TATE ETC. Issue 16

Visiting and Revisiting Art, etcetera

www.tate.org.uk/tateetc

TATE ETC. is delighted to announce issue 16 – 5^th anniversary issue! Our Birthday issue is filled with in-depth articles, discussions and interviews with the artists and art-practitioners reflecting on the fine, modern and contemporary faces of art. Among contributors there are such outstanding writers, artists and practitioners as Kurt Forster, John Cage and Anthony d’Offay.

 
John Cage famously said that musicians in the post-war world had to learn from visual artists, while Frank O’Hara called himself a “sweeper-up after artists”. Collaboration, interaction or simple conversations between artists and poets have a fruitful history. What is it, Vincent Katz asks, that fascinates artists about those in other fields, drawing them across the lines to work together?

Last year one of the largest donations of art in Britain was made by Anthony d’Offay. This year Tate sites, the National Galleries of Scotland and thirteen museums and galleries across the UK are showing more than 30 ARTIST ROOMS in what is the first tour of this collection. TATE ETC. talks to Anthony d’Offay about the impetus behind the project, and also to a selection of the artists on display.

Boris Groys: “One of [the Futurists’] most famous declarations was “War, the World’s only Hygiene”. Better to antagonise the audience than let it remain neutral.” They led the way for participatory art, from Dada, Situationism and Allan Kaprow’s happenings, to the present. To coincide with Tate Modern’s ‘Futurism’ exhibition, TATE ETC. brings together two art professionals to explore this history.

As a year-long season of exhibitions focusing on Polish art begins across the country, TATE ETC. brings together four Polish art professionals to discuss the reasons why the visual arts produced after 1945 in Poland are not better known abroad.

“Lust, conceived beyond moral preconceptions and as an essential element of the dynamism of life, is a force.” as written by Valentine de Saint-Point, a former model for Alphonse Mucha and Rodin, in her Futurist Manifesto of Lust. Adrien Sina and Sarah Wilson celebrate the work of this unsing hero of Futurism.

Gigantic construction sites, mining pits, hydroelectric dams, polar regions, Soviet cosmodromes and Chinese cities… Kurt Forster discusses Armin Linke’s recent documentation of the Alps and the influence of Italian painter Giovanni Segantini in their common gravitation towards the sublime.

Tate Liverpool’s exhibition ‘Colour Chart; Reinventing Colour, 1950 to Today’ explores the moment in twentieth-century art when a group of artists began to perceive colour as “readymade” rather than purely scientific or expressive. The gallery’s director talks to one of its leading practitioners.

“In a seaside town, pleasure, or at least its less blatantly sensual cousin, leisure, is the business.” A photograph of two unidentified men by the seaside found amid Francis Bacon’s archives sets Travis Elborough’s mind pleasantly adrift.

“Why stop skimming stones when you grow up?” Richard Long, p.56.

TATE ETC. is published three times a year.

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Poem of the Month is the initiative of TATE ETC. magazine, publishing a new piece of poetry every month on its website at www.tate.org.uk/tateetc.

The poems are written exclusively for TATE ETC. magazine and among the authors there are widely acclaimed poets such as John Burnside, Moniza Alvi, Adam Thorpe and David Harsent.

The writing they contribute responds to the pieces of art which are within the Tate collection, be it the landscapes of John Downman, Bridget Riley’s Op arts or the ready-mades of Man Ray.

TATE ETC. is Europe’s largest art magazine, issued three times a year. Each issue is filled with in-depth articles, discussions and interviews with the artists and art-practitioners. Such personalities as Sigmar Polke, John Banville and Tracey Emin are among the contributors discussing the fine, modern and contemporary faces of art.

The latest Poem of the Month was contributed by Roger McGough, a leading English performance poet and a member of the Poetry Society.

For TATE ETC. exclusively he created a poem inspired by Cadeau – a readymade piece of art created by Man Ray. The artwork features an iron with the row of nails attached to its bottom. Can such a gift tear down someone’s love?

Find out at http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue15/poemmarch09.htm

TATE ETC. is pleased to announce issue 15, set to entice the reader with in-depth articles by internationally acclaimed writers and artists, providing a place for thinking about and experiencing art.

In the light of his recent exhibition 'Morning Star Evening Star' at Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, Simon Grant talks with American artist Robert Morris in a very personal and candid interview only available online at http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue14/interviewmorris.htm

Robert Morris (b. 1931) is currently regarded as one of the most prominent theorists on minimalism as well as having been variously involved in the development of performance art, land art, the process art movement and installation art.

