Category: In focus

Maggi Hambling’s Wollstonecraft statue

I’m currently locked down in London, so what better activity than to go to Newington Green and look at what the Guardian yesterday called ‘one of 2020’s most polarising artworks’. It is Maggi Hambling’s A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft. If you missed out on the social media furore about this sculpture, the main issue was that people were very, very angry that what was supposedly honouring and commemorating one of the founders of feminism had a naked woman at the top of it. In principle I agreed and plus, visually it didn’t seem that interesting. More figurative art? Still?

As I trudged up, I hoped that I might see some protest performance going on (it has been covered up at various points), but there was nothing except a LOT of mud on and around the plinth, which reads “For Mary Wollstonecraft”, i.e. it’s for her, not of her, which is important to remember.

The statue on a muddy Newington Green

Firstly though, some perspective. The figurine that caused such a stir is TINY. She appears at the top of a much bigger silver blob, and though I was standing right up close, the height of the sculpture means she’s far away. On twitter and in the media, all the photos I’d seen were deceptive: closely cropped and zoomed in on the female figure, emphasising the defined abs, perky boobs and a full, rather prominent bush. Some were cross that the female body had been idealised in this way, but in the context of the full sculpture, that critique strikes me as odd. For me, this muscular figure brought to mind soviet-era sculptures, in particular, Vera Mukhina’s Worker and Kolkhoz Woman. Made in stainless steel, 24 metres high and created for the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, it is one of the most badass monuments ever. The diminutive size of the figure in Hambling’s sculpture works against this reading, but it still is a visual connection I find helpful when trying to place the work.

Vera Mukhina, ‘Worker and Kolkhoz Woman’, 1937

To me the figure does not read as sexual in any way. But, maybe, because of our understanding of the nude, it’s not possible to see a naked woman without this idea being drawn into this debate. As Heather Parry explained on twitter at the time:

Yep.

The woman emerges from a swirling mass, which calls to mind another transformation, Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, the marble sculpture in the Galleria Borghese in Rome, made in 1622-25. It is based on the tale in Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Apollo has been struck by Cupid’s arrow, and is lusting after Daphne, chasing her. Daphne cries out for her beauty to be destroyed, or for her body to be changed to save her from the impending rape, and is transformed into a tree. Bernini’s sculpture captures the exact moment when flesh begins to become bark. Her outstretched fingers transform into leaves, she is swallowed up as the natural form encases her living body.

Bernini, ‘Apollo and Daphne’, 1622-25

It feels strange to compare those works, because the Bernini is one of my favourite sculptures of all time, and the Hambling is certainly not. But perhaps we can see the Hambling sculpture as this metamorphosis process in reverse. Here, rather than being engulfed, the female figure emerges from the shapeless forms and looks powerful. The aesthetic of the shiny silvered bronze also acts as a reversal of the natural elements in Ovid’a tale. The sheer artificiality makes it look futuristic and alien and that is my favourite thing about it.

In its almost mirror state, it jars pleasingly with the muted, natural winter browns and greens of the mud and bark in its surrounding park. There’s no missing this sculpture, it is a beacon that demands attention and has definitely received it. Wollstonecraft has too, and that’s not a bad thing.

The take home for me is that artworks may be polarising, but art is not Marmite. You can simultaneously love and hate different things about it, you can sit with it and feel differently about it on different days. It’s a reminder that especially at the moment, when we’re consuming art on a screen and from afar, context is everything. It’s good to know if we’re getting a detail or the whole picture.

I found some old photos

I recently found an old hard drive I’d stored photos on for many years, dating back roughly to 2009 – pre cloud storage and Instagram. Back then, I was getting ready to leave school and move out of the family home I’d lived in for most of my life. Finding these photos now, I’m struck by what you can learn about yourself by seeing what you’ve carried with you, and who you’ve journeyed with, over the years.

I never thought I’d taken that many pictures, and yet here they are. A selection of moments documenting around 8 years of my life. Over that time, what did I decide to photograph? Is this curation, of a sort?

