Arts Council Collection New Acquisitions 2007—08
Arts Council Collection New Acquisitions 2007—08
Chair of the Acquisitions Committee Caroline Douglas The external members of the Acquisitions Committee for 2007–09: Katrina Brown Kodwo Eshun Rosalind Nashashibi
Karla Black Karla Black’s sculptures are made from materials more commonly found in a domestic environment than in an art gallery. Unused To was made using a variety of materials including sugar paper, ribbon, chalk, paint, body cream, hair gel and polythene. Black has described her works as ‘physical explorations into thinking, feeling, communicating and relating’, and her use of domestic and perishable substances has feminine and bodily connotations. The artist states: “For me, the existence of art is proof of a human need to express physical instincts. Creativity is just necessary behaviour. Art – the refined and civilised evidence of this behaviour – is one example of what society will
accept in return for granting permission to those who wish to behave like the animals they are. Art is a rationalisation of sorts for enacting one’s true self. However, because the approval of others is required, a person cannot sustain the experience of making in their life without also making this proof of it.”
Unused To, 2007 mixed media, dimensions variable
Steven Claydon The artist states that: “This work attempts to highlight through amplification and aggregation the multiple sophisticated, and not so sophisticated, complex and obscure ways in which the artwork tries to distinguish itself from other objects and is accordingly conferred with special cultural status or qualities. There is as well a cannibalisation of the furniture of display and didactic or illustrative tropes resulting in the artwork attempting to subsume the devices of its own presentation and visa versa. The character of the old man figure is developed from an original drawing by Olaf Gulbranson in Simplicissimus, 1916. The ‘disappearing’ figure is transcribed from a Brian Bolland illustration that appeared in 2000 AD in 1980.
The sculpted hand was removed and altered from sculptor Ian Brennan’s de commissioned sculpture of ‘Southampton soccer legend’ Ted Bates 2005.”
Logs from the Black Forest, 2007 oil on canvas, steel, bakram, wood, bronze and plastic, dimensions variable
Kate Davis In Who is a Woman now? Davis draws a crumpled postcard, folded in half, like a body bent from the waist and propped against a dense black background. The image is based on a cheap reproduction (a postcard or print) of a de Kooning painting from his seminal ‘Woman’ series. De Kooning’s painting was significant at the time for its harsh, aggressive brushstrokes, snarled, toothy expression and wild talons; Davis re-explores it from her position as a woman artist working today. She situates her work within a framework of cultural and historical movements referencing, in particular art history, modernism, its techniques and iconography. Who is a Woman now?, 2008 pencil and screenprint on paper, 160 × 129.5 cm
Garth Evans Untitled No.1 followed a series of laminated plywood pieces that the artist called ‘Frames’. The ‘Frames’ were made on his return to the UK following his first visit to the USA, where they had been conceived on paper. The ‘Frames’ gave the artist a new way to remake a basic grid as in his previous work ‘Breakdown’, a large floor piece made from steel. ‘Breakdown’ was a result of a number of considerations, the most important being that the artist wanted to make a sculpture that did not offer itself to the viewer as an ‘object’ or a ‘thing’. He believes this is related to the sculptures’ descent from the pedestal into the world and that there were already enough “things in the world”.
Untitled No. 1, 1974 plywood, 20.3 × 243.8 × 243.8 cm Untitled (2), 1974–1975 plywood, 30.5 × 243.8 × 243.8 cm Both works: gift of the artist
Tania Kovats During a residency at the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford in 2006, Tania Kovats drew inspiration from the Uffington White Horse: a 2500 year-old drawing carved into an Oxfordshire hillside. She collected a range of objects on a theme of the white horse, and made precise drawings which employ the conventions of cataloguing archaeological ‘small finds’. Her entire collection was housed in The Museum of the White Horse, a museum dedicated to the white horse and to landscape. The original museum occupied the interior of a mobile horse-box and stopped off at various museums, hillsides and racecourses during 2007.
