Feels like time to catch up on a few shows that are running in galleries at the upper end of the commercial sector which, perhaps unsurprisingly, means going for a walk around some of the posher, dark green bits of the Monopoly map of London. But, before I get to that part of town, I start today’s journey by visiting an outlier on the opposite side of the famous board game, a short walk from Marylebone station. The Lisson Gallery, or rather galleries (for there are two separate building on either side of Bell Street) will be marking its fiftieth anniversary next year, which must make it one of the capital’s longest-running exhibition spaces dedicated to the display of contemporary art. It’s also probably one of the most respected and I like to think that I made a small but significant contribution towards helping it achieve its current, prestigious position of eminence. About thirty years ago, a colleague and I whitewashed the walls of the gallery prior to a showing of Sol LeWitt sculptures and I like to think that the minimalist muralising, with which I so conscientiously engaged for a couple of days, played a minor, but very likely crucial, role in ensuring the growing reputation of both artist and gallery at that particular point in time.
Anyway, enough about me and my contributions to the footnotes of art history, and back to the current Lisson show which is a display of the latest works by the acclaimed British sculptor Tony Cragg. Starting out in the early ‘70s, Cragg was a fairly radical and adventurous experimentalist who, along with quite a few of his compatriots of the time, was keen to expand the boundaries of what could be considered appropriate forms and materials for artists to use to construct their artworks. It was an interesting period in the development in art and I can still remember the first piece of his that I ever saw: a silhouette of the British Isles constructed from colourful pieces of flat plastic – discarded urban detritus – that had been stuck directly onto a wall at the Hayward Gallery. I thought it was rather witty and elegant and a clever riposte to both the old Modernist figurative tradition embodied by Henry Moore and the later, heavy metal abstraction of artists like Antony Caro. But that was all a very long time ago and while Cragg still evidently retains a deep interest in playing around with the potentiality of different materials – the current show includes pieces in glass, steel, wood, aluminium and bronze – it’s been a very long time since he went rummaging around skips and pound shops to trouve the objets he wanted to turn into art. And, frankly, the highly polished monumental biomorphic forms on display today look like they’ve all been effortlessly 3-D printed out by some enormous super-computer programmed with software instructed to create megaliths for the luxury lobbies of smart corporations and five-star hotel chains. The work still carries some interest but with every potential flaw very carefully engineered out it’s all a bit too silky smooth and soulless for my tastes.
And so it’s on to Edgware Road tube station and then a couple of changes to get to Green Park and the newly relocated Skarstedt gallery which offers a rather intriguing inaugural show by combining works from David Salle and Cindy Sherman. Both artists play around with Post-Modern themes through sampling references to earlier art historical works, so that Salle’s giant paintings superimpose African masks and Modernist sculptures on top of copies of 17th century Italian and Dutch tapestries. And Sherman raids the dressing up box once again in order to deck herself out in flowing robes, fake wigs and false noses and so reenact the poses of sitters from classical masterpieces of the art historical past. Both Salle’s Tapestry Paintings and Sherman’s History Portrait series were originally created in the late ‘80s when they probably looked a good deal more strange, daring and perhaps even mocking in their attitude to the traditional western cannon but I think they’ve probably aged rather gracefully. And in our current Post-Post-Modern world, especially when considered in comparison with some of the current threadbare threads of contemporary art, they seem to have managed to acquire a patina of authority and even a sense of seriousness that I’m not entirely sure even the artists would have originally intended.
A bit further south down St James and into Mason’s Yard for the White Cube presentation of work by Jannis Kounellis. Again it’s quite an interesting show that combines some curious student paintings and drawings from the ‘60s – that play around with stenciled numbers, letter and mathematical symbols – along with later, more familiar sculptural wall pieces from the ‘90s. There’s something oddly sensual and appealing about the way Kounellis stacks up these heavy sheets of steel and then decorates them with colourful rags, lumps of wax or, most impressively, a trio of little gas lamps.
And after those last couple of historical shows it’s back to the present with some prints and sculptures by Yinka Shonibare at the Stephen Friedman Gallery. And I think it’s perhaps not too outlandish to suggest that his current works draw on both some aspects of the Arte Povera tradition that Kounellis embraced and the Post-Modernism of Salle and Sherman. So, there are a bunch of exuberantly colourful prints here that seem to be hybrid constructions where important figures from Christian iconography like St Francis and St Paul have been redrawn with their faces hidden behind African masks. Similarly, reproductions of three classical sculptures of David, Venus and Discobolus have had their pristine white marble bodies painted over with patterns from African fabrics while their heads have been replaced by little globes. I think the artists is probably trying to make some kind of symbolic statement here about benefits of multiculturalism, the disbenefits of colonial oppression and the mixed benefits of globalisation, but as for the precise point I think that’s probably best left to each individual to try to figure out for him or herself.
So, with time pressing on I continue north and cross over Regent Street and round a couple of turns to get to the Marian Goodman Gallery for some more sculpture, this time courtesy of Giuseppe Penone. The works have been created over the past few decades and, according to the Gallery notes, are broadly linked by reflecting the artist’s interest in ‘the metaphysical relationship of his body to the living ecosystem’. Consequentially, the Gallery is full of leaves, twigs and other bits of trees onto which assorted plaster casts, rough terra cotta mouldings and some rather neat bronze hands have been laid. As to what the nature of the metaphysical relationship is between artist and wood, again I’m not too sure and decide that I’ll have to ponder that one at a later date.
In the meantime I head across the road for my penultimate stop – LA Exuberance by Tacita Dean which may sound a bit like a new brand of perfume but is, in fact, the latest show of work by the artist at the Frith Street Gallery. The tripartite exhibition consists of drawings and prints of cloudscapes, which are pleasant enough, plus two video films. The first of these shows David Hockney standing in his studio apparently immobile as he pores over a sketch, his horoscope, the racing pages or something else of equal importance, while puffing away on a cigarette. It’s not really all that inspiring or moving, in either sense of the word, and when I see that the other, main feature lasts for 50 minutes, which I don’t really have to spare, I decide I’m going to have to give it a miss. But, for those interested in a quick mini-trailer, as far as I could tell, it starts off with the silhouette of man with impressive beard walking around in front of a theatre audience as it settles down into its seats. I’m guessing that the story probably develops without shoot-outs or car chases but probably quite a lot of watching the beard grow.
And so, finally, for my last stop of the day it’s over to Hanover Square and Blain Southern for the recreation of a 1971 installation by Bruce Nauman. And it’s hard not to be impressed by the ingenuity and dedication of the technical team who have managed to construct an entire, complete empty white would-be gallery space within the actual proper main white gallery space. Entering the ersatz room through a particularly squeaky door (which I’m not sure would have been in the original) it becomes apparent that the artwork, as such, consists solely of the empty room and the internal ambience created by a mix of natural light, seeping in from the bottom of one side, matched by artificial fluorescent blue light, entering from the top of the facing wall. I’m not sure that the optical sensation is quite as spooky or disconcerting as the artist hoped to achieve. In fact, entering a nice plain white room where there’s no obvious art to see on either walls or floor gave my eyes a rather welcoming rest and made for a bit of a refreshing change. It’s almost tempting to suggest that there are quite a few galleries out there for which the experience of paying a visit might actually be enhanced quite significantly if they followed a similar course of no platforming action. Not, I hasten to add, that this would apply to any of the places visited today which I feel all tried, and succeeded to a greater or lesser extent, to provide at least something of interest for the rambler to look at.
