I sort of stumbled on this show at the Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, going to an artists talk in the hope of improving my German, though in fact – as has been the case a couple of times now - it was held in English. I wandered round the show before the talk started: looking at the work, looking at the labels. A rectangle of Felix Gonzalez-Torres silver shiny sweets here, a Vija Celmins painting of a bar heater there, a drawing by On Kawara that well, frankly, didn’t have the precision and simplicity I expect in his work, a stripy piece of fabric billowing from the force of a portable fan which looked like it was imitating Daniel Buren but, kind of on the cheap. In between there were works by artists I hadn’t heard of, the new generation walking in the footsteps of their artist heroes. Some directly responded to the more famous pieces, others did so more tangentially, through common themes and interests and imagery.

I’ll admit it wasn’t until the artists talk that I really knew what was going on. I did wonder as I walked around the gallery. Some pieces weren’t quite right, they weren’t what I expected from the art names on show. Then there was the fact that the show was held in a small gallery in a studio building.  This is not the place where I would expect to come across works by famous artists (it seems I am a little obsessed with the value of art at the moment, but I'm sure it'll pass).  It is not a place I would want work to be on show if, as a collector, I had valuable pieces to lend. Something wasn’t quite right, the show didn’t feel quite what it purported to be.  And yet I listened with interest to the John Cage recordings, as one of my own art-world heroes, of works the length of cello strings. Pieces I hadn’t heard of before. 

At the talk the façade was stripped away. Those big name works weren’t at all that, they were created by the exhibiting artists who were each asked to make a piece by an artist they admired to show alongside their own work. The copies were labelled as by the imitated artist, but coming from the collection of the imitator. Fakes. Unoriginals. 

I am really not sure how I feel about the show.  One thing is for sure, that it has niggled me, and I have been back to see how I respond a second and a third time. On the one hand, I like the provocation against the critical value we infuse in a work based on the artists’ name. It is a poke at that sideways glance we all do – I can’t help myself no matter how hard I try not to look - to the label.  And the change that occurs in the way we perceive the work once we’ve done so and we see a name we recognise. A name shouldn’t affect our response to an image, but through the context it provides it does. We infuse meaning in a name that others have valued through art purchases and promotion. 

Art is seen as a progression, reinventing itself with each new generation.  As an artist we look at the works of these who came before us and are asked to present our practice in the context of the history in which we work. As students most of us start off more or less directly imitating while we learn. I have gone back to sketching works in museums, as it allows me a more in-depth analysis of the compositional elements, usually when I don’t copy the relationships between one another quite right. Copying activates looking, and was the way that students learnt when apprenticed to past art masters. Ultimately, though, we are expected to develop our own style, our own ‘language’ to stand in conversation with art history, and to differentiate our work for market.

It is, though, a show for art insiders. Without recognising the homage or the names, it is just another mixed-media exhibition. I’m not sure how the artists and gallerists wanted the audience to respond. Did they want us to be in the know as we walked around or to accept the show at face value? The gallery assistant I spoke to was ambivalent but thought it important that I looked around first before I read the explanatory text. A number of reviews of the show took the labels and press notice earnestly, which seemed to have embarrassed the gallery’s director. To commit fraud the deceit has to be flawless and remain undetected.  However, to be a provocation the viewer has to know that they are being provoked, and how and why. With a little prodding, I got there and while I didn't particularly like or covet the pieces, the show as a whole got me thinking.  


Tomorrow it’s time for the future – Talente und Vorbider. Berlin – New York is at the Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin, from 7 September to 20 October 2013. 

It was Berlin Art Week, last week, and the art market was in town. A selection of collectors, galleries, makers and the interested public, descending on the same place at the same time to meet, greet and see. I went to many of the events; some of which, particularly outside of the two main art fairs, were fantastic.  The Kleine Humboldt Galerie presented Beautiful Minds, artists’ installations relating to specialisation, and obsessions, allowing us to nose into behind-the-scenes spaces to which they responded in the University. Four art institutions collaborated to show different elements of the German painting scene. Painting Forever! presented very different but thought-provoking shows – from an eye-poppingly bright installation Hügel und Zweifel by Franz Ackermann in the Berlinische Galarie to a show, To Paint is to Love Again, in which three contemporary female painters responded to late semi-abstract work by Jeanne Mammen - exposing me to a whole range of painters I had not previously seen or heard about. I had been really looking forward to the week but, despite these highlights, it has, sadly, left me in something of a funk. Since it ended on Sunday I’ve been trying to work out why.

