­Time and Memory...

 

Here’s a rather lovely piece by young artist Samatha Danckwerts. Check out her tumblr page here..

http://samantha-danckwerts.tumblr.com/

I was attracted to it straight away because a few days before I saw it I had been formulating a plan for a QoE Creative event based on memory and time.

I saw it at a show of Portsmouth University students work the other night and as you can see it is comprised of many different time pieces. My apologies for the poor photo but I only had a mobile camera phone with me and this photo in no way does the beauty of the piece justice. I believe it got sold that night to a certain famous Portsmouth based steampunk antiques dealer and he’s a lucky fellow! It is replete with meaning and has great substance and sensation. If you could walk around it you would sense that despite its apparent fragility it has both solidity and sensuality. I haven’t asked Sammy this but I have a feeling that this is a gendered artwork. The notion that time can be gendered according to personal experience is deeply interesting to me. I am not going to discuss this now because I haven’t yet fully formulated my response to Sammy’s artwork in this way, but I feel that there may well be a Part 2 to this blog post!! For the moment I want to view time as a fluid vehicle that can be so personal that it defies the international standards of time as an internationally recognised dimension.      

My Dad has vascular dementia so for me this artwork has a deep personal resonance. He can remember certain things and stretches of decades but some decades and some people are forever lost to him. As we get older our sense of time passing increases but with Dad his sense of time has become fluid. He is stuck in a bubble of time which can change from day to day. His bubble is circular but distorts on an irregular basis. One of the problems of time is that it has an inherently circular structure. We can draw a from a line from A to Z to describe the lifetime of a person on a chart, but the concept of time as a dimension is difficult to describe without thinking in terms of an evolving cycle or in terms of reasoning by circularity. I was thinking about this when I was looking at Sammy’s artwork because her piece is most certainly not circular. We can see that it is the shape of a torso, a person built of the components of time. I liked the idea when I was viewing it that I was actually looking at the different experiences in time of a person’s life and that each cog, wheel and spring was a metaphor for specific events; a car crash, getting a new job, the death of a loved one, even just simply boiling an egg for breakfast! We all hold memories which are explicitly linked to time and key events in particular places. These things make us what we are. What happens when a spring or cog fails and drops out of kilter with other experiences? What significance do the other memories then have to the person? Are the remaining memories heightened or diminished by the loss of the springs and dials that have fallen from the body? What is left of us when all the cogs have fallen to the floor and the hand on the clock has slipped too far forward?

I’m going to write more about this on here, preferably when Sammy tells me if I’m right about this artwork being gendered as then I will have a lot to say about it. If I'm wrong I will still have a lot to say! It’s a clever piece. I want QoE to run an art event based around notions of time and memory. Stay tuned as I develop this idea...

 

RIP Magic Slim, the only person I can think of who could make Fender Jazzmaster sound really hot playing Chicago Blues...

Kitaj: Fragmentation

I did say I would be posting all this week about Kitaj but yesterday was so hectic that I didn't get the chance. Here I am though with more Kitaj...

Kitaj has been an influence to me on many levels. One of the first things I saw was an interview with Kitaj by Timothy Hyman. I'm guessing it was done for London Magazine but I can't find it on my bookshelf to verify. Over a decade later I visited Timothy to ask him not about Kitaj but about Bonnard and he very kindly answered my questions. I did mention the interview because it had really sparked my imagination and he showed me a painting by Kitaj's second wife Sandra Fisher that was full of beautiful Manetesque brushstrokes and bright colours.

That interview made me go looking for Mondrian, Schiele, Benjamin... Oh God so many different people in fact. And not just people but ideas. Having grown up in an art world of post modernist conceptualism I was amazed not just that anybody still drew figuratively at that level, but that they drew so well and mixed it with so many literary and art historical ideas. He was intense and vivid and talked as much about notions of the abstract as he did about the old masters. I can be corrected on this but I don't think I ever saw him write about Donald Judd. He was a Modernist with Cartesian leanings and post structual notions that the author didn't know what they were creating didn't sit well in his work. I personally loved that about them. They were not unlike the American modernist poetry he loved and since I grew up with books of Cummings, Ashbery, Duncan and Creeley I was amazed that this painter not only drew ideas from them but that he actually knew them personally. Like those poets and their poems, you need to know something of Kitaj's personal motivations in each work to draw further interpretation. That was always a stumbling block of modernism. You always needed some research in hand, unlike post modernism which begs you to explain it because the author often can't. I love research though. Research is knowledge. If you have read my earlier post on the UK school system you will understand why I prize this very highly. To research is to both understand and construct further and Kitaj's work was replete with those motivations.

By the time I had seen the Marco Livingstone monograph I was on a mission to incorporate as many of the ideas I had seen in his work as I could into my own ideas. One of the main ideas was fragmentation. There is so much written about fragmentation in painting and sculpture that I won't reassess it here. I will however explain what I saw in Kitaj in this respect. This painting is a stunner...
  

R.B. Kitaj (1932-2007), From London (James Joll and John Golding), 1975/76, Oil on Canvas, 152 x 244 cm, Private Collection.

