Marcus Coates, 'Red Fox', 1998

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: http://www.london.gov.uk/priorities/arts-culture/fourth-plinth/2014-2015-commissions

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.

Links

Grizedale Arts #1

Grizedale Arts #2

Meadow Arts

Picture this

Workplace

Tate Gallery

Vision Quest (Elephant and Castle) Nomad
The Nuisance of Landscape

Luke Jerram, 'Just Sometimes', 2010

'Just Sometimes'

Luke Jerram b.1974

Deck Chair with Printed Seat

Deckchair dimensions when flat = 1300 x 600 x 60

2010

Priceless (or £100 from the online shop)

Exh. 'Deckchair Dreams 2013' Royal Parks

2013.020

Rare though it is for something to enter the transparent collection on the day it was received because I do not do things 'in order' - for this, I'm making an exception. 

I worked with Luke as a project mentor on his project Aeolus in 2010 and have continued to act as a sounding board up to the sale of the work earlier this year. 

Luke has been following this blog and offered me a work. 

Did I want 2D or 3D? I said I was relaxed about it but that he should bear in mind where I live and so this morning a parcel arrived addressed to 'the relaxed Christian Barnes'. I haven't been relaxed recently, I've been stressed, so stressed I haven't made an entry in here for ages. It is pouring with rain today so the umbrellas are appropriate and the photo is in the kitchen and not in the garden. But none the less I love it. 

It also brings to mind a particular discussion with Luke. Aeolus went on forever, was hugely unwieldy, caused a lot of worry (not least to project co-ordinator Carolyn Black), financial risk and cost a lot of money - around £500k. It was eventually engineered by Arup so what else do you expect? It was fabulous and fine and has just been been bought by Airbus. There is a happy ending! Luke is always sunny side up. 'What could possibly go wrong?' and it is true that people with no plans who are open to opportunity are rarely disappointed!

The project did bog Luke down however. It was challenging and difficult and delivered in a very different economic and cultural climate to the one in which it was conceived and in the middle of it Luke went off to Rotterdam to the Witte de With Festival where he had a few days to do a commissioned event project. I seem to recall that while he was there, there was a bust up with the first project engineer (not Arup) arising from that curse of the email age the accidental forward. There were some anxious calls from the hotel though I may be off about the actual timing.

One of many ideas he proposed saw him buying a load of umbrellas and chucking them (tr. ‘arranging randomly by placing them upside down like paper boats’) in the waterways and he loved doing it. Quick. Instant.

It also kind of matters that Luke is colour blind, the element of not seeing the same way and not over designing, occupying a space where randomness and factors that that you can't predict or control occurs is key to the work.

It sits among his preoccupations around ideas of gathering and dispersal that suit festival type programming and also alongside his preoccupations with perception at the margins of both the senses and consciousness from REM sleep to mirages. 

It is the light touch that he does best. 

The relief of thinking quickly and just doing it was the perfect antidote to the Aeolus project. 

After three days they were gathered, given away, and are now revisited for this Royal Parks fundraiser. 

I will enjoy sitting on the deck chair and as I write he has offered me another - if they ask him next year, this time of the Sky Orchestra.

It also reminds me of the work of an 'artist, dreamer and blagger' living not far from here who works with umbrellas on water too. How spooky is that! I have seen quite a few of his umbrellas upside down in water in my time... not usually to the same positive effect.

Links

Deckchair Dreams 

Luke Jerram

Luke Jerram 'Witte de With' Festival, Rotterdam 2010 

Witte de With

Sky Orchestra

Max Moodie, 'Camelia', Undated

'Camelia'
Max Moodie
Oil on Canvas
1340 x 1080
1973
Gift
Low Commercial Value
2013.019


'Camelia' is painted with brushes and knives on a particularly coarse primed canvas. I'm tired of the number of people who sit down to dinner in front of it and say 'what is that supposed to be?'

It was bought from an exhibition at Abbot Hall Art Gallery by my father in 1973 I would have been six.

As a school boy I remember it hanging behind his desk and simply huge executive chair at his factory at Kent Works in Kendal.

It completed the 'modern' look of the office suite: White walls, a hi-fi with a smoked glass top, a roladex, other gadgets, a purple carpet, brand new office furniture of the 1970s chrome and leather, a computer room (spinning tapes and everything), the MBE for services to export and sales targets on adjustable graphs.

It was (to the schoolboy me) like a Bond villain's lair with only a white cat missing from dad's lap and a 'moo ha ha' laugh in relation to some dastardly machination.

'No meestre Bond.... it is time to DIE!'.....

See what tricks memory plays... Dad manufactured horn goods, the company was called Abbey Horn of Kendal and in the 70's it took the General Post Office three months to install a telephone of the type that didn't have buttons! 'Moo ha ha' that Dad! World domination postponed, time only to make a quick getaway (perhaps with the help of the RAC recovery service) in the Maxi, the Austin Maxi!

Max, the artist, was actually an architect with Cumbria County Council whose best work was his own house in Ingleton. Which no doubt, is now impossible to heat, the price of 'sculpting with light'/specifying single glazing across the whole of the north elevation levened only with louvered windows of the type commonly found in greenhouses it is also ruined externally by the planners insistence that he have a hipped roof when Max had designed it for flat. Why say the planners, no problem, simply put a hipped roof on top!

