The golem is an animated anthropomorphic creature from Jewish folklore, created entirely from inanimate material. The being was said to carry out terrible deeds, and in medieval texts was formed from terracotta and activated by an ecstatic ritualistic act. Ghenie’s reference is the creation of a radical idea in society; let loose to change its socio-cultural environment. The artist also uses the golem as a metaphor for modern artificiality and simulacrum.

These concepts are placed in context with an installation. Ghenie’s paintings are presented alongside a specially created chamber. This installation environment is titled The Darwin Room and is built within the white cube space of the gallery. The installation is crafted from meticulously sourced 18th century panelling, floors, and furniture juxtaposed with contemporary items, and illuminated by an internal window said to reference ‘post-enlightenment thinking.’ The installation is a recreation of the attributed-to-Rembrandt’s painting Philosopher in Meditation, 1632 (Collection Le Louvre Museum, Paris). Ghenie demonstrates how a certain aesthetic form became the criteria for the European intellectual’s environment.

This environment suggests a space for academic contemplation, within which we are greeted by a space devoid of the figure yet surrounded by the slightly Baconian figures of Ghenie’s paintings. The artist references Darwin in his works as the protagonist of the transformative idea, yet absent from the installations environment of thought, instead replaced by the viewer. The paintings are separated from the white cube space by the installation, creating a boundary with the contemporary. The viewer journeys through the history of the transformative and transgressive thought referenced in the attributed to Rembrandt’s ‘Philosopher’, but the construction is also a stereotype of the idea of the academic and the intellectual; an old man in a darkened room surrounded by equipment; a jaded visual repetition, used as rhetoric for a noble scientific history.

Ghenie presents himself in Self portrait as Charles Darwin, 2014, oil on canvas. Here the artist is at once the arbiter of scientific change, the cliché of the tortured intellectual, and the anamorphic threat of the Golem; the idea let loose to reek havoc. All of these elements are present in Ghenie’s Bacon-esque brush strokes.

With a fluidity of paint the artist mingles his identity with that of the axiomatic historical figure; the blurring of the objective ‘Iconic’ with the subjective self. Adrian Ghenie highlights an era that questioned man’s significance, the existence of God, and the question of Creationism —through a use of paint that suggests the anamorphic nature of identity through the evolution of scientific understanding, and contradiction of the Baconian flesh that presents it.

By Paul Black

The post The Axiomatic Figure and the Subjective Self appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Richard Hamilton’s work chronicles socio-cultural changes throughout the twentieth century, at the same time as it embraces the rise of technology. The artist translates the Duchampian language of the object with a populist bent. His was an art of disparate subject matters and methods, from ploughs and toasters to the iconography of the “Swinging Sixties” (an iconography that the artist helped to create) via Goya, Da Vinci, and James Joyce. The father of Pop Art, and the Grandfather of Brit Art; Richard Hamilton was an artist with an analytical gaze, paired with a methodical twist not echoed by his Pop Art peers.

Hamilton was one of the first artists to embrace digital technology as a medium for exploration. This was a reflection of a futurist ideology in using technology to enhance human ability, and also, one could say, to increase the ability of the artist to communicate. Hamilton was always at the forefront in appropriating contemporary methods of production, an aspect mirrored by a lifelong fascination with industrial design.

From the 1950s austerity to the introduction of American products and design into a British marketplace; the epoch of consumerist culture and capitalist growth would turn the stoic 50s of Britain into the swinging, amoral 60s.

With a Duchampian response to the consumerist objects of the time, the ready-mades and the found objects in his art always possessed a relevance to the period. One example would be the artist’s Braun toothbrush with a candy top, which served to reflect a Duchampian non-authorship in art, while at the same time highlighting the all-pervasive design influence of the day with a subversive wink to the viewer.

From his Reapers of 1949, to the artist’s Just what is it that make today’s new homes so different, so appealing? from 1956, Hamilton was along for the ride. He reflected on each decade, often seeming to ring in the cultural sea change before the prevailing Zeitgeist took hold.

This was a journey that saw the artist’s work as utterly varied, yet completely consistent; Hamilton’s art is at once a juxtaposition and reflection of the early post-war decades and their swift cultural and moral ascension, or decline, depending on your perspective. At times the artist’s work can now be seen as completely prescient of the socio-cultural changes to come.

This Is Tomorrow is the re-creation of the 1956 installation that was a collaboration between artists and architects, in this case with John Voelcker and John McHale, that includes the collaged images of film posters, sci-fi imagery, and advertising. This is part of a series that was to become known as the Fun-House—including sensory stimuli and optical illusions—with a jukebox churning out greatest hits. With its bright colours, sounds, and multi-media approach, the piece balked against the austerity of the decade in which it was created, and heralded the 1960s before they had even arrived.

