Manchester

Posted: April 2, 2015 | Author: Emma L Holt | Filed under: Contextualisation, Third Year | Tags: artist research, contemporary, contextualisation, manchester art gallery, whitworth | Leave a comment

I went home at the beginning of last week for a few days (yay!) and I knew I wanted to visit the Whitworth Gallery since it has been renovated. I couldn’t go all the way into town without popping into Manchester Art Gallery. Most of the artwork in there are always there and unfortunately, the contemporary rooms were opening the day after I came back to Cardiff.

The Whitworth

Cornelia Parker (until May 31st 2015)

Parker’s work transforms ordinary objects into the compelling and the extraordinary. Featuring career defining works i.e “Cold Dark Matter (An Exploded View)” 1991 and “The Distance (A Kiss with String Attached)” 2003. This exhibition also shows many new works that continue her preoccupation with dematerialising matter; bullets, blood and bronze are transformed into linear explorations. Unique to the Whitworth is “War Room,”  a vast and immersive installation made from punched out paper negatives taken from the Poppy factory in Richmond, its moiré of empty spaces echoing the 45 million remembrance poppies made each year.

 

“Poison and Antidote Drawing” 2012, rattlesnake venom and black ink, anti-venom and white ink. Over the years, Parker has made a series of poison and antidote drawings. When on a residency in Texas she asked the nearby rattlesnake farm if they could milk some snakes for her (disarming one of her greatest fears.) They procured enough bright yellow venom to kill at least ten people. She approached a local doctor to prescribe an antidote, a task, which was more difficult than acquiring the venom. Combining the poison with a quantity of black ink and the anti-venom with white ink, she produced works that literally have the ability to kill you and save you at the same time.

“Black Path (Bunhill Fields)” 2013 patinated black bronze. This piece is a cast of the spaces between the paving stones of the non-conformist cemetery of Bunhill Fields, London. The graveyard’s most famous incumbent is William Blake. Parker had often played ‘don’t step on the lines,’ or Hopscotch with her daughter, while on the route to school. These games rekindled an obsession with pavement cracks that had lain dormant since her own childhood. By pouring liquid cold-cure rubber into some of the gaps and letting it set, she was able to lift up this part the geography of the city that had been mapped out in stone many years before. The captured rubber cracks were upturned, then cast in bronze. Placed on steel pins, they appear to hover just above the floor, creating an obstacle, a kind of petrified line drawing.

“Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View” 1991 blown up garden shed and contents, wire, light bulb. With thanks to the British Army.

“Living in London in the 80’s and 90’s, meant living with the constant threat of IRA bombs. Somehow the idea and imminence of the ‘explosion’ in society seemed such an iconic thing. You were being bombarded with its imagery. from the violence of the comic strip, through action films, in documentaries about Super Novas and the Big Bang, and least of all on the news in never ending reports of war. On my MA I had made a series of wooden explosions, attempting to give extreme volatility a fixed state of being. Now I wanted to create a real explosion, not a representation.”

The shed was blown up at the Army School of Ammunition in Banbury, with Semtex, a plastic explosive popular with terrorists. Parker mentions how she still remembers the pungent smell of the substance as she helped model it. She was sat in a bunker a long way off when she pressed the plunger that blew the shed skywards. The soldiers helped her comb the field afterwards picking up the pieces which, when laid out in the gallery, made it look like a morgue.

The first part of the title “Cold Dark Matter” is a scientific term describing invisible matter in the universe that scientists knew existed but yet couldn’t measure. The second part “An Exploded View” is a technical term to describe the laying out and labelling of parts of a machine in a diagrammatic way to show how it works, usually taking the form of illustrations in a car or washing machine manual. So the two parts of the title together sounds like a forensic examination of an emotional state or a murder. An attempt to measure something you can’t measure, or to formalise an explosion.

