ROOM London, site and subject of Tom Wolseley’s excellent short film “House”.

One object of an art trawl is to discover talented artists I’ve never come across before, and on a day-long West End jaunt I’ve just found two whose installations struck me as outstanding. They weren’t showing at established big hitters like Pace, David Zwirner and Michael Werner (where I spotted Luc Tuymans striding handsomely down the stairs, having perhaps popped round from his own swish display at Zwirner to see the Peter Doig show). No, the artists in question were at younger, smaller spaces – the kind that used to entail a trip to the East End, but which have now decisively re-congregated around Mayfair and Fitzrovia. They were Tom Wolseley at ROOM London, and Cipriano Martinez at Maddox Arts, and though their work couldn’t look more different, both are concerned with urban landscapes, and the places we inhabit and abandon. Below, I discuss Tom Wolseley.

Tom Wolseley’s “House” (2012), projected onto his artfully distressed wall.

ROOM London’s inaugural group show “Another Room” features six artists “responding to the space”, as artists are wont to do. The space responded to here is 30 Manchester Street in Marylebone, a grand old Georgian house whose previous incarnation appears to have been as a warren of cheaply-converted flats. It is now gutted and partly burnt out (not surprising seeing the archaeological dig of fuseboxes in the hall) – the kind of edgily evocative interior more usually associated with the East End, and so fascinating to see turned over to art projects in glossy West One. It’s a natural habitat for the participants’ installations of found objects, swirly carpet, superannuated audiovisual equipment and the like, with Christie Brown’s baleful ceramic figurines and Juliette Losq’s oddly vaginal hearth installation of delicate drawings having particular impact on their sites. However it’s always hard to form an impression of unfamiliar artists’ work in a small group show, so dallying through the lugubrious gloom I was excited to find, in the far basement room, a genuinely standout standalone piece: “House”, a narrated short film by Tom Wolseley.

At first I thought the measured, calmingly rhythmic commentary was Will Self declaiming one of his psychogeographical tracts, such was its verbal and vocal quality; but it proved to be both written and read by the artist, whose words alone are compelling enough to engage attention. This is necessary, as the film at first looks stalled – just a frame of white light shivering on the flaking wall while the narrator recounts strange architectural dreams he’s had in his flat above an old pub in London’s Elephant and Castle (an area vastly less picturesque than its name suggests).

Just as the viewer is losing patience, a flicker of movement animates the scene, and the camera starts to pull back, gradually framing a wide shot of the very same wall it is projected onto: thus allowing the realisation that the patch of light at the start was actually a shot of the exact area it was illuminating. In a self-reflexive double whammy, the artist at this point admits that the wall’s charmingly peeling surface is just a bit of DIY distressing created to add visual interest, one of several tips for successful tracking shots suggested by a filmmaker mate.

As the camera continues to slide gracefully backwards, it reveals not just the room around it, but the wonky hand-built rails it runs along to create the tracking shot, while the artist tells a colourful tale of reclaiming his raw materials from dodgy geezers at the ex-Olympics site. Eventually the camera retreats from the room entirely, passing through further empty chambers and a long corridor leading to the basement’s front door, all the while focusing unwaveringly on the increasingly distant spot it will later be projected upon.

Viewing “House” from the end of the corridor, which the camera gradually retreats down.

There’s little to see as the building has been virtually stripped bare, but Wolseley’s fluent musings mine every shabby detail for significance, from the 1980s-style repro glass doors he hates, to the crummy Ikea bedsitland spotlights, to the narrow wood-shelved pantry that’s never been modernised, lurking like a capsule of history beneath the streets of London. All this is threaded with memories of his own unconventional childhood home in a complex of freezing, decaying buildings, and his adult attempts to refurbish the aforementioned pub-flat in a controversially gentrifying part of South London.

Turning one’s head back to look at the real corridor he’s filming from, it’s clear that the camera will soon hit the basement’s front door, and tension mounts as we wait to learn how the artist will conclude his shaggy house story upon reaching it. Pleasingly, he ends just as deftly as he began, via a passage in the passageway about the societal meaning of our homes past and present, how that relates to the very building under examination, and out beyond to the state of the nation today. Finally he backs up against the front door, the light filters in gently as it opens a crack, and the film draws to a halt.

Outside view of the shabby basement housing “House”, and the front door where the film ends.

