Reticence and the beauty of restraint. The Power of No thing.

Part 1



I've been thinking for some time about not doing things. I recognise this as a continuous underlying theme in my thinking with many aspects and significant details to it. I can see how it applies across the whole of my life and acknowledge that it is something we all have to consider, possibly on a daily basis, and no doubt, for the main part, at an subconscious level.

Choosing whether or not to do something is an intrinsic part of thinking and decision making. We choose each time we act or don't act. There is not time enough to do all the things we might consider doing. If there is not opportunity, we may decide to work at creating an opportunity, or we may decide to leave that thing aside. I could, at this point, decide to go down many different paths with my thinking and eliminate all the obvious aspects of choosing, deciding, or being forced by circumstances not to do things, not to include things in our experience, our life etc. I choose, however to not do that but to consider the origins of my current thought process;

The "something" that lead me here was being told about the work of a poet called George Oppen, who is described as an Objectivist. L.S. Dembo, author of such works as "Conceptions of Reality in American Poetry",  attempts to sum up Oppen's approach with these words;

" aesthetic qualities of objects or events - apprehended not in terms of their associations or conventional meaning, but in terms of their form or motion - [were] considered by Oppen to be 'empirical' "

At this point, I considered the word empirical. I extracted the essentials of the way it is described by Wikipedia and laid them out as a list :



EMPIRICAL :


Evidence

Sense experience

Knowledge

Source of knowledge

Acquired by the senses

Observation

Experimentation


from the Greek word for experience :  emporia



Bearing this in mind, I considered the stated approach of Objectivist poets, which is, I read, to;



" emphasise simplicity and clarity over formal structure and rhyme "



Whenever I have read about such apparently spacious approaches to creativity, I have been drawn to them by their misleading impression of the simplicity of their method. Oh how wonderful it would be to clear the mind of its crowded thoughts and images so that you could tread an easy path, thinking clear thoughts and producing lucid work.

Yet the world and life and daily life in particular are not simple. To establish a way of living and creating takes a lot of hard work and a lot of that involves a task which I now recognise as akin to earth moving or sorting through piles of rubbish in which many precious things nestle and amongst which those precious or significant things are hard to recognise. In fact, there are some days when each and every item in this pile seems potentially precious and significant. In addition to this, the earth you have moved, the things you have put aside must be put somewhere else. We are, after all, only moving stuff around, randomly picking things out to be viewed as significant - for a time. We could so easily go back to the pile of abandoned things, the old dug earth and resift, looking again with different parameters, if our thinking is adjusted in some way.


In addition to the fact that George Oppen worked in an Objectivist style, I am also interested that he stopped writing poetry for a period of his life when he became involved in politics. Twenty eight years elapsed between his initial success and recognition and his re-engagement with publishing poetry. Twenty eight years of not publishing might not, I realise, entail 28 years of not writing, but the fact that he didn't publish anything during this time presents us, who view him as a poet from the outside, as someone who is no longer a poet, or maybe a poet in suspension. A resting poet. A latent poet. A poet who chooses not to write perhaps. Certainly a poet who has decided not to allow us to read what he has written.


Jonathan Galas, poet, translator and publisher,  said of Oppen's writing career that it was;

"a life-long confrontation between an unimpeachably free spirit's sense of order and a 'world of things'.

Another critic described his approach as;

"the effort of the mind to reach clarity of vision by turning always upon itself, travelling back and forth between things and words, reconsidering and correcting earlier impressions or pondering."

This paring down process begins to sound arduous, entailing a lot of graft, both mental and physical. If I relate it to George Oppen's description of it being empirical, I start to think about how it is that we can begin to know what to extract, pick out, focus on, from the life that we live, portions, components, elements, to be considered and possibly transformed into what may be regarded as a work of art, in whatever form that may take.

An eavesdropped aphorism sums up this approach simply;

" art is what is left when you think you have erased everything. "


It is, perhaps, our chosen "form" that will dictate, for the most part, what to include and what to leave out. We could, conversely, decide to let the content create the form. Forms can also be combined if we choose to be inclusive. So begins the sifting and sorting, the oscillations of thinking and choosing which may or may not lead to an action and its corresponding impact.

Object : flood tablet

Going towards consciousness

and 

coming away from it.



