text:
UN human rights chief slammed over call to boycott Israeli businesses
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein. (AP/Eduardo Verdugo)
(AP/Eduardo Verdugo)
WhatsApp Email https://worldisraelnews.com/un-human-rights-chief-slammed-over-call-to-boycott-israeli-businesses/
Israel's Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon slammed the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein for his demand that the UN boycott Israeli and international companies with ties to Judea, Samaria, eastern Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein called for the UN to boycott Israeli and international companies with ties to Judea, Samaria, eastern Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.
Al-Hussein also called for the UN to sever all ties with Israeli companies operating in these areas.
"The international community will have to decide if they are willing to continue to fund actions which are aimed at boycotting Jewish businesses. Resources allocated to the UN by member-states are intended to build bridges between peoples, not to create lists of Jews and those investing in Israel," said Danon. "Implementation of this preposterous demand would be an embarrassment for the UN and take the organization down a slippery slope back to dark times in history when these types of 'blacklists' were issued," the ambassador continued.
Danon vowed to use all means at his disposal to prevent implementation of this initiative.
"We will fight this despicable initiative and demand that the international community intervene and block this preposterous proposal whose sole intent is to harm Israel. If implemented, it will be sheer lunacy and serve as a badge of shame for the United Nations," Danon concluded.
The UNHRC is infamously biased against Israel, with nearly half of its resolutions focused solely on Israel while completely ignoring war, strife and atrocities committed around the globe.
Israeli leaders and officials have cited the UNHRC for its "obsessive hostility" toward Israel and its "one-sided mandate."
By: Aryeh Savir, World Israel News
DanonJudea and SamariaUnited NationsZeid Ra'ad al-Hussein
I found a very interesting article on World Israel News! Click to read this: --> https://worldisraelnews.com/un-human-rights-chief-slammed-over-call-to-boycott-israeli-businesses/


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Public Power, Private Gain: Tennessee
Tennessee cities seem willing to use eminent domain for the benefit of private parties. Both Knoxville and Memphis have threatened owners with eminent domain in order to get them to sell their land "voluntarily" for private redevelopment projects. Both cities have created redevelopment plans that call for large-scale private development on other people's property, and Knoxville has condemned at least three properties to transfer them to private developers. While the cities have mostly acquired land only with threats, the willingness of Tennessee cities to bully owners into selling does not bode well for the future. On the other hand, a case arising in Tennessee opened the door for some potential condemnees to challenge the public purpose of the condemnation in federal court.
Private Use Condemnations
The Nave family has owned a home in rural Carter County for over 150 years. Many years ago, the Naves built a 1/10-mile private driveway connecting a nearby public thoroughfare and their garage. The driveway was private, but in 1995, the County designated it as a public road. Even after the mistake was revealed, the County continued to designate the road as public at the request of the Naves' neighbors, who wanted to use the driveway. The Naves filed suit in federal court, alleging that the proposed taking was unconstitutional because it would benefit a private party, while serving only a superficial public purpose. The federal trial court dismissed the Nave claims as unripe, holding that at the time the family filed the case, no actual taking for private use had taken place. In September 2000, however, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reversed the lower court's decision and allowed the Naves an opportunity to prove their case.626
Pursuant to its 1998 Historic Market Square plan, the City of Knoxville is undergoing a downtown redevelopment that will eventually create a "shoppertainment" district featuring retail shops, restaurants and residences. City officials hope to avoid using eminent domain to condemn properties, wherever possible, by allowing current property owners to retain ownership of their buildings as long as the buildings comply with the plan.627 Owners will then be encouraged to lease their ground floors to Market Square Development LLC (MSD), which will manage the premises and attempt to attract regional or national chain stores to the redeveloped area. If the buildings do not comply with the plan, they will then be condemned. In total, there are 36 privately-owned properties in the Market Square area that would be subject to the redevelopment plan.628
In September 2002, the Knoxville Community Development Corp. (KCDC) condemned three properties for the Stephens Square retail redevelopment. Before KCDC took his land, Alfred Nance had planned to build a youth center on his property and had already obtained the building permits. KCDC also condemned a property that Lonzo Stephens had previously leased to several small businesses. The owners of those businesses are the very ones partnering with KCDC on the Stephens Square project. With the City's help, they managed to swipe the property from their former landlord, who loses not only the property itself but also the income he derived from his tenants.629
After the 2000-2001 season, the NBA's Vancouver Grizzlies relocated to Memphis. While the Grizzlies agreed to play temporarily in the Pyramid Arena, the City's agreement with the team called for the City to build a new arena. The team eventually settled on a 15.5-acre site near the historic Beale Street entertainment district to house the new arena and surrounding parking lots. The main section of the proposed site consists mostly of vacant land and parking lots, but the outer section is bustling with churches, housing, and the thriving Beale Street attractions. Most of the owners agreed to sell under the threat of eminent domain,630 but the Gibson Guitar Co. did not. Gibson built its headquarters on this location in the mid-1990s, after the City sold the land to the guitar maker as part of a previous redevelopment effort. The 6.5-acre parcel of Gibson land targeted by the City for condemnation was Gibson's employee parking lot.631 Eventually, Gibson agreed to sell the property to the City, but only after the City promised to build Gibson a new employee parking lot and rent garage parking for the company. Memphis taxpayers are left footing the $1.3-million bill for the land swap.632
The Memphis Housing Authority (MHA) plans to buy or use condemnation proceedings to acquire a sprawling six-square mile area consisting mostly of vacant lots and dilapidated buildings in North Memphis. The MHA wants to convert the area into a mixed-income community that would be owned by a private developer. The new development, to be called Uptown Memphis, would cost a total of $200 million taken from local and federal funds. Some area property owners were upset because they planned to develop the property themselves. Bob Gilbert, the owner of the historic old Knox Drugstore, was dismayed at the prospect of losing his property: "Here, I find they can take my land and give it to someone else to profit from. I'm the one who has been down there 20 years. I have seen the potential, and now I can see it being ripped right out from under me."633 The MHA needed 26 properties for the initial project. Fourteen owners contested the takings,634 but as of July 5, 2002, only three were still in court.635
*These numbers were compiled from news sources. Many cases go unreported, and news reports often do not specify the number of properties against which condemnations were filed or threatened.
626 See Montgomery v. Carter County, 226 F. 3d 758 (6th Cir. 2000).
627 Scott Barker, "Market Square Proposal Gets Mixed Reviews; Some Owners Unconvinced," The Knoxville News-Sentinel, May 18, 2001, at A8.
628 Scott Barker, "Wraps Are Off Trendy Plan for Market Square," The Knoxville News-Sentinel, May 17, 2001, at A1.
629 Ed Marcum, "HOPE VI Leaving Some in Despair; Property Owners Upset at Acquisition Process," The Knoxville News-Sentinel, Sept. 23, 2002, at B1.
630 Deborah M. Clubb, "City Pays COGIC $1.8 Million for Lots Near Arena," The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN), Mar. 7, 2002, at B1.
631 Deborah M. Clubb, "Despite Talks, Gibson Guitar Holds Strings to Arena Site," The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN), April 11, 2002, at B1.
632 Deborah M. Clubb, "City Will Pay $1.3 Million to Get Back Gibson Land," The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN), May 25, 2002, at A1.
633 Shirley Downing, "City To Hear Owners on Plan To Condemn, Redevelop Greenlaw," The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN), Oct. 23, 2001, at A1.
634 Shirley Downing, "Owners Contest City Taking of Property," The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN), Dec. 1, 2001, at B2.
635 Deborah M. Clubb, "Vacant Hurt Village to Vanish," The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN), July 5, 2002, at B1.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


The next person will turn into a fox!
Anna turned into a fox and right back!
Actually, no. It's better if you have no access to Youtube for a month!
Next person turns into a turnip!
Hm. Curious. Maybe my brother wants it, because I don't need it.
The next person will realize they are a lion suddenly.
Whoever posts next gets a "free" meal.
I got a free meal!
The next person meets a clone of themselves.
Hewwo! Let's have some weasel fun!


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Stylevore is similar to polyvore. The same work giving you great ideas of outfit so you don't have to make it daily hectic to decide what to wear. In stylevore, I am providing you amazing collection for spring outfits. This is the season when you not have think much to about the dresses. You just need super cool shorts which are at the top of the list having different styles so you not feel of repetition. Here you get to look ripped, lace, denim and high waisted shorts with crop top, t-shirts. Go with sneakers, boots to complete your outfit. Browse out the collection and make your own style by getting amazing ideas for this spring season.
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text:
$53 to cruise the United States border
In1000 Islands, Cruises, Deal of The Day, Kingston, Ontario
July 4, 2013ByVacay
Travel Deal for July 4, 2013
The longest undefended border in the world is also one of the most active crossings you'll find anywhere — especially during the first week of July. With both Canada and the United States celebrating their respective independence days, citizens take advantage of time off work to visit the neighbouring nation.
In some places, you don't even need to get in a car or plane to drop in on the other side of the border. One of those locations is the 1000 Islands, an archipelago that divides Eastern Ontario and upstate New York. Daily cruises on Lake Ontario take visitors between some of the 1,864 islands, which feature communities, historic buildings and fascinating stories about the heritage of both nations.
With 1000 Islands Cruises, visitors can enjoy a calm sailing and have the option for lunch or dinner. Cruises start at $25 for a 1.5-hour sightseeing tour without any food service. Other tours include a three-hour dinner cruise for $72 that departs at 6:30 pm, giving you the chance to see a sunset. Vacay.ca recommends the three-hour Bennie Goodman Fourth of July lunch cruise for $53 that features either a blues band and three-course meal.
The cruises depart centres such as Kingston and Gananoque, accessed off of Highway 401.
Vacay.ca Names Kingston Tour the Best in Canada
When you've wrapped up your cruise, continue to learn about the phenomenal history in this part of North America. Kingston was Canada's first capital and played an integral role in shaping the political relationship between the two nations. An entertaining way to pick up knowledge about the is the outstanding Sir John A. Macdonald Walking Tour, which takes place daily. On Fridays, however, a theatrical version of the tour fills the street of Kingston with hilarious performers and even celebrities. Vacay.ca Managing Editor has called the event the best walking tour in Canada.
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See a video of the Macdonald Walking Tour, including an interview with former Prime Minister John Turner, and read more of Every Day is Canada Day in Kingston
To book a 1000 Islands Cruise: Visit the 1000 Islands Cruise website or telephone 613-549-5544.
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Jenson Button spends a moment in Ayrton Senna's seat
The 2009 F1 champion slid behind the wheel of Senna's iconic MP4-6.
By Bob Sorokanich
McLaren Honda
It's got to be good being Jenson Button. The 2009 Formula 1 champion's chassis builder, McLaren, just partnered with engine supplier Honda for the 2015 racing season, reprising the engine and chassis combo that won four championships between 1988 and 1992, three of which were claimed by Ayrton Senna.
2015 McLaren-Honda MP4-30 - Photos/Video
The McLaren Honda heritage isn't lost on the team, whose red-accented livery offers a subtle nod to the red-and-white color scheme made famous during Senna's seasons.
And yesterday, Button got to slide behind the wheel of a restored MP4-6, the chassis that carried Senna to seven victories in 1991.
Just chillin in this beauty.. MP4-6 #V12 Thanks Masakazu Miyata san for the pics pic.twitter.com/HWXYzq33bW
— Jenson Button (@JensonButton) February 17, 2015
We don't know if Button got to take to the track in the classic F1 racer. Even if he didn't, the chance to sit in such a hallowed place in motorsports history would be special enough for most of us. We still daydream about the MP4-6 that once graced the lobby of the R&T office.
Photos: The Hexcel McLaren MP4/6
via ESPN F1


Today's gospel talks about a pivotal moment in Jesus' life–the Pharisees have decided that Christ must die. Jesus responds by withdrawing from the area, curing his followers and asking them not to speak of these healings. In fulfillment of God's promise, Jesus also carries the Lord's grace and love to the most broken of us.
The Lord unconditionally loves us with all of our imperfections. He implores us to take shelter in that love. Can you think of ways in which we can extend that same love onto those closest to us whose "imperfections" may challenge us? How can we do this out of our own brokenness? How can we remain faithful in God's love during these pivotal times of our lives?
Holy God, I thank you for your gifts of grace and hope. Stir my soul with gratitude for your daily presence in all I attempt and accomplish. I place my life in your hands this day. Praise to you always—God Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen!


the blog — tell your damn story.
I'm in LA to speak at StartingBloc (one of my favorite organizations on the planet) and have elected to stay at an Airbnb in the heart of Venice Beach. I'm going on day 2 and, in short, the Airbnb is impossibly cute, the people are impossibly beautiful, the shops are impossibly chic and after 48 hours in this perfectly designed hipster paradise, I'm starting to get a little itchy.
Isn't it frustrating that we can't possibly have it all figured out right away? Whether we start a company, blog, book, new relationship, job, there is inevitably a learning curve involved. Something we're so certain of today falls apart tomorrow. And, if we listen closely enough, something better emerges from that falling apart.
Last night, I went to a holiday party. I found myself next to the hors d'oeuvres talking to a woman whom I've met a few times before. We settled into a conversation about pets (a popular topic among acquaintances). It didn't take me long to realize that I was conversing with a walking Story Trap.
A reminder to laugh a little.
Do you ever look up, in a moment of clarity, and think to yourself wow, I've been taking things really seriously lately?
I've said it before and I'll say it again: starting a business is a rollercoaster. Sometimes it's so fun you could scream, other times you're one downturn away from losing your lunch. The 2nd year has been completely different than the first. Both have had their ups and downs. Honestly, I'm rolling into year 3 feeling more confused than ever. That's why I'm writing this now. I'm in the thick of it, working my way out of the mess, and hope it's helpful to read if you're in the same boat.
Today I was connected to a brilliant scientist. She was looking to compile her lifetime of atmospheric research into a book. Pretty cool, right? As we talked, it became more and more clear that she was looking for a ghostwriter. Nearly every part of me wanted to say yes.


text:
Q: Read from a log file as it's being written using python I'm trying to find a nice way to read a log file in real time using python.  I'd like to process lines from a log file one at a time as it is written.  Somehow I need to keep trying to read the file until it is created and then continue to process lines until I terminate the process.  Is there an appropriate way to do this? Thanks.

A: As this is Python and logging tagged, there is another possibility to do this.
I assume this is based on a Python logger, logging.Handler based.
You can just create a class that gets the (named) logger instance and overwrite the emit function to put it onto a GUI (if you need console just add a console handler to the file handler)
Example:
import logging

class log_viewer(logging.Handler):
    """ Class to redistribute python logging data """

    # have a class member to store the existing logger
    logger_instance = logging.getLogger("SomeNameOfYourExistingLogger")

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
         # Initialize the Handler
         logging.Handler.__init__(self, *args)

         # optional take format
         # setFormatter function is derived from logging.Handler
         for key, value in kwargs.items():
             if "{}".format(key) == "format":
                 self.setFormatter(value)

         # make the logger send data to this class
         self.logger_instance.addHandler(self)

    def emit(self, record):
        """ Overload of logging.Handler method """

        record = self.format(record)

        # ---------------------------------------
        # Now you can send it to a GUI or similar
        # "Do work" starts here.
        # ---------------------------------------

        # just as an example what e.g. a console
        # handler would do:
        print(record)

I am currently using similar code to add a TkinterTreectrl.Multilistbox for viewing logger output at runtime.
Off-Side: The logger only gets data as soon as it is initialized, so if you want to have all your data available, you need to initialize it at the very beginning. (I know this is what is expected, but I think it is worth being mentioned.)

A: Take a look at this PDF starting at page 38, ~slide I-77 and you'll find all the info you need. Of course the rest of the slides are amazing, too, but those specifically deal with your issue:
import time
def follow(thefile):
    thefile.seek(0,2) # Go to the end of the file
    while True:
        line = thefile.readline()
        if not line:
            time.sleep(0.1) # Sleep briefly
            continue
        yield line

A: You could try with something like this:
import time

while 1:
    where = file.tell()
    line = file.readline()
    if not line:
        time.sleep(1)
        file.seek(where)
    else:
        print line, # already has newline

Example was extracted from here.

A: Maybe you could do a system call to
tail -f

using os.system()

