Here is the Guardian‘s blog about Arts Council cuts, with live updates coming in throughout the day.
Also, congratulations on these new NPOs: Auto Italia, Studio Voltaire/IntoArts, Phoenix Arts, Bow Arts Trust, Peer, Stanley Picker Gallery, The Drawing Room, UP Projects, Workplace Gallery, The Whitworth Art Gallery, Spike Island, Project Space Leeds.
UP
Firstsite, Colchester: 28.2%
Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire: 74.8%
Derby Quad: 13.1%
Nottingham Contemporary: 2.3%
The New Art Exchange, Nottingham: 22.6% Art Monthly: 20.9%
I’ve just returned from Australia, where I visited the new Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania, which opens to the public this weekend – entrance is free. It’s the biggest privately funded museum in Australia (which isn’t actually saying much, as there are only a couple of others in the country) and, as far as I know, is the only one in existence to include a crematorium – visitors are encouraged to buy a life-and-after-life membership, which means they will be cremated at MONA and stored there for eternity. (I’m not joking.) Around 460 pieces are on display, from a collection of more than 2,000 works. Less than half of this is contemporary art; it includes a lot of antiquities from Egypt and various parts of Africa, Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica: the oldest is a 6,000-year-old jar and the most recent is a new version of Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca (2010), which was specially commissioned for the museum (as were about 20 other works by artists including Julia deVille, Christian Boltanski, Tomoko Kashiki, Gelitin, Roman Signer, Erwin Wurm, Tessa Farmer, Masao Okabe and Dasha Shishkin.) Works are displayed in a non-linear fashion – three Sidney Nolan paintings, say, are hung next to a pile of ancient Chinese coins – and MONA is designed to be intentionally disorientating: it’s a place that privileges the journey over the destination. Similarly, connections between objects and periods are never explained and there’s not a wall label in sight. Information can be gathered from state-of-the-art individual iPods, which each visitor will be given on arrival. (At the end of your visit it can email you information about the works you’ve looked at it; it also registers exactly how long each visitor looks at each work, which would, apparently, make it possible to assess which is the most popular work in the collection – which, I was told, might swiftly effect its removal from display.) MONA is a wonderfully eccentric, philanthropic endeavour that includes a winery, brewery, restaurant, café and self-contained pavilions for guests and it’s run with as much humour and self-deprecation as scholarship.
Wim Delvoye Cloaca (2010)
The museum is funded by one man: David Walsh. A gambler and something of a mathematical genius, he started out playing blackjack before moving on to horse racing. He’s a self-confessed ‘rabid atheist’ who, when I met him, was dressed in a T-shirt emblazoned with a Richard Dawkins’ line about what a malevolent creature God must be if he exists. Walsh talks non-stop; his enthusiasm for his project is electric, but he’s not what you’d call a listener – he has Asperger’s syndrome and expresses himself without censorship. He’s passionate about his museum, which he describes as a kind of ‘secular temple’ to the ‘pursuit of sex and the avoidance of death’, themes which, he says, are the two fundamental motivating factors in life. He never seems to tire of discussing this, despite the fact that it’s all a little reductive – after all, you can wander around the National Gallery in London for hours and be inundated with images of sex and death, but that’s not, obviously, all that is being communicated. But it soon becomes clear that Walsh likes to provoke. (He recently told one journalist: ‘This is how you should start the story. David Walsh is a rich wanker.’) But for all of his bluntness Walsh is a more nuanced thinker than he likes to let on. The more time you spend with him the more apparent this becomes; he rattles off facts and figures and theories with the rapidity of a machine gun. He is never dull, often illuminating, quite frustrating, always irreverent and very funny – and his humour infiltrates every aspect of his museum. Take, for example, his description of the Keifer Pavilion on the MONA website: ‘Books, says Keifer, are a manifestation of time. He also says you must build a pavilion to house my massive sculpture. Otherwise you’re not having it.’ Or this, for the ‘Boltanski Cave’: ‘What kind of idiot would pay two-and-a-half grand a month to watch an old guy sitting around picking his nose? David Walsh has too much money, obviously.’ Similarly, Walsh’s online invitation to the public for the opening weekend, which includes an extensive programme of bands and performances – from Wire to the Cruel Sea, Grinderman to Phillip Glass and more – is nothing if not inclusive: ‘The Museum’s opening’ it declares. ‘We’re having a party. Want to come?’ Yet, he’s more tentative in his surprisingly enigmatic written introduction to MONA: he compares someone opening a museum to someone aspiring to be a writer:
‘This is good, I think: but maybe not useful, too clever, clever. You think you’re a great writer. But you’ve got writer’s block. You’ve had it for a while, your whole life in fact. You’ve never written anything. But you’re a great writer. Finally, here, now you’re lifting the pen, putting it to paper. Will the words pour out in a delicate, delightful stream, conveying the depth and beauty of all the ideas you have ever had, lovely capsules of meaning in perfect prose? Or will they resemble the chaos of your mind, words tripping each other in a tangle of obfuscation, only misconceptions conveyed? The writing is on the wall. I call it MONA. I await the museum opening with interest.’
