Nick Read » Exhibition

Intimations of Hope

Nick Read — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 06:49:33 +0000

The idealistic Konstantin, humiliated by his famous mother, the actress Irina Arkidina, his play publicly dismissed as ridiculous, tries to shoot himself but instead shoots a seagull and presents the corpse to Nina, the daughter of a neighbouring landowner, whom he adores. Nina is disturbed and disgusted, but shows it to the sinister Trigorin, a famous writer and house guest, who notes down the metaphor for future use. Nina is in thrall to Trigorin. She sees in him an opportunity to escape the cage of the family estate and take flight as an actress. She follows Trigorin to Moscow, becomes pregnant and is rejected by the writer who is being kept by Irina. The baby dies, her family lock their gates against her, and she is transformed into the kind of tragic heroine that the painter, George Frederick Watts depicted in his allegorical studies of hope and poverty. She becomes the seagull.

Watts had taken as his child bride the teenage actress, Ellen Terry, in order to protect her from the same fate, or so the story goes. The marriage failed. It was supposedly never consummated. According to the amusing fiction by Lynne Truss, Watts just wasn’t interested in her that way. Released from Watts’ protection, Ellen soared upwards to become the most famous actress of her generation.

The Seagull possesses the usual Chekhovian themes; the country house, a self indulgent Russian bourgeoisie, decadent, bored and in decline, the threatening clouds of the oncoming revolution And the actors have the same familiar roles, the ageing actress and matriarch playing to the balcony while the theatre crumbles around her, the elderly and ailing uncle, the owner of the estate, representing old Russia about to vanish forever, the frustrated and bullish farm manager, fed up with the old ways and wanting progress, the desperate young author, the naive and fragile girl, and the doctor, perhaps Chekhov himself, a reflective observer, not entirely engaging with it all. Soon all will be scattered. Seen from this perspective, the seagull presents a broader perspective on the oncoming crisis, a fragile but beautiful way of life soon to be chopped down like The Cherry Orchard. Of course, the characters seem hysterical and self centred, they are all in love with love as a form of escape, the end of their world is coming; what else can they do? It wouldn’t be theatre if they all behaved sensibly and worked together.

The Seagull is currently playing at the Arcola Theatre in Stoke Newington; not an area I know well but accessible via the London Overground. The theatre is a converted warehouse. The set and seating are rough and ready but the cast and direction is as accomplished as many productions you might see in the West End. Geraldine James plays the actress and matriarch. The doctor is played by Roger Lloyd Peck, recently seconded from the Dibley parish council. Chekhov billed the play as a comedy but nobody in Stoke Newington was laughing.

The Watts Gallery opened at Compton on the North Downs outside Guildford on June 18^th. It is said to be the only major gallery in the country devoted to a single artist. Watts was immensely popular in his heyday; two rooms were devoted to his paintings in the newly opened Tate Gallery at Millbank but the fashion for Victorian art changed and by the nineteen fifties you could pick up his paintings for less than a hundred pounds. His museum at Compton fell into disrepair but was rescued by coming second in the BBC’s Restoration programme and then getting a 4 million pound lottery grant. Watts’ paintings are not exactly cheerful. The most famous are allegories of themes like hope, poverty and despair. They are sombre and intense; Watts saw his mission to produce work that encourage young people to think about moral issues.

Lynne Truss didn’t treat Watts kindly. In her novel, Tennyson’s Gift, which described with humour the characters that circled the bard of Farringford, she portrayed him as self obsessed and sexually repressed. Who knows, if he had been more responsive to Ellen’s allures, she may never have felt the need to escape to the stage.

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In the Mind’s Eye

Nick Read — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 06:30:46 +0000

At the age of 14, Rene witnessed his mother, being pulled out of the river; her lower body was exposed and her nightdress was over her head concealing her face. Was it her, and if it wasn’t where had she gone, what had happened? But Rene never talked about it; he didn’t trust words. He just expressed it through the medium he had control of; painting. He was an artist philosopher. Perhaps all ‘creative’ artists are. What is art, if not visual metaphor?

