From Berlin, my travels took me to London, where questions of space, both imaginative and physical seemed central to most of the art I encountered. The degree shows of Chelsea College of Art and Design, one of London’s foremost art schools, seem to be a pretty good gauge of the present and immediate future of British fine art—and the overwhelming impression I got from the work on show is that, whether due to fashion, educational trends or simply natural progression, contemporary artists are obsessed with context and completely bored with content. In other words, most of the works shown here are much more interested in creating an environment for you to be in than giving you something to look at—as if the possibilities of invention within the confines of a canvas or art-object have been so exhausted that the only area of creation left to explore is the exhibition space itself, and our relation to it. While certainly this is fertile ground for artistic exploration, it’s still just one of many grounds, and the unanimity of this shift in focus seems to have left a lot of artists floundering, with many 2D artists struggling to extract some environmental impact out of their work beyond just paint on a canvas, and many 3D artists just taking the piss with purposeless environmental ideas (the giant woodshed in which there was nothing but a neon sign reading “Lumen” deserves special mention in this regard). And, at the risk of sounding old-fashioned, one wonders if or where the idea of personal expression can exist in these limited terms—a question another London exhibition brought into focus for me.
Further along the South Bank, the Hayward Gallery was showcasing the work of one of the acclaimed masters of environmental art: Antony Gormley. Gormley’s work is all about creating a space for the spectator to navigate, and his sculptures tend to be less sculpted objects of contemplation than means of sculpting the space in which you walk, in fact almost a way of sculpting the way you walk within it—that contorted figure hanging from the ceiling is there less to be looked at than to make you look up. The centrepiece of the Hayward exhibition was Gormley’s new work, “Blind Light” (pictured above), a brightly lit glass room of white fog so dense you can barely see the end of your hand, in which your only points of orientation are your fellow museum-goers. If one accepts this environmental focus as a normative principle in contemporary art, then “Blind Light” is probably a masterpiece; a brilliantly simple combination of solid conceptualisation and accessible and engaging physicality—but it’s also thoroughly impersonal, more the product of an architectural engineer than a creative artist. And I wonder if, as open as this fine art world may seem (”anything” can be used to design an environment), it isn’t actually a very limiting restriction for new artists and, from an expressive point of view, a pretty castrating one.
Anyway, the real reason I was in London was for the National Film Theatre’s two retrospectives, of Roberto Rossellini and John Cassavetes. The cinema of these two geniuses creates new kinds of spaces too—especially when you see almost half a dozen of their films within a few days. I caught five of Rossellini’s late historical made-for-TV works (BLAISE PASCAL [1972], CARTESIUS [1974], AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO [1972], ACTS OF THE APOSTLES [1969] and ITALY: YEAR ONE [1974]): an incredible and fascinatingly difficult series of works that manage to be both plodding and thrilling, expositional and disorientating all at the same time. One finds one never knowing quite where one is in these films despite characters constantly explaining their positions. This isn’t to denigrate the films, however, because they do put you inside of a historical and intellectual space with extraordinary directness and efficacy, making physically palpable the profound claustrophobia of Descartes’ philosophical life in CARTESIUS, or the totally pervasive (and from a modern perspective thoroughly alien) atmosphere of belief and possibility among Christ’s followers in ACTS OF THE APOSTLES. Their difficulty is undeniably part of what makes them work.
However, after living in those spaces almost continuously for a few days, it was like a gust of fresh air kicking back with Cassavetes’s FACES (1968), A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (1974) and OPENING NIGHT (1997), films who’s spaces are open, performative, theatrical and present-tense—and, I think, more so than many films, fundamentally different experiences when you see them in the cinema.
Finally in London, my Talent Campus friend, Taiwanese actor/director Chen Chia-Kuei, took me to see the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan at Sadler’s Wells. Their show, WILD CURSIVE, the final part of a trilogy of “cursive” works, was kind of like a flip side to this whole environmental-art thing. Choreographer Lin Hwai-Min takes an art that is one of the most space-based by nature, and treats it like a flat surface. Using the principles of calligoraphy as his basis, Lin’s dancer’s become graphic material fluidly “written” across the stage. While the contemporary art world may be aghast at such blatant “regressive” practice, it was stunning to watch.
[...] I’ve written before about the limitations of the contemporary fashion of spatial or environmentally focused art, but the distinction between “Zero Degree” and something like Antony Gormley’s Blind Light is that Collado makes no claims that her spatial arrangement is the artwork itself, nor does the spectator (participant is perhaps a better word…) tend to think of it that way. Rather, it’s a form of curatorial intervention; a display of artworks designed to facilitate certain kinds of engagement and relationship and obstruct others. [...]