CONCEPTS - Altermodern (Bourriaud)

Nicholas Bourriaud
Tate Britain - Exhibition- 2009



See:
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/altermodern/

Tacita Dean - Film

The twelfth commission in The Unilever Series at Tate Modern in London has been realized by the Berlin-based artist Tacita Dean. Entitled Film, the work is an eleven-minute silent 35mm looped film projected onto a monolith standing 13 meters tall at the end of a darkened Turbine Hall.

Richard Hamilton

Interior II  1964

Oil, cellulose paint and collage on board
support: 1219 x 1626 mm frame: 1425 x 1830 x 100 mm
painting

Like Hamilton’s later prints, A dedicated follower of fashion, 1980 (Tate P07448) and The marriage, 1998 (P78290), the painting Interior II was developed from a discarded photograph the artist discovered by chance. Hamilton was teaching art at Newcastle Polytechnic when he found a still from the film Shockproof (1949, director Douglas Sirk, screenplay by Samuel Fuller) lying on a classroom floor. The 1948 photograph became the generator for a series of works playing on the representation of an interior space. Hamilton was struck by the carefully arranged composition of the still, photographed in a specially constructed set. He explained:

Everything in the photograph converged on a girl in a ‘new look’ coat who stared out slightly to right of camera. A very wide-angle lens must have been used because the perspective seemed distorted; but the disquiet of the scene was due to two other factors. It was a film set, not a real room, so wall surfaces were not explicitly conjoined; and the lighting came from several different sources. Since the scale of the room had not become unreasonably enlarged, as one might expect from the use of a wide-angle lens, it could be assumed that false perspective had been introduced to counteract its effect – yet the foreground remained emphatically close and the recession extreme. All this contributed more to the foreboding atmosphere than the casually observed body lying on the floor, partially concealed by a desk. I made three collaged studies and two paintings based on this image of an interior – ominous, provocative, ambiguous; a confrontation with which the spectator is familiar yet not at ease.

(Collected Words, p.61.)

Hamilton initiated Interior II as he completed Interior I (Erna and Curt Burgauer Collection). He had laid down the background of Interior I and required the image of the image of the actress Patricia Knight (1915-2004) as she appeared in the film still to complete it. He had already created a screenprint of Patricia Knight taken directly from the still, minus the end of one shoe and with the outline of a table edge cutting into her skirt. For the paintings, the printer Christopher Prater (1924-96) of Kelpra Studio, London prepared a photo silkscreen filling in the end of her shoe. In both paintings a new object covers the affected area of Knight’s skirt. Prater transferred the newsprint onto the surface of the coloured canvas of Interior I and the primed white canvas of Interior II before Hamilton decided how to compose the rest of the painting around her. In the event, the figure was placed in positions fairly similar to the place occupied in the still; in Interior I she is slightly further centre and in Interior II she has been shifted further back and to the left.

Interior I and II are Hamilton’s first treatment of an interior scene since his famous collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?(Kunsthalle Tübingen) created in 1956. The technique of collage is central to these new interiors. Each painting shows a room superficially similar in structure to that created for the film still. Hamilton brought a full-length curtain covering a window on the left side of the still into the foreground of his paintings where it appears to open on the space depicted in the composition. In Interior II, the space behind the actress leading to another room has been retained, although the room is different. Hamilton derived it from a colour photograph of the studio of the artist and musician Larry Rivers (1923-2002) that he came across in Esquire. A small blue monochrome canvas propped against the wall in this space refers to the modernist artist Yves Klein (1928-62). A section of wall with a decorative column of square indentations in the plaster that appears next to the curtain in the still has been transferred to the right side of the painting in Interior II. It is next to a sepia photographic image of an interior half obscured by white paint. The perspectival vanishing points of the architectural features meet invisibly at a plug socket painted at the bottom of a lilac coloured wall in the centre of the image. Above this, a photograph of a television screen shows an image from footage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963 in Dallas Texas. The television and a standing lamp next to it are printed onto a section of canvas resembling a painting within the painting. In the bottom right corner of the image, realistically painted tiles anchor the painting. On these, where a rug might be, a rectangle of brightly coloured abstract paint refers to the process of painting as representation. In front of Knight, who stands, apparently transfixed by something she can see beyond the viewer, the back of a Charles and Ray Eames ‘La Fonda’ chair, constructed in relief, obscures a portion of the actress’s skirt. The incorporation of elements that stick out of the painting recalls the Cubist practice of mixing real objects with images of them on a single canvas and further dislocates readings of the painting’s representation of interior space.


Further reading:
Richard Hamilton, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 1992, p.158, reproduced p.87 (plate 30) in colour and p.158.
Richard Hamilton: Exteriors, Interiors, Objects, People, exhibition catalogue, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hannover and IVAM, Centre Julio Gonzalez, Valencia 1990, pp.46, 50-3, reproduced p.53 in colour.
Richard Hamilton: Collected Words 1953-1982, London and New York, 1982, pp.61-3 and 90, reproduced p.63 in colour.

Elizabeth Manchester
September 2007

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=5827&searchid=28328&tabview=text

Richard Hamilton Self-portrait  1951

Intaglio print on paper
image: 300 x 196 mm
on paper, print



These prints, with their tentative shapes resembling amoebae, anemones and other forms of microscopic life, were made in response to D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's book on morphology On Growth and Form (1917). The book was a scientific study of the forms in nature, which argued that recognisable mathematical structures can be found in all organisms. The print titled Heteromorphism was used as the cover of a catalogue for Growth and Form, an exhibition inspired by Thompson's theories, which Hamilton and Nigel Henderson organised in 1951, when they were both studying at the Slade School of Art.