I enjoyed listening to Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, reading from his work  "A History of the World in 100 Objects " some years ago on Radio 4. I was given his book as a present, so I cannot remember now which objects I heard described and which I have just read about myself in Neil MacGregor's memorable voice with the punctuating sound effects, but the object which I remember most vividly is the Flood Tablet.

It's a clay tablet, part of a collection from ancient Mesopotamia, written in cuneiform script and translated by George Smith, apprentice printer who taught himself to decipher cuneiform script during lunchtime visits to the British Museum in the 1870's.

More specifically, Neil MacGregor tells us, it's from Nineveh in modern Iraq and is about 15cm high, made of dark brown clay and the text is densely written in two close columns. It's a fragment, bits are missing, but enough remains to enable George Smith to tell us the tale it tells; about a man who is told by his god to build a boat and load it with his family and animals in order to survive an impending deluge. It's a familiar story; one retold in Genesis some time after apparently. Neil MacGregor is such a fountain of knowledge.

The translation makes the hairs stand up on your neck, if you're predisposed to that kind of reaction to antiquities revealing treasures :

" demolish the house, and build a boat ! Abandon wealth and seek survival. Spurn property, save life. Take on board all living things' seed ! The boat you build, her dimensions all shall be equal: her length and breadth shall be the same. Cover her with a roof, like the ocean below, and he will send you a rain of plenty. "

Neil MacGregor tells us that there are about 130,000 clay tablets in a library in the British Museum. Most of them are fragments, kept on shelves in narrow wooden trays. I try to imagine what that looks like and marvel at the enormous responsibility in looking after them and handling them whilst deciphering them. I also think, as others do, about the wealth of knowledge and interest they contain.

I have always loved such things. Like other children, I would dig in the garden and sometimes other places, and delight in the treasure found; usually bits of pottery, coins, stones, undefinable bits of things which may have been bone. I would bury things too. The first thing I ever buried was a tin of pennies next to the washing pole. I sometimes wonder if they have been found. You have to consider the receptacle you choose to bury things in. Tin rots slowly, plastic takes forever. Do not bury a beloved pet in a plastic container is something I learned from someone who loved her pet hamster dearly.

Archaeologists and scholars who study ancient objects do a great service. It goes without saying that they are piecing together our history and ensuring that the story and understanding of it is ever evolving as it should be. With each new fragment unearthed, new understandings can be reached.

To preserve fragments before quite understanding their value is an act of faith and even though it can be taught, I suspect for some people, it's an innate and instinctive urge. When we look at ancient objects without scholarly understanding, we have to use our imagination if we are to appreciate their potential significance. Once the imagination has been stimulated with enough bits of information, we can use all our faculties to build a story around each object or fragment.

I am trying to do this when I look at a piece of art work. For so many years, I was addicted to reading the plaques and any surrounding verbal information before really looking at the work itself. I think this urge was stronger when looking at figurative works rather than abstract ones. If there is a narrative being told, then I have a need to understand it rather than imagine it. If I am looking at an abstract drawing, print, painting or piece of sculpture, I assume that the artist is using formal language that I can decipher for myself if I look long enough and use the knowledge I already have of art, including themes, processes and to some extent, history to decipher the artist's intent. I also assume that the artist has chosen to work abstractly in order to leave room for the onlooker to bring their own interpretation and understanding to the work. I accept this could be wrong. Perhaps some abstract work has a specific meaning that is apparent if you observe it correctly. It is, of course, generally hard to know whether to overlay a work with allusions or to try to take it completely literally and get some sense out of it that way.

Looking at the flood tablet and thinking about George Smith teaching himself the cuneiform script makes me wonder if there is a significant link between what he undertook and the process of understanding a work of art. I also suspect that there is a lot of common ground with the kind of thinking taking place in the actual creation of a work.

In order to explore this idea, I am going to try to remember my thoughts when making a piece of work at art college many years ago.


The Torso

It always seemed to feel, and I get the impression that this is still the case, that figurative work is considered both passe and far too simplistic when you're studying fine art at college. I make an exception for certain institutions such as The Slade, the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at  Oxford and other places I don't know about that take care to uphold the tradition. For the most part, I am fairly certain, the modern fine art course taught in this country at degree level is rooted in post modern philosophy and with particular respect to deconstruction, that is, of ideas and of the nature of practice as well.  When I first went to Manchester Polytechnic to study Fine Art in the early eighties, I was blissfully ignorant of this and of postmodern concepts at all and since the teaching/learning style was indirect and osmotic rather than directly instructive, I never fully understood the concepts I was supposed to come to understand during the 3 years I spent struggling to get my degree there. I assume that's the postmodern teaching approach.

