Analogue Soho

This week is the last chance to see Richard Nicholson's photography project, part of the exhibition Analog, at Riflemaker in Soho.  The portraits capture, in all their glory of organised chaos, London's professional darkrooms still printing from film-stock to paper.  Beginning the project in 2006, at that time 204 studios were still in operation yet sadly only 3 years later, on completion of the project, just 6 remained.  

This project echos the all too familiar grief shared by lovers of analogue formats, having also recently taken a further blow at the news the Soho Film Lab (now known as Deluxe Soho, after being bought out by US film giants Deluxe in 2010) will no longer be printing 16mm film.  This was the last lab in the UK still printing 16mm film and is a particularly heavy loss for UK based artist-film makers using this medium.  Tacita Dean, in her article in the Guardian this week, articulates the consequences for film practitioners and the industry.

"Digital is not better than analogue, but different.  What we are asking for is co-existence: that analogue film might be allowed to remain an option for those who want it, and for the ascendency of one not to have to mean the extinguishing of the other.  The real crux of the difference is that artists exhibit, and so care about the final presentation and presence of the artwork in the space.  Other professions have their work mediated into different formats: TV, magazines, billboards, books.  It remains only in galleries and museums that the physical encounter is so critical, which is why artists, in the widest sense, are the most distressed by the obsolescence of analogue mediums."

Sign the online petition to save 16mm film printing in the UK here.  

Analog, also featuring sculptures by Clare Mitten and an interactive light installation by Zigelbaum and Coelho, is on at Riflemaker until 5th March 2011.

Pictured: Richard Nicholson Roy Snell Darkroom, Earlsfield (2006)

Ben Rivers, Slow Action

The Curve, Barbican

Aura Satz, Sound Seam

Dara Birnbaum

Fiona Banner at Frith Street

Hito Steyerl, In Free Fall

There are few images more representative of total and utter destruction than that of a plane crash. Hito Steyerl’s film In Free Fall opens with a carefully constructed montage of spectacular, Hollywoodesque aircraft explosions, instantly laying down the contemporaneously allegorical narratives of economic, political and cultural crash.

Structured in three parts; After the Crash, Before the Crash and Crash, Steyerl’s film references the economic collapse of 2008 through the chronicles of a fleet of bowing 707- 700 planes. From their hey-day at Howard Hughes’ TWA, to military service in Israel and on to their final resting place at a small desert airport in California, the planes become subject to the cyclical nature of capitalism and consumer-driven production. Once they become functionless as machines they find new uses as scrap; recycled to make DVDs or destined for the money shot of a block busting film such as 1994’s Speed. There are a number of parallels explored throughout In Free Fall that reveal the comparative destinies of both humans and objects caught up in a repetitive sequence of production and destruction.

Using a portable DVD player placed in the landscape of the desert airport, and employing the televisual technique of chroma key, these images become layered, compositing one image inside the aesthetic, structural frame of another. This produces coexisting narratives that are in essence framed by the very nature of their construction to the point where, as Gil Leung explains in her introduction to the work:

“...it becomes unclear as to the reality of the situation. Out of this surplus of form, it is the now of presentation, not representation, that is experienced through each thing’s own contrary articulations, it is a plane, it is a DVD, this is a historian, this is an actor, this is a pilot... things speak in each others voices.”

A particular moving part of the film involves the acting narrator and Steyerl herself dressed as cabin crew, moving through the gestures of a pre-flight safety demonstration, whilst visible on the portable DVD layer is the video of a man in free fall, struggling to unravel his malfunctioning parachute; his article of hope for survival. This vision is very different to the cyclical modes of crash portrayed through the aircraft. Herein lies the moment of tragedy and a desperate will for the parachute to rectify itself in time. It presents to us most vividly the moment before the crash, the powerful knowledge of an unstoppable disaster. On the other hand, the falling man serves as a warning; one where this dense interplay between crash as the awesome spectacle of a Hollywood movie and the horrific realities of tragedy distorts how we might understand a crash in real terms.

In a talk given by Mark Fisher in conjunction with the exhibition (framed with the question: “Can anything genuinely new emerge in a political landscape that is clogged with ideological junk?”), the position of being ‘after the crash’ was sited as an inherently complex one.  As the catastrophe of a crash unfolds, the very shock of its inevitability induces an urgency to remain in the air, for which Fisher uses the analogy of a cartoon character running off a cliff. In this scenario, mirroring the time since the collapse of the markets at the end of 2008, there is a momentary pause before the plummeting toward the ground ensues, where one must ask the question; what is keeping us afloat now that the ground has fallen away?

