All American Realism

It is fascinating to watch the visitors at the current Berlin Guggenheim exhibition, there is a dance that people seem to be doing, a slow waltz with the paintings on display. And it goes like this, gently moving right up to the paintings, close but not too close to draw the watchful gaze of the museum guards. Right up and then back away from the paintings and then right up again gazing all around from one corner to another and back again until finally moving on to the next work. The reason for this dance is that the viewers are confronted with a selection of iconic hyper/super/photo realism paintings and it would seem the main reaction people have when confronted with such “perfection” is to look for flaws. The flaws reveal that it is in fact a painting and not a photograph, that it was created by human hands and not a machine. The paintings can’t fail to astonish and amaze the viewers with the undeniable skill of these painters but what is also undeniable is that the more perfect the execution the colder and more inhuman the work is. A single flaw, no matter how small is all the viewer needs to see before moving on; the weave of the canvas, an uneven glossiness to the surface, a pencil mark around the edge of a car headlight, a brush mark for the highlight on a neon sign or even a tiny hair imbedded in the paint.
We get an airbrushed self-portrait by Audrey Flack, Cowboys on horses by Richard McLean, all American cars by Robert Bechtle, a shiny chrome truck by Ron Kleemann, wrecked cars by John Salt, a shiny chrome caravan by Ralph goings, a neon Bud sign by Robert Cottingham, the front of a VW Beatle by Don Eddy and on and on, each surface more perfect than the next.
The giant portraits of Chuck Close are astonishing in their perfection and this is intensified by the fact that they are painted with watercolour, which is far from a medium renowned for its accuracy. There is a dizzy feeling to be confronted by faces at such a scale and there is an ever so slight haziness to the surface which helps intensify this feeling.
The scenes presented by Richard Estes are quintessential New York capturing the look and feel of the city from the late 60’s and early 70’s. He gives us the neon, the glass doors, the chrome and stainless steel and all the reflections. He is following squarely in Edward Hopper’s footsteps in his ability to present the city at a very particular moment in history.
The fly in the ointment in the exhibition is Malcolm Morley, a British born artist in this “All-American” show whose paintings are less about dazzling the viewer with perfection and more about actual paint. These are very self-conscious paintings (in a good way) which play which the idea of super-realism but don’t deny the fact that they are paintings. Here we see brush marks and also a white painted edge which highlights the face that he is not painting reality but painting the reality of a photograph. The subject matter is less about a celebration of modern urban shininess and instead the two works here present a scene from a golf championship and a couple rowing a boat in a Central Park lake; there is something more mundane about both of these scenes. Here for the first time in this exhibition we question why the artist chooses to paint these particular scenes.
Over all, love them or hate them, this is a very good selection of work which epitomise the photorealism movement. We have some of the iconic classics here. The exhibition groups the works under three themes, Reflections on the City, Culture of Consumption, and American Life. There is an attempt to use these groupings to say something about American culture in the 1970s but this is best ignored.

Picturing America: Photorealism in the 1970s, the first major showing of Photorealism in Germany in nearly thirty years, features thirty-two paintings, a number of them the most iconic works of the period, by seventeen artists:
Robert Bechtle, Charles Bell, Tom Blackwell, Chuck Close, Robert Cottingham, Don Eddy, Richard Estes, Audrey Flack, Franz Gertsch, Ralph Goings, Ron Kleemann, Richard McLean, Malcolm Morley, Stephen Posen, John Salt, Ben Schonzeit, and Paul Staiger

Deutsche Guggenheim
Unter den Linden 13/15
10117 Berlin
http://www.deutsche-guggenheim-berlin.de

Official Welcome

Running until 22 February at the Hamburger Bahnhof is an exhibition which is part of the "Cult of the Artist" series entitled "I can't just slice off an ear every day". Deconstructing the Myth of the Artist. This show contains work by artists such as Francis Alÿs, Marcel Broodthaers, Marcel Duchamp, Andrea Fraser, Dan Graham, Rodney Graham, Richard Jackson, Christian Jankowski, Martin Kippenberger, Sarah Lucas, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Pipilotti Rist, and Cindy Sherman to name but a few. It is truly a mixed bag of which most is forgettable and doesn't really deconstruct any myths. One piece worth a mention is Andrea Fraser's "Official Welcome" (2001) a video piece of a performance which shows Fraser delivering a speech at an art award ceremony and during which she begins to strip. It can be see here (in 4 parts):

Review on Anish Kapoor’s Memory

06/01/2009

by Benjamin Jiva Dasa Norris

Memory (2008) is the latest commissioned sculpture to be housed within the German Guggenheim gallery in Berlin. Its creator, Anish Kapoor, uses the stark, white space to accentuate the scale and confrontational aspects of his latest work to generate a lasting, stunning impact.

Memory consists of a twenty-four ton Cor-Ten steel tank; its outer shell an almost fragile looking rust-covered collection of tiles (the earthy, almost bloody pigment is perhaps the most immediate reminder that this is a Kapoor piece) seamlessly held together, creating delicate curves and leering bulges which almost glance the sides of the gallery walls and ceiling, and causing something of a disconcerting sense of the defiance of gravity in the room – it feels as though the tank should not be able to sit as still and sentinel-like as it does, as if the entire colossus could roll in somnambulance to one side at any moment.