For me, the art fair is about creating spectacle. It has to be. While clustering together into a fair attracts a bigger audience – a record number apparently - galleries then have to compete with each other to be seen. The abc fair, in which participating galleries were required to show the work of a single artist, did it incredibly slickly. Without the opportunity to stack a range of artists’ work into a booth, the stands were really varied, giving each gallery a distinct identity.  At the more traditionally presented Preview fair, the winner for me was the building, the painting halls in a former and somewhat dilapidated workshop for the opera (I'm rather amazed there was once this huge opera workshop). 

So why did the week create such a funk in me?  Simply, because I can’t see my work ever being presented in such a context.  Because I can’t see me ever being an insider to such an event. And if that is the case, if I can’t see my work ever being presented as part of the official art market, then who am I making for?

The KW Institute for Contemporary Art held an evening of exhibiting artists talking about why they paint, as part of Painting Forever!, the four-institution collaboration, and its show Keilrahmen (stretchers). One of the artists, Thomas Schoeren, was retrieved from the bar as the last speaker and proceeded to rant about over production of art (at least, that’s what I understood his speech to be about).  With 7 billion people living in the world, of which something like 4 million claim ourselves to be visual artists (over half a million of whom are professionals), the world, the market, is flooded with art. 

There is an excess of production, over-supply. Which, I am sure, is the main reasons why so many of us struggle to make a living from our work, or even show as often as we would like.  Walking around the two main art fairs in Berlin Art Week, with over 200 galleries showing between them, I wondered at the diversity of work presented, and if this was caused, maybe indirectly, by market forces. In an over-supplied market, are artists and also galleries, perhaps unconsciously, seeking to differentiate themselves to attract an audience and buyers, through their uniqueness? I do it, with my, so-to-speak, signature of unpicking and re-sewing. Something I have always struggled with is why make art given this situation. In making work I am contributing to my own problem of excess art-supply and that of other artists, and yet I feel compelled to make. I wonder if other artists feel this way too.

I’m not quite sure where this leaves me. Definitely wanting to make the best work that I can – the most articulate representation of my ideas, well thought through and intelligible – and to fight the compulsion to make a lots, to be seen to be making to be able to call myself an artist.  But, standing on the fringe, I need to find an outlet to present my work as well. My cousin has suggested, several times, that I set myself on Etsy or something similar, which I have been reluctant to do. I feel it is somehow more suitable for products and I definitely don’t want to be a maker of an art-product. What excites me at the moment, though I think it is a pretty crazy idea, is setting up my own space. In Berlin I have stumbled across two book exchange projects which I have really liked – one with covered shelves set in hollowed tree trunks, the other in a telephone box (see below). I like the generosity and unexpectedness of these spaces. Perhaps it is time for me to try the art world out from a different angle, to try to elbow my way to being more of an insider, though I don't imagine for a second it would be simple setting such a space up and running it. 

For the past couple of weeks I have had visitors which, despite best intentions from both my guests and me, has meant that I have done considerably less painting. Their visits did, however, give me the opportunity to show and talk about the work I have made recently. The conversations that we had have been really valuable to me to reinforce what I am doing and to point out inconsistencies between what I say and what I make. Back in London, I usually work at home which I have come to consider as working in a vacuum, isolated and, because I hadn’t sought them out, without many such opportunities to reflect on what I have done. This is something I want to change when I return.

Disruption

We talked about disruption. I disrupt the surface of the materials I work with, fragmenting any image that sits on them, to draw attention to the dichotomy between image and object. Sometimes I am too precious in this action.  I am conscious of wanting to produce something finished, presentable.  With drawings or paintings that I think are successful the disruption can be timid, as I am concerned to destroy something I like and which, therefore, others might value too. My ‘good taste’ overrides my interest in exploring a conceptual framework.