'Hope' seems to be a common reply, and indeed the film suggests, in its representation of renewal through capital, optimism is certainly a factor. But while it persists, the very comprehension of the crash and its subsequent ramifications is deferred along with the moment of devastation itself. What Steyerl is presenting, through this postponement of final destruction, is a cannoning of crash where the event is rolled over in to the next stage of production so the moment of crash can begin again.

Returning to Fisher’s question of ideological junk, it is this propensity toward recycling from the detritus of wreckage that reinforces the cyclical nature of capital, thereby eliminating the emergence of anything “genuinely new”. So what might counteract these recurrent episodes of failure? Fisher’s argument is one of practicality; finding solutions to the problems that prevent victory against the onslaught of capitalist realisms denial of fallen ground.

Steyerl’s film is not one of denial; it is as much about the moments of revelation that a crash can produce as it is it’s devastating repercussions. Therefore, whilst I do not dismiss the importance of resistance such as we have begun to see through recent student protests (in fact quite the contrary), works like this demonstrate it is culture that seeks to offset the stagnant, failing ideologies of capital and supply us with that which is genuinely new.

In Free Fall is on at Chisenhale Gallery until 19th December 2010.

Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds

Over 100 million ceramic sunflower seeds currently carpet a large section of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall; uniquely perfect painted imitations, as if made by nature. Sunflower Seeds by Ai Weiwei is one of those works that can be conjured in the mind before it is seen with the eye. 

Indeed it was just as described, yet disappointingly roped off to the public, at a distance of over a metre.  A sign explains this is due to the danger of the inhalation of dust created by walking over the sculpture.  But even with 20:20 vision it is impossible to appreciate the intricacies of each individual seed at such an inaccessible distance.  

Due to this and in part due to the almost constant swarming crowds that have become an essential feature of Turbine Hall, the work struck me instantly as rather latent.  May it not as well be millions of buttons or chocolate Smarties or those little stony bobbles found in office plant pots? 

It is the accompanying elements of the installation, in the form of a 15 minute film and booth of interactive screens with webcams where the viewer can contribute to debates around the work, that partly answer this question.

The film eloquently details the journey of the sunflower seeds through 30 different processes of production in China, to their installment at Tate Modern.  It quickly becomes clear that the very feat of their quantative and labour intensive manufacture is not necessarily the main feature of the work. 

Neither, infact is its aesthetic impact or physical presence in Turbine Hall.  Even the socio-political symbolism of the ceramic seeds pales in meaningful comparison when considering the implications and efforts of their collective production.

Ingrained in the skills of the people in this rural Chinese town is a legacy of ceramic manufacturing.  Weiwei sought the traditional methods and techniques in making this work and in the process rekindled, if only for a short while, the fading fires of a specific cultural industry that has given work to whole families for generations.

Watching the men and women meticulously cast, shape, paint, fire, clean and pack the 100 million seeds that are now piled and raked to perfection in this monolithic gallery puts to rest all thoughts of treading them like gravel, or even why they are there at all.


Sunflower Seeds is at Tate Modern until 2nd May 2011.

Summer at Tate Britain

The annual switch into summer mode has made the past few months busy ones. Galleries are rife with kids workshops and seasonal salons, whilst the degree shows of London art schools could fill your social calendar for the better part of two months.  However, with some smaller galleries closing their doors for the short sunny season, July and August can often be slow months for the seeker of 'serious' art works.

Tate Britain currently has much to offer with the recent installations of Mike Nelson’s Coral Reef and Duveen Commission by Fiona Banner.  Added to these are particular highlights from the Tate Collection, moving image works by Gerard Byrne and Francis Alÿs.

Originally installed at Matt’s Gallery in 2000, Coral Reef is a series of rooms each simultaneously emulating a sense of absurdity and abandonment.  The estranged objects and paraphernalia present in each room identify as features of a minicab office, a waiting room, traces of a passion for Americana and automobiles, evidencing what Nelson describes as a structure of belief systems functioning under the ideological ocean of capitalism.  Assimilated to the escapism of reading a novel, the work takes you on a path through a narrative of speculatory spaces and constructed déjà vu.

Nelson’s meticulous approach to detail is mirrored in Fiona Banner’s Duveen Commission, which takes the form of two recently decommissioned aircraft.  Occupying the gallery as if to-scale versions from a young boy’s model aircraft collection; the nose of Harrier hovers vertically above the floor, imposing its great whale-like presence on the classical architecture that keeps it from crash landing on to Tate visitors, whose heads are tilted upwards in awe.  Jaguar is buffed shiny, reflecting light and movement; it's fierce elegance rendered motionless, almost invisible. The works mechanical ingenuity chimes well with Francis Alÿs’ film work Guards (2004), originally commissioned by Artangel.