But ultimately, of course, what Walsh has created speaks for itself: despite my reservations about some of the work (I can do without the bombast of, say, Jenny Saville, Marc Quinn and Damien Hirst et al), a lot of it is wonderful – in particular some gems of Australian Modernism (such as Sidney Nolan’s largest work, the fantastic 46-metre Snake, 1971, which comprises 1,620 separate images and which forms the heartbeat of the collection), some great contemporary Australian work (by Callum Morton and David Noonan, among others) and an eclectic array of international works by artists from Egon Schiele, Wassily Kandinsky, Gerry Judah, Su-en Wong, Fernando Botero to Paul McCarthy and Erwin Wurm – and, of course, the exquisite antiquities.
Julius Popp Bit.Fall VI (2010)
The breathtaking building, designed by Melbourne firm Fender Katsalidis, is a three-level structure built into a sandstone hill overlooking the Derwent River. From land it’s almost invisible; the most visible thing about it is a tennis court. From the water though – and it’s possible to visit it by ferry from Hobart – it appears, like some kind of startling and elegant sci-fi monastery. (Walsh wrote about it in 2007: ‘Even those that ridicule the theoretical underpinnings and abhor the capriciousness of the new venture may glory in its physical manifestation just as I do the by-product beauty of the architecture of the catholic church.’) The site includes two buildings by the late Modernist architect Roy Grounds, who designed the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne; they’re sensitively incorporated into the new museum as a library and accommodation. When I visited, the collection was in the process of being installed. We descended more than 30 metres down a winding staircase into a breathtaking, vertiginous space. The lighting is a dramatic chiaroscuro; the enormous sandstone wall reminded me a recent visit to Jerusalem. (Such a reference is, of course, intentional.) During the course of the next few hours we wandered around the beautiful, disorientating spaces where works were still in the process of being hung; the spaces are astonishing, yet never distract from the work on show. I’m sad I couldn’t be there for the opening to see the final hang – which, of course, will have nothing final about it. All that is locked in, as far as I know, is an exhibition curated by Jean-Hubert Martin in 2012 and a shifting landscape of other possible shows. Time will tell. Lucky Hobart.
Tate – hardly a stranger to controversy – has this week come under attack from two artist groups, their criticisms centered around Tate Modern’s tenth anniversary celebration No Soul for Sale, which was held over the weekend of 14–16 May.
Making A Living, an anonymous organisation describing itself as ‘a discussion group of arts professionals currently active across the UK’, issued an open letter to the Tate challenging the museum’s treatment of artists during the ‘No Soul for Sale’ event.
The group write: ‘It has come to our attention that many participants are not being paid by Tate Modern for their efforts. In fact, most are self-funding their activities throughout the weekend. Tate describes this situation as a “spirit of reciprocal generosity between Tate and the contributors”. But at what point does expected generosity become a form of institutional exploitation? Once it becomes endemic within a large publicly funded art space?’
Arguing that ‘it is complacent for Tate to believe that their position is comparable to ground level arts activity’ and that it is ‘disingenuous’ for the museum to claim that this ‘spirit of reciprocal generosity’ is ‘somehow altruistic or philanthropic’, Making A Living go on to accuse Tate of not having paid artists ‘for some exhibitions, workshops and events, including last year’s Tate Triennial’, although no specific details are given in the letter.
They end their letter by calling on Tate ‘to make public its policy in regard to artists’ fees’.
A group calling itself Liberate Tate have also confronted the museum, distributing a communiqué during the anniversary weekend calling for the Tate to drop its sponsorship agreement with BP, whom they say are ‘creating the largest oil painting in the world’ following the recent spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In their communiqué Liberate Tate argue that ‘every time we step inside the museum Tate makes us complicit with acts that are harming people and creating environmental destruction and climate change, acts that will one day seem as archaic as the slave trade’. Josephine Buoys, a spokesperson for the group quoted in a press release publicizing Liberate Tate’s activities, says that ‘Tate scrubs clean BP’s public image with the detergent of cool progressive art’. The group state that ‘In March 2010, Tate Modern ran an eco-symposium, Rising to the Climate Change Challenge: Artists and Scientists Imagine Tomorrow’s World on the same day that Tate Britain was celebrating 20 years of BP sponsorship with one of its ‘BP Saturdays’. Incensed by this censorship and hypocrisy, participants in the symposium called for a vote: 80% of the audience agreed that BP sponsorship be dropped by 2012’. Liberate Tate call on the museum ‘to become a responsible, ethical and truly sustainable organisation for the 21st century and drop its sponsorship by oil companies.’