Rene Magritte just took it further. His painterly skill allowed his imagination the freedom to use the image to describe the thought. His images express the way the mind connects ideas. They have a dream like quality because that’s how our mind sees things when we are not fixed by the consciousness of real time and space and the rules of language. So like dreams, his images break the rules, size is relative, shape distorted, there are impossible associations. In The Dominion of Light, he merges light and day, street lights illuminate a street against a bright afternoon sky, a bird flies over a dark sea, its shape filled in by a bright cloudy sky. A crescent moon is placed in painted in front of the dark tree, the artist creates the woman by painting her, the landscape on the canvas becomes the view, the window pane breaks up into pieces of the landscape viewed through it, a couple kiss with cloths over their heads, an act of intimacy between two people who are concealed from each other.

The theme of concealment dominates his work. He creates illusion by representation. Magritte liked a mystery, the anonymous detectives in bowler hats coming to arrest and assailant, the woman’s body on the operating table, the same bowler-hatted figures of differing sizes descending like rain in front of the buildings of his home town.

Magritte wasn’t so much looking for meaning, he was more interested in the process of how we represent ideas; he wanted to express ideas as he perceived them. Our mind, as the extension of the vast neuronal network that is our brain, makes connections between ideas and actions and feelings. Having conceived of a certain way of thinking, we return to it again and again, establishing neural connections like paths through the forest. But our mind’s reality makes connections which are impossible in the real world. Magritte shows us the way our mind thinks about things. So a pipe is not always a pipe but represents something much more potent, a carrot morphs into a bottle, a bird becomes part of the sky, clouds are like object and thoughts.

Magritte recognised how words condition our thought, fixing and channelling the meaning, so he experimented with different words for objects. Words tell us what an object is, but our mind sees other connotations. Poetry plays with this idea. It explores the power of words, but also their limitations. Freud and Jung explored the same territory in their papers on symbolism and dream, but at least Freud had the honesty to admit that ‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’.

Magritte, The Pleasure Principle, is currently being exhibited at Tate Liverpool on Albert Dock.

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Gabrile Orozco; meaning out of chaos.

Nick Read — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 20:36:53 +0000

Gabriel Orozco is like his ball of plasticine, Yielding Stone 1992, rolling along, always on the move, always picking up new ideas, things from the streets, imprints, objects, impressions. He installs whatever he thinks is interesting, often distorting them to remove their utility, change their function, so that they engage more closely with the viewer as a work of art, a receptacle for meaning. In one installation (Lintels 2001), he gathered the plaques of felt from the filters of spin dryers, with their residues of hair, nails, grit and paper, and hung up on wires like washing lines. When this was exhibited in New York in November 2001, the ash coloured skins of lint with their message of the transience of human life, took on a poignant significance; something about the residues, the impermanence of life. In Carambola with pendulum 1996, he distorts the billiard table and suspends one ball on a wire so that it swings over the table. The players make up their own rules; hit the other white ball into the swinging red, strike the red so that it swings high over the edge of the table, position the other white ball so that it is in the path of the red. In Dial Tone, 1992, he slices the pages of the New York phone book and places the anonymous digits next to one another on a 10 metre roll of Japanese paper. It’s a measure of the city. In La DS, 1993, he cuts a Citroen car in three pieces, removes the central section and rebuilds the car in an aerodynamic form without an engine. It’s beautiful, creates an impression of a contender for the land speed record, but totally useless.

Orozco loves to play, to invent, he is fascinated by the meaning in everyday things, as a child would. While he was artist in residence in Berlin, he bought a yellow Schwalbe, a motor scooter, and then roamed the city looking for a partner, another yellow motor scooter, photographing the pair wherever they met (Until you find another yellow Schwalbe 1995). In a five star hotel in India, he was given three rolls of toilet paper, so he fixed them to the arms of the fan in his room, so that the paper streamed out with the rotation like pennants, and danced to it, Ventilator 1997.

Orozco explores the pattern of things, their organisation from chaos, their reordering into art. He collects the bits of blown out tires he finds at the side of the motorway and arranges them like black crocodiles on a white sheet of paper, Chicotes 2010. In Black Kites, he imposes order on death by inscribing a geometrical black and white grid on a human skull. As a child, he was obsessed with planetary motion, the orbits, ellipses, circles. This obsession appears in his work, in Samurai Tree and Atomist Series 2006 and Four Bicycles; there is always one direction 1994, in which he slots four bicycles together, so that the wheels rotate in different directions. It might be a comment on the ambivalence of life.