Max toyed with the idea of becoming a painter and was offered the show by Mary Burkett then director of Abbot Hall (but opted for a council salary and pension instead).

The gallery is the only one in the UK to own a painting by Max which can be seen by all (upside down as it happens) at 'your paintings'....http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/the-green-bowl-145411.

See that bit where they say 'tell us what you know?' I told them it was upside down.

'Camelia' is now what it always was - a bit of decor. It hangs in the dining room looking like a proper painting, albeit one consigned to the graveyard of ambition and rendered in 'hearing aid biege', faded even when it was new. The 47 year old me sees it very differently but part of me still clings to a view of it formed in that perfect moment nearly forty years ago when I understood virtually nothing outside the present moment and my father was alive.

Links
Your Paintings
Abbot Hall Past Exhibitions

Ed Ruscha, 'Real Estate Opportunities', 1970

'Real Estate Opportunities'

Ed Ruscha b.1937

Self-published book

180 x 140

1970

Bequeathed by Audrey Melville Barker

£700.00

2013.018

The Getty Museum explains this book thus….

‘In Real Estate Opportunities, Ruscha presents, without comment, pictures of various tracts of land for sale in different parts of L.A. County’.

I’m tempted to leave it at that.

The Glassine cover is lightly damaged. I don’t know if it’s beginning to disintegrate or if it has been helped along by mice, I don’t think so. It is slightly browned.

There is a great interview with the artist and Dave Hickey. Ruscha is totally at ease, deadpan and dry. He is bang on the money and he knows it. Ruscha reminds me of Bob Newhart a bit and the audience is eager to laugh, enough to say they are in on the joke. I’ve put it in the link below but skip to 4:30 when the tedious introductions are over.

Actually there is something to say about it and that is to do with cars and how the landscape is seen and accessible from them. The views are all ‘driveby’ locations it’s somehow more noticeable in this book. In many ways the subject isn’t there, what you see is the infrastructure, the power lines, the commercial notices, the signs and the roads. They are all places of the same type and so the archetype rather than the particular is what you end up with out of the book, perhaps without really looking at any one of these banal photographs.

But its worth looking again. I saw a Ruscha show recently, one of the Tate gallery's artists rooms exhibits. In some of the photographs Ruscha had made the slightest scoring in some of the film plates to look a bit like chemical process film for movie projection as if his drive by photos were cut from a super eight film, they wern't. Now that it is rare to see film projected in this way it is also so much easier to read his intentions - to see  the  particular. Ruscha's gaze manages to be both staggeringly cool and tight at the same time. It made me look again at the photos in the book to see if there are any errors or slips? There are none, every photograph is perfect.

The provenance of this is the same as 2013.004 and 2013.017 in that all these books were collected by Audrey and Dennis Barker when sending $3:50 to an artist in California for a book like this was (in rural Cumbria at least) a rather rare activity.

LINKS

Getty 'Pacific Standard Time

Ed Ruscha and Dave Hickey talking 

Ed Ruscha, 'A Few Palm Trees', 1971

'A Few Palm Trees'

Ed Ruscha b.1937

Self-published book

180 x 140

1971

Bequeathed by Audrey Melville Barker

£400.00

2013.017

Made in Hollywood under the imprint of 'Heavy Industry Publications', a title chosen no doubt because of its closeness to Ruscha's desire to be 'the Henry Ford of books'... 1971. First Edition. Small octavo. One of 3900 copies. Good condition with plain black wrappers, no cover jacket of 'Glassine' this time.

Each photograph shows only the palm itself with the location erased from the image plate. The text on the left hand page tells the reader the location of the tree in Los Angeles and that each photograph was taken facing west. Each tree illustrated (there are fourteen of them) although conforming to type is very different. After the plates the book consists of blank pages. 

That's it then, type, method and context (experienced here in its absence) and formula. The same formula Ruscha uses for the discovery of other typologies of the built and cultural environment in Los Angeles like swimming pools and gasoline stations. From this straightjacket of constraints the little irregularities in the life and form of these trees is immense.

It is not one of Ruscha's more valued books. It is easy to find at specialist book sellers and generally retails for around $500, but it repays the investment of time surprisingly well.

Its provenance is the same as 2013.004.

Ruscha's book making is currently being celebrated with this great boxed collection http://www.gagosian.com/shop/ed-ruscha

Links

Gagosian Gallery Show

Simon Cutts, 'late starlings startled by traffic resettle', 2003

'late starlings startled by traffic resettle'
Simon Cutts (b.1944)
Edition unknown
220 x 810

2003

£175 (including framing)

2013.016

I saw this last year at Shandy Hall, Coxwold in the exhibition ‘Printed in Norfolk, Coracle Publications 1989-2012’. I’m surprised to find that I took a photo of it in the show. 

This is the last of them. None were available at the time. I tried to buy it without Simon knowing from the curator/owner who rejoices in the name of Patrick Wildgust! This last one was framed flat for the show. It was lovely to see Simon and Erica Van Horn there too and I’m grateful to Simon for remembering that I wanted it and for his encouragement with a project. 

I thought my request to buy it had been forgotten until the other day.

It arrived here only the day before yesterday.

I think they were all supposed to be supplied as a scroll/roll with all the handling that this implies but I prefer it like this. 

