Whitworth Galleries Relaunch

When it comes to the newly revamped, extended and rebranded Whitworth (Manchester, UK) Gallery, timings the thing. 

Or rather, a misstep and a series of unsynchronized stumbles. 

The truth is that the relaunch has been, well, a bit creaky.

On the up side, the new spaces are pretty impressive. The visitors can flow around the building taking in the shiny glass and light of the very large, over-priced cafe, bob into the sizeable side galleries, slide through the shifting ambience of the cluster of spaces. It has turned the act of visiting the Whitworth into something of an event. A job well done. 

Then the dysfunctional aspects of the rebuild start to show - toilets are a bit thin on the ground, the intentionally photogenic cafe is basically an uncomfortable glass corridor on stilts serving poor coffee.

Obviously the ‘creative industries’ shop model raises its cynical and oxymoronic head in every institution paying back its government funding. 

So there’s twee papery ‘objets’ that pepper the gift / bookshop; wooden things, tasteful notebooks, expensive faux-artisanal trinkets allowing the middle-brow ex-graduates to feel distanced from base consumerism whilst feeding their inclusion.

War references pepper the displays. Presumably because the relaunch was originally to be last November and synchronized with the commemorative 11th of November’s Red Poppy day.

Cai Guo-Qiang’s huge 45 metre long, 4 metre high gunpowder drawing “Unmanned Nature” does look vaguely like a landscape drawing minus any delicacy of line. The DVD playbacks of his vast firework and gunpowder displays seemed to enjoy blowing things up far to much considering the dour thematics.

Cornelia Parker’s a decent artist with a backlog of irritatingly efficient and occasionally playful works. The apparent simplicity of her smaller object-based neo-conceptual work: silver dollars reconfigured as threads as long as Niagara Falls and The Statue of Liberty are high, a glass drum, orangey-beige rectangles of canvas linings from Turner paintings, and so on, are her real strength.

She also has a tendency to produce larger gallery-filling installations; casts of pavement cracks lying horizontally but raised from the floor; crushed tubas and trumpets, flattened silver service utensils, all hovering off the ground on fishing line strong wires. I suspect that the local art schools will soon be filled with the suspended flotsam and jetsam of students bedrooms.

Reconstructed here, her most successful example is probably the early ‘signature’ work ‘Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View’: the component bobs and bits of a garden shed literally suspended mid-explosion. A centred light bulb throws large elongated shadows on the gallery walls giving the work a scale way beyond its physical heft, It’s still a visually effective construct.

Less successful is Parker’s new ‘War Room’ installation, a high-ceilinged oblong room with its walls and ceiling covered by large perforated sheets, left-over paper negatives resulting from factory production of commemorative red paper and plastic poppies. It feels like a large porous tent but lacks any atmosphere.  

Off on a tangent is the Karpadis Foundation’s dumping (or donation depending on how you want to look at it) of a 90 piece collection of American and British art - paintings, prints, photograph and photo-process based pieces. The Lisa Oppenheim 2011 reprint of 1876 heliograms look like grey circles stamped onto burnt baking trays. Almost reflective, almost an image they work remarkably well.

Speaking of all things Karpadis, Johnnie Shand Kydd’s “Hydra” is a length of corridor wall covered by 3 panels of black and white photographs from Shand’s ‘extensive and varied portfolio focus on his yearly trips to the Geek island of Hydra at the invitation of the art collector and Whitworth patron Pauline Karpadis.’  (as present in wall C’s photograph number 2 and number 16)

Shand Kydd’s (see wall C’s photograph number 35) holiday snaps aspire to being a historical record of the group of artists cursed with the title ‘Young British Artists’ as they rose to playful moneyed success. They succeed very well in these terms but the rather cheaply done book of these images piled in the Whitworth Gallery bookshop suggest a cultural value that they can’t really justify. 

The self-regarding, look-at-me-mummy dimension of Shand Kydd’s work could be compared to Warhol’s homegrown stable of wannabe superstars; louche urban-types just hanging about. 

Warhol got away with it because his scattershot reportage jigsawed into an overview of a social system which had critical bite, both of Capitalism’s playground indulgence of the narcissist and the seductive banality of accumulated images. 

