Scottish Art Archive 2014

2014 

24 June     Obit Ian Hughes, Herald 

14th Nov Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Scotland at the Frick, NY, Herald 

Dec 12  Douglas Gordon at Park Avenue Armory, New York Herald. 

ZERO at the Guggenheim & Achim Moeller


Two such interesting, unexpected shows!  In 1958 Otto Piene & Heinze Mack, later joined by Gunther Uecker, (he of the robust, hardware shop/ farm nails)  formed Group ZERO in Dusseldorf. Its aim to create "a zone pf silence & pure possibilities for a new beginning." Their art championed kinetic, light & above all minimalism. They used new materials: chrome, aluminium, latex & motors. It was a European movement but attracted international attention. 

But as I walked down to Guggenheim's long curving ramp, I was surprised to see work by George Rickey, Tinguely, Fontana, Yves Kline, Manzoni, Kusama, plus lots of artists I didnt know at all ! In fact but for Ricky Demarco I would be ignorant of Uecker too! Most pieces are from the 1960s.

And despite knowing George & Edi Rickey, I also didn’t know about their collection of Zero works among their Constructivist Art, gifted to the Neuberger Museum, NY.  What a lot we don't know! I asked around and discovered that few of our friends knew about Zero.  

Except Achim Moeller. He has a gem of a show - small but perfect. His is called ZERO in VIBRATION; the Guggenheim’s is ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s–60s.

Another show which included tons of artists unknown to me is at Jack SHAINMAN’s Kinderhook outpost upstate: the amazing, vast former School which easily absorbs El Anatsui’s huge hangings made out of liquor bottle caps and copper wire. These radical pieces are now famous from their inclusion at Venice in 1990 & 2007, but many artists coming, like him, from Ghana, Nigeria or parts of India need someone like Jack to introduce them to the West. As we walked upstairs & downstairs Jack counted on his fingers the different nationalities represented there - & came to 16! We may have cheated a bit but for sure the total is over a dozen. 

I was happy to see big dark ominous metal pieces by Kounellis & Salano (2002 & 1987 respectively) along with new work by Brad Kahlhamer. I especially loved his big painting American Horse plus quirky sculptures made from painted wood & feathers. Jack's NY gallery shows El Anatsui till Nov 15 (he is also at Guggenheim Bilbao) & Kay Hassan. Nick Cave is in St Louis & Carrie Mae Weens in London.  

RICHARD ESTES at Marlborough, NY

I have been an Estes fan since the mid 1960s. No one can do SuperRealism better then him.  I didn't meet him in the flesh till 1999, when we visited his home in Maine. Modest to a fault, his complex oils of New York subway, store or diner windows are a magic puzzle of layered reflections. 

Richard signing catalogues October '14

TOM OTTERNESS also at Marlborough NY 

Kissing Couple 20!4`. 

UPSTATE NEW YORK & uptown MANHATTAN: PICASSO< BRAQUE< LEGER< GRIS< David SMITH< TADEO ANDO< Sol LeWitt< EDWARD HOPPER< Norman ROCKWELL< and more. 

Can one have too much art?? We went to Matisse The Cutouts today; yesterday the superb and wonderful Leonard Lauder collection of CUBISM at the Met & at the weekend saw impressive David Smith show at the Clark Museum + some really great exhibitions (& one awful) at MASS MoCA in upstate Massachusetts along with beautiful glimmering gold & burning orange Fall foliage   at The Met

Rarely does a NY tabloid come up with the perfect short caption but this week even the Post could pun, "It's a gift from the Art." Cosmetic chairman, Leonard Lauder, of Estee Lauder, just gave the Met $1 BILLION worth of Cubist paintings. 81 works, (34 by Picasso, 17 Braques & 15 each by Leger and Gris) dating from 1906-1924 fill 7 galleries. 

8 Picasso & Braque pix in the Lauder house early this year.

One gallery is totally Picasso with studies for his breakthro Demoiselles d"Avignon; one gallery all Gris - punchy and colourful; one all Leger, full of cylinders & pyramids, basic geometric shapes. The collection charts the development of cubism in all its complex twists & turns from tentative beginnings where Braque led the way, via analytical & synthetic cubism. Leger came closest to totally abstraction.

Picasso said that in Paris from 1909-11 "Almost every evening I went to Braque's studio or he came to mine. We HAD to see what each had done that day. We criticised each other..."   