Thus in just a few engrossing metres and minutes, this elegant polemic has traversed a span of 40 years and addressed the UK’s slow, inexorable glide from socialism to selfishness, from egalitarianism to inequality, from bust to boom and back again. And all without needing to utter the all-too-obvious word a fellow viewer felt compelled to spit out at the end of it: “Thatcher”.

With or without its loaded site, Tom Wolseley’s film is a clever and considered tour de force which wouldn’t have looked out of place at Documanta 13, and it made me want to see and hear much more of his work – not to mention what’s coming next at this atmospheric West End venue.

Tom Wolseley, “Another Room”, 10 October – 9 December 2012
ROOM London, 30 Manchester Street, London W1U 7LQ (map)
www.roomartspace.co.uk, www.tomwolseley.com, www.architrope.com

Another Thatcher reference at ROOM: Falklands-era Daily Mail on the stairs, part of an installation by Mimi Joung.

ROOM’s hall, with installation by Charlie Billingham, another artist in the six-person exhibition “Another Room”.

Susan Philipsz: 
“Study for Strings”
Hauptbahnhof

• Kassel’s massive, superannuated central train station is an atmospheric place: a mix of 19th and 20th century architecture thanks to the RAF’s wartime visits, it is nowadays bombed only by pigeons (so watch for plummeting guano). A bit remains smart and is still used for trains, while the rest crumbles into weedy decay or is repurposed as creative spaces. At the end of platform 13, where unwilling passengers once departed for the concentration camps, a ghostly piece of music plays over the tannoy every 15 minutes: a snippet of the modernist “Study for Strings” by Paval Haas, a local Jewish composer. From this very station he was deported to Terezín, where in 1943 he wrote this bleak chamber piece; a year later he died in the gas chambers, though the music clearly survived. There’s always the thorny question of whether it’s possible to make art about the Holocaust, but Philipsz didn’t create this, she’s just resurrecting and re-presenting it. The music’s emotive power is magnified by platform 13’s mountain-framed desolation, its tangle of black power lines stretching hazily away beneath bomb-amputated church spires and a skeletal, watchtower-like phone mast. Straining to hear the frail music, it comes as a physical jolt when a real tannoy message barks over it, a real train pulls in, and real Germans stream out – all unaware, no doubt, of the scratchy music at the disused end of the platform, and how it’s altered the perceptions of a small group of listeners loitering uncomfortably there.

Video clip (disappointingly static, but at least a train appears at the end):

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller:
“Alter Bahnhof Video Walk”
Hauptbahnhof
“Forest (for a thousand years)”
Karlsaue Park

• The highlight of my visit was undoubtedly this Canadian duo’s half hour video walk through the most resonant venue, Kassel’s old Hauptbahnhof. Holding an iPod’s hi-res little screen before you, with headphones enveloping you in utterly convincing Binaural sound, you are guided through the station by a narrated film, meshing sensitively together memories of the speaker, the building, and their relationship to the Holocaust. Weaving through the real station, seen only as a frame around the unnervingly immersive video, you start to believe the filmed figures – clattering travellers suddenly dropping their wheelie suitcases, dancers grappling in a vaulted hall – are real, and treat the real people as ghosts. If you’re walking round with a companion whose digital visions are slightly ahead of yours, as I was, it’s even more disturbing. Is this what the onset of schizophrenia feels like, I wondered at one point – or is it that I haven’t played enough video games? It’s either cognitive dissonance in action, or how we’ll all interact in future.

Equally gripping was the Cardiff & Miller’s sound installation in a dell in the park, for which you don’t even need a ticket. A compilation of noises you would and wouldn’t want to hear in such a setting, it runs the gamut from birdsong, domestic clitter-clatter and a heavenly choir to stormy thrashing, charging horses and a blistering bombing raid. Threatening at first to be a simplistic play on life and death, it rapidly develops into something more complex and strange, though I never worked out quite what they were driving at. What’s really compelling is the superb sound quality and the bosky setting (possibly more challenging on a rainy day) – true 3D surround-sound in nature, which as with the Hauptbahnhof video walk, tricks the brain into treating as real what’s not really there. I’ve never been a fan of the pair’s work before, finding its too-careful construction rather twee and laboured, but I’ll pay more attention in future.

