A Virtual Reality Cosmos at the Serpentine

 Toby Upson visits the Serpentine to view Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s 'Alienarium 5'

 

I am a dreamy romantic; more drawn to Elio Pearlman (Call Me by Your Name) than Paul Atreides (Dune). That is, I like to be pushed into free flow through sublime affect, not guided to a beyond vis-à-vis spectacular narrative. It goes without saying, therefore, that I approached Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s current exhibition, Alienarium 5 at Serpentine’s south gallery, with a level of aesthetic reticence. Building upon Gonzalez-Foerster’s interest in science-fiction, as well as her previous exhibitions that question the psychological dimensions of one’s being, this exhibitonary environment, a gesamtkunstwerk perhaps, is billed as a site through which to ‘imagine possible encounters with extra-terrestrials.’ To reiterate, as someone not fond of the somewhat paradoxical composite, science-(and)-fiction, I find myself bracing teeth as I venture onto, into, and the beyond of (deep voice) Alienarium 5.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Alienarium, 2022. Produced by VIVE Arts and developed by Lucid Realities. Installation view, Alienarium 5 (Serpentine South, 14 April - 4 September 2022). Photo: Hugo Glendinning. © The artist and Serpentine, 2022

Set up as a cosmos of sorts, a solar system formed without a singular divine bang, Alienarium 5 is a constellation of collaborations and alien-corporealities brought into an orbit. Laid out spherically, the Sci-Fi connotation is omnipresent and perhaps a little too contrived. Indeed, focusing on each of the works-come-gestures that form this speculative planetary system, I sense a clash between the more narrative-based and the more mysteriously toned pieces. For example, as I sojourn around the exhibition’s press view, there is a rather long queue for Alienarium, 2022, a multi-user Virtual Reality experience, with no one curiously peeping through the tiny eyeholes of La Planète close (vision), 2021. Perhaps this is a sign of the times. Who needs to work at piecing together what we are seeing, being told, or experiencing, when we can plonk ourselves on a bench, plugin, and be guided towards an expanded understanding of ‘how we might relate to one another when untethered from our physical form.’ Conceptually, I find this notion of untethering uncomfortable. My critique of post-humanist postulations for something otherwise comes from the lack of real multi-sensory encounters I see mediums like VR offering to bodies; and importantly, the affective labour these encounters can provoke in a body. Now that is a far larger conversation, one nuanced by formalities in artistic media as well as by wider socio-cultural factors. It is a conversation, however, perhaps best entered into with Gonzalez-Foerster’s collaborator Paul B. Preciado and others from the fields of Queer and Black Studies (Jack Halberstam and Saidiya Hartman to name two other beautiful theorists). 

 

But let's backtrack; get up off that critical stool and feel what Gonzalez-Foerster’s experimental art universe has to offer. I mean, after all, I am a fan of neon (Alienarium 5 (Neon), 2022), perfume (Alienflowers (holorium), 2022), and pearlescent exhibition guides. 

Alienarium 5 exhibition guides. 

I stand, sit, and then stroll on a soft crackling amoeba. The gravity holding Alienarium 5’s cosmos together, Planet Carpet (Uranus), 2022, runs throughout the inside of the Serpentine’s exhibition space. As the name suggests, this carpet piece is based upon an image of the planet Uranus; one rendered here in psychedelic shades of electric blue and LSD orange. Perforated with glitchy pops, or spores, these colours and the weave of the carpet, echo the pixelated world of Alienarium, 2022, and indeed the central force around which the exhibition revolves, Metapanorama, 2022.

 

Unlike the computery narrative of her VR works, Metapanorama, a 360-degree collage with a soundscape by Julien Perez, leaves more room for bodily meanderings. Working from the historical panorama - a mode of display that provides ‘an unbroken view of the whole region surrounding an observer’ - this self-referential wave juxtaposes grainy images of human and non-human beings, organic and architectural references. Aesthetically, the collage recalls Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, with Perez’s added burps of fragmented Teletubby noise give this staged meta-world a sense of lightness; furthering its lyrical capaciousness. As a narrative tool, the panorama isn't new to Gonzalez-Foerster. In 2019, her panoramic collage, Volcanic Excursion (A Vision), exhibited at Secessions (Vienna), used images of human beings as starting point to lay out a cosmology of the artist’s role models, friends, and influences, establishing a field of meaning for her practice at that moment. Here, the panoramic mode functions in much the same way, and when paired with another work situated in the exhibition’s central chamber, Alienarium 5 (Bibliography), 2022,Metapanorama can be seen as a sun radiating life into different elements of the exhibition. 

