Turner Contemporary Margate Broken Again

Today I visited the JWM Turner, Carl Andre and Rosa Barba exhibition running concurrently at the Turner Contemporary Margate for the fifth time, whereas on the three previous visits two of the exhibits were out of order, today three were.

As my previous two blog posts have been about this problem and my dialogue with some of our county councillors about it, I made a special effort to go and check on the situation in the gallery again today.

I have to admit to being a bit lost for words on this one, photography is banned in the upper galleries where the broken exhibits are, so I was reduced to the quick sketch above to illustrate the problems.

I may put a few more pictures, my lunch or something and add a bit of text later.

 We had lunch in The Greedy Cow which was very good.

 The Turner Contemporary are erecting an exhibit outside the gallery, this is the first time I have seen this medium being used for art. I am a bit curious as to whether the artist constructs it themselves or just phones a glazier.

 The new sea defences are pretty much complete

 There were a larger proportion of the black headed gulls than usual.

Turner Contemporary Broken Again, and some other musings on today’s visit to Margate.

Today was my third consecutive visit to the Turner Contemporary art gallery in Margate where at least two of the exhibits in the Rosa Barba exhibition have been out of order.

Photography is banned in this exhibition and frankly I couldn’t be bothered to draw it again. My understanding is that two million pounds of public funding are required to run this gallery for a year.

Half of this funding comes out of the Kent County council purse and therefore out of our council tax. I am beginning to wonder if this is something I should complain to the council about, like a blocked drain.

There were fewer people in the upstairs galleries where the Carl Andre, William Turner, Rosa Barba exhibitions are than I have ever see, although this may be a coincidence.

When I first visited this new exhibition I reviewed it, see http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/carl-andre-and-rosa-barba-at-turner.html and have been back again http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/carl-andre-and-rosa-barba-at-turner_10.html and again http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/everything-you-always-wanted-to-know.html

Frankly it is very difficult to criticise both modern and contemporary art but this is not a good collection of exhibitions, the Turners are not really works of art but Turner’s lecture illustrations, the Andre is a bit of a hodgepodge of his works and looks like what was available rather than what would have been chosen and the Barba both doesn’t work because the artist has chosen a medium beyond her ability and because it is intrusive – noise and flickering light – to the other exhibitions.

My reason for being in Margate related to delivering children and collecting them from The Winter Gardens, so I took a few pictures of the inside of the venue.

After this cream tea at The Walpole Bay Hotel.

Carl Andre and Rosa Barba at The Turner Contemporary Margate follow-up Review

Having been to The Turner Contemporary last week and written my review based on my initial impressions of the new exhibitions, see http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/carl-andre-and-rosa-barba-at-turner.html

I though I would return today and see if I could make more of it.

For me the fundamental problem with this exhibition is that there isn’t on major conventional exhibit there. In simple terms, there isn’t really anything in the gallery at the moment which if situated outside of a gallery environment would be easily identifiable as significant art. Were it all to be in an auction room or at a boot fair, for instance, you would be hard pushed to say you had had an artistic experience.

I think there are differences here between what a private collector may do and the responsibilities relating to a provincial publicly funded gallery, inasmuch as there should be something both accessible to and enjoyable for the majority of the people who have paid for it. A couple of major turner oils would have tipped the balance for me and I would have had no complaint.

On top of this two of the exhibits had gone wrong, in a general sense were “out of order” if this is the right phrase for a piece of machinery – that while it has no easily defined function – had broken down so that it isn’t functioning in the way the artist intended.

I am sorry if the sketch isn’t very good, for some reason I find it difficult to sketch when standing up and of course photography is forbidden.

What the artist has done here, is to remove the keys from an electric typewriter, incorporate a timing mechanism, something like a clock escapement to regulate its speed and attach it to the top of a super16 film projector.

When functioning as hoped the typewriter types random letters on the film, which moves forward very slowly projecting a fuzzy image of the letter on to a small screen suspended from the ceiling.

As far as I can understand the escape mechanism malfunctions and runs away several times a day, requiring adjustment by a gallery technician, today it seemed for a moment that the technician would do something. What? Real amusing. I don’t know really. I suggested, perhaps unkindly that he needed a fine tuning sledgehammer, after considerable tinkering he went away, thinking he had mended it, the gallery attendant and I watched it for a while and although it had stopped running away it had also stopped typing.

The other malfunctioning exhibit, sorry the sketch is even worse than the previous one, is another super16 projector which has a continuous loop mechanism (like an 8track cassette) on top of it. Allowing on long continuous film to play perpetually.

The way this exhibit was supposed to work, is that the moving image was projected onto two semi opaque, screens one in front of the other, a servomotor being used to change the focus from one screen to the other. 

In this instance the servomotor had burnt out so the exhibit was sitting on the floor turned off.

I went off to the café, got a pot of tea and sketched the view from my table, while my children visited the joke shop, once again not a very good sketch, I think the whole experience had failed to inspire me.  