Hamilton meticulously devoured imagery from popular culture and recycled it into collage, screen print, sculpture and painting; the latter being a method that separated the artist from Duchampian purists he was an innovative and technical painter of various styles, engaging with a multitude of subjects. Hamilton was a true “modernist” in its broadest sense.

This interest in reflecting the socio-cultural events of popular culture are evident in the works Swingeing London 67 showing the arrest of Mick Jagger handcuffed to the gallery owner Robert Fraser, titled after the judges reference to a swingeing sentence Hamilton’s paintings from the television images of the Kent State University Shootings have also been important in the works of artist Richard Prince. Both of these works are concerned with the importance and meaning of the image as a socio-cultural value.

In fact, Hamilton would do his own form of Protest Picture much like the artist Richard Prince – often an indictment of power; whether those were attacks on that of Gaitskell, or Thatcher, or Tony Blair as a gun slinger in the work Shock and Awe – Hamilton’s work was not without political statement as a chronicler of his times.  The artist was “passionately responsive” to every decade through which he passed.

After the death of Marilyn Monroe, Hamilton chanced upon a contact sheet of her images from a beach shoot by photographer George Barris in which Monroe, to quote the artist, had actively caused the “violent obliteration of her own image” in scratching out the images that she did not want to be published. The images are recreated in My Marilyn with painterly gestures reflecting that of Monroe’s savage defilements. These works have a direct relationship to Warhol’s use of Marilyn Monroe as an iconic pop image of socio-cultural value; with Hamilton’s use there is also an intimacy that is evocative of an individual’s perception of their own value as an image in popular culture, and the loneliness that accompanies placing that value on one’s self.

One enduring trend throughout Hamilton’s career was the creation of Polaroid portraits of himself by fellow artists. These were published in four volumes and spanned a thirty-year period. With portraits of the artist created by the art glitterati of the day, from Lichtenstein to Lennon. Hamilton began to recognise the sensibility of each creator in the corresponding image. For example, Francis Bacon’s Polaroids of the artist were blurred and poorly lit. They were quite reminiscent of his paintings.

Fascination for this observation turned into a request by Hamilton for Bacon to paint into the images. But when Bacon declined, Hamilton attempted to teach himself Bacon’s brushstroke, and with that created Portrait Of The Artist By Francis Bacon this was simultaneously a work of photography by Bacon and a painting by Hamilton. It was a slyly inadvertent collaboration between arguably the greatest British painter of the twentieth century, and possibly the most innovative British artist of his generation, and perhaps our own.

By Paul Black

The post Richard Hamilton: Grandfather of Brit Art appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

The exhibition is a survey of the artist’s works on paper and is the first major exhibition of Höch’s art in Great Britain, bringing together over 100 works from major international collections. The exhibition examines Höch’s career from the 1910’s to the 1970’s—if circumnavigating her prolific array of oil painting and drawing—the exhibition at least focuses on her most remembered output: photo-montage and collage and her works of fantastische kunst.

Höch’s art was often an astute social satire on the female form, and the politics of Europe. The artist’s human condition is resolutely female, and reflects her own experiences. A reflection of the female form, and identity in society, as well as art.

These were figurative abstractions of tension and urgency. A juxtaposition of formal abstract aesthetics and emotional socio-cultural clout—initially reflecting a period of enthusiasm and great change in a post First World War Berlin.

Yet Höch’s art was radical in contrast to the purely formal concerns of the Dadaist movement. The ‘simultaneous muddle of noises’ that the Dada Manifesto called for was discarded by Höch for a certain aesthetic balance, a definite composition, and a narrative structure, often politicized.

This one-woman Dadaist revolution also reflected a more obvious socio-political content and feminist drive, prevalent in the creative party of 1920’s Berlin, eventually to be trampled under booted heel by a ‘mad, inhuman, bestial clique‘—as the artist herself described the Nazis—once she was no longer muted by their tyranny.

In fact the Second World War saw the artist publicly derided for her degenerate works, and she lived out the war in cautious seclusion. A period that saw no public displays of her work, or opinion. Yet her art was spared exhibition in Die Ausstellung Entartete Kunst—the Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937—as many of her peers fled Europe to America to continue the movement.

But it was the compositional harmony of Höch’s work as opposed to the ‘anti-art’ of the Dada aesthetic that may have been the reason for her seeming erasure from Dadaist history. It was in the 1920’s that fellow Dadaists John Heartfield, and George Grosz decried her inclusion in the First International Dada Fair. Also the fact that fellow German Dadaists considered their female peers ‘charming and gifted amateurs’, suggests that left-wing art movements were not spared sexism, even in a progressive Berlin.