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Martial Galfione and Mike Gaughan, Metapanorama, 2022. Installation view, Alienarium 5 (Serpentine South, 14 April - 4 September 2022). Photo: Hugo Glendinning. © The artist and Serpentine, 2022.

Gonzalez-Foerster's use of the collage as a device through which to create ‘extraordinary apparitions’ not only lies in the realms of the purely visual. Throughout Alienarium 5 an expanded notion of collage is used to bring differing historical references, ideas, forms of life and modes of artmaking in contact with one another; to allow new possible beings to be dreamt. To me, it seems fitting that this idea of a new possible and the display of such dreamings lies in proximity to the historical site of the Albertopolis - the antiquated name for this historical area of South Kensington; the site of the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, where the spectacle of new other worlds was laid out for a hungry Victorian public to consume. 

 

Tracing that sense of voyeuristic wonder through art-history, Gonzalez-Foerster appears to take a stop at Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés, 1946-66. In what is my favourite piece/planet in the solar system of Alienarium 5, La Planète close (vision), 2021, riffs off the Duchampian tableau vivant, inviting, nay implicating me as a viewer in a surrealist multisensory quisicality. Peeping through one of the eye holes cut into a mute mint green MDF wall, I spy a bulge of bark sprouting forth from a blaze of auburn hair. At once glistening, luscious and smooth, the scene appears to conceal something writhing just off out of sight; something just or about to happen. The scene reminds me of some of Gonzalez-Foerster’s filmic works, Cinema (QM.15), 2016, or some of the music videos she has produced with Julien Perez, under the title Exotourisme. Without sound nor movement, the sense of liveness I gleam from my peeping arrives through the olfactory. Spritzed with a specially produced, Barnabé Fillion (Apra Studios), fragrance, Alienflowers (holorium), 2022, provides a heady musk of fire and bean, cedar and fern, bracken just crunched. As with most fragrances, there is something beyond comprehension, to this sensorial encounter. For Gonzalez-Foerster, the pairing of the perfume and closeted space are meant to provoke a sense of edge, a seductive invitation to imagine possibilities beyond the chromatic universe rendered throughout Alienarium 5. 

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Mélanie Gerbeaux and Barnabé Fillion (Arpa Studios) La planète close (vision), 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris. Installation view, Alienarium 5 (Serpentine South, 14 April - 4 September 2022). Photo: Hugo Glendinning. © The artist and Serpentine, 2022.

Leaving the Serpentine, one more work holds me. In remembrance of the coming alien (Alienor), 2022, a sculptural collaboration with Paul B. Preciado, sprouts forth from the soil of Hyde Park, twisting like a tree root and forming what looks like a butterfly or a scientific diagram of a female sex. As an anthropomorphic sculpture with a pearlescent pink and yellow sheen, we are told the queer stature is more than a marker for something past, but a ‘portal, a site for transmission and an invitation to engage across time and space.’ Caught up in the curves of the work, I notice its surface dotted with ornately speckled ladybirds. Gorgeous: the ambivalence of nature. It's romantic. And I am back in my comfort zone. 

Toby Upson

 

 

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Alienarium 5

Serpentine South, London

until 4 September 2022

 

 In remembrance of the coming alien (Alienor), 2022

 

Putting the Fabulous into the Fantastical

 Alex Michon visits Fabulation at All Saints Cambridge 

 

‘So’, I ask, genuinely intrigued, ‘What does Fabulation mean?’ Toby Upson, one of the four exhibiting artists in this show gives me the somewhat enigmatic answer, that it could be ‘Doing whatever you want, whenever you want to do it!’. 

