Upper Gallery view towards the entrance
Ignoring the slippery meaning of ” visual awkwardness” the aim that it samples an exploration is perfectly achieved by all the exhibits. Moreover it includes not just visual awkwardness, the sound gets involved with a force, as does the relationship between humanity and habitats. The work of 14 architects and artists fills (overfills) the Tall and Upper Galleries at the MAC . John Walter’s proposal was selected from 125 submissions for 2017 Hayward Touring Curatorial Open. The artist/curator presents the curating of this exhibition as a follow up to his PhD research.
On my first visit the two very loud neighbouring sounds overwhelmed my hearing/viewing in the Tall Gallery. One was the installation by Benedict Drew (image below) the other , in the next space, oversized cards. boards and music by a group Plastique Phantastic.
Benedict Drew, A Dyspraxit Techno, 2017, Tall Gallery
Plastique Fantastique, fragment of the installation
On my second visit the decibels were markedly lower.
Tall Gallery view from the entrance
Thank you, MAC.
Comments on Facebook included several younger visitors loving the show without reservation. To attract those who otherwise do not visit art exhibition is – in this case- wonderfully connected to a question what is art for – these works of art and their curator answers loudly: for aesthetic experience.
Even if the artist/curator, John Walter( b 1978) admits that it is a mission driven exhibition:”… to privilege shonkiness over other aesthetic forms that have dominated recent visual culture…”( see the Gallery handout)
That carries a responsibility to ensure that there is no confusion or equivocation what each exhibit foregrounds by its own awkwardness. This is safeguarded by an idiosyncratic grouping and separation, almost as if reading Timaeus on sameness and difference, and, the aesthetic experiences a viewer has before coming to this display. Eg. If you have no memory of soft sculpture by Claes Oldenburg (1929) and Coosje van Bruggen
Claes Oldenburgh, Cravate sculpture, 2010, SF MOMA
you may accept the ckaim that Cosima von Bonin
Cosima von Bonin, Oysters
is “one of the most influential artists in Germany” and that her art ” mocks the pomposity of the process of viewing art” and “pits itself against the slick production values of much contemporary art” (quotes from the gallery handout pp1 and 2).
Oldenburgh appears also as a predecessor to Las Vegas based Justin Favela’s Floor Nachos.
The gallery notes state that the exhibition is a celebration of “shonkiness”, employing it for critical purposes that include questioning the cultural status quo. It helpfully lists means employed to achieve this: “craft badness, mistakes, glitches, tears, precarity, fragility, amateurism…irreverence and visual awkwardness”. That pluralism is not a problem – the problem is what status quo in the culture it questions, and does it question at all or rather represent it.
One possible answer includes the experience that vulgarity and bombastic attitude offers satisfying aesthetic experience to some and not to the rest. Be it Biedermeier or kitsch or blatantly commercial seduction. Variants of all three are present, and it is not a new way of thinking. Just another application of the old. As always it polarises visitors – who excavate what they prefer and not necessarily why. The copious notes and the curator’s video lecture both shy away of identification of the reason for this particular questioning. It is as if the Stalin and Zhdanov theory of reflexion was being given new lease of life. What else would you expect from a challenge to the “late western capitalism” mentioned several times as the target?
Arakawa and Gins, Inflected arcade house
The two architects made the above design of a house expecting it to have soothing, healing influence on the brains of the users. Utopia coupled with awkwardness? Possibly, but the visual tenor of the above is that of maze, of labyrinth for getting lost, for failure to find easily both entrance and exit, for endless detours and search, i.e. dysfunctional habitat, a multicursal puzzle. Alternatively – if i read the green rectangle as a door I come soon at another green rectangle on the left which prevents me to meaningfully occupy it. Consequently, it frustrates every expectation I may have about a home.
By chance this appears in my inbox a few days ago.
“Critical perspectives on the discourse surrounding artistic research might be argued to already be too formulaic or self-defeating. Making a case for its own institutional legitimacy could unwittingly reinforce some of the very things artistic research aims to critique.”
… It moves onto more esoteric points that may or may not become apparent to a visitor of the “Shonki”:
” Yet such onto-epistemological paradoxes can offer a rich territory for exploration along with generative practices that involve reflexivity, automorphogenesis, and recursive feedback loops. In recognising auto-cannibalism as an analogy for broader socio-political and environmental concerns, one of the challenges for artistic research is to respond imaginatively to the dynamic tensions between self-destruction and regeneration.” (from the invitation to 9th SAR-International Conference on Artistic Research planned for 2018)
The gallery handout defines “Shonky” term thus: “…corrupt, bent, shoddy, unreliable or cobbled together..” significantly it adds “ It is a form of making that purposefully pits itself against the slick production values of much contemporary art and transgresses accepted boundaries of taste within late Western capitalism”.
