New space

So I've not written much in November so far. This is because I was moving studios, or rather, expanding my studio space, perhaps a rather insane thing to do in a recession. Here is Gypsy Dave knocking the wall through:



The hole in the wall was already there but had been boarded up. I have also had flu, and art-wise I was invited to make and submit two new pieces for POP100 (www.presentingthetop100.com) which is nothing to do with the Willow Pattern project.

I have still not been to see Runa Islam at Tate Britain, but I'm hoping to do that trip soon, combined with a visit to the new Saatchi space in West London which is showing Julian Schnabel's new "Chinese Paintings". Schnabel, of course, is famous for his huge canvases with broken pottery attached to them from the late 70s. I didn't like them much then, but his new Chinese paintings look interesting...And the main show at the new gallery is Chinese artists.

Here's a stack of Chinese paintings of my own, waiting for me to finish them...

Ai Weiwei - The Irony at The Albion

It was the first time I'd heard of the Albion Gallery in Battersea. It's a HUGE space, housed on the ground floor of a massive development by Norman Foster.

It struck a strange chord, coming across this riverside development having read about Ai Weiwei's protests at the uprooting of Beijing's communities to build the Olympics. I wondered if he was aware of how this is going on in London all the time now - and particularly near the Olympic area. OK, it's not so much whole communities uprooted along the river here, but I bet this new development at Albion Wharf (which the building is named after) replaced something already here that was perfectly fine, thank you, before Norman Foster came along.

I noticed there were some barges moored by the riverside right opposite the gallery and I could see some people standing outside on one of them, but I couldn't see where the access to the barges was. I thought, how nice that there's still some life on the river here, next to this sterile monster. You can just see a mast to the left in this picture...



I didn't hang about long enough to find out but I did notice the Royal College of Art's Sculpture studios (unobtrusive) on the walk back to the car, and fancied there may have once been warehouses on the riverside that housed artists who probably had to bugger off when the new Albion building came along.

Deyan Sudjic writes: "Everything that makes London look like London is being destroyed" in his 2003 Guardian article "Sold down the river".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2003/may/18/urbandesign.communities

Says Sudjic: "Now developers, driven by soaring land values to extract the most out of every inch of riverside, build as close to the river as they can. Whole stretches are now lined with apartment blocks, built to take advantage of the views of the river, but the result is to offer residents spectacular views of all the other ranks of balconies on either side of them, and on the other side of the river, looking back at them. In the process the Thames has been turned into something very much like a very long thin football stadium."

How true indeed. Come to Deptford and see what a mess they are going to make of it here, those money-grabbing bastards. Anyway, so what was here at Battersea before Norman Foster? A little research turned up a not too disimilar story from the one I'd imagined...What's this from 2004? "Foster vision could sink an art gallery"...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article486844.ece

Those barges I saw, could these be the very same? Jonathan Leake's report for The Times says: "The Couper Collection, a charity supported by the Prince of Wales and Ken Livingstone, the London mayor, says it could face the removal of its barges, containing works designed to introduce youngsters from local schools and estates to modern art...For several years, while Couper lived on his barges with his collection, the adjoining land was occupied by a steel-yard and a disused bus garage whose owners paid him little attention."

"Hutchison Whampoa, one of China’s largest multinationals, had acquired the derelict bus garage and asked the architect to replace it with a luxury riverside complex of 200 flats, suites and upmarket shops."

Couper and a neighbouring boat owner had laid claim to ancient mooring rights for his bit of the riverside with the Land Registry. So Whampoa Hutchison and Foster laid counterclaims with the Land Registry and engaged top lawyers Farrer & Co to take on the boat owners, and got the Port of London Authority which controls river moorings to revoke all ancient moorings and make Couper apply for a license.

But this from Guy Adams in The Telegraph, 2002, shows how long this saga had already been going on:

THE dispute between developers loyal to Lord Foster of Thames Bank and a Jubilee art gallery has escalated into a minor diplomatic row.