Shand Kydd’s pictures may, however, be entirely appropriate to the tone of the YBA - a recycling of historical models and a case of diminishing returns - but there’s a further problem. It seems tonally incorrect for the revamped 2015 incarnation of the Whitworth to restage a point in history when art as commerce openly ruled the roost, a celebration of socio-economic conservatism and critical surface skating, which is both decades old and, even first time round, a little lacking in substance.

And speaking of Young British Artists, Sarah Lucas (see Johnnie Shand Kydd’s wall A photograph number 6 and wall C’s photograph number 10) has a mini-retrospective upstairs. There’s three walls of wallpaper showing a regular pattern of domed breasts made from cigarettes or as tabloid-loving Lucas prefers “Tits In Space”, seedy stuffed stocking sculptures, large photos of Lucas scowling in a fuck-you kind of way - the usual Lucas alphabet of things. It’s all fine but really just another outing for things which have been seen time and time again.

By the time one leaves the building this tangle of implied nepotism and retro-staging of New Labour style grinning optimism leaves an uncomfortable niggling in the stomach.

Parker’s side room projection of a Noam Chomsky interview, one in which he does his usual informed unpicking of global feudal power structures in the tone of a tired and disappointed headmaster, suddenly seems depressingly appropriate.

The Day My Mother Touched Robert Ryman

Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery (UK) has been extended, buffed and recently reopened to a fanfare of audience-attracting publicity. And, to be fair, prior to its temporary closure for redevelopment, it’s had a decent run of shows.

The history of a city’s moments of significant application to this thing called ‘art’ is not however built on firework displays at the launch of gallery extensions but on an investment in an art practice which needles, resonates or questions its own function.

The splendidly hermetic exercise that is the gallery / project space / event ‘facilitator’ (delete as appropriate) ‘titledateduration’ continues its determination to head in the opposite direction of government funded institutions and promote work which refuses to be easily comprehensible. 

Currently on display at ‘titledateduration’ is Stefan Sulzer‘s film and book combination ‘The Day My Mother Touched Robert Ryman’. The touching in question being fingertips on a white canvas rather than Mr Ryman himself.

Sulzer recounts the possibly fictional story of a woman’s encounter with Robert Ryman’s work followed by the woman’s homeward bound reflection on the encounter, intercut with a secondary author-narrators speculations about Ryman’s work. Narrated through the text in a book and as a voiceover on a short film it builds its own complicated layering of surfaces remembered, surfaces implied and the digital ghosts of surfaces experienced.

In the digital projection a static camera has recorded the landscape moving past a train’s rain blotched window, twitchy sliding layers of visual information. The camera’s lens doesn’t appear too clean. There are gaps in the houses, cars and trees of the world passing by outside exposing a misty haze blurred horizon line of mountains. 

Impressively vast expanses of water suggest a wavering coastline but are probably the muted grey-green mass of the Hudson River, as referenced in the accompanying book and DVD’s documentary-style voice over.

The suspicion remains that the text has been edited from the film’s accompanying monologue. Alternatively the soundtrack could be an expanded version of the written piece. Or possibly neither. The voice transcribing writing into speech may be doing just that. 

What is certain is the eccentric spacing in the layout of the printed sentences: blank pages alternating with isolated sentences sandwiched between short paragraphs - basically a lot of white paper infected with language.

Ryman is understood to be an artist who operates a balancing act between the idea-based blankness of Conceptual Art and old school abstract monochrome painting by the simple act of painting white paintings; paintings with no reference point outside the fact of paint on a flat surface.  

In actual fact, Ryman plays with scale, the different material supports of the paintings and the variety of ways that a square can be attached to a wall. The seductive material complexity of Ryman’s practice is usually overlooked.

Central to the practice is an emphasis on the fact that displaying blankness isn’t a simple reductive repetition of sameness, it’s a battle with the impossibility of a blankness which can only be represented or re-presented by difference.

In Sulzer's work the various material supports of white paper, filmed glass, ill-defined horizon lines and the mental interiors of fictive narrations seem to suggest the impossibility of a pure visual experience of staged near blankness. 

The one thing required is the experience-event of a Ryman painting to wipe the slate clean and silence all this muttering. Which may be Sulzer’s point. Or maybe not. 

