an atrium in the desert

Paul Klee making visible (making im-material)
On at the Tate Modern, London until 9th March 2014

1. 
Hotel rooms. lego blocks 
by a lake. atrium in the desert
at the top of the green fields
the Kasbah folding up into the size of a postage stamp

through a letter box. 
trailing umbilical cord
hushed flaps sail. I can see it all. 

2. traces

at the museum Neue Kunst Hans Goltz
a clockwork mechanism counts down
the silent fishing rod hook beneath the lake
pendulum still, rotations still
tides round the hot lazy sun. 

3. 
tattoos peeling off the sheets
scrolls pressed and dried
toner unfixed
I press through the sheets 
and oil on my palms. 

substance - glass - scales 
shield and reflect 
but the gills let the right ones in

4. 
In the aerodrome hotel a telescope landing strip

the city flattens out. 

5.  etre 
ruined architraves
ancient futures in fish eye memories
the memory of bulbs, from inside out
slicing through the onion epidermis

sandstone's memory, an ocean mountain

this is a concentration game
like a computer game
pinball. architect. dot matrix
woven tear garden

6. 
The cloth makers cottages along Claygate. Three children run to sunday school or out onto the wash. The light curves drawn out onto the open fields. The land here is beneath sea level and so water flows downhill towards the centre. The birds know this and nest. The alphabet's visible root structures. It's the catastrophe of a dream. It's a dot on the map. 

Gerhard Richter: Portraits

Gerhard Richter: Portraits
National Gallery, London
27 February - 31st May 2009

Razor sharp focus. It’s a prerequisite of the photography industry. The images that surround us offer the eye the illusion of every detail. For this reason viewing Gerhard Richter’s Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery challenges the eye.

The hallmark of Richter’s portraits are paintings that subordinate the photographic image for very different ends. The canvases offer the shapes of figures which on closer inspection break up into flat layers of paint. Richter’s most striking technique, which is in evidence throughout this retrospective, is to rake a brush across the damp canvas smudging the tones together. The result gives an appearance of automatism to his images; As if they had been produced by a period photocopier or printer. These surfaces are Richter’s tool to inhibit the viewer’s attempt at interpretation. From a photograph we expect a copy of reality. However, here the viewer is required to consider a number of visual contradictions: paintings that appear to be photos, figures that remain illusive, canvases that have the appearance of mass produced objects.

The exhibition contains further illuminating contrasts in Richter’s work. The atrium of the gallery is filled with Richter’s monumental 48 Portraits a work which dryly offers us a canon of great white males looking down on the viewer. Take the elevator to the upper galleries and you rise up through the ranks. However, the prevalent subject matter here is not the iconic image but the family portrait. This is an object that he describes as a modern ‘devotional picture.’ With these images Richter offers the viewer a chance to glimpse into personal relationships while emphasizing their conceal realities. Richter portrays his daughters in a way that both captures personality and side steps it by hiding the subject’s face of using an unusual angle. In a small self-portrait Richter appears to be emerging from deep inside the picture. Coming into focus, but looking away from the camera as if to resist its gaze.

The final surprise is Richter’s installation of a mirror in the gallery as the exhibition’s final work. Richter compares the mirror to one of his paintings, suggesting that it offers a semblance of the thing without showing us the object itself. Seeing oneself staring into the mirror with the traffic of the gallery behind offers exactly this experience. It reminds me of Velasquez’s Las Meninas; suddenly we’re

Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard.

Gerhard Richter 4900 Colours: Version II, 2007
Enamel paint on Aludibond
49 Panels, each 97 × 97 cm
La Collection de la Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création
© 2008 Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter:

4900 Colours: Version II

Serpentine Gallery, London

23^rd September – 16^th November 2008

German painter and photographer Richter is exhibiting 49 paintings at the Serpentine which are composed of hundreds of blocks of flat colour. They were composed by a computer programme which calculated created an entirely chance configuration of tones. The gallery note informs us that a dice was then rolled by Richter to choose the orientation and positioning of the works in the gallery.