Till this amazing gift the Met had little Cubist work, indeed NONE at all till 1990s. Now at a stroke things have changed. "The joy of living is the joy of giving" said Mr Lauder. Fantastic.
MATISSE 

Matisse The Cut-Outs  received 562,622 visitors in London making it the most popular exhibition ever held at Tate & the first to receive over half a million people. 

Now in NY at MoMA +queues round the block. But members can go in 9.30-10.30 before the crowds! There will be lots new members. 

The thing that strikes is the intense COLOUR & the scale. At the end of his life in the 1950s Matisse worked on wall-size collages directing his assistant where to pin or nail the shapes with his stick. In the 1930s he used pins, tailor-style as well. The results are joyous and life-affirming. That's why we love these cut-outs simply made with paper & scissors -  true minimalism at its best. 

150 miles away Raw Colour: The Circles of David Smith is an example of how to do another artist justice: well selected, superbly installed and not too much. It focuses on his Circle paintings & sculpture of 1961-62 when he was obsessed with placing his works in the landscape of his Bolton Landing farm & studio. My husband visited him there at that time, says he was "very direct." Henry Moore was also busy placing his sculptures in fields at this time. A Yorkshireman, he was equally direct! 

Art OMI Fields is a 120 acre sculpture park very near to us upstate New York with a running programme of installations in woods and pastures, up hill & down dale. We went on a switchback ride in a golf cart driven by Cody who obviously has motor racing aspirations! This fall 6 artists have contributed to the already installed various outdoor pieces. New work comes from Catherine Lee, Jackie Ferrara & Harrison Atelier, from Brooklyn.

ccc

Catherine Lee 

                                          The Berkshires seen from the Clark Museum. 

LOTS More later - about Mass MoCA, and also about the UNKNOWN HOPPER and Norman Rockwell - illustrators both it now seems. 

NEW YORK: 
PUBLIC SCULPTURE on Park & Broadway. Museum of Art & Design. The MET: Thomas Hart Benton & Thomas Struth.  

New York NEW YORK. Blue skies but gridlock everywhere when Obama's in town along with 100 heads of state at the United Nations.  Streets sealed off. Police everywhere. But an ideal time to view public sculpture as your taxi creeps along Park Avenue or Broadway. 

                                
This Spring Alice Aycock made a very impressive display of super steel tornados, twisters, whirlwinds, & spinning tops racing down Park Avenue, which is after all, she said, "New York’s symbolic canyon of money, power & aspiration." 

Aycock is now followed by Ewerdt Hilgemann’s whose shiny steel sculptures, between 8-20 feet tall, are made by vacuuming the air out of welded-steel cubes or rectangles, using pumps or simply water, to create iconic “Implosion” pieces. 

 Seven now grace Park Avenue from 52nd to 67th Street. It's Hilgemann’s first major exhibition in the United States, appropraiate in that he was a student of the cofounder of Germany’s ZERO group in the 1960s, which will get its own retrospective at the Guggenheim in October. In addition to totally cubic forms, Hilgemann has created Cube Flower, a disarticulated floral study, in front of the Seagram Building. (Till Nov 7th.)

Many of Hilgemann's works, he says, reference the minimalism of Piet Mondrian whom Hilgemann admires. “Mondrian tried to become part of American society & New York by painting in a minimalistic way,” he explains. “But with Broadway Boogie Woogie, he painted himself into the structure of New York. I want to do the same with sculpture.”

Which brings us to Broadway Morey Boogie" curated by Max Levai, son of Marlbrough's Pierre. Broadway is usually reserved for solo shows, but here is a group selling show of ten disparate mid career artists, all based in America.      

It begins well with a huge 2 ton concrete Bear as tourist complete with camera on red cord around its neck. Sited on busy Columbus Circle, it's by Polish-born, Brooklyn based Joanna Malinowska. 

Next, at 64th St by the Lincoln Center, is Sara Braman's 8ft coloured glass cubic shape, which works amazingly well in rain as well as sun. 72nd St is truly disappointing with 2 flat figures far too subtle in colour & form for the location. They completely fade into the background.In fact all the sculptures are hard to see, hard to find. I went looking for Tony Matelli's dog & despite asking at cafes, hotels and shops, no-one could help. Indeed no-one knew anything about these Broadway sculptures at all! Next is a big white ball - but not big enough - in the colours of Con Ed, the ubiquitous NYC electricity supplier.