↖ Stonehenge, RJC Atkinson (1956), 2007 pencil on paper, 37 × 32 cm ← Metal Horse Head Spoon, 2007 pen on paper, 45 × 36.2 cm White Horses by Jacky, 45 rpm single, 2007 pencil on paper, 41 × 50.2 cm White Horse T-Shirt, ‘Precious’, 2007 inkjet on paper, 65.3 × 48.8 cm White Horse Head, 2007 ink on paper, 46 × 38 cm White Horse Rearing with Jousting Colours, 2007 pencil on paper, 48.2 × 38.2 cm
Books from the Museum of the White Horse Library, Non-Fiction, 2007 pencil on paper, 56.5 × 71.5 cm ← White Horse Rearing, 2007 ink on paper, 48.2 × 38.3 cm White Horse Bottle Stops, 2007 inkjet on paper, 49.5 × 60.2 cm Three Horses Walking (one without a tail), 2007 inkjet on paper, 47.3 × 57.8 cm
Linder Untitled, 1977 is part of a small series of collages using images taken from contemporary magazine, “True Confessions” – which often featured romantic stories and accompanying images. According to the artist, these stories ultimately culminated in the “female falling victim to her own temporary lust and then, inevitably, regretting the act.” Two cigarette burns have been made on the photograph on the area where the woman’s eyes would have been located and colour cut-outs of eyes from a cosmetic advert in “Woman’s Own” have been added in their place, along with a large cut-out of a mouth.
Untitled, 1977 collage, 8.5 × 10.3 cm Untitled, 1977 collage, 15.7 × 16.5 cm Untitled, 1981 collage, 31 × 18.8 cm
Hilary Lloyd Hilary Lloyd has gained significant recognition for short films featuring urban young people engaged in mundane everyday activity. Her influential ‘video sculpture’ Colin #2 features two monitors back-to-back: one shows a young man taking his vest off with a balletic, concentrated slowness; the other documents the same process in reverse. Shot in real time using a static camera, the film captures the intense concentration of both the protagonist and the artist, while touching on issues of voyeurism, fetishism and the value of time.
Colin #2, 1999 HI-8 video installation, 20 minutes
Hew Locke This work is part of a series of images in which Hew Locke has used mixed media to represent Queen Elizabeth II. In this case, he has used cheap, brightly coloured plastic materials to both describe and conceal her traditional image. The contradiction between Locke’s subject matter and chosen materials is a reflection of his experience of the iconic image of Queen Elizabeth II at different times of his life. Though Locke now lives and works in London, he was born in Edinburgh and moved to British Guyana at a young age.
Medusa, 2008 metal, plastic, textile on plywood and MDF, 210.5 × 80.2 × 20.4 cm
Simon Martin
Carlton, 2006 16mm film transferred to DVD projection, 8 minutes 25 seconds
With its measured voiceover and careful camerawork, Carlton resembles the sort of interpretation material one might find in a room adjacent to a museum exhibition, rather than an exhibit itself. The voice tells the story of Memphis, the Postmodern design group led by Ettore Sottsass, and of perhaps its most iconic product, the ‘Carlton’ bookcase from 1981. Despite its use of kitsch laminates instead of rare woods, the original bookcase was beyond the financial means of most households, and was made only in limited numbers. Nevertheless, the film proposes that its influence ripples not only through every home, but also through the design of every public space and building we encounter.
Susan Philipsz Susan Philipsz works with sound and its relationship to architecture and public space. She often takes popular or forgotten songs and situates them in different urban environments. Outdoors or in supermarkets, malls and galleries. The songs are then amplified and punctuate the space as pedestrians (listeners) pass by. She is interested in the emotive and psychological properties of song and how it can evoke certain memories and reactions. In this work, the artist recorded herself singing ‘The Internationale’ and played it originally through two trumpet speakers in a public underpass in Ljubljana, Slovenia, a former Soviet country. The song was once a rallying call for socialists around the world, but is now almost forgotten. She says “It could be
Margaret Salmon
PS, 2002 16 mm film transferred to DVD 8 minutes 13 seconds
interpreted as either a lament for something that has passed or as the song suggests, a clarion call for political action.”
The Internationale, 1999 sound installation, 1 minutes 54 seconds
Margaret Salmon’s work touches on universal themes of ageing, human relationships and motherhood. Inspired by documentary propaganda films and technically influenced by French cinéma vérité and Italian neo-realist filmmaking, she makes slow-moving films focussing on everyday routines and habits. In PS, Salmon shows monochrome scenes of domesticity as her male protagonist cuts the grass, weeds, waters the garden and inhales heavily on a cigarette against a night sky lit up by fireworks. In the accompanying audio, a man and woman argue in voices impassioned yet flattened through years of frustrations, with undertones of hurt and malice, revealing fading love in a mature relationship. As Salmon says, “it is the ghost narrative in mundane tasks that I find interesting.”
