Sarah Lucas: Situation Classic Pervery at Sadie Coles HQ Off Site, December 1, 2012 through March 2013

Antony Gormley: Model at White Cube Bermondsey, November 28, 2012 to  February 19, 2013

Installation view, Sarah Lucas: Situation Classic Pervery at Sadie Coles HQ Off Site, London, December 1, 2012 through March 2013

In Terry Southern’s 1969 cult classic “The Magic Christian,” eccentric billionaire Sir Guy Grand (Peter Sellers) explains to his adopted son, Youngman (Ringo Starr), “sometimes it’s not enough merely to teach, one has to punish as well.”  Two exhibitions currently on view in London teach and punish as well: Antony Gormley’s Model at White Cube and Sarah Lucas‘s Situation Classic Pervery at Sadie Coles each follow the artists’ working process in a way that is less pedantic and more gritty.  And it’s important to remember that Seller’s Guy Grand is a classic pervert anyway: punishment as a “Fifty Shades of Grey” pleasurable episode of paddling and pinching.

Situation Classic Pervery is another installation in a series of Lucas projects (Situation Franz West, Situation Rose Bush, Situation Make Love, etc.) to inhabit the second floor of the gallery.  In each she chooses a basic theme and creates an environment populated with an occasional finished piece, but more often strewn with odd bits and pieces that are seminal parts of Lucas’ artistic vocabulary.  Toilets stand about, sometimes piled in the corner, but also outfitted with dainty cushions. A witty and seductive Untitled (tit chair) (2012) re-purposes as cushioning a multitude of yummy-looking artificial tits made from stuffed hose, a classic Lucas statement of both feminist defiance and self-abnegation in line with her Human Toilet Revisited (1998, not on display).

But the process of creation is not always pretty.  She toys with disturbing undercurrents, regardless of whether the viewer can stomach the results.  The freedom that lurks in this room is of a different variety than the perhaps more utilitarian frame of mind of an artist preparing for a staid museum exhibition. Soup is an entrancing wall mural of penis tips emerging from their foreskins, dotted over a background of bean soup—with a gleam and consistency chosen for maximum gross-out potential.  A similarly double edged work is an endearing “field-trip” vignette-a projection across the room features Lucas visiting a goat farm.  She seems to be wearing a coat of goat fur and her demeanor is one of cheery amusement as the goats jump and frolic around her and the farmer, but the references to perversity-bestiality, devils, satyrs, and the animals’ eventual fate as food and clothing, are all implicit within the context of the show.  Situation Classic Pervery has an unnerving brilliance as it skips mischieviously between clever DIY aesthetic and a profoundly poetic subtext.

Antony Gormley, Model, 2012. Weathering steel,
16’6” x 106’9” x 44’6”. Courtesy White Cube

Antony Gormley’s Model at the new and imposing White Cube in Bermondsey is just as concerned with the humanity of the artist’s subject, but less with our proclivities and secretions than would be the case in Lucas.  Instead the focus is on formal concerns.  The artist’s model, himself, which features so prominently in earlier projects such as Angel of the North, (1998) and the various Event Horizon  installations (2007-2012) has been reconfigured as a series of rectangular volumes with a pixellating effect.  These stolid, rust-color figures populate the gallery, attempting to negate the eponymous white cube.  One pair, Hinge II (2011) stands in the courtyard in front of the gallery, while others skulk in corners and sprawl across the massive entry hallway that stretches from the front door to the screening rooms at the back.  They have several rooms to themselves and grow progressively larger—striking curious poses that range from Michelangelo’s slaves to Degas’ dancers to Toltec Chacmools.

An entire room devoted to the process of generating Model, (2012) a giant, walk-through funhouse cum sculpture, is as rigorous, meticulous, and repetitive as a first year architecture final review.  Gormley presents every aesthetic step in the formulation of his golem, from a single block to spidery and nimble human form.  Amusingly, the largest rectangle of the composition becomes the knob–on that point both Lucas and Gormley would agree.  Though Gormley has embraced the new age of the 3D printer, a host of materials is on display—delicate bass wood matrices as well as blue foam carvings, for instance.  This army of little creatures has a market stall air about it, tempting the viewer to handle the works, a quality that is all but impossible in his giant steel works.

