Travelling is a good thing and if you have an
interest in art every city visited has an art gallery or museum full of
interesting images and alternative ways of putting thoughts together visually.
This summer I have been looking at museums in Belgium, in particular trying to
see as much work by Van Eyck, Memling, Bosch and Brueghel as possible as well
as other Flemish Primitives, the work from that time is so fresh and exciting.
It was a time when oil painting was brand new and artists such as Van Eyck were
using it almost as a mystical tool, its ability to render surfaces being so
fantastic that they seemed to be able to merge ‘reality’ with religious awe as
if there was no difference.
Van Eyck
That ability to find the magical in the everyday is
something I have always tried to foster and I strongly believe that this is one
of the main possibilities open to us as artists. If we can hold on to the fact
that wonder and mystery are there in everything we see, we are also fostering or
continuing to nurture the idea of the necessity of art. In your lifetime you
will often be asked by people who don’t make art why? What’s it for? Artists
will all at some point ask the question why? My answer is an old one, an answer
I came to believe in in my early 20s and one I haven’t given up on yet. I
believe that all societies need people embedded within them to make that link
between the everyday and a deeper meaning, if not life can become meaningless.
Artists; (story tellers, sculptors, painters, poets, musicians, etc.) sometimes
working for an established religious authority such as the church and at other
times being both artist and mystic, such as in the figure of the shaman and
sometimes simply trying to go it alone, as is so often the case in our individualistic
capitalist society, all help the society they work within to visualize things
beyond what you could call the everyday.
I am also of course as I go round looking for
any contemporary artists that might be of interest to students within the
drawing strand. Here are a few taken from an afternoon looking round SMAK in
Ghent.
The German artist Marion Möller had an exhibition of her tracings on the
ground floor. She always exhibits her work in pairs. A small photograph of
where her imagery comes from is always placed right next to the tracing or
other work done from it.
The tracing below was to the left of the image above and was about 3 feet across.
Marion Möller
She has been looking at architectural ornamentation and the way that historical
conventions of decoration still persist in our cities. Over forgotten doorways,
in gaps between 1950s shopping modernism and contemporary post-modernist
design, snippets of old decorative motifs will often be found, lingering within
attempts to clear out the old and establish the new clean territories of modern
life. Decoration was traditionally incorporated into the very fabric of
architecture, but this convention is expensive and suggestive of an
architecture that will have lasting values, unlike our contemporary idea of
inbuilt obsolescence and short termism. By focusing on these leftover reminders
of the organic (decorative motifs are often based on vegetation) we are
reminded of our vain attempts to ignore nature; our Modernist obsession with
pure geometry, being constantly at odds with a need to be reminded of our
ancient home within nature. These images have a sort of double existence - in
the exhibition and in the public space where the original photographs were
taken - a link between the two places is made, one which you can actively use
by going to the places they came from and spotting the originals.
I have previously
posted a couple of things about tracing and how as an activity it simplifies or
clarifies an image. (See LINK and Link 2) In Möller’s case she sometimes
exhibits the tracings she does of blown up decorative parts of her original
photographs, or she takes these a step further and uses CAD software to have
the tracings routed out of sheets of ply or other materials.
From a Marion Möller exhibition using CAD
There was a
large show of the conceptualist art of Wilfredo Prieto on the first floor,
‘Speaking Badly About Stones’. He has been described as a ‘baroque minimalist’:
using minimal form and materials to highlight often humorous issues in the way
we read and interpret artwork. As you arrived at the gallery a huge road
transport water container was parked outside next to an electrical generator.
Pipes and cables ran into the gallery and went up the stairs into the Prieto
exhibition. If you followed these you eventually came across the work itself, (Much
ado about nothing’ 2003) a small plant in a tiny plant-pot, the whole set-up of
hoses generator etc. leading to a controlled drip which was being used to water
the plant. This huge effort just to get a drop of water to where it was needed
was of course a way of getting his audience to think about other things, how
hard it might be to get water to someone dying of thirst in some third world
country, or how much intensive labour might lay behind other things that we
take for granted. ‘Expensive line, cheap line’ from 2014 consisted of two lines
drawn around a room at about head height; one using ballpoint ink, the other
Montblank ink. However the room was an enormous exhibition space right in the
centre of the museum, the two lines were simply drawn as if he had walked
around the room and let the pens make lines as he did so. Again we had a lot of
effort in preparing the room, but very little in making the final drawing. It
was of course impossible to tell which was the expensive ink and which was the
cheap one. If you like Martin Creed you will like Prieto, they work in a
similar territory.
'The more you add the less you see' 2011 Clingfilm
Prieto preparing for an exhibition.
In total contrast to Prieto was
the work of David Bade who makes drawings and sculptures that he builds from recycled
‘worthless’ materials. He makes room-filling installations which he scatters
with personal anecdotes, caustic comments on current affairs and ironic proverbs.
His images refer to contemporary culture as well as art history and are framed
in the visual idiom of Curaçao, his native country, where influences from
Western and African culture combine with Caribbean carnival and folk
traditions. These images were raw and powerful and even the exhibition plan was
hand drawn which helped to further separate the work out from Prieto’s who was
using the more familiar numbered exhibition guide. Bade’s work is centred on
incidents and experiences he has had and his titles reflect these.
With titles
such as, ‘Take your pizza and get the fuck back to Africa’ and ‘Talk to the
hand’ we are made aware that he is responding to an often quite aggressive
relationship that he has at times had with the world. His drawings are not
pretty and don’t rely on traditional drawing skills. He simply pins the
drawings up, no framing and mixes drawing with making in totally informal ways.
He also forces the audience to get close to the work by making entrances and
exits to different rooms as works of art in themselves. To get into one room
you had to go through a tent like construction and into another you had to walk
through and under a piece of sculpture.
Bade installing a show.
There was also an exhibition of
recent student work ‘Coming People’ and I was interested to see that the grid stills holds a universal attraction (see
the work of Lisette de
Greeuw) and that students are making more
use of illustrator as a tool with which to make vinyl stickers.
A detail taken from a student's work using vinyl stickers as a drawing method.
One work in particular caught my eye but I didn't remember the name of the person who did it. It was simply a drawing constructed by folding a translucent sheet of tracing paper in half, over a block of what looked like a circle of foam rubber covered in black charcoal dust. By folding the paper over it held the block in place and all we could see was a 'ghost' of the object's image as it 'bled' through the translucent paper.
Over the way from SMAK is the more
traditional Fine Art museum which houses more Flemish primitives, as well as
Bosch, Breughal and a whole host of stuff going right up to the late 19th
century. A vast collection that you have to be very select about if you are not
simply going to become visually exhausted.
In the foyer they were hosting some contemporary drawings, a Dialogic Drawing Experiment, by Andrea Bianconi, Ricardo Lanzarini and Mark
Licari, which is well worth looking at, especially if you are thinking about
how to approach collaboration.
Collaborative wall drawings
They were
as a trio working with the architecture of the space and also over a large
collection of assorted objects set up as a group in the centre of the space.
Details of the drawn over installation
I
had come across an artist working drawings over piles of 3D blocks the day
before in the Museum Dr. Guislain.
This is a museum about the history of psychiatry and mental healthcare and
includes a great collection of outsider art as well as hosting contemporary exhibitions
of work that can be read as either ‘outsider art’ or art dealing with psychiatric
issues. Some of the work I saw in there was really ambitious and was useful in
that drawing in both 2 and 3D was again central to artistic production. I might return to some of the issues
surrounding the use and reception of ‘outsider art’ another time.
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