Looking at it fresh out of the parcel post it’s just as exciting as I remember and it’s going to look superb in the house when I find a long thin place to put it.

It’s so carefully considered, the two lines offset over each other in similar colours of dark grey and blue.

On one level it’s the visual language of cancelled print. It reminds me of the kind of devices that banks use to send you a secret pin number so that they can’t be seen by villains (Villains who might hold the envelope up to the sky but who are obviously too pusillanimous to simply open the envelope and read it.) or those irritating online security texts, ‘CAPTCHA’, that are randomly distorted but which can still be read by human beings, though not by machines.

The form of the printed words conjure up a literal image of birds from the figure and ground relationship of the letters on the paper prompted, no doubt, by the sense of the words in much the same way as the randomised blots of the Rorschach test acts on the suggestible mind.

If this were such a test I would see a group of starlings lined up in silhouette on an overhead cable, their wings rustling, flexing and popping with the sound a bag makes when it is shaken out.

This line, this short string of words shackled together by their own rhythm, depicts of a flock of birds in the late season gathering before they submit to the collective discipline of flight in an air-bourne shoal where changes of direction appears to be steered by some invisible bond of mutual consent.

Its lyrical feel is intense but unusually for Simon there is also something of an urban feel to it too which reminds me of my first encounter with this line.

I had been appointed by what was then Cleveland Arts in 2002 to organise a competitive process to commission an artist to create a major commission for Marchday PLC who then owned Centre North East in the centre of Middlesbrough. I asked Simon to propose a work for it and he sent me a small orange book with this line in it and a description of how it might appear 10 to 13 floors up on the principal façade in neon lettering that would be illuminated, only when the wind blew, by the operation of a turbine.

It was to be an ‘Aeolian Neon’, his words.

Simon felt it would be right for a townscape environment and that it would work in Middlesbrough.

It was a perfect proposal. It wasn’t chosen though and in an attempt to interest others in the work I sent the book to another commissioner who managed to lose it! 

One such ‘Aeolian Neon’ exists in a private collection in Northumberland.

The commission went to Ron Haselden who created a superb work (also lyrical) simply called ‘Rose’.

For the duration of the commission Rose made a terrific impact. 

I recall once seeing it from the crest of Bowes Moor.

I have a substantial archive of great public art proposals that didn’t happen and Simon’s aeolian neon is one of the best of them. It still galls me that an opportunity to commission other great works (albeit well-mannered ones) from Bill Culbert and Simon Patterson nearby were also lost.

These failures, failures to commission the best work, have been instrumental in my growing disaffection for competitive appointment processes.

It’s a mistake to ‘tender’ for public art, tendering exists solely as a device for mitigating risk the best strategies for managing this kind of risk involve judgement, reputational liability and personal responsibility.

I went through that whole regeneration boom and the resources which went with it seeking to apply, but failing to implement this increasingly strident mantra that rattles round my head… ‘If it were my money would I spend it on this?’

As for Simon’s proposal I’d have had a confidence sapping worry. Not about the work or the context but about the mechanical engineering and the realistic term (approximately six years) for which the operations of an installation like this could be warrantied. 

The proposal felt more like an event (a great one nonetheless) than a permanent proposition to me.


Links
Printed in Norfolk Website
Coracle
Simon Cutts (Dumbarton Oaks)

Benedict Drew, 'The Persuaders', 2012

'The Persuaders'

Benedict Drew (b. 1977)

Achival Pigment Print on Metalurgy 200gsm.

edition 12/50

440 x 440

2012

£120 (including framing)

2013.015

Benedict Drew rhymes with ‘bad review’ which brings me to Adrian Searle’s scathing mention of ‘The Persuaders’ when he wrote up the Circa Projects commissioned project at Newcastle’s 2012 AV Festival.

The Persuaders was an installation of dizzying, ambient nastyness at the Stephenson works in Newcastle. The centrepiece was a film that said ‘Breath in’ ‘Breathe out’. 

The Persuaders had a spectacularly incomprehensible text with it which ended with the words ‘a complaint about the world will be lodged’. Actually like Searle, I had a bit of a ‘wtf’ moment in there too. However, unlike Searle who I saw running out of the installation, like the white rabbit with a judgement to form, the shit flyer with the text on it to help guide his thoughts, a copy deadline and a train to catch… I had time on my side.

When I came out, I saw this multiple on the wall and I thought ‘that’s cool’ so I bought it.

Sometimes there really is no more than that to it.

Anyway Drew finds himself better reviewed in Art Monthly and is named as a ‘future great’ in this month’s Art Review so he rhymes with ‘good review’ too.

It hangs (at the moment) next to the Rayburn which keeps it rather too warm and has a sort of a mashed potato/puff of smoke/letraset/smiley vibe going on.

Context is everything and the context here at home is ‘Kitchen’.

They have some good multiples at Circa Projects. I particularly like Eric Bainbridge’s sausage photo which would also be very ‘kitchen’ I’d buy that too but I know it would inspire a ‘wtf’ moment in my wife and unlike my ‘wtf’ moments which induce a sort of digressive reverie, Lynn’s ‘wtf’ moments are normally accompanied by a scowl of a fortnight’s duration and a list of 200 zillion other things that the money would be better spent on like a new kitchen, Caribbean beach holiday, new and improved husband, etc.

