www.whitecube.com
Wikipedia
White Cube is one of the most prominent contemporary commercial art galleries in the world. It is based in Hoxton Square in the East End of London. It represents Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and many other internationally-recognised artists.
History
The White Cube is owned and run by the art dealer Jay Jopling1 (an ex-Etonian and son of a Conservative MP) who is married to artist Sam Taylor-Wood2. It was first opened in a small, square room in May 1993 in Duke Street, St. James's, a traditional part of the West End in London. In that location there was a gallery rule that an artist could only be exhibited once. The gallery achieved its reputation by being the first to give one person shows to many of the Young British Artists (YBAs), including Tracey Emin.
It moved to its present larger premises in April 2000. The 1920s building had previously been occupied by the small publishing company Gerald Duckworth & Co., and had once been a piano factory. In 2002 an extra two stories (750 m²) were added by hoisting a prefabricated unit on top of the existing structure.
The Hoxton/Shoreditch area has been popular with the Young British Artists (YBAs) since the 1990s, at which time it was a run-down area of light industry. More recently it has undergone extensive redevelopment with clubs, restaurants and media businesses. Hoxton Square is a prime site, home also to Jarvis Cocker, with a central area of grass and trees, which the vicinity is mostly lacking.
White Cube previews are open to the public and crowds fill the square on such occasions. Its publicly-accessible interior is a small reception area, which leads onto a 250-m² exhibition area downstairs, two storeys in height. Another smaller exhibition space upstairs normally shows a different artist. Offices and a conference room are on the upper floors. On some occasions exhibitions have been installed on the grass of the square, one example being Hirst's large sculpture (22 ft, 6.7 m) Charity, based on the old Spastic Society's model, which shows a girl in a leg brace holding a charity collecting box.
Other artists shown at the gallery include Sophie Calle Jake and Dinos Chapman Chuck Close Lucian Freud Gilbert and George Nan Goldin Antony Gormley Marcus Harvey Mona Hatoum Gary Hume Ellsworth Kelly Anselm Kiefer Martin Kobe Marc Quinn Neal Tait Sam Taylor-Wood Gavin Turk Koen Van Den Broek Jeff Wall
White Cube is also promoting "E-vent" for web-based work.
The address of White Cube's Hoxton Square site is 48 Hoxton Square, London N1 6PB. In September 2006, it opened a second site at 25–26 Mason's Yard, off Duke Street, St. James's, home of the original White Cube gallery, on a plot previously occupied by an electricity sub-station. The gallery, designed by MRJ Rundell & Associates, is the first free-standing building to be built in the St James's area for more than 30 years. Admission to White Cube's galleries is free, and they are open from Tuesday to Saturday, 10 am to 6 pm.
In 1999, the Stuckists3 art group declared themselves "opposed to the sterility of the white wall gallery system", and opened their own gallery (with coloured walls) in an adjoining street. On another occasion in 2002, while dressed as clowns, they deposited a coffin marked "The Death of Conceptual Art" outside the White Cube's door.
In 2003, Charles Saatchi launched an attack on the concept of the white wall gallery, calling it "antiseptic" and a "time warp ... dictated by museum fashion".
Nick Cohen commented on the 2006 Gilbert and George show Sonofagod Pictures: Was Jesus Heterosexual? at White Cube, "Last week I went to the East End of London to witness the death of the avant-garde."
Notes
1.Jay Jopling (born 1963) is a British contemporary art dealer and gallerist. He is married to the artist Sam Taylor-Wood.
After school at Eton and graduating from Edinburgh University Jopling began by dealing post-war American art. In 1991 probably the most significant event of Jopling's career occurred as Jopling formed a friendship with the artist Damien Hirst. In terms of background the two could not have been more dissimilar but Hirst had grown up in Leeds and Jopling, the son of Lord Jopling, Thatcher's Agriculture Minister, had family connections in the area. Hirst had already sold a number of works to the influential collector Charles Saatchi but was having difficulty financing the production of new work which Jopling then arranged.
Initially Jopling only supported a small list of artists including Hirst and Marc Quinn organising exhibitions in warehouses. In 1993 he opened White Cube as a blue chip gallery in St. James's, London. In 2000 the gallery moved to a larger space in Hoxton. Along the way Jopling acquired representation of a formidable list of young British artists including his wife Sam Taylor-Wood, the Chapman Brothers, Tracey Emin and Anthony Gormley.
With his trademark rectangular frame glasses and Savile Row suits Jopling is often portrayed as a Svengali figure moulding and manipulating his artists and the market. While he is one of the most successful British gallerists in recent history this is more a result of his astute business sense. Jopling has the knack for picking up artists for whom there is already an established market such as Hirst or encouraging artists with established pedigree to become more market friendly.
2. Sam Taylor-Wood was born in London, England in 1967 and graduated from Goldsmiths College in 1990. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998 for her prize-winning presentation at the Venice Biennale, as well as her solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle, Zurich and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. Her work was selected because of its 'acutely perceptive explorations of human relationships through photography and film.'
This information has been taken from The Turner Prize: Twenty Years, by Virginia Button, Tate Publishing, 2003.
Sam Taylor-Wood (born London, England, 4 March 1967) is a contemporary artist working mostly in video and photography. She has been identified as a member of the young British Artist group, and is a graduate of Goldsmiths College. She is married to her art dealer Jay Jopling. She also inspired artists such as Louis Joseph Higgins.
Taylor-Wood's parents divorced when she was a teenager, and she moved with her mother and step-father to a new-age commune in Surrey. Her mother abandoned the family when her daughter was sixteen and she moved into a bed-sit to live alone. Having fared poorly in exams, it took Taylor-Wood several years to gain the required qualification for entry into art school. After a year at a North London Polytechnic, she transferred to Goldsmiths College to complete a Fine Art degree in 1990.
Following University, Taylor-Wood held jobs at the Royal Opera House, and managed the Camden Palace nightclub. In 1991 her work began to appear in a number of group exhibitions alongside that of contemporaries from Goldsmiths. Her breakthrough came in 1994 with the work "Killing Time" in which four people mimed an opera score. From that point multi-screen video works became the main focus of Taylor-Wood's work. Beginning with the video works "Travesty of a Mockery" and "Pent-Up" in 1996, Taylor-Wood began to use professional actors. Her work since 1996 has often featured celebrity friends: Elton John was included in a large photo-work, and commissioned Taylor-Wood to make a promotional video starring Robert Downey Jr. for one of his records. In 2002, Taylor-Wood was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to make a video portrait of David Beckham sleeping.
She is also a long-time collaborator with Pet Shop Boys having produced films for their Somewhere concerts at the Savoy Theatre, London. She has also been guest vocalist on two Pet Shop Boys produced songs - in the Boys' rendition of Serge Gainsbourg's "Je t'aime... moi non plus" and Donna Summer's "Love to Love You Baby". For the latter of these two releases, she used the pseudonym Kiki Kokova.
Taylor-Wood was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997.
3. Stuckism
The logo on the Stuckism International web siteStuckism is an art movement that was founded in 1999 in Britain by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson to promote figurative painting in opposition to conceptual art. The Stuckists formed as an alternative to the Charles Saatchi-patronised Young British Artists (also known as Brit Art). The original group of thirteen artists has since expanded to over 120 groups around the world. Childish left the group in 2001.
They have staged many shows, but have gained more attention for outspoken media comments and demonstrations, particularly outside Tate Britain against the Turner Prize, sometimes dressed in clown costume. After exhibiting mainly in small galleries in Shoreditch, London, they were given their first show in a major public museum in 2004, The Walker Art Gallery as part of the Liverpool Biennial.
Other campaigns mounted by the group include official avenues, such as standing for parliament, reporting Saatchi to the Office of Fair Trading to complain about his power in the art world, and applying under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 for Tate Gallery trustee minutes, which started a media scandal about the purchase of Chris Ofili's work, The Upper Room (which led to an official rebuke of the Tate by the Charity Commission).
The name Stuckism was coined by Thomson in response to a comment, made by artist Tracey Emin to Billy Childish, then her boyfriend, which he had recorded in a poem as:
Your paintings are stuck,
you are stuck!
Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!
White Cube (official site)
White Cube, Mason's Yard
White Cube, Mason’s Yard opened in September 2006. It is located off Duke Street, St. James's, home of the original White Cube gallery, on a site that was previously an electricity sub-station. Also designed by MRJ Rundell & Associates it is the first free-standing building to be built in the St James's area for more than 30 years. The building houses a main, basement floor gallery which is a naturally lit, double-height space with a second gallery on street level providing 5000 ft² of exhibition space. White Cube, Mason’s Yard continues with an international, high profile programme of exhibitions and was launched with an inaugural exhibition by Gabriel Orozco.
White Cube, Hoxton Square
In April 2000, White Cube, Hoxton Square was set up as a second, larger gallery space in London’s East End. Housed in a 1920s light industrial building, and designed by architects MRJ Rundell and Associates, White Cube Hoxton Square has 2000 square feet of uninterrupted exhibition space.
White Cube, Duke Street
White Cube was set up by Jay Jopling in 1993 as a project room for contemporary art. Although it was one of the smallest exhibition spaces in Europe, it was arguably one of most influential commercial galleries of the past decade. Situated on the second floor of 44 Duke Street, St James’s, one of London’s most traditional art dealing streets, White Cube, Duke Street was, literally, a simple white cube, a room within a room, designed by the architect Claudio Silvestrin.
The central concern when establishing the programme was to create an intimate space in which an artist could present a single important work of art or a coherent body of work within a focused environment, an idea that in some way, stemmed from the memorable experience of Walter de Maria’s ‘Earth Room’ in New York. The programme was singular among commercial galleries in that an artist was invited to exhibit only once. Since its inception, the gallery mounted exhibitions of work by many leading international and British artists including Franz Ackermann, Miroslaw Balka, Chuck Close, Tracey Emin, Katharina Fritsch, Mona Hatoum, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Ellsworth Kelly, Julie Mehretu, Doris Salcedo, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Luc Tuymans and Jeff Wall. White Cube, Duke Street closed in 2002.
Saatchi turns on 'clichéd' Britart rivals
By Catherine Milner, Arts Correspondent
Last Updated: 10:36pm BST 27/09/2003
Charles Saatchi has launched an outspoken attack on white-walled modern art galleries like those that he once owned and championed, branding them "antiseptic", out-of-date and "worryingly" old-fashioned and clichéd.
The intensely private collector, the greatest patron of modern British art, denounces the "pristine arctic isolation" of the stark "white cube" spaces that have become the norm in the art world because, he says, they prevent viewers from seeing art in its broader context.
Mr Saatchi, who very rarely makes public pronouncements, accuses museums of squandering "millions on creating identical, austere, modernist palaces in every world city" and says that they should stop using ropes to cordon off works of art because they "destroy" the public's ability to appreciate the objects on view.
His outburst appears in the preface to a 40-page supplement on his new art museum in County Hall in central London, to be published by Time Out magazine on Wednesday. It is timed to coincide with an exhibition of his collection of works by Jake and Dinos Chapman, two leading members of the Young British Artist group that is due to open at the Saatchi Gallery the same day.
"Many in the art world, artists included, feel contemporary art can only be seen properly in a perfect white space," Mr Saatchi writes. "After years of showing art floating in a pristine arctic isolation, it's a revelation to break out of the white-cube time warp. If art can't look good outside the antiseptic gallery spaces dictated by museum fashion of the last 25 years, then it condemns itself to a worryingly limited lifespan.
"What's more, that once cutting-edge gallery style is beginning to look like a cliché trendy bar or loft conversion. It's time for a bit of a rethink."
The outburst is being seen as a defence by Mr Saatchi of his new gallery, housed in a colossal 1920s municipal building with a warren of wood-panelled corridors and offices. It has come under fire from some artists and critics for being dark and poky and an unsuitable place to show modern art. Damien Hirst described it as "a waste of time" and Richard Dorment, The Daily Telegraph's art critic, called the building "a nightmare".