Lucy Skaer
Leonora (The Tyrant), 2006 oak table with inlaid mother of pearl 72 × 76 × 49 cm Leonora (The Joker), 2006 16 mm film, 45 seconds The Great Wave (Expanded), 2007 ink and pencil on paper, three parts, total: 141 × 350 cm
Lucy Skaer’s work explores time, mortality, photographic imagery, history and chaos and includes drawing, painting and, increasingly, sculpture. Leonora (The Tyrant) is part of a series of works inspired by meeting the Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington. It consists of an oak table inlaid on the surface with motherof-pearl images of grasping hands, suggesting contrasting themes of Empire, conflict, living decay and beauty with echoes of Surrealism. Skaer describes her work as “something to do with where those materials originally came from, and how they came to be associated with British antique furniture, all these tropical hardwoods and Pacific mother-of-pearl shell. I wanted the table to reflect the tyrannical stages of early colonialism”. The Great Wave (Expanded), an intensely wrought drawing, is based on Hokusai’s famous woodblock print.
John Stezaker
Mask LXIV, 2007 and Pair V, 2007 are from an ongoing series of collages collectively called Masks. Since the 1970s John Stezaker has made collages using a narrow range of source material: he has amassed an unparalleled archive of film stills and studio portraits from the 1930s onwards. Stezaker overlays postcards of rural English scenes on the faces of the actors, producing frequently unsettling visual correspondences between the line of a cheek and a rocky outcrop, a fine stand of trees with the profusion of starlet’s hair. Rather than a reaction in the viewers subconscious, in the manner of 20th century Surrealist practice, Stezaker’s aim is an interruption in our unconscious consumption of images in a media-saturated age. ← Mask LXIV, 2007 collage, 25 × 18.5 cm Pair V, 2007 collage, 17.8 × 24.9 cm
Emily Wardill Captured amid the tolling bells of St Anne’s Church in Limehouse, London, Emily Wardill’s 16mm film alternates vignettes of everyday London life against sudden breaks of complete darkness. Employing as a reference point a text by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Born Winged Animals and Honey Gatherers of the Soul visually evokes Nietzsche’s metaphor of the tolling of noon bells as an individual’s struggle for self-awareness. Working across film, performance, painting and sound, Emily Wardill uses the ideas of philosophy, theory or science as a starting point for her works. Her films function as visual and aural translations of a philosophical argument or theorem, focussing on human existence in a
complex, multi-layered and inexorably urban, contemporary society.
Born Winged Animals and Honey Gatherers of the Soul, 2006 16 mm film, 10 minutes
Rebecca Warren Rebecca Warren follows the lineage of an artistic tradition and pays homage to artists she admires, from Edgar Degas and Pablo Picasso to Helmut Newton and Auguste Rodin, while at the same time subtly questioning their authority. She describes her process: “I made three sculptures out of clay which were cast in bronze. When the bronzes were delivered to the studio, the foundry also returned the original clay works – smashed up, broken and pulled apart by the process of casting. I decided to rework them, fix them up, by adding and taking away clay. Then I sent them to the foundry to be cast again. The result was three new sculptures with elements of the previous sculpture still intact.”
Regine, 2007 bronze, 126 × 37 × 39 cm Acquired with funds from the McLaren Art Foundation, in association with Outset Contemporary Art Fund, 2007
Images Š the artist except Hew Locke image Š Hew Locke. All rights reserved, DACS 2011
Cover: Tania Kovats, Three Horses Walking (one without a tail), 2007
Design: Catherine Nippe, www.cnippe.com
The Arts Council Collection is based at Southbank Centre, London and at Longside, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield. For further information about the Arts Council Collection please visit www.artscouncilcollection.org.uk Loans from the Collection are generally free of charge. Where exceptional curatorial or technical support is required a small fee may be charged to cover administration, preparation and installation costs. To enquire about borrowing work from the Arts Council Collection, email loans@southbankcentre.co.uk