January 30 to March 14, 2015
63 Margaret Street (between Great Titchfield and Great Portland streets)
London, +44 20 7580 1480

Royal Academy-trained painter and independent curator Bella Easton lives and works in South London. She regularly exhibits her work while also co-directing a project space, a platform for invited artists to produce a site-specific work. Her current curatorial and ongoing offsite projects include: “Collateral Drawing,” “The Opinion Makers” and “A5, Athens.” She found time to take in ”The Presence of Absence” at the Berloni Gallery in London, a 14-artist exhibition curated by artcritical contributor Paul Carey-Kent, and to discuss the show with him.

BELLA EASTON: How did the show come about?

PAUL CAREY-KENT: As with the four previous shows I have curated recently, it stemmed from a gallery that I know fairly well asking if I’d like to put on a show. In this case, Berloni had two preferences: for a conceptually based group show and for a minimal proportion of painting, as they felt their existing and planned programmes were painting-heavy and they wanted a contrast.

What’s the idea behind of “The Presence of Absence”?

It’s often said that negative space is as important as positive shapes in a composition. The works in this show turn around a parallel feature of content, as opposed to form: namely, what is not present is at least as important as what is present — so a key role is played by the paradoxical-sounding “presence of absence” in work by 14 artists.

What were your influences leading to that idea?

Probably my background in philosophy: I like a good paradox, and have always been interested in how far you can push an approach in art — for example, how little can possibly be enough? My standard operation procedure as a curator is probably that I see a lot of shows — some 800 a year, of which I write on about 150, so I do have a wide spectrum of artists to choose from once I’ve fixed on a theme. My preference is not to have heavily intellectualised theory, but to look for something simple and thought-provoking that can connect choices together without pretending to exhaust them: there will always be more angles on the work of interesting artists, and so a show can develop its own complexity.

How did you decide what to put in the show?

Just before being asked to curated the show, I had seen a rough cut of Maria Marshall’s new video. She made a film in 2001 in which a boy kicks a ball against the wall of a church; only the ball has been digitally removed leaving only its sound and shadow. It is an attack on the church of sorts, albeit not too effective, with a subtext of how football might have become a new religion. Her new film (premiered in this exhibition) shows a ball bouncing around the dilapidated interior of a church in Georgia. This time it’s the person who has been edited out and the ball bounces menacingly around, looking likely to knock over iconic religious images set on a table — but never quite does. The idea of putting these two films together pushed me towards this particular project, out of the range I had in mind. I planned to mix film, sculpture and photography with a small amount of painting. I decided that a sound-only piece would be thematic; and Giorgio Sadotti proposed the scent installation, which I was happy to accept.

Who else is in the show?

Films by John Smith (The Black Tower, 1987) and Liane Lang (The Last Days, 2012-13) use buildings, outside and in, to animate our understanding of what we cannot see. Stefana McClure gives us the longest films — albeit, it could be said, without images or duration — through two of the drawings in which she traces their complete subtitles. A sound installation by Bronwen Buckeridge creates an illusory space in the midst of the gallery. Nika Neelova presents a sculpture that seems to stand in for another absent work, echoing Rachel Whiteread’s characteristic casting of the negative, seen in her Herringbone Floor (2001). Blue Curry’s found object groupings stand indirectly for people and for differing constructions of their self-images. Alan Magee fills in two hoops with plaster. Anni Leppälä and Jason Oddy exploit the uncanny ability of the photograph to freeze into permanence what is and isn’t there. Two painters complete the line-up: Martine Poppe’s images come and go as we circle round them, and Ian Bruce plays with the absence and presence of people in their surroundings.

What’s that smell?

That’s Sadotti’s Vatican (2015): he instructed that incense be burned at the gallery daily in order to evoke an absent place.

Is curating a creative medium or process for you and, if so, could it be suggested that the outcome of the curation is the presence of the absence of the curator?

I suppose it is creative, yes, though essentially I do it for enjoyment. It’s a nice thought that I was present during the show while absent; though I was present several times guiding people around.

Has there been an audience favorite?

