Thoughts on a late Tate Friday evening

A few weeks ago, on a cold Friday evening, with Amandine, we went at the Tate Modern – I then realised it was a long long time i did not cross the bridge to go and spend a couple of hours in the museum. It was nice to be there, and while walking in the main exhibition, I started to take some notes about some pieces and ideas that were coming to my mind; below are a couple of them, these are personnal rough notes taken on the go if such a disclaimer can avoid any confusions.

We first went to see the Shibboleth by Dorris Salcedo – the piece in the Turbine Hall at the moment; it echoed the rehabilitation of the building in 2001 by Herzog and De Meuron in 2001, originally designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott in 1947 – the exact same architects who designed the Church we came across in East London, more pictures by Amandine on her Daily Bread.
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On flickr there’s a dedicated pool to this Gilbert Scott, architect, who acted as design consultant on the Battersea power Station.

You can’t help but wonder about the how the Shibboleth piece has been made, built, and then also on the why. The idea in this quite amazing installation is to deal with the past of Great Britain as an colonialist Empire, as Amandine reframed it to me.

Shibboleth is any language usage indicative of one’s social or regional origin, or more broadly, any practice that identifies members of a group.

Shibboleth on Wikipedia

I like the term ‘an archeological sense of history’ as stated in the leaflet, more details on the website. Aalex nonetheless had a quite different opinion spotting the fact that being forced to read 10 pages of obscure text to understand a piece of art was something that was a bit too much, and definitely not really enjoyable. I couldn’t help but think again what I wrote earlier. I like this process when you reconsider what you like under a new light, shed by someone you like the work.

We finally went to the main exhibition of Juan Muñoz. Of all the nice things there, I really liked the Room 7 “The Crossroads Cabinets” where he makes use of the notion of Cabinets de Curiosités to present collections of objects; it’s related with the Renaissance idea of bringing together disparate objects: relics, works of art, freaks of nature and other oddities. Quite strangely this definition fitted quite perfectly the one of a blog nowadays in general; R-Echos.net and Assembling in particular. It would be nice to imagine a physical transcription/representation of those two website.

From there we finally went to the permanent collections which offered me a couple more thoughts and ideas; Mondrian, “Composition C (no.111) with Red, Yellow and Blue”, 1935 – that’s a very strange discovery: I realised I never ever saw a Mondrian in real, face to face. The reality is far from what my assumptions made me believe was the truth: Mondrian was to me using a perfect sort of cold and rigid mathematics, and the drawing and small reproductions in books I read drove me to think of his work in terms of perfect vector shapes, plain ‘simple’ colours arrangements uniformly recovering the surface of the canvas. Bam! Plain wrong: first, no canvas on this one – it seems to be wood. Then I realised the wood is badly cut, Mondrian did not even try to polish the sides, the whole thing seems to be closer to a rough than the perfect execution I was expecting. Nothing so rigid in fact, but much more intense, with the trace of the brush in the paint. Maybe this one was just a sketch – I would need to see more Mondrian to be sure – but it made me happy to rediscover his work leading at his own time toward a new aesthetic being more live, raw and sketchy than the clean shiny surface I assumed.

I quite liked as well the Ellsworth Kelly plain colours collection “Mediteranée” – not all the canvas being perfectly aligned on the front face create a sort of topography of colours.

Dan Flavin famous use of lights and colors made me sad I missed his last exhibition a little while ago; the use of colour reflections is brilliant and should inspire any designer, like using plain color reflection on a folded poster.

Now, more than 10 years after, I remember when in first year of Fine Art school, being taught by Pierre Charpin and Vincent Beaurin, I discovered some of the voluptuaries of the colour phenomenon applied to objects, design, sculpture, … one of the expression they both used that marked my mind was the Augmentation of the Signal. They both really and deeeply influenced me, my practice, my behaviours – maybe without even being conscious of this fact.

Seeing the pieces from Dan Flavin made a mental connection with the Field Study I republished some times ago two times on R-Echos / Field Study and R-Echos / Fluorescent Field; they use the electricity around high voltage line to light up neon tube without even wiring or connecting them.

Following on the topic of documenting, representing collections, assembling information, I quite liked as well the serie “ “The Hotel, Room 28-44-47-29” from Sophie Calle where ragments of her found/stolen pieces are made into a collection

“Map not to indicate” from Terry Atkinson & Mickael Baldwin was presented in the same room – I felt there was a sort of narration in between those 2 pieces. The “Map not to indicate” caught my attention in its subversive use of a tool I use all the time.