But tactility may be the new thing for Gormley: one exits The Model Room with a naughty hankering to touch the art, and down the hall, after completing a safety waiver, you climb in the foot of the sleeping giant.  Again the experience is about form: the body as house for living in.  It relates to a claustrophobic feeling we all get once in a while, thinking of ourselves as an even smaller person looking out through the windows of our eyes.  Gormley’s Model has windows too, a little interior stage and dark passageways as well, and is all about feeling one’s way-the steely resonance of the footsteps and the cold smooth metal that has to be touched, simply to avoid banging one’s head in the dark.  Both the Gormley and Lucas exhibitions come to a “head” with a head:  within Gormley’s leviathan you must retrace your steps after clambering from foot to crown, while Lucas’s (pre-Hirst) “skull” (2000) hangs over the well-upholstered tit chair.  Again delving into the perverse, Lucas has decided to give the dead bloke a set of gold teeth.

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Gillian Wearing approaches identity furtively.  This even applies to her self-portraits where she is rarely fully present, instead flickering in and out of the frame, oscillating between herself and an older self, or another family member, or another photographer.  It seems fitting, therefore, that the retrospective of her work at the Whitechapel Gallery, (March 28 to June 17, 2012) curated by Daniel Herrmann and Doris Krystof (it will travel to the K20 in Dusseldorf and then the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich) starts plaintively with a ceiling hung monitor showing Dancing in Peckham.  This seminal early work that so perfectly expresses alienation and the raw nerve of hidden, unspeakable secrets is not alone in the main ground floor gallery, but because the other films in the room have their own self-contained theaters, Dancing in Peckham dominates the room, and gives us our only glimpse of the artist, herself, doing a weird lonely dance in a crowded, South London shopping mall.

Gillian Wearing, Bully, 2010. Video for projection, 7 mins 55 seconds. Installation shot at Tanya Banakdar Gallery, 2011

Wearing’s most recent film on display, Bully (2010) is a staged performance of what might be either an acting exercise or some kind of psychological role-playing.  The question of what genre the films actually fall into is an important element of her work.  Most are interviews, but with whom?  Often the main character has been switched out with another, who lip-synchs their voice, or the speaker wears a mask.  The monologues are morbidly fascinating, but again, who they are aimed at is equivocal, as much of the time it seems the characters are more interested in seeking absolution than entertaining an audience.  The main protagonist of Bully coaches his fellow actors into re-enacting an altercation on the playground from his youth.  He then chastises those who intimidated him and those who stood by watching, but whether this is a cathartic release for a real person or a figment of Wearing’s imagination is never revealed.

Upstairs, the series of photographs,  Signs that Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say are virtually given a room of their own.  Even after numerous advertising campaigns over the years have borrowed or stolen Wearing’s imaginative vehicle of pure self-expression, these pictures of average Londoners, many again photographed in Peckham, retain their original energy and power.  The attractive young man in a suit holding the words “I’m desperate” or a man with facial tattoos whose sign reads, “Have been certified as mildly insane” are a tremendous leveler of humanity, in the face of superficial appearances.  The room also contains Crowd, a video on a small flat screen created in imitation of Dürer’s still life with weeds and wildflowers of 1503, a reenactment of sorts, and several small, precisely executed sculptures of individuals who have distinguished themselves: a rooky police officer, Gervais (2010) and Terri (2008) who was injured during the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in September 2011 but still rescued several others that day.  In the sculptures, Wearing inverts the traditional tropes of heroism, instead creating a small delicate trophy-sized replica of an individual, rather than a large monument.

The exhibition ends with a series of self-portraits of Wearing as members of her immediate family, or masquerading as various members of the historical family of photographers.  The eerie portraits which strive for realism through prosthesis show Wearing as Andy Warhol, Diane Arbus , Robert Mapplethorpe and August Sander, among others, and as her father and brother, as well as a particularly disturbing image of herself as a chubby-cheeked toddler in Self Portrait at three years old, (2004).  These costume changes and disguises seek to question who Wearing herself is, literally referencing where she came from but also questioning where it is that the personality of the artist rests within the context of photography.