‘It’s such a great word’ I reply, ‘With just a hint of camp about it’

Upson smiles knowingly but our conversation is cut short as he gets distracted by one of the many visitors to the show and I move on with the distinct impression that he has more to tell me. Subsequent online searches define it as, ‘the act of relating false or fantastic tales or in literary criticism; a style of modern fiction, similar to magical realism’ But more of this later.

 

The exhibition’s venue, All Saints’ Church in Cambridge can truly be described as magical. Known as The Painted Church, designed by the architect G F Bodley around 1870 it is a notable example of both Gothic Revival and Arts and Crafts styles. This Grade 1 listed building ceased to be a place of worship in 1973 and has been under the care of the Churches Conservation Trust since 1981. 

Decoration in All Saints, Cambridge, photo Adrian Powter

The church is noted for its ornate decorated interior; the painted wall and ceiling decorations, were applied by the Leach Studio (one of the team of artists was David Parr, whose modest but lavishly decorated house is open to the public in Cambridge) and feature Pomegranates bursting with seeds, flowers running riot, and the repeated use of religious symbolism such as the sacred monogram and the fleur-de-lys, and the stained-glass east window was designed by Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris and Ford Madox Brown. The church is now used for both worship and non-religious events, such as concerts and this, its first art exhibition. Thus, on one of the first gloriously spring Saturdays in March, I find myself at Fabulation, interested to see how this mix of secular and sacred, old-school craft and contemporary art could possibly be played out. This two-for -one visual experience proves surprisingly serendipitous and a veritable treat for mind, eye, and dare I say soul.

Fabulation at All Saints, Cambridge (with work by Luke Burton), photo Adrian Powter

Each of the artist’s individual works responds to the venue in strikingly unexpected ways; subtly responding to the Painted Church without obviously calling attention to the mythologies therein, religious, or otherwise. Rather one must navigate the church’s interior coming across each new artist’s narratives in a cornucopic Alice in Wonderlandish fashion.

 

Toby Upson’s work in the exhibition is influenced by Oscar Wilde’s essay The Soul of Man under Socialism from 1891. In it Wilde expounds a libertarian socialist worldview with a critique of charity. I was shocked that I had never heard of this Wildean work. Morris’s socialism is, of course, well known and it is typical of Upson that he took a sidestep from making the more obvious link with Morris, introducing, this viewer at least, with a hitherto unknown side to Wilde.

Toby Upson, cite Oscar Wilde (1891), 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism' (in the Painted Church), 2022, varying lengths of nay and gold print 12mm tape cassette ribbon tape, gold-coloured safety pins, and church kneelers, photo Adrian Powter

Upson has taken snippets of text from the essay and printed them in gold on small blue satin ribbons which he has subtly attached to similarly coloured kneelers lined up in a pew at the entrance to the church. Once discovered, as they as so delicately and unobtrusively displayed, they sang to my soul! How wonderful, I thought, to have a remembrance of The Beatitudes with their original socialist intent in a church setting. These agitprop-like sayings such as, ‘The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is’, ‘In consequence of the existence of the private property, a great many people are enabled to develop a certain very limited amount of individualism’ and, ‘In the present state of things[...] the people who do the most harm are the people who try to do the most good’, suggested to me, not only a subtle dig at establishment do-goodery, but the call to arms for individualism echoed Toby’s original brief of ‘doing what you want whenever you wanted to!’ 

Toby Upson, cite Oscar Wilde (1891), 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism' (in the Painted Church), 2022, varying lengths of nay and gold print 12mm tape cassette ribbon tape, gold-coloured safety pins, and church kneelers

Luke Burton, John Ruskin Surrounded by I Sores, vitreous enamel on copper, photo Adrian Powter 

Luke Burton’s vitreous enamels on copper reminiscent of jewellery, archaeological fragments, miniature paintings and ex-voto offerings are little gem like finds surreptitiously and sometimes cheekily placed throughout various architectural niches within the church interior. The diminutive scale of these fictionally precious pieces, with their suggested critique of overblown grandness served as a respectful counterbalance to all the finery therein. A cigarette in an ashtray found nestling in a pulpit, suggesting the vicar had had a quick drag of a fag, and a group of ne’er-do-well choristers atop the organ, were particular favourites, adding a maverick touch of ‘carry on up the cathedral’ humour to the event.