Mr Saatchi's manifesto also seems to be a thinly veiled jibe at his two greatest rivals - Tate Modern, which is a few hundred yards downriver from where his new gallery stands, and the White Cube Gallery, based in St James's, central London, and in Hoxton, east London, with whom he vies to discover talented artists.
Jay Jopling, the owner of the White Cube Gallery, refused to be drawn into a discussion of white spaces. It can be deduced from his recent run of exhibitions, however, that he has perhaps started thinking along the same lines as Mr Saatchi - four of the past five exhibitions at his White Cube Gallery have been set against coloured walls.
Sir Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate Gallery, said: "Anything Charles says is interesting and it is true that art can be shown in a number of ways.
"As far as the ropes are concerned, it is a dilemma for all museums to strike a balance between showing the work of art and ensuring that it cannot be endangered. This is particularly true for frequently visited museums."
Dinos Chapman, one of the brothers whose work is going on show at County Hall this week, said that he found Mr Saatchi's comments surprising, given that the collector's former gallery in north London was a large white converted factory and exactly the kind of space about which he was now complaining.
"It was Charles who invented the very idea of the white gallery," said Mr Chapman last night. "The problem is that he had the classic white space in London when nobody else had one and, now that everybody has decided to get a Charles Saatchi-style gallery, I guess he's got bored with it."
Mr Chapman said he thought it unlikely; however, that Saatchi would be able to set a new trend for old buildings. "Put it this way: I don't think every wood panelled ex-council office is suddenly going to turn into an art museum."
Karen Wright, the editor of Modern Painters, the art magazine, supported Mr Saatchi in his new campaign.
"Museums are in danger of becoming cathedrals to art - joyless and reverential," she said. "In County Hall, Charles is trying to create, by comparison, a pleasure palace where the viewers interreact with the art more - and it works.
"It has a joyful atmosphere that you don't get in many other art galleries."
A survey recently conducted by Tate Modern could prove an embarrassment to Mr Saatchi, however. More than 100 artists were asked to name their favourite gallery. An overwhelming number replied that they liked Mr Saatchi's old gallery in north London.
"Artists like their work to be shown in spaces that are similar to those that they are used to working in - namely, a whitewashed studio," said a spokesman for the Tate.
« Radio Interview ‘’We’re from the Tory party and we’ve come to help’’ »
The Rout of the Avant-Garde
Nick Cohen,
www.nickcohen.netAfter school at Eton and graduating from Edinburgh University Jopling began by dealing post-war American art. In 1991 probably the most significant event of Jopling's career occurred as Jopling formed a friendship with the artist Damien Hirst. In terms of background the two could not have been more dissimilar but Hirst had grown up in Leeds and Jopling, the son of Lord Jopling, Thatcher's Agriculture Minister, had family connections in the area. Hirst had already sold a number of works to the influential collector Charles Saatchi but was having difficulty financing the production of new work which Jopling then arranged.
Initially Jopling only supported a small list of artists including Hirst and Marc Quinn organising exhibitions in warehouses. In 1993 he opened White Cube as a blue chip gallery in St. James's, London. In 2000 the gallery moved to a larger space in Hoxton. Along the way Jopling acquired representation of a formidable list of young British artists including his wife Sam Taylor-Wood, the Chapman Brothers, Tracey Emin and Anthony Gormley.
With his trademark rectangular frame glasses and Savile Row suits Jopling is often portrayed as a Svengali figure moulding and manipulating his artists and the market. While he is one of the most successful British gallerists in recent history this is more a result of his astute business sense. Jopling has the knack for picking up artists for whom there is already an established market such as Hirst or encouraging artists with established pedigree to become more market friendly.
2. Sam Taylor-Wood was born in London, England in 1967 and graduated from Goldsmiths College in 1990. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998 for her prize-winning presentation at the Venice Biennale, as well as her solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle, Zurich and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. Her work was selected because of its 'acutely perceptive explorations of human relationships through photography and film.'
This information has been taken from The Turner Prize: Twenty Years, by Virginia Button, Tate Publishing, 2003.
Sam Taylor-Wood (born London, England, 4 March 1967) is a contemporary artist working mostly in video and photography. She has been identified as a member of the young British Artist group, and is a graduate of Goldsmiths College. She is married to her art dealer Jay Jopling. She also inspired artists such as Louis Joseph Higgins.
Taylor-Wood's parents divorced when she was a teenager, and she moved with her mother and step-father to a new-age commune in Surrey. Her mother abandoned the family when her daughter was sixteen and she moved into a bed-sit to live alone. Having fared poorly in exams, it took Taylor-Wood several years to gain the required qualification for entry into art school. After a year at a North London Polytechnic, she transferred to Goldsmiths College to complete a Fine Art degree in 1990.
Following University, Taylor-Wood held jobs at the Royal Opera House, and managed the Camden Palace nightclub. In 1991 her work began to appear in a number of group exhibitions alongside that of contemporaries from Goldsmiths. Her breakthrough came in 1994 with the work "Killing Time" in which four people mimed an opera score. From that point multi-screen video works became the main focus of Taylor-Wood's work. Beginning with the video works "Travesty of a Mockery" and "Pent-Up" in 1996, Taylor-Wood began to use professional actors. Her work since 1996 has often featured celebrity friends: Elton John was included in a large photo-work, and commissioned Taylor-Wood to make a promotional video starring Robert Downey Jr. for one of his records. In 2002, Taylor-Wood was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to make a video portrait of David Beckham sleeping.
She is also a long-time collaborator with Pet Shop Boys having produced films for their Somewhere concerts at the Savoy Theatre, London. She has also been guest vocalist on two Pet Shop Boys produced songs - in the Boys' rendition of Serge Gainsbourg's "Je t'aime... moi non plus" and Donna Summer's "Love to Love You Baby". For the latter of these two releases, she used the pseudonym Kiki Kokova.
Taylor-Wood was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997.
3. Stuckism
The logo on the Stuckism International web siteStuckism is an art movement that was founded in 1999 in Britain by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson to promote figurative painting in opposition to conceptual art. The Stuckists formed as an alternative to the Charles Saatchi-patronised Young British Artists (also known as Brit Art). The original group of thirteen artists has since expanded to over 120 groups around the world. Childish left the group in 2001.
They have staged many shows, but have gained more attention for outspoken media comments and demonstrations, particularly outside Tate Britain against the Turner Prize, sometimes dressed in clown costume. After exhibiting mainly in small galleries in Shoreditch, London, they were given their first show in a major public museum in 2004, The Walker Art Gallery as part of the Liverpool Biennial.
Other campaigns mounted by the group include official avenues, such as standing for parliament, reporting Saatchi to the Office of Fair Trading to complain about his power in the art world, and applying under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 for Tate Gallery trustee minutes, which started a media scandal about the purchase of Chris Ofili's work, The Upper Room (which led to an official rebuke of the Tate by the Charity Commission).
The name Stuckism was coined by Thomson in response to a comment, made by artist Tracey Emin to Billy Childish, then her boyfriend, which he had recorded in a poem as:
Your paintings are stuck,
you are stuck!
Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!
White Cube (official site)
White Cube, Mason's Yard
White Cube, Mason’s Yard opened in September 2006. It is located off Duke Street, St. James's, home of the original White Cube gallery, on a site that was previously an electricity sub-station. Also designed by MRJ Rundell & Associates it is the first free-standing building to be built in the St James's area for more than 30 years. The building houses a main, basement floor gallery which is a naturally lit, double-height space with a second gallery on street level providing 5000 ft² of exhibition space. White Cube, Mason’s Yard continues with an international, high profile programme of exhibitions and was launched with an inaugural exhibition by Gabriel Orozco.
White Cube, Hoxton Square
In April 2000, White Cube, Hoxton Square was set up as a second, larger gallery space in London’s East End. Housed in a 1920s light industrial building, and designed by architects MRJ Rundell and Associates, White Cube Hoxton Square has 2000 square feet of uninterrupted exhibition space.
White Cube, Duke Street
White Cube was set up by Jay Jopling in 1993 as a project room for contemporary art. Although it was one of the smallest exhibition spaces in Europe, it was arguably one of most influential commercial galleries of the past decade. Situated on the second floor of 44 Duke Street, St James’s, one of London’s most traditional art dealing streets, White Cube, Duke Street was, literally, a simple white cube, a room within a room, designed by the architect Claudio Silvestrin.
The central concern when establishing the programme was to create an intimate space in which an artist could present a single important work of art or a coherent body of work within a focused environment, an idea that in some way, stemmed from the memorable experience of Walter de Maria’s ‘Earth Room’ in New York. The programme was singular among commercial galleries in that an artist was invited to exhibit only once. Since its inception, the gallery mounted exhibitions of work by many leading international and British artists including Franz Ackermann, Miroslaw Balka, Chuck Close, Tracey Emin, Katharina Fritsch, Mona Hatoum, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Ellsworth Kelly, Julie Mehretu, Doris Salcedo, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Luc Tuymans and Jeff Wall. White Cube, Duke Street closed in 2002.
Saatchi turns on 'clichéd' Britart rivals
By Catherine Milner, Arts Correspondent
Last Updated: 10:36pm BST 27/09/2003
Charles Saatchi has launched an outspoken attack on white-walled modern art galleries like those that he once owned and championed, branding them "antiseptic", out-of-date and "worryingly" old-fashioned and clichéd.
The intensely private collector, the greatest patron of modern British art, denounces the "pristine arctic isolation" of the stark "white cube" spaces that have become the norm in the art world because, he says, they prevent viewers from seeing art in its broader context.
Mr Saatchi, who very rarely makes public pronouncements, accuses museums of squandering "millions on creating identical, austere, modernist palaces in every world city" and says that they should stop using ropes to cordon off works of art because they "destroy" the public's ability to appreciate the objects on view.
His outburst appears in the preface to a 40-page supplement on his new art museum in County Hall in central London, to be published by Time Out magazine on Wednesday. It is timed to coincide with an exhibition of his collection of works by Jake and Dinos Chapman, two leading members of the Young British Artist group that is due to open at the Saatchi Gallery the same day.
"Many in the art world, artists included, feel contemporary art can only be seen properly in a perfect white space," Mr Saatchi writes. "After years of showing art floating in a pristine arctic isolation, it's a revelation to break out of the white-cube time warp. If art can't look good outside the antiseptic gallery spaces dictated by museum fashion of the last 25 years, then it condemns itself to a worryingly limited lifespan.
"What's more, that once cutting-edge gallery style is beginning to look like a cliché trendy bar or loft conversion. It's time for a bit of a rethink."
The outburst is being seen as a defence by Mr Saatchi of his new gallery, housed in a colossal 1920s municipal building with a warren of wood-panelled corridors and offices. It has come under fire from some artists and critics for being dark and poky and an unsuitable place to show modern art. Damien Hirst described it as "a waste of time" and Richard Dorment, The Daily Telegraph's art critic, called the building "a nightmare".
Mr Saatchi's manifesto also seems to be a thinly veiled jibe at his two greatest rivals - Tate Modern, which is a few hundred yards downriver from where his new gallery stands, and the White Cube Gallery, based in St James's, central London, and in Hoxton, east London, with whom he vies to discover talented artists.
Jay Jopling, the owner of the White Cube Gallery, refused to be drawn into a discussion of white spaces. It can be deduced from his recent run of exhibitions, however, that he has perhaps started thinking along the same lines as Mr Saatchi - four of the past five exhibitions at his White Cube Gallery have been set against coloured walls.
Sir Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate Gallery, said: "Anything Charles says is interesting and it is true that art can be shown in a number of ways.
"As far as the ropes are concerned, it is a dilemma for all museums to strike a balance between showing the work of art and ensuring that it cannot be endangered. This is particularly true for frequently visited museums."
Dinos Chapman, one of the brothers whose work is going on show at County Hall this week, said that he found Mr Saatchi's comments surprising, given that the collector's former gallery in north London was a large white converted factory and exactly the kind of space about which he was now complaining.
"It was Charles who invented the very idea of the white gallery," said Mr Chapman last night. "The problem is that he had the classic white space in London when nobody else had one and, now that everybody has decided to get a Charles Saatchi-style gallery, I guess he's got bored with it."
