JMW Turner and Lamina Fifana: Dark Waters at Tate Liverpool.

Art  This morning I attended Tate Liverpool for the press viewing of their new paid exhibition, JMW Turner and Lamina Fifana: Dark Waters.  I could pretend that I was in completely the right mind for this.  As you'll probably gather from the scarcity of writing here this past few months, I've not been in the best places mentally.  The grief of losing Mum last year still lingers and I've never quiet felt the same since catching COVID earlier in this year.  Plus anxiety continues to thrum away in the background every now and then turning to into a full blown rock concert but sadly more Woodstock '99 than Glastonbury '99 (which at least had REM headlining)

All of which made me rather nervous about a press day at Tate, something I've really enjoyed in the past, but having not put my name down since before the pandemic or indeed been to many exhibitions in general, it felt like it was going to be a lot.  Pre-pandemic, one of these events involved reception desks and noise, lots of bodies in the space, a curator led tour at certain time making me feel need to rush around the show beforehand, followed by a meal with all the inherent low self esteem issues of being sat at a table with professional journalists when you're a blogger who's mainly doing this sort of thing as a lark.

But the format has changed, or at least it had for Turner and Fifana.  The space was just open for a couple of hours this morning.  On entering I was offered some brief directions by the press person pointing to some notable items and then I was left to fend for myself.  Perfect.  It's also not a huge show.  The fourth floor is currently being prepared for this year's Turner Prize exhibition, so T&F are inhabiting one side of the fourth floor, quality rather than quality, large oil paintings punctuated by watercolours and drawings, a conscious decision, perhaps, to recreate the feel of the Turner rooms at Tate Britain.

Well, I relaxed.  I becalmed.  I began to enjoy myself.  I also had questions.  Why was Tate Liverpool, which has generally been on the cutting edge of contemporary art hosting a Turner show?  That should not be seen a complaint.  Over the years, I've hoped they would diversify the types of work they display to before the 1900 cut off which seems to have been the general rule and cheered on the occasions when they have, for Turner Monet Twombly: Later Paintings (ten years ago folks) and Alice in Wonderland (even longer).  It's also interesting that this is a paid exhibition when it's entirely sourced from Tate's own collection.

The most numerous selection of Turners are of his Whaling Scenes, depictions of one of the industries which developed in the 1700s out of the same docks which can be seen from the windows of this Tate (see above).  However abhorrent we might find the practice now, when these were originally painted it was a way for the public to envision how many household items such as oil for lamps. soap and lubricants were provided in the years before fossil fuels were properly harnessed.  Almost everything here was accepted by the nation at part of the Turner bequest in 1856.

Not that Turner's work doesn't take some creative license with Whalers Entangled in Flaw Ice, Endeavouring to Extricate Themselves (1846) showing the boiling of whale blubber on board ship, something which would usually have happened back in port but allows the artist to contrast the deep red of the flames against the muted grey backdrop.  In many of these later works, the objects become less important than Turner's experimentation with colour leading to near abstraction and how light interacts with the canvas to the point that the image almost "shimmers".

The centrepiece of the exhibition is A Disaster at Sea (1835) which was inspired by the loss of the Amphitrite, a slave ship which left Liverpool in 1799 and capsized off Nigeria the following January.  Unlike other depictions of sea tragedies, like The Raft of the Medusa (painted a few decades earlier) which show the anguish and fear of the sea farers against an otherwise quite static background, Turner loses the sense of individuality amid the hellish swirl of the ocean and chaotic skies with the pieces of ship and fragments of people almost indistinguishable.

Lamina Fofana's sound installations are inspired by another tragedy at sea in which the crew of the Zong massacred over a hundred and thirty slaves and threw them overboard near the Caribbean (by doing so the ship's owners could make an insurance claim).  Of the three, the most prominent and certainly the most recognisable is Life and Death by Water (2021) which mainly consists of the hummed section of Boney M's Rivers of Babylon repeated on a loop for twenty minutes like an ancient chant.  

Originally recorded by the Jamaican Reggae group The Melodians for the 1972 film The Harder They Come, the lyrics, based on Psalm 137, although originally about the Jewish exile following the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem, could equally be applied to the souls lost on board the Zong, "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion ... They carried us away in captivity requiring of us a song ... Now how shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?"

For about five or ten minutes at the end of my visit I sat listening to Fofana's piece.  Potentially it's a distraction from the Turner paintings, especially as your ears twig a familiarity with the melody in the other room and then try to identify it like a human version of the Shazam app.  The repetition does make it inherently irritating and I fear for the invigilators who're going to have to be in the space and will collectively develop it as an earwig on mass.  But just sat listening, once again I relaxed, I becalmed and I began to enjoy myself.  

On reflection the opening paragraph to this was a bit gloomy so I wanted to say I am fine, really, and in this past week I've been on an overnight city break to Birmingham and Stratford-Upon-Avon (more on that in the next couple of days) and a day trip for Blackpool for my Dad's 80th birthday (and that) (maybe) so it's not like I've been a complete emotional wreck.  I just wanted to show that you can't approach any exhibition with a clear, neutral mind.  And at least I didn't try to make some tenuous connection between my mental state and the chaos of Turner's paintings.  I'd never have forgiven myself.

Art of the State: Liverpool: Tate Liverpool.

Art There's not much more that I can add to the last time I visited Tate Liverpool as part of one of these grand projects. In 2013 I suggested that Tate Liverpool saved my life and there's not much to add to that in the six years since, other than to an extent it saved me again.  What I didn't mention then (due to the blog rules) was that at around that time, a company called Morris Hargreaves McIntyre employed me as a market researcher, which amounted to stopping people as they left the building and asking them what they thought.  The number of shifts per month were variable, but quite often they got me over a few financial bumps although it did mean that whenever I attended a press day there, the resulting review would be more diplomatic, shall we say, than perhaps they might be.  Eventually, I began following Thumper's philosophy and just wrote about those exhibitions that genuinely engaged me.

Access to Collection.

During the winter months, Tate Liverpool is open Monday to Sunday 10.00–17.00, extended to 18.00 during over the summer.  But the gallery as such does not have a permanent collection, its contents a mix of loans for the paid exhibitions and items from the Tate's larger archive in the form of Constellations and In Focus displays, both of which rotate their topics on an annual basis if not longer.  The Art UK website lists four paintings as being in this location which is an error.  Perhaps you could say that it has a permanently temporary collection, a way for people in the North West to enjoy items which would otherwise be in storage or on display in London.  It's worth noting that in the past I've privately been pretty scathing about the level of work which has made its way up here, but at the moment there's an astonishingly good selection on display.



Collection Spotlight.

The current "in focus" exhibition is considers Op Art, a movement which unsurprisingly sprang from the sixties given that the proponents, as the Tate website describes, "combined lines, geometric shapes and eye popping colour to create artworks that fool the eye. Images could be subtle or disorientating, giving the illusion of movement".  In many ways this exemplified by Jesus Rafael Soto's Twelve Blacks and Four Silvereds (1965) in which dozens of thin vertical parallel lines are broken by a series of black squares floating above the surface which cause the said lines to "move" when the viewer shifts their weight forth and back.  This is an interactive display, the viewer being coaxed into participating in each piece even though for the most part they're two or minimally three dimensional objects which we're not allowed to touch.

Unifying the exhibition is Jim Lambie's Zobop, an installation with a 1999 insep date which has been recreated in the gallery space.  Perhaps I'm being obtuse in selecting this as my favourite piece because it won't exist in this form once the exhibition closes, but it is an excellent example of how an art collection doesn't just contain objects but also ideas or at least the prerequisites necessary for the recreation of a work.  It's listed on Tate's website as "presented by Tate Members in 2006" which presumably means that when it's constructed by the artist or someone else, unless its inside a Tate building its essentially "on loan" even though it's contents are a series of coloured lines spread across a floor.  The record for Zobop contains images of an instance of Lambie's effort on the floor of Tate Britain, a much larger space than at the Albert Dock.

The work is the most striking part of the space, filling two of the three display room on the second floor.  Lambie pleads the 5th on the meaning of the work, which he's recreated in black and white and materials other than the 3M tape which adorns the Tate Liverpool floors.  The lines twist and turn around the corners of the place like Tron cycles or a manic game of Snake, frame within frame within frame.  I spent a few minutes following a green line around as it shifted between corners and over concentric ovals which from a distance look like curved slices, an optical illusion often exploited by chalk street artists.  What I'd really like to know is how this is held within Tate's vaults.  Is it a patent-like statement of intent wrapped around to reels of tape?  Photographs of its various installations across the years? 