Luke Burton, Choristers, vitreous enamel on copper

Cathy Lomax’s paintings, Five Saints, were made in response to the female saints depicted in the church’s stained-glass window. Lomax is known for her film paintings so her decision to cast her saints as film stars was no coincidence. Cinemas have often been compared to cathedrals with both suffering a similar trajectory of closures in the late 20th century. ‘Cinema had apostles. (It was like religion.)’ wrote Susan Sontag in ‘The Decay of Cinema’ in the New York Times. Similarly, Camille Paglia in an article for the Smithsonian writes,

 

 My first moments of enchantment by beauty occurred in a church and a movie theatre. The interior of St Anthony of Padua church in Endicott, New York […] was lined with richly coloured stained-glass windows and niches holding life-size plaster statues of saints in sumptuous robes or silver armour. Paying no attention to the action on the altar, I would stare transfixed at those glorious figures, which seemed alive. At the theatre downtown, I was mesmerized by the colossal Technicolor images of Hollywood stars, who seemed as numinous as living gods.

Cathy Lomax, Saint Catherine, 2022, oil on canvas, 60x45cm

  

Lomax’s paintings highlight this celebratory equivalence of worship. As a cineaste her painter-as-casting-director choices are far from arbitrary. St Catherine (of Alexandria) is ‘played’ by Kiki Layne, the African American actress known for her recent appearance in If Beale Street Could Talk. This is an important re-education, as coming from Alexandria, Catherine would obviously have been dark skinned. In the stained-glass window she is depicted as a floaty Pre-Raphaelite muse with no regard to her cultural heritage. Catherine was reputed to have been martyred around the age of 18 for her conversion to Christianity and yet her historical existence has recently been disputed. In her book The Cult of St Katherine of Alexandria in Early Medieval Europe, Christine Walsh writes, ‘the cult of St Katherine of Alexandria originated in oral traditions from the 4^th century persecutions of Christians in Alexandria. There is no evidence that Katherine herself was a historical figure and she may well have been a composite drawn from memories of women persecuted for their faith.’ This historical mythmaking adds another interesting layer to Lomax’s saintly re-inventions. Accompanying her larger paintings Lomax has added some ex-voto offerings; smaller paintings located around the pews. These give further insights into the often-absurd things that the saints have become known for. For instance, Hats for St Catherine relates to the French tradition in which unwed women of 25, known as Catherinettes, wear richly decorated bonnets on the day of her feast. 

Cathy Lomax, Ex-Votos for Saint Catherine (Eyes, Hats, Spiral Staircase), 2022, oil on card

Ingrid Bergman, (who played a nun in the Bells of St Marys (1994) is the model for virgin and martyr St Dorothy, shown in her painting surrounded by flowers since she is the patron saint of gardeners. Although nothing akin to martyrdom, Bergman suffered a fair bit of persecution herself when she had an affair with the director Roberto Rossellini. The star was denounced on the floor of the US Senate, with senator Johnson saying that she had perpetrated ‘an assault on the institution of marriage’, and even calling her ‘a powerful influence for evil’. Lomax’s other saint translations are Linda Darnell as St Barbara, Kirsten Dunst as St Agnes, and Jennifer Jones (who played the eponymous saint in The Song of Bernadette (1943)) as St Radegund. Although ostensibly playful, these paintings embody a layering of both cultural and psychological signifiers. Without getting bogged down in quasi-religiosity they seem to speak about desire and a deep-seated ‘we are all of us in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars’ need to worship something unattainable, glorious, and miraculous. Lomax’s saints also contain a touch of latent proto-feminist appeal, her young women who have been chopped about, burnt and misogynistically murdered are here stripped of the tortuous garb of their horrific histories, portrayed instead as strong and independent women with often dreamy yet steely gazes.

