I went along to The Tate and perhaps felt a bit worried about being the only photography student amongst a bunch of very impressive drawing and art students but I do love it at The Tate and I am also loving learning about art forms other than photography, and especially as I begin to see how I might tie in my interests and skills with work I do using a camera. I tentatively wonder what is possible but remember advice from Andrew C about not worrying about being self-indulgent (which I said I was) as that will only stop me from exploring and finding out what I might do. I guess for now, I feel that most of what I am doing is either highly derivative or over-processed and pretty crass or both. But every now and again I look at something I worked on and think it's going in the right direction. Seeing as much other work as I can and as wide a variety of work as possible I know is the answer, and allowing that work to influence and affect me. I wish I could see what it was I was aiming for - that might help, but I can't really, so all I can do it keep going the way I'm going and not worry to much about it, or worry about it later as advised.
Anyway, we spent time in the Structure and Clarity: Minimalism Gallery to begin with and then looked at the Louise Bourgeois exhibition including plates and accompanying parables from her book He Disappeared Into Complete Silence, drawings she did towards the end of her life called Works on Paper and finally a collection of red paintings she also did towards the end of her life.
I found it really interesting to hear about the different artists tutor Michelle Charles had known or worked with and she was a fascinating guide. Her evident interest and enthusiasm for the artists we looked made the visit even better than it might have been. I will discuss some of the people we looked at although there were several more.
Ellsworth Kelly; This was interesting for me because of the way in which the works interacted with the space and the walls. Beautiful shadows were created by the work so the gallery becomes part of the art. Michelle used the word expansive: the art does not simply stay within itself. It leads the eye up and out and across and makes the viewer work to take it in. When I think of photographs which are usually framed within a square or rectangle I am struck by the difference. Photographs are flat two dimensional representations of a world within a frame. The Ellsworth Kellys are not framed and continue to work beyond the confines of themselves. This art is about art and how it relates to the world in which it exists. I wonder if and how photography ever does this.
Hans Haake: The Condensation Cube was very compelling because inside a perspex cube there is some liquid which then creates condensation so in effect a little bit of life is going on inside there. The way the curator has placed the object looks like the cube is relating to and watching work by Jo Baer. I'm not sure if this is what the artist would have wanted or if it suggests too much to the viewers, or if that was just my own very personal and particular interpretation. The condensation reminded me of breath, of life. I enjoyed photographing this object. I love it when you are allowed to take photographs in a gallery as they offer great opportunities but I always feel somewhat like a thief, taking other people's art and trying to make something of my own with it - maybe that is the nature of photography, that it is a little bit like 'stealing' moments, trying to retain aspects of what we see and experience where ever those moments take place. I suspect there are some artists who would like that people 'keep' their work through photography and some that wouldn't at all.
Louise Bourgeois: We saw a lot of LB's work but He Disappeared into Complete Silence which was probably some of the oldest on show has probably made the biggest impression on me. I found this art highly relevant to the current section of TAOP. Here LB has compiled initially 9 but later 11 engravings and presented them in a bound book each (except the final two in the later editions) alongside a short parable which she wrote herself. I bought a book about this as I felt it would be a useful bit of inspiration for the narrative section of TAOP. However, I am of course slightly concerned that I am once again heading off into the wilderness and about to do something that maybe wasn't asked for or expected.
Depending on what you read the parables should not relate directly to the images. They are images that are open to interpretation, less so the parables although they too are strange and surreal at times. The words in them (for me anyway) give you much more direction and trigger ideas that seem familiar such as loss, motherhood, relationships, loneliness, anxiety. The images are more troubling because they are harder to pin down and seem like motifs from dreams, from childhood sensations. I read quite a disparaging review of LB in The Guardian and I cannot say whether that journalist has any validity in what he says but it seems to me that for someone to be able to tap into that level of unconscious creativity so effectively they must have a fairly impressive ability.
The book I bought is a collection of essays in relation to he He Disappeared into Complete Silence. In the introduction we are told by Laurie Cluitmans and Arnisa Zeqo who compiled the book that some art works are 'like an inexplicable love, which holds some kind of hidden power over us' and that this is how LB's book is for them. Her subjects are phobias and that she 'eschews the Freud-filled mystifications of classic surrealism in favour of devastating plainness.' (Perhaps this is what the journalist mentioned above finds so awkward to accept.) I found LB's work to be direct and frank about loneliness, female sexuality in all it's guises - i.e. from eroticism to the basic plain facts of reproduction. The writers also state that the book explores 'intimate alienation, simultaneously "being with" and "being apart" - LB's sense that her loneliness was not alleviated but worsened by being with others whom she could not relate to, and that is why in the end she surrounded herself with lost souls who became her family. I found it weird and wonderful that Melanie Klein and object relations are mentioned (I discuss this in A4): although there is some reluctance on their part to accept any Kleinien interpretation: 'we might now be in a position to free Bourgeois from autobiography and symbolism without allowing her to disappear completely into Kleinien part-objects".
I loved the suggestion that one of the parables, about a son who is loved to distraction but who does not want to be loved that way, who slams the door and doesn't come back could be how LB feels about her work. She finds it so painful to make and create her art, give birth to it in effect, nurture it into existence, only to have to let it go and be absorbed by the world who will understand it as it sees it and not how she intended.
I have not read all of the book yet but am learning about narratives that are open to understanding. I am thrilled by by these ideas but wish I were more educated and found some of the ideas less alien, less difficult to get my head round. It will take me time but I do feel inspired by what I have seen.
Finally there was also a room filled with red roughly-made paintings which were of breasts and childbirth and family. The red reminded me of menstruation and childbirth. There is so much about motherhood and nature and sexuality in LB's work and I can't help thinking, "Yay!" I have spent the last 12 years reading and trying to understand all I can about the nature of motherhood across all species, not only our own. And so there is a lot I feel able to take away from LBs work and hope it will inform some of mine. I have been contemplating using red as a colour for something - either my own work or something to do with TAOP Narrative and so it was extraordinary timely that I went to see this exhibition just now. So, even though I was the only photography student there and felt a little like I was intruding (I know I wasn't really, just a silly worry) I am very glad I went along and feel I will go again quite soon to look at LBs work.
Quotes from: He Disappeared Into Complete Silence, Rereading A Single Artwork by Louise Bougeois, De Hallen Haarlem/Onomatapee complied and edited by Laurie Cluitmans and Arnisa Zeqo, 2011
Some photographs from the exhibition
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