Cristina NualART

Tag: Collaboration

Today I gave my heartbeat to an artist…

Cross Hyde Park facing East, get to the Serpentine Gallery, see no red (as you arrive from the West). Encounter a make-shift white box. Enter. Participate. Collaborate. Remember. Take your heart back home with you. Forget.84_RedSerpentine_photocnualart

A long way ago, entertaining the young son of my friend the nurse, I found a stethoscope amongst the pile of children’s toys. I slipped in the earpieces and put the disc on my chest, then nearly fell backwards at the loud thudding noise of my own heart.This was before MP3s and in-ear buds. Walkmans with flimsy sponge headphones didn’t cancel noise and turn you inwards like that stethoscope did.

Hearing my hearbeat was an uncanny experience. For the first time in my life, I experienced the knowledge that I was real and solid, but machine-like in my fragility. Hearing the workings of my own body, the symmetry of my blood transmissions, I gaped in awe at the miracle of life. I was not just an outside shell with airy thoughts in the head and bones to hold me up, I was full of thick, juicy, rich cogs and wheels, running up and down and palpitating in sync. I learned that peripheral vision can work inwards as well as laterally. The thudding sound in the stethoscope was me: nothing else but that rhythmic, all-exterminating noise. Wow. One of my many epiphanies…
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Christian Boltanki’s hearbeat recording booth for his Les Archives du Coeur project arrives in London from Monumenta Paris. It’s beautiful in concept, but collides with my current ponderings on data-gathering. I want to hoard and store all paintings, books, photos, documents, etc., but I wrestle with the futility of it – there is a destruction of time in revisiting lived experiences, which makes archiving a pretty egotistical pursuit. Reading Art, Time and Technology (Charlie Gere, 2006) this week I found this message: ‘Andreas Huyssen suggests that one response to the ever-greater ubiquity of real-time systems is an increasing interest in memory. (…) The more memory we store on data banks, the more the past is sucked into the orbit of the present, ready to be called upon the screen.’

After that, Wolfgang Tillmans‘ photographs (the artist as curator) and Jean Nouvel’s red pavillion (glowing) were less moving than they might have been without my flashbacks.
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0 comments © Cristina Nualart 15 July 2010

Made In – Oil without paint

79_MadeIn_photocnualart Excited about being in Birmingham on a nice sunny day, I dashed to Ikon gallery first, and dove right in. Seeing One’s Own Eyes is the current explosive exhibition by MadeIn artists collective. It is FUN! I went through, so absorbed in the objects that I didn’t read any of the blurb beforehand. What did I get excited about? Bombastic wall hangings, shodily made with chopped up kitch fake fur and sequined textiles, all tackily glued and stitched together. The colours are loud and the cartoons show people you will recognise from newspaper headlines. The text is as in-your-face as the imagery. The whole thing works! This is art that is cheap and cheerful, big and bold, and as amusing and meaningful as pop art can get.

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78_MadeIn_photocnualart There’s an instructive video by gallery director Jonathan Watkins on how he met Xu Zhen, one of the founding artists of MadeIn.

At this point, you can -like I did- realise that it’s all a fiction. These artists have nothing to do with Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East or a country at war. They are Chinese artists using made in China sarcasm to share with art consumers of the world, who are – of course – deeply interested in big issues like blood for oil and war in far-away countries full of invisible terrorist camps…

To give respite from the bomb-blasts on the second floor, the third floor welcomes you with some quiet anihilation, a breathing pile of rubble. Calm is the name of this surprising room of living destruction. See my video of it.

I was lucky to see MadeIn’s exhibition the day after I visited Contemporary Art Iraq in Manchester’s Cornerhouse . The latter is, clearly, art made in Iraq. The Iraqi artists share their daily stories and creative pursuits without loud protesting of their county’s situation. Not that they ignore it, they just get on with life without making a song and dance about things. Had they done so, they might have come up with some strident, controversial artwork of the sort the tabloids would discuss. But it could pigeonhole them as protest artists, which is not for every artist to be.

Since Documenta 11, in 2002, there is a tendency for much contemporary art to function as documentary,* but living amidst irrational ruination for years, their museums plundered, current Iraqi artists do what artists do: make art, quite simply. MadeIn are taking on the documentary agenda and parading it in fancy-dress. It’s a fun party. But along with a good party, there’s nothing better than a soul-baring conversation – away from the pandemonium.

* See Materialist Feminism for the 21st Century, by Angela Dimitrakaki, in Oxford Art Journal, vol. 30, 2007.

