Tuesday, June 19, 2007

UBS Openings: Drawings from the UBS Art Collection

Tate Modern
4 May – 4 Nov 2007 [free entry]

Drawings by artists includes: Charles Avery, George Baselitz, Alighiero e Boetti, Vija Celmins, Chuck Close, John Currin, Bruce Conner, Walter Dahn, Joel Fisher, Helen Frankenthaler, Lucian Freud, Robert Gober, Philip Guston, David Hockney, Jenny Holzer, Franz Kline, Markus Lupertz, Rosemari Trockel, Ed Ruscha, Jim Shaw, Michele Zalopany.

I wandered to the over populated Tate Modern to check out the drawings that were on display. Like the density of people at the Tate the drawings were also slightly too cramped.

These are notes that I made while I looked and walked around.

Alighiero e Boetti Aerei 1978 – ball point pen – plane spotting put into a picture, he his making the sky with his pen marks

Galaxy #1 (Coma Berenices) Vija Celmins – Still powerful, but the galaxy needs to breathe and it can’t do it next to the Boetti.

Untitled 1961 Helen Frankenthaler – blobs and spirals – a dedication that becomes part of the drawing

Untitled (Drawing No. 1) 1988-9 Joel Fisher – the curved red ochre graphite line gone over with black becomes almost the same register as the ground, the hand made paper with its rough edge.

Coiled Paper 1973 Edward Ruscha – the image throws you back to the ground of the image with its own subtle undulations within the frame.

Untitled #5 (Double Sink) 1985 Robert Gober – My eye looks at the ripped out sketchbook edge (series of vertical holes along the left edge of the page), I glance at the title and back to the image. I see two bodies, two figures and wonder which side left or right made the drawing. Who is the significant other, so close that you would share dirty water with? Traces

Untitled 1971-2 Cy Twombly – A wrong tilted grid that automatically makes me see Agnes Martin’s grids and lines that remind me of a tree in winter scratching on the glass in the wind.

Hunters’ Cabin Charles Avery – Drawing has x-ray vision.

STUART MURRAY - CELL PROJECT SPACE

Stuart Murray, Cell Project Space,
16 Jun – 22 July
258 Cambridge Heath Road, London E2 9DA

Stuart Murray is a Spy


Crap jobs I have had include:

• Putting the walnuts in walnut whips [I only did this for a day but the girl next to me fainted on the conveyor belt (imagine this bit)]
• Peeling potatoes by the sack load [I did this sitting outside a pub and daydreamed about being in an early Van Gogh],
• Stuffing letters to opticians and ophthalmologist in a grand Georgian room that was supposedly used to be Jack B. Yeat’s studio. When no one was looking I searched the room for paint drips but found none.
• Packing Brylcreem lids into boxes hurriedly trying keeping up with the machine, while a South African man shouted at me over the noise, describing how beautiful his country was with wonderful wild flowers.
Lucky for me, I wasn’t sent to the much-discussed ‘chicken factory’. What happens to you there is still very much a mystery, perhaps it is a place where you become a non-person and never manage to escape the underworld.

The best thing about the crap jobs was that I wasn’t really like my other workers; I was there undercover, an artist. I was a spy. Stuart Murray is also a spy.

When I walked into Cell I found a crisp white pure space, where clean attractive people looked at the results of Stuart Murray’s undercover information gathering, contained in books arranged on tables. He has recorded his interactions with the homeless, drunks and fellow temporary workers. These temporary people are the ones who society perpetually tramples and rejects, people we try to hide and move on: actively ignore.

This data is in the form of pen drawings of the individual and hand written record of what they said. Reading them transported me to a dismal gloomy Glasgow underworld. I could smell the fags, piss and alcohol. How many different ways can you ask for money? How many strategies are there for apologetically giving nothing? My favourite person in ‘On the Street’ was the woman who asked Murray not for money but if he lived in a house. If so, could she live with him?

This exhibition is crammed full of moments with people who are normally hidden. Lots of people should see this show, especially not just the art world.

Monday, June 18, 2007

MARK OUT

Artists: Simon Barker, Teresa Carneiro, Patrick Adam Jones and Onya MacCausland
Respond through to the architecture of the Phoenix Gallery

23 Jun - 21 Jul
PV 22 Jun
10-14 Waterloo Place, Brighton