Installation shot, Sara VanDerBeek at The Approach. Courtesy of The Approach, London

Sara VanDerBeek’s exhibition at The Approach (May 24 to June 24, 2012;) follows a methodology of transmogrification between concepts and sculptural forms.  This may seem like one of the textbook definitions of sculpture, but for VanDerBeek, there is a poignant directness.    . Until recently the objects that she fabricated were at third-stage removed through the filter of photography.  Thus a sculpture that was a physical interpretation of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, for example, still did not exist in the viewer’s space (Sara Vanderbeek:  Of Ruins and Light, Whitney Museum 2010).  This lead to a seductively fictitious art practice that involved layers of creation that were in the end relegated to a two-dimensional medium, an art practice that functioned through traces rather than objects.  VanDerBeek’s exhibition at The Approach is a 2 stage process, the first involving a series of photographs the artist took working with   ballet dancers from her native Baltimore, and the production of cast and painted plaster sculptures based on these images.

VanDerBeek hurls herself into the debate as to whether architecture is actually frozen music as Goethe would have it.  The questions and criticisms that arise in deriving one art from another, in this case sculpture from dance/photography or in her past work, poetry, add up to whether the work stands on its own, references its origin point, or even needs to.  The black and white photographs are of dancers performing short choreographed interludes.  “Baltimore Dancers 10” is a stark white photo of a dancer flexing her leg, the contrast of the pale leg against velvety black background reduces the movement of the dancer to a series of stresses and vectors. It is a visually engaging image, but more mathematical than organic.

These images are then referenced by the cast plaster sculptures.  The totemic towers each have their own unit, stacked one on top of the other.  Untitled VII presents a column of plaster rectangles with a single transverse from corner to corner, to the best of it’s simple plaster capabilities mimicking the dancer’s calf and thigh in Baltimore Dancers 10.  In a very literal way the mass-produced units of these totems are reminiscent of uniformly garbed dancers in a corps de ballet, interweaving and executing identical movements.

The static white of the plaster, and the right angles and sharp corners of the simple geometric volumes bespeak the mathematical precision of choreography, and do form a palpable physical counterpoint to the clean lines and undulating shades of the dancers’ legs arms and backs.  While the dancers are soft and their bodies a mass of curves and shadows, living, breathing and in flux, the sculptures exist as the other side of dance, the rhythm meter and the absolute fact of ballet that it must be learned and repeated.  Though the sculptures have emerged from their original hiding place in the space of the photograph, they still engage the images of the dancers and their movements in the space of the gallery.

Whitechapel Gallery: 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX. +44 (0)20 7522 7888

The Approach: 47 Approach Road, Bethnal Green, London E2, +44 (0) 20 8983 3878

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The Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art
April 20 to May 7, 2012

Bookended by Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s glorious Arts and Crafts Glasgow School of Art on the hill, (like Edinburgh Castle, protective and aloof) and the urban fabric of the once blighted and still slowly recovering industrial city beneath is a small, well-knit network of galleries and public spaces that help make Glasgow the second most vibrant art scene in the UK.  Some of the more polished venues aspire to London-style blue chip glitziness, but other, more thoughtful, independent spaces, retain a gritty, vernacular quality, inhabiting empty warehouses and commercial quarters true to the heart of the city’s Victorian architecture.

Karla Black, Empty Now, 2012. Installation, Library, Royal Exchange Square. Courtesy of Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow

Several exhibits in the Glasgow International seemed geared to impress an international art crowd.  The Glasgow School of Art commissioned series of sculptures by Folkert De Jong, while local hero Karla Black filled the Gallery of Modern Art with an overwhelming installation, also a commission.  The most heavily promoted attraction of the festival, however, was  “Sacrilege” by Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller. An inflatable “bouncy castle” life-size version of Stonehenge, the piece questioned both the British reverence of the neolithic stone circle on Salisbury plain and it’s importance in contemporary culture as a lightning-rod for kitschy celebrations of the vernal equinox and summer solstice, and low-budget sci-fi flicks about witches and druids. For all the seductive and viscerally engaging quality of this doppelganger in rubber, a lingering feeling that the British have already transformed Stonehenge into a conceptual bouncy castle made this elastic piece of satire a bit redundant. And sadly, rain made actual bouncing on the castle impossible; harsher critics than I, aged four to ten, deemed the piece completely useless.

