We Tell Stories to Live: Writing about Art and Life

I haven’t written a blog for a while because, ironically, I have been busy writing.

Almost five years ago, living in Houston, Texas, I was trying to find courses to improve my art writing. I had written some articles for Arts & Culture Texas and really enjoyed it – after all what is more exciting than being invited to a press preview and being led around by Mona Hatoum (see my review of the 2017 exhibition Terra Infirma at the Menil Collection here).

Mona Hatoum, Homebound, 2000 installation at the Menil, Houston, 2017

Some purists argue that art critics should evaluate artworks without giving thought to the intentions of the artist. Shouldn’t the artwork be able to speak for itself? I am not in that camp. I believe the artist’s thoughts are invaluable: artworks offer a unique chance to get a peak into someone’s mind. What struck me most when listening to Mona Hatoum was how she was led by the specific time and place in which she made her artworks: a residency in rural France peaked her interest in making domestic objects on an industrial scale, a stay in Japan in led to her meditative, contemplative sand drawing sculptures. People, Places and Things are important.

As for the art writing courses – I didn’t find any. What I did find was a course called ‘Memoir - First Page.’ At that point ‘memoir writing’ was a new concept for me; something that only elegant French women did. I have meanwhile learnt that ‘memoir’ is the biggest growing category in book publishing, that almost all literary magazines have a non-fiction category, and that it is also called ‘Life Writing’, ‘Creative Non-Fiction’, “Narrative Non-Fiction’ and ‘Personal Essay’. Where an autobiography is someone’s life told chronologically, a memoir shines a light on a specific period or theme in someone’s life. It is often more complex in terms of craft: using flashbacks, interweaving interviews or research, using imagination and fragments and other literary tropes (my favourite book on narrative structures is Jane Alison’s “Meander, Spiral, Explode’).

Berhe Morisot. Woman and Child on the Balcony, 1872, Oil on canvas, 61.0 × 50.0cm, Artizon Museum, Ishibashi Foundation,Tokyo

My first page for the Houston memoir course consisted of two parts. The first part was an account of an accident I’d had on the morning of my eighth birthday party, when, so excited for my guests to arrive, I’d run straight through our floor-to-ceiling patio doors, the thick, sharp glass slicing my femoral artery. The only reason I am here today is that my parents were both doctors, my father a practising surgeon. Without time to call an ambulance, my mother drove our new blue Hondah through all the red lights, with me stretched out on my father’s lap in the backseat like a modern day Piéta. Except my father wasn’t mourning my death but trying to keep me alive, pressing his thumb on my thigh with force.

The second part was about my admission to a very different sort of hospital shortly after my fortieth birthday: The Priory North London. I described how I was disoriented and confused. How, without a visible injury, I felt guilty: that I had abandoned my two young children, that I had done this to myself. The nursing staff watching me 24/7 didn’t make things better. They wrote notes in their books and made jokes to colleagues in the corridor outside my room. The way in which they treated me showed to me that they doubted my illness too. What is a young woman with a handsome husband and two beautiful children, an apartment in Hampstead and several degrees, doing on the psych ward?

My first page was well received. After I’d read it out aloud, my tutor asked me a question.
  “I’m wondering what it was that got you in the hospital, what kind of trauma?”
I hadn’t answered him, just looked at him, perplexed. “There was no trauma”, I replied. “That’s the point of the piece.”
  A sensation of anger welled up inside of me. This was the typical reply of people who hadn’t experienced mental illness: cause and effect; trigger and release. And yet for me, depression had engulfed me for the first time when I was twenty, and come back in waves during my late thirties. But then, on my way back from the course, I started wondering if maybe the tutor had a point. What if there was something that had caused my depression? Wouldn’t that be liberating? After all, it would mean that I could take control of my life.

“Life is made of stories,” Joan Dideon wrote in her famous essay On Keeping a Notebook from her 1968 collection ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ “the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves.” And so I started writing, taking online courses during lockdown, working with great mentors (thank you Lilly Dancyger and Peter Mountford and Jontahan Collard).

Last year came my first success: a third place in the Fish Memoir Prize for my short memoir ‘Escape Van’ about my depression and camping in Yellowstone and visiting the Plains Indians museum in Cody. A week after I returned from reading that story and celebrating with the other writers at the West Cork Literary Festival, I heard that I was a finalist in US magazine `Fourth Genre’s essay contest, too. My essay ‘Behind the Fence’ about Berthe Morisot and the relationship between my mother and me, and the ways in which women can be held back in their lives was published last month (please see below how to access both pieces).

A year or so after my stay in The Priory, when I finally started to emerge from my depression through a combination of medication, therapy, mindfulness and doing what felt good instead of what I thought others wanted, I read the fictionalised memoir of a Dutch writer: PAAZ by Myrthe van der Meer. She was admitted for five months in the psychiatric ward of a well-known, state-funded hospital in Amsterdam. I remember feeling a pang of jealousy turning the pages, at the easy jokes between the Dutch staff and the patients, the direct way they communicated with each other.

My memoir will be about that. About the pathologising of mental illness at the expense of finding deeper, lasting solutions. About the preference in Western psychiatry for the biological approach at the expense of what psychiatrist Karl Jaspers called ‘the biographical method’, in a 1910 paper in which he described several cases of paranoia in unusual details, paying attention to his patients’ accounts of their lives before they entered hospital and to their subjective experience of their symptoms. Or, as Dr Eleanor Longden, who suffered from hearing voices and spent years on psychiatric wards before becoming a psychiatrist, says in her amazing 2013 Ted Talk ‘The Voices in my Head’: Instead of asking my patients ‘What’s wrong with you?, I ask them ‘What happened?’

My book will also be about art. Ultimately it was my engagement with art that brought me back from my depression: wildly beating on an African drum in The Priory’s music sessions; listening to the songs chosen by other patients. And stories: listening to other people’s troubles by the lights of the plastic Christmas tree, seated around the coffee table with the puzzle that somehow never got made, like a sad metaphor for our minds. I strongly believe that art has that power to heal, to take us outside ourselves, to teach us something in our lives. Thank you for continuing to follow me on this journey.  

For a FREE COPY of the 2023 Fish Anthology containing the 10 winning entries in flash fiction, memoir and poetry, email me the addresses of two people who you think may be interested in my newsletter! sabine@sabinecasparie.com

The 2023 Fish Anthology is avalaible to order on Amazon for £9,-

My story ‘Behind the Fence’ in Fourth Genre’s 2024 Spring Issue can is available on ProjectMUSE for $5,-, or you can subscribe to this great magazine here.

West Cork Literary Festival, 2023

Collecting Moments: Thoughts on Why, Where and How to start Collecting Art

Last week the Affordable Art Fair was back in Hampstead, and a few people asked me if I was going. I wasn’t. I always try to explain that the art sold there is a bit too ‘gimmicky’ for me, and when I see people’s confused looks, I then add that Affordable Art Fair is great if you want to find a nice-looking piece that fits your new sofa, but that if you want to find an artwork that has a little more depth you are much better off going to Photo London, which is on in the same week. ‘Or you can just ask me,’ I think, but I don’t say, because I am not that good at promoting myself. But yeah - you can just ask me.

A friend of mine once described buying at the Affordable Art Fairs – and for that matter at all the shiny galleries with gold-coloured shopfronts that always have some kind of Banksy/Mickey Mouse/ pink-neon combination in the window – as similar to buying a designer handbag. I’m not that into designer handbags, so I personally like to compare it to the categories used in the book industry: ‘commercial’ and ‘literary’. Commercial fiction is the kind that you read on a beach or in the train – high on plot but low on themes; in other words the kind of book you read when you want to switch off. The same counts for a ‘commercial’ artwork – something to look at when you’re stretched out on the sofa after a busy day. Literary fiction, on the other hand, is the kind that makes you stop and wonder, the kind that you relish long after you have finished it. Who knows, you may even make notes in the margin. In other words, literary fiction is the kind that makes you switch on. And so does an artwork that isn’t just well made, but that delves deeper into some aspect of what it means to be alive.

Jeppe Hein’s All I Need is Less, 2019, seen at Frieze London 2019

Another question I often get asked is ‘Are you a collector?’ to which I always answer that my definition of a collector is someone who owns more artworks than can possibly fit on their walls, and so: yes. There are a few very good artworks lying in waiting in my drawer/ store room, still unframed. What I could also tell you, if you have time, is that a collector buys artworks first and foremost for what they are, and not for where they will go in the house. I could explain that a collector does research into the artists they buy; and that often their collection as a whole has a certain theme or focus. I don’t mention that a collector often operates alone, as it sounds a little predatory and pretentious, and yet I strongly believe it – there is almost nothing more personal than liking or disliking a work of art. And admit it, art collectors are a little predatory and pretentious (but also very, very important).

Vanessa da Silva, FLAG#1, 2017-21 and partly shown: Emma Cousin, Mimesis, 2020

Much more interesting than the definition of a ‘collector’ – which in the end you could argue is as vague and oblique as the definition of an ‘artist’ (“Everyone is an artist,” according to Joseph Beuys) – is the question of what kind of art to collect. I have always been fascinated by the numerous passions and motives of different collectors. Italian collector Valeria Napoleone collects only female (identifying) artists, driven by her passion to promote one half of the population structurally ignored by the art world. The Zabludowicz Collection, showing their collection and other artworks in a beautiful converted chapel in Kentish Town, focuses on art that is make of digital media or engages with the digital world. Andreas Siegfried of Siegfried Contemporary opens up his Notting Hill home as a gallery space; he has a soft spot for artworks that deal with life and death and the cycles of nature (pre-register for my tour to view Siegfried’s collection on 22nd June here).

So what drives me, as a starting collector? Living with the same artworks for a length of time, I hunker after the stories they contain. I recently acquired a large flag by Brazilian artist Vanessa da Silva, who is based in London. The work is magical: sown by hand and incorporating both the English flag and that of a former colony, Kiribati – a subtle nod to a better world where we one country doesn’t dominate another, where everything is in flow. But what I treasure almost as much is Vanessa sitting on the sofa by our window, her curly hair as playful as her art, lit up by the early evening sun and helping me decide how to install the work. Or Vanessa in her studio when I picked up the work, watching her meticulously iron the flag, square by square, on her large studio table.

Sophie Clements, On Letting Things Be (An Exercise), 2020

Or take Sophie Clements, from whom I acquired five small prints, stills from her performance film On Letting Things Be (An Exercise). She personally came on her bike to meet me in the centre of London to hand over the work. A touch of her sporty appearance and her can-do attitude started to seep into the seemingly delicate and poetic prints. I recently attended a night at Iklectik Artlab where Sophie screened four short films, and I started to understand her quest for those hard-to-find epiphanies, those moments in life when things are just right and you are lucky enough to get a glimpse of pure beauty.

Maybe, then, I am a collector of moments. In fact, most of our modest art collection has some reference to the performative realm. William Mackrell lighting a thousand tea candles, Carali McCall drawing a circle the length of her arm for more than 3 hrs. Anna Perach’s tufted Spidora sculpture worn by dancers performing spidery moves, Liane Lang’s hyper-real and witty feminist doll, photographed interacting with cold stone statues. There is something vulnerable, something honest in those moments that moves me immensely.

Carali Mc Call, Circle Drawing, 4 hours 15 minutes, 2019

But what about you? What would you buy if you had the right budget (and trust me, there are great artworks starting from only a few hundred pounds)? Do you go weak in the knees at the smell of oil paint? Do you like art that takes you away to a place of contemplation, or art that engages you with difficult topics? Do you want to hunt graduates’ fairs in search for the next big thing, or are you like my husband, whose dream it is to own one monumental work by an established artist, something that radiates grandeur and reduces the rest of your interior to a mere side-show? (An Andreas Gursky photograph, should you be interested).

Go and visit some galleries with me. Come to my next collection visit and hear an expert talk about what drives them in collecting art. Because all collectors, however quirky or haughty or obsessed they may appear, have one thing in common. We all have a lifelong passion for art. It’s the thing that makes our heart beat faster and sets our mind on fire. It’s the thing that we think about on the tube and when we lie awake at night.

So next time you are thinking about what artwork to buy, or where to look for it, you know what to do.

Just ask me.

Contact me for art consultancy services on sabine@sabinecasparie.com

Booking for my collection Tour of Siegfried Contemporary, Thursday 22nd June, 6-7.30pm will open next week - email to follow.