Keith Haring at Tate Liverpool.

Art When New York artist Keith Harring exhibited at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in 1982, true to form and in keeping with his belief that art should be as accessible as possible, he turned the space into a night club, with florescent lighting, break dancers and his partner DJing in the corner.  Such an approach was not unusual for Harring.  He first became noticed for his subway works, in which he'd masking tape a piece of black card to the curved wall of a pedestrian access tunnel and draw his images free hand in white crayon.  He was arrested several times for this, but he presumably knew that if he was able to draw a crowd then with his images, symbols and themes that he was on the right track.

For their retrospective, Tate Liverpool have created a black light room in order to give us a flavour of what it must have been like in that gallery in 1984.  Inside are a number of his fluorescent paintings, shining brightly under ultraviolet light, his familiar mix of three eyed faces, barking dogs, pyramids and headless beings accompanied by a speaker stack pumping out 80s disco from a compilation available in the gift shop.  The effect is transportative, representing one of the key achievements of this exhibition, much like the Warhol show a few years ago and Glam before that, of placing the artworks within their chronological context, heralding those of us who lived through these times backwards in both memory and emotion.

There was only one reaction I could have to this.  I danced.  On entering the space during yesterday's press preview, throwing caution to the wind and entirely forgetting about my latest hernia, I began to shift my legs about in time with the music.  Slowly at first and then slightly more pronounced.  The image was probably hopeless and at the age of forty-four could quiet correctly categorized as Dad dancing despite me not having any children.  I shifted around in circles like a demented George McFly letting the images and beats flow over me.  A visitor wandered through and smiled as she took photos the paintings.  She asked if I was enjoying myself.  I nodded. I was.  I could quite happily have stayed there all day.

Except there is so much more to see.  Unlike some recent shows, this Keith Harring retrospective fills the whole of the fourth floor.  Although his career barely spanned just over a decade, he was incredibly prolific.  Beginning with his aforementioned early work from his time at the School of Visual Arts on East 23rd Street, to his street art, his activist works protesting apartheid and nuclear arms to his part in the Club 57 scene, onward to his drawings then his more commercial works and finally the material he created around the HIV/AIDS epidemic as he watched his friends die, Harring following in 1990 at the age of 31, not slowing his workflow down at all.

This is incredibly accessible artwork, visually legible and also incredibly profound.  Harring didn't like to offer explanations and most of the paintings are untitled and the Tate have declined to give contextual labels.  Instead as you enter the space you'll find a small visual dictionary which provides some background to his repeated symbols, the baby, flying saucer, figure with a whole in his stomach, nuclear, tv, computers, robots, religion and money.  The meaning behind the juxtaposition of these shapes is rarely cryptic.  A man riding on the back of a leviathan with a Commodore Pet like computer for a head stomping on what look like police murder outlines of decapitated corpses is probably about the dangers of rampant technology.

Obviously I'm most drawn to the apocalyptic images of flying saucers bringing about the destruction of humanity, his simplistic representations of people escape through rooftops only to be exterminated by death rays raining from above, joining the piles of corpses below.  Sometimes robots are involved just to add to the misery.  Along with the grotesquely portrayed many breasted hermaphrodites accompanying by what look like nuclear reactors in the shape of mutant rabbits, it's like witnessing a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape drawn in the style of an early nineties Nickelodeon cartoon, The Garden of Earthly Delights starring Ren and Stimpy. 

What's perhaps most impressive about Harring's technique is that he created these drawings and paintings freehand, mentally planning the structure rather than, as might be inferred from just looking at photographic reproductions, filling in pre-draw pencil outlines.  Much of the time he'd paint on the floor in acrylics, base colours first then the lines of his subjects on top blurring the lines between painting and performance art, especially when creating in public.  One of his largest pieces, The Matrix, spans an entire wall at the Tate, ten metres of dense imagery, almost all of his usual symbols, structurally improvised in front of an audience.

Due to work commitments, yesterday was my first Tate preview in a while so it helped that it was an artist I'd (a) heard of and (b) already liked.  Harring's bold creations helped to define the 1980s and inspired plenty of the design work of the era.  Although I was a teenager then and would not have known he was the source, stepping into the space took me right back to then, leafing through Smash Hits Magazine looking for Kylie interviews.  That we didn't get to see how Harring's work would have developed in subsequent decades is a great loss.  But the crises he highlighted back in the eighties continue to surface and it's up to us to heed his message and act accordingly.

Ken's Show: Exploring the Unseen. Press launch at Tate Liverpool.

Art Next year, Tate Liverpool celebrates its thirtieth anniversary and this morning held a press launch in one of the handling rooms, with coffee and danish pastries to explain their plans. The room is less glamourous than you might expect, with its heavy duty floor and white walls, the kind of space you might expect to be used to actually display paintings at the Biennial. But the large wooden storage boxes reveal some glamour with foreign destinations written on with in black marker or printed labels.

Ken Simons began working for Tate in 1974 almost straight from school and particularly as a handler in the Liverpool branch since 1998. As a way of commemorating his long service and imminent retirement and providing a retrospective view of the exhibitions which have been at Tate Liverpool since the start, he's been given the opportunity to jointly curate a show containing the work of thirty artists (one for each year), his favourites amongst those he's been tasked with placing in the the gallery spaces across his career.

After an introduction from Francesco Manacorda, the current artistic direction of Tate Liverpool, Ken offered a brief description of some of his favourite exhibitions across the years, notably the Rothko which opened the building and which I have fond memories of from a school trip. He spoke of how exciting it was to be at the launch of a major art gallery, the staff pulling together to present the space to an audience queuing around the block for entry.

You can read in this post from 2013 what Tate Liverpool has meant to me across the years and this sounds like an inspirational way to celebrate its legacy. The press pack contains a list of the works which will be included but I've chosen not to look preferring to be surprised by some old friends.  There's bound to be a Proustian rush to the exhibition and I want to enjoy the surprise.  With so much work to choose from, I can't wait to see what will be there.

Yves Klein at Tate Liverpool.

Art The first and so far only comments card I've ever filled in Tate Liverpool was about Yves Klein. One of his blue paintings, IKB 79 1959, was once part of the permanent exhibition. One day, this must be over a decade and a half ago, I was in an especially cantankerous mood and noticed that, because the painting was behind glass and positioned in a particular place with a florescent light above it, the blueness seemed to be off colour, slightly dull, the shimmer of the pigment only really visible along the edges.  After chatting to the invigilator, I headed to the foyer and filled the white space on the card and popped it in the box, not expecting a reply.

Tate replied via email and explained to me what's now patently clear.  That the painting has to be behind glass for protection purposes and so it's almost impossible not for light to be reflected off the surface no matter were the painting was hung.  Would you believe I argued back about this?  But the exchange was perfectly cordial and in retrospect especially patient considering my ignorance.  There's always a trade-off in museums between displaying and preserving an object and sometimes, because of the very nature of a painting or sculpture or an example of the decorative arts, there isn't a perfect solution.

IKB 79 1959 returns to Tate Liverpool for this retrospective and remains one of art history's greatest achievements, breathtaking in its execution and visual beauty.  Displayed in a corner near the entrance, as far away from direct light as possible, it has an almost supernaturally watchful presence within the gallery, with all the foreboding of Clarke's monolith.  It shimmers as your eyes find it impossible to quite focus on its aquamarine surface, unable to fix on any particular details.  To stand before it, is to find your emotions being absorbed and reflected back, as it broods, smiles, addresses, surprises and it's impossible not to look, to want to look, addicted by its luminosity.

International Klein Blue or IKB, was created with the help of the chemist and paint dealer, Edouard Adam, attempting to retain the radiant blue that the dry pigment has even after it had been applied to the canvas.  The result is the bluest of blues, with all the lucidity of the skies in the Giotto frescoes which were the painter's initial inspiration.  Giotto mixed lapis lazuli with egg tempera and oil which hasn't aged well in some cases but Klein's "trick" was to suspend the pigment in a synthetic resin, Rhodopas, described by Klein as "The Medium."  As a result the surface has much the same quality as it must have done when he originally applied the paint.

If the exhibition had simply been an empty room with this at the centre, then nothing more would need to be said, an example of an artist at the apogee of his creative powers, what would be the perfect album for a musician, the unrepeatable novel for a writer, the first feature film whose magic can't be recreated.  But like any creative, Yves Klein during his slender life (he died of a heart attack at thirty-four in 1962 just after most of these paintings were produced), kept trying, kept working and if the rest of the items in the exhibition are any evidence, wasn't fucking around.  As well as a painter, he was a judo master, one of the few in Europe at that time, and there's even a startling photo of him leaping off a building (albeit heavily staged).