Jennifer Caroline Campbell, (Satellite) Prancing Deity Offering Bowl, Azure Valley, Eastern Region 2680-2715 CE, paper pulp, acrylic paint, plaster, clay, wire mesh, pendant, sand, neoprene, string, silk clay, diamond shaped rock, photo Adrian Powter  

Cambridge native Jennifer Caroline Campbell was one of the prime movers in getting this exhibition to fruition. In briefly describing her Azzurian Worlds works to me at the exhibtion Campbell stated that ‘fictional seemed like a way to go with Utopian thinking which, for me, was better than the political’. For Campbell, making things with her hands is a way of developing and re-shaping ideas. The hand-painted walls at All Saints Church were the starting points for Azzurian Worlds. Campbell describes the painted walls as ‘wearing a multitude of traces, which embody past human gesture, and form an encasing lattice surround’. Thinking about who had made the work, about the perceived differences between high and domestic craft, about Morris’s longing for a Utopian society led Campbell to invent her own utopian society, Azure Valley, which occurs around the 27th century in an undisclosed isolated location. Her decorative brightly coloured sculptural pieces stand in as artefacts from the Valley which have survived to tell their story. Azure Valley is imagined as a matriarchal society, therefore many of her artefacts are displayed within feminised cup like holders. A particular favourite was a tiny silver horse in a bright blue bowl ‘Ah yes’ she says as I mention it, ‘that symbolises the way horses represent something wild and yet also tamed’. I also ask about the significance of what seem like ornate bishop’s croziers which are placed vertically across the pews. These she describes as a counterbalance to the masculine verticality so redolent in churches. Campbell cites Perkins Gillman’s visionary yet flawed and problematic novel Herland (1915) as partly inspiring her work, along with other texts such as The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892) and Uses of the Erotic by Audre Lorde (1978). Knowing the highly theoretical backstories to Campbell’s works belies the sheer visual enjoyment of the pieces themselves in all their glorious gloopiness and delicacy. Since the ravages of time have not tainted their exuberant colours, Campbell has gloriously put the fabulous into the fantastical!  

Jennifer Caroline Campbell, Staff with Pomegranate Decoration, Azure Valley, Southern Region 2680-2715 CE, paper pulp, acrylic paint, plaster, clay, bamboo, wire, sand, neoprene, string, plastic ring, sea sponge, jasmine tea  

 

Back to Fabulation, other meanings of the word are informed by the writings of Saidiya Hartman who introduced the idea of ‘critical fabulation’, signifying a writing methodology that combines historical and archival research with critical theory and fictional narrative. It also relates to Robert Scholes 1967 novel The Fabulatorswhich has some relationship to science fiction and has been described as taking flight from accepted ‘realistic’ fictional concepts, dislocating time and space and purposely blurring lines between the actual and the artificial.

 

All the artists in this exhibition have in their own way made thoughtful, often startling responses not only to the magnificent church interior but to the very interesting word chosen to corral the overall concept. Within the world of jazz when a musician is deemed to have played or sung something exceptionally well the phrase ‘they just took it to church’ is used, I cite it here as an epitaph for this show.

 

Alex Michon 

 

 

 

Fabulation

Toby Upson, Cathy Lomax, Jennifer Caroline Campbell, Luke Burton

All Saints Church, Cambridge

17 - 31 March 2022

Open Weds to Sunday 12-4pm (until 6pm on Thurs and Fri)

 

 

 

Glenn Ligon: An Open Letter

This ain't no review. No poem, nor essay. It's chattar (sic).

Addressed to the particular but shared to and amongst a wider public. An open letter. A form often pertaining to some kinda social, some kinda political, rousing; “their reading doesn’t open up through metaphors,” as we are told, rather, potential meaning arrives when we sit with-and-in the failure of the social and political systems they address. That is, meaning (becoming-) arrives when certain doxa and values are suspended. Frozen in the air.

 

Shadowy debris, scattered over a flat ground. Or frozen in the air. The paintings included in Glenn Ligon’s exhibition, An Open Letter at Thomas Dane Gallery, break with his previous language-based paintings. Instead of pressing meaning through the content of essays, poems, or aphorisms, here the form of individual phoneme, the smallest sounds in a language - L 1 T P 9 0 I i M . V 8 J - becomes content. Becom(e mean)ing itself.

