0: England: London: Monkey Magic 01/ 08/ 2002

Chris Ofili 

At last I go to an exhibition by Chris Ofili, and this time the wait was well worth it. He is best known  for the use of elephant dung which is added in lumps onto the canvas or as supports for the canvas to lean on and for his pornographic images often used in controversial religious themes. His signature painting technique is a combination of layered pattern and fine dots that cover parts of the surface allowing multiple layers underneath to seep through. 

Afroninana: Chris Ofili 2002

I see the sign, Victoria Miro , and realise this must be it. Outside it looked little more than a warehouse, while inside the room has transformed itself into a large bright open space, a perfect setting for a series of art works called, 'Freedom for a day.' Each canvas is brightly illustrated in red and black, radiating the colours of an African flag, celebrating freedom. The paintings, 'Afronivana' and Triple Beam Dreamer,' celebrate the beauty of an exotic woman lying in a bed of luscious fruit, flowers and foliage, accentuating her sexual allure. 'Afromantics' and 'Afro Love and Unity', are similar in colour radiating red and green colour from a star with lush foliage surrounding a hip sexy Africancouple, which look asif they could be dancing seventies retro or funk. The paintings become part of a one off, spoken word event, 'Freedom', which tells stories, poems and pros, illustrating multiple realities exploring freedom. 

Chris Ofili's Upper Room

The Upper Room.

Upstairs the atmosphere couldn't be more different as you follow a darkened our corridor of walnut wood, where we are taken up stairs to, 'The Upper Room'. There are bleeps of beamed light that highlight your way across the blackened out corridor, directing you towards a dark wooden room that appears like a holy chapel. The sinister setting makes way for large paintings of the 'Rhesus Macaque' (Monkey) As thirteen paintings rest up against the wall, identified by name in Spanish on the elephant dung supports. Almost all the same size and shape and position and yet differ greatly in contrasting electric colours each creating their own individuality. Every painting is lined up the same distance apart, placed directly opposite another. As you enter the room it feels as if you have interrupted on the Last Supper with Jesus. 

Mono Amarillo : Chris Ofili 

92% of our DNA is shared with the Rhesus monkey and the similarities continue with many physical attributes. Psychologically their social behaviour are also like ourselves, yet it is to their sacrifice that the human race has survived as these monkeys were used for vaccine testing for many illnesses. In this instance then we can assume that this asks many ethical questions that can relate to how we have persecuted Jesus and once again we close our eyes on this monkey, of whom we have so much to learn. 

Mono Blanco :Chris Ofili 

Mono Gris : Chris Ofili

Mono Verde : Chris Ofili 

Photo credit: Victoria Miro Gallery  & David Zwirner

0: England: London: The Not So Cool Americans: The Japanese do it Better & The' Mute' White Cube 09/11/2001

The Americans : New Art

I started the day seeing an exhibition called, 'The New Americans.' I wondered if this was a poor relation to the UK's YBAs (Young British Artists) signature exhibition 'Sensation' being a little late and past it. Maybe it's a little unfair to compare the two as there were a few interesting works. 

Perhaps the closest works that trigger similarities between this 'New Art' and the YBA's can be seen in Tony Matelli's realistic sculptures. Matelli's sculptures are allegorical depictions of people and things that are found, lost within a turbulant world striving to survive. 'Lost and Sick: Winter version', shows a drunken pubescent trio puking up their guts, out in the snow. 

Lost and Sick: Tony Matelli

In contrast Keith Edmier's 'Victoria Regina', Beverly Edmier,  a life sized figure of the artist's mother made in opalescent pink resin. She wears a Chanel suit in a lighter shade of pink, she looks lovingly down into her transparent room to her growing embryo, the artist inside her tummy.

