Art and Architecture @ The Lyon Housemuseum

I went to this talk last Sunday, for an artist the opportunity to hear architects discussing the role of architecture in displaying art was a first for me, and I did get a few surprises, learned a great deal and came away with my head buzzing.

How do we condense the content of this event into a few words in a blog? As it happens quite easily, "neutral container" was rather disparagingly translated to "White Cube" which when uttered was usually expressed with an air of boredom. Whilst "active participant" was delivered with some commitment and excitement, clearly this concept was much more interesting to the architects and basically means a building that it is a full expression of the architect as artist. I'm old enough to remember being taught the history of art when it included architecture and have always believed it to be the most influential art. After all - architects make the spaces in which we live, work, relax and exhibit our art.

And of course no talk like this these days could ever omit mention of "starchitects" or Zaha Hadid herself, http://www.arcspace.com/features/zaha-hadid-architects/ more wonky walls than you could poke a stick at all justified by the success of buildings as a magnet for tourists and generator of collateral income, thus highlighting the major dilemma for the cities and institutions that propose new art gallery spaces but get seduced into funding these "bugger-the-art just look at the building" examples.

The concept of architecture as art was taken to the most extreme level in this talk not by an architect but by Jason Smith, Heidi Museum of Modern Art, Director, who very enthusiastically announced that he saw a great deal of merit in the idea of exhibiting no art in one building in his gallery complex and letting the building itself be the "art" on view (which was never the intention of the building in the first place). Incidentally there was virtually no discussion or acknowledgement that maybe artists themselves may have views and valid opinions on the spaces in which their work will be exhibited!

Of particular interest to me was the Lyon Housemuseum and the explanations of its founder Corbett Lyon, I too have something that could be called a "house museum" though it has never occurred to me to call it that before. It is architecturally significant, heritage listed and does impose itself quite markedly on any art that is exhibited in or around it. Lyon Housemuseum -  http://lyonhousemuseum.com.au/ 

I even have the insane Guggenheim sloping floor at the Cowwarr Art Space! a sculptor's nightmare and somewhat of a challenge for any art! Not with standing this I consider it a sort of blank canvas in which we can attempt to create ways to make art live. 

The heritage architects describe the Cowwarr Art Space (a recycled 1918 butter factory) as a Federation Arts and Crafts style building, and pointed out that this was a high minded socialist architectural movement that, in terms of industrial building, set out to create "beautiful" spaces that would encourage people to feel like working hard!!!The quality of the spaces are exactly what our visitors respond to most.

Now all this gives us a real clue to the development of a good and trusting relationship between art, architects and art gallery/museum architecture. Clearly the answer lies neither with the "white cube" nor the "active participant" approaches but possibly in a thoroughly sympathetic melding of both by embracing the idea that an architect could muster the skill, poetry and care for humanity to create spaces that actually encourage people to love art and the total art gallery experience. Architects win, curators win, artists are relieved and the general public audience win too. Nice I reckon.

art - art school - music

Here's a tatty old picture of a Brisbane band called the Impacts taken shortly before they became the Purple Hearts, I stumbled across it , or more truthfully, I knew I had it somewhere and just went looking. This search was the result of just discovering that my dear old friend Mick Hadley had died about 18 months ago, he's playing drums in this pic and therefore not visible, regular drummer Adrian Redmond is singing with bass player Bob Dames and Les Binns on lead (Les and Bob both ex-art school). Lets try not to make this so long, because as I write so many very old memories comes rushing back. Adrian and Les both left and were replaced by Tony Cahill, Lobby Loyd and Fred Pickard, all in the pic below.

Mick's death made me Google those times and rummage through old photos etc, more out of respect than anything else. But then I discovered the romance of memory and one of those plausible ways that both the history of art and music get slightly bent, its sort of like the old game of Chinese whispers, memories altered by time instead of poor hearing. Dear Mick on one or two of the blog histories of Aus Rock was convinced that I was the 'black sheep son of a British Aristocrat" often called "remittance men"back in those days, and before, in the Colonies. Nothing could be further from the truth, I'd actually been to secondary school in Queensland and was at art school with Les Binns (pictured in the first picture) 1962 . His family sponsored me as 10 Pound migrant to Brisbane in 1965.

And Mick believing that, "Clive regularly received T chests of items suitable for maintaining sanity in the colonies. Art/Music magazines and newspapers, Carnaby clothes, catalogues, oh and those long play records just coming into rage as well as 50 of all the latest singles," wasn't quite on the money either, the T chests were just my belongings, I'd flown here and my things came by boat! but to be at Guildford Art School in 1963 and 4 meant that I did have some records that any Queensland band trying to play British style R&B would die for in 1965, and almost the entire Purple Hearts repertoire was covers of bands like the Graham Bond Organisation, the Pretty Things, Downliner Sect, Yardbirds, Georgie Fame and more - all regular players at Guildford's Ricky Tick club and some booked by us for our Art School Parties!

