100days of Art: Day Fourteen: Pearls

Well and truly in the festive spirit today, so I thought I’d give you a present. It’s not an artwork you can see or touch, but it’s an artwork that you can enjoy anywhere at any time and once you’ve got it, you’ve got it forever. You can even give it to someone else without losing it.

Lawrence Weiner was one of the first wave of Conceptual Artists who emerged in the late 1960s and early 70s, who, in the words of the critic Lucy Lippard “dematerialised the art object”. The idea behind art became paramount and the actual physical nature of it was deemed to be unimportant. Artists produced performances that were documented in photographs, issued statements and theoretical texts and made work from sound or light. On the occasions where there was a physical presence it was usually made form the most abject or mundane materials – sand, condensation, rubbish, food and air.

Weiner’s work takes the form of statements of ideas for artworks, whether or not the owner or the curator decides to carry out the instruction is unimportant – more often than not, they chose merely to exhibit the statement itself. A River Spanned (1969), for example is usually displayed as a small card with those works written on it, a bridge could be built or a line could be fired from one bank to the other, but in a way to actually carry out the instruction would limit the work – as a simple statement it’s full of possibility and dependent on the viewer, open to an almost infinite number of possible interpretations. It could be any river, the spanning could be achieved in many ways, the end result is a collaboration – the artist provides the idea and our imaginations fill in the gaps.

Some of Weiner’s work is more prescriptive such as One Aerosol Can of Enamel Sprayed to Conclusion Directly upon the Floor (1968). Although more specific than ‘A River spanned’ there is still much room for our imaginations to shape what final form the completed work might take, we might think of the sounds and smells that such an action would produce., we might think of the effect that different angles of holding the can might have, is the paint to be sprayed in one spot producing a pool of paint or are we going to coat the entire floor? What colour is the paint? What does the floor in question look like and what will the effect of the surface be on the end result? A simple instruction detailing a simple action draws attention to the complexity of the world in which that action might take place.

In theory I’ve now already given you two artworks (I’m a generous soul) but the one I really wanted to give you is one that has always stuck in my mind since I first saw it.

“Pearls Rolled Across A Floor”

I can hear the sound they'd make, I can see the pearls and the floor (in my mind it's dusty and wooden), I can imagine their different textures of the wood and pearls, I can even smell the wood and imagine the space that the situation might be taking place in, I can even imagine events that might lead up to this situation. It’s full of poetry and possibilities.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do, help yourself to the others as well, and feel free to pass them on.

Happy Christmas.

100days of Art: Day Seven - Clutter and Cardigans

Cornelia Parker - Pornographic Drawings (1996)

De-cluttering before moving house with me can be a painful business. Left to his own devices Pete will quite happily clear a drawer in 30 seconds flat leaving nothing but a couple of paperclips and a teaspoon. The ‘left to his own devices’ here is key because if I’m within a mile-radius of him as he goes to throw away a long-dead lighter, some sixth-sense kicks in and I’ll be at his shoulder before his hand’s out of the drawer.

“You can’t throw that away.”

“But it’s a dead lighter.”

“Yes, but look, we bought that in Amsterdam..”

“But it’s a dead lighter.”

“Yes, but we bought it that night we got lost in the rain ‘cos all the canals looked the same.”

“But. It’s. A. Dead. Lighter.”

This continues for some time until I get distracted by something shiny and Pete throws the lighter away anyway.

Objects have memories.

Or rather, to be uncharacteristically rational about it, we attach our memories to objects. Relics of our past become mnemonics for whole events, a dead disposable lighter starts a domino-topple of remembered sensations that leads to a hazy giggly night negotiating canals in the rain.

Such associations and leaps of logic seem hard-wired into us, we don’t even need to have direct personal experience of the object to be affected by a real or imagined history that it might have somehow woven into its fabric. In his book Supersense Psychologist Bruce Hood describes a neat trick that he uses in his lectures to show that even the most rational skeptic can find themselves in the grip of supernatural belief. Holding up a tatty cardigan, Bruce asks the audience how many would, for a fee of £20 be willing to wear the moth-eaten garment. A few of the audience raise their hands. When however Bruce reveals that the cardigan once belonged to the serial killer Fred West, the potential volunteers invariable lower their hands. The cardigan didn’t belong to Fred West of course, but Bruce’s little prank illustrates the way in which we almost subconsciously imbue objects and materials with meaning beyond their intrinsic properties. In the case of the ‘killer’s cardigan’ it’s an example of what James Frazer defined in The Golden Bough as ‘contagious magic’, by contact with evil, the cardigan itself has become contaminated with evil.