Victoria Regina/ Beverly Edmier : Keith Edmier

Fred Tomaselli creates an interesting technique with his use of collage. He uses found images, bugs, flowers, medicinal herbs, hallucinogenic plants and medicinal pills. He chooses titles such as: 'Bug Blast', 'Gravity's Rainbow', and 'Untitled Expulsion'. Together these images work as pure eye candy stimulating the mind, desiring to take it to another place. You are never quite sure what you are seeing, as the image plays on your visual senses, hallucinating and merging into a larger pattern within a swirling kaleidoscope. The final result becomes luscious and inviting the cut out images become almost suspended within the encased multiple layers of glossy resin.

Untitled Expulsion : Fred Tomaselli

There wasn't that much to see as far as using paint as a medium for expression, perhaps the closest is Erik Parker's pictures that became a stylistic hybrid mix of word paintings, genealogical charts, psychedelic posters posters and graffiti art. While looking at these images, with titles like, 'Money Jungle', 'Boogie Down - This I Know', and 'Unlimited Epidemics', they become reminiscent of a hiphop and dance culture wrapped in bubblegum.

The Japanese do it better 

Facts of Life

The Haywood was showing 'Facts of Life', an exhibition of Japanese art. 'Facts of Life', does not try to define what is considered to be 'Japanese', instead it seeks out the most interesting art that is being made in Japan today. 

The first artwork that drew me in was the hypnotic spectrum of colours that make Shigenobu  Yoshida's video, 'Bordeaux', the artist is preoccupied with light and is particularly interested to communicate the ordinary miracle of the rainbow. With the help of volunteers he demonstrates how to make them, using water and mirrors as a method of projecting the sunlight. In 'Bordeaux', a video of the view taken out of the train window while holding a prism over the lens. The result captures the moving contours and shapes of the passing urban landscape as the trees buildings and other features are split into multicoloured bands of colour. 

Still from Bordeaux: Shigenobu  Yoshida

Close by, hovering in the heavy air space of the gallery is Takefumi Ichikawa's 'Fuju'. A piece that consists of large transparent tubular shapes filled with helium, which floats about the large gallery space like ghosts of sculpture. Much of its identity is derived from the environment as it communicated between surrounding works, moving fast and slow, high and low, subjecting itself to the flow of air that picks it up or pushes it down, surrounding us, as you literally see through it.

Fuji : Takefumi Ichikawa

The artist Yayoi Kusama is a well known figure within the Japanese art scene, spanning back from the mid sixties. Now in 2000, she has made a film of the 'Song of a Manhattan Suicide Addict', which shows the artist seeming to turn mad as she emotionally sings, due to her overwhelming agony of flowers. She becomes troubled by the foreseeable demise of the floral phenomena that accentuates the intensity of her song becoming quite erratic. In contrast her other instillation, 'Narcissus Garden', is calming and serine. It's created by numerous 17 inch silver balls that spread across the gallery floor. Somehow I feel the desire to dive into the instillation, to roll onto the mirrored balls that glisten reflections of all the angles of the room. But I don't, I just watch the repeat of change reflected in the silver as I, or others walk by. 

Narcissus Garden: Yayoi Kusama

The 'Mute' White Cube

The White Cube in Hoxton Square was showing Sam Taylor Johnson' s 'Mute', a series of silent films, solitary photographs and sculpture. The art of film, sculpture and photography work together to expose the vulnerability and resilience of the human body and the mind's psyche when it is stretched to its limit. Her works are full of symbolic meaning as the relationship between the past can be seen in the Baroque and Renaissance religious imagery placed beside today's urban landscape. The most beautiful, emotional images are: 'Bound Ram', showing the helplessness of the young bound lamb and 'Self Portrait as a Tree', which seems like a usual view of the countryside until a moment within the cloud  breaks, allowing a slightly odd looking tree to become momentarily highlighted within a glow of a sun beam.

