And so the new year begins with an icy blast that, according to the daily Metro freesheet, has taken the trouble to come all the way over from the chilly Canadian tundra especially to meet me as I exit from Oxford Circus tube station. It’s accompanied by a light smattering of sleety, slushy, half-baked snow-like stuff for which doubtless the Eskimos have a precise word and these days kids have a clever emoticon but, whatever the most appropriate meteorological descriptor should be, the stuff is cold and wet and starting to settle on my thinning gray thatch. It’s time to jam on my beanie hat, hike up my hoodie and stride off to Blain Southern in Hanover Square to warm up by looking at their curious little concept show entitled Revolt of the Sage.
The title refers to a painting by Giorgio de Chirico but it’s not one of his classic works where a deserted Turin piazza provides a background for some artichoke, rubber glove or other mundane object to be made mystical by being inserted into the slightly spooky setting. As a quick Goggle Images search reveals, this is a more cluttered work where various intersecting, overlapping planes fill a room, at the front of which rests what looks like a screen displaying trade sample of biscuits, breads and loofahs. The technical term for this particular sort of nonsensical, semi-Surreal, dreamy style of whimsicality is Metaphysical Art, and I assume that it’s the slightly disconcerting mood evinced by this kind of painting that the curators are aiming to recreate through the choice of artists and artworks included within this current exhibition. And. I think it’s fair to say, they’ve done quite a reasonable job since all of the dozen or so selected artists have produced images that are indeterminate, off-kilter and generally just a little bit skewed off from boring rationality. From Paloma Varga Weisz’s woman with a block of wood balanced on her head to various John Stezaker film still, photo collage mash-ups, Sigmar Polke’s stretched and swirled photocopies, and even the Lynn Chadwick abstracted bronze figures – all carry a slightly sinister look. Interesting stuff but perhaps the best indicator that the curators have successfully created the desired ambience is when, for a brief second, I find I’m looking at the invigilator’s own vacated white chair cloaked by her black jacket and bag and thinking how well it fits in with the rest of the items on display.
Then, as if in confirmation of the power of art to change one’s perceptions of the world, I find that when I leave the gallery the weather has ameliorated – the wind has dropped, the precipitation ceased and there’s even a small patch of blue bravely trying to force its way through all the stacked up layers of gloomy grey around it. All of which makes the walk on to the Almine Rech Gallery a decidedly more pleasant perambulation. In fact, it puts me in such a better mood that I even find that I quite like the exhibition of recent works by Jeff Koons that’s being shown here. There are a couple of very large polished stainless steel recreations of ballerina sculptures which are industrial-sized examples of the squeaky kitsch so favoured by the artist but nevertheless strike me as being perhaps just a little less deliberately, teeth-grindingly irritating than the usual things that Koons tends to giantise and glossify. And then there are a series of reproductions of classics by Giotto, David, Poussin, Boucher and the like, each of which has been adorned with its own strategically placed reflective blue ball. The result is that the image of the viewer is both incorporated into the painting and then mirrored back out, presumably for further contemplation. I suppose the idea is a very literal attempt to involve the audience within the artwork which is maybe a pretty thin piece of Conceptualistic game-playing but it’s inoffensive enough and easy to understand and since everything in the show has been manufactured to the slick production standards so characteristic of Koons’ output, I’m sure his fans will not be disappointed by this latest range of merchandise.
And so, on to David Zwirner for Sunny Side Up, which is the rather jocular title given to a whole series of paintings by Josef Albers. No-one familiar with the work of the great Bauhaus alumnus and teacher will be at all surprised to learn that the vast majority of the works in the show here are entirely rectilinear. In fact, there are no acute or obtuse angles to be seen at all, let alone any curves or other examples of non-geometric randomness, except for the trial and error splodges apparent among the preparatory sketches and test works where the artist has been mixing colours and experimenting with different variations of mainly yellowy shades and tones. Such is the great position of authority and respect that Albers evidently still commands that even these studies and scraps of ephemera have been thought valuable enough to be properly framed and displayed alongside the fully authorised finished works. Oh well, at the risk of appearing to be an appalling Philistine and committing the most dreadful artworld apostasy, I have to confess that Albers’ infinite series of homages to squares, in which one precisely delineated monochromatic patch is meticulously lain over another, strikes me as being all a bit boring. I’m just not sure that the square deserved quite the lifelong obeisance that Albers decided to devote. Neither am I convinced that the artist would have been happy to have all the aforementioned off-cuts, scraps and doodles exhibited on equal terms with the finished pieces. Surely, any artist who spent so much time and care making so many variations on such a small theme exhibits a tendency towards the kind of perfectionistic neuroses that would shudder at such non-kosher combinations. Judging by his work, I suppose I sort of always assumed Albers to be a sort of rigorous, humourless type and totally obsessional about the art he made and the way it was shown but maybe I’m wrong and that the researchers at Zwirner’s know something that confirms the contrary and that he was totally easy going and indifferent, equivocal and unbothered how his work was made and presented.
There’s still another couple of shows to call into to complete the day’s ramble so time to move on to Gazelli Fine Art for their show entitled Toute Seule which, I think I can safely translate as All Alone, although I’m not sure why this little exhibition of work by five women artists should have been given that title. As far as I can see, there’s nothing in the gallery leaflet to explain the reasoning behind the name, although it does advise that each of the artists is somehow aligned with a different decade, starting with Nancy Spero who is representative of the 1970s and the birth of a kind of full-on, political feminist art. I’ve always quite liked the stylised depiction of people and objects used in her prints and friezes which seemed to me to be related to design styles from Egypt and other ancient civilisations. But as for the ideological points that she was also making in her work, I have to confess that I always had trouble figuring out exactly what they were, but then I’m not sure that they were probably directed towards me and my gender, at which point experience has taught me it’s probably best to get out of this debate and move on to the next couple of decades. I suppose in simplistic terms these years bring a reversion to formalist and conceptualist concerns which brings along Elisabeth Murray’s unexceptional abstracts and then Rachel Whiteread’s fairly familiar sculptures. Most interesting from the latter is the maquette for the inverted plastic plinth that Whiteread wittily stuck on the empty one to fulfill her Trafalgar Square commission. Here, in small scale it actually looks quite clever and neat although my memory of the actual, full-size version is that it looked a bit glib and vacuous. As for the final two artists and decades, both Rebecca Allen in her video and Charlotte Colbert with her photowork refer back to the oldest of artistic concerns and representations of the human form – the former via digital manipulations of wriggling bodies and the latter in a set piece deconstruction of a mother into her separately framed segments. And since both works were made in the past year or so I’m not entirely sure how close either of these particular formats are meant to be allied to the naughties and teens of the new millennial eras.
Finally to end with New Beginnings at the Alan Cristea Gallery – a simple mixed show of prints from some of the Gallery’s stable of artists acting as a preview to some of the shows that will fill the rest of the year. So, there’s a good mix of figurative, abstract, decorative and conceptual works from the likes of Julian Opie, Gillian Ayres, Joe Tilson, Cornelia Parker and others. And, sadly, since the blue glimmer in the sky seems to have conceded defeat to the forces of darkerness, I think it’s probably time to put the headgear back on and take a speedy walk back to the warmth of the undergroundworld.