More notes from the benches of the Farnese.

August 12, 2011
Palazzo Farnese
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Two men walk from the left of the piazza carrying a large bag that I assume contains a double bass, not a body surely, although the bag is big enough.

A woman in a short blue dress with very long brown hair has been standing in the centre of the piazza in front of her old black bicycle (with a wicker basket naturally). The two men stop behind this self-aware and photogenic ensemble, exchange glances with each other and walk slowly in a circle around her. She pays no attention.

There is a pair of very large fountains in the piazza, they are composed from enormous marble rings, each containing a vast Roman bath and a 16th century single fountain with a sort of Fleur de Lys shape. To the side of the left hand fountain, a family with their back to the water feature is admiring a small, new, grey Fiat.

A man in a blue shirt, an almost identical colour but different pattern to the short blue skirt, cycles up to greet its wearer. They cycle off together towards the Campo dei Fiori, his bicycle has no basket.

 A nun from Santa Birgittae comes out to water the palms. The headdress is a white affair that quarters the head to hold on the black cloth that billows down the shoulders. The white crisscross formation and encircling band (I think it is called a chaplet) looks like that protective headgear that front row forwards wear in rugby, I assume nuns don’t wear mouth guards as well.

Two elderly nuns of a different order, (all white gowns, black headdress no head protection) are chatting up the soldiers. The nuns are enjoying themselves hugely. The soldiers (all body armour, beret and machine guns) are deeply embarrassed and keep looking at their boots and blushing. The nuns walk away smiling broadly, I’m sure the one with the stick would swish it in the air if she could.

There is a vigorous football game going on by the right hand fountain. Two boys have taken the space between a lamppost and their bicycles to make a goal. The goalkeeper certainly needs the practice, his net is the very expensive wine bar. The ball keeps banging against the elegant planters that mark the entrance; this is not going down well.

Rome: what makes a work convincing, explaining Borromini to a cat

August 12, 2011
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So, I’m sitting in the little park next to the Borromini church: San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane.

http://romafelix.com/scarlino.htm

I have eaten my focaccia alla caprese and I’m talking to a cat about Borromini. Unlike one’s family and students, cats might listen, particularly if they think there might be some mozzarella left. And, it’s back to the ‘convincing’ theme.

With Borromini it is the combination of balanced and tweaked proportions. I was thinking back to how the young Raphael didn’t get these sorts of vertical rhythms quite right for the context in his early Deposition. But here, the distance between paired pilasters for example and the slightly larger distance than the standard Vitruvian proportion between them and the next element is famously convincing. It gives exactly the right sort of powerful, muscular sense of movement, carefully prefigured of course in the facade.

But, convincingness in art depends on removing everything that isn’t necessary (‘Everything is purged from this painting but art’, John Baldessari, 1966). Borromini is suitably minimalist in this interior. But notice also his care with details, look at the capitals. Look at the http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/italy/rome/carlofontane/0069.jpg

band between the volutes, where you might expect to see and egg and dart moulding, in one pair there is a laurel wreath, but the next pair has pomegranates, often a symbol of the resurrection. The wreath theme is continued around the oval of the dome, but not the pomegranates. And that care with proportion and minimal detail is even more noticeable in the crisp details in the windows as you go down to the crypt.

Pigeons are marching along the path where I sit, the cat ignores them, content to think about Borromini.

More notes from the benches of the Farnese. Context, proportion and the creation of space

August 12, 2011
Palazzo Farnese, Pictorial Space
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It gets quieter each evening as August gets going, apart from us tourists and one or two mothers with children at the right hand side, the benches are empty.

I have been thinking further about melancholy and Borromini and the convincing use of proportion to emphasise context and therefore create meaningful spaces. At the bottom of the Palazzo Farnese, on the Via Giulia is a strange, neglected church, It is the Santa Maria dell’Orazione e Morte set up to bury the unburied, the nameless bodies found in the streets of Rome.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Maria_dell’Orazione_e_Morte

The exterior is cream, crowded with Corinthian columns and deaths heads, images of Old Father Time and hour glasses; grim stuff. Inside though, it is shaped like a small 18th century theatre. Centrally planned around an oval, but unlike Borromini’s San Carlo, it has none of his claustrophobia, edginess, muscularity and strain.

Here we have green Corinthian columns, gilded capitals set against pilasters forced into interstices. This is playful, ‘let’s see what this looks like’, rather than a brooding Mannerist, Laurentian Library approach. Above the deep entablature, there are what look exactly like theatre boxes, places for the better sort to peer out on the proceedings, placed best to see the altar/ stage.