Cornelia Parker works with found objects and through display, transformation or destruction she amplifies, distorts or reverses their contagious memories and meanings, anchoring a web of ambiguous ideas to physical properties. Sometimes these works are minimal, abject objects displayed in vitrines whose significances only become apparent when we look at the label to find out what they’re made of – a pair of dusty earplug are made from fluff gathered from the Whispering Gallery of St Pauls Cathedral, a pile of black plastic fingernail clippings entitled ‘The Negative of Sound” turns out to be the cast off lacquer cut at Abbey Road Studio from the grooves of master disc for a vinyl record, a stain on a handkerchief is the tarnish gathered from the inside of one of Henry VIII’s gauntlets and so on. Other works are monumental, for Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View the artist filled a garden shed with household objects and toys before getting the British army to blow it up, the resulting debris now hangs orbiting a light bulb casting shadows on the walls of the gallery space, the moment of the explosion frozen in time.

Pornographic Drawings is a favourite of mine, at first glance it seems to be a collection of Rorschach Ink Blot tests, we peer at them looking for images in the abstract splodges, recreating their very purpose. The title leads us to search for erotic imagery and in two it doesn’t take much of a stretch to find phallic and vulval forms. The other two are more perplexing, there’s suggestions of eroticism certainly but but nowhere as obvious as the first two or have we just got one-track minds?

Already the work is questioning the status of the images and our process of looking at them, psychoanalysed by the blobs in front of you, you can’t help wondering if you’re missing something. Given that two of them seem so explicit, are we failing to notice erotic content in the others that the artist has seen, is pornography in the eye of the beholder?

The situation become both clearer and more confused when we discover the materials used to make the images. Working with Customs and Excise, Parker took shredded video tape form confiscated pornographic videos and created an ink from the Ferric Oxide that gave the tape its magnetic and therefore recording properties. The ink was made from the very physical matter of pornography, the images were therefore erotic both by virtue of what we might see in them, but also by virtue of their material. Of course you could argue that the original film images are long gone, if we were to slide the drawings across the head of a VCR we wouldn’t see ‘adult entertainment’ (and we’d probably get chucked out of the Tate) but the point is that’s it’s our memory that’s at work here. Once we know the origin of the ink, we can’t forget it and our view of the images is irrevocably changed. Somewhere in our minds that contagious magic is at work, as if the very molecules of Ferric Oxide are ‘contaminated’ with the images they once carried, in the same way that the work’s title and our knowledge of the use of Rorschach blots contaminated our first encounter.

It’s a cliché that good art should change the way you look at the world. For me Cornelia Parkers’s work does exactly that. After visiting one of her shows the most ordinary of objects become fascinating artefacts bursting with meaning, memories and stories.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I can hear Pete rummaging in a drawer, he might be about to throw away one of those stories.

100days of Art:Day One - Bittersweets

Felix Gonzales Torres Untitled (Rossmore II) 1991

(I’d originally intended to start my Hundred Days project by writing about another work of art entirely, but since it’s World Aids Day, this seemed far more appropriate)

I’ve got a confession – I love Conceptual Art, and without getting into the tricky business of definitions (one draft of this blog has already been consigned to the recycle bin after becoming utterly bloated with art theory), I mean real Conceptual Art, not just ‘stuff that’s a bit weird and isn’t a proper painting’. I mean work that’s so minimal and physically inconsequential that you have to do a series of mental gymnastics to understand why it’s there. To me, true conceptual art works like a good crossword, it takes time, it stretches parts of your brain that other activities don’t as you wrestle to understand why, for example, a glass of water is an oak tree. Of course, you don’t necessarily come out of the encounter with a definite answer – more often you come out with a lot of indefinite questions, and, perhaps, more often in a state of utter befuddlement. But that’s good, I like being befuddled.

In those terms Conceptual Art, for me at least, is quite a cerebral activity, quite cool and detached, it’s art for the head and for the intellect, a mental workout if you like.

So imagine my surprise when I burst into tears in front of a pile of sweets in The Serpentine Gallery on a warm July day in 2000.

