by Ann Jones

Lis Rhodes isn’t an easy artist to write about. That the exhibition Dissonance and Disturbance at the ICA represents her forty-year career in seven films doesn’t help. There is a world of difference between the abstraction and pattern of Dresden Dynamo, Rhodes’s 1972 cameraless film in which sound and image come from disrupting the surface of the film by applying Lettratone and Lettraset and using filters to introduce colour, and In the Kettle (2010) and Whitehall (2012), recent works centred around political protests. Yet, somehow, there is a coherence and a sense that there are central concerns explored throughout Rhodes’s career and the body of work on show here is brought together by a consistent approach to layered and collaged imagery that keeps recurring. Ultimately, for me, though the messages may be powerful and important, what makes me want to watch the films is the beauty of Rhodes’s image-making whatever source material she is working with. Continue reading Lis Rhodes: Dissonance and Disturbance →

by Ann Jones

I like video art. I’ve bored enough people by talking about art to know that lots of people don’t, but I do. And I like artists’ film. And I like art that challenges expectations and art that questions traditional use of the gallery space. Bring them all together in the right way and the result can be genuinely exciting – think Antony McCall’s solid light works (which I wrote about when MostlyFilm first started), or Banks Violette’s as yet untitled (TriStar Horse) projection onto water vapour which will stay with me a long time – so I fully expected to love Eyeball Massage, Pipilotti Rist’s exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.

Things get off to a pretty good start. The first thing on view in the gallery is a chandelier of pants, onto and into which video is projected. What’s not to like? Pants. Art. That’s the sort of ridiculous combination I can get behind, especially when the pants in question aren’t the frilly lacy ones designed for show but sturdy sensible ones we’d rather stayed well hidden. And the rest of the room – a small, vulnerable looking model of a suburban house (which looked somehow American to me but is apparently the ideal home of Swiss suburbia) with wall sized projections around it – initially has me hooked. It’s as I give this work more time that things start to change. A video in the house shows a family at the dining table. They eat their dinner from plates that are on fire. At this point the word “kooky” creeps into my head and doubts start to set in. I confess that at this point – far too early in the show for it to be a reasonable response – I also start to browse rather than really looking. There is a video here that requires attention. I should read the subtitles but my mind keeps wandering and I move on. I stroll up the ramp to the back gallery where I enjoy the stuffed clothes-shaped cushions inviting me to lounge on some trousers or a T-shirt (when I say I enjoy them I mean they make me smile, they look too mean as cushions to persuade me to brave the inevitable pins and needles associated with lounging about on the gallery floor; in my book, it takes at least a bean bag for that indignity to be worth considering). The work here seems less narrative; images float in the space catching the hanging screens of diaphanous fabric, breaking up the images and creating an abstracted wonderland that is genuinely quite beautiful.

Continue reading On video art and pants or video art on pants – Pipilotti Rist’s Eyeball Massage at the Hayward Gallery →

by Ann Jones

Gerhard Richter is often described as the greatest living painter – certainly he is the most expensive – but it’s easy for such superlatives to get in the way of the work, especially work that poses questions and needs consideration and concentration rather than reverence. Gerhard Richter: Panorama at Tate Modern offers much more than a retrospective of his career – above all its about his exploration of paint both as his raw material and as a medium whose relevance has not always been accepted during his long career. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Richter exhibition I didn’t like but nonetheless I approached the Tate show with caution: I would hate to hate Richter, even mild disappointment at a show that couldn’t live up to expectations would hurt, and I’m usually not much of a fan of chronological arrangements.

In the end my first visit to the exhibition was brief; I walked through the show quickly after a screening of Corinna Belz’s fascinating documentary Gerhard Richter – Painting,  a dialogue between the artist and his materials which offers real insight into Richter’s working methods, but also into his inability to articulate how he knows when a painting is finished (there seemed to me to be a certain generosity in allowing the camera access given that Richter seemed to find its presence intrusive, but the result is an interesting portrait). On that walkthrough, I’m pretty sure I exclaimed “Oh. I love that painting!” out loud a couple of times. When I saw the painting of Richter’s daughter, I may have added “Aah. Betty.” From that first quick look, I knew that many of Richter’s most familiar works were there (his painting of Jackie Kennedy perhaps the most notable omission for me) along with others I’d known about but only seen in reproduction. There were also surprises – both good and bad – the squeegee paintings of the 1980s reinforced the idea (brought to the fore by the worst excesses of design on show in the V&A’s Postmodernism: style and subversion 1970 – 1990) that that was a decade with a lot to answer for aesthetically, and what poor Betty had done to deserve being stuck in a room full of them I have no idea.

Continue reading Gerhard Richter: Panorama →

by Ann Jones

Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall is a difficult space for film – or indeed for any art, though clearly industrial scale sculpture has a head start – although, like many, I’d quite like to see Christian Marclay’s regulation carpet and sofas installed for an extended showing of The Clock; all weekend every weekend for six months or so perhaps. And, for me at least, Tacita Dean is an artist whose work has always seemed to work best in more modest spaces where the audience can give the work undivided attention away from the distractions of this most bustling of gallery spaces. Though the space demands a level of spectacle Dean has never seemed to aspire to, the Turbine Hall Unilever commission is not something to shy away from and being the first to bring film to the space at least allows Dean to work on her own terms. Or it might have done if the subject matter of her piece hadn’t forcefully imposed itself upon her in the form of the demise of Soho Film Laboratory, the last 16mm film lab in Britain. This then is a eulogy to a medium threatened with imminent extinction, a medium that defines Dean’s career.

Continue reading Tacita Dean – Film →

by Ann Jones

Venice isn’t like anywhere else. I realise this might seem like an extreme example of stating the obvious but I’m not referring to the the architecture or the canals or the all-pervasive air of unreality that always makes me wander round exclaiming ‘I can’t believe this is really here’ incessantly for the first couple of days until gradually familiarity with the actual place edges out familiarity with previously seen photographs and the picture of Venice I carry in my head. No. In an international art world increasingly driven by biennials, Venice isn’t like anywhere else.

So, what makes La Biennale different?

Continue reading Glimpses of the 2011 Venice Biennale →