Mary on her art

The Money Trick

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TV ART -'Home is where the art is.' BBC One 2020

'Home is where the art is'. BBC tv



Three artists go round the potential client's house as they put it 'snooping'.
They meet the buyers and pitch for the commission.
One is thrown out.
The remaining two make some art.
The buyers choose between the results.


The thing is most of the art is absolutely dreadful and the rest is dreadful.
The presenter says things like how amazing it is that the artists are all so different.
None of the buyers betray the slightest dislike of the works presented.
The buyers in general are overcome with emotional reactions of admiration and sentimental attachment to personal references in the work - symbols of their dead relations or their recent marriages.


We get glimpses of the artists filing, casting, sticking or painting. They are all mutually appreciative of each other's efforts. They all say the works are good value for money.
A selection is made, quite often the buyers buy both works.
In general it's a lot of kitsch, twee, well crafted birthday card sort of banality.


The works are presented in the buyers' homes to universally awed friends.

There's a certain fascination with guessing who is rejected, with seeing the apparent genuine effort and appreciation involved.


I am personally longing for a reaction of horror and rejection, just one, like there used to be on the programme where interior decorators presented people with a room that might appall them.


I was telling a neighbour about the program. Why watch it he says if it's so bad?


Is it the absolute dearth of any good tv about living artists?
Is it liking the idea that people are encouraging folk to buy art?
Is it a superiority complex stoked by comparing my work with these?
Is it wanting one time to be impressed?
Am I hoping for out takes where the presenter reveals what he really thinks?


Aargh!


But there I am recording it!

Mierle Laderman Ukeles - her talk on youtube

Mierle Laderman Ukeles 'Maintenance/Survival/and its Relation to Freedom' YouTube. 14 Feb 2013, 2,558 views - 1 hour 32 minutes.

www.youtube.com/watch.?v=3Hr-MWXpuvs

Ukeles

Krzysztof Wodiczko, Professor of Art and Design at Harvard University, who introduces this talk, asks if an artist by working with people can de-alienate the worker whose plight was explained by Marx.

Twelve minutes in Ukeles appears, the screen goes blank disconcertingly but then she is back, an impressive, calm, assured speaker with a wealth of experience and plenty to say.

Useless mentions names familiar from the avant garde of the 60's - Pollock, Duchamp and Rothko, pointing out that that they didn't change diapers and that when she had a baby daughter she was suddenly in a world of maintenance, of both mind bending boredom but also rediscovering the world as her baby did.

In October 1969 Ukeles wrote her Manifesto, unfortunately shown on slides too fuzzy to read, and she found her theme of connecting with the world's maintenance workers and making her art about them and their vital work.

Ceremonial Arch 4-1988,93,94 and 2016 Queens Museum photo Jillian Steinhauer

Ukeles explains several projects including the 30 year making of 'Fresh Kills' a park on Statton Island, New York, constructed on top of fifty years deposited garbage, where she is organising that a million people donate valued objects, hand size, to be documented, archived, and incorporated into the walls and paths encased in glass blocks.

She tells her audience about working with snow truck drivers in Japan to make a mechanised ballet based on Romeo and Juliet.

She also met garbage truck drivers to make a display in a Madison Avenue art parade. She describes holding on to get these drivers to come up with their own ideas because, 'it can't be art if I tell you what to do'- in great contrast to Anthony Gormley who used volunteer labour to carry out his instructions for the many terracotta figures made for his 'field for the British Isles'.

She says in that work or in the studio it's the same process of waiting for the ideas 'to rise up, in the vacuum of terror'.

However it is Ukeles 11 month project in the 70's when she shook hands with every one of the 8,700 sanitation workers in New York City, thanking each one and rising early to walk all the garbage collection routes with them that made her famous and which is so relevant now because the worth of all maintenance workers is so apparent in the Coronavirus crisis.

Book by Patricia C Phillips, 2016

Ukeles has earned her place in the contemporary canon of art made from social cooperation.

One can argue that she might have been more involved politically in the workers' union struggle but it's certainly worth giving her projects your attention.

 In her Manifesto Ukeles said anything was art if she said it was - and I believe her.