Video clip (Video Walk):

Video clip (Forest):

Haegue Yang:
“Approaching: Choreography Engineered in Never-Past Tense”
Hauptbahnhof

• Being a keen follower of this Seoul artist’s immersive domestic environments, I knew broadly what to expect: a derelict platform with an installation of venetian blinds. Going by her previous atmospheric work, I was looking forward to a fragile confusion of ricketty multicolour kitchen blinds, perhaps blown by electric fans and wafting with the smells of past-their-sell-by-date oriental foodstuffs. What I found was altogether darker, and cleverly apt for the space. Hanging above the shadowy tracks were serried ranks of sombre blinds of the kind more normally seen in minimalist yuppie-dromes, neatly arranged up and down the platform, uniform in their metallic black perforated slats and beige cording, which gleamed like golden epaulettes in the broken sunlight. The only noise was an intermittent snap and whirr, as hidden mechanisms caused batches of blinds to smoothly open and close, rise and fall, reveal and conceal, in a glacial string-driven choreography. It was fast and slow at the same time: movements always seemed to start where you weren’t looking, so alerted by another snap and whirr, you’d whirr your head too, to be confronted by a bank of blinds half way through some stately movement. The evocations and contradictions were obvious but effective: hide and show, domesticity versus office, drilling as dancing, public display masking hidden control, veiling used for modesty or temptation, with even a hint of monkish garb complicating the military implications of the cappuccino colourway. Aaaaah, cappuccino. Another point in favour of this installation is that it’s next to the cafe.

Video clip (sadly non-moving):

Allora & Calzadilla:
“Raptor’s Rapture”
Weinberg Bunker

• Screened in a cave-like bunker, and requiring viewers to don ill-fitting white hard hats to view it, this stupidly-named film’s venue is presumably a somewhat literal reference to archaeological digs. Some musically-expert friends found the whole experience uncontrollably hilarious, which I can understand, but I enjoyed this odd little chamber piece, and not just because I was accompanied by a prehistorian. In a glossily filmed scenario reminiscent of an earnest New Romantic music video, a woman struggles to blow a stringy bone pipe, watched over by a huffy, fluffy vulture. The woman is a flautist allegedly expert in prehistoric musical instruments, the prehistoric bone pipe is one of the earliest such ever found, and the bird is – supposedly – a descendent of the provider of the bone. The flautist (whose bona fides my cynical musical friends seriously questioned) looks utterly perplexed by the instrument; she treats it like a puzzle, tapping it, puffing over the finger holes, stuffing gunk in the end, holding it like a flute, and doing everything except giving it a good old parp. Her experimental approaches make only terrible sounds as she goes redder in the face and the tension and embarrassment grow, till at one climactic point she does get a few harmonious notes from it. But who’s to say the pipe ever worked? Maybe it was broken, maybe it was a reject, maybe an Amazonian tribesperson would have had more luck. It’s a fascinating look at how we interpret such mute relics, though the distinctly non-rapturous raptor doesn’t add much. My prehistorian companion wasn’t impressed either, so maybe I’m the only person who found enlightenment in the film’s ear-splitting absurdity.

Video clip (Raptor’s Rapture appears half way through):

Ryan Gander:
“I Need Some Meaning I Can Memorise (The Invisible Pull)”
Friedericianum

• I know Gander is a “good thing”, a generous, public-spirited fellow who helps other artists along, but I never really get his work. This, however, I did get: a mildly chilly blast of air, as if from a windfarm-scaled Dyson fan, rushing softly and urgently through the near-empty ground floor of Documenta’s large primary venue. On a basic human level, this works on two counts. If it’s hot and humid weather (likely in high summer in central Germany), then it’s nice to cool down. And if you’ve already been trawling round art-stuffed venues for a couple of weary days, as I had, then it’s a massive relief to find two whole display halls with nothing to do in them but stand and shoot the breeze. On an art level it also works, and not just – as the curator has stated – as Documenta’s austere anti-commercial riposte to glitzy art market billionaire-fairs such as Art Basel and Frieze. Surely, in arse-obsessed Germany, Gander saw a baser play on the relationship between Documenta and wind: a giant fart in the face of the assembled art intelligentsia’s overwrought (and often pseudo) intellectualism. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part.

Video clip (not much happening, you had to be there):

Tacita Dean’s Documenta installation.

