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.
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