Mr Chapman said he thought it unlikely; however, that Saatchi would be able to set a new trend for old buildings. "Put it this way: I don't think every wood panelled ex-council office is suddenly going to turn into an art museum."
Karen Wright, the editor of Modern Painters, the art magazine, supported Mr Saatchi in his new campaign.
"Museums are in danger of becoming cathedrals to art - joyless and reverential," she said. "In County Hall, Charles is trying to create, by comparison, a pleasure palace where the viewers interreact with the art more - and it works.
"It has a joyful atmosphere that you don't get in many other art galleries."
A survey recently conducted by Tate Modern could prove an embarrassment to Mr Saatchi, however. More than 100 artists were asked to name their favourite gallery. An overwhelming number replied that they liked Mr Saatchi's old gallery in north London.
"Artists like their work to be shown in spaces that are similar to those that they are used to working in - namely, a whitewashed studio," said a spokesman for the Tate.
« Radio Interview ‘’We’re from the Tory party and we’ve come to help’’ »
The Rout of the Avant-Garde
Nick Cohen,
Last week, I went to the East End of London to witness the death of the avant-garde. At first glance, Gilbert and George’s Sonofagod Pictures: Was Jesus Heterosexual?’ exhibition at the White Cube did not look like a wake. The bright and glistening gallery is in Hoxton, a corner of town that has been full of life since it was colonised and gentrified by ‘Young British Artists’ in the early Nineties. As fashionable visitors move between its loft conversions and cafes, ‘edgy’ is the highest compliment they can bestow and ‘taboo’ the gravest insult. Taboos are taboo in Hoxton.
Even on a wet Thursday lunchtime, there were plenty of sightseers from the metropolitan intelligentsia enjoying the show rather than mourning the passing of their world. In prose that might embarrass an estate agent, novelist Michael Bracewell told them in the catalogue that Gilbert and George were engaged ‘in rebellion, an assault on the laws and institutions of superstition and religious belief’.
Burbling critics agreed. Gilbert and George still get a ‘frisson of excitement’ by including ‘f-words, turds, semen, their own pallid bodies and other affronts to bourgeois sensibilities’ in their work, wrote a journalist with the impeccably bourgeois name of Cassandra Jardine in the Daily Telegraph. ‘Is it the perfect Christmas card to send George Bush at Easter? Yeah, yeah,’ added groovy Waldemar Januszczak of the Sunday Times
Their justifications for edgy art won’t work any longer and not only because the average member of the educated bourgeoisie likes nothing better than f-words and pallid bodies on a visit to the theatre or gallery. After the refusal of the entire British press to print innocuous Danish cartoons, the stench of death is in the air. It is now ridiculous and impossible to talk about a fearless disregard for easily offended sensibilities.
Sonofagod is clearly trading under a false prospectus. Gilbert and George narcissistically present themselves as icons towering over a shrivelled Christ. ‘God loves Fucking! Enjoy!’ reads one inscription. This isn’t a brave assault on all religions, just Catholicism.
The gallery owners know that although Catholics will be offended, they won’t harm them. That knowledge invalidates their claims to be transgressive. An uprising that doesn’t provoke a response isn’t a ‘rebellion’, but a smug affirmation of the cultural status quo.
If they were to do the same to Islam, all hell would break loose. In interviews publicising the show, Gilbert and George showed that they at least understood the double standard. They’re gay men who live in the East End where the legal groups of the Islamic far right - Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Muslim Association of Britain - are superseded by semi-clandestine organisations which push leaflets through their door saying: ‘Verily, it is time to rejoice in the coming state of Islam. There will be no negotiation with Islam. It is only a short time before the flag of Islam flies over Downing Street.’ Even if the artists found the audacity to take on the theocrats around them, they know no gallery would dare show the results.
The fear of being murdered is a perfectly rational one, but it is eating away at the cultural elite’s myths. In the name of breaking taboos, the Britart movement has giggled at paedophilia (Jake and Dinos Chapman) and rubbed salt in the wounds of the parents of the Moors murderers’ victims (Marcus Harvey). It can’t go on as if nothing has happened because the contradictions between breaking some taboos but not others are becoming too glaring. They were on garish display last year when the Almeida Theatre, the White Cube of theatreland, showed Romance by over-praised American playwright David Mamet.
His characters hurled anti-semitic and anti-Christian abuse at each other and very edgy it sounded, too. The justification for his venom was that he had set the play against the backdrop of Palestinian-Israeli peace talks. He meant the hatreds on stage to reflect the hatreds of the Middle East.
Readers with an interest in foreign affairs will have spotted that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is between Muslims and Jews, not Christians and Jews. Islamophobic abuse ought to have followed the anti-semitic abuse if the play was to make sense. Neither Mamet nor the Almeida had the nerve do that. Their edginess was no match for the desire of the prudent bourgeois to save his skin.
The insincerity extends way beyond the arts. Rory Bremner will tear into Tony Blair, but not Mohammed Khatami. Newspaper editors will print pictures of servicemen beating up demonstrators in Basra, which may place the lives of British troops in danger, but not Danish cartoons, which may place their own lives in danger.
You can’t be a little bit free. If you are not willing to offend Islamists who may kill you, what excuse do you have for offending Catholics, the families of murdered children and British troops who won’t?
The time out London
White Cube in the West End
Nearing completion: White Cube in Mason's Yard In the heart of the West End is a hidden courtyard; access to Mason’s Yard is through a scruffy archway off Duke Street in St James’s but, since there has been little to attract passers-by to a square dominated by an ugly electricity sub-station, you could easily have missed it altogether. This week changes all that; the sub-station has been torn down and in its place rises White Cube, Jay Jopling’s latest venture
A stone’s throw from the building in which he opened the first White Cube gallery in 1993; the new space marks his return to the West End. When Jopling moved to Hoxton Square six years ago, Victoria Miro and others followed, provoking a veritable stampede; some 120 galleries have since opened in the area.
Why, then, is Jopling returning to his old hunting ground? ‘It’s about being central,’ he says, ‘building a gallery that allows us to make exhibitions that are more accessible geographically, especially for people who are only in London for two days. The East End misses out on that so, from a business point of view, being in the West End will be beneficial. It also reinforces our commitment to London; we’ll be able to do four shows at once, since each gallery has two spaces, and they’ll probably attract different audiences – about 3,000 people come to our exhibitions!’
Designed by MRJ Rundell, architects of the Hoxton Square gallery, the new White Cube is like a ship that has inadvertently docked on dry land. Covered in white-painted render, the tall, narrow building has few windows – to provide as much uninterrupted wall space as possible – but is topped with a light beam, similar to the one drawing light into Tate Modern. The design is extremely clever; considering the confined space the building occupies, the inside is unexpectedly light and airy. Beneath the courtyard is a subterranean gallery, lit by glass panels let into the paving overhead. There’s a large, ground-floor gallery and on the first floor a double-height, top-lit cube. Jopling’s office has a glass wall opening on to a roof terrace with spectacular views of surrounding buildings. Showing me round is Tim Marlowe. He remarks, with only a hint of irony, that this is ‘the seat of power for the London art world’.
What strikes me most about this impressive enterprise is that, with its large and austere galleries, the building resembles a museum. The message is clear: work exhibited here is destined for major collections. In fact, White Cube is the nearest thing there is in the commercial sector to an institution – so much so that Craig Burnett and Susan May have joined it from Tate Modern. Jopling’s commitment to fostering creativity has earned him enormous respect and has attracted superstars like Andreas Gursky and Jeff Wall to join the stable of some 50 artists.
‘The main purpose of the exhibitions,’ says Marlowe ‘is not commercial. It’s to stage something dramatic, to provide space for artists to produce something ambitious so their work can develop. To a certain extent, it’s a marketing strategy; even if the work doesn’t sell, there are spin-offs. You wouldn’t last long in the current climate as a “pile ’em high and flog ’em off” kind of dealer.
‘It’s also about developing an international context for British artists; 70 per cent of our exhibitions have been of artists born or based overseas. The key for ongoing success is to transcend your generation and Jay shows people from Lucien Freud and Chuck Close to the YBAs and younger artists. Next June, Damien Hirst will show in both galleries, but Hoxton Square will also be used for experimental work by younger artists.’
My story begins and ends with missed openings and two sharks. Jopling entered the scene big time when he persuaded Charles Saatchi to commission Damien Hirst’s pickled shark, and opening his new gallery is a shark skeleton covered in patterns by Gabriel Orozco. Jopling skipped the launch of Hoxton Square to be with his wife, Sam Taylor-Wood, who was being treated for cancer; he may miss the opening of Mason’s Yard, for a happier reason – the birth of their second child. There’s a lot to celebrate.
Sarah Kent, Tue Sep 26 2006
This is London
White Cube goes west with gallery in St James's
By Tom Teodorczuk, Evening Standard 27.09.06
It is London's modern art hub, the gallery that Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Gilbert and George, Antony Gormley and Marc Quinn all call home.
Now White Cube's founder Jay Jopling has unveiled a second, £12 million gallery in the West End.
It will complement the existing premises in Hoxton Square in the East End and reinforce London's position as the world's capital for contemporary art.
The new outpost in Mason's Yard, St James's, has been built on the site of a former electricity sub-station. It will be the first new freestanding building to be built in the area for more than 30 years.
White Cube has come a long way since Mr Jopling opened it as a tiny project space for artists - originally in St James's - in 1993.
Now he plans to showcase blockbuster exhibitions simultaneously at both galleries, beginning with a Hirst show next summer.
Mr Jopling, one of London's most influential art dealers and married to artist Sam Taylor-Wood, said: "London is unarguably the pre-eminent city for contemporary art in Europe.
"White Cube Mason's Yard will allow us to showcase artists in the centre of the capital as well as continuing to present their work in our Hoxton Square gallery. The new White Cube will more than double our gallery space and provide a broader platform for bringing world-class art to a world-class city."
The inaugural exhibition at Mason's Yard will be by celebrated Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco. Its centrepiece will be a life-size sculpture of a whale skeleton suspended in the main gallery space.
Orozco will be followed by Palestinianborn British artist Mona Hatoum, Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, Germans Anselm Kiefer and Andreas Gursky and a collaboration between Britons Jake and Dinos Chapman and American photo-realist painter Chuck Close. There are also plans for exhibitions by Quinn, Gormley and Gilbert and George.
In future, the Hoxton Square gallery will host up-and-coming artists while the new St James's building will focus on leading international contemporary artists. Tim Marlow, director of exhibitions at White Cube, said: "The West End is easier for many international curators and directors while the East End is more of a haven for artists.
"We hope to straddle both worlds, but the galleries won't be reflecting different artistic sensibilities. White Cube attracts a huge number of visitors in Hoxton and the question is whether we will get as many people coming to the West End."
Cerith Wyn Evans: White Cube - London
ArtForum, Feb, 2004 by Michael Archer,
A white neon sign on the facade of White Cube read "slow fade to black." The gallery name, one imagines, marks an ironic acknowledgment of Brian O'Doherty's paradigmatic art space. But Cerith Wyn Evans's cinematic instruction tlips the expectations raised by the building squarely on their head: If it wasn't dealing in dreams and fantasy so much as constructed realities before, it certainly is now. "Look at that picture ... / How does it appear to you now? / Does it seem to be / Persisting?" is a series of five crystal chandeliers hanging together in the main gallery space. Inspired as it is in look and attitude by Broodthaers's "Decor" work, the installation is beautifully simple and at the same time densely complex in its intellectual and affective ramifications. One chandelier design originated in an exhibition in Victor Horta's Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, another has been used in a Riyadh casino, a third, by Achille Castiglione, lit a lounge at the Milan airport, and so on. Their stylistic differences produce a babel of references to the contemporary city, both in its cosmopolitan reality and in the degree to which its forms embody modernity's faded, thwarted, and displaced dreams and ideals.