• Contents

Documenta 13 is massive, so although I’ve tried to keep this concise, it’s still long. Therefore I’ve broken it into chunks, which you can jump to from here.
• Documenta overview
• Main venue highlights: Hauptbahnhof | Fridericianum | Ex-Elisabeth Hospital | Ottoneum & Orangerie | Documenta-Halle | Karlsaue park | Neue Galerie
• Off-site shows overview
• Königsplatz area must-sees: C&A, Tacita Dean, Youth Library, Walid Raad
• Brüder-Grimm-Platz area must-sees: Aschrott Fountain, City Hall Library, Huguenot House, Paul Chan, Francis Alÿs, Gerard Byrne, Brüder-Grimm Museum, Mundo Kassel, Weinberg Bunker, Weinberg Terrace, Funeral Museum
• Practicalities: tickets, photography, getting around, refreshments

• Documenta 13 overview

A tense Antony Gormley sculpture in front of the bombed church where JS Bach once played.

I’ve just come back from what, in an annoying “caps-lock stuck” logo, is styled dOCUMENTA (13), but which I shall call Documenta 13. This five-yearly art fest, which launched in 1955, is the second-most revered non-selling art world event after the bi-yearly Venice Biennale. That’s an art world love-in I’ve learnt to enjoy too, and which despite its randomness always sets up themes that resonate through the real world’s art institutions over the next two years.

Central Kassel – not very beautiful, even through a wine glass.

So I had high hopes for my first Documenta, and didn’t know what to expect at all, geographically or artistically. The town proved to be small and pleasant but unremarkable, massively bombed in WWII and thoughtfully rebuilt with expensive materials in the decade after (the one that also spawned Documenta), rendering it a museum of fine 1950s staircases – more akin to Coventry than Venice.

A 1950s staircase in Untere Karlsstr. 14, home to Walid Raad et al.

The art was generally less remarkable than Venice’s too, and pretty gruelling to get around in Kassel’s summer climate of alternately beating sun and rain, though it already seems to be improving in my memory. Given the high-flown and impenetrable prose that surrounds it, I suspect Documenta is largely aimed at curators, academics and artists, ie those in the biz who gain value from this veneer of erudition, and use such worthy jamborees as tribal get-togethers (centred on the artist-filled Huguenot House in Kassel, no doubt).

And another 1950s staircase, this in the Youth Library “appropriated” by Matias Faldbakken. Loving the mosaic pilotis.

Curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev says this Documenta is themed around four incomprehensible art-speak “conditions”, eg “I dream, I am the dreaming subject of anticipation”, but many straightforwardly interleaving themes become evident as you walk around, eg wind, wind instruments, music, dancing, books, mountains, the moon, time measurement, trees, sheds, bunkers, the Holocaust, Afghanistan, archives and 1950s buildings (this last probably by necessity rather than design).

Help! I’m trapped in a 1950s staircase!

So what is the “amateur” art visitor to make of it? I have a few friends going next week, and they asked for my tips. Even cutting it short it’s a frighteningly long list, but here’s the blob-point version. There were a few works I really did like, so I’ll write about those at more length in a follow-up entry.

• Main venues

There are a few major venues, mainly commandeered museums but also a railway station and a huge park, showing group exhibitions of varying quality, but mostly with at least one must-see. The “keynote” show is in the Fridericianum, which supposedly sets out the themes. But since these are either tenuous or blatantly obvious, it can safely be done at any point in the trip.

There’s sufficient labelling on most exhibits to make it clear what’s going on, but for more info buy  “The Guidebook”, a €24 green behemoth which gives a page plus picture to every single project. (Many doughty souls wander round clutching this weighty tome, but for me a kilo of dead tree stays in the hotel room.) The numbers in brackets throughout this article refer to the artwork’s reference number in the official Documenta map and guidebook.

• Hauptbahnhof

The Hauptbahnhof – cheerful!

Most impressive is the Hauptbahnhof, a superannuated railway station with a heavy wartime history, an atmospheric site, and a concentration of good works. It took me five hours to get round even without watching any films, but with two snack stops and a brief look at the attached museum dedicated to local composer Louis Spohr. (Mahler also worked here briefly, but couldn’t get away fast enough.) I recommend kicking off this Arsenale-like venue, and indeed the whole Documenta, with Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller’s (37) scene-setting self-guided video tour, one of the festival’s highlights, mixing personal histories with the station’s actual past and imaginary present, and involving some stupendous choreography. Get there at 10am on the dot (or 9.45 if you need to buy your Documenta ticket) to get hold of an iPod before the crowds do. Apparently there’s a downloadable video for people with smartphones, but the official players have superb headphones and make life easy. Make sure to bring your passport, which is needed as a deposit.