Last month, I revealed that Hutchison Whampoa, the Chinese developer which is building a Foster-designed block of flats in Battersea, had threatened to cut off the Couper Collection's water and electricity. Last week the head of the Foreign Office's China section, John Virgo, interrupted a meeting between the Couper's trustees and Edmund Ho, Hutchison Whampoa's European boss.

"Mr Virgo telephoned to say Jack Straw was concerned that the matter should be settled before the Golden Jubilee celebrations," says the gallery's chairman, Canon Ivor Smith-Cameron. "I am told that he did not want to see the dispute marring relations between Britain and China."

In 2005, The Observer reported that new residents of the Albion Riverside, including Ruby Wax no less, were complaining to Wandsworth Council about the "ugly" barges and were objecting to the Couper Collection's plans to build a disabled ramp. Alice O'Keeffe reports: "Opponents of the gallery include the art dealer Michael Hue-Williams and the former chairman of Railtrack, Sir Robert Horton."

However, this good news from Tim Walker in The Telegraph in March 2007:

Argy-bargy

Having rejoiced in the title Lord Foster of Thames Bank since he was made a peer by Tony Blair in 1999, the celebrated architect now appears to be taking a proprietorial attitude to the London waterway.

Norman Foster, who is best known for the wobbly Millennium Bridge and the "Erotic Gherkin" in the City, has submitted a dossier to his local council objecting to the presence of an art gallery housed in nine barges in front of one of his most prestigious buildings. The architect claims that the Couper Collection, a charity supported by the Prince of Wales, should be refused permission to improve disabled access because the gallery's "presence on the river is unneccessary".

His company, Foster & Partners, says the barges' presence in front of his gleaming Albion Riverside apartment block in Battersea is "unsightly" and "unacceptable". He suggests that the charity, which introduces disadvantaged local children to art, moves elsewhere. "There is no reason why the Couper Collection should qualify as a river activity," he says.

Happily, Wandsworth council's borough planner has discounted Foster's objections and recommends that the gallery is given planning permission at a meeting this week."

HURRAH! THE PROJECT SURVIVED THE BASTARD MONEY MEN!

Here's the Couper Collection's website:

http://www.coupercollection.org.uk/index.html

And no surprise that The Albion is the new gallery of Michael Hue-Williams Fine Art, he who objected to The Couper Collection. It is an impressive space because of its size. But Adrian Searle reviewed a show there in 2004 and said of the Foster building and the gallery within: "This is architecture as novelty prize marrow."

Oh well, here's a link to the Albion anyway since Hue-Williams' remit is to show artists "who provide a world-wide view of social and cultural issues", and he has championed the marvellous James Turrell, among other artists.
www.albion-gallery.com

Not a very active site considering the money that must be washing about behind it... Oh, but what's this? Maybe his money is all tied up in a lawsuit against artist James Turrell whose work he has been promising to buyers and collecting payments for without Turrell's authority, ie, a proper contract...See this report from James Turrell's lawyer:

http://www.uslaw.com/library/Copyright_Law/Seeing_understand_upset_sorry_jumped_gun.php?item=193623

I wonder what Ai Weiwei would think of all this...perhaps he would say that it's a small matter compared to the actions of the Chinese state...

Ai Weiwei

On the eve of Barack Hussein Obama's election victory on November 4th, I went to Battersea to see the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei at The Albion Gallery.

Whichever way you do it, Deptford to Battersea is not easy on a week day. I drove, it took ages, and when I looked for The Albion at its address in 'Hester Road' I found this is no longer an accessible road, but a pedestrianised walk that leads to a new Norman Foster building by the riverside. I had to park a couple of streets away.

I had come because I'd read about Ai Weiwei in both Time Out and in The Sunday Times (which a friend had given me because of the feature on Damien Hirst's wife in the mag section)...Waldemar Januszczak (formerly of The Guardian) wrote the review and you may still find it here:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article5050070.ece

Ai Weiwei, a Chinese dissident, was the original artistic consultant to Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium, which was designed by Herzog & de Meuron (who commissioned him, rather than the Chinese government), architects of Tate Modern and Deptford's very own Laban Centre. Despite (or in spite of) his role in the design, Ai Weiwei has continued to protest about the destruction that was being visited upon Beijing by the Olympics — the communities that were bulldozed and the 'undesirables' who were removed from the area - a familiar background story, perhaps, to any Olympic city story...

