BLOG: "Graffiti: time to wave a white flag?"

Published: 'Art City' Blog, MANCHESTER EVENING NEWS, May 2009 (no longer online)

"Graffiti: time to wave a white flag?"

The other day I found myself staring, perturbed, at the Manchester Police website. Not being particularly paranoid about local crime, I was unfamiliar with their crime busting updates, which proudly announced that the police are “winning the fight against graffiti”.

Now not only is it slightly ridiculous that this was the ‘big news’ from Greater Manchester’s police force, capturing a dastardly drug dealer would have been more impressive, but it also highlights the public sector’s continually negative response to Graffiti.

The refusal of local councils and the government to curb their repressive policies on street art confounds me. Of course some antisocial ‘tagging’, (merely writing a signature on any available public property), is not particularly aesthetic. But when Graffiti is well executed it can be thought provoking and beautiful. The results can provide our streets with bursts of colour and inspiration.

Inspector Mark Davis’s remark: “There is nothing artistic about the daubing of graffiti. It is pure vandalism and has a negative impact on the lives of nearby residents” is, in many cases, simply not true.

I wonder what Inspector Davis would have to say about ‘The Arrival, Contemporary Urban Art’, the new show at The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Stoke on Trent. Featuring internationally acclaimed street artists such as Banksy, Adam Neale and Candice Tripp, it is the perfect case study for Graffiti as a respected art form.

Banksy’s once controversial, now coffee table, images are sold for thousands and are displayed in galleries across the globe. Apparently even Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt have acquired one, surely showing consumer appeal.

Examples of the talent present in Manchester was showcased last year by the Upper Space Gallery, and can be seen on many a Northern Quarter corner. It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but then what art is?

Expressing creativity in public spaces is something art is no stranger too. Continually commissioned, public art is actively endorsed as producing positive effects upon a community; promoting pride within inhabitants and economy via visitors.

Graffiti is a crime because it is unlicensed public art. If this changed, the creative ability of many would be encouraged, and their talent given a purpose.

Berlin is famous for it. America’s welfare policy in the 1930’s paid painters to decorate airports and libraries. Diego Riviera’s murals cover Mexico City, and are one of its biggest attractions. While in India adverts are hand painted on houses and walls, filling the streets with a mass of vibrant images.

That we are complacently bombarded with visual imagery does not need to be said, billboards, posters and huge TV screens fill Piccadilly already. I would rather see a mural than a printed advert for soap any day.

Street art should be utilized not penalized and given artistic recognition. Even the police force could find use for it…

For example Candice Tripp’s work ‘The Arrival’, part of the Stoke on Trent exhibition, depicts a young girl peeling herself off a white outline of her body. It would be a very efficient advert for road safety. Covering the side of a building with the ominous warning to not drink and drive, it would provide a vivid reminder of those being put at risk.

'The Arrival' Contemporary Urban Art

7 February 09 - 10 May 09

The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery

Bethesda Street, Cultural Quarter,

Stoke-on-Trent, ST1 3DW

http://www.stokemuseums.org.uk/

Monday to Saturday 10.00am - 5.00pm, Sunday 2.00pm - 5.00pm

BLOG: "Filtered Out: Antony Gormley"

Published: 'Art City' Blog, MANCHESTER EVENING NEWS, April 2009 (no longer online)

 

"Filtered Out: Antony Gormley"

 

Last month Manchester Art Gallery revealed their latest purchase: Antony Gormley’s Filter.

Walking up the stairs of the gallery’s modern extension the life-size male figure hangs horizontally above you, face looking down, threatening to come crashing upon your head.

Made of cut steel rings welded together, Filter comments on the mechanical analogy between our biological body and machines, and the construction of our exterior self by mass-produced culture. High street clothing, changing trends, cosmetics. Just as the shell of Filter was manufactured, our appearance is also a product of mechanical processes.

