Online Viewing (part one)

During the first phase of Lockdown Richard Guest and I made a few virtual gallery visits – here is our equally virtual conversation that followed…

Anselm Kiefer viewed on Frieze.com

David Locked down and desperate for art – the art world’s response to the emptying of galleries has been to try to tempt us to a new gallery experience online. we have decided to visit three ‘online viewing rooms’ to try to get our art fix:

The Frieze New York Viewing Room

https://frieze.com/fairs/frieze-viewing-room

Rodney Graham at the Lisson Gallery:

https://www.lissongallery.com/online-exhibitions/rodney-graham-painting-problems

Hauser & Wirth Menorca in VR

https://www.vip-hauserwirth.com/hauser-wirth-menorca-in-vr/

I managed to visit all three sites, but I’m not really sure what I saw. It looked like art, but it didn’t feel like art. It was really very odd. It was a very different kind of art experience: on one hand, it was just like visiting any website, but on the other there was a certain self-conscious quality to the presentation of the work that gave me quite a lot of insight into how and why I enjoy looking at art at all. How did you get on? 

Richard: Yes, I’ve visited all three and plan to return to them during the course of our chat. The differences in the galleries’ approaches are interesting. Not sure how much the different experiences are going to colour my reaction to the works.

Frieze is the most like an online shopping experience I think (including price tags), so the layout is clean and you get a nice big picture of each object on sale in the various galleries represented, but it’s pretty static.

The Lisson kicks off with a jaunt round the exhibition space in the form of a short video and follows it with the rest of the page taken up with pictures and descriptions of Rodney Graham’s works.

Hauser & Wirth’s tour of their new gallery in Menorca is the most ambitious of the three, using VR and game technology to simulate the experience of visiting a physical exhibition. It’s very easy to access, silent and begins outside, so you get to walk through the gallery doors. There are various marks to guide you to different viewing areas and other marks to access information about each work. The downside is that the image naturally warps as you move around, presumably because of the kind of camera used to shoot the show.

Of the three presentations, I like the Lisson Gallery the most – the film sketched out the layout of the show and the isolated images of the works filled in the gaps. The Hauser & Wirth is fun, but slightly frustrating – as in shoot-em-ups I want to be able to wander off the prescribed map and have a nosey around in the areas we don’t have access to.

Looking at these showed me how much I miss being in a physical space with objects and other people. When I visit a show it’s a little like stepping out of everyday reality for a while. When you’re accessing an exhibition online, you’re still rooted in your reality (your office, bedroom etc) – there’s no sense of occasion. I find it grabs my attention less maybe because it has to fight with other distractions.

David

Clearly online viewing is no substitute for a real experience, it is more like a menu than a meal.  I am a bit surprised at how inadequate it is. The differences are instructive as they tell me what I like about the whole gallery experience. I felt no emotional involvement in what I was looking at; there was little focus or intensity, and there were a lot of peripheral noises from the internet and from being at home. I was missing material detail, scale, true colour not to mention the charismatic presence of the art object.

The time things take to load is also an issue for me. I’m very impatient and want to look at everything all at once, but this is like traipsing round a very crowded exhibition in some kind of Soviet style queue. Not liberating at all.

I hate the cameras of the vr – so wide angle – distorted as you say, and very gamy.

Hauser and Wirth’s Minorca gallery

The filtering of an experience through many layers of media is something we are so used to it passses almost unnoticed a lot of the time, but online gallery viewing  is very self conscious and it gives us insight into the essence of contemporary art. I also felt the Lisson offering was strongest. But it begs the question: does the online viewing suit some work more than others?

Richard:

While we’re on the subject of substitutes for the real gallery experience I realised the other day that reading a monograph, an art magazine or a history of art is a more satisfying experience for me than trying to look at shows online. There is at least a little more tactility viewing art on the page (and fewer distortions in reproductions)…the only drawback is that you can’t view much new work this way (although, and I don’t know whether you are finding this during lockdown, I’m more interested in rediscovering old stuff in both art and music)…Anyway…online viewing…I guess it maybe works better for digital and video works, although scale is naturally dictated by the size of the screen you view them on (which in the case of Douglas Gordon for example would change the meaning of the piece because the screens used in gallery shows create a kind of installation, and you are missing the hum of projectors, the smell of the room etc) and you still have the problem of distraction as you say.