This is not perhaps as obvious as a church I saw on the Corso (Santa Gesu e Maria) this morning, in which the same arrangement of theatre boxes down the nave and around the apse have been filled with over life sized sculpted portraits of the patrons. All gesticulating and reacting as you would at a good piece of theatre; Bernini’s set piece with Colonna onlookers is to blame apparently. Possibly, but this church was playing Strauss waltzes on their sound system when I visited. Santa Gesu e Maria was also a riot of hideously expensive polychrome marble, but dedicated to barefoot, hermit Augustinian monks

Santa Maria dell’Orazione e Morte has none of that extreme levity, despite the underlying jolliness of the architecture. It only opens for an hour each evening and every time I have been in there are two nuns, head to foot in white, silent, still; kneeling at prayer.

Out in the piazza, a large herd of priests surge up to Saint Birgittae, it as usual, locked. The priests stand around, perplexed, they ring on the door next to the church, the one the nuns pour out off. After a long wait, but they seem a very jolly and young herd happy to enjoy the evening sun, the door opens and they file in one by one.

Two men march into the centre of the square, the y stand very close to each other, they are both on their phones. One faces east, the other north. They are both wearing black jackets, one has bright yellow trousers one bright red. They finish their calls simultaneously and, without speaking, stride back towards the Campo dei Fiori.

Rome: Pictorial Space, the picture plane and Mike Nelson, part 2 (return to Het Steen?)

August 12, 2011
Pictorial Space, Rome
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To end this discussion, does all this musing on art in Rome have anything to do with Nelson and, going further back in these posts, does it have anything to do with Rubens and Het Steen? Can I make the connections? Well do you know, I think I can.

Starting with Nelson, what makes him interesting and what makes him stand out for the new generation of artists? It is the combination of narrative, conceptual clarity and high craft; integrity and sophisticated understanding of the possibilities of ‘pictorial space’.

He is very clear, rightly so, that he is not building a stage set, a set for something to happen in front of. This is art space, art space that you walk into. Therefore it can contain all the conceptual implications you might wish to bring. We ‘read’ it in the same way we ‘read’  a painting, we walk round the spaces in the same way our eyes walk round the space behind the open window of a painting.

The difference is that the crucial relationship to the picture plane of all illusory objects/ gestural marks/ colour fields etc in a painting is tangible, measurable almost. Whereas in a Nelson, that picture plane is conceptual, embodied in our consistent recourse to narrative, i.e. the relationship of one form to another through time/ space and causal relationship. One is actual, the other conceptual; in essence (in artworld) the same.

And Het Steen? Het Steen is all about the house, an illusory object in pictorial space in conceptual space, the house of the successful artist. The lights are on, we have walked out of the house to admire it, or we are perhaps approaching it for the first time. The House is a series of spaces we will encounter that have a series of potential narratives, each vital to the artist. Our conceptual route to them and through them is equally vital to our understanding of the work, hence the emphasis on paths and journeys in the painted landscape.

‘Bacchus and Ariadne’ Titian, 1520-3

July 3, 2011
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http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/titian-bacchus-and-ariadne

On my way out of the National Gallery, due to closures, I took a different route and passed Titian’s ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’. A painting I have been looking at, on and off, at least once a month I should think, for about 50 years. Thinking about that painting afterwards an image came immediately to mind: I want you to imagine two people both aged about 19 or 20, she has her hair fanned out into a huge mane, it is dyed orange, some white, some black. His hair is dyed also, mostly a sort of white colour with a great red streak across the front. They are dressed in black, but with some pieces of vivid coloured clothing, hand painted shoes for example. It is the later 1970’s and this couple are standing in front of a painting that is an astonishing blue, this painting in fact.

But when I very first saw it, Bacchus and Ariadne would have looked like a sort of brown colour. It was cleaned in early 1969 and that must have been the point when it really came into my consciousness. I can still remember the shock of first seeing that intense blue, the vividness of the colours the brightness of the contrast between the blue and the red. And I suppose, given the date, and what was happening in London in 1968/9 it must have mirrored the clothes and the excitement that was going on around us. I would have been about 12 when this happened. It was no doubt on that journey as many others to London, that I remember going to places like Carnaby Street with my parents and seeing the clothes and the painted walls and thinking that, like this newly bright painting, the world was an exciting place to be. Later, as I went through school and had to read things like Robert Graves Greek myths and Ovid’s Metamorphoses I began to get more sense of the story, although in fact this image largely comes from Catullus, a much more exciting writer I think.

