ARTICLES

'Us and them, North and South, Sane and Insane, Deaf and Dumb, Male and Female, Observer and Object, Living and Dead.'

INTERNATIONAL MODERN ART AT TATE LIVERPOOL: 21st June until 2005.

By Dr Robert MacDonald
Reader in Architecture
Centre for Architecture
Liverpool School of Art & Design
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When we experience art we all do so through the tinted glasses of many preconceptions. One of the advantages of having modern galleries such as the Tate of the North, Tate at St Ives, Gateshead or Walsall is that we can view works normally exclusively for cultural metropolitan eyes only. The Liverpool Biennial now gives even more people the opportunity to experience new waves of modern art in our streets, public spaces and local galleries. Over the years, like many, I have had the unique cultural opportunity to see Mark Rothko’s ‘deep’ canvas’s, Joseph Beuys fat, felt and fur, Anthony Gormleys clay figures, Tracy Emin’s bleached blue beach hut and even the complete works of Salvador Dali.

This was my context for a British Sign Language Interpretation at the Tate Gallery on Sunday 3rd August 2003. Whilst waiting for the talk to start I had a look and listen to Rebecca Horn’s Ballet of the Woodpeckers (1986-87). The walls of mirrors and clicking metal peckers can be read as a metaphor for mental illness and it was created for the hall of a theatre housed within a psychiatric clinic in Vienna. Rebecca Horn has spent considerable time in hospital and her artistic preoccupations are with overflowing blood machines, arm extensions and moveable shoulder extensions all contained inside black and red boxes.

In presenting International Modern Art through the medium of British Sign Language the Tate Gallery is taking responsibility to address a minority of them and disadvantaged few. The participants were also given a rare opportunity to touch (wearing white gloves) some early modern sculpture. International Modern Art is arranged chronologically, divided into six sections:

Focus Room: Henry Gaudier-Brzeska
Towards Abstraction
The Legacy of Cubism
The Call to Order
A New Beginning
Down to Earth
Disaster of War

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, like many modern artists of the First World War years, died young at the age of twenty-three. He left The Dancer (1913), cast in 1965 and the dramatic Bird Swallowing a Fish (1913-1914) cast in 1964; this bronze sculpture has the feel of animal life and mechanistic forms of the new age. Henry Moore added the colouring. One quickly realises that almost all the Masters of modern art were male; Cezanne, Matisse, Derain, Mondrain and Picasso. The Fauvist Wild Beasts painted and the women posed. Sometimes the men painted each other i.e.; Matise by Derain (1905). The representation of light is intense, none so much than in the case of Mondrian’s Sun, Church in Zeeland (1910), with its powerful use of chromatic modern blues and oranges. His abstract of a tree anticipated much of cubist art.

Of all the Masters represented in the exhibition, Picasso appears to have the greatest control over his muse; see his cubist Seated Nude (1909), Seated Woman (1923) and Head of a Woman, (1924). In his early cubist paintings he appears to use geometric planes, views and mechanistic slices to dissect the female form. In 1905 he painted Girl in a Chemise; she appears as a vulnerable waif like girl from the margins of society. The painting has a melancholic mood, which is conveyed behind veils of paint.

The Italian Futurists are well represented with Giacormo Balla’s The Car Has Passed (1913) and The Train Has Arrived in Paris. David Bomberg’s In the Hold (1913-1914) is a large impressive canvas using a new visual language to express his perceptions of modern urban environments. The most tactile sculpture is Raymond Duchamp-Villon’s Large Horse (1914), which was cast in 1961. The horse feels like a dynamic and powerful interpretation of the animal’s head; sadly Duchamp-Villion also died just after the War.

The New Beginning section includes Number 23 (1948) by Jackson Pollock. Pollock started to ‘drip and pour’ in 1947 and Number 23 appears to be a compact and controlled canvas with a richness of overlapping paint. There is even a moth trapped within the surface of the paint.

Lucio Fontana claims to be the first artist to slash or cut the canvas and Spatial Concepts (1960) is full of holes. The tagli (=cut), hole, slash, gouge, puncturing all evoke pain and sexual symbolism; the Spatial Conceptualists were interested in the other side of the canvas. Herman Nitch created his work with fabric and blood; self-drained and animal sacrifice. Nitch was a member of the extreme Viennese Actionists who worked with blood and bodily fluids. Long before the current Suicide Bombers they took to the streets by performing suicides in the name of their art. Shozo Shimamoto, a Japanese post-holocaust artist, made Holes 1953, from American sweet silver wrapping paper, representing the gift that the USA had given the people of Japan.

In Down to Earth a small number of exhibits suggest that Modern Art is impoverished and call for a return to the use of natural materials i.e. clay and wicker. There is an implied reference to Joseph Beuys maxim Everyone is an Artist. The universal expansion of this idea is explored through The Fibbinacci Series and multiple numerical growth.

If there is one single theme that percolates this exhibition then it is the impact of War on 20th Century Art. Disasters of War (1993) by Jake and Dines Chapman, comprises a model based on a portfolio of etchings by Goya (1746-1819). The small-scale model of a battlefield presents the atrocities of war in minute horror and gore. The Chapman brothers appear to capture all the horror of man to man combat in a way that our televisual experience of the Iraq war did not.

US & THEM

It was most appropriate for a British Sign Language tour to end with Barbara Krugers We will no longer be seen and not heard. Barbara Kruger represents the minority perspective, reminding us that art is a self purifying ritual for artist and viewer. Her work challenges the viewers expectations using image and text. She mixes hand sign, language, gesture and words to enforce or counteract meanings.
The International Modern Art Exhibition at the Tate is free culture at its very best; its good value, especially as it reminds us to think about what separates us from them; sign, language, gender, gesture, words and writing.