Morris' relationship with TATE has certainly been controversial over the years with his 1971 exhibition at the TATE Modern being closed after just five days. The exhibition took up the whole central sculpture gallery with ramps and cubes designed to encourage public interaction. The press accused TATE of a deterioraton of standards, describing the piece as an 'assault course' which encouraged visitors to go 'mad', 'jumping and screaming' through the exhibit.

Whilst contemporary critics have long regarded his classic grey modular plywood structures of the 1960s and the felt pieces as monuments of restraint, in this exclusive interview Morris discusses the biographical elements behind his work, offering a more personal insight into his artistic inspiration.

"This rise of creativity is accompanied by increasing personal unhappiness. Marriage collapses. A certain mental energy and obsessive, single-minded concentration, bordering on a kind of possession" Robert Morris

Robert Morris currently lives and works in New York and was at, London, 26 June 2008 – 26 September 2008.

www.tateetc.org.uk is the website for TATE ETC. Europe's largest art magazine, combining fresh design and imagery with exclusive features from outstanding writers and artists, from John Banville and Mario Vargas Llosa to Chuck Close and Pipilotti Rist.

Each month, TATE ETC. publishes new poetry by leading poets who respond to works from the Tate Collection. This November Henry Shukman presents his poem, based on The Roundabout (1923) by Stanley Spencer, currently on display at Tate (Room 13: The Art of Leisure). Enjoy it online now at http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue14/article16920.htm  where you can listen to Shukman reading his poem.

Henry Shukman is an English writer currently living in New Mexico. His work includes fiction, poetry and travel writing and he has won an impressive array of literary awards throughout his successful career.

His poem The Roundabout is inspired by Stanley Spencer's painting of the same name. Sir Stanley Spencer is considered one of the most extraordinary British artists of the twentieth century, much admired for his intimate portraits of loved ones and powerful depictions of Biblical scenes in new and intriguing contexts.

Spencer's 1923 painting The Roundabout was inspired by the view from Henry Lamb's studio which overlooked Hampstead fairground. The roundabout with chairs that Spencer chose to paint was a recent invention, only being introduced to fairgrounds in 1922.

Subscribe to the Poem of the Month RSS feed online at http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/poemofthemonth/feed.xml

www.tateetc.org.uk is the website for TATE ETC. Europe's largest art magazine, combining fresh design and imagery with exclusive features from outstanding writers and artists, from John Banville and Mario Vargas Llosa to Chuck Close and Pipilotti Rist.

I first saw Bacon's work in reproduction – I was painting and decorating a home in late 1970s Cabbagetown, Toronto, and I leafed through a coffee-table book. I was surprised, shocked and excited by what I saw. There was an immediacy and aggression to the work that was appealing to my adolescent self; paintings that included sinks and toilets, hypodermic syringes, swastikas, blood and flesh. There seemed a cockiness and swagger in his relation to his subjects, and his photographic source material was alarming and daring and sometimes disturbing. Seeing this as a young artist (seventeen years old), he appeared to be looking in very unlikely places for painting material.

The immediacy of his work is partly because he has such a strong sense of design. Not just in the way he frames and glazes his works, but especially in the settings he creates within his paintings – these rooms and spaces where the activity takes place. Bertolucci picked up on this and used this room idea in Last Tango in Paris. The back­ground setting is often very precise and designed, whereas the figures are where all the action and painting takes place. I don't think Bacon could really draw, but he could really paint, and although there is control, he also seems able to do this by any means necessary when it comes to his figures. Having said this, I think he also has the ability to find the appropriate way to describe whatever he needs to in paint; be it grass or an umbrella, he makes it work without killing it. His painting technique seems wholly evolved out of his own acts of trying; even when he famously makes reference to other artists' works, his language remains his own – one that he has invented.

Up until the Van Gogh paintings, Bacon seemed to be a tonal painter. In this series he starts really to work with colour. These are some of my favourite works of twentieth-century painting. After this, his colour palette appears to become more distinctive and considered. He is certainly the best ever painter to use orange – although when I first saw the cricket paintings, I found them repulsive. The stumpiness of them. In the end, I think the colour is electrifying, and he uses it in a way to draw you into the picture so that you almost no longer are aware of it being a colour.

