Nicola Siebert-Patel
Jake and Dinos Chapman
Arguably the artists I gain the most pleasure from, I have been a supporter of the Chapman brothers since first seeing their work in 1997 at the 'Sensation' exhibition.
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Jake and Dinos make art reflecting the culture we live in. It may make some feel uncomfortable, and they have been accused of being shocking for shock's sake, but I would argue that far from being melodramatic, their work is darkly humorous and intelligent. Their work is iconoclastic in the use of symbols which carry a lot of weight (for example the repeated use of the swastika. This symbol is now so heavily associated with Nazism it will never be reclaimed. Just as the smiley face symbol will always be associated as happy). The brother's work questions and reflects, it doesn't look to give answers.
If Hitler had been a hippie, how happy we would be, 2008
A favourite series for me is 'If Hitler had been a hippy, how happy we would be', 2008. The brothers obtained 12 original watercolour paintings by Hitler and after studying them with the intention to find some indication of the mass murderer reflected in the work, were disappointed to find these very sub-standard watercolours with no indication of the monster that created them. They brilliantly appropriated the works by adding their own interpretations to them, painting rainbows and monsters over the originals, The weight of these originals is so heavy due to the history of the creator, but there is dark humour in them now and one could argue more artistic merit.
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''We've never pretended that our art is anything other than extremely elitist. It's not for Sunday afternoon gallery goers. Galleries should not seek to be redemptible spaces for bourgeois people to pay their dues to culture. Some people need to be alienated''.
Jake and Dinos Chapman
A recurring theme of theirs is the appropriation of other artist’s work. None more tongue in cheek than when they recreated Tracy Emin’s tent Everyone I have Ever Slept With and titled it The Same Only Better.
The brothers have long been obsessed with the work of Goya too, in Great Deeds Against the Dead, 1994, their reappropriation of Goya’s solemn etching becomes an ironic evocation of beauty and perversity, humour and horror.
Great Deeds of the Dead, 1994
Anish Kapoor
Cloud Gate, Chicago 2006
''When one sets out to look for a language that gives meaning at some level to the abstract, one of the meanings that occurs is, in very broad terms, religious.''
Perhaps in strong contrast to the Chapman Brothers, I have always been attracted to the more widely accepted work of Anish Kapoor. One of the most influential sculptors of his generation, perhaps most famous for public sculptures that are both adventures in form and feats of engineering. He manoeuvres between vastly different scales, across numerous series of work. Kapoor's organic shapes and reflective surfaces have a layered depth to them, depicting the world as we know it in reflection on the surface but by changing the concave or convex, playfully questioning what is real and what is unreal.
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''I have always been interested in the mythology of the self-made object. As if without an author, as if thereby its own volition.''
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As if in a process of willing itself into being, his art can be compared to an appropriation from nature, taking a given form and purifying it.
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''Meaning arises because it must, not because I put it there''.
Kapoor's work creates an intimate dialogue between inanimate objects and the viewer. Where the meaning isn't in the actual object, but in the way the audience engages with it. How you enter the space, how the work manipulates the body. We define as being other than ourselves. Kapoor acknowledges that one cannot set out to make something mysterious or sublime, this is what the viewer brings. The object cannot exist on its own.
Kapoor chooses to let his art speak for himself but when he realised as a public figure he had a voice, he chose to use it for moral causes, which have led him to stand up against governments in Britain, India, and China in the defence of the rights of migrants, dissidents, and the otherwise-disenfranchised.
Descent into limbo, Havana 2016
Mona Hatoum
From her earlier performance work to her current sculptural pieces, Hatoum has stuck with humanistic themes throughout her career, commenting on the vulnerability of life, home, displacement and the uncanny.
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Looking specifically at Cellules (which was created during a residency at Centre International de Recherche sur le verre et les Arts plastiques (CIRVA), Marseille), Hatoum plays with opposites. The aesthetic contrast of eight dark, industrial manufactured, construction steel grid structures with deep red handblown glass gives a feeling of fragile organs or soles trapped inside cages. The cold geometric steel grids which appear as a support frame and would usually be used to create stability, look unsteady as if a slight movement would knock them over, which in turn would shatter the glass objects held inside.