The three examples we’re looking at are broadly similar types of work – 2D paintings, drawings etc and looking at them again I’m struck by how much more I prefer the Lisson approach – I’m happier to spend more time looking at the work even though I don’t necessarily prefer the work to those in the H&W show – I’d like to get a closer look at the Paul McArthy painting for example.

I’m beginning to feel the online exhibition experience is closer to leafing through a slightly unsatisfying exhibition catalogue than anything else and the economics of the situation are less well hidden than they usually are – the physical art would usually act as a much bigger distraction from the obvious shopfront.

Do you want to talk about any of the individual works – I’ve just received an email about what sold at Frieze…

David

I found the filtering options on the Frieze site an odd way to categorise art. I can tell you though that there were no works by a transgender artist for $1m+. 

Choosing art on the Frieze website.

There were interesting works on the site, including this Robert Motherwell picture, 

Robert Motherwell via Frieze.com

but really we are just guessing what the real work is like – the scale, the texture of the unprimed cotton duck and of course the colour. One thing that I do know is that colour representation on screens is very variable. Overall, the Frieze site fulfilled my worst expectations of the online art experience. However, there are great online art experiences out there – I was blown away yesterday by this site: http://boschproject.org/#/book/

It allows you to get much closer to the works than you ever could in a museum setting, enabling a unique and intimate connection to the paintings. But they aren’t trying to sell you anything. What did sell?

Part Two here

Mark Wallinger’s ID – A Conversation (Part Three).

On May 1st, Richard Guest & I visited Mark Wallinger’s show  ID  at Hauser & Wirth London W1. Afterwards, we discussed the show by email. The following is the result of several weeks’ electronic toing and froing. You can read part Two here:

Mark Wallinger’s Ego

…David: In the way you describe it, Ego comes across as a possibly disingenuous but certainly disarming glimpse behind the scenes at the moment of artistic creation in 2016. I like to think the ink under his fingernails is from the Id paintings, and Ego represents a kind of dumb show which shows the conscious perception of the creative moment in the mind of the artist in all its glory and shoddiness. Maybe it started as a sarcastic gesture of either satisfaction or dissatisfaction. I can see that it is in a way describing the meeting of our modern selves and our cultural past, but can it simultaneously subvert and promote the creative act? Wallinger seems to be saying this is nothing, but is also everything…can we absorb that paradox?

The Id paintings seem like a cathartic release of the need to paint, to make marks and of course the need to make big canvasses to fill that huge space. Can’t do that with a couple of sheets of A4. They are giant Rorschach tests, no more, no less. On the one hand they seem to be a weak echo of Yves Klein’s Body paintings , on the other because they are so many and they are all the-same-but-different they seem to be devaluing and denigrating the gestural mark in art.  Wallinger seems to be saying ‘marks are nice to look at and fun to make, but in the end one mark or the other – take your pick – call it a face or a cloud if you like – but it makes no odds. All that remains are just the marks. Everything else is your interpretation, based on the primitive parts of your brain that needed to make sense of abstract shapes when we were hunting in the wild and painting in caves. Sort of Anti-Impressionism. Anti-transcendence. We are not in the wild any more.

Mark Wallinger ID Painting 29 2015 Acrylic on canvas 360 x 180 cm / 141 3/4 x 70 7/8 in Photo: Alex Delfanne

Richard: I’m not so sure…maybe this is a tentative (not so?) step in that direction. One definition of the Id is: the part of the mind in which innate instinctive impulses and primary processes are manifest. Are these paintings titled Id because Wallinger followed his instinct to make marks with his own hands, rather than develop another clean, cool, detached neo-conceptual work? Or has he found a conceptually acceptable excuse to be a painter again (I’m interested in their conception. The canvases are divided vertically down the middle, so that the two sides of the painting roughly mirror each other. There are variations in some marks, which underlines the hand-made quality. But in some of the paintings there are clear central dividing lines, like the ones you get if you try to create a mirror image in image manipulation software (such as Photoshop) (very difficult to get rid of, believe me…) Which makes me wonder whether MW created his images digitally and then used them as a model for the eventual paintings).