Links

Adrian Searle (AV2012 Festival)

Circa Projects

Art Review, Future Greats

Benedict Drew

Kenneth Rowntree, 'Flora Geometrica', 1988

'Flora Geometrica' 

Kenneth Rowntree (1915 1997)

P.V.A. (Stencil) on Board

650 x 560

1988

£800.00
2013.014

Cat 30 ‘Paintings, drawings and constructions by Kenneth Rowntree : Queens Hall 5th anniversary : a celebration. 1988

Cat 87 in Kenneth Rowntree, 1992 Davies Memorial Gallery touring to National Museum of Wales, Royal Festival Hall.

This painting was a gift to me from my father.  It was purchased by him from Abbot Hall’s late showing of the retrospective organised by Michael Nixon at Oriel 31. I don’t have a copy of the invoice but I think the painting was purchased for either £650 or £800 pounds. When he closed his office in Kendal in 2005 he gave the painting to me and it has hung in our dining room ever since. Today it is well set off by the younger son's industrial supply of 'Terror Eyes' bubble gum. I absolutely love it, the painting, not the gum. There is a circularity to this because it was in fact me who sold the painting to my father. If I’d had the money I could have bought it myself! 

It was bought unframed and I arranged for it to be framed by Alan Harvey up near Banks, his invoice for that is dated 12 Jan 1995. 

It’s a full description ‘Gray painted pine box with straight slip and 2mm glazing. Work floated off ¼” from back and margins as discussed, original backboard with title and signature retained…’ Alan’s choice of gray, made up for the purpose, is perfect.

I remember the occasion clearly because of the other work Alan had in to frame and which I spent ages looking at.

But I digress.

‘Flora Geometrica’ was quite simply the best recent painting in show and I think probably the best overall.

John Milner who eventually succeeded Rowntree as Professor at the Department of Fine Art at Newcastle University (whilst I was an undergraduate there) and who is Rowntree’s biographer has written about the painting on two occasions that I know of.  Firstly when the paint was still wet in 1988 when Rowntree showed at the 5^th Anniversary of the Queens Hall in Hexham. Milner made ‘Flora Geometrica’ both the title and subject of his introduction to the show and secondly in his introduction to the Oriel 31 1992 retrospective in which he reworked and refined his earlier text.

Rowntree was given another retrospective at the Hatton Gallery at Newcastle University in late 2003, 6 years after his death, on the occasion of the publication of John Milner’s biography in the which the painting is also referenced.

When I learned of the plans for the show I contacted the gallery and offered to arrange the loan of the painting but didn’t even get a reply which just goes to show what impossible tossers gallery people can be.

This is an extract from the Oriel 31 catalogue:

‘While Rowntree is a shrewd and enthusiastic observer of individual human traits, whether expressed through portraits, still-lifes or constructions, he is also a painter with ambition and ability of another order. He addresses his art to the achievements of other painters and takes his place within a dialogue that concerns the conventions of painting itself. His of art is related to that of Picasso, Braque, Ravilious, Nicholson, Pasmore and Nolan.  There is nothing local about this aspect of his work which relies upon an engaged knowledge of many twentieth century artistic achievements both in Britain and abroad. He has adopted shifting positions in relation to artistic landmarks of the period.

This dialogue with other painters is not local in its language but concerns the grammar and syntax of everything he does.  It is an examination of how painting works and what it can achieve, studied inevitably in the light of what others have made possible before him and in the light of his own long experience as a painter. In this dialogue the same sharp wit and shrewd eye are much in evidence. In this way Cubist painting has offered many possibilities through multiple viewpoints, collage, new systems of perspective and lettering. But other dialogues have occurred which have been just as rich. The gestural brush mark and the formal vocabulary of design have all played their part. Beneath all of this, like a rich vein of precious metal, there exists in Rowntree an inventive and devoted contributor to the unique achievements of British landscape painting.

Buro landschaft is German for open-plan office design. In Rowntree’s version it is its literal meaning of ‘office landscape’ that provokes his imagination into a rehearsal of the shining surface textures of office interiors that approaches but does not quite reach an air of mockery. In the two paintings of 1970 Based upon the theorem off Pythagoras, presented here in the format familiar from school geometry books, Rowntree takes on the traditions of mathematics in art but reverses the usual procedures.  Many painters have discovered a geometry in the still-life objects before them, but Rowntree is the first to make a theorem itself serve as a still-life. Colour, shading and the play of light in such depth and substance to its structure that it could make a vase of flowers . 

Flora Geometrica is a triumph in this respect.  It tilts and turns its silvered crosses is as if geometry were a garden in which the painter could select and pick the choicest flowers to put them in a vase for the pure pleasure of seeing them there.  The crosses are like flowers.  The converse is also true for flowers have the exploding visual impact of his silver crosses. 

The viewer is directly engaged in interpreting the metamorphosis that Rowntree presents.  As a result the experience of his paintings is like a visual dialogue, as rich, witty and enlightening as intelligent conversation.  This conversation is full of invitations, intrigues, surprises and revelations; it has its own poetry which can transform the objects and images he employs.  But the ultimate metamorphosis that he achieves is to transform the visual vocabulary of his viewers by making poetry from the mundane, intimate and yet spectacular visual world that surrounds them.’

