Témoins oculaires: Isabelle Cornaro

Isabelle Cornaro presents a series of film set-like tableaux at Spike Island, but the stages are filled with trinkets and tools rather than thespians.

At Isabelle Cornaro’s exhibition Témoins oculaires (translation: eyewitness) on display at Spike Island I find myself standing in front of a self-contained, miniature film set. Its base is raised above the gallery’s concrete floor and is painted and elegant deep blue to match the back wall of the stage, which, although it stands about 7ft tall, is dwarfed by the warehouse-like ceiling in the Spike Island gallery space (Scenes # 4, 2015).

Elvis at the O2

From Memphis to Greenwich.

This exhibition of Elvis memorabilia from the Presley family’s Graceland archive is the biggest ever staged in Europe with many of the objects leaving Graceland for the very first time. There is however one very big problem, the O2 is not in Memphis, Tennessee.

Visiting Graceland, the home that Elvis very proudly bought in 1957, is an awe-inspiring experience for any Elvis fan. The house is as it was the day Elvis died in 1978, giving it a uniquely melancholic aura. Its location on the edge of the once prosperous, hard-edged, city of Memphis with its musical history of blues, rock’n’roll and soul infuses the experience with authenticity. The O2 on the other hand is a corporate hulk of a place in southeast London, housing soulless restaurant chains and reunions of past-their-sell-by-date bands. You might think that the ‘give us your money’ aesthetic of the O2 is completely in line with the money making machine that is Elvis Presley Enterprises. Elvis is worth much more dead than he ever was alive and Graceland itself is actually encased in a shopping mall that sells every conceivable shape of Elvis merchandise. But there is a difference. The idea of ‘Elvis’ and his huge appeal to young people was fundamental to the mass commercialisation of pop in the 1950s – the story of Elvis is the story of exploitation. Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, spotted the financial rewards of merchandise very early on and issued a multitude of licences to allow the use of the Presley name and image. Some of these charm bracelets, lipsticks and bubble gum cards can be seen inside a glass case at the O2.

Love is Enough: Warhol and Morris

The subjects of this exhibition are an odd couple by any definition. Cathy Lomax's verdict: less chalk and cheese, more green and pleasant consumerism.

Separated by time, country and ideology, Warhol and Morris are seemingly a very disparate pair. But what is interesting about this show at Modern Art Oxford, which was thoughtfully curated by Jeremy Deller, is how many similarities they actually have. 

Key to this is the all-encompassing ideologies that both men were driven by. Morris and his group of collaborators, which included pre Raphaelite painters Burne-Jones and Rossetti, shared a vision of a pre industrial-revolution society built on craftsmanship and an appreciation of the beauty of natural forms. Morris was a socialist who wanted to create rewarding environments for his workers and famously said, ‘you should have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful’ – he created all manner of decorative objects including paintings and tapestries. 

Suspicion: narrative painting at the Jerwood Space

Mary Mercer wanted to be ‘spellbound’ by the painting at Suspicion. Instead she found some ‘rich and strange’ work which was let down by a boringly conventional hang.

Kate Lyddon, Man Vs Wheel Vs Woman Vs Beast, 2014, 

oil, acrylic and collage on canvas, 150x120cm (x2)

The Suspicion show at the Jerwood Space was something that I wanted to see. The title which could have come from the Elvis song but just as satisfyingly comes from the Hitchcock film, had been trailed by some tempting images – shiny marble heads by Damien Meade and weeping Victorian ladies by Simon Linke. It was probably always going to be hard to live up to this expectation.

Schizo-Culture: Cracks in the Street at Space

Excavated for your viewing pleasure – works from the seminal semiotext(e) event. Presented alongside contemporary responses to the thematics of societal control, penal discipline and anti-psychiatry. Alicia Rodriguez investigates.

In 1975, an early incarnation of the Semiotext(e) group organised an event that brought together counter-cultural icons and philosophers to engage in discussion surrounding anti-psychiatry, societal control and penal discipline.

Schizo-Culture: On Prisons and Madness included contributions from Michel Foucault, John Cage, R.D. Laing and William S. Burroughs. Addressing a number of socio-political issues, the event itself has achieved near mythical status in Semiotext(e)’s archive and has informed generations of creative, critical thinking.

This archive is excavated for a new project titled Schizo-Culture: Cracks in the Street, which takes place at SPACE in Hackney, alongside a selection of new works commissioned as a response to the original, seminal event.

Too Much

Alicia Rodriguez visits Leicester's Two Queens where their show Too Much combines kitchen-sink drama, social media, dance music and an eminently decipherable Rorschach blot test.

Rósza Farkas

Too Much deals with excess and overflow. The joined-up nature of internet browsing and the digestion of technology provide a starting point for the gushy, the viscous and the emotional throughout Two Queens’ most recent output.

The group show is in part a response to the re-launch of the city’s collection of German Expressionist paintings alongside a Georg Baselitz exhibition at the New Walk Museum; the show satisfies a hunger for work laden with feelings, informed by critical theory and contemporary political culture.

Rósza Farkas’s handwritten text appears, in fact, to have been scrawled on the back of a used Georg Baselitz poster, and quotes his now infamous, if somewhat delusional, claim that 'women don’t paint very well.'

Miscommunication

I am not convinced of the ability of any painting to communicate the complex intent of the maker/artist. I think any system of communication suffers an inherent loss of meaning when transmitted from the emitter (the one speaking/painting) to the receiver (the one listening/viewing). 

These losses are minimal in a language like mathematics and can be controlled in philosophy. When you come to poetry the gulf is growing, but I think that that next step to the language or languages of art creates untenable losses. When so much is unclear, it loses its ability to function as more than a sign, like the hand gestures used between drivers trying to communicate, which can so easily be misunderstood.

There are often miscommunications in everyday speech when trying to communicate about something very ordinary that might have happened that day. This becomes commonplace when we are trying to discuss more abstract ideas. You see it when there is a debate between two opposing parties on the news. They are arguing and accusing each other, but it seems that have completely missed the intent of their opponent and are, in a sense, talking past each other. Saying this, if we ask questions and are supplied with answers, we can generally work our way through to an understanding of the other person's view, if not an acceptance of it.

In the diagram that follows I have laid out the process by which I think that an artist's original idea/intent finds its new form in the mind of the viewer. This is not an attempt to analyse the whole viewing experience, but focuses only on the ability of a painting to communicate the particular intent of the artist. It therefore does not touch upon the pleasure that can be found in aesthetics or the purposeful empty spaces that can be included in art for the viewer to ‘occupy’. 

It is also worth noting that many of the stages I include are not necessarily experienced consciously. It can even be the case that the stages are missed out completely or repeated. My main focus for this study is painting, and if I refer to an object or art, it is within this context.