Purple Lining - Working for a Hospital Art Collection

Happy new year! I will continue this year writing about my life as a freelancer in the art world.

I recently started working as a collection consultant for CW+, the arts charity of Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. I got to know the hospital collection as a volunteer many years ago.

When I finished my Masters in contemporary art almost ten years ago, I was finding out the hard way that art jobs are difficult to come by as a nearly forty-year old mother of young children. Having worked as a lawyer, the only roles I was asked to interview for were in fundraising. But then I saw an ad for a volunteer at Chelsea and Westminster hospital, assisting with their art collection. My father was a surgeon, my mother studied medicine; my husband’s family are all doctors. A year earlier, I had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital for depression, and my art tours helped me get back into the world and find a sense of purpose. It was, as they say, a no-brainer.

The Atrium, with (from top) painting by John Copnall, mosaics by atelier Adam Nathaniel Furman and painting by Liam Mertens

I ended up staying for two years. Besides leading a project to donate de-accessioned artworks to other medical organisations – a hugely satisfying job, like handing out Christmas presents every day – I also curated a few wards, re-installing works from the collection. I was able to us a fantastic selection of School Prints – which we installed in the Imaging ward (in fact, Hepworth Wakefield has issued a new collection of school prints by contemporary artists in 2018, which is very exciting). In the Centre for Sexual Health on Hammersmith Broadway, a clean, industrial looking building, we installed prints by British post-war artists such as Bridget Riley, Robert Long and Joe Tilson. 

The first thing I remembered when I walked into the hospital again in October last year was how highly complex it is to look after a hospital collection, which has to represent all people, can’t offend anyone, and has to be proven to have a positive impact on health in order to receive continued funding. After years of seeing art mostly in white cube galleries, I also remembered the tricky logistics of installing work in clinical spaces. Artworks in hospitals do not have ideal lighting. They often have to be installed above barriers. They sometimes get blocked from view by lovely volunteers selling cakes and cards, and they constantly are at danger of being trashed by trolleys and hospital beds. Allen Jones’s Acrobat, the largest work in the Atrium, had lost its head, which was sitting abandoned in an adjacent room. 

Nevertheless, the rewards are enormous. Last month, for World Aids Day, I organised a small gathering for the artists who had loaned us work for our quarterly exhibition wall – a space at the back of the Ground floor Atrium that we paint freshly for each new exhibition, this time a sparkling purple. All of the artists are or were patients of the hospital. There was no wine, there were no mince pies. There were no speeches, and just myself attending on behalf of the charity. But they showed up, and they were beaming: seeing their work exhibited in a public space was a first for many.

That dark December afternoon, the participating artists were able to name their illness, and to celebrate being a part of a community that has been through a lot but is still standing. Shivering in a cold hospital corridor with the streets outside frozen, we kept warm in the knowledge - deep seated and proven and true - that art can heal, connect and inspire. And we found our purple lining.

For any questions, suggestions or ideas for partnership please contact me at CW+, at the following email address: cwplus.arts@cwplus.org.uk

A Room of my Own - How to be a Leader whilst Working Freelance

It’s that time of year again. Recharged after a Summer holiday, I always love coming back to London, to walk on Hampstead Heath and sense the tiniest chill in the air - that sharpness of a new season, announcing change. I suddenly have an endless energy for dreadful projects that I haven’t been able to muster all year: the bathroom has a leak, the carpets need to be cleaned and the old folders in the box next to my desk are gathering dust. How did I leave it there untouched for so long?

With the post Summer clean-up comes a need for tidying the mind. Will next year be the year I finish my memoir? Can I find the energy to delve into the Arts Council website, to see if the classes I have been leading voluntarily – using art to improve mental health and wellbeing – would be eligible for funding? When did I last send out a blog to my loyal subscribers – you? Well, at least that last one is hereby resolved. 

In the midst of this frenzy, I nearly forgot that some time ago I signed up for a taster session with an organisation called ‘She Leads Change’. The conditions at home are not ideal. The carpet cleaner is in the living room, and he is almost two hours late, thereby missing my carefully planned slot when our sensitive guard dog is out with the dogwalker. So I am stuck in the tv room with a dog anxiously monitoring the street, ready for bursts of excessive barking. Well at least there’s the ‘mute’ button. And come to think of it, I might as well use the ‘video off’ button too and eat my lunch. Haven’t we become so efficient since the miraculous appearance of Zoom?

‘Welcome everyone!’ the facilitator says, greeting five black screens and one human being,
‘We are a small group and the session is going to be quite interactive, so I would appreciate it if you turned on your cameras.’ Alas, no lunch.

Having all said what brought us to the sessions, we are asked to do an exercise: in pairs, we should talk for three minutes each about what it means for us to be a leader. But just at the moment I find myself in a break-out room with a young girl zooming in from Australia (who left briefly to change from her pyjamas, so was probably expecting an impersonal webinar just like me), my son rocks up outside with to ask if he and his friends can hang in the tv room for a while. Or at least that’s what I think he asked – I can’t hear very well over the dog barking and the humming of the carpet cleaning machine.
‘No! I’m in a meeting and there is nowhere else to sit!’ I shout. My son retreats looking rather surprised; maybe he has forgotten that when his mother is at home, she works sometimes too. I admit, it’s hard to tell when I am in cut-off shorts with hair turned grey from all that swimming in the sea.

Back in the breakout room, the facilitator has taken the Australian girl’s place.
‘Breathe,’ she says kindly, seeing my frazzled state right through the screen. Did I ever manage to put that Zoom filter on?
After I apologise she repeats the question. What does it mean for you to be a leader?
’Hmmm, I work freelance, so I don’t really lead people as such. I lead myself, in a way.’ The facilitator nods patiently. The other party is supposed to listen without reacting. I babble on.
’Being a leader is about having a clear purpose and communicating that to the people I am trying to reach. It’s about not always reacting to opportunities but creating them.’ I straighten my shoulders.
‘Actually, what I really need is to claim the space and time for myself.’
A room of my own, I want to add, but that sounds a little bit too basic and not at all leader-like. I am relieved to be ejected from the break-out room the moment my daughter storms in.
‘Mum, the door is wide open! Anyone can just walk in!’
‘Well hello to you too, sweetie. How was your sleepover?’
‘Why haven’t they finished my carpet yet? I need to do my make-up and there’s a chair on my bed. ‘

I sigh and sit back behind my desk. The meeting is almost over and everyone is asked to say what struck us from the three-minutes talk of our partner.
‘The word that stuck with me from Sabine is “focus’’, the facilitator says.

So here’s my focus for you. Here’s to a new season, and here’s to change. Not the micro-changes of a new website or a new blog-style, but the long-lasting ones – making the world a better place to live, however small the changes are that we can individually make. Art can do this, I truly believe that. And I hope to convey that in everything I do, whether it is writing about artists I feel have something relevant to say, introducing new people to art, teaching future art historians in schools, or giving well-seasoned collectors an interesting angle that challenges and surprises them.

I hope you will stick with me on this adventure. And maybe, as your new project for the new season, you will book that birthday tour or that company outing or that enrichment session in your classroom.

 I would love to be your guide.

Stop Tanks with Books - Mark Neville

Eight days ago, Russian troops invaded Ukraine. In the terrifying war that resulted, one thing that shines through is the incredible resilience of the Ukrainian people. It is something that Mark Neville, a British photographer based in Kyiv, has known for years. The three children in his photograph The Choir at Kyiv Lavra Church, taken in 2017, could as well be the national emblem for the Ukrainian resistance. Dressed in local clothes, standing in front of their Orthodox church, these children are looking at us with pride and defiance. ‘Don’t mess with us’, they seem to say.

The image is part of Neville’s book Stop Tanks with Books, on which he has worked since 2017 and which was published at breakneck speed when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine became imminent. Printed in English, Ukrainian, and Russian, the book contains a selection of 80 photographs of Ukrainians, accompanied by stories from Ukrainian novelist Lyuba Yakimchuk and research from the Centre of Eastern European Studies in Berlin. “With sirens sounding I am sitting here in Lviv, Western Ukraine, looking at this photo I took in a small town in Donbas, nearly one year ago” reads Neville’s Instagram post from earlier this week. “People here are the bravest and most resilient I have ever known. They will never surrender their homes, and they will never be defeated.”

I first encountered Mark Neville in a 2020 online studio visit organised by The Photographer’s Gallery, where he talked to us from his studio in Ukraine. Things were relatively stable at the time, although the country was still reeling from Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014. When Neville first came to Ukraine that same year, he was shocked to hear that around 2 million people had been forced to flee their homes after the annexation of Crimea – one the biggest displacements in the world, but rarely reported on by international media. So Neville did what he always does when making photographs: he immersed himself in the local community. He travelled through the country, photographing and interviewing the people of Ukraine.

Most of Neville’s subjects look straight at us, seeming fully at ease with the photographer. There are more formal looking portraits of people in uniform - soldiers and police officers - but mostly the book contains snapshots of people busy with everyday life. A woman is shopping at her local butcher, families are enjoying the beach in Odessa. And there are many children. A girl in the countryside dressed in colourful clothes stands behind a plentiful harvest of pumpkins; a ginger-haired boy is captured against a backdrop of grey, dull Soviet architecture, putting his fist forward in a gesture of triumph. Life goes on, the book appears to say, despite adversity and misfortune.

Until last week.

What can art do in the face of such horror? Make sure that the photographs that matter are seen by the relevant people, as a start. This is why Neville has just sent out 750 copies of Stop Tanks with Books to the people who have it in their power to help Ukraine: politicians, media members, wealthy business people, academics, celebrities. The book includes a specific set of actions the international community can take.

Neville has always made sure that his photography books were not just a mirror, but also a means. Often working with communities which were in some way disadvantaged – inhabitants of former industrial towns like Port Glasgow and Pittsburgh, people living in the vicinity of Chernobyl, a farming community in Brittany – Neville would not just make free copies available to the members of the communities he photographed, but also send copies to people and institutions who might in some way be able to help improve their lives.

This is how Neville came to Ukraine in 2016. Commissioned as a war artist for the 16 Air Assault Brigade in Helmand, Afghanistan a few years earlier, Neville’s resulting book Battle against Stigma combines the intimate and honest portraits that he is known for with direct accounts from the soldiers about their experiences of PTSD (including his own: Neville wrote beautiful account of his experience with PTSD in The Independent in 2015). That there was a stigma attached to PTSD in the army was apparent: 500 copies of the book were seized at customs by UK Border Force. However, a second consignment entered the UK via a different route and Neville distributed these copies to Defence Mental Health Services, prison libraries, homeless veterans, probation services, and veteran mental health charities. The response was overwhelming, judging by the emails he received from other sufferers and family members.

A military hospital in Kyiv, having heard about the book, requested a Ukrainian language version for its patients, and so in 2016 Neville spent two days at the hospital. In his 2020 studio talk he recounts how on the second day of his visit to Kyiv military hospital, a group of child performers visited, wearing traditional dress. “What happens when a country is at war is that people tend to identify more directly with the symbolism of what their country culturally stands for, so that means a lot of people returning to things such as national costume, a focus on the core elements of being Ukrainian.”

The attention of the whole world is now on what it means to be Ukrainian. What it means to fight for freedom, for democracy. Neville’s photographs in Stop Tanks with Books remind us what freedom looks like in all its proud, colourful glory. They remind us what being free looks like in the faces of people, in the subtle gesturing of their hands, their upright shoulders, their confident smiles. And they remind us that freedom and art are inextricably connected. Neville said it beautifully an interview with The Guardian last week. “What changes people’s minds about a conflict is a poem, a song, or a photograph. It’s people’s feelings that need to be changed. To my mind, that’s the role of the artist.”

Stop Tanks with Books is available to pre-order via Setanta (UK and Europe) and Nazraeli Press (US)
The mayor of London has just issued a helpful list of charities charities to donate to on their How you can Help Ukraine page.

Play as Survival - Robin Rhode

The Dutch museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar, opened in 2016 to show the collection of Joop van Caldenborgh, can sometimes feel a little heavy on art that dominated the early Noughties: humorous, bold and toying with our perception and even our idea of what constitutes art. There’s artist Leando Erlich’s real life swimming pool with its glass bottom, showing visitors moving in a box underneath. There is the sculpture of an older couple resting under a parasol by Australian artist Ron Mueck – it’s the size of a small building, every hair and pimple augmented and scarily real. And somewhere hidden in one of the corridors are Maurizio Cattelan’s two tiny elevators that open and close to the sound of a ping, going… where? But besides these crowd-pleasers, Voorlinden has an excellent program of temporary exhibitions. The current display, Robin Rhode, is the first solo exhibition of the South African artist (1976) in the Netherlands.

