Bon hiver: A journey through a Winter Landscape

Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne

1 December 2012 - 3 February 2013

Olafur Eliasson The Forked Forest Path

The proposed theme of this exhibition was, we are told, “a journey through the winter landscape” and superficially this is evident but I cannot help but feel that time is the real subject. Bon Hiver, we are told, is a French greeting meaning “good winter” and it used on the day of the first snowfall. This, in itself, reminds me of the cyclical nature of time in nature, but I also found time recurring throughout the exhibition.
Olafur Eliasson’s excellent, and well know, The Forked Forest Path is made entirely from large sticks (or small branches) which are precariously propping each other up to form a forest in the gallery space through which visitors can walk. It looks as though it may fall over at any moment – and with the volume of visitors it was impossible not to occasionally brush up against some of the spindly twigs. The piece is as ephemeral as it is timeless: timeless in that the material from which it is made cannot be dated (and probably does not age very much either).
The forest path does indeed fork and to the left you are led into a room with a work by Joachim Koester that further evokes the notion of time through his use of antiquated machinery – a slide projector. The slides project images of a timeless landscape covered in snow, devoid of humans or any human intervention. We learn through text projected over the images that this is an expedition to the North Pole. Anecdotes give us glimpses not only of what the adventurers are up to at the time the slide was taken (resting, drinking coffee etc.) but also where we are and who we are with: “the Greenlanders refused to go any further”. I imagine that Greenland is ancient land, but then I recall the temporal nature of the North Pole itself – how it is made of ice, not rock and earth, and how it moves with the currents so that no two expeditions reach the same physical point: a flag mounted at the North Pole will simply drift away on its glacier. Is Greenland “ancient land”? It doesn’t really matter whether it is or not. The point is, the images recall ancient land – a land before humans – and yet at the same time make us think of their precious temporality as icecaps drift or melt.
Walking back through the forked forest path you arrive at a room on the right hand side. The most striking piece of work in the room is, perhaps, Mariele Neudecker’s The Sea of Ice. Neudecker has made a 3D replica of Friedrich’s painting of the same name and immersed it in a fish tank. The opaque walls of the tank (or perhaps the murky liquid that fills it) evoke mist: a mist that recalls Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. While instantly reminiscent of Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice (also called The Wreck of Hope) the opaqueness makes it somewhat difficult to get a good view. You walk around the tank peering in to get the best angle and as you do so you begin to appreciate the curious light that Neudecker has achieved and the optical illusions that you get with tanks of water – where as you turn a corner the image disappears for a second, only to reappear anew from a distinctly different angle. This reminded me of viewing a moving hologram. In this way you “enter” Friedrich’s painting, but you are able to walk around it too. Neudecker has created not only a 3D version, but also a sensory experience, in the same way that Eliasson created a sensory experience by creating a forest out of branches in the gallery space through which you walk. In a similar way, Koester created a sensory experience through his “full wall” projections and the noise of the clicking slides. The projector itself becomes part of the work and recalls expedition briefings (which might use such imagery, or such equipment). In this sense, in a way, you enter the work.
On the wall opposite The Sea of Ice hang two photographs by Kelly Richardson. In these works Richardson has taken Polaroid snapshots, scanned them and enlarged them to the point that the image breaks down. This creates something dreamlike out of something disposable something ephemeral, something fleeting? Is time also a factor in this work? By scanning the analogue prints Richardson digitises them, creating a sort of time travel: she takes a now antiquated medium and drags it into the 21^st Century. In doing so she also pixelates the image which now mimics CCTV or grainy film stills but also looks like cyanotypes (perhaps a reference to photography’s relationship with nature or to its roots?).
To the left there is another piece by Richardson, a shaky handheld film of the moon. The image is distorted, we find out from the wall text, by “vapours”. The rustling, crackling sound makes us aware of ourselves and humans are made “visible” in yet another unpopulated “landscape” in much the same manner as Koester’s slide projector. The wall text goes on to explain that the sound is of popcorn cracking on a campfire (also the source of heat and the “vapours” that distort the image as they pass by the lens).
There is one more (back)room to this exhibition but this time we encounter older artworks: paintings by artists such as Eric Ravilious (whose picture is included in the gallery publicity for this exhibition). This room failed to achieve the sensory experience felt before it and left the whole exhibition somewhat flat. If you didn’t know better you could be mistaken for thinking you had finished the exhibition and entered the permanent collection (ironically it is Eliasson’s The Forked Forest Path is owned by the Towner). Curiously, time is still evident, but not in a good way. You feel a clash of eras as you drift from a contemporary art exhibition into something older.
Kelly Richardson’s photographs were part of her Supernatural Series. Supernatural etymologically means above or beyond nature. The clash of times in Bon Hiver is augmented as you literally go above nature (above this exhibition) to Kelly Richardson’s solo show upstairs (2 February – 14 April 2013 http://www.townereastbourne.org.uk/exhibition/kelly-richardson/). Richardson’s HD films are digitally projected and incorporate animation. Sci-Fi trees made out of light appear and disappear on a lunar-esque landscape arousing the notion of the hologram felt when viewing Neudecker’s Sea of Ice. Richardson’s landscapes are hyper-real, videogame-like and yet recall timeless mythology in their subject matter (the stag and the forest for example). Through her work we imagine a world run out of nature, a world increasingly digitised and reliant on new technologies. We do not encounter the dystopia that the press release tells us to expect, but rather an uneasy and ambiguous balance between the familiar landscape and the unknown future.
Richardson’s films point to an uncertain future but in doing so also look back to the Romantic sublime of Friedrich. The uncertainty of what’s beyond the frontier, the limit of man’s endurance for extreme nature, was for the Romantic adventurer, the source of excitement and terror that the technological future holds for us today. With no new lands left to discover, cyberspace is our final frontier. Rather than replacing nature, it is technology’s future relationship with nature that is explored in Richardson’s films and with this in mind Bon Hiver also elicits questions about how we can understand a future where the once seemingly timeless and unchanging “nature” (represented by the landscape) is called into question. Will “technology” be its saviour or help facilitate its demise?