But IKB 70 1959 doesn't exist in isolation.  Klein painted over two hundred similar paintings, trying out different painting techniques from brush to roller to sponge and there are smaller examples of these blue voids elsewhere in the show.  In his 1957 show, Monochrome Proposals, Klein displayed eleven identically sized blue monochromes with different prices to "focus our attention of the sensitivity of artistic expression and the role of the audience".  But they are different, with varying textures leading to other ways in which the light shines from the canvas but few as successful as the larger work.

Similarly, there's a rainbow of even smaller monochromes collected together with only purple missing from the usual list and other than the IKB, none of them are actually monochrome, either because of blotchy paintwork, or dirt which has collected on the surface across the decades or fading.  Around the same time, Klein experimented with utilising his pigment within sponges either attached to the surface of a canvas or as stand alone sculptures, but this has a dulling effect, making it just seem like the kind of blue water based paint we'd use in school, artificial.  But it's important for us to see these choices in order to appreciate the miracle of IKB 70 1959.

Half of the main display space is filled with Klein's Anthropetries, in which the artist attempted to find a crossover between performance art and creating something with aesthetic qualities.  A film is included demonstrating how these works were achieved, as the artist daubs naked women with blue paint and they then press their bodies against the canvas, the idea of a whole being becoming living paint brushes.  People with long memories, or want to click here, can see a recreation of just this on Channel 4's Club X in 1989 during a live television broadcast, which even filtered through TV Hell's presentation is still fascinating.

Klein said that he considered his paintings to be "ashes" of the original work implying that the actual art work was the process of creation rather than the results.  But creative people always say that their output is always a goshima shadow of the version they had in their heads, and it's possible, that the very great artists in all media are those who're able to replicate the version they have in their head to the rest of us as close as is meaningfully possible.  Klein was able to do just this.  IKB 70 1959 is one of a small number of paintings which has the capacity to create sense of wonder despite its apparently simplistic formal qualities and shouldn't be missed.

Yves Klein (with Edward Krasinski) is at Tate Liverpool, 21 October - 5 March 2017.  £10.00 / £8/00.

Liverpool Biennial 2016: Tate Liverpool.

"I think I ought to warn you that I've given second thoughts to the whole of this scheme, and I think it better we turn round and go back before it's too late. Hmm, hmm."

-- The Doctor, "The Myth Makers"

Art If the TARDIS looks like it's dropping in and out of phase, it's because the weather was utterly horrendous on the way to the TATE this morning, rain shifting horizontally across the waterfront, making it pretty difficult to control the time ship long enough to take the photograph.  Perhaps the shock of returning to the gallery so close to having been to the Biennial's opening press conference also discombobulated the controls.  After deciding to use a randomiser, I hadn't expected to be at TATE quite so soon and rather makes me wish I'd stuck around for the curatorial introduction last Thursday before toddling off to Caines.

Not that the exhibition itself isn't fairly self explanatory.  The key expression of the "Ancient Greece" episode of the Biennial, it presents a selection of busts and reliefs bought by art collector, Henry Blundell in the 1800s and now in the vaults and so on loan from National Museums Liverpool.  Having spent a portion of the late 90s cataloguing sections of this collection when I worked for the then National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, I was well aware that there was more in the donation than what's on display in the sculpture gallery at the Walker, so it's fascinating to see some objects which haven't always been on display.  The press kits gives a figure of 553.

The first floor gallery at the TATE displays about a dozen specifically chosen because of how they represent inaccurate restoration.  As the Biennial booklet explains, female heads could find themselves attached to male bodies, parts of the anatomy incorrectly fused, fragments married with later creations to form new sculptures by eighteenth century restorers.  Within the show, there are disembodied heads married to bases to become busts, mismatched breasts fused to females for which they were missing and even an example of hair extensions on a scalp for which they were never meant and look entirely incongruous.

Presented on a wooden boards atop pink-painted metal frames this is not the usual museum display, apart from the accompanying labels which are every bit the sort of text you might expect in an antiquities gallery, explaining how the object was restored and who or what it's supposed to represent.  The pottery selections are not presented in the usual manner behind glass cases and it's possible to walk almost right around them, again not something usually possible within a more traditional museum setting.  Perhaps I was expecting something a bit closer to a recreation of the Ince Blundell Hall interior as featured in the booklet photograph, but again the Walker's sculpture gallery exists for that.

Amid these ancient relics are new commissions and other business by contemporary artists reflecting on ancient Greece.  Andreas Angelidakis's digital video explains how Ancient Greek vases were on of the ways in which news and myths were communicated, relating them to social media which arguably works in a similar way albeit on a much quicker timescale.  That's accompanied by various shapes, some of which appear in the video, created through 3D printing displayed in a similar fashion to the ancient greek objects.  But it's fair to say my interest was always directed back the magnificent museum piece cobbled together by various makers across history.  Now, where next?

Next Destination:
Master Chef Restaurant.

Ella Kruglyanskaya at Tate Liverpool.

Art "Oh hello you."

This lunch time, Tate Liverpool were once again kind enough to invite me to the press view for their three new shows, Maria Lassnig, Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms (the paid exhibitions) and Ella Kruglyanskaya (which will be the free exhibition on the ground floor). All three shows are well curated, the objects thoughtfully chosen and with a keen sense, as has been the case in recent years, of finding ways in which they thematically and materially overlap, in idea, composition and motif.

Unfortunately for me, I've never, not exactly not been a fan of Francis Bacon, or more specifically not feeling anything about his work. From being taken to an exhibition at school and in the years since, often in visits to Tate Liverpool, I've tried my best with it, built an understanding of his thought processes, even bought a postcard of his famous triptych, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) (which is on display). But there's nothing here for me and now that I'm in my forties I've made my peace with that.

After the disappointment of not having the kind of revelation which occurred during the Warhol exhibition (see here), I wandered disconsolately to the ground floor space (well got the lift) and into the Ella Kruglyanskaya exhibition and smiled. And smiled some more, and smiled again. The first image through the doors is Fruit Picnic (2011), an image of two figures lolling across a multicoloured mat, one winking at us, the other fast asleep, wearing a belt with a buckle in the shape of a mouth. What could I say but:

"Oh hello you."

Ella Kruglyanskaya is a New York based painter (originally from Latvia) and this is her first dedicated museum exhibition (although she's had plenty of shows in commercial galleries). There's some explanatory text on Tate's website about how this is a retrospective of her work from the past ten years, and the first appearance of paintings made in 2016, some completed just a few weeks ago apparently.  It pays homage to the history of art, in her use of egg temora and a medium and embracing "a wide range of influences from German expressionism to film and popular culture of the 1950s and 1960s."

On reflection, I understand my own taste enough to realise exactly why I had this reaction.  In the same way that Spotify Discover or Netflix attempt to fathom what your tastes are and present you with other things you might like, Ella Kruglyanskaya's work strokes my art appreciation algorithm almost obscenely.  It doesn't tick all of the boxes, there aren't any depictions of Shakespeare and none of them were painted in the Victorian era, obviously, but in terms of wanting to buy half the exhibition as postcards and t-shirts, this is pretty close.

Here's why:

There's a strong feminist undercurrent.  The artist also chooses to depict women and pairs of women interacting, not for our visual pleasure in the Laura Mulvey sense, but happy in each others company or in the case of the small, graphic Primary Colors (2006) and Girls and Guns (2006), in a state of all out war, acknowledging the panoply of ways in which women have been depicted across visual culture.  When voyeurism is implied, as per the images of bathers, the composition makes the viewer feel slightly uncomfortable as though we're invading a private space.

Many of the paintings are not as they first appear.  The newly completed Girls With Drinks With Paper Cuts (2016) and Bather with Paper Cuts (2016), look from a distance like pencil drawing and collage glued to a canvas, but look closer and they're actually photorealistic paintings of same (the artist offering a clear influence from Matisse who occupied this same space up until a couple of weeks ago).  Sideways Face (Paper Ruin) (2016) attempts a similar trick by sculpturally implying three dimensions on a two dimensional plain.

Kruglyanskaya also embraces post-modernity, the messy interplay of elements from a range of different cultural influences.  Girl With Sunglasses (2008) noirishly utilises the frames of a woman's shades to reflect a beach scene.  The aforementioned Paper Cuts pieces are graphically similar to the kinds of artwork typified by the the day-glo 80s and you could well imagine them being used on anything from a music compilation to advertising an alcoholic tipple.  This isn't a criticism by the way, I love their complex simplicity.

