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)