Thursday 12 August 2010

Wednesday 4 August 2010

Exhibitions 2

Enjoyed Wolfgang Tillmans at The Serpentine

Excited by Newspeak: British Art Now at The Saatchi Gallery

Still letting the thought of 'assemblage' float around. Both shows seemed to show an aesthetic of assemblage - the composition/juxtaposition/assemblage of different registers of meaning within one piece or installation.

Tillmans is all photography, but the images show great variety of subject matter and aim, and the installation is one of an experience reflected within the architecture of the gallery space. The experience conveyed is multi-faceted and complex.

The British Art Now exhibition is dominated by assemblages, both in the materiality e.g. sculptures by Daniel Silver, made from mixed materials - 'high' and 'low' materials in one, fabric and stone, with found or reclaimed wood - all seemingly retaining their own individual histories as a material, producing interesting new conglomerates that don't subsume these different (semiotically understood) codes into one new thing but a thing with its internal differences intact.


Daniel Silver, Untitled, 2010

The painting of the show shows a similar spirit of democracy, where different traditions are deployed to subvert each other in a mutual spirit of ironic re-invigoration (or mutual destruction).


Ged Quinn, The Ghost Of A Mountain, 2005


Alastair MacKinven, Et Sick In Infinitum, 2008