John Milner, 24 April 1992. 


Links
Tate Gallery, Kenneth Rowntree

Richard Calvorcoresi's Obituary

Kenneth Rowntree by John Milner

Paintings in Public Collections by Kenneth Rowntree

Damien Hirst, 'Life is Normal', 1995

'Life is normal'
Damien Hirst b. 1965
Long sleeved T Shirt (Screen printed)
Size M
1995
£20.00
2013.013



I had completely forgotten that I owned this but with the family away I have had an opportunity to sort out my groaning T shirt shelf. By the sedimentary system of filing I use for such things this had found its way to the bottom of the pile. I have too many T shirts. I also have a Barbara Kruger T shirt which carries the slogan 'It's a small world until you have to clean it' - this was a present from my wife Lynn, a souvenir of an arty junket in New York, oh how she must have laughed as she flexed our credit card. She bought our son a cuddly tortoise puppet, I don't like wearing this either, T shirt or tortoise.

I mainly wear T shirts associated with sailing events, to the point of disintegration as it happens.

Hirst's T shirt  reminds me of the 'slogan' T shirts that Katherine Hamnett made fashionable in the 80's, also it reminds me of Wham, the 'Wake me up before you GO GO' period, when George Michael might have been described as bouffant. A time when in order to look cool you simply had to walk around with an irritating and slightly in your face truism on your chest like '98% don't want Pershing'...

Hirst's T shirt injects a vapid nothingness into this 'space' it's just stupid. It inflicts embarrassment on the wearer to the power of 10. Also the neck is tight. I wore it once but never actually went out of the house in it!

However this discovery is not a tail of woe... for it also reminded me of how I bought it by mail order from the brilliant 'supastore MIDDLESBROUGH' exhibition in Linthorpe Road in 1995.

I have found the catalogue and it is priceless, a collection put together out of association and probably a bit of blagging, a snapshot of who could be got, who was who, including a hefty clump of soon to be Turner Prize nominees and winners.

Runners, riders and shot in the paddock, they are all there recorded for posterity at a time before word processors were in widespread use in galleries in Middlesbrough. Obviously things are different, though not necessarily better, now. In those far off days before email (yes really) it was OK to make do with a crappy old typewriter and a telephone (maybe with buttons) although this typewriter has a sans serif typeface. To me (and I suspect only to me and the person who bought it) this says its a bit 'gallery'. Some line drawings made with a biro and a photocopier complete the production. If one was being uber critically aware, it might be described as a homage to the 'zine'. It is lifted by the fiddly circular binders.

There would have been a great case for buying one of everything in it. It taunts me with the stupidity of what I actually bought. Slideshow here... enjoy.





Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Adrian Wiszniewski, ‘Unicorn’, 1986

Unicorn

Adrian Wiszniewski b. 1958

1986

Etching & Letterpress

610 X 810   

1986

£250

2013.012

In 1986 I was (reaching for calculator) 18! I had a Saturday job working as an assistant for the Simon King press in Beetham. The press specialised in block printing, wood engraving and letterpress.

Simon was approached by Charles Booth-Clibborn to print the written content of the inaugural Paragon Press publication The Scottish Bestiary. 

Booth-Clibborn, while still a student, had personally approached the Glasgow boys (the mid-eighties generation that is - the ones being bought by Goma in the 90’s doh!) to illustrate a suite of poems ‘The Scottish Bestiary’ by the poet George Mackay Brown (1921 – 1996).

Wiszniewski’s subject was the Unicorn.

I helped Simon set, kern and prepare a makeready for the lead type to what I still consider to be a near fascistic state of perfection, still not good enough for him mind.

We used a beautifully restored, by him, Albion press made in the 1820’s which he and I hand pulled in turns. No offence was intended to the Scottish in this choice of press by the way! 

I think now that I could have gone on from this to be a powerful rower! We then printed the papers we had received from the Peacock Press where the illustrations were being done. It was tense because the edition was very small and we couldn't afford too many spoils, of which, this is one. 

Simon gave a couple of spoils to me I think recognising that he wasn't paying me very much. Looking at it now I really can’t see what was wrong with it. I had it framed when I moved to a new house. The bedroom has always seemed the right place to put it.The Unicorn has watched me get middle aged and fat.

The poem is lovely and so is the type in which it is set ‘Bodoni’ if memory serves. 

UNICORN

You will not meet the unicorn

Outside the queen’s garden.

 

He goes among the roses and the fountains

Very delicately treading.

His silver horn and shines in the sun. 

The queen’s ladies

Offer him roseleaves and honey.

Too coarse! 

He devours the scent of the flowers.

As he leans his white neck

On the white necks of the ladies.

 

Peacocks fold their fans and droop

When the unicorn walks in the garden. 

The swans

Drift dingily to the far side of the lake. 

Blackbirds stop singing.

 

The unicorn comes to the garden at night

Under the full moon.

He feeds on dew, delicately.

 

He will not go near the sundial.

 

In winter he moves through the snow

Invisible

But when he breaks the script of the bare branches.

When King and council come

With their talk of war and trade and taxes

The unicorn gallops to the bower

Where ladies sit at the looms.

‘Sweet ladies, give me sanctuary now

In your tapestry’….

Gravely, there, for centuries, heraldic,

He sports with the lion.