Circa 1960

Guest Projects, London
27 - 29 January 2012

What is Circa 1960? Upon entering Guest Projects space you are confronted with Mark Selby’s No Need to Shout, a top heavy structure with a large red PVC trumpet shape (reminiscent of Kapoor’s Marsyus) leaning towards you. The main structure is made from Meccano-esque steel and stands about eight feet tall. To the left there is a pile of handouts on a chair. It tells you that:

“Circa 1960 is a group of artists/ Circa 1960 is a residency/ Circa 1960 is a research project/ Circa 1960 is a physical and metaphorical meeting space/ Circa 1960 is a group show/ Circa 1960 is an exploration into failure, notions of modernity, sci-fi, design and ideals.” 

Mark Selby, No Need to Shout. Photo: Jimmy Merris. Courtesy: the Artist

Circa 1960 fits aptly with Guest Projects’ ethos: the artists are guests, invited in to create a project of which the exhibition was just one small part. Examining failed ideologies of Modernism; we must view this project as a whole, as mocking the ambition of the Modernist project. The sheer scale of ambition in the project smacks of this and it is for this reason that I will turn my attention to the satellite events that occurred during the build up to the exhibition. There are clues that the artists may not be taking this too seriously here. Events included a Danceathon by Hey Baby Chief Panda – which was a competition where the winner is the last person dancing, and (so I am reliably told) a parody performance of a Careers Centre by Jimmy Merris – where instead of delivering careers advice the performer tried to give the customer whisky, and stared them for long periods while a man named “Paul” talked about his own work. The story of the Careers Centre struck me because my wife works in the careers department of a London university. University careers centres have long since abandoned actually giving careers advice – Christ no! They might get sued. Also, more liberal teaching philosophy underpins their decision to act more like counsellors. Instead of making suggestions they ask questions like, “What do you want to do?” and “How do you think you can achieve that?” – the aim is for the individual to realise, for them selves what they need to do to achieve their aims. Very well you might think but due to cut backs even this service has been retracted and this major UK university now offers no face to face careers service to students – it’s cheaper to print such questions on a help card, or better still “develop online resources”. This got me thinking; in the context of failed ideologies the university is right up there. Governments have bent university education to conform to vocational needs; it’s all about employability. They have done this by forcing the cost of education onto the recipient. This has two effects. Firstly the recipient takes a financial risk, and is re-assured that they will be well remunerated over a lifetime as a graduate. Secondly, a covert message is sent out that higher education has no benefit except for the recipient, therefore they should pay for it – there is no benefit to society as a whole (who needs doctors, teachers, artists anyway?) so why should society pay? Additionally this makes the student arse-kiss lecturers as they worry about grades and references and how this will affect future job prospects. Saddled with a huge debt the student runs to the careers centre for re-assurance that it’ll be worth it and advice on how to achieve their goals – only to be told that they need to figure it out for themselves – there is no help (unless you want to pay for it privately of course). Anyway, most industries operate on healthy nepotism and you can always “network” by doing years of unpaid internships. In this context a drunken, selfish and unhelpful careers advisor is not a far-fetched as it may seem. The performance comments on university life and the struggles that will follow after graduation.
John Walter tackled the failure of Modernism through a performance exploring the break up of couples, using home made theatre costumes reminiscent of Picasso’s Parade which in turn dealt with the horrors of the First World War through a Dada-esque ballet – as if the only way to respond to the realisation that the Modern world of industrialisation has just collapsed into mechanised slaughter, that all that the machine promised us in terms of helping society and lessening workloads has been reversed by taking away jobs and taking away lives, the only way to respond to this is through absurdity. This reminded me of the Gaddafi quote “If the world is crazy, we will be crazy too”. Perhaps Circa 1960 isn’t just about failed Modernism in the 60s, but a response to the absurd and frightening debt ridden situation we find ourselves in today.
Karen Tang’s wall based sculptures are inspired by science fiction. A Mass of Crystalline Tissue is inspired by a JG Ballard quote both in its form and content – the content being a distorted image of the magazine cover in which the quote first appeared. The work goes one step further by crystals set into resin to make the work a literal interpretation of the quote as well as a meditation on the Ballard story. This piece is typical of Tang’s sculptures in this show. Decision Cave, however, is visually different to the rest of her work. For a start it looks much more organic, evoking the craftsmanship of tribal communities and shamanistic practices that you could associate with such an object. Decision Cave differs from the other works in that it could be an actual object from a sci-fi story whereas the other sculptures appear more as interpretations. At the centre of Decision Cave is a toy called a Magic Eight Ball which you use to answer questions. Its answers can be enigmatic, like the oracle at Delphi. When I visited the show the words of wisdom were “Outlook so so”. I don’t know if this changed throughout the show.