 We gave up here, but from photos of the remaining 5 pieces, it seems an uninspired array. Altogether too small scale. Public sculpture is a hard task 

master. 

Meanwhile the Public ART people have installed  Gerrard's Solar Reserve (Tonopah, Nevada) 2014 , a 28 by 24 foot frameless LED wall re-creating a Nevada solar thermal power plant and the surrounding desert landscape,  at Lincoln Center! 

At the center of this virtual world is a tower surrounded by 10,000 mirrors that adjust their positions according to the location of the sun & reflect light upon the tower to generate electricity. The digital simulation changes in real time throughout the day, so no specific view  will be the same over the course of the exhibition. His first major public art work in the U.S. also marks John Gerrard's most ambitious work to date. MUSEUM OF ART & DESIGN, Columbus Circle NY 

I first got to know Edward Durrell Stone's famous lollipop building in 1982 & 83 when I curated New Scottish Prints as part - the only outside London part - of the Britain Salutes New York extravaganza which also featured Constable at the Met & Henry Moore along Park Avenue.

The building, at busy Columbus Circle at the corner of Central Park & the Lincoln Center, was one of New York's few memorable & idiosyncratic structures, "a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops."   I loved it on first sight. My room at the  Empire Hotel (or Vampire Hotel as taxi drivers loved to call it) was right there. In my innocence I had no idea how central it all was. 

The Scottish exhibition, which featured the young Bellany, Donald, Blackadder, Fisher, Watson et al travelled by sea & got lost on the docks! Found just in time before the Arts Minister, Ambassador etc came by.  

Today the same building, now home to The Museum of Art & Design, is OK inside, but the exterior has been ruined. I hate it. Efforts by the world's top conservation bodies from 2003-5 to save this landmark failed, & the MAD Museum took over. How could they!  

But it does have a good restaurant! Today we enjoyed the amazing view up Broadway, across Central Park's greenery and down to Columbus on his pillar, + Malinoska's Bear. The restaurant ceiling, with shocking pink and orange, also plays its part.  

Downstairs 2 shows address past & future. Mrs Webb who founded the MAD museum in 1956 on West 53rd St, was rich & driven. From 1939 on she set up cooperatives & craft councils, exhibitions & surveys, all from the premise that "independent living could be attained through craftsmanship." This section shows key works in silver, ceramic, wool, textiles, wood & glass, many from the 1960s, including Anni Albers' weaving, Jack Larsen's panel & Hiroshi Suzuki's silver bowl. Stylish, elegant, beautifully executed. Archival photos fill it out. 

Another 2 floors feature 100 NYC MAKERS of today, some truly hideous, (Confettisystem's Fringe Wall in the foyer; Meromi's huge Working Girls), some interesting: Mark Dion's ghostly specters of explorer Robert Clark's 1908 expedition equipment; Polan's drawings; Yoko Ono's 2013 Plastic Band video. A mixed bag.  http://www.madmuseum.org

 Mark Dion

By chance the Met's THOMAS STRUTH show includes his 1978 b & w photo of Stone's building, together with his more recent large scale colour prints. 

Milan Cathedral facade is awe inspiring in its breadth & detail; Giles Robertson, Edinburgh 1987 intimate, brooding. It's a small show but gives an idea of his range. Especially memorable is the Rome image: tiny figures dwarfed by vast architecture. It's all about looking. 

 Thomas Struth 1978

The Met is so huge that it can launch 3 or 4 new shows in a day. It's also a long 4 block inside walk from 81St entrance to the American wing. But worth it to see Thomas Hart BENTON's epic 1931 mural, America Today.

I first came across Benton in Kansa City, his home town, with no idea his NY period produced such a remarkable, vibrant panorama. Originally commissioned for the New School's 30ft boardroom, the 10 panels, all 7 ft tall, sweep from rural to urban celebrating farmers, cowboys, oil men, miners, steel workers, flappers, boxers, dockers, tycoons. 

He was a great draughtsman & the show includes many terrific sketches. Benton's student, Jackson Pollock, posed for some figures; his wife & child for others. 

Invigorating, boldly dramatic, optimistic, full of colour & life, the mural celebrates the industry that created the American Dream - yet the Depression was just round the corner. 

This month the new, completely redesigned Plaza outside the Met opened after 2 years: new fountains, trees, seats & tables under the trees. It feels like Paris! Billionaire David H Koch paid all $65m cost. 

