Went to see three exhibitions over the last two days, all in the Penwith Peninsular of Cornwall:
Richard Cook at The Exchange, Penzance;
Unfold at Newlyn Art Gallery, Newlyn; and
Peter Lanyon at Tate St. Ives, St.Ives. The three exhibitions are jostling about in my mind as I try to make sense of them, physically framed by my extraneous wanderings in the Cornish landscape and the clever use of windows and scenic viewing points by the galleries to reframe the outside view as inside. All three exhibitions use landscape and nature as subject matter, two of them solo painters and the other a group show.
It seems a monumental task to tie all my thoughts on the past two days into a coherent whole. Landscape is the ultimate frame, but there is a meandering problematic residing within this broad term as I grapple with it in my own experience, thinking and photography. I am going to post a small series of photographs and writing on this thematic.
I felt most troubled by the Newlyn exhibition, troubled in a way that marks an uncomfortable boundary to what I want from my own work. The full title of the show is 'Unfold - A Cape Farewell art exhibition, A cultural response to climate change'. It is a gathering of responses to an expedition that a group of artists, musicians and poets made to the icy north to reflect upon the changing status of our natural world. The impetus to the show is indeed laudable and I was quite excited to see it. I want art works that engage with the political issues of the day, especially when it's about the natural world. I want art works that help. But, despite liking several of the works on show, I was left feeling all my usual doubts about the success of such works to fulfil this extra-aesthetic role. I say extra-aesthetic because the political element to the show's purpose throws an uneasy extra criteria to our judgements: how does this work help us slow down climate change? And what happens to the aesthetic element of works when they are utilised for such a purpose?
On the train on the way down to Penzance I noticed that there were trees on the edge of some fields that had a shape like giant weeds, and I remembered how easy it is for us to justify felling trees accordingly, that the cultural associations and linguistic signs that we use are crucial to treating the planet better. It is in this that art and artists are crucial.
There is the post 'institutional critique' reading of art that gives us works that expose the social and material relations operative to works' realisation within their setting, gallery, landscape. This thinking criticises the aesthetic object for keeping up a facade of ideological illusion of art's autonomy for the bourgeois' claim on taste and political hegemony. I am impressed by this but mourn a means to make art that can retain an element of that spiritual rapture we get from great beauty.
Though how often do we encounter that? And how often is beauty genuinely beauty and not another kind of bewitching?
I sat after looking at the art works in 'the studio' to peruse the various materials that has been put there for our research (on eco art, the exhibition, the expedition etc). All text based, a computer, some books, some written comments on the wall. As I read I wondered how much this show was supposed to be a pedagogic experience, (which I find a little patronising), and how much the format lent on a design orientated aesthetic. Did I come here for information, in what feels like an ever encroachment of the administrative? Am I a purist to wish for my art to be art? (Maybe I am turning into a traditionalist).
It is an interesting question - where is the aesthetic in a specific art sense here? Or maybe it should be, what is the aesthetic here?
As I was leaving I noted that Frieze is doing a religious issue.
This is Daro Montag's, Leafcutter Ant Drawing, Amazon rainforest, Carbon and oil on pre-used paper, 2009. It was created with the feet of tens of ants navigating the two stripes "painting" made by Montag with a carbon-oil solution. The film accompanying the piece was very interesting. Where does the aesthetic reside in this? Perhaps in the visual as a composite of all the different material and social elements that go together to make an art object and to give that art object, externally, internally, meaning - firmly, integrally, immanently to its, the, landscape.
