Callum Innes, Exposed Painting Green Lake, 2012. Courtesy Frith Street Gallery, London

They sit pleasingly framed in their white spaces every inch the art work, nodding sagely to Barnett Newman, Rothko and their forebears back to Malevich and his graceful hymns to formalism from the beginning of the 20th Century. Their quiet minimalist aesthetic appeals to me greatly on a visual level but in this context they serve to draw my attention to their surroundings. Two things: the first is a banal visual joke. These large iconic paintings have their status and their security reinforced by being presented separated from the viewer by a symbolic this-close-and-no-further black tape. It’s always an odd thing in a gallery: here is a rope – please pretend it’s not here. In this case there is an element of camouflage as the black tape adds a further layer of formalism but then upsets the balance by introducing an actual third dimension to these unerringly two-dimensional works.

The black tape across the front of the painting

The second observation concerns the floor. If you should happen to find yourself in the Whitworth Art Gallery, please take some time to examine the wooden floor beneath your feet. The geometry of Callum Innes’ paintings finds an echo here. It is a parquet floor laid out in a contemporary offset grid design rather than the more classic herringbone pattern reminiscent of church halls and school gyms. It has a deep warm colour and plenty of contrast. Although I like to think that it may well have come from one tree an enquiry to the gallery assures me that it doesn’t (Thank you Kat on the Visitor Services Team for taking the time to respond). The blocks are leylandii and the floor was laid in 1958 – the year of my birth (sweet!) – so it has quite possibly spent more time as a floor in Manchester than it did growing as a forest. The interesting thing is that you can imagine the trees with their random organic shapes and their histories held in their rings then being sliced and diced with geometric rigour before being laid out on a two dimensional plane like an anti-jigsaw. The possible decisions by the worker(s) to achieve a randomness of pattern are apparent as you look at it. However as it has laid there over time it has gained a new patina of scratches and marks that, like the rings, are a record of its recent history and a new continuity has developed between the blocks. Imagine now, if you will, lifting the blocks and placing them back in their original order so that the history of the past fifty-five years is randomised – there’s a job for an artist, but perhaps we will just leave it as an idea.

Standing on the floor at The Whitworth Art Gallery

For more information please visit: Whitworth Art Gallery

Poemdrum ©Liliane Lijn

They glitter on their display stands with words, phrases and sentences shimmering like sunlight on water. Liliane Lijn creates kinetic sculptures, the exhibition at Riflemaker showcases several of her recent poemdrums where, russian-doll-like, three interlocked cylinders – each with words etched out of them – rotate in different directions around a central light source. The text alludes to the immensities of time and space and the flickering movement draws you in as would a fire in the hearth. They invite you to reflect on your transience, your brief flicker as it were, measured against the light years of matter travelling across the universe. I guess it also contains a promise of immortality in that we are all made of stardust and that the group of atoms that currently define you will be scattered and regrouped elsewhere in other guises – you have been here since the beginning of time and will still be here when the show ends – you just probably won’t be aware of it.

Hmm, that does beg the question regarding consciousness, a real bugbear in these neurological times – where does that sit in the equation? A darkened room on the first floor possibly places it elsewhere – a display cabinet with the futuristic iridescent aerogel, a scattering of crumbled rock, a soundtrack that makes you feel that you have stumbled into a science fiction film and a lighting display reminiscent of Captain Scarlet’s deadly foes, the Mysterons may have you considering consciousness in different locations within time and space.

Riflemaker, 79 Beak Street, London W1F 9SU
http://www.riflemaker.org/
http://www.lilianelijn.com/

Working on my HAPPY NOW series with the well-weathered garden gnomes bought at the outside auction in Aylesham last week – in some ways I see it as a confrontational  extension of the much earlier Bear pictures. Presses all the buttons – interesting from a photographic/technical perspective and gives plenty of time to explore the emotional resonance.

Photo: Manuel Vason

Early this week I bought a collection of weathered garden gnomes at an outdoor auction in Norfolk (don’t ask!). They have been sitting in the car all week leading rise to speculation as to what they get up to while the car is parked up – and a suggestion that they may well have assumed that Nick White could be Snow’s Prince who having rescued them from an auction has now left them to rot in a glass coffin – how ironic.
The first act of the enigmatic Anatomie had me believing that the gnomes had escaped and were performing their crazy antics on the stage of Sadlers Wells – a feeling further reinforced by a soundtrack/score featuring a fast-talking auctioneer. For this first act the audience, limited to two hundred souls, were placed in the second circle and, as the lights went down, we overheard the (one-sided) conversation of two apparent latecomers then a female dancer in black appeared on the stage folding and unfolding herself in a manic dance to the sound of Bulgarian bagpipes. She was soon joined by a host of other dancers each engaged in their own frenzied activity. If you can picture an animated version of a painting by Pieter Breugel the Elder or, more grotesquely, by Hieronymus Bosch, you will get the general impression. As I usually like to sit as close to the stage as possible being confined to the second circle was an educational experience – virtuosity, though apparent, plays second fiddle to choreography at this distance: a sense that was reinforced when the initial dancer suddenly appeared directly in front of us on the balcony – the three-dimensional experience of watching dance as bodies in space – spectators and performers -  was made apparent by the stark foregrounding of one figure so close against the remote backdrop of ‘gnomes at play’.