As in so many paintings the clue to the story is in the details, top left on the sea is a small boat. The boat belongs to Theseus, him of the slaying of the Minotaur fame. Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos, had shown Theseus how to escape from the labyrinth after slaying the Minotaur, in return for Theseus taking her away from Crete and making her his princess. On the return from Crete they stop at the island of Naxos, Ariadne falls asleep on the beach and Theseus abandons her there. This painting is set at the point at which she both realises her loss, and suddenly sees and fall in love, at first sight with Bacchus. In fact the whole painting is full of those sort of glances. For a young man at an all-boys school seeing this sort of thing was heady stuff. And Bacchus himself was an appealing figure, the god of wine, of parties, of good times. I can remember reading the Greek myths in astonishment at what they got up to and couldn’t help but compare it to the frankly rather dull behaviour of Protestant approved Christianity. My parents were defiantly atheist, but in those far off days we did seem to get an awful lot of morally improving Christian stories, and without any of the, for boys anyway, appealing gore of Catholic saints and martyrdom. In that earlier mythology Bacchus, as part of his earlier travels had been to the Middle East and then India, that’s why his chariot is drawn by exotic animals. Also because his patron, Alfonso d’Este, kept them, this painting is part of a very upmarket interior decoration scheme. It was while Bacchus was on his travels that he discovered the worship of the juice of the vine. In other words wine and the ecstatic rituals and rites that went with it, which is what we see here in his followers, the Bacchante. Paralleling the development of a young adult?

Pursuing that theme of love further, as no doubt I was trying to do myself, rather unsuccessfully if memory serves me correctly, notice up in the sky above Theseus’ ship, a circle of stars. Bacchus has thrown Ariadne’s crown (given to her by Theseus) into the sky, Bacchus is immortal, he promises her that she will become immortal in the sky as the constellation Corona. Perhaps you could see this as a parable for male behaviour, one man promises to make her his princess, but once he has had his wicked way with her he abandons her on the beach, the next man, says he’s a god and promises her the stars. Unusually in the myths (and life?), Bacchus and Ariadne stay faithful to each other forever.

At school I began to find out more about how to look at painting, and some of the specialist terms. For example: contrapposto, the Italian for against the body and the description for the pose of both Ariadne and Bacchus and others, Look for example at the Bacchante struggling with snakes. Wrestling with snakes was part of the Bacchic cult, as was eating raw meat by the way, hence the animals head being dragged along by the small boy. And the satyr brandishing an animal leg. But this snake wrestler also refers to the Laocoon which (according to Vasari anyway) had been dug up in 1506 in peach orchard just outside Rome, under the very eyes of Titian’s great rival; Michelangelo. Including this pose is a form of one-upmanship, although Titian hadn’t been to Rome by this point he would have known this sculpture and the sort of use Michelangelo was putting it to. You can see this sort of showing off even more clearly in the way Titian signs his name. Alberti, in Della Pittura had written that only the best artists could imitate gold with colours rather than the material itself “there is greater praise and admiration for the artist in the use of colours”. Not only has Titian imitated gold with colour, he has made it even more difficult by placing the vase on a yellow cloth and has painted his signature in the ellipse of the vase. This is someone at the height of their powers really showing off.

In my gap year I worked for six months at the Marley Company in Lenham, Kent making floor tiles. Not much connection between Titian and floors, between art and industry you might think, as indeed many of my fellow workers tried to point out. I can remember trying to explain the contrapposto position of Bacchus to someone as we heaved great sheets of lino about, twisting our bodies in dynamic forms etc, not surprisingly he didn’t think we were very godlike and was not impressed.

I went to Venice as part of my own travels, the city where Titian was born and worked, a city known for its intense colours as the pigments came down the silk route from the east. A city steeped in art and trade, particularly in textiles and dyeing cloth, hence the emphasis on cloth and colour in this painting. After that first journey, perhaps inspired by Bacchus and Ariadne I have been back to Venice many times since, for the Biennale exhibition, and will be going again in a couple of weeks.

My first year at University was spent studying the Renaissance, I learnt for example about materials used, the importance of ultramarine, the pigment that gives Bacchus and Ariadne it’s vivid, intense blue. A pigment made from the mineral lapis lazuli, that only came into Venice from Northern Afghanistan, dug out of the Sar-e-Sang mine, very near to the two huge Buddhas that where destroyed by the Taliban. Incidentally these huge statues were originally painted blue and red, ultramarine and carmine.

Back to the image I started with. It was from University that I took my girlfriend to see my favourite work of art in the National Gallery in London, we made a special trip, hours in a coach. We stood in front of the painting in our coloured clothes; I think she was about as impressed as my fellow worker at Marley Floors. One thing she said though that stays with me, “This place” she said looking round and Claire was not from the University, “this place is not for the likes of me” and I remember being horrified by that.