Piano Chair, 2011

My feeling upon entering the exhibition was a mix of surprise and confusion. There is so much going on in each individual work. Is this a drawing? Photograph? Sculpture? Performance? An Animation? In most works, it’s all of these media, all in conversation with each other.

The short digital animation Piano Chair shows the outlines of a black piano drawn on a white wall, and before you can really examine the work, you notice a man dressed in a black tie walking towards the piano, as if the wall, the canvas for the drawing, is now a stage set. Then you notice the rope. But now it’s a real-life rope installed on the gallery wall, which the man now grabs to try to pull the piano away, in a humorous, almost Charlie-Chaplin-esque act. He fails. The film ends with the piano catching fire, the flames filmed separately and inserted into the animation. Are you still following? It’s truly dazzling.

There is something really exciting about your mind being whirled around like that, constantly veering between perception, understanding, and undoing. We are shown all the different temporalities and all the different media all at once. The result is that we are both captivated by what is happening and by how on earth the artist made it work. It’s like our brains are engaged on different levels.

People in Rhode’s works often fail - in that sense, it has similarities with the work of performance artist Francis Alys. But whereas Alys’ art is sometimes so conceptual that it is difficult to grasp what exactly constitutes the artwork, Rhode’s work is a true visual feast. Some walls in Voorlinden are clad in wallpaper with geometric designs derived from Rhode’s real-life wall paintings on the streets of South Africa; on other walls, the artist has painted fresh drawings especially for this exhibition.

Chalk Bicycle, 2011

Chalk Bicycle looks so fresh and alive that it seems it was painted on the wall just moments ago. In fact, it was done just before the exhibition opened - you can see clips of Rhode at work on the walls on Voorlinden’s website. For Rhode, drawing on the wall is a performance; it involves his whole body in a vigorous acrobatic dance: so quick and virtuous that the drawing is there before you even realise what exactly he is doing. A real bike and the artist’s paint-covered shoes left on the floor give the illusion that a performance is still going on, except now it is done without the artist present. Rhode is a master of illusion, making us see and imagine things with just a minimum of visual means.

But there is a more serious undertone, too. Rhode sees his performance drawing as a kind of poetry: the rhythm of shapes, the harmonies hidden inside the lines. His futile interventions are a comment on the futility of life itself. As he says in one of the clips on Voorlinden’s website, he is trying to capture in his works the struggle of the everyday, in search of that one creative spark. “I use humour and play as an ode to survival - those small moments that can lift humans up.”

Phantom Rain (detail), 2019

Some works are more conventional: his photographs are always shown in series, documenting the stages of a performance that happened longer ago, in another place. Drawing extensively on the walls of streets and dilapidated buildings in his hometown of Johannesburg, Rhode engages performers to activate the sites. In the series Phantom Rain, the human figure almost merges with the tree, as if the body is just another compositional element in the whole. But of course, our mind tells us differently: a body is a three-dimensional, complex, moving thing. The effect is that both the drawing and the building become animated, an extension of the artist’s psyche. Even the tree starts to look like a drawing, and again, that wonderful moment happens, that mix between confusion and surprise, trying to join the rational part of our brain with our emotional and physical reaction to the work.

Untitled (Compass - Male & Female), 2013

In Compass Male & Female, an object is literally animated: a sculpture of an enlarged compass is suspended from the ceiling, so that it moves around like an elegant dancer. Rhode is interested in the idea that mathematical instruments can embody a kind of sexuality and a kind of animism, as if they are a stand-in for humans. It really starts to feel like everything Rhode touches comes alive, as if he can magically transform even the dullest and most common things.

Proteus, 2020

The series Proteus was made in 2020 in the backyard of Rhode’s parental home in Johannesburg. It is named after the prophetic god of the oceans rivers bodies of water. It beautifully captures the wrought times of the pandemic, having to make do with what is around us, having to find beauty in the domestic and the everyday.Looping back to the beginning - it’s an apt metaphor for the nature of Rhode’s work. His work offers no resolution; there’s only fleeting beauty and short moments of humour and surprise and connection.

Rhode’s art is tentative instead of declaratory: it poses questions instead of giving explanations. It is hard to pin down, its forms and mediums shapeshifting right before your eyes. Rhode’s art offers a meta-commentary on art itself: however much the artwork tries, it will never be able to fully grasp real life. And yet, I feel that Rhode’s art comes close. His work, to me, captures the incredible wonder and complexity of what it means to be alive.

Robin Rhode, Voorlinden, Wassenaar (The Netherlands), until 25 September 2021

Journeys of a Laundry Mountain: Lana Locke

This week, a committee of the Freelands Foundation chaired by art critic Hettie Judah held a talk on ‘How not to Exclude Artist Mothers’ and released a set of guidelines for institutions and residencies. Unfortunately, motherhood is still not compatible with the demands of the art world.

In 1973, in the year that I was born, and my mother gave up her job as a doctor to stay home with me, American artist Mary Kelly gave birth to her son. Kelly struggled to combine artmaking with the slumbers of motherhood: the constant feeding, the dirty nappies, the gibberish baby talk, the laundry. So she decided to make it the subject of her art.

Divided into six sections and 135 objects, Post Partum Document tracks everything Kelly’s son did or produced during the first five years of his life: stained liners from the inside of her baby’s cloth nappies, feeding charts, her son’s early drawings, transcripts of his first words. Using the theory of linguistics and psychoanalysis - most prominently the readings of Jacques Lacan - Kelly painstakingly catalogued and annotated theses specimens of baby- and toddlerhood and framed the 135 objects as if they were artefacts in a science museum. Refusing to represent the female body itself, Kelly instead presented motherhood as a psychological and social process, thereby transporting it into the realm of the male-dominated discourse of objective science.

Almost fifty years later, UK artist Lana Locke found herself in a similar position as Kelly all those years ago – at home with two daughters under five, swallowed up by the demands of domesticity and childcare. The burden was made heavier by the recent Covid-19 lockdowns.

Locke’s film Journeys of a Laundry Mountain (26 minutes and 49 seconds long) moves between the artist’s neat garden in a gentrified area of London and the rural landscape of Queensland, Australia, where her parents live. Having begun filming herself hanging the laundry in London, she found herself doing the same in her parents’ garden when she and her family visited them in the Winter of 2020.

The film has the feeling of a documentary. ‘We call it the Laundry Mountain: the result of multiple loads of washing dumped in one spot’ the artist voice reports. ‘Working from home, I guard against the domestic taking over in terms of my labour. I make such calculated risks that segregate the laundry as little as possible.’

Lana Locke, Journeys of a Laundry Mountain (2020,) Video 26 minutes and 49 seconds

We move from the artist’s London garden with its flimsy, temporary structures of the laundry racks, to her parents’ overgrown garden in Australia with its makeshift water supply arrangements and a half-finished swimming pool covered in dead leaves. Locke is standing in between the green weeds with her four-year-old daughter, who is helping her sort the clothes. It is a moving scene; mother and daughter at work, chatting. But the voice-over tells a different story. ‘Sorting and separating each subject’s clothes creates some temporary structure and order… But how do I escape perpetuating the gendered role of mother with my daughters?’

The London and Queensland scenes are interspersed with short film clips: a painting by Poussin of women doing the laundry by a lake, a film clip of two white, suburban women in America discussing the merits of a new bleaching product. Locke highlights the normative and restrictive nature of doing the laundry, and its underlying, sometimes racial connotations of whiteness and purity and cleanliness. There is archival footage of British people arriving as immigrants in Australia, with their territorial ideas of claiming the land, just as the laundry rack claims its place in the garden. It soon becomes apparent that this film is about much more than the laundry.

When Locke visited Queensland, in 2020, wildfires were still raging in nearby Victoria. We follow Locke and her family as they visit the ravaged forests in Queensland, where the fires have died out. There is her oldest daughter again, in a summer dress and sandals, marching over the dead branches. ‘This is so boooring’ she exclaims, repeating it like a mantra, as if visiting the site of a natural calamity is just another chore, like helping her mum with the laundry. Locke retorts, in a serious but motherly voice. ‘Don’t you think it’s scary that the planet is burning?’

Pangolin-Bat (2020), Mixed media relief; 26 cm x 47 cm x 9 cm

An Aboriginal firefighter appears in the frame. It’s bad enough that the Natives have lost their land and their identity, he tells us, but now, because of mismanagement, the whole country is losing its identity, too. ‘The wild we encroach on and seek to possess’ Locke’s voice-over muses, ‘like China’s pangolin’ (Locke is also showing a sculpture of a colourful Pangolin, made from bits of her children’s old clothes). And, seamlessly, Locke takes us back to the laundry, showing us the brown residue from the pipes in her parents’ house. ‘Whitening, purifying, cleansing, yet the residue keeps coming back.’

This film is clever, layering the mundane with colonisation and climate change, jumping from topic to topic like the forest fires that jump the trees. As in Mary Kelly’s Post Partum Document., the domestic and the scientific are brought into the same realm. But where Mary Kelly subverted the visceral, messy nature of motherhood and made it minimalist and pristine, Locke does the opposite, replacing the white and pure connotations of doing the laundry with the messy and chaotic nature of motherhood, globalisation and life.

There is a lightness and humour in Locke’s film, an element of not taking herself too seriously. The film ends on a hopeful note. In London, Locke asks the rest of the family to help her sort through the laundry mountain which almost reaches the ceiling. A warm and messy scene full of jumps and laughter and tears ensues, ending with two little girls sitting in an empty laundry basket as if sailing to a better world. In Queensland, we see Locke’s daughter in the woods again. She picks up something from the forest floor and turns to her mother with an excited look. It is a green shoot,  starting to grow again.

Journeys of a Laundry Mountain can be viewed online at Lungley Gallery until 8 April 2021
It is also shown at Exhibition: Equality Video Club at National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts, Weiwuying, until 28 March 2021

Photographs courtesy of the artist

Falling into the Picture: Fred Tomaselli

With the news of a vaccine for Covid-19 last week, it was hard not to feel optimistic. A perfect moment to look at the work of an artist who combines the viral information of news media with the cosmic shapes of nature.

James Cohan Gallery in New York is showing the work of Fred Tomaselli, but thanks to the hugely improved global connectivity during Covid-19, I encountered the artist and his work through an online talk organised by Brooklyn Rail and led by its editor Toby Kamps. Tomaselli and Kamps met before, during a dinner in New York in 2017, during which they shared their views on what they both viewed as an apocalyptic moment (US politics and the election of Trump). Little did they know what was to come.

Tomaselli has always viewed the media with a mix of awe and worry, calling the continuous stream of information that is offloaded to us on a daily basis ‘a form of virus in itself’. Born in 1956 in Santa Monica, California, Tomaselli grew up with the artifice of Hollywood and Disneyworld, but also against the backdrop of striking nature. A graduate of California State University, he didn’t feel that much of a connection to an art world that consisted mainly of academic Minimalists, and for a while, he worked in a surf shop whilst immersing himself in beat and punk culture and psychedelic experiments. As he explained over Zoom, “[m]y work has always been a chemical cocktail, and when I got rid of pharmaceutical elements I guess I made up for it by using more and more of the buzz of the media.”

Spending New York lockdown in his Brooklyn house with limited studio space, Tomaselli found himself returning to the precise, intimate process of collage that he had developed in his ongoing New York Times series. He felt that he couldn’t ignore what was happening in the news every day. “Every day was another blow, one blockbuster headline after another. In addition, I was worrying for friends who became ill with Covid-19”.  

In March 16, 2020 we see what at first sight looks like a normal front page, the headline ‘Fed Cuts Rates to Near Zero; Virus Toll Soars’ like the chorus of a song. But Tomaselli has reworked the image into an array of light and colour. The grand interior suggests we are in Grand Central Station, where a lone female figure can be seen trailing a suitcase and walking towards pitch-black exit. The rainbow of colours that arches over her highlights the woman’s loneliness, whilst at the same time making her universal. Is she walking towards heaven, or the abyss?