What the other visitors to the gallery made of this, whether they were even aware that two of the exhibits were malfunctioning, I certainly wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t seen them last week, behaving differently, I don’t know.

To me the sight of the artistic fraternity appearing to enjoy exhibits that had gone wrong is the equivalent of watching them enjoying The Mona Lisa painting with the eyes cut out of the canvas.

This raises questions for all of those who visited this exhibition and claimed to enjoy it.

Would you have noticed if anything was broken or missing?

Are you sure, for instance the Carl Andre exhibits were displayed as intended, were there the right number of bricks, floor tiles and so on and were they arranged in the right way?

Did you notice anything wrong that I didn’t?

It also gives a new definition of art: "Something that you can’t tell whether it is broken or not." 

I guess one way of inspiring some confidence here would be some sort of signage, saying. What?

“Out of order”

“This is not art”

“This is not a pipe”

Difficult really isn’t it?

At least we would all know if we were looking at what we were supposed to be looking at.

In a general sense I am always very suspicious when art is accompanied by a lot of text, part of this exhibition is two large floor to ceiling sheets which have writing on them in the form of letters that have been cut out of the sheets.

The writing is holes like a stencil.

On the floor opposite the cut out letters are left on the gallery floor in the form of a pile of what looks like the accumulation that gathers in a shredder.

It does in fact look like a pile of swept up rubbish and apparently one of the gallery staff has already swept it up an put it in the rubbish bin from where it has had to be retrieved and redisplayed.   

My own contention is that art in the form of written words is best contained in books, one usually expects framed words on a wall to start; “thou shalt not” and visual art doesn’t need a verbal explanation. In fact a verbal explanation should be either very difficult or impossible, I have added a picture of mine here to explain what I mean. You can see what it is and you can sort of say what it is, but it doesn’t seem to need explaining if you have seen it.

   Of course, I am not an artist so it isn’t art.  

Carl Andre and Rosa Barba at The Turner Contemporary Margate a Review of the New Exhibitions.

Most of Carl Andre’s works are on the floor, or at least fairly low, the exception in this exhibition is the cuboid made up of 28 railway sleeperish lumps of wood, this was too tall to see over the top of.

There is also a V shaped henge of 14 sleeperish lumps of wood and the inevitable bits of text on the wall, I find if I have to add text to visual art, is because the thing is a cartoon and not the Da Vinci sort that doesn’t need a code. 

The problem is with the art works, that are in the form of metal floor tiles, god knows The Turner Contemporary has had enough in the way of problems over the floors, without adding another one, but that is what theyhave done. 

All to do with one of the Andre myths, which is – if I remember rightly – about some art critic who turned up to review one of Andre’s works and claimed that he couldn’t find it, of course the answer was; "you’re standing on it you idiot."

The upshot is we have one artwork that people are allowed to stand on, in fact standing on it is requisite and knowing (if not by education) then, by inference through its positioning; perhaps. Yes. Ones gallery cred depends on knowing which one to stand on. 

Oddly enough the other usual rules for artworks still apply, although you are allowed to walk on it, you are not allowed to touch it with your hands and – even – bare feet are prohibited when walking on it.     

I would say an art purist would walk on it in retro shoes, I was just careful no to tread on the cracks between the tiles for fear of offending up the goddess Aesthete.

As I guess most will know Carl Andre is famous for flogging bricks to the Tate and having a wife who failed to follow the advice in Hotel New Hampshire; “keep passing the open windows.” Artists, clowns, bears and girls with beards should be particularly careful about this, as they come into the likely to jump category, not because they are mad, so much, as they are “more” than most.

 Back to Carl Andre’s metal floor tiles and the difficulty of explaining to children, that while it is perfectly ok to walk on one art exhibit made of floor tiles that is on the gallery floor, walking on the other exhibits made of floor tiles, also on the gallery floor, is strongly forbidden.

I had a similar problem with Rodin’s Kiss which was displayed in the Turner Contemporary foyer with photography forbidden, reducing most of the staff time on the front desk of the gallery; to telling people not to. In that case I managed to get the Tate who own it to rescind their rule and let people photograph it. Perhaps I can find the owners of the other two and get consent, sounds like a tall order. 

 I was more difficult about the kiss and spent some time sketching it in order to do a sort of inverse Duchamp and get the other hand where the sun don’t shine. What with one thing and the other Duchamp obviously would go for the frontal orifice.

It was Duchamp, apart from his risqué cartoon of the Kiss and displaying the urinal, who coined the phrase; “I am an artist therefore it’s art” however the ultimately this leads down the road of “this is a pipe” or even “I am not an artist therefore is isn’t art.

Photography is banned in the upper galleries, so I stood around doing a few sketches to try and get to grips with exhibitions there.

Anyway the question arises in the back of the mind, like what is the square root of minus one?  Are these latest exhibitions any good – well they passed the first test, which is for me, do the make me want to draw?

 I went of the Turner Contemporary gallery café and sketched the above.

The photo is to give you some idea of the way the sketch went.