I had never thought of art and art galleries as being closed to anyone, art and art galleries have always felt like home to me, since early days sheltering from bullies in the art room, or seeing this painting in my pram (apparently). I suppose that is why I am writing this.

And that brings me to the most recent part of the painting to come to my notice. This figure in the top right hand corner: Silenus, was, traditionally, Bacchus’ teacher, he is described as the oldest, wisest and most drunken of the followers of Bacchus, typecast no doubt. But that sense of trying to get others to appreciate, to understand or just to enjoy art perhaps it was planted then in front of a painting I have been looking at for over fifty years

Claire by the way left me soon after for someone much more glamorous, someone who was to become the leader of one of the top Goth bands in the country, that was my fault obviously, not wearing enough black, and liking bright paintings, as I still do. And will do for the next fifty years, I hope. Though, if the Coalition has its way it will be in pension poverty and no doubt, by then we will have to pay to see such an important painting. After me one/ two/ three/ four: ‘No Ifs, No Buts, No Public Sector Cuts’.

Thirteenth Approach to Het Steen 1636

July 1, 2011
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Het Steen 30th June, 2011

Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak. Oil on oak.131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/peter-paul-rubens-a-view-of-het-steen-in-the-early-morning
In London for the Public Sector Pension strike: “No Ifs, No Buts, No Public Sector Cuts…Tory, Tory, Tory, Scum, Scum, SCUM etc”. Much of the National Gallery is closed, but Room 29 is open and Het Steen is still is on show.
The lighting on the painting this afternoon is dire, really clunking gear changes between settings. Perhaps this is in keeping with the lack of subtlety in the press about the activities outside. In what way for example, should I be grateful for a £2-300 a month rise in pension contributions after many years of no pay rise in the middle of rampant inflation and at the very least several more years of service? How is expecting the conditions I signed up for, greedy? I am ranting, but it did take me back, to the seventies of course and in my case, back further to CND “Hey, Hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”
The rapid changes in light make the depth of the ditches in Het Steen seem greater than I remember, particularly in the deep ditch/ stream that acts as a Ha-Ha and separates the foreground from the pasture and runs to the right of Het Steen. The artificial light snaps on, it evens out the surface, it is a warm yellow tone stressing the autumnal theme (015 Deep Straw coloured gel if memory serves). The focus is now even from bottom left and the cart to top right and the sun, the carter etc. is immediately obvious. When the lighting abruptly cuts out, with no obvious cause from the ambient light in the room, then the natural and painted sunlight really draws the eye into the beautiful vista, away from the darker left foreground. Under natural light, only slowly do we become aware of the carter and the bottom third of the painting. Surely this is what Rubens intended? Lit by natural light, or by the sort of candle light we can see through the windows, the gradation of tone in a naturally lit painting would have been more dramatic. Notice that this type of illumination of course lights up his house most of all.
There is constant movement in front of the work; perhaps reflecting the passionate movement on the march? Maybe not. No drums, chanting and whistles here, but large Italian families with small, heavily ringletted and bored principessas refusing to leave the bench on which they have dramatically collapsed and on which I am sitting, writing. I fight my way through the flow to look closely at the paint surface. It is surprising how little tangible information you can get from close study of this Rubens anyway. The warm brown glaze, probably some sort of umber with, to my eyes at least, a yellow in it as well (lead tin yellow?) covers the thick underpainting of the foreground. Is this brown the same mix he used for the initial imprimatur, that first layer that covers over the initial priming of the board, the first tone that sets all the colour balances for the subsequent painting? That final glazing obscures detail and some of the very careful drawing with a fine sable brush, even the first charcoal chalk drawing, around for example the foliage on the fallen trunk. Close up, I wanted to find out about the bright light/ reflection we can see through the trunks of the thorn bushes, running along our side of the stream. They stand just to the right of the last silver birch of the central roundabout. From the bench this reflection could be a bridge, echoing the bridge between the huge game birds/ partridges and the milkmaids and the cows. Getting up to it, flinching away from the marching Europeans, it is impossible to tell if this is a bridge, therefore it probably isn’t. But it is a part of a clear line of light that runs from the figures/ door of the house right across the land to the sun.
If it is a reflection on the water, that would make sense. There is a lot of it about. Couple all this standing water with the fallen tree we could, with a certain hesitation, forward the notion that we are looking at the evidence of past, relatively recent, storms. Is it possible to add this apercu to the tentative assertion made earlier (see previous posts) that this is a painting in which Rubens shows off his material success to a certain viewer. Through the elevated viewpoint and (I am trying to assert now) through content Rubens tells us something about how he got here. Pushing this theme to its limits, if the carter is a self-portrait, of sorts, and the woman behind him is Hélène Fourment, his second wife. Then can we assume that the couple with the wet nurse to the left of the surprisingly rustic entrance gate, are Rubens and wife again?  This time they are in more elegant clothes, not easy to tell, but it is a possibility; just.
Rubens’ Netherlandish upbringing was complex, his lawyer father, a Calvinist and therefore heretical to the ruling Spanish Catholics, was also an adulterer with his employer; Anne of Saxony wife of William of Orange. Jan Rubens (father of Peter Paul) was apparently only released after pleading by his wife. How does this help us unpack this painting made towards the end of Rubens’ life?
    • Firstly, from his father and schooling he received a stronger academic education than most contemporary artists; his similarly schooled brother was a classical scholar for instance. I.e. he could think in layers of subtle meaning, unlike the lighting designer of the National Gallery I might add.
    • Secondly, such early complexity must make some demands on anyone who has grown through it. This is undoubtedly a painting that emphasises harmony. There is a basic three dimensional grid here, the uprights of the trees, particularly the birches in the central roundabout, act as the vertical to the horizontals of the receding landscape. A grid form creates a calm and ordered pictorial space. But note that the ground of that pictorial space is not quite a straight forward Renaissance pavement stretching smoothly away to infinity. The transversals clearly swoop in a curving form, i.e. the streams/ ditches, curve around us the elevated viewer.
    • Thirdly this is a painting that represents the painter in two possible disguises (carter and figures by the house).
    • Fourthly this is a painting that does not represent the rewards from his labours plum centre of the pictorial space, but shows them off nonetheless. I am wary of some of the awful over-reading that it is possible to make, especially when it comes to dodgy psychology, but this is a personal painting, made for the artist, to decorate his new studio, or home.That crashing change of museum lighting brings this homemade theme right to our attention. In the raking light that keeps switching on and off, the edges of the random boards that make up this surface keep catching the eye; up to 21 the Christopher Brown book informs me (‘Making and Meaning: Rubens’s Landscapes’ National Gallery Company Ltd. 1996 ISBN-10: 1857091558 ISBN-13: 978-1857091557 )
    • In other words, Rubens started somewhere in the centre of the image and just added extra boards as he kept working on the idea. It was not a set composition; it arrived under his brush as he teased out the image, to use an old art teachers term. Degas does much the same thing with his drawing of a bather on show in Room 49 (After the Bath, Woman drying herself about 1890-5) adding more bits of paper until he got down what mattered to him. Under those circumstances I would suggest that what comes out will owe a great deal to personal circumstances.
I would say all this to the small grumpy Italian personage next to me, but I think she has had enough art for the day. I presume that is what she is telling her father, my Italian is not quite up to translating the hard time she is giving him; I recognise the tone though.