I opted to specialise in sculpture in the second year. The reasons for this were complex and I thought for a long time afterwards this was a mistake, but recently as I have begun to consider making art again, I am beginning to understand this is a good approach to making art for me personally.

As the second year wore on, it started to become clear to me that all the work I wanted to carry out was about the body. This made me feel out of synch with the approaches being advocated, albeit in an indirect way, by the lecturers in the department. I may have been misguided in this impression. There is no innate reason why the body is not a fit subject for art produced in a post-modernist way; it all depends on the treatment of it. However, my approach, as a young student, was rather too instinctive, personal and therefore allusory for it to slot into synch with postmodern thinking. Or so I thought then.


The idea

So, feeling somewhat out of kilter with what was being endorsed as good work down at the studios, I made some work at my flat. I was very taken with gyproc plaster bandages; that is, bandages impregnated with plaster used for making casts for people who had broken their limbs and I bought it at great expense from a medical supplies place near to the studios. We had a plaster studio at college, but I did not like the colour or texture of it. It was good for making casts of clay structures, but not for direct work on the body. I know that you can obtain supplies of gyproc - bandage strips impregnated with a fine white plaster - from craft and fine art material suppliers now. I wasn't aware of any at the time.

With the help of my friend, I made a couple of casts, one of each of our faces, and a full torso of myself.

Because I had made these at home, I didn't develop them much further. They were like private pieces, strange and tame as they were. I bound the two halves of the torso together with more gyproc and reinforced the inside with another material I used a lot of as a student and beyond - the so very useful chicken wire. What I did next was related to some other small objects I had been making for some time at college - small wire cages containing soy beans. I filled the torso with soy beans; so I could have entitled this 'piece', this thing, wittily, "full of beans" couldn't I, but I didn't. I kept it in my flat, full of its beans, took some photographs of it which I'm not even sure went into my portfolio, and pondered it daily. The masks remained masks.

I've often thought of this thing that I made. It's just a simple thing and I've seen a lot of other pieces of art work since along similar lines; in particular, a series of works based on corsets. Not quite the same, but dealing with just that middle part of a woman's body which has been the focus of so much art over the centuries. Other examples come to mind, rather ludicrous to link such major works to my own tentative beginnings, but this is just a thought experiment;


The Winged Victory of Samothrace

I've seen this magnificent figure at least three times in the Louvre. (Yes, I've been there a few times, once only long enough to see this again and the Mona Lisa, but that's another story). It stood, it seemed, momentously, at the top of a long, beautiful staircase and on a very large piece of stone resembling the broken prow of a ship.

It's a marble carving and it's impossible for me to imagine carving it. The drapery and the wings - how on earth. It seems supernatural.

Date : Between 200 - 190 BC

Greek

She will, presumably, have had arms and a head originally. In fact, I know she had at least one hand because her right hand, minus her fingers, was found at some point after she herself was unearthed, then later, the tip of her ring finger and thumb were also and these are displayed in a nearby glass cabinet.

The person who wrote the Wikipedia entry about the Winged Victory commented that the figure's very evident power is enhanced by the fact that she has no head.

The things I love so much about it are the obvious ones to do with her pose, the subtle evidence of her breasts, stomach and thighs beneath drapery rendered so well in beautiful Parian marble and not least of all, her wings. They occupy a vast space behind her body, I wonder at how large the original piece of marble was that she has been cut from and what the remaining pieces went on to become.

She is not, in fact a torso is she, since her legs are intact and the wings really have the effect of compensating for a lack of arms. Her stance, together with her robust form, despite her lack of certain essential physical features, still portray immense power, but I suppose this is purely because she is a rigid thing, made of hard stone, still standing despite fatal injury due to the stuff she is made of. Therein lies an allegory, perhaps even one that may have crossed her maker's mind as she was hewn.



Aphrodite of Cnidus

Another Greek beauty, in fact, beauty herself, which has survived since the 4th C BC.