The bleak Hauptbahnhof platform where Susan Philipsz’ sound piece is sited.

Also referencing the station’s history as a Holocaust staging point is Susan Philipsz’ (135) haunting sound piece on bleak platform 13, allowing an austere string quartet written by an Auschwitz victim to live again, fighting aurally with real tannoys and trains. After assimilating this, move on to the North Wing, where almost everything is arresting, especially Haegue Yang’s (189) militarily dancing blinds and William Kentridge’s (93) room-sized steampunk animation around time measurement, full of parping musicians and trundling machines. Don’t miss the gnomic moon and mountain museum by Haris Epaminonda & Daniel Gustav Kramer (55), which is in a separate building – though be prepared to leave your bag in the cloakroom outside.

Haegue Yang’s military-looking parade of marching blinds lining a disused platform.

Grab early lunch at the end of the North Wing, then cross Lara Favaretto’s (61) rubbish-sculptured yard to the Nachrichtenmeisterei, whatever that means. Here, Christodoulos Panayiotou’s (132) lopped-off telegraph poles smell nice (if you like creosote) but won’t detain you long, while Willie Doherty’s (51) well-paired film about mysteriously polluted trees looked interesting but too long to watch in full – though I wish I had now.

Wind instruments recur throughout – these are from William Kentridge’s steampunk animation.

The South Wing is mainly notable for its sounds: a challenging but pleasingly percussive electronic composition by Florian Hecker (77), and the more harmonious Beethovenian strains of the attached Spohr Museum. Sneak a break at the cute little ad-hoc snack stop next-door, then – if you can face it – head back to the main concourse to nose round the few bits and bobs there, basically a Susan Hiller (79) juke box you can hear to better effect in other venues, and a not-very-good 2,400-hour-long film (so don’t watch it all) in the classic 1950s Bali Cinema. Phew!

• Fridericianum

Vital too is the overstuffed Fridericianum, one of Europe’s oldest purpose-built museum buildings and keynote to the festival, though not necessary to see first. If you ever get overheated, cool off in Ryan Gander’s (67) “big wind”, which puffs through the mercifully bare ground floor. Best to start at the top with Kader Attia’s (17) grave and brooding roomful of masks and busts depicting self- and war-inflicted facial deformities, cross-culturally sculpted by Western and African artists. Descend to Korbinian Aigner’s (4) obsessive postcard-sized renditions of apples and pears, begun when he was a political prisoner in Dachau, secretly developing new strains of apple trees, one of which is exhibited in the park.

You can’t see it, but this room is being buffeted by Ryan Gander’s cooling big wind.

Kader Attia’s comparative study of willing and unwilling facial mutilation.

Also worth seeking out in the building’s Zwehrenturm (tower) is Emily Jacir’s (85) room papered with personal inscriptions from some of the thousands of Palestinian books looted by the Israelis in 1948, now kept in an Israeli library as “abandoned property”; she took the delicate photos on a cell phone, presumably covertly. Equally redolent of the tightly-bound relationship between religion, learning and war is Michael Rakowitz’s (144) nearby archive of Bamiyan Buddha fragments alongside destroyed European sacred books, recreated in Bamiyan travertine by Afghani stone carvers and clearly pointing up their visual similarity to Islamic texts.

Emily Jacir’s fragile Palestinian texts, photographed on a cell phone.

Michael Rakowitz’s stone sacred books, carved in Bamiyan.

Finally, do allow time to queue (or get there early) for the glassed-in Rotunda, Documenta’s self-styled “brain”, which brings together the various themes in a densely-curated display and only allows in 40 viewers per time. It’s notable for a peaceful row of beautiful Giorgio Morandi paintings (121) and the real bottles he copied them from, plus a rare array of tiny, ancient “Bactrian Princess” (18) sculptures, startling in their squat, modernist-looking elegance.

Wow – these are the actual bottles Giorgio Morandi used to paint.

Mysterious and rare Bactrian princesses, over 4,000 years old.