Perhaps I should point out that me turning into a blubbering mess in front of works of art and architecture isn’t a particularly rare occurrence, my long suffering partner has frequently had to nonchalantly walk off and take photographs or read a wall text while I howl at, say, a Barnet Newman painting, the view from the forum in Pompeii or the Temple of Karnak. It’s not something I’m ashamed of, in a way I find it comforting that after all these years of studying art some things still have the capacity to bypass my analytical detachment, catch me off guard and deliver a great big emotional gut-punch.

But where was I? Oh yes, in front of a pile of sweets blubbing.

These ‘candy spills’ were a staple of the Cuban artist, Felix Gonzalez-Torres's practice, at the beginning of the exhibition a quantity of sweets would be arranged, the artist specifying the colour of the sweets, their arrangement (either as a ’pavement’ laid out on the gallery floor or as a pile in the corner) and the total weight of sweets to be displayed. Once installed, the gallery visitors were free to help themselves to the sweets so that over the course of the exhibition the pile or pavement would slowly disappear, eroded by the visitors.

At first the whole idea made me chuckle, it seemed fun and mischievous. We were being given carte blanche by the artist to break two of the cardinal rules of the gallery – 'no eating' and 'don’t touch the artworks'. Children visiting the exhibition gleefully filled their pockets and adults, a little more reticent at breaking the standard patterns of correct behaviour, turned into children, giggling as they wandered the exhibition happily munching on lime sherbets and chocolate caramels. It felt warm and generous, coupled with the ‘paper stacks’ (piles of prints by the artist that we were invited to help ourselves to), here was an exhibition which allowed us not only sugary treats but something to take home with us at the end, all we need was a balloon and a slice of cake and it would have been like a conceptual art birthday party.

The other works in the exhibition were equally playful, a silver platform stood empty in the middle of one room, at random times during the day a go-go dancer in silver hotpants would perform on it listening to a walkman, in another two more walkmans (walkmen?) hung on the wall in a room festooned with strings of light bulbs – the wall text informed us that couples were invited to plug themselves into the walkmans and waltz around the room under the lights (this being an exhibition in England, no-one did of course, but we all got the joke).

As I stood in front of Untitled (Rossmore II), mouth fizzing with sherbet, I turned to the gallery guide to read up on the work and learnt a piece of information that started the torrent. The weight of the sweets in front of me at the start of the exhibition had been the weight of the artists’ lover, Ross on the day that he had been diagnosed with AIDS. Like Ross, the pile of sweets was destined to lose weight, to diminish and eventually disappear. Suddenly this playroom of dancing and sweet-scoffing became a place of loss, the go-go platform and unused walkmen hanging in the dancing room became memento moris, as much symbols of absence as they had been sites of potential entertainment and play. I tried to compose myself, but the tears started streaming down my face.

As I stood there, desperately trying not to completely lose my composure and slip into all-out howling, a small boy approached the sweet pile. “You can eat the sweets you know.” said a gallery attendant.

”Really?” said the boy, his eyes widening.

“Yep, help yourself.”

He grabbed a handful and scuttled back to his parents “Mum, Dad. You can eat the sweets!” he yelled joyfully.

I looked up at the gallery attendant who was now grinning as broadly as the boy with his handful of lime sherbets and it hit me. The work was about loss, about the cruelty and stupidity of AIDS, about the death of a partner and the gaping hole that it leaves in people’s lives, but it was also about those tiny moments of shared joy in any relationship, how loss and such moments act on each other to make us feel both more keenly. When Pete’s away from home, it’s not just his presence I miss, it’s the tiny moments – his daft jokes, his inability to remember to take a lighter with him when he goes for a bath, his ‘coffee symphony’ (a ritual involving making as much noise as is humanly possible with teaspoons, coffee jar and sugar bowl just so I know that he is making coffee, the implication being that it’ll be my turn next).

But more than that – the work was about carrying on, in another location the sweets would be replenished, in an hour or so, the go-go dancer would be back and in another place couples would waltz to a private soundtrack under the lights. Loss is always with us, it’s part of life, it’s part of being human, but so are the little moments, the ones that remind of those we love and those we've lost and we can keep replaying them over and over again.

We left the gallery and walked across Hyde Park to Kensington where we dropped my mum off at her hotel and then headed for the tube. On the platform, as part of a public art project the gallery were running associated with the exhibition was another of Gonzalez-Torrez’s works, a billboard size print of a photograph of an empty bed – the bed that he and Ross shared.

As the tourists bustled around us I grabbed Pete’s hand and held on, lost in the moment.