In March 14, 2020, just visible on the left is a man’s face in profile (a medical worker in Seattle, I was informed). But instead of the black reality of death and illness, Tomaselli inserts another, more uplifting reality: cosmic and aesthetic. For Tomaselli, interacting physically with the newspaper was like adding editorial input to the front page. Or, in his own words, “[i]t is my ultimate aim to seduce and transport the viewer into the space of these paintings while simultaneously revealing the source of their seduction. Truth and beauty, art and artifice.”

Tomaselli also started to elaborate on the cosmic shapes that he had developed in his larger resin paintings. Turning the process of the New York Times collages around, he took parts of written text out of the newspaper and re-arranged the letters into abstract forms, leaving behind the scale and dimensions of the original front page. These more abstract compositions are mind-blowing.

In one work (all works not showing the newspaper’s date are Untitled), a multitude of forms - circles, stars, diamonds, ellipses - burst out from a central point, a symphony of movement and colour and intricate patterns against a cobalt blue backdrop, the colour of a bright, Californian sky. Detached from the page of the newspaper, the black and white letters function as formal elements in their own right. The media that shapes reality is in turn shaped by it, like a planet circling the sun. Inside the rings of these mandalas and ellipses are more layers with images of birds and eyes and hands: luminous stratospheres populated with the flora and fauna of our natural world.

In another collage, the background is a photograph, dark silhouettes of trees against a maroon sky. Tomaselli has lifted lines of newspaper text and re-arranged them in circle formations, alternated with lines of colour. He then photographed the main circle and repeated it smaller and smaller still, like an infinite constellation of itself. By containing the text in these cosmic forms, death and illness are lifted out of their context and turned into something soothing, something bigger than us.

Other works contain the shapes of birds, composed of images found on the internet, mostly of plastic objects, painstakingly cut and glued together into the bird’s fragile body. Tomaselli’s brother is an avid birder, but it was only during lockdown that Tomaselli himself finally found the time to really look at birds, get lost in the moment.

Cosmic theory, tantric shapes, religious iconography, folk art: grand themes of science, history and art seamlessly blend in with the remnants of our information-saturated age. The works are dazzling and mesmerising and grand, as if we are viewing the world through a lens of psychedelia, seeing right through the detritus of the everyday and into the very essence of our universe.

Tomaselli may look at the world from an agnostic space, but his images are close to the divine. “I see the transcendental moments”, he says towards the end of the interview, “falling into a picture, falling into the face of a wave. I want to give my audience that same experience. The world may go to hell, but beauty keeps being worth looking at.”

Fred Tomaseli is at James Cohan Gallery until 21 November
The Brooklyn Rail conversation between Toby Kamps and Fred Tomaselli can be viewed here.

All images © Fred Tomaselli 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d'Heurle.

They Can't Cancel Autumn: Helen Cammock, William Mackrell and Daphne Wright

Another season, another lockdown. With Covid-restrictions tightened again in London today, memories of those strange, otherworldly months in Spring come flooding back. I find myself thinking of the luminous painting that 82-year old artist David Hockney shared with the world in March, of sunshine-yellow daffodils holding up firmly against a background of bright green grass and a turquoise sky. “Do Remember They Can’t Cancel the Spring’, was its title, a message of light in dark times.

The daffodils have long gone; on my walks in Hampstead Heath I am threading conkers and acorns and damp Autumn leaves. But this is the thing with nature: it cannot be canceled. It will keep on going, growing and reproducing, promising a future.

The refuge to nature is visible in the art world, too, and three artworks shown in London this month have particularly grabbed me. First of all, Helen Cammock’s film They call it Idlewild, a beautiful meditation around the theme of idleness shown at Kate MacGarry. Cammock made the film during a residency at Wysing Art Centre, Cambridge in January this year when word of a quickly spreading virus had just emerged from China. Whether it was an artist’s sensibility to what was to come or an unexpected twist added to the work later, Cammock’s film is an unbelievably timely piece that manages to convey at once the strangeness and the mundanity of the past six months. 

Helen Cammock, They Call it Idlewild, 2020 (still)

Helen Cammock, They Call it Idlewind, 2020 (still)

 The camera moves from a quiet country lane outside Wysing art centre, where cars glide by as if in trance, to the garden. It lingers for a moment on drops of rain on leaves, a brick wall, a quiet park bench then takes us inside into Cammock’s studio. It captures an arrangement of clay pots laid-out on dew-covered window panes, lit by a weak Winter sun. ‘The light shaft of nothingness’, says a woman’s voice (the artist’s). Our gaze is directed to a dead fly on a table. ‘Fly lies in light, a beautiful corpse, leg flicks’. A hint to vanitas paintings, maybe, but in Cammock’s world, even death is clouded in softness.

The film takes on a sharper edge when Cammock starts singing Johnny Mercer’s Depression Era song ‘Lazybones’ in a slow, melancholic tone. The song, sang to Cammock by her father when she was a child, was traditionally used to mock black slaves in America. ‘It is ironical’, Hammock’s voice continues, ‘that those who work the hardest are often seen as lazy, whilst the lazy slave owner is considered the hardworking businessman to which all material assets accrue.’ Cammock makes clear that idleness and laziness are two different things, but that only those who are fortunate enough to be able to do nothing have access to both.

William Mackrell’s work Rage rage against the dying of the light was also started before the pandemic and finished in the studio in the months of lockdown. During a residency with Launchpad in Charante last September, British artist William Mackrell, like many people visiting the region, was impressed by the beauty of the sunflowers in the blazing sun. But more so, he was struck by what happened after they had faded, when rows and rows of sunflowers were clipped by machines and left in the fields.

Photo of the sunflower fields in Charante by William Mackrell

“The farmers were mowing down the fields, leaving a battlefield of stumps behind them”, Mackrell told me. “It was this clash between their beauty and the sinister presence of impending death that struck me. I had this sense of them in my studio at night wandering around, looking for their group in the field. I started to play out this story of the sunflowers as a group of insomniacs’’. 

Mackrell took the broken-off sunflowers to his studio and started a process of camera-less photography, leaving the sunflower-stalks, heads, and seeds on black photographic paper which he placed directly under a skylight in his studio at night. It is a hauntingly beautiful scene: the blue of the skies in the day replaced by the black of the skies at night; the colourful, living sunflowers replaced by their ghosts, shredding a sparkling shower of seeds. 

Adding another layer to the work, Mackrell painstakingly wrote the same line on top of the image over and over again: ‘raging rage against the dying light’, taken from the Dylan Thomas poem 'Do not go gentle into the good night'. It is as if the sunflowers themselves are raging, desperately holding on to the last rays of light. But this is not a sad work, on the contrary: Mackrell gives the sunflowers a new lease of life; from plant object to art object, from positive to negative, from sunlit to moonlit. In nature, death is often just another chapter in the everlasting cycle of life.

William Mackrell, Rage rage against the dying of the light, 2020. Rayograph and texts, 245 cm x 126 cm

Sunflowers also feature in the work of Irish-born artist Daphne Wright. Part of another beautifully paired down show – titled ‘Quiet Mutiny - persists’ at Frith Street Gallery, Wright’s group of six tall sunflowers in pots could almost be the twin work to Mackrell’s Rage rage against the dying of the light.

Wright’s sculptures address the mundanity of everyday domestic life; the exhibition includes easily overlooked domestic objects such as a pushchair, a lamp, a laundry rack, a house plant. But the sunflowers stand out, tall like statues, lined up in a solemn row, heads hanging down. As in most of Wright’s work, an uncanny detail is hidden in a seemingly calm and quiet scene. It is only later that I notice that the sunflowers are missing their petals and leaves. On even closer look, these sunflowers are unusually tall for flowers kept in a pot. What exactly are we looking at?

Daphne Wright, Maple Row Sunflowers, 2019. Mixed media Overall dimensions variable

Wright’s flowers move me in their nakedness. The sculptures are rendered in unfired grey clay, and this simplifying gesture reduces the flowers further to their essence. Like William Mackrell, Dapne Wright presents us with a shadow image of the sunflower’s colourful and life-affirming ‘self’, and like Mackrell’s sunflowers, Wright’s sunflowers take on an almost human presence. Both artists play with an idea, a metaphor of the sunflower, and both their interpretations - although in very different media - lend the sunflowers the same powerful feeling of vulnerability.

“Futile acts for futile times”, says Cammock’s voice halfway through the film They Call it Idlewind. But these three works by Helen Cammock, William Mackrell and Daphne Wright are the most honest, most moving artworks that I have seen in a long time. Maybe our present times call for small gestures, quiet acts of mutiny, the permission of idleness. Like sunflowers facing the sun, these artworks capture rays of light in an otherwise dark period and remind us to cherish that what is real, that what is closest, and that what is dearest to us.

Helen Cammock, I decided I Want to Walk, Kate MacGarry, London until 17 October 2020
William Mackrell, Lungley Gallery, www.lungleygallery.com
Daphne Wright, A Quiet Mutiny - persists, Frith Street Gallery, London until 14 November 2020

Dizzy With Art - Hospital Rooms

I have once been hospitalized for depression. One of the first things I noted, even in my detached state of mind, were the prints on the wall. Tired-looking posters of an unidentifiable lake in an undefinable country. Cheaply framed in brown mounts, sticking against the filthy plexiglass. The art felt lost, like me.

In 2016, the charity Hospital Rooms stepped into the artistic void. When visiting a friend who was sectioned in an NHS mental health unit, curator Niamh White and artist Tim A Shaw were shocked to find that the hospital environment was cold and clinical at a time when she was so vulnerable. With ten years of experience in the art world, they realised that they had a real opportunity. “Our mission is for all people in mental health wards to have the freedom to experience extraordinary works. We believe in the power of art to provide joy and dignity and to stimulate and heal.”

The results have been truly astounding. Staff of NHS psychiatric units around the country are waking up to the enormous possibilities that artworks can offer to the wellbeing of their patients. The amount of projects that Hospital Rooms is involved in is growing exponentially and there is now a waiting list as new requests keep flooding in.

Sonia Boyce, Design for Courtyard Gate, Croydon PICU, 2019

As Hospital Rooms’ art projects are site-specific and sometimes situated in extra secure units, the results are not always visible to all. But Hospital rooms has found a solution for that. Through regular exhibitions in art galleries, artworks derived from the originals are accessible to the wider public. Currently South London Gallery is showcasing the artworks made for Croydon PICU, a psychiatric intensive care unit for men located in Bethlem Hospital.

Harold Offeh, Dining Room, Croydon PICU, 2019

The five artists who made work for Croydon PICU were carefully selected according to the needs of the community and asked to work closely with patients, staff and the NHS trust. Artist Harold Offeh held workshops in which service users were encouraged to explore the texture of different spaces in their unit through wax rubbings. Offeh layered the resulting patterns in a composition that was projected and painted directly on the wall of the Dining Room. The work tells a story of how we experience and map the spaces around us.

The work was replicated in South London Gallery and accompanied by a performance, ‘Mindfully Dizzy’, on opening night. Offeh and an accompanying trumpetist were dressed in gowns with the same prints as the mural, looking like a cross between doctor and wizard. In between atmospheric musical tones, Offeh expressed his dizzy state of mind with increasing intensity of voice and gestures, moving between the audience, lying on the floor. The crescendo repetition of Jon Kabat-Zin’s forecast that “mindfulness may be the only promise that the species and the planet have for making it through the next couple of hundred years” was a powerful ending, sounding more like an ominous curse than a gentle choice.

Tim A Shaw, Hallway, Croydon PICU, 2019

The other artworks are equally inspiring. Sonia Boyce held a karaoke workshop with service users where everyone came prepared with their favourite song; her large wall-based artwork depicts the hands of people of various origins each carrying a different flower with healing properties. Tim A Shaw’s patchwork-style artwork in the hallway sits in between figuration and abstraction: based on colours chosen by the patients, it is related to maps of the nearby area and meant to slowly unfold over time.

Remi Rough, Outside Area, Croydon PICU, 2019

Similarly colourful and bright is Remi Rough’s large exterior mural, made of a vibrant but calming palette that seems to be in movement, like rays of sun hitting the building. According to the artist, an exponent of the Abstract Graffiti movement in the 1990s, “[i]t’s one of the simplest yet most complex mural designs I have done of late but I am so pleased with the result and I really hope that it makes the patients a little happier when they’re spending time outside of their building.”