• Oberste Gasse 4 (Ex-Elisabeth Hospital)

This is a mini-venue behind the Fridericianum, just around the corner from the Ottoneum. It’s a storied building, but too dark inside to appreciate architecturally, and not visually rich. The worthy exhibition of Afghani artists within also offers powerful stories, but is uncompelling to view. Depending on the whim of the intermittent door guard, you may be asked to leave your bag in the Fridericianum’s somewhat distant cloakroom, which possibly isn’t worth it if you’re short of time.

Afghan portraits by Ustad Sharif, commissioned by Jeanno Gaussi, inside the Ex-Elizabeth Hospital.

• Ottoneum
• Orangerie

The nearby Ottoneum (natural history museum) and Orangerie (science museum) have iffy art themed around their interesting subject matter, and needn’t take long. Highlight of the former is Mark Dion’s (49) library of trees on the top floor; little else impressed, in addition to which my companion surrendered to heat exhaustion at this point – if only we’d known of Ryan Gander’s “big wind” round the corner!

The Orangerie seen from the park (that bushy thing on the right is a Song Dong work).

The science museum down the hill is more rewarding, largely due to its rambling permanent collection of steampunkish optical instruments and early computers (echoes of William Kentridge’s film here). Best art is a small selection of untutored deco-ish architectural fantasias by 1940s computer pioneer Konrad Zuse (193), and Erkki Kurenniemi’s (95) impressionistic three-screen documentary film about the building of a nuclear power plant in Finland. There’s a famous physicist and his students holed up in one room giving cutting-edge quantum talks as part of Documenta too, but it’s all in German and beyond a non-science buff’s comprehension.

Erkki Kurenniemi’s film about a Finnish nuclear plower station.

The Orangerie’s a good place to end the day, because outside is a terrace overlooking the park where it’s nice to eat and drink in the evening – more pleasant, in my opinion, than the plethora of open air dining spaces beside the Fridericianum.

• Documenta-Halle

This purpose-built gallery lies between the above two museums and, being smallish, its offerings can be sampled en route from one to t’other. Best are Thomas Bayrle’s (25) splayed-open car engines, still smoothly pumping like living beings, and the influential Gustav Metzger’s (116) archive of old work – though interesting more for his Kindertransport back-story and subsequent break with traditional art than the actual drawings.

Thomas Bayrle’s mesmeric pumping car engines.

And when nature, hunger or weariness call, as they all surely will, there’s a cafe down the side for interim comfort stops – we found this a very useful break-point when continually trolling back and forth between the town and the park.

• Karlsaue park

The elegant park of Karlsaue spreads greenly amidst the whole Documenta experience, inviting and daunting in its lush expanse, and divided by decorative canals. Some exhibits require tickets and some are open access; but as it’s a long walk and you won’t want to retrace your steps, I advise having a valid ticket at all times. There’s far too much to list, mainly housed in customised sheds, so simply wander and wonder – the park can be done in stages, whenever you need a fresh-air stroll / restorative bus ride.

Giuseppe Penone’s trapped stone.

The town side is quicker to do: standouts include Guiseppe Penone’s (133) realistic bronze stone-in-a-tree and the explosive sound installation in a bosky glade by Documenta stars Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller (37). There’s also a working “clinic” by Pedro Reyes (147) where you can be “psycho-analysed” by white-coated artistas, which seems popular, but I didn’t have time or inclination to participate.

Ceramic sausages – just what every home needs. An installation by Anna Maria Maiolino.

The park’s far side is more spread out and harder to navigate, but has a nice cafe, the Glashaus, half way down, plus the free d13 bus route running along its length. Notable here are Sam Durant’s (53) giant playframe made of genuine American hangman’s gibbets, and Anna Maria Maiolino’s (107) little house full of clay sausages (only in modern art, eh?). Nearby is Anri Sala’s (155) giant malformed clock, shaped to appear in circular from a telescope in the Orangery (it looked like a white blur to me), and with a lozenge-shaped gear to help its asymmetrical dial keep time.

Anri Sala’s huge, distorted clock. Wow man, it’s like being in a Salvador Dali painting…

If you can face walking to the park’s very extremity beyond the pavilioned island, there’s a charming 18th century vista back to the town contrasting with a rough and ready dogs’ playground by Brian Jungen (88), though I didn’t fancy lingering at the non-Documenta eateries by the bus stop, or indeed the mini-golf course.

The elegant view from the rear of Karlsaue park.

Brian Jungen’s inelegