Cecily Brown: Shipwreck Drawings

Cecily Brown has become a significant presence in contemporary painting. 

Her large paintings often balance De Kooning’s pale patches of paint with echoes of the pastoral washes of English watercolours and Bacon and Freud’s meaty applications. A loose allusion of faux-gestural marks and a disciplined car-crash of organic forms building into a sliding accumulation of vegetable chaos straining to indicate an animal, a figure or a torso.

The twitchy sliding layers of almost-imagery can become strangely claustrophobic. Often the paintings suggest a flighty grabbing of subjects, themes, historical models, of types of representation.

She smears the chaotic minutae of Bosch’s Garden Of Earthly Deights into near abstraction with the unreliability of memory and the necessity of images to still the erosive movement of time a constant in the paintings.

With Brown’s work it feels as though there is a suspicion and disdain for the seductive properties of matter tempered by a resigned love for the stuff - seduction, penetration, pleasure and pain all alluded to. 

As a counterpoint to this play with the substantial substance of paint, Brown currently has an exhibition of ‘Shipwreck Drawings’ at Manchester (UK) Whitworth Galleries. 

The display shows two groupings of nine drawings, one of eight, along with a more conventional horizontal hang of three drawings and two isolated smaller ones.

The wall text / promotional blurb notes that all drawings are reworkings of areas from four paintings of post-shipwreck survivors; three by Eugene Delacroix, ‘Christ Asleep During The Tempest’ (1853) and an accompanying preparatory study and ‘The Shipwreck Of The Don Juan’ (1840), as well as Theodore Gericault’s seminal ‘The Raft Of The Medusa’ (1818 -19)

Often they have large areas of muted primary coloured washes, occasionally supplemented with a grassy green, overdrawn with grey-black charcoal and pencil line drawings of groupings and clusters of bodies. These primary washes tend to move the eye around the picture space in opposition to the suggested movement of the linear complexity of the studies. 

Heads, torsos,and bodies seem almost compressed into vagually triangular scrambles of shapes. They seem chaotically restricted rather than huddled which is fairly reasonable for images culled from images of shipwreck survivors on a fragile raft of wood.

And yet the theatrical pile and tangle of suggested imagery lacks the gravity of the physical bulk and sweat of human bodies. 

A strong reminder that Brown’s enterprise is very much a restaging of earlier compositions and images and an indicator of her practice as an offshoot of the 1980s artworld appropriationist bent.

Ellsworth Kelly: Liverpool Tate

                                                             'Broadway' (1958)

Liverpool UK has a number of high profile galleries, not least the Liverpool incarnation of the Tate gallery franchise. 

Settled in the relatively small, but not inconsiderable, ground floor gallery is an excellent mini-retrospective of prints and paintings by American artist Ellsworth Kelly. 

Kelly’s work is an exercise in high-quality wrongness, each distortion of the flat, coloured and rectangular seems retrospectively obvious. Obvious in the same way a successful melody seems contained and complete, even prior to being heard. 

The elegant incorrectness of Kelly’s best work demands sustained attention. Its refined variance from the strictures imposed by High Modernisms simplification to colour and surface is a continual pleasure.

As somatic deformations of an architectural purity, traps for the eye, Kelly’s paintings loop the experience of the graphically attractive back to the act of reading the design. Looking becomes thinking about looking whilst simultaneously enjoying the activity. 

As a return for time spent in front of any object it is hard to know how that can be improved on.

Steve Hunt: UNITY - Memories Of A Free Festival

Hunched and scowling on a corner on the outskirts of Manchester’s Northern Quarter, ‘The Crown And Kettle’ pub eyes suspiciously the city’s self-professed ‘cultural quarter’ and its mercantile infighting. 

The walls of the pub are currently home to Steve Hunt’s photographs communally entitled ‘UNITY: Memories Of A Free Festival’. 

The pictures are belatedly printed black and white ‘documentary’ photographs of small groupings of attendees at an anti-racism UNITY festival staged in Chorlton in Manchester in 1994. 

Hunt has a good eye for spotting if not moments of disunity then points of apparent individual introversion within a crowd. Even if this interpretation of the images is very much imposed by the viewer, Hunt’s cumulative compilation of moments which suggest this reading have a destabilizing effect on the festivals theme of joyous UNITY. 

Not, to be fair, a dismissive undermining of the festivals good intentions, more a suggestion of questioning uncertainty.