Standing in the central space of the Serpentine the blocks of colour give me the sense of being in a nursery. The statistical operations they represent lead me back to thinking about the power of number crunching data to rip huge wormholes in national economies when put into the hands of investment bankers. It also reminds me of a title: ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard.’

Richter’s dice operation makes me think about Stéphane Mallarmé rich and strange poem. I don’t pretend to understand it but I looked it up this evening and was stunned again by its beauty. It's criminal to try and typeset it or translate extracts out of context so here are a few pages from the original French booklet:

A THROW OF THE DICE



NEVER

even when cast in the eternal circumstance

of a shipwreck's depth

You can see the full image of the book here:

http://www.my-os.net/blog/index.php?Graphisme/2006/11

The full text in French and English here:

http://www.tonykline.co.uk/

Summer Lightnings

video stills, Summer Lightnings, 2004, (c) Victor Alimpiev
All images taken from http://www.ekaterina-foundation.ru/eng

Encounters: Victor Alimpiev
Modern Art Oxford
15th June - 31st August 2008

Whose is this Exhalation? The title suggests a whodunit. A group of eight performers bunch together before an evacuated space. They sing: an improvised series of ascending chords. Yet one of the group remains silent, holding their breath and resisting, until their body propels them into a desperate life assuring exhalation. Each phrase of the music climaxes with this release. We watch the group comfort the sufferer whose face moves from agony back to composure. This member of the group will now join the seven singers and another member will gather their reserves to deprive themselves of air. The delicate combination care and suffering within the situation that make the work utterly compelling.

Summer Lightnings takes me back to the class activity of creating a rainstorm by scraping, scratching and knocking on school desks. Here we see a young class performing this same communal effect before the video cuts to the lateral bursts of lightening across cloud burdened skies.

Together the two videos show Alimpiev working with a diverse and intriguing vocabulary consisting of ideas of community, abstract sound, silence, and sinister or powerful natural forces.

I am curious by the idea of silence in both video works. Summer Lightning offers us an audible event that we perceive as silent. We know the violent crack of lightening but disassociate it to the name thunder. Effectively we silence the lightening.

In Whose is this exhalation? Although we are listening to the singers ascending octaves they emerge as a cruel taunt to the silence that forms the vertebrae of each phrase. We watch and listen for silence amongst the sound. Silence is more verbally potent than the prattle of sound in both pieces: it measures and orders the other forces at play.

---
For a short clip of Summer Lightnings go to http://www.videoartworld.com/beta/video_59.html




Video Stills, Whose is this exhalation? , 2008, (c) Victor Alimpiev

Cy Twombly

Images: Cy Twombly
Text: Cy Twombly with errors, emendations, inclusions, and collaging by David Foster

Cy Twombly , Ferragosto V 1961

*

Please remain behind the line. cross the line. line of trees. line drawn up.
letters wake, shake out the sleep begin to resemble

*

Ferragosto paintings

touching flesh
body tastes
water interludes
U U U days age
131415

globes
fruit juices
wanton sky
feria lights
ache
crusted

hardly a
noun all
summer
touching
big sex
huge cunt
fruits
almost waking
lift my head

Cy Twombly, (Untitled) Bolsena 1961

Bolsena Series

cloud 9. sun. bulb. 335. 3 1/2. 1 67. 144. 17 ½ . 2. by 2 by 3. number II. CT. 67. 2. 3. 7 ½ . 92. void (3) (3) w. w. w. bulb. sum.

38. 2 ½ . 4. just. 1 ½ . 7 – 11. 3 ½ . brushing. orbits. 124. 200. 126 – 700. 180.214. overlay. clearing 14 O E. 12662870. error 0 3 x.

sssssssswch. ssssssssssswch. 2/8. 2 over 1 2 2 stage 2 4. 1964. raise vertical. N028. ½ . 3 4 2. 4 < 4/5. 1801. 224. 14x20. 18x20 lay. stem and out

*

Veil Paintings

shuttle. rails. convey.

sheets along the plain

one moment also proceeds

conveyance purring trail. chalk grates

mail pouring. commute

inside the falling veil.