Mick and me - 2008, there are thousands of stories connected to my Purple Hearts days but I there's one that I'm still little ashamed of. So now's the time to get off my chest.

We did a tour of Queensland and Northern NSW Christmas 65, compare Ross D Wylie - bands, the Easybeats, MPD, Purple Hearts and Tony Worsley and the Bluejays and nearing the end of the tour we started to get bored. So in Casino the guys thought they have some fun, they reckoned that I looked enough like Manfred Mann, so backed by the Easybeats, and a big bunch of the other musos, I'm up on stage (could play harmonica a bit) being Manfred Mann - for half a tune and heaps of "It's great to be here in Australia - you're a wonderful audience etc etc take it away Stevie and so on," but here comes the bad bit - after the show, of course, I have to sign lots of autographs as Manfred Mann. So I often wonder if there are still people in Northern NSW who still faithfully keep their prized autograph believing it to be the real thing.

Good on you Mick.

iris goes to America

i-luru's evolution has been pretty well covered in this blog but I reckon she needs a bit of a send-off, she's on her way to Washington DC to live in a nice home with people who like her very much. The idea for this sculpture came along when Iris, muse/model, went to live in Central Australia working as an interpreter for tour groups, so what could be more natural than finding a lump of marble that looked a bit like Uluru? 

Australia's answer to Mt Rushmore maybe! but on a more serious note, what got me excited when I started, out, was that I'd stumbled across a way that would allow me to make both portrait and landscape in the one sculpture.

Here's Iris in Central Australia - the thing about her is that she really likes to talk, so the driving force behind the expression for this sculpture was the idea that she should look as if she's just about to say something.

Just had to include my favourite photo of her, somehow even with a plastic bag over her head she still does her thing pretty well.

Here she is just moments before she was hoisted up and dragged off unceremoniously to get ready for her long flight to America. Part of the excitement for me in this sculpture is that 26 million year old hole that you can see. It was made by lava going through soft spots in the North Queensland coral reef that was transformed all that time ago. And from the perspective of a person who loves getting something for nothing, a free Henry Moore is gratefully accepted any day of the week! 

up up and away

and off she goes

last view of her in Australia - next stop USA

So there goes one of the few sculptures, that for me, has the lot

The Internal Logic: Schindler Sanné creates new habitat for endangered moderns

Lady with Green Stripe, 1905
Sanné Mestrom, 2013 marble, steel, timber, found objects

The Internal Logic: Schindler Sanné creates new habitat for endangered moderns.

Sanné Mestrom creates art’s equivalent of an ecosystem and each individual work is comprised of numerous competing parts that jostle with each other for the opportunity to grab just enough air and nutrients to cling to life. She champions Art’s endangered species.

 The fundamentals of art that have been abused, mutilated, tortured and wrongly imprisoned flock to Mestrom like refugees to our shore. These, she mothers back to life with all the care and consideration they dearly deserve. Like anthropologists and the inquisition, she can only ever interpret through the ears and eyes of her own time and culture.

At the core of Sanné Mestrom’s work is an understanding that modernism was not a simple reductive progression from spotty realism (Impressionism) towards an ultimate final bland abstract statement. She seems to appreciate that there were, in fact, two equally viable modernist approaches. One typified by Picasso, Matisse and Morandi, (all referred to in this exhibition) who chose “traditional” subjects including the still life, portrait and standing figure. Each artist then interpreted their subjects according to their own modernist bias; we could describe this approach as a newness or modernism of content. As an aside I do have to admit that one of the only artworks to ever give me goose bumps was a small painting of a bowl of apples by Courbet at the National Gallery in London. It still puzzles me, there is nothing original about the subject, there is no apparent narrative, it makes no great leap forward in re-evaluating what can or cannot be art, but all the same, the more I look at this humble little effort the more I can see that here was an artist writing the history of his time on the day that it occurred. Maybe Courbet just gave us the living Courbet on that day and the magic in his bowl of apples is that through them, we can comprehend immortality.

Devotees of the other path saw the primary role of a modern artist as being an inventor of new looking art forms, avoiding anything that had been seen before and purging art of any traces of its past. It was a comprehendible process that appeared logical, objective and was easily arguable. It completely suited the Americans in their vigorous push to create a national world ranking artistic presence after World War 2.  