Self Portrait as a Tree : Sam Taylor Johnson

The film, 'Still Life', appears almost as a Cezanne painting fit onto a liquid display unit. At a closer look the beautiful colours of the lush fresh fruit gradually change, slowly revealing decay. As the fruit rots it folds in on itself, reducing itself to no more than a green sludge. The process of the sequences become speeded up, unraveling the imagery before your eyes. Echoing our life cycle, the life and death of the fruit shrivelled, as juicy and mouldy played on a continuous loop.

Still Life : Sam Taylor Johnson

'Breach (Girl with Eunuch)' consists of two parts, as a film and a sculpture. The silent film shows a single shot taken in real time, showing a girl becoming increasingly upset and anxious although it remains unclear why, as the threatening presence remains unseen. Somehow the sculpture shows a sign of hope with a desire to escape.  A large scale, upper body of a unicorn seems to reach with all it's might to pull it's sinking back legs out of the gallery's concrete floor.

Breach (Girl with Eunuch): Sam Taylor Johnson 

Photo credits:  The Hayward, Ikon, White Cube, Suzy Stories 

The Tate Modern 2000

Old Man at The Tate Modern

In May 2000, The Tate Modern, was first opened by Her Majesty The Queen. Housed in the old Bankside Power station that closed in 1981, it became one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary art in the world. It’s situated directly opposite St Paul’s across the Thames, linked together by the Millennium bridge. The first exhibit in the Turbine Hall was Louise Bourgeois’ instillation of a giant spider. Although it had been open for a few months the crowds continued to flock, ( unlike the Millennium Dome, which has also opened becoming more of a white elephant than a tourist attraction.)

The Tate Modern's conversion of Bankside Power Station keeps many of the original features, mixing raw materials of glass, steel and wood. The giant entrance slopes into the womb of the building welcoming you to a vast cross section of global art. The art of the last hundred years are no longer placed chronologically, instead works are placed under the heading of four themes: 1, Landscape, Matter and Environment. 2, Still Life, Object and Real Life. 3, History, Memory and Society. 4, Nude, Action and Body. This allows the likes of Claude Monet's paintings of 'Water lilies', to be placed beside Richard Long's Stone Circle.

I liked this new way of ordering the art work, as it can show more within the influences within  history as similar issues remain an important focus in society today. I had seen a large proportion of this work previously as has been rotated within what today has become known Tate Britain.

The building of the Tate Modern is just as much of a work of art as the art inside it and the panoramic views of London that peak in between the works speak for itself. As for the millennium bridge that stretches across the Thames, linking the Tate Modern at Bankside with Central London across to St. Pauls - it looks very high tech, yet people are still unable to use it due to the extreme movement causing the whole structure to sway. 

Louise Bourgeois, Spider in the Turbine Hall

Photo credit: Tate Modern 

0 : Greenwich Mean Time: England: London : Cool Britannia / The Saatchi Decade 18/ 09/ 2000

Charles Saatchi's YBA's

Autumn 1997, not quite the end of the 20th Century and 'Sensation' arrives at the Royal Academy, becoming the result of a cross-section of British art. This era of art is often thought of as, 'The Saatchi Decade,' courtesy of Charles Saatchi, the advertising mogul who is their greatest single patron and supporter. It has been almost a decade since 'Freeze', the exhibition organised by Damian Hirst and 15 of his class mates from Goldsmiths collage shown in the summer of 1988. These two exhibitions have become the markers from the beginning to the hype and phenomena that became Brit-Art, riding the wave of cool Britannia.

Sensation: YBA's from the Saatchi collection.

The artist's are all unique individuals whose aims were to primarily  shock by celebrating the strange, the mysterious and freakish, while creating the abnormality of the normal and the normality of the abnormal. As these works bid to evoke both reality and sensation they also became images documenting many contravercial issues that were of concern at that time. The most shocking being Damien Hirst's dissected shark in formaldehyde, the Chapman brother's deformed, conjoined sex objectified figures and Marcus Harvey's 'Myra,' whose giant portrait was created out child's handprints which became defaced with egg during the show. While we could easily ask how this can be art the reality is a different story.  London is well and truly back in the global at the forefront brought back into the arena.

