adplus-dvertising
Connect with us

Art

At the National Gallery of Canada

Published

 on

Paul Wells: How Canada’s national gallery and its director, Alexandra Suda, have been working to ‘keep the doors open’ to new art and new realities

Somebody once said anecdotes are the only evidence. I wanted to write about Alexandra “Sasha” Suda, the director of the National Gallery of Canada. I wanted to contrast the difference between the year she expected—her first full calendar year running the nation’s flagship visual-arts institution—and the year she wound up having instead, which in many ways was the same gong show we all lived through. But first I asked her about a big orange painting she’d shown on her Instagram account. She took me upstairs, to one of the gallery’s largest display rooms.

The paining is Middle Passage, a riot of billowing orange and red cloud, in acrylic and ink across a square of canvas three metres on a side. The artist is Frank Bowling, a Guyana-born British painter, whose formative years were in New York City in the ’60s and who was knighted this year by Queen Elizabeth.

Suda came here a week earlier to see Middle Passage with her children. To get to know it, really. “We were here for about an hour, basking in its sunlight. We got all dressed up.”

300x250x1

The setting is propitious. Middle Passage, which is a promised gift from Winnipeg financier Michael Nesbitt, hangs in Gallery C-214, next to the most hallowed and sometimes controversial works of Abstract Expressionism in the National Gallery’s collection: A Mark Rothko, a Clyfford Still, an Agnes Martin, and a handful of stark Barnett Newmans, including Voice of Fire, whose 1989 acquisition sparked one of the National Gallery’s greatest controversies. This makes sense: Bowling was a contemporary of the AbEx gang, exhibited with them, exchanged ideas with them. That he’s only now joining the others as the first Black artist in a room that’s become, “in many ways, the inner sanctum,” as Suda put it, is to some degree a case of the gallery catching up to the culture.

Rothko and Newman favoured simple shapes and uniform fields of colour. In Middle Passage, Bowling has more to tell you: a map of Africa is visible, and human faces, all half-obscured amid the clouds. The painting evokes the murderous Atlantic shipping routes of the 18th- and 19th-century slave trade. Compared to the taciturn works beside it, it’s practically chatty. “It renegotiates your expectations,” Suda said.

It’s been a year for renegotiated expectations around here. When the Trudeau government appointed Suda in early 2019, she was the highly-regarded chief curator of European art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, but she was youngish and untested, having never directed any arts institution. When she spoke to John Geddes for Maclean’s a year ago, she had some new ideas for increasing visitor traffic, a solid slate of summer shows, and a few years to make her mark. Three months later the building, and most of surrounding society, shut down on a few hours’ notice.

“Our biggest concern then was a little bit less about, ‘How do we keep everybody at work?’ and a little bit more of, ‘How do we keep all of our guards healthy?’ We went from being an outward-facing institution to really having one single job, which was to secure the national collection.”

For weeks after, the National Gallery alternated between implementing contingency plans that had been drawn up in January and February, and improvising a path forward. Suda started giving virtual tours of the building on Instagram Live. She and a camera operator would wander through the eerily empty building, discussing the sculptures and paintings. The online tours acknowledged, and barely began to resolve, a yearning for the in-person experience that any arts institution’s patrons know well.

In mid-July the gallery reopened to the public on Thursdays through Sundays. Gallery visitors are used to restrictions on where they can stand, after all. By December 50,000 people had visited. On two weekends the numbers were comparable to a year earlier, but instead of tourists almost all the visitors were local. So that was a big objective ticked off Suda’s to-do list, quite by accident—”to reset our relationships with the communities we exist to serve.” Beginning with the hometown crowd. “We want to be more than just the place people bring their in-laws to, once or twice a year.”

