Horses Make A Degree Show Look More Beautiful: Harrow Ceramics Degree Show 2009

Plagued, first by fire, then by threats of closure and, finally, by tube strikes, Harrow Ceramics marches on undaunted. This was certainly one of the most varied of their degree shows that I’ve seen and easily the most colourful. They’re normally pale shades of grey, all very finely tuned and produced, but ‘clay colours’ nonetheless. Not so this one. Now then, a monumental hats off to Chris Sutherland for a rare example of astounding virtuosity that also managed to be interesting – I know, you wouldn’t think it possible, but it is. As per the previous post, I am normally bored to death by virtuoso displays, but this was actually enticing. Weird great big dead baby birds, the size of three year old children, (and that’s the point), were draped over plinths and slumped in corners. I didn’t exactly feel for them, partly because I was distracted by the glazes, but most people, presumably, wouldn’t be. They’re funny looking cartoon characters, exactly the sort of thing you’d expect find in computer game graphics, or vinyl LP-cover artwork, only these were 3-d and ceramic. Weird, as I said.

There were two or three installationy-type displays, some more interactive than others and an assortment of standard ceramics degree show fare- but all of it several notches above the ‘standard,’ I’d say. Geraldine Williams produced wonderful ‘whore’s handbag,’ Victorian-looking peep show comprising a big, red, fake-crushed-velvet-covered box with peep hole and when you were sitting peeping through said hole, the whiff of the velvet was almost nauseating. I’ve never been in such a booth, but I have to say, I’ve got a good idea of just how grotesque it might be now. It also did very very weird things to my sense of gender-assignment – which is a fancy way of saying I felt like a bloke. I’d just been reading an account, in ‘Whores and Other Feminists,’ by a woman who was a peep-show performer. The book is a bizarrely and ferociously American, obsessive wail about Feminism and the sex industry, but fascinating even so. Anyway, Geraldine’s work tuned right in and for a moment, I was the teenage boy jerking off over something that looked like a twirling Christmas decoration / pretty ceramic figurine in magic box. Brilliantly fetishistic and provocative but in a not too serious way – which was a relief and which makes it a big improvement on the book. There were some laughs in the red box– as there were in the rest of her work.

And from whores to horses, Hiromi Nakajima’s smoke fired animals also belong to a standard category in degree show production, but these were anything but standard. ‘Working with animals makes me happy,’ she says in what must be one of the most straight forward artists statements I’ve ever read. Her glorious beasts writhed and giggled and stretched and snuffled and the smiling horses – oh the smiling horses – sniffing clover – she’d made them a paddock with real grass and clover and they screwed up their eyes and, somehow you just know, that when the lights are out, they start galloping about.

There’s lots more and it’s all good, and excellent pictures can be seen here.

Viva Viva

I'm shocked to find it's more than a month since I wrote for this blog. Much has happened. I've been in Iran, discussing a planned solo show in Esfahan in 2009, in the Iranian month of Ordibehesht, which runs from April 21st - May 21st. There will be much more on this soon, and more about plans for The C Word's second year, which, coincidentally starts at about the same time as Iranian New Year, mid - March.
Meanwhile, I want to tell you about a remarkable, ambitious, and to the best of my knowledge, unique exhibition I saw on Sunday 14th December, the last day of it's two-week run.

Viva Viva

In a giant concrete bunker under the Marylebone campus of the University of Westminster, opposite Baker st. Tube Station and Madame Tussaude’s, lies P3. It’s one of London’s newest art spaces, and certainly one of its biggest. If Tate modern resembles an airport, (which it does), this is the aircraft hanger. It’s brutal though, the sort of place that General Pinochet would have singled out for particularly ghastly torture sessions.

Undaunted, however, the turbo-charged visionary that is Zemirah Moffat, spun into action and delivered an astonishing exhibition of flickering, glittering screens, colour bars, soundscapes, language trails and lovingly bound, printed volumes, all in the service of the practice-based PhDs in Audio-visual media.
The idea itself was eccentric to the point of insanity – it would certainly have seemed so to the average, art-world curator.
‘I’m going to curate a show of practice-based PhDs in audio-visual media from the last 20 years. It’s a show about knowledge. The centre piece will be a library with all the doctoral theses bound in orange on the shelves so that the audience can read them.'
YAAH RIGHT, drawls the west-end curator, adjusting her velvet hair band, and hastily doing up the top button of her Harvey Nich’s silk blouse. A doctoral thesis sounded mildly threatening–she wasn’t going to take any risks.
YEAH RIGHT, sneers the cool cat curator, tossing his thinning mane, grease landing in a fine spray on a nearby wall – consults his blackberry, ‘we’ll just close the gallery for the two weeks it’s on shall we?’ Collapses with laughter at his own side-splitting wit.

I wont pretend it wasn’t overwhelming, intimidating almost as you descend the concrete bunker and encounter the numerous screens, but bit by bit, they separate out and become individual pieces of work. The vast space is generous, you could arrange yourself comfortably and settle into each work, absorbing the particular nature of the ‘cinema’ venue, or the tv screens, the still photographs suspended from the ceiling, or the computer screen tucked up next to a pillar, or the several screens forming a whole installation. Ear phones allowed me to sink into John Wynne’s ‘Hearing Voices’, work on click languages from the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, which attended to all my personal obsessions, and for which I would cheerfully have settled in for the night.

