Tag: Tate Modern

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Futurism at Tate Modern

I went along to the Futurism exhibition at Tate Modern. Having sometimes commented on the excellence of past Tate exhibition websites, I have to say they’ve fallen down on this one — nothing to see at all. And they also didn’t have any exhibition booklets, so I have no aide-mémoire at all.

EDIT: they now have a much improved website up, so they obviously just hadn’t got their act together yet. Who knows, maybe they have some booklets ready as well.

CRI_151141

The Futurists were the early Italian Modernists — most of the paintings were pre-First World War — who were keen to embrace modernity, speed, machines and suchlike. They’re probably most famous not for any of the paintings but for the Futurist Manifesto, written by Futurist poet Marinetti. And whatever its aesthetico-philosophical merits, it’s punchy stuff; this is point 4:

4.—We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

Admittedly some of it is a bit less appealing; this would be unpleasant anyway, but it’s even more so in the context of the upcoming war:

9.—We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.
10.—We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.

Which segues neatly into the other thing that the futurists are famous for: Fascism. You can see how all the rhetoric about war and power and modernity might appeal to the same people who liked Fascism; and after the war, Marinetti founded a Futurist political party which ended up being absorbed into Mussolini’s Fascists. But the Tate makes a very reasonable case that it is unfair to tar all the Futurists with the same brush. So much happened between 1909 and the 1930s — the war, the Russian Revolution and the Great Depression, for a start — that you need to be very cautious in drawing any link between provocative aesthetic statements before the war and the politics of 25-30 years later.

bocc

And in fact many of the pre-War Futurists had left the movement by then, apparently. The reality of full-scale modern mechanised warfare left them less enthusiastic about the idea of machinery and war. And indeed some of them, like the Russian Futuro-Cubists, went in the other direction to produce Constructivist posters for collectivist farms.

One thing I rather enjoyed was one of the many manifestos: ‘Vital English Art’. This was published in the Observer in 1914:

VITAL ENGLISH ART.

FUTURIST MANIFESTO.

I am an Italian Futurist poet, and a passionate admirer of England. I wish, however, to cure English Art of that most grave of all maladies—passéism. I have the right to speak plainly and without compromise, and together with my friend Nevinson, an English Futurist painter, to give the signal for battle.

AGAINST :

1.—The worship of tradition and the conservatism of the Academies, the commercial acquiescence of English artists, the effeminacy of their art and their complete absorption towards a purely decorative sense.
2.—The pessimistic, sceptical and narrow views of the English public, who stupidly adore the pretty-pretty, the commonplace, the soft, the sweet, and mediocre, the sickly revivals of medievalism, the Garden Cities with their curfews and artificial battlements, the may-pole Morris dances, Æstheticism, Oscar Wilde, the Pre-Raphaelites, Neo-primitives and Paris.
3.—The perverted snob who ignores or despises all English daring, but welcomes eagerly all foreign originality and daring.

[…]

8.—The old grotesque idea of genius—drunken, filthy, ragged, outcast ; drunkenness the synonym of Art, Chelsea the Montmartre of London ; the Post-Rossettis with long hair under the sombrero, and other passéist filth.
9.—The sentimentality with which you load your pictures—to compensate, perhaps, for your praiseworthy utter lack of sentimentality in life.

[…]

WE WANT:

[all the usual Futurist guff; I can’t be bothered to type any of it out]

F. T. MARINETTI,
Italian Futurist Movement (Milan).
C. R. W. NEVINSON,
Art Rebel Centre (London).

Ah, what fun. You gotta love the ‘Art Rebel Centre’.

As a geeky aside, the multi-media guide (basically an audio guide with a few still photos) was excellent. Last time I got an audio guide at Tate Modern I said this:

The commentary has a kind of coy, knowing, vaguely patronising tone, as though the narrator was trying to seduce a slightly dim 12-year-old…. It was also short of insights that reached beyond the blindingly obvious. If I’m standing in front of a painting, I don’t need the guide to carefully tell me what the painting looks like; I want some kind of extra information that I can’t see for myself.