Höch was also an artist exploring the contradictions of her own identity, juxtaposed against a society in either post-war ascension or decline, whether in the darkening clouds of a pre-war Berlin with a tableaux of a fluid sexuality and social conscience, or with more than a glimmer of biting satirical wit.

Hannah Hoch, Untitled (From an Ethnographic Museum), 1930. Collage
48.3 x 32.1 cm. Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg. Image courtesy of Maria Thrun.

There are certainly references to the gaze of the viewer and objectification of the female form, and it’s socially disempowering consequences, bringing to mind; ‘The surveying woman is a man, the surveyed woman is a woman’, a notion that Höch would probably agree with, if not the language with which the concept is posited.

The stark nature of racial inequality in a 1930’s Germany was also referenced on several occasions in the artist’s work – a courageous act in the period of the Weimar republic.

There is also an anachronistic tendency to read a feminist agenda when viewing the works – yet the female figures of Höch’s photo-montages often express a knowing place, not only within the composition, but in history, both art history and cultural history; while creating mischief in their own social present.

Höch was not a follower of the strict formalist theory of Dadaism—hers was a detail of arrangement—abstracted social-conceptual imagery—often focusing on the female form and with a political vibrancy – a power to excite an anarchic aesthetic reflecting a period of tumultuous social upheaval.

But post World War Two Höch’s insightful and piercing aesthetic softened into lyrical abstraction. The artist’s anarchic social criticism was worn down by the fear of Nazi oppression—or maybe this was a reflection of a new found social and artistic freedom; her social commentary was quieter and her ‘attacks’ less ferocious.

One of the artist’s final works; ‘Lebensbild (Life Portrait) 1973′, is a complex photo-montage including images of Höch throughout her career. Having lived through one of the most eventful centuries in human history, she embraced the new media of ‘photo-matter’ often using it to comment on the very subjects it had captured.

Amongst the detailed collage is an almost hidden image from the Apollo moon landings and the famous image of ‘Earth Rise’. Höch’s figure is collaged into the image as an almost final act of mischief and a clever narrative of artist as attestor to the world. Human action processed through the eye of the artist as social conscience and political commentator of unmediated expression.

As Höch is not only observing the moon landing but peering over the shoulder of the astronaut, with magnifying glass in hand looking back at, and observing the earth. The most objective view of ourselves in history. A conceit to a lifetime of critical study and manipulation of the photograph, and a modest, almost hidden statement of witness to a lifetime of change, and an artist’s moral obligation.

By Paul Black

The post Hannah Höch at Whitechapel Gallery appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Come And See is another of the artists’ exhibitions to be filled with insalubrious gore and crude hyper-reality. This is the classic art dialectic of vanitas; birth, death, sex, horror … and of course McDonald’s.

Yet the artists attention to detail is never more obvious than in their miniaturised apocalyptic landscapes; the minutia of degradation and destruction, iconoclastic works of vitrine-encased dioramas; Hieronymus Bosch-style miniature Hell-scapes, in which zombie-Nazis fight for superiority with multiple Ronald McDonalds and his burger-headed fiends. The surreal nightmare of tiny violence is only offset by an extraordinary level of detail. This is a comedy-horror juxtaposed with the crucifixion of Mathias Grunewald, crafted from a toy box of intentional puerility.

From the hand-painted bronzes of organ-infused devices on plinths, to the copulating taxidermied animals complete with contorted facial expressions —and a video piece called The Organ Grinder’s Monkey—or more accurately a series of video sketches with actors; Rhys Ifans as the artist, David Thewlis as the hapless alcoholic art tutor, and Samantha Morton as Mrs. Chapman giving birth to an adult Jake. Humour is as important in this exhibition as irreverence and gore—and all presided over by Ku Klux Klan clad mannequins wearing rainbow socks and Jesus creepers.

As a young student diligently made notes while watching David Thewlis voicing an animated cockroach aspiring to live in the studio of a ‘real artist’—namely Rhys Ifans—and I belly-laughed with the gusto that the ‘Brothers Grimm’ demanded—I felt that she was missing the point.

But hidden amongst the two-dimensional pieces is a more serious conversation in waiting; a reference to the artists ‘surfaced’ works created from the bought and appropriated Disasters of War Series by Goya, drawn over with the ghoulish and questionable iconography of Ronald MacDonald. This was a reference to the changing values of iconography from religious to capitalist, a Duchampian dialogue about authorship in art, and the committing of art-historical sacrilege in the defacement of ‘high-art’ to, ironically, create ‘high-art’.

The Goya prints were simultaneously devalued and revalued in a dialectic about values—to change the location of a value [of profit]. The final intentional irony of the work being that the numbers of the original Disasters of War prints had decreased, increasing their value.