Screen work rarely does well in a conventional gallery space, so perhaps this most emphatically not white, not cube, demonstrates that very different kinds of spaces are needed for such work to thrive. The most significant thing though was the constant humming presence of the research, the building of knowledge through experiment and writing, the integrated relationship between the written thesis and the art work, which, probably for the first time, were allowed to appear in the same venue at the same time, so the viewer/ reader/ audience could encounter the whole, rather than the fragmented, disassociated parts. This was an extraordinary adventure which demanded much from its audience and delivered more. I’d love to see something like it in the Hayward. The public are quite capable of coping with a bit of hard-core thinking, if only we’re given the chance.

Some thoughts on open studios and degree shows: Kingsgate Workshop Trust and University of Westminster

There’s a delicious anarchy about these events. Open studios herald the annual clean up. Kilns are pressed into service as giant plinths, bookshelves become display shelves, newspaper cuttings become exhibits and you find yourself wishing that galleries could find a bit of this make-do-and-mend spirit. The degree shows do their damnedest to conform, and some, unfortunately, succeed, but in most cases, and Westminster was no exception this year, the students are too varied and hopelessly ill-matched and the ‘galleries,’ for all their scrubbing and painting and hiding of sinks, are still studios really. Hooray. You can find work in something close to its raw state at a degree show and makers who are still able to enjoy the adventure, not yet cowed by oppressive art or craft world orthodoxies and, equally important, not yet constrained by the expense of producing work which requires big expensive equipment, or which needs to inhabit a large space.

Kingsgate Workshop Trust was celebrating its 30th birthday, showing off its new education building and generally strutting its venerable stuff. These are established studios and have the painty patina to prove it. There’s furniture, big stuff, in the basement with much whirring of machines and someone making extraordinary pink and blue chairs, and someone else making formica furniture for cafes and offices. These are proper, sleeves-rolled-up places, urban – what shall we say – terraced industries?

Kingsgate also hosted a glistening exhibition of their ‘emerging artists’, three of them, Olivia Horley, Jo Dawn and Anthony Luvera: Ceramics, Printed textiles/furniture, and Film/photography. It was the sort of show that flickers past in a couple of weeks and evaporates, except in memory, because one so wishes there were more shows like it. We don’t get shows that mix docu-photgraphy about homeless geezers with domestic tableware and printed textiles all ringing with bird-song. Can you think of a more perfect narrative to be huddled in one show? No? Me neither. But spurious categorisations and artworld gender-cleansing ensures that we are never permitted to contemplate the domestic as proper art.

Consuelo Siexas Radclyffe (Westminster)did all those astounding doll works, one pictured above, all the rest in the next post below. Working with child images is difficult enough, but dolls! You just couldn’t stop looking at them. In the past decade or so, much longer than that really, there has been a trend to portray children, especially girls, as somehow menacing or threatening, or just evil. It’s a deeply reactionary, Victorian obsession which, to put it absolutely brutally, is really about defending incest / rape, the right of the male patriarch, the paterfamilia, to practice ‘droit de seigneur’ with girls and young women with absolute impunity. The sensationally, revolutionary BLISS of this woman’s work is that she portrays her girls as deeply human and interactive, with each other rather than the audience. She’s not afraid of the complications of girlishness. They’re arguing with each other and gossiping and so on, but there certainly isn’t any misogynistic girl-hating / girl-blaming crap that one finds in mainstream artworld galleries where girls are portrayed as fiendishly sexual and the authors of their own destruction.

Mitzuyo Yamashita, (Westminster) makes little buildings and trees and then puts them all together into a weird city with giant plastic animals pacing down their otherwise deserted streets. These nightmare small towns really come to life when you photograph them. Never encountered ceramics like that before. They don’t usually like the camera much.

Claire Palfreyman did the transboybunnies. They’re hoodies really but they’ve sprouted bunny ears. We’re at Kingsgate open studios now, so Claire’s work is nestling in its clutter. Work which examines masculinity usually wanders off into transgender territory. I much prefer this trans-species approach. It’s funnier and also more affecting.

The stuff that looks like a thesis on tonal variation between white and slate-grey, like some kind of ceramic version of a highly complex but very spare quartet for obscure stringed instruments, that’s Sarah Scampton’s work. The strange looking form on top of the filing cabinet is a monument to Durer and something of a monument to Scampton’s relentlessly inquiring, probing and probably slightly obsessive mind. Those things that look like lengths of hose-pipe hanging up are actually fired clay and they’re hollow. I decided it was best not to think about it too much.

Now here’s what I love about ceramics, you can move effortlessly from urban transbunnyboy to pure maths with a hint of applied physics in a matter of a couple of studios, or from surreal, nightmarish, virtual photo-ceramics, some kind of liminal no-town, to infinitely real, conversational, brown-girls from not-rich Brazil, lots of them talking, doing, being, arguing, hanging out, avoiding boys, – and how often do you hear those voices? All this in one day and two venues. Show me any other artform that can do that and does it with such style! There aint one. And that’s a fact.

open studios and degree shows part 2 - now for the pictures