They look like they were a lot of fun to make (and I’m disturbed that so many of them suggest to me scenes from Star Trek). And I’d hazard MW was a lot more physically involved (he, not a studio assistant, made these – they are effectively massive finger paintings) in the creation of the final objects than he was with Ego and Superego, so there’s a lot more of him present in the Id works.

Proportionally, the paintings take up a lot of space at Hauser & Wirth. If this show is about the act of creation, which I think it is, does this mean Wallinger is placing more value on the Id than the Ego and Superego in the creative act? Do you think the paintings have more worth as works (and consequently monetary value)?

Mark Wallinger id Painting 56 2015 Acrylic on canvas 360 x 180 cm / 141 3/4 x 70 7/8 in Photo: Alex Delfanne

David: It clearly is no accident that the paintings are linked to the primitive part of the brain, and photographs and printing are linked to the conscious. Photographs capture an image of something that already exists. The moment of the shutter opens is the moment of cognisance: analogous to the awakening of consciousness of the ego as it observes the world and perceives its own distance from it. Paintings – particularly abstract expressionist paintings like the kind the id paintings reference – seek to be making visible the viscera of the internal subconscious without reference to external reality. The Id paintings feel like therapy, but their context points to an ironical rather than a straight reading of them. Freud was a long time ago and any reference to him feels retro, knowing – like wearing a tweed jacket and smoking a pipe.

To me it is like this. Wallinger feels (deep down in the unconscious part of his brain) the need to make art. He gets a three metre canvas (well, he gets quite a few of them because after all he has a big show coming up) and starts to finger paint black on white in a sort of planned-unplanned way. It feels honest and direct; but Wallinger is reflective and oblique. Maybe he did do a digital version first. But I think the tactile element is important here. Having made a couple of id paintings he sits back with a coffee and a cigarette (reaching a bit here). In this contemplative moment of self-awareness he sees himself clearly. He is a creator of work, yes. But the work is unsatisfactory, tawdry, second-hand. And unbidden the image of the Sistine Chapel comes to mind. He compares himself to Michelangelo…maybe arrogantly, maybe abjectly. He touches his own fingers together in a sardonic act. Both acknowledging and taking the piss out of his own self, his work and his situation as a leading contemporary artist. He is in that moment God, Adam and Wallinger. Then another level of mind above all that kicks and and says “hey, you know what? That might be a work there you know?” Ego is born. It is rather a feeble specimen next to the lusty Id paintings and the cold, blank Superego and I wonder who might have the courage to buy it ahead of the other larger archivally made gallery fillers…

Mark Wallinger’s ID – A Conversation (Part Two).

On May 1st, Richard Guest & I visited Mark Wallinger’s show  ID  at Hauser & Wirth London W1. Afterwards, we discussed the show by email. The following is the result of several weeks’ electronic toing and froing. Here is Part Two – you can read Part One here.

 

My accidental version of Shadow Walker in Lisson Grove – the twins in the camo trousers I was surreptitiously trying to photograph cropped off at the head!

David: Ever Since and Shadow Walker left me pretty cold I have to say, but there are a couple of things that make me scratch my head. Shadow Walker is on a screen resting on the floor, leaning against the wall. It was shot on a phone of some sort I think, it is very poor quality footage anyway, and it’s vertical). Ever Since is the reverse – very high quality and projected directly onto the wall. Leaning stuff has been everywhere recently..so maybe I am tired of it, but is the slipshod presentation of Shadow Walker a little studied – do you really feel any spontaneity looking at it or is Wallinger tying to be too clever by juxtaposing all these disparate idioms?

As soon as we move into the North Gallery we are (if we had been going round the right way) greeted by Ego which is a pair of peeling inkjet prints ‘shot on an iPhone’ we are told. They are stuck on the wall any old how, with blu-tac or similar it looked like. Again there is a massive and deliberate contrast between this and the standardised size of the Id paintings which seem to have the correct production values for H&W. Does this contrast work for you, and does it seem to be a clue to unlocking Wallinger’s approach?

Ego – Gallery tour in progress…we hung back.