Another goal will just have to wait. Suda had hoped to boost total attendance past the levels set by her predecessor Marc Mayer, about 400,000 visitors a year. That will take years now. Even after it’s safe, people will probably be leery of crowds. But raw numbers weren’t the goal anyway. “I’m not going to bring in a mummy show to get more foot traffic.” She hopes the National Gallery of Canada can draw audiences with art that’s good and doesn’t shy away from hard topics. The Indigenous contemporary-art exhibition Abadakone, which had been in the works before her arrival, was an early highlight for Suda and an audience success. In May, pandemic permitting, the gallery will host the first major Rembrandt exhibition in Canada since 1969.

Much has changed since 1969. It’s harder now to ignore that Dutch art’s “Golden Age” was an ornament of an imperial culture’s economic upper crust. While Rembrandt is in town, the gallery will prominently display new works by two young Black artists, Toronto’s Tau Lewis and New York’s Rashid Johnson. “They’re going to be offering alternate narratives to this notion of a Dutch Golden Age… unique contemporary installations that you can think about in connection with Rembrandt.”

You can’t really just hang an old master any more, or you can’t only do that. COVID-19 is hardly the only crisis that’s rocked the art world in 2020. The Black Lives Matter aftermath of George Floyd’s death “rocked the museum sector,” Suda said. Executives or institutions that have seemed awkward or reluctant to change have paid in turmoil. The National Gallery of Canada has had to play catch-up too. Just before a 2019 exhibition on Paul Gauguin opened, Suda and her staff changed some title cards to reflect awkward or appalling realities in Gauguin’s life. A reference to his relationship with “a young woman” was changed. She wasn’t a woman. She was a 13-year-old Tahitian girl.

“And then this notion of us as a white supremacist institution, which is the kind of language that’s circulating now, comes to life for people,” Suda said. “Nobody was out to do the wrong thing. But I think we were a little bit scared to have those tough conversations, because it’s hard to do. And I’m not saying that I’m the expert in it. I have a PhD in 15th-century manuscript illumination from northern Europe. [But] I think every work of art offers that invitation to see it differently. And it’s our job to keep those doors all open.”

“I think there might have been a time when a big institution like ours framed the story for people. Those days are over. Not for us, but for art within society. I think when somebody comes and says, ‘You’re wrong about that label, and by the way, you triggered trauma within the friend I was with and you’re doing harm,’ instead of being defensive, we have to kind of relax and understand that it matters what we do. People care. So how do we keep their attention and incorporate their story in here?”

The answer to that one won’t be the work of a weekend or a season. It will become one of the lenses through which Suda’s tenure at the gallery will be measured and evaluated. The year 2020 was quite good at replacing the work people thought they had ahead of them with other, often harder and more important work. “There will be a robust discourse” around the role of art in society, Suda said. “Period. Whether we think we can hide from it or not, it’s going to happen. And if we’re not prepared to engage in that conversation, then we shouldn’t be museum professionals.”

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Art

At Tiffany's Flagship, Luxe Art Helps Sell the Jewels – The New York Times

Published

 on


Now that tickets to the Museum of Modern Art are priced at an astonishing $30 apiece, you could be forgiven for timing your visits carefully, making sure that they count.

So, let’s say you find yourself in Midtown Manhattan with an hour or two to spare, and you are yearning for some culture. Perhaps you have already seen MoMA’s latest exhibitions, or perhaps you are not quite in the mood to fork over that kind of money. May I instead suggest stopping by Tiffany & Co.’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue?

No, there are no “Demoiselles d’Avignon” there, and no “Starry Night,” but what The Landmark (as it is called) does offer is a heady fusion of contemporary art and luxury retailing that is as relevant, and discomfiting, as anything you could hope to find in a museum.

300x250x1

After a renovation by the leather-clad architect Peter Marino that debuted last April, 58 pieces that he selected by major artists — many of them blue, or silver, or both — now fill the 84-year-old building. A color-shifting James Turrell oval is embedded in a wall near one set of elevator doors. Hanging by another is a shiny Damien Hirst cabinet filled with rows of cubic zirconia. Hovering next to the engagement rings is one of Anish Kapoor’s eye-bending mirrored discs. On the ground floor, 14 arched window frames glow with a state of the art animation by Oyoram Visual Composer, of the Manhattan skyline and Central Park — the city is immaculate, with no people, just birds.