… instead of the standard audioguides with a big keypad, the Tate has got some little touchscreen devices. Which would be fine in principle, except that the touchscreen is erratically responsive, you have to carry around a stylus, and the user interface is badly designed…. I spent a couple of minutes trying to figure it out and nearly crumbled and went and asked for help. Even when it was working, some design decisions were just bad; for example, when you pressed the ‘Go’ button to start a recording, the screen changed and the play/pause appeared on exactly the same part of the screen, with the result that many times, I accidentally pressed the screen twice and found I had paused the audio by mistake. And just when I was coming to the end of the exhibition, it crashed and I lost the tour altogether.

Well, this time the guide was much better written; it actually added useful context and information I wouldn’t otherwise have. And they’ve sorted out the hardware by getting some iPod Touches. Admittedly since I have an iPhone it wasn’t a fair test of how intuitive it would be to just pick up and use, but it has to be better than the crap they were using before.

Personally I would like it even better if they would let me buy the guide through iTunes and use it on my own phone or iPod, with my own headphones: either as a stand-alone application or just as a set of audio or video files. Why not? That would save them worrying about people nicking their equipment — I had to leave some ID as a deposit — and it would mean I could listen to the introductory blurbs on the train on the way to the exhibition. Or refer to them at home later.

» Carlo Carrà’s The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli is currently in the Tate but normally lives at MoMA. Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space is part of the Tate’s own collection.

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Rothko at Tate Modern

I went to the Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern today. The show is of his ‘late series’: the centrepiece is the Seagram Murals (i.e. the group of dark Rothkos which have been in the Tate for years, plus some related works that normally live in Japan), but there are also some other groups of works (the ‘Black-Form’, ‘Brown and Grey’ and ‘Black on Gray’ paintings) as well as related odds and ends.

'Red on Maroon Mural', Mark Rothko, Tate

It’s quite suggestive, I think, that the Seagram murals were commissioned for the Four Seasons restaurant in the new Seagram building in New York, and that they ‘never reached their original destination, after Rothko decided that a private dining room was an unsuitable environment to experience his paintings.’ Because with these big colour-field paintings there is always going to be a delicate path to tread between art and interior design. And indeed you can see why the restaurant might have wanted them: they would have added a touch of modernity and sophistication without actually challenging the air of hushed pomposity which is so important to an expensive restaurant.

But although they could serve as interior design, they are certainly more than that. They are seductive pieces, and they do reward patient contemplation. Partially that’s because they are much more carefully made than the simplest description of them might suggest: a painting may be, in the most reductive terms, a big maroon blob on a red background, but they have more presence than that. Apparently he painted them with many many layers of very thin paint, and they remind me slightly of fine Japanese lacquer; the way a plain red and black rice bowl can be a deeply desirable object because of the texture and way the light falls on it.

And despite what I said in my last post, and despite the funereal colour-schemes, they aren’t gloomy. They are whatever the antithesis of frivolous is — suolovirf — but half an hour spent in their company was restful rather than depressing. They are beautiful things: big, but subtle in their colours and textures.

Or at least the Seagram murals are; some of the others were less exciting, most notably the ‘Black on Gray’ works, all divided into an area of black at the top and pale grey below. Those ones managed to be exactly as boring as the description suggests.

» The painting is ‘Red on Maroon Mural’, from the Tate. I’ve taken it from the exhibition website, which as usual with the Tate, is very good, so do go and take a look.

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Culture

Cy Twombly at Tate Modern

I went to the Twombly exhibition at Tate Modern today. What a fabulous name, btw: I tried climbing the Eiffel Tower but the height made me go all twombly.

He’s not someone I knew much about beforehand, and I don’t know how excited I would have been if I had known; he does what you might describe as scribbly abstracts. In fact with some of the the early ones, white covered with scrawly pencil marks, you wouldn’t be totally surprised if you were told they were taken from the wall of a particularly chaotic primary school. Or perhaps, given the presence of crudely-drawn genitalia and thick gobs of turd-brown paint smeared on with the fingers, a nineteenth-century lunatic asylum.