Map Not to Indicate is one of a series of three prints created by the collective Art and Language, which play with the conventions of marking the world’s geographical boundaries. The extensive title lists all the geographic areas that the artists have removed from the map. Only Iowa and Kentucky are outlined and labelled but, floating like islands, they lose geographical relevance, metaphorically cast adrift from their cartographic moorings.

Funnily, the day after, going to a party in the south of London, near Crystal Palace, we had to rush in a corner shop to buy an A-Z to find the place we thought we would find quite easily; unfortunately, the limit of the map was just one centimeter above our approximative guessing of the location. We were stuck, ourselves, with a map no to indicate…

A little bit after, walking along the rooms i came across Sol Lewitt piece, whose work I think I excessively like. I also participated in an hommage to him and his work in the first issue of the Atlas Journal (see the image above).

I was stuck by a consideration when confronted to the Sol Lewitt sculpture “Five Open Geometric Structures” 1979: there was no external light, only spots from super high roof projecting a constant light and shadow throughout the day – I was left wondering about light parameters in his studio, or where those pieces were created – and if light and its natural movement was finally a part of his work, meaning, in a way, that the abstract and perfect geometry would include (or not) the external world (and its underlying physical interaction) as a parameter of its existence.
But Since Sol Lewitt was creating this piece ‘objectively’ there was no such consideration, I guess.

Since the 1960s, LeWitt has made three-dimensional work using basic geometric units, such as cubes and squares, arranged in pre-determined mathematical sequences. He has written: “To work with a plan that is pre-set is one way of avoiding subjectivity. It also obviates the necessity for designing each work in turn. The plan would design the work.” The objects are made by assistants according to LeWitt’s instructions. By minimising his physical presence in the process of fabrication, LeWitt emphasises the impersonality of these structures.

It would be nice to get some ideas and insights in the comments.

Recently I came across some photographic compositions from Brad Troemel, trough R-Echos – which in a way is a bit the opposite of John Baldessari; Brad Troemel reframe bits of the subjects with plain colours, which John Baldessari on the contrary would have probably covered. I liked the assembling of pictures of Baldessari, with the only common denominator: this covering spot of colour on the “Hope (Blue) supported by a bed of Orange (Life): amid a context of Alusions”, 1991.

In the library, I also spotted a couple of interesting things amongst them:

- From 1984 to 1987, Peter Saville designed for Factory records a series of audio cassettes that were packaged in a box, bound in fabric like traditional book binders would have done; on the top of the box, a very simple inscription of the artist name and the title of the album, inside the box would come the audio cassette and a couple of leaflet bringing the extraordinary visuals from the designer.

on this page I noticed a nice homage to the original design which made me think to Field Study republished article i spoke earlier – I originally discovered from a post on yewknee.com but it is originating on Flickr.

- “Massive Change” is a book by Bruce Mau, published by Phaïdon – as the bottom line states it: It’s not about the world of design. It’s about the design of the world. It soudns nice for a topic – I just fear that this could fall short as it does so often. The topic is quite related to another book which I like a lot and which I am currently reading: “In the Bubble: Designing in a complex world” which I was expecting to find this book in computer/technology/design/business section and finally found it in the Media Studies at Foyles the other week.

The Bruce Mau’s blog called ‘Massive Change’ like his book seems to have been running from June 2006 to September 2007; as it seems not be updated anymore, I would say the feed is like a dead shell, was it only used in a promotional approach to marketing the book? And maybe it stays now online with the purpose of archiving – I wonder if they plan to keep the website running for long, strangely the book has been published in 2004. Those dates makes no sens at all to me.

I really like the approach of blogs like LifeHackers: even if the book is published, the interrest to keep things alive is not going to die since I assume the blog is supporting Gina Trapani in her activities and business on the long run – while someone like Bruce Mau maybe does not need to invest energy any further once the book has been launched and met a big (awaited) success.

- “Project VITRA”has been designed and edited by Cornel Windlin and Rolf Fellbaum. It is a very nice book which give so many thoughtfull insights on the adventure that finally became the Project Vitra: Sites, Products, Authors, Museum, Collections, Signs, Chronology, Glossary. As Marius Watz said it a little while ago:

Lineto and its designers were players in the spirit of experimentation that dominated graphic design in the 1990s. They challenged typographic conventions with fonts such as Windlin’s classic Moonbase Alpha, and championed the new role of the designer as author. Also apparent in projects like Lego Font Creator, Rubik Maker and Sign Generator is an understanding of form as system, manifested as software.

This one might finally well be the next offline product I will buy.