There was another kind of babel going on here as well: Each chandelier represented a different voice, being connected to a wall-mounted plasma screen on which a text slowly appeared as it was converted into Morse code by a hidden computer. This process of translation controlled the turning on and off of the lights so that there was a constant flickering, a display of short and long light pulses filling the gallery. Thus one flashing chandelier channeled Brion Gysin interviewing English writer Terry Wilson on the subject of one Eileen Garrett, a spiritualist medium who also worked for the CIA, while through another, Theodor Adorno discussed astrology, pointing out that it provides an analogy for "the split between irrationality of the dream and rationality of the waking state." Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's critique of J.L. Austin's theory of performative speech acts rendered both past and future events, as well as the meanings we find in them, open to reconfiguration, while John Cage, writing in his inimitable multivocal style, assured us that "two people making the same kind of music is one music too many." In this company, Madame de Lafayette's Princesse de Cleves (1678), collaboratively produced as it probably was by members of her salon, appeared as something like a corps exquis, where form appears as something that has arisen outside of the individual imagination and in relation to the indeterminable thoughts and actions of others.
The overall effect was one of gentle intensity--a conversation among five presences which, while its contours are in fact traceable, could be experienced as random and without pattern. If there is significance in this ungraspable totality, described by Evans as "polyphonic," it seems to lie as much in impulse, intuition, and emotion as in reason and logic. The promise was held out of a meaning that lies outside language and that is influenced, but by no means fixed, by the established facts of history.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
Modern Art: London
By ALAN RIDING, New York Times
Published: September 25, 2005
…Still, art can be uplifting in more ways than one. And cafes, restaurants and new businesses have followed the lead of the dozens of art galleries that now pepper the streets around Hoxton Square in Hackney. Indeed, offering proof of the district's gradual gentrification, rising property prices have led the next generation of art galleries to move a mile or so farther east to around Vyner Street in Bethnal Green.
But Hoxton Square is the place to start, not least because it is home to White Cube, a striking brick and glass gallery at No. 48 owned by Jay Jopling, a pioneer of contemporary art in London. Its shows also often feature well-known artists, most recently Anselm Kiefer, some of whose huge paintings were housed in a temporary annex in the square itself. At White Cube, 7930-5373, it is also possible to pick up a small map that identifies other galleries in the area. (The country and city dialing codes for London are 44-20.)
The New York Times
Critic's Notebook
Who Needs a White Cube These Days?
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: January 13, 2006
"WHAT is art?" may be the art world's most relentlessly asked question. But a more pertinent one right now is, "What is an art gallery?"
It is heard often these days, and within it lies another question: do galleries have to run or look the way they do? How inevitable is the repeating cycle of solo and group exhibitions and the steady movement of artworks from galleries to museums, auction houses and collectors' homes? How can you slow, expose or disrupt the delivery mechanism - maybe even avoid it altogether occasionally - to reassert art as a process and a mind-set rather than a product?
With their changing exhibitions and precarious finances, galleries are by definition fluid forms, under constant revision. But lately the gallery model has seemed even more in flux than usual. More young dealers, artists and people who are both (or neither) are thinking outside the white cube. Other galleries are trying to brake their ascent to establishment status by interrupting the flow of monthly shows and finished objects, substituting a monthlong presentation of short exhibitions and even shorter performances.
Miami exchange art
Art and Exhibition in the White Cube
book review by: Michael Betancourt - 8 Sept, 2002
…O’Doherty makes his argument about this space through several essays that interpret this arena. It is the special power of this exhibition space to strip away the original context of the art shown and replace it with a neutralizing one, a context where the meanings produced by the arts role and engagement in culture and society can be held at a distance from the viewer’s encounters with the world. The White Cube is a space of aesthetic neutralization, a space that converts everything it contains into commodities. It is a privileged space for the economic transformation and ungrounding of an art objects’ engagement with the world.
Political art placed within the domain of the white cube will lose its political aspects and gradually become a collection of objects with a specific aesthetic and commercial value. One need only consider the fate of both Dada and Fluxus when placed within the art gallery to recognize this transformation. The fate of Duchamp’s Fountain is inevitable according to O’Doherty: it will become an aesthetic object, devoid of insult and without the ability to mock once it has spent enough time in the gallery. Urinals, toilets, sinks, etc. have all become a standard part of a certain kind of art produced by a wide array of artists as aesthetic objects whose pedigree is insured by Marcel Duchamp. The idea that these works could be anti-art seems ridiculous.
Articles for Exhibitions in White Cube, London
Patrick van Caechenbergh at White Cube London, England
Art in America, April, 1996 by Melissa Feldman
For his first solo show outside continental Europe, Belgian artist Patrick van Caeckenbergh presented "The Very Life, Part III," the latest in a series of wacky, visionary installations. While Parts I and II offered domestic displays of altered furniture (for instance, a cabinet whose drawers were papered inside and out with pictures of flesh), Part III took the form of a burlesque science-fair display of diagrammatic collages and models. Van Caeckenbergh's work, which humorously laces theoretical systems with organic incident, is related to that of his compatriot Marcel Broodthaers.
Aided by a press release in the form of a hand-scripted letter from the artist to gallery owner Jay Jopling, the works on view expounded on van Caeckenbergh's scatological conception of the universe. The Bum, a surrealistic, 6 1/2-by-6-foot collage fashioned after an antique astronomical map, encapsulates his theory. Floating in the centre is a giant cut out black-and-white photograph of a human buttock shown in three-quarter view; it is the Earth. This planetary "body" consumes from an open mouth painted at its top and then flatulates the painted clouds which encircle it. The effect is of a farcical Baroque ceiling tondo. The bum-planet is surrounded with curious cut-outs of stomachs with pictures of clog-shod feet and teacup handles attached. (The recurrent clog motif in this show lent it a local Flemish flavour.) According to the artist's letter, these are gastric "angels" who save the Earth from its "cruel balance" of overproduction and overconsumption. In the darker surrounding area are small cut out pictures of hands preparing food on which the planet feeds.
Other works, including a wall-mounted diorama, reiterate aspects of this cosmological system or elaborate on its genesis. Using simplified forms outlined in black and resembling a medieval woodcut, the large painted collage "and see that you never pass it on" illustrates the birth of an angel. The central figure, sprouting from carrotlike legs whose myriad roots support a mobile of collaged clogs, has a head composed of flowers and fruits. The work's antique associations are offset by dental photographs of the blistered insides of diseased mouths set within each red fruit (in fact, making it red) and the image of an intestinal tract pasted on the tree-trunk torso.
Another work, Ali-Baba, is a charmingly clumsy clay sculpture of a camel sporting a teapot-lid hump and a swanlike elephant's trunk instead of a head. Festooned with bell-spangled gold chains and set atop a pedestal decorated in a circus motif, this chimera stands almost 6 feet tall in earth-filled clogs. In a visual reiteration of the theme of the show, the camel's form resembles a human stomach. Throughout "The Very Life," digestion provided an apt model for van Caeckenbergh's own art, which feasts on found, altered and recycled images.
COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
Jake and Dinos Chapman: White Cube - London
ArtForum May, 2003 by Michael Archer, www.findarticles.com
Is there any mileage left in the idea of art as an oppositional practice, a set of moves made against the prevailing culture and its norms from outside its territory? For the Chapman brothers the answer would appear to be no. Why bother to fake an ideological purity when such a thing is an irrelevant impossibility anyway? Their game, rather, is to welcome the apparent inescapability of their situation and to juggle truisms until the viewer becomes disoriented by their dexterousness. You think contemporary art is a con, that it makes pretentious use of half-understood theories, and is deliberately outrageous and silly? OK, we'll give you some of that. You think that real art is about skill, hard work, and serious engagement with issues? OK, we'll give you lots of that, too. It's never either/or with them. It's always both/and, and then something else besides.
The smell was perfect. Stuck into the arms of one carved figure, two joss sticks smoked away, filling the air with the cloying scent of hippie joy in the superior spirituality of the Other. White Cube had had its whiteness obscured: dark paint on the walls, low lighting--just spots falling onto the sculptures, which sat atop the plinths crowding the space. It was sepulchral, reverential, almost holy in a self-consciously contrived and artificial way. The gallery is on the cultural wannabe circuit, so it was packed, and people shuffling around talking to one another in respectfully hushed tones added to the overall atmosphere.
The sculptures themselves--all of them "Works from the Chapman Family Collection," 2002--were wood carvings of humanoid forms whose poses and bodily exaggerations aped the look of what, over the years, has loosely, ignorantly, patronizingly, or disparagingly been classified as primitive art. They had been done in a variety of styles as if to suggest origins in a range of different cultures, and the press release even helpfully named some of these evocative-sounding imaginary locations: Camgib, Seirf ... The riddle of their provenance, then, was hardly a riddle at all, since what united this "extraordinary assemblage of rare ethnographic and reliquary fetish objects" was a consistent, if backhanded, reference to a well-known fastfood outlet. Bowed legs formed the double arch of the famous M, the stippled back of a nonspecific four-legged animal imitated a carton of French fries, a squat, rotund deity could be seen, on close examination, to be a hamburger on legs, and so on.
One of the brothers' earlier works--a model of a drive-thru McDonald's--was given the title Rhizome, 2000, and the ubiquity of reference to the same symbol of global corporate reach among this collection of ostensible family treasures extended the Chapmans' raunring play with fashionable ideas. Whether or not Deleuze and Guattari's theory of deterritorialization and reterritorialization will get us very far in combating the curse of globalization--or whether, indeed, globalization should be thought of as a curse at all--are not questions that the Chapmans seem likely to answer in any straightforward way. That would be too simplistic, and anyway, where they stand, either aesthetically or morally, should be of little concern to us. What the "Family Collection" amusingly provokes is more nuanced thinking about one's own position.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group
Cerith Wyn Evans: White Cube - London
ArtForum, Feb, 2004 by Michael Archer
A white neon sign on the facade of White Cube read "slow fade to black." The gallery name, one imagines, marks an ironic acknowledgment of Brian O'Doherty's paradigmatic art space. But Cerith Wyn Evans's cinematic instruction tlips the expectations raised by the building squarely on their head: If it wasn't dealing in dreams and fantasy so much as constructed realities before, it certainly is now. "Look at that picture ... / How does it appear to you now? / Does it seem to be / Persisting?" is a series of five crystal chandeliers hanging together in the main gallery space. Inspired as it is in look and attitude by Broodthaers's "Decor" work, the installation is beautifully simple and at the same time densely complex in its intellectual and affective ramifications. One chandelier design originated in an exhibition in Victor Horta's Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, another has been used in a Riyadh casino, a third, by Achille Castiglione, lit a lounge at the Milan airport, and so on. Their stylistic differences produce a babel of references to the contemporary city, both in its cosmopolitan reality and in the degree to which its forms embody modernity's faded, thwarted, and displaced dreams and ideals.
Industry & Business News
Publication Date: 22-SEP-05
Gregory Crewdson: Beneath The Roses.(White Cube Gallery, London, United Kingdom)
Article, News, Research, Information
Art Gallery Classifieds Find & Place Art Gallery Listings for Art Sales & Exhibitions
Publication: C: International Contemporary Art
Publication Date: 22-SEP-05
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Whitehead, Terri
Article Excerpt
GREGORY CREWDSON BENEATH THE ROSES WHITE CUBE GALLERY, LONDON, UK
The opening of Gregory Crewdson's Beneath The Roses exhibition in London's Hoxton Square had an atmosphere of carnival as more than a thousand revellers swarmed the pavement in front of White Cube Gallery. Following on from his hugely successful Twilight series (2002), his new work is a collection of 20 large format colour portraits Fourteen of these, exhibited at White Cube, were characterized by their technical complexity, intense cinematic and dramatic qualities, and obsessive...
String of violence
Prison cells, nooses, decapitated figures - Liza Lou can make anything out of beads. How disturbing, says Adrian Searle
Tuesday March 21, 2006, The Guardian
Before he left for the last time, Daddy did something bad to Liza Lou. He'd already whacked her around the kitchen for making too much noise, already driven Mom from prayer to the bottle, already whipped and blinded and cut the family dog. No calls to the Lord would drive out those demons. Whatever was done to Mommy's little Pumpernickel should never happen to a six-year-old. He made her lie obedient on the worktable in the basement, the one where he made some kind of living with his Bible study illustrations. She was blindfolded and in her best dress. Poor Liza Lou.