The only American works referred to by Mestrom in Internal Logic are Black Painting 1959 and Black Painting 1963 by Frank Stella and for them she reserves her harshest and most disrespectful criticism. Stella was an extremely articulate artist who, in the remarkable Emile de Antonio 1972 documentary, Painters Painting: The New York Art Scene 1940-1970, stated that Jackson Pollack took on Picasso (implying that Pollock knocked Pablo clean out of the ring) and all that Frank and the newer American artists had to do was take on Jackson. An unambiguous statement about a competitive art made up of domino like components that would fall one after the other.

Mestrom’s version of Black Painting 1959 shows she completely understands Stella’s criteria but criticises them by taking them forward on their own terms. Spitefully witty, the cold hard edge of Stella has become a hand woven object made with undyed wool, an example of traditional craft and popular retro décor: the ubiquitous Scandinavian Rya rug.

Black Painting 1959 Sanné Mestrom, 2013, unspun, undyed woolen tapestry

By singling Stella out as a major contributor to modernism’s dead-end proposal driven demise, Mestrom seems to be siding with the idea that art is just one of the ways that human beings make personal sense of the world they find themselves in.

The process that took Sanné Mestrom to this point is most instructive, trained as a painter she avoided all the strange values that are often espoused in Sculpture departments. These include weird ideas like; stone is an old fashioned material that is totally unsuitable for contemporary use, or any art made before Minimalism is not worth looking at and worst of all, the totally illogical, craft should be avoided. Even the history of contemporary or modernist sculpture that is most regularly taught bears little resemblance to truth. In many ways the absence of a formal sculptural education has given Mestrom carte blanche to do whatever she likes and it is this portrayal of personal freedom, liberation and inventiveness that greets us in this exhibition.

I suspect Mestrom is one of those artists who genuinely needs to make things with her own hands and knows the value of manipulating material because it continually offers up alternatives and even brand new ideas.

Choosing well known paintings as motivators for sculptural invention can be fraught with danger for the unsuspecting artist as it gives reviewers (and viewers) the opportunity to self-aggrandise through their knowledge of art history - which in reality means that the artist provides people with a reason not to look at the work on hand. Mestrom negotiates this deftly because in the cases of works pinched from Picasso and Matisse her versions are so far removed from the originals that they stay intact in our memories.

This is true of the largest work in the exhibition, titled, Weeping Woman (Picasso) gushing water from a bronze eye; it splashes tears wherever it is placed, to me owes a lot more to an Alexander Calder “stabile” than Picasso. It also shows the advantage of not having a normal sculptor’s education. Most sculptors who had conceived a huge aluminium work like this would automatically opt for a homogenising surface treatment, like the vastly overdone David Smith style swirly, light catching, angle sander stereotype. Mestrom makes no such mistakes and simply lets us see the truth of its manufacture, finger prints, rivets and all. This is most refreshing as it gives new meaning to Henry Moore’s, “Truth to materials” quote. Lurking in my mind is a thought that this work is, in fact, a slightly, “woe is me”, sobbing Sanné self-portrait walking in its courtyard with exactly the same gait as the artist herself.

The direct, honest Truth to Materials and processes approach is the glue that holds this exhibition together. It is there with everything that Mestrom does, from the fabulously sensitive and thoroughly beautiful clay constructions, based on equally calm Morandi’s, to the mother and daughter Stella weavings and on to her seductive use of finely crafted marble (Matisse’s  Lady with green stripe), a la Arp or Brancusi.

Still life with nine objects 1954  Sanné Mestrom, 2013 ceramic, steel.

We are always surprised by the twists and turns that art makes, we can rarely predict what is going to capture our attention next but one of things that is almost guaranteed, is that the last thing you’d ever expect to see is exactly what we get. Many or even most of the current crop of sculptural fashions are simple presentations of things masquerading as art, like the pre-occupation with taxidermy and hyper-real waxwork models.

Mestrom on the other hand seems to have found art’s great op-shop, a great barn of a place, stacked to the roof with long forgotten ideas, refugees from the time when American art and artists, to validate their own achievements, brutally bludgeoned everything and anything that smelled even remotely of European culture. These poor strays of accumulated wisdom speak languages that we often do not wish to understand. Things get lost or altered in translation. The generation gap is so great, that all Mestrom can do, is care for these great grandparents using the values of her own time.

These encounters with The Masters of High Modernism have certainly payed dividends for Sanné Mestrom. Fossicking she finds an exciting, bargain price, Picasso top, she wears it for a day and wonders if she could make her own.  Whilst making the pattern for it she notices that she’s made something like a Calder as well (most important: nothing is more exciting than two for the price of one deals), and on it goes, discovery after discovery.