This is the first depiction of the Greek goddess, apparently caught off guard as she emerged from her bath.  Once again, it is described by an art historian thus; "Even lacking its head and limbs, this figure possesses a sensuous movement compelling as one moves around it."  You can just about fill in some of the gaps; Praxiteles, her maker, did such a good job of implying movement in the posture of her torso, you can, if you work at it, imagine how her limbs would look. I'm not so sure about her head, although by what remains of her neck, there is the suggestion that her head was inclined downwards.




Torso Miro

Henry Moore

Barbara Hepworth

Rodin

Torso of the Pharaoh Akhenaten

The Metropolitan Museum in New York, where this fragment of a statue is kept, describe it so ;

"The heavy breasts and sagging belly of the king are typical of his representation, a feminized body that may suggest his fertile receptiveness to life and divine inspiration from the Aten".

The Aten was the deity worshipped in Egypt c. 1353-1336 BCE



Brancusi  Male torsos

Giacometti bronze torso

Louise Bourgoise  Woven Child

As a tapestry of images, torsos become surreal, but looking at them all, it's apparent to me that focussing in on the central area of the body is an interesting way of concentrating on specific ideas. 

Reduction of imagery, leaving parts out yet implying their phantom presence, directs the eye and mind to a focal point which attempts to eliminate extraneous features, yet nevertheless makes our thoughts wander back to them in our wondering about their absence.

Drawing the strands of my thinking together; we imagine there are mysteries in the fragments of the tablets and in a similar way, we are intrigued by the fragmented image of the body. 

In my mind, there are visual references to amputation rather than just the passage of time in the torsos by Hepworth and Rodin. Hepworth seems to imply blood vessels and internal elements in the exposed amputated arm stump. Rodin's figure's writhing posture, together with the tapering shape of the withered arm also suggests injury to me. Conversely, Bourgoise's torso seems complete and intact. Rather an absurd impression I know and I admit I haven't seen any of these works in the flesh so to speak. Perhaps my impressions would be altered by seeing them in actuality.


Wrapped Torso

The only photo' I have of this is of my friend holding the front piece up against her after it had dried. None of the finished object containing beans remain, but it was a very simple thing, so it is easy to visualise. The bandage is very much in evidence; it gives the impression of a wrapping, a bit like The Invisible Man.

So it is a wrapped thing.

Protected, suggesting underlying injury.

A container.

Of space.

Of potential energy - hence the beans. 

It reminds me of embalming.

Of some kind of armour.

A breast plate.

A protection for something.

An outer covering for something precious within

Not a fragment, but a complete container.

I have seen a work by a female artist in bronze which is part vest, part piece of armour, part 

female torso, but empty like a garment.

Bill Viola , art that I hate and other things that scare me

  

  I went to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park recently, not to see anything in particular, there's such a lot to see there and the place is so beautiful, you don't need a particular reason to go. It was during the school holidays and very busy. We were turned away from the usual parking lots and diverted to the original entrance that we used to use a long time ago and I was so pleased to drive past Elisabeth Frink's Riasce warrior figures, those masked, running men who are poised menacingly at one point on the lush grass on the way in. Like lots of people, I love that group of figures. Going slowly past them over the speed humps, I wondered if they were slightly smaller than full scale. On looking them up on my return home I discovered that they are, in fact, life size or even slightly taller. Their apparent smallness is no doubt due to their situation, posted in front of monumental trees. The expanse of Bretton Park with its mature landscaping and massive trees creates a dramatic stage for sculpture. The Riasce figures are placed as though they have emerged from the trees behind and are now paused, caught in a moment of tension, perhaps looking where to go next
with their left arms lifted ready for attack or defence. They evoke a strange impression of both menace and vulnerability. It occurs to me that their power and influence is derived from them being in a group, a group of people wearing the same masks, using the same gestures. Passing them, I want to linger.  I'd like to stalk them, perhaps starting under cover in the shelter of the trees then approach and stand among them, consider the composition of the group, assess the weight and bulk of each individual. An outdoor gallery invites such interaction.