The holes of the steel rings allow you to see the interior of the body, the heart of steel balls it contains, and the sky outside the glass roof of Manchester Art Gallery. It is a body completely open to its environment, it is involved and part of the space it hangs in.

The steel complements the metal framed and glass interior of the stairwell. You project yourself onto the sculptures human form and feel the tension, the vulnerability, of such frozen suspension.  Is he hovering, flying or falling?

However, though I am a fan of Gormely’s work and like Filter, I couldn’t help feeling that it would have been smarter if Manchester Art Gallery had made a more original choice of artist.

I am not insulting the piece or that, as with much of Gormley’s work, the figure is based on the artist’s own body. Rather that Antony Gormley seems to be on slight overkill right now. His Angel of the North stands tall in Gateshead and his instillation Another Place populated Crosby Beach, Merseyside a few years ago. Soon his piece One and Other will preside on Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth. To put it bluntly, Antony Gormley is everywhere.

While this does mean that Filter is a safe purchase, and it undoubtedly places Manchester Art Gallery more prominently on the map in terms of contemporary art. Maybe, just maybe, a work by a different modern British artist would have provided more national coverage and provoked more response. Rachel Whiteread? Marc Quinn? There are so many to choose from.

Antony Gormley’s Filter threatens to be so familiar to viewers that it fails to be exciting. Audiences know Gormley’s work and expect to see a passive figure of some description. Filter becomes just another Gormley.

Galleries in Manchester need to show that they are pushing boundaries and providing new work, new artists. They need to offer art and artists that are not associated with nearby artistic hotspots such as Liverpool.

Sometimes jumping on the bandwagon is not the best option. The Gormley Express in particular. Especially when your suitcase contains a £80,000 grant from The Art Fund and a mass of potential.

Manchester Art Gallery

Mosley Street, M2 3JL

http://www.manchestergalleries.org/

Tuesday-Sunday 10am-5pm.

BLOG: Purposeful Controversy? Ray Caesar at Richard Goodhall

Published: 'Art City' Blog, MANCHESTER EVENING NEWS, April 2009 (no longer online)

"Purposeful Controversy? Ray Caesar at Richard Goodhall" 

I went to the Richard Goodall Gallery this week to have a final peek at Ray Caesar Angels in the Opera House. Working with 3D computer software, his technical skill is certainly incredibly impressive; at some points the digitally created skin of his waif like subjects is indistinguishable from a photograph. 

However, the images themselves I find quite difficult. They are beautiful in many ways, yet, if I’m honest, I do not know what their agenda is, whether I like them, dislike them, or even hate them.

Consisting almost always of a childlike female figure, human but mythical; they are surreal and disturbing, kitsch and kinky. They are sexualized, with both science fiction and cartoon elements, and I just don’t get it. 

Is it meant to shock me?

I guess on some levels Caesar’s work does shock me. Without their alien qualities, the women are perfect, pubescent ‘damsels in distress’. Their frames are tiny (I mean really tiny), their stature similarly minute in proportion, their faces angelic – large eyes, tiny lips, clear and pale skin. They look fragile and petit, possibly rather ill. Indeed, their form of attire reminiscent of Little Red Riding Hood and Bo Peep indicates similar vulnerability. Without their robot claws, mechanic vessels or tentacles reaching out from under their skirts, they would be helpless innocents. It is odd to look at an image of an imp sized childlike girl, heavily sexualized, demure and knowing in glance. 

Yet, this is in a sense extremely prudish of me. Young sexualized figures are hardly shocking in art. You need only look to Manchester Art Gallery and gaze at John William Waterhouse’s ‘Hylas and Nymphs’ to see some pubescent breasts and knowing eyes gazing straight into the attractive Hylas as they suggestively pull him in to the water. 

The difference is while Waterhouse’s nymphs are subtly seductive, Caesar’s are dominating and demonesque. Rather than being so of their own accord, like the sexual, even manipulative, Lolita of Vladimir Nabokov’s classic novel, they need weaponry and instruments of damage. 

