Museums, Galleries and Utopia

It turned out I misunderstood the "Utopia" homework brief a little.

We were expected to come up with simplistic ideas like "a world without war" and "happy families" rather than my more specific (but still Utopian) ways of how society might be better organised.

Anyhow, Thursday's session on museums and galleries, their purpose and the way in which exhibits within them are organised (or curated in museum/gallery parlance), resulted in small amount of  homework:

Research controversies surrounding Tate Modern, the implication being that  I should have known about a big one that's current at the moment.

I'm a bit non-plussed.   Wikipedia's "Tate" listing has a whole section labelled "Controversies" -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tate

- but none of them seem that "hot".

I suppose Mary, our lecturer,  is referring to the most recent entry in the Wikipedia list, concerning oil company BP's sponsorship of the Tate - one of the focuses of the "Art Not Oil" group:

http://www.artnotoil.org.uk/about

Check out a Guardian article on the latest "protest" in April of this year:

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/apr/24/liberate-tate-arts-bp

By the way, I've got my own axe to grind over Tate Modern.  Check out these previous posts:

My thoughts on art galleries and museums
My Art Manifesto


"A Very Moving Perpetual Festival"

In the class on Thursday, we were split into groups and asked to come up with a way of "curating" the Utopian ideas we'd developed for homework - and we were encouraged to think outside the box.

Our group came up with an idea that really tickled me because it was Utopian in itself.

Under the  "art by and for everyone" banner we proposed closing the M25 and staging a perpetual festival of art on it.

As the festival would cause the whole of London to seize up, it would get huge media coverage and attract millions of people from all over the world.

The festival would move slowly forward around the M25 ring as new artists and visitors joined the front and worked their way through the festival to leave from the back.

I liked the idea so much I rather hijacked presenting it, and then omitted to say the magic phrase "a very moving perpetual festival" (sorry!) but I think people got the idea.  I spotted Mary giggling.

As I'm posting all of my "homework" on this blog,  here goes with my vision of Utopia - Utopia being something that has a connection with Modernists, who got all excited about art becoming an organising force in society through such things as architecture.

Utopia

Non art related ideas  

Radically expand opportunities for people to do suitable community work and incentivise them to do it.

 Expand opportunities: 

•          Introduce a working week of 4 days working for yourself and 1 day working for the community
•          Reorganise a lot of community services to accommodate volunteers
•          Get volunteers to run training courses.

 Incentivise people to volunteer:

•         Volunteers earn “credits”
•          Credits can be used to reduce Council Tax
•         Win the right to vote once you’ve earned a minimum amount of credits
•          Entry to further education requires a minimum amount of credits
•         Old age pension increased once you’ve earned a minimum amount of credits

 Goals:

•          Make volunteering an expected activity for all ages
•         Tackle loneliness of old people       
•       Harness skills of retired people.
•            Encourage helping your neighbour
•          Address child-minding.
•          Encourage participation in community affairs

Put tax “carrots and sticks” in place so that cooperatives become the predominant way of setting up and running businesses.

      So everybody is incentivised to work for the best interests of the business they own, and everybody is rewarded appropriately for success.

Impose 100% tax on earnings of more than £1 million a year and use it to raise the tax threshold for hard-up families.

      Try to reduce the difference between the haves and have-nots

Utopia

Art related ideas  

Impose  20% tax on sales of art worth more than £1 million.

Use the revenues from to fund a revolution in galleries and museums (see below).

Make art much more public

• Put a system in place where advertisers have to match whatever they do to promote products etc with an equal amount of “space” for popular art (see below).
• Put a system in place where art can be submitted for public viewing and can be voted for by the public.
• Move collections out of galleries and museums and disperse them among large numbers of public buildings.
• Turn the empty galleries and museums into places where everybody can experiment with making art.  Use the tax revenue from expensive art sales (see above) to fund this.

Recognise gardens as “living” works of art

• Encourage artists to realise that a garden is a giant canvas in which they can immerse themselves.
• Use public gardens to house some of the artwork moved out of galleries and museums.
• Include garden design as a subject at art college.

Edmund de Waal

Without really trying, I've become a bit of a follower of Edmund de Waal (not in a Twitter sense - he has yet to tweet).

It all started with his book, The Hare With Amber Eyes, which I read a couple of years ago and really liked.

As a result of that, I checked out his "Signs and Wonders" installation at the Victoria and Albert Museum - a steel channel running around the perimeter of the dome above the entrance, into which de Waal has arranged lots of pots he's made, pots that echo his favourite exhibits in the ceramic galleries.

Here's a video about it:
  http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/videos/e/video-edmund-de-waal-signs-and-wonders/

I used this as a starting point for a submission for the V&A's "Inspired by" competition while I was going to evening classes on glass at Plymouth College of Art (which got me hooked on doing a degree).

I started out thinking I would make a small section of his curved channel in glass and then place some glass objects in it.    To cut a long story short, I ended up casting the channel as 6 segments, changing the section so the channel looked more like a breaking wave and then beaming light up through them by placing them over a hollow plinth in which I installed lots of light emitting diodes.

More info on this here: http://www.peter-heywood.co.uk/work_details.php?id=17&s=0

In other words, I ended up with something that didn't have much to do with "Signs and Wonders".  I don't like it much.  (Neither did the V&A).

Anyhow, the reason I'm bringing this up is that Edmund de Waal was on the TV twice last week:

In  "Edmund de Waal: Make Pots or Die", a documentary about him, his book, and his preparations for his first exhibition in the U.S.:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03hcmmp/imagine..._Winter_2013_Edmund_de_Waal_Make_Pots_or_Die/

and in "What Do Artists Do All Day No. 6: Edmund de Waal"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03hd9hd/What_Do_Artists_Do_All_Day_Edmund_de_Waal/

I must admit I decided I didn't like Edmund de Waal after watching the "Make Pots or Die" documentary.  The programme jumped around quite a lot and Edmund came across as too much of an aesthete for my liking.  I bet he got bullied at school.

