16 May – 28 June 2009
Leeds Art Gallery

18 July – 20 September
Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea

At a first glance, The Russian Linesman, a group exhibition curated by Mark Wallinger seems to be an eclectic choice of art and artefacts, like a contemporary cabinet of curiosities.  Such a comparison, however, obscures this exhibition’s genuine qualities.  The Russian Linesman, in fact, is exemplary of what happens when an artist intelligently uses curating as part of his or her artistic practice.  This exhibition is a work in itself in its use of appropriation, revealing extraordinary acumen in its choices and juxtapositions.  The show’s sub-title; Frontiers, Borders and Thresholds is the touchstone for the exhibition and Wallinger’s selection is a shifting focus between taxonomies of kind, meeting points between nations, religion and ideologies (that are inevitably sites of conflict and watersheds in history).

The film of Philippe Petit’s audacious tightrope walk between the summits of New York’s Twin Towers in 1974 is poignant from the point of view of our present; Petit carefully traverses a point in space that events have since effaced.  It seems like a dream.  Wallinger’s text in the book accompanying this exhibition unfolds this moment as a succession of perceptions, impressions and references.  Through Beuys’ naming the towers in 1975 Cosmos and Damien (who were the Syrian twin brothers who practiced the art of healing) to Wallinger’s realisation that the image of the cricket wicket painted on walls by Indian, Pakistani and West Indian New Yorkers is a graphic depiction of the twin towers.

Elsewhere Dublin is the place where Leopold Bloom responds to an advertisement to purchase “sandy tracts from the Turkish government” at an address in Berlin where the Palestine Development Company was based.  Until 1918 Palestine was in the Turkish Empire. The shifting lines in Wallinger’s text resonate in the exhibition’s objects.  A painting by C.R.W. Nevinson, The Road from Arras to Bapaume, 1917 depicts a razor-edge straight road cut through a landscape to the horizon.  The landscape is barren, like a desert.  Military transport and soldiers file to and from the vanishing point, through Europe’s killing fields.  Elsewhere we find lines between insect and human, in drawings by Hooke and Stubbs, and the interface of skin in the ‘Dying Gaul’, an anonymous 19th century copy of an antique sculpture and a later version of the same pose as an écorché.

Whereas Wallinger could be accused of effecting a mere mix and match of themes, what is exciting about this exhibition are the palpable relationships produced between objects, in the way, for instance, the show moves from Renato Bertilli’s Profilio Continuo (Head of Mussolini), to a set of Eadweard Muybridge images to a Klein bottle.  The spacing and switching between modes of viewing – between a work of art, a model of thought and scientific speculation – marked not only frontiers but also points of displacement and transition.

It is rare to see an exhibition where an artist of Wallinger’s stature curates in a way that goes beyond creating a snap shot of a contemporary milieu where the longest reach is a close knit group of artist comrades.   It is – by extension – rare to see an exhibition by a non-artist curator that can engage as effectively with objects ,spaces and such a wond erfully nuanced sense of signification as Wallinger has achieved in a show which literally works the hang as a form of composition.

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Figures du corps was a rare insight into the archive of one of the most significant art schools in the world.  The anatomy collection of École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris is an extraordinary resource and archive which the curator Philippe Comar has brought together in a fascinating and surprising way.  This collection’s origins are in the 17th and 18th century Académie that predates the present école.  This exhibition maps the relationship between body, both human and animal, and art education from the Renaissance until the first half of the Twentieth century.

The presentation was thematic and rigourously chronological.  Each time frame is organised as a table of documents under glass with objects placed upon them.    Documents from the earliest section include drawings by Leonardo and an anatomical reference book by Durer.  Progressively, photographs like those of Charcot  or the glass photographic slides used in Richer’s anatomical classes become more numerous.  The objects reflect a similar diversity from Houdin’s early écorché, to animal skeletons and casts famously used as models by the animal sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye.