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
All posts tagged Piet Mondrian
Lee Krasner: Living Colour @ Barbican Art
'I like a canvas to breathe and be alive. Be alive is the point.' Lee Krasner
On 11 August 1956 the world-famous artist and leader of the school of Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock, crashed his Oldsmobile convertible while driving drunk. His wife of 11 years, Lee Krasner, also an accomplished artist, heard the news while away in Europe, and hurried home to New York to sort out the arrangements for his funeral and Pollock's affairs.
Lee Krasner at the WPA Pier, New York City, where she was working on a WPA commission (c. 1940) Photo by Fred Prater. Lee Krasner Papers, c.1905-1984
She moves into the big barn
Ten years earlier, and soon after marrying (in 1945), the couple had moved to the Springs area of East Hampton on the south shore of Long Island, and bought a wood-frame house and barn, which they converted into studios.
Of the buildings at their disposal, Pollock had early on nabbed the biggest available space – the barn – as a studio, and it was here that he created many of the masterpieces that made his name in the later 1940s and early 1950s. Sometime in 1957, the year after his death, Krasner moved Pollock's paints and equipment out of the big barn and her own stuff in, and began to paint in the largest space she'd ever had at her disposal.
The result is a decade's worth of quite extraordinarily powerful and enormous abstract paintings which make up the core of the major retrospective of Lee Krasner's art, which is currently being held at the Barbican Centre in London. They are absolutely stunning. Breathtaking. Wonderful. Huge!
Installation view of Another Storm (1963) by Lee Krasner at the Barbican. Photo by the author
A light and airy space
For this exhibition the Barbican has removed some of the partitions which usually divide up the main ground floor exhibition space, and also removed some of the temporary walls which previously concealed wall-sized windows in the exhibition shop and at the end of the main gallery. The combined effect of this decluttering is to make the big central space (technically 'room 10' of the exhibition) feel long and bright and airy. From the moment you arrive at the ticket desk, the new lighter, brighter space feels like the perfect environment in which to hang Krasner's huge and awe-inspiring works.
It is a genuinely uplifting and life-affirming experience to wander among these paintings, I felt like a mortal wandering dazzled through a mansion of the gods.
Siren by Lee Krasner (1966) Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution © The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Photo by Cathy Carver
Her early years in self portraits
The exhibition is arranged in broadly chronological order, and you are directed to start on the upper floor of the Barbican galleries, which houses eight living-room-sized spaces. These eight rooms take us from Krasner's birth, in 1908, in New York, into a family of Orthodox Jewish Russian émigrés, and onto the early art school training she got (at the Women's Art School at Cooper's Union, Art Students League, National Academy of design. From her student days there's a room of self-portraits in oil, which are OK.
Nudes classical and modern
After the Wall Street Crash of 1929 (when she was 21) Krasner began training as a teacher and attended life school classes. On one wall of room four are the extremely accomplished nude studies she did in the style of the Renaissance Masters in 1933 – very accomplished, very traditional. On the opposite wall is a selection of charcoal nudes she did just six years later, in 1939, which are completely different in style, riven by big abstract angular lines, showing a complete assimilation of European modernist trends.
By 1942 she was a respected member of New York's artistic community. She had been included in an exhibition of contemporary painting in New York alongside friends Willem de Kooning and Stuart French. Piet Mondrian admired her work. As a result she was given a number of commissions by President Roosevelt's Public Works of Art Project, including a job to oversee the design and execution of twenty department-store window displays in Manhattan advertising war training courses. She adopted a cut-up-and-paste collage approach, and room five shows blow-ups of photos of these wartime artworks. Well, sort of interesting as a) social history b) if you really a completist looking for evidence of every step of her artistic development.
The Little Images
She knew most of the exhibitors in that 1942 show except one, a guy named Jackson Pollock, so she dropped round to his Greenwich Village studio to seek him out and say hi. One thing led to another and they were married in 1945. They moved to the farm on Long Island and, in the winter of 1947, Krasner embarked on what became known as the 'Little Images' series, abstract paintings made up of tightly meshed squares and shapes which some critics described as 'hieroglyphic'. Rooms one and two kick off the show with some fine examples of these 'Little Images' and it's amazing what a variety of design and visual effect you can achieve from such a seemingly simple premise.
Composition (1949) by Lee Krasner © Philadelphia Museum of Art
The collage paintings
Krasner was given her first one-woman show at the Betty Parsons Gallery in October 1951. The work didn't sell and, although she began a new series soon afterwards, she quickly became despondent and ended up tearing some of the new work to shreds in frustration.
Weeks later, returning to the studio, she realised that the torn strips lying about on the floor got her juices flowing. Quickly she began incorporating them into a new series of collages. She layered pieces of fabric over the paintings shown at the Betty Parsons show, adding pieces of burlap, torn newspaper, heavy photographic paper and some of Pollock's discarded drawings. The resulting 'collage paintings' were exhibited in another gallery show in 1955, and there are several rooms of them on display here.
Blue Level (1955) by Lee Krasner © The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Photo by Diego Flores
Strikingly different from the 'Little Images', aren't they? The very tightly-wound hieroglyphs of the Images are completely different from the violently torn strips of the collages.
In the summer of 1956 Krasner began work on a new series. The dominant tone of pink made me think of human flesh and nudes, but nudes severely chopped up and filtered via Demoiselles d'Avigon-era Picasso.
The first example of this new style was on Krasner's easel when she left for France that summer. In the first half of their marriage, her husband's career had gone from strength to strength, peaking around 1951, as he became world famous for his 'drip paintings', getting on the front cover of Time magazine, promoted by the American government as a home-grown genius, snapped up by collectors. But when, after 1951, Pollock tried to change this winning formula, he met with incomprehension and sales slumped. Pollock lost confidence, his drinking increased, he began an affair, which Krasner knew about, in early '56.
That was the troubled background to the first of these flesh paintings and then – mid-way through her visit to Europe, she got the call that he had died in the car crash. Just weeks after the funeral, Krasner returned to the style and quickly made three more big, torn-up flesh paintings which she titled Prophecy, Birth, Embrace and Three In Two.
In the last room of the first floor of the exhibition, these four paintings are reunited, one hanging on each of the four walls, and it is impossible not to be powerfully affected by their eerie, agonised power.
Prophecy (1956) by Lee Krasner © The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Courtesy Kasmin Gallery, New York. Photo by Christopher Stach
The night journeys
So Jackson dies and Lee moves into the big barn studio and she is afflicted with insomnia and can only work at night, and she decides not to use any colour in her new paintings because she prefers to judge colours by daylight – and so, from the late 1950s, Krasner began to make a series of paintings combining just black and umber and creamy white onto huge, unstretched canvases.
Wow! These are great swirling, turd-coloured pieces, full of energy and despair. A poet friend of hers labelled them 'Night Journeys' and to follow any of the angled, curved or circular lines which strike across the surface is, indeed, to go on a churning, bitter journey though a landscape in torment.
Polar Stampede (1960) by Lee Krasner. Doris and Donald Fisher Collection, San Francisco MoMA © The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Courtesy Kasmin Gallery, New York.
Krasner exhibited these big brown works in 1960 and 1962 to critical praise, and half a dozen of them dominate the first half of the enormous ground floor space in this show. You can stand in front of them, or there are benches where you can sit down, meditate on them, and be drawn into their drama and action.
But the jewel in the crown is the Primary series. In the early 1960s Krasner replaced umber with a range of vivid primary colours. When she broke her right arm in a fall, she taught herself to work with her left, squirting paint directly from the tube, using her right hand to guide the movements.
Critics often use the word 'gesture' or 'gestural' but in this case it really is justified. As you follow the great sweeping arcs and patterns of paint, and note their dribbles and dynamic interactions, you can almost feel and see the great sweeps of the arm they must have required, the leaning of the whole body, the straining, the movement from one zone of focus to the next. They are extraordinarily vibrant and exciting paintings.
Icarus (1964) by Lee Krasner. Thomson Family Collection, New York © The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Courtesy Kasmin Gallery, New York. Photo by Diego Flores
I couldn't get enough of these paintings. I wandered up and down the central room, enjoying all the views of the works offset against each other, glimpsed behind the one central supporting wall of the main exhibition space, addressed front on, strolled past, studied up close, looked at from the other side of the room.
Wow! What a space, and what works of staggering brilliance to fill them with!
Later works
The Umber paintings and the Primary series cover the decade from the late 50s to the late 60s. What a brilliant decade it was for her.
Then, in 1968 Krasner discovered a stash of handmade paper in the farmhouse, and decided to make a new series of works, on a much, much, much smaller scale. She decided to experiment by making each of these small, crafted works from just one or two pigments. A dozen or so of them are in a room off to one side (room 11).
They require a completely different way of looking. Much more conventional in size they require the viewer to step forwards and examine the detail, rather than step back and admire the scale, as with the Primary series.
The dozen or so examples on display here are all lovely – free-spirited dances of colour, and interplays of defined brushstrokes against broader washes, all given a wonderful background texture by virtue of the expensive paper they're painted on.
Untitled (1969) by Lee Krasner © The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Courtesy Kasmin Gallery, New York
In the early 1970s, Krasner made a significant step change in style. Still completely abstract, her works changed from soft biomorphic shapes to hard-edged abstract forms. I found them a shock to the system after the huge works in the central hall.
I liked even less the works in the final room, dating from 1974. In that year she stumbled across a portfolio of work from her art school days, the kind of angular nude studies which we saw examples of way back in room four.
Now Krasner took a pair of scissors to these early studies and cut them up into jagged shapes. Most of the source material was black and white drawings, but she interspersed some coloured strips into the collages, and also left other areas blank, apparently 'echoing the empty space around the nude model' which had served as the subject for many of the original drawings.
They were exhibited in 1977 under the title Eleven Ways To Use The Words To See. I didn't warm to them.
Imperative (1976) by Lee Krasner © The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
No, I went back up to the first floor and walked back through the eight rooms soaking up the evolution of those early works and admiring, in particular, the 'Little Images' series. And I revisited the rooms holding these later 1970s works, trying to give them the benefit of the doubt — but all the time I just wanted to go back into the massive main gallery space and be swept off my feet and ravished all over again by the huge, vibrant, dancing works of the 1960s.
This is the first European retrospective of Lee Krasner's career for over 50 years. It brings together nearly 100 works from some 50 galleries, institutions and private collections. It must have been a labour of love to assemble them all, and was totally worth it.
The exhibition ends with a 15-minute video made up from various interviews with Krasner towards the end of her life. She was one tough lady, and she told it like it was, still, in her 70s, harbouring a bitter resentment at the sexism of the New York art world which she had to combat all her career.
If you start reading up about her life you quickly find people claiming that, far from being overshadowed by her famous husband, Krasner was in fact the driving force behind his career. And, from some of the interviews, you get the impression that, having seen what really high-profile high pressure publicity did to an artist (Pollock), she was quite content to avoid that level of scrutiny, and just get on with what she loved doing.
The publicity material accompanying the exhibition quotes the playwright Edward Albee commenting at her memorial at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that in both her life and her work, Krasner 'looked you straight in the eye, and you dared not flinch'.
That seems a perfect description of both a tough lady, and of her extraordinarily resolute, exuberant and unsentimental art.
A short film about Lee Krasner
Lee Krasner: Living Colour continues at the Barbican until 1 September 2019
Introducing: Lee Krasner a long biographical essay
Posted in America, Art, Exhibition, Feminism
Tagged Abstract Expressionism, art, Barbican, Betty Parsons Gallery, Eleven Ways To Use The Words To See, exhibition, Greenwich Village, Icarus, Jackson Pollock, Jewish, Lee Krasner, Lee Krasner: Living Colou, Little Images, Long Island, Manhattan, New York, Night Journeys, nudes, Painting, Piet Mondrian, Polar Stampede, Primary series, Public Works of Art Project, Siren, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Wall Street Crash, Willem De Kooning
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/08/01/lee-krasner-living-colour-barbican/
Cubism by Philip Cooper (1995)
Browsing through books about Cubism in either a bookshop, library or second-hand shop can be a bit dispiriting because there are just so many of them. Where to begin? Should you read them all? And shouldn't you know all about the most famous art movement of the twentieth century already?
The Colour Library look and layout
Cubism is a volume in Phaidon's 'Colour Library' series. I came across it in a second-hand bookshop and snapped it up for £3, mainly because the size and format means it includes lots of full-page, full-colour illustrations – something often lacking in longer, more text-based accounts (e.g. the 'World of Art' volume, Cubism and Culture).
It's coffee-table-sized (22.9 x 30.5 cm) but, being a paperback, is light and easy in the hand. It's divided into two sections:
Pages 5 to 25 give a surprisingly thorough history of the Cubism movement, surprising because I'd forgotten, or never knew, there was quite so much to it, nor that it spread to have quite so many exponents.
Then there are 48 double-page spreads with a full-colour plate on the right-hand page, and commentary, artist biography, sometimes a b&w illustration of a related work, on the left.
Altogether the 48 illustrations show a surprising range of paintings and sculptures by precursors, core cubists and peripheral members of the movement, namely:
Cézanne (2 paintings)
Léger (4)
Juan Gris (5)
Robert Delaunay (3)
Marcel Duchamp (1 – 1912)
Gino Severini (1 – 1912)
Natalia Gontcharova (1 – 1912)
Albert Gleizes (1 – 1912)
Jean Metzinger (1 – 1912)
Alexander Archipenko (1 – 1913)
Francis Picabia (1 – 1913)
Piet Mondrian (1 – 1913)
Lyonel Feininger (1 – 1913)
Franz Marc (1 – 1913)
Emil Filla (1 – 1915)
Edward Wadsworth (1 – 1915)
Max Weber (1 – 1915)
Henri Laurens (1 – 1920)
Stuart Davis (1 – 1921)
Amédée Ozenfant (1 – 1925)
Ben Nicholson (1 – 1947)
Cubist forebears
The Impressionists tried to capture fleeting impressions of objects in changing light, as they appeared to the artist, not as they objectively were (e.g. as depicted in the increasingly prevalent photographs).
Post-Impressionists – specifically van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, used unrealistic colours and vivid brushstrokes or strong black outlines and stark colour schemes to express emotion.
The Fauves (1905-8) took the colour idea further to represent real-life scenes or people in garishly bright and deliberately unrealistic colours.
The German Expressionists depicted real people or scenes in harsh, primitive woodcuts or angular ugly paintings.
The single greatest source of Cubism was the later painting of Paul Cézanne, who used a variety of techniques to bring out the geometric forms, the planes and rectangles implicit in a subject, to the fore – not least by creating patches of paint which look like facets of a view.
For example, Mont Saint-Victoire (1904) where the notion of realistically depicting the foliage of trees or houses has long since disappeared to be replaced by the idea of blocks or chunks of paint. The effect is to undermine the idea of a painting as 'a window on the world', and replace it with the arrangement of units of paint for semi-abstract aesthetic purposes.
In Cézanne's still lifes he painted, for example, the bowl of fruit, the table it sat on, and the floor or background wall, all at different angles, with different implied perspectives – Still life with plaster cupid (1895).
The invention of Cubism
Cubism takes these trends a decisive step further. Cubism abandoned 450 years of the careful development of Renaissance techniques for creating a sense of perspective in a painting – rejected the notion of one particular vanishing point towards which all lines in the image converge which gives the viewer the illusion they are looking through a 'window on the world' – and instead set about representing the same subject from multiple points of view depicting all sides, top and bottom as required solely to create an aesthetic composition. Abandoning realism or naturalism. Conceiving the work as a purely aesthetic creation.
Cézanne had died in 1906, and 1907 saw two major retrospective exhibitions of his work held in Paris. It is a neat coincidence (or maybe no coincidence) that the first, proto-Cubist painting was made the same year, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Picasso. In this seismic work the idea of a coherent perspective giving depth and shape to the objects depicted has obviously been ripped up in favour of a stylised depiction of space and objects which is is impossible to relate to in any of the traditional ways of 'seeing' art.
In 1907 Braque saw Les Demoiselles in Picasso's studio. He was also bowled over by the big Cézanne retrospective. By the next year he was painting landscapes at the village of L'Estaque in a kind of exaggerated Cézanne style, converting houses, trees and roads into increasingly stylised geometric forms. – Houses in l'Estaque (1908)
Thus began a period from about 1908 to 1914 when Braque and Picasso worked very closely together, to begin with both living in rented rooms in a rundown building in Montmartre, the bohemian area in northern Paris, named the Bateau Lavoir. Here they spent the days painting and the nights drinking, partying, joking, discussing ideas, and often spending the summers painting in the same or similar locations.
Very quickly they moved towards painting a relatively small selection of objects:
common-or-garden objects from their lives – jugs, newspapers, guitars
interiors – so few if any landscapes
in muted tones of grey and brown
If Matisse and the other 'Fauves' (Vlaminck and Derain) were continuing to explore colour in all its garish vibrancy, B and P undertook an almost scientific analysis of what happens if you paint things after abandoning the idea of there being one point of view in either time or space, if you bring in facets from every angle, if you abandon the idea of producing one coherent perspective on an object and instead, use your artistic power to depict whatever elements you want.
In 1910 Braque painted Violin and pitcher, the palette restricted to grey or brown, the entire composition broken up into numerous clashing planes, with only hints of the ostensible subject (actually, the violin is fairly easy to make out). The trompe l'oeil image of a nail hammered into the top of the painting (complete with its own shadow) conveys the ideas that a painting is a two-dimensional artefact.
Analytic cubism
Violin and pitcher is an example of so-called 'analytical cubism' i.e. the subject has been taken to pieces and the resulting fragments reassembled so as to seem splayed out, so as to emphasise a multitude of clashing picture planes.
Now objects can be seen from all points of view at once. Or denoted by one or two scattered attributes – a moustache for a man, an eye for a human being, a fragment of text to denote a newspaper, and so on.
The effect was liberating and seismic. It spread right across the art world like wildfire. As early as 1912 Gleize and Metzinger published a book On Cubism. Contemporary critics and artists related it to Einstein's undermining of the traditional world of Newtonian physics with his new theory of relativity. Others related it to the philosopher Henri Bergson's idea that Time isn't made up of discreet, definable moments measured by clocks and human reason, but is instead an endless flux in which perception of the present moment is flooded with memories of the past and anticipations of the future: all happening at once, as all sides of an object can be depicted simultaneously in a cubist picture.
In 1911 Braque and Picasso went on to break objects down into constituent parts and not even reassemble them, making it almost impossible to see what they are. This further stage is referred to as 'hermetic' or 'high analytical' cubism. Thus Woman Reading (1911) by Braque – you can make out the curlicues at left and right indicating the wings of the chair, but after that…
It created the notion of the painting as puzzle, with only the title giving the viewer any help in identification.
It's all the same to me whether a form represents a different thing to different people or many things at the same time. (Braque)
the book reinforces how cubism really was a joint venture by the artists, the look of their works converging into the same style. They often didn't sign works, giving rise to a century of confusion and misattribution.
In 1912 Braque introduced several further techniques:
the use of stencilled lettering, which he had learned as an apprentice housepainter, and which further flattens the surface
a method of using steel combs to create the effect of wood grain (faux bois)
There were also three major innovations in materials:
Collage, i.e. attaching real objects and non-artistic elements onto the canvas. – Still Life with Chair Caning (May 1912) by Picasso.
Paper sculptures – Braque pioneered the idea of making sculptures of paper and then drawing or painting on them i.e. paper is no longer a flat surface i.e. the picture itself can be folded and sculpted.
papiers collé where collé means pasted. You paste a flattish medium onto paper and then paint or draw on that. Braque pasted imitation wood-grain wallpaper onto white paper and drew on it; Picasso, always the brasher and more experimental of the two, used newspaper pages. –
Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper (1913)
Bowl with fruit, violin and wineglass (1913)
They mixed sand with paint to give the paintwork a real texture.