To say that Memory is confrontational is perhaps an understatement. The piece literally looms in the viewers face, reminding us of our own relatively tiny scale, and of our positions within the gallery itself. Perhaps the most intriguing feature of the installation is its purposeful inaccessibility; we are forbidden to duck beneath the curving hulk of iron and see behind it, instead we must exit the gallery and re-enter with fresh eyes through another door, into a brighter, whiter space to observe the other side of the tank, the back of which has a more flattened, less familiar plane, made all the more unmovable and alien by the brief moment just spent between entrances on the busy street outside. Kapoor almost teases us with disorientation; we cannot help but want to view the sculpture as a whole, the very way our minds (but not our memories) work creates a sense of longing for a little distance, a little space to better apprehend the piece as a whole.

The next dimension of Memory is accessed through the gift shop of the Guggenheim. Again, a minute of familiarity, distraction; up a small set of stairs and down another, before we realise we are to one side of the sculpture, staring into its belly through an aperture in the wall it rests against. Kapoor has managed to create a true void; beyond a couple of inches of the rusty metal shell, we see nothing. Blackness. Depth incalculable, and volume incomprehensible. The meaning of the installation’s title starts to make sense as one looks into the darkness: By segmenting our viewpoints and taking full control of the ways in which we can see the sculpture, Kapoor forces the viewer to use their own memories to try, and fail, to construct an image of the whole in their own minds. This idea of ‘mental sculpture’ has less to do with the steel tank, and far more to do with the individuals movements around the tank: memory as a fleeting, unreachable creation made up of singular, mental images from different viewpoints. The void itself, a triangle of black space, acts as an empty canvas (for the darkness is so complete from certain angles it looks as though it is a flat, two-dimensional plane, a black square mounted onto a white wall) for the mind to attempt to sketch the image onto.

By fracturing both physical and mental space, Kapoor creates a steel metaphor for the intimacy of the individual’s memories and the cognitive process. Like our own memories and dreams, Memory is viewed in a third person perspective – whether standing at the front, to the rear or looking within the sculpture, we cannot help but mentally place ourselves at the other points. From each perspective we must mentally take ourselves back through a set of doors, or up and down a small flight of stairs to attempt to comprehend the mass that fills the space we stand in. In this way, Memory is permanently situational, its true physical, tangible nature remaining nebulous. No matter how quickly we move through the doors and around the heaving curves of steel, no matter how firmly we hold images in our mind, each moment we place ourselves in and see as ‘present’ immediately disappears into the past with each and every movement of the self.

more from Benjamin Jiva Dasa Norris

Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin

Lots of Koons

Let's start with Jeff...
There has been a little bit of an epidemic of Jeff Koons recently around Europe, (well around Paris and Berlin anyway). I hope all have recovered. First there was the Château de Versailles exhibition and then came Jeff the Celebration exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin and not forgetting a show of new paintings at Galerie Max Hetzler also in Berlin.
The thing about Koons is that, with his sculpture at least (let’s ignore the painting), the setting is everything. His work always seems to make amazing public sculpture, think of the flower puppy in Bilbao, monumental, eye-catching, playful and some of the pieces even spark controversy all the things public sculpture should do. But when you put these glossy pieces into a gallery setting, the often sterile nature of these spaces makes the pieces loose any interest. This is almost what happens at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. To mark the major series of exhibitions on the Cult of the Artitst, the Neue Nationalgalerie proudly presents the exhibition entitled Jeff Koons. Celebration. running from the 31 October 2008 to 8 February 2009.. The space is far from you average sterile white cube but it still doesn’t offer a setting strong enough for these pieces to live. In fact the best way to see the work is by not going into the gallery at all but instead wandering around the building an looking in the windows, there you can see the work in an almost “public” setting and also marvel at the visitors who meander through the space gazing and search for some meaning as they take in Koons. But best of all you don’t have to queue to get in or pay and also you can take photographs of the work.

As for Versailles, what an amazing setting for Koons. Kitsch meets kitsch or something like that. The catalogue for this show is quite amazing, it is like a “Where’s Wally?” (or Waldo) book because the work blends in so well with its surroundings. “Where’s the Koons?”. The catalogue makes a beautiful addition to even the most stylish of coffee tables and also highlights another setting that Koon’s work always succeeds in and that is in the book format. The show itself managed to Ruffle some Feathers in France apparently making a “Royal Heir” poke his head out of the woodwork, Prince Charles-Emmanuel de Bourbon-Parme has asked an administrative court at Versailles to halt the exhibition, he called the show “a desecration and an attack on the respect due to the dead,” (that is the dead that went to the guillotine, is it?) It seems quite fitting if you ask me. It brings Jeff Koons work to a very large audience and this may or may not be a good thing.
What can you say about Koons that hasn't already be said.... Nothing much.