Look On This Picture, And On This

Just in case you were thinking I was exaggerating about the height and clutter in some rooms of the salon-style hang at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, here is some evidence. That BIG painting is, unmistakably, by Anselm Kiefer; but who knows who the smaller ones above it are by? I can't even read their catalogue numbers by enlarging the photo 1:1. Notice, too, the cordon sanitaire around the Kiefer; the surrounding pictures are basically acting as a frame. It seems disrespectful and not a little unfair, doesn't it?

And how about this other Big One (502 cm x 284 cm), which was sucking any remaining oxygen out of the same room. It's called "Hey Wayne on the Meath Estate", by David Hepher. It's a very detailed, quite impressive painting of a block of former council flats in south London, not unlike the block I grew up in myself, and is self-evidently based on a photograph. The sense of variety within uniformity is nicely done. It seems the first thing anyone does, on buying an ex-council property, is to replace the front door.

However, Hepher has then scrawled graffiti over it ("Hey Wayne", etc.), together with a small rendering of Constable's "Hay Wain" (geddit?) on an overlaid central panel of what is, I think, concrete. These extra, conceptual layers strike me as both superfluous and condescending, exaggerating as they do some superficial and clichéd signifiers of "urban working-class life", presumably as some kind of gesture of interest in and concern for the lives and souls of those within. Whatever: it may look like human warehousing, David Hepher, but it's really not so bad, living in a block of flats! Note that the painting is also priced at £90,000 (I make that over £6000 per square metre), and clearly far too big to fit anywhere other than a substantial gallery like this or, alternatively, on a wall in the residence of a very wealthy person indeed. Which would be weird, wouldn't it? Such are the contradictions of art, I suppose.

Talking of which, being in Bristol last week, I went to the Royal West of England Academy, where an interesting exhibition is currently on (Fire: Flashes to Ashes in British Art 1692-2019). It's one of those loosely themed miscellany shows, that depends entirely on the quality of what the curators have managed to pull together. In this case, it's quite a stellar assembly: William Blake, J.M.W. Turner, Joseph Wright of Derby, John Martin, Eric Ravilious, John Nash, Stanley Spencer, Graham Sutherland... A roll call of major British artists, and well worth seeing if you get a chance. But I was struck by the comparison between these two contemporary works:

Here are their respective gallery labels:

Cornelia Parker OBE RA
Red Hot Poker Drawings 5, 2 and 7
2012
acid-free paper folded and burnt with a hot poker

Parker's crisp clean sheets of paper are folded in layers then brutally punctured by a red hot burning poker. The works suggest order and chaos, a constant reminder of the tools of their production. Parker's work often explores the notion of uncontrollability. Volatile process, such as fire and explosives are used to transform otherwise everyday objects and materials. Here, the expanses of white paper take on a perilous fragility as if the singed edges might relight at any moment.

Siân Bowen
Gaze: No. 14
2006
laser cut and palladium on paper

The starting point for this series of drawings came about by coincidence. A friend's request for Bowen to burn a number of confidential letters, coincided with the artist buying a bundle of love letters at a flea market into which she burnt fingerprint size fragments. Bowen explores the relationship between damage and the creative impulse through these delicate drawings, which capture the fragile moment before the flame moves too far, eating away the paper's frayed edges forever.

Hmm. You've probably heard of Cornelia Parker (if only because I arm-wrestled her in the previous post) but may not have heard of Siân Bowen. But, making allowance for the pretentiousness of art-speak, you can see there are two very similar projects going on here, both involving fire and paper. But, what a contrast! For me, Parker's verges on the hilarious: look, I folded up some paper, poked a hole in it with a hot poker, then unfolded it! It doesn't so much "suggest order and chaos" as a miserably failed attempt at making a decorative paper chain. I love the fact that it's acid-free paper; well, you don't want to go too far exploring that "perilous fragility". Those interesting sculptural details and textures you can see in the paper, by the way, are merely reflections of the wall opposite in the glass of the frame. Bowen's work, by contrast, has an intriguing back-story, and – surely this is the important thing? – has resulted in an unusual and beautiful object, one that repays close and repeated viewing, and which would still be unusual and beautiful minus the back-story.

But, as both I and Michel de Montaigne like to say, what do I know?

The Original Reading and Writing Machine

John Latham, c.1960