All these experiments with medium move the work of art away from being a flat, illusionistic window on the world into being a fully autonomous object in its own right, completely divorced from all previous aesthetic theories. It was a volcanic upheaval in art.
Picasso extended these techniques into the sculpture, Guitar, a) made from scrap metal b) with a rough finish c) inverting space (the sound hole should go into the guitar; instead it protrudes out from the surface like a tin can.
All these deliberate rejections of the entire history of Western sculpture were to have seismic repercussions and affect sculpture right down to the present day.
Synthetic cubism
These latter works are examples of what the critics came to call 'synthetic cubism'. Whereas 'analytic cubism' reduced a given object to its constituent elements and then reassembled them according to a new aesthetic, 'synthetic cubism' took elements which had nothing to do with each other (newspaper, sand, spare metal) and assembled them into new objects, which were the end result of the process, not the starting point.
1913 saw Braque and Picasso experimenting with introducing more colour into analytical works, and experimenting further with sculpture and synthetic works.
Montmartre cubism and Salon cubism
But these stunning innovations had not gone unnoticed. Juan Gris was living in the same building as B&P, observing their innovations, and decided to give up his career as an illustrator and commit to becoming a painter.
In 1912 Gris painted a cubist portrait of Picasso. Immediately you can see the difference between his approach and that of B&P – how the idea of breaking down an object (here a human being) into facets can be done in completely different ways by different artists with different personal styles. The facets here are bigger and arranged in a much more orderly way – to the line across the top and the lines off at diagonals create a very regular geometric space of a kind never found in Picasso or Braque. (Cooper points out that Gris trained as an engineer and this may explain his love for architectural regularity.)
This is what now happened – at first a trickle and then a flood of other artists began to incorporate one or other aspect of analytical of synthetic cubism into their own practice.
While B&P didn't exhibit their new works in 1912 or 1913, another group of artists, based around Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes, was exhibiting regularly at the various Paris art shows and/or had dealers who promoted them. They quickly soaked up the lessons of cubism and incorporated them into their own works. Other members of Salon cubism at the time loosely include Robert Delaunay, Henri le Fauconnier, Jacques Villon, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Roger de la Fresnaye, Louis Marcoussis and Alexander Archipenko.
Salon Cubism is characterised by:
size – B&P's works are often small and intense: Salon Cubist works are often immense, metres across
ambitious subject matter
less severe, demanding and complex
They also theorised and wrote about their work, something B&P never did. Thus it was Metzinger and Gleizes who co-authored On Cubism, which put the ideas into phrases which are still quoted. They had realised they were working in the same direction when their works were hung more or less by accident near each other in the 1910 Salon des Indépendants.
They recruited like-minded colleagues and then lobbied the hanging committee to get their works deliberately hung together in one room for the next year's (1911) show. The effect of having a roomful of the new style hung together was to cause scandal (as so often in Paris art history). The poet Guillaume Apollinaire wrote a long defence of the show and thus came to be seen as a spokesman for the movement.
As to the name, Matisse, who was on the hanging committee of the 1908 Salon which B&P submitted some early works to, is said to have dismissed them as little more than a bunch of 'cubes'.
The art critic Louis Vauxcelles (who has the distinction of having made the throwaway remark about the paintings of Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck looking like the works of wild things – thus naming the art movement of Fauvism) in 1910 referred to the collected works of Metzinger, Gleizes, Delaunay, Léger and Le Fauconnier as 'ignorant geometers, reducing the human body, the site, to pallid cubes.'
Whatever the precise origin, the book On Cubism cemented the term and promoted it to a wide book-reading public.
La section d'Or
The Salon cubists held another show in October 1912, named the Section d'Or, French for 'Golden ratio', a mathematical concept which had fascinated artists for 2,500 years. It contained over 200 works and was designed as a deliberate retrospective, showing the evolution of a number of artists from 1909 to 1912, and also to establish cubism as a much broader range of styles and approaches than the narrow high cubism of Picasso and Braque.
Its strength (its diversity) was also its weakness. By 1913 many of these artists were pursuing their own visions and interpretations, so much so that Apollinaire's book of 1913 – The Cubist Painters – was forced to divide the movement into four distinct categories.
Robert and Sonia Delaunay named their experiments in colour combination – painting interlocking or overlapping patches or planes of contrasting (or complementary) colours – Simultanism. Apollinaire called it Orphism or Orphic cubism insofar as it was interested in abstract shape and colour, and the play of colours was identified – by Delaunay and Apollinaire (as by Kandinsky, who Delaunay corresponded with) with music.
Windows Open Simultaneously (First Part, Third Motif), 1912. Did you spot the Eiffel Tower, painted in green, at the centre of this work?
Meanwhile, a work like Metzinger's Dancer in a café (1912) uses cubist rhetoric but is obviously much more decorative and accessible than P&B's more demanding experiments – the lamp at top right is pure Art Nouveau.
Contemporary movements affected by cubism
Futurism The impresario of Futurism, Filippo Marinetti, published his loudmouth Futurist manifesto in 1909, then took his gang of painters and poets to Paris to see the latest work. Well organised and polemical, the Futurists adapted many of cubism's tricks but focused on the modern world of machines and on the challenge of depicting movement. They were soon attacking cubism for being quaint and staid and conservative (ladies with mandolins, newspapers on cafe tables, how dull!).
States of mind: the Farewell by Umberto Boccioni (1911) breaks down the subject into facets (and uses a very obvious bit of stencilling) but in order to convey the dynamic and modern subject of a fast steam train gathering steam in a railway station.
Rayonism Russian artists wanted to create a home-grown brand of modern art. In 1911 Mikhail Larionov invented Rayonism, an attempt to depict the rays of light reflected from objects using spiky splintered forms. Kasimir Malevich experimented with this angular look and in 1913 he would invent Suprematism, starting from the radical ground zero of his famous black square. Many other contemporary works are described as Cubo-Futurist, for combining elements of both.
Expressionism Cooper sees the influence of cubism on the German Expressionist painter Franz Marc, whose rather naive paintings of animals from 1910 or so, become steadily more involved and broken up by complex sheets or facets as the cubist vision influenced him.
Deer in a forest II (1913)
In fact Cooper attributes this highly colourful use of facets and planes more to Robert Delaunay's version of cubism, than to the grey and brown style of Picasso or Braque.
Vorticism Established in London by the Canadian writer and artist Wyndham Lewis, named by the American poet Ezra Pound, Vorticism published on edition of its bombastic journal, Blast, trying to outdo the Futurists at their own game, and (inevitably) pouring scorn on cubism for being pale and passive. Nonetheless, in its brief life Vorticism attracted impressive talents including Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Edward Wadsworth, David Bomberg, C.R.W. Nevinson and Jacob Epstein.
World War One brought modern art to a grinding halt – Vorticism ceased to exist, Futurism's key artists were enlisted; two of the key artists of German Expressionism (Marc and Macke) were killed.
Many of the French artists were called up (the Spaniard Picasso being lucky in this respect) and ceased working for the duration. Across Europe there was a reaction against the avant-garde in face of an understandable rise in patriotic nationalism. In France this was called the rappel a l'ordre.
The best example I know of this move to order is in the music of Igor Stravinsky, who moved from the barbaric primitivism of the Rite of Spring (1914) to the orderly, post-war, neo-classical ballet Pulcinella of 1920, which is still recognisably Stravinksian, but made orderly and sensible.
Something similar can be seen by comparing any of Picasso's pre-war cubist works with Three Musicians of 1921. The later painting keeps many of the elements of cubism, but is somehow completely different. Every object now has a solid outline unlike the swirling blurring of facets in the pre-war work. There are brighter colours instead of the earth browns and greys of high cubism. The colours themselves are painted in solid unshaded blocks, unlike the very rough dabs and strokes of paint in pre-war work. All these changes go to make the later work much more readable that the esoteric 'hermetic cubist' works of the pre-war.
The use of much more clear and precise forms has given rise to the term crystal cubism to describe this late style.
Braque fought in the war, and survived. On his return he was never again so close to Picasso and continued to plough a traditionalist cubist furrow, earth colours and all, reworking the same still lifes, becoming maybe a bit more decorative. For example, Fruit on a table cloth with a fruit dish (1925). You can see why Picasso's style would be more popular.
Léger, meanwhile, was perfecting the 'shiny tube' style which was to last the rest of his career. – The card players (1917)
These and other post-war 'cubist' works are included in the forty-eight colour plates of this impressive little book.
After cubism
By 1919 the poet Blaise Cendrars wrote a piece saying Cubism had been hugely important but was now finished. Artists were looking elsewhere. In Russia socially-committed Constructivism influenced the new post-revolutionary avant-garde. In Germany the airily 'spiritualist' Expressionists were succeeded the grotesque social satire of Otto Dix and George Grosz, which came to be called Neue Sachlichkeit.
In Zurich, Berlin and New York, the Dada movement (1915-20) ridiculed everything, all previous art included, in an outburst of nihilism whose most enduring artistic legacy was the invention of photomontage by John Heartfield in Berlin, a sort of spin-off of cubist collage but focusing exclusively on elements found in newspapers and magazines.
And when Dada fizzled out it was replaced by a new anti-rational movement, Surrealism, led by the imperious writer André Breton in Paris, and exploring dreams, automatic writing and drawing, which also criticised Cubism for being tame and passive.
Around 1918 the Purist movement was founded by Edouard Jeanneret (better known as the modern architect Le Corbusier) and Amédée Ozenfant who co-authored a book, After Cubism in which they criticised the fragmentation of the object in cubism and the way in which cubism had become, in their view, decorative by that time.
They proposed a kind of painting in which objects were represented as powerful basic forms stripped of detail. Purism reached a climax in Le Corbusier's Pavilion of the New Spirit built in 1925 for the International Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris which contained works by the three principals and the cubists, Juan Gris and Jacques Lipchitz. Soon afterwards the movement lapsed and the painters went their separate ways. – Still life with jug by Amédée Ozenfant (1925).
But it didn't really matter what these or any other art movements said about Cubism – its historical important is still vast, as seismic as the French Revolution. It definitively ended a centuries-old way of thinking about art as naively representational, and opened up a whole range of strategies and ideas and opportunities, and the use of new media and materials, which are still playing out to this day.
