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London walks - Arte Povero

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

So back to our London walks Art wander in the Energy and Process wing of Tate Modern.

Arte Povero literally translates as Poor Art.

This doesn’t relate in anyway to the quality of the art that these Italian artists created but rather echoes their core belief that any object or material, no matter how ordinary, how mundane, how everyday, how poor, could and should be used in the creation of an art work.

With Pistoletto’s Venus of the Rags we have a perfect example of this.

Ostensibly it shows a figure of Venus, the Roman goddess of love, facing a pile of rags.

It contrasts and combines classical sculpture, as represented by the white statue of Venus, with the modern consumer driven throwaway age.

Interestingly, the statue that Pistoletto used in the original work was very much an emblem of the modern age of mass production for he purchased her from the ornament department of a roadside garden centre!

The rags used in the original 1967 work actually came from Pistoletto’s own studio.

Michaelangelo Pistoletto was known for his Mirror Paintings which, as the name suggests, consisted of paintings painted onto the shiny surfaces of mirrors.

The rags that he used in the original Venus of the Rags were in fact left over rags that were lying around after he had used them to polish the surfaces of the mirrors before painting them.

So having established how the work came to be created and with what, let us now turn our attention to what exactly it is about, what does it mean?

We will begin our analysis of the work in our next blog. In the meantime you can see Tate Modern in all its soaring glory on several of our London walks that wend their way along the banks of the River Thames.

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London, Trees, Walks and Art.

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009

Trees feature a great deal in our various London walks. For example on the Secret City Walk we point out a tree on Cheapside, close to St. Paul’s Cathedral, that the poet William Wordsworth actually wrote a poem about.

But to return to our little wanderings inside the Energy and Process wing at Tate Modern, we can even point out a tree in there and link it to our other London Walking Tours.

The tree in question is a work called Tree of 12 meters created in the early 1980’s by the Italian artist Giuseppe Penone.

It takes a while to “get” this sculpture. At first glance you appear to be staring at two very stark almost skeletal trees that appear to be almost petrified.

You could be forgiven for thinking that you are just looking at two dead trees that someone has stood upright and decided to call them art.

If that is what Penone has done then it could, of course, be a follow on to Marcel Duchamp’s breakthrough in the early 20th century when he bought a urinal displayed it in an art gallery making the belief that if he as an artist took an everyday object, no matter how mundane or basic, and displayed it in an art gallery then it became a work of art.

So, if Penone takes two dead trees and displays them in an art gallery setting, then they too become art.

And indeed, that would be exactly what the Arte Poverta movement would revel in.  An ordinary, everyday object that is used by an artist to create a work of art.

Except, Tree of 12 metres is not any every day object, it is in fact a carefully and skillfully carved work that has been created using one of the oldest forms of sculpture - carving.

We’ll return to this theme in tomorrow’s blog as our Haunted London walk is about to take place.

In the meantime, don’t forget that we have a whole  host of wonderul London walks that will show you places that you would never dream still existed.

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Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Artist

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009

London is a a City of Art and our Walks include numerous wonderful places where works of art can be seen. Indeed, we have been known to refer to our London walks as Walks of Art!

Last night, before we were called away to do a little bit of scary art of our own on the London Ghost Walks, we started telling you a little bit about a painting by Nikki de Saint Phalle, which can be seen in the Energy and Process wing of Tate Modern.

We explained how, at first, the picture, one of her Shooting Paintings, seems like a series of coloured streaks running down a plaster.

But we ended by telling you how Nikki de Saint Phalle actually made chance itself the main creator of the painting. Here’s how.

She would begin with a wooden base board which she would lay down flat on a surface.  This done she would fill plastic bags with different colours of liquid paint.

Having done this she would then cover everything with plaster so that she had a pristine white, rough mound of plaster piled against the background of the board.

She would wait for it to dry and then would be ready to “create” the painting.

The board would be raised upright and Nikki would then take a .22 rifle and shoot at the plaster.

The bullets would penetrate the plaster and would then rupture the plastic bags beneath causing the paint to run down the surface of the plaster in streaks of colour that mixed, mingled and pooled together.

Thus the element of chance effectively became the means by which the painting was created.

It was a revolutionary way to create a painting since it brought a new realism into art and, as a result, Nikki de Saint Phalle became famous and travelled all over the world to stage her Shooting Paintings.

The one you’re looking at in Energy and Process was created on the stage of the American Embassy in Paris on the evening of June 20th 1961.

Two American artists, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, fired the bullets at the plaster and created what you see before you. So this could be said to be a collaboration between de Saint Phalle and these two other artists.

Shortly after this was created Nikki de Saint Phalle was introduced by Marcel Duchamp to Salvador Dali, both of whose works we will cover in a later post.

However, Nikki de Saint Phalle stopped creating her Shooting Pictures in 1963 saying that she had become addicted to shooting “like one becomes addicted to a drug.”

We will continue our tour of the art inside Tate Modern later today with a look at the central hub of Energy and Process as we look at Arte Povera itself.

You can, if you wish,take a look at our various London walks or tonight you can join us on one of our Old City of London Ghost Walks.

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London Art Walks - Tate Modern

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

In a previous post we began looking at a building that is passed on many of our south London walks, Tate Modern. Today we look at one of the paintings on display inside Tate Modern.

On level five you will find the gallery Energy and Process. The Central Hub of this gallery is dedicated to the Arte Povera Movement, an Italian Art movement of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.

The late sixties was a period of great social upheaval, not just in Italy but also across the rest of Europe and in North America.

Artists began to attack the status quo of government, industry and culture. They started to question whether art as a private expression of the individual could still exist ethically in their society.

In Italy a group of artists began using materials that were not readily associated with art - every day objects such as industrial beams, metal,  rags and even statutory purchased from garden centres.

The movement became known as Arte Povera, or Poor Art and we’ll look at the central hub of this is a later London Walking Tours posting.

However, to reach the hub of the Energy and Process wing you must first enter the dialogue room where a very strange looking painting confronts you.

The painting is called Dynamic Suprematism and it was painted in 1915 or 1916 by the Russian Artist Kasimir Malevich.

One of the things that we stress time and again on our London walks is the importance of looking, and this applies particularly with some of the art in Tate Modern.

At first glance Dynamic Suprematism looks like a series of meaningless and jumbled shapes. Triangles, rectangles, cones and semi-circles lean against each other. They push and pull against each other, or else they balance precariously on top of each other.

But what Malevich wants us to look at the painting as a spiritual experience and in so doing to look into the void,  to see across the abyss and, perhaps, even glimpse, eternity itself.

For what Malevich has tried to do with Dynamic Suprematism is to replace the traditional high art and religious iconography of pre revolution Russia with a geometric simplicity that does away with with the need for the artist to depict the external world. He wants the artist to, as Malevich  himself put it, “swim in a white free abyss” and, in so doing, to presented the viewer with a suggestion of the third dimension.

In our later post we will look at what Malevich is trying to portray with Dynamic Suprematism, meanwhile why not join one of our London walks that take in the wonderful Industrial Cathedral that is Tate Modern?

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