And that giant-size, faux-deteriorated Venus of Arles with a Tiffany Blue patina? That comes from the mind of Daniel Arsham, who has devoted his career to such banal corporate collaborations. He has designed a limited-edition bracelet and sculpture for the brand, as well as, I quote, “exclusive Pokémon-inspired jewelry.”

The key work here is Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting “Equals Pi,” from 1982, his milestone year. (MoMA, for the record, does not own a Basquiat painting.) It is high up on a wall on the ground floor, covered by a translucent shield, looking a little forlorn. It has Basquiat’s classic crowns and handwritten text, and its turquoise ground is awfully close to Tiffany’s trademarked color. When the Tiffany executive Alexandre Arnault used it in an ad campaign with Beyoncé and Jay-Z back in 2021, he proposed that the artist may have been making a “homage” to the brand. Some who actually knew Basquiat were quick to reject that.

But let’s not dwell on conflict. Just about everything in this 10-story palace is bright, polished, antiseptic and exactly where it should be. There are stunning flower arrangements, stacks of art books, and capacious public restrooms. The salespeople are unfailingly polite. “I’m just poking around,” I told one who asked to help. “Poke away,” he replied. The atmosphere is subtly disorienting, a bit unnerving, as in a casino or an elite art fair during its early hours. There is money at stake here.

Buyers sip sparkling wine or ice water as they try on jewelry. Two are being led to a private room, where pastel-colored macarons might await. Behind one discreet blue velvet rope is a hallway with paintings by Hans Hartung and Jules de Balincourt (blue and blue).

It is tempting to wring one’s hands about this instrumentalization of high art to sell high-end accessories, but many decades have passed since Mark Rothko canceled his commission for the lavish Four Seasons Restaurant, reportedly saying that “anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kind of prices will never look at a painting of mine.” Ideas about art’s purity, and the stigma of selling out, have less currency today.

In any case, Marino’s Tiffany project follows in a rich tradition. In the 1950s, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg collaborated on window displays for Bergdorf Goodman, across the intersection from Tiffany’s, and Bonwit Teller, a block south. They used a pseudonym, but Rauschenberg later had work on view at Bonwit Teller. (The pair also worked with Gene Moore at Tiffany; the designer’s displays are featured in exhibits at the Landmark.)

Andy Warhol showed in the Bonwit Teller windows, too, in 1963, just as he was becoming a star. The venturesome Robert Irwin produced a spectral sculpture for a California mall in 1970, and Takashi Murakami infamously incorporated a Louis Vuitton pop-up in his 2007—08 traveling museum retrospective. (Vuitton’s parent company, LVMH, which is controlled by France’s art-loving Arnault family, acquired Tiffany in 2021.)

The works at Tiffany are, alas, not for sale — they have been purchased, commissioned, or borrowed by the company — but there is a robust history of department stores hawking art. In the 1960s, the actor and art historian Vincent Price was involved with art sales at Sears, and in Minneapolis at that time, the Dayton’s department store (which created Target) had a gallery with material by leading artists, some via the famed New York dealer Leo Castelli.

In China, the developer Adrian Cheng has filled his K11 malls with trendy art, and in Seoul, where I lived until recently, a Frank Gehry-designed Vuitton store has hosted compact shows of Cindy Sherman, Alex Katz and Warhol from the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s holdings. (Marino handled the interiors.) Last year, the Shinsegae department store’s gallery, at a high-end clothing offshoot called Boon the Shop, had a Rirkrit Tiravanija show that included free T-shirts by the artist, just as his recent MoMA PS1 survey did.

In 1970, the Print Collector’s Newsletter quipped that “being a ‘department store gallery’ is a dubious distinction; it is not quite an insult, but surely not a compliment,” calling it a domain of “middlebrow art.” As it happens, much of the art at Tiffany is middling — the sort of adequate, professional things one could find in auction house day sales or uninspired booths at art fairs anywhere in the world. A brand this rich could have been far more ambitious and daring.