The paintings in the exhibition, which covers his whole career, are nearly all large whitish canvases with various kinds of roughly-applied scrawls, smears and squiggles. The colours, the media used, and the arrangement of the marks all vary, but there’s a clear continuity through the work. Despite the brief outbreak of genitalia they are overwhelmingly abstract; only the titles and a few scrawly bits of text give you a hint of what they are ‘about’. The two main themes seem to be classical myth and particular places, mainly I think in Italy where he works.

'Quattro Stagioni: Autunno' by Cy Twombly

When I say I might not have been excited to see the show had I known what the work was like, it’s because I find myself increasingly unsympathetic towards non-representational art. Which is a bit philistinic, I know, and I don’t want to get too Daily Mail about it — I do know there’s a baby somewhere in the bathwater — but I think it’s just a sense that when abstract art doesn’t work it’s really exceptionally dull, and I’m not sure even the most successful stuff can ever reach the heights, or have the richness, of representational work.

Having said all that, I did actually enjoy this exhibition. Twombly has the knack of producing charismatic objects. Even the paintings which appear most messy and haphazard have a kind of presence to them. I was going to say that they are more than the sum of their parts, but perhaps it’s that they don’t seem like the sum of parts at all: they come across as organic wholes. Why that is true strikes me as a deepish mystery. The sheer size of them helps give them authority: the painting above, which is perhaps 8’×5′, is typical. There’s a room of much smaller works, about 18 inches square, and although I quite liked those too, they were that much easier to ignore.

» The painting, Quattro Stagioni: Autunno, is © Cy Twombly; the picture is taken from the exhibition website.

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Culture

‘Duchamp Man Ray Picabia’ at Tate Modern

The exhibition is subtitled ‘The Moment Art Changed Forever’ and the poster is illustrated with Duchamp’s Fountain, the famous work that just consists of a urinal signed with the name ‘R. Mutt’. In 2004 Fountain was voted the most influential artwork of the C20th, presumably for having sharply and clearly established the principle that art is whatever the artist says it is. So I can see why the Tate is emphasising it; but in fact those kind of ready-mades make up a fairly small proportion of the show; which is probably just as well because they are pretty one-dimensional. Sure, it was a gesture worth making, and Duchamp did it well, with a good choice of object and title and so on; but I wouldn’t want to see a whole exhibition of them.

Other stuff in the show includes paintings and sculptures themed around the body, sex, machines and movement, including familiar pieces like Duchamp’s Nude Descending A Staircase and The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) which is in the Tate anyway; there are paintings as well as photographs by Man Ray. Picabia was the artist whose work I knew least about beforehand; lots of the Duchamp and Man Ray has been in previous exhibitions about Dada and Surrealism. Picabia was also probably the least interesting, but some of his paintings were quite fun.

Daughter Born without Mother by Picabia

I can’t say I was wildly excited by the show, but if it’s the kind of thing you like it’s certainly worth checking out. The most covetable objects are mainly Man Ray photographs and Rayographs (made by placing objects on photographic paper and briefly exposing it to light), though there were some small, very abstract late paintings by Picabia, just a few dots of colour in thick paint on a plain coloured background which I would also quite like on my wall.

On thing I would say is: don’t waste your money on the audioguide. The commentary has a kind of coy, knowing, vaguely patronising tone, as though the narrator was trying to seduce a slightly dim 12-year-old; so that was deeply irritating. It was also short of insights that reached beyond the blindingly obvious. If I’m standing in front of a painting, I don’t need the guide to carefully tell me what the painting looks like; I want some kind of extra information that I can’t see for myself. You can actually hear some of the audio tour on the exhibition website (this page, for example) if you’re curious.

