Wednesday 9 November 2011

REVIEW: Julia Oschatz – Below is Flat Up There



Palagkas.Temporary’s most recent exhibition space is the Old Pimlico Library. A building filled with disregarded shelves, books long gone, tables upturned and still speckled with pastel mounds of chewing gum; glass panels giving view to laminated office desks no longer occupied. 

German artist Julia Oschatz, who created an entirely new body of work for this exhibition, was not presented with the plain canvas of white walls and clear floors, synonymous with the modern gallery. But rather a space saturated with remnants of its past. This teaming, however, has resulted in a wonderfully integrated show, where location and art enter into delicate dialogue.

Oschatz has created work sensitive and empathetic to its situation. Large cardboard structures reach in precarious shapes up into the ceiling, and curve to form hallowed caves in the children’s reading area, where tiny red plastic chairs still populate. Constructed roughly, silver tape and staples left visible, the physical weakness of each momentous object is made apparent.  As a result, so too is the vulnerable fate of the rooms they occupy. 

Embedded within these installations and scattered lopsided on the floor are old TV sets displaying videos of Oschatz’s performance art. Across each convex screen moves an odd creature dressed in loose plane grey clothing, with large clumpy blocks for feet and various bulbous, featureless heads: some spherical, some tubular, others loosely resembling a rabbit. 

In most, this mute, mysterious animal enacts fruitless actions: scrubbing the floor aggressively with a broom covered in black ink, frantically tying knots in a long rope, spilling ping pong balls over the floor. Predominantly playful in tone, there is also a disarmingly sinister undercurrent. In these moving images the viewer witnesses both mania and the creation of chaos to no clear purpose. The futility articulated highlights the fruitlessness of these previously long unused rooms.

While the re-presentation of performance art in film format can often dampen the mediums effect, (as many art theorists have argued, a large part of performance art’s power lies in the physical presence of artist and audience together in a particular temporal moment), here it only adds.

The TV screens enforce a barrier between audience and creature, rendering the viewer utterly helpless to the bizarre, destructive actions of Oschatz’s fantastical protagonist: a sensation particularly poignant considering the many library closures across the UK this year, despite frequent and substantial protests. 

Yet through these videos, Oschatz also offers a glimmer of hope. Each screen presents a documentation of her live art, thus making this somewhat dilapidated space fulfill its original purpose. Through the work shown in ‘Below is Flat Up There’, the Old Pimlico Library is, delightfully, made an archive once more.

REVIEW: Barry Flanagan at Tate Britain

Published: LONDON CONFIDENTIAL, 8th November 2011


"Barry Flannigan at Tate Britain Review. Thalia Allington-Wood's interest is sparked by the artist's early works."

Never much of a fan of Barry Flanagan’s famous bronze Hares (the large-eared leaping creatures of his later work that provided the artist with financial security and public popularity), I held slight trepidation attending this exhibition. Yet Flanagan’s ‘Early Works’ from 1965 – 1982 are a delight: subtle, but incredibly powerful.

If unaccustomed to the objects of Flanagan’s early years, Tate chucks you right in at the deep end. Walk through the entrance of this exhibition and before you stands ‘Aaing j gni aa’, an abstract, somewhat ridiculous sculpture of bulging shapes made from different coloured fabric packed tight with sand, one with a singular flower poking out of the top. It is an object that would sit well in a contortion of Serge Danot’s wonderful children’s TV show The Magic Roundabout.

Needless to say, it is not advised to search for a particular meaning behind such work. Flanagan’s art is precisely about confuting such cultural practice. His work playfully scrambles codes and alters perception.

Take ‘4 casb 2 '67’, in which towering monoliths in brilliant blue stand solidly rising from the ground, a large thick rope winding between them. These trunks provide all the expectations of traditional sculptural columns: they are weighty, overbearing and solid. Yet step closer and these qualities are suddenly undermined. Made from canvas filled with sand, their form is malleable; the tubes stretch at the seams, struggling to contain the grains within. The columns are, in fact, tentative and vulnerable.

Likewise ‘June 2’ 69’, a large work in room three, sticks two fingers up at standard artistic language. A large rectangle of fabric, thick and roughly cut with frayed edges, is propped up by knarled hazel braches. The materials used to create a traditional painting are presented and fulfill their usual functions – the wood still holds up the canvas as would a frame, and the canvas is still stretched by the wood to be visible to the viewer. Yet the supporting wood, normally hidden behind a painted surface, is now the focus, becoming drawn lines dividing the image.

In similar vein, and a favourite of mine, ‘untitled (carving no. 13/81)’ makes hard lime wood look like soft clay squeezed by a human hand. Flanagan’s work subverts what one expects from the sculptural form.

Hugely influential upon his work was author Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), who wrote ‘Ubu Roi’, later championed later by the Dadaists and Surrealists as the first absurdist drama. The word ‘absurd’ befits the work of Barry Flanagan quite aptly. 

