Blackpaint 478 – Just a Quick One

Slate Projects; Demimonde at 17 Thurloe Place, opposite V&A

Great exhibition in a derelict house (once Margot Fonteyn’s); the paintings and sculptures hang and lurk amongst bare plaster and boards, baths, sinks and toilets, rickety staircases and holes in the walls.  There are abominable snowmen, lifesize figures in some lead- like material with heads encased in Monopoly boards and more conventional painting, examples below.  I like the big ones by James Collins and the slightly Chantal Joffe-ish one below (didn’t get the artist’s name).  It’s only on until the 18th January and it’s free, so must be seen.  The venue is unheated, so gloves and woolly hat required.

James Collins

 

Demimonde, ??? is this your picture??? 

Adventures of the Black Square, Whitechapel Gallery

I was lucky enough to get a ticket to the private view for this survey of geometric abstraction 1915 – present and so was able to see the works in the context of their natural Fellini-esque audience.  Several retro figures who looked to have arrived from the set of la Dolce Vita, with accents to boot.  Favourites as follows:

Clay Ketter

The wall cracks are photographic, not actual.  Like the last standing wall of a demolished house, with the “ghosts ” of rooms, doors, joists left sketched on it.

Sophie Tauber-Arp

Love that blue – it’s a tapestry, by the way.

Ivan Kliun

Associate of Malevich, obviously.

Jenny Holzer

A touch of Oiticica (who is also here).

Liu Wei

Like a gigantic barcode, in red and turquoise.

Loads of delicious stuff, and assistants patrolling about wearing giant circular and triangular mirrors.  Famous names: Oroszco, Palermo, Alys, el Lissitsky,  Trockel, Pape, Clark, Moholy -Nagy, Malevich (of course) and plenty of others.  Now, what is needed is a parallel exhibition of expressionist abstraction.

The Poetry of John Cooper Clarke – Ten Years in an Open Necked Shirt

It’s up there with Ginsburg, Auden and Plath.  Although Cooper Clarke lacks the unique perspective on nature of  Ted Hughes or the erudition (and casual anti-semitism) of Eliot, he has his own kingdom of the urban back-street:

The fucking pies are fucking old

the fucking chips are fucking cold

the fucking beer is fucking flat

the fucking flats have fucking rats

the fucking clocks are fucking wrong

the fucking days are fucking long

it fucking  gets you fucking down

evidently chicken town

With beautiful illustrations by Steve Maguire, Vintage pbk, £7.99.

Three liquitex on card life drawings to finish:

 

Blackpaint

15.01.15

 

Blackpaint 408 – Bilbao; Picasso’s Leeks, Urs Fischer’s Tongue

 Guggenheim Bilbao

If you’re in northern Spain, brave the giant Scalextrix set around Bilbao and visit Gehry’s Guggenheim.  Even if the exhibitions are bad – not often – the building is always worth another visit.

At the moment, there is an exhibition about France in WW2.  It’s a little contrived, cobbled together, and actually runs from 1938 (surrealists, Spanish war aftermath) to 1947.  It includes pictures and cartoons by several artists (Charlotte Saloman, Felix Nussbaum) who died in Auschwitz and other camps; art done in hiding or on the run; art done in exile;  “official” art, i.e. acceptable to Vichy and/or the Germans (including Dufy with a giant blue panorama, like a Festival of Britain poster, and a Villon, rather like a Colquhoun/MacBryde figure); there is even a Picasso room, with some great studio photos by Brassai and one terrific painting in watery blue, “Studio with skull and Leeks”.

Most of the art, as always in wartime, was realist, symbolist or tragic/heroic – crucifixions, barbed wire, agonised, objectified suffering, calls to arms, etc.  Cartoons and collages  along Grosz and Heartfield lines from Joseph Steib; for some reason, a stupendous nude in the bath from Bonnard that I last saw a couple of years ago in the Pompidou, surely – that one with the walls that look like Klimt.

Also a couple of beautiful, colourful abstracts from Sophie Tauber-Arp, “Etudes from the Earthy Food” (?)

After the obscenity of war, a floor of plain obscenity.  Three or four large Paul McCarthys, “The Spinning Dwarf”; black cartoon charcoal or paint mouse, claggy smears and sprays of paint here and there, pages of porno mags torn out and stuck on upside-down.  I suffered a rather painful neck spasm as a result.

Urs Fischer’s Tongue, poking through a ragged hole in the wall – not her real tongue, that is, but a synthetic one that emerges suddenly when you approach the hole – it darts through and licks at you.

Two R Crumb strips in his – er, uncompromising style, Boswell’s Diary and Making Love to a Strong Girl – no racial stereotypes this time, but plenty to offend those who wish to be offended.

Finally, there is Riotous Baroque, which I’ll do next week.

Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters

Reading this protracted, repetitive rant against artists, philosophers, musicians with an Austrian connection – I think it’s supposed to be ironic – I was suddenly reminded of John Cooper Clarke’s “Evidently Chickentown”, although the latter is a far superior piece of art, I think.  Watching the hour long programme celebrating his poetry, I was bowled over by “Beasley Street” – bits of it were  almost like those Auden poems that copy the form of nursery rhymes.

Top of the Lake

Great TV serial. marred by two factors; Holly Hunter’s laughable and highly irritating guru “GJ” (or maybe GeeJay) and the cop out regarding the relationship of Robin and Jonno – are they really brother and sister? No – Jonno’s mother had an affair as well.  That’s all right then.  All the white men, apart from Jonno, were violent and potential rapists, all the women deeply damaged by men.

Blackpaint

22.08.13