I went because I saw a picture of the work in Time Out that included blue and white porcelain. The large scale work on show at Albion featured huge structures made of ricketty scaffolds of floor-to-ceiling bamboo (similar to that which would have been used as scaffolding in the construction of the Birds Nest) arranged at tottering angles - in one room with bamboo chairs and stools added to the bamboo structure at intersections, and in another room bamboo poles are capped at either end by blue & white porcelain urns.

Ai Weiwei re-appropriates ancient cultural icons into contemporary artforms. Here's another link:

http://truthinart.wordpress.com/2008/11/04/ai-weiwei-in-itself-to-become-the-other/

His own site strangely doesn't work very well, so to get an idea of his work it's best to do a Google Image search. He also showed in Sydney Australia earlier this year at Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and there's a good piece about him on their site:

http://www.sherman-scaf.org.au/exhibitions/ai_weiwei_under_construction1/

Another Portuguese connection

I began to make China Blues soon after a week's holiday in Portugal with my family. Just before the holiday I had got the go ahead from Deptford X that I was to be included in the festival. We stayed in self catering accommodation on the outskirts of Porto, in the grounds of a family estate. The family business was wedding banquets and the owners (who were grandparents) lived on the estate and tended the garden which was full of fruit and vegetables. On our penultimate day, they invited us to have lunch with them and the rest of the family and we had a marvellous feast followed by a tour of the banqueting rooms. It turned out, to my surprise, that our hostess, Maria, was an enthusiastic collector of Willow Pattern. She and her husband Antonio had travelled quite a lot and had been to Macao, and also to England and the Midlands potteries. The china they used for the wedding banquets wasn't Willow Pattern but featured the family crest and had been ordered from Royal Staffordshire. Maria had also been a highly regarded chef and had cooked for British royalty and the president of Brazil on state visits to Porto. Anyway, she had an enormous collection of blue and white, and most of it was Willow. It was an interesting co-incidence.

A Portuguese Connection

Cilda Meireles is a Brazilian artist showing at Tate Modern until January 11th 2009. It is a retrospective of his career and there are eight large scale installations...his work is described as "powerful and compelling", "elegant", "possessing clarity and mystery, science and poetry".

It's all that and political too. And breathtakingly beautiful.
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/cildomeireles/about.shtm

I mention him on this blog because of one of the pieces "Through" (or "Atraves") which can be seen on this page (click on the picture to see more of the piece)...
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/cildomeireles/events.shtm
As you walk through the installation in a maze of see-through walls made of different materials (such as plastic shower curtains, wire fencing, glass fishtanks - with see-through fish!) you step on panes of glass laid over already broken glass. You can feel the glass shattering at its weakest points under your feet, making a delicious crunching sound. It's a powerful feeling, being allowed to do this in a "don't touch" sort of place. It's especially liberating if you've just seen the Rothko treasures on the same floor (although in a completely different way he was also dealing with boundaries). The staff periodically go round with a brush and sweep up tiny shards that have fallen from visitor's shoes.

It is about being able to pass through prohibitions and barriers. Meireles says that by stepping on the glass (and breaking it) you are freeing yourself - "metaphorically breaking each piece of debris, each prohibition or obstacle"...

I was thinking about my recent rather small (and by no means comparable) attempt at an installation, China Blues. When I first began to make the piece, I was troubled by it being bound in the round shape. I had taken for granted the constructed and distorted view of the eastern hemisphere and I wanted it to bleed out. But since there were to be visitors and, especially, an Open Day with lots of children crashing around - and some people were already not seeing the piece and walking straight into it - it became apparent that I would need to mark the edges very strongly, not least because should anyone trip over it they might cut themselves quite badly. So I collected white chalk pebbles from the beach at Greenwich and laid them on the perimeter.