There is one extraordinary thing about this exhibition that I have never seen in my life before. Over the course of little more than a year Mestrom has invented four totally different and original bodies of work, each enough in themselves to sustain most artists for a lifelong career. There are the delightfully irreverent marble heads, capable of working on just about any scale. Similarly there is the clay still life works and the natural fibre wall hanging/rugs, all perfect and extendable. The set of small slot-together bronze Picasso/Calders set up on a low table top are possibly a light hearted dig at Caro’s table sculptures but their implications are profound. To get a closer look at them I got down to their level and discovered that the table had become a plaza inhabited by very engaging monumental public sculptures. They were probably little cardboard studies for the “Weeping Woman”.

The fundamentals of art that have been abused, mutilated, tortured and wrongly imprisoned flock to Mestrom like refugees to our shore. These, she mothers back to life with all the care and consideration they dearly deserve. Like anthropologists and the inquisition, she can only ever interpret through the ears and eyes of her own time and culture.

Clive Murray-White 2013

A review by Clive Murray-White of The Internal Logic, an exhibition by Sanné Mestrom at the Latrobe Regional Gallery running from 19 October 2013 – 2 February 2014

Art: a schizotypal disorder, no cure

Clive Murray-White

"By doing the "Bourriaud" dance the forest demonstrates ways of living 

and models of action within the existing real."

Last night while watching television I saw a news item about a fat guy who successfully sued his doctor for letting him get so fat. It made me think a lot about the tendency in our society to see all sorts of things as illnesses that are caused by neglectful professionals. So if fatness can be an illness so can art! Just as the fat person can't stop eating we can't stop making art. Society cares more about fat people than artists, it's just not right.

For most of my life when people have said, "You are so talented, aren't you lucky?" I reply, "I see it more as a terminal disease than anything else." Well its confirmed now, its even got a proper medical name - Schizotypy, and I'm relieved but also just a little grumpy because to cover their tails the researchers are calling it a good kind of madness.

A rewarding article on the subject is: 'Flow" and Psychosis in the Artist's Experience - Scott Barry Kaufman, PhD - Huffpost 03/13/11.

But all this has got me thinking about who I could sue, my secondary school is first on the list they should have noticed the symptoms and done something about it when I was found unconscious after hemorrhaging whilst I drove myself to complete the school play backdrop - instead they strongly encouraged my art. So far my sue list includes, schools, individual teachers, governments, doctors, art critics, other artists, gallery staff, corporations, several universities and a healthy number of extremely wealthy collectors!!!

Many of the consequences of being an artist impact on families just as badly as gambling or alcoholism, both deemed illnesses now, but no! there has been no effort from Government agencies to offer us support, there's not even counselling services. Instead they encourage us to strive more and feed our addiction/illness to our own detriment.

The strangest thing about this disease called art is that it often makes you feel so unbelievably well.

McClelland Gallery, Fed Square.... home at last

So much has been happening lately that I neglected to post pictures of Sara Delaney - a head of her time in her new garden setting here at the Cowwarr Art Space. She looks happy that she's not still travelling around the place. 

She's been the test bed for many of my recent ideas, especially those to do with making sculpture that relates to people instead of buildings or spaces, the theory seems to have a lot to do with how it makes contact with the ground - if a sculpture is bolted down hard on a solid plinth it becomes part of the built environment - if its got plenty of air under it seems to join in with all the temporary things that people bring into a place. 

It also becomes a nice sustainability metaphor in that it goes out of its way to have the very smallest footprint or contact with the ground, and, by inference, is going to cause minimal inconvenience to anything that shares the environment with it. It even becomes excitingly democratic because instead of dominating the environment, as many/most sculptures do, it just lets everything be itself and do its own thing.

Muse meets Museum

Exactly a week ago today my latest exhibition, Museum opened at the Gippsland Art Gallery in Sale - and what with having to be constantly vigilant watching out for the huge, nearly 80,000 hectare, fire that wanders at will around in the mountains near us I've almost forgotten that my exhibition was on at all. The wretched arsonist that lit 4 fires in the town the other day didn't help either.

So I'm indulging myself today by concentrating on my memories rather than the fires. This show could have backfired badly, we'd bumped the drama up to pretty high levels in the way we displayed it and if the actual sculptures weren't quite good enough the whole thing could have fallen flat. 

Iris Bendor, the muse/model flew in from Alice Springs for the book launch and to see for the first time what I'd done to her! Just imagine having 7 different stone versions of you all staring at you at the same time - it could have been a pretty emotional moment for her or worse it could have made her quite angry, but fortunately, no, it didn't happen.

During dinner, however, she did tell me about a most unexpected experience she had while sitting in amongst her lookalikes. They became the women in her family and all had a nice little chat!

All photos are of "Flying Mountain-i"