The Physical Impossibility of Death in The Mind of Someone Living: Damien Hirst

Zygotic Acceleration, Biogenic De-Sublimated Libidinal Model : Jake & Dino Chapman

Myra : Marcus Harvey

Now in Autumn 2000 the follow up to 'Sensation', has arrived: 

'Apocalypse : Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art.' 

Entering into the exhibition you crouch into a very small entrance that looks more like a gap that allows access into a building. This is an instillation by Gregor Shielder, a rebuilt room and an imaginary space for living within a house, yet separate from it. He builds rooms within rooms that are separated by narrow spaces, containers that hold the history of an individuals existence. 

It's very dark and there seem to be quite a few people about, causing a state of confusion. People don't really know where we are or where we are supposed to go. I feel a desperate need to get out, experiencing an intense feeling of claustrophobia, a slight breathlessness and momentary panic. I'm unsure of the likely escape route becoming trapped inside this labyrinth. Afterwards you can see where you have been, which is little more than a box construction that seems so small and unthreatening within the large walls of the Royal Academy gallery room. Instead of imagining the type of people who may have lived in a room similar to this reconstruction, for some reason I think of Anne Frank. I wonder if her hiding place was anything like this, something about this instillation triggers thoughts of the Holocaust and of the genocides that occurred during World War II.

Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art.

The Exhibition's name "Apocalypse,' implies facing history and the present, bringing with it a sense of finality, with a horror that is recalled from deep within our memories. We as individuals can face these realities, or take refuge in superficial beauty. The work of these artists can therefore be sentiments that illustrate many perspectives within parallel worlds, within life, or within theatre of fantasy. 

I tend to be drawn to 'beauty,' although it is always the 'horror,' that will remain engraved in your brain. In this case the most horrific has to be a sequence of miniature sculptures of 'Fucking Hell', by Jake and Dinos Chapman, which reveal the atrocities of war, life in the trenches and on the front line. All blood and gore, illustrating the images of injury and pain too often hidden from the public after a victory. 

Fucking Hell: Jake and Dinos Chapman

In total contrast are the works of Mariko Mori, who creates a futuristic, 'Dream Temple'. At 5 metres high and 10 metres wide it is made of glass. There are also aspects of circular dichronic glass, that create a glowing spectrum of coloured light due to it's iridescent surface, enhancing the dream. Inside the central sphere with the temple is a virtual reality video projecting abstract images of astral bodies that float in and out of existence. We are taken into Mariko Mori's dream, into a future where time is frozen, where you imagine that you have entered into a time capsule that takes you into the illusion of  a contemporary Nirvana. You experience a contrast of emotion, initially you are captured and attracted by the transparent beauty that becomes seductive and hypnotic, a place that looks like it can take you on a trip to enlightenment. And then on the other side of your mind there is uncertainty and apprehension, a fear of a future where science has gone a step to far, or aliens could have abducted you. 

Dream Temple: Mariko Mori

An interesting sculpture I likes is Tim Noble and Sue Webster's 'The Undesirables'. A shadow play rising above a stack of rubbish, which in the light across the wall, becomes the shadow of a couple watching the sun go down. Inspired by a trip to Glastonbury music festival the work becomes a comment on the state of society. At the base a pile of excess rubbish that contributes to environmental catastrophes such as pollution and global warming, although somewhere there is hope and beauty within nature and love. 

The Undesirables / Dirty White Trash (with gulls) : Tim Noble and Sue Webster

Perhaps one of the most shocking is Maurizio Catalan's, 'La Nora Ora / The Ninth Hour' a fully life-sized waxwork of Pope John Paul II who has been hit to the floor by a meteorite that has smashed through a glass roof above, as he continues to clutch on to his crucifix, in hope , clinging onto dear life. A whole large room is dedicated to this piece and when you walk in you are set gasp because the sculpture looks terrifyingly real, you can easily imagine such an unfortunate event. It's shocking but also ironic as the Pope holds on to his cross to the very end. 