Over the course of the four acts the audience were requested to move from one location to another – from the second circle to the dress circle, followed by the stalls and finally wending our way through the dancers to the back of the stage. Over the course of our descent we witnessed the transformation of the general to the particular – identities and nuances were located.

At each juncture new sensations were thrown at us – a string orchestra was introduced in the second act; our descent to the stalls was accompanied by a beautiful song performed by Nuno Silva prostrated on a wooden platform raised among the seats, reminiscent of the posture assumed by Mel Gibson before the gruesome disembowelment in Braveheart – though here appearing as if it had been directed by Derek Jarman. Heavy bass and drums (rock, not drum’n'bass) were performed live on stage as the dancers went through the moves of the third act – something was disturbing them, drawing them into a group – perhaps the encroaching audience. The same moves were pretty well repeated for the fourth act but this time observed from behind the dancers.

Finally we completely swapped places with the dancers – the transformation was complete – the performers took their first bow facing away from us towards an empty auditorium and, for the sake of propriety, towards us but from the stalls. The curtain came down and the audience were left on the stage until a large stage door was opened and we were ejected into the night on Rosebery Avenue much like the protagonists in Being John Malkovich were tossed onto the New Jersey Turnpike at the end of their dreamlike experiences. We scratch our heads and, more than a little disorientated, make our way back to our lives.

Further events are looming, I recommend everyone to look at http://www.clodensemble.com/ for details

As if lifted from a painting by Paula Rego a soldier guides seven blindfolded men across a desert waste. It looks like an illustration to the tale of the goose that laid the golden egg and it is is really big and it is very colourful – very rich saturated colours (printed by Chau Digital I notice). That’s the thing these days if you are going to exhibit then exhibit large. Thomas Struth at The Whitechapel is doing just that to different effect and everywhere you go if you want your photography to be accepted as art (or advertising), or even for it just to be noticed, then big is beautiful. Big is the antidote to the small screen that sits in front of us daily in our workplaces and our homes.

So how does this approach affect reporting from a warzone? The decontextualisation implicit in showing war reportage in an art gallery is nothing new: there have been plenty of exhibitions by Don McCullin and others to stimulate debate, but there is something different afoot here. No grimy darkness, these images fizzle with their brash seduction, they remind me of the large canvases that you would find in the renaissance galleries of the National Gallery. The size and the compositions draw you in and the richness of the colours tease the eye (they are far richer than they would appear in a newspaper or even here on the web). The images are not completely devoid of explanation – a caption sheet at the desk tells you that the blindfolded men are suspected insurgents in Iraq. There are statements lying behind each of the pictures, but here they feel stripped of their specificity and are pushed forward as icons such as in the image below which again is far starker and more graphic in the exhibition than the repro suggests (A woman is caught in the fighting between US marines and insurgents as part of Operation Steel Curtain, Ubaydi, Iraq, 2005):

There are nuances to them though – you pick up on details that a camera includes and a painter might leave out – such as the motif on the blindfolded prisoner’s sock suggesting that at some time those socks were bought from the Iraqi equivalent of Primark. The prosaic meets the iconic as if a laundry tag had been left on Christ’s gown in Carravaggio’s Supper at Emmaeus.

I like these photographs, I like them very much. I would put them on my wall and that worries me. I am certain that it was not Sean Smith’s intention when he was out there surrounded by horror and bullets. They are powerful in the way that they magnify our powerlessness, but what to do?

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, the Belgian choreographer, has created some of the most memorable duets I have seen. For example in the extract from Faun performed at Sadlers Wells on their taster day earlier this year two dancers (James O’Hara & Daisy Phillips) glided sinuously around and through each other as if totally entranced by their explorations of touch and body in a manner similar to the leopard slugs mating in the beautifully observed David Attenborough ‘Life in The Undergrowth’ documentary (starts about 1’30″ in)

Similar sequences formed a part of TeZukA – one with two men and the other with a male and a female dancer – both were mesmeric. As was the extremely complicated choreography of several groups of dancers creating block like shapes and rhythmically accenting the structures with swift syncopated movements of their arms:

Unfortunately the complete structure of the piece was overextended with too much going on. Ideas that would have been interesting in isolation or more cleverly integrated became lost on a stage that ended up looking like a the aftermath of a party in a dancers’ playground. Too many ideas and not enough of an overview. I suspect that the constant work that the choreographer has put in has given him a familiarity with the piece that it is impossible for an audience to glean on first viewing (though the initial multilingual text with translations appearing on the screens to the left and the right of the stage was just an unforgiveably foolish idea – are we meant to watch the two, possibly three groups, engaged in different activities on a wide stage or read the text – not enough eyes for everything).

Worth mentioning that it was a multimedia event with showpieces in the manner of Sutra, though this time with hanging scrolls of paper and interactive projections – clever stuff, but the continental aspect of circus inherent in the production was at odds with the sharpness and precision of design that one associates with Japan – the folding paper being a case in point (nice idea though).

I can’t work out from the programme who the dancer was that performed the part of Astro Boy, but he was marvellous – constantly in character with small engaging robotic movements even when way off right out of sight.

Really hope this gets tightened up, honed down and set to rights and I will be back for more.

Django Bates at Kings Place

Always nice for the ego to see my pix being used large – this one of Django Bates is gracing the outside of Kings Place advertising an upcoming performance. The shots have gone down a storm and seem to be appearing all over the place as the festival season kicks off. I guess these large pix are even better for Django’s ego – though as he spends most of his life in parts of Scandinavia these days they can only represent an occasional hit.