 

Dodging, ducking, in a candescent glow, moving through the space of display, two large fields of pulsating red acrylic cast the small glimmers of sound cascading down their surface into space. At first, the two appear as echoes; the common tone in their notes stretched like shadows. But, though Ligon’s print-paintings, echoes and shadows aren’t echoes and shadows; more like shared rhythms. Like the groundless jives of noise shared by players of jazz. Tuning in, each gutty note and notation falling from on the canvases, each thick high and washy low, warps and wains in its own way; just like players of jazz, each with their own eck, mmmm, ooo, and calamitous scream. Alone-together, here, atmospherics is surface. Content. 

 

Language fails to express so much. Ligon himself knows this and has “laboured to uncover the essence of language.” Entitled Debris Field, the series from which the works in An Open Letter are drawn shatter syntax in order to undermine the pervasiveness of value given to something that is merely a socially dictated agreement. Language. Out of the wreckage of this shattering, this rhythmic stammering, “the possibility of meaning, the elements of meaning” arise. 

 

Room two. Four works. Two pairs scat in double duet. Again, the same notes, different eck, mmmm, ooo, and calamitous scream. No dramatic glow, just grey-black patta on paper-white ground. Mu. Moments of enunciation in and as themselves, or figures within acts of speech. The joy arising from Ligon’s layers of silkscreen and oil stick lies in his debasement of systemic meanings. Meanings held too wilfully as fixed, syntactic truth. No fences, no borders, just flows between figures on and beyond some ground. Joy seen here is in free-flow, eye could say.

 

Eck, mmmm, ooo, and calamitous scream. This is not a review. No poem, nor essay. Its chattar (sic). My rousing sic chattar.

Toby Upson

Glenn Ligon, An Open Letter 
Thomas Dane Gallery, London 
until 2 April 2022

Turner @ Tate

Toby Upson visits Turner's Modern World at Tate Britain and notices connections to Rothko's Seagram murals which are now also installed at the gallery.

It is rare that the cool air swirling around a Victorian painting gallery adds something romantic to the works pinned, steadfast, to their often colour-block walls. But here I am, sitting on a rather welcoming bench, taking in both art-work and air-con. Specifically, I am in Tate Britain (the Turner’s Modern World exhibition), looking at a rich mushroom wall, and Philip James de Louthbourg’s The Battle of the Nile, 1800, whilst a dead whirring of electrified air reverberates about me. In front of this particularly crisp image, with the sound of treated air rushing into the enclosed gallery, I am enamoured by something particularly atmospheric. Moved by something harrow in its formal hollowness. 

Drama lies in action, and as I sit, feel, taking in de Louthbourg’s painting, I am left thinking about the stories not told, or rather those possibilities that are foreclosed, in this high-sea battle scene. De Louthbourg’s is an allegorical work - a modern history painting: crashing about the foreground little dinghies helplessly drift, manned by a hodgepodge crew of ship mates and masters; framed by battleships, the core of the composition is dominated by an eruption, a blaze, through which we are just able to discern a shadow of a ship’s mast within the vortex of white-hot flames and plumes of smoke. It seems fitting that such a powerful visual record of this ‘crucial British victory’ over the French (as described in the display caption), is executed in such a definitive manner. Personally, it is as if the weight of the finish is meant to recall or mirror the weight of nationalist pride felt amongst ‘Great Britons’ upon reading about this important win that secured the Mediterranean and re-affirmed British sea power. Action is deployed here, in other words, to propagandic affect.

 

Philip James de Loutherbourg, The Battle of the Nile, 1800, oil on canvas

 

De Louthbourg’s patriotic scene apparently had a profound influence on Joseph Mallord William Turner, leading to his first paintings of modern warfare (although Turner’s direct response to this painting, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1799, cannot now be traced). Indeed, de Louthbourg’s use of brilliant colour, to add astute highlights to areas of action within the composition - areas such as rip-roaring flames in the glimpsable distance - recalls those touches of white, zinc, and bold primary colours used by Turner to evoke a sense of deep awe within his later works (War. The Exile and the Rock Limpet, c.1842, is a case in point). Unlike de Louthbourg, whose use of contrasting hues render this newsworthy battle spectacular, Turner uses colour accoutrements to enhance the sublimity of his subject matter. In other words, colour is what gives Turner access to romance. Indeed, it is colour under Tuner's hand that lets loose possibilities.

