Writings, News
Jo Higgins
Routledge publication: Youth Programs in Art ...
Routledge publication: Youth Programs in Art Museums - An International Perspective
Writings
Jo Higgins
Art Guide Australia: Field Notes. A Grassroots ...
Art Guide Australia: Field Notes. A Grassroots Approach to Public Art
Events, Review, News
Jo Higgins
Berlin trip: Connected Audiences Conference and ...
Berlin trip: Connected Audiences Conference and some Art, Art, Art....
Writings, News
Jo Higgins
Art Guide Australia: Home Truths - feature story
Art Guide Australia: Home Truths - feature story
News, Writings
Jo Higgins
Artlink magazine's 'Hyphen' issue published
Artlink magazine's 'Hyphen' issue published

London

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Frida Kahlo at the Victoria & Albert Museum

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Plaster corset, painted and decorated by Frida Kahlo, Museo Frida Kahlo. © Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Archives, Banco de México, Fiduciary of the Trust of the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museums.

I so, so loved seeing Frida Kahlo: Making Herself Up at the V&A when I was in London earlier this month.

Despite finding the haunting soundtrack they bled into every room a bit emotionally manipulative, I felt that the exhibition - full of personal belongings and artefacts exhumed after 50 years from a locked room in her house, La Casa Azul, in Mexico City - powerfully cut through so much of the myth about her, absolutely anchoring her life and work and extraordinarily wonderful, powerful sartorial choices in her body.

The plaster casts and steel braces; her prosthetic leg; her many medicines and the details of her pain – so much pain – brought a real clarity and urgency to her work. To create such visceral, clear-sighted, provocative works despite and because of her pain, I’m just in awe really of her intense female energy. To have her passion and anger and vision, when so many others would have foregone their politics and aesthetic agendas for painful solitude and defeat, I was profoundly moved actually. And I also really, really loved – thinking about her jewellery – how she used it to do and say so many things – about herself and about Mexico. Jewellery really can be this extraordinarily powerful, subtle tool for communication if you wear it right…

There’s so much more to say about Kahlo, her work, the exhibition, the god awful, tasteless shit they were selling in the giftshop (I can’t imagine how the socialist Kahlo would have felt about £45 floral headbands being sold in her name…) but really, for me - it was about that visceral, tangible connection to her pain and her clarity of purpose.

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A round-up: Miles Aldridge, Somerset House; Katharina Fritsch, Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square; Michael Landy, ‘Saints Alive’, National Gallery

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Yesterday I took in a couple of exhibitions in and around central London. What follows is more a collection of immediate responses than any sort of at-length review. Take from them what you will…

First up, Miles Aldridge, ‘I Only Want You to Love Me’, Somerset House, 10 July – 9 September 2013

Miles Aldridge for Vogue Italia

A career retrospective of sorts of the fashion photographer Miles Aldridge, this tight show was bright and shiny and visually stunning with lush, saturated colour and a highly strung sense of pop.

Aldridge’s creative collaborations with Italian Vogue in particular are pretty impressive – he conjures these dark, female domestic narratives and tableaux, working initially from sketches and stories,  which Vogue then dress in high couture. Think super-saturated plasticised Stepford Wives and a compelling, creepy beauty.

 

From here, it was a short walk to Trafalgar Square to see Katharina Fritsch, Hahn/Cock, Fourth Plinth, 25 July 2013 – 2014.

Katharina Fritsch, Hahn/Cock, Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square, 2013-2014

The latest Fourth Plinth commission was unveiled in Trafalgar Square this week, Hahn/Cock by German sculpture Katharina Fritsch. There’s a lot of mileage to be had in this work in the form of cheap gags but as an obvious metaphor for all the other male posturing going on in Trafalgar Square – from statues to street performers – it’s a straightforward enough work to appreciate with enough visual bang to be an effective addition to the Square.

And what with giving Boris Johnson the chance to make a complete, well, cock of himself by not being able to say the word ‘cock’ on its unveiling, well that was just a free gift with commission really.

Lastly, a visit to see Michael Landy, ‘Saints Alive’, National Gallery, 23 May – 24 November 2013

Michael Landy has been at the National Gallery since 2009 as the eighth Rootstein Hopkins Associate Artist. Bringing his interests in assemblage, destruction and the story of things to bear here, Landy’s seven mechanical sculptures bring to life the deaths of several saints including Jerome, Thomas, Francis of Assissi and Catherine of Alexandria who are portrayed elsewhere in the gallery in paintings by artists including Botticelli and Carlo Crivelli.