Joll was a historian specialising in anarchism and socialism, and Golding was an abstract painter and art historian. The painting is full of references to their interests and lives and that is interesting in itself, but what I loved was its fragmentation. Kitaj wrote about this paintings state of 'unfinish'. Both fragmentation (in the sense that Rodin applied it not the way the Surrealists applied it), and 'unfinish' have a lot in common. The borders of the imagination are not so defined in a painting that has these 'unfinished' and fragmented qualities.

When I saw it, Golding's arm in the Kitaj painting instantly made me think of Elizabeth Frink's 'Dying King'...

Dame Elizabeth Frink (1930-1993), Dying King, 1963, Bronze, 850 x 1850 x 400mm, Tate Collection.

Frink's dying Richard III (the real one having now been found under a car park in Leicester!) is flailing in agony not just as his attackers move in for the kill but in despair at his predicament, the end of the road, and what lays beyond. That's my interpretation anyway and I think it does hold up. There are much greater greater metaphysical ideas at play here though (as well as an excellent solution for conveying movement in a 3D static object) and the arm extends to another metaphysical sphere beyond what we can grasp visibly. I'll probably do a QoE Creative course where I go into these ideas in much greater depth.

I suggest that we are essentially provided with three spheres of time; the present in which the piece is being viewed, the past in which it was created, and the historical past that the figure represents. This is obviously not true of all artworks but again, this is a modernist piece and the Tate's research shows that Richard III's death was the intended subject. Likewise we have three sphere's of seeing. There is the space between the viewer and the object, the spatiality around the object itself, and the metaphysical spatiality that is hinted at by the flailing arm. Again, this is a personal assessment not academic research but I think it is worth proposing. Rodin employed similar theories and certainly the Cubists and later the Surrealists later took ideas of fragmentation to signify the breaking up of time, space and contextual meaning.

In Kitaj's painting, Golding's arm has that aspect to it. It dissolves into an abstration and suggests what lays beyond the physical world and takes us into the metaphysical. I did this in one of my photos on a series I did about English Culture...

 

Mod Shop, 2011, Digital Print, Copyright E. Woodroffe 2013

 



When I shot this photo I actually had not just Kitaj but another great fragmenting artist in mind, Edward Burra. Esprcially his late works where he went away from the opaque and into the transparent as a further possible field of metaphysicality in two dimensional spaces. At face value my photo is about commodity culture and fetishism but if you look closely it goes a lot deeper into the realms of spatiality. Consumers often forget time when they are engrossed in shopping and sellers absolutely want them to forget it. Like gambling casino's that have no clocks, the longer that the shopper stays then the longer there is the chance that they will go home with a prize. I tried to capture this idea in one shot in 1/250th of a second through multiple layers of glass and consumers on every side of me during a street festival.

That's just a barest snippet from what I have thought and written about this subject over the years and I do intend to do an event based around it. Keep tuned to www.qoecreative.com and our upcoming events and workshops for more details.





 

Plans are afoot for for an exciting event this summer. It's too early to say much at the moment but it might involve a great deal of vintage clothing and creative nostalgia... :-)

QoE Creative will want YOU!

...to join in

Leadbelly

This is the first blues album I ever owned and I got it off my Dad. He bought it new in 1954.

You can read about this wandering psychopathic Guitarslinger here...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_Belly

This album made me take up the guitar and I was thinking about this album this morning while I was practicing scales. Even after thirty plus years of guitar playing I have started practicing scales every morning the way that other people go for a jog. All these scales are very familiar to me from different musical situations but there is something very relaxing and focusing about working through scales and harmony and practising position playing correctly up and down the neck. Today I was practising the Ionian Imaj7th scale. It has a very floaty jazzy feel to it and is very ubiquitous. It has some long stretches that can be a bit tight on fast runs but that is what art is all about. If you don't stretch yourself to the limit you get nothing back in return and that is something always worth remembering. 

Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?

I went to the friends view of the Kitaj show at Pallant House yesterday morning and I said I'd return to the theme of R.B. Kitaj this week so I will. When I first saw a Kitaj show he was a living artist and a major one. It is sad that I have now seen my first show where he is a late artist. The world seems a good deal less brighter today. I'm going to go back to the summer of 1994. Where are those who have gone before us?

To me, after over twenty years of being with his ideas and art on my bookshelf, I still love the work as much as I did on the first day I saw it on a wintery Saturday afternoon in Houbens bookshop in Richmond.

I'm not going to go into the 'Tate war' of 1994 to any great extent. I think that more than enough has been said about it by just about everybody. I do want to say this though. I went to that retrospective and loved it and I didn't see anybody else who visibly didn't. I feel that Richard Morphet is entirely correct in the comments he made regarding this. On the day I went I saw people not just wandering through but really closely looking, scrutinising, and devouring the paintings. I had lunch in the Morpeth Arms and then I went to the Marlborough Fine Art Kitaj exhibit and finished the day at the V&A where I saw the exhibition of Kitaj prints. I will say only one thing about the 'Tate war'. It takes guts for an serious and committed artist to make marks on a canvas because those marks are tracks of flesh and blood and spirit. The are imbued with the life of the person who made them and that person must be brave enough to stand by those marks and reveal them to the world. I have never seen a drawing or painting as good as anything as Kitaj at his best by any of the critics who savaged him and were not able to forgive what were actually very human flaws that appear to some degree in all of us. Often art historians and art critics do not spend as much time looking in the mirror as they do looking out of the window and maybe if they did their words would be kinder but have no less veracity.   