The show could be viewed on two levels.  The objects and documents are, in themselves,  absorbing purely as works of art; there were Mascagni’s and Gautier-Dagoty’s extraordinary anatomical colour etchings and a series of studies of a dissected horse by Géricault for example.  However the exhibition really came into focus when the objects were viewed as artefacts, objects of knowledge serving as a series of schema representing successive and distinct academic.  Up until the early 19th century these viewpoints reflect the development from Renaissance humanism to the scientific inquiry of the enlightenment. The academies of science and art shared similar concerns for veracity in representation.  However, as the exhibition moves to the upper gallery, the body as a site of objective knowledge begins to become blurred.  Animal bodies feature more as skeletons, mummified corpses or plaster casts made from freshly deceased examples in the menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes where Bayre dissected and drew from life.  Taxonomies of ethnicity in the form of Dumoutier’s face plaster masks or photographic studies of women from different continents in the journal Humanité Féminine,  reveal clearly that the academic art school system was at the very least a parallel to the dominant ideological concerns of the time.  These are less than innocent artefacts as they are also being used for the establishment of colonial ethnic arborescences and catalogues of exoticism.  Even more surprising parallels happen when the photograph begins to rival and then displace drawing as the dominant form of documentation in the exhibition.  Charcot’s images of hysteria,  famously discussed by Georges Didi-Huberman, and Duchenne’s photographs of his experiments on the effects of electric currents on muscles reveal an increasing preoccupation with medical pathologies.

The ambiguity of this becomes evident in the period after the Great  War.  The anatomy professors Henry Meiger and Paul Richer begin a practice of making studies of what Meiger describes as the ‘representation of deformity and illness’ .  This comes in complete contrast to the pre – First World War practice of studying the morphologies of athletes at sports competitions held during the Paris 1900 Exposition Universelle. Undoubtedly the response to the infirm from professors like Meiger was one of compassion following the post-war trauma that he described as the  ‘lamentable procession of our wounded’.  The period before the Second World War thus offers a chilling proximity of images of the classical ideal of the athlete, in stark contrast to these formal pathologies cataloguing the ‘corps malade’.

By the 1930s the academic system, with its fiction of a classical ideal, was precariously positioned in relationship to fascism.  With the German occupation of Paris and Arno Breker’s exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in 1942 the classical ideal was being put to work in the service of Nazi ideology while their ‘scientists’ had already catalogued the ‘degenerate’ in preparation for the horror of the genocide that was to come.

Like photography, archives produce text, interpretation and ideology. Nowhere more apparent than in the academic art school system, is the correspondence between dominant ideologies  with what many see as the harmless mechanisms of aesthetic systems.  Surprising and palpable throughout this exhibition, is the chilling wind that blows through its taxonomies.  The representation of  Darwinian ‘natural’ selection is so easily derailed in the service of supremacist regimes.  Catalogues of difference and diversity become the unwitting blueprints for totalised and monolithic perspectives.  By the 1920s the conditions for the holocaust can be sensed as an insidious product of its artefacts.

The presence of photography in over half of the chronological breadth of this show is interesting and significant particularly for how art schools can be thought of today.  The anatomical collection is invariably a genealogy of a succession of anatomy professors.  What is interesting is that as the exhibition moves toward the present, there is an awareness of who these people were, what they contributed and how radical their viewpoints could be.  By the mid 19th c century at least, photography was being not only embraced but being harnessed to the production of new forms within the institution of the art school. Mathias Duval’s interest in the movement of the human and animal body led him to develop the first zoetrope, which is the ancestor of cinema, thus bringing the anatomy class into a direct relationship with the history of the moving image.  Under Paul Richer the life model was extensively photographed alongside being drawn, painted and sculpted.  Richer assembled over a thousand glass slides that were projected during his life classes and lectures.  There is a sense in the anatomy class that the photograph was considered to be a graphic medium that was at least a parallel to drawing. At the time, at least this belief was arguably held more by art school institutions than by an informed public.  Interestingly it was via the anatomy class and its professors that mechanical photographic reproduction found its way into the academic system.   This was arguably one of the factors instrumental in challenging its dogmas and canons, releasing drawing from the constraints of artificial rigour and veracity.

What this exhibition reveals is that the academy was never merely a monolithic guardian of a classical system and the stalking horse for salon polemic. The richness of the resources brought together here bear witness to the achievement of  the current anatomy professor at the  Beaux-arts,  Philippe Comar, in curating this show.  It also points up the lack  of scholarship on this subject and the underestimated cultural resource of art school archives.

