Pauline Griffith's Umbrellas

Pauline Griffiths

I love art that makes connections and that has purpose but Pauline Griffith’s practice makes finding the links with lived life challenging , equally many of the reasons as to why Pauline does her work are not immediately apparent. Yet despite the absence of an obvious intention or purpose her work has a  subliminally pleasing attraction  perhaps rooted in English idyosyncracity found in artists like Vivienne Westwood, George & Gilbert and the man who paints chewing gum – Ben Wilson - who I've written about elsewhere on this blog.

Pauline Introduces Her Practice

Pauline dismantles old or broken umbrellas with a view to making the fabric into bags while leaving their frames to create an object d’art. I caught her in the grounds of Guys Hospital at the first stage in her artistic work flow.

Pauline and Umbrella Frames

Should Pauline put half the energy and vitality that she puts into the dismantling  those broken umbrellas into the completed  bags they will be works of art which will at once delight and entertain not to mention have a planet saving recycling intrinsic utility

I plan to keep in touch with Pauline to follow her progress – meanwhile don’t throw away that broken umbrella as you maybe throwing a future work of art.

Learnt from Las Vegas, Applied in London and Liverpool

Preparing for my first Image of the Black in London Galleries tour I looked at how the postmodern influence behind  the Sainsbury Wing extension to the National Gallery was rooted in Robert Venturi’s 1972 influential work Learning From Las Vegas.

Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign,

Betty Willis 1959

His radical ideas from consideration of the famous Las Vegas Strip with its iconic welcome sign gave way to a new way of thinking about urban architecture as he parodied modernism’s minimalism saying Less is a Bore! The Strip inspired him as buildings made their function and presence known through extravagant individual signage on its buildings.

Stardust sign and hotel front,
Las Vegas, 1961

Where modernism was about space Venturi argued postmodernism was about communication. A Mies van der Rohe modernist building had an intrinsic indifference to its history and location, it could be in any urban space, leading to the modern city having a uniform look and feel regardless of location from London to Los Angeles (or Liverpool).

The Mint. Las Vegas 1957 to 1989

Postmodernism was about context with its buildings fitting in a fun, idiosyncratic way within the settings they found themselves, letting the world know who they are. A postmodernist building fits within its environment. With its name etched into the front and the back of the Sainsbury Wing leave the viewer in on doubt what the building is.

St Martins's Street view
rear of Sainsbury Wing

The Sainsbury Wing's eponymous lettering minded me of the lettering I'd seen in the entrance to the British Libaray and of  a newly built care centre in  my home town Liverpool which I'd often stopped to admire.

Sir Colin St John Wilson (1922 – 2007)

British Library June 1998

Liverpool Primary Care Trust 

Edge Hill Health Centre
Taylor Young Practice 2013

To conclude, from prestigious public buildings exemplified by National Gallery's Sainsbury Wing extension and  The British Library  in London to the functional local buildings like the Health Centre in Liverpool Robert Venturi's Learnings From Las Vegas have been applied. The idea he first highlighted in 1960s Las Vegas urban development finds a place in the buildings of the 21st century from Las Vegas to London to  Liverpool.

BTW ONE the National Gallery's eponymous gold sign on the frieze of its portico is very recent postmodern addition after the Sainsbury Wing

Portico of the National Gallery,
Trafalgar Square

BTW TWO This frieze postmodern signage ain't that new......

Pantheon, Rome, 118–128  AD

Santa Marie Novella, Florence, 1456–1470

For my take on the Santa Marie Novella signage see my post Taken Back to My Comparative Roots

BTW THREE The black presence in the Venturi's Sainsbury Wing is to be found in its faux Egyptian columns which parody the classical Corinthian columns and pilasters and remans us of the African influence on the western canonical art to be found in the Sainsbury Wing. A controversial debate intuited with Dr Martin Bernals' Black Athena hypothesis.

Sainsbury Wing Egyptian Columns (detail)

Egyptian Capitals
(see Wikipedia for more on Egyptian Architecture)

Leah Thorn - Older Women Rock

I didn’t get it at first when Ebun said she was going to be part of Leah Thorn’s Older Women Rock (OWR). Thoughts of aging rock chicks  in leathers recalling and lamenting former glory days came to mind .

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Older Women Rock is for me a brilliant example of the sublation of art in the praxis of life  - the reintegration of art into the very way we live our lives*. A brilliant, thought provoking, bloke challenging multi-sensory,  including taste,  multimedia concept, event and idea.

It would be trite to call OWR multi media as yes, it does mix different media: Leah’s poetry with art, fashion, music, curation, photography. But it goes much further, it brings art into life as OWR creates its own vocabulary to reveal, display and explain the lot of the older woman in society today, making making and revealing connections.

Allie Lee vajazzled

OWR makes manifest the older woman not just as the trope of mother, wife, grandmother, carer  or that old lady living alone but, in roles unfamiliar to too many of us:

As a prisoner – one of the fastest growing demographics in prison today is women over 55 (1)

As a mental health sufferer - 28% of women aged 65 years and over suffer form depression (2)

As living in poverty – 14 per cent of women pensioners live in relative poverty, defined as having incomes below 60 per cent median income after housing costs (3)

OWR brings these issues to light through Leah's fun creative, innovative poems expressed by artists in the novel media of clothes and fashions.

I loved the whole OWR concept.

Leah turns her poetry in to art and fashion,  her words inspire artists to create works based on clothing  to which they applique, embroider words and images in response to Leah’s poetry.  OWR works are then central to a series of  panel discussions, fashion shows, cabaret evenings  with, and about, older women.

Claire Angel screen 

I found several of the poems and their subsequent artefacts very challenging  (for me, a bloke!) specifically the poem button, with its opening lines Vulva lost its youthful lustre and vajazzled's I’ll never have a designer vulva the resultant works leave little to the imagination.

While other works make profound comments, encouraging one to think and reflect on other aspects of the older women's life and times, for example on the presence or rather absence of older women on TV and movie screens  with the poem screen's opening line embroidered into the back of  a cream leather jacket: only men grow old on the screen. Throughout OWR there is resistance, subversion  and rejection of the cliched image of 'the older women'.

Leah Thorn

I found Leah's OWR experience – the poems, the fashion, the art -  engaging, entertaining and thought provoking and not just the artworks works were tasty so was the rock.

References 

* For other examples see my post: Gormley’s Bollards - Great Art or Gormless Artefacts
1 British Society of Criminology
2  Fundamental Facts About Mental Health 2015
3 Age UK Evidence Review: Poverty in Later Life

Jon Daniels' ICONS on Railton Road

Jon Daniel’s facia redesign for Brixton Advice Centre’s livens up the junction of Shakespeare Road and Railton Road - Brixton’s Poet’s Corner - with his inspirational eye catching facia - ICONS on Railton Road. Testament to how art and design, form and function can work together - the integration of art into everyday life - making it hard to impossible to tell one from the other.

From the brief for the facia Jon’s approach is simple and eloquent - art: celebrate Brixton’s icons and design: create naturally light but private office space.

Jon has paid respect to the building’s history: it has a blue plaque commemorating CLR James lived there and Race To Day edited by Darcus Howe was produced in the there. Their historic presence is acknowledged in Jon’s iconographic art installation which also includes the pianist Winifred Atwell, the writer Farrukh Dhondy, the poet Linton Kwesei Johnson and the activist Olive Morris, each icon having a strong connection with Brixton. Their grainy, much enlarged back and white images add to the drama of the installation.

The materials Jon has used allows the light to flow through the images so the office space is naturally light yet remains quite private from outside preying eyes.

The inspiration for the colours is particularly interesting as the building had just been painted white, its three doors - one on Shakespeare Road, one on the corner and one on Railton Road- each painted a different colour - Blue , Green and Yellow. Those three colours Jon has referenced in his new logo design for BAC including a witty speech bubble as well as using them in the installation.

.....and this is not the first time Jon's work came to my attention. His excellent curation of the exhibition of AFRO SUPA HERO at the V&A Museum of Childhood I really enjoyed and wrote about earlier on this blog.

 For me this is what art is all about something beautiful with purpose - aesthetic, yet practical - art should touch one’s soul, inspire one’s mind while at the same time be a natural part of our everyday lived lives.  Jon’s Brixton’s icons on BAC’s facia are for me testament to how art can enliven not just our physical but also spiritual circumstances.

Please Take A Seat

Martindale M., (2015) Please Take A Seat , mixed media
Price on Application

PLEASE. TAKE A SEAT a new work from one of London’s newest,  freshest artists. Wittily referring to the ambivalence found at the intersection of the indefinite and definite articles.