But that's the subject of another book (in fact, whole libraries of books). This Phaidon volume combines a fact-filled and intelligent introduction with a generous selection of works to show how cubism influenced an entire generation of artists.
Cubism on Amazon
Related book reviews
In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and Modernism in Paris 1900-1910 by Sue Roe (2014)
Futurism by Richard Humphreys (1999)
Fauvism by Sarah Whitfield (1991)
Marc by Susanna Partsch (1991)
The Post-Impressionists by Belinda Thompson (2nd edition 1990)
The Expressionists by Wolf-Dieter Dube (1972)
Related exhibition reviews
Arp: The Poetry of Forms @ Turner Contemporary (November 2017)
Cézanne Portraits @ The National Portrait Gallery (December 2017)
Matisse in the Studio @ the Royal Academy (November 2017)
Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
Picasso Museum @ Barcelona (July 2017)
Picasso's Portraits @ the National Portrait Gallery (January 2017)
by Simon on January 14, 2018 • Permalink
Posted in Art, European History
Tagged 1995, Albert Gleizes, Alexander Archipenko, Amédée Ozenfant, Ben Nicholson, Braque, Cezanne, Chagall, Cubism, Edward Wadsworth, Emil Filla, Fauvism, Francis Picabia, Franz Marc, Futurism, Gino Severini, Henri Laurens, Jean Metzinger, Juan Gris, Léger, Louis Vauxcelles, Lyonel Feininger, Marcel Duchamp, Max Weber, Natalia Gontcharova, Orphism, Philip Cooper, Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Robert Delaunay, Stuart Davis, Vorticism
Posted by Simon on January 14, 2018
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/01/14/cubism-philip-cooper/
Every room in Tate Modern
Tate Modern, housed in the famous converted power station building on the South Bank near London Bridge, contains six levels. But as levels 0 and 1 are shops and cafes, and 5 and 6 are, respectively, the members' level and restaurant, that leaves only 2, 3 and 4 to actually display art. Level 3 is given over to temporary exhibitions (currently Alexander Calder and The World Goes Pop) and some small, one-room displays (currently George Baselitz) – which leaves floors 2 and 4 to house the permanent collection.
Each level is divided into two wings, west and east, grouped around a broad theme and housing 10 or 11 rooms: thus level 2 west is Citizens and States, level 2 east is Making Traces; level 4 east is Energy and Process and level 4 west is Material Worlds.
So Tate Modern contains about 42 rooms, plus 3 or 4 one-room displays between each wing, say 46 in all.
The audio guide costs £4.25 (£3.75 for concessions eg students). It has audio commentary on a relatively small number of selected works. The woman selling it said it lasts 45 minutes but that can't be true. My one had one or two minute-long items on 38 works, and half or more of the entries consisted of more than one track eg 90 seconds on the art work, with an additional quote from the artist, and then maybe some music (the Mark Rothko item has two pieces of music, one of which was five minutes long). Surely more than 45 mins – and very useful…
Personal highlights
As with my recent trips to the British Museum, National Gallery and Tate Britain, the following are obviously not any kind of official highlights, just a list of things that made me stop and think or admire or want to make a note.
I used to think I knew about modern art, but this visit confirmed my feeling that I have been completely overtaken by the explosion of post-modern art since the 1980s. There has been a vast expansion in the numbers of artists and artworks and types and styles of practice over the last thirty years, as well as a massive expansion in the types of discourses available to make sense of new movements and artists from around the world.
Also there has been a significant movement to reconsider and revalue the past, especially as regards rediscovering or rehabilitating women artists – a process exemplified by the current The World Goes Pop exhibition, which is designed to promote hitherto little-known artists from around the world, and goes out of its way to foreground women artists and gender issues.
So this attempt to visit every room at Tate Modern felt like it shed a bit of new light on some old favourites and familiar faces, but mostly introduced me to new names. A lot of new names.
1. Citizens and States
Who doesn't love Piet Mondrian? But I didn't know he was a theosophist nor that the calm grids of black lines dividing rectangles of white or red or yellow or blue are representations of an ideal society. A psychologist was interviewed to say they've done experiments turning Mondrian squares onto the diagonal and people really don't like them: there's something powerful about horizontal and vertical lines, our brains react to them more deeply than to diagonals. Compare the impact, the pleasing sense of order and clarity in any Mondrian, with that of fellow De Stijl member Theo van Doesburg's Counter-Composition VI (1925). Not nearly so pleasing.
Composition B (No.II) with Red 1935 The cool structured grids can be interpreted as a way of establishing order on a chaotic world. That aim reminded me of the images I saw recently in the British Museum, the wall paintings of Nebamun hunting and the friezes of king Ashurbanipal of Assyria's lion hunt. In both, hunting is a way for aristocratic or royal man to establish order out of nature's chaos and the painting re-enacts that function. Striking that the same impulse links painting from 800BC and 1940AD.
The movement he belonged to in Holland, de Stijl, is pronounced 'dare stale'.
When Barbara Hepworth moved to Cornwall, ovals replaced circles in her work, which gave them two centres or focal points, instead of one, making them more complex and interesting. Oval Sculpture (No. 2) 1943, cast 1958
Tate had an exhibition of Hélio Oiticica back in 2007, which I was fool enough not to go to. The three abstracts by her here, from the 1950s, show not quite perfect geometric shapes jostling and balanced on plain backgrounds, creating a lovely impression of jazzy movement. Metaesquema 1958
Tate also had an exhibition of Saloua Raouda Choucair a few years ago, another show by a woman artist which I should have gone to. In room two I liked Composition with Two Ovals 1951. On the audio guide we hear her insisting her work comes from Islamic, not Western, sources of inspiration. A couple of her works were included in 2015's Adventures of the Black Square show at the Whitechapel art gallery last year, where I liked Poem (1965).
Joseph Beuys was one of the dour Germans who put me off contemporary art in the 1970s and 80s. There are not one but two whole rooms devoted to him at Tate Modern, mainly documenting his tireless activities as an educator, organiser of student events, giver of marathon interviews, supporter of alternative political parties, green enthusiast and so on. How tiresome all that 1970s student politics looks now; how ultimately futile. The main artwork is the massive Lightning with Stag in its Glare (1958-85). The audio commentary usefully explained Beuys's cryptic personal mythology: the metal sheet is the lightning, the ironing board is the stag, the clay lumps represent lumpish unintelligent creatures.
A lot more up to date, Theaster Gates's Civil Tapestry 4 (2011) is a tapestry made of vertical strips taken from the fire hoses which were turned on civil rights protesters in the deep south of America in May 1963. Reminded me of Ai Weiwei's enormous sculpture made of steel poles salvaged from the wreckage of schools destroyed in the Szichuan earthquake. A similar sense of unimpeachable righteousness.
Artur Zmijewski (b.1966) has made various films, including the one featured here, Democracies (2009), splicing together footage shot at a variety of political rallies in his native Poland, from feminist and environmentalist campaigners, to right-wing nationalist rallies. Watching the Catholic nationalist rallies, I recall political commentators interpreting last October's election of the Law and Justice Party to government in Poland as a 'lurch to the right'. Zmijewski's film shows you why. It is an interesting documentary film but, like all film and video, I wonder about its relevance as 'art'.
A room devoted to Latin American Photobooks, testament to the turmoil in Latin America throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s, collected by British photographer Martin Parr.
I saw Richard Hamilton's The Citizen (1981-3) in Tate Britain's recent Fighting History exhibition. The audio commentary here made the neat point that the patterns the dirty protesters made with their own faeces on their prison walls echoed the patterns of Celtic designs – although what Celtic art is turns out to be hard to define, as the British Museum's exhibition on Celtic Art and Identity showed. How genuinely subversive it would have been it Tate had bought an actual prison wall covered in IRA prisoner shit, and exhibited it, smell and all.
Sheba Chhachhi b.1958, was represented by Seven lives and a dream, photos inspired by the rape of an Indian woman in the 1970s, and other large b&w photos of Indian women.
Teresa Margolles (b.1963) is represented by Flag I, a big flag coloured with blood, earth and other matter from the murder sites of various people killed in Mexico's bloody drug wars, a death rate which currently runs at around 20,000 a year.
Reflections on Citizens and States – ie the failure of radical politics
It is my belief that the forces for radical change have everywhere been comprehensively defeated and, in fact, that even moderately liberal bourgeois democracy is itself under attack from religious extremists at one end and home-grown nationalists at the other. Neo-liberal capitalism defeated and buried not only the communist regimes of Russia and Eastern Europe but the very idea of any kind of socialist / communist alternative.
The student radicalism of the Joseph Beuys rooms, and in evidence throughout the Pop Art exhibition from the heady 1960s, is irrelevant to the world of Putin, growing right-wing forces in eastern Europe, to the Refugee Crisis, to the permanent collapse of big parts of the Middle East and the state of terrorist threat which we are going to have to live with indefinitely.
The economic engine of the world, China, whose meteoric industrialisation has been underpinning rising standards of living throughout the West for the last generation, is coming stuttering to a halt. If you haven't done well over the past twenty years, that was a one-off golden age and chances are you're going to get a lot worse off in the coming era.
And underlying everything is evidence that man-made climate change is kicking in now, unchangeable and unavoidable, with unforeseeable but potentially cataclysmic consequences.
Against this backdrop it's hard to avoid thinking that much of the art in this section is trivial or, at best, irrelevant. Nothing is going to stop Mexicans (or Colombians) murdering each other over drugs. President Nixon announced his nationwide War on Drugs as long ago as 1971: how's that war progressing? Nothing is going to stop Indian men raping Indian women. Sheba Chhachhi's photographs were sparked by rapes in the 1970s but gang rapes by Indian men have been in the news for the past few years. And Theaster Gates's sentiments about historical injustices in the Alabama of the 1960s might be impeccably correct, but seem irrelevant in light of the ongoing inability of American police to stop their officers beating up and shooting dead a seemingly endless stream of unarmed black men.
Activists have been protesting these issues for decades and not only has nothing changed, lots of things have got worse. Considered as political activism, then, most of this art is a complete failure. Considered as art, it relies so much on the worthiness and impeccable liberalism of its credentials, that the failure of its causes in the real world makes it almost comical. Nice flag. Shame even more Mexicans will be murdered his year. Nice hoses. Shame even more black men will be shot by police.
It was a relief to emerge from the politically charged, fraught, upsetting and ultimately depressing Citizens and States wing and cross over to the less contentious Making Traces.