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=5821&searchid=28328&tabview=text

Richard Long - Art made by walking in landscapes

Richard Long.  Art made by walking in landscapes.


In the nature of things:
Art about mobility, lightness and freedom.
Simple creative acts of walking and marking
about place, locality, time, distance and measurement.
Works using raw materials and my human scale
in the reality of landscapes.

The music of stones, paths of shared footmarks,
sleeping by the river's roar.

RICHARD LONG WEBSITE

Robert Smithson - Mapping, and the Concept of the Non-Site

ROBERT SMITHSON
Ruin of Map Hipparchus (100 B.C.) in Oswego Lake Quadrangle (1954-55), 1967
Map collage
13 x 18 inches

Entropic Pole, 1967
Map collage and photostat
16 x 34 inches

October 13 - November 24, 2001

James Cohan Gallery presented an exhibition of work by Robert Smithson titled Mapping Dislocations. The show will feature a selection of maps, drawings and photographs that highlight Smithson's exploration of mapping and its integral relationship to his works defined as "nonsites" and "displacements".

Robert Smithson is most well known for his monumental earthwork Spiral Jetty, 1970, located in the Great Salt Lake, in Utah. While he is most recognized for his earthworks, Smithson also created a large body of work that explored a variety of themes dealing with the post-industrial landscape, entropy, and paradox. His experiments with maps and mapping began in 1966, when he was commissioned to do a project for the Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport. Smithson developed an idea for a low-lying site-specific project to be seen from the air. Smithson's use of topographic maps from that project led him to develop a small but focused body of works based on his notions of mapping as fictive sites that pre-figured his sculptures called nonsites.

In 1970, Smithson was interviewed by Paul Cummings and stated, "The nonsite exists as a kind of deep three dimensional abstract map that points to a specific site on the surface of the earth. And that's designated by a kind of mapping procedure… these places are not destinations; they kind of [are] backwaters or fringe areas".

There are two major sculptures on view that illuminate his relationship to mapping. A Nonsite, Pine Barrens, New Jersey, 1967-68, Smithson's first nonsite and Mirrors and Shelly Sand, 1970, a displacement, which will be exhibited for the first time in the United States since 1970. Mirrors and Shelly Sand is comprised of 50 mirrors 1'h x 4' w back to back with shelly sand.

Smithson's early nonsites combined both a map and a container that housed the earth or industrial materials he brought back from the site he had visited. He thought of the nonsites as "an absence of site" referring to the geographical place where he gathered these materials. Smithson wanted to confound the viewer's perception by constructing a dialectic that referred simultaneously to the indoor gallery space where the work is exhibited and the outdoor site from where he collected the material.

Smithson's map works personify his notion of displacement. He accomplished this conceptual displacement by folding maps, cutting maps and reconfiguring them. One example of displacement which typifies Smithson's imagination, is established in a work on exhibit titled Ruin of Map Hipparchus (100 B.C.) in Oswego Lake Quadrangle (1954-55), 1967, in which Smithson collaged an ancient map of the Middle East together with a map of the Pine Barren's area in New Jersey.

http://www.robertsmithson.com/ex_events/mapping_dislocations01.htm
A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites

By drawing a diagram, a ground plan of a house, a street plan to the location of a site, or a topographic map, one draws a "logical two dimensional picture." A "logical picture" differs from a natural or realistic picture in that it rarely looks like the thing it stands for. It is a two dimensional analogy or metaphor - A is Z.

The Non-Site (an indoor earthwork)* is a three dimensional logical picture that is abstract, yet it represents an actual site in N.J. (The Pine Barrens Plains). It is by this dimensional metaphor that one site can represent another site which does not resemble it - this The Non-Site. To understand this language of sites is to appreciate the metaphor between the syntactical construct and the complex of ideas, letting the former function as a three dimensional picture which doesn't look like a picture. "Expressive art" avoids the problem of logic; therefore it is not truly abstract. A logical intuition can develop in an entirely "new sense of metaphor" free of natural of realistic expressive content. Between the actual site in the Pine Barrens and The Non-Site itself exists a space of metaphoric significance. It could be that "travel" in this space is a vast metaphor. Everything between the two sites could become physical metaphorical material devoid of natural meanings and realistic assumptions. Let us say that one goes on a fictitious trip if one decides to go to the site of the Non-Site. The "trip" becomes invented, devised, artificial; therefore, one might call it a non-trip to a site from a Non-site. Once one arrives at the "airfield", one discovers that it is man-made in the shape of a hexagon, and that I mapped this site in terms of esthetic boundaries rather than political or economic boundaries (31 sub-division-see map).

This little theory is tentative and could be abandoned at any time. Theories like things are also abandoned. That theories are eternal is doubtful. Vanished theories compose the strata of many forgotten books.

*Non-Site #1. Smithson changed the title for this text which was initially "Some Notes on Non-Sites." It has been partially excerpted by Lawrence allowy in "IntroIntroductionrections 1: Options, Milwaukee Art Center, 1979, p. 6

from Unpublished Writings in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam, published University of California Press, Berkeley, California, 2nd Edition 1996

http://www.robertsmithson.com/essays/provisional.htm

Interventions - Paul Klee Angelus Novus

Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel

looking as though he is about to move away

from something he is fixedly contemplating.

His eyes are staring, his mouth hangs open, his wings are spread.

This is how the angel of history must look.

His face is turned toward the past.

Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one catastrophe,

which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage

hurling it before his feet.

The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead,

and make whole what has been smashed.

But a storm is blowing from Paradise;

it has got caught in his wings with such violence

the angel can no longer close them.

This storm irresistibly propels him

into the future to which his back is turned,

while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.

This storm is what we call progress.

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations (1940).