It really doesn’t matter. 

Any exhibition / show / presentation which leaves a visitor wrong-footed in such an insidious and polite way is an automatic success. 

Playtime

Once upon a time in Manchester (UK) there was a politically convenient, widely held (and strategically promoted) belief that Manchester’s Castlefield Gallery only showed the works of tired old men, all churning out blocky abstract paintings.This was a period of insular playground scuffles over potential ‘arts’ funding so Castlefield had become a target for hungry young ‘art’ types enviously lusting after the filthy lucre keeping the thing economically afloat. 

The combatants of the period have retired, bloody-mindedly continued their practice or now have a gallery and / or teaching position. The infighting is subtler and, more often than not, concerned with maintaining rather than acquiring status in the local / provincial / UK ‘art world’ (delete as appropriate). 

In the Manchester of now a recurrent gripe is the Cornerhouse Galleries over-reliance on cinema related, themed or inflected exhibitions. Actually, looking back a few years at the rolling programme, this isn’t true. Of course pictures that move about a bit or the ubiquitous ‘digital media’ feature fairly regularly but, for god’s sake, it is 2015 and to be expected. 

A fairer criticism is the obviousness of most films referenced - here artists have to take a considerable amount of the blame - leaving a post-exhibition feeling that you’ve attended a powerpoint display by a middlebrow academic. Not uninteresting just a little tepid.

The current exhibition, and the last one prior to the whole art centre’s rebirth as ‘HOME’, is very solidly film related as ‘...nine artists take inspiration from film director Jacques Tati’s 1967 comedy masterpiece Playtime...’  

In actual fact five of the of the exhibits pre-date the exhibition by a number of years. The appropriate thematics of four of these pieces means that they can be conveniently shoehorned into the show. With a little more curatorial rigour Gabriel Lester’s ‘Melancholia In Arcadia’ - lace curtains seemingly suspended in time whilst being ruffled by a light breeze - would have been saved for a future  retrofitted affair.

Tati’s film is stylish and odd and extremely hard to date accurately; it’s from 1967 but feels like a 1957 speculation about the future. In it Tati’s avuncular and ‘befuddled’ gent gets lost in the blocks and clean lines of a Modernist Paris. Pieces in Cornerhouse’s ‘Playtime’ occasionally reference particular scenes from the film or work as compact tonal critiques of the contemporary urban world.

Lester’s other work here is ‘Bouncer’ (2014) a horseshoe shaped series of thirty saloon-type swinging doors, one after the other, which crash too behind the gallery visitor only revealing yet another set of the swing doors. Physically they’re clumsy things: the hinges are too large, the wooden doors surface have the quality of cheap compressed laminated board and the crash on closing is mildly irritating rather than sonically effective.

Niklas Goldbach’s ‘Habitat‘ (2008) is a looped DVD showing the same man crossing his own path in the enclosed greys and brown blocks of a French Modernist estate, finally chasing himself until the routine starts all over again. 

The other ‘film’ piece is Shannon Plumb’s ‘Madison and E 24th Street’ (2008) in which Plumb, with fake moustache and dressed as a disheveled and harried businessman, stands in front of a screen showing the streets intersection and feigns hailing a taxi. 

Andy Graydon’s ‘Untitled (Plate Tectonics)’ (2009) has four record players, one each side of a square central pillar; each surface has shallow shelves with vinyl records sat on them. Each record appears to contain the ambient noises of different gallery spaces around the world. Four can be played at once with the sounds muffled, but amplified by, speakers attached to the surfaces of eight squares of plywood hanging in a circle around the record players.

Rosa Barber’s ‘One Way Out’ (2009 - 2014) has the gallery floor penetrated by a human scaled transparent tube. The lower level has a floor projector positioned presumably to feed a long loop of running film celluloid through the gap’, the accompanying sound spilling through to infect the space. Unfortunately, the mechanism was broken so it was an elaborate hole and projector combination.

Functionally ‘interacive’, Naomi Kashiwagi’s ‘Swingtime’ (2014) is a slightly raised plateau of rubber mats with a centred frame and two childrens swings which trigger pre-recorded outdoor sounds; it’s clunky and underwhelming.