It so happens that on this day, all car parks are full and we have to invade the dis-used tennis courts. This lovely place was once the home of a teacher training college affiliated to Leeds University. It must have been an inspiring place to learn with it's expanse of beautifully landscaped and planted grounds and the Yorkshire landscape rolling away into the distance. It functions as a place to display sculpture so well, it takes your breath away when you visit and see how much there is to see.

This day, the ground is waterlogged, as is most of Yorkshire after the torrential rain and flooding at Christmas and the early part of the year. Our feet sink into the grass as we walk over to inspect the large sculpture, Promenade, which is a line of large metal shapes by Anthony Caro. the five shapes are all of different heights and comprised of curving parts which could be said to give an impression of movement, gesture or posture.  For such a large steel construction, it's surprisingly inviting and it does really tempt you to walk a weaving path in and out of each piece of it. In doing so, you don't exactly feel as if you're amongst a line of people, but the scale and positioning of them gives them a being-like presence and this makes me think once more about the effect of a group of forms.

In the near distance, you can see Sol Lewitt's 123454321 end on. The pale pinky grey of the cinder bricks it's made of look natural in the sunshine, although the material is actually a cheap manufacturing one used commonly in building. Its colour is inoffensive as it sits on the grass, again with trees as a backdrop. I like its lack of plinth or base. It doesn't require one since it's own structure supports and delineates itself. The mathematical sequence it describes gives it a satisfying shape and makes it a peaceful, contemplative piece of work and also, despite it's angularity and synthetic material, one that seems to have grown naturally out of the natural world. Although not a group of separate structures, the sequential pattern of it gives a feeling of progression and in this way it has something in common with the Riasce warriors and Anthony Caro's Promenade.

There are many other sculptures placed along the way as we walk towards the Underground Gallery. One of them I instantly take a dislike to. I've never seen it before and the LED lights it's composed of keep commanding your attention as you walk nearby. It's a moving image of a horse running on a screen which is on top of a black brick wall. I read on my return home that it's by the sculptor Julian Opie and the Park's write-up of it, quite naturally, describes it in ways that improve my impression of it, but I don't like it because it's garish and out of place. It reminds me of the screens erected in city centres for advertising and information these days. One of my companions, who likes it, says it looks like it's referencing Muybridge's visual studies of a horse's movements. Well that's one way of giving it some status in the history of art but for myself, this reference doesn't detract from the brutality of its incongruity in the natural space of Bretton Park. Perhaps the brick wall plinth is slightly reminiscent of fences that horses jump in horse jumping, but the screen holding the LED image can only be for
me like a tv screen with all the associated ideas connected to do with horse racing and betting, I can't get any further with the meaning or significance of the work itself. It might mean even less to me if it was within a building or a more man-made space and I wonder if it site specific. I also worry about it breaking down and what it would look like as a structure without its image of the horse. Then it really would look like a screen for displaying adverts or information on.

It's strange because, I'm not averse to horse racing or betting or screens per-se, and I do want art to reflect and use the kind of materials that are symbolic of our area, but.......

Here, at the "but",  I start to wonder about how my own taste comes into play when I look at a piece of art. I have been particularly resistant to date to looking at and appreciating video art. I know many people who used to paint now use video instead or alongside and in some instances sculptors choose to use it, but I have not been very interested in looking at any. When Steve McQueen won the Turner Prize with his reproduction of a famous scene in a Buster Keaton film, I took no notice, apart from the fact that a black artist had won. This is partly due to my lack of interest in the prize itself, but mainly due to my lack o f enthusiasm for video art. I am very suspicious and resistant to technology, which I know is quite ridiculous. I, along with so many other people, crave craft and objects. We want things to have a human hand behind them, possibly personality. We fear robots, alienation, maybe impermanence. We desire authenticity, although, we're not quite sure what it is. We love film, so why the hesitancy towards video art ? Does it seem too facile ? I haven't taken the time to look at any sufficiently to judge. Just the idea of it deters me.