Michael ‘Reilly, Extra Care Room, Croydon PICU, 2019

Michael O’Reilly, a scenic painter at the Royal Opera House, chose a mild blue colour on the wall of the Extra Care Room, a space for patients who need some time away. His landscape is painted from an elevated position, enabling the viewer to contemplate a calm expanse, whilst at the same time surrounded by a sense of shelter from the wooded foreground. Sepia illustrations on the wall depict individual objects, resembling the drawings found in natural history books. Service users have described the artwork as ‘serene and deep’.

Jessica Voorsanger, TV Room, Croydon PICU, 2019

At the end of the day, residents can gather in the tv room, where Jessica Voorsanger chose warm and saturated colours interspersed with symbols that she designed together with the patients from drawings based on their favourite tv shows. “I chose to work with the TV room as that is where I would spend the most of my time”, she says. And that, ultimately, is what Hospital Rooms wants to achieve: that patients will feel at ease and see their environment as a positive space where they want to spend time.

As I can attest, mental health wards can be hostile and confusing environments. But at least those who find themselves in one of the wards transformed by Hospital Rooms can find comfort in the experience of being surrounded by art. And not just any art, but the kind of art that I see in the UK’s best galleries and museums.

Photographs courtesy of Hospital Rooms
@Hospital Rooms

The Croydon PICU Exhibition is at South London Gallery Fire Station until 23rd February 2020
Become a benefactor of Hospital Rooms starting from £8.50 per month

I have recently joined the Development Committee of Hospital Rooms. Contact me at sabine@sabinecasparie.com for any questions or suggestions

Child's Play and Artist's Residency - The Watermill Center, NY

Oh, to be six again! This was my wish and granted dream when I attended a Family Day at The Watermill Center, in eastern Long Island, New York.

Traveling on a single-lane road, I nearly missed the discreet white sign for The Watermill Center, across the street from an old barn. The driveway wound towards the center’s modern building, set among 10 acres of partially wooded land near the Hamptons hamlet of Watermill.  In the parking area, which looked like a stark gravel carpet next to spiraling trees, a large Indonesian stone statue over 5-feet high greeted me like a totem. The circular shapes on the stone eluded to a head and eyes: a human form, but without limbs.

Founded in 1992, The Watermill Center provides a sanctuary for selected artists and individuals working in the humanities, giving them time and space to explore their creative pursuits. This cocoon of creativity only becomes public on select days throughout the year including on Family Days. At the entrance, Watermill Center Staff welcomed eight or so youngsters in attendance with their family members. Resident artist Cleek Schrey and his Daxophone Consort started the session with a musical presentation using the Daxophone: an oblong wooden instrument that attaches to a block. Families were then ushered downs stairs from the Main Studio, past the community kitchen to a large dining room with a 20-foot circular table. Once seated, we were given the chance to experiment with the assorted instruments and fiddler’s bow.

Though the hum- strumming sound of the bow on the simple wood slates was not perfectly melodic (think of a squeaky or dull saw), the group of children and families seemed to gain a sense of sonic unity and accomplishment.

This was followed by a poetic presentation of Ghanaian-born poet Afua Ansong. At each seat, a carved block of an African Adinkra symbol was placed with an associated phrase. With block in hand, we were led back through the building past the Study Library (with over 8,000 titles) to the Summer Office, a large space with open worktables. A glass wall faced an open lawn of cut grass, giving the participants a view to contemplate. With tubes of paint, rollers and a paint plate we replicated Adinkra stamp print-making on fabric and wrote accompanying poems.

Family days are a great way to experience the ‘universe’ that is The Watermill Center. Or, if you are part of the lucky few, you can buy tickets for the sensational summer fundraising gala dinner when a spotlight is thrown on this nook of woods, drawing artists and patrons from around the world to appreciate outdoor exhibitions and performances (tickets for the annual summer fundraising gala dinner are in the thousands).

Before all the pomp and ceremony, the property was once a defunct Western Union site (where the fax’s first stylus was created). The Watermill Center and surrounding acres were purchased by the avant-garde director Robert Wilson in the late 1980s. The industrial building was remodeled and the grounds tidied. The Watermill Center now serves as a year-round artist residency, as well as a summer home for Mr. Wilson.

To be clear, this is not a museum. It is not a gallery trying to sell art. No, this is an art incubator, a sort of camp where artists gather to support each other’s exploration and individual artistic creations. "The Watermill Center is not just another non-profit foundation,” says world-renowned performance artist Marina Abramovic in a 2018 Forbes article. “Watermill is a universe of its own. Artists have a possibility here to create and show their work.”

Writers, directors, visual artists and performing artists can partake as residents, in three categories. There is the most prestigious category, the Inga Maren Otto Fellowship: fellows need not apply but are chosen by the Watermill Center to participate and all expenses are covered. The second category is The International Summer Program which takes 60 to 100 participants. As Watermill Center Director Elka Rifkin describes, “this summer group is a communal and working environment. All participants and staff contribute to maintenance and housekeeping of the grounds as well as contributing to Wilson’s productions”. During the rest of the year, the Artist Residency Program accepts around 20 artists. The center provides housing, space to work, access to their archives and some production expenses. In all cases, the expectation is to allow artists to “critically investigate.” Participants are required to share their work with the public community in workshops, lectures and open rehearsals at the center.

“I was moved by the monoliths on the grounds,” comments Brazilian artist Lillian Colosso, upon reflection of her 2017 stay at the center. Throughout the building, rustic stone statues greet visitors, wooden bowls are on display on shelves and pottery is visible in open cupboards. These items are part of the Watermill Center Collection, collected by Robert Wilson over the past 40 years. Rifkin comments “… in general the philosophy here is to live and work around the art as an influence for the work the artists are doing while in residence.”

Other former residents gushed with equal enthusiasm about their time at the center. Mexican artist Lua Rivera valued the daily exposure to the library and architecture during her 2017 residency. From her studio in Taiwan, she reflects that at The Watermill Center, “every day in every corner you can find something amazing that helps you understand the evolution of art. The team has lots of experience and encourages artists to stretch their boundaries, but at the same time they make you feel at home and part of the artistic family.”

After the musical session, I asked Cleek Schrey how he experienced the Center. “The performers are thrilled to be surrounded by the Bob Wilson legacy. The center’s physical space allows the musicians to explore non-sonic realms of musical performance and gives us the ability to explore lighting design.” Fellow ensemble member Ron Shalom added: “This is an exceptional residency where one can be immersed in the archive and library.”

To me, the community Family Day mimicked, on a much smaller scale, the imaginative experience of the resident artists. Families left the event with wooden pieces, musicals bows and block prints. After playing a new instrument, writing a poem and rolling and printing a new fabric in a pristine setting, my creative urges were comfortably met. What a pleasure to participate in this cultural gem nestled in this corner of the woods.

For Watermill Center residency, click here
For Watermill Center events, click here

Tanya Rulon-Miller is a freelance writer
@ttrex

All photographs are the writer’s own

New Beginnings - Joanna Rajkowska

At the centre of Shoreditch gallery l’Étrangère, set up by Polish-born, London-based art historian Joanna Gemes in 2014, sits a large egg. With its pastel light-brown colour spread out over its plaster shell like a patina, the egg is perfectly formed, as all eggs are, and the size of a small infant. A group of women has gathered for an evening in support of the charity Women for Women International.  

“Touch it”, says one of the other guests. A few of us stand around the egg, our hands on its ‘shell’. I am immediately soothed by a regular, tapping sound inside, a strange sensation like a heartbeat. Rajkowska calls this acoustic sculpture ‘Hatchling’, and we learn that she was inspired by seeing a bird egg crack: the anticipation and the energy going on inside the egg, and then something breaking out, like a new beginning. Rajkowska wanted to recreate that feeling in an object.

Joanna Rajkowska in front of The Hatchling at Frieze Sculpture

You may have seen the large-scale replica of a blackbird’s egg by Rajkowska that is currently exhibited in Regent’s Park for Frieze Sculpture. This Hatchling is inspired by the egg of the common blackbird, one of Britain’s most common birds and one whose song is arguably the most beautiful and best-loved of any bird. Made from pigmented acrylic plaster, the bluish colour is given by powdered stone mixed with the plaster; and like the smaller Hatchling in the gallery, its surface is hand-painted by the artist. There is a similar sound of the labour of hatching birds: their heartbeat, the pecking of the shell and their first vocal attempts, recorded by Rajkowska on a microphone.

It was important to Rajkowski that the egg exceeded the size of a human being, became somehow larger than us. Also important was that the audience can touch the sculpture, and put their ear on it to listen to its beat. On the standard “Do not touch or climb” subscript at Regent’s Park, ‘not’ and ‘or climb’ are wittingly crossed out.

Some further reading informs me that the blackbird is a Europhile – British blackbirds are joined in winter by large numbers of migrants from Europe, mainly Scandinavia, the Baltic States, Russia, and Germany. “How many people at this table were born in the UK?” asks Joanna Gemes. Two or three women raise their hand (not Gemes herself, not me). In fact, the name of the gallery l’Étrangère refers to Gemes’ identity as a foreigner, as well as to the Camusian notion of displacement within one’s own country. On the eve of Brexit, these are daunting thoughts.

The strong connection between humans and animals is further explored in sculptures that incorporate masks, human hair, fur. A sculpture in a luminous deep blue reminds me of Yves-Klein blue (a colour I will from now on refer to as Joanna Rajkowska blue). At first sight, it looks like the animal heads that traditionally adorn hunters’ lodges, albeit an animal with strikingly elongated horns. But this animal has been seamlessly transformed into something more human, but also more sinister; small animal bones and stones stand for eyes and a mouth. Gradually the horns start to take on a human form, too, rising up into the air like arms in prayer.

Joanna Rajkowska, Mask with Roe Deer's Vertebrae, 2019 Papier-mâché, roe deer's vertebrae, stone, acrylic paint, beeswax

Masks are a recurrent theme for Rajkowska: a mask is something that we humans often hide behind to avoid showing our true face, a man-made object that animals do not have. At the same time, masks have a strong association with ritual, that expression of togetherness and bonding that humans share with animals (albeit in a much more cultured and developed way for humans). It is this constant push and pull between the animal world and the human world, and between vulnerability and strength that shines through in all of Rajkowska’s work.

There is a series of drawings in which Rajkowska uses the shape of the egg as the shape of our planet. These Egg-Earths contain buildings and factories and trees and animals, but worryingly there are many more buildings than nature. If our world could be a bit more like the egg, Rajkowska seems to say, a bit more open and nurturing and soft, mankind would be better for it. It is in these drawings that Rajkowska most actively and most critically takes a stance. The show’s ominous title, ‘The Failure of Mankind’, seems to suggest that the metaphorical egg is the one that cannot crack. We need to make sure that the built world doesn’t break through and destroys and damages the natural world.

Joanna Rajkoswka, Egg-Earth (Industrial Revolution), 2019 Collage on hand-made paper

 As much as a wake-up call, The Hatchling and other works in the exhibition seem to be a proposition. An invitation to openness and looking at our world from a different, more gentle angle. Both Joannas told us that the works are about the power of empathy: the ability to feel and understand other species, on whom we are dependent, and to understand and listen to others. This is why Gemes’ thought of Rajkowska’s art when she came across Women for Women International earlier this year and spoke to its Executive Director, Brita Fernandez Schmidt. As Gemes said, “to help women from countries struck by war, rape, and abuse, the most important thing we can bring to them is empathy. Empathy is often painful, so we avoid it. Instead, Rajkowska’s art and Women for Women International embrace it.”

This was a night for women. But I do hope men go and see this show, too and are not scared away by its title. Feminism is about taking an open, inclusive stance, not replacing one dominant power with another. In my head, I am replacing the ‘Failure’ in the title with ‘Hope’’ and the ‘mankind’ with ‘humankind’. Leaving the gallery after the beautiful dinner, surrounded by challenging art and inspirational women, greeted by the soft London night, I thought of new beginnings.

Joanna Rajkowska, The Failure of Mankind, l’Étrangère, London until 31st October 2019
The Hatchling, part of Frieze Sculpture, Regent’s Park until 6th October 2019

Photographs courtesy of l’Étrangère

I Have a Nightmare - Rachel Rossin

My family and I are currently watching ‘Blackish’, a comedy about a mixed-race family in which the four children are completely comfortable with who they are, but the father constantly urges them to express their ‘blackness’. In one episode, he is shocked that his offspring does not seem to know much about Martin Luther King. “You must know his famous speech, I have a dream!”, he exclaims . “Not really”, his son Junior answers, “I always find it so boring when people talk about their dreams.”