On top of the tour itself, the controllers were also a problem; instead of the standard audioguides with a big keypad, the Tate has got some little touchscreen devices. Which would be fine in principle, except that the touchscreen is erratically responsive, you have to carry around a stylus, and the user interface is badly designed. This is a machine which people are expected to just pick up, use for about an hour and hand back; there’s no time for a learning curve. So make the controls large, use standard icons for play/pause etc, and if necessary label the buttons with text. I spent a couple of minutes trying to figure it out and nearly crumbled and went and asked for help. Even when it was working, some design decisions were just bad; for example, when you pressed the ‘Go’ button to start a recording, the screen changed and the play/pause appeared on exactly the same part of the screen, with the result that many times, I accidentally pressed the screen twice and found I had paused the audio by mistake. And just when I was coming to the end of the exhibition, it crashed and I lost the tour altogether.

» The painting is Daughter Born without Mother by Picabia, from the exhibition website.

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Culture

Visiting the crack

Last week I went to see the crack at Tate Modern, which is the latest big artwork in the Turbine Hall. You can read what the Tate thinks it’s about here. I found it less impressive in reality than I expected. I’d heard about it before I went, and it looked exactly as I expected except I vaguely thought it might be bigger and scarier at the fat end.


Shibboleth by Doris Salcedo – the crack at Tate Modern, London, originally uploaded by chrisjohnbeckett.

I personally didn’t notice it exposing a fracture in modernity itself or encouraging me to confront uncomfortable truths about our history and about ourselves with absolute candidness, but then I didn’t read the blurb until after I saw it.

I also went to the Louise Bourgeois exhibition. Which I quite enjoyed although I wasn’t really in the right mood to give it the attention a major retrospective hopefully deserves. Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911 but has lived in New York since 1938. One interest was just to see work produced over such a long period; the earliest works were from the 1940s and the most recent from this year. I thought the objects were quite likeable—they had a very human sort of quality. A lot of contemporary art seems to be either highly finished and glossy or so roughly put together that it looks scruffy and half-arsed. This work avoids either quality. Apart from the traditional sculpture, I thought one example of that was the recent works which are ‘rooms’ assembled together out of found objects: furniture and tapestries and stuff. The objects themselves are battered and tatty, and it’s the kind of work which can often be a bit nothingy, but here I felt they were thoughtfully put together and really felt like coherent artworks. Those works also seemed very French; after 60 years in New York producing work that doesn’t seem so specific to a particular place, it’s interesting to see her returning to the details of her childhood in France.

Anyway. I can’t really claimed to have engaged with it in a very meaningful way, but it was interesting enough. I’ve got a cold and I’m feeling a bit shit, so rather than rambling on any more I think I’ll go and make some hot lemon and honey or something. Can anyone suggest any other favourite homemade cold remedies?

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Culture

Gilbert and George at Tate Modern

I went yesterday to see the big Gilbert and George retrospective at Tate Modern. The Tate have done their usual thorough job of putting the exhibition online, so that link will give you a fair idea of what the exhibition’s like.

I enjoyed it more than I expected. Not that I expected to hate it, but it wasn’t a show that I was especially excited to see. My usual gripe about contemporary art is that it often seems a bit half-baked; good moments that never seem to be worked through and developed fully. Gilbert and George did at least seem fully-baked. There’s a sense of a lot of stuff in the show – lots of ideas and images and variation. At the crudest level, a lot of work. Not that work ethic is the most sophisticated metric for artistic worth, but it at least predisposes me to be little more sympathetic.

I preferred the works with a more geometrical composition and a more austere colour scheme; there was a period in the eighties when their work became a bit too much like the packaging for a particularly odd range of children’s breakfast cereals (click on any of the images to see an enlarged version):

Generally, the obvious visual parallel with their work is stained glass windows, but actually some of the more geometrical ones remind me of quilts. Whether that’s a good thing or not.. don’t know, really. I’ve always quite liked simple, traditional geometrical quilt designs; when they work, they seem to be doing so much with so little. I don’t know whether that sense of formal restraint really applies to a work like Jesus Said:

In the past few years, they’ve started using computers to do the design work, and I’m not entirely sure that it’s an improvement: they seem overfond of some of the heavier-handed tools in Photoshop. Still, I like some of them.

So overall, I don’t know that I’d like to have many of these pieces actually in my house—and yes, I know that’s another rather simplistic metric for artistic worth, but it’s one way of communicating a gut reaction—but I’m glad I went to the exhibition.