The value of the prints bought and ‘added to’ by the artists also gained a new potentially higher value for being a post-postmodern piece of Appropriation Art; a ‘Two for the price of one’ conceptual capitalist garage sale. Call me cynical for this opinion, but I’m merely joining the club.

Often the duo’s conceptual underpinnings are as meticulous an invention as their craftsmanship. As with a number of the artists two-dimensional works that have been manipulated into ‘tattoo flash’ and made available in book form. In purchasing the book, the viewer can choose a tattoo from any number of the Chapman brothers works and in being tattooed with the design can actually become a part of the artists’ oeuvre.

The equation of an artwork that becomes the very thing that it discusses and derides has a certain cynicism. For example; art does not have to be amoral to discuss the amorality of a particular system. This seems a clever and cynical equation; an art object that attacks consumerism at the same time as supporting its own market. If not for the genuine commitment and passion shown in the execution of the work you might weep at the cyclical moral horror. A horror far more disturbing than miniature nihilistic genocidal maniacs.

The exhibition is the realization of an amoral infantile amusement taken to both macro and micro scales, but the elongated boorishness of callow creatives this is not.

Shock in art is a dead concept in a contemporary world of visual saturation. If not for the tools with which these shocks are delivered; being juxtaposed with humour and the slavish commitment to minuscule hand-crafted detail—a mind-boggling feat reminiscent of Renaissance artisans—often taking the artists themselves months if not years to create. But the greatest shock of all is not visual but found in the duality of certain works to also be what they actually pertain to discuss.

By Paul Black

The post Jake and Dinos Chapman At Serpentine Sackler Gallery appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

The ICA is showcasing 46 artists in the exhibition for the fourth year in succession from what panellists Chantal Joffe, Nathaniel Mellors, and Ryan Gander consider to be the most promising of graduating artists in the UK. The selection in part reflects the tastes of the panel, a fact often derided, but then how could it not? The work is also informative of the thinking and trends of a new wave of contemporary artists; still expanding their working practice, admirably taking risks with their work, in attempts to evolve new narratives and concepts. But like any early experiments, not all are a success.

The New Contemporaries heralds a Duchampian nod back to the ready-made in art, and a rather whimsical return of a slightly Cornellian style of assemblage; the components of which operate as linking points of narrative relying on form and materiality at a conceptual level. One is reminded in some ways of the contents of a Beuysian vitrine.

A refreshing change of depth occasionally becomes a little too deep, as you feel the artists in question may be a little out of their element. There is a feeling that the use of assemblage in these works veers too closely to homage or derivation.

It seems at times that the précis for this exhibition is not far from a Beuysian assemblage—but as a video piece—and with the slick veneer of an MTV edit. With music. who knows, it might work.

There is an allusion to that particular balance of conceptual solidity and disposable culture with Alex McNamee’s Pickled Onion Knuckle Dusters, bronze casts of ring-shaped crisps; that are conceptually ‘permanently transient’ in nature. This is a playful juxtaposition using a serious medium when contrasted with the fashion for unsophisticated painting found throughout the exhibition. That is to say, the conceptual relevance of materials is a thematic element in contrast to the neo-simplistic paint.

Hannah Regel’s pair of faux-snakeskin upholstered shelves, each bearing the apparent weight of a geometric block made of resin and marble dust, have a particular poetic clarity and balance in terms of material usage—if slightly conceptually oblique in nature.

The melodramatic and the ridiculous are also on hand; which is often a reflection of infantile rebellion—as with Adam Hogarth’s video Trolling—as a troll doll talks out of its backside. But then on balance this could also be seen as a juxtaposition between the avant-garde and its subject matter.

There are—in places—moments of refreshing clarity of language to be found in the show; like beacons of perceptibility amongst the over-convoluted.

Fatma Bucak’s video of a performance, Blessed Are You Who Come—Conversation On The Turkish Armenian Border, is one of the more memorable video works on display in New Contemporaries. It has a sense of maturity belying the artist’s age, in that it has a confidence in its use of humour, and in that, questions its own technique.

The video becomes the work, not the documentation of a ‘serious’ performance that it at first purports to be. Instead, this has an element of intentional farce surrounding the behaviour of three septuagenarians in the foreground of the film, arguing about what the hell this performance artist is doing, and why one of them wants to go home!

The piece is highly amusing and in the same instance discusses the nature of language, the subjective perception of visual narratives, and cross-cultural implications. Bucak’s work is quietly self-assured, and has a genuine sense of self.

Another work with a knowing sense of its own identity is Laura O’Neill’s Boney P, a naïve figurative sculpture. It sits as a critical insight into notions of primitive art in relation to its civilised surroundings—and a mockery of that overly self-aware, self-obsessed art-consumerist environment. The piece is a moment in the exhibition where the ridiculous gives way to a cleverly balanced sense of humour.

This exhibition is often ‘quirky’, ‘controversial’, ‘offbeat'; the viewer is met with the ‘shock of the new’—all of these adjectives are clichéd and redundant; not only in relation to any intelligent art criticism, but also in terms of the existence of contemporary art in a visually overt and uncensored media world.

The violent hyper-reality of news media and multifarious Internet imagery shines in our unblinking eyes on a daily basis. In this instance the art should focus on clarity. After all it is a language.

The art in graduate survey exhibitions often has a sense of energy and experimentation not necessarily found in the latter stages of an artist’s career. Within that there can be the cliché of the self-appointed enfante terrible’s habitual desire to shock. There is sometimes the feeling that when learning a new language the practitioner can, on occasion, form sentences that upon first reading are quite unintelligible—but can at least, be interesting to decipher.

By Paul Black

The post ICA London: The Bloomberg New Contemporaries appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Morley is hard to place, difficult to categorize, and therefore hard to kill. Because of this, critics don’t quite know what to make of him. Negating our art historical desire to pigeon-hole with a finely chosen “ism”; it is harder to quantify what Morley is than what Morley is not.

He is not a Photorealist. Morley’s painting can convey a Photo-realist quality when reproduced in a publication, but to the eye of the viewer there is a subtle yet conscious energy to the paint. There is covert mark-making in Morley’s Superrealist works. If an “ism” was to be found it was in the artist’s self-categorisation—before discarding the method and the category of Superrealism in order to follow an expressionistic route—a route already alluded to in his noticeably surreptitious energy.

As Morley stated; the paintings in reproduction appear as Photorealist, but upon inspection of the actual work a strange phenomenon occurs and you see the physical reality of the surface, and it seems to work through your central nervous system.

As Morley focused his attention on “area” [the surface of the canvas as opposed to any exploration of background or foreground] he worked in grids, painting each section of his canvas one at a time, and applying the equal values of a mathematician, or an artist of the Renaissance, to every segment of the image

In fact Morley expressed an interest in Malevich’s suprematism, where the object is rendered meaningless to feelings engendered by geometry and form. Morley was making his objects quietly flat, and his canvas democratic.

Malcolm Morley, The Theory of Catastrophe, 2004. Oil on linen. 72 × 81 in. Courtesy of the Hall Collection.

This notion is reflected in the artist’s work The Theory of Catastrophe. This painting shows a bird’s-eye view of a motorway pile-up, where, upon inspection of the Photorealist energy and violence of objects, the painting gives way to an equality of form and surface.

The act of a Photorealist painter—or in this instance; the Superrealist painter—is still, in and of itself, controlled and methodical. Yet Morley juxtaposes this restraint by delving into his own subconscious to find his subject matter, and there is a frequent exploration of chaos and destruction as an almost counter weight to the artist’s equipoise of paint.

The leitmotif of the ocean liner is another recurring image for the artist. Originally Morley attempted its likeness by painting the real thing from pier 57 in New York, only to discover that he couldn’t take in the scale of these vessels. So instead, he resorted to a postcard. With this decision Morley’s Superrealism was born, and a plethora of ocean liners followed in its wake.

Only many years later in the depths of psychoanalysis did the artist remember a balsa-wood model of HMS Nelson waiting to be painted, left overnight on a windowsill destroyed by a German V1 bomb, along with his childhood home. With this memory Morley realized that all the ships that he had painted in his career had been an attempt to complete that lost model.

The story is possibly a conceit similar to that of Joseph Beuys’ story of the origins of felt and fat in his work; yet it is an exemplifier of Morley’s need to inject an element of chance and the random into the highly structured format of his Super-real.

The exhibition has been curated by Sir Norman Rosenthal and is situated in one of the lower galleries of the Ashmolean Museum. This is not a white cube space in the sense of a contemporary art gallery, as the exhibition shares this location with a small number of permanent artifacts from antiquity. A fantastical hybrid creature rests between Morley’s paintings in the form of an Assyrian “Winged Genie” Relief carved from a slab of gypsum. This minor deity rests its eyes upon Pamela Running before the Wind with a Dutch Lighthouse—it’s an unfortunate relationship thankfully not destined to last. Yet, Morley’s oeuvre is certainly arresting enough to draw the eye away from this inadvertent juxtaposition, as it does with that of Sir Henry Cheere’s 18^th century statuary.

In fact, Morley has not been overpowered by old or indeed new media. His painting from postcards transcended that of the Photorealists in that it never dismissed a sense of the painterly. But in this Malcolm Morley has far more in common with George Seurat than he does with Roy Lichtenstein.