In the sketches that I showed in my last blog entry Window on the world we agreed that the collage which was most successful was the third work down, a drawing I disliked at each stage until the last. While that which doesn’t work was above it, second from the top, because it is half-hearted.  So I have reworked, several times, the drawing I was too precious to disrupt at first to reach a point where I feel that the image is fragmented and yet, elements of it are reinforced by the editing that the collage provides (below). 

I am not completely happy with how it is now, but can see that it is stronger than before. I have done more collages since our discussion, including the one below, and have been conscious to try to avoid purely aesthetic decisions while I am making them. 

Influences

The second area that we discussed was influences. I am concerned that I have too many; that I flit from one area of interest to another in my work in a scattergun way, my head turned by each little thing which catches my attention.  I feel that this means I’m not always clear in my own mind about the subject matter of my work, which means that others can’t be either.

Condensing them down afterwards I came up with a number of dichotomies that I play with in my work:

image and object
domestic/interior and landscape/exterior
artifice and natural
detail and distance
masculine and feminine
dyeing and painting
unpicking and sewing

Add to the mix some over-arching themes: process, surface and, as I’ve already mentioned, disruption, and the themes of my work become pretty all encompassing.  Although some do reinforce one another. 

In our conversation, we differed in our opinion of whether this is problematic or not. Trying to achieve a more focused list of influences may be artificially constraining, too concentrated to sustain my interest for long. Which would I drop? How many interests would make me sufficiently focused? On the other hand more concentration might help me to navigate what I am doing and would give me the opportunity to plunge deeper into individual themes and dichotomies. While I have the luxury of time now, this won’t be the case when I return to work next year, and is something I need to consider for me to be able to sustain a more productive practice in the future.

In the meantime, I have started to draw weeds, like the dandelions shown below.  Thankfully not a new area of interest, but something detailed which counterbalances the distant, moving landscapes I have been drawing over the past couple of years. It is not the best choice of subject with autumn already here, but it feels very fitting for Berlin - a city in various states of renovation but also of decay, with nature taking over in parts.  For me, weeds are the pioneers in this process, literally breaking the ground for other plants to follow.  Michael Landy, who did a serious of life-sized etchings of weeds in 2002 called Nourishment, has described weeds as 'marvellous, optimistic things' which 'have to be adaptable ... to prosper'.    

Post script: I had meant to include this in my original blog, but am adding it a couple of weeks later, hence the PS. A quote I read a couple of days ago that chimed with me, and one of the reasons I may think I have too many influences is from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a writer, poet and aviator: 'In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped to its nakedness.' Something to strive for. 

I think it is time that I showed more of the things that I have been working on since arriving in Berlin. Recently I have had two disparate strands to my practice – unpicked and resewn canvases, and small drawings exhibited as memorabilia – which I would like to reconcile, bring closer together. To do this I have felt it necessary to step back from abstraction and go closer to my source material: landscape and the way in which we, particularly urban inhabitants, tend to consume it as an image as we travel through it. In doing so I feel that I have given myself licence to experiment without thinking that this work needs to lead somewhere, to a final piece or place.

I mentioned in my blog Materials, surface and textures that I would like my work to be read in the context of painting’s role as a window on the world, and as an object. In these - I’m not sure what to call them – sketches, trials – I have explicitly played with frames, obstructing shapes, creases, to differentiate between what is surface and what is image. Working away from home has forced me to innovate with a limited palette adding plant dyes and make-up, contrasting natural and artifice. I have bought one pigment since I arrived, Prussian Blue, an early synthetic pigment discovered by Diesbach in Berlin at the beginning of the 18th Century. 

It is so nice to feel an affinity for something that one reads about, and then when one actually visits, for it still to surprise, provoke and delight.  So was it for me and the Neues Museum last Friday.  I must have read about it around its re-opening in 2009, and then again in Together by Richard Sennett which I have just finished.  When I talk about the museum I predominantly mean the building, rather than its collections.  Originally designed by Friedrich August Stüler and opened in the 1850s, the building was bombed in WWII and left unprotected until the 1980s.  