In ‘Ubu Roi’, provocative Papa Turd wipes a soiled toilet cloth over his guests’ dinner in the first act. ‘Heap 4’, a smaller piece by Flanagan consisting of long, flaccid, fabric tubes in green, purple and yellow draped over each other in a pile, resembles something not far from the name of Jarry’s farcical character.

Despite complementary colours, ‘Heap 4’ made me rather nauseous, and it is this feeling of stomach turning which gets to the heart of Flanagan’s brilliance. His work holds a wonderful tactility that is a force to be reckoned with.

Hessian, rough wood, sand, rope and unpolished stone: all the materials Flanagan uses are raw and sensory. When rope digs into tight sacks, as with several of the pieces on show, images of bound flesh are evoked and ones hairs crawl. A pale washed canvas with a delicate spiral cut from the center and hanging down loosely like an apple peel, conjured images of flayed skin. 

There are moments of wonderful humor too. Such as ‘Poem for the Lips’, a work on paper whose stream of letters make ones mouth contort in pouts, goldfish like, when read out loud; and ‘A Nose in Repose’, a carved stone loosely resembling the human snout, resting proudly on a Jenga formation of wooden blocks.

When I entered Tate Britain on a recent windswept Sunday to see this show, the entrance of John Martin’s apocalyptic paintings was clustered with hubbub and bustle. However, Flanagan’s work should not be missed. It is a truly wonderful exhibition, full of evocative work, and deserves to be far more populated with curious visitors. Martin’s fire and brimstone there might not be, but sometimes slow-burners are all the more rewarding.

LINK:  http://www.londonconfidential.co.uk/Arts-and-Entertainment/Art/Barry-Flannigan-at-Tate-Britain-Review

Wednesday 2 November 2011

FEATURE: Dennis Sever's House

Published: LONDON CONFIDENTIAL, 2nd November 2011


"The Haunted: Dennis Severs' House. Thalia Allington-Wood discovers a gem in east London."

Standing in dark, shadowed, shuttered room of the seventeenth century, my companion and I are awe struck. We have been whirled into another time and my Converse trainers feel glaringly out of place.

The air is thick with the smell of tobacco and the burning of tallow candles. Two dead pheasants hang against a dark paneled wall and the embers of a fire glow orange in an iron hearth. The room we are in is in disarray. A chair is upturned, a glass of pungent port spilt, seeping a dark bloodstain on a white tablecloth covered in crumbs.

We are in Dennis Severs' House, nestled down a narrow street in East London. Painstakingly recreated to its original state and resurrected for the public every Sunday afternoon and Monday evening. Food of the period is cooked and left steaming, footsteps patter from hidden speakers, clay pipes are lit and left to issue smoke as you wander across 100 years in eerie silence.

The people who keep Dennis Severs' House running don’t wish it to be called a museum. None of the dry explanatory notices or neutralizing effects of modern exhibition displays are found here. This is a place where, rather, the past comes alive to startling and evocative effect.

A ticket (which must be booked in advance) will let you slip from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, between domestic privilege on the main floors and poverty in the attic.

Wandering the house on a blustery grey Monday evening, one can’t help but feel like an intruder. Wooden floorboards creak as you peer among belongings; bottles of liqueur line a table; wax sealed letters rest on a mantel piece. Alarmingly, we find the symbol of the Freemasons scratched frantically into a wall (Sherlock Holmes would have been proud).

Upstairs, we enter a ladies bedroom, where the scent of oranges stuffed with cloves and coffee that sits slowly bubbling below a candle on a small wooden table fills our nostrils. On the bed, the indent of last night’s slumber remains on the pillow, the covers are thrown back. A black cat eyes us suspiciously, flicking its tail.

Continuing our adventure, we push back laundry that hangs to dry in the rafters, reaching the top of the house. Cobwebs hang thick on a threadbare poster bed, a pan of fresh piss at its foot. An ink-splattered desk sits in the corner: old volumes teeter upon it in a pile.

Many museums could learn a thing or two from what this magical place is doing. Entering this house is like stepping through Alice’s looking glass into another world, or driving head first into the pages of Charles Dickens. These rooms belong to the London of Little Dorrit, Bleak House and Oliver Twist: melancholy streets, dingy and grime filled, as Church bells chime ominously. This, surely, is how to capture the imagination of school children (and adults) to the wonder history has to offer: to make the past tangible and real.

It is incredible. I could spend hours and hours here.

Unfortunately, however, our time is up. The front door swings wide and we are thrust back into modern London. A black cab rolls past, as our ears retune to the grumble of traffic and the jaunt of Brick lane.

Yet, walking along the cobbles of Folgate Street, the clatter of horse hooves and the rattle of iron wheels from Dickensian history continue to echo in my ears. Dennis Sever’s House is a place you will find hard to forget.

LINK:  http://www.londonconfidential.co.uk/Arts-and-Entertainment/The-Haunted-Dennis-Severs-House