Peter Bowyer's Top Ten
1. I have been spending a lot of time in the bicycle friendly city of Utrecht in the Netherlands so my Top Ten list will branch out from here. Barry Flanagan’s monumental bronze sculpture, ‘Thinker on a Rock’ 2002, is a major landmark that I ride past on my bike regularly. A great piece of sculpture, and poignant for me because I knew him for a while in the late seventies when I was in my final year at Central Saint Martins. His oversized green high top sneakers and air of intellectual mischievousness made me think of a red haired Bugs Bunny. A year or so later, when he started to make his bronze rabbit sculptures, they appeared to me as self- portraits. Barry Flanagan,1941-2009.
2. My first side trip out of Utrecht was to Den Haag (The Hague) to see a sound and technology based art festival called ‘TodaysArt’ 2010. Here is a picture of Anke Eckardt documenting her sound sculpture from 2009 called ‘!’. The piece consisted of three speakers suspended in a vertical formation over a pool of black liquid. Like the high diver at a circus, the sound, (a kind of whistle that builds to a crash) travels downwards to the pool and make a big sploosh when it hits, like an invisible rock being dropped into a bucket of black water. Repeat.
3. Amsterdam is a twenty minute train ride from Utrecht. On my first visit to the city I mostly went around to commercial galleries, but also stopped at ‘Bureau’ a satellite space of the Stedelijk Museum. Joep van Liefland had an exhibition called ‘Black Systems’ which focused on relics of outdated technology, like VHS. It made me think how art has historically been made from the discarded tissue of other organisms.
At Ellen de Bruijne Projects there was a show by the two person collective ‘gerlach en koop’ called ‘Not not precise’. An arrangement of quite ordinary things with poetic attachment, and relations to a time the artists spent in Brussels. Beautifully presented objects and marks, ‘minimal gestures’ in an installation, that contained some very distinctive qualities of spatial balancing that I associate with Dutch Modernism.
4. London is not far away, so I headed over (or is it under) to check out the Frieze Art Fair and the multitude of other things going on in the city. I had some unexpected revelations about artists and objects at Tate Britain. I was anxious to see Fiona Banner’s suspended Harrier jet, which I assumed would be a grand critique of modernity. It was an impressive feat of art installation for sure, but it did not transcend itself as an ordinary (hollowed out) found object. A more surprising object at the Tate was a small cubist inspired rug designed by Francis Bacon from 1929. I felt privileged to see it, like finding something that had been hidden, a seemingly accidental object in the continuum of his work, but not a found object.
5. Frieze Art Fair was intense. Out of the hundreds of wonderful displays, the one that really stayed with me was the work of Marlo Pascual. Sculptural pieces from vintage photographs, most were printed as face to plexi and displayed like sculpture, either leaning up against the wall, freestanding or flat on the floor. I liked his direct manner of physically interrupting the two-dimensional.
6. Stuart Shave/Modern Art is one of my favorite spaces when touring around the commercial galleries in London. They had a show by Bojan Sarcevic called ‘Comme des chiens et des vagues’. There were similarities to my own work, in the use of metal and the way of combining two and three dimensions. Simple steel constructions on the floor, re-appear in the accompanying photographs as play things for partially dressed super-models.
7. Marina Abramovic’s two exhibitions at the Lisson Gallery were deeply profound. One gallery housed the older performance works, beautifully re-contextualized as framed photographic pieces with poetic text pages explaining the story behind what you were looking at. Across the street were the more recent works, just as powerful but without the violent overtones. A mature artist totally at peace with herself. In this video she calmly describes her parents tortured marriage, to an understanding donkey.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnSIYGV9dZU
8. The Rijksakademie in Amsterdam is a residency program for artists that does an open house once a year. A mix of painting, video and installation work displayed in the individual studio spaces. I really enjoyed Yaima Carrazana’s ‘Daniel Buren Nail Polish Tutorial’ 2010.
9. The Stedelijk Museum had a large group show called ‘Monumentalism’. Artists working in the Netherlands were invited to address concepts of history and national identity. In the projection ‘Exercise’ 2007, by Lucia Nimcova, the artist filmed older inhabitants of her home town in Slovakia re-enacting some of the exercise routines they were forced to perform in the old communist days. She captured an unexpected form of dance or ritualized movement. The exercises seemed funny, energizing and transformative...lots of laughing on both sides of the screen.
10. Also at the Stedelijk, and bringing to my mind Amy Wilson’s photographic project, ‘Carpets of Las Vegas’; was Job Koelewijn’s ‘Nursery Piece’ 2009. A colored sand painting (with printed stickers and eucalyptus) on pages of text by Spinoza. I share an interest in philosophy and optically complex structures with the artist, and I share a birthday with Baruch Spinoza, born in Amsterdam, November 24th, 1632.
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