Jan St. Werner’s ‘Molecular Hypnotics’ (2014) (or ‘Molocular Hypnotics’ according to the wall text) is ‘a bespoke light and sound environment’ or rather a spartan white and grey-blue room, electronic throbs, pulses, and squeals accompany Mark E Smith’s voice snarling impenetrable narratives through his phlemgy disdain. As often happens, even for the dystopian sci-fi simplicity there’s too many ill-considered elements - confusion over the title and a small square framed kaleidoscopic fragmented image (possibly an iris to keep the ocular bit going) - which niggles even when experiencing the thing.

In the face of freely roaming corporate corruption and economic instability, the atmosphere of the time is one of confusion and resignation hidden by an enforced rictus grin of affability. The show may actually be very revealing of the cultural tone of the time but to a large degree by accident. ‘Playtime’ really requires at least the suggestion of the flutter of an anarchist’s heart to pose the possibility of a healthy opposition to the castrating banalities of bureaucratization.

Gretta's Gabriel, Gabriel's Gretta

Now perched on the Manchester / Salford (UK) border, ‘International 3’ gallery is currently home to Maeve Rendle’s two-screen installation piece ‘Gretta’s Gabriel, Gabriel’s Gretta’.

Gretta and Gabriel are a husband and wife couple Rendle has lifted from James Joyce’s short story ‘The Dead’; a story in which an Xmas get together terminates in Gretta’s attention drifting from her husband’s advances due to the distant warblings of a male tenor’s interpretation of the old Irish song ‘The Lass Of Aughrim’. 

With this starting point in mind Rendle has filmed tenor Michael Jones in the act of learning how to perform the song.

Far too often the formal construction of the component bits and pieces of an exhibition ape the spacing and space of a clothes shop or apple boutique without any attempt to take on board the centrality of this formal architecture to the substance of an ‘art’ show. Rendle’s displays foreground this aspect of staging, often in an idiosyncratic combination of the pragmatic and the anthropomorphic. ‘Gretta’s Gabriel, Gabriel’s Gretta’ is no different.

Two Sony playback cubes of different sizes show DVDs of Jones getting to grips with ‘The Lass Of Aughrim’, their plinths are different heights and a slightly diagonal spacing has the backs of the devices facing each other so the looped DVDs can’t be seen at the same time. Viewers circle the piece and alternate the visual playback experienced. Not that there’s much to actually see, a left shoulder and the cheek and chin of a turned head listening to headphones. One head seems to be gauging the tuning shifts by tentatively whistling along to the song being played back, the other singing in unison to the presumed playback of the song.

But there is a degree of trust on the audiences part; the tenor may indeed not be hearing or singing anything, soundtracks are as easily applied to electronic images as they are to the imaginatively remembered.

The indulgent and maudlin implications of using an old Irish song never takes hold over the piece. The unpicking of the insular mechanics of language, a straining towards articulation by the singer, retains the feeling of a performative distance from emotional sincerity but insinuates a keening aspiration to learn by rote how to actually engage with emotional demands. 

Joyce has always seemed smart, cold and aloof but drawn to and drawing from the intimate and particular. Distance and ill communication in one migraine inducing package with a healthy dollop of sentimentality (knowingly mangled along with the English language).

Joyce’s ironic detachment from his own biography allowed him to deal with the intimate at several removes, a myth-making process which helps the minutia of the everyday in his books resonate with an additional significance, and helped him to make the provincial feel universal. At odds with this is a certain literariness which both hides expressive intent and allows its articulation. 

Rendle’s installation echoes these onion layers of complexity by transcribing them into spatial intimations of intimacy and distance, closeness and rejection, engagement and performative indifference and yet still retains a human warmth to the whole gameplay.

Sensory War

Manchester Art Galleries (UK) are currently home to ‘The Sensory War (1914 - 2014)’ which is billed as ‘the responses of a range of artists over the past century to the sensory effects of warfare through a series of themes’. 

Indeed the underlying thematic of the senses assailed by the technology of war is paralleled by the sheer quantity of work and the relentless role call of sub-categories: ‘Militarising Bodies, Manufacturing War’; ‘Pain and Succour’, ‘Rupture and Rehabilitation’; ‘Shocking The Senses’; ‘The Embodied Ruin’, and on and on. 

