Painting the People

'Art is not something to, you know, superimpose over everyday life if it’s any good it has always come from everyday life.' 

Jack Smith

Dave

ACTION! 

Melancholy, jangly-jazz music underscores moodily monochrome everyday is like Sunday tracking shots. Buses drive through the Maudlin Street backstreets of industrial Northern towns where Tom Courtney’s skinny borstal boy is long distance running through loneliness to dissent. Whilst  Bardo blonde-beehive-backcombed, mini-skirting, stiletto-cobblestone-clicking teen-girls rage against their apron-pinny-ed matriarchs. All the fragmentary mise-en-scenery of post war Kitchen Sinkery, that much Morrisey loved, lost land, when a Working Class hero was still something to be has long since faded to grey.

New York: Art City (Part 2 - Escape from New York)

Garageland writer Debbie Ainscoe visits New York. On the second leg of her trip she investigates the confluence of artistic invigoration, gentrification and rent hikes, crossing the bridge from Manhattan to Williamsburg and then Bushwick. (Part 1 – Following the Art)

As a visitor to New York in this short time I saw a very clear view of a pervasive attitude that is being allowed to happen in cities globally. And only in New York does the creative element raise itself so sharply. 

Due to a culturally rich and vibrant past, and a historic encouragement of the arts, this has been the basis of the solid New York art market that exists today within the global one. Small wonder it is such an intense draw for so many artists now.

I took a trip to Williamsburg and Bushwick in Brooklyn via the Lower East side. Its galleries are only a hop, skip from Williamsburg’s bright, young trendy professionals over the river. 

New York: Art City (Part 1 - Follow the Art)

Garageland writer Debbie Ainscoe visits New York. On the first leg of her trip she searches for the city's creative edge, following the art through Central Manhattan to Chelsea and then North to Harlem.

From Chelsea High Line

I visited New York.

And I specifically visited New York for its art. A visit, that on reflection confirmed to me that this is indeed one hell of a place to see it. And yes, people will disagree about the relevance of some, stacked up amongst all the art business hype. Which I get too. But from where I stood, I was pretty much blown away, and not least with the attitude of the artists and gallerists I met. 

Aurélien Froment's Fröbel Fröbeled at Spike Island

Garageland reviewer Travis Riley pays a visit to Bristol’s harbourside to take the benefits of the thoroughly un-English weather, and what better way to enjoy the summer sun than indoors playing with building blocks designed by a German educationalist. 

The walls of the high-ceilinged, Spike Island gallery space are dotted with photo-realistic pencil drawings in thin, white frames.

One series depicts wooden blocks in various formations; simple, cuboid children’s toys in little stacks. The images are central on the white pages, and no evidence is given of the surface upon which the wood rests or any space that it might inhabit – the blocks are isolated in the mode of a study or schematic. They are filled out in soft-pencil tone that perfectly captures the shade of the wood grain.

Holly Antrum's A Diffuse Citizen at Grand Union

At Holly Antrum's Grand Union solo exhibition Alicia Rodriguez observes an archive, not a remote memory of something past, but a moving catalogue of a collaboration still unfolding.

A pair of travelling eyeholes allow playful glimpses of floorboards, white walls and a collection of abstract paintings. The gentle and sporadic sound of a jazz saxophone accompanies little ovals of vision. Later, the same paintings can be seen in a studio. Back in the gallery, the artist thumbs through a book resting on her lap. She recites an experimental sound poem from 1964.

The Voice and the Lens

Joe Turnbull reports from The Voice and the Lens festival (Whitechapel Gallery and Rich Mix) where he finds himself immersed in a Divine Comedy of tattoos, back slang and post-industrial rave/pop.

The advent of sound recording and motion pictures are two of the most beguiling developments in the last 150 years. Undoubtedly these technologies – which both came to fruition separately in the late 19th century – changed the face of the cultural and artistic landscape irrevocably. It took almost another half century for the two to be formally combined and the western cultural tradition hasn't looked back since. 

The Voice and the Lens curated by Sam Belinfante and Ed McKeon was a weekend-long festival exploring the relationship between the human voice and moving image, encompassing film screenings, live performances and talks delivered by vocalists and multimedia artists.

The Human Factor at Hayward Gallery

Mary-Claire Wilson is welcomed into the Hayward Gallery by a ballerina with a pistol flanked by two fearsome warriors. And they say manners are dead.

Hayward gallery is usually ten leaps ahead of the more mainstream Tate Modern. At the Hayward, fresh, thought-provoking and superbly curated shows that use both interior and exterior spaces to dramatic effect are the norm. Don’t be put off by the weak and irrelevant Jeff Koons sculpture, Bear and Policeman (1988) that advertises the Human Factor, incidentally one of the oldest pieces here. This exhibition will deliver thrills and spills to all.