By Paul Black

The post Rebuilding Subliminal Models: the work of Malcolm Morley appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

It is difficult not to see this exhibition as a competition of interests and the interesting; the very personalities of both artists are quite evident—one only needs to look at the photographs in the exhibition of both artists’ studios to see the yawning chasm between them. A curatorial decision that seems to play more to their differences than similarities, we are reminded that the cult of personality also comes to bare; as the viewer brings a foreknowledge of the infamy of one of these artists as well as of his art. The show brings together a gilded gutter life in Soho with the life of a fellow of the British Academy and a public figure. As one enters this exhibition, passed the photographs of Bacon’s Reece Mews studio, with its paint-strewn shambolic glamour, paired with photographs of the sedate and organised ‘school room’ of Moore—the scales of personality are already tipping in Bacon’s favour.

There are two ways in which you can view this exhibition. If prejudice is left at the door along with the misguided cult of personality, comparison of the very dichotomy of these artists can lead to the recognition of shared formal concerns; faces lost, distorted, or abstracted. Identity for both artists was at times even non-existent; as the likeness of an individual was of no importance to either man, yet the physicality of the human body, and the subsequent abstraction of form and shape is of paramount importance to both artists visions. What at first are diametrically opposed works do on occasion give way to familiar aesthetic concerns of the shape and weight of the figure.

But it is hard to balance these two artists’ works. Bacon’s feverish sacks of meat are positively fervent set against Moore’s stolid immovable incapacity; Moore is like a muted child being out-screamed by a naughty sibling.

Where Moore regains footing, however, is in his drawing. This has a dynamism that, frankly, I can never find in his sculpture; a sense of movement and even urgency that reflects at least an aspect of the supine, frail flesh all around it. Moore he reflects upon war, it is the only occasion for the artist where he is less kind to the reality of the human form, with slight echoes of Baconian angst. Moore’s tepid beauty receives more pain than is usual and becomes all the more vivid for it— both artists having been influenced in their own way by the realities of war.

For the most part, Moore’s human condition is concrete solidity; the unbreakable skeleton shrouded in bronze—here juxtaposed with Bacon’s fleeting and bloodied flesh. His painting appears both “bruiser and bruised”—and if viewed as a boxing match between these two giants of British Art, Moore’s fair play is taken advantage of at every opportunity by Bacon.

The second way of viewing this exhibition, and secret to finding its success, is in trying to imagine that Moore’s sculpture is the three-dimensional result which—in some ways at least—of which Bacon has often dreamt. This is expressed in a very sculptural style of painting, and equally expressed by a drunken Bacon, who at one time actually turned up at Moore’s door demanding lessons in sculpture. In fact, the similarities between Bacon’s sculptural figures and Moore’s curve of form are often prescient as highlighted by Richard Calvocoressi and Martin Harrison’s curatorial decisions, even made almost too obvious on occasion.

Installation view courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University.

There is no denying the comparison between these two artists; Moore’s King and Queen reside as a seemingly permanent weight beside Bacon’s Pope Innocent X. A surface reading of this juxtaposition reveals certain formal similarities between the sculptural heads and the painted; yet that raw kinetic vision of Bacon again causes the once timeless, osseous matter of Moore’s work to melt away before your very eyes.

Bacon’s Lying Figure and Moore’s Reclining Figure share a striking visual collaboration; but Moore’s sculpture is a physical reality whereas Bacon’s figure is a theatrical construct placed in its own caged environment—and is all the more powerful for its decadent sanguineous fantasy. In that sense Bacon’s fictional sculptural figures behave like objects in an installation—an object within its own universe—as opposed to Moore’s sculptures that are forever separate and reside in our own.

The curatorial attempt to reference academic similarities is sometimes heavy-handed, but the juxtaposition is of significance, highlighting a core value with wildly different and antithetical results. Aside from formal and conceptual conceits which are present and of interest, when viewing this exhibition there can be no denial of power. For all the curatorial insistence of equality it seems that the psychological response to our fears will always be greater than that of our desires—as Baconian existential horror out-screams Moore’s muted immortal bones.

By Paul Black

Bacon Moore: Flesh and Bone, is on view at Ashmolean Museum, Oxford until 19 January 2014.

The post Flesh And Bone: Francis Bacon And Henry Moore appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Paul Black: Having won the BP portrait award in 1991—your initial response to the figure was more inclined toward capturing a ‘likeness’ of a sitters identity. The evolution of your work has seen an inclination toward an exploration of the human condition reminiscent of painters such as Francis Bacon, or even the evolution of Lucian Freuds’ response to the human regarding an awareness of fragility. Is a ‘likeness’ now being ever-more influenced by a declining flesh?