Born Again is a sorry tale, told in an up-close, 50-minute filmed monologue. The way Lou tells it, her mother had minor roles on Broadway in the 1960s, and lived in a New York loft, below the painter Roy Lichtenstein. She'd hung out at the Factory, she knew Andy Warhol. She met her handsome beau at a cocktail party; married within weeks in a whirlwind romance, they went one night to a Billy Graham revival meeting and were reborn. Not long after they burned all their books, tore up the paintings Lichtenstein had given to Mom, fed their bohemian liberal Manhattan life into the wood-burning stove and booked one-way tickets to small-town Minnesota. As the plane swung away from the coast Mom wept. "Isn't it wonderful?" she said, emptily. After that they wore their happy born-again Christian smiles and never once looked back.
Liza Lou sings plaintive gospel songs, recalls bitter memories and the blind hypocrisies of a strict, Pentecostal upbringing among the Christian right. She is filmed in a single, static take. But on screen Lou is animated, clambering over the table, leaning into the camera, her face looming in intimacy. She slumps, she croons, she recollects the confusions of her childhood world. There are moments of adult irony and of snot-dribbling tearful anger. She does all the voices. It is a terrific performance, brilliantly framed and choreographed, stark in black and white. Her story and her delivery are funny, harrowing and awful; Liza Lou is a natural performer. Her whole body talks.
Born Again is screened every hour on the hour in a small room, a few doors away from White Cube, where Lou's first British solo show is installed. Born Again is more than a counterpoint to the strange and at first sight overwrought sculptures and tableaux she has become famous for. How much of her story is gospel truth we'll never know, but it makes one look at her art differently. "What happened to her, what goes on happening to her, does not account for her work," writes Jeanette Winterson in the catalogue to the show.
Liza Lou has often been trivialised as the "bead lady". Her art is distinguished by the thousands of tiny threaded and glued beads that cover every millimetre of her life-sized sculptures and environments. There are those who would see Lou's work as a kind of extreme and cranky craftwork, an obsessional but minor art. Her most famous piece is a full-scale kitchen, whose counters, cupboards, sink, dishes, tap and even the gushing water are all picked out in chains and whorls of beads. There has been a beaded trailer home and a backyard, every blade of grass a spike of beads. Beaded blankets, beaded portraits of all the US presidents, a beaded toilet bowl with beaded stains, beaded saints, a beaded suicide. When can it ever end? It started when she was in college. If Lou could she'd bead the world.
At White Cube, a chainlink cage of security fencing topped with razor-wire stands in the centre of the gallery. There is no gate, no way in or out. What should appear stark and brutal shimmers: the wire, the steel poles and the chainlink are all iced in glass beads, a strange and sparkling coating. It took a year of work, with a group of 20 Zulu women in Durban, South Africa, where Lou has recently been living, to complete. South Africa, lest we forget, is where the British invented the concentration camp, where black townships were corralled behind fences boiling with wire coils, where gated housing estates keep the wealthy safe behind their perimeter walls and razor-wire. Wire is everywhere. It is impossible not to think of compounds in Bosnia, fences in Palestine, the pens at Guantánamo Bay. Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib were on Lou's mind. But what does it mean to anoint this object? I have begun to see each bead as but one of a million light-fingered, dextrous touches. One of the women Lou worked with said of the cage that: "We are covering it with love." Each bead a blessing, then, or a kind of forgiveness.
Perhaps. Is this also how we are intended to think of the big, gnarled branch that sticks out of the gallery wall, above head height, which Lou has called Scaffold? Is this work an invitation to a lynching, or a memory of one? What about the golden noose, dangling above an upturned plastic bucket, which has been installed in a small alcove? Is this a corner of Daddy's cellar? The bucket bears a beaded safety label: "Warning. Children can fall into bucket and drown." Not when they're standing on it to reach for the rope, they can't. This is called Stairway to Heaven, and reminded me of Robert Gober's lovingly remade domestic artefacts, all of which carry a sour unease. In the best of Lou's work, something similar is going on. But love, it strikes me, is not what the beads invoke. What they do instead is create a sense of remove, of unreal presence.
I have a great deal of difficulty with Lou's figures, which have a very different sense of unreality. I just can't believe in them. A man, doubled over into some absurd, almost Hieronymus Bosch-like yoga position, balances a knife between his testicles and his mouth. Another, vaguely Christ-like, loinclothed figure, squats, holding up a plank of wood. He has no head; the red tunnel of his trachea disappears down into the darkness of his body. This unrecorded station of the cross is ridiculous and awkward. I could not but think of the gruesome and ultimately laughable statuary one sometimes comes across in Spanish churches.
Lou doesn't need human figures, not least because they illustrate what is already there. We are the figures in her art - both as spectators, and as witnesses to all those other absent hands that toiled with all those beads, whose trace is everywhere we look. And to the figures who might be lynched, might be behind the wire, might be about to top themselves.
The show really comes unstuck in the gallery upstairs, where a naked figure stands, facing away from us, his hands raised and pressed against the wall. Called Homeostasis, his body is a variegated mosaic of red and white beads, a surface pattern tracing blood flow, heat variations, surging lymph. It is horrible only in a boring, illustrative way. The real problem is that he stands, in the gloom, beside a small inspection slot cut through a false wall built into the gallery. Beyond the wall is a cell, whose proportions are based on the death-row cubicles at San Quentin jail. Standing there, peering into the cell, one emulates the position adopted by Lou's homeostatic man. I don't think this is either intended or properly thought through. The cell alone would have been more than enough.
The room beyond the wall is empty, brightly lit by a single strip light. Every detail is tessellated with grey, tan and white beads - the cinderblock walls, the scabrous concrete ceiling, the grouting, the soiled cement flooring, with its alluvial, shit-curdled stains. Even the dangling threads of dust from the ceiling are beaded. The work took years. Lou insisted on using the smallest possible beads, all placed the right way up. Fabricating this work was itself a kind of sentence. I think of each bead as the counting out of each moment in the cell, every heartbeat, each breath, every cough. This, I thought, is somewhere she knows, her own jail.
There is something deathly about this threnody of beads, many so small they had to be handled with tweezers. All those millions of glass and plastic atoms, all that finger-numbing, eye-straining, relentless, painstakingly repetitive work. Lou also decided that the beading should be built up in successive layers, stratified and laminated in beads. During the fabrication of the cell, she allowed no talking among her assistants. You wonder who was being punished here. Right at the end, she hacked away about a year's worth of work, leaving the cell with a palpable sense of use, damage, lost time, lost lives.
Liza Lou is at the White Cube Gallery, London N1, until April 8/2006
“Experience” the mass games without leaving London 25-Mar-07
Andreas Gursky: new work
White Cube Gallery, 23 Mar - 5 May 2007
www.londonkoreanlinks.net
One day my fairy godmother will wave her wand and magic me an all-expenses paid trip to Pyongyang to see the Arirang festival. Ever since seeing Dan Gordon’s film A State of Mind I’ve been wanting to experience the spectacle live. The problem is, trips to the DPRK don’t come cheap.
For those similarly positioned, for the next month you can “experience” the mass games for free via some large format photos by Andreas Gursky. And when I say large, I mean large. The biggest is 4 metres wide by 2 metres tall. The other two, portrait in orientation, are 3m x 2m. That’s a lot of wall you need to hang them on. These photos of the Arirang Festival are on show at the White Cube gallery in Mason’s Yard, St James’s (walk down the alleyway beside the Chequers pub in Duke Street).
I’m hoping the press officer is going to email me a lo-res jpg of one of the photos, but until then you can see small versions of them over at the White Cube site here. For the moment you’ll have to make do, on this site, with a colourful image from Lee Ock-hyun of the Yonhap news agency below, and one from the People’s Daily at the top of this post.
Gursky’s two “smaller” ones are the more colourful to look at. Lots of gymnasts in red cheerleader leotards waving pom-poms, while behind them is the wall of 30,000 school children holding up their coloured cards to provide the spectacular backdrop. You look at the pictures from some distance, and there appears to be perfect harmony: immaculately-drilled performers, each playing their part in the massed group exercise. Look closer, and you see the human aspects: tiny differences in the individual performances. Pom-poms not being held at the same height; the heads being held at slightly different angles; a leg not being perfectly straight. Tiny individuals, all different, yet working together collectively to produce a show like no other on this earth.
But the big boring-looking one, Pyongyang III, is in fact the most interesting of the three. It’s tucked into the basement lift lobby which means you can’t look at it from a distance. But that’s a good thing as this picture demands to be looked at close-up. In this picture, the 30,000 school children who are responsible for the backdrop are taking a break. So instead of a colourful picture of mount Baektu and some hibiscus flowers you just get a large expanse of white: the tablecloths on the rows of tables where the children are sitting.
Go up close to the photo and get drawn into what the children are doing. One of them is sitting on the table with his back to the performers, chatting to one of the kids in the row behind. Some of them appear to be reading. Others rest their heads on their hands in a resigned manner. Some of them even appear to be exchanging blows (the exposure seems to have taken some time, which means any quick movements are blurred).
In between the performers and the 30,000 schoolchildren, and also with their backs to the performers, are half a dozen men in white suits gesticulating wildly like turbo-charged Toscaninis. It’s almost as if they’re trying to conduct the resting placard-carriers, but they’re not paying any attention. Meanwhile in the foregound, there’s hundreds of gymnasts in straight lines. The ones in blue leotards are doing headstands with their legs apart, while in between them girls in orange swimsuits bend gracefully back with their rubber rings. (The People’s Daily picture at the top of this post is of the very same scene, but from a different angle.)
You wonder what’s going on. Why, when the gymnasts are performing, are the card-holders resting? Gursky provides the article in a quote provided in the Times:
Pyongyang III is, in reality, two photographs brought together. You would only see the card holders when they were waiting for whatever was about to take place on the pitch. Otherwise, I only made some formal corrections in terms of composition in the other images, and the events as they took place are very similar to what you see in the photographs
So actually the image you see is a composite of two images. In real life, those half dozen white-suited conductors would have had the concentrated attention of the card-holders, and instead of being presented with the rather fun window into the lives of the children at rest we would see a colourful 30,000 pixel backdrop.
Does it matter that what you see is unreal, manipulated? Does it matter that the other photos are only “very similar” to what actually happened? Somehow, I feel slightly cheated. So I’m going to have to wait for my fairy godmother to do her stuff. She’ll find it a lot cheaper than buying me a Gursky photo: one of his sold recently for $2.4 million.
GALLERY: Swept under the carpet ... Red faces as another Banksy mural bites the dust
www.thisislondon.co.uk , 13.05.07
When renowned graffiti artist Banksy created one of his trademark pieces on the wall of the cutting-edge White Cube art gallery he might have expected it to be in safe hands.But the gallery has been left embarrassed after the £200,000 work was destroyed.The mural, called Sweep It Under The Carpet, showed a maid looking as if she was lifting up a part of the wall like a curtain to sweep away some dust. It adorned the outside of the gallery in Hoxton, East London, for two months before vanishing.
Although White Cube employees insist they have no idea who painted over the mural, neighbouring businesses say they believe gallery staff were responsible.Dave Ma, the manager of Shish restaurant, which is directly opposite the wall, saw someone he believes was a White Cube staff member painting over the work.
He said: "The gallery's policy is to paint over any graffiti the following day. When the Banksy work appeared, staff at the Cube asked their boss if they could bend the rules and leave it.
"He said they could leave it for a month but ordered them to cover over it once the month was up.
"It's a real shame. People in the area thought it was a great piece of art. They certainly didn't expect it to be destroyed."
A White Cube spokeswoman said: "Contractors were hired to paint the wall but were told not to paint over the Banksy.
"It wasn't removed by us or our contractors. It was painted over by a third party but we don't know who."