Twelfth Approach to Het Steen, 1636

June 4, 2011
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Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak. Oil on oak.131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/peter-paul-rubens-a-view-of-het-steen-in-the-early-morning
Het Steen
At the National Gallery for a brief moment.

Looking at this painting very closely, what intrigues is the evident process; stages shown not hidden under seamless layers of glazes. Rubens laid in thick white last, probably Cremnitz White, ie Lead White ground with Walnut Oil rather than Linseed Oil to stop yellowing with age. Lead Whites were extremely poisonous, traditionally used for underpaint, stiffer and drier than Flake White which has a bit of Zinc in it. Certainly these laid in areas are thicker and show the brush, possibly palette knife,  that laid on the impasto.
He then washed in a translucent glaze of a drab yellow around the trees in the grown out hedge going from the centre foreground off to the right for example. Or, a reddish brown on the overlaid impasto around the overgrown fruit tree centre foreground. The function of these rough, lighter areas is to provide depth and background behind brambles and trees, to foreground them.
What is odd, is the inaccuracy of this foregrounding, it is not characteristic bravura and Rubensian vigour. These are great horizontal streaks that go right over very carefully painted passages; roughly delineating the oversized fowl for example. That central tree is painted in detail and  with enormous care, it is probably taken from, what looks an en plein air, drawing made in 1616 of a Wild Cherry Tree with Brambles and Weeds

Rubens: 'Study of Wild Cherry Tree with Brambles and Weeds', Courtauld Galleries, London

