Art & Photography

Friday, 6 February 2015

Postcard from Berlin, 1. (Inc. East Side Gallery and the Jewish Museum)

The Fernsehturm and Marienkirche, Alexanderplatz

Day one, in Berlin (with Fine Art students and staff* from the University of Gloucestershire) began with a walk through the old Jewish areas of Mitte to see Karl Biedermann's 1996 bronze sculpture, Der verlassene Raum (The Deserted Room) in Koppenplatz. The slightly oversized table and chairs (one overturned), ringed by a poem by Nelly Sachs is a memorial to the families who fled their homes as the Nazis attacked during Kristallnacht (9-10 November 1938).

Nearby, in Grosse Hamburger Strasse, site of the Jewish Cemetery, is The Missing House by Christian Boltanski. A gap in the houses was created by allied bombing on 3 February 1945. Boltanski has mounted 12 plaques onto the facing walls of the surviving buildings on either side of the gap showing the names, occupations and dates of residency of the people who had lived in the bombed apartments.

Amongst the cobbles of Grosse Hamburger Strasse (and many other streets in Berlin and other cities) are rather wonderful 'Stolpersteine' ('stumbling blocks') - the work of Gunther Denmig. These modest, brass-faced, cobble-stone sized, concrete blocks memorialize individual victims of the Nazis at the places where they lived. In the picture, below, for example, the top right Stolperstein reads "Here lived Wolf Segal, born 1873, deported 1943, murdered in Auschwitz."

Our walk took us to Hackescher Markt from where we caught an S-Bahn to Ostbahnhof which is a short walk from the East Side Gallery, the spectacularly painted 1.3km long remnant of the Berlin Wall.

A ride on the U-Bahn from Schlesisches Tor, and a short walk, led us to the Jewish Museum. Daniel Liebskind's extraordinary extension to the museum was completed in 1999. Liebskind's building appears to be detached from the older buiding to which it is an extension; it also has no visible entrance. Visitors must enter through the old building and via an underground passage - a metaphor for the difficulty of entering into the troubled history represented in the museum. The extension is in the form of a zig-zag - apparently a "dislocated Star of David... that is visible only from the air" (see Jacobson). However, I found that I had little sense of the shape of the building from inside it.

The most dramatic and affecting features are the 'Holocaust Tower' and the installation Fallen Leaves in the 'Memory Void'. You enter the Holocaust Tower through a heavy door and find yourself in a bare concrete space, some 79 feet high, lit only by a narrow window slit; it is cold and dark; the walls converge into a narrow space into which visitors disappear. It is very powerful.
Empty spaces, or Voids, are built into the museum. One of these, the Memory Void, contains an installation called Shalekhet (Fallen Leaves) by Menashe Kadishman: it comprises 10,000 faces punched into steel plates covering the floor, many layers deep. Visitors walk across the uneven surface of faces causing the steel plates to clang. Also very powerful.

A short distance from the Jewish Museum on Lindenstrasse is Galerienhaus a building housing 11 contemporary art galleries. Notable amongst the exhibitions showing at the time of our visit were Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart (1899-1962) at Galerie Berinson and a group exhibition, Gathered Fates at Galerie Nordenhake. This latter show, curated by Ignasi Aballi, took its theme from a video by Sofia Hultén, Altered Fates, which is a delightful exercise in pointlessness - we watch the artist select objects or materials from a skip, alter them, and throw them back into the skip.

Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, Composition No.41, 1927

Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, Untitled, c1924

Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, Composition No.75, 1933

Sofia Hultén, Altered Fates, 2013

Installation view of Gathered Fates at Galerie Nordenhake

Ceal Floyer, Garbage Bag, 1996

Click on images to enlarge.
*Special thanks to Jack and Abbie for organising the trip.

Sunday, 25 January 2015

Morris & Warhol - Modern Art Oxford

Andy Warhol and William Morris

Love Is Enough: William Morris & Andy Warhol, curated by Jeremy Deller is at Modern Art Oxford until 8 March 2015.
I love Andy Warhol (see below); I love William Morris; I am also a bit of a fan of Jeremy Deller (see below). So I was pretty excited by the prospect of this exhibition. (With another of my heroes, William Blake, the subject of an exhibition at the Ashmolean (see below) a visit to Oxford was irresistable.)
Broadly, the premise for this suprising pairing of artists is that they both employed printmaking processes in collaborative factory production systems as a means to extend and distribute their art; they both employed repetition as a design principle; they both used flower imagery and made pictures of cultural heroes and myths; the show even tries to argue that Warhol's politics had some affinity with Morris' socialism.
However, I don't think it works: there are a few terrific pieces in the exhibition, but the juxtapositions are, too often, painful clashes rather than complementary contrasts. Two of Warhol's Electric Chair screenprints on a background of Morris' densely patterned wall paper does neither artist a favour. Generally, I think that Warhol is the loser in this contest: Morris' dense, highly crafted designs make Warhol's casual elegance look lightweight and thin. But it's an unfair contest - the earnest sincerity and idealism of Morris' nostalgic vision sits awkwardly with Warhol's ironic detachment. The fact that they both made wallpaper isn't enought to make them brothers in art. (In fact Morris and William Blake would make a much more sympathetic pairing; the Blake show, incidentally, is excellent.)

Read reviews by Waldemar Januszczak, Richard Dorment (he hated it!) and Farah Nayeri. Click on images to enlarge.

William Morris, printed fabric design: Kennet, 1883

William Morris, wall paper design: Acanthus, 1879

William Morris, wall paper: Acanthus, 1879

William Morris, 'Kelmscott Chaucer', 1896

William Morris, bound pamphlet: How I Became a Socialist, 1896

Andy Warhol, Elizabeth Taylor, 1967

Andy Warhol, Electric Chair, 1971

Andy Warhol, Flowers, 1970

Andy Warhol, Cow wallpaper, 1971

Love is Enough... installation featuring Andy Warhol, Marilyn Tapestry, 1968 and photograph of Shirley Temple (1941) from Warhol's collection, on wallpaper by William Morris

Love is Enough... installation

Thursday, 15 January 2015

Adventures of the Black Square - Whitechapel Gallery

Peter Halley, Auto Zone, 1992

Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915–2015 is at Whitechapel Gallery until 6 April 2015.
Last year Tate Modern presented a fascinating show of the work of Kazimir Malevich, creator of the revolutionary Black Square in 1915 (see below). Now Whitechapel Gallery is showing an ambitious exploration of the story of abstraction as it evolved through the following 100 years in the work of some 100 artists.
The exhibition follows 4 themes: Utopia, Architectonics, Communication, and the Everyday and charts the life of geometric abstraction through painting, sculpture, photography, graphic design and textiles, from Russia to the USA, from Europe to Asia and Latin America, from revolutionary politics to corporate capitalism, from the spiritual to the material. It promises to be a rich and fascinating story. (I was fascinated to learn from Adrian Searle's review that Amalia Pica's Memorial for intersections #2 (see image, below) refers to the banning of the use of Venn Diagrams in primary schools in Argentina in the 1970s - on the grounds that they were believed to encourage subversive thought!?)
Read reviews by Adrian Searle, Laura Cumming, Waldemar Januszczak, Jackie Wullschlager, J J Charlesworth, Louisa Buck and Charley Peters and an article by Frances Spalding. See also, below, for information about the complementary exhibition: David Batchelor: Monochrome Archive, 1997-2015.