A friend of the artist said: "The fact that it was painted over is an embarrassment. It's a ridiculous thing for the gallery to do."
Banksy, who likes to remain anonymous, uses stencils to spray his images. His work of two policemen kissing in Brighton was blacked out in January. And contractors believed to be from Transport for London painted over another of his pieces in the capital. It showed Pulp Fiction stars John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson holding bananas instead of guns.
Current Exhibitions:
Jessica Rankin: New work 20 Apr—19 May 2007
Hoxton Square
White Cube Hoxton Square is pleased to present the work of Jessica Rankin in her first solo exhibition in the UK. Appropriating methods traditionally identified with feminine pursuits – embroidery and needlework – Rankin’s work features a series of ‘mental maps’, with codes, signs and symbols that explore ideas of memory, intuition and interpretation.
Rankin’s embroidered paintings begin with coloured panels of organdy, a fabric known for its sheer, diaphanous quality. Into this material the artist stitches renderings of mountain terrains, thermodynamic charts and astronomical maps, all of which mutate into lines of text before collapsing back into landscape drawing. The text assumes an abstract quality, executed in capital letters that call to mind the embroidered works of Alighiero Boetti. Taking the form of random thought patterns, these strings of words slip into phrases that avoid narrative structure from one to the other
WHENYOUHIDEINTHESHADOWSYOUBECOMEME; IWANTEDTOSCREAMBUTINSTEADDIDSOMEWEIRDSORTOFJIG.
An interest in Surrealist and concrete poetry is evident in the work, with the arrangement of words as objects and rhythmic lines that form an integral part of the imagery.
Rankin’s compositions are influenced on one level by personal experience – a road trip, camping under the night sky or snippets of conversation – and on a more universal level, by cartographic, cosmological or genetic diagrams, amongst others. Commencing with what she terms ‘a decisive act’ – a particular phrase or image – these elements develop organically, winding through the work like a street or river. Positioned several inches from the wall, the translucence of the organdy enables the forms to reverberate, casting faint shadows on the surface behind. As a whole, Rankin sees the structure of the work as an ‘embodiment of thought’.
The exhibition includes a selection of drawings and watercolours that provide insight into Rankin’s working process. Sketches of biomorphic forms feature alongside abstract representations of astral or lunar cycles, while other studies depict recognisable scenery. Together with the organdy paintings, these works serve as a kind of visual diary, combining direct experience with abstract thoughts.
Jessica Rankin was born in 1971 in Sydney, Australia and lives and works in New York. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions in the US, Europe and Australia. Recent solo exhibitions include PS1 Contemporary Arts Center, New York (2006) and Franklin Artworks, Minneapolis (2005).
A fully illustrated catalogue, with a text by Sarah Kent, will accompany the exhibition.
White Cube Hoxton Square is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 6pm.
Up coming exhibitions
Damien Hirst: Beyond Belief 3 Jun—7 Jul 2007
This exhibition will open at both White Cube, Mason's Yard and White Cube, Hoxton Square on 3 June 2007.
Exhibitions
(for photographs from the exhibitions please visit www.withecube.com)
Tracey Emin: My Major Retrospective 1963-1993 19 Nov—9 Jan 1994
Duke Street
The title of Tracey Emin’s exhibition poignantly suggests the artist felt, rather than being at the beginning of her career, that significant things had already happened. The show comprised over a hundred objects Emin had collected over the years, in what constituted a continuing act of almost obsessive assemblage. The precious ephemera that she put on display included teenage diaries, souvenirs, toys and memorabilia, combined with paintings, drawings, and tiny photographs of her art-school paintings. These photographs were mounted on squares of the last canvas she ever bought, as a testimony to the works Emin destroyed after experiencing what she has described as her ‘emotional suicide.’
This ‘photographic graveyard’ of past works revealed an admiration for paintings by Egon Schiele and Edvard Munch, and, although Emin’s approach was conceptual, there was a lingering influence from Expressionism in both her choice of subject matter and the style of her rapidly executed line drawings and monoprints. Text also played an important role, providing the crux for Emin’s storytelling. She lays herself bare to the viewer through letters to ex-boyfriends and relatives, journals that tell of early sexual encounters and past traumas, while a newspaper cutting records the death in a car crash of a favourite uncle, and a patchwork quilt, Hotel International (1993), with hand-stitched felt letters, features the names of the artist’s family members written alongside tender messages.
Together, this material was used to build a disarmingly frank, deeply confessional and personal narrative, while—as always—Emin’s dry sense of humour and self-effacing irony tempered the highly-emotive and moving nature of her visual autobiography. Experiences from the earlier part of the artist’s life have continued to be a major source of material that she has returned to and transformed through her work.
Sarah Lucas: Where’s my Moss? 24 Jun—10 Sep 1994
Sarah Lucas presented Bucket of Tea (1994) in the gallery space, a mobile suspended from the ceiling by a network of wires and rods, that featured four large, colour-photocopied self-portraits backed by mirrored styrene. The artist had made cut outs from a series of self-portrait photographs taken with a wide-angle lens, whose distortion served to increase the in-your-face attitude of the portraits. These pictures present Lucas languishing with laid-back defiance in an armchair, wearing jeans, an old leather jacket and worker’s boots; she sits with legs apart and boots dramatically enlarged, pushed up into the foreground. The movement of the floating images conveyed a listless mood with the artist suspended in an uncertain equilibrium, this fragile condition seeming to undermine the tough self-confidence of the portraits.
Halfway up the stairs leading to the gallery space, Lucas presented Headstone for Tracey (1994), a concrete tombstone with the words ‘fuck me while I’m sleeping’ carved into its surface. In 1993 Lucas collaborated with Tracey Emin by setting up an art space in a shop on London’s Whitechapel High Street. This rough ungainly object serves as a darkly humorous ‘epitaph’ for her friend and former collaborator.
In the adjoining space the artist showed three small photo collages that combined newspaper print and watercolour. These intimate works have a delicate appearance at odds with the confrontational stance Lucas adopts in her images. In one, (Volvo) Strange Eye (1994), she is seen lounging in a battered armchair with her crossed boots thrust so far forward into the viewfinder that they completely obscure her face.
Lucas makes concise, funny and direct works with an economy of means that often combine resistance with sensitivity and lightness of touch.
Antony Gormley: Lost Subject 1 Apr—7 May 1994
Duke Street
Antony Gormley exhibited a new sculpture called Lost Subject (1994). The starting point for the piece, as with earlier work, was a mould taken from his own body, which becomes a vehicle for feeling.
Lost Subject marks a radical departure, as for the first time, Gormley makes a positive cast of himself in an extremely relaxed attitude, one which is far more detailed and less formal than the majority of his void lead body cases or solid-iron body forms. A heightened tension is created between the libidinous, palpable, spontaneous exposure of a particular body, and the distanced, generalised ‘idea’ of the body expressed through the hermetic medium of a carefully-soldered and sectioned lead skin that forms the entire bodily surface. The sculpture gives one a sense of invading the intimate space of another, while, at the same time; its deathly stillness allows one to look down on this site of life as if the body were one’s own. One could say that Gormley’s identification of the body as ‘subject’ constitutes a reworking and broadening of the Duchampian ‘found object’, now extended to include the body as the site of the self.
Gormley is also a draughtsman, and in the adjoining room he exhibited a number of works on paper. As with all his drawing, these works form an essential part of his practice, offering him an alternative to the ‘slow unfolding’ of the sculptural process—drawing provides a direct and immediate method of expressing what is buried in the recesses of the mind, as well as a way of unravelling experience that is deeply and intuitively felt. Gormley’s drawings are highly personal, poetic, meditative responses that bear witness to a singular experience of being in the world.
Marc Quinn: Blind leading the Blind 7 Jul—9 Sep 1995
Duke Street
Marc Quinn exhibited Blind Leading the Blind (1995), a life-size three-quarter cast of his own body. This sculpture is one of a series of pieces based on the seven deadly sins, entitled ‘Emotional Detox’, in which contorted torsos represent heightened states of both physical and emotional expression.
Quinn’s choice of lead as a material for this piece was determined both by the metal’s dense physical properties, and its symbolism. Lead is toxic, yet historically, it was used as a base metal in alchemy and, as such, is associated with a process of transformation—these two associations link to the artist’s personal experience of overcoming a dependence on alcohol.
The figure of The Blind Leading the Blind is contorted in a state of what might either be ecstasy or agony, with eyes closed, head thrown back and penis erect. As with much of his art, Quinn used a representation of his own body to explore a preoccupation with the mutability of the human form and its ability to encompass different states: the spiritual and the physical, the cerebral and the sexual. Resembling an exposed shell or an anatomical model, the interior of the figure is hollow, and a network of lead rods inside the torso (evidence of the original casting process) look like the veins and arteries of a petrified circulation system. The rough surface, the fractured seams between neck and chest, arms and torso, and the matt dense surface, suggest the vulnerability of a body in crisis. On one level, the sculpture could be interpreted as an ironic comment on male sexuality. However, there are also visual parallels with religious Baroque sculptures such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of St Theresa (1645–52), or the work of Austrian sculptor Franz Xavier Messerschmidt. In this sculpture, Quinn used the anatomy of ecstasy to draw out the differences and similarities between states of spiritual and physical abandon. Casting directly from his own body serves to give the work an emotional immediacy, enabling the viewer to identify directly with the artist’s physicality.
Damien Hirst: Still 19 May—1 Jul 1995
Duke Street
In Damien Hirst’s Still (1995), a clinical vitrine made from glass, mirror and steel displayed a series of surgical instruments. The glinting scalpels, forceps, retractors and clamps, arranged on a series of shelves, with surgical, non-hierarchical precision, reflect the aesthetic of the laboratory. The display case lends the work an assertive sculptural presence. Hirst used the case to isolate and frame the medical tools, focusing the viewer’s attention on some uncomfortable truths by highlighting the vulnerability of our bodies, and the temporal nature of our existence. In this respect, the work can be interpreted as referencing ‘vanitas’, a theme associated with the genre of still life; Hirst made this link explicit by putting a mirrored backplate in the vitrine that reflected the physical presence of the viewer.
The ordered form of Still employs the cool aesthetic of Minimalism, with an emphasis on repetition and the machine-made. At the same time, the ordered rows of instruments are emphatic reminders of the violence inflicted on inflicted on countless, unseen, ailing bodies. The work taps into our fears by combining deadpan macabre with a pervading tone of chilling melancholy. In addition, the taxonomic display also recalls the museum vitrine that, by association, turns these objects into relics.
In contrast to the themes Hirst broaches in Still, he also showed one of his ‘spin paintings’; beautiful, pop, spinning, ice creamy, whirling, expanding painting (1995), a circular work made by pouring household gloss paint onto a rapidly rotating canvas from above. This mechanised and abstract tondo, emptied of authentic gesture, countered the cold minimalism of Still with celebratory exuberance.
Suchan Kinoshita: Stuff 31 May—29 Jun 1996
Duke Street
Suchan Kinoshita’s installation Stuff (1995), focused on a by-product of our cleaning rituals: human detritus. Kinoshita collected her raw material from used vacuum bags given to her by acquaintances and, having transformed the gallery into a makeshift laboratory, subjected it to a process of painstaking examination. The pieces of ‘stuff’, such as balls of hair and bits of fluff, were carefully classified and then sorted according to a labour-intensive system that looked as if it had been devised by an eccentric archaeologist, conducting research into the habits of our contemporary age. By taking stock of the detritus in this way, Kinoshita’s work subtly gauged the passage of time, converting the hair and fluff into fragile ‘evidence’ suggestive of past events and experiences.
Although the installation represents the artist’s quest for order, it had a playfully chaotic aesthetic: the cluttered glass shelves looked precarious, the structure unstable. In offering up this residual matter for public scrutiny, she took it out of the intimate realm of domesticity and into one of quasi-scientific categorisation—through being ordered, the gathered ‘stuff’ acquired a poetic innocence that seemed to transcend the notion of ‘valueless’ material.