One by one the royal ladies have withered and died. 

I can see what’s wrong with it now that I have stood in front of it and pushed the poem through voice recognition software… It’s not justified quite straight to the page. Now whose fault was that?

Links

Yale Centre for British Art 

British Council 

George MacKay Brown

Museum of Modern Art

Albion Press 

Adrian Wiszniewski

David Tremlett, 'Abyssinia', 1989

Abyssinia 

David Tremlett b. 1945 

Screen print

61 x 79

1989

£50 

2013.011

I bought this print in 1999. I paid £50 for it.  It is 30/100. This was one of a series of print editions by the Serpentine Gallery.  I remember that I had tried to buy the Bridget Riley which was under-priced at the same time but that this had sold out immediately.  

They exercised a practised snottiness on the phone when I asked them to roll the print and post it to me (relax no harm was done) but I did wonder whether a conservator was really needed for the task. 

Tremlett was nominated for the Turner prize in 1992 alongside Grenville Davey, Damien Hirst and Alison Wilding.  Astonishingly Grenville Davey won!  Looking back on it 20 years later is a bit like remembering who was in the charts.  

As it happens I do remember who was in the charts: Whitney Houston, Snap, Shakespeares Sister and the Shamen: ‘E’s are good’ (snigger).

Tremlett’s drawings (colourings) are normally made in a specific place and drawn directly onto their support engaging with the structure of walls and buildings, both inside and out. Works that can be bought (especially as cheap as this) are rare. I like it, I like the structure of the truncated word complete and not complete. 'Sin' links the bathroom and bedroom in our house (snigger again).

It was a transition year in which the eighties became history and the millennium became a prospect. Actually it wasn't a good year at all.

I have updated this entry having found the certificate that came with it. It cost less than I thought. I have to say the Serpentine editions are very good value.

Victoria and Albert Museum

David Tremlett

Serpentine Gallery

Li Yuan-chia, ‘Axe and Shears’, 1993

‘Axe and Shears’

Li Yuan-chia (1929-1994)

Tinted photograph mounted on Rice Paper

360 x 390

1993

£25.00

2013.010

I bought this directly from Li in 1993. I had an overpowering sense of standing next to a great but almost completely ignored artist, one who didn't fit with established narratives and someone from whom I could really learn.  The meeting and the build up to it was in every way challenging and it wouldn’t have happened without the intervention of Simon Cutts who has made a number of suggestions which, when followed up, have resulted in collecting something brilliant. Its my title by the way not Li's.

People talk a lot about LYC Museum, the gallery Li ran until 1982. They talk of the transforming effect it had on their lives. I never went when it was open and didn't even know it was there.

When I spoke to Li about it he regretted the level of commitment he had made to it feeling that although it had in a sense, the sense of being a service to others, been an art work it had distracted him from his other work and contributed to his isolation.

He would, he said, be interested to do a show at Abbot Hall only if Northern Arts Board would pay him £32,000 to compensate him for the way in which they had ‘treated’ him. I struggled with this feeling that that they had ‘treated’ him to years of funding and that perhaps they might not welcome these words on an application form. But this is the sort of arm lock I've got used to, the sort that can switch from banter to a shut door in the blink of an eye. 

I met Li because; through Audrey Barker I was introduced to Simon Cutts. Simon had possession of Audrey’s accumulated collection of LYC catalogues. He later gave them (without her permission) to Iniva. 

He suggested to me that I might like to write a pamphlet for the Coracle ‘Little Critics’ series on the way in which Li used publishing as a platform for artists’ practice.

Fine I said, the only problem being that I didn’t know and had never met Li and had never been to the museum or seen any of its shows. He gave me a selection of 'Little Critics' in a nice little box to have a look at.

Nothing much happened for about 18 months, I kept it in mind. I collected as many catalogues as I could find from antiquarian and specialist book shops, finally hitting paydirt at the fabulous Michael Moon’s bookshop in Whitehaven where I was able to order LYC Catalogues by shelf length. I probably have a complete set now including a large book on Winifred Nicholson published under the imprint of LYC press.

I called at the museum a number of times at the beginning of the decade. It had a very derelict appearance.  Sometimes I knew he was in but he just wasn’t answering the door. It was a major effort because at the time I didn’t have a car and the visits I made were on the back of the visits I was making to the area researching ‘Banks Head a Painters Place’ about the Nicholsons and their guests at Banks in the late 20’s in a selection of rented and borrowed vehicles. Everyone said he was difficult to deal with. He was.

Finally on possibly the third attempt he opened the door and he let me in. I wanted to see his work I explained… I had a commission from Simon Cutts… I knew Li’s early work from material in private collections and indeed from the Abbot Hall Collection and of course I knew of the renewal of critical interest in his work since Rasheed Araeen had included him in ‘The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-war Britain’, at the Hayward Gallery in 1989. I found out as we talked though that Li had been frustrated that he had been unable to interest the organisers in the work he was making now.

Because of this he refused to discuss anything historical and especially the museum and its publishing with me. The ‘Little Critic’ died.

He marched me tantalisingly past a room full of older work (Hanging Disks) and sat me down in the kitchen. 

He began to show me his photographs and all around us were the scenarios he had been photographing.