“War Room” 2015 poppy negatives, perforated paper left over from the manufacture of British Legion Poppies with thanks to the Poppy Factory, Richmond and The British Legion. An immersive installation made from punched out paper negatives taken from the Poppy Factory. The rows of empty spaces (of over 320,000 picked flowers) echo the endless symmetry of war graves, a left over remnant of the 45 million plus remembrance poppies made each year. The two layers of perforated paper hang a few millimetres apart creating a double negative. Moving around the empty spaces creates a moiré effect, which is physically and perhaps emotionally disconcerting.

I found “War Room” gave the illusion that the room was moving so when my eyes scanned the room, it began to hurt. I think that it would have been more peaceful and gentle for my eyes, if I had lain down and looked up as then I wouldn’t have been moving.

Cai Guo-Qiang (until June 21st 2015)

The artist Cai Guo-Qiang was born in China and now lives in New York. He is best known for his remarkable projects using gunpowder, including firework displays for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. His installation “Unmanned Nature” 2008, includes  a 45 metre long. 4 metre high gunpowder drawing, is the first artwork to be shown in the Whitworth’s new landscape gallery, as well as the first time being shown outside of Japan.

Guo-Qiang lays out large sheets of Japanese hemp paper on the floor and then carefully places fuses and gunpowder across them, sometimes sprinkling the grainy powder by hand, as if sowing seeds into a field, sometimes working with brushes to manoeuvre the substance and create delicate sweeps of fine residue. Once the composition of the drawing is completed, sheets of cardboard are laid across it and the fuse is lit.

This was one of my favourite pieces from all the exhibitions in the gallery. I love how the piece is reflected in the pond and when there is a slight ripple in the water, it gives the feel of the gunpowder going off.

New Acquisitions (until August 16th 2015)

This exhibition marks the remarkable gift by The Karpidas Foundation of 90 contemporary works of art to the Whitworth and is presented in memory of Constantine Karpidas. Highlighting the work of established British and American artists and also those at the beginnings of their careers, it includes pieces by Anna Barriball, Richard Forster, Luke Fowler and Laure Prouvost. Photography features strongly with works by Josh Brand, Liz Deschenes and Wolfgang Tillmans, while paintings by Richard Aldrich, Michael Craig-Martin and Dexter Dalwood overlook the park.

Portraits (until November 22nd 2015)

This is a show about the lives about the relationships between the artists, collectors and curators who made the Whitworth. Collections are created by people: the people who acquire and present collections to a gallery; artists who make the works; curators and others who select and assemble works for public viewing; and, not least, the people who feature in the works themselves. This exhibition is animated by some of these people, from Francis Bacon’s portrait of his friend Lucian Freud to Sir Stanley Spencer’s drawing of Margaret Pilkington, honorary director of the Whitworth for over 20 years.

Johnnie Shand Kydd (until February 21st 2016)

Shand Kydd became known for capturing the incipient community of YBAs (Young British Artists) during the 1990s. He created hundreds of now iconic black and white images of his artist friends and has continued to track the progress of figures such as Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin, Gilbert and George and Damien Hirst. This selection of works from Shand Kydd’s extensive and varied portfolio focuses on his yearly trips to the Greek island of Hydra at the invitation of the art collector and Whitworth patron, Pauline Karpidas. With an informal, convivial and occasionally poignant eye, Shand Kydd captures the annual summer confluence of invited members of the international art world.

Watercolours (until May 31st 2015)

The Whitworth is home to an internationally renowned collection of British watercolours. The greatest benefactor of this collection was John Edward Taylor, who presented and bequeathed 266 watercolours and drawings of the highest quality to the gallery between 1892 and 1912. John Edward Taylor was the owner of the Manchester Guardian (now The Guardian), and his gifts to the Whitworth epitomize how money from industrial and commercial ventures was transformed into cultural wealth, a vital force in both the history of the Whitworth and the city of Manchester it calls home. This wonderful exhibition shows highlights from Taylor’s collection, including works by three of the most gifted and celebrated exponents of watercolour: 22 works by J. M. W. Turner, seven by William Blake and four by John Robert Cozens.