Kinoshita was born in Japan and, before deciding to make art, studied theatre and music in Germany. This training was perceptible in her installation’s resemblance to a stage set. The tools employed to carry out her curious investigation—including brushes, rubber gloves, lamps and a goldfish bowl full of water—were displayed as if recently set down, implying a participatory experience for those who ventured into the gallery. And as Kinoshita collapsed conventional hierarchies by assigning value to substances that are usually discarded, she also highlighted the frailty of our bodies by revealing the dead matter we shed on a daily basis.
In the adjoining room Kinoshita exhibited two cardboard boxes punctured by illuminated fairy lights which spell the word ‘Nowhere’, with its inherent semantic suggestion that ‘Now + Here = Nowhere’.
Glen Seator: Within the line of the Studs 11 Jul—6 Sep 1997
Duke Street
A new installation by Glen Seator
White Cube is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in the UK of American artist Glen Seator who will present a new installation entitled According to the Highway act.
Seator's work typically enacts a displacement; at this years Whitney Biennial he recreated the director of the Whitney Museum's office - a full size room complete with grey carpet, bookshelves and window. The massive construction was tilted at an angle of 45 degrees to inspire an intense feeling of vertigo. Seator has received critical acclaim for his architectural interventions which involve construction processes in order to precisely duplicate a physical reality. His works challenge us to think about the relationship between real and record, original and copy, familiar and strange and between site and non-site.
Earlier this year, Seator made an outstanding installation for Capp Street Projects in San Francisco. Approach effectively turned the gallery inside out by rebuilding within the gallery the section of street immediately outside it. Second street in San Francisco was replicated inch by inch using 15 tons of gravel as well as concrete, sand and asphalt to produce an exact three dimensional facsimile complete with curbs, manhole covers, street cleaning signs and pavement cracks - a literal deja-vu where the clone street is experienced as both familiar and strange, an uncanny non-site seemingly wrested from space and time.
According to the Highway act at White Cube will recreate and re-present, to scale, the facade and entrance to 44 Duke Street St James's. This new installation exactly duplicates and displaces the real and re-presents it as an object. We enter the building in order to reach the gallery, only to find ourselves re-entering the building again; like an endless film loop we are repeatedly brought back to where we started.
Peter, David Fischli/Weiss: New Work 23 Oct—21 Nov 1998
Duke Street
For their exhibition, Peter Fischli and David Weiss produced a new installation that involved the slide projection of hundreds of images of flora and fauna, superimposed onto and dissolving into one another. There is a strangeness in viewing this piece, a kind of double vision, as at any moment the single projected image can become a layered exposure, made up of at least two images. In addition, the very slow dissolve process gives the impression of impossible blooms, as yet unseen in nature, created by forms slowly coming into being, combining and merging with others, and then passing out of the visual field. An individual flower can never be held still, but is transient, in a constant state of change.
The work also evokes different seasonal moods. In one sequence, the flowers appear psychedelic, full of bright sunlight, discharging a sense of summer excess and fecundity, while, in another, the mute colouring of the blooms and less abundant forms point to the depleted melancholy of autumn. The multiplicity of images does not suggest an ideal form, or a general pattern for a flower, but rather, to the ever-changing and divergent possibilities of each individual bloom.
This installation evolved out of an earlier work in which Fischli and Weiss created an agricultural garden planted with an array of flowers and vegetables. They began to document the garden by taking photographs of the plants, which led them over the course of the following year, to record a multiplicity of different species of flora and fauna.
Jake & Dinos Chapman: DISASTERS OF WAR 12 Mar—17 Apr 1999
For their White Cube show, Jake and Dinos Chapman showed two sets of eighty-three etchings from their Disasters of War series. One hand-coloured set was shown in the gallery, with another black and white set displayed in the adjoining room. Employing classical etching technique of hard ground, soft ground and dry point with aquatint, they produced prints that display a rich and diverse range of images.
In these works, the Chapmans are clearly responding to Francisco de Goya and his graphic depiction of the Napoleonic occupation of Spain, while also giving free rein to their own drawing style and obsessions with the poles of beauty and pain, humour and horror, the sublime and perverse, the diabolical and the infantile.
Like Goya’s Disasters of War, their post-Christian images focus on victims rather than victors; some plates actually rework Goya’s original images or fragments of them. For example, in one etching, Great Deeds Against the Dead, with its mutilated, chopped-up bodies tied to a tree, has been overdrawn with a swastika; and in another, a seated soldier contemplating a hanged man has been turned into a hanged Nazi, observed by a grinning idiot.
Although Goya-esque piles of body parts do make an appearance in these works, most depict contemporary monstrosities, the ‘horrors’ we know of through television pictures and newspaper photographs, as well as comic and Bataillian images, such as eyeballs sprouting tendrils of hair, and various grotesque views of bodily orifices.
Antony Gormley: Drawn 8 Sep—14 Oct 2000
Hoxton Square
For his exhibition at Jay Jopling’s White Cube2 Antony Gormley presented Drawn, a new work conceived specifically for the gallery. Drawn continues to explore Gormley’s obsession with the relationship between the human body and architecture (testing the first body against the second in the artist's terminology), making the spaces of the constructed world ‘felt’ in unusual confrontational ways.
The exhibition of a single work in eight randomly orientated parts identified the taut line between the body's ability to express freedom through extension, and architecture's compulsion to contain. Occupying the corners of the exhibition space at White Cube2, where the ceiling and floor meet the walls (a place of oblivion and punishment), Gormley reinstated the body as the locus of lived experience, reinventing the room as an arena and the body itself as a battleground between inheritance and aspiration.
Never has his body been more exposed, the lines of the casting process more tensely indexing the internal contraction of the solar plexus and extension of the limbs, nor the surface more legible in its declaration that the work issues from a lived moment. Through testing the body to its limit the work evokes a physical intelligence that has been seen as sadomasochistic or as evidence of a spiritual struggle to allow liminal experience to become palpable, a struggle in which the viewer is inevitably implicated.
Lucian Freud: A New Painting 3 May—1 Jul 2000
Duke Street
Lucian Freud exhibited a single painting, entitled Naked Portrait (1999), that hung between the two windows of the gallery. This portrait presents a naked middle-aged woman, sitting, with her legs drawn up, on a large, straight-backed armchair—with its strong vertical geometry, it both frames and contains the figure. This pyramidal nude subverts the ideal nude of the Western tradition by recording the awkward truths of the undressed body: the genitals, the sagging breasts, and the folded flesh that, in places, stretches over bone. The woman is presented in a posture so intimate and close-up, that her body appears pushed up against the viewer, one foot seeming to project forward out of the picture plane.
In Naked Portrait, the paint texture adds a tangible sense of physicality to the person represented, and the woman’s flesh is rendered in so truthful a way, that there are even hints of blood-filled veins and fatty tissue that lie beneath her skin. Freud has said, ‘As far as I am concerned, the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does.’ He uses coarse hog’s-hair brushes that allow for a looseness and painterliness in the work, as do the accumulations of heavy, granular pigment the artist reserves for the painting of flesh.
Paradoxically, this painting combines intimacy with distance, because at the same time as the viewer is being invited into a contemplation of her flesh; the model’s personality is withheld. She is kept at a distance, her head appears receded, diminished, disproportionate, and her face is turned upwards and away from, it seems, her own physicality, the body that grounds her. Freud has pointed out that, ‘although we are familiar with our faces from seeing them reflected in mirrors every day; it is only occasionally we view our bodies. We are most distant from them.’
In the adjoining space, Freud presented a new etching entitled After Chardin (2000), possibly his most worked to date, and based on a painting by Jean-Siméon Chardin in the National Gallery in London, of a young schoolmistress and her pupil.
Gilbert & George: New Horny Pictures 2 Jun—15 Jul 2001
Hoxton Square
Gilbert & George began working together in 1967 when they met on the advanced sculpture course at St Martins School of Art. Since then, they have had major exhibitions at Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York; Central House of the Artists, New Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; National Art Gallery, Beijing; The Art Museum, Shanghai; Sezon Museum, Tokyo; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the Hayward Gallery, London. In 2001 they will have solo exhibitions at the School of Art, Athens and Chateau d'Arenthon, France and in 2002 at Centro Cultural de Belem, Lisbon.
Home News Artists Exhibitions Editions Publications Info Contact About Terry Winters: Paintings 18 Jan—2 Mar 2002
Hoxton Square
For his White Cube2 exhibition American artist Terry Winters presented a number of paintings taken from his most recent body of work entitled Set Diagram, a series of 100 pictures measuring one metre by one yard. Set Diagram is a term used to describe relationships between two or more sets of information, and the work in this series utilizes Winters' method of combining already existing data into new configurations.
Winters chose a key selection of 15 pictures that form a distillation of the series as a whole. These works were exhibited alongside two larger paintings with significantly different organizational principles: one is a taut grid structure, the other a fluid matrix. These two larger canvases acted as brackets for the exhibition, establishing the scope of the group.
The idea for Set Diagram grew out of discussions Winters had with the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, who designed the first installation of 60 paintings from this series shown during the spring of 2001 in New York. These paintings, like all of the artist's work, draw together a variety of natural and artificial source materials such as biological photography, computer animation and architectural structures.
During the first 20 years of his career, Winters developed a complex abstract language comprised of energetic fields and lines, which create dense, graphic images that frequently converge into an impacted central core. The patterns and shapes that emerge suggest various hypothetical worlds. Ranging from the molecular to the psychological and the social, Winters paints what John Rajchman has called ‘the theme of the brain-city’. His paintings also engage many ideas of post-War abstract art, referencing works such as the paintings of Jackson Pollock and the futuristic architectures of Buckminster Fuller.
Through abstraction, Winters explores and maps bodies of order, chaos, gravity and speed. In the artist's new work, the spaces of the digital age are mediated by human gesture, creating hybrid images, at once contemporary and archaic. The basis for all of Winters' painting is drawing, and the network of lines on the surface of his pictures creates an all-over energy. The goal is to describe forces - both virtual and actual. For Winters, the picture-making process is a 'collaboration with circumstance', a pragmatics where chance and intention collide. Through urgent and immediate mark making, using wax, oil and resin, Winters creates different palpable sensations. At some points the paint is heavily applied and intensely visceral, at other times it is lucidly translucent, creating different temperatures and emotional qualities within a single picture plane.
Carroll Dunham 21 Mar—19 Apr 2003
Hoxton Square
White Cube is pleased to present a new group of paintings and sculptures by American artist Carroll Dunham. Dunham is known for his vibrant, chromatic semi-abstract paintings that explode with psycho-sexual content and are driven by seemingly aggressive and underlying libidinous energy. The exhibition will include five new paintings as well as five free-standing painted steel sculptures - the first three-dimensional work that the artist has ever exhibited.
Dunham began painting in the 1980's, making pictures on wood veneer that incorporated the grain of the wood as an integral, formal element in the picture, with a shallow depth of field where foreground and background interweave between optical bands of colour. Dunham's work then developed from being vehemently non-representational in the 1980's to a series of paintings in the 1990's that incorporated organic forms that took on human characteristics. Tuberous body parts and strange, primal shapes emerged from sharp blocks of colour with a rude sexuality, comic aggression and insistent physical presence. Psychic, animalistic universes or 'sexual galaxies' as the artist has described them, are peopled with visionless beings who seem to be turning in on themselves with Vaudevillian abandon in a riot of primary colour. Dunham's energetic works are stratified, with different, formal elements within the picture plane creating a volatile union of mind and body, figure and ground, male and female, interior and exterior.
The artist has said of his work that it 'exists in this kind of tension between irrational, almost goofy things and extremely tight, formal, organized things.' His explosion of shapes is tempered by a formal visual acuity and controlled by a strict, graphic line, combining an unsettling mixture of cartoon-like drawing and vivid color. Dunham's art seems to have absorbed the art brut physicality of Jean DuBuffet and fused it with an erotic vernacular akin to illustration or cartoons. His paintings are like journeys - a probing and uncovering of the internal visions of the human mind.
