London

Whitechapel

Serpentine

W1 and again

Clapham

and some blogs about John Armleder

Janis

Kounellis

August Eva

"The artist who did the most to humanize Minimalism without sentimentalizing it was Eva Hesse. Dying of brain cancer at thirty-four, an age at which most artist's careers are barely under way, she left a truncated body of work but one of remarkable power: an instrument of feeling that spoke of an inner life, sometimes fraught with anxiety..."Spurred by the examples of Joseph Beuys, Claes Oldenburg, and Jean Dubuffet, Hesse grew more and more interested in what usually didn't pertain to sculpture. Backing away from its 'male' rigidity, which included the high-style rhetoric of Minimalism, she allowed her fascination with the 'female' and the inward, including what was grotesque and pathetic, to enlarge. The phallic mockery in Hesse's work can be comically obscene: black salamis wound with string, slumping cylinders of fiberglass. Even when it looks entirely abstract, her work refers to bodily functions. Hang Up, 1965-66, looks at first like a query about illusion and reality - the big rectangular frame hanging on the wall with no picture in it, but with a loop of steel tube spilling onto the gallery floor and connecting the frame's top left to its bottom right corner. But again, there's a fleshy metaphor. Both tube and frame are wrapped in cloth, like bandaged parts of a patient, and the tube might be circulating some kind of fluid. Blood? Lymph? Fantasies? Even in absence, the body is somehow there, as an ironically suffering presence; the title phrase, 'Hang-Up,' means both what you do to pictures and (in 'sixties slang) a mental block, a neurosis."However, Hesse wasn't an art martyr and her images are very much more than mere enactments of illness or oppression. They reflect on identity, sometimes with wry wit or an angry fatalism; but to see Hesse as a precursor of 'victim art' does her a disservice. She never wanted to see her work smugly categorized as 'women's art.' Quite the contrary; Hesse wanted it to join the general discourse of modern images, uncramped by niches of gender or race. 'The best way to beat discrimination in art is by art,' she brusquely replied to a list of questions a journalist sent her. 'Excellence has no sex.' Very old-fashioned of her, by today's standards of cultural complaint."- From "American Visions", by Robert Hughes

Some Tony Cragg and Bruce Nauman

Links to John Armleder

Oldish stuff from the Tate...and there's more from Frieze

Reaching a conclusion...I don't belive it!

I think under this cosh of introspection I realise some of my frustration grows from my inability. In particular I have been thinking about structures and how best to construct them how to anchor things in space, against a wall etc just how to do it...never mind how best to do it.
Ideas are ok but things growing from ideas are not easy- never mind deconstruction I am finding the construction an impediment.
So a way out?
Look for good art construction... who first thought Richard Wilson.

Seen his work in a few exhibitions most recently an exhibition in Grey Studio, Edinburgh last year.
So here are some pictures...interestingly a picture by his dad with a touch of the Sol Le Witt's about it-maybe we are all on the same wave length after all!

Something about Hugh Locke

"THE KINGDOM OF THE BLIND: Hugh Locke"

For the past ten years, Hew Locke's work has explored the visual display of those in power and those who aspire to power. His immense and complex architectural installations and, more recently, his monumental wall drawings and figurative sculptures are made from the mundane, bright and sparkling ephemera of street markets and pound shops. They adopt, question and subvert the iconographies and language of royalty and government in relation to notions of power and cultural identity. In this major new installation for Iniva at Rivington Place, Locke brings together these formal and thematic elements of his practice to create his first ever ‘museum display' - a fictional collection of the possessions of an imaginary ruler.
The installation combines a carnivalesque frieze of monumental figures (reaching up to 14 ft tall) with an elaborate backdrop of wall drawings. Depicting this fictional leader's rise to power, Locke's figures enact victorious moments in battle and resemble elaborate votive objects - composed of intricate combinations of fake leather handbags, miniature plastic animals, doll parts, sequins, chains and fake weaponry.
This chaotic and flamboyant commemoration of individual power becomes a poignant parody of today's social and political global climate. Presented through the formal language of traditional museum display, Locke's allusions to the language of contemporary dictatorships and war assume a powerful commentary on our national cultural institutions and their relationship to the modern constructs of history and society, cultural identity and national pride.
Locke's personal history - he spent the first seven years of his life in Edinburgh before moving to the newly independent Guyana and later returning to London in the 1980s - feeds into his ongoing interest in the links between personal and national identity. This piece also draws on the iconography of great historic battles, such as the Battle of San Romano, the Bayeux Tapestry and the British Museum's Assyrian Lion Hunt reliefs

Alex Hartley

Working primarily with photography

often incorporating it into sculpture and installation Hartley's work addresses complicated and sometimes contradictory attitudes toward the built and natural environments. Encounters with buildings are grounded by conventions and expectations but Hartley shows us new ways of physically experiencing and thinking about our constructed surroundings – through surface and line,scale and materials,locations and contexts. His practice is wide ranging,comprising wall-based sculptural photographic compositions,room-sized architectural installations and, more recently,unique photographic works with sculptural elements inserted as low-relief into the surfaces of large-scale colour prints. Uniting these works is an investigation of modern architecture and the ways in which it is conceived and presented. Often destabilising ideas of 'iconic' architecture, Hartley's practice allows room for multiple perceptions of and uses for architecture.