Anyway, for the next two months, you can take a closer look at Marino’s taste by booking a free ticket to “Culture of Creativity: An Exhibition from the Peter Marino Art Foundation,” which is on view in the Tiffany Gallery — an airy space high in the building that was designed by OMA’s Shohei Shigematsu, with excellent views of Billionaires’ Row. You will find almost 70 more pieces, including intricate, witty 19th-century Tiffany silver, bronze sheep (by François-Xavier Lalanne) atop artificial grass, serviceable pieces by artists represented elsewhere in the store (Francesco Clemente, Vik Muniz, Sarah Sze), and many portraits of Marino: emblazoned on a Michelangelo Pistoletto mirror, in Roe Ethridge photos, and painted atop broken dishes in a Julian Schnabel.

There is one very dark moment that surprised me in the Marino show: a large 1980 Sarah Charlesworth photo, an appropriated image of a man falling from a building. It curiously echoes two grand wall pieces that Rashid Johnson created for the store, as part of his “Falling Man” series. Johnson’s depictions of pixelated, upside-down (Tiffany Blue) men recall 8-bit videogame characters. They are surrounded by mirrored panels that have been scratched and partially cracked, as if smashed by a hammer.

These works are meant to be “existential investigations, meaning the idea of man falling through space, finding himself,” Johnson told an interviewer last year. Fair enough. But you could also see them as portraits of a culture intent on self-destruction (or outlines of bodies at a crime scene); spend time with them, and you may find that their hints of violence stick with you.

You will want to relax after this dizzying experience. The $30 you have saved will not go too far at the Blue Box Café by Daniel Boulud, on the sixth floor, where the “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” menu is $59 per person (before tax and tip), but you can at least enjoy a glass of Champagne as you reflect. Why not order a second, or a third? This moment will not last forever.

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Art

Nick Cave on love, art and the loss of his sons: ‘It’s against nature to bury your children’ – The Guardian

Published

 on


Nick Cave has a touch of Dr Frankenstein about him – long, white lab coat, inscrutable smile, unnerving intensity. He introduces me to his two assistants, the identical twins Liv and Dom Cave-Sutherland, who are helping to glaze his ceramics series, The Devil – A Life. The twins are not related to Cave. His wife, the fashion designer Susie Cave, came across them one day, discovered they were ceramicists and thought they would be able to help him complete his project. It adds to the eeriness of it all.

Cave, 66, is one of the world’s great singer-songwriters – from the howling post-punk of the Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds to the lugubrious lyricism of his love songs (Into My Arms, Straight to You and a million others I adore) and the haunted grief of recent albums such as Skeleton Tree, Ghosteen and Carnage. He is also a fine author (see his apocalyptic novel And the Ass Saw the Angel), thinker (his book of conversations with the Observer journalist Sean O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage), agony uncle (at his website, the Red Hand Files), screenwriter (The Proposition) and now visual artist. Which is where he started out half a century ago.

Cave studied art in Melbourne in the mid-70s before being chucked off his degree course. He reckons he was too fascinated by the subject for his own good. He spent all his time talking about art to the older students and didn’t find the hours to do the actual work. Now, he is making up for lost time.

300x250x1

We are at the headquarters of Susie’s business, where she makes and stores the beautiful dresses she designs as The Vampire’s Wife. For now, it’s doubling as Cave’s studio. He gives me a tour of the 17 ceramic figurines, which will be exhibited at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels next month. The pieces are stunning in a creepy, Cave-esque way, all blood-curdling pastoral idylls. But it’s as a series that they are most powerful. The sculptures, inspired by Staffordshire “flatback” ceramics from the Victorian era, forge a shocking and deeply personal narrative.

Initially, we see the devil as a child – a cute little lad, dimple-cheeked in a white jumpsuit sitting next to a red monkey. “Look at his little face,” Cave says, lovingly. We see the devil getting up to erotic mischief with a sailor, then ecstatic with his first love. “I’m extremely happy with this one,” Cave says. “His impish pleasure and her just drained of life.”