Richard: Wallinger could be trying to be too clever, but I prefer to think he’s problem-solving, without regard to aesthetics – finding the most direct way to express what he wants to say and going with it (the resulting object is what it is, its aesthetic a part of the message). For me there’s a freshness to this show, which could not have been achieved if it had been all paintings or all videos (But in answer to your question, I don’t feel any spontaneity looking at Shadow Walker, more a wave of ennui crashing over me).

Yes, I think there is a clue in Ego to what Wallinger is doing. He is an artist, regardless of media or technique, who understands that everything he makes has an intrinsic aesthetic value, in part based on what it looks like and in part what that appearance “means”. (To a certain extent, I think he sends up his role as an artist) Ego, for example, would mean something quite different had it been painted. He’s clearly alluding to Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel (and possibly the opening title sequence of The South Bank Show), but the image was made in the quickest way possible and reproduced without fuss. Ego carries an idea as much as any of the other work in the show, so its appearance may be lowly in comparison with the Id paintings, but its worth as a statement is equal. Do you like it as a work?

David: Honestly, it’s only because I am talking to you about it that I have even stopped to think about it. It is not just ephemeral but scruffy…slapdash and proud. You are completely right I think to suggest that the method of production is integral to the meaning, but whether it really is produced without regard to ultimate aesthetic impact is hard to say. Outside the gallery context this work would just be two pieces of paper – within it, it feels like a deliberate old-school provocation. It is almost Dadaist in character and Wallinger must know that. It is the key work of the show I think, but I have difficulty with it . I am curious about its conception…but it seems to forestall my scepticism by referencing the most famous and sublime depiction of creation (and by implication artistic creation) while simultaneously seeming to disrespect it by casually presenting it as a second-hand experience.

Ego installation view …appropriately shot on a blurry phone.

It’s all a bit too cool for me. It is very far from the impulse that first drove a cave dweller to pick up a piece of burnt charcoal and draw a horse on the walls of a cave. It falls into the category of comment rather than expression. Problem solving is a very positive way of looking at it. For me it is part of a sub genre of critical commentary in an artistic medium. Is that unfair?

Richard: As far as Wallinger’s method is concerned, I’m not so sure it is that far removed from the Paleolithic decorating impulse – the cave dwellers would have used a quick and convenient method to convey their message, with the materials they had at hand, I think, without regard to aesthetics (because they were in the process of inventing them).

For me, Ego represents the shortest route from conception to creation in the show. It appears to be a joke, but it’s a complex one:

• Wallinger unfairly compares the craft of his work to that of Michaelangelo
• (whilst simultaneously daring the gallery to sell inkjet prints of photographs he took on his phone)
• and makes light of the fact that he has spent little time crafting the finished work (once he’d had the idea, he surrendered it to a mechanical means of production)
• he asks the question, “where do the ideas for my art come from?”
• and answers it, “from me and my accumulated knowledge of art” (both hands are his)
• and finally he invites the audience to laugh at the shoddiness (and cheek) of it all
• and asks, “have you got the guts to buy this?”

What I found really interesting about it as an image was that in it Wallinger has black dirt under his fingernails and the Id paintings are all black – does this suggest we can date Ego to the same period? Did he produce Ego in a creative rush after finishing a particularly satisfying Id painting (if so that makes his joke even funnier)? Do you think he achieved personal satisfaction from executing any of the Id paintings, or was his approach to them as conceptual and cool as it appears to have been with Ego?

David: That is as good an all round picture of how Ego functions as we are going to get, I think. But what it tells me is that if Mark Wallinger is anything to go by when we look around we no longer do it with our eyes, but with our iPhones; and what we see is not life in the raw, but a series of references – images quoted from the past. As if only by looking in the mirror of Michelangelo’s Creations can we correctly place our own. Our ability to directly experience things is compromised by our knowledge of art and our insatiable image capturing technology. There has been a Fall – a loss of innocence and there is no going back. This robs art of its primal power of redefining how you look at something on its own terms as if for the first time. It is always doing so as part of a network of critical references, and each work is merely an inflection of this ongoing critical environment. In a way it’s like the block chain security devised by Bitcoin where each transaction is recorded onto an ever-growing chain of verified transactions. If an incoming transaction does not have all the previous ones attached it will be rejected. Works of art in the critical canon have to absorb and reflect all previous works and critical positions: if they do not then they cannot be verified critically and cannot sit within the canon. They are in outer darkness critically and commercially. Meanwhile the critical canon becomes ever more bloated, unwieldy and impenetrable.