Joseph Mallord Turner, War. The Exile and the Rock Limpet, 1842, oil on canvas

 

As a curator I am a big lover of serendipity, I thrill off the spontaneous, superfluous, and sometimes superficial connections between things (those who know me will recognise my skittish pull to eke the meta out if everything). Prior to opening the Turner’s Modern World exhibition, Tate set about rehanging and moving some of its 'masterpieces' further down the Thames. Dislodged from their position in Tate Modern, Mark Rothko's Seagram Murals - large weepy canvases composed from hazy rectangles of red and maroon, that, to quote Jennifer Campbell’s Garageland review of the works, ‘overlap and hover [...] creating a new colour that [ones] eye cannot fix’ - now sit in the older of the Tate siblings. Positioned next to, and curated as to be in conversation with, a free display of yet more Turner's (part of the Turner Bequest), I am a little lost as to the language the two artists are conversing in, aside from jubilant praise from Jr to Sr Modernist.

Maquette for installation of Mark Rothko's Seagram murals at Tate gallery, 1970

More than just a pairing of formalist romantics, who sought to break with the old through chromatic affect, this later, free, exhibition had for me more of a resonance than the 'blockbuster' that is Turner’s Modern World. Perhaps this is due to curatorial intent: Turner’s Modern World is framed as a historical survey, ‘examin[ing] what is meant to be a modern artist during Turner's lifetime’, whilst the conversation between Rothko and Turner is one of deep admiration and personal resonance - Rothko gave his Seagram Murals to the Tatebecause of the wonder and respect he had for his predecessor's work.

 

Like any good discourse, these two exhibitionary conversations add so much and reward each other. Or rather, I should say that the insights gained from the historical survey enlivened the Rothko-Turner discussion for me. For example, we soon learn from Turner’s Modern World that the artist wasn't much 'good' at figurative work: the people who dot his early allegorical and genre paintings lack a liturgical festering; they seem more blob-like, banal, than active agents in a story - just like those naive figures in Rothko’s early canvases. Indeed, as with Rothko, as Turner's career ticks on, the figures in his compositions dissolve like a mist into the eerie scenes that beautifully haunt the Turner Bequest - the unfinished oils left in the painter's studio, such as Norham Castle, Sunrise, c.1845, are perhaps some of the strongest works in either of the Tate displays. This is not to say that the 'best' of Turner's paintings are purely surface - like a Rothko - works such as Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), 1840, and Peace - Burial at sea, 1842, have an intoxicating narrative within their composition, inviting prolonged engagement and moral rumination through their choice use of figuration and pools of transcending colour. There is nothing propagandic about these evocative scenes, they suggest subtly, with the harrowing quality of their lament lying in the cataclysmic drama unfurling within us viewers.

 

Joseph Mallord Turner, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), 1840, oil on canvas

Mark Rothko, Red on Maroon, 1959, oil on canvas

And on that note, where better to turn for a 'modern' point of conversation than Rothko's ecstatic tomb. Originally commissioned for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, the Seagram Murals perfectly encapsulate the modernist spirit embodied by Rothko: ‘I am interested only in expressing basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.’ It is of note that Rothko subsequently pulled this commission two years after receiving it in 1960, as his ‘ambitions for the works grew, [and] he no longer saw the restaurant as an appropriate location for his paintings.’ It was following this move that he gifted the series to Tate in 1969. Personally, sitting with this Rothko series recalls that feeling of sitting with de Louthbourg; the entombing installation feels like another form of scripted address: ‘one must feel, feel the sublimity of your emotions.’ In this way, rather than inviting romantic reflection, the Seagram Murals dictate a subjective state in order to cause affect. To me this runs counter to Turner’s romantic ideas, where even the subtlest action invites subjective speculation – complicating the ‘basic’ in Rothko’s ‘basic human emotions.’ 