We see the devil going to war in a field of flowers, wading through a field of blood and skulls on his return, getting married. Then the series takes a traumatic turn. “This is The Devil Kills His First Child,” Cave says. “It’s a little Isaac and Abraham thing. Then he’s separated from the world. Life goes on. Then he dances for the last time.” And now we are at the final piece. “He bleeds to death. He’s found washed up and the child is forgiving him, leaning out to him with his hand.”

It’s impossible to know how to respond when Cave reaches the story’s conclusion other than to gulp or weep. After all, this is a man who has lost two sons over the past nine years. In 2015, 15-year-old Arthur died after taking LSD for the first time and falling from a cliff near his home in Brighton. In 2022, 31-year-old Jethro, who had schizophrenia, died in Melbourne. Death and grief have informed all of Cave’s work since Arthur died. But this takes it to another level.

We say goodbye to the Cave twins, who continue painting pubic hair in gold lustre on the devil’s first love. “We’ll see you, guys! Slave away, my children!” Cave says.

Liv smiles.

“I’m already dressed like a Victorian child’,” Dom says.

“A pint of stout for lunch!” Cave says.

We move into Susie’s office to chat. It’s dark, gothic, a dream home for bats. He whips off his lab coat to reveal an immaculate three-piece suit and sits behind the desk. Before I sit down, I ask if I can do something I have wanted to do for the best part of a decade. I reach over the desk and clumsily hug him.

“Aaah, man! Here, let me stand up.” The last time we talked was 16 years ago. He was making a video that featured Arthur and his twin brother, Earl, who were then seven, gorgeous and already musical (Arthur was playing drums, Earl guitar).

Cave became famous as one of the bad boys of rock – a ghoulish junkie with a feral live act, equally fixated by the Bible and Beelzebub. But he is one of the nicest people I have met. In 2008, I turned up knowing sod all about him. I tell him that he was so generous with his time and nonjudgmental about my ignorance. “Really?” he says, surprised. “That’s good to know. I tend to have a low opinion of myself back then. I see a cutoff point around the death of my first son of a change of character. But it’s not as black and white as I thought.”

Every Cave story seems to begin with a death. Take the origin of the figurines. He went into the studio to start work on them the day his mother, Dawn, died. He had planned to start on that date – 15 September 2020 – for a while. “Susie made me go. She said: ‘Get there and do your work.’” He adored Dawn – she had always stood by him, no matter what trouble he was in. (The day his father died in a car crash, she was called to the police station to bail out 19-year-old Cave after he had been charged with burglary.)

Did he have any idea what he wanted to create in the studio? No, he says, but there was an inevitability about the subject. “Even when I’m trying to use art to escape certain feelings and sorrows I have, everything just seems to fall into the slipstream of the loss of my son. And even when I was glazing these, Jethro died, so it’s like …” He comes to a stop. “What I’m trying to say is these losses are just incorporated into the artistic flow and they move in a direction that is beyond your capacity to rein in. They’re just sitting at the end of everything you do. In the end, the ceramics are a story about a man’s culpability in the loss of his child, and addressing that in a way I wasn’t really able to do with music. That’s what happened without any intention.”

Does he feel culpable for the death of his sons? “I think it’s something that people who lose children feel regardless of the situation, simply because the one thing you’re supposed to do is not let your children die.” He comes to another abrupt stop, almost as if he is dictating notes. “Forget that. The one thing you’re supposed to do is protect your children.”

He returns to the final figurine. “You have this hollowed-out old man with a little child, possibly a dead old man, dead in a pool of tears – a biblical flood of tears, shall we say – and the little child is reaching down in forgiveness. It’s called The Devil Forgiven.” He smiles. “I hope this isn’t too abstract, too woo-woo. Art has a way of bringing to you the things you need to know. It feels to me that art knows what’s going on more than the artist knows what’s going on.”