There is something touching and personal in Oroczo’s work, he is not afraid of expressing his childlike self, exposing his vulnerability. This is perhaps most movingly expressed in My hands are my heart, 1991, in which he shapes a lump of clay, of the same colour as his skin, with his hands then has this photographed against his chest, exposing, as it were, his heart.

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Je t’aime.

Nick Read — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 18:25:13 +0000

In one video, the artist stopped people in the street and asked them to look into the camera and say ‘Je t’aime’ (I love you). Her subjects found it so difficult. Their body language was so defensive. They laughed, looked away, crossed their arms, shuffled their feet, lit a cigarette. Some just couldn’t do it at all. Just three words, but these three words carried such heartfelt hope and desire that uttering them, even to somebody they had not met before and would not meet again, carried a dreadful risk of rejection and destruction. As they composed themselves to do it, their faces became softer, more child-like, more appealing, more vulnerable. Their gazes lingered on the camera as they tried to assess the risk. It was as if saying I love you stripped away a defensive mask and made them appear loveable. The words meant so much.

So much human expression is defensive posturing. It feels so dangerous to reveal our needs and desires. We need love so much, yet are terrified of its power to subsume all the meaning in our lives and potentially destroy us.’ If we ever doubted love’s affect on the human psyche, just look at these faces. Strangely, it is the men not the women who seemed more vulnerable and frightened. Perhaps they have more to lose.

‘Emportez moi’ (Sweep me off my feet), at the MecVal Centre in Paris, is a brave and powerful evocation of the power of passion to bewitch and destroy, to throw us off balance into the white waters of emotion in ways both wonderful and painful, always at the risk of losing ourselves.

The works include videos on the interplay of harmonised gazes and movements, the tenderness of a caress, the passion of a kiss, the ecstacy of multiple orgasm, the spontaneous lament of lonely men in a late night bar (crying over you), even the poignant tableau of the two parakeets, who died for their love. As mediums for longing, impulses, illusions and abandonments, they express sorrow and solitude as much as they do hope, expectation and ecstacy.

As the programme for the exhibition points out, ‘perhaps the true subject here is the deeply human appetite for encounter; the search, the desire, transport and the vertiginous sensation of possibility.’

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Origins, space and time in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Nick Read — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 06:28:38 +0000

David Nash has a real fascination with wood. He knows his material intimately. He knows how it weathers, dries out, splits along the grain. He understands how it chars and how it becomes waterlogged and rots. Wood expresses the fundamental elements of life; earth, fire, air and water. Nash is interested in how wood comes into being, how it occupies a place and how it changes. It might be a commentary on the human lifespan.

Some of his creations take years for Nash to complete. He planted Ash Dome, a ring of ash trees in 1977 and then fletched the joints so that as they grew, they appeared to be dancing in sequence and then bending in on each other to form the shape of a dome. .

He launched his wooden boulder in a stream in 1979 and followed its progress, urged on by storms and floods until it reached a bigger river and finally the estuary. He then plotted its progress with the tide up and down the estuary until it finally disappeared. Now after three years, it has turned up again in the same estuary.

In Bretton Park, he has charred a tree trunk and bole by building a palisade of sticks around them and setting them alight with a burner. The surface of the trunk splits and cracks into shiny charcoal nodules. He has embedded 28 charred oak steps up the Oxley Bank in 30 tons of Barnsley coal. They will slowly be worn down by people walking on them and return to the earth. Nash likes to study how things decay.

He bought his chapel studio in Blanau Ffestiniog in 1967. Hunkered down n a wasteland of slate, filled with half completed works, one gets the impression that he is waiting for growth and time to transform them and him.

Occasionally Nash’s his work is more political. The charred verticals and cross pieces of ‘An awful falling’ evoke the destruction of The World Trade Centre, while ‘Husk’ a group of hollowed out, charred, rectangular blocks of oak, resemble a burnt out village in Palestine.

