STUFT All Over Again- Red Gallery, Hull UK until July 13th, 2014

A belated entry to my blog.....Stuft all over Again is the second show at the Red Gallery of Contemporary Arts, Hull by ex-students and staff of the Fine Art course at the Hull School of Art (as apposed to the School of Art and Design) which closed in 2005 to become part of Hull College. The first show was in 2004 under the title of simply Stuft.

Contributers and punters outside of the Red Gallery on Osbourne Street, opening night June 13th 2014.

This show was curated by Louise Hazelwood an-ex fine art student (1991-1994) and Hull-based artist (pictured above in the Hull Daily Mail).

My three pieces.

Is the above piece Rosse Butler's work or Rob Gawthrop's?

One of Stuart Bradshaw's unstretched canvases: Lasker meets Reinhardt.

 

Many thanks to the curator, the contributors, the tutors and to the Red Gallery for such a great show.

Until July 13, 2014 

Red Gallery of Contemporary Art,

19 Osbourne Street

Hull,

HU1 2NL

UK 

https://www.facebook.com/STUFTalloveragain

http://www.red-gallery.com/

https://www.facebook.com/redgalleryhull

Dave Whatt

Hull Underground original design Dave Whatt for Remould Theatre Company (no date).

It is hard to categorize the Hull-based creative Dave Whatt. He is an accomplished Blues guitarist, a multi-instrumentalist musician and artist, set designer, photographer, graphic designer, illustrator and writer. He is avant-garde, anti- avant-garde, an anti-poet and, he will hate me for this, a poet. I like to think of him as a polyartist, for he is “a master of several unrelated arts” (Kostelanetz, 2001, p. 486) as well as many related ones.

Above: A kid for two farthings by Dave Whatt. This drawing was I assumed, based on a still from the film of the same name directed by Carol Reed in 1955, I believe now however that it is a based on this book cover for the novel of the same name of which the film was an adaptation, written by Wolf Mankowitz:

No doubt Dave Whatt owns a copy.

'Acting' by Dave Whatt

I am not sure about the source for the above picture or the date.

As you can see many of the works here are representational. However there is plenty of his work that I would describe as abstract, recalling the “landscapes” of Yve Tanguy. Unfortunately I do not have a copy of these works. The surreal nature of such works and of his writing made him the ideal founding member of the Hull Surrealist League.

Dave Whatt's website contains examples of his own compositions: music and poetry and a list of his diverse influences that include early nineties rave:

The Plasmatics:

Captain Beefheart:

and

The Cramps:

amongst others! All great bands and artists!

Take a look at http://www.myspace.com/davewhatt

Kostelanetz, R. (2001) Dictionary of The Avant-Gardes, New York and London: Routledge

Is It Art, or Memorex?

This is a link to an article in Wired called Is It Art, or Memorex? by Reena Jana 21/5/01 discussing the work of Net artist Michael Mandiberg. Mandiberg's "art prank" was to "reproduce" Sherrie Levines reproductions of Walker Evans work and presents them as his own: a simulation of a simulation.

Mandiberg posted his photos on two websites he created: AfterSherrieLevine.com and AfterWalkerEvans.com.

Posted using ShareThis

Digital montage: problemitised sight, illusion, art and sculpture.

Greenberg's comments about collage are relevant to the reading of my digital montages. I use similar materials like wallpaper. There is the same optical play on depth and surface, foreground and background. There are other ways of seeing that seem as relevant and connected. The digital montage in its transitions shifts the wallpapers and the flowers from being intaglio to relief and back again. This shifting view recalls Helen Chadwick’s Piss Flowers which seem to be moulds and then transform into the very objects that come out of moulds.

Chadwick, Helen Piss Flowers, 1991-2
Bronze, cellulose lacquer

Still from The Irritated Gaze, Part II Intimations 2010. Digital image, wallpaper and light.

Edouard Manet: Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère (1882)

Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère (1882)

Manet’s last painting Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère (1882) is a fascinating modern painting. Its relevance here was at first unclear to me. Ever since we discussed modernism in the Media Technologies and Public Spheres unit, it has been recurring in my thoughts.

T. J. Clark made reference to the criticisms of the painting: it “was held to be badly drawn and insubstantial”, while “the light was ‘indecisive’, ‘bluish, (and) murky’, the glass and reflection were hopelessly botched” (Clark, T.J. 1985, p.240). There is a “general haze and dazzle” (1985, p.249) which provides us with a fascinating atmosphere. Clark quotes the critic Jules Comte’s description of the painting: “the bar and the room are lit by two globes of electric light, that white blinding light that we all know; but Monsieur Manet has probably chosen a moment when the lamps were not working properly, for never have we seen light less dazzling; the two globes of polished glass have the look of lanterns glimpsed through a winter’s fog” (1985, p.240).

The paintings softness and blackness is described by Gilbert-Rolfe in his essay “Edouard Manet and the Pleasure Problematic”. When it comes to the light, he suggests that within the Bar “the hardness and reflectiveness (invisibility) provide a space for blurring and bursts and orbs of light brighter than the light of the painting as a whole, but which is shown to be the source of that light” (Gilbert-Rolfe, 1995 pp.3-4).