Does he feel culpable because drugs were involved in Arthur’s death? “There could be some element of that, yep. Look, these things are in our DNA, they’re inherited. I don’t want to make any assumptions about Arthur, who was just a young boy. It’s not like he was into drugs … On a fundamental level, it’s against nature to be burying your children. And there can’t help but be feelings of culpability.”

Cave believes he is emerging from his losses a different man. He has a point. It is hard to imagine the old Cave curating the Red Hand Files, a website in which he invites fans to ask questions about anything they want, many of them profoundly personal.

Soon after Arthur’s death, the family moved to Los Angeles for a couple of years: “We were triggered too much by things. We were just down the road from where it happened.” Everybody seemed to know what had happened to Arthur, because it was so widely reported, but he says that ended up being a positive. “I was forced to grieve publicly – and that was helpful, weirdly enough. It stopped me completely shutting the windows and bolting the doors and just living in this dark world.”

He was overwhelmed by the kindness of strangers. “I had letter after letter addressed to ‘Nick Cave, Brighton’. It was a really extraordinary thing. And that attention, and sense of community, was extremely helpful to me. I think people are usually just on their own with these sorts of things. Susie met somebody whose son had died seven years previously and she still hadn’t spoken to her husband about it. These people are utterly alone and maybe full of rage. So I can’t overstate that I’ve been in an extraordinarily privileged position in that respect.”

Did his experience of bereavement help after Jethro died? “Yes. It really helped, because I knew I could get through. I’d been through it.” Did he feel cursed? “No. No, I don’t feel cursed, no.” He says it would be wrong to talk publicly about Jethro – he didn’t meet Jethro till he was seven and their relationship was complex; although they became close, it would be disrespectful to his mother, who brought him up. (Cave’s first two children, Luke and Jethro, were born 10 days apart to different women.)

Cave says one way in which he has changed is that he appreciates life more. In the past, he has described learning to live again, refinding happiness, as an act of defiance. But he no longer thinks it’s an appropriate word. “Defiance has a fuck-you element to the world; we’re not going to let it get us down. That sounds a little too heroic now. I’m pretty simple-minded about things. It says something to my children who have died that I can enjoy my life now. It’s what they would want. I think it’s a softer relationship we have to the world now.”

Rather than a two-fingered salute to fate, it goes back to culpability and his Christian (if questioning) faith. “Look, this is extremely difficult to talk about, but one of the things that used to really worry me is that Arthur, wherever he may be, if he is somewhere, somehow understands what his parents are going through because of something he did, and that his condition of culpability is not dissimilar to mine. And I think that’s the reason behind a lot of what I do. It’s to say it’s OK. I mean it’s not OK, but we’re OK. We’re OK. I think Susie feels that, too.”

He stresses that he is not just talking about his personal tragedies. “What’s it saying to all those who’ve passed away in their multitudes if we lead lives where we’re just pathologically pissed off at the world? What does it say to those who have left the world to be in a perpetual state of misery and fury and depression and cynicism towards the world? What legacy are they leaving if that’s how we manifest the passing of that person?”

He thinks people sometimes misunderstand what he is saying about loss. It’s not that there is more joy in his world than there was – far from it. But when it comes, it tends to be more intense. “Joy is something that leaps unexpectedly and shockingly out of an understanding of loss and suffering. That’s how Susie and I are. That’s in no way saying we’re not affected, or we’ve somehow gotten over it, or we’ve had closure or even acceptance. I think closure is a dumb thing. Even acceptance is, like: ‘Just give it a few years and life goes back to how it was.’ It doesn’t happen. You’re fundamentally changed. Your very chemistry is changed. And when you’re put back together again, you’re a different person. The world feels more meaningful.”

He knows plenty of people disagree with him. “I get people, mothers particularly, occasionally saying: ‘How dare you suggest there is joy involved in any of this?’ People are so angry, and they have every right to be enraged by the fucked-up cosmic mischief that goes on, and it’s deeply unfair. But it’s not personal. It feels like it is, but it’s just the vicissitudes of life.”

