London: The New Saatchi Gallery - The Revolution Continues

THE REVOLUTION CONTINUES: NEW CHINESE ART
Saatchi Gallery
Duke of York's HQ, King's Road, Chelsea, London
until Jan 18 2009
FREE

At last the much-anticipated new gallery in Chelsea has opened, in the vastness of the old regimental barracks on the Kings Road, and at vast expense. Critics, while loving the immense spaces, have been divided on the quality of this inaugural exhibition, which features most of China's contemporary superstars, with the notable exception of Ai Weiwei.

The Guardian's Adrian Searle (Saatchi gallery: A study in blandness, October 7 2008) is withering:
The former Duke of York's HQ has been transformed into a study in blandness. If not for the art, we might be at a King's Road corporate wellness retreat...
Too much here looks secondary, or like a tiresome kind of entertainment. There are few signs of language being stretched and one has the feeling that many works have been manufactured with a market in mind...
On the whole the sculpture is better than the painting. It is almost all figurative, sometimes aiming for abject hilarity, sometimes for mordant gravity. But this time, optimism and Saatchi's unquenchable enthusiasm might not be enough.

Although everyone seemed to make an exception for Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's extraordinary Old Persons Home, left, Charlotte Higgins (Guardian Blog) was also unimpressed by most of the art:
The paint was still drying and the pale-wood floors still pristine this morning as the press drifted around the inaugural exhibition of Chinese art.
And therein lies the problem. It just is a truly grim show.
There is one mildly amusing piece - Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's room full of life-like sculptures of very elderly men in wheelchairs, each one looking something like (although hard to pin down to) a world leader in his dotage. These uniformed fellows in their medals, heads lolling on shoulders, white hair unkempt, reminded one of the broken Saddam, or of Yasser Arafat in his last days, or of what Bill Clinton might end up like in his twilight. The wheelchairs moved around of their own accord, such that the old blokes with their blankets on their knees bumped into each other from time to time.
Well, that was the highlight. Too much of the work here was on one note, or had one shouty visual trick up its sleeve. As often in the company of the work of Charles Saatchi, or at least the stuff that he has collected recently, I found myself being reminded that he is an ad-man. Visual puns are his bread-and-butter. That's why he likes this kind of thing: the miniature city (badly) constructed out of dog chews; the 'history-painting' containing Mao sitting in the back row at a McCarthy hearing; lord help us, the giant turd containing miniature toy soldiers. Hectoring art with little to say.

It was not all bad - Richard Dorment (The Telegraph) was more approving, see the video link below, which includes footage of Old Persons Home.



Considering it's free, and there is a very promising line-up of shows to come, it would appear that London is just being characteristically bitchy about the flamboyant Charles Saatchi. LF disagrees with the naysayers - we think that more far-sighted zillionaires should follow his lead and fund great public galleries. If you don't like all the art on show, at least it's there to experience first-had, so get yourself along and decide for yourself.

London: Frieze Art Fair opens Thursday 16 October

16-19 October 2008

It's here again - so soon!
"Frieze Art Fair takes place every October in Regent’s Park, London. The fair provides an environment to introduce and showcase new and established artists to visitors from around the world."

http://www.friezeartfair.com/

London: Tate Modern unveils the new Turbine Hall installation

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
TH.2058
Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, London
until 13 April 2009

Left: Centre-stage in the new installation, entitled TH.2058, is a larger-than-life model of a massive spider sculpture by Louise Bourgeois, who herself took on the Turbine Hall commission in 1999. Courtesy Tate Modern, London

Tate Modern has unveiled the latest in its series of Turbine Hall commissions - one of the most terrifying challenges in contemporary art, if also one of the most prestigious. French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster has filled the vast space of Giles Gilbert Scott's former power station with recreations of sculptures by Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, blowing them up by 25% and placed them among a sea of mattress-less metal bunk beds, complete with reading material. The aim is to present a vision of a post-apocalyptic world 50 years into the future, the artist says. (The Guardian, October 13 2007)

London: Andy Warhol's exposures at The Hayward

Andy Warhol
Other Voices, Other Rooms
Films, screen-tests, videos and Polaroids
Hayward Gallery, London
Until January 18 2008

"Mr Land invented this great camera called a Polaroid. And it just takes the face of the person. There is something about the camera that makes the person look just right. They usually come out great. I take at least 200 pictures and then I choose. Sometimes I take half a picture and a lip from another picture. Sometimes it's hard, sometimes it's easy." – Andy Warhol

What's to say? A must-see from the inventor of '15 Minutes of Fame'. See Jonathan Jones' Guardian review below.