These larger than life sculptures are animated by the pushing of pedals and pulling of levers and there’s something quite shocking about seeing Saint Jerome thump his fibreglass chest with a heavy rock in the hope of quietening his impure sexual thoughts, never mind Apollonia reliving her torture by yanking her teeth out with a pair of pliers.

There’s a great beauty to the sculptural, mechanical elements of these works and Landy’s preparatory collages, which decorate the walls of the first hall, are just exquisite. It’s well worth a visit.

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Jeremy Deller, Sacrilege, Burgess Park, London

A series of gratuitous photos of the irreverent joy that is jumping on Jeremy Deller’s Sacrilege. This inflatable Stonehenge, a co-commission between Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art and the Mayor of London, is touring the UK and it’s currently in Burgess Park, Peckham.

OTHER POSTS

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Christian Boltanski, Les archives du coeur, Serpentine Gallery, London

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10 July – 8 August 2010

I’ve been long been drawn to the work of French conceptual and installation artist Christian Boltanski. I don’t really remember my first encounter with his practice – it may have been an overwrought art theory lecture on trauma? – but his decades-long practice, which might best be described visually as a sort of mournful poetry in its exploration of memory, absence, loss and suffering, continues to resonate.

While much of Boltanski’s work is rooted in an awareness of the Holocaust and its social and historical consequences, universally his work is about reclaiming the individual experience within History and Memory and the ultimately ephemeral nature of both life and ‘little M’ memory.

The opportunity to contribute to Boltanski’s latest work thus proved irresistible.

In Les archives du coeur, or The Heart Archive, Boltanski returns to the fundamental idea of his 2005 work Le Coeur, where a single light bulb flickered on and off to the rhythm of the artist’s recorded heartbeat, a neat visual expression for the connection between darkness and revelation and life and death. In Les archives, Boltanski re-visits this idea of the heartbeat – as both a function of the artwork and as a metaphorical and physiological testimony to the singularity of each life lived. Began in 2005, Les archives, as an encounter, is an unassuming white office space with the equipment to simply record the heartbeat of each visitor. These heartbeats – named and dated – are then added to an ongoing archive now in excess of one million recordings collected from all over the world. As an experience, Les archives is oddly mechanical and while each visitor takes a CD of their recorded heartbeat away with them, it is not heard during the recording process, which is done with a small electronic stethoscope pressed simply to the chest and plugged in to a computer. The magnitude – and the poetry – of the gesture lies in the vision of this simple 30 second soundtrack to the very essence of your being, being held with so many others in a specially designated archive on the uninhabited island of Ejima in the Sea of Japan. A 30 second soundtrack that says I was here and my existence was real. For such a perfunctory encounter it is a profoundly overwhelming concept.

In January this year the archive was broadcast throughout Boltanski’s epic installation Personnes at the Grand Palais in Paris for Monumenta 2010. Not having experienced the work in this context, with the heartbeats echoing throughout the 13,500 square metre space as visitors navigated their way through the carefully arranged piles of abandoned clothes, the imaginative and emotional possibilities are but endless. If Boltanski’s other works are any measure of things, the resounding effect in this environment was undoubtedly an awareness of the human experience as both tangible and fleeting.

Boltanski has said that he is interested in “what I call ‘little memory’, an emotional memory, an everyday knowledge, the contrary of the Memory with a capital M that is preserved in history books. This little memory, which for me is what makes us unique, is extremely fragile and it disappears with death. This loss of identity, this equalisation in forgetting, is very difficult to accept.” Les archives du coeur is both a material and a philosophical counter to this forgetting, and while it is hugely confronting to realise that in recording life you are ultimately acknowledging death, participating in Boltanski’s work is affirming above and beyond anything else – of the preciousness of life and of the value of each of us as individuals.

This is the first time Les archives du coeur has been shown in the United Kingdom and it is should not be missed.

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I live and work on the unceded lands of the Gadigal and Bidjigal people and acknowledge their unbroken connection to this Country. I pay my deepest respects to their Elders, past and present, because this always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.