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5/4/2005

Beached

Motinternational, London

Ben Nicholson, Derek Jarman, Nicholas Symes

Curated by Chris Hammond

The perfect line between sky, sea and sand, dissects the frame, only broken by the one human intervention, a pile of clothes, abandoned. Is this the fatal end of an unfulfilled life or in the case of Reginald Perrin the new beginning of several parallel existences? Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is swept onto the shore, clinging to the beach for his very existence, he struggles to pull himself from the water as the waves rip him back to sea. A black and white Saturday morning flashback focuses upon the exhausted body of an actor, playing Crusoe, lying in the surf as the familiar strains of a remembered soundtrack soars up through the consciousness and the camera pans the large expanse of sand that is both his salvation and prison.

On a 1940's morning Ben and Barbara take a stroll along a Cornish beach, the world is in a flux of movements, their beloved coast has been a frontier under siege, but they are ambassadors of the brave new world, ruled by a purity of form, mirrored within the nature of their chosen environment.
As we enter the last decade of the twentieth century Derek is asleep at his desk, dreaming of persecution and death within a surreal version of the Christ passion play, collaged across time, within and around his simple coastal home and garden, we are given a brief glimpse of the artist's agony and ecstasy.

Nicholas sits on his beached sea barge, stranded upon the tidal mud flat of a new century, wondering if there can be any truth to his materials and whether he can manufacture the synthesis of the found object.

Beached examines the coast of this country as a site for art production and as a symbol of national artistic identity that spans the generations. The exhibition acts as a time machine, calling in at three random instances. The setting remains the same and without leaving these shores, the time traveler is able to put together a micro-collection of disparate artworks that remain inextricably linked by the environmental context of their making.

Ben Nicholson (1894 - 1982) is seen by many to be one of the leading figures in British Modernism. There have been many retrospective exhibitions of his work, including shows at the Venice Biennale and Tate Gallery in 1954-5, Kunsthalle, Berne in 1961, Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas in 1964, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo in 1978, and Tate Gallery in 1993-4. From 1939 to 1958 he lived and worked in Cornwall. Derek Jarman (1942 - 1994) was a filmmaker, theatre designer, painter and writer. A long time gay activist, Jarman was diagnosed HIV positive in 1986 and died in 1994. He has had exhibitions at the Lisson Gallery, the ICA and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1986, but it was for his films that Jarman became most recognised and many were awarded prizes at international film festivals. In 1987 Jarman bought a fisherman's cottage on the Kent coast at Dungeness. Here he created a garden that, along with the cottage, became the setting for his film The Garden (1990), which is the work that will be on show at MOT. Nicholas Symes is, by comparison, a relatively unknown artist who lives and works on an old sea barge moored on the Thames in London. His work has often taken the English coastal identity as a context, with his futile attempts to manufacture driftwood from artificial materials that have then been utilised to make craft objects such as boats. It was his proposal to manufacture a large piece of structural driftwood, based on an eroded timber groin or breakwater, but finished to resemble a shuttered concrete building dominant in Modernist architecture that prompted the curation of Beached.
A news presenter sits at his desk on a pebbly beach. The tide is coming in and water laps around his ankles. Shuffling his papers he makes an announcement,
"And now for something completely different."

MOT would like to thank James Mackay for granting permission to screen The Garden (1990) and a very generous collector for the loan of the Ben Nicholson.

PRIVATE VIEW: WEDNESDAY 6TH APRIL 6-9

MOT
Unit 54 Regents Studios
8 Andrews Rd
London
Open Fri, Sat, Sun 12-5pm or by appointment

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