Which means they're also very web-friendly images, of the kind you might imagine cropping up in social media feeds.  Primary Colors (2006) and Girls and Guns (2006) show two frames of an abstract action and although we're meant to imagine what we're seeing, they're not unlike animated gifs.  PBS Ideas Channel has a strong piece about how images are now being used to imply, depict or replace emotion online and there are plenty of this artists paintings which could be utilised for this purpose.  Especially Gossip Girls (2010).

This is only a small exhibition but it offers a good enough sense of Kruglyanskaya's work for me to want to see more.  An online image search for her name presents dozens of others, some variations of paintings in the Tate's exhibition, some even more graphic and on the nose in their symbolism.  This makes sense of the bananas on the pullover in Lips and Lemons, for example.  As the artist says in this interview: “Even when they’re offering themselves up to be looked at, there’s a sense of resistance. Consuming their voluptuousness feels a bit risky.”  I happily take that risk.

An Imagined Museum: works from the Centre Pompidou, Tate and MMK collections at Tate Liverpool.

Art All art is about memory. Actually let me clarify this grandiose statement, because everything in life is about memory. Walking down the street is “about memory” since we’re creating a memory of walking down the street for ourself and others, especially if we trip over a flagstone or absentmindedly walk into a bollard. It’s clearer to say that all art is about the representation of memory. All of it. From Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings which records the process of the period in which he made the painting to the representations of horses in the Chauvet caves of Southern France in which the painter attempts to capture their memory of the movement of the beasts to Michael Craig-Martin’s An Oak Tree in which we’re confronted with a beaker of water sat on top of a glass shelf which represents our memory of what an oak tree looks like.

This notion is at the heart of Tate Liverpool’s new exhibition, An Imagined Museum: works from the Centre Pompidou, Tate and MMK collections which pulls together sixty works dating from 1945 onwards as a kind of “imaginary museum” within a supposed scenario, inspired by Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, that the works are on the edge of vanishing, disappearing from humanity’s cultural assets so that they’ll then only exist the memories of those lucky enough to see them. The show culminates in a two day performance event on 20-21st February when the objects will actually be removed from the space to be replaced by volunteers who’ll then be called upon to represent the works, and describe their memories of them to visitors.

When a friend first described the idea of the exhibition to me, it’s fair to say my reaction was emotional. There may have been tears. I remembered the scene from the film version of Bradbury’s book in which members of the commune are shown speaking the words of the texts they’ve been tasked with memorising, a library of human beings walking in and out of each, their own brains vulnerable recording devices containing the single surviving copy of these great works of literature. I thought about what it would be like to see a live version of that within a gallery space and how tenuous and fragile the task will be when it’s about a person’s perceptions of an object and the impossible responsibility of having to do it justice.

In the event, if the exhibition doesn’t quite live up to the version that existed in my head, which I imagined, it’s because the works selected are not necessarily from artists for which I’m a huge fan. We’ve discussed Warhol at length before, and although there’s plenty of conceptual art which I find appealing (and Felix Gonzales-Torres returns to Tate here with a similar idea to his clocks but with bulbs this time) I find myself mired in practicality when confronted with plenty of the work here, notably Marcel Duchamp or something like Edward Krasinski’s Ostrich egg. The concept for the exhibition could equally have been applied to any group of objects and I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I wished there were more representational works.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of good surprises many of which key into the notional of art as memory. Rachel Whiteread’s resin imprint of a bath. Allan McCollum’s Plaster Surrogates, ceramic and plaster recreations of empty photo frames of the kind you’d find on sale in Rennies on Bold Street, potentially influenced by Paul Almasy’s also included famous photograph of the Louvre in during the Viche occupation in 1942 in which empty frames represented artworks removed and secured from Nazi plunder. Lawrence Werner’s STONES FOUND AND BROKEN SOMETIME IN THE FUTURE which writes that statement across a wall in English and German with the idea that a sculpture is created from it within the visitor’s own memory.

Although Chris Marker’s La Jetee also makes an appearance, the highlight of the exhibition is undoubtedly Dan Graham’s Present Continuous Pasts which I’m unable to talk about without spoiling the very thing that makes it an unforgettable experience and one of the most exciting pieces of contemporary art I’ve ever seen. Which is odd considering it’s as old as I am, produced in 1974, something which is odd only if you appreciate what it contains. Watch this video and read this explanation if you want to spoil the mystery but know that I spend a good ten minutes inside the room it contains walking about, experimenting, giggling and think of the Star Trek episode it reminded me of. If I didn’t work weekends, it’s this piece I’d certainly volunteer to replace in February.

Fittingly, Tate Liverpool hasn’t produced a traditional catalogue for An Imagined Museum which means that for the most part it will only exist in the memory of visitors, those chosen to be able to describe specific works and whatever material is distributed in the media. There is however a permanent record: the artist Dora Garcia has been commissioned to produce a newspaper, given away free in the space, which provides an inventory of the works on display along with texts rumination on the themes of the show and the fragile nature of artworks. Which does do the same job as a catalogue, I suppose, but feels more ephemeral because it will presumably end distribution when the show closes or at least continues its tour to the other venues. After that then.

Exhibition runs from 20 November 2015 – 14 February 2016. Free for Tate Members. Adult £8.80 (without donation £8). Concession £6.60 (without donation £6) (press day attended).

DLA Piper: Constellations at Tate Liverpool.

Art Sinister computers.  Although it would be misleading to say that nothing frightens me, because frankly I'm scared of everything, sinister computers and indeed computers in general would be pretty high on the list along with my own face in the wrong light, biting into biscuits and the future.  For a computer to be especially sinister it has to be running but without a particular reason for existence or at least no obvious sense of purpose, even for a limited time.  Passing a closed university teaching room filled with computers at night is terrifying, dozens of identical machines with monitor and standby lights flashing in unison.  The laptop I'm typing this on is perfect fine right now because it has a working screen, a keyboard and I'm generally master of it, although given that it's a Windows 8.1 machine, "master" tends to be interchangeable with "the things I can get to work".  But there are moments, especially when I've closed the lid and my room's dark and the small blue light of the hard disk (pictured) continues flashing when I wonder, "What is it doing?  What is it thinking?"

There's a very sinister computer reposing at the new edition of the DLA Piper series Constellations exhibition at Tate Liverpool (for which I attended the press view this afternoon), a Diab DS-101 computer, the exterior for which was designed by the artist Richard Hamilton.  Constellations is the semi-permanent display show which fills the first and second floors at Tate Liverpool displaying sections of the gallery's own collection.  A particular artwork is explored through a series of pieces by other artists which may be connected either thematically or technically.  Elsewhere Louise Bourgeois's wall hanging, Mamelles, which features a three dimensional collage of female breasts in rubber, fibreglass and wood is reflected in a series of piece bringing together ideas of gender and the body including Marcel Duchamp's Female Fig Leaf (the casting of a vagina from another of his mannequins) and Rachel Whiteread's Untitled, one of her customary castings, on this occasion showing the interior of an air bed.  The Tate's own website has a better explanation.

The Richard Hamilton constellation is actually "triggered" by a different piece, Towards a definitive statement on the coming trends in menswear and accessories (a) Together let us explore the stars (which as you can see from the image on the Tate's own website) is a collage inspired by JFK's moon speech produced in 1962 at the interstitial point between when the the President said these words and was shot.  The rest of the display includes art works which evoke the space age, like Liliane Lijn's kinetic spinning cone Space Displace Koan, with its sleek white surface and lit circular lines which make it seems like the kind of artwork you'd find in the inevitable gallery on the Galaxy-class Starship Enterprise.  Artworks about the space race like Pierre Huyghe's video One Million Kingdoms in which an electronic version of Neil Armstrong's voice reads a passage from Jules Verne's Rocket To The Moon computer generating a digital lunar landscape which is explored by a wireframe girl not unlike Rod Lord's animations for the TV version of Hitchhikers.  Artworks about the Cold War such as the photographs by Don McCullin of Berlin citizens on either side of the wall.