Bibliography:

Clark, T.J., (1985) The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Age of Manet and His Followers, London: Thames and Hudson

Gilbert-Rolfe, J., (1995) “Edouard Manet and the Pleasure Problematic” in Beyond Piety: Critical Essays on the Visual Arts 1986-1993, Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, pp.3-12.

Gilbert-Rolfe, J., (1995) Beyond Piety: Critical Essays on the Visual Arts 1986-1993, Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.

Picasso's Collages

Pablo Picasso Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wine Glass 1912

As I work on my digital collages I am reminded of Clement Greenberg's essay on collage: "The Pasted-Paper Revolution" (or as it is known "On Collage"). Greenberg's article is still amazing. In it he discusses a number of cubist works by Braque and Picasso.

In the Autumn of 1912 Pablo Picasso began a series of works using a range of materials such as wallpaper, imitation wood grain, newspaper, a charcoal drawing and sheet music. This is one (above) of the earliest collages and perhaps even the first.

Clement Greenberg in his "The Pasted-Paper Revolution" of 1958 argued that pictorial allusion gave way to what he called an optical illusion. In his sophisticated formalist reading of the work he argued that the various elements, the lettering, the charcoal lines and the coloured papers "begin to change places in depth with one another, and a process is set up in which every part of the picture takes its turn at occupying every plane, whether real or imagined, in it."


Art News 1958

Source:

Frascina, Francis and Harrison, Charles (1987) Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology New York: Harpers and Row pp.105-108.

Mark Rothko

Simon Schama on Rothko:

"One morning in the spring of 1970, I went into the Tate Gallery and took a wrong, right turn and there they were, lying in wait. No it wasn't love at first site. Rothko had insisted that the lighting be kept almost pretentiously low. It was like going into the cinema, expectation in the dimness. Something in there was throbbing steadily, pulsing like the inside of a body part, all crimson and purple. I felt I was being pulled through those black lines to some mysterious place in the universe. Rothko said his paintings begin an unknown adventure into an unknown space. I wasn't sure where that was and whether I wanted to go. I only know I had no choice and that the destination might not exactly be a picnic, but I got it all wrong that morning in 1970. I thought a visit to the Seagram Paintings would be like a trip to the cemetery of abstraction - all dutiful reverence, a dead end. Everything Rothko did to these paintings - the column-like forms suggested rather than drawn and the loose stainings - were all meant to make the surface ambiguous, porous, (and) perhaps softly penetrable. A space that might be where we came from or where we will end up. They're not meant to keep us out, but to embrace us; from an artist whose highest compliment was to call you a human being."
BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/powerofart/rothko.shtml

Black on Maroon, 1959

Rothko reached his mature style around 1949 and the early nineteen fifties. Rothko’s work features “large hand-shaped rectangles, usually staked one above the other, together filling nearly the entire field of the canvas”, with each rectangle having “slightly different hues, while the background color (sic) differs only a little more from that of the rectangles” (Kostlanetz, R., 2001 p.530). Rothko’s work can be seen as an important precursor to monochromatic painting that we have seen since the nineteen sixties and seventies, which explore “surface tensions, color (sic) relationships and ways of negating suggestions of ‘depth’” (p.530).

No 14, 1960.

Rothko was part of the “theological” wing of the abstract expressionists. He was “obsessed with the moral possibility that his art could go beyond pleasure and carry the full burden of religious meanings- the patriarchal weight, in fact, of the Old Testament” (Hughes, R., 1991 p.322-323). His attempt to fulfil this ambition culminated in a series of paintings from 1964-7, commissioned by the de Menil family as “the objects of contemplation” in a non-denomination chapel attached to Rice University (p. 323).

Centre Tryptich for Rothko Chapel, 1966, Houston

The monochromatic paintings have “all the world…drained out of them, leaving only a void”: the Rothko Chapel therefore represents "the last silence of Romanticism” (Hughes, R., 1991 p. 323).



Bibliography:

Hughes, R., (1991) The Shock of the New, London: Thames and Hudson.

Kostelanetz, R., (2001) Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, New York & London: Routledge.

Schama, S. & BBC, Simon Schama on Rothko: Available from World Wide Web: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/powerofart/rothko.shtml [last accessed 24/03/10].

Braque

Le Guéridon

Le jour (1929)

L'Atelier III, 1949

The Classicism of Braque’s painting of the twenties and thirties and beyond are interesting for a number of reasons. The works “reactionary nature” is connected to Braque’s “collapse into calm” (Wheeler,D., p.64). The works representation of calm is partly due to the process of the “reassembly” of the still-life tradition that Cubism “helped to shatter” (Hughes, 1991 p. 146). His subject was the studio. For Braque “the studio is a sanctum, imagination’s cave, and its clutter of bottles, pots and oddities suggests the alchemists cell with its alembics and stuffed crocodile” (Hughes, 1991, pp. 146-49). The studio or at least the image of it is one of “a privileged place of transmutation, memory and contemplation… the key to the paintings of Braque’s old age, the Ateliers of 1949-54, with their calm transparency and baffling layers of images” (Hughes, 1991 p. 146).

A further discussion on Braque is available here.

Sources:
Hughes, R., (1991) Shock of the New, London: Thames and Hudson.
Wheeler, D., (1991) Art since Mid-Century, London: Thames and Hudson.