Thursday 28th October was spent at Tate Britain and the Victoria and Albert museum.
My visit was primarily to see the Turner Prize nominations for this year and a day later, I have already forgotten who they are (so as far as I am concerned, not a memorable lot!). Four artists are nominated each year, this year's Turner Prize nominations are:
Dexter Dalwood
Angela de la Cruz
Susan Philipsz
The Otolith Group
Dalwood's painting is flat, but yet intriguing: it's very vivid and uses very different styles thrown together. Cubism, still life, collage like imagery: for my money, he is a very strong contender.
De la Cruz's work is also painting but she has detached the canvases from the frames and they are just 'hanging' on the wall, totally disembodied and divorced from their original purpose: sorry, not moved by it one little bit.
Susan Philipsz's voice is her way of expressing herself for this nomination: no visual art but three big black speakers in a white room. From them emanate the artist's voice and it's very hypnotising, extremely relaxing. Maybe she is trying to blur the boundaries between visual art and music but for me, this is just not enough. Even with her explanation of the work: 'uniquely evocative sound installations that play upon and extend the poetics of specific, often out-of-the-way spaces', I am not convinced!
The Otolith Group founded in 2002 by Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar, is showing an audio visual installation of a number of documentaries on various TV screens simultaneously playing in a dark room. It's all very confusing (which I suppose is the point being made as the group is questioning the nature of documentary history) but there again, I fail to be taken in by the work.
The winner will be announced at Tate Britain on 6 December 2010, so I will just have to wait and see if Dalwood is a winner!
OK, to some much more interesting stuff now:
Ms Whiteread is better known for her 3d work, looking at interior spaces.
One of her more monumental sculptures was her concrete cast of the interior of a nineteenth-century terraced house in the the East End of London made in 1993/94 which only survived a few months before the council destroyed it. She has also exhibited in the turbine hall at Tate Modern in 2006 and I remember seeing her pretty memorable installation 'Embankment' (made of many white boxes)
But this current exhibition is really special because it shows all her drawings, which is not what I know best in her work. As I am working on graph paper I was really moved to see that, she too uses this way of working out her 3d ideas. But what is interesting is that whichever colour the graph paper is (orange, red or green) she will use a similar tone of ink for her drawings and then put resin on the solid part of the object she is trying to depict. Her drawings are working drawings so show all the mistakes and re touchings and don't pretend to be anything else than plans for 3d works and seem very intimate.
I particularly liked the photos stuck together and simply drawn onto with masking fluid to give an idea of the finished product, such as her work for he fourth plinth in Trafalgar square.
The exhibition concludes with a number of vitrines showing Whiteread's collection of objects: from sticks of wood in the shape of guns, to coral as well as glass and small casts of light switches.
A MUST SEE!!
Going through the various galleries within the building, you can't but fail to notice Fiona Banner's 'Harrier and Jaguar' work in the Duveen Galleries: two enormous planes totally out of context and cleansed of all their original paintwork. Banner has always been fascinated by fighter planes and she says that she remembers as a little girl seeing them over the welsh mountains: 'At the time Harrier jump jets were at the cutting edge of technology but to me they were like dinosaurs, prehistoric, from a time before words'. She has totally transformed them from their original purpose: now they have become helplessly trapped into this space: the Harrier suspended like a trapped bird and the Jaguar turned upside down on the ground, its polished surface acting like a mirror, beautifully useless.
I finished my visit of Tate Britain with the Eadweard Muybridge exhibition, and what a visual feast that was. Though I am not a photographer, this was very informative and his photography is very much iconic and well known through images of galloping horses. He was an innovator and his studies were the foundation of cinematography.
This show is full of prints of animals and people in motion as well a landscapes, mostly as albumen prints (process dominant between 1856 and 1885 where paper is coated with salted egg white to bind the light sensitive chemicals on its surface).
There is also a vast number of stereographs: two nearly identical photographs which, when viewed through a special viewer acquire a third dimension.
What fascinated me most was his constant research into trying to attain the illusion of movement thus jumping from photography into the first moving pictures done through his Zooptaxicope (a modified slide projector).
.Muybridge was also very good at self promoting and never missed the opportunity to be interviewed by local newspapers as well as giving lectures on his inventions.
This is another MUST SEE for any art and photography student!!
To conclude, I braved the busy half term underground to go to the V&A and see another photography exhibition: 'Shadow Catchers'.
This time, a camera-less collection of works by five international artists:
Floris Neusüss
Pierre Cordier
Susan Dergres
Garry Fabian
Adamd Fuss
This was a very busy show so I will go and see again at a quieter time: it finishes in February 2011 so plenty of time yet. The exhibits are just mesmerising and I have just spent hours swatting on all the techniques and artists.
I have been following Susan Dergres's work for years now so was not disappointed to see some of her very iconic work 'Under The Moon' series involved working with photographs of the moon and combining these with water and branch patterns exposed to sound vibrations. But I really like her 'Chladni figure', made with iron filings and just can't wait to try this out for myself...
As usual, no photos of the exhibition allowed so follow the links above to discover this marvellous show!!!
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