0 comments © Cristina Nualart 26 June 2010

Open Arts Cafe

64_OpenArtsCafe_photocnualartYesterday I had a lovely evening at the Open Arts Cafe. From the link a friend sent me on fb, I expected it to be geared towards fine arts performance, but instead of being all obscure and weird (mock stereotype alert!), it was entertainment of a very enjoyable ‘normal’ kind. Lovely singing voices, amusing poetry, short plays, hilarious comedy and a deeply striking contemporary dance piece by Drew Gordon (so powerful it was scary!) all rolled into one event, supported by (yes!!) an art exhibition featuring Elli Chortara‘s illustrations and Aleksandra Laika‘s glowing portraits inspired by internet communication, a topic closely related to my current art research. The selection of music and poetry was on funny little love stories. And so, I checked out the websites, and I really like the way that Erinkmusic’s one is going, albeit not finished yet.
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0 comments © Cristina Nualart 28 May 2010

The Creative Compass

Strolling up to the Serpentine Gallery on a fine London morning I happened upon a wonderful little exhibition in the Royal Geographical Society, which is giving its space to women artists for the first time (about time).

‘The Creative Compass’ features the work of Agnès Poitevin-Navarre and Susan Stockwell, both of whom have created sculptural pieces using maps and banknotes from around the world in response to the geographical brief.

61_Stockwell_photocnualart Susan creates money dresses, in the the European style of the 1900s,  and 2D images of maps by stitching together international currency. The ‘fabric’ is beautiful: colourful and very tactile,and constitutes the main attraction of the pieces. Sculpturaly, the costumes look a bit too rigid and mannequin-like, almost awkward, in contrast with the warm and fun appeal of the money-material. Likewise, the map pictures resonate of Jasper Johns pop-art paintings and take on a historical coldness. One rather English stereotype, I infer, is that having lots of money comes hand-in-hand with a detached demeanour, and maybe that rigidity is what’s coming through. It all poses lots of questions about the global economy, colonisation, and the use of government money to create goods for the already wealthy…

60_Pointevin_photocnualart Agnès does not exploit the inherent beauty of maps and banknotes, she is more interested in locating things in space. Using coordinates, her work explores the ties between memories and specific places in peoples lives.

A significant piece is the tabular monument she creates to celebrate colleague women artists. Unlike her other polished pieces in this show, ‘Fellow Artists/Fellow Muses’ looks like quality old-world furniture, offering up the homage in a format that is very believable as a memorial, with its lists, names and impeccable finish. Inspect it more closely for a good laugh: paintbrushes are the everlasting symbol of an artist, the bristles are artist’s hair, the coordinates indicate exhibitions and the names, of course, are those of friends. A toast to suffrage for all the women artists who have never before been invited to the RGS.

0 comments © Cristina Nualart 24 May 2010

Singh Twins

China may be doubling the value of its art market every year, but the superpower is not sending as much Chinese art to this neck of the woods as the other future superpower, India. It may be post-colonial guilt, or better connections, but Indian art in some form seems to make a grand exhibition every few months in London.

The Garden and the Cosmos in the British Museum last year was one of my absolute favourite exhibitions of the last couple of years (along with, I think, Antony Gormley and Annette Messager, both at the Hayward). Then the Serpentine threw in an awe inspiring, spectacular show of contemporary art from the subcontinent, Indian Highway, stunningly powerful, it thrilled me to the bone, ah…

The V&A’s recent show on the Maharaja’s treasures was not quite as fun as Waldemar Januszczak’s damning review of it in The Sunday Times, but the riches still had you holding your breath at the craft, the beauty and the retro appeal.

Now it’s the National Gallery’s turn, and it is flamboyantly promoting its Indian Portrait special exhibition:

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The show, roughly chronological – and thus more informative, is worth a visit, though it lacks the inspirational scenes of awkward perspective and magic encounters that Indian landscapes offer. The paintings here can be almost photographic, and the cross-fertilisation with Western art is most amusing.

However, the jewel in the crown has been kept well hidden, and not advertised anywhere that I have seen. Down in the basement galleries there is a superb and scousestastic exhibition by The Singh Twins.

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The identical sisters collaborate arm-in-arm, literally, to create exhilarating satires of politicians, fast food joints and family life, with the vibrancy of fresh jalebis and the immaculate technique of Persian miniatures. How I never came across their work all those times I went to Birkenhead to see family (and Tate liverpool…), baffles me. They should be everywhere!

Some months ago I visited the Shazia Sikander (apologies to anyone who is offended by my comparison of a Pakistani-American with British-Indians – it’s the Persian tradition poking through) show in Pilar Corrias gallery, hoping to find what the Singh Twins are doing: a multicultural cocktail of modern afflictions with traditional know-how. Not quite, this time.While Sikander’s recent work tends to the conceptual, and plays with the formal qualities of calligraphy, the Singh Twins are banging their drums riotously, and having a ball of a party. I utterly recommend it. Oh, and the animation is a must! No pictures, sorry, but here is a link to a video.

 

0 comments © Cristina Nualart 5 May 2010
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Unless otherwise specified, text and images © 2012 Cristina Nualart