Of course, my favourite photos, the ones that give me the most pleasure, are those of people. Family and friends, people I’ve held close, literally, over the years. My appearance has barely changed, I’ve never had an interesting or drastic haircut. But despise the lack of intrigue provided by my personal aesthetic, these pictures of people together show moments of joy, some of which feel so distant now – a packed Shangri la at Glastonbury in 2010. Look how many people are in such close proximity!

Shangri-la, Glastonbury, 2010

There are a couple of art photos, but not that many. Before formally studying and writing about art, I don’t think I took many photos of paintings or sculptures. In fact, I thought that was lame. That it was a distracting side quest which got in the way of the true purpose: engaging directly with the art, without intermediaries. Yes, I was a censorious undergrad. Now of course, photography is one of the prime ways I engage with and consume art.

Themes start to recur. There are photos of old buildings, the backs of houses. The patchwork aesthetic of cities, their layering, has always appealed to me. I like seeing things in multiples, billboards that repeat themselves, tiny bricks, signage, squares of different colours and textures that make up a whole.

Drummond Street, London, as a patchwork quilt

It turns out that the idea which underpins Encounters Art, of finding intrigue or humour or beauty in the everyday has been there for a long while. There are more photos of graffiti, ephemera, what I call ‘notes in the margins’ than there are of Art™, and each of these is loaded with associations and place-memories. My photo library treasures are a bin in Berlin that screams “HATE Gentrification” and an annotation on a signpost in New Haven (the home of Yale University) that advises, “God = 1st / College = 2nd).”

Bin graffiti, Berlin, 2012

Some of the photos that unexpectedly chimed with me were of a different kind of ‘everyday’, not in the city but at home. There aren’t many of these – clearly we don’t document where we live as much as the special, occasional, noteworthy moments in our lives. There’s a photo from my childhood bedroom window which I must have taken to preserve the delicate lattice of snow and frost on trees and buildings, but now it’s everything else, the normality of it, that resonates.

The view from my bedroom from 1992-2010

Looking back at the somewhat unremarkable picture, I realised that the view I saw every day for nearly 18 years (the apple tree in the garden, our neighbours’ grand conservatory they never used) had been forgotten. Or rather, it was covered in memory-dust that had gathered over years without me realising, which I hadn’t bothered to wipe away. Even my basement room in university halls of residence, a place I hated, seems interesting at this distance, captured in blurry photographs, hastily taken and packed away until now. Artists who work with found objects (a genre I, perhaps predictably, love) have understood that things don’t actually need to be our own to feel intimate, to resonate. Certain feelings, moments, memories are almost universal, though drawn from vastly differing actual experiences.

Perhaps these images of home interiors and window views have taken on a new significance since lockdown began. Looking at these photos didn’t feel simply like a trip down memory lane. I felt more like an archivist with the task of retrieving and reviving the forgotten. Unraveling continuities and disruptions in relationships, places, things my eyes have been drawn to, was a task which felt like the psychological equivalent of traveling. It gave me reassurance I think I needed, that this period of staying at home doesn’t have to be a vacuum because nothing has really happened. That memories can be made out of and despite boredom, via the simple act of taking a photograph from your window, or failing that, just looking out of it.

One of the exhibitions I did photograph, Gabriel Orozco,
Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, 2012

Belfast’s murals

Last weekend was my first visit to Belfast, and I spent some time looking at the city’s famous murals. I wasn’t there for nearly long enough – there are hundreds of murals scattered throughout the city and I only managed to walk around the Falls Road and Shankill Road areas for a short while. But what little I saw I know will stay with me for a long time.

A section of the International Wall, which addresses global struggles

I wouldn’t presume to even try and talk in detail about the context here, but the murals are deeply embedded in years of complicated and violent political history. Public art is always a reflection of power struggles: who is represented and who is left out is a political issue. This is even more true in the case of the murals, which have sprung up over decades, and are for the most part created by people who live in these communities, rather than by artists brought in from outside and commissioned to make work.