It’s encouraging that one visitor or another has named each artist in the show as a particular favorite. That said, it’s probably fair to mention three artists as being especially popular. The remarkably persuasive spatial illusions created by the three minutes of binaural sound that make up Buckeridge’s Mid Eye Long High (2013) provoked such animated responses in the people listening that I was asked at the opening whether it was a performance piece! It also proved the biggest hit with child visitors. Artists tended to be struck by the simple elegance of Alan Magee’s Return to Glory (2014), in which filling two hula hoops with plaster makes quintessentially light toys into heavy sculptures, removing their function and presenting them as art. Of course there was nothing in the hoops originally, so I see this as an absence of absence itself. The two Maria Marshall films were also very popular.

If given the opportunity to expand on this theme as a larger exhibition, is there anything you would do differently and who else would you include?

I originally asked 18 artists, expecting that some would turn me down, and four did. Normally, one would not mention that, but here it seemed thematically apt to imagine them as present: John Stezaker, with a work from the Tabula Rasa series, wherein the removal of part of an image stands in for a screen and simultaneously implies the possibility of other presence. I’d wanted one of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s cinema photographs, which curiously parallel Stefana McClure’s arrival at something like a modernist monochrome through the act of transcribing subtitles to the point of indecipherability. Paul Pfeiffer wasn’t included, but he’s an artist best known for editing out parts of video footage to great effect. Finally, I wanted Mungo Thomson’s The Collected Live Recordings of Bob Dylan 1963-1995, a sound piece comprised only of applause recorded at Dylan’s concerts. That proves oddly addictive, and would, I believe, have been a fitting presence for those who did accept my invitation. Still, I’d like those four to accept second time around, and it would be good to have a more substantial presence from some of the other artists.

Did everything turn out as you expected?

Perhaps not as I expected, but certainly as I hoped. A number of relationships occurred that I had not anticipated. For example: Neelova and Magee echoed not only each other, but also the windows of the gallery’s upper space; and the way in which works covered for each other’s absences was picked up by visitors and critics, such as Rowena Hawkins, who reviewed the show for The Upcoming.

Were there any unexpected or unplanned “presence of absence” surprises that came out of the curation?

What I had anticipated least was how several works would turn out to reference a critical question of presence or absence: does God exist? Wherever you stand on that, there’s no denying the charge that it brings to the work of Lang, Marshall and Sadotti, and there’s also implications of a world beyond in Leppälä and Magee, an angel in Poppe’s painting and a cross to be read into one of Oddy’s photographs of the Pentagon, which shows a rebuilt room 18 months after the crash of Flight 77 destroyed it on September 11, 2001.

What future UK or international curatorial projects do you have lined up?

Curation is very much my third string after my day job and art writing, but I have two definite plans for the rest of this year: a group show themed around “weight” at London’s Maddox Arts in April, and a ten-artist Anglo-German project in Berlin in September, which presents works of art alongside the collateral residue of their production (an interesting theme, but it’s my co-curators, you and Iavor Lubomirov, who came up with it!). I’m also booked well ahead to present a group show of process-based abstract painting at Soho’s St. Barnabas club in 2017. Then there are several possibilities that are more speculative at this stage, including an IKEA-themed show, and two potential co-curations with artist friends Jane Harris and Sara Haq.

Thank you Paul for your very personal and informed incite into a truly exciting exhibition. I look forward to your future curations and working with you on Collateral Drawing Berlin, later this year.

For more details see: www.berlonigallery.com
paulsartworld.blogspot.com
http://www.collateraldrawing.org

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Michael Brenson, Martha Schwendener, and Lilly Wei joined David Cohen to review Rachel Whiteread at Luhring Augustine, Su-en Wong at Danese, Jake Berthot at Betty Cuningham and Thomas Nozkowski at Max Protetch.

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CALDER: FROM MODEL TO MONUMENT
PaceWildenstein thru March 4, 545 W 22

PHILIP GRAUSMAN
Lohin, Geduld thru March 11, 531 W25, 212 675 2656

Monuments maybe every sculptor’s dream, but they can be a mixed blessing. They communicate beyond the artworld with a big public, and put the sculptor in a line from Stonehenge, the Gothic Cathedrals, Rodin.  But they consume disproportionate energies to their aeshetic return.

