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In London until tonight for the RCA show and a couple more exhibitions. Yesterday was Sunday. Barbican day to check out Radical Nature. Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009. "Yawn! Do we really need to read about yet another exhibition around that theme?" will you ask. Yes! It is a great show. A bit on the spectacular side but really intelligent, i'll detail that later on this week. Not because i'm a big fan of suspense (i always pause thrillers and go online to see how it ends) but because i'm short on time. Here's a project i liked a lot:
Danish artist and environmentalist Tue Greenfort's series, Daimlerstrasse 38 (2001) lured foxes living in the industrial area in eastern Frankfurt with frankfurter sausages towards a hidden camera.
Greenfort made "traps" using garbage he found in the area. He put a camera inside. At the other end of the camera flex is the sausage. When a fox bit in the sausage, it activated the camera and made an auto-portrait of itself. One week later the animals had learned to eat the sausage without being photographed. |
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As i mentioned earlier, finally got to visit The Wellcome Collection, a museum in London dedicated to health and medicine. The Collection is based on the artefacts amassed through the years by Sir Henry Wellcome. This turn-of-the century pharmaceutical entrepreneur and collector was hoping to create a Museum of Man one day. The Wellcome Collection features a permanent exhibition of his artifacts as well as temporary exhibitions. They are spectacularly fascinating and have the good taste of mixing scientific and artistic displays.
When i checked the place out, War and Medicine was on the programme. It was, to say the least, quite graphic. Not grossly graphic but elegantly upsetting. As James Peto, the curator of the show, explained, the necessity to repair and heal has to adjust constantly to advancements in the art of hurting and killing: "I suppose what the exhibition is really about is the struggle of doctors, nurses, surgeons and research scientists to keep up with the pace of development of weapons and armaments," Peto says. However, progresses do not prevent the existence of disheartening paradoxes: "Survival statistics among soldiers are hugely improved, but civilian casualties of terrorist attacks and bombs apparently intended for soldiers seem to be growing."
Concentrating on the modern era, the exhibition explores the intimate relationship between warfare and medicine, beginning with Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War in the 1850s, and continuing through to today's conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. The prologue of the show is a video installation by David Cotterrell who spent a month in Afghanistan gaining first-hand experience of life beyond the front line, after he realized that he is part of a generation that not only was not required to join the military but that is also the last one to have living relatives who experienced the Second World War.
He observed and captured the daily life of soldiers through film and photography that immerse viewers in the realities of contemporary battlefield medicine. War and Medicine displays all sorts of memorabilia: old posters warning soldiers against STD, gas masks, bandage with instructions printed on it, old surgical instruments, tin facial prostheses, a brain specimen damaged by a shell splinter and kept in formol, photographs, a portable liturgical kit to enable military chaplain to deliver the last rites, etc.
One of the core discoveries of the show for me was that each major conflict has stimulated great advances in a particular branch of medicine. For example, a series of photos showing the result of pioneering skin grafts on a soldier with a missing nose attests that a priority of WWI was facial reconstruction.
WWI brought soldiers disfigured by shrapnel from exploding shells and gunshot wounds. Facial reconstruction would start in a rudimentary fashion with tin face masks. Made of thin copper, the mask were sculpted to match the portraits of the men in their pre-war normality. They were then painted and finished while the patient wore it, in order to most accurately match the tone of the flesh with the enamels (via.) On Project Facade is a stunning silent film clip that shows Anna Coleman Ladd and Francis Derwent Wood crafting and fitting tin facial prosthetics to injured servicemen circa 1916. Surgeon Harold Gillies, considered to be the father of plastic surgery, persuaded the army to establish a purpose-built site that would treat facial injury in a more sophisticated way. The Queen's Hospital, Sidcup opened in 1917. Gillies and his colleagues developed many techniques of plastic surgery; more than 11,000 operations were performed on over 5,000 men (mostly soldiers with facial injuries).
