Since Thursday I have made it a point to try to find some rejuvenating art in London so with that I went to museums, I went to some galleries, I
went to more museums and honestly there
was not too much that revived me. I’m tough to please, I have an impatience for
bad art in good contexts but also I know that it’s a time for changeovers in
London’s exhibition schedules so I didn't expect too much. In face of the mostly underwhelming on Saturday I thankfully saw a real tingler of a show at Whitechapel
entitled, Fiona Banner selects from the
V-A-C Collection: Stamp Out Photographie.
So the title says most of what is happening. British artist
Fiona Banner (a YBAer) has taken works from the V-A-C Collection (a private
collection in Moscow) and has installed and re-imagined them into a room in one
of Whitechapel’s free admission galleries. This being the setting doesn’t give
away the plot though as what is inside this room and what Banner has done with
it is where it thickens. The room is a fair size, not too big, not too small.
It is just long enough to not feel claustrophobic but also small enough so you
can see from opposite walls with ease. Well seeing with ease is actually not
that easy but it’s not from the architecture of the space but from the lighting
imparted in the exhibition. Instead of the steady brights and dramatizing spots
Banner has opted for a dimming fade of CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black)
which varies from dim to dark and never fully bright.
These slow shifting lights reminds me of being in a car
driven by someone who is trying very hard to be cool and has their windows
tinted to a virtual black. Looking out of them, through them, the world is
always pre-midnight and a touch sinister. This effect has a bit of the
too-cool-for-school/trying-too-hard but it actually works incredibly well. The
scene outside is not of the mundane suburbs but of some of the heaviest art
hitters our (mostly) Western world has produced in the last hundred years.
These artists include:
Richard Avedon
Olga Chernysheva
Liz Deschenes
Shannon Ebner
Olafur Eliasson
Andres Gursky
Wade Guyton
Michael Krebber
Sherrie Levine
Claude Monet
Sigmar Polke
Gerhard Richter
Bridget Riley
Rudolf Stingel
Andy Warhol
Christopher Williams
James Welling
Christopher Wool
I have taken the time to spell these names out because it is
through the names that you can start to imagine the show. These artists’ names trigger
into the mind a ready formed visual and all these names/artists being in the
same room together creates a mixing of those visuals. All of them in one room
could seem like a recipe for disaster but take my word for it (or go see it for
yourself) it works surprisingly well. The Richter is a one of his smaller
single candle paintings, Kerze, 1982
but it is hung low and stacked above is Guyton’s Untitled, 2007 which in the dim light auto-conjures Barnet Newman
as the fact that it was inkjet on linen misses your eyes with the fading of the
lights. Shannon Ebner has a few contributions and the photographic gray scale
of them enforces the purpose of the light’s optical effects. Artists that I
find a bit annoying like Christopher Williams I found totally fitting in the
room as the screaming cry for attention that I usually can’t stand in his
flattened photographs gave some geometric surface and playfulness in the room.
Also, to see a Monet street scene, The
Church at Vetheuil, 1878, in this black-light-esq setting was odd but fun
especially when the lights made his whites seem neon.
I don’t know much about who or what the V-A-C is but they have a good eye and obviously
a capacity to purchase such a wide swath of art. The collection as museum, the
collection as archive is something that has been around for a while and with
the total enmeshing of ultra rich with the purchasing of art, this is something
we will see more and more of. Being rich and buying a lot of art still has a
taint of the tacky if done a certain way. But create a foundation, share your
cultural wealth with the public, well then you are like the old school type of
rich person we can stomach which is the philanthropist with civic honor. Snark
aside, seeing this selection of this collection wasn’t a reveal in the gems
that the V-A-C might possess but it was fun nonetheless and Banner’s creative
and witty flair for putting works in a room together made it exciting even in
the familiarity of the artists and works.
This mixing of genres, times, and value of content is an
interesting model for curation and installing. It is one that I think we will be
seeing more of, as there seems to be a need to make sense of what all this
modernism was and is for. It’s a cleaning out but also a means of measuring
relevancy, connection, and necessity of successive generations of art which
seems to be getting shorter and more densely populated. Banner’s theatrics in
lighting, her taste and style of selection and installation made this process
feel fun and slightly liberating. It was a show that gave these artists and the
over familiarity we have with them some room to play. Banner let them be cool,
underneath the tint of the dimming lights you got a chance to see them without
the rose colored glasses of art history and expectations.