The debut exhibition at the gallery at 42 Carlton Place, “Ever Since I put Your Picture in a Frame,” is a refreshingly thoughtful and diverse selection of painting both contemporary and from the early 20th Century.  The gallery is a project of the painters Carol Rhodes and Merlin James; curated by James, “Ever Since…” clearly shows the touch of a painter.  Initially a bit bewildering in its breadth, it corrals portraits by artists such as Alex Katz, André Derain and Walter Richard Sickert alongside landscapes by the self-taught artists Alfred Wallis and James Castle.  Despite all the recognizable faces, places and sundry animals, including Richard Walker’s mesmerizing “Moth” and Stephen McKenna’s delightful “Lesser Antilles Bullfinches,” this is an exhibition of paint and materiality.  Both framed and unframed, all the works in this show are consciously vehicles of their own creation.  Clive Hodgson’s “Untitled,” a meditation on decoration and it’s often uneasy allegiance with deep symbolism, revels in it’s painterliness, while Joel Tomlin’s “Elk,” and Julie Roberts “Young Apprentice (Study)” investigate the lugubrious  propensities of oil paint to define a painter’s style.

Walter Richard Sickert, Gwen Ffrangcon Davies as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1934. Oil on canvas, 16 x 11 inches. Private Collection

It is the trifecta of Derain, Sickert and Wallis at the heart of this show, however, that lend sturdy historicity to James’ curatorial endeavor.  Sickert’s delicate 1930s oil sketch of “Gwen Ffrangçon-Davies as Elizabeth Barrett Browning” on a brutal, textured canvas, conveys a spontaneity of creation that perhaps bespeaks his obsession with the pretty young actress, while Wallis’ blunt but warm sketch of “Fishermen’s Cottages” done in a fresh and unassuming hand captures the pure beauty and rustic simplicity of a working seaside village.  With such a variety of subject and so many different viewpoints—including abstractions by James Hyde, Tony Swain and Joe Fyfe—the show insists upon the old adage, “the devil is in the details.”

Karla Black’s installation at GoMA was a more sincere rejoinder to Deller’s “Sacrilege,” located in the precious classical library that almost claustrophobically fills Royal Exchange Square, Black’s sawdust and face makeup rectangular mound, “Empty Now,” similarly dominated the interior of the gallery.   The sheer magnitude of this layered, almost geologic concretion of earth tones, resembling a giant bar of halvah, oscillated between grabbing the viewer with its delicious consistency and coloring, and repulsing them through fear of its seemingly immanent collapse.  Hanging over the piece was “Will Attach,” a filigree of clear packing tape daubed with more face makeup in iridescent pinks and gold.  Too junk-like to be visually pleasing (as is Black’s aesthetic) it hung low enough to threaten the spectator’s shoulders and hair.

The two galleries at 6 Dixon Street, Mary Mary and Kendall Koppe managed, despite being under the same roof, to locate their exhibitions about as far apart on the art spectrum as possible.  Lorna Macintyre’s “Midnight Scenes & Other Works” at Mary Mary featured two quiet and subtle totemic sculptural installations that played with themes derived from Brancusi, also pensively questioning the idea of perimeter and containment in sculpture. The raw outrage of the work of Emory Douglas, former Minister of Culture for The Black Panther Party, was very tastefully framed and commodified at Kendall Koppe:  an attempt was made to revive some of the anger in the work by having a wall painting featuring violent protesters and dead pigs created by the artist himself around the doorway to the gallery.  The Modern Institute presented a very personal series of notebooks and related artworks by  Paul Thek (1933-88),“If you don’t like this book you don’t like me,”  and “Dresden,” a Beuys-referential/reverential show by  Michael Wilkinson at their new space on Aird’s Lane.

This quick survey of the officially sanctioned GI would not be complete without mention of the alternative, “satellite” shows organized by emerging artists and students. The gritty, earnest assemblages in “Stay Vector, Stay!” organized by a group of graduate students at the Glasgow School of Art in an empty storefront on Albion Street had a willful, kinetic energy.  Justin Stephens’ punctured canvases resonated with the colorful drapery of G. Küng’s ceiling hanging, while Dunja Herzog’s rickety sculptures lurched threateningly over Scott Rogers floor pieces that resembled a awesomely cracked out Smurf village, while Sarah Rose’s thoughtful video installation flickered on the chipped paint walls of this suitably grungy venue.

The Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art manages to keep a healthy distance from outright bald-faced capitalism with a predominance of commissioned works and archival museum-quality exhibitions:  it still is a festival, not an art fair.

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