I was reminded of this when trying to write about Rachel Rossin’s show, Stalking the Trace, at the Zabludowicz Collection in London. I am finding it hard to find the words to describe the art, and especially the VR part. VR is often like entering someone else’s dream. The way we encounter VR is highly personalised: a headset that limits the viewing to one person only. But the content of the VR that I have encountered so far is also highly dreamlike. With its 360 degree-view, VR results in an unusual spatial awareness: without a solid base or vantage point there is a feeling of disembodiment, like floating. The objects that appear in VR don’t adhere to the rules of physics that we know: they are weightless, they crash, they move through you, they disappear. Like a dream, VR has recognisable aspects of the real world, but is always just out of reach.

Inside the former Methodist chapel that houses the Zabludowicz Collection, viewers are bathed in darkness. The Zabludowicz has been putting art and new technology on the forefront of their programming since they opened their London space in 2007, and the digital art works surprisingly well in dialogue with the architectural environment of the 19th century chapel: the old and the new, Baroque architecture housing sleek digital design.

Rachel Rossin, Stalking The Trace, 2019, ExhibitionInstallation view. Photo: Tim Bowditch. CourtesyThe Artist and Zabludowicz Collection

The first work in the exhibition, Stalking the Trace, consists of an immersive video installation. There are elements of the installation that are uplifting: images of the natural world float by, forests an lakes and mountains, sometimes sparsely populated with small cartoon-like figures. The sound is a mixture of a classical score and a trance-like tune. The psychedelic virtual environments of Swiss artist Pippilotti Rist come to mind: her flowing images of nature in saturated colour. But Rossin’s imagery is sharper, more staccato. Brightly coloured, angular shapes float in the midst of nature, digital mark-making interspersing the calm. At times, the screen is minimal; for a few minutes, all you see is a giant blue chain that is virtually linked to the illuminated exit doors. It feels like a metaphor: I am glued to the ground.

At one point, a human figure appears, towering over us and wearing a harness like a sleek Artificial Intelligence-suit. There is something very unsettling about the technology guiding this body. “Only injustice, no outrage” the voice-over echoes through the empty room. I am reminded of the injustices we witness every day through the lens of our digital screens, how real disaster and pain have been filtered through the virtual funnel to satisfy our need for quick and easy information. Our need to know, not feel.

New images follow, of flooding around the world, swaths of dark water washing over shores accompanied by news feeds at the bottom. “If you find yourself here, you need to leave immediately” a steely, robotic voice informs us. I am almost ready to take the prompt.

The VR work titled The Sky is a Gap is in a side passage. An invigilator instructs the viewer to walk back and forth, like an animal trapped in a cage, and press the button at the end of a virtual line to be directed to the next ‘scene’. This is time-based VR, guided by the actions and movements of the user. Objects fly around, almost crashing into you. Rossin was inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 movie Zabriskie Point, with scenes of domestic objects flying around a room. But there are explosions too, buildings detonated by bombs, fire, debris. Although I haven’t been in either situation, I feel as if I am simultaneously in a cruel, violent video game and in the middle of a war.

The work, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2017, is an impressive feat of animation, computer programming and cinematography. Rossin grew up with technology and gaming, and she started programming from age eight; in her own words, ‘technology was a huge part of the way that [her] brain was forming’. But Rossin also works in sculpture and painting, and sees these media as fluid. This is, of course, how a whole new generation is growing up, with the merging of the analogue and the digital.

Like Junior in Blackish, I also find hearing about someone else’s dreams extremely boring. But of course, Martin Luther King wasn’t really telling Americans what he dreamt last night, and to me, Rossin’s art equally crosses the line from ‘dreaming’ to ‘having a dream’. Her artworks feel like a conscious statement, a declaration about the state of the world and our fragility as human beings. I suspect that for technology and gaming buffs, such a future of heightened control and agency of our bodies and our technology would be fantastic, but to me, Rossin’s dream feels like a nightmare. A fear that the world will be a cold place. That floods will destroy our planet. That humans will be taken over by robots. That we are locked up in our own destructiveness, hit by the debris of our own undoing. The fact that Rossin’s viewer has agency to enact the explosions at the push of a button makes this all the more terrifying.

Intrigued, I pick up a book from the bookstore, Dawn of the New Everything by VR pioneer Jaron Lanier. “Never has a medium been so potent for beauty and so vulnerable to creepiness”, he writes. “Virtual reality will test us. It will amplify our character more than other media every have.” Walking out of the former chapel onto the crowded Prince of Whales Road, I mainly feel a huge relief. Rossin’s art makes you think about what could happen to our planet if we do not look after it. I realise, surrounded by the cars and the birds and the people, that we have the power to act and turn the nightmare into a dream.

Rachel Rossin: Stalking the Trace, Zabludowicz collection, London, until 7th July 2019

With thanks to Laura August for editing
All photos my own unless specified

Rachel Rossin, Stalking The Trace, 2019, Exhibition Installation view. Photo: Tim Bowditch. Courtesy The Artist and Zabludowicz Collection

The Conceptual Monument: 'New Monuments for New Cities'

In 1958, Henry Moore presided an international jury that was to select a monument for the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The jury chose The Road by Oskar Hansen, a radical monument. An asphalt road one kilometre long and 70 metres wide was to run through the whole camp diagonally, and the remains of barracks and crematoria would be left to decay naturally, overgrown by wild plants. But this revolutionary anti-monument was never built, rejected by the former prisoners, who couldn’t find themselves or their experience in this project and chose a more figurative monument containing the names of the deceased. [1]

In 1981, a new sculpture in the form of a 120 ft long curved, steel wall was erected on the plaza of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in lower Manhattan, commissioned by the US General Services. The sculpture drew criticism from neigboring government employees as soon as it was installed: by slicing the plaza in half, Titled Arc was an obstacle for anyone who wished to traverse it in a straight line. That was Serra’s goal, arguing that “Step by step, the perception not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes”. After a public Hearing in 1985, Tilted Arc was finally cut back into three pieces and sent to a storage yard in Brooklyn.[2]

If these two examples show one thing, it is that public art, and monuments as its subset, are complex. If you live or work in a city, chances are that you pass monuments on a daily basis: statues, memorials of war or markers of achievements. But do you notice these structures? Do they blend into the architecture of the city, or do you see them as artworks? Are they accomplishing what they promise? Do they honor the past or do they evolve with time? And what would it mean to encounter a fictional monument, one that will never be built?

The High Line Network Joint Art Initiative, with its focus on industrial reuse areas, proves to be an ideal platform to explore the subject of monuments. “Imagine a monument for today, for your city, for your country, for your community. As monuments […] are torn down every day, what will go up in their stead on these empty pedestals and plinths, or in the open sky above urban square and urban plaza?” This was the prompt given to twenty-five artists from five cities, who were selected by a jury of art professionals to design ‘new monuments for new cities’.

The exhibition that resulted, New Monuments for New Cities, started in Houston, after which it will travel to Austin, Chicago and Toronto, ending at New York’s High Line this October. I visit Houston’s recently regenerated city park, Buffalo Bayou, on an un-typically cold day. Twenty-five posters the size of billboards are displayed double-sided on thirteen light boxes, which are in turn mounted on pedestals. There are the five posters from the selected Houston artists, as well as the others from the remaining cities. There is something ancient-looking about the positioning, watched over by Henry Moore’s Large Spindle sculpture, as if Moore is presiding a second competition.

One work immediately catches my eye. A woman is holding a little boy, their faces touching. It is a black-and-white photograph crossed by a single line of text in a warm maroon color, reading: ‘a part’. The body language of the woman and child conveys closeness, but the image appears fragmented, consisting of black and white pixels. On closer look, I can make out a tiny subscript. “A four year old reunites with his mother, El Paso, July 26, 2018’ (and a photo credit to John Raedle/ Getty). This is a picture taken directly from a newspaper.

The artwork delivers a punch to my stomach: fleeting newspaper image reconfigured into a solid, monumental presence. “We are talking about things that have really broken hearts in our community: the separation of women and children”, one of the artists, Jimmy Castillo, explains to me at the opening of the exhibition. “We are at a point where we can allow immigrant families to grow ‘apart’ or become ‘a part’ of us.”  He and the second artist, Delilah Montoya, are part of the Sin Huellas collective, an art/activist collective composed with the aim of revealing issues of borders and migration.

In another poster, Mary’s Naturally, the pink outlines of a building are visible behind a pink triangle, which is – as I learn from the artists, Nick Vaughn & Jake Margolin – the  symbol of queer activism. A combination of an archive photograph, a screenprint and a digital design, the pigment seems to be pushed inward to form the triangle. The work is a tribute to the past, in the artists words, “to Houston’s iconic queer gay bar with the same name but also to the Houstonians killed by AIDS.” To me, it seems like a bold vision of future our city too, one where there will always be public spaces for everyone.

Not all the works are political. Artist Philip Pyle II has taken a model of Houston’s iconic Broken Obelisk by Barnett Newman and added golden wire rims, a nod to our car culture. The remaining two Houston posters do not appear to be directly linked to our city. Jamal Cyrus’ work, in his words, ‘a monument to science’, shows a pyramid of life, starting with insects and crustaceans and ending with a human figure. Cyrus has inserted a Khokhoi woman to counter the white male that dominated in his own science books. Regina Agu’s contribution is a collage of elements of different buildings, strangely angled and blending into each other. It is like a meta-commentary, as if to state the impossibility of having one monument, because monuments, like history, are fluid and relational.

In all five works, and in many of the non-Houston works too, I detect a spontaneous, almost irreverent quality. The artworks of New Monuments for New Cities are most and foremost ideas, meant to generate discussion and questions. I realize that what makes this exhibition so refreshing is that here is a new type of monument: the conceptual monument, only existing as ‘design for’ even though it is temporarily presented as a structure in the landscape. The usual constraints of public art and monuments are absent here: there is no need for consensus, no dialogue with city planners, no consultation with members from the local community, or petitions from passers-by. There are no lengthy and difficult discussions with historians or survivors of war.

I look again at the mother and child, the pixelated image – not fixed, still becoming. And then I see it: this is a monument of hope. Hope that Houston will be celebrated for its motley of nationalities and cultures, a city where everyone can be ‘a part’. This city, built on swamps, ever expanding, hard to contain. Come to think of it, the poster would be a fitting monument for all of America, a nation of immigrants, fragmented and uncertain, but also strong and caring. A nation of independence and divide, but also of community.

But never mind. America is already building a national monument. It is a permanent one, a gigantic monument, on a scale you have never seen before. It is a monument and a memorial all at once, although there is no sign of a war. It is minimalist, made of concrete and steel, stark and solid like a Richard Serra sculpture. Except this one isn’t playful, and there was no consultation with the local community, or with the national one. There are no faces of people on this monument; only stone, stretching for miles and miles over the empty planes along our Southern border. Sadly, this wall is designed to keep people ‘apart’.

New Monuments for New Cities will be at Houston’s Buffalo Bayou until 30th April 2019, after which it will travel to Austin, Chicago, Toronto and New York. Entrance by Allen Parkway at Gilette Street .

With thanks to Laura August for editorial input

[1] Katarzyuna Murawska-Muthesius, ‘Oskar Hansen, Henry Moore and the Auschwitz Memorial Debates in Poladn, 1958-59, pp. 193-211 in Figuration/ Abstraction: strategies for public sculpture in Europe 1945-1968, ed. Charlotte Benson, Aldershot, Hants, Ashgate, 2004

[2] How Richard Serra changed the Discourse about Public Art in the 20th Century, Artsy Editors, May 2, 2016

Imprinting the Interior: Njideka Akunyili Crosby

When I think of interiors in Western art history, I think of the contemplative quietude of Vermeer or Chardin. I think of the frivolous burst of colour in the scenes of Bonnard and Vuillard. Or, more recent, the stark sunlit rooms of Hockney. Njideka Akunyili Crosby, born in Nigeria and living and working in LA, has burst onto the art scene in a few years’ time to become one of the leading artists of today. Her main subject: interiors.

Akunyili Crosby’w work, a combination of painting, drawing, and photography transfers, has lit up the side of buildings like the Hayward Gallery in London and the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA. At Frieze Art Fair, her work Mama, Mummy and Mamma (shown by Victoria Miro Gallery) was the largest and the most expensive piece of the contemporary section, snapped up by a major museum on the first day.