They are in a world dreamlike and separate to our own. This both safe guards Ray Caesar’s images and makes them problematic. These girls and women belong to a fantastical realm and are thus distanced from the viewer. However at the same time, this sexualizing of obscure female forms, like pornographic cartoons, turn women into unrealistic figures of gratification. What is presented as attractive in Caesar’s work is what is unattainable for real women to actualize. 

Some would say the girls of Caesar’s images are liberated and powerful. Indeed, they do man large machines and mockingly ride and punish their male counterparts. Yet  a girl wielding a whip so tiny that without it the fat lump of a man she is riding would crush her in an instant is hardly that. There is a side to these images, which diminishes the sexual female.

It is such aspects such as these, which even if you deslike Caesar’s images, make you appreciate them. They provoke and cause questioning and disgruntle your perceptions. They are also very beautiful, the colours exquisite and details intricate. While I would not have one hanging in my hall, the number of removed price tags shows that clearly many people would and will. Whether if be for controversy, appreciation or technical skill, or even fetish something in Roy Caesar’s work pleases the crowds.

BLOG: "A Question on Art": Manuel Saiz at Castlefield Gallery

Published: 'Art City' Blog, MANCHESTER EVENING NEWS, April 2009 (no longer online)

"A Question on Art:: Manuel Saiz at Castlefield Gallery" 

What is art? Not an original question, but one Manuel Saiz tackles head on in his solo show Private Party. Keep Out at Castlefield Gallery. A title that aptly comments on how, for many, contemporary art is illusive and seemingly pointless. It is an exclusive form far less approachable, and far harder to initially appreciate, than classical realist paintings.

Contemporary art is ambiguous in meaning and talent: artists present painted dots, a urinal, or a room full of air-conditioned air as artwork, (see the Pompidou’s current show Voids, a retrospective of the many empty exhibitions in recent art history).

Yet Saiz is quick to make the distinction between ‘anything as art’ and ‘art itself’. In The Two Teams Team, a short film in which two actors discuss the relations between video art and cinema, (contemporary art and traditional), it is made clear that modern art works through the intellect: integral to an artwork’s success is the idea it attempts to indirectly convey rather than the technical skill of its execution.

His Social Structures (everybody is an artist) utilizes Joseph Beuys famous words to remark on the range of possibilities, content and attitudes in modern art. Three actors repeat the words over and over again in varying emotions, from elated to blasé to positively upset. It highlights the important role the audience holds in creating meaning.

If you are still suitably confounded to the meaning of art, what you think it is, traditional or contemporary, realist or abstract, Saiz comes to the rescue once more with his What is Art Flowchart, a poster the visitor can take away to contemplate. Using binary statements that demand yes-no answers, the flowchart guides you to your final ‘art judgment’. Whether it is that art is objects that create beauty, the audience themselves, what is displayed by galleries or even that everything is art.

Manuel Saiz addresses the identity of contemporary art and the relationship it has with the audience and society with wonderful comic and intellectual work. Private Party. Keep Out is a compact but sharp and poignant exhibition, well worth a visit.

Manuel Saiz: Private Party. Keep Out

06 February to 22 March 2009

Castlefield Gallery

2 Hewitt Street, M15 4GB

http://www.castlefieldgallery.co.uk

Wednesday to Sunday 1pm – 6 pm

BLOG: 'Art City' for Manchester Evening News

In early 2009, Manchester Evening News approached me propositioning that I become their official arts blogger. The blog was entitled "Art City" and I was to write a weekly post on art and life in Manchester. What you see above is the blogs homepage.

Unfortunately this occurred approximately one month before the economic meltdown led the Guardian to make redundant half the Manchester Evening News staff. All blogs and freelance writers were also cut.

And so 'Art City' floundered before it had really begun. In the following posts I am going to upload the articles/blogs that were written before the axe fell (these are now no longer available online).

LINK: http://www.citylife.co.uk/arts/blogs/10/art_city