Cellules, 2012-2013
Hatoum often repeats these grid-like structures in her work along with the confrontation of opposing materials. The hand-blown glass opposed to industrially produced steel. The work metaphorically talks of hardness and mercilessness of a system in contrast to the vulnerability of life. It evokes feelings of captivity and longing for freedom.
In Light Sentence, 1992, ready-made wire mesh lockers are accompanied by a single light bulb that dangles, slowly circling in the centre of the installation. The rotating light bulb dynamically casts pencil-thin shadows which grow and reduce on the walls around the room as if being interrogated.
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''I like keeping my work so open that it can be interpreted on different levels. Art can't be compared with journalism; it can't discuss concrete issues.''
Mona Hatoum
James Elkins
Art has been religious or ritual in nature even in times and places where there was no word for what we call religion or art. Before the Rennaissance, all art was religious, rather than the artist and their skills being glorified above the subject they were portraying. This is where art became a comment on religion as opposed to being displayed in a church. Elkins discusses what it is about religion that generates such suspicion in contemporary art. He attempts to clarify the relationship between art and religion.
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Using Manet's painting Dead Christ with Angels as an example, something has happened between religion and art. The issue is raised that if the work weren't modern, would it be considered as religious art? There are several religious inconsistencies in Manet's painting (Christ's tomb is empty apart from two angels and his wound appears on the wrong side). The painting has not contradicted religion, or absorbed, recreated or identified with it. Faith in art is reborn out of doubt.
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The Dead Christ with Angels, Edouard Manet 1864
Elkins introduces the reader to the word 'numinous', originally coined by the Protestant theologian Rudolf Otto in his book The Idea of the Holy. It is the closest one-word definition of the spirituality that informs some current visual art. The sudden, overwhelming and nonverbal presence of the godhead, surpassing all comprehension or understanding the immediate revelation of holiness. He attempts to blend Kant's philosophy with Otto's conviction that the heart of religion is a nonverbal experience. Whatever counts as truly spiritual cannot have an adequate name.
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Elkins concludes that it is impossible to talk sensibly about religion and at the same time address art in an informed and intelligent manner; but it is also irresponsible to not keep trying.
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''The name God does not belong to the language of art in which the name intervenes, but at the same time, and in a manner that is difficult to determine, the name God is still part of the language of art even though the name has been set aside.''
Maurice Blanchot
Michael Foucault
Foucault believed that religion is distinguished by how it arranges languages, practices, teachings and rituals to control the world and people in it.
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He recognizes Christianity as an ultimate power structure which imposes an obligation on its followers to accept its dogma, its sacred text and, most importantly, its authority as truth through confession. Implemented by the early church, a new form of knowledge and interpretation of the self is developed through the repeated analysis of our own individual sins and their actions are influenced by the fact they will have to confess each sin committed. Foucault acknowledges how people willingly submit to this confession much in the same way they submit to governmental and medical authority.
He applies a critical yet accepting approach to religion. He doesn’t seek to understand why this phenomenon occurs just that it does and he attempts to challenge these holders of power and their values.
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On acknowledging the political power the church holds, ‘’..it is a superb instrument of power for itself. Entirely woven through with elements that are imaginary, erotic, effective, corporal, sensual and so on, it’s superb.’’
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“You may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying, you will make a man that will live longer than he.”
“Death as the destruction of all things no longer had meaning when life was revealed to be a fatuous sequence of empty words, the hollow jingle of a jester’s cap and bells.”
Michel Foucault & Noam Chomsky on Creativity & Science, 1971
Recent exhibitions / talks attended which I found thought provoking:
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Bridget Riley - Southbank
Steve McQueen Exhibition - Tate Modern
Dora Maar - Tate Modern
Nam June Paik - Tate Modern
Baroque - Tate
Andy Warhol - Tate Modern
24/7 - Somerset House
Collier Bristow Gallery - Curated by Rosalind Davies
Liz West - talk on colour
Mike Nelson - The Asset Strippers - Tate
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