Two Akunyili Crosby exhibitions are currently on view across the pond, in Forth Worth, Texas and London (my home state and my home town, as it happens). The beautiful and underrated Modern Art Museum Forth Worth, a large concrete and glass building half an hour outside Dallas, has devoted two large rooms to six monumental works on paper. London’s National Portrait Gallery focuses on a selection of smaller works that are part of Akunyili Crosby’s ongoing portraits series of Nigeran youth.

The Modern interestingly presents three pairs of interiors: one set in the artist’s birth country Nigeria, the other one in her adopted home town LA. The African rooms are more traditional. In Home as you See Me, we peek into an interior that is almost life-size. Colourful wallpaper holds family portraits, most notably of the artist’s mother, Dora Akunyili, who was a respected African politician. There are worn, brown sofas with lace covers. Heavy velvet curtains in blue open onto a back room containing an old model air-conditioning unit and an old tv set. The tv is showing Sean Connery’s James Bond.

Home: As You See Me , 2017. Acrylic, transfers, colored pencil, collage and commmorative fabric on paper, 72 x 60 in

What is maybe most striking about the interior is the floor. Using a process of transfer, Akunyili Crosby renders hundreds of small photographs taken from Nigerian society magazines. The floor looks almost transparent, yet the faces on the photographs are clearly visible. It is as if the artist literally imprints black culture onto the room.

The act of transference has an even stronger impact in Akunyili Crosby’s LA interiors. In Dwell: Aso Ebi, the artist herself inhabits he interior, sitting on a chair looking down on her elegant feet in blue tights. Her dress is a brightly coloured geometric design, as if she is comfortably wearing a Modernist painting. The wallpaper’s design looks contemporary, but it also features repeated portraits of her mother Dora as a queen-like figure (and, notably, chickens). The straight lines of the furniture and walls contrast with the dark foliage outside the window and the large portrait of the artist’s parents in African dress.

Dwell: Aso Ebi, 2017. Acrylic, transfers, colored pencil, collage, 72 x 60 in

There is a cacophony of textures and colours at play here, as well as a complex layering of references. From the rich depth of the woman’s face and her legs to the shiny top of the dining table; from the bright yellow of the clothing to the midnight-blue of the tight-cladded feet with a zing of pink: Akunyili Crosby shows complete control over her material. All her works are on paper, which further enhances their directness. The surfaces of the photographic transfers are neat and precise. There are paintings inside paintings, photographs over photographs, a family portrait inside a self-portrait. The mood is at once highly traditional and incredibly contemporary. It is as if African history is smoothed over the shiny stark features of the Californian room.

Architecture, interior decor, photography and paint all vie for our attention. But nothing disturbs the harmony of the whole. I am reminded of Matisse’s mastery of flat space and his clever blending of the abstract and the decorative a hundred years earlier. But unlike Matisse, Akunyili Crosby’s works have the added intimacy of people, deeply involved in their own thoughts, wonderfully contemplative.

As We See You: Embarassment of Riches, 2017

By blending African, European and American cultures and histories, Akunyili Crosby captures the complexity of our times. She layers images and references without hierarchy or judgment. A smaller work, titled As We See You: Embarassment of Riches, shows an interior with an extravagant Thanksgiving table , containing pumpkin pie, bowls of check-mix and smarties. In the ornate mirror we see a black woman in a fashionable dress, looking at the still life with an uninterested gaze.

Or is she? On closer inspection we can make out two ‘blackamoor’ serving trays, disturbing decorations that trivialise the history of slavery in America. It is an understated but urgent reminder that we can never escape the past.

One of the most pressing topics of the twenty-first century is identity. The personal is political. Other black artists have addressed the subject of interior space as a window onto identity: Toyin Ojih Odutola’s fictional aristocrat families in lavish interiors, or Mickalene Thomas’ glimmering spaces, collaged with bold fabrics and glitter beads. But it is almost as if Akunyili Crosby’s works don’t have to prove anything. Her works are still. Akunyili Crosby’s people sit confident and calm, completely at ease in a complex world. And maybe that is the ultimate luxury of life: the possibility to simply enjoy the everyday, without worry. Akunyili Crosby celebrates the power that comes from being truly at home.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby,, Counterparts, The Modern Art Museum, Forth Worth, Texas until 13 January 2019

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, The Beautiful Ones, National Portrait Gallery London until 3 February 2019

Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Adriana Varejão, Interiors, will be coming to Haus der Kunst, Munich, 29 November 2019 until 29 March 2020

ACCESS ART || Art Beyond Sight: The MFAH's program for the visually impaired

“If you went blind tomorrow, would you still visit the art museum? If you couldn’t see art, would you still be able to have a positive art experience?” With these questions in mind, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) started developing its programming for the visually impaired in 2012, as part of an initiative started by NYC charity Art Beyond Sight. Last month I was teaching the program.

On a rainy and cold Saturday morning in November, a group of around twenty individuals make their way to the museum. Most of the people know each other, shouting names and hello’s. A few are here for the first time. The group is very much up to date with what is on at the museum - some people have been coming for years - so the program usually covers works from the latest exhibitions.

Dorothy Hood, The Light of Rain, 1968. Museum of Fine Arts Houston

My colleague and I have both chosen a work from the recently opened exhibition Kindred Spirits: Dorothy Hood and Louise Nevelson, and we each spend forty-five minutes leading a discussion about these works. The Light of Rain by Dorothy Hood immediately appealed to me: it has a mix of abstract and figurative elements and its title is pure poetry. Dorothy Hood was of the same generation of famous abstract artists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, and her works show a masterly control of colorfield painting. Spending most of her life in Texas, away from the male-dominated New York art scene, she never really got the attention she deserves.

Hand-out (detail)

As a starting point the participants are given tactile hand-outs, on which contours and textures are enhanced. I rendered the shape of the clouds in thick foam, to highlight their density, and used puffy paint for the thin, wiry strands of rain. It doesn’t take the group long to identify clouds with rain.

It is important to give a rich description of the object. There are many ways you can talk about art without relying purely on the visual:  dark and light areas, different ways the paint is applied, scale, movement, how each element is situated in the larger composition. In The Light of Rain the clouds are painted in a very thin layer of oil paint, washed down so that they are visibly filled with water on the canvas. In contrast the background is dense and dark and seems to recede infinitely, a re-occurring motive that Dorothy Hood called ‘The Void’. Hood made this work at the time when Nasa had just moved to Houston, and from her journals we know that she was enthralled by space travel and the mysteries of the universe.

The title of an artwork takes on extra significance for the visually impaired. What do we feel when hearing ‘The Light of Rain’? A member of the group is reminded of hurricanes, with their dark ominous skies. Someone else talks about how behind every cloud there is sunshine. I point out that the clouds in fact have a white line around them, and this made me think of the expression ‘clouds with silver linings’.

From all corners, members share their ideas. I am starting to realize that there is a silver lining right here: without being able to resort to sight, the group is able to draw from an exceptionally rich imagination. After I told them that the artist made this painting having just moved back to Houston from a twenty-year stay Mexico, someone remarks that ‘the Void’ must reflect the artist’s state of transformation between the two worlds of Mexico and Texas. Another participant jumps in, offering that the shape in the top feels like the head of a Longhorn, Texas’ distinctive bull.

We talk about about why only few people have heard of Dorothy Hood, and how being a female artist away from the epicenter of abstraction must have taken its toll. Most of us agree that Hood deserves more attention, and I can sense frustration in the group, as well as pride that we may be witnessing the resurrection of a local celebrity. The forty-five minutes of conversation has flown by. I secretly hope that the participants will continue talking about Dorothy Hood, and clouds with silver linings, over the lunch in the museum’s cafe that follows each session.

When I later ask Chelsea Shannon, the Interpretation Specialist responsible for the program, about her experience, her passion stands out. “This is an incredible group of people, with a wide variety of backgrounds, meaning that the conversation is always unpredictable. There’s always at least one moment in a tour where I’m just totally floored by the insights the participants have about works of art they can’t actually see. Every single program changes the way I think about the artwork we’re discussing.”

With a small modification to museum programming - finding a way to describe museum objects effectively - a whole new group of individuals from the community can enjoy all the museum has to offer. As the MFAH’s website explains, “[w]e think of art in terms of the visual: color, composition, texture, technique. But artworks involve much more than the physical: broader concepts, narratives, political statements, historical contexts. Art Beyond Sight goes beyond aesthetics and considers what really makes museum objects important: culture.”

I too found it strangely refreshing to skip the tendency we all have to judge an artwork by its visual qualities, or to compare to works we know by famous artists. This group is able to suspend judgment, instead delving straight into the meaning of the artwork and its positioning in the broader world. The MFAH’s motto greets me when I am leaving the session: The Museum of Art, Houston aims to be a museum for all people. Outside, a shimmer of sunlight is coming through the clouds, the silver lining to an inspiring, affirmative and inclusive morning.

A docent teaches the group. Photograph by Allysson Huntsman. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Write here… 

The Dazzling Absurdities of Capitalism - Mika Rottenberg

Frieze week in London is a well-oiled money machine: thousands of artworks at Frieze Art Fair where the average price is around £100.000, record auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, and all major commercial galleries putting on their best-selling artists. Banksy’s stunt was of course a reaction to all this artworld extravaganza, but long-lasting art is based on more than a gimmick with a shredder. Enter Mika Rottenberg. 

Ironically, I discovered Mika Rottenberg at my first year guiding at Frieze Art Fair in 2012. Her work stood out amidst a crowded fair. Candy-coloured, boxed viewing stations contain films that in turn consists of different levels, as if entering a multi-storey, well…, store. What you see in Rottenberg’s films is at once highly seductive and repulsive.

Argentinian-born, New York-based Mika Rottenberg had her first solo show in the UK in 2012 at Nottingham Contemporary and is inaugurating Goldsmiths’ Centre for Contemporary art (Goldsmiths CCA). Located on the campus of Goldsmiths University of London, it is London’s newest contemporary arts institution. A Grade II listed building, this former Victorian bathhouse was re-designed by Turner Prize winners Assemble. It is the perfect stage for Rottenberg’s work.

Mika Rottenberg, Bowls Balls Souls Holes, 2014. Above: Video and sculptural installation, 27 min 54 s, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and the collection of Jill and Peter Kraus Installation view: Goldsmiths CCA, 2018. Image credit: Andy Keats, 2018. Below: Video stills. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, NY

Laid out over three levels are three of Rottenberg’s films contained in architectural viewing stations, surrounded by sculptures and installations that move and pulse, and more screens attached to the walls and ceilings. Walking around, I felt like the participator in some mysterious, walk-through play.  

The protagonists in Rottenberg’s films are working women and a few effeminate men. At first it looks like the films are staged in beauty salons: a woman is lying down on a massage bed, another one is clipping her long fake nails. A man is sneezing, his nose growing longer and redder. They are all extorting something from their bodies.

Then there are groups of women intensely concentrated on some sort of mind-dulling labour. Balls Bowls Souls Holes shows a bingo event. A bored-looking woman pulls the balls from a machine, reading out their numbers in a monotonous hum. The women crossing out numbers in the brightly-lit hall look no less bored than the leader of the pack.

In NoNoseKnowns, women sit around a table in a basement extracting little shiny pearls from oysters. Shown in close-up, the wet flesh of the shells contrasts with the hard surface of the pearl. All Rottenberg’sfilms simultaneously show us different rooms, interconnected by tunnels or holes. One of the pearl-workers absent-mindedly pedals a wheel, and we see the pearls being transported upwards, to a room containing another woman surrounded by flowers. The breeze from the upward movement causes the flower pollen to enter her nose and makes her sneeze repeatedly. She miraculously sneezes out plates of noodles (the sneeze is a re-occurring motif for Rottenberg).

Mika Rottenberg, NoNoseKnows. 2015, Still. Video and sculptural installation, 22 min; dimensions variable. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, NY

In Balls Bowls Souls Holes we can see the bingo-balls pop down a tunnel into a level below, where a sad looking male somehow turns them into cloth pegs that he carefully clips first to his chin, like a beard, then all around his face like a radiant sun. These individual scenes make no sense, but somehow in their entirety they form their own subjective logic.

The way we encounter Rottenberg’s films within the exhibition space is essential. Her stages set up the scene and anticipate what is to come. Making your way to see the boxed-in films, you pass sculpted props. The NoNoseKnows viewing area is entered through a shop front, dotted out with beads and pearl necklaces; the bingo event in Balls Bowls Souls Holes is entered through a bright blue revolving door, passing a vintage bingo-balls machine on the way.