Cave feels he is misunderstood in another way, after saying recently that he has always been “temperamentally” conservative and attacking the “self-righteous belief” and “lack of humility” of woke culture. This has led some to assume he is supping with the “alt-right”, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

“Conservatism is a difficult word to talk about in Britain, because people immediately think of the Tories. But I do think small-C conservatism is someone who has a fundamental understanding of loss, an understanding that to pull something down is easy, to build it back up again is extremely difficult. There is an innate need in us to rip shit down, and I’m personally more cautious in that respect without it being a whole political ideology that surrounds me.”

Is he a Tory? “I’m not a Tory, no.” Has he ever been? “No. No, I’ve never voted Tory.” And is he really anti-woke? “The concept that there are problems with the world we need to address, such as social justice; I’m totally down with that. However, I don’t agree with the methods that are used in order to reach this goal – shutting down people, cancelling people. There’s a lack of mercy, a lack of forgiveness. These go against what I fundamentally believe on a spiritual level, as much as anything. So it’s a tricky one. The problem with the right taking hold of this word is that it’s made the discussion impossible to have without having to join a whole load of nutjobs who have their problem with it.”

He hates dogma, whether religious or political. His work has always embraced uncertainty. “People don’t like me to say this, but I do feel it’s in my nature to constantly be redressing the balance of my own ideas about things. My mother was exactly the same – she always saw the other side. It was incredibly frustrating. You’d be angry about something and she’d go: ‘Yes darling, but …’”

Like his mother, he has never shied away from the trickiest “buts”. When he talks about his appalling loss, he also knows he has been lucky. Not only has he been able to express his grief in his work, but it has also fed his creativity. Even at its bleakest, he has found it cathartic. “Making art is in itself the great expression of joy and optimism, in my view. That’s why we need it. Music, art, reminds us of our fundamental capacity to create beautiful things out of the fuckeries of life. Even when I’m making The Devil Kills His First Child, I’m not depressed, I’m like: ‘Wow! Look at the head!’ It’s a joyful occupation, no matter what. And when I’m singing a very sad lyric, it doesn’t mean I’m sad inside.”

The forthcoming Bad Seeds album is the first thing he has created since Arthur’s death that isn’t “set through a lens of loss”. He is funny when talking about his work – so angsty and uncertain early in the process, almost messianic by the end. “The new album is really good. It’s really strong. Great songs,” he says.

Similarly with The Devil – A Life. He has got over the doubts and now he is buzzing with self-belief. Is he nervous about the exhibition? “No, I’m excited. I think the ceramics are really good and really strange.” But he feels unusually protective towards his figurines and the story that they tell. “These guys feel extraordinarily vulnerable. They are vulnerable little things, and they are saying something deeply personal.”

Nick Cave: The Devil – A Life is at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels from 5 April to 11 May

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Art

Appreciating Richard Serra, who made us giddy and afraid. – The Washington Post – The Washington Post

Published

 on


Richard Serra made modern sculpture exciting. He did it by creating the feeling that it might fall on you.

Facetious as that may sound, it’s somewhere near the heart of what made Serra, who died Tuesday at 85, both a wonderful artist and intermittently vulnerable to accusations that he was a bully.

If you don’t find his works beautiful, you could easily hate them for being ugly, imposing and in-your-face. But attitudes toward modern art — even minimalist sculpture — changed enormously over Serra’s lifetime, and he personally played a role in converting millions of people to the possibilities of abstract sculpture. After years of operating as an edgy, uncompromising avant-gardist, he began to make things that, losing none of their toughness — and only growing in ambition — were undeniably seductive, dazzlingly original and just very cool.

300x250x1
End of carousel

I don’t know what he was like to work with, but as an artist, he was no bully. Rather, he was a physicist. He wanted you to know, and to feel in your bones, that weight isn’t just a thing — it’s a force. It’s mass times acceleration.

As such, it carries an inherent threat.

Sculpture, for Serra, wasn’t just something over there — passive and separate. It was right here, all around us. And it wasn’t just active, it was involving.