In 2002, the artist embarked on his black and white Mesokingdom paintings in which a single male character dressed in a black suit and hat, half gangster, half religious zealot, wanders alone through visionary landscapes. The paintings in this exhibition, collectively titled Edge of His World, both continue and depart from the themes in those paintings. The character reappears in brightly coloured and starkly painted images of a drastically emptied landscape where he is enlarged, cropped, and truncated by the structural elements of the paintings. These paintings will form a kind of sexual dialogue with the sculptures, which embody images of the female characters that have been absent from the artist's recent paintings.
Carroll Dunham has exhibited widely in both group and solo exhibitions. He recently had his first full career retrospective at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York.
An illustrated catalogue will be available during the exhibition.
Sarah Morris: Los Angeles 3 Jun—10 Jul 2004
Hoxton Square
White Cube is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings and a film by Sarah Morris . This body of work is based on Los Angeles and focuses on the city's unique and spectacular architecture, its sprawling, de-centred urban plan and, most importantly, its role as a centre for image production.
Morris makes complex, physical paintings that use rigorous over-all grids and luridly bright colours, executed in brilliant household gloss paint on square-format canvases. Her paintings have become increasingly disorientating over time, with their internal vortex-like spaces working to pull the picture beyond the reality of the canvas as a two-dimensional object.
This new series of paintings are a development from Morris' earlier work since their grids are more fragmentary. In paintings such as ‘Bonaventure [Los Angeles]' (2004) Morris has used octagons to form the image, obliquely referencing the city's layout as well as hinting at the clustered and bureaucratic social network of a city that constantly shifts between documentary and fiction. In the painting, ‘Century Plaza [Los Angeles' (2004) the grid is reduced to a few single lines or vectors which cut dramatically across the canvas, leading the eye to the edge of and beyond the picture plane, its schematised reduction akin to a mental image of a particular and temporal urban view.
In Inside the White Cube , Morris will present her new film ‘Los Angeles', the fifth film she has made to date that posits the city as a hyper-narrative within a very distinct duration of time. In ‘Capital', Morris shot Washington DC during the last days of the Clinton administration and in ‘Los Angeles', the city is caught at its most ebullient and narcissistic moment: the week running up to and including the Oscars. Morris has described her films as ‘condensed manifestos' for the paintings, in the sense that they are a compendium of images and situations that could provide the visual source and psychological complexity from which the paintings begin and abstractly devolve. In ‘Los Angeles' well-known sites of the city such as a John Lautner house from 1971, the Bonaventure Hotel, the Creative Artists Agency, Mulholland Drive or the Wells Fargo building in Beverly Hills are set to an original musical score which works in parallel to the images.
Morris is adept at using the methods of seduction and deflection as a visual and conceptual strategy in her work. Her films investigate both the surface of a city – its architecture and geography – as well as its ‘interior': the psychology of its inhabitants and key players. ‘Los Angeles' gives an ‘inside' look at an industry that is fuelled by fantasy (shots of Botox injections and laser eye surgery for example, are paired with shots of the rehearsals of the Oscars) and the relationship between studio, producer, director and talent is exposed in scenes with legendary producers such as Dino de Laurentiis and Robert Evans alongside numerous Hollywood ‘A-list' actors. Morris employs very different kinds of cinematography – from documentary recording to apparently narrative scenarios – which work as a method of visual distraction (what Martin Prinzhorn has termed ‘automatist closure'), a way of exploring the urban environment, and more particularly its issues of social power and representation.
A fully illustrated catalogue with texts by Douglas Coupland and Martin Herbert will be available during the exhibition.
Richard Phillips: Michael Fried 9 Dec—14 Jan 2006
Hoxton Square
White Cube is pleased to present Richard Phillips’ latest project Michael Fried, a group of seven large-scale oil paintings.
Over the last decade, Phillips has developed a striking signature style that derives its tension from a selective use of lurid popular images from that he subjects to the technical, value-laden refinements of academic painting. As a self-conscious American painter weaned on postmodern appropriation strategies, Phillips is acutely interested in the continuing discourse on “the sacred cloth” and how his own work situates itself within, and contributes to, its canonical status. To this end he has designed an octagonal, chapel-like enclosure for this particular group of paintings and titled it, provocatively, Michael Fried.
One of modern art’s eminent historians and critics, Fried famously took Minimal Art to task on account of its irredeemable theatricality in Art and Objecthood (1967), then later explored the dialectical relationship between theatricality and non-theatricality in painting in the writings of Denis Diderot and the painting salons of eighteenth century Paris in Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980). Fried remains a leading, though contested, exponent of the vexed relationship between art criticism and art history.
The critic suggests new possible ways to understand a work of art but for Phillips, critique is as much an intrinsic material in the conception and staging of his own paintings as the paint and canvas with which they are made. In this exhibition, in a reversal of the normative relationship between artist and critic, Fried is cited as the very subject of Phillips’ attention.
Visitors to Michael Fried encounter a panoptical space, where an image confronts from every wall. Culling his subjects from fifties soft porn and other genres in the lower reaches of the subject hierarchy, Phillips crops the body from each figure, scales up the faces via gridding technique, and resets them against bold, striped grounds. The beautiful and banal ‘Eve Bello’, ‘Mickey Jines’ and ‘Janise Carter’ stare boldly out of their frames, rendered to impervious perfection. In counterpoint to these huge portraits are four reworked graphic images – a pencil sketch of a man’s face, a bleeding heart, a pornographic drawing of a sexual threesome, and a Manga cartoon girl.
Phillips’ deft and selective scrambling and conflating of genres is a challenging comment on the condition of painting now. Is it an important and vivid medium or a redundant object of nostalgic connoisseurship? How do current art practices relate to painting’s history? And is painting itself central or peripheral to them?
Born in Massachusetts in 1962, Richard Phillips lives and works in New York. He has exhibited his work in numerous individual and group shows internationally. For his most recent work, he has devised specific architectural environments, beginning with Law, Sex & Christian Society at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York, a companion show to the White Cube project.
A fully illustrated catalogue, with an essay by Michael Bracewell, has been published by White Cube to accompany the exhibition.
Franz Ackermann: Home, Home Again 21 Apr—20 May 2006
Hoxton Square
‘The daily practice of painting, in Ackermann’s case, amounts to nothing less than an attempt to redefine the discipline itself, not as a stable given, but as a fluid, self-differing medium constantly branching out into new territories.’
Daniel Birnbaum
White Cube is pleased to present a new exhibition of works by Franz Ackermann. Ackermann makes large-scale dynamic installations that are built up from individual components comprising paintings, drawings, photographs, wall drawings and sculptural, billboard-like constructions. Ackermann uses the gallery space as an extension of his studio, the site where the installation is finally constructed and finished. Colourful and architectural, his abstract works function as elements within a greater system – an imaginary mental topography that explores notions of travel, urbanism and globalisation, connecting the specifics of disparate locales. His installations map real and imaginary places, buildings and urban layouts, but are as much about the fantasy of escape as they are political gestures in an ever-shifting world.
Ackermann’s work frequently deals with the double side of tourism – the glamour, speed and consumption of international travel but also the detritus, architectural scarring and garbage that it leaves behind. His paintings deal with illusionary points of view, bringing together details from far away places to ones that are closer to home, seeing the city as a lens through which other places are represented. Entitled ‘Home, home again’ after a Pink Floyd song, this exhibition will bring together a series of large-scale paintings, numerous drawings and floor and wall based sculptures that focus on London as their conceptual point of departure. For the first time, Ackermann will present a large-scale drawing that is a metaphorical link between his ongoing mental map series – watercolours made while on the move in hotels around the world – and his paintings, constructed from memory in the studio.
The show will also examine the relationship between tourism and terrorism - the spectre of international travel - as well as the way that cities are constantly in flux, in the case of London, looking towards the Olympic games in 2012 that will irrefutably change the layout of our existing city. Always site-specific, his work comments on the architecture of the space it inhabits, whilst inviting the viewer to enter its proposed geographical space. Ackermann’s paintings fuse various perspectives in one image, from distant to close up or simultaneously from above and below creating an ungrounded, all-over terrain that recalls the energy of Italian Futurist paintings or the visual delirium and alienation that one experiences in new cities. The work is predicated on the roving eye of the artist, the travelling flâneur, which can be traced from Baudelaire to the ubiquitous contemporary tourist.
Franz Ackermann has exhibited internationally. He has had numerous solo exhibitions including Kunsthalle Basel, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.
Andreas Gursky: New work 23 Mar—5 May 2007
White Cube Mason’s Yard is pleased to present the work of Andreas Gursky in his first major solo exhibition with the gallery. Renowned for his large-format colour photographs charting themes of globalised society at work and play, Gursky’s new production employs the latest digital technology to capture and refine an astounding compilation of detail on an epic scale.
The perspective in many of Gursky’s photographs is drawn from an elevated vantage point. This position enables the viewer to encounter scenes, encompassing both centre and periphery, which are ordinarily beyond reach. For the Pyongyang series (2007), Gursky travelled to the Arirang Festival, held annually in North Korea in honour of the late Communist leader Kim Il Sung. The festival’s mass games include more than 50,000 participants performing tightly choreographed acrobatics, against a backdrop of 30,000 schoolchildren holding coloured flip-cards that produce an ever-changing mosaic of patterns and images. Gursky’s photographs describe, in panoramic dimensions, the incongruity of the brilliant colours and smiling faces of the performers within the controlled, totalitarian nature of the event.
A chamber designed to detect the smallest known particles in the universe is the subject of Kamiokande (2007). The actual scale of the neutrino observatory in the Mozumi mine, deep below the town of Kamioka-cho in Japan, is at first glance ambiguous. Containing 50,000 tons of purified water, surrounded by thousands of photomultiplier tubes protected by metallic spheres, its immensity becomes clear as two small boats float into view at the bottom of the image, each containing a figure gazing up at the vast architecture that engulfs them. In Beelitz (2007), horizontal black lines of plastic sheets protect rows of asparagus in a field near Potsdam, East Germany. Embedded within the scene are agricultural workers harvesting the crops, which are visible in adjacent handcarts. The flattened perspective of the aerial image enables the view to shift back and forth between abstraction and figuration, and the macro and microscopic.
F1 Boxenstopp (2007) focuses on the frenetic activity around Formula One cars stationed in their pits during a race. Dozens of mechanics and technicians in bright team colours surround two vehicles, hurriedly refuelling and repairing, all but obscuring the cars and drivers from view. Above this scene, members of the audience look down from the darkened interior of the hospitality suite. Shot at various Grand Prix races around the world – Shanghai, Monte Carlo, Istanbul, São Paulo – the figures appear captured in a moment of authenticity, yet in reality, such simultaneous action would not be possible; these images are in fact a carefully composed digital construct.
The rocky island peak of Khao Phing Kan in Thailand, popularly known as James Bond Island, features in James Bond Island I, II, III (2007). Soaring over the bay used as a location for the 1974 film ‘Man with the Golden Gun’, the view takes in a range of islands scattered in an azure ocean, with signs of human habitation just discernable.
Andreas Gursky was born in Leipzig and lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany. Since the 1980s he has exhibited extensively, including major solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, MCA Chicago and SF MOMA, San Francisco. His most recent museum exhibition opened in February 2007 at the Haus der Kunst in Munich and will tour to Istanbul and Sharjah.
Andreas Gursky at White Cube Mason’s Yard coincides with a presentation of new work at Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers London, 7a Grafton Street, London W1S 4EJ from 22 March to 12 May 2007.
1 comment:
The "Rosetta Stone" hypothesis
proposes that the existence of nyctalopia is 'dayblindness,' e.g., total colorblindness, and hemeralopia is 'night blindness as ** Bansky's destroyed work.'
[http://lnwme.blogspot.com/2007/01/rosetta-stone.html]
Expressing Pyongyang III as a ideal chimera hybrid as In a primitive chordate 8/28/2007 Development and Design
[http://lnwme.blogspot.com/2007/08/development-and-design.html].
While Mixed Wino Dark Matter: consequences for direct, indirect Win/Dino and collider ... U.S.A. is the subject of Kamiokande (2007).
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