London Reviews

While in London last week I saw four exhibitions:

Eberhard Havekost: Guest
White Cube
http://www.whitecube.com/exhibitions/havekost/
The most interesting Havekost paintings were the Gast series (Guest) – quite convincingly 3 dimensional forest forms maybe seen at night, which are at the same time strangely out of focus as you approach them. The thing that is odd about the show is the unexplained interruptions in the flow of the display with canvases which are vaguely floating colour fields. Then there is one strong graphic piece, “Distanz” possibly representing the bottom of a door in a corridor and another painting called “H2O”, the torso of a swimmer – neither seeming to make sense in relation to the night forest paintings. The upper floor mainly features more of the colour field paintings – which in the majority work quite pleasantly. Apparently Havekost starts from a photo and “enacts a process of de-materialisation and re-materialisation, from thought to object.” I think the interchange of figuration to abstraction is an interesting effect but the absence of a connecting logic undermines the whole.

Jia Aili & Lu Chunsheng
iniva at Rivington Place
http://www.iniva.org/exhibitions_projects
Jia Aili’s paintings are technically brilliant, though I would locate his iconography and forms with Bacon rather than (as curator David Thorpe suggests) Beckett. Unfortunately, I would say that when he takes the paint beyond the canvas onto the walls and floor they become inauthentic. The painting “Jia Aili, Good Morning” is a case in point: as the paint leaves the canvas at the bottom there is some dynamic spontaneous paint splashing but then other parts are overworked and remarkably clumsily done compared to the rest of the work. This exposed artifice is magnified by elements of broken glass or mirror on the floor which do not make the convincing transition from the image to the gallery spatial reality.
(Sadly I didn’t have time to see Lu Chunsheng’s video).

The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today
Saatchi Gallery
The impressive Saatchi Gallery has a very strong Indian Art exhibition.
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/current/indian_art_installation_views.htm

Artists who stood out: Shezad Dawood and especially Chitra Ganesh.
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/chitra_ganesh.htm?section_name=new_india

Jannis Kounellis
ambika P3
http://p3exhibitions.com/

P3 is quite a weird space to visit. I think part of the effect of the final installation is the process of getting to it, though the backside of the urban façade. The Kounellis installation is remarkable. Reading the exhibition notes doesn’t do the effects of this many favours, since it is one of those artistic acts that touches your being beyond language.

The Kounellis and Saatchi exhibitions are strongly recommended.

London - Nothing Matters

Just back from London: Very enjoyable lunches with Holly Pester (agreed her input into the next Text Festival) and Museum consultant Benedetta Tiana. Sadly Carol Watts had to cancel.

With Lois and CJ at the Live Arts Development Agency, I agreed a Language Moment DIY project in September this year and a Live Art Platform event in the 2011 Text Festival.

I only managed to see a couple of exhibitions – one of which was Nothing Matters – Damien Hirst’s painting show at the White Cube.
http://www.whitecube.com/exhibitions/nothing-matters/hs-ii/

The only interesting thing about the Hirst show is the question whether it reads as Nothing (actually does) matter or nothing at all matters – and that is not that interesting. What Hirst does generally tends to pass me by and I have a feeling that he didn’t actually paint the works, that assistants did them, much as his teams of technicians build the Pharmacy cabinets, etc. Whoever painted them was being taken much too seriously. The ground floor featured 3 large triptychs – each panel featured 3 elevations of a ‘flying’ crow being shot in mid ‘flight’, a explosion of red paint representing presumably a bullet hitting the birds. The birds have no painterly life and no sense of aerial dynamism so there is no emotive charge to their mid-air death. It reminded me of school level projects painting death – empty of any sense of what it actually could mean. Paradoxically although one of the nine blood red bursts is quite expressive, all are undermined by paint dribbles maybe meant to be blood falling from the wound moment but just looking like someone who didn’t know when to stop dribbling – the gravity is not falling from the bird but falling from the brush, drawing attention to the act of painting these given the limited ability further undermines. In the gallery upstairs there were six much smaller paintings of skulls. I have a soft spot for skull paintings, primarily because in the summer holidays before I went to University, back when people didn’t have a year out, I spent my summer in the local medical school studying anatomy – I spent days drawing and painting especially skulls; so I like to think I approach the paintings with a detailed understanding of the requirements of the object. I feel qualified then to say that Hirst (or his assistant) are crap at it and because they are so badly observed there is nowhere to hide in claims of emotive depth. In the hand-out, extracted from the catalogue essay, Rudi Fuchs compares the visual mood of the paintings to the austere dryness of Beckett. This is to load something onto these works that is fundamentally not there; the claim that they “direct us towards a clearer perception of the real” can not be substantiated by the evidence of my eyes at least; what they do give is a clearer perception of the difference between existential nausea, the viscous horror of nothingness, and, like bad acting, the shallow melodrama of someone barely pretending.