A pioneer of process art, Serra loved verbs — action words like twist and roll — and spent part of his early career thinking about materials in terms of what he could do with them (as opposed to what they would become once things had been done to them).

But he also came to love nouns. And you can’t talk about Serra without tossing around big heavy nouns — words that most of us would never otherwise use but which make you feel suddenly tough just uttering. Cor-Ten steel and antimonial lead, for instance.

Serra used antimonial lead (an alloy that makes soft lead very hard) for “One Ton Prop” (1969), a key piece from his early mature period. The sculpture was four pieces of lead leaning against each other like the walls of a card house. No welding. No plinth. Nothing propping them up except each other.

“One Ton Prop” proposed a strange — and strangely intimidating — new way to think of sculpture. It was physical — emphatically so. But it was also psychological. It involved you in ways that had nothing to do with stories or sentimentality but that somehow went beyond pure form. “One Ton Prop” — like a lot of Serra sculptures — was about as ingratiating as a sewer cover, but it induced fear and giddy excitement, and you wanted to linger with it.

Most people’s favorite Serras — and mine too — are the ones he made after “One Ton Prop.” For the enormous, bending, exquisitely balanced sculptures he called Torqued Ellipses, he used Cor-Ten steel. Sometimes used for the prows of ships, Cor-Ten is weathering steel, protected from corrosion, that changes color in the open air. There, it takes on seductive shades of orange and textures as rich and streaky as the surface of Gerhard Richter paintings.

The colors and textures (and the spiderwebs and other marks of the organic world they can play host to) are important. They pull you in to the sculptures’ surfaces, even as you’re conscious of your body’s relationship to something that is overwhelmingly large — almost too big to grasp, and definitely too big to explain.

Engaging with them reduces the brain to the status of a six-year-old tugging at the sleeve of an adult with a checklist of unanswerable questions: How do these things stay upright? How were they made? How did they even get here?

The engineering behind Serra’s late works was indeed mind-blowing. But the pleasure of his greatest creations is afforded by a sensation of the mind giving up, and the body yielding. He dealt out stimulants to sublimity like a croupier dealing aces.

Serra was a practitioner — I would say the greatest — of what was sometimes called “walk-in modernism.” That’s to say, you don’t just admire his sculptures from afar. You walk into and out of them. Looming over you, they close in on you, then veer away from you. And they make you conscious of time as you make your way through, along or around them.

They sometimes induce vertigo. But they’re also remarkably liberating. You can come out of them with feelings of secret and victorious expansion, as if you were Theseus after slaying the Minotaur.

Serra’s sculptures fulfilled the primary purpose of minimalist sculpture — making you acutely self-conscious of yourself in relation to the thing you’re looking at or walking around. But they did something more. They challenged and seduced with psychology and undeniable emotion. They turned nouns into verbs, things into actions, and stray thoughts into lasting feelings.

Placed outdoors, they aren’t merely sculptures, of course. They do double duty as architecture, landscape design, urban planning. Ways of ordering space, in other words, often on a large scale.

It’s true that some of Serra’s outdoor sculptures prevent you getting from A to B, and that this has sometimes proved controversial. In the art world, an air of legend lingers like romantic fog over the “Tilted Arc” affair. Serra’s rude division of an open plaza in Manhattan with an enormous, hostile-looking steel arc, 120 feet long and twice the height of most humans, was one of the last moments of meaningful tension between public opinion and an uncompromising artistic avant-garde. In the end, the work came down.

Works like “Tilted Arc” made it easy to dislike Serra for being domineering. I can appreciate that line of thought, and I’m happy that there are other kinds of art, keyed to transience and delicacy, art with a light and poetic touch. But I love what Serra achieved. In fact, I’m in awe of it. At the Guggenheim Bilbao, at Glenstone, at SF MoMA and in St. Louis — in so many places around the world — Serra’s adamantine sculptures act on you. And they activate everything around them. Life quickens in their presence. We have lost a great artist, but we have not lost that quickening.

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Trending