Corinne Felgate, 'The Lady's Not for Turning'
Photo: Jimmy Merris. Courtesy: the Artist.

Handbags play a surprising role in the show. Adrian Lee’s Beuys/Vuitton Remade is a Louis Vuitton handbag stuffed with fat and with felt patched on the outside. I’m not aware of the original Beuys piece but assume that it did exist as with Portrait of the Artist as Tretchikoff’s Blue Lady Lee draws our attention to the reproducible. It is said that the Blue Lady (as confusingly known as The Green Girl and the Chinese Girl) has been reproduced more widely than the Mona Lisa. It also revokes the old high-art low-art debate especially when artists in the 1990s started to cite him as a precursor to their ironic postmodern style. Perhaps it is this play on “commodity” that points us towards the other handbag in the show, which makes up part of Corinne Felgate’s The Lady’s Not For Turning, a bewildering series of sandpaper plinths with objects placed on them in a manner not dissimilar to designer shop window displays, but this time the handbag is made of clear resin encasing various types of salami with a chicken foot, adorned with nail polish, perched on top. Another work by Felgate, Hair Brush, seems to be a straightforward joke – the bristles of the brush as replaced with the artist’s childhood hair. But then you are confronted with Exponential Growth, a chair entirely covered in hair – “cousin It” style, which is funny, until you read the materials “Brazilian Human Hair and Wood”, then it becomes disturbing. Where did she get so much Brazilian hair? Probably from a Brazilian hairdressers, but you begin to wonder if it’s available online – anything can be a commodity now we have the Internet. Perhaps the display of The Lady’s Not For Turning is intended to refer to commodities and in the context of Circa 1960 we are reminded of the end of rationing and the rise of luxury goods. Earlier work such as Austerity Measures (a Chanel handbag hand made from a paper bag with gold leaf, marker pen and gaffa tape) appears to confirm the link.
I made a visit to the project space on the 12^th January and met three of the artists. Alastair Levy has a practice rooted in 60s Minimalism. He feels that the last hundred years has freed people to work in any way they want in a kind of pick and mix culture, taking from previous styles. In his case Minimalism and Conceptualism are raided. Levy has a series of differing works in the space. A painting about the everyday was made by stretching an old tablecloth over a frame. The tablecloth has been used as a shower curtain for sometime and had recorded the marks of a daily activity in the form of stains. A C.D. perched on a windowsill was another artwork. It was exactly half filled with data. This links with another work Box Set (featured in the exhibition) where all the paints from a Daley Rowley box set were mixed together to make a bistre-brown which he used to cover a canvas. Both works are about middle points. But Levy also had an ashtray on the floor with a half smoked cigarette made from grass taken from the pitch at White Hart Lane, and in other works he stages reconstructions of EBay photographs. For Levy failed modernism means he can do what he wants.
Luke Ottridge was half way through his residency when we met. His installation seems to me to be very much in the spirit of mocking Modernism’s grandeur and I was pleased to see Event Horizon make the exhibition. The centrepiece of the installation is a copy of a plaster bone from Texas, which in turn was a copy of a destroyed bone from about 100 years ago. There is a creationist myth attached to the story which supposes that this is evidence that angels walked the earth. There is also doubt as to whether the original bone ever existed. The bone sits on a circular “black hole” and is surrounded by the only 3D shapes which are symmetrical. These refer to Platonic ideals and their copies (referring back to the bone as a copy). Also around the whole are a series of TV monitors depicting a blind man walking or stumbling about. Ottridge speaks about the circular composition as a tool to echo religious cults and in turn he sees the failure of the promises made by utopian 1950s gurus as unfulfilled; coming to an end with the Charles Manson murders.
The third artist I met was Mark Selby, who was yet to undertake his week-long residency. The only outcomes of his that I saw were those in the exhibition. Where the unlikely balance of No Need to Shout confronts and has a comic feel to it (like Hong Kong Fuey jumping out of a filing cabinet) Selby’s other work, Better Half, is different. Better Half is a tidy piece of conceptual sculpture in the form of a chair (no hair on this one), half made in plywood and half Perspex. Selby challenges us to judge which is the better half. Both halves are made with the industrial precision of a Donald Judd so there are no clues in the making to give away Selby’s own position. The naturalistic wood could be seen as nature re-capturing the (failed) Modernist chair, like ivy growing over a house. Or the Perspex could be seen as a triumphant prosthetic enhancing the wooden structure, like a cyborg. Better Half works well as a seat of contemplation in the exhibition, encouraging us to reflect on all of the works both individually and as a collective.