I didn't think de Waal's pots looked anything special and I didn't "get" de Waal's pre-occupation with the way his pots were arranged, the spaces between them, and how that was related to the poetry and music that de Waal is so familiar with.

I changed my mind during the second programme.   I don't think it was spelled out but I (finally) got the message.  It's all about "vitrines" as de Waal calls them - the glass cabinets he used to peer into on his many visits to the V&A ceramic galleries as a youngster.  Actually, it goes back even further - to peering at his uncle's collection of netsuke in a vitrine, the basis of The Hare With Amber Eyes.

So, de Waal isn't just making pots.  He's making the modern equivalent of vitrines and arranging pots within in them.  The position of the pots,  the spaces between them and how much of them you can see (in some installations some of the pots are partially obscured behind sand-blasted glass)  are evocative of poetry and music, and also hark back to de Waal's family history.

Check out de Waal's website for one of his latest installations:

http://www.edmunddewaal.com

I can see the music and poetry in this - the way the pots come in waves, a bit like the way those strings of punched cards are fed into street organs.

I can see the connection between de Waal's vitrines, with lots of long shelves fairly close together, and the single shelf created by the channel in "Signs and Wonders".

It's got me wondering what came first - whether "Signs and Wonders" was an extension of vitrines de Waal was already making, or whether "Signs and Wonders" was the starting point?

Lots more images of de Waal's work here:
http://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=edmund%20de%20waal&rs=ac&len=14

My Art Manifesto

1. I will prioritise making art over studying it.
2. I will make art primarily for myself because I get a bigger buzz out of the creative process than I get from showing the results to other people.
3. I will make a point of taking on ambitious projects because I get an even bigger buzz if I push boundaries in the creative process.
4. I won't display artist's statements.  I will let my work speak for itself.  I won't try and influence the way in which it is interpreted.
5. I will seek out opportunities to have my work shown in public.
6. I will make a strong distinction between making my own art and analysing other people's.
7. I won't write pretentious twaddle about anything, even art.
8. I will question the purpose of philosophical navel-gazing about art.
9. I will support any plan to distribute the contents of art galleries and museums among public buildings so it can be studied in more conducive surroundings.
10. I will support any plan to put Banksy in charge of Tate Modern.

A Modernist Object

We were asked to pick a Modernist object and explain why it belongs to that style:

 Crown Hall, which houses the Illinois Institute of Technology’s school of architecture in Chicago. 

Photo from Wikipedia

Steel and glass rectangular 2-storey box with no internal columns.  Glass in lower floor is sand-blasted to minimise distractions.  Glass in upper floor is clear to let in light and allow views of the sky.

It’s considered to be the masterpiece of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a leading architect in Germany’s Bauhaus movement (part of Modernism).

More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._R._Crown_Hall

Why it is Modernist:

·       Simplicity and clarity of form.

·       Form follows function

·       Visual expression of the structure. 

·       Use of 90 degree angles

·       Emphasis on horizontal and vertical lines

·       Industrially produced materials – “machine aesthetic”

·       Truth to materials

Red Rum

I'm adding this post to my blog so I've got everything in one place - ie it doesn't quite belong here.  

We were asked to pick an image and write about 250 words on a "formal" and "content" analysis of it.  I didn't have a lot of time so I picked something easy, something I owned.

On reflection, I should have picked something harder,  a work of art that I didn't understand or like  in the hopes of seeing the light.  When I have a spare moment I'll try to do this!

Red Rum

Formal Analysis

One of the most striking aspects of this sculpture is its size.  It’s a life-size bust of a famous racehorse, Red Rum, mounted on a wall in similar way to a stag’s head.   It dominates its surroundings.

The construction of Red Rum is also unusual.  It’s made by hand-crocheting a skin of coarse brown wool over a polystyrene armature.  The direction of the stitching has been used to highlight the musculature of the horse’s body in a very effective way.  The wool gives the surface of Red Rum a “horsey”  tactile texture.

Content Analysis

Red Rum is the only horse to have won the Grand National steeplechase three times.  The race is considered to be “the ultimate test of a horse’s courage” according to Tony McCoy, a famous jockey [1].

The large scale of this sculpture and the method of emphasising the musculature of the horse captures Red Rum’s enormous strength and courage.  The way it is mounted – as a trophy – indicates that this is no ordinary horse.

Some people might also say this sculpture symbolises Liverpool because the Grand National is staged there and Red Rum is buried on the finishing line.  

In addition, this sculpture was given by the artist, Shauna Richardson, to Liverpool Love [2], an art auction, from which 90% of the profits went to a Liverpool-based children’s hospice. 

I bid for the sculpture in the auction and got quite a surprise when I won.  Red Rum hangs on a wall above our stairs in our upside-down house in Looe, Cornwall. 

For me, the sculpture has an additional symbol – the Olympic Games.  When I went to the Olympics I encountered the huge crocheted lions made by Shauna Richardson for the “Cultural Olympiad”.  It was love at first sight – I took a note of her name, searched for other work she’d made and found Red Rum up for auction at Liverpool Love. [3], [4], [5].

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/horseracing/8775130/Tony-McCoy-jump-jockeys-owe-Ginger-McCain-a-huge-debt-for-saving-the-Grand-National.html

[2] http://www.liverpoollove.org

[3] http://vimeo.com/49915502

[4] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17915318

[5] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-17141964