As that decision was in the making I was also thinking that drawing the countries in the gravel was too literal and that I should just fill in the whole circle with the pottery shards - and invite people to walk on the piece. What a fun interactive experience it would be! But then the piece was already advertised as "18th century pottery assembled in the shape of the Eastern hemisphere" and it also had to last 4 weeks for the duration of the festival...

So, the possibilities were there for a completely different piece. I thought perhaps I would remove some of the gravel land masses as the weeks wore on - symbolic of the rising seas - but which country first? And this would also mean finding more pottery to fill in the encroaching sea areas and that would be lots more work...

I also regretted that South America was absent from my "world in pieces", not that this continent was part of the history I was describing, but for the Portuguese connection - as the first Europeans to find and trade with the East. Oh well, never mind.

I also thought about having a final event in which I could invite people to come and walk on the piece, but there was another idea on the cards which was, far from destroying it, to keep it in place at Creekside Centre. Even as the piece was being made, plantlife was starting to grow through the gravel. Nick Bertrand and myself both liked the idea of seeing what else might sprout through given time...a sort of greening of the land...

Birds Eye View

The first Western balloon flight was in 1783, 25 minutes from Versailles to Paris. The first international flight was in 1785, Dover to Calais in two hours. By this time the fashion for chinoiserie was fading, and yet the Willow Pattern was born and became hugely popular. David Richard Quintner in "Willow! Solving the Mystery of our 200 Year Love Affair with the Willow Pattern" writes:

"Technically, the Willow Pattern design is formed from a series of receding horizontal planes in which, as a rule, the nearest objects to the viewer are shown the largest, and the farthest smallest. Nothing...to challenge European art norms..."

And no exception to ancient Chinese codes for landscape painting. Except for the birds."It is in the way the pair of birds suddenly appears as a design element that we can find the most significant clue to the psychological mind-shift that occurred in western Europe in the 18th century...

"The plate design's aerial view...offered highly charged elements which were the talk-of-the-town...Man and avian nature face to face, eye to eye...The Caughley design...might well have deliberately marked the success of manned ballooning.

"The success of ballooning gave humankind a new perspective on the world; it changed the nature of art's vision; it changed the essence of mapmaking and of concepts of waging war; it changed the way Europeans saw themselves and their symbols."

But how come the Chinese developed the aerial view, Quintner asks, and it is here he speculates on the idea of the Chinese having invented ballooning in the 14th century. After all they had already invented gunpowder in the 9th century, and rockets originated and were developed between 1150 and 1250 AD, and by 1350 multi-stage rockets were actually designed and used...

He also quotes from Chinese Art by William Willetts:

"In China (there is) the 'law of three sections'...each plane is drawn as though seen from the same angle of vision. Buildings and other objects in the middle distance and background, which should show a foreshortening proportional to their height above the horizon, are drawn as though they were at ground level. There are, in fact, three separate horizons...Separate objects are drawn as though the eye were free to vary the horizontal direction along which it looks into the depth of the picture...As a convention of primitive landscape, the bird's eye view may have been suggested by early experiments in map making."

Excerpts from Willow! by kind permission of the publishers: General Store Publishing House, Ontario, Canada. ISBN 1-896182-78-X www.gsph.com

Balloon image: 'Utopian flying machines of the previous century', printed in Paris c.1890-1900. More images: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Early_flight_02561u_(2).jpg

Deptford Willow Pattern

Here I have all the elements except the three people crossing the bridge. Plus a couple of things that don't exist yet (but are being built, credit crunch or not).

Actually I have two bridges (the Ha'Penny Hatch footbridge and the DLR) across the creek instead of just one (when there are in reality also two road bridges). The Mandarin's house is a jumble of new and old buildings; the newer ones are gated communities. The island is the Isle of Dogs and Canary Wharf. The two skyscraper images are taken from the developer's hoardings at "Creekside Village" and "Greenwich Reach", their height determined by the cranes currently in place. Yes, they really will be that tall. The building on the left has an exaggerated perspective because it will have a triangular base, but this is how the developer wants it to be seen...terrorising the locals. This same developer has had his architects draw up plans for the whole of the area, featuring endless repetitions of this building all the way down my road. Dubai on my doorstep. Naturally, the birds are vultures.

