I had a truly great experience when I went to London last week, visited 2 shows that are 2 of the best I have seen in a very long time, Gerhard Richters portraits at the National Portrait Gallery and Annette Messagers retrospective at the Hayward.
Messagers retrospective, The Messangers,centred around her successful pavilion at the Venice Biennale which they have transferred to the Haywards space. It is astonishing to me that this important artist has not had much previous recognition in the UK considering the validity and sensitivity of her output over the past 30 years.
In my eyes (a masculine eye I consede) there are not many other artists who have succeeded so well in decoding and reviewing the mysterious quality of the female rhythm. By this I refer to the problem facing female artists in a still largely male dominated arena and the difficulty they may face in finding their own true voice, where so much in the peripheral vision of their sub-conscious remains masculine. In musical terms I would describe the female rhythm quite literally in the rhythm of Laura Nyro’s music, it is not the boom cha-ca throbbing rhythm of much music, which I would describe as having masculine origins, but is more various, harder to pin down and relies much more on the flight of the melody leading the rhythm rather than vice-versa, a bit like a very complex song thrush.
Annette Messager’s work speaks to me on these terms; it is at once whimsical, delicate and lyrical but is just as likely to flip suddenly to a forlorn melancholy or an aggressive and voracious sexuality (akin to P J Harvey at her best) . Quite simply, it was an intoxicating experience, liable to cause a man to well-up or have to sheepishly walk out of the gallery space like a teenager with his bag in front of his crotch.
Richters show was a different experience. As a painter I can’t begin to explain the importance that this man has had in defining my thinking on this, the most complex of practices.
I was stunned first of all by the sheer painterliness of his portraits which I had been led to believe were much more closely reliant on their photographic roots. It made my heart sing to see the tensions created on the surfaces between flat areas and thick gloopy masses, and I left feeling utterly dejected at the prospect that there was no way of topping his achievements.
The thing that struck me was the deep expression and sensitivity within the clarity of his vision, by maintaining such a cold stance in the face of ideology I was wary that by seeing his works close up they would hold nothing more than all the other second rate photorealists that have been and gone. I should have known this wouldn’t be the case, from looking at his abstracts you can clearly tell he has a deep relationship with the matter of paint, only with his portraits he plays with the lines of his diatribes so cleverly. When talking about emptying out the idealogy of his work he succeeds in creating works that are more isolated in their completeness, even when they appear to be very similar, each image seems to have been approached successfully on its own terms and the reason for painting it is found within the diversity of one’s personality. One image finds its sleazy core, another, a surreal whimsy whilst another finds a delicate tenderness and this is all in one room where the curators have hung them because of the similarity of their handling.
A painter par excellence, I can’t rate this show highly enough. I want to go back.
It is interesting you refer to the female rhythm, it’s something I have not really come across before, or maybe I have but not been able to verbalise it. You talk of the female rhythm as an idea and use Laura Nyro’s music as a literal example, however Messager often uses rhythmatic physical movement in her work, and whilst I believe this is something different to the concept of the female rhythm which you talk about, the two seem to be interlinked..? I would be interested to hear more about your thoughts on this…. What role does movement play in reviewing the female rhythm, if any…?
Emma
27 Mar 09 at 3:02 pm
The Richter show was excellent, went myself on Friday.
I felt like I finally started to understand the reason for the depth and range of his influence and importance to so many painters since the 1970’s.
Your comment on the range of chords struck in his owrks of similar themes seems accurate. It is justification to a process which looks to discover its subject and contant within the act, rather than preconceiving an idea, or projecting an agenda and ideology onto a constructed motif. Its as if Richters sytemmatic detachment to his subject matter leads to a total divorce of that subject from any preeixsting content. By emptying so much of this out he is then able to find a new something within the act of painting, something which then fills and houses itself within the boundaries of the image he works with. The image is merely a pliant receptical to the discovery of content.
Richter seems to be most seismic in the manner in which he dismnisses previous modes of constructed a whole agenda, a whole personal and universal iconography, which we decode on reading the work. Yet having said this his very destruction of aush ca process and of ideology in general, is itself a parallel form of ideology. Richters choice, for instance, to use found images, is something we decode, analyse, find reason with and look for meaning, in the same manner we might attempt an iconological deconstruction of the existence of certain motifs in past painters.
What most surprsied me was the hseer painterliness of Richters work. His range of mark making and surfaces was both broad and hugely accumplished. He is not just a painter of incredible technical ability, but also one full of romantic warmth, poetic lucidity and human understanding. These are all idealised visions of the painters innate ability, and the delights of the lingusitics of paint, which we might not assocaite with the apparently more cold, cynical and objective approach of Richter. Yet I sense delicacy and tenderness in his approach, or at the last a range of human variety, which is anything but coldly scientific and analytical.
Tom
29 Mar 09 at 4:06 pm
Hello Emma
Thanks for the post. By talking about the female rhythm I’m talking about it as an abstract concept, when you speak about movement as in the female rhythm, it is made into a literal physical expression, although movement has a big part to play in her making of the work and thus her realising the of the female rhythm it is only a part of a greater whole. By using Laura Nyro as an example, i think i made the rhythm appear literal, and in terms of music I believe it can be understood in these terms. This is because music is the art form that has the shortest route to the emotional centre (it speaks most directly to us), with visual art, the route to our emotional core is more complex and involves entangling itself within our conscious, intellectualizing self. Having said all this, there are pieces in Messager’s retrospective which have a great sense of musicality, and this can be treated as a way in to feeling the abstract nature of the female rhythm. However, they can to be read alongside everything else to create a full understanding of what I am trying to explain; so, for example (I’ll have to apologise here because i’m terrible at remembering the names of things) the photo’s of mens crotches can be understood alongside the installation with the billowing red sheet. The red sheet was a very musical piece in that it was rhythmical, with crescendo’s and lulls in the action, during the crescendo, my mind was taken to the photo’s of the crotches, because it spoke to me of an aggressive longing sexuality, something uncontainable, powerful and dominant. Then when the objects hung from the roof descended to the point where they gently caressed the billowing sheet, at once being supported by the sheet and at the same time pinning the sheet down, it spoke of a completely different relationship that women have with sex. In the intervening minutes these opposing relationships would then be corrupted and all the grey areas inbetween would be explored. This, to me, spoke profoundly about the feminine relationship to sex, and more than that, to their relationship with touch and how they come to understand the world.
Andy
30 Mar 09 at 11:17 am
Your final paragraph summed it up perfectly for me. For all the stuff you read about him, and all the stuff he has said himself about remaining at a distance, it is this sensitivity and warmth which actually pushes the painting into the realm greatness and timelessness. In terms of him faling to escape from the confines of ideology, he actually talks about this in his later writings and talks about the impossibility of escaping ideology.
Andy
30 Mar 09 at 11:23 am