1994 was roughly the point at which digital photography began its rise to dominance, a form of image construction which dispenses with the lick of reality implied by older printed photos.

In reality photos were always things which acquired value through their different potential uses. Whereas a mediated flow of images is controlled information, instructions pretending to be one-side of a conversation, the photographic print is a record of a process of fixing an image and can have a number of functions at one-and-the-same time - memory enhancer, a record of an incident, a form of surveillance, and so on.

As photographs are objects divorced from one simple function, solid material facts as much as congealed movement peeled from reality, their immobile indifference to the viewers demands makes them alien artifacts from somewhere else. Even if that somewhere is our own pasts.

In this way, the passive irresponsibility of older photographs-as-things, their refusal to be easily defined, there stubborn mute there-ness, stands in opposition to the deadening economy of images, the contemporary digitized world of an excess of images; here today and largely gone today.

However, like a hazy memory or a half-seen event, all photographs nag at us, demand interpretation.

These pictures now sit at an almost distant moment in time. With all such photographs there is a temptation to indulge the viewer in the warming certainties of nostalgia. 

But these prints willingly embrace the entropy of their physical decay, the fact of old processes slipping from use, the imperfections of their production processes controlled by the artist, all suggesting a less clear framing of historical events, both culturally and privately.

The inevitable end-point for the medium, its moment of disappearance, is being used as a new user function. One we still have yet to fully understand.

John Hyatt: Rock Art

From 04 February through to 29 March 2017, the galleries at Manchester’s HOME art centre are the stage for a grouping of collaborative installations, sculptural pieces, and digital and audio works by John Hyatt. 

The whole affair, loosely predicated on the theme of the ego of the artist and its transcendence by communal activity, is accompanied by a series of four early evening Friday night music and cabaret events, all MC’d by Hyatt, under the title CLUB BIG. CLUB BIG being a reference to an actual Club in Milan where Hyatt performed in the 1980s whilst a member of Post-punk musical trio The Three Johns.   

The walls of the area designated CLUB BIG has a thin peppering of art student paintings, a cut-out figure, object sculptures, and digital playback screens, all showing work engaging with the concept of prospective alter-egos for Hyatt the artist and educationalist.

The HOME publicity goes further than just presenting Hyatt as both an artist and teacher announcing him as a Renaissance-style polymath: artist, musician, scientist and punk professor. Although the claims of multidisciplinary competence may be a tad overblown, the gallery promotional blurbs expand further on his impressive skills-base - photographer, designer, printmaker, author and sculptor. 

The press release and exhibition pamphlet add a jokey reverential tone and appear to be a further comedic layer of ego-buffing; Hyatt is an ‘irrepressible explorer’,‘transdisciplinary theorist’, ‘one of the North West’s most beloved and exciting artists’, ‘an irrepressible and influential force’ and a ‘genuine original collaborator-innovator.’  

Hyatt’s solo work has certainly jumped around different art forms. 

Recent paintings are generally filled with cartoonish vegetation, often toxically bright Edens with Hyatt’s figure striding purposefully through the compact of Surrealism’s impossible space and Outsider Art’s earnest escapism.

Hyatt’s digital prints ‘Rossendale Fairies’ (2014), photographic enlargements of blurred winged creatures, were allegedly fairies frolicking in the sunshine; a clear reference to the 1917 Cottingley Fairies hoax. Teenagers Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths photographed themselves with drawings of fairies pasted onto cardboard and convinced the credulous members of the newspaper reading public of their authenticity.

His most high-profile artwork is probably still the impressively tall ‘Tilted Windmills’ public sculpture sprouting from the pavement in Manchester centre’s Exchange Square. Unfeasibly large replicas of the popular children’s rotating sand castle bling, they are as proudly ostentatious as a Damien Hirst fabrication.

A constant is these examples is Hyatt’s intentional occupation of a peculiar territory between cynical, self-promoting showmanship and a stubborn, almost childish, belief in the transformative potential of imaginative play.

For all its trinkets and constructions, reference points and echoes of historical models of art play, ‘Rock Art’ is a less self-reflective or revealing event than a genuine retrospective would have been: the term ego may be bandied about but is never explained, the concept of an alter-ego cited but never really exhibited.

The exhibition physically announces itself before reaching the gallery entrance in the form of a Hyatt-themed merchandise shop: there’s Hyatt collaborative and solo CDs, tee-shirts, cups, badges, and on and on.