 (http://www.artandarchitecture.org.uk/images/gallery/4e7043e4.html, from
 The Courtauld Institute, London, although they call it ‘a Study of Blackthorn with Bramble and other Plants’, unlike Christopher Brown in the National Gallery’s ‘Making and Meaning Ruben’s Landscapes’ who goes for the Cherry Tree appellation).
It is as though Rubens had given the task of foregrounding this tree to an untrained, but enthusiastic child. It reminds me of my own attempts, when very young, to help my father with one of his own paintings. My thick muddy brushstrokes lapped around his careful shapes; the leg of a dog against a white background. This painting hung as a personal reproach on a wall in our house for most of my childhood.
When you look closely, the whole of Het Steen is marked by unevenness, small thick autonomous impasto on the left, the windows, the horses tack. Or, beautifully painted thistles amongst rough brown splashes. Or, extreme differences of scale; the vast fowl and cows as big as trees – why?
It is Friday evening, late opening. An elderly couple, white, very English, rather proper in beige linen are very asleep on the bench in front of Het Steen. Next to them a large Asian family are really enjoying a worksheet on the painting: how many cows; can you spot the man fishing; what is on the cart? Dad engages with great vigour, then sneaks in a quick phone call whilst the attendant is not looking. Troops of Russians march past, it is too late in the day for the huge coach parties of unattended European schoolchildren.

‘Bunker PLC’, A Sensory Installation by ScreenDeep. Abbot Street, Dalston Hackney, East London

May 16, 2011
Dalston, Het Steen, Landscape Art, Poussin: Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake, Time Based Art
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http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-05/10/bunker-plc
http://screendeep.wordpress.com/bunker-plc/
A fully immersive art experience in every sense. It starts with online booking, then a woman in wellies and clipboard ticking off names, in front of a large rusted metal door in a carpark at the back of a warehouses just of Kingsland High Road, East London. You have to walk past a McDonalds and all the excitement of Hackney street life to get there. ‘There’ is Edgelands, the car park is one of several hemmed in blank urban spaces, derelict and graffitied (including oddly a memorial to a Chechen freedom fighter). In the distance the sound of Ridley Road market (“come on love don’t be shy, everything for a paand”) around the wastes are stacks of cardboard for rough sleepers. But we must go; our group of slightly baffled art enthusiasts are being hurried through the door by a tall figure in black with a strange voice.
Down steep stairs into darkness, dampness and oddness. We are recruits for a job with Bunker PLC apparently. We fill out application forms in almost complete darkness, chivvied by strange figures with headtorches, who fit waterproof slippers over our shoes, later we will get into full waterproof ponchos. Scientific glass vessels full of beautiful, crystallised plant life provide light. We watch the company film, full of appropriate corporate cliché, in another room, hurried down many dark, wet mouldy corridors from low ceilinged space to space. We find out more about the company, set up after cataclysmic climatic events in 2012 (we are in the future now). Life evolves underground: human pollination; urban vertical farming; genetic modification by plunging the hands deep into bloody chest cavities; a hands on art work then.  The combination of film/ sci fi/ dystopia/ comic references echoes throughout the hour underground and in every one of the rooms; crystallised books by Ballard in one room, references to Tarkovsky on a white board in another. The conviction by the actor/ artists is total, as is the whole set up.
The usual fear of role play promotes the wish to see this art work on many levels. As a walk through film, a theatrical polemic about climate change, an artwork that derives from performance and installation traditions of the 1960’s. I suppose you could say that critique has been implicit within performance art since Oldenburg’s anti materialist Happenings and is certainly present here. You could also point out that a future in which nothing works is a common feature of much contemporary art work. Noticeably none of these futures involves digital technology, imagine Blade Runner without all the toys, or the replicants for that matter.
