Rose Wylie on tv and in Penzance and Newlyn.

Watching Alan Yentob talking to Rose Wylie , who at 83 is having sucess as an artist. She is just as I would have imagined, a terribly middle class bohemian, messy, speaking in that perilously well educated quiet way. I am expecting not to find out how she became successful. She has a lot of space and therefore works big. How did she get a show at the Serpentine?

Her drawing is very rough and childlike, no attempt to observe closely, repetitious cliches of pink square heads. She collages on top, writes words on, uses memory.

Germaine Greer speaks well of her. She was married to a painter who has died, and she brought up children, only later going to the Royal college and having time to paint, using unstretched  canvas and working on several pictures at once.

The crude drawing is a bit like Guston? A bit early Hockney?

She says nothing about her relationship with her husband Roy Oxlade.

She wears lipstick and has her hair carefully styled.

So, I can't say I really like Wylie's  work, it's unpleasant, derivative of films without saying anything, it's clumsily faux naive and it's been taken up with ridiculous enthusiasm.

It has a certain vitality but it's tedious, slapdash, self indulgent and Yentob has not asked anything very difficult.

I am of course envious of her sucess. It's rather terribly emperor's new clothes.Must go and see the two local shows of her work so I can speak with more authority about what the pictures are like at firsthand.

X.    X

So, just returned from her two shows at The Exchange in Penzance and at Newlyn.

It's nice to be able to see paintings here that are currently in the art news.

They are big, the unstretched canvas is glued on to stretched canvasses and you can see where the staples were that the artist used to tack the canvas to her wall.

I notice the comment book has many enthusiastic comments about her vision being like a child's, but, but....I want to ask why Wylie likes this faux naivety. I don't like it, the lack of observation, the use of Nazi uniformed figures, the crudity.

One picture with its recall of wartime aeroplanes and dogs below gave me a feeling of Rose using authentic memories but many of the works were not so interesting. 

If they were done smaller by an artist without her connections who would give them gallery space?

If she is to be congratulated on success in the art world purely because she is old isn't that condescending?

I couldn't stand more than two minutes of watching her painting a wobbly blue line but maybe the rest of the over an hour long film about her was more compelling.

How will oil paint on raw canvas survive the ravages of time? 

Does it matter?

 I have a feeling there's only room for one Rose Wylie, that others with her cack handed badly drawn cartoonish figures will not fare so well. 

She's having a ball, enjoying creating images and being courted as if she's the new Basquiat, who she admires, but I suppose it's like marmite, if the taste grates and the novelty isn't impressing you you have to leave it to those that contemplate Wylie's work with relish.

Francis Alys 'The silence of Ani'

Francis Alys 'The silence of Ani'  13 minute HD video installation at Cast , Helston,July 2018

This video is in black and white, more stylish and beautiful than it would have been in colour?

The setting looks deserted and wild, spacious, grasses waving in the wind. There are fragments of masonry, something like a chapel, columns, carved words, an ancient site with no visitors, or only a few young people with bird whistles, making sweet trilling noises of various kinds, approaching and coinciding, falling into a rhythm and then then silence as they are seen lying down. 

Were they remembering some destruction? Were they reenacting deaths?

After a pause we see a drawing of the once large city of Ani, we read that this was a performance to imagine the place with birdsong revived, before a long past destruction. The bird whistle blowers were asked to perform until tired, when they lay down. Alys probably put forward his idea and it was selected by a  Turkish committee.

I was reminded of visits I have made to ancient sites, aware of lost long dead people, of the transience of life. I was enjoying the way the filming was done, the swaying of grass, some blurred shots, the mingling of various trilling sounds, the movement before stillness.

My companion would have liked the explanatory titles at the beginning rather than having been led to speculate but I liked being aware of my reactions before the information came up. I had been expecting more current conflicts to be referenced but instead the message seemed to be a universal one of time passing, civilisations falling, cities ruined but treasured for their ability to evoke history, an idea of people everywhere as fragile, as possessing a common humanity caught in the events around them.

I saw parallels with my favourite work  by Alys to date, the one where many red coated soldiers in London were choreographed to march around in formation, a gentle and fascinating  amusement using the image on many tourist postcards. A performance was made that animated the place and played with notions of empire, anachronistic bear skinned chocolate soldiers, patterns and rhythms and the break up of marching in step on the bridge.

We were lucky to see the video, kindly switched on for us even though I had misread the dates and arrived after this part of Groundwork was finished.

  The Cast building is an appealing old place with some desirably large studios and a pleasant light cafe. It's funded largely  by arts council grants and I suspect hardly any of Helston's inhabitants drop in for coffee or even know it's there just behind the car park near the Godolphin Buiding and very near the Museum. And only 50pence to park for an hour!

I wonder how much the artists meet? Do they? Do the artists in the studios get exhibitions also?

It seems idyllic, space, refreshments and interesting international artists brought in by Theresa  Gleadowe. 

A place worth keeping an eye out for if you want to be one of Cornwall's art cognoscenti.