*

Untitled 1971

roomful and not even . so

rain . rain from the east

rain through the day. rain at dusk.

Cy Twombly, The Wilder Shores of Love 1985

Shores

grid bubbles sur-wake
as if glass mirrors. the surface of the
scatter. In the hall. rain leaks
pigment. braile. sur-wake. drowns
breathing. tow gondolas through the. rake sifting
channel dredge up. notes scatter. window
blows open.

Cy Twombly, Quattro Stagioni: Primavera 1993-5

Quattro Stagioni

1. And you who thought of happiness fleeing would feel the
illumination that almost overwhelms and will.
motes suture happiness pulling little falls

2. goodbye cumulus. high on light and white youth. forever touching it melts and faints. goodbye Catullus. you made me realise.

3. Autumn sweet breads. passenger, you’re Priam B.S.E.E.M.S you beetroot fog.
and yet in the south and exceeding moon like

*
Cy Twombly, Cycles and Seasons
At the Tate Modern , London
19th June - 14th September, 2008
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/

Here’s an introduction to Twombly’s work
http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue13/cytwombly.htm

Bucharest Biennale: In-Between Cities

Sabine Réthoré, Lovely Romania, 2008, color print, 135x135 cm. Courtesy the artist. A map of Romania turned on an East - West axis.

Bucharest Biennale

Various venues
23rd May - 21st June 2008
www.bucharestbiennale.org
Information Point: Sos. Nicolae Titulescu nr. 1 (Piata Victoriei)

Entering the Unibank Pavilion at the Bucharest Bienniale I am greeted not by the smooth interior of a commercial gallery space but by a series of gutted rooms. Walls are stripped to bare brick work and electricity cords hang down from the ceiling. The space has just been given to the biennale organisation group, a signal that Bucharest is beginning to emerge as a commercial location for art. Speaking to Ravzan Ion, Biennale director, I comment that I like the sense that this gallery is an in-between space. He responds: ‘It’s an in-between city.’

It is suitable then that the subject of the Biennale should be mapping and cartography. A theme devised by the Biennale curators Jan Erik – Ludström and Johan Sjöström. It’s a theme made very real to me as foreigner who has not visited Bucharest before. Like any tourist I am consistently gazing at walls to look non-existent street signs, trying to figure out the tangle of bus routes or looking for conference rooms that doormen and receptionists have no knowledge of. It’s impossible to create a map of an in-between space; the map will almost immediately be outdated.

Books, posters, documents, websites all find a place in the materials on exhibition across the city. This both adds variety and suggests that curation was dictated by what was available.

My impression is that the work roughly divides into artists either approaching mapping in a personal, speculative manner or in a research led 'objective' approach. For the first group there are maps in rugs, maps made from food or distortions and reshaping of maps. Lukas Einsele’s extensive One Step Beyond project would be a good example of the second approach.

In One Step Beyond Einsele has documented the experiences of civilian victims of landmines in a number of war torn countries. Photographs and testimonies of victims are placed next to personal maps that eloquently describe the arbitrary geography of their tragedies. Lukas has also created his own map of Angolan capital Luanda from his memories. He described the map as full of mistakes where he had forgotten details. The work combines to make an engaging illustration of the fallibility of mapping in a location where uncertainty is always there in the ground beneath one’s feet.

Lukas Einsele, One Step Beyond, texts images and multimedia formats 2005. Courtesy of the artist. An illustration by 12 year old Angolan landmine victim Rebecca Mujinga. The picture illustrates where she stood on a VS50 anti-personnel mine.

The Biennale director Razvan Ion tells me that the Unibank gallery will endeavour to be a research led space, commenting that the people of Bucharest need to be involved in the art to be exhibited in the gallery. The scene in the city is clearly at a stage where it needs to build an audience and develop debate. It will be interesting to see if the city and its artists can use the generic moment and the weight of a troubled history to produce engaging work and new propositions.

Links:
Lukas Einsele: One step Beyond, The Mine Revisited