Liberate Tate’s communiqué can be read in full here and Making A Living’s open letter can be found here
The artist list for the seventh edition of the British Art Show – which takes place every five years and tours to four different cities across the UK – has been announced. Curated by Lisa Le Feuvre and Tom Morton (a contributing editor of frieze) , this year’s BAS opens at Nottingham Contemporary (pictured above) and will tour to the Hayward Gallery, then venues in Glasgow and Plymouth. This is apparently the first time in 20 years that the exhibition – which was originally intended to take art to ‘the regions‘ – will be coming to London.
The BAS has kind of a spotty history: the first edition, which opened in Sheffield in 1979 and was selected by the FT‘s art critic, William Packer, was criticized for its predilection for established white male artists; in 1995, a large portion of the show was seen as being too closely aligned with Charles Saatchi’s collection. As Neil Mulholland wrote in friezefour years ago:
‘An attempt to celebrate the resurgence of a ‘British’ art that had allegedly been repressed by the Modern Movement, the BAS was part of a reactionary Postmodernism that included Margaret Thatcher’s sabre-rattling, Merchant–Ivory costume dramas, Peter Fuller’s young-fogey Marxism and working-class girls with Princess Di haircuts. Such dusty ‘British’ values were, of course, specifically rooted in a south-eastern English aristo-bucolic mindset. This arrière-garde was quickly usurped by the New Object Sculpture and New Image of the 1980s (BAS 2) and the Brit Art of the 1990s (BAS 4).’
I’m more hopeful about this year’s edition: the artist list is strong, if low on big surprises. A few quick observations: while the gender balance isn’t quite the 50/50 of Alex Farquharson and Andrea Schlieker’s BAS 6, it’s not bad, and there’s a definite tendency towards film (Duncan Campbell, Emily Wardill, Kirschner & Panos, Otolith, Luke Fowler) and sculpture (Karla Black, Steve Claydon, Roger Hiorns, Ian Kiaer etc) that seems to me fairly reflective of what’s going on in the UK at the moment, despite the relative lack of performance. There are some crossovers with the Tate Triennial – Charles Avery, Spartacus Chetwynd, Matthew Darbyshire, Nathaniel Mellors, David Noonan, Olivia Plender, Tris Vonna-Michell – but not as many as may have been expected (surprising that Ryan Gander hasn’t been featured in either?). The best-represented gallery is, by my count, Hotel, who must be happy with four of their artists on the list (Blightman, Campbell, Claydon and Noonan), while a few prominent London galleries are nowhere to be seen.
This year’s show is subtitled ‘In the Days of the Comet’, after H.G. Wells’ 1906 novel of the same name. According to the curators: ‘The story charts the appearance of a comet over the UK that releases a green gas creating a “great change” in all mankind, turning it away from war and exploitation towards rationalism and a heightened appreciation of beauty. We are interested in the recurrent nature of the comet as a symbol of how each version of the present collides with the past and the future and the work of the artists in British Art Show 7, in many different ways, contest assumptions of how “the now” might be understood.’
Follow links below to articles from the frieze archive:
Luiza Nader (University of Warsaw and Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw, 2009) / Lukasz Ronduda and Piotr Uklanski (Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw)
Sorry to hear that Mark Sladen is to leave the ICA. Sladen has been the ICA’s Director of Exhibitions since the beginning of 2007, and has been responsible for solo shows from Enrico David, Rosalind Nashashibi, Loris Gréaud and Billy Childish (which is currently showing), and group shows including ‘Poor.Old.Tired.Horse’, ‘Double Agent’ and ‘Nought to Sixty’, an ambitious survey of emerging artists in the UK.
According to yesterday’s press release: ‘His position has been made redundant within a review of the ICA’s organisational structure’ – David Thorp, who has been working with the institution as an external consultant since last year, will be advising on the ICA’s artistic programme until further notice.
According to a piece just posted by Charlotte Higgins on the Guardian website, Sladen told bosses that he would only reapply for his position if the ICA’s director, Ekow Eshun, resigned. ICA staff have apparently taken a vote of no confidence in the director. According to an unnamed staff member: ‘The results of the vote were suppressed, and whatever the official line on this, this is manipulation. Ekow Eshun made it clear that to reveal the results of the vote would be an act of sabotage, that the ICA would suffer from such information being out there.’
This restructuring is unfortunately timed, given that the ICA has just received 1.2 million from Sustain, an emergency fund organized by Arts Council England to help arts organisations affected by the recession. For more, read JJ Charlesworth’s detailed (and prescient) analysis of the ICA’s finances, posted on the Mute website three weeks ago.
Wim Delvoye Cloaca (2010)
Julius Popp Bit.Fall VI (2010)