Below: Polaroid pictures taken by Andy Warhol: O.J. Simpson, Robert Rauschenburg, Joseph Beuys, Truman Capote. Photographs: Founding Collection, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh © 2008 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc
Video: Andy Warhol photographing Joseph Beuys

The Polaroid production line
© Jonathan Jones, The Guardian, Monday October 6 2008

"Mark Rothko was once at a party in New York when Andy Warhol walked in, with his entourage of superstars. Warhol heard Rothko complain bitterly to the host: "How could you let them in?" The two great American artists were not exactly drinking buddies - so it's a strange twist that a Warhol exhibition should open in London this week, coinciding with a retrospective of his antithesis, Rothko.

Rothko thought Warhol represented the worst things about America: consumerism, celebrity, superficiality, you name it. But the two artists may have had more in common than you might think. In the early 1990s, New York's MoMA put on a great display of abstract paintings from the 1940s and 50s. At the end, some curator put Warhol's Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times (1963). It was totally right. Warhol's tragic subject matter, held in a saturated field of colour, shared the pathos and power of the abstract expressionists, but with less introspection, and more interest in others.

This was abstract reportage, and its compassion, its determination to bear witness, was almost unbearable.

Other Voices, Other Rooms was a novel by Warhol's favourite writer, Truman Capote. The Hayward's Warhol retrospective has adopted this as its title, as if to underline the artist's readiness to listen to, and look at, other people. It features Warhol's films, screen-tests, videos - and his Polaroids, which it rightly hails as works of art in their own right, even though they were actually used by Warhol as aids for painting portraits. They are strangely compelling images: one of the great humanising threads running through his factory-like output is his fascination with portraiture. The Polaroids provide a fascinating insight into this man who wanted to capture the world like a camera.

The Polaroids are, however, the most difficult of his works to reconcile with any lofty view of Warhol's output. In the early 1970s, he started to do society portraits. His subjects were stars and high-society types, from Chris Evert to OJ Simpson, Grace Jones to Joseph Beuys. Sitting for Warhol simply meant letting him take Polaroids of you. These were converted into silkscreen templates, printed on to canvas and painted over in lurid smears of bright colour that take the contrasts and saturations of the photographs as their starting point. In the Polaroid, Capote has bright blue eyes; in the painting, these become electric circles of sky blue within a pink face.

Just to make that observation is to home in on how precisely and intelligently Warhol's portraits work. Capote's eyes are not just eyes - they are the eyes of the great Truman Capote, whom Warhol revered and whose book In Cold Blood looks unshakingly into the worst elements of US life, just as Warhol did when he painted the electric chair. There's an emotional choice in the decision to heighten his eyes: a man becomes a myth, a face becomes an image.

The fact that Warhol liked famous people does not mean - as is usually assumed - that he worshipped celebrity for its own sake. In his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, he gives celebrities this advice: you shouldn't value your fame in itself; you should "always have a product that's not just 'you'". An actress should count up her performances, a model her photographs. This way, "you always know exactly what you're worth, and you don't get stuck thinking your product is you and your fame". This is the opposite of the famous-for-being-famous ethic he often gets the blame for.

In the Polaroids, it's noticeable that no one is "just" a celebrity. These people do things: there are artists Warhol sincerely admires (Robert Rauschenberg, Max Ernst), pop stars, sports heroes. And many of the portraits are far from flattering. The camera does no one any favours, producing oddly lumpen, gross images of bright, damaged flesh - the raw facts, the rude material. Warhol said he deliberately miscast his films because the wrong person is always funnier and stranger. In these Polaroids, the stars, famous as they are, look miscast in their own lives.

