Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

I remember that there were only two artists at Sevilla Biennale 2008 whom I found interesting; I can't recall one without looking back to my journal but the other was the Mexican-Canadian electronic artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. He also caught my radar at Basel Art Fair in 2009. So I am pleased to see that he has a solo show called Recorders at Manchester Art Gallery. It features seven recent pieces of which I think I recognise a couple from the previous installations.
Lozano-Hemmer’s artworks depend on the participation of visitors to exist and develop, as the artist describes:

“In Recorders, artworks hear, see and feel the public, they exhibit awareness and record and replay memories entirely obtained during the show. The pieces either depend on participation to exist or predatorily gather information on the public through surveillance and biometric technologies.”

Highlights of the exhibition include Pulse Room, on show in the UK for the very first time. Premiered in Puebla, Mexico in 2006 and shown to critical acclaim in the Mexican pavilion for the Venice Biennale in 2007, the work is made up of 100 light bulbs which are activated by a sensor to flash at the exact rhythm of particpants' heart rates.

"33 Questions per Minute" is a Queneau-like question-generating programme which as much uses rules of grammar to create endless (enigmatic and/or meaningless) questions. "Close Up" invites viewers to insert a finger into a scanner which then generate a digital image of the finger print into a collage of previously inserted fingers.

Seeing this accumulation of Lozano-Hemmer work, the striking thing is the visual pleasure in the digital super-realism of the images or the soothing beauty in mathematically balanced proportion in such works as Pulse Room. Oddly though, this ultimate over-rules the putative selling point of interactivity. This becomes of peripheral interest - and if focused on too long undermines the effect of the show as a whole because it gives the impression that in the end all the works are versions of the same piece.

http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/
http://www.manchestergalleries.org/whats-on/exhibitions/index.php?itemID=73

The Absence of War

Seeing the exhibition of Goya's Disasters of War at Manchester Art Gallery is a dismal experience, strangely encapsulated by one label accompanying one of the etchings - "A group of people gather sadly around a corpse which is hidden from view". The display itself is as professionally shown, in dim light, nicely laid out, as you'd expect. It is strongly supplemented with Jake & Dinos Chapman's model version of the disasters, reinterpreted with nazi torturers. But to get into the gallery you have to go through an anteroom which features children's prints of war themes - as usual, children's art is only of interest to their parents. Interestingly, quotations from the children have also been mounted in vinyl on the wall; the first one seemed to recognise this problematic intervention: 'Katy' comments: "...it makes me uncomfortable as it is so far removed from my experience and I dont know whether it is right to make a comment on it." It is a mercy that the child-centred stuff hasnt bled into the Goya/Chapman space though children are endlessly present in the show because the noise of them shouting and screaming in a nearby 'education' space fills the air. So the small group of adults looking at the prints looked very much like a group of people gathered sadly around a corpse which is hidden from view.

Angels of Anarchy

Last night, we attended the preview of Angels of Anarchy at Manchester Art Gallery.
There was a big crowd, which made looking at the show not so easy - previews generally are not the best time to actually see an exhibition. Rarely for the Gallery, this show made me think I would probably go back to see it without the crowd. I admit that my interest in surrealism has always been limited so my knowledge of women surrealists, who, as Jeanette Winterton pointed out in her opening remarks, are as marginalised as most women in avant-gardes. Therefore it was pretty much all new for me (except vaguely Lee Miller.) I found that the works which I most frequently looked at the label to see who had done pieces that stood out were consistently by Eileen Agar (http://www.redfern-gallery.co.uk/pages/artistinfo/121.html ), her self-portrait in pen & ink of 1928 was a beautiful drawing made somewhat poignant by the inscription "for peter". "Ladybird" is another worth seeking out and her collage "A Thousand Thanks. Letter to E.L.T. Mesens" is a great piece.

The photography of Emila Medkova was also a powerful discovery for me. I'll also recommend an exquisite still-life watercolour "Caballito Mexicana" by Frida Kahlo. One or two Dora Maar's stood out too.