In his book, Sennett refers to the museum in relation to concepts of repair, in which the repairer responds to or, in a way, collaborates with the original craftsman or woman and the object to be repaired. He identifies three ways to repair – restore so that there is minimal trace of damage, remediate using new materials to improve the object while retaining its form, or reconfigure.  He ascribes the reopening of the Neues Museum to the last category because the form of the building has been reimagined so that it too tells a story (although it is done with subtlety when compared to other reconfigured buildings).

How does this relate to my work? Leaving aside, for now and maybe until a trip to the psychiatrist’s couch, the fact that I unpick my canvases first; notions of repair are very relevant to the act of resewing in which my canvas works are joined or made whole again (see below). It is, as I am sure you can imagine, laborious, resewing by hand each thread, and physically arduous, hunched over a small canvas with my fingers pricked and rubbed raw. What I keep coming up against is the question of why this should matter to the viewer of the final work. So I went to the Neues Museum, as an example of something celebrated for the richness of the narrative created through the way it has been repaired, to relate the strategies adopted by the architect, David Chipperfield (supported by Julian Harrap), to the context of my own work.

The building weaves several narratives together in its restoration. Where the original building could be preserved it has been, complete with the highly decorated surfaces, originally intended by Stüler to make the building as aesthetically interesting and instructive as the objects it housed. In places the building has been restored using original fragments, or similar materials – walls were rebuilt using bricks reclaimed from demolished houses – or materials were painstakingly recrafted.  One man apparently spent three years making 30,000 cylindrical clay pots to repair the domed ceilings. The damage isn’t hidden by the repair, old and new are distinct. In that, the building echoes the way that its collection of Egyptian and European antiquities have been conserved so it is clear what is the historical original (see below). So on going round the museum I believe that each visitor’s experience is probably unique, in that we engage with the three narratives available to us – the original building, the history of its destruction and the collections it housed - to a different extent. I would like to know how someone arriving completely cold to the building, not knowing any of its history, would respond.  For me the building dominated my experience as it was the purpose of my visit. 

It is a hard building to photograph.  There wasn’t a single view which I felt captured the essence of the building so I have tried to show a few details below.  It is dramatic and busy, and reveals itself slowly as one walks around it. It has a physical presence rather than the fragility of a ruin (in contrast to the way the Hotel Esplanade has been preserved, in glass-encased fragments, elsewhere in the city). It is entirely contemporary, not a relic of a bygone era. While it is not my craft, I believe that the way the architects restored the building must have involved engaging closely with each space on its own terms. Engaging, with what was there and salvageable,  developing strategies to replace what was not; architect’s models and historical documents being secondary to the materiality of the building itself.  On walking around the building the word that turned over in my mind was integrity: in preserving or replacing the original materiality of the building, in retaining its history, and in not creating a pastiche of the past. 

In my work, it brings me back to the possibility that I need to use materials with a richer narrative than new raw canvas, as I mentioned in my earlier blog Materials, surface and textures.  I am reluctant to leap to a new material because it needs to feel right – something which I choose to use and display for a specific and reason - and it is clear to me that I don’t know what that is yet. As an aside, I write this wearing a jumper with bright spots I added to repair its moth-eaten holes; it has been suggested to me in the past that I should integrate my life and art more closely. Not that I am suggesting putting my wardrobe on display, but that I may want to transfer the aesthetic. The act of repair in my work is methodical, slow and visible as in the Neues Museum. But where mine is imperfect, the repaired parts of the building have been done so expertly, flawlessly complementing the damaged original.  To balance a different and potentially damaged material it may be that I need to demonstrate greater skill, or seek unity and integrity through the materials I use in my repair. 

Post Script: Near to the Neues Museum a very different kind of repair is taking place. They are rebuilding the Berlin Stadtschloss, a baroque palace which was the winter residence of the kings of Prussia. It was damaged in WWII and demolished in the 1950s by the then East German government. Although not an exact replica, its external facade will be like the original to recreate the historic views on the Museum Insel, with lots of money being invested in craftspeople to recreate the external decoration. I can't help feeling this recreation leans towards Disneyfication.