Then sitting patiently the middle of all that is the Diab DS-101, a short pile of four metal boxes in various shades of grey, the topper most of which has a logo "Diab Data", a cassette drive, a 5.25" floppy drive and another space I can't identity but others have tried.  As the accompanying label explains, Hamilton was interested in how the boundaries between art and high end design sometimes merged and was asked by a Swedish computer manufacturer, Dataindustrier AB, in 1983 to design this (what was then) "minicomputer" with a simple three-box design (actually a version of their DS90-3, a UNIX computer with a dual Motorola 68030 processor).  So it's a potentially practical object which is also an art object.  In the Tate's own image, it looks relatively benign even when you use the little button at the bottom of the photo to rotate it and turn it upside down) and I imagine now that we live in an age when the average microwave has better processing power than this box most people would probably overlook it, or perhaps stop and marvel and how the phone they're using to take its image (since this is an exhibition when such things are allowed) would seem like magic to both the artist and the scientists who designed the innards (though they probably went on to design the phone too).

Except it's actually ghastly, clearly the scariest object the Tate has ever displayed and that includes the faceless infant mannequins in their recent Cathy Wilkes retrospective.  I noticed the Diab almost as soon as I entered the exhibition and the fact that it was turned on, the small green and red lights on the front illuminated.  There's a cliche about how the eyes on some portraits follow a visitor around the room in stately homes and haunted houses in Scooby-Doo cartoons and these two lights have just that effect, impassive, unchanging and always in my peripheral vision as I wandered the gallery and chatted with friends and even when I couldn't see them, I knew they were there.  The reason the Diab DS-101 is sinister is because although it still has utility as an art object, its primary function is obscured and so like the laptop in my room or those university computers at night I can't help wondering what it's thinking.  We can find out.  There's an array of twenty DVI sockets on the back waiting to output but instead the only form of communication it has is those two lights, one red, one green, both always on somehow, simultaneously reminding us that it exists and is working but also, in my imagination, watching like the circular eye of a HAL-9000.

Which is all, of course, entirely irrational.  For a start the processor isn't powerful enough to have artificial intelligence, let alone magically network with the desktop and tablet computer which are surely otherwise in the Tate's ancient building creating a kind of rudimentary Skynet with the potential to overthrow the curatorial direction of the gallery replacing it with some sort of mechanised brain repetitiously scheduling Futurist retrospectives (though it's worth noting - ish - that the WOPR in War Games almost brought nuclear armageddon and that was surely even less powerful than the Diab).  Plus there are admittedly far scarier objects in the exhibition, not least the Paul McCarthy video, Painter, a satire on the heroic artist, which is in places so disgustingly scattalogical children aren't allowed to watch it (and here's a shot of me from the Liverpool Echo website doing just that).  Yet I am wondering right now if it's turned off when the gallery is closed or is left to sit overnight in the solitary exhibition space plotting our downfall.  Perhaps I'd simply be happier if it wasn't turned on at all, if Pinocchio was broken, its strings cut.

DLA Piper: Constellations at Tate Liverpool is free to visit.

Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots, Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions and Geta Brătescu at Tate Liverpool.

Art Monday morning I was invited to the press view for the major new shows opening at Tate Liverpool this week. Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots investigates the period just after he became one of the most famous artists on the planet and shifted from his familiar multi-layered, multi-coloured drip paintings into his lesser known and lesser appreciated black "pourings" and began experimenting once again with something glancing towards figurative painting.  The exhibition features the most of this type of painting ever shown together with some which have never been seen in the UK before.  Twinned on the top floor with this is Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions in which an artist profoundly influenced by the abstract expressionists curates a group show collecting work which expresses his own ideas about form and US history,  Then on the ground floor, there's a retrospective of Romanian artist Geta Brătescu's work, focusing on her use of the line in various media including sewing and collage.

But I want to talk to you about clocks, specifically two identical clocks which are displayed above the exit from the Glenn Ligon exhibition, easily missable by visitors thinking about visiting the gift shop, the cafe or catching the bus home.  Through all of the above, despite seeing Pollacks originally owned by Rockefellers and rare art shorts by the now film director Steve McQueen, this was one piece I became fixated about and I knew would be what I'd be writing about here.  These are two circular wall clocks, potentially of the sort that would hang in an office or kitchen with circular black frames, with alphanumeric digits, minutes and seconds hands and "sodium" branding on the face.  The label says they're one of a series of three and a quick bit of research finds this explanatory pdf (on how to create on in your own at home!) which explains that they were all shop bought, with a signed label on the back then transforming them into artist entities (oh and that there are actually four including an artist's proof).

My first reaction on seeing them was "OK what's the thing with the clocks."  Then I read the label which says (and I hope Tate don't mind me simply quoting this here but I don't think I could paraphrase this as well):  "The clocks in this work reference time, living and life partnerships.  Both clocks are set to the right time at the start of an exhibition and then allowed to run their course.  Like any long-term relationship they may run in synch, out of synch, or one or the other may cease altogether.  Identical, the clocks may allude to same-sex relationships, Gonzalez-Torres conveys profound and devastating ideas through the lightest, most effortless and inviting means."  Which is I think you'll agree profoundly, profoundly moving even if you're someone who hasn't been in such a relationship but at least observed them from a far or in the same household.  You know that they will have problems, which like clocks can sometimes be temporarily repaired, but all relationships end even when the participants don't have a choice in the matter.

One of the key phrases in the note, "the clocks may allude to same-sex relationships" expresses quickly the even more poignant background to the piece that the artist was potentially offering a conceptual portrait of himself and his life partner Ross Lawcock who died from the AIDS epidemic not long after the piece was created.  Gonzalez-Torres himself died of the disease not long afterwards in 1996.  It's almost as though whenever the piece is displayed its tell the story of their lives and because the behavior of the clocks can and will change, sometimes offering alternative versions and realities.  Such is the power of the best conceptual art, to apply complex, autobiographical ideas on otherwise everyday, humdrum objects.  I'm also reminded of Henry Clay Work's song My Grandfather's Clock written in 1876 and covered by Johnny Cash as well as the flash game Passage, in which the player simply walks from left to right experiencing the rich tapestry until s/he reaches the inevitable.

What's to stop us creating our own version at home?  Not much.  The exhibition note goes on to explain that in "the year Gonzalez-Torres died, Ligon emulated this piece, hanging two shop-bought clocks side by side on his living room wall.  His homage still hangs in his studio."  In 2002, artist Tobias Wong produced a version of the work Perfect Lovers (Forever) in which he utilised radio controlled clocks which always keep time creating an artificial immortal love (Wong himself then died in tragic circumstances creating new layers of meaning to that version).  I did consider it, popping into Argos on the way home.  But for various reason I have a phobia about ticking clocks, and two tocking out of sequence on the wall would be difficult and also, at least right now, fraudulent.  But metaphorically I already have this digital alarm clock, as pictured, which I was given on my eighteenth birthday and despite knocks and parts disintegrating still rings a real bell to wake me up each morning, twenty-two years later.  If only I could get it to tell the right time.

Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots, Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions and Geta Brătescu at Tate Liverpool run from 30 June – 18 October 2015. Entry fees apply.

Gyorgy Kepes at Tate Liverpool.

Art My first encounter with a photocopier was at Tate Liverpool. It was during an school visit, when the education staff utilised various example of Manga, which was the comic trip ascendancy at the time, to illustrate how Roy Lichtenstein and the Pop artists chopped and changed and as we’d describe it now, mashed-up, various images and themes to create new images and themes. They demonstrated how the photocopier could isolate various colours, or reduce or expand images, edit together characters and frames to create new implications. For speed, this was usually done without the lid down, so you could see the giant strobe scanning light shift back and forth below the paper.

But I didn't stop there. I put my hand against the glass or my cheeks and which created strange human-like shapes against black backgrounds and for ages whenever I saw a photocopies, or scanner, I’d want to use it for something other than creating facsimiles of paper, for seeing how various objects looked when pressed against the glass how the light refracted against them in conjunction with one another and how they looked within the resulting imagine. To be honest, the results weren't ever that remarkable but every now and then there’d be some surreal or abstract image created in which that strobing light had hit something at an unusual angle and produced an attractive effect.

That’s presumably why out of the three exhibitions in Tate Liverpool’s current Surreal Landscape season (with Leonora Carrington and Cathy Wilkes), it’s Gyorgy Kepes I’m most drawn to. Back in 1937, the late Hungarian-born artist, designer and educator hit upon the idea for “photograms”, a sort of “camera-less” photograph in which images were developed in the dark room by as the press notes describe “arranging and exposing objects directly on top of light-sensitive paper; juxtaposing geometric, industrial and organic forms to create images that are poised between abstraction and representation.” Like me, he was interested in seeing how a model for capturing images reacted when faced with disparate objects. Unlike me, Kepes was an artist.