The subjects of the murals vary hugely, but many of them commemorate the victims of The Troubles. In a conflict fought at such close quarters, even the smallest of exposed façades becomes a canvas for stating the allegiances of the area.

Signs and symbols: the crown dotting the ‘i’ of Shankill denotes the area’s allegiances

I was shocked to learn that thousands of lives were lost in the violence, and perhaps just as surprising was that neither me, nor any of the people I was with (Scottish and English) had learned anything about the conflict in school, even though it is very much in living memory and an important part of both British and Irish history.

The Bobby Sands mural is the most photographed in Belfast.

It’s a moving and hard-hitting experience, but walking the streets and engaging with the murals as a tourist is one of the ways we can learn about the city’s difficult past in an accessible way. It’s also an important reminder that images, signs and symbols are always laced with countless different meanings, and it is worth taking some time to try and decipher them.

Images of solidarity using the colours of the Irish and Palestinian flags, situated on the International Wall

‘National Gallery, London’, by Jean-François Rauzier (2018)

I keep on thinking about a remarkable work I saw as part of Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage at the Modern last week, which I didn’t include in my review. The work was made in 2018 by Jean-Francois Rauzier (b.1952) and is called National Gallery, London.

At this stage I will admit that I may have been predisposed to think favourably of the piece. I worked at National Gallery for around four years, and the bonds I form with places dear to me don’t tend to fade away casually. This work recreates some of the place’s grandeur, its abundance, then mashes it up and reimagines it in the most striking way.

Familiar architecture, reimagined

The composition is made up of thousands of different photos of the National Gallery, with around 3000 works from the collection digitally stitched together (hence being part of the ‘Cut and Paste’ narrative). The National Gallery’s architecture has been futuristically transposed, its famous long vistas and arches lined up across the base of the work, while the broad white borders that cut horizontally across the centre give the impression of a multi-storey building, packed to the rafters with paintings in a dizzying salon hang.

National Gallery, London is one of Rauzier’s “Hyperphotos”, which he began creating in 2002 and which combine the feeling of a panorama with microscopic detail. While it may not be evident from my own photographs of the work, snapped during an exhibition visit, each painting is reproduced with pinpoint accuracy, astounding detail and clarity. Getting up close to the work, the viewer can pick out any number of famous, recognisable and well-loved paintings. For me, finding some of my old favourites was like searching for the faces of long lost friends in a crowd.

I found George Stubbs’ Whistlejacket (1762), a painting I loved as a child, taking pride of place in the centre.

One of the special things about the National Gallery is that in the action of walking through its rooms, the visitor goes on a pretty comprehensive journey through the history of Western European painting from c.1250-c.1930. Within that broad narrative, each painting tells an individual story, and captures something of its own historical moment. With the help of wall texts, written by curators and educators, we as viewers use clues to decipher that story, such as the subject matter, the style in which it is painted, the life of the artist, or through the artwork’s history as an object itself (who it was painted for, who has owned it throughout the centuries).

Even though I am lucky enough to be familiar with some of the works photographed by Rauzier, I felt as though I needed hours, if not days, to look properly at this artwork and the paintings contained within it, just as when you visit an art gallery you know it won’t be possible to absorb everything before what a friend of mine calls “museum back” kicks in and you need to sit down in the cafe.

A wall of paintings by Titian (1490-1576). What’s not to love?

There is so much life packed into every single artwork, and the more you learn about the history of art, the more remarkable it is that here, Rauzier has piled a major chunk of that sumptuous and fascinating history into one single work, exercising his own curatorial and architectural choices along the way. He tells the story in way that would almost be legible in one glance, were it not for the sheer weight of all that’s packed into it.

As individuals, we create and take our own meanings from artworks, and our experience of art is informed by our own stories, which is certainly one of the reasons why I found this work by Rauzier so fascinating, and why I know I’ll keep finding things to say about it even after I’ve hit the ‘publish’ button for this blog post. Whether or not you are interested in art history, it is impossible to deny that Rauzier’s futuristic retelling of it is a visual feast, albeit an overwhelming one that is impossible to finish in one sitting.