Read Part Three here

Mark Wallinger’s ID – A Conversation (Part One).

On May 1st, Richard Guest & I visited Mark Wallinger’s show  ID  at Hauser & Wirth London W1. Afterwards, we discussed the show by email. The following is the result of several weeks’ electronic toing and froing.

Wallinger’s Superego 2016 Stainless steel, glass mirror, motor 350 x 160 x 160 cm  Photo: Alex Delfanne

David: Firstly let me confess that I don’t know much about Mark Wallinger or his work apart from the copies of the Stubbs horse paintings which I prefer to the originals but consider pretty pointless. What (unusually) made me want to see this show were some reviews of it that I saw. I didn’t read them too closely but the fact they reached me in my bunker caused me to think that Hauser and Wirth are trying to reshape the critical landscape that art inhabits in a way that hasn’t been done (in London at least) since White Cube thrust itself upon us about fifteen years ago, and in a way that say Anthony d’Offay or the Lisson gallery have in the past. Is there a bit of a curatorial turf war in progress and is Mark Wallinger a pawn or a player? Or should I just be looking at the work?

Richard: I can see H&W as a hipper D’Offay (a gallery I used to love). Not sure what MW’s role is, but the exhibition’s an interesting one. The works I think of when I think of MW are Ecce Homo (1999) (a human-sized Jesus on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square), State Britain (2007) (a recreation in Tate Britain of peace campaigner Brian Haw’s anti-war protest display outside Parliament) and a video work called Angel. They were all conceptual works to a certain extent, but ones that had a strong emotional effect.

Shall we talk about the work in the order we saw it?

David: Well, the show comprises just six works (although one is a series of paintings) sparsely occupying the two pristine HW spaces on Saville Row. The first piece we saw in the South Gallery was Superego (2016) which is essentially a large mirrored triangular prism mounted on a rotating pole about three metres off the ground in the centre of a large bare room. I was watching it for a little while before it dawned on me that it was a replica of the famous Scotland Yard Sign with mirrored faces. The mirrors reflect only the room, and first I read it just as an optical toy, but then when I remembered where I had seen the shape before and it assumed another meaning in my mind (and probably only in my mind). The blankness of the mirrored facets reflecting the empty gallery although defining the motion in a hypnotic way seemed to imply a mindless automaton –  a machine efficiently ruling an empty world, indifferent to the futility of its task. Is this some kind of comment about the Met Police or is Wallinger just appropriating and abstracting a familiar shape in a way derivative of Jasper Johns’ Flag? (Amazing how much contemporary art seems to owe to that piece – much more than to Duchamp or anyone it seems to me).

Richard: Wallinger likes to play with British (pop cultural) icons – he displayed a shiny, super-reflective, Tardis at the Hayward Gallery in 2009 (Time and Relative Dimensions in Space, 2001). In that case, it looked as if Doctor Who’s police-box-shaped time machine was dematerialising in front of the viewer. The police again…

My gut feeling is that Wallinger is taking the Johns route, which coincidentally (or not) brings with it a certain amount of wry comment (in the 1970s, to the little kid me, the revolving sign, when seen on TV news, communicated the idea of law and order, and the authority (and possible omniscience) of the police. And did it succinctly. Who else had a revolving sign in the UK at the time? – it was positively space age!).

So with Superego, Mark Wallinger has stripped the object of its crime-fighting power and presents us with what? A deliberately dumb object. A symbol of authority transformed into a decorative object. Where Superego differs from Johns’ Flag is that the flag is in an ongoing relationship with the nation it represents. Wallinger’s Superego is time-locked to a certain extent; I feel like there is a definable demographic who would “get it”.