A sculptor can have any number of  new ideas in the maquette studio for the time and energy, usually demanding assistance, needed to realise a single piece at a monumental scale.  A maquette, thanks in part to the dollshouse effect, inspires a natural empathy: literally issuing from the hand, it conveys tangible emotion, a felt quality, that will inevitably get lost when transformed into a relatively depersonalized monolith.  The biggie is seen by more people, but people who are rushing to catch a train, or sit with their backs to the piece to enjoy a sandwich, or delinquent kids looking for a surface on which to skateboard or graffiti.  Alienation, starting with the production process, is felt all around.

The other problem with monuments is that often the artist is making them has become a monument, too: self-important, fixed in their ways.  The paradigm of the modern sculptor ruined by success is Henry Moore—or that at least is a received wisdom endorsed recently by Rachel Whiteread, explaining in interview why she didn’t want to be typecast as the kind of artist who makes memorials.  This expectation arose in part from her successful, widely admired Memorial to the Victims of the Holocaust in Vienna’s Judenplatz, inaugurated in 2000 after years of planning and negotiations. You could say that her new series at Luhring Augustine represents a struggle to find a post-monumental identity.

Ms. Whiteread was a natural for the Holocaust commission (won in competition) because her often poignant art deals inherently with memory and literally with loss.  It is a strength and weakness alike of her work that her career is predicated on a singular sculptural strategy: To make solid the negative space surrounding, or more intriguingly, sometimes, inhabiting the objects from which her works are cast.

The irony with Ms. Whiteread is that, unlike 9 out of 10 sculptors, she is far more effective when struggling to produce a big, public statement than when (no pun intended) casting around for smaller ideas, making sketches, exploring tentative explorations.  The projects that really extended her are the ones that also extend her medium and the viewer’s notion of sculpture or of the very experience of things. Besides the Holocaust memorial, this would include “House,” (1993), a cast of an entire terraced house in London’s East End, shamefully demolished weeks after completion by a philistine municipality; the similar treatment of individual rooms and staircases; and her contribution to an ongoing series of temporary pieces on the vacant fourth pedestal in London’s Trafalgar Square—her solution was to cast the plinth in transparent resin and mount it in reverse upon its original, a temporary apotheosis of the support, the ultimate celebration of the overlooked.

On a smaller scale, and in the works that seem spinoffs of her ambitious projects, Ms. Whiteread’s aesthetic can quickly degenerate into a boutique-version echo of itself: Elegant, occasionally suggestive, but gnawingly banal.  The Holocaust Memorial teased-out the negative space behind shelved books, a multilayered evocation of the People of the Book, the sense of missing volumes, of untold tales, of cruel statistics.  Following the commission, Ms. Whiteread turned out smaller works and variations which cheapened the memory of her original insight., At her best, Ms. Whiteread’s sculpture exploits and thus transcends the mundanity of the things in the world that occasion it; at second best, which never lurks far behind, mundanity claims her art for itself.  Maybe it is because the Whiteread casting process pushes literalism to such an extreme that it results in an aesthetic binary: the sculpture will be extraordinary or all too ordinary.

Her latest works derive from “Embankment,” (2005), an installation (which I am yet to see) in the gargantuan Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern, on view through April.  This work is made around 14,000 white plaster casts of different cartons, stacked to varying heights, amongst which visitors walk.  At the smaller but still voluminous Luhring Augustine, where individual sculptures are sparsely installed, there are two bodies of work: “pure” cartons, and cartons stacked in relationship with actual, appropriated furniture.

The problem with the carton motif is that there isn’t a significant differentiation between its exterior and its interior.  In a Whiteread there can be a crucial difference between a thing cast from without and within, to imply surrounding or vacated space.  The difference with a carton is academic—wherever the cast is taken, the result in a lumpen box that looks just like a carton only it isn’t empty and isn’t made out of cardboard.

The relationship of cast to actual in works like “Wait,” (2005), where six plaster units surround a chair, or “Surface,” where a table cohabits space with four carton-shapes, seems gratuitous.  There is none of the sinister poetics of the Columbian Doris Salcedo’s collisions of cement and furniture.