The exhibition includes eighty of Kepes’s photographs, photomontages and photograms from his Chicago period 1938-1942. After fleeing Nazi Germany in 1935, he settled in the city of big shoulders and became head of the Colour and Light department at the New Bauhaus School. Also during this period he wrote a book, Language of Vision, which was about his theories of how the new technologies of photography, cinema and television were having on visual culture. As this New York Times obituary notes, Kepes had a “long-held view that traditional art forms could no longer adequately speak to the problems of the modern world, a world too much conditioned, he believed, by chaos and alienation.”

If anything informs the work most, it’s the human eye. Although this features very specifically in two works, a photograph of an eye ultra close-up and a photomontage of various eyes from numerous sources, throughout the works are motifs of lenses and the mechanics of vision. Leaf and Prism exemplifies this, with its refraction patterns mimicking (albeit at the wrong angle) the veins of an organism which needs light to survive. There are also straight photographs of collections of objects, usually with an inventory of them for a title, Cone, Prism, Rock or Prism, Compass, Grid 2 in which the shapes of items rather than the items themselves which are important, how they merge into one another as we stare at them for longer than a glance.

As Kepes said himself (I’m quoting from in gallery text), “the master of nature is ultimately connected with the mastery of space; this visual orientation. Each new visual environment demands a reorientation, a new way of measuring”. We shouldn't look at all of these images in the same way. We have to recalibrate our expectations and perceptions as though we've never encountered something quite like that before. That’s important to keep in mind when encountering the exhibition. Few people stop to look at the close-up of an ear presumably because they've seen a few ears in their lives, but what is it about this ear? What’s important about this ear? What are its distinguishing features?

For old times sake and because there are a lot of images of what we must assume are Kepes's own hands in the exhibition, I decided to scan my own.  Using the HP desktop scanner next the computer I stood with the appendage on the glass and waited for the light to stutter across the glass trying not to more.  There isn't a black and white setting on the machine which is why its in colour.  I'd expected it to be surrounded in black but I think the grey area is actually the ceiling above my hand.  I suppose i'll have to take another scan with something pinned up there to check.  Which suggests that my experimentation days aren't over yet...

György Kepes is at Tate Liverpool from 6 March – 31 May 2015. Admission Free.

Soup Safari #22: Spiced Roast Tomato with Carrot, Garlic & Borlotti Beans at Tate Cafe Liverpool.

Lunch. £3.50. Tate Cafe Liverpool, Albert Dock, Liverpool Waterfront, Liverpool L3 4BB. Phone: 0151 702 7400. Website.

Transmitting Andy Warhol at Tate Liverpool.

Art I hate Andy Warhol. I loathe him all out of proportion. As a deeply held, foundational personality trait, my hatred of Andy Warhol has been an important part of my life almost as important as my inability to eat fish and to call people “honey”. It’s just always been there, the sense that at a certain point art history ended, expiring in the form of a painted representation of a Campbell soup can, a brand of soup that I dislike intensely no less and Warhol’s conviction that “art should be for everyone” leading to a stream of subsequent art which in trying to satisfy everyone ends up impressing no one and which also devalues existing art because of the prevailing attitude that it must be accessible. Oh really, must it?

There’s a frustration to standing in an art space filled with iconic, apparently important pieces of art not feeling anything positive but that’s what happened today at the press view for Tate Liverpool’s Transmitting Andy Warhol, whose first room, "Expanded Painting", contains all the work which crowds will be flocking to see but which makes me seethe. Oh it’s the Brillo boxes. Oh it’s those soup cans. Oh it’s the dayglo Monroe screenprints. Oh it’s the, well, you get the idea. It’s everything I hate about Andy Warhol within a single art space, have loathed across the years, as I say, all out of proportion. I’m fine with it. As Taylor Swift says, “the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate” and it’s ok sometimes to be one of those.

Except, of course, it’s an irrational, incoherent hatred. Look closely at the earliest of the Monroes in the Marilyn Dyptich from 1962 and you can see that he’s not simply creating identical replicas, brush strokes introducing variations and I like that. His Dance Diagram, a painted reproduction of the foot movements in the Foxtrot just made me want to try it out, which I did, even though it’s ultimately impossible to do without a partner. When creating his Rorschach prints in the 1984 he misunderstood how the original test worked assuming subjects created their own blotches, which led to him creating his own version. That gives him an attractive fallibility.

Which is really the narrative of my approach to this very good exhibition. No matter how much I like to say I hate Andy Warhol, I don’t really. I like the idea of him and I like some of his work and what I probably hate is what’s been done to him in respect to exposure and the effect he had on the art world, plenty of which wasn’t really his fault and was a result instead of the art world’s inability to cope with his subversion. Plus he’s an extremely important marker in how we now approach celebrity and fame, especially at a time when the famous fifteen minutes have become literal, when a figure like Alex from Target bubbles up from nowhere on a Sunday via a Twitter meme only to lose credibility in days when a marketing company falsely takes credit.

So I took Taylor Swift’s other advice, shook it off and really quite enjoyed myself. In the next room is Exploding Plastic Inevitable or EPI, a recreation of a mixed media installation, in which a room is filled with footage from a series of similarly named events Warhol held in Chicago in 1966 featuring The Velvet Underground, projected across every wall amid mirror balls. About twenty-minutes long, it’s like standing inside a dream, as close-ups of Salvador Dali and a Nico are interspersed with performances pieces starring a man in a gimp mask and someone who looks disconcertingly like late era Lennon being hogtied and whipped. Bob Dylan wanders through briefly with his harmonica.

The experience notionally mimics what it’s assumed it must have been like in the Factory and certainly how it appears in some film representations (notably Men in Black 3 of all things) even though you know it was probably boring as sin with all the high and drunk celebrities talking rubbish while having their picture taken. Ironically, EPI will probably work best when the room’s filled with people, perhaps even a college group, folks from the same generation as would have attended the original happenings. Even with the professional press pack, the reflective light of the mirror balls flashing against their faces, pixels from the projectors making them look like products of Andy Warhol’s mind, the imagery was utterly transcendental.

And so I continued and in each successive room found my resolve broken. “Dispersal” is about Warhol in the wider world, through his commercial design products for magazines and for book and album covers, Chigall-like line drawings which show a draftsman with real flair and in the case of his fashion spreads accuracy. His classical and jazz images, providing in a still image what promotional videos still can’t all these years later, are so alluring and so perfectly capturing that moment in time, that I was jotting down titles for future reference (this is what Spotify was designed for, Taylor!). Not The Velvet Undergound and Nico with their banana, of course. I already own a copy of that.

I’m even charitable towards the concept of his novel, a, now, even though in many ways its appalling. A response to Joyce’s Ulysses (art is for everyone remember), it features a transcript of everything Factory stalwart, the actor Ondine says over a twenty-four hour period, poorly transcribed by non-professionals so as to render it entirely unreadable. Sigh. Except, having produced the worst book of all time, he stood behind it, putting poor reviews on the posters and generally taking advantage of his own celebrity to sell a few books, effectively taking the piss out of the kinds publishers for whom the ghost-written celebrity biography is their foundation and the kinds of people who buy them. You have to love that.

The final room is "Transmission" which sees Warhol wrestling with the artistic possibilities of new media, of putting his beliefs into practice. Piles of cathode ray tube televisions presenting recordings of Andy Warhol’s TV, his chatshow and magazine programme which ran in the early eighties. Although there are headphones, most visitors will probably simply glance at the given screens as, people who may or may not be a celebrity are interviewed about their lives. While I was there someone called Jim Fourett from something called Dancetaria was holding forth from a couch about something. Was anything he had to say any more useful or interesting than any of the other anonymous faces which cropped up on the other screens?

The pieces I spent the most time with are a collection of covers from Interview Magazine, which Warhol founded in 1969, this selection spanning from 1979 to the mid-Eighties. By then Warhol had withdrawn from the publication, it seems, only really being an ambassador but this display underscores, as so much of his work does the fleeting nature of celebrity, how some faces Jack Nicholson would go on to become iconic whilst others like Maxwell Caulfield slowly fade. Half of the covers on show don’t have the name of the cover star emblazoned on them and our inability to name them ourselves is very powerful. I spent a good five minutes with someone trying to identify one face. We think its Carole King. Perhaps.  Bette Midler?

His film work is largely represented by Empire, the legendary eight hour shot of the Empire State Building, shot in 24 frames, projected in 16. A gallery space is presumably not the best place for this though it’s only rarely been presented in the style of a typical “movie” (the wikipedia has a handy screening history). Within this setting and with the pressures of seeing it within the context of an exhibition, it’s difficult to see the subtle changes in image, as the accompanying text suggests, the drama. Inevitably there is an modern fan-produced sequel available on YouTube, Empire II: The Empire Strikes Back, which is more of the same, with the subtle addition of daylight, of only three hours. See it here.