The assumption that the awkwardness transgresses accepted boundaries of taste of current western society is only a conjecture, not an established evidence. The slang word – as any word- has both narrow meaning and flexible range of meanings , and as such does not align with art practices in this exhibition any more than with those elsewhere, documented and accessible even online.
Beryl Cook, Tea Party, 1988
Freewheeling. amorphous, can still pair with energy, empathy and inventiveness without preference for any of the meaning of that slang word.
Fernando Botero, Mona Lisa Aged Twelve, 1959
A work of art wiggles out of any narrow category with an ease of an invisible chameleon combined with a serpent. Not in vain Antoin Artauld compared art to a plague.
Niki de Saint Phalle (1930 – 2002)
Niki de Saint Phalle used to shoot art objects before she settled on the a mixture of the phantastic like in a Juan Miro and earth bound like in a Pablo Picasso. Well known to any visitor looking at the the fountain near Pompidou centre in Paris she has been a building blog of the cultural status quo which this exhibition aims to subvert. If people perceive it as that challenge – they are not likely challenging the same cultural status quo. In turn, this is an unintended fate of this exhibition that it both confirms and questions various sets of aesthetic categories, including the awkward. There is nothing unexpected in that, given that system of art changes place to place, time to time, and not in a simple vertical line as envisaged, for example, by Marinetti.
Panem et circenses come to mind on entering the multicoloured Upper Gallery – manifesting in the distribution of opening ceremony drinks by the artist/curator. He favours the practice of a sculptor/jeweller/performance artist Andrew Logan (b 1945), whose portrait of Molly Parkin (1988) oversees the space.
“they are goudy and gorgeous- full of colour, bejewelled and visual glorious”
(Gallery handout)
Logan’s exhibits appear distributed in several places in both galleries. In the Upper Gallery his hard high definition objects forge an exchange with equally determined and colourful but soft objects by Kate Lepper. She includes pre-owned materials, like dry leaves by nature and plastic by people. No equilibrium attempted.
The other insistent memory is of too loud exhibits in the Tall Gallery. Indeed, the status quo of current visual art questions its insecurity to stay silent. When Denis Donoghue thought and wrote about the Anxious object (Reid Lectures, 1982) he considered art objects like A Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, silent insecurity about identity. With the increase of sound/noise and words – the visual thoughts are offered a help they do not need. A help which decreases the “mute poetry” – usurping the precious domain of visual arts.
That visual thinking is fully engaged by Niki de Saint Phalle, Kate Lepper, Duggie Fields. Cosima von Bonin and in the rather wonderfully playful installation by Tim Spooner. Cosima von Bonin successfully reworks common expectation of a low relief in stone or metal by a collage of soft materials. Spooner affords his constructions vulnerable absence of certainty, by irregular animation, including falling. His small black objects animate into a world of animals, cuddly and benign. Or not? Sadly, neither MAC not the artist website have images of this installation. Instead -I copy his statement:
“I am interested in ways we try to explain the world: metaphysics and creation myths. My own approach to the mystery is to experiment with how materials behave, to get a better understanding of them. From these I construct collections of objects which come together into ideas for possible universes.” (http://b-side.org.uk/artists/tim-spooner)
I looked up other exhibitions of Louise Fishman (b 1939) to compare those exhibited here with the rest. These two rectangles are exceptionally vacuous in comparison- these paintings do not represent her dominant strength, so in that sense they challenge her habitual take on abstract gestural painting.
Andrew Logan (left) ; Louise Fishman (right)
On the other side of the curtain with Hundertwasser’s facade , Tim Spooner’s kinetic and inflatable objects share their endearing humour and vulnerability with ease and elegance that mitigates against any pedestrian awkwardness. Their sincerity of being playful does not extend to revelation, they guide some secrets with sophisticated resolve.
Since John Walter insisted on Shonky as an umbrella term – it may unfairly dismiss the more important and valuable thesis, which comes directly from the exhibits: tolerance of differences, freedom and sincere co-operation. Not so much of any ideology – rather on the essence of art – the aesthetic function. Jan Mukarovsky famously defined it as transparent (in 1938 essay Aesthetic Function …. accessible in English on Google Books) capable of appearing as different qualities to different viewers in different historical periods. Well – not too far from phenomenology, isn’t it ?
This edition of the aesthetics of awkwardness reminded me of this:
“I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself,” said Oldenburg, “that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.” (https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/oldenburg/
Images courtesy of MAC and Simon Mills.
Slavka Sverakova 