I knew instantly how fantastic and original they were. How powerfully they expressed the way he saw things. I recognise in them the basis of the formal language of the New British Sculpture of the 80’s particularly those artists of that generation represented by the Lisson Gallery which both Audrey and Li had been associated with a decade earlier. I could also see how intensely symbolic, poetic and reflective they were and that they proceeded from another unfamiliar (to me) tradition. 

When I later showed them to Audrey she was struck by the way they reprised something of the ‘Moon Show' which Li had installed at the Lisson gallery in 1969. She vividly recalled an arrangement of leaves and a swing.

I knew I would buy some straight away; In fact I cooked up the idea of setting up a standing order. I could see Li needed income and thought this arrangement might suit him and not empty my pockets so rapidly. I asked him how much he wanted and he settled on the astonishing figure of £25 each, a price that I have always regarded as a personal gift.

I bought two, both using the motif of a hatchet and shears supporting each other and intended to write to him with my suggestion about buying more. In fact I contemplated writing to him and suggesting that I come and work for him as an assistant. I also contemplated how I would explain this madness to others. Even now I feel robbed of opportunity by his death.

As he prepared them for me he carefully stamped and numbered them . This one is [LYC 248/93|Banks, Brampton Cumb. CA8 2JH. England.] He mounted the photographs on rice paper and recorded details of the work in a book. He showed me how they were to be framed in black. I visited him at the museum a number of times but before any of my plans could be articulated or explored I learned that he was ill. I visited him subsequent to the diagnosis of the cancer that killed him (he had ignored early symptoms) and I visited him again in the Cumberland Infirmary shortly before he transferred to a hospice to die.

As well as being in a good deal of physical discomfort he was in turmoil really not wanting to die and insecure about his will. He worried that he could not rely on the contacts he had named in his will to execute it as he wished. He described the will as a mistake but died weeks later without changing it.

One of the things that troubled me most about Li’s death was the way in which people moved in on him claiming territory and controlling access to him. Audrey was desperate to see him before he died and shamefully was not assisted by someone who later briefly became a trustee of the LYC foundation. 

The LYC was full of Li’s work. Most of it was removed after his death to Iniva who produced in 2000 ‘Li Yuan-chia: Tell me what is not yet said’ with essays by Guy Brett and Nick Sawyer. The exhibition (Curated by Guy Brett) toured to Camden Arts Centre and to Abbot Hall, after my time there and presumably not in exchange for £32,000!

Much to my surprise the exhibition and book recognised the importance of this late work which was featured  very prominently.

There are plans for the LYC Foundation to develop at Banks. I really hope that one day this happens.

Links

INIVA

Third Text

LEAP LEAP

LYC Foundation 

Kenneth Rowntree, ‘Breton Morning’, undated

‘Breton Morning’
Kenneth Rowntree (1915 – 1997)

Acrylic on Card

196 x 196

Undated

£150

2013.009

This is one of the two pictures given to me by Kenneth Rowntree. It is a retrospective copy of another picture. ‘Breton Morning’, 1965. illustrated in: John Milner, Kenneth Rowntree, Lund Humphries, 2002.

On the surface of it, it’s an abstract and I could easily go on about formal language, picture planes etc. but in fact, as related over our lunch, at some length, it is an erotic fantasy.

I mentioned in my previous post about the other picture (Acomb Grey and Green) that while he had been talking his wife Diana had become irritated; it was in fact at this point in our conversation that I noticed her irritation had reached its peak.

Rowntree told me that in the sixties at Newcastle University he had had a secretary. She always wore a close fitting black polo neck sweater and a short blue dress.  In this picture she stands to the left, her head is missing, as are her legs and arms which have been cropped from the picture hinting at close physical proximity.

In some versions her breast is sculpted out of the surface as a concave dish. The white triangle in the bottom right is a tent in which he fantasised that they had spent the night, my version is garnished with a coffee stain in the bottom right, and the rest is landscape and sky.

I have no idea if it’s true but I like lies - an artist friend of my father’s once told me as a child that the reason Flemish painters always did cows standing in water was that they couldn’t do feet. I have chosen to retain this pearl of wisdom and will carry it to the grave. Stories are always best when told to the credulous.

Links

Breton Morning (Harry Moore Gwynn Fine Art)

Fry Art Gallery

Kenneth Rowntree, 'Acomb Grey and Green' undated

'Acomb Grey and Green'

Kenneth Rowntree (1915 1997)
Pencil and Acrylic on Card
190 x  222

Undated

£150.00

2013.08

I organised an extra showing at Abbot Hall of Kenneth Rowntree’s mid-nineties Oriel 31 retrospective organised by Michael Nixon. 

In preparation for the show he invited me to his house in Corbridge (two shop fronts knocked together in Front street) opposite the Black Bull for a lunch. He was something of a bon viveur and lunch was very nice. He had wonderful art on the walls, a superb Ben Nicholson with an airmail motif, a Pasmore and a great big watercolour of his own showing a red box car. He was a terrific story teller and spoke about how they had come by these works, much to the irritation of his wife Diana who had probably heard each successive iteration of these accounts practiced to perfection on their guests.

After lunch we drove a less than straight route to his studio above the town in his little French car, rolling suspension, rolling landscape. If wine had not been taken it would have been alarming but it seemed smooth as if the world turned underneath us. He was so hospitable and showed me an enormous quantity of his work - some of which we agreed to add to the Oriel Show.