All of which should illustrate that the problem with deeply held hatreds is that they’re inherently inconsistent. I will eat fish if they’re covered in a batter. I don’t hate Andy Warhol as much as I thought I did. I still hate his screen prints, but as this exhibition demonstrates, his work was so multi-faceted, because he applied himself to so many different media, because he was so clearly talented, it’s impossible to hate everything. It’s also impossible to hate the man too because all he really did was what we should all do which is take advantage of the opportunities presented to him, forever with his fingers crossed behind his back that he wouldn’t get found out, knowing better than anyone just how fleeting celebrity can be.

Liverpool Biennial 2014: Tate Liverpool.

Art Either I’ve been taking on too much caffeine again or this Liverpool Biennial is finally starting to get to me. There’s no other way I can explain my Room 237 moment while visiting the Claude Parent installation in the Wolfson Gallery at Tate Liverpool. Room 237 is an increasingly notorious documentary regarding the conspiracy theories surrounding Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, that more than a pretty good horror film, it’s at the nexus of socio-economic intellectual mush, which includes such things as the director subtly revealing that the footage of the moon landings was all created on sound stages with himself in charge. Like a fever dream, these theorists drag together disparate elements like Danny’s t-shirt, the shape of shadows and the colour of the carpet to reveal a truth which just simply isn’t there.

Clause Parent’s installation is a multi-level architectural construct which like much of his work, attempts to disrupt our expectations of a given environment, in this case filling the white cube space with ramps and balconies and splitting the levels turning the Wolfson into a kind of mini-Guggenheim. The works housed in La colline de l’art are supposed to extemporise and complement the space it seems, full of abstract shapes and circles on canvases against three-dimensional curves. In some respects it reminds of the fears expressed by artists in an open letter to the Guggenheim when it opened that visitors wouldn’t be able to experience their works in the best environment because they’d effectively be standing on a slope. As it turned out the gradient there wasn’t as exaggerated as they were expecting. It is here in places.

Now, join me in Room 237. After spending some time in the space, engaging with some pieces, reviling others, I walked up the ramp at the very centre of the space which leads up to the main balcony. At the top of this ramp is Paul Nash’s Voyages to the Moon, an abstract pieces which as apparently the result of him sitting in a restaurant and noticing a glitterball refracted the moonlight across the space. We see what looks like the moon gradually rising through the space and up into the sky. At the other end of the balcony is a Roy Lichtenstein piece, Moonscape, a gorgeous image which utilises plastic to provide the gradients in colour in the deep blue sky, like cosmic currents. Thinking about the both pieces, it occurred to me that in moving up the ramp onto the balcony, I’d essentially watched Nash’s moon rise in Lichenstein’s sky.

At which point I began to think about the other pieces I’d seen and the recurrences of moon and space symbols in them. Paul Delvaux’s Sleeping Venus has a crescent moon in the sky. Naum Gabo’s two pieces Model for ‘Construction in space, suspended’ and Model for ‘Monument to the Astronauts’ have it in the title. Francis Picabia’s The Fig-Leaf has a moon shaped ball on it with a person on top – moon landing? The video piece Trisha Brown WATER MOTOR has a slow motion section in which the dance looks for all the world like its happening in low gravity. Looped Network Suspended in Pictorial Space by Gillian Wise resembles a rocket scaffold. I was sure that the other pieces would reveal some connection but I just hadn’t seen it yet. I was enthralled. I'd found some hidden message right there.

Yes, well, ok. I did what you need to do in these situations and asked an invigilator and of course it was the first time he’d heard of it. This was not, as I suspected some hidden joke by Claude Parent. He hadn’t selected the art, just designed the space. The art had been selected by Biennial curators Mai Abu ElDahab and Anthony Huberman and although its possible these connections were intended, it seems unlikely. In the main Tate collection display which investigates mundane domestic objects in art, we’re told in no uncertain terms that this is what its doing. If this whole moon connection was more than a coincidence it would certainly be mentioned in the accompanying text. It is not. The accompanying text is all about how the art complements and contradicts the space. Welcome to Room 237.

Trisha Brown WATER MOTOR (Babette Mangoite, 1978)
Felix Gets Broadcast (Mark Leckey, 2007)
Instructions No 1 / Instrukcije br. 1 (Sanje Ivekovic, 1976)
The Coat (Karen Cytter, 2010)

Since this is a Tate collection display, most the pieces are already heavily documented. Babette Mangoite has written at length about the making of Trisha Brown WATER MOTOR on her website and the Tate has its own critical appreciation which is the basis for the text which appears with the work in the gallery space. Both of these rather blow the wind out my sales and I can’t be bettered so you might as well go and read those. To offer a quick description, it depicts legendary postmodernist American choreographer and dancer Tricia Brown performing her WATER MOTOR piece in black and white in single takes firstly at normal speed then slow motion taking full advantage of her obvious abilities to compulsive effect. It’s projected at Tate and is arguably the most eye-catching piece in the space.

In her text, Mangoite says her one regret is that she didn’t record synchronous sound because as she says, even though the dance occurred without music its impossible to convey that without recording the silence, which of course wouldn’t be silence because microphones would have picked up the sound of the camera, Brown’s breaths and shifting footwork and ambient noise. For my part I probably violated the artist’s wishes by listening to my own music during the two or three occasions I watched the piece, various tracks (some Kevin Shields, Eliza Doolittle) all of which eerily synched up. Seeing it instead with the ambient noise of the gallery space was also counterproductive, the mix of children screaming, random chatter and feet banging on the woodeness of Parent’s sculpture working against the magnetism of Brown’s athleticism.

Having just spent the past week and a half with the Commonwealth Games, whose visual language, especially in the gymnastics, includes the slow motion replay, it didn’t occur to me that the recording of the second dance wasn’t simply the first duplicated and slowed down. But it isn’t. This was recorded in 1976 when such technology was still magnificently unreliable. Mangoite filmed the piece three times, twice at normal speed, the third in slow motion then selected the best takes. In the third take, did Brown especially emphasise certain moves for the purposes of extemporising on the underwater feel of the whole dance? Perhaps. Not sure. But it’s a starting, emotional piece of choreography which repays multiple viewings even if we can only imagine what it sounded like.

Nasreen Mohamedi at Tate Liverpool.

TV Accompanying Piet Mondrian on his journey through the Summer months at Tate Liverpool is Nasreen Mohamedi, the Indian artist who as we discovered in the press view tour but not through direct verbal comparison, shares certain biographical connections with the Dutch painter. As with the Constellations displays on other floors, this is an example of Tate Liverpool’s almost algorithmic approach to art, familiar to online shoppers. “If you like Piet Mondrian, who may also like … Nasreen Mohamedi …” And it works. Because I do.

Born in Karachi in 1937, raised in Mumbai, taught in London and Paris, Mohamedi created the majority of the work on display at Tate (the biggest collection of her work in the UK ever) when she returned to India, eventually settling in Baroda in the 1970s where she became a teacher at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University. She lived and worked there until her death in 1990 and its during this period that she shifted from nature into abstraction and her interest in trees, whose leaves and branches led to an intense study of triangles which became the dominant shape in her art.

The exhibitions shows her artistic transitions, beginning with almost Turner-like explorations of nature, gradations in colour indicating elements of the landscape to exploring grids to overt architectural shapes filled with perspectives and diagonals to floating forms, in which anything remotely figurative gives way to geometric shapes in the centre of stark, empty backgrounds to elliptical forms whose simplicity can be explained by a desperation to continue working despite a rare condition which affected her muscle control.

Throughout she was influenced by photography and the exhibition includes a selection of her own pictures as well as images of unclear provenance but which the artist has drawn lines and frames on to indicate abstract shapes hidden within. You can see the artist’s eye noticing that at a basic level the natural world and humanity’s degradation of it through buildings and vehicles can be incredibly similar. The curve of a river and a road at their most basic level contain the same internal geometry filled with triangles.

Mohamedi appears after Mondrian within the narrative body of the gallery space so it’s impossible not to view her work through the prism of the other artist. As the press notes say, “Mondrian, much like Mohamedi, moved away from a figurative style and developed his own unique approach to abstraction.” Both began with trees, but Mondrian ended up with squares, Mohamedi with triangles. Perhaps this is why Mondrian’s earlier work has been omitted. To include it would be repetitious or at least to prosaically spell out such connections.