It was interesting for me that on this visit to Bretton Park, a huge exhibition of work by the video artist Bill Viola was being held and as we approached the Underground gallery to go and have a look at it, I wasn't exactly filled with enthusiasm. The Underground Gallery at YSP is a good venue for showing retrospectives or large exhibitions of one artist's work. It's divided up into four separate rooms which are connected and a long corridor that runs the length of them all. I've been to a Henry Moore retrospective there and it worked well; some of his large sculptures were placed with sufficient space around them to look at them properly, others were tightly enclosed so that you got a sense of their scale and mass. His drawings and prints surrounded the sculptures on the walls and the end room was filled with artefacts that had inspired him alongside tools that he used. A fine documentary made in the sixties all about his work practices was running on a small screen in one corner, not at all dominating. The room was light enough to take a good look at all the artefacts and notebooks on display. Prior to seeing this exhibition, I was not really a Moore fan, but seeing his work displayed together in this way and to some extent explained or enlightened, I came away with an increased respect for it. It's a fantastic opportunity to understand an artist's work when it's presented altogether and I really should have been more excited about the Bill Viola one. It seems I expected solid forms and materials with evidence of the hand behind them to be more interesting.

Before entering the exhibition, we were forewarned that we would be entering complete darkness and I couldn't imagine what this would mean. Light would emanate from the video images, albeit intermittently, surely, but video images are unpredictable in their provision of light as a useful source and it was only a matter of time before I stumbled over a small child and nearly caused a domino effect amongst the throngs of  art lovers milling about in the immersive dark.

And it did feel as though people were milling in the gallery. Very few people were entering into the intended immersive experience. I didn't enter into it either for the most part. I was interested in the installation piece which had hanging pieces of gauze- like material through which a moving image was being shown. I was interested in the camera at the source of the image which was visible and in how the gauzes were hung. I don't recall the images being projected through them. This is partly due to my inattentiveness - I had just tripped over the child - and also due to the positioning of the projection; to view it, you had to go and stand next to the gauze hangings which seemed rather fragile and the room was busy and I had just tripped over a child.

You can see the state of mind the situation had put me in. I knew what the work required but I couldn't give it that full attention. I remembered visiting the room at the Tate where Rothko's Seagrams murals were displayed in one room with benches when I was able to sit and contemplate them in relative peace as intended. Not so Monet's lovely curved waterlily paintings in the Orangeries, Paris. It's a double edged sword this displaying work in public spaces. Perhaps being able to book a ticket for a time would help. Or going late at night. I know the Hepworth gallery does evening openings.

Shuffling into another room, I found myself captivated and moved by a sequence of images displayed on two screens, side by side. One was of a male, the other of a female. Things, powerful things to do with water and fire, were happening to them simultaneously. The male has to walk through fire, the woman must pass through water and you get the impression at the end of the sequence that these spiritual experiences unite them on the other side of somewhere. Bill Viola is obviously, in all senses of this word, using easily identifiable symbolism in order to reduce the experience of life and death to a core of commonly felt emotions and experiences; pain, fear, being submerged in and subjected to overwhelming experiences etc. In terms of referencing universal themes, it makes you think of the universe being composed of maleness and femaleness and the idea that they are striving constantly to be united; the force of creativity itself as understood in many different religions and philosophies.

Fire and water are also well known and easily understood symbols in relation to birth and death; consider the crossing of the River Styx, Viking burials, Hindu funeral pyres to name but a few. I did enjoy watching this sequence. I liked the long oblong shapes of the screens, the intensity of the colours of the elements, the reduced, elemental ideas themselves. Had I been on my own, I may well have been moved to some tears by the ideas of separation and suffering and having to go through certain experiences before you can be united with some other part of you. Once more, however, the public nature of the viewing detracted from my experience and it is only in thinking about this imagery afterwards that I can appreciate its force.  I can't quite remember the sound now, but I think there was a lot of roaring. I also can't quite remember whether another sequence of images involving a lady in a long robe lighting a huge amount of candles as in a church belonged to this set of sequences also, but I appreciated the beauty of that image, especially for the painstaking slowness with which it was carried out. There is a common thread of slow, measured movement in all these videos. It's not exactly slow motion, more things appearing to happen at a steady pace in real time which has a subtle, mesmeric effect.

The same companion who had enjoyed Opie's running horse pointed out the lack of context within which all these things were taking place. He did not like the detachment of the symbolic figures from real world contexts and situations. He pointed out their lack of individuality and yet their obvious Western, Caucasian identity. He was dismayed by the simplicity and conventionality of balancing female with male and attaching water to the female force and fire to the male. By the time we got to the room where images of a wide variety of different types of people were represented as being peacefully submerged in water, he walked out in disgust, likening it to a Benneton advert' - and I knew exactly what he meant. I was also quite unsettled by the imagery of people looking peaceful submerged in water, but I suppose unsettled is not necessarily a bad thing. I'll have to reflect some more on why this felt wrong to me.