But you could also say that what links many of these works is a common understanding of the role of time within the artwork and in the way that the viewer encounters it. There is more to this than the simple process of setting the work in the future, as seen in both ‘Bunker PLC’ and ‘whiteonwhite’ (see previous post).  Could we say that, in using an overarching narrative: the role of this imaginary corporation in a future society that has undergone cataclysmic change; the search for meaning by a geophysicist in a post Soviet city, both works fluently create sequenced packages of time that are apparently linear, but are in fact circular? Time that appears ‘representational’, in that it is subject to the usual chronological rules that exist this side of the picture plane: diurnal (A diurnal cycle is any pattern that recurs every 24 hours as a result of one full rotation of the Earth).But time that is in fact subject to systems set up by the artist/s.
In the Bunker, although our narrative packages are physically divided by rooms in which the different activities occur, including the relaxation room/ bar at the end where loud music is played at us. Drinks, by the way, have been served throughout in different forms, there is a level of humour/ wit/ fun in this work that is admirable and adds to the sense of understanding this on many levels. Although the way we move through the scenarios appears linear, they could work in any direction. I did try to move away from one room, only to be approached by a very fierce actor/ artist squeaking “Task? Task? Have you completed your Task?” at me; impressively staying in character throughout. In ‘Bunker PLC’, in common with ‘whiteonwhite’, we make the overarching narrative complete in our reaction to the sequences of activity we participate in, and the connections we make between them and what we know of the outside world.
How does that fit into what I have been struggling with in my encounters with an earlier art work (Het Steen, see earlier posts)? We left the notion that art needs to be a physical object behind in the 1970’s. Nonetheless, the way we encounter, for example the glued together boards covered with green and brown paint that is called ‘A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning’, bears more similarities with these two recent works than you might think. Granted they are not art objects, In an art object, traditionally a flat piece of static painting, time can be encapsulated in the ways in which the artist has laid material on the surface: slowly drawn line; thick violent gestural paint; visibly layered surfaces etc. Time can also be manipulated conceptually ‘through the picture plane’ as it were, on the other side of the Albertian window. So, for example in Het Steen we see the horse pulling the cart with its two occupants to our left, the sun will rise, the hunter will shoot the ducks on the far side of the fallen tree. In other words the representations are presented for us to read as mental images that we can happily accept as a narrative sequence subject to the usual rules of diurnal time.
As I think I have established in earlier post, it is how you traverse the mental image of the landscape that tells the viewer about the qualities of that landscape. ‘Bunker Plc’ the artwork is both a physical landscape – a Second World War bunker- and a conceptual landscape- ‘Bunker Plc’. We traverse the conceptual landscape according to the rules we are given by the imagined protagonists. So what have we established? That these works (‘Bunker PLC’, ‘whiteonwhite’) are also ‘landscape’ in that they involve traversing a landscape (physically and conceptually). They involve presenting time, on the far side of the ‘picture plane’, as a diurnal chronological process sequenced through traditional narrative structures. But, beneath the immediately visible layers of pictorial space, in the formal features of the composition so to speak, are far more complex, contemporary, non linear time based processes. Playing with stories is as old as humankind, it’s fascinating to see how artists are now working with them in such a multilayered referential and, crucially, easily accessible manner.
It occurs to me as a postscript that: Het Steen, like most painting is the work of a single ego, and as many post Pollock (Griselda not Jackson) will point out, white and inevitably male. Whereas both Bunker Plc and whiteonwhite are collaborative works, film is inevitably so and such a substantial installation must have demanded continuous negotiation. Both contemporary works seem to be largely put together by women, Eve Sussman as well as the rufus corporation for ‘whiteonwhite’ and Jo Shaw & Olivia Bellas, as well as the other women artists and actors involved in Bunker Plc.

Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir and other works from the project’, Haunch of Venison, London, UK

May 3, 2011
Art Seen, Eve Sussman Rufus Corporation Video Time Utopia
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http://www.haunchofvenison.com/en/index.php#page=london.current.eve_sussman
http://www.rufuscorporation.com/projects.html
A series of photographs, and video installations. The three screen work, ‘Wintergarden’, is your entrée to all this. Each screen has a tight focus on a concrete balcony, slowly changing details, but the overall form remains the same. These are the pre-fabricated ‘Khrushchyovka’, Soviet mass construction, concrete apartment blocks built in the 1960s onwards, the differently refurbished balconies slowly morphing into each other. The original open balconies were inappropriate for hostile climates, residents blocked them in, using a variety of styles and materials.
‘Each resident, creating a vernacular architecture marked with personal expression from a pre-fabrication. The perfection of the master plan is thus destroyed in a patchwork of humanity.’
Not dissimilar to the 1970’s passion for stone cladding on identical terraces in the UK. A passion now replaced by a vast range of different types of plastic surround double glazing and the ubiquitous satellite dish, accessorized with the biggest 4 x 4 you can’t quite afford afford. ‘Wintergarden’ is fascinating and surprisingly beautiful, not just for lovers of concrete panel construction, they have a slight look of Gaudi about them by the way. The morphing is so slow and careful that it takes a long time to work out what is going on and prompts thoughts about uniform individualism, about how we decorate our nests, about the inevitable fate of grand utopian housing projects. The ‘Khrushchyovka’ were only designed to last for 25 years, but still seem to be functioning; just. Like the British high rise, or deck access flats, what was once so revolutionary, and successful is let down by subsequent bureaucracy. By the way, the mass produced bathroom for these apartments, with a 120 centimetre sitting bath to save space sound fascinating (didn’t Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion bathroom in the late 30’s do something similar?). I suppose a series of morphing bathrooms would not have the same minimalist intent as flat panel, moulded concrete parallel to the picture plane.
But, the important work is the ongoing film project: ‘whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir’. Which is, at first sight, a straightforward narrative about a geophysicist called Holz (similarity to Kurtz?) in a dystopian, post Soviet, City A, trying to work out what is going on around him. City A seems to be a composite of various places, Baku and Almaty, cities in Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan and Latvia, all those places on the edge of vast empty desserts of snow or sand. Many short sections of film shot on an “expedition to unravel utopian promise”. The beauty of edge lands and the different sorts of space they conjure up, from failing city, to sixties hotel rooms or offices to views from train of lands that don’t change from one days journey to the next. The styling keeps returning to Sputnik era Soviet, a photographic recreation of Gagarin’s office is shown elsewhere and seems to pop up here as well.
And that’s the point, the narrative sequence depends, not on the usual Hollywood ‘journey’ but on a ‘serendipity engine’, the screen showing the code is on the left of the installation. This code just endlessly edits the 2,637 clips loaded into it, apparently it never repeats and has no middle or end, no fine resolution and redemption at the end; there is no end. Although the couple of hours that I saw, seemed to move in a fairly believable arc.
Can I claim formal similarities here to Christian Marclay’s ‘The Clock’? That 24 hour film, in which short fragments of traditional film showing clocks/ watches etc are synched to real time. You could for example point out that both films depend on digital technology to sequence tiny sections so precisely. But there must be more going on to link these two contemporaneous works. It might be more useful to think of another element, both films deal in fractured narrative. Usually in narrative film your main task as a viewer is to get busy with the emoting, rather than consider the fundamental processes involved. Like any worthwhile art, in both ‘Clock’ and ‘whiteonwhite’ the possible range of references to other art demands the viewer gets heavily involved in the viewing and (re)making process. Should those, maybe subliminal references to Modernism make one trudge slightly wearily to Greenberg’s famous dictum:
“The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself – not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.”
Could we say that, as we see it, as painting has flatness, the key area of competence for film is time? Could that then lead us to say that, the use these videos make of time links them formally, rather than chronologically, via the way the viewer tries to construct narrative? And, if we really want to get stuck into all this revisionist stuff, will all this Modernist talk about time take us (holding our nose perhaps), inevitably to T S Eliot and Burnt Norton,
‘Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable’
So, the present and the past are already part of the future but the future is determined by the past. Time is not linear, either in the elite world of the (non PC) Twentieth Century intellectual or in the digitally organised present. Burnt Norton from which this poem takes its name; is a ruin. Ruins as a symbol of the futility of human aspirations. Let us ignore the overt Christian element in late Eliot: the natural order that can only be put right by God, not us: ‘time is unredeemable’ etc. Notice instead the connection to the ruins in progress in ‘whiteonwhite’, and refer to the collapse of the Utopian order that feature in this post Soviet state: City A. Look to the apparent linear narrative that is in fact, as the monitor on the walls tells us, arbitrary. No God controls this, the Utopian God; the future, has died. All we see are fragments, a heap of broken images, remade by the viewer steeped in late capitalist redemption tales; from Georges Melies ‘Le Voyage dans la Lune’ to Star Wars.

Eleventh Approach to Rubens ‘Het Steen’, 1636

April 29, 2011
Art Seen, Het Steen, Landscape Art, National Gallery
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Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak. Oil on oak.131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/peter-paul-rubens-a-view-of-het-steen-in-the-early-morning
Het Steen

The behaviour of gallery goers is endlessly fascinating. Apart from the usual schoolchildren (poorly behaved and French today) others trudge through the galleries, is this a form of nomadism? A pilgrimage? Something dutiful, done with little interest, the journey is the penance, the reward comes at the end. Although some are clearly fascinated and will stand entranced. Is gallery going a useful space to think about life outside the gallery?
Woman on cart has red blouse/ shirt and blue dress; contrasting complementaries. Only just noticed that the man driving the cart is actually on top of his horse, not on the right of the woman as I had always assumed. He (looking vaguely like a younger Rubens, with the hat to hide his baldness) is sitting on some sort of saddle and the two horses have a heavy bridle between them to pull the two wheeled cart; a fairly agricultural affair. She sits on hay with the brass jug (by the way there is a very similar jug in an equivalent late landscape ‘Landscape with a Rainbow’ 1635,

Rubens: 'Landscape with a Rainbow', 1636. The Wallace Collection, London

a peasant balances it on her head). In front of her is the deer.