Marcus Coates b. 1968
C Print (Unique)
1180 x 1180
1998
£590.00
2013.025
This was purchased after meeting Marcus Coates at a dinner
held ‘in honour’ of both him and Jordan Baseman at Lawson Park then the rented home of Grizedale Arts Director Adam Sutherland in 2002. Coates
representation by the ghastly Jibby Bean had come to an end and Lawson Park had
not yet been transformed into the luxurious pad/hq designed by Adam Sutherland’s
brother and funded by arts lottery largesse which has now graced the lifestyle
spreads of a number of style magazines.
The farm is inconveniently sited (miles from anywhere) up a
sump cracking track and the dinner was held in the un-refurbished barn which I
remember well because of the alarm Lynn and I shared over the hazard of good
clothing meeting a rusty nail or some similar in conditions of near darkness. It was cold - as was every meeting at Grizedale then. There were bobble hats and ‘t
lights’ in jam jars, hot food in big pans, and a screening of Baseman’s film
shot at the Roosecote Raceway in Barrow in Furness, featuring a stock car nutter
called Grandad and an unconvincing fat transvestite called Adam. Coates also
showed a film of a friend of his dressed up in football gear shouting obscene football
songs into the forest. (See links below)
Screenings complete, speeches were made and backs were
slapped.
Part of the function of the dinner was to draw to a close
the almost permanent series of residencies that Coates seemed to have enjoyed
at Grizedale Arts. It has not really been successful in doing this.
Coates early residencies had led to the making of a series
of brilliant works engaging with the relationships human beings have with
animals, most memorably ‘Stoat’ filmed by Miranda Whall in which Coates
attempted to leave stoat tracks without breaking his ankles by wearing some impossible
Stoat sandals which he seemed to have whittled from a stick and attached to his
feet with elastic bands. It was immediately clear to me that Coates
was making important work.*
The house had been arranged to display a number of pieces relating
to the two artists and in what was possibly an insight into Adam Sutherland’s
curatorial approach of the day a prominently placed biography of Aleister
Crowley.
Coates had two small pictures displayed in the house; one of
him quite literally giving the finger to a bird and one of him dressed in an
orange boiler suit. The unpulled focus is sufficient to support the interpretation
that he is a man dressed as a fox and also somewhat fox like. It also suggests a context of
surveillance, that the animal is perhaps being sighted at a distance through
binoculars or the sights of a rifle.
The photograph was again, taken by Miranda Whall who is credited as
the camera operator at a location in the Malvern Hills prior to the Grizedale
residencies. After the dinner I asked Adam if he could make a sale of the work
and the deal was done by email directly with Marcus for £500 + £90 for the c
type print. I was astonished but
delighted to discover that he sent me a picture 40” wide in a square crop which
I had framed to Coates instructions by Alan Harvey. I had expected Coates to
send me a picture identical to the print I had seen at the house in size and
shape. Subsequently Coates has shown the photograph widely in a variety of smaller
and differently shaped crops.
Since moving to Crosby Ravensworth in 2004 it has hung in the
kitchen. Initially it excited a lot of comment, most of which arose from
resentment at the ill-conceived and unloved fox hunting act of the same year. Our new friends and neighbours were seemingly all almost as keen on killing foxes
as they were on killing Tony Blair.
Now it gets completely ignored.
Meanwhile in the real world Coates is currently shortlisted for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. His proposal is the best of them you can support it here:
2014/12/23 Update: This picture has just been returned from an exhibition 'The Nuisance of Landscape' at Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal. Review here. Owing to it being Christmas and my being confused, having overslept and not being dressed at 10:00 am.... Lynn was away in Dorset. I had forgotten that the gallery were coming to return it in time for Christmas (Thank you very much) and seeing them through the kitchen window I completely mistook them for Jehovah's witnesses shooing my youngest son to the door to get them to go away!
Here it is in the show with some lovely people who prefer to look at a wall with some writing on it!
In a final touch of all things being connected in a deeply uncomfortable, sticky, drowning in quicksand type of way the picture was hung (hanged?) on the same wall which for a decade in the 90's contained the door to my office as Curator for Fine and Decorative Art! Adam Sutherland hung it with the text from this blog above. It is a tragedy that I could not have bought this for the gallery at the time and a continuing tragedy that Abbot Hall doesn't buy something from Grizedale every month! All public galleries are the same, waiting for cycles of validation to be completed before turning to the lottery (a voluntary tax levied on people for not being interested in art) to fund now expensive acquisitions. If I could have spent even £5,000 a year at risk on contemporary art outside this process I could have made a lasting contribution to the gallery and to artists. What is needed so badly in this country are development collections with a public role from which disposals can be made as these cycles complete.... but that idea is so alien to our public gallery culture that I can't ever see it being realized.
* This is an irony free line.
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