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Tate Modern

15 Feb – 07 May 2007

Claire Nichols

"Your way is as hard as we are blood-hard with rigid-brained resolution" – a quote from Gilbert & George who star in their own feature-length movie, The World of Gilbert and George: and one which aptly encapsulates the colliding energies of quotidian ambition and East End lackluster that permeate the work of this artist duo on display at the Tate Modern. The "you" to whom Gilbert & George refer here is a 'no-one in particular' and an 'everyone'; an entirely impersonal subject that embodies the landscape of each piece's confrontation.

The retrospective progresses chronologically around one entire floor of the Tate. At the start, we bear witness to the shy boys out at play in their English garden: The Nature of Our Looking, 1970. Considered by the artists as a paper sculpture, this piece, akin to the other charcoal on paper works in the first room, creates a preamble of tension within and around the picture frame that has now become their signature motif. Their romantic poses, distant gazes, as well as the captions within the drawings, gather a sense of desperation from the physical and material limits of the page where the landscape falls off or fades out. The 'fake aged' quality of the paper and the rife pun exerted through the grid-crossed folds that these drawings be read as maps, are at the same time, paradoxically, anti-framing devices that serve to open their sculptures out into the democratic space of the viewer.

The space of the viewer throughout the exhibition, though an open, highly associative arena of interpretation, is certainly not a comfortable position. To watch their feature length film, The World of Gilbert and George, from start to finish, inside the café, which is included as part of the exhibition space on the fourth floor, is at the same time both a casual and momentous event. The 'feeding of the tramp' sequence is tapered by the viewer's polite, seated patience at the café table, whilst the scene in which Gilbert & George dance to the pop hit, Bend It, offers a light-hearted break and momentary closed door on the politics of East end city life that is the contextual framework of the film. From their dancing to their annotated monotone proclamations of the words: 'Tired. Station. Depressed. Pub. Waiting…' across circling video footage of an urban 80s London, Gilbert & George are firmly in control of themselves and of the video frame. In their own words, 'It was vital that we remain in control…otherwise we would have been lost'. This major retrospective enables an overview of the work of a pair of artists whose oeuvre and maxim is about confronting modern British life that recoils at such a self-conscious frame. Gilbert & George are 'living sculptures' about Sex, Money, Religion, Race, Englishness and Terror.

The World of Gilbert and George DVD is available online at:

http://www.tate.org.uk/shop/gilbertgeorge.htm

Where is the Work?

Cornford & Cross

Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth

24 February – 22 April 2007

Well this brought back memories – I used to work at the Aspex Gallery at the private views when I was 18. It was very much a community then, as it is now, of local artists, many best friends or even related to each other.

The Aspex Gallery has moved from its spacious yet endearing converted church in the less-than-fantastic area of Somerstown, to a stunning contemporary space derived from an old naval storehouse building. I am most impressed by the gallery offices, suspended glass above the lobby; a far cry from our teenage HQ. It is extremely well arranged to give the impression of a 'one-stop-shop' of contemporary art; talk to the artists, have a coffee, use the education centre, watch a film, read a magazine, and emerge feeling like you have achieved something.

I am sorry to have missed the previous Is Britain Great? exhibition, involving touring the country in an old caravan, which then came to rest in the exhibition space.

The latest offering is from Matthew Cornford and David Cross, who met at St. Martin's School of Art in 1987, reminiscent of another famous mono-initialled pair who, after meeting at the School, have never parted. The large photographs mounted on foam board are vibrant, but the ones that really catch my attention are the ones in which there has been a little doctoring; the purple plume of a pond fountain, the blurred face of a Second World War airman, reminding me of the article in TATE ETC about erasure. However, my favourite is a picture of one of those dusky evenings where you look out to see and you can't see the horizon, as the same back-lit pinky-orange pervades both the sea and the sky. Perfectly placed I think, having done just that tonight on the seaside walk down here. The only things separating the two hemispheres are tiny battleships in a rather beautiful gun-metal grey. The overall effect is to remind me of a modern take on one of Whistler's Nocturnes.

An installation covers the ornate original storehouse door at the rear of the space, and I am ashamed to say I walked past it at first. Perhaps I could put it down to paying homage to the title of the exhibition. The pictures have extensive writing alongside them, which the artists say are part of that particular series of works, so consequently, this has none. Reading later I understand that the fuchsia ribbon before me is geometrically positioned to highlight the unnoticed beauty of the door's construction. I love the idea, but am unsure whether it integrates with the pictures.

The evening buzzes away, and whether it is part of the community feel that I get from Portsmouth's art scene, or whether people are furiously debating the work, I get a sense that everyone is very intrigued by Aspex's every move towards bringing the long-standing undercurrents of artistic interest to the fore of this historic city.