There are some differences. With the exception of his London house, Mondrian’s life is heavily documented, even to the point of being able to tell which of his paintings were begun before the war then completed later. Mohamedi’s chronology is a blank. Most of these works are untitled and the only dates available are based on the recollections of friends and colleagues. In producing the exhibition, the curators have effectively had to guess that chronology with only a rough idea of when the artist shifted between her artistic periods.

Another approach might have been to mix the periods of the artists together ala Turner Monet Twombly, though Mohamedi and Mondrian are different enough that the resulting display would presumably have jarred rather than suggested clearer connections. In keeping the two artists separate and selling them as different shows within the same admission price, Tate suggest they stand alone, even if, Mohamedi can’t quite do that because the exhibition can’t be visited separately. Her entrance is at the end of Mondrian’s show and you have to exit through his gift shop.

Yet there’s no denying this is vintage Tate, in the spirit of Klimt and Chagall in which some of the best examples from a world renowned artist are brought together in the Liverpool and offered up to the visitor in a coherent, retrospective not to mention ballsy manner surrounded by plenty of wall and gallery space allowing them to breath, stand out, and challenging us to decide whether we do like it. This is Mondrian. This is what Mohamedi does. Iconic names. Iconic works. Come and see.

Nasreen Mohamedi is at Tate Liverpool from 6 June – 5 October 2014.

Adult £11 (without donation £10)
Concession £8.25 (without donation £7.50)
[Tickets for Mondrian and his Studios: Abstraction into the World include admission into Nasreen Mohamedi.]

Mondrian and his Studios at Tate Liverpool.

Art Anyone with even a passing understanding of contemporary broadcasting in the UK in 2014 will find the sentence after this one entirely unbelievable. I have Channel 5 to thank for helping me to understand Piet Mondrian. Back in 1997 when The Jack Docherty Show was still at the cornerstone of the schedule and the branding was fittingly hewn in primary colours, morning television included a very basically presented half hour slice of public service broadcasting in which an expert, I expect it was Tim Marlow, interviewed another expert on a particular subject, very Late Night Line-Up, very History Today without the jokes.

One morning I happened to be watching and that morning they were covering the life of Piet Mondrian. I don’t much remember the specifics of what was said, but I do remember the paintings and how across the half hour beginning with his trees and landscapes and buildings, the expert explained how across his life, Mondrian just kept paring back and paring back the elements of his work right to the essentials. Suddenly these paintings which were prominent enough for me to recognise but not enough to understand, and which I’d seen numerously in exhibitions, made almost perfect sense.

All of which probably sounds terribly remedial to you, but for me, sitting with on my sofa with my cornflakes trying to decide how late I could leave it before getting the bus to work it was a revelation, because it also meant I understood that artists have chronology. They don’t simply produce random pieces of art across their lives as the mood took them, but there was a clear sense of trying to develop, of shifting from one idea to the next to the next and it quickly became apparent to my half-formed brain that this was true of all the best cultural creators, in film, in music, in books and in theatre.

Tate Liverpool’s Mondrian and his Studios begins at the transitional point, that moment during the First World War when he’s stuck in the Netherlands producing work that glances towards the figurative, creating pieces like Scaffold Studies in which its still possible to see architectural shapes and The Tree A in which, thanks to the title giving us some idea, we can see the darkened cracks of bark around the trunk of some timber even if the colours are pastel greys and blues rather than dark greens and browns. But without the titles, if they were Untitled, I expect we’d assume them to be “abstract”.

Then in the next room, we’re straight into his neo-plasticity phase, blocks, lines and colours and I wonder how I might have reacted had it not been for Channel 5. It’s interesting that exhibition doesn’t set itself out to create the same “oho” moment or an “Oh, I get it!” One of his day-glo tree efforts from a couple of years earlier would certainly have gone some way towards this. Instead, there’s an expectation that the visitor is supposed to have some kind of working knowledge of the painter, even though unlike other recent artists gifted iconic Summer shows here, he’s pretty challenging.

The exhibition does allow Mondrian to speak for himself. In the accompanying booklet, there’s a quote from 1941 which does much to clarify: “More and more I excluded from my painting all curved lines, until finally my compositions consisted only of vertical and horizontal lines, which formed crosses, each one separate and detached from the other. Observing sea, sky and stars, I sought to indicate their plastic function through a multiplicity of crossing verticals and horizontals.”

That quote is missing an opening section, “In painting a tree I progressively abstracted the curves; you can understand that very little ‘tree’ remained.” Is it an exhibition’s job to be education in the same way as that discussion programme? I don’t know and I definitely can’t say because I’m not seeing Mondrian’s work as a new thing, just as when someone says that can’t understand Shakespeare I can’t see it from their perspective because he’s been with me for so many years.  Which isn’t a criticism, incidentally, but worth asking.

Amid these discussions about curatorial intent, as with all exhibitions it can’t help, as part of its function, being educational. Seeing these paintings up close, it’s possible to see that Mondrian wasn’t working with uniform colours. What seems from a distance or postcard reproduction like a block of TARDIS blue has gradations, elements of royal blue, Tory blue and other blues without descriptive connotations. Age has also produced crazing, extra jagged elements of black which in one of his neo-placticism works, Composition A, resembled the bark of The Tree A.

The show does also demonstrate that even after Mondrian had abandoned what he’d initially decided was “abstract real”, he continued to develop. Faced with his initial blocks of colour, critics apparently decided that he’d created a full stop on painting, that there wasn’t much more to say. But It was only 1920.  A semi-colon.  He had decades of work still left to do. As he moved from Paris, then to London and finally to New York, although at a glance the work, which now had the familiar white background, black bars and blocks or blue, red and yellow seem the same, his ideas were forever changing.

By the late twenties he’s creating the most familiar of his works, in which a single block of colour, most often white, fills the space with everything else pushed to the side. By the 1930s he’d begun to use the phase “dynamic equilibrium” and said that his work expressed “the perpetual movement of changing opposites”. He’d spend months even years on some paintings, making choices on how the lines would intersect, where to put the colours, whether he could be radical and have a horizontal line stretching from left to right stop at a vertical or box.

By the 1940s, his love of jazz meant that he wanted to create an ever greater sense of movement in the paintings so there are more lines and they were more likely to intersect, and the colours sometimes stand alone. Many of these works took years to create, begun at one end of the Second World War but completed towards the end. His work rate was surprisingly slow. Across his life he only produced about three hundred paintings, which in comparison to some “abstract” artists is amazingly small. But unlike some, the effort in terms of thought was  exceptionally intense.

So there is some narrative here, and underpinning the sense of biography, each artistic period is accompanied by recreations of his studios, the “and his Studios” part of the title (unlike some exhibitions where “and his studios” means the paintings touched up by the artist’s students). His home in London, which due to the war remains entirely undocumented is represented by a slideshow of computer reconstructions. His final studio in New York is evoked through a contemporary filmed recording, photographs and reconstructions of the wall decorations, small squares of coloured card.

But it’s the recreation of his Paris studio at 26, Rue du Depart, an installation originally created in 1995 by this Foundation for the Construction of Mondrian’s Studio which is getting the most coverage. It’s extraordinary. Mondrian realised that the best way to publicise his work and its possibilities was through this space, or the original version of this space and so it was designed to reflect the work, from the vertical lines to the positioning of his work spaces to the decorations which included recreations of his already sold work amongst the originals still in production.

But as you can see from the photos it was also a living space and the details of Mondrian's humanity have also been painstakingly included. The alarm clock hung on wall, his wire rimmed spectacles sat on a table as though he’s just left them there, stacks of paintbrushes (some of them with paint staining), binoculars, pipes sitting within small wooden rests, even a hole punch, all bathed in natural light from windows in the real ceiling of the gallery, though in this context, with a little bit of suspension of disbelief, Liverpool’s sky could just as well be Paris.

Except Liverpool is ever present through all of the windows in the gallery and that’s what reminds us that at its source, Mondrian’s abstractions have real world origins. Stand in front of many of these paintings then look left and right and we see similar, if more uniform grids in the Tate’s window frames. Look beyond that to the rest of the Albert Dock and we see arches and verticals similar to his transitional architectural drawings. Look even further across the road to Liverpool One and we find trees. Mondrian’s artistic development isn’t just in the gallery.  It’s all around us too.

Mondrian and his Studios is at Tate Liverpool from 6 June – 5 October 2014.

Adult £11 (without donation £10)
Concession £8.25 (without donation £7.50)
[Price includes admission to Nasreen Mohamedi]