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20/1/2011

Three Exhibitions

Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham

Anne Collier

Nottingham Contemporary presents a major exhibition by Anne Collier, one of the most exciting artists working with photography to have emerged in the past few years.

The imagery she chooses is often romantic, sentimental or clichéd. Her art works use received images, handed down to us from the cultural world of the mass media that surrounds us. They are also pictures that she - and we - somehow find irresistible. They refer to an intimate world of feelings - but she retains a critical detachment about these widely available, commodified images.

Many of her photographs themselves feature a photographic image. She uses clichéd posters, magazine and album covers, photographed against flat, plain surfaces, so that the depth in her photographs is almost non-existent. Very little comes between the images and her overall photograph. Yet the two remain absolutely distinct.

Her work can be seen as perpetuating an art that questions the possibility of originality in image-making. In New York of the late 70s and early 80s artists like Jack Goldstein, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine were sometimes called the Pictures Generation. Their work was referred to as Appropriation Art in that it borrowed and reproduced existing images.

Collier can be seen as contributing to this debate. What she adds is an indirect sense of self-portraiture. We sense she may be saying something about herself by making these widely circulated images her own. She sometimes re-photographs photographs she herself has taken - a print of a close-up of her eye floating in chemicals in a developing tray, for example. In fact the eye motif recurs in her work.

Her work makes us very aware of the sexual politics of photography - amateur and professional. It presents us with stereotyped images of women - both as the subject photographed or as the photographer herself. Now based in New York, Anne Collier studied at CalArts under the artist John Baldessari - as did Jack Goldstein three decades earlier.

The Anne Collier exhibition is generously supported by the LUMA Foundation.
With thanks to Valeria and Gregorio Napoleone, exhibition patrons of Anne Collier’s exhibition.

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Jack Goldstein

Jack Goldstein has been called the most important “artist’s artist” of the last 30 years. A key “missing link” between 60s and 80s art, his work spans performance, film, painting and poetry. He even made 45rpm and 33rpm records which he presented as sculpture. All of these are represented at Nottingham Contemporary, in his first solo exhibition in the UK.

Goldstein’s roots were in minimalist sculpture, he has said, but he allied this to an ironic, pop-cultural sensibility that questioned the originality of art by focussing on mass reproduced images. Made in Los Angeles in the 1970s, his films lift images and stylistic devices from the burgeoning media technology of the era, as well as the history of the Hollywood movie industry and its place in America’s image of itself.

“Art should be a trailer for the future,” he famously wrote. Seen in that light, his work is a series of intense psychodramas that hint at apocalyptic narratives.

His series of immaculate 16mm films feature haunting motifs that play with the meaning those images have acquired – a glinting knife evokes Hitchcock, MGM’s incessantly roaring lion signals the start of a story, a trained dog barks senselessly on cue, a gradually tarred and feathered chair alludes perhaps to the endemic racism of early Hollywood

He also drew on Hollywood’s technicians and the craft of big budget film making, in particular on lighting and sound, to recreate the seductive allure of mainstream cinema and to orchestrate suggestion. Here though, the image itself is isolated - his films are only a few minutes long. Meaning becomes ambiguous. He was, he said “letting you experience the sense of an extreme situation, but at a distance, so that you can control it.”

Like the Hollywood disaster movies made in the same era, his work hints at catastrophe, particularly the later paintings made by graphic artists using the glossy airbrush technique that then pervaded popular culture. They do not reflect the prevailing movie version of the future – seen in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, George Lucas’s Star Wars series or Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner. Instead they revisit America’s history, particularly the 30s and 40s. His paintings appear to portray the world’s last images, following natural cataclysm perhaps – yet they are scenes of destruction from World War II. Even here, meaning and image are coolly parted. “An explosive is beauty before its consequences,” he wrote.

Although his art is not directly self-expressive, it does give a sense of his own life too. The artist often disappears, sometimes literally, whether avoiding a spotlight in a film of an early performance, or finally in absenting himself from the production of his art works altogether - his later paintings were carried out entirely by assistants. Goldstein’s own life was turbulent, and apparently rancorous. After falling from favour in the art world, he disappeared throughout the 90s, perhaps to his trailer in the desert where, despite a renewed interest in his work with a retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum in 2002, he took his own life in 2003.

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John Newling
The Miracle Trees (Moringa Oleifera)

In March of 2010 John Newling was approached to develop a work in collaboration with Bronislaw Szerszynski of the Department of Sociology and the ESRC Centre for the Economic and the Social Aspects of Genomics (CESAGen), Lancaster University. The work that emerged 'Synthia II (code / soil / life)' consisted of Craig Venter's synthetic life form 'Synthia'. Growing in the soil was a Moringa Oleifera tree germinated by Newling in his studio.

During this time Newling germinated and attempted to grow 11 of these 'generous' trees. Often referred to as the Miracle Tree, the Moringa Oleifera is native to the southern foothills of the Himalayas in northwestern India. Gram for gram, Moringa leaves contain: seven times the vitamin C in oranges, four times the calcium in milk, four times the vitamin A in carrots, two times the protein in milk and three times the potassium in bananas. It is for this and other extraordinary properties of this tree that it has been referred to as the world's most generous tree.

As part of his research Newling has been closely observing the growth of the trees and making pressings of the Moringa leaves and complete trees. Leaves from the Moringa are pressed in selected books and the work is complemented by a video documenting Newling's recycling process of making the soil from which the Moringa grows, caring for the plants, and pressing their leaves.

This is a rare opportunity to study the growing trees first-hand, with only one other known example within the UK of a successfully cultivated tree, at the Eden Project in Cornwall. This is the first in a series of artist's interventions in the Study.

Image: Anne Collier, Woman With A Camera, 2009, Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery, New York; Corvi-Mora, Marc Foxx and the artist

Opening 22 Jenuary 2011

Nottingham Contemporary
Weekday Cross, Nottingham NG1 2GB
Hours: Tuesday - Friday 10am - 7pm, Bank Holidays
Saturdays 10am - 6pm, Sunday 11am - 5pm
free admission

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