I am still working on this collage...In his book Willow! David Richard Quintner suggests the Willow image, based as it is on elements of Chinese design, takes one vital aspect from the Chinese, that of non-Western perspective. It is an aerial view. Quintner speculates that the Chinese invented the hot-air balloon well before the French (a hot-air balloon featured strongly in the Beijing Olympic opening ceremony this year, without comment from the BBC team covering the event)...either way, ballooning was the technological advance of its day when the Willow Pattern was introduced...

Creek Willow

This is a willow growing in Deptford Creek. Now all I need is a bridge, a river, an island, a fenced-in property, two birds...

Deptford X has finished

Great to have been involved in this secret backwater of a festival, which finished last Sunday. Didn't get to see everything as I had to sit with my piece, but I managed to get pix of the following (sorry, they're not particularly Willow Pattern related and nor are they very good pix!):


Deepa Chudasama's BINDI DRAWING on the arches at Ha'Penny Hatch (she worked on two arches but I only have a pic of one arch)..."examining the historical tradition of mark-making on surroundings and bodies"...


Katie Gilman's 10,597..."the distance in miles between Deptford and Tasmania - the birthplace of the artist and final destination of convict boats that sailed from Deptford in the early to mid 19th century...drawing on the history of rope making..."


Fran Cottell's GOLDEN BALLS, which were dotted around Deptford in all sorts of unexpected places...referencing architectural domes...(turns out I wasn't the only one manically spray painting balls this September)...



Helen Barff's TWO BOATS, CREEKSIDE...

Also, there was Leila Galloway's HOLD, Patrick Semple's MEMORIAL TO THE UNKNOWN SHOPPER, and a show by Patrick, Bea Denton & Paul Marks in Paul's new space ARCH, a great film by Anita McKeown (www.deptford45s.com) and some guerilla art from Rachel Hale. Rachel was not included in the programme, but her POLITE SIGNS raised a chuckle from everyone who came across them...



Also, I really enjoyed Ben Cummins' PAVEMENT SONNETS, DEPTFORD SCARS, an audio-walk around Deptford which narrates the history of the area. He missed out on talking about the art one might see on the way, but nevermind. Presumably it is still available for download at the Deptford X website. www.deptfordx.org

Lastly, on the third Sunday of the festival, Creekside Centre ran a Walk Up The Creek, late in the afternoon, and Helen Barff came to take pictures of her boat and say a few words about her piece. Here we are setting off down to the creek.



If you fancy a walk up a creek, go to their website and check for dates and times.
www.creeksidecentre.org.uk

Kochi

Picture courtesy:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Chinese_porcelain_tiles,_Cochin_synagogue.jpg

18th Century hand painted porcelain tiles from Canton, on the floor of the Jewish synagogue in Cochin, Kerala.

These are referred to in Salman Rushdie's 'The Moor's Last Sigh'...

"Scene after blue scene passed before her eyes. There were tumultuous marketplaces and crenellated fortress-palaces and fields under cultivation and thieves in jail, there were high, toothy mountains and great fish in the sea. Pleasure gardens were laid out in blue, and blue-bloody battles were grimly fought; blue horsemen pranced beneath lamplit windows and blue-masked ladies swooned in arbours..."

An essay by Timothy Weiss "At the End of East/West: Myth in Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh" examines the novelist's 'cultural hybridity' and explores ideas about narrative and myth-making.
http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v4i2/WEISS.HTM
"The vignette of the Cantonese tiles is one among numerous tales in miniature that illustrate the creative, mythmaking process of the novel as a whole. 'In the end, stories are what's left of us, we are no more than the few tales that persist,' muses the dying Moor..."