The film depicts the regimented walking of 64 Coldstream Guards through the City of London. At first separated, as if sheep strayed from the flock, they converge, falling into step. On reaching the area’s periphery, a bridge, the Guards disperse, breaking the animation-like presence of the marching costumes.

Room 26 currently displays Gerard Byrne’s video and photographic work 1984 and beyond (2007). A staged conversation is played out between a number of science fiction writers (Arthur C. Clarke and Rod Sterling among them) postulating how conditions and operations of living might change and develop in the future. Taking the text from a 1963 publication of Playboy, the discussion is presented by eleven Dutch actors within the context of modernist architecture.

Awoken from the silence of the pop culture archive, Byrne's film is a strange kind of fictional documentary; the immaculate sets and costume, along with the elaborate dialogue reminds us of our past fascination with assuring the future. Settled between nostalgic melancholy and residual hope, he evidences our desire to follow modernism’s beeline to what would become the failures of utopia; the grand architectural projects, the unfulfilled missions into space, the end of the socialist ideal.

Pictured: Fiona Banner Harrier (2010)

Richard Hamilton, Modern Moral Matters

Richard Hamilton's retrospective at Serpentine Gallery was berated by critics, even though he continues to be impressively referred to as the Father of Pop Art.  The criticism firstly stems from a blatant aestheticising of contemporary political situations and figures and secondly, from the stylistic referencing of other artists such as Bacon and Duchamp; an approach regarded as passé in today's arts practice (there is no denying appropriation, but one is expected to be clever about it!).  But, what is his work if its not Pop?  

After Tate Modern's monsterous Pop Life show a few months ago illustrating the (in some cases inexplicable) rise and rise of artists whose work continues the Pop Art legacy (such as Takashi Murakami and Damien Hirst), one might wonder at such a negative response to an exhibition of one of it's founding fathers.  How far removed is his art since the late 1960's from the work that gave rise to Hamilton's title?  And how is it that Warhol and his successors are still enjoying the pop party but Hamiliton, in taking a turn for the political, is left out in the cold?

Charles Darment, Independent:

"Hamilton's pictures of Bobby Sands and a freshly arrested Mick Jagger, of a monstrous Hugh Gaitskell, tell us everything we need to know about their maker's political views: Sands and Jagger are Christ-like martyrs, Gaitskell a masked devil. I know that painting news images questions the news itself, also that doing so in the mid-Sixties was immensely brave and novel. But I always come away from Hamilton feeling as though I've had a finger wagging at me in a pub, and it is not a feeling I enjoy."

Adrian Searle, Guardian:

"He makes art for a culture that is more interested in commodities than statements, and everything he does has a sheen, an elegance and a technical sophistication that is both attractive and repulsive. There's something sickly and nacreous about his work, which I can only see as deliberate.

One might ask if Hamilton's work really is as analytical, as far-reaching, as acute, as knowing, as deconstructive and as on-the-ball as Buchloh and others assert. Some of it – like those giant images of Blair, with their echo of Warhol's pistol-toting Elvis – seem altogether too obvious, especially when compared to the best political cartoons. Not only do they tell us what we already know, or think we know, they also tell many of us what we already think, politically speaking, which might make us feel smug, but doesn't do much more. We know Blair is a dupe; we know Israel behaves monstrously; we know about the dirty protest and hunger strikes in Northern Ireland during the 1970s. But that, of course, does not mean that art can't be made of these subjects."

Richard Hamilton speaking with Ossian Ward, Timeout:

"Political pictures have different effects - whether moving effects of a depressing kind or effects that can linger for a long time. Some critics have said that this exhibition is stale and that subjects such as nuclear disarmament have lost their interest, but my inclination is that they've become more powerful as time goes by, rather than less... It's a question of timing. I'm sure that it will find its power as time goes by and becomes history. It seems necessary that an artist's attention should be directed at these problems, so I'm not going to give up."

One might choose to follow the notion that all political art should be made politically (an example set currently by Thomas Hirschhorn and others), but does that mean images of politics, characterised by the political photograph, are redundant in an art world still fixated with the representation of popular culture?  My instinct is no, as all images are subject to artistic treatment and/or selection; pornography, violence, death and many other taboo themes are constantly represented in artistic practice, therefore politics should not be made an exception.  

However, it is necessary to differentiate work like Hamilton's from the new landscape of political art, following Benjamin's example; where politics is rendered aesthetic one must respond by politicising art.  Perhaps this leaves Hamilton back where he started; as a cultural mirror rather than a political one, still retaining his title as the Father of Pop Art.