In reality there’s probably half-a-dozen exhibitions here. 

On a positive note ‘Sensory War’ has more than enough ‘art’ quality to justify several visits.

The works attempt to make sense of the chaos of war whilst often being seduced by the scale and visual beauty of the carnage; from First World War bombardments to the games console ‘virtuality’ of the predator drone.

Georges Leroux’s painting ‘L’Enfer (Hell)’ (1921) shows a First World War landscape: cement greys, porridgy mud, green-grey smoke and interchangeable bones, rubble and twigs. A similar post-Apocalyptic entropy and decay radiates from CRW Nevinson’s ‘The Harvest Of Battle’ (1919), a large canvas with a middle ground of trudging wounded surrounded by dead grey greens and blues, slashes of turned buttermilk yellow; the dead expanse of Passchendaele and Ypres.

The flat certainty of photography as trustable ‘fact’ is used as a blank report (with aesthetic tweaks ) of our violent assaults on bodies or, in Richard Mosse’s aerochrome photograph of a valley in the Congo ‘Poison Glen’ (2012), as a restaging of chemical processes which parallel the war’s toxic defoliation of landscape and soil.

Keeping things traditional in artistic terms, Sophie Jodoin’s ‘Helmets and Gasmasks’ series (2007 - 2009) uses the subtle tonal complexity of conte drawings to show the charcoal blur of distorted faces trapped inside an exoskeleton of the circles, tubes, studs and straps of a gasmask. There is no interest in a simple fetishizing of the enveloping thingness of archaic technology but like Mosse’s photo-work there is an instinctive understanding of the contrary seductive aestheticization enforced by the medium.

Herbert R Cole’s 1918 watercolours of faces torn, deformed and disfigured by war injury and Harold Sandys Williamson’s pencil and watercolour side view of a ‘Human Sacrifice In An Operating Theatre’ (1918) are additionally disturbing because of the casual politeness of the medium. Roy Lichenstein’s ‘Wall Explosion II’ (1965), a roughly oval cartoon explosion constructed from layers of brightly painted metal, remains a joyous whoop of American ‘positivity’ lathered in art irony.

The moving image quite reasonably gets a digitally slick appearance in the tragically bland and clean dystopia of Larissa Sansour’s ‘Nation Estate’ (2012) and the three screen cinematic sweep of Dinh Q Le’s Vietnam documentary ‘The Farmers And The Helicopters’ (2006).

The works in ‘Sensory War’ emphasise the degree to which art is a transcriptive system of equivalences, necessarily informed by editing and simplifications, but nevertheless straining towards the most appropriate stylistic incarnation to carry more than can ever be shown or even re-presented. 

The more successful individual works succeed in being depressingly appropriate visual equivalents for historical moments when human beings showed their latent impulse to socially and politically naturalize a clinical indifference towards each other.

Technoscientific progressions may depend on increasingly subtle understandings of electrical, mechanical and material interactions but they have always been at the expense of a secure sense of ‘selfhood’, psychic solidity as it were. Transgressing the secure frame of the body only serves to imply the liquid fluidity of the human psyche, its mutability and, by extension, its potential inhumanity.

Noel Clueit : Towards Monumental Sculpture

Spinningfields Manchester (UK) is a fairly compact mini-metropolis of commerce; all shiny glass, tweaked Modernist blocks, ground floor chain restaurants and bars, a ‘business, retail and residential development’. The kind of thing that arouses people in suits.

Bureau gallery has been based at 3 Hardman Square, right in the belly of the beast, for a number of years, using the extremely large foyer space for exhibitions and art events. 

Currently fighting for attention in the corporate emptiness that signals cash and success is Noel Clueit’s two-part installation ‘Towards Monumental Sculpture’ and it’s nice to report that in a straight fight Clueit has managed to win. 

The exhibition has two discrete parts: a large billboard sized wooden framework displaying two close-ups of areas of, according to Clueit, Henry Moore sculptures; the other end of the foyer has two touching DVD playback screens showing the same synchronized hand movements of someone copying instructive hand gestures on the pad of an apple mac. 