In the final room, the split images of a naked elderly man and a woman inspecting their bodies sent a ripple of embarrassment through most people encountering it. I was pained by it too. They were fit and slender, but even health cannot prevent the inevitable slackening that time effects on the body. It's a rather beautiful, poignant fact, but too close to the bone for most of us to confront for long maybe. I liked these images, but couldn't stand in front of them for long and no-one else was lingering there either. 

Approaching the Chapel to see two more videos; Fire Woman and Tristan's Ascension, we see Ai Weiwei's tree golden in the sunshine. It's a great thing. I love it because it's a metal tree cast from wooden bits and the way it's been cobbled together is so clumsy and obvious with the bolts all visible. Ai Weiwei is a popular artist mainly due to the political nature of his work I think, but I like the things he makes as objects in isolation from their political message. I like the materials he uses and the working processes involved. They have a character and are usually pleasing aesthetically. 

The chapel is full. It's a great venue for showing video art and we're able to sit on a bench which is a relief; the dark is so thick, it makes me lose my footing. The screen again is a tall oblong and this in itself is dramatic, rather church window-like. The images are powerful, here is more water and fire once more being used to depict spiritual transitions. The perspective is breathtakingly subtly distorted. We stay to watch it twice to see if we can understand which way the figure is falling - into or away from the wall of water. It's gripping. The sound is loud and upsetting. The roar of water is quite frightening, especially in these parts with all the flooding we've had. Everybody's glued to it. The cynic in me is wondering if it just feels cool to be watching it. You rarely see people glued to works of art in such a way. My underwhelmed companion is appalled by the slickness of it all and mutters about money and equipment and insurance advert' aesthetics. I feel guilty about my enjoyment of it and try to formulate arguments in it's defence. I've decided I want, need to appreciate video art.

However, I admit that this work does seduce us with the same techniques as advert's use; slick filming and sound, powerful, abstract imagery which is possibly, ultimately vacuous, overwhelming the viewer with techniques that serve not to engage our emotions but rather saturate them in such a way we are stimulated and reminded of feelings, perhaps even to confront feelings such as fear in a way we ordinarily avoid, yet not to take us anywhere with them. At the close of the video, it is as if we have been told, this is as it is and that is all. I think what I mean by this is that there is no resolution, nor revelation, only illustration. We can recognise the themes, identify with the imagery and the emotions they evoke, but there seems to be no avenue for contemplation except about the work itself, it's technique, the equipment used, the processes involved. People leave the chapel murmering "amazing" and "fantastic". What will their conversations continue to be about ? Where will it take our minds and imaginations after we have returned home ? Having put these thoughts down now, I realise I have no properly formed opinion about the work. I enjoyed some aspects of it and not others. That is all for now.


Bill Viola is treating video as a serious fine art medium. He uses it to portray epic themes and his work, insofar as I can gather, emulates the aims of the great master painters and sculptors of the past. He appears to be interested in impressing us with his craft in the way fine artists used to. It perhaps could be construed as the antithesis of post-modernism in that it unashamedly explores themes about humanity in a direct way without obfuscating the meaning too much. He has brought the figure, the nude, as a symbol of our humanity, strength and fragility, back into the frame. It's figurative art in a traditional sense using modern technology. Quite a strange anomaly maybe.

I admit, I'm confused. I see this work as the first in a long line of similar things to come. I admit I am bothered by the loss of fixed objects that will sit in the landscape or in galleries or amongst architecture. It's the aesthetic of the technology that puts me on edge. These are not valid reasons for disliking video art and I know it.

But the materials. All this technology uses vast amounts of resources; precious elements, energy, and people have to make it in dire conditions. If it's the future for art work, these issues have to be confronted.

There's another vague worry: I really hope Bill Viola's approach to re-visit the grand themes of the old masters doesn't pave the way for artists to just repeat art history, but on screen. 

Post script


I did return and stalked Elisabeth Frink's Riasce figures. They are much bigger than I thought. They towered above me, possibly 7 feet tall, and heavily built. The scrim of the plaster is still visible on their backs.