SCOTTISH ARTISTS COLLECTIVES

There is a lot of talk about grassroots politics. So what about artists grassroots collectives?  There's nothing new about them, and many vital galleries & workshops began that way. The venerable Glasgow Group is now 56 years old. Founders Anda Paterson, James Spence,  James Morrison & other GSA art students were irritated by the conformist, unadventurous policies of the local exhibiting societies namely the RSA & the RGI and at the dearth of commercial outlets in the city.

Today collectives are 2 a penny, too many to shake a stick at. Todays versions are also better supported. In the 1950s-70s there were no grants available, no funding bodies. It was all self-help.  

As I visited Ashley COOK's show at GPS & STREET LEVEL's show of Sophie Gerrard's Sweet Sixteen, I remembered their first homes: GPS in a former electrician's with earth floor, or Street Level's place up the High St. Sweet Sixteen inevitably takes us to the Scottish Independence Referendum. www.streetlevelphotoworks.org

 Ashley Cook

For the first time ever 16-18 yr olds could vote - and they did! Scotland can be proud of its civilised conduct of this momentous, irrevocable, once in a lifetime event. A very high level of civic engagement & passionate debate; huge turnout - a record 87%, ie 4 million folk, voted peacefully. No riots, no violence. Think of Egypt. Where else could such a peaceful, democratic, energised search for change happen? And change there will be, despite a 55% vote to stay as part of the UK. Scotland leads the way in a radical shake-up against  London-centric policy. 

Philip Reeves

The Glasgow Group has its ups & downs but is very active. The current show over the summer is its second this year, with Philip Reeves exhibiting in both. Reeves played a big part in several collectives. Edinburgh Printmakers was established in 1967 as the first open access studio in Britain. Glasgow Print Studio followed in 1972 with 400 quid from the Gulbenkian Foundation. Unlike painters, printmakers can't work in the spare room or shed at home. They need equipment. Hence GPS, then Peacock Printmakers in Aberdeen, & Dundee. Later sculpture studios sprang up. In 1977 Stills Photography Gallery opened in Edinburgh, followed by Street Level in Glasgow in 1989. Edinbro's Collective gallery, founded 1984, has the best name - as they move to a new home on Calton Hill. 

Like Street Level & GPS, TRANSMISSION, (set up in 1983 in a cobbled space that was once an alley way,) was started by GSA graduates dissatisfied by lack of exhibition space for young artists. Through sponsorship + support from the Scottish Arts Council (now Creative Scotland) they managed an exh space in which to exhibit themselves + work of local artists.They also invited international artists who had influenced them, like Lawrence Weiner, to show.

Lawrence at his Whitney NY retrospective, 2007

So it seems to me that the "Glasgow Miracle" is no miracle at all. It took 60+ years hard graft. And "Miracle" is a stupid tag. Makes me think of saints & Bernadette's Lourdes. 

The Transmission of the 1980s & 90s should be recognized as crucial to Glasgow's success. Not just because of the interesting, gifted artists who were involved then, but because of the way Transmission committee members handled & managed the cooperative. They made links & contacts, worldwide. This was their triumph. 

Lawrence Weiner text piece at Bard, NY

What a long way collectives have come. But what of the new young cooperatives like a 2-1-4-1, Black Cube, SWG3, Glue Factory, Pipe Factory, Embassy etc? 

Will they stay the course? 2-1-4-1 has been active with group exhibitions in Edinburgh & Glasgow, with a recent summer show, Draw In, related to drawing.  

More worrying are Transmission's 'descendants" with their thin, parched efforts, insubstantial ideas & poor imagery. While Glasgow's trail blazers were robustly innovative, clever & uniquely memorable, these followers drawn to the city by the buzz & hype created by recent Turner Prize winners & nominees, totally lack depth. Concept may have replaced image; words substitute the visual; video, film & performance supercede traditional media - but for heavens sake, please give us some quality, the brain some food, the eyes some joy! 

People worldwide love Scotland, none more that award-winning photographer, Tan Lip Seng, FRPS., FPSA., MPSA, EFIAP., ABIPP. of Singapore who has been visiting Scotland for years. We met him in Oban. Put my husband on the moon, & he would buttonhole interesting people.

Lip Seng Tan's recent images of Skye are superb. Also great pix of us eating 

langoustines on the pier in the sun.

http://www.elcreations.org/lipsengtan/photoblog