barbara walker MBE RA at the arnolfini…

I went along to the Barbara Walker ‘Being Here’ exhibition at the Arnolfini today (I’d been meaning to go for some time!). She and I share the fact that we were both born in Birmingham and grew up in Handsworth (albeit she’s 15 years younger than me!).
The exhibition presents almost 60 extraordinary artworks, including rarely seen early paintings of Walker’s family, friends and community in her home city, along with her Turner Prize nominated monumental drawing series ‘Burden of Proof’, which illustrates the impact on the lives of those affected by the Windrush scandal.
Stunningly beautiful, powerful drawings and paintings.
The exhibition runs until 25 May. See it if you can. 

grayson perry: the most popular art exhibition ever!…

Moira and I were due to attend the preview night of Grayson Perry’s exhibition at the Arnolfini on Tuesday 26 September but, due to the queues, we decided to opt out – afterall, it’s a free exhibition and we can walk round it as often as we like between now and Christmas.
I love Perry’s work but, probably, most of all, I love his approach to his art and his wonderful ability to talk about it (and other stuff) in a brilliantly straightforward, engaging way. This quote from the exhibition programme sums it up quite nicely:
“Art can be intellectually stretching, moving and fun at the same time… People, on the whole, come to art exhibitions on their day off. They do not want to feel that they are just doing their homework. Maybe it’s time to take the sting out of the word popular. When I came up with this title – The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever! – I liked it because it chimed with one of my ongoing ambitions – to widen the audience for art without dumbing it down. Mainly I liked it because it made me giggle, but popularity is a serious business. Ask any politician.”

I love the way he frequently uses words in his work (eg. “flat whites against racism”!). I find his stuff funny, entertaining, profound, poignant, beautiful… and thoroughly thought-provoking. I’ve listened to his Reith Lectures, I’ve watched his TV documentaries, I’ve been to hear him at Colston Hall and I’ve seen his work at a number of exhibitions over the years - the first time he made a real impact on me was when we went to see his exhibition “The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman” at the British Museum in 2011 (yes, it took me some time to ‘get him’!). He comes across as just a really nice, ordinary bloke (if there is such an animal?), but there’s clearly far more to him that that (like "talented artist"!?).

He’s become a national treasure.

Whoever would have thought, say as little as 20 years ago, that an Essex-born, straight-talking transvestite would achieve a status such as this?

Of course, he has used his cross-dressing to his advantage – it singled him out and made him instantly recognisable within an art world that had perhaps become rather too predictable (I was at college with sculpture/artist Andrew Logan – not on the same course, I hasten to add – and was very aware of how used his appearance and style to mark himself out in a vaguely similar way)(at college, he decorated his room in the form of a country meadow - with the radiator resembling a sheep, plenty of blue sky and clouds and greengrocers “grass” used as his carpet!).

 

Although we didn’t actually get into Perry’s preview at the Arnolfini, we did see him mingling with the crowds – completely at ease with himself and utterly accepted (and adored?) by all who had come to see his show.

I think it’s quite brilliant how Perry has managed to challenge (in a gentle, amusing but determined way) prejudices that so many of us have perhaps harboured – and I very much include myself in this – on a whole variety of things. It’s not anything to do with him condoning people’s behaviour or characteristics or eccentricities or views, it’s just that he seems genuinely interested in finding out more about their circumstances and listening to their stories.  
It’s great that the exhibition will be at the Arnolfini for the next three months… I’ve been once thus far (and thoroughly enjoyed it – even though I’ve seen most of the pieces before - and just know that I’ll be dropping in on a regular basis to focus my attention on just a handful of pieces at a time (there is so much to see in every piece of his work).
Photo: A quick collage of various images taken at the exhibition (and, yes, it’s good that he’s perfectly happy for people to take photographs of his work!).

richard long: “time+space”

Moira and I went along to the Arnolfini this morning to see Bristol-born Richard Long’s latest exhibition. Now I have to admit, the first time I experienced Long’s work at Tate St Ives in 2002, I was a little nonplussed. Although I was rather taken by his “walking texts”, from a graphic perspective (Gill Sans font!), they didn’t really feel like art to me.

Over the years, however, I’ve come to love his work - and somewhat strangely perhaps, in the circumstances, I PARTICULARLY like his textworks. Many of these originate from walks undertaken in the countryside around Bristol. Every walk is unique. They’re crystallised/summarised in a few phrases, together with details of mileage and timespan (and he always seems to cover very impressive daily distances – frequently 40 miles or so!).
The walks, like all his other work, represent the artist’s physical actions. He frequently uses mud taken from the banks of the Avon for his “paintings”. Nature is key to his work. Sometimes, in the constructed pieces, they might be fingerprints in the landscape. His walks are always undertaken alone; they could be seen as pilgrimages. His walks are limited by the capabilities of the human body and the body becomes the artist’s “natural material”. Long’s landscape sculptures are typically unplanned – created after a period of walking in the landscape.
For me, there’s a spiritual, poetic element within his work – Long has referred to “what you might call a state of grace” after walking close to nature. In many ways, the exhibition is a call for us all to look at our surroundings in a new way. Perhaps Long’s work is also a reminder, in our frenetic world of “instant access”, to pause and to consider, to experience and to feel.
It’s definitely an exhibition to take your time over. I really enjoyed it and I’ll certainly stop off on a regular basis to reflect on specific pieces over the coming months (it ends on 15 November).
You need to see if you can.
Photo: “Time+Space 2015” slate sculpture.

joelle tuerlinckx exhibition at the arnolfini…

I have a problem with most of the exhibitions at the Arnolfini, here in Bristol.