La Nora Ora / The Ninth Hour: Maurizio Catalan

Photo credits : The Royal Academy and The Saatchi Gallery

Art Crazy Nation: So What's Art Got To Do With It? 01/ 01/2000

My Art Seeker Journal : 20002

Art Culture Vulture: Travels of an Art Seeker

While my work as cabin crew took me to many countries I began writing about different situations that I found myself in. I took hundreds of photographs that I thought that one day I might use within my own art. I continued by collecting images of other people's artwork that I found, that I came across along the way. I realised the searching became like an addiction, a need to feed visual stimulation which in turn triggers continuous inspiration which allows my own work to grow, forever changing and developing. My writing doesn't follow a traditional, logical journey in a usual sense as most of my visits are only a few hours to a day long. Often it was by luck or chance of circumstance and the possibility of what I was able to find within a very limited timeframe. I therefore used time as my format, creating a 24 hour day. By jumping time zones of the world I could document the segment of time I had within a country or place with in it. I started in London at Greenwich Mean time, whereby I added an hour, until I reached the international date line , and then began to subtract an hour, returning back to where I started. By using this format I have been able to place one day next to another that could be over a year apart, depending on when I last visited. 

01/01/2020

Art Seeker Stories

20 years on and my views are still the same. What I couldn't have imagined back then is the extreme advancement in technology and communication, the main factors being the smart phone, the rise of the internet - google and social media. 

I hope to take this year to revisit my experiences and art findings and share them with you in Art Seeker Stories. I continue to seek art, no longer real time but on my laptop. I hope   for the art stories to grow, to see how the artists or places I saw may have changed in the last 20 years but also to share new artist stories so that I am continuing  my artist journey of 20 years ago, sharing art I love, connecting artists worldwide. 

My Art Bible: 3 Books by Matthew Collings

Blimey!

It Hurts

Art Crazy Nation

I have a lot of books and have collected them for years but three books are probably my most influential because they marked an era in art history which in response started me on my artist journey.  Mathew Collings is an artist and writer, an art critic and presenter for; 'This is Modern Art' and, 'Hello Culture'. In his book 'Blimey! 1997 he tackles the London art scene from within the inside but questioning from all perspectives. It rides the wave at the height of the Saatchi decade, the Young British Artists phenomena and cool Britannia. His direct, matter of fact, nothing spared approach sparked my quest for searching art.

     

 In 1998 he published 'It Hurts',   a New York version  of London's 'Blimey!' When I read it I never imagined that I would be seeing and experiencing New York once or sometimes three times a month myself. It's strange as it's not so much the art or artists in this book but more the the bite sized snippets  of art exploration  that Matthew gives us.   

While I was on my own journey of exploration of searching for art worldwide a year later in 2001 Matthew wrote, 'Art Crazy Nation'.  This book is about what happened within the British art scene  5 years following his first book Blimey! My diary as it was became 'Art, Culture Vulture: Travels of an Art Seeker,'  without knowing it at the time of writing, 'Art Crazy Nation,' felt like a conformation of what I was trying to do, and in the end it became my response or my answer, following on -the story, but from a different perspective - that of a 20 something female, cabin crew outside of the art-scene.

Thank you Matthew for being such a huge inspiration. Ironically many years later I showed my own artwork with New British Artists at The London Art Fair, after I was taken on as their 'Wild Card'. The ground floor was reserved for 4 of the highest brow galleries, the first and most prominent was Jay Jopling's, White Cube. Everyone else were on a galleried level, higher up The view looking up to the next tier had a wall which showed a memorising abstract painting, delicate and  inviting made out of triangles and diamonds, for quite a few years I saw similar versions of this same art work, on that very same wall. Only 15 years later did I come to find out that it was created by husband and wife. duo, Matthew Collings and Emma Biggs.