Justin Mortimer: I was very young when I won that prize; much more a craftsman than intuitive artist. Painting anything realistically was very hard for me, so a likeness was an achievement in itself. Content was a matter of fluke. Now being twice as old as I was then, I’m less bothered with technique and far more interested in the story and psychological possibilities of the picture.

PB: The psychological possibilities of the picture are certainly evident in your current practice; the leitmotif running through the work lends itself a very contemporary narrative—an ‘amoral landscape’ in which your figures reside. This post-moral, post-Baconian narrative reminds me of Bacon sifting through war photographs and books on dentistry in an oil stained studio; a conceit I grant you, yet you construct images from various sources including the internet. As a writer I’m interested in that romantic parallel—how do you see the early stages of your practice?

JM: Yes I am a great sifter too. Much of what I do is thinking about and looking for the imagery that will be the catalysts for my paintings. These are mostly sourced from the second hand books I keep in the studio. They range from flower arranging manuals to techniques of orthopaedic surgery, through to all the scanned, downloaded, and snapped images I have taken. I begin by then throwing them together into digital collages on my studio PC. The collages for the largest paintings mostly start as a mashing together of figures and an environment. I am looking for those strange visual crunches, serendipitous clashes that could open up previously unconsidered psychological avenues, or could kick life back into a flagging composition. These collages are printed out and continually revised throughout the painting process so that by completion the initial idea is often a long way from the finished piece. This approach to the early stages is mostly successful, but I sometimes wonder if I am closing myself off from a more unconscious engagement with the image. Source material is crucial of course—how else would Bacon have made his paintings without photos of wrestling men or dental hygiene? I’d like to know how much time he spent on his research—how much of an archaeologist of the Internet would he have been?

PB: That is an intriguing question! Could it be said that your unconscious engagement is in the composition of sifted images? I find the idea of Internet archaeology as a part of the process of painting fascinating; the visual ingredients of the collages, once taken out of their original context become ahistorical fragments. Reformatted they become atemporal, the nature of the images become timeless; this appears to be transferred to the final form of the painting, resulting in an ambiguity.

JM: It is certainly that but I would also say it is there, in the necessary application of paint.

When you have painted a certain element or area many times—subject to revisions and the experimentation of process—you eventually enter into that space where you are unaware of what you are doing and the voodoo moment of painting is reached. It is that excruciating knife-edge between self-consciousness and fugue where you almost know what you want to do, but mostly don’t. Annoyingly this is actually a boon to any good painter. You’ve got to go where it hurts. Do the work, put the hours in then be prepared to ditch it. Ditch all of it.

The original source imagery is always going to be seductive. Look at it; there it is. Game over. The only way I can move forward and make it my own is by redaction. I also need to take the subject out of its context and jam it into a new space; WWI soldiers in a suburban garden, machines and balloons in snow, disused bunkers with surgeons, and so forth.

My more successful work has always been when it looks as if something has or is about to happen. This openness to interpretation is interesting to me. I like to find myself unable to describe an image I have cobbled together. By re-contextualising source material you’re no longer snagged on the irritatingly literal, but released into a new ambiguous fiction.

PB: The source images are removed from their initial context; making them timeless as de-contextualised forms placed in an atemporal space. Each interacts with the other and cancels out any singular reading regarding it’s time period, focusing the narrative onto the collective components of the painting and the interpretation of new meaning. The structure is similar to the poetic in that you are building a sentence, a paragraph, a statement, in the non temporal and abstract? As you say the most successful paintings suggest an event or the moment in-between; a frozen moment, or the most pregnant of pauses? Would you say that this is the aspect of your painting that intentionally builds unease in the viewer?

JM: People say there is a sense of unease in the work. How intentional this is at the outset, I’m not that certain. I am always on the look out for that oddness which I talked about earlier, but at the same time to describe a scene without exhaustively describing it. Sometimes the piece is triggered by the thrill of a strange composition/alignment of content, other times the catalyst could be a found photo of a tree or a medical procedure. I have subjects that I want to make work about but I always try to avoid describing them.

The protagonist/victim might be hidden by a door or put outside the picture plane. Maybe this unease is due to irritation with my obscuring or filtering out. There is no money shot—if you like, so the viewer is left with an unresolved visual puzzle. Perhaps a certain emptiness here can help the viewer fill the gaps emotionally.

I imagine screen writing is similar; the less you know about the character the more you want to know—my pictures have no voice over.

Justin Mortimer, Chamber, 2012. Oil on canvas 240 x 180 x 3.5 cm

PB: I don’t see it as an irritation but more as a form of obfuscation. You seem to shift focus. To obscure ordeal or indignity, you appear to glance at an event while almost being unable to process its potentially sordid horror. This results in the heightening of our concentration, as you say; we fill the emotional gaps—the dark recesses of the subconscious complete your tableaux—and in doing so you hand the viewer a projected sense of voyeuristic guilt. Do we become the voyeur’s of an amoral potential?