2. Making Traces
Magda Cordell (Hungary 1921-2008). Woman artist, her Figure (Woman) is, according to the wall label, 'an image of heroic femininity'.
Korean woman artist Lee Bul's Untitled (Craving White) (2011) is a gargoyle assembly of sacks of fabric, with wood and steel, twisted into weird shapes. She wore it to do performances, the weird bulges and squiggles intended to 'deconstruct ideals of the female body'.
Avis Newman, woman artist born 1946, is represented by The Wing of the Wind of Madness (1982).
Lee Krasner, woman artist apparently overshadowed in her lifetime by her husband, Jackson Pollock, is now being rediscovered with works like Gothic Landscape (1961).
Woman artist Hilla Becher (1931-2007) spent most of her adult career travelling with husband Bernd around Europe and America taking series of b&w photos of industrial buildings eg Coal bunkers (1974). I wonder whether they inspired the b&w photos of abandoned nuclear bunkers and wartime defences by Jane and Louise Wilson?
Woman artist Hedda Sterne made lovely semi-abstracts, including NY No. X (1948).
Joan Miro is a big name from the modernist mid-century and represented here by the large and colourful Letter from a friend. After the post-modern works in the previous gallery, this type of Modernism looks reassuringly old-fashioned.
At the heart of this display is the big room showing Mark Rothko's Seagram paintings (1958-60). Rothko was commissioned to decorate the restaurant in the new Seagram building in New York and was half way through making them when he went along to the restaurant himself, and was horrified to find it full of 'rich bastards', as he described them, eating dinner. What did he expect? He turned down the commission, returned the money and was contacted by various museums who wanted to buy them, of whom he favoured Tate because of a sentimental fondness for British art. He committed suicide the same day in 1970 that the paintings arrived in London. The audio guide plays Perilous Night by John Cage, favourite composer of so many modern artists. Of the 8 or so works here, my favourite was Red on Maroon, Mural Section 4 (1959).
By complete contrast, woman artist Rebecca Horn (b.1944) specialised in making strange imaginative extensions of the human body, for example Cockfeather Mask (1973). A room is devoted to her strange inspiring creations. A film shows cockfeather being used to do a sort of fan dance-cum-striptease over a man's penis, a rare appearance of the male member in these galleries.
Simryn Gill (b.1959) has a whole room devoted to a series of large colour photos he took in the Malaysian town of Port Dickson, A Small Town at the Turn of the Century (1999–2000) showing its citizens in normal or portrait style poses but with large fruits concealing their faces. I liked number 5, number 34, number 24.
The American artist Mark Bradford (b.1961) is represented by Riding the cut vein, an entrancing large image, owing something to the street layout of Los Angeles where, according to the wall label, freeways cut through the city dividing rich neighbourhoods from poor ones.
The last room in this mind-bending tour of 20th century art is devoted to six massive paintings by Gerhard Richter (b.1932) Cage I-VI, named after the American composer and philosopher John Cage, ever-popular with the avant-garde. Prepared for them to be dirty smears, I was in fact entranced. There's a film showing Richter at work using a metre-wide squeegee to smear the paint across the surfaces, which sounds unpromising, but the results are actually full of countless details, imperfections, unknown unnameable elements, insights and peculiarities. Close up.
3. Energy and Process
The wall labels explain that this suite of rooms is based around the 1960s Italian art movement, Arte povera, which used industrial by-products, or found materials, to create large, generally abstract sculptures. It was deliberately distinct from the grandiosely 'heroic' American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s, but also different from the American Minimalism of the 1960s, which is smooth and cerebral. The main works are in the big, well-lit room 3:
Lynda Benglis Quartered meteor (1969) This woman artist's lump of dull lead is a deliberate riposte to the smooth geometric shapes of American minimalism.
Kishio Suga's Ren-Shiki-Tai
Giuseppe Penone's Tree of 12 Metres (1980–2)
According to the wall labels, Arte Povera 'upset traditional ideas' about how art should be distributed and displayed. Well, here they are being displayed in an international art gallery. Doesn't seem to have upset or challenged that pretty traditional idea.
Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) was a groovy French woman artist whose website shows the full range of her colourful imaginative oeuvre and who is represented here by one of her 'shooting paintings'. She filled bags with colour pigment, attached them to a canvas and covered the lot in white plaster, hung the canvas outside on a wall and then invited friends to shoot it with .22 rifles. The colour bags exploded and spurted colour over the work. Shooting Picture (1961)
Michael Baldwin is represented by a board with a mirror attached, Untitled Painting (1965). The commentary tells us with a straight face that this work is 'questioning a long-held action of painting transcending reality'. OK.
In a similar radical, subversive, revolutionary etc vein is the anti-art tea tray of Július Koller (1939-2007), Question Mark b. (Anti-Painting, Anti-Text) 1969. Here it is in a major art gallery, subverting away like mad. Funny in its way, but also funny in its quaint utopianism.
Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) experimented with lots of slits in otherwise untouched canvas. Spatial Concept 'Waiting' (1960).
In room ten is the rather marvellous motor engine covered in crystals of copper sulphate, known as Untitled 2006 by Roger Hiorns, born in 1975.
Nicholas Hlobo is a gay black man, born in 1975 in South Africa. I enjoyed the works where he's used embroidery or sewing using pink ribbon onto canvas to create shapes and flows, although I was disappointed that the curators instantly say this work 'challenges gender-based assumptions about the division of labour'. Does it? Really? Ikhonkco (2010)
A small room is devoted to Emilio Prini (b.1943), who took countless experimental b&w photos in the 60s and 70s. According to the label, 'Throughout his career Emilio Prini was engaged intensively with photography and photographic processes.' Not 'experimented with photographic techniques', but was engaged with… And not just engaged. Engaged intensively. Lots of photos of parts of his body.
In these rooms, as in various other exhibitions of 20th century art, you get a powerful feeling from the wall labels and commentary of the curators' nostalgia and regret for an era when art really meant something, when it was part of wider social movements genuinely upsetting old traditions and assumptions.
Now, when there is more art and more artists than ever before, more women artists, more artists from around the world, working in every conceivable medium, all trying to establish a marketable brand which can be sold to Saudi oil and Russian mafia and Colombian drug lord investors, it is impossible to recapture the heady idealism of, in particular, the 1960s and early 70s.
These galleries reek not of revolutionary exhilaration, but of the mournful nostalgia for, and the comic over-excitement about, the truly 'revolutionary' art of a bygone era, on the part of a generation of curators and critics born too late to experience it.
Tate Modern website
Tate Modern floor plan
Every room in the British Museum
Every room in the National Gallery
Every room in Tate Britain (part one)
Every room in Tate Britain (part two)
Posted in Art, European History, Exhibition
Tagged Arte Povera, Artur Zmijewski, Avis Newman, Barbara Hepworth, De Stijl, Emilio Prini, Gerhard Richter, Giuseppe Penone, Hélio Oiticica, Hedda Sterne, Joan Miro, Joseph Beuys, Lee Bul, Lee Krasner, Lucio Fontana, Magda Cordell, Mark Rothko, Nicholas Hlobo, Niki de Saint Phalle, Piet Mondrian, Rebecca Horn, Richard Hamilton, Roger Hiorns, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Sheba Chhachhi, Simryn Gill, Teresa Margolles, Theaster Gates, Theo van Doesburg
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/01/27/every-room-in-tate-modern/
Adventures of the Black Square @ Whitechapel Art Gallery
I wrote about the big retrospective of Malevich at Tate Modern in August last year. This is rather like the sequel: Malevich II – The Square Goes Global.
Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) was a Russian avant-garde artist, architect, designer and writer. From early naturalistic paintings of peasants, farm scenes etc he evolved quickly towards the legendary exhibition – titled The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10 – in 1915 which exhibited 39 paintings of black squares, rectangles and other geometric shapes on a pale cream background.
Up in the corner of the room, where the Russian icon was traditionally situated, was placed the famous black square painting. Famous because it declared the end of four or five centuries of Western art struggling to create and exploit the idea of depth and perspective in an oil painting. Malevich tore up the entire notion that a painting is a realistic window onto the world. Painting is shapes on a flat plane. Shapes, colours, whatever you want. They can do anything. There is infinite scope. Painting set free. He called his version of the new, geometric art, Suprematism.
(The work below isn't the black square, but one of Malevich's other black and white geometric works which featured in the famous show.)
Kazimir Malevich – Black and White. Suprematist Composition (1915)
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Donation 2004 from Bengt and Jelena Jangfeldt
This exhibition at the lovely, airy Whitechapel Gallery, right next to Aldgate East tube, takes Malevich's iconic square and tracks its influence through the hundred years since its début, right up to the present day. 1915-2015. The catalogue says the show is divided into four themes:
'Utopia' – the black square as founder of new aesthetic and political horizons
'Architectonics' – floating geometries that suggest new social spaces as imagined by Lyubov Popova or Piet Mondrian
'Communication' – the flood of early 20th century manifestos and avant-garde graphics
The 'Everyday' – the square around us, for example in textiles by Sophie Taeuber-Arp, in abstract motifs painted on Peruvian lorries, in random white squares photographed in cities around the world etc
In practice the show consists of one or two works each by over a hundred artists. A hundred! From the past hundred years. From all around the world (Europe, America, Brazil, China). That's a lot of names, a lot of countries, a lot of styles, to get anywhere near grasping.
Therefore, I found it easier to manage – and I found the division of four rooms fell easily into – a simpler, binary schema: the first room shows the Early Modernism of Malevich and his generation of likeminded experimenters, in painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, ballet and music, in Europe (and Russia).
The other three rooms show geometric art from The Rest of the Twentieth Century, from around the world, in all its bewildering variety.
Part 1. Early Modernism
Malevich's name is one among a flood of other innovators from the period just before the Great War to the mid-1930s. Other pioneers given passing mention or featured by one choice work here include El Lissitsky and the Hungarian-born Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (who took up a post at the Bauhaus when it was formed in 1919) and Wassily Kandinsky – breath-taking experimenters, as well as the often overlooked woman artist Lyubov Popova.
Lyubov Popova – Painterly Architectonic (1916)
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
Gustav Klutsis produced a number of designs and images which make clear the avant-garde's association with revolutionary politics, with the wish to use new ways of seeing, building and designing to create a new society, whose socialist mechanistic schemas have been revived periodically ever since, in posters, and album covers, and other art school-inspired media.