This image and above: Mika Rottenberg, NoNoseKnows. 2015. Sculpture and video installation, 27:54, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and the collection of Jill and Peter Kraus Installation view: Goldsmiths CCA, 2018. Image credit: Andy Keats, 2018

I am dizzy and disoriented but somehow cannot stop watching. Rottenberg’s characters are dispassionate, but very intense, staring at me from their monotonous labours. Other characters feel trapped in too small spaces, and I too start to shift and turn in the boxed-in viewing area. I am waiting for a wrap-up, a release from these prisons of commerce, but none is forthcoming.

Mika Rottenberg, Frying Pans, 2018. Stovetops, pans, water dripping system, lights; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist, Goldsmiths CCA, London, MAMbo Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna and Kunsthaus Bregenz. Installation view: Goldsmiths CCA, 2018. mage credit: Andy Keats, 2018

When I eventually extract myself from the films, and wander through the maze-like corridors, I am startled by a ponytail sticking out of the wall, eerily bouncing up and down. It feels like a part of someone’s body left lying around from the films. A dark room emanates a strong hissing sound, coming from from a selection of giant frying pans. They turn on and off to the beat of a mysterious purple light. The artist is already cooking up her next realist-fantastical contortion.

Beauty-industry mix-ups that lead to futile labour that lead to an abject product that is then extracted from someone’s body, making its way back into the store. Rottenberg makes us feel the complex absurdities of a globalised economy, and the fragility of human bodies trapped within it. She cleverly uses cinematic, sculptural and architectural dimensions to design systems with their own ogic, but constantly on the verge of collapse.

The people (mostly women) she hires for her film are referred to as ‘talents’ rather then actors: people who earn their money using their bodies, such as wrestlers. Rottenberg lets them retain control over her narrative, which adds an interesting layer to their seemingly automated actions on screen.

When I go to Frieze Art Fair the next day with its cacophony of thousands of colourful, textured, screaming art objects, I cannot stop thinking about Mika Rottenberg. At the same time, I feel energised watching the expensive, shiny art being sold to the beautifully dressed people. Our capitalist world excites both immense desire and a huge sense of emptiness, and the unexplainable urge to keep watching, and keep buying.

If you are experiencing exhaustion from Frieze, make your way to Lewisham, and let yourself be shaken by the art market’s antidote that is Mika Rottenberg. Experience art at its best: in dialogue with the architecture of a place. You will probably feel confused, repulsed, and strangely drawn to her colourful world. You might leave the show and wonder for days why it is bugging you so much. And that is what a great artists like Mika Rottenberg can do.

Mika Rottenberg, Goldsmiths Center for Contemporary Art, until 4 November 2018

THE WORLD’S A STAGE, BUT WE ARE IN THE WRONG PLAY - OTOBONG NKANGA

If Black Panther’s Wakanda would have an artist residency program, Otobong Nkanga would be its ideal resident artist. Her solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, titled To Dig a Hole that Collapses Again, was worth the weekend trip alone.

It is difficult where to start, so versatile is Nkanga’s use of different media: tapestries, sculptural installation, watercolours, paintings and prints; often several media in the same work.

A strong exotic scent lingers. This turns out to come from the largest work of the exhibition, Anamnesis, an intervention in the architectural structure of the room. A white dividing wall is hollowed out through the middle in a curved shape, filled with products commonly imported to Chicago, such as coffee, tobacco, tea, and spices. We are transported straight to Africa, with its strong earthy scents, its associations of natural riches and the feel of moist, fragrant soil.

Stylistically, the work is minimalist, with its emphasis on shape and line and use of a limited colour palette. But this is minimalism with soul, the warmth and richness of Africa bursting through the seams, the shape of the earth mimicking the shape of rivers (and, cleverly, the graphs of economic markets).

Anamnesis, coffee, tea, peat, tobacco, cacao, spices; dimensions variable. Installation view, MCA Chicago, photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago

What is contained cannot always be tamed. This is a spiritual shrine to Africa if there ever was one. But there are darker themes in Nkanga’s work. Why don’t you grow where we come from? is a woven textile- hanging on which are stitched and glued photographs, ink-jet print, viscose, cashmere, wool, mohair and bio cotton: an incredible and original selection of materials.

Why don’t you grow where we come from? Woven textile, photographs, ink-jet print, viscose, cashmere, wool, mohair, bio cotton, and laser-cut Forex plate.

Two women hold Baobab trees, their faces connected to a vegetated landscape. The branches of the trees are artificially extended and carried somewhere else; the title suggests that the girls do not recognize their native species. The pose of their bodies suggests this too: puzzled, startled, full of wonder. On closer look their limbs also have artificial extensions. This is an image that Nkanga constantly comes back to, as if to say that not only the resources of Africa are contested, but its (black) bodies too.

Nkanga’s people are always interacting with the earth and with their surrounding territories. Yet they make us uneasy. The title Why don’t you grow where we come from? hints at a desire for ‘the other’ but at the same time, for the possession of others.

In a wall-sized tapestry, The Weight of Scars, two male figures, their upper torsos replaced by a selection of limbs in muted colours, hold on to a network linking photographs of sites in Namibia. Nkanga often uses photography to document landscapes that have been irrevocably altered, linking them together as a way of mapping. It is as if she wants to illustrate the play of forces raging on the world’s stage.

The Weight of Scars, woven textile, photographs, yarns (viscose, bast, mohair, polyester, bio cotton, linen, and acrylic), and ink-jet prints on ten laser-cut Forex plates. 

This is much more than nostalgia for Africa. Nkanga's work suggests the broader impact and metaphoric scars caused by the capitalist exploitation of the land. Her art is like an abstracted model of our economic relations, to which the artist adds humanity and pathos. The indigenous objects from Namibia are mapped out almost scientifically, but the structures also look like molecules, something altogether more human.

The Apprentice and The Embrace, acrylic and stickers on paper

The ambiguity in Nkanga's bodies and in her use of contrasting visual clues is also apparent in The Apprentice. A woman tentatively moves forward, followed closely by another woman. Is she the apprentice? Are they navigating a network, the economic channels of production? The two women enter the ring, but something tells us there is no winner in this fight.

Other works are hopeful. In The Embrace, love sprouts from the barren land, and rich and vibrant colours merge from the brown earth (curiously re-appearing in the left corner). Like her artworks, the world is complex, and Nkanga does not offer a solution. But alerting and awakening is where recovery starts. 

The plundering of Africa’s resources is not a new theme, yet to see it explored artistically, and in such poetic works, is a true eye-opener. By focusing on the treasures rather than on the culprits, Nkanga succeeds in linking her message to a deeper consciousness, appealing to a universal desire for the beauty of nature.

Reading the countless rave reviews of the Black Panther movie, I remember one that was especially powerful. A New York Times reviewer (his name has unfortunately escaped me) related how, feeling completely energized after watching the film, a black moviegoer called out: “Wow! This is how white people must feel all the time!” Nkanga’s work poignantly reminds us of that white privilege, of what it feels like to be in charge of resources. But more so, it calls to people of all colour. It reminds us what the world as a whole stands to lose if we do not care for it.

Both the beauty of Wakanda and the poetry in Otobong Nkanga's work celebrate the natural riches that humanity has been entrusted with. It encourages us to keep striving, so future generations will not look back and regret, but look forward and embrace. So we can all smell, see, hear, taste and touch the soft earth of Africa, revived by the wet rain, warmed by the sun.

Otobong Nkanga, To Dig A Hole That Collapses Again, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, until 2nd September 2018. Otobong Nkanga was born in Nigeria and is now based in Antwerp.

 

ACCESS ART II Global Outlook, Local Feel: Hauser & Wirth nurtures community

If there is one thing that stood out for me at last week's Royal Wedding it was the celebration of charity. Over 200 charities supported by Harry and Meghan were invited to the wedding grounds. Charismatic bishop Michael Curry passionately asked us all to “Love thy neighbour”. Inspired by this as well as by Houston's reputation as a place for socially engaged art, this blog will have a new regular feature titled ACCESS ART, highlighting important art projects, galleries, artists or collections that care about their community and about access to art for all.

It caught my eye recently that Hauser & Wirth, one of the largest commercial galleries with offices in Zurich, London, Somerset, Hong Kong, New York and LA, has embraced a more open, charitable position. 

It’s a sunny afternoon and the LA branch of Hauser & Wirth is buzzing with activity. Children are creating artworks on tables in the gallery’s sunny courtyard. Parents are talking to other parents. The gallery’s artist-educators are on standby to offer help. Such community programming has become a familiar scene in museums and public galleries, which heavily rely on these activities to obtain more funding. Hauser & Wirth, however, is a commercial gallery, operating a business model of achieving the highest possible sales for its artists (and seeing its rate of expansion, doing this very well). 

Hauser & Wirth opened its LA office in 2014 in the late-nineteenth former Globe Grain & Milling Company in the middle of LA’s downtown Arts District. Already its preservation efforts have won the gallery the prestigious Conservancy’s Chair’s Award 2018. and the building is impressive. The complex includes a multi-disciplinary arts center, incorporating the first ARTBOOK store in Los Angeles, a gallery space for Hauser & Wirth Publishers’ Book & Printed Matter Lab, and the restaurant Manuela, featuring seasonal fare and locally sourced produce. There is a sunny courtyard open to the public, surrounded by flower beds and murals by two of their artists.

But it is Hauser & Wirth LA’s program of community events that truly stands out. ‘Sundays with the Gardener’ offer all-age demonstrations by resident gardener Jake Mumm, who is also a lifelong community educator raising awareness of urban regenerative food-production. In last month's ‘Family Studio Workshop’ art educator Matt MacFarland led children around the exhibition of gallery artist Mark Bradford (himself a great pioneer for social change) and let the children make artworks that use Bradford’s technique of building up and layering the surface. Music performances to activate the space have included a violinist from LA’s chamber orchestra under a Pipilotti Rist installation, and the gallery organizes regular ‘Noise Concerts’ pioneering the interplay of sound and art.

As far as I know, this is the only ‘blue-chip’ gallery that offers a public program aimed at its direct community. What drives them? I decided to approach the gallery's LA branch directly. 

Senior Director of Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles Stacen Berg informs me that Hauser & Wirth’s outreach started in the UK, when the gallery opened its space in a 17th century farmhouse in rural Somerset in 2014. As Berg explains, the public programming was inspired by more than sales figures. “Iwan and Manuela Wirth, the partners of the gallery, brought together their passion for art with their enthusiasm for hospitality, gastronomy, and community when they opened the Somerset location. Pioneering a revolutionary model for the 21st century gallery, Hauser & Wirth is dedicated to exploring how art interplays with all aspects of life.”

Located in one of America’s largest cities, Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles serves as a counterpart to its rural Somerset gallery. According to Berg, "[t]he LA art scene is experiencing a renaissance. Art is now an integral part of the conversation around fostering community within the city.” The gallery tries to include everyone within a two-mile radius of the building, including families, local non-profit spaces, schools, and local artisans. The Arts District LA is branded as a ‘non-profit business improvement district (BID) where area property owners assess themselves additional fees to pay for maintenance and security services above those provided by the city. A for-profit art space reaching out to the community fits well within the district’s mission.

This begs the question whether more commercial galleries should start to build social responsibility into their business models. Cynics may say that Hauser & Wirth uses its expanded public program as a marketing tool and that its local audience is still relatively affluent. But Berg emphasizes that outreach is a natural and organic part of the Hauser & Wirth brand. “Hauser & Wirth is, at its core, a family business, which over the past 26 years has expanded internationally, however, each of its global outposts maintains a local feel and celebrates the history of its surroundings.” In other words: a global outlook with a local feel.

Is there a social responsibility for the giants of the gallery world, just like there is for other large companies? This is a complex field: many galleries struggle to cut even and adequately support their artists. But there is definitely an argument to be made for the larger, conglomerate galleries – where the average artwork price often exceeds the $100.000 mark – to start to dedicate some of their profit to building community. This is especially true if the gallery shows artists that are (or were) strong activists for social engagement, such as Mark Bradford - there is much to be said for the gallery extending the artist’s generous spirit to their own local community.

Time will tell if other galleries will follow suit. But if I had the right budget and was looking to buy art, it’s Hauser & Wirth I would go to first.

Family Garden Workshop, Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, 20 August 2017
Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Noé Montes