I love the scale of Nash’s work. Who would wait 30 years for nature to complete a work? Who would shape a gigantic piece Californian redwood shaped into a square with a gigantic two man chain saw and install it with off-cuts in an underground gallery in Yorkshire? Who would arrange three massive tree trunks on the lawn, curious to see the way the wood would split. But at the other end of the scale is elegant Ubus, two slender limbs of wood, one oak, one beech, leaning into each other to resemble an arch, reminiscent of the whalebone arch in Cley-next-the-sea.

This is my second visit to Nash’s epic retrospective at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Simon gave me his ticket to the opening and I met the artist. He had the look of an explorer about him, a trained observer, more scientist than artist; clear, perceptive, curious, calculating and full of insight and possibility. I marvelled again at the confidence and self belief of the artist and guessed that it came from a fascination with the object and not with himself as the artist.

He piercing blue eyes put me in context as they would a block of wood.

‘So you’re Simon’s brother. Yes, I see. You’re like him. Is he still on the boat?’

David Nash’s exhibition will be at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park until February, changing with time and the seasons. It’s not far away; I shall evolve with it.

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War without end; Amen.

Nick Read — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 21:32:40 +0000

Armies pursued each other around Europe; soldiers, little better than animals laid waste the countryside, taking what they wanted, burning, raping, killing, no longer knowing, if they ever did, the reason why. It had been a good war for Mother Courage, for a time. She became a camp follower, trailing the armies, selling food, blankets, clothing, brandy and even ammunition, changing allegiances when it was expedient to do so, always keeping one step ahead of the game. Her sons were killed; one was too crafty, another too honest. Her daughter saw it all but couldn’t speak. She was cut and raped. But she beat the drum and paid the price. And Courage survived for want of anything better.

The talk over the long breakfast table at 22 York Street was about other wars; Iraq, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe; brutal, unwinnable, neverending wars. There have been 250 major wars since the end of the second world war and over 23 million people have been killed. But why? Who really understands why we are fighting in Afghanistan or why we really went to war in Iraq? Bush’s war against terrorism is a tautology. War against terrorism is like war against war! It doesn’t make any sense. And there are no winners in this war. It’s war for the sake of war; completely futile. Nobody gains the moral high ground. We were shocked by the atrocities committed by our boys (and girls) at Abu Graib prison, but why? Of course our troops would commit atrocities as much as the enemy. It has always been so. Frightened people do the most awful things. And war degrades humanity; murder, theft, rape and destruction becomes a way of life. Soldiers become inured to feeling. It’s dog eat dog. When the Duke of Wellington inspected his troops in the Peninsular War, he was heard to comment, ‘I don’t know what they do to the enemy, but by God, they terrify me. But it’s not only the enemy that is injured, mutilated and killed, it’s innocent civilians as well. And there are always people like Mother Courage, ready to make a quick buck out of it all.

The attendant at Anish Kapoor’s exhibition, a young man from Bosnia, said that many people had been offended. Every twenty seconds, a cannot shoots a pellet of soft red wax across the room through an archway to splatter against the war of the next room. Kapoor claims not to have any preconception of the meaning of his work, but you really don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to understand how it uses sexual metaphor to explore he brutality of war. The large erect penis shooting its bloody ejaculate through the doorway, stains the virgin-pure white walls of the Royal Academy, leaving a large crimson mark, that resembles brutalized female genitalia. Blood stained labia enclose the gaping wound like a scream, and the matter that slithers from that gruesome gash forms a mound, which winds like a crimson glacier, from the dead, white, empty womb. It is a shocking, yet compelling image. The twenty minute beat of the cannon will continue until January. By that time the Academy will be awash with blood.

Fiona Shaw is brilliant as the feisty, calculating, yet indomitable Mother Courage; a woman with balls! The play, like war itself, is unrelenting in its dark brutality, the music by Duke Special and his band, a thumping accompaniment. It is wonderful performance that shocks and disturbs. Anish Kapoor’s exhibition is at The Royal Academy until January. It is art on a big scale, shocking and impressive. 22 York Street is in Alastair Sawday’s book. It provides an interesting and enjoyable stay just off Baker Street and within easy access to the west end. The long curved breakfast table with abundant coffee and a variety of fruits, cereals, croissants, pastries and preserves, is conducive to conversation. By yourself in London? What a good way to start the day, even if all the talk is about war!

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