On to Rosa Barba, does anyone remember the Eight Track cassette player that was the first practical way of playing recorded music in motor cars? Well the nub of this thing was that it was one continuous quarter inch tape with eight tracks of music recorded on it.

I will expand on this a bit, you know the ball of sting where you are supposed to use the string from the middle? If you imagine winding as much string on the outside of the ball as you were taking from the middle, well the thing would last forever and if it is the string being taken from the middle of the ball that is wound on the outside….. I guess you either get the idea or you don’t.

Well Rosa Barba’s exhibition is to do with film and several of the film projectors use continuous film in this way, there is a big reel of film with the film coming out of the middle of the reel, going through a projector and then being wound on the outside of the film.

Quite a lot of ones mind is absorbed by the very visual way in which this is happening, there is also the evident tension of will the film break or tangle, definitely a sense of something about to happen, only latin has the tense, to be about to be. In English forfilmement will have to do.

We now come to the gallery’s biggest error with hanging these exhibitions, the Rosa Barba is hung in two gallery rooms, one which has doors on all the entrances and one that doesn’t.

One of the continuous film exhibits is very noisy, possibly to the degree that the gallery staff may get tinnitus after a few months of it. Also there is the problem with the noise from the film exhibit being very much audible, and in my opinion inappropriate, in the gallery where the Carl Andres are displayed.

Yes you guessed it they put the noisy one in the gallery without closable doors on all of the entrances, so the noise can never be shut out.    

I am not really sure I know what to make of this exhibition, there is a sense that with the digital age there must be an awful lot of expensive movie projectors that have suddenly become pretty much worthless. From the point of view of an engineer there was some interest in looking at this equipment in operation, industrial archaeology on the go if you like.

The very flickery movie images, certainly make a demanding watch, I didn’t make it around the whole loop.   

There is also a display of stuff by Joseph Mallord William Turner chosen by Rosa Barba, I seem to developing something of cringe when contemporary artists choose Turners works. Last time it was when our Tracey Emin selected from Turner’s erotica and left out the most controversial one. The one in which it looks like Turner may be doing something like the gallery may be doing to The Droit House.  

I have to admit to being a bit surprised the Stephen Fry didn’t mention this omission when he interviewed our Tracey in the gallery.

This stuff chosen by Rosa Barba, has rather an unusual relationship with Turner’s pussy, if you ever have occasion to view it out of the frame, you will notice it has cat footprints on the back.

Turner didn’t intend this to be art work, they were part of his lecture notes, he liked cats, but there is no evidence that he let his cat walk over his artwork intended for public display.

What Turner seems to have done here is copied illustrations from the textbook he was using to teach perspective onto sheets of paper large enough for the whole class to see. I think this may be a case of “I am an artist and if I let the cat walk all over it then it isn’t art.” Certainly inserting a cat into some of Rosa Barba’s exhibits would be fun and didn’t it say in Hotel New Hampshire “life is dull but art is fun.”

Finally I suppose the question is, what do I think of the exhibitions? Fraid the answer is you will have to wait. If I get a chance I will go again several times, sketch bits of them, but with art I am a slow thinker. What I am missing is some top end, paint on canvas or sculpture, I miss The Kiss and the James Webb picture of Margate downstairs, but most of all there is no major painting in the whole of the gallery at the moment, I guess nothing I lack the ability to do myself.

I don’t think I could say this of any of the previous exhibitions there, the Carl Andre was fun, but I guess I don’t feel lifted out of myself.   

Incidentally the cartoon, top picture in the post, is india ink and blackboard chalk on cheap rough paper, I guess spraying it with fixative is the most expensive part of the whole thing. 

Oh and I hope the head turning trick (gallery attendant in the cartoon) works for some people, an optical illusion based on the brains propensity to construct the human face, something like Emanuel Kant said – most of what you see is already there in your head – or to be honest something much more complicated but that is the gist of the thing, I call it an optical delusion.    

Update the Turner Contemporary have just (04/02/2013) published the video below about this exhibition.

Margate Turner Contemporary Valentines destination

With the Turner Contemporary’s main exhibition for February being Carl Andre the artist famous for the bricks I was a bit slow making this connection http://insidekentmagazine.co.uk/insidekents-top-7-romantic-dates-in-kent/   

The Turner Contemporary Art Gallery Drops a Brick.

Carl Andre, the brick man of art will be having an exhibition at The Turner Contemporary Art Gallery in Margate, starting from the beginning of next month.

Andre is famous for selling an art exhibit to The Tate Gallery in London that consisted of some bricks.

I guess The Tate had the last laugh with that one as the bricks are worth over a million pounds now.

The next few days are the last chance you have to see the Alex Katz exhibition at the gallery in Margate.

After that as far as I can see the majority of the gallery will be closed for the rest of the month. 

The gallery calls this Spring exhibition installation period15 January 2013    - 31 January 2013 you can check this on their website http://www.turnercontemporary.org/exhibitions

I was tentatively wondering if I could get away with closing my bookshop in Ramsgate for this long, but I think the local readers would get withdrawal symptoms. a different sort of art I suppose