JM: I like the idea of the shifted focus. It takes me a long time when making a piece to realise what it is I am actually painting. Often I find that the story only starts to emerge after working many weeks on a single piece, editing out whatever it was that took me so long and then squeezing the glimpsed figure around the side, behind or amongst what I first thought were the throw away areas of the painting. This is an interesting point in the process because I then find myself with an unassembled composition and an odd focal stress or imbalance that I use as the key to the finished piece.

I am a figurative painter but have I got to the point where I almost can’t stand having a figure in the piece. I often wonder why. Maybe this is why objects such as balloons and plastic sacks and cabling have been appearing recently. Presumably they are a proxy body or metaphoric body for me. Whatever they are, the viewer has to straddle these things to find or more, probably not find the subject, and to fill in the gaps. At the moment I continue to make work about perverse or threatening situations, but without being too explicit. Yes, I think the voyeuristic potential here is crucial. Isn’t it (voyeurism) so much more interesting than looking? My subjects aren’t presented, you have to find them. You are not even invited—you have to intrude.

PB: You set the viewer adrift as a wanderer in a psychological mise en scene; in some respects of their own making? Turning corners of dank corridors and gazing through glass at moments of captured immoral performances. But alluded to by an oblique and disturbed gaze; as you glance at an event while almost unable to process the sordid malaise and project that position onto the viewer; the artist has not entirely set the scene. I suppose that one of the ideas around a stolen moment of voyeurism; is being presented with a greater truth?

JM: I believe most people bring what they want to the picture. Of course they can be guided by various visual sign posts, but for me it’s the peculiar that the viewer brings that is of interest. If there’s any aberrant behaviour to be interpreted is it not that that’s externalised by the viewers? I think that you may be right in that I present an ambiguous opaque scene or arena, that to be honest is always going to be limited by the restrictions of my imagination, and hope that the viewer will charge it with their own projected psychologies.

PB: Goya’s Casa De Locos is replete with figures that are marginalised and rejected, which is reflected in their grotesque and pitiable behaviour.  The subjective moral certainties of his The Disasters of War—the guilt of the victim in war through the authority of the victor—are lost to a moral ambiguity. The Asylum paintings; much in the same way as the artist’s Black Paintings, were a manifestation of fear.

Goya’s asylum figures – more than any of his others – reflect the terror of not being able to control one’s physical self or destiny; they are subject to the whim of others or of their own insanity. Would you say that your works also reflect that particular Goya-esque fear of lost control?

JM: I would say yes. Certainly the disappointment of the failing body and the internalised locked-in terror that realization entails. The participants in whatever unfolding non-drama in my pictures are most likely a projection of that interior anxiety.

For what it’s worth, my own personal experiences of depression and having being born with a physical anomaly have stained most subjects I tackle. I suppose it’s inevitable that a shadow of these experiences is a constant murmur throughout my work and yes, feed my obsessions with medicalised imagery, war, and loss of control.

The early 19th century Spanish asylum was a dustbin for society. It was also a place where people came to be entertained by the lunatics twisting and juddering to their own singular torments. Asylum is the perfect visualisation for Goya, mentally and physically tortured by an unknown illness and trapped in a country being ripped apart by war. For me his asylum is a voyeuristic arena exorcising societies angst—just as the bullring purges the spectator’s dread of their own deaths.

PB: And here we return to the exploitation of the figure. In much the same way as Goya’s juddering lunatics were in reality entertainment for the Spanish masses; we see a reflection of that idea in your works. The narrative composition of your paintings reflect the presence of a furtive third party. The existence of a work of art is determined by a viewer as part of its own equation. Within this you construct a visual narrative that exemplifies the triad between artist, work, and viewer. The image suggests the existence of a voyeuristic third party as an internal part of the narrative of the painting itself, as well as the essential presence of a viewer in the equation of artist, art object, and viewer. Would this, if intentional, give the painting a quiet self-awareness, and a slight conceptual lean?

JM: It’s not unusual for me to suggest that a viewer is participating in the narrative. Sometimes I have even included their shadow. To passively watch, to stand aside, to let happen—this is interesting to me. There is the guilt and impotence.

To speak of the painting as having a self-awareness suggests it inhabits its own discreet space, somehow separate, aloof even.

A painting takes on its ‘ownness’ when the artist no longer has full control. The work has its own volition, slipping outside of the artist’s expectations into a non-habitual place. Here the unsettling crunch and crackle of unknown shapes, the bizarre push and shove of odd misalignments amount to a certain voodoo that puts a painting outside the perimeter of expectations into its own, separate dimension.

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