Tantalizingly we are left uncertain as what to do -  take the seat to the dump or to be seated for an indeterminate wait for some undeclared service - the work is redolent with ambiguity

PLEASE. TAKE A SEAT has a commanding presence, asking questions, demanding answers (those capitals are not without purpose) , the spectator cannot be neutral, they are drawn in by the command, no matter how courteous the command resonates PLEASE! TAKE A SEAT!

Chewing Gum Painting on The Wobbly Bridge

On the way over the Wobbly Bridge en route to St Pauls to celebrate 50 years to the day that MLK spoke there, I was delighted to come across Ben Wilson, the chewing gum painter, who I’d met and wrote about last year summer. As bright and cheerful as ever, despite the cold and damp December evening, there he was laying full length on the cold steel bridge working on a piece a gum by torch light.  

His idiosyncratic oeuvre made manifest in this cheerful, colourfully painted chewing gum Christmas card to James & Lauren. It was part of series of works he has around Tate Modern. Sadly, time and light did not permit touring his other works, as I did last time we met up. This time however I had the chance to see the work in progress and the finished work.

It was a good fun trying to find that finished work. As by the time we were on the way back he’d gone leaving only his work. Not quite a needle in haystack but looking for a 25mm by 30mm piece of coloured gum on the 325,000mm by 4,000mm bridge at night using the bridge's subdued blue foot lighting was a challenge.

Multi Media Curation From TV to NPG

I was already to rant about the indulgence and self obsession that is Grayson Perry and his subjects  in his Channel 4's Who Are You ? To me this was Perry and his fellow self publicists on a self promotion trip. My Twitter correspondence on the program reflected my attitude:

I’ve now seen the show at the National Portrait Gallery Who Are You? The installation or rather,  quote that  insert[ion]into the Gallery’s 19th and 20th century displays unquote, is simply brilliant quite extraordinary curation.

NPG’s curators have excelled themselves in creating 14 individual installations which confront, arrest and question the viewer.

Grayson has taken inspiration from throughout Art history to create his fourteen portraits for example:

• The image of Renaissance Fortified Town is behind his self portrait - Map of Days 
• A Medieval reliquary casket has given Perry the idea for the portrait of a  Christian group that works with homeless people, Jesus Army Money Box
• A Hilliard miniature of Sir Francis Drake inspires the portrayal of Rylan Clark, famous for being famous - The Earl of Essex

My favourite was the £5 note inspired tapestry - Comfort Blanket - which Perry describes as  a portrait of Britain to wrap yourself up in, a giant banknote, things we love, and love to hate, what  attracted me to the work was its eloquent word picture of all that is Britain & Britishness namely the Archers, the Beeb, Fish & Chips and right upto to date with the inclusion of Steve McQueen - a tapestry version of Danny Boyle's Opening to the Olympics London 2012

Detail of Comfort Blanket

What makes the NPG installation so good is that works within its collection are hung along side portraits of the traditional, conventional great & good. The positions can be quite revealing of Grayson’s portrait and the works that surrounds it, complimenting each other by adding new layers of meaning.

The Ashford Hijab, for example, depicts the Muslim convert Kayleigh Khosravi and her children on a path from that “temple of consumerism”, Ashford Designer Outlet Centre, to Mecca. Creating a revealing contrast with the refined portraits of the Britain's elite - aristocrats, war heroes and heroines,  authors , artists,playwrights - that surround her portrait.

The show is an exemplar of modern museum curation which has its roots in the TV programs that had a book alongside. No TV art series seems to be complete without that associated book – perhaps dating back to 1969 and Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. What the curators at the National Portrait Gallery are doing, as those at the British Museum are doing, is to link their institution a more familiar media to thier target audiences: TV and Radio respectively.

In the case of NPG it’s Channel 4’s Who Are You? while the perhaps, the British Museum in a more cerebral mood has gone for Radio 4 with the incomparable Neil Macgregor’s Germany: Memories of a Nation.

I believe this intersection of media - TV & Radio - with museums is brilliant as the two compliment each other so well (when done properly as the case with the two examples). It creates a new space in one's mind to appreciate and reflect on the works adding many new layers of meaning leading to a better understanding of the exhibition or installation.

So, although I would say exactly of the same things as I said on Twitter about the self publicising Perry and his models, I cannot speak highly enough of how the NPG has presented the works - I fully recommended NPG installation!