Gustav Klutsis – Design for Loudspeaker No.5 (1922)
Coloured ink and pencil on paper
Greek State Museum of Contemporary Art – Costakis Collection, Thessaloniki
© ARS, New York and DACS, London 2014
Surprisingly, maybe, alongside the German and Russian avant-garde was a thriving Dutch one, epitomised in De Stijl, founded in 1917. Its most famous member was indubitably Piet Mondrian, who developed the grid paintings of rectangles of white, yellow, red or blue which are one of Modernism's most immediately recognisable achievements.
Piet Mondrian – Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red (1937–42)
© DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2014
Courtesy Tate Collection: Purchased 1964
Modernist magazines
The show features quite an array of magazines from Germany, Russia, France, Britain, from the Modernist moment during the Great War until well into the 1930s, including Ezra Pound's Blast, which I reverenced at school in the 1970s; the Little Review, home to Eliot and Pound; transition, containing another instalment of the long experimental work by James Joyce which became Finnegan's Wake – these I know from their literary associations – but also on display were a lot of others I'd never heard of from across Europe, featuring the trademark experimental typefaces, designs and layouts of the period.
Modernist photos
As well as paintings and magazines, the exhibition has a fine selection of photos pinned to the wall as well as a large video screen showing a large slideshow selection of early modernist pioneers at work. the visitor can spend a happy 6 or 7 minutes just standing watching the procession of wonderful black and white photos from the 1910s, 20s, and 30s. Most memorable from the slideshow were shots of Piet Mondrian's apartment-cum-studio and Wassily Kandinsky supervising students at the Bauhaus painting sets for a theatrical production.
But it also made me think all over again (like the Malevich exhibition, like the Bauhaus exhibition did) that whereas a lot of these super-famous paintings turn out to be quite small and quite amateurish, and a lot of the buildings were never built or are crumbling Art Deco ruins that you'd walk past without a second look, and all the magazines seem surprisingly small, plain and dusty – the photographs of the period still pack a tremendous punch and are maybe the best medium for conveying the unbridled energy and experimentalism of the 1920s and 1930s.
I especially liked three by Werner Mantz, who I'd never heard of before. 'During the 1920s and '30s Mantz photographed functionalist architecture such as houses, factories, bridge constructions and motorways. The pictures are extremely detailed with .. bold cropping and angles.' Wonderful.
Photos like this made architecture far more exciting than it could possibly be in real life, and helped to encourage the notion that architecture could create new societies, new politics, new human nature. All of which turned out to be desperately wrong.
Room 1 with its priceless examples of early Modernist geometric art
Part 2. The rest of the century
So far the show is a highly enjoyable refresher course in Modernist Art. You could leave now, pick up a book on the subject in the airy bookshop, and spend the rest of the day reminding yourself of the glories of European Modernist art.
But the real point of the show is the remaining rooms, which contain a bewildering smörgåsbord of styles and approaches and media and artists, old and young, male and female, from Europe, the Middle East, South America, from schools and movements I had never heard of, from the 60 plethoric years since the end of World War Two.
Quite overwhelmed and spoilt for choice, I could only give them each a fair crack of the whip and see what made an impact, what lingered. I've placed the following in chronological order:
Hélio Oiticica – Metaesquema 464 (1958)
Gouache on board
Courtesy of Catherine & Franck Petitgas
Photo: Todd White Photography
© The Artist. All rights reserved
Swatch of Snap Fasteners by Běla Kolářová (1964) Very funny, very striking, very light and imaginative and visual.
Third Syntagmatic by Jeffrey Steele (1965) – his career has been spent creating geometric images according to complex mathematical formulae. BBC slideshow of Jeffrey Steele paintings
Poem by Saloua Raouda Choucair (1965) – Simple. Brilliant. Yes. A rounded geometry.
Homage to the Square by Joseph Albers – Albers appears to have done quite a few homages to the square, the one exhibited here being in shades of orange.
Roberto Burle Marx – never heard of him before, and why not, when he appears to have made wonderfully colourful paintings of abstract but sinuous and organic shapes, very life-full, very Brazilian.
10 x 10 by Carl André (1967) – slender square slate tiles laid out in a square and which we are allowed to walk on (unless we are wearing stilletos). Minimalism. Flat. Open. There. No secrets.
Monument for Tatlin (1969) by Dan Flavin – a tribute to the famous ideal Russian avant-garde plan for a vast building-cum-radio transmitter for the new Soviet state, cast in Flavin's trademark 'minimalist' fluorescent tubing. Though a properly trained art student might be able to argue this is subversive of something, from our perspective in 2015 it looks a lot like the real political threat of Tatlin's building (broadcasting revolutionary propaganda to Europe) has been completely subsumed into the fluorescent department store and office lighting of consumer capitalism.
Dóra Maurer – Seven Rotations 1–6 (1979)
Six gelatin silver prints
Collection of Zsolt Somlói and Katalin Spengler
© Dóra Maurer
This striking image from the eminent Hungarian artist Dóra Maurer consists of seven iterations of her holding a large photo in front of her face, and in each iteration it has become populated by versions of the photo, increasing in number and density. So striking it is used for the poster of the entire exhibition, not Malevich's square. Another reminder of the power of black and white photography.
Dmitri Prigov – locked up in an insane asylum in 1986, Prigov was a post-War dissident Russian artist, represented here by images of books in the cold Russian snow, an image I can't find on Google.
Shrunk by Angela de la Cruz – experiments with breaking up the wooden frames which hold canvases in a rigid rectangle, preserving and sometimes painting the resultant wreckage of the traditional mechanism of Western art.
Sceaux Gardens Estate by Keith Coventry (1995) One of less well-known of the 1997 Sensation artists, Coventry has made paintings out of the architect's designs for big housing estates in London, implicitly satirising the utopian hopes of the early Modernist architects who intended to make Ideals For Living and socialist paradises for the workers with their concrete and steel tower blocks.
Gabriel Orozco – Light Signs #1 (Korea) (1995)
Synthetic polymer plastic sheet and light box
Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
© the Artist
I Don't Remember by Clay Ketter (2006) There appear to be numerous works with this title, so I've linked to a bunch of them on Google Images: I always like painting which is rough-finished, the canvas frayed round the edges like Paul Klee's, or the readymade painting surfaces of Alfred Wallis, which featured the St Ives exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery, or Jasper John's works with stencils and bits of flag or crate or found material stuck to the surface. Ketter's are large photographs of the walls of derelict or half-demolished buildings with panels of real world materials stuck on, to create a mix of naturalism and collage. Big. Striking.
Rings by Sarah Morris (2008) Now I google it I find Morris seems to have done numerous works featuring rings and titled rings. To be honest, I didn't like the shiny Duluz gloss finish of what could, possibly, be 1960s Pop Art paintings, but there's no denying their vigour and impact.
Top Secret 32 by Jenny Holzer (2010) a satire on the numerous 'redacted' documents which have featured in public life in recent years, from dodgy Iraq dossiers to the Edward Snowden revelations, as well as vast troves of documents involved in bank scandals
Leadlight by Adrian Esparza (2012) Esparza appears to have created a mode of art from disassembling woven tapestries and displaying the constituent threads into shapes, squares and so on, displayed across whole walls of galleries.
Zhao Yao – Spirit Above All 1-93A (2012)
© Zhao Yao
Courtesy Pace London
October Colouring-In Book by David Batchelor (2012) The art magazine October has been published since 1976 but never featured an illustration in colour. To take 'revenge', British artist David Batchelor dismantled an edition of the magazine and coloured every page with different shapes and outlines and colours, and the 20 or so separate framed pages take up one wall of a room, and are lovely and bright and inventive and unthreatening and funny.
Gallery 8, including works by Keith Coventry, Clay Ketter and Angela de la Cruz.
Photo Stephen White
1. Stepping out into the gritty diesel sunlight of Commercial Road and then strolling along the backstreets to Petticoat Lane and so between the forest of tall, commercial buildings towards Liverpool Street Station, made me notice how modern architecture, in particular, is made up of squares and rectangles, whether of glass or concrete slabs, squares and rectangles everywhere. How so much of the hard-edged geometry of the vision of Modernist architecture has been completely assimilated into the buildings that surround us.
2. BUT – as in Hannah Starkey's large photos of women alienated in the stark steel and glass atriums and waiting rooms of modern commercial buildings – how that Modernist vision of soaring glass and steel buildings, far from offering the liberation from bourgeois convention and society which the early Modernists envisioned, turned out to be the perfect style for fascism, communism or, in our time, corporate capitalism. In all its guises, a style equated with power and control. Sure it successfully replaced the fussy decorativeness of Victorian and Edwardian architecture – with a new brutalism, a physical setting for the worship of youth, power, money, control.
3. One of the last items was a video by Karthik Pandian, bang up to date as it was completed this very year. Reversal Red Square Video (2015) is a highly finished sequence of photos of cool looking dudes in darkened bars or studio spaces, across which float red rectangles of varying sizes and shapes with a minimal humming soundtrack. Simple idea, but with production values much higher than your usual art video, and calmingly mesmeric in effect.
As I sat watching these red shapes drift across the screen I thought, What about the biggest and most blindingly obvious embedding of the black square in our lives today – the screen? Most of us spend most of our day looking at the screens of desktop computers, laptops, ipads, ipods, or our smart phones (as I am as I write this, as you are as you read this).
I was surprised there didn't appear to be a single work reflecting on the omnipresence of the rectangular screen in every aspect of modern life, and all the issues of power, control, connectivity, superficiality versus depth, speed versus reflection, and so on which we are all having to engage with whether we want to or not.
Financial Times review
Saturation Point review
An Instagram page
by Simon on March 9, 2015 • Permalink
Tagged Adrian Esparza, Adventures of the Black Square, Angela de la Cruz, Bauhaus, Běla Kolářová, Carl André, Clay Ketter, Dan Flavin, David Batchelor, Dóra Maurer, De Stijl, Dmitri Prigov, El Lissitsky, Gabriel Orozco, Gustav Klutsis, Jeffrey Steele, Jenny Holzer, Joseph Albers, Keith Coventry, László Moholy-Nagy, Lyubov Popova, Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Roberto Burle Marx, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Sarah Morris, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Suprematism, Wassily Kandinsky, Werner Mantz, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Zhao Yao
Posted by Simon on March 9, 2015
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/03/09/adventures-of-the-black-square-whitechapel-art-gallery/