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 contemporary 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 was at the Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin, from 7 September to 20 October 2013.

This post was first published on my Reside Residency blog

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 inTogether 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? 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.  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. 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. 


A slightly longer version of this post was first published on my Reside Residency blog