The disappointing aspect of the show is in the curation. It goes for rather predictable thematic categories - "portrait/self-portrait", "still life", "interiors". In the latter section, I could only write "nil" in my note book, and again in the section "surreal objects" - nil.

http://www.manchestergalleries.org/angelsofanarchy/

they never run, only call

I meant to write about Rachel Goodyear’s superb show “they never run, only call” at International 3 http://www.international3.com/exhibition.php?E=40 while it was still on but didn’t get round to it. But I have been carrying the experience around with me of her intense concentration of the drawings since I saw it. And this was magnified the other day when I happened to be in Manchester Art Gallery for the launch of Manchester International Festival – of which more in future posts. No, the specific trigger for reconsidering Goodyear was seeing the Gallery’s newest acquisition Antony Gormley’s Filter (pictured). “It’s a hanging figure made of flat mild steel rings welded together. The sculpture is hollow and holes in the rings allow you to glimpse inside the body, which contains a suspended heart.”

During his siting visit, Gormley said “The work hangs in space as if in orbit, open to light and the elements, it is a meditation on the relationship between the core of the body and space at large... It suggests that, while movement, freedom of choice and the exercising of will is one way in which life expresses itself, there is another axis: the relationship between emotion and spatial experience." I was particularly struck by these comments in part because my next book “Space” is examining these very questions; but as I say, when I say Gormley’s metal sausage, Rachel Goodyear became an even stronger presence. The work itself I have already dismissed formally with the reference to metal products; but the sculptors claims for his work are more interesting because of what they tell us. Some of the chaff can be cleared straight away: it is not open to the elements because it is in an environmentally enclosed atrium. There is no suggestion of orbit or movement because it is suspended at a height, relation to other structures (lifts, staircases, etc) in the space and angle to suggest stasis not movement. And then the two claims that it suggests 1) movement, freedom of choice etc are herein represented. 2) that there is a relationship between emotion and spatiality. The first one hardly needs repeating – there figure is static. It’s casing with arms at its side and legs together suggest no internally generated motion (something you would expect even a subtle indication of if you were going to claim a relationship between the internal emotion and the external space), and as already noted there is no external motion either; it can’t even be said to hover in the space as it quite clearly hangs, nor is there dynamics that move it because you can see stablizing wires so there is no suggestion of imbalance or spin. But, as if to anticipate formal critique of the metal sausage, Gormley says: "My work continues to be misinterpreted as some form of representational art. It's useless if you take it as that. It's an invitation for you to think of yourself being there, an invitation for you to think of those moments when you are, like it is, detached from the flow of everyday life. We're always doing something, fulfilling some kind of command, some kind of duty, some kind of work and this piece is trying to think of a human being as being not doing." That is dangerous ground for Gormley to tread because this claim of existentialism invites not a location as representational art but rather a comparison with artists who could actually make work that coalesces being, such as Giacometti. However, I think there is a way in which Gormley’s self-casts engage with “the flow of everyday life. We're always doing something, fulfilling some kind of command, some kind of duty, some kind of work”; in the context of the UK’s regimental institutionalising ontology Gormley’s work does say something to us: it is the apotheosis of the mediocrity expected of us; as (most of) his oeuvre are casts of himself, they represent are our standardisation, but without ontological insight the artist, mediocre himself, this New Banality to which we are directed to aspire is writ dismal and large which ultimately is more denigrating than hopelessness. Gormley’s planned installation for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, http://www.london.gov.uk/fourthplinth/plinth/gormley.jsp, “One & Other” inadvertently but openly displays this for all to see. No doubt it will be surrounded by some bollocks of celebrating ordinary people (in the context of the imperial sculptural landscape of the square) but actually what it does is offer up our interchangeability and therefore lack of value. No doubt the selected 2400 people will have be unutterably worthy New Labour diversity, but I find the safety net around the plinth the hilarious Health & Safety coda – the work celebrates its absence of artistic and physical risk.

Criticising Antony Gormley is really too easy to take so much space, ordinarily I wouldn’t give it brain space. It was the context of remembrance of Rachel Goodyear’s show – even the title “they never run, only call” could be a description of establishment artists such as Gormley (or Motion and Armitage for that matter). But to mobilise her to that cause would be a disservice and a paltry use for something so powerful. It may seem strange to compare stodgy metal sculpture with fine small scale drawings, but it is an ontological comparison: Goodyear’s investigations are mystical, edgy, humorous and sexy, desperate and transcendent. Even ontological grounds though, it is still an unfair and unnecessary comparison: Goodyear is fascinating and Gormley is Official stodge.

So what was the other thing that bothered me? It is the same underlying problem in the Manchester International Festival, the launch for which I was in the city gallery and will write on in more depth in another blog.