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