The organic curves of the fingers echo the smooth arches of the images of Moore’s works. The very same black and white images whose definition has decayed, on being blown up to such a degree, leaving the surfaces seemingly constructed from repeated stabs of black paint on a bristly painting brush.

The title, ‘Towards Monumental Sculpture’, may itself potentially imply a diagnostic cynicism about a flimsy monumentality which has long since been usurped by a different conception of space and scale; even the near infinite space of the techno-sublime has itself been thoroughly colonized by corporate branding which bleeds back into domestic space.

Clueit isn’t however interested in cocking a snook at civic and private statuary.

The ethical necessity of ‘Public Sculpture’ is predicated on the assumption that unyielding static blocks somehow incarnate the immovable and unchanging correctness of political and social institutions founding principles. 

However, Clueit is less concerned with sculptures solidity, its concrete physicality, than he is with its aping of the architecture of gesture. The successful imposition of the ephemeral on sculptures ungiving surface is what truly allows ‘sculptures’ experienced to resonate in the mind. It’s this knowledge that allows the installation to head towards its own presentation of monumentality with an apologetic grin. 

Clueit has actually managed to have his cake and eat it. 

Not unlike Credit Suisse who own the building. 

Third Space

Crusader Mill is a stone’s throw away from the centre of Manchester (UK) so it’s an ideal site for a gallery space. Indeed it’s so ideal that Magnus Quaife’s ‘Malgras / Naudet’ gallery closed and has now reopened as ‘Cardroom’, a gallery run on more democratic principles by a loose grouping of artists. 

Ironically Quaife’s curatorial input seems to have been central in bringing together Manchester and York artists for Cardroom’s current ‘Third Space’ exhibition. And, as usual with group shows, it’s a mixed bag.

Alyson Olson’s ‘Hang In There’ is a chemically yellow sheet of perspex pinned to the wall by a pink sheet of curtain. The perspex is angled almost horizontally and its almost fluorescent edges poke into and deform the materials vertical hang. Janine Goldworthy’s ‘Pure Land’ also uses material leftovers and found items: a ten-foot rod of metal pierces what appear to be two crumpled oversized paper towels whilst her ‘Mountain Fold’ looks like a knee high, horizontally looped length of a roll of paper, little nuggets of colour decorate the paper edge free of the floor and the whole thing appears quite unstable.   

The grubbily disposable and materially odd have a touch of camp about them in Jude Lin’s ‘The Day You Won Me A Unicorn’, a light pink painted pelt stuck on the wall and pieced together from nylon mesh, feathers and padding. The suggestive tactility of the components is emphasised in the scratchy abstractions of Lin’s ‘Touch’ drawings.

In the sculpture department, Tom Wray’s three oversized, lumpen ‘Crucifixion Nails’ pierce the gallery floor. There’s an irritating literalness about the work but it does get under the skin. More willfully obtuse, Helen Wheeler’s ‘Untitled (Glass 1)’ is a blown glass alchemical flask, its glass neck gripped by a metal clamp, filled with a cotton candy pink glass thread.

Apart from Megan Wellington’s body parts and vegetation collages, two static camera ‘films’ complete the show: Wellington’s ‘Garden Book Club’ (the same title is given to all her pieces) and Liam Healey’s ‘Haze’.

Wellington’s camera work looks like an old, lined black and white video of a man and woman alternately placing bland, leafy potted plants on a table top until it's full, cleaning the leaves with a sodden cloth then removing the plants. 

Also referencing the still life, and by extension a memento mori, Healey’s ‘Haze’ is a more artful affair: pink and white flowers (painted or real? It’s hard to tell) slowly come into focus on a smudged green background, a dark stain congeals into an image which gradually becomes increasingly defined until the looped sequence starts again.

The real conceptual glue of ‘Third Space’ is the works grotty aesthetic, a popular offshoot of shabby chic automatically popular amongst cash strapped arty types. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this, the career artist does after all have a tendency to go from a cheaply produced but thoughtful output to polished, slick and less interesting gallery-funded productions. But things may have reached a point in small gallery world at which the urban beards and delightfully scuffed furnishings of magazine culture are promoting an ‘aesthetic’ which is in danger of becoming an orthodoxy.