Warhol's quest for the ungainly, even the freakish, reaches its fascinating climax in these Polaroids. Warhol thought himself ugly. He also thought of himself as a mirror. In front of the camera, as if in front of the mirror, he tries out disguises: drag, wigs, lipstick. He even poses as himself, plain Andy Warhol. The more you look at his work, the more you feel there really was such a person, who was not just an empty mirror but a dark, reflective lake - with hidden depths that have still not been fully charted."

Memes and matresses - Alexander Seton at Chalk Horse

Alexander Seton
Memeoid
Chalk Horse Gallery, Sydney
until 25 October
Also (upstairs): Marley Dawson

This is LF's standout opening of the week, not least for a thirsty, happy crowd spilling out into the street on a sultry spring night - don't you wish it happened more?

Alexander Seton must be Australia's most skilled carver, with the possible exception of Ricky Swallow. But then marble (from Wombeyan) is a much more demanding medium than wood. The standout installation - actually catalogued as 4 separate works - is a series of minitaure bunk-style beds in unvarnished blackbutt, on which lie a series of baby matresses, on each of which lies a jarring and sometimes cryptic object(s), including a tiny, sleeping, swaddled infant. So far so interesting, although on opening night the blandly-lit space did nothing to enhance this subtle tableau, which seems to demand a darkened and hushed space. Those unfamiliar with Seton's work may take some time to realise that the matresses are carved, with exquisite detailing, from solid marble - the quilting, the creases, the pleating, the subtle textile qualities of matress lining... Wow!

This is a great example of material as metaphor, an old LF theme, but is just an added resonance in an already poignant installation. There is a further subtext - Seton is apparently referencing internet 'memes' - viral cultural multipliers on YouTube and the like. One of the matresses has a webcam as its object, another some sort of high-tech chrome 'wand', referencing memes such as 'The Dancing Kid' and 'Star Wars Baby'. LF isn't totally convinced that YouTube videos can be coinsidered memes in the original (Richard Dawkins) sense of the term, but they are certainly 'memeoid' in nature, and it's an interesting overlay on Seton's more enduring concerns, and the beautiful tension between the hard monumentality of marble, and the soft comforts of 'bedware' as also seen in his stunning Security Blanket series of 2007, below.

Left: (Not in current exhibition) ©Alexander Seton
Self-censoring helps everyone (2007)
Plastic & Womeyan marble
Couresy the artist and Chalk Horse Gallery

Dougal Phillips wrote about Seton's 2007 installation Security Blanket:
In Security Blanket, Alexander Seton brings the fine art of marble sculpting to a conceptual sculptural practice which draws upon themes of memory, play and safety. The works in this exhibition are beautifully crafted objects which marry hyper-real material effects with carefully chosen miniature icons - a row of houses, a Spruce tree, a jeep.

The common foundation of each of the works is the folded doona recreated in marble. Each doona is folded differently, someas if laid out at bed’s end, others as a heaped pile on a teenager’s floor or as a stage for combat in a child’s room. The materiality of the marble is key here. The doona folds have been carefully rendered, with colour of the marble matching the off-white and grey tones of an aging comforter. The marble itself incorporates the powerful impressions of childhood - not only does it remind the artist of his bedclothes, this particular marble is quarried from the Wombeyan area, close to where Seton spent time as a child.

What Security Blanket ultimately offers is a double-barreled question: What does security mean, and where is it found? People of all ages cling to their doonas physically and mentally, as landscapes for emotional turmoil, covens of vulnerability or, in the eyes of the child, a ground-level world to be built on and conquered. In the end, what Seton reminds us is how little really changes over the years.

- Courtesy Dr Dougal Phillips , Honorary Research Associate
School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, University of Sydney Director and Curator, 1/2doz.

Back to Mimeoid at Chalk Horse - there is also a considerable cast multiple component, plus video, but it's the rocks that get us off. Marley Dawson's witty sculptural meditations on the world of men's sheds and tools is also worth seeing, and testament to Chalk Horse's ongoing commitment to mounting complex installations by emergent artists, and their brave transcendence of the demands of running a commercial gallery.

A la prochaine.