Frequently, I find them obscure and impenetrable.
I feel very sad about this… because it’s a wonderful gallery space and somewhere I pass several times each week.
Now, I appreciate that this view is not shared universally – BUT it IS the opinion of a large number of talented, open-minded, perceptive arty friends whose opinions I respect.  
Even the name of her exhibition: “WOR(L)D(K) IN PROGRESS?” is a bit puzzling. To me anyway (I know what it means, but it’s contrived to say the least).

Joelle Tuerlinckx was born in Brussels in 1958 and her work has been shown widely on an international level.

If you haven’t already seen the exhibition, this blurb from the Arnolfini’s website will hopefully provide you with a flavour:
“Her work is distinguished by a unique sensual and transient approach and a precise use of materials, colours, and abstract shapes, culminating in expansive, complex installations. Film projections, video, drawings, collages, photographs and found objects are often combined with subtle alterations to the spaces and gestures that highlight the time and space of the viewing experience”.

Before today, I’d seen the exhibition twice. Well, I tried… really I did, but I’m afraid most of it just went over my head. To me, it really did feel like the “Emperor’s New Clothes”. So today, I went along to one of their exhibition tours (every Saturday at 2pm)… in the hope that someone REALLY would be able to make the “scales fall from my eyes”.

Eight of us joined the tour, given by an art lecturer at UWE.
She spoke for ten minutes or so about what was meant by the term “conceptual art” (actually, she read out most of it from her notes… which, for me, seemed only to suggest that perhaps she didn’t really understand Tuerlinckx’s work either!).
Actually, that’s unfair, but that IS how it made me feel.
We were then given 20-25 minutes to look round the exhibition and then to meet in the Reading Room for a general discussion.
In the event, only two other people turned up - in addition to the tour guide and me.
During the course of our discussion, I acknowledged that I found the work very difficult to appreciate. This was received sympathetically by my tour colleagues (although in a rather “we-feel-sorry-for-you” kind of way - they were both young artists and I THINK one of them was going to be a guide at another exhibition in Bristol)… effectively, I was told that “this IS what art is about these days”.
That may be so… but, if it is, then I think art is in great danger of becoming far too arrogant for its own good. I try to visit every exhibition at the Arnolfini but, sadly, most of them leave me feeling frustrated and irritated by this absolute concentration on art’s conceptual form (and, remember, this exhibition is on for more than THREE months – it finishes 16 March)
Is the Arnolfini trying to educate us into appreciating this type of art?
If so, I think it’s failing.
I suggested that they survey everyone who visited the exhibition (I would feel reasonably confident that less than 5% would say they appreciated or understood the work), but I know they won’t.

Guardian’s art critic Adrian Searle’s review of the exhibition (December 2012) included this: “I am considering writing this in the style of Joelle Tuerlinckx whose work has been baffling me for more than a decade. Attempting to describe the Belgian artist's work, I'll have to keep all the words I've crossed out and put them in a pile to use later, along with all the commas, colons, semicolons and full stops I've dropped. Currently they're all under my desk, sprinkled among the pencil shavings and bottles that litter the floor. What's that length of rope doing there? I must have accidentally carted it home from Tuerlinckx's show at the Arnolfini…

At some point I'll have to paint my desk with white emulsion, then invert my laptop and shake out all the dead skin, hair, biscuit crumbs and dried tears I've somehow shed over the keyboard. All this stuff must mean something, possibly more than the things I commit to the page… Keep going like this and I might become an artist, but probably not, nor will I ever be Tuerlinckx.
I had to have a lie-down on the floor for a bit. Why has she stained a wall upstairs with tea, and prematurely aged some of her own catalogues and posters and gallery hand-outs? Is it to show what things look like when they age? Or that when they age in a museum, they do so differently? Tuerlinckx does such odd things, though there is a logic to them all, even if it is her logic rather than ours. Art that is only a puzzle is boring: solve it and it's over. Tuerlinckx continues to tease because her works resist solution. Mystery remains”.
For me, mystery certainly remains.

Photo: Gallery 1 at the Arnolfini.

PS: the video on the Arnolfini website is quite useful (enthusiastic… and informative to a degree).
PPS: I blogged about the Matti Braun exhibition at the Arnolfini (October 2012) and made similar comments about “inaccessible art”… their response was interesting (see the comment at the end of my October post).
Footnote: As a retired architect and someone who has had a life-long interest in art and design , I’d like to think that I’m NOT a philistine when it comes to art appreciation but I accept that my art preferences might be a little on the conservative side – they would certainly include work by the likes of David Hockney, Peter Blake, JMW Turner, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Andre Derain, Antony Gormley, Stanley Spencer, Henri Cartier Bresson, Paul Cezanne, Grayson Perry, Dorothea Lange, Alberto Giacometti, Henri Matisse, John Everett Millais, Amedeo Modigliani, Marc Chagall, Katsushika Hokusai, Balthus, Grant Wood, Richard Long, Michelangelo and Rafael to mention just a few.