From the first day I ever saw 'The Ohio Gang' I always believed Kitaj's paintings to be Marmite; you either love them or hate them. I do a bit of both. To me, a Kitaj painting at its best is still a strange symphony that combines the extremes of deep romanticism and the deepest clashes of atonal polyrhythmic discord. I don't know, but I can imagine that Kitaj was probably a bit like that himself and if he was then so what? Nobody was ever forced to read what he wrote or look at what he drew and painted. The world is made more colourful by passionate people and their intense passions and I think we can say that Kitaj was one of the most intense in this regard.

R.B. Kitaj, (1932-2007), The Ohio Gang, 1964,

Oil and Graphite on Canvas, 183 x 183 cm, The Museum of Modern Art New York, Philip Johnson Fund 1965.

Some passages in his painting make me cringe and I almost hear myself shouting 'No! Don't do that!' But they are corresponded with drawing of sublime beauty. It's the Rodinesque fragmentation, the surrealist bent for the uncanny that is so exciting. Just like his writing, the paintings make me want to find out more, look longer, look deeper, concentrate harder.

This week I will revisit Kitaj every day on this blog. This isn't going to be an assessment of his works. This is going to be a revisit to the things that have inspired me. A return journey after a very long trek.  

Context and Seeing...

I've been listening a lot to Marc Ribot recently...

http://www.marcribot.com/

I've always liked his music since I heard his session work on Tom Waits 'Raindogs' years ago. I like the way he will drop a pentatonic scale into a soup of dissonance at the drop of a hat. I like the fact that he never sits still in his music and creative thinking. At one moment you could be listening to a beautifully structured jazz piece, and other times you might be hearing screeching noises as he rubs a balloon up and down the strings (yes he does do that! Find it on Youtube!!).

At the heart of his music though is a thorough training in classical and jazz music, whether he's a Blues/Rock sideman on a The Black Keys record, doing country with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss or performing with one of his various avant-garde jazz ensembles. This foundation shows through in everything he does. He can break rules with the guitar because he knows the rules thoroughly.

One of the most common things I have found when teaching a session on creativity with young creatives whether it's photography, guitar, or fine art, is a complete lack of the essential ingredients required to make the kind of fantastic creativity that Marc Ribot does. The terrible thing about this is
that it's generally not their fault. The educational system of the UK has failed them in the last thirty years.

The recent English Baccalaureate farce revealed that the Government has no idea of the roots of art, culture, and science as a backbone of democratic thinking and culture. It has long been a standy position of both Labour and Tory governments to start emphasising science and technology as the way forward when they have left the economy in ruins or they know they are not in a position to make it any better. Art becomes sidelined as the flaky and erratic sibling of science, not to be trusted and not a commercial viability that will help the UK economy. Alan Turing was a mathematician but he was also a creative. I would suggest that he was also an artist. Successive governments would be wise to consider the notion that art, science and philosophy fit together to make a whole culture, not just one or two of the components. The ancient Greeks knew this. When the current government chose the term Baccaulaureate as a buzz word they ignored it's true roots of the 'Laurel of Berries' awarded to scholars. I find it very sad.

If we take art and make it a 'lesser' subject than science (which was the position of the English Baccalaureate) then we remove the essentials of creative experimentation (and by default, artists who criticize govenment decisions). That is a very useful stance for a weak goverment in trouble. Unfortunately it ignores facts such as major turnover industries like the worldwide gaming industry relying heavily on artists who understand direct observation, bone and muscle structure, and classical concepts of dimension and measurement. Like Marc Ribot and his guitar, artists drawing up layouts for digital arts have to understand the rules before they can break them. The gaming industry is not the only industry that utilises these skills by far but the ignorance apparent in the failure of  the government in being able to understand the value of the creative industries in the UK is appalling.

One of the alarming things in this regard that I have noticed over the last ten years is the lack of literacy and numeracy amongst Uni students. Worse than this is the lack of understanding of the notion of context. If the question is not offered as a multiple choice question then there is no understanding of the act of building and constructing the answer through diligence and research.

Likewise, life and still life drawing seems to have disappeared from the young artists toolset and this is very alarming because young artists are no longer taught to 'look'. If they are not looking carefully and with scrutiny and do not understand the notion of context then what do they have as an asset? I could be cynical and say that any UK government would find them to be the perfect voter but my business is not voters.

My business, QoE Creative, is about encouraging context and looking carefully at mixing art and science to form a whole. We will soon be announcing scientific as well as arts events. I'm looking forward to seeing what can happen in that context and looking forward to taking our interdisciplinary adventures into increasingly interesting and fruitfully creative areas.