Keith Piper 'The Perfect City' on vimeo

Keith Piper 'The Perfect City'.  2007 12mins. Vimeo.

This video work was first shown as a two screen installation in PM Gallery London, funded by Film London.

The version on Vimeo is a compelling short narrative by the artist with a complex visual series of images. There is the paper model of the design he is making of an archetypal city. There are shots of people in London, of police, of beautiful scripts in different languages, of fire and water, ofthe Tower of Babel in past art, of maps.

The sound includes quietly sonorous menacing music and a ticking clock.

Piper speaks of the 'memory of drowning'- floods- the refuge Tower of Babel that he says challenged God.

Aptly for our time of Coronavirus  there is a section on contamination, pandemics, the use of infected bodies as weapons, of smallpox inflicted on  Native Americans.

What Piper calls 'the memory of amputation' shows boundaries between areas of wealth and poverty. This is followed by 'cleansing', regulation, surveillance, the words are spoken calmly with the disquieting soundtrack behind them.

Finally there is burning, the destruction by God of Sodom and Gomorrah, his angels having failed to find ten pious people. Fires are mentioned that destroyed St.Pierre in Martinique, and in  Monserrat, both in the twentieth century, and before that the Fire of London, 1666,  that ended the Plague. Piper says that God seems to have a fondness for fire.

It ends with Piper reciting that God gave Noah the rainbow sign- still as we see recently a symbol of hope as we in lock down to  escape our current pestilence put rainbows in our wi- but 'it won't be water but fire next time'.

I don't know if Piper believes in God or simply finds the Biblical stories suitably apocalyptic. It's not a narrative with a clear plot but what is clear is that he expects the worst.

Keith Piper, born 1960 in Malta but brought up and living in Britain as a black artist, part of a group called the BLK art group, has done a great deal of work, exhibited widely,  and teaches at Middlesex University.

I loved his work that  I saw in Derby about how everyone has moved from one place to another, everyone's family have been migrants for personal betterment or to escape something. This was done very cleverly by inviting visitors to answer a questionnaire which was projected on the wall to reveal every person as a migrant.

He has done work about slavery- the 'Lost Vitrines' that were installed in the V & A to bring a new awareness about the Georgian exhibits and that era.

Recently in 2017 his 'Unearthing the bankers' bones' used fiction, history painting and video to make a complicated show about the evils of class and race discrimination.

Keith Piper is not an artist to repeat a signature piece. His work tackles serious and political themes in a variety of media. It's often complicated and requires time to absorb.

I think he is saying important things in imaginative and powerful ways.

Somehow this doesn't make him well known but he keeps at it with a controlled passion.

Leonardo da Vinci - on tv

Leonardo da Vinci   

BBC One - Da Vinci: The Lost Treasure

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b016xjq6

I am watching Fiona Bruce go from country to country showing on tv Leonardo da Vinci's work.

She started with the Salvator Mundi in New York thought to be by him. To me it looks unlike his work, too ill defined and fuzzy.

She is good at this exposition, rather self consciously strutting about in Italian sunshine in a very expensive looking yellow dress, then in a dark embroidered number.

There are lovely Italian words - the sound entrances me, thinking of a visit to Florence with my beloved husband, sadly killed by docetaxl. How glad I am we went as he had always wanted to.

When I was an undergraduate we had a trip to Italy to study art but the Last Supper was closed as it was Easter, so I have only seen a copy in Caglieri in Sicily. Fiona Bruce shows a us a richly coloured English copy. Such a lively composition.

Then it's the Madonna of the Rocks - Luke Syson from our National Gallery talks about light and sfumato. A restorer is shown working on it.

We get a good explanation of Leonardo's multi faceted explorations into weapon design and anatomy.

Now we get to the Mona Lisa, which I remember feeling surprised to find so small.

I think it's the way the background doesn't match up in a straight line that keeps us looking, and of course the slight smile, about to change, to react to us as the viewer as if we have just met her, and the quiet glow of her in the darkness.

So, ten minutes left for the discovered painting, revealed by infra red photography.

I still don't buy it - not that I could afford it.

They say it's a real Leonardo.

If so its his worst.