For Ms. Whiteread, attention to small, banal things produces results that are small and banal.  She is no Chardin, nor even Richard Tuttle.  The act of variation merely produces upscale tschotkas.  In small fry mode she mimics her  conceptualist mentors in the casting of negative space, Bruce Nauman and Joseph Beuys, whereas when confronting complexities, both thematic and technical, she can tap a richer vein of metaphor and association.  But don’t despair of Rachel Whiteread—just wait for the next monument.

Alexander Calder ought to be an example of a sculptor ruined by success: He was extraordinarily fecund in his early years, pioneering new sculptural forms with the mobile, the stabile, wire construction.  But exploring these further and making them bigger was no kiss of death, as a stunning show at PaceWildenstein’s second Chelsea space, leased from the Dia Foundation, makes clear.

The beauty and intrigue of Calder often has a lot to do with an inherent tension between human touch and machinist impersonality.  The son and grandson of sculptors and a trained engineer, his genius melted the distinction between art and technology.  His mobiles were “drawn” in wire, metal, found objects, often revealing a nervous, wobbly line, but then “worked,” miraculous staying aloft, floating, shimmering.

A similar dualism comes across in his late stabiles, the subject of this show.  These mammoth steel plate pieces arose from lucrative sculptural commissions during the building booms of the 1960s and 1970s.  Far from leaden or officious, however, they extended the elastic, exuberance of his mobile inventions. Actually, they knowingly riff a sense of the ponderous as circus-clown imitations of elephants and whales.  Beefy, bolted-together forms force an equation between heavy engineering and animal stockiness.

Most of the show is of working maquettes.  It is fascinating to chart upward progressions in scale when there are intermediate models to hand: “Jerusalem Stabile” (1976), for instance, a red-painted steel 1:3 model, which just shy of 12 feet high dominates the show.  A must see show, but who can explain the bizarre, pretentious catalogue which represents the works in scaleless, surfaceless, computerized graphics—defeating the whole point, I would have thought, of this otherwise thoughtful exhibition?

When it comes to a debate about intimacy and monumentality, Philip Grausman portrait sculpture throws a cat among the pigeons.  He makes images of people which are at once familiar and depersonalized, obviously born of observation and yet coolly hieratic.  They are installed in Lohin Geduld’s cramped quarters with the same dramatic effect as Ms. Whiteread and Calder are in their respective, sprawling art barns.

The heads in stainless steel are set on tubular pedestals of the same material, crowded into a back room like some Roman mausoleum.  There is something martial, even vaguely fascistic, in their polished metallic surface.  They look a bit like life masks at first, but have an animation that is only possible from sculpture worked ex nihilo.  Still, they elude the old category distinction of carving versus modeling in the way they are at once severe and fluid.

The show is dominated, however, by “Susanna,” (1996-99) a ten foot high version of a female head in fiberglass.  Dwarfing its surrounding space, it brings to mind Magritte’s surrealist fantasy of a comb and shaving brush in mammoth disproportion to its bedroom, or else romantic meditations of people amidst monumental classical ruins.  The white material has an ethereal, weightless quality, giving the woman’s serene expression a Buddha-like calm.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, March 2, 2006

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There is a tendency for international art stars, especially those with “signature” styles, to risk in large scale works the predictable and monotonous, but to surprise the viewer, pleasantly, with smaller pieces. The handmade, the throw-off, the experimental, tantalize with the possibilities of change and growth. Even the act of variation on a familiar theme casts unexpected emphasis on facture, say, if the “usual” is conceptual rather than formal in emphasis. Rachel Whiteread, interestingly, bucks the trend, at least on the evidence of her current Serpentine Gallery show, her first solo show in a public London space, incidentally, and surprisingly, since her Chisenhale Gallery show in the early 1990s. The smaller works are much of a Whiteread muchness, the Bruce Nauman rip-off casting of the underside of a table and chair in her favored “wine gum” resin, a limp wax mattress looking like nothing so much as yesterday’s fried polenta. But the show is redeemed by its largest item, in the central gallery, Untitled (Upstairs) 2000-1, a mammoth, thought-provoking, deeply resonant work rich in formal and technical intrigue. If just one work, a small piece, was a winner, you’d think it a fluke, but when it’s the most ambitious effort that pays out an aesthetic dividend, that’s a big deal.

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