 

If New York's mid to late 1900 modernity played out in high-rise hotels, the modern world Turner was working through was very much the high seas. Indeed, instead of the secular church of the dining hall, Turner's faith lies in the sun, the sky, and the storms of the world - aspects of his life narrated for us in Tate's Turner’s Modern World. The earthly dramas captured by Turner, via his lush mists of colour, do not so much push for a self-referential search for ‘basic human emotion’ - as Rothko seeks - but invite romantic rumination, freeing, in their dispersed nature, polyphonic possibilities. Just as the cool-air of the painting gallery slowed me down to contemplate the shallow script of de Louthbourg’s battle, so to the audible winds rushing through Turner's later, unbounded, work whistle a hollow tune - a romantic call asking for a response.

Toby Upson

 

Joseph Mallord Turner, Sunrise with a Boat between Headlands, 1840-45, oil on canvas

Joseph Mallord Turner, Norham Castle, Sunrise, 1845, oil on canvas

 

Turner’s Modern World 
Tate Britain, London 
until 12 September 2021.

 

Linder Sterling - Bower of Bliss Performances

 

‘The BBC were due to film the 11.30 performance, but they've been delayed’, says a  member of the Liverpool Biennial staff. There are other concerns. ‘We're just checking the sound levels’, says a voice nearby. No sooner have these words been uttered, than a sombre wash of pre-recorded strings signals the beginning. Two theatrically clad dancers stride in funereal slow motion towards a marked-off performance space...

Against a backdrop of uniform brick, Linder Sterling's Bower of Bliss mural blooms into life; its joyous crimsons, pinks and magentas foregrounded. KEEP A BOWER QUIET FOR US; a recent text overlay by Kajsa Ståhl cites Keats' Endymion: A Poetic Romance. In a busy weekend shopping thoroughfare, we're summoned to a place of sanctuary, with its abundant poetry of magic, enchantment & transformation.  

This specially commissioned work forms part of The Stomach And The Port, the final chapter of the 2021 Liverpool Biennial, curated by Manuela Moscoso. In addition, a series of performances - or 'sense activations', as Sterling describes them, form part of a series of weekend events across the city, marking the Biennial's conclusion.

The term sense activation seems apt, reflecting the aspirations of an artist who sometimes appears frustrated by the limitations of the picture frame. In recent years, Sterling has sought to create collaborative pieces inhabiting three-dimensional space; itself part of a wider desire to explore realms of sense beyond the purely visual. With this in mind, a company of musicians, dancers, and costume designers is on hand, well versed at playing to their own and each other's strengths.

Her son Maxwell, composer, double bass player and sound designer, though not in attendance, is musically present via a pre-recorded soundtrack. His layered textures are enhanced by live stylings supplied by Kenichi Iwasa, seated on a carpet, surrounded by an array of unorthodox musical instruments. While most spectators lining the opposite wall could be described as 'art crowd', there's also a smattering of weekend shoppers more than happy to be drawn into the piece's more contemplative time frames. 

The two dancers, Lauren Fitzpatrick and Kirstin Alexandra Halliday, seem, at times, like spirits torn between breaking free of constraint, or pursuing an elusive union. Fitzpatrick's performance, by turns, more solar, fiery, playful and insouciant, Halliday's more cool, lunar, angular and cryptic. Their costumes, designed by Louise Gray, channel strong colour themes within the mural – the reds in Fitzpatrick's picking up the florid foregrounds, the whites & blacks in Halliday's transmitting the more diffuse, contrasting elements.

The stage props, an ironing board with iron, recall Sterling's late 70s oeuvre, with its confining domestic spaces. Clasping the iron to her ear like a telephone, Fitzpatrick's grin replicates not only grinning mouths within the mural, but those of an entire timeline; one of several repeat motifs evident within the Bower of Bliss (alongside whorls of rose petals, cosmetics, bird heads in profile, glamour models – all repurposed from their original sources and contexts). Yet, for this reviewer at least, there's never a feeling of jadedness when encountering these elements in Sterling's work.

At one point during the second performance, the man from the BBC finally arrives. He shoots a few frames before disappearing in search of the next story. Over at a nearby coffee chain they're counting customers in and out, but meanwhile, in a performance space now strewn with flowers, the two dancers join hands and take a bow...

William Garvin 

Linder At Bower of Bliss 
Liverpool Biennial
19 June 2021