Over lunch we discussed the announcements and publicity for the show and he produced two pictures, small copies on card of ‘proper paintings’ but made by hand. These would do to send to the press he said; they would be better than photographs! It didn’t matter if they were lost, he didn’t want them back, I could keep them. I was astonished but he was sincere. I was slightly embarrassed by this because I knew that the process involved in printing would prevent them and us from using them as he intended and I didn’t want to reject them. This one is a retrospective copy of ‘Acomb Grey and Green’ in the collection of Northumbria University Gallery.

Rowntree had been professor of Fine Art at Newcastle University well before my time there as a student and we talked about the school.

I love Rowntree’s painting it’s a paen to ‘Modern’ Britain, the one that was born with the ‘Skylon’ and buried with ‘Get Carter’, via the other country that was also lost in the Second World War and so beautifully commemorated by the War Artists Committee – Rowntree included.

Unlike many of his contemporaries Rowntree was inspired by fellow departmental staff Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton to embrace modernity becoming ‘a bridge’ between the painterly Euston Road formality of Laurence Gowing (also a Professor at the Department) and these, last gasp of credibility, English moderns.

I’m not sure such a bridge was actually needed.  

This later work has never been well liked or received and Rowntree is better represented in public collections by the work he did before the war and for the war artists committee. Rowntree’s comfortable life and security of tenure meant that he didn’t have to strive to maintain critical subscription for his work. Fogeys who like the early work regard him as an artist who 'went off'.

He is however celebrated with a superb biography by art historian John Milner who worked under him and also later became Professor at Newcastle. I wish that as a student I had learned more and had greater insight into John’s knowledge. I suspect that the biography is a way of repaying the mentoring of the older man.

Links

Tate Gallery, Kenneth Rowntree

Richard Calvorcoresi's Obituary

Kenneth Rowntree by John Milner

Acomb Grey and Green, University of Northumbria Gallery (They have spelt it incorrectly.)

Paintings in Public Collections by Kenneth Rowntree

Thomas A. Clark, ‘Evening Light’ undated

‘Evening Light’

Thomas A. Clark (b. 1947)
Enamelled Plaque

222 x 302

Undated

Purchase from Cairn Gallery

£150.00

2013.007

I bought this on the 15 January 1997 in ‘Art97’ at the Business Design Centre in Islington from Thomas who at the time was running the Cairn Gallery in Gloucester. He didn’t really look like he was enjoying the event.

In black writing on a dark blue ground (that you really have to make an effort to read) is written:

You are invited to sit here

for a while and remember

a place, a landscape or

a quality of evening light.

It’s a poem (a sentence) that has been made rather than written, being conceived of as an instruction to the reader.

Cairn Gallery had support from the Contemporary Art Society to be at the Art Fair and represented a quiet, well-mannered alternative to the attention seeking horror of the cast flayed corpses on show at the hideous Jibby Beane Gallery (Plod took an interest thereby helping the hype) and the frantic jizz of the YBA thing going on downstairs and of course in the wider context of the bigger jizz going on in the country at large.

The cynical ‘enabling’ (exploitation) of ‘aspiration’ (greed) by the newly elected government which to me carried echoes of Thatcher’s mobilisation of the ‘yuppies’ a decade earlier, was similarly buzzing around the whole country from its epicentre in Islington.

I actually hate art fairs and at them I tend to seek refuge in material that is quiet in nature or which distracts from what is actually going on. This year I managed a whole 25 minutes in Elizabeth Price’s installation at MOT at Frieze thinking at the time that it was good, but now wondering whether it was mainly because it was darkly lit, intensely seductive and comfortable to sit in.

Cairn Gallery were on my radar because Abbot Hall, where I then worked as Curator, had just presented a show of James Hugonin’s paintings. The Clarks also had an association with Simon Cutts and Coracle who I knew through Audrey Barker. I recall that James and I discussed at length the need to re-frame some of James’ paintings that had just been shown there replacing jarring mitred corners with butt joined corners in the occasional style of Ben Nicholson. James had these works re-framed for our show with Alan Harvey who I also used at that time.

In the file I have on the plaque (which has been left untended until today) there is a Goods Pass Out form from the art fair. It doesn't record what I paid for it, or when it was made. I think it was made around that year and I paid about £150. The file also contains a Cairn Gallery pamphlet ‘In Praise of Walking’ (1988) and I’m wondering whether that too should become part of the ‘Transparent Collection’ simply because it is fantastic - it was a giveaway.  

‘Evening Light’ was one of a number of similar plaques that Clark had made and installed in public and private places. At the art fair it was appropriately close to a chair and on bending down to peer at the plaque I did feel invited to sit down and do just that. It is an experience I repeat almost daily.

Since then the plaque has always been on the wall somewhere in our houses.  For the last 8 years it has been next to the chair at which I eat my breakfast. I love it because it constantly invites a reverie disengaging the here and now. On Cairn editions website there is a short essay ‘On Imaginative Space’. If instructions on how to look at it were needed, these are they.

Since 2002 Cairn Editions has been based in Pittenweem. It’s not very open but you can go if you want, ring first.

Links

Cairn Editions

Scottish Poetry Library

Oxford Poetry (Thomas Clark)