
HEPWORTH GALLERY WAKEFIELD
The main exhibition was a retrospective of Alina Szapocznikow’s sculptural work and preparatory
drawings. Let’s be honest. I had not heard of this artist but what a rich and
fully engaged career is opened up here, full of searing honesty and the necessary
obsession that creates art. Szapocznikow’s early death and its expectation
became for her a means of deepening her concerns with boundary-crossing between
boundaries, of flesh and machine, human-animal, female-male such that she began
to explore the buzzword of all art – development – in terms of the pressing
living growth of cancerous tumours alongside other developments. Taking casts
of her body still, she made that and the relationship to other bodies – notably
her beautiful son, Pyotr – her theme and object. Pyotr naked and lieing at an
angle, exposed and dead to sight, bears a large phallic growth that resembles a
tumour. The exploration of sex and gender then remains painfully close to her concern
with the Gothic monster – that thing of horrible parts that insists on
wholeness.
And those apparitions are in the early work too. I was
pleased to find that Griselda Pollock has a book on this. I purchased it.
So back in Leeds and surprised by how it has changed today’s
Leeds Art Gallery visit promises the artists which were so ignored today,
Hepworth but especially Henry Moore of the Henry Moore Institute. At last we
might be beyond seeing Moore as the old reactionary of art: Szapocznikow’s debt
to him was clearly enormous, although her thought and feeling perhaps outgrew
him.
By the way, I did take the chance to see Henry Moore’s
mining drawings again in the Hepworth. Tom McGuinness is right though. They do
not live as pictures in a mine but merely depict it. Food for thought.
All the best
Steve