Definition:

superego

suːpərˈiːɡəʊ,-ˈɛɡəʊ,sjuː-/

noun

Psychoanalysis

noun: superego; plural noun: superegos; noun: super-ego; plural noun: super-egos

1. the part of a person’s mind that acts as a self-critical conscience, reflecting social standards learned from parents and teachers.

“the father is the model for the superego”

Of course, it may just be a revolving mirror, ha ha.

In any case, I like how big it is, and the fact that it seems, initially at least, not to be saying anything. Is it the odd-man-out in the exhibition?

David: Maybe it is just an image of our superego as the police force of the mind, tirelessly reflecting society and its values back at us. It could be that literal. It’s hard to say if it’s the odd one out because MW seems keen to avoid any deliberate pattern to his work – at least in appearance – but there is a Freudian theme to the titles in the show. There is a sentence in the gallerist blurb which made my heart sink as I read it : “Wallinger utilises Sigmund Freud’s terms id, ego and superego in an interrogation of the psyche, the self and the subject”.  Oh dear. I don’t know how much clinical weight Freud’s definition of levels of consciousness still carries as a description of the mind but in art they seem to be familiar labels. Too familiar, perhaps. But we are getting ahead of ourselves: we came to id and ego after superego in the North Gallery, so once again we are going round an exhibition backwards, but we seem to like it better that way!

Found myself driving by one of the roundabouts on the A10, close to Orrery’s location. I did not find my muse here though…

As it was we came to the three video works next. For me the most persuasive of the three pieces was Orrery (2016) – four journeys around a roundabout made at different times of the year shown on four screens where the viewer was in the middle. It was quite a neat trick to turn the commonplace experience of driving around a roundabout into a description of the cosmos but the other two video pieces – a filmed shadow walk and a static tableau of a barber’s shop – were less successful for me.  I think we both have reservations about video in galleries, or maybe just short attention spans…did these work for you?

Richard: Yes, I liked Orrery and its air of flat artlessness (it made me feel nostalgic for video art in the Eighties (specifically the late night spot on our local ITV channel, which I watched religiously).

Ever Since (2012), the static tableau of a barber’s shop was interesting for having no discernible action taking place, and at first I thought it was one element of a video installation – Shadow Walker being the other part. There was a nice tension in the room between the static image of one and the relentless motion of the other. I liked the mystery of Ever Since. Seen in isolation, Shadow Walker reminded me of a lot of boring (not in a good way), handheld video made in the Nineties and 2000s). Watching someone’s (Wallinger?) shadow as they progress along a street from the perspective of a handheld camera quickly pales as a viewing experience. I’m sure this is the point, but I was impatient to get away from the video after a couple of minutes. Having said that, Shadow Walker creates a nice bit of visual noise, which destabilises the exhibition and keeps me interested in what Wallinger chose to show.

…(Part Two to follow)…

Under Golden Pond

Pierre Huyge at Hauser and Wirth

 

Installation view – note real umbrella outside.

 

 

Sheltering from the rain at lunchtime I dived into Hauser’s North Gallery and was immediately submerged in a world of aquatic mystery. The vast space has three largish aquaria full of pond life and sometimes illuminated, a large concrete reclining figure (with puddles), a sanded gallery wall and two fairly extraordinary gallery films.

Fly floats eternally

In the film that caught my attention an extreme closeup camera probed the depths of amber to reveal the insect lives preserved but buried within. The silvery carapaces of flies or the powdery patterns on a spider’s egg are bathed in a golden light and filmed in an epic slow motion. The stillness of an eternal dying moment is briefly dignified in the flickering light of the projector.This was truly eye opening. In the other film a monkey wearing (I think) a Kabuki mask is alone in a Japanese flat. I did not get past the strangeness and I could not easily tie it to the other one.

Apparently the show ‘reveals a chronology which spans 30 million years until the present day” Which seems like a tenuous connector, but there is a curious mind at work layering up art history (because apparently the pond is culture from Monet’s garden) with prehistoric remains and a live pond. It does have a certain hard eyed industrial mood. The illuminated cubes of the tanks in particular have a Blade Runnerish feel. Art has lost the ideal of a signature style – for now eclectic work is welcomed if you happen to be rich or electrified – Gallerists abhor  but is generating critical verbiage to replace it. One to watch…