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.

REVIEW: Mooch and Revolve Gallery

Published: MANCHESTER CONFIDENTIAL, 28th April 2009

"Mooch and Revolve gallery: Thalia Allington-Wood is appalled and delighted by the Triangle's new commercial art gallery" 

Walking down Cross Street on your way to the new Mooch and Revolve gallery, there are certain things you can be forgiven for expecting. White walls, and lots of bright lighting are two of them. The sound of busy shoppers echoing loudly are not.

However, when it comes to the contemporary art gallery checklist, Mooch and Revolve have many a tick. The large ground floor space is a flood with daylight and the décor is a reassuring snow colour. The many walls were, and presumably still are, lined with many paintings: always a good sign when in an art gallery. (You think I jest, but the Pompidou in Paris recently held a retrospective of empty exhibitions since that of Yves Klein in 1958). So, one more tick for Mooch.

On the opening night, even more ticks could be awarded. A substantial amount of free wine drinking occurred. Tick. Suitably dressed people considerately milled around the space, nodding their heads as one does when viewing artworks. Tick. (Take note, to do this to best effect one’s head must be tilted, though ever so slightly. Squinting additionally goes down very well. While the accompanying gentle wag of a pen, or in this case a cocktail sausage stick, adds certain panache). We seem to be off to a good start.
 

Yet, some of the work, if I am truly honest, I thought was awful, dreadful even. I will name no names, as this is merely my opinion, you can go and judge for yourself.

I am all for affordable art and supporting local artists, but this does not mean the art cannot be well executed or mildly original. Replicating scenes from famous films and manipulating them in the style of Photoshop’s ‘cutout’ button is neither inventive nor mildly intriguing.
But I will hold my tongue, as simultaneously much of the work I enjoyed greatly. Rebecca Wilmer’s heavily textured pieces are subtle and moving. They are both abstract and realistic; the layered roughness of the paintwork creates the very essence of the rural landscapes she paints. Similarly, Barry Spence executes his fantastical seascapes with skill; his use of light and brush stroke creates dreamlike images.

Another favorite was the work of Michael Hitchens, whose screen-printed, geometric urban landscapes are well composed and capture perfectly the ordered, yet chaotic environment cities provide. Bold use of colour and sometimes unexpected angles add a unique stance to his images.

Then, of course, there is Andrew Brooks, whose layered and reworked digital photographs are surreal, stunning and captivating. However, it would be nice to see a bit of variety: the works of his on show have already been displayed at both From Space and Urbis.

What is so nice about this gallery is that there is little pretence and much honesty. It is a gallery that aims to be accessible to the public, to show affordable work for people to buy, and thus display work that can hang suitably in a hallway. It is not therefore the most exciting of exhibitions, but one that does its job very well indeed. Tick.

Mooch and Revolve Gallery, Triangle Shopping Centre, Exchange Square, Tuesday-Saturday, 11am-6pm, www.mooch-art.co.uk, www.revolvegallery.co.uk

LINK: http://www.manchesterconfidential.co.uk/Culture/Architecture/Mooch-and-Revolve-gallery

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

REVIEW: 40 Days of Solitude at Nexus Café

Published: MANCHESTER CONFIDENTIAL, 25th March 2009

"40 Days of Solitude at Nexus Café: Thalia Allington-Wood on the art of doing nothing"

Nexus Café is pretty unassuming. With its dull grey front and ambiguous stairwell leading into the room of sofas and coffees below, you could very easily miss it. However, since 40 Days of Solitude began it has undoubtedly been getting a little bit more attention than usual. As I approached, people walked past, shopping bags bustling, doing a double take, and pausing bewildered to take a better look.

And why, you might well ask? Because, for the 40 days of Lent usually reserved for various forms of fasting, Nexus Café are sticking people in a glass box. Well, not quite a glass box David Blaine style, but near enough.

Their glass-fronted installation space (shop window to you and me) will be occupied each day, between the hours of 9.30am and 7pm, with a lone individual. Sometimes they will be under the guise of an artist, sometimes not. All they will be allowed is three items of their choice (electronic methods of communication not permitted). All that will be bestowed upon them is: The Complete Works of Shakespeare, The Bible, water and a singular meal’. Desert Island cliché fully in place. What happens next?

Answer: who knows? While in captivity, the inhabitants are free to do and create whatever they wish (except nudity). Alternatively they are free to do absolutely nothing whatsoever (watching the web footage it would seem some have merely taken the opportunity to catch up on some well needed sleep).

This is a shame. Nexus Café are providing an unusual and uniquely regulated studio space, which should provoke intriguing results, from sculpture to installation to performance.

Though with our current obsession with reality TV, maybe watching people do nothing is exactly what people like to do? The viewing numbers attracted by the Big Brother house eating breakfast say it all.

The fish bowl experience must be an odd one. Never unobserved, the inhabitants of 40 Days of Solitude are constantly filmed by a webcam and goggled at by people doing their shopping and sipping lattes. I imagine it makes you feel rather self-conscious. One woman hid herself behind an umbrella, others flit from one awkward, attempting-casual pose to the next. Nine and a half hours could seem like a very long time.