The post Figures du corps – une leçon d’anatomie aux Beaux-arts at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris appeared first on artcritical.

In side by side exhibitions this summer at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, the reputations of two painters who have come out of a British context were aired before a French audience.  Despite the considerable difference in age and ‘genre’ between Riley and Doig, their juxtaposition fruitful.

Riley, the older artist of the two, has achieved a central status not only as an abstract painter but as one who is identified as the op artist of post war pop culture.  Black and white works such as Fall and Metamorphosis from the mid sixties use shape and line to create kinetic optical illusions. The picture plane is not a flat, stable, surface here but is curved and undulates in an illusion of movement as the eye moves across the canvas. Even though, at least to a British audience, the later colour work is familiar and highly acclaimed, the inclusion of her student work throws up some surprises. Post-Impressionism rather than Cubism engineered her relationship to abstraction.  A group of early drawings are marked by the influence of Seurat, not as a pointillist but for his graphic chiaroscuro. The palpable product of this influence was her classic black and white optical paintings of the 1960s.  The presence of Cézanne and Pissarro are also felt in the early paintings, particularly in the proto-divisionist brush work of landscapes made as a student which look forward to the later colour paintings like  in the High Sky series. Riley’s link to Seurat bought to mind Duchamp’s interest in the same artist.  For Duchamp, the pointillist project created a circuit of spectatorship where the viewer activates the work, with the final mix made in the eye and in the act of beholding the work so that the spectator puts the painting to work.

A sense of profound relationship to several modernist challenges was the overwhelming impact of this exhibition.  That she has been able to sustain an engagement with painting in terms of particular objectives and limits is the major achievement here.  Subsequent series maintained her ambition, looking fresh today, not only as paintings but as conceptual devices.  A room of preparatory sketches and drawings was very informative as to how the works are produced (or performed) in their transitions from schematic ideas, on ruled paper, to robust painterly objects where the optical phenomena are integrated into a relationship with the painting’s physical structure.

Peter Doig’s engagement with painting appears to be very different. From an early image of a long distance truck traversing a landscape to images of paradise in the later paintings, it is possible to tick the boxes that set up Doig as a latter-day romantic negotiating an ever-shifting relationship between the figure and landscape.  Yet this seems to be just half the story and at times even a subtext. The snow paintings like ‘Blotter’ in the middle section of the exhibition tend toward a lyricism which feel somewhat simplistic, in contrast to the work in the opening and later sections in which a conjunction of painterly qualities and their impact as images saw Doig at his best.  The series of paintings made after a visit to Le Corbusier’s  Unité d’Habitation apartments in Briey-en-Forêt in France  is an intriguing set of images producing readings that for me, mark Doig out as having invented within a genre.Here, he is not just simply carrying the transcendental flag to the next post.Concrete Cabin I and Concrete Cabi II from 1991-1992 foreground a forest. The eye moves through the dark traceries of branches and foliage to the white façade of the Unité in the background, reflecting bright sunlight in its woodland clearing.  Qualities of light and dark transform into shifts of readings across an axis of nature and culture.  Nature here is not a simplistic trope  but is put into tension with the Unité.  The forest does not overcome the ‘cabin’, or vice-versa, instead they both find their place in the compostion.  Similarly the later works show a spareness of execution and a sense of image that pulls him clear of the clichés he was slipping into in the mid nineties.  The ghosts that haunt Doig’s work , besidesVuillard and Bonnard who are obvious touchstones, include Gauguin and Matisse.  Matisse comes through particularly in the lightness of touch of works such as ‘Man dressed as a Bat’ where countless erasures linger under the surface and where there is a hard-won graphic resolution.

Seeing these two painters successfully sustaining the echoes of a modernity marked by Post-Impressionism, yet with such dramatically different results, was both surprising and instructive, coming as they do,  from opposite poles of representation and abstraction. Doig as the younger artist  potentially has much time before him to develop and transform this already impressive body of work.  However with Riley there is in addition, the sense that she may astound us with something more – as unexpected and yet as conclusive as the late works of Monet or Matisse who like her, gradually built up a body of work reflecting a life time of research and application to a practice.

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