Once the product placement plinths are negotiated, the galleries contain a handful of interactive areas, headphones for music and digital playback screens.

‘The Great Deception’ (2017) is a large, approximately ten feet tall, boxy sculpture of the Trojan horse covered in the tiny mirrored squares of a mirrorball. Inside the empty MDF and wood construction a disembodied voice relates instructions on intergalactic travel, the horse is a fantasy spaceship womb and a disco bauble.

The implications of male aggression and the cult of the egotistical leader who often fuels its battlefield release feeds into the black and white imagery on the three long hanging banners of ‘The Anticipation’ (2017). Putin, Trump and planet Mars, the god of war in the planetary zodiac of meaning, all appear on these parodies of early punk records cheaply collaged covers.

The series of hangs accompany the directive theatrical rope barrier leading into CLUB BIG. The moments waiting in anticipation of the evenings revelries seem to be being compared to the build up towards the fallout from the butting egos of the world leaders. 

There’s two independent digital ‘video’ work.

‘Brainbox’ (2017) is a two channel piece: the right hand playback has Hyatt speculating on the human brains capacity to create meaning for itself; the left shows a shifting of mass in a granular powdering of vibrated sand, the work referencing Hyatt’s and mathematician Jon Borresen’s earlier joint work ‘Creative Spiral’ (2016). 

The three channel piece ‘Three Wishes’ (2017) is really a rejigged compilation of old footage: words cut out of lines of poetry filmed on a vibrating surface shift around, the organic curls of moving sand forms overlay Hyatt’s face, the geology of the Peak District imperceptibly moves on the final screen. 

‘The Collection And Reading Room’ (2017) is a pop-up lending library housed in a white gallery cube of the type seen at art fairs and biennales. The inside walls hold top to bottom white shelves supporting copies of Hyatt’s large collection of superhero comics. 

The hero’s identity hidden behind an alter-ego is a perennial in these stories but the notional idea of surface camouflage is taken further. The display cube’s external walls are coated in a regular pattern of large red dots, these bring to mind the red dots indicating a gallery sale and the atomic unit of the Ben-Day dots which construct early comic book imagery. 

In an ‘art’ space they cannot avoid also insinuating a nod towards the Pop Art productions of Roy Lichtenstein and, tellingly, the endless fabrication of spot paintings rolled out by showman artist Damien Hirst.

To further muddy loose connections between the installations elements, a shallow surrounding display case houses various rocks and stones. Each has a couple of text panels relating a spotty holidaying adolescent’s escape into the fantasy worlds between a comic’s covers.

Tentative connections but manageable if the whole thing remained self-contained. 

The dotted tomes can, however, be read in a cafeteria area serving a John Hyatt inspired infusion, an attempt by artist Mike Chavez-Dawson to distill and transcribe personal qualities into an invigorating assault on nostrils and palate. 

In the cross-over arena of pop and art, there are notable predecessors. Raymond Pettibon, with his comic-book and cartoon influenced drawings and designs for LA punk bands, has himself become culturally enmeshed with the noise of Black Flag and their contemporaries. The visuals of Pettibon’s designs are as resonantly influential as the music it augments and fine tunes.

Hyatt’s output is a much more fragmented compilation of art historical styles and procedures for producing ‘art,’ as indebted to Fluxus performance events as it is to techniques of ‘appropriation’ so prevalent in 1980s art school culture.

With this in mind, proclaiming oneself a ‘Punk Professor’ is, presumably, an ironic reference to the art-worlds over-reliance on irony. Or something along those lines. 

However, ‘Punk’ (whatever that actually may be) was dependent on a spikiness and irreverence, even to its own lineage; the stance of the professorial and academic, for all its implications of willful aloofness, upon a degree of specialism and intellectual rigour. Hyatt’s exhibition would benefit from a considerably more nuanced interplay between the two.

The ‘Rock’ of the exhibition title transmutes into the gray mineral versions (in the text and display cases surrounding the ‘Collection and Reading Room’ installation), into the sticky sugar tubes of confectionary rock (in the Hyatt-themed merchandise shop) and the rock strummings of the CLUB BIG musicians. Unfortunately, the component bits don’t seem to add up to anything close to the weight and heft of an actual rock.

Finally, the ‘Rock Art’ exhibition is momentarily diverting as an exercise in hijacking Nicolas Bourriaud’s popular socializing-as-art notion of contemporary practice and converting it into a means of self-promotion.