Which is why the most interesting of residencies have been those with a plan: those who have manipulated and altered the space and responded creatively to their new environment. One girl created an intricate cocoon out of multicolored string, a haven from the pubic eye. Another made large and bright 3D shapes and hung them from the ceiling like a slightly surreal mobile, turning the stairwell into a dreamlike environment.

A different artist attempted to reverse the psychological effect of his captivity by taking photos of everyone who stopped to look at him. Then promptly proceeded to grid the room with orange paper, making it into a geometric vortex. Whether this neon surrounding enhanced his experience I can’t say. It would have given me a headache.

Last time I was there, the artist in occupation had created a wonderful installation titled ‘The Practice of Generosity’. One of her three items appeared to have been a sack full of lovely earthy red sand. Scattered across the steps, the earth was compacted into small castles of circular shape, like miniature Towers of Babels, indented and crumbling.

To quote their own strapline: ‘40 days, 40 people, 40 experiences’. Some are good and some are bad. This temporary and multi-faceted exhibition is an entertaining idea that has a lot of potential.

40 Days of Solitude. Until Sunday 12 April. Nexus Art Café, Dale Street. Open 10am-7pm. 0161 236 0100. http://www.nexusonline.org.uk

LINK: http://www.manchesterconfidential.co.uk/Culture/Architecture/40-Days-of-Solitude-at-Nexus-Caf

REVIEW: 'Subversive Spaces', Whitworth Art Gallery

Published: MANCHESTER CONFIDENTIAL, 9th February 2009

"Subversive Spaces: Whitworth Art Gallery"

You can see nothing. The darkness is suffocating and engulfing. Stumbling, groping along the walls, you experience Gregor Schneider’s astonishing ‘Kinderzimmer’. The content and message as dark as the space you explore alone.

The familiar and sunlit South Gallery of the Whitworth has been transformed. It has become shrouded and claustrophobic, the temporary container for other transplanted spaces: replicas of a child’s abandoned domestic space.

The duplication and displacement of the rooms, alongside the feeling of confinement in ‘Kinderzimmer’, articulates the Surrealist thought explored by the exhibition.

A poignant and effective introduction to the magnificent ‘Subversive Spaces’, Schneider’s work expresses the sense of constraint found in the home and the solitude and vulnerability of open, designed spaces. It physically represents the Freudian theory of repressed childhood within the dark subconscious, while also highlighting the disruption of space that fascinated and preoccupied the Surrealists.

In his manifesto of 1924, the self-proclaimed Surrealist leader, Andre Breton emphasized the importance of boundaries that “have been assigned even to experience”. It is the narrative of these boundaries, both physical and mental, and the resistance to their “cage” that the surrealists sought to express through exploration of the unconscious mind. Art to them was a means to transcend controls exerted by society and habit.

‘Subversive Spaces’ examines two distinct legacies from this movement: the domestic space and the disturbances it contains or causes. Followed by walking within urban environments, the surrealist preoccupation with wandering to discover hidden spaces and emotions. In both there is a focus on hysteria, childhood experience, abuse, our dreams and mental illness as a means to subvert the traditional and familiar.

Each piece undermines your expectations and challenges assumed perceptions. The works seek to disrupt the safe and comfortable. As you walk from room to room, distorted bodies, ominous settings and menacing everyday objects stop you in your tracks.

Sarah Lucas’s provocative and prostrate furniture copulate as you enter, their personification realizing potential unconscious desires. The dining room setting further highlighting the undercurrent of repressed motives and fantasies that fill everyday discourse.

From here you encounter a medley of the unexpected. Robert Gober’s prostrate limb protrudes from the wall, while Mona Hatoum suggests torture with her oversized tomato slicer. Markus Schinwald photographs flexible and objectified contortionists, while Lucy Gunning shows remarkable climbing skills. Traveling around a stark and bare room without once touching the floor Gunning literally climbs the walls in her captivity. In enacting the anxiety felt in constriction, her work interrogates the restrictions felt by some women in the family space.

Leaving the home and entering the city, confines remain but in different form. Francis Alys draws our attention to the British overuse of railings in his playful films, walking aimlessly around central London rhythmically chiming his exploration with a wooden stick. Similarly Alex Villar’s ‘Temporary Occupations’ comically highlights the physical barriers and enclosures that fill our environments, as he jumps and climbs into pointless inaccessible spaces. While both William Anastasi and Katie Holten use the city’s movements to produce ‘automatic’ and spontaneous patterns that contrast the regular motion and repetition of the environment.

‘Subversive Spaces’ is truly excellent. This is the Manchester art scene pushing its limits, eliminating them, and providing something at international level. The exhibition moves coherently and fluidly from room to room, theme to theme. Greats such as Max Ernst, Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte stand next to contemporary artists, highlighting the continuing dialogue Surrealist thought has with more recent art. Thought provoking, visually striking and packed to the brim with impressive content, it can’t be faulted.

Subversive Spaces: Surrealism and Contemporary Art, The Whitworth Art Gallery, 7 February - 4 May 2009

Link: http://www.manchesterconfidential.co.uk/Culture/Architecture/Subversive-Spaces-Whitworth-Art-Gallery

PDF: Subversive Spaces, Manchester Confidential, 9th February 2009