The 1960’s (until January 10th 2016)

The 1960’s was a transformational decade for the Whitworth. A far reaching scheme to modernise the gallery resulted in a new open plan exhibition that responded to the design ideologies of the era, while the gallery itself began to actively acquire modern art and design. This exhibition presents work collected during that vibrant and politically inflammable period: painting, prints and sculpture from artists such as Peter Blake, Allen Jones, Bridget Riley, Richard Hamilton and Elisabeth Frink.

Textiles (until March 6th 2016)

The reopening exhibition in the textile gallery celebrates, through an exploration of green and its associations, the rebirth of the Whitworth as a beautiful, extended gallery space, its new relationship with the Whitworth Park and the green spaces outdoors. Many cultures associate the colour green with nature and nature’s attributes, including growth, fertility and rebirth. In recent years, green has also become the symbolic colour of the environmental movement. Drawing predominantly on the gallery’s own textiles collection, which ranges in date from the 3rd century AD to the present day, historic textiles from around the world are set alongside newly commissioned work from contemporary designers that responds to environmental issues – which underlines the fact that the new Whitworth is now one of the most environmentally-friendly galleries in the UK. Artists and designers represented include William Morris, C. F. A. Voysey, Lucienne Day, Keith Vaughan, Michele Walker and Susie MacMurray.

Sarah Lucas (until July 19th 2015)

The Whitworth’s renowned wallpaper collection is full of papers that are funny, challenging and striking. The sculpture court is reopened with a wallpaper installation that promises to be all of these things. Sarah Lucas’s “Tits in Space,” 2000 in which multiple pairs of cigarette-encrusted orbs float against a pitch black background. Alternating between risqué and cosmic. “Tits in Space,” embodies the wide-ranging and often contradictory mood of Lucas’s work and forms a backdrop to a selection of sculptures by the artist, who will represent Britain in this year’s Venice Biennale.

I wish that this exhibition had been up while I was writing my dissertation as Lucas was one of the artists that I wrote about while exploring anti-beauty. I love how the sculptures become alien and human within the same form, whilst depicting relationships. The poses the sculptures display are quite pornographic and yet they harbour a mass of implications about gender stereotypes, war, death, and the very way we consume the world around us.

Thomas Schütte (until July 19th 2015)

“Low Tide Wandering,“ a series of etchings by the leading German artist Thomas Schütte, promises to be one of the most remarkable print installations of recent years. After drawing in sketchbooks as a form of visual diary for several years, in 2001 Schütte changed his practice and began to use etching. For “Low Tide Wandering,” Schütte produced 139 images that range from views of the sea, through quirky portraits of friends and acquaintances, to flower studies – all everyday subjects. World events of 2001, including the dramatic attack on the Twin Towers in New York, also intrude into these personal preoccupations.

I found that the prints that I enjoyed the most were either monochromatic (not surprising) or humorous. Although Schütte’s prints are simplistic, they depict important events and his view on the world. A particular favourite of mine was the “Shit Happens,” as it’s humorous and exceptionally correct.

(Only popped “Genesis” in as it was also featured in my dissertation.)

 

Manchester Art Gallery

Unfortunately the contemporary galleries weren’t ready for the public when I went to Manchester Art Gallery but I had a stroll around the rest of the gallery. The classical paintings always stay the same but one gallery features someone new.

Emily Allchurch

Allchurch uses photography to recreate old master paintings and prints, constructing new and contemporary narratives. Using Utagawa Hiroshige‘s (1797-1858) wood block prints – that flourished in Japan between the 17th and 19th Century, she captures contemporary life and culture reflecting passages of time and change to landscape.

 

 

Allchurch created a piece specifically for Manchester Art Gallery, recreating “Albert Square,” 1910 by French Impressionist Adolphe Valette.

 

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