The most fascinating story is the one of Harold Gillies' German counterpart, Jacques Joseph who treated many soldiers who had received facial wounds during World War I. In the 1920s, he set up a private practice where he developed and performed rhinoplasty on many of Berlin's Jewish community (to which he also belonged). He would sometimes even 'fix' the noses of poor Jews for free helping them to "vanish" into German society. Joseph died in 1934 but his reputation survived World War II, partly due to the many rhinoplasty instruments he designed, which still bear his name today.
At the time, plastic surgery was much less a matter of vanity than an attempt to cure the psychological depression that arose with a loss of the appearance of a bomb-damaged soldier. The section of the exhibition dedicated to psychological trauma was actually where one could see the most unsettling material. Extracts of a film shot right after WW2 show soldiers who were released from the army because of emotional difficulties. Titled Let There Be Light and directed by John Huston follows U.S. soldiers from World War II as they are treated in a clinic for a condition then described as "psychoneurotic" illness, (commonly known today as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder PTSD). You can find extracts of the movie on youtube. The film was commissioned by the US but the way it portrayed the suffering of shell-shocked soldiers was so uncompromising that the movie remained banned until 1981. "What this also highlights is how far we've come in terms of taking psychological issues seriously - at the time, these men were referred to as 'psycho neurotics'. It's the same condition that led to men being executed for deserting their posts in the First World War," says Peto. And now ladies and gentlemen, a mix-match of images from the image gallery of the show:
The original version of this cotton bandage was designed by Professor Friedrich von Esmarch, who had been Surgeon General to the German army during the Franco-German War (1870-1871). This later example, designed for use on the battlefield, could be used open or folded and applied in 32 different ways as per the printed instructions on its surface.
In order to accommodate the massive numbers of casualties in World War I, numerous buildings were requisitioned as military hospitals, including mansion houses and casinos. One of the most elaborate hospitals was the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, which opened its doors to hundreds of wounded Indian troops returning from the battlefields in France.
In the aftermath of World War I, eight million veterans returned home permanently disabled. Social reintegration presented a range of issues from employment to disability rights and war pensions. Like many charities extending their remit in the wake of the war, the YMCA set up an Employment Department that found jobs for 38 000 ex-servicemen. Image galleries. On the homepage: Chinook helicopter, 2007. Credit:David Cotterrell, 2008. |
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A month ago, i visited War and Medicine, a unique exhibition that explores the relationship between warfare and medicine, beginning with the disasters of the Crimean War and continuing through to today's conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Proper report will follow later on but i thought this image deserved a post on its own.
War and Medicine closed on February 15, at the Wellcome Collection in London. |
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Before i dedicate some blog space to the ARCO art fair that just ended in Madrid, i would like to squeeze in a couple of lines about the Tate Triennial which opened on February 3 at Tate Britain in London.
Reviews from Brit mainstream newspapers were everything but overwhelmingly enthusiastic. I for one found the exhibition very energizing, exuberant and joyful. And how could i not? The curator of the Triennial this year is Nicolas Bourriaud, the French cultural theorist and co-founder of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, an exhibition space which has reconciliated many people with contemporary art. Altermodern declares Postmodernism dead (in case you still had any doubt about that), and that a new form of art is emerging in the 21st century. Bourriaud christens it Altermodern! Altermodern, the 'alternative modern' is the product on non-stop communication, globalization and new forces that shape the way artists operate today. If early twentieth-century Modernism is characterised as a broadly Western cultural phenomenon, and Postmodernism was shaped by ideas of multi-culturalism, origins and identity, Altermodern is expressed in the language of a global culture. Altermodern artists channel the many different forms of social and technological networks offered by rapidly increasing lines of communication and travel in a globalised world. Will Altermodern bring Bourriaud the fame and admiration he earned back in 1998 with a book that coined Relational Aesthetics for art practices based on the inter-human relations they represent, generate or trigger? Probably not. Will crisis have an impact on or even put a stop to the Altermodern movement and give way to something different? Jury is still out.
I wouldn't spread my enthusiasm on everything i saw at the Triennial (damn! what were those dreadful animatronics? Do artists need to make animatronics?) but there were some great moments. On top of the list is The Russian Ending. Tacita Dean's series of photogravure etchings are based on postcards the artist found on a flea market. They are deeply tragic: ship wrecking, explosion, death, funeral, etc. The title of the series refers to early 20th century practice in Denmark to make different endings for films exported to the Russian and American markets; Russians responded well to death and disaster, while Americans favoured a happy ending. Annotated with handwritten "stage directions," prints with titles like Ship of Death, The Wrecking of the Ngahere, The Tragedy of Hughesovka Bridge and So They Sank Her! are re-purposed as storyboards for disastrous finales of films that never were.
(more images.) The story has it that Charles Avery was thrown out of Central St Martins after just six months, and that the artist spent the ensuing decade pretending to be a 19th century explorer discovering an imaginary island. The Islanders emerges through made-up maps and landscape, sketches and sculptures of an imaginary population addicted to gin-pickled eggs and its cosmology and pantheon of gods. The island's creatures are obviously far from bland. The Tate was exhibiting one of them: the Aleph, an imposing creature that looks like some hybrid between an elephant and a man who isn't happy to be trapped in the skin of an elephant.
Bob and Roberta Smith's colourful, faux-retro works are transported into a storage room (open to the public) and replaced by a new version each Friday.
One of the best installations is without any doubt Lindsay Seer's cardboard cinema modeled on Thomas Edison's first film production studio Black Maria. What is screened inside the structure looks like nothing i've seen before. Extramission 6 (Black Maria) is an eerie docu-fiction exploring her childhood traumas and her desire to turn into a photo camera and subsequently a movie projector. Altermodern runs through April 26 at Tate Britain in London. |
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The South London Gallery in London is currently showing a brilliant video by Danish collective Superflex. Damn! did i have to walk to find that gallery! (thanks Gunnar for pointing me in the right direction.) Little did i know at the time that the artists had uploaded the film online:
As deeply rooted into economic and political awareness as ever, Superflex' latest opus, Flooded McDonald's is a 20 minute video that shows the model of a typical but empty McDonald's gradually being submerged with (collected than recycled) water. The work is both intensely dramatic and irresistibly funny. Flooded McDonald's goes beyond the usual fast food suspect. It hints at the consumer-driven power and influence, but also impotence, of large multinationals in the face of climate change. Unlike some documentaries on the same subject, the movie doesn't point an angry finger, it doesn't give lessons nor does it make you feel as guilty as sin. Instead, the film elegantly and comically allows you to draw your own conclusions. Flooded McDonald's is on view at The South London Gallery through March 1, 2009. Related: Open Source Beer. |
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I had seen the little creatures of Jon Pylypchuk in art fairs and catalogs in the past. I found them likeable enough, even more than that. This afternoon, i went to the Alison Jacques Gallery in London and here they were again. All together in a tender and brutish installation but also on paintings and collages. That's it. I'm officially besotted.
The title of the exhibition is Just sit back and recount the violence of one year is intriguing. Pylypchuk's sloppy little elephants, wild cats, snakes and other animals are spending a merry moment at the beach trashing their cans of beer on the sand and snorting voraciously cocaine from the belly of a big (and probably too drunk to notice) walrusy.
The press release says: Working across a range of media Pylypchuk populates his paintings, sculptures and films with a menagerie of dysfunctional furry creatures composed in various tableaux through which the artist examines the human condition. The mini dramas Pylypchuk stages always have wider philosophical implications for our ideas of love, rejection and pain. Typically humorous and cruel the titles of these works express the blackly ironic personal thoughts of Pylypchuk's protagonists.
On view at Alison Jacques Gallery in London through February 21, 2009. Upcoming: Jon Pylypchuk's first European solo survey show at the Städtische Ausstellungshalle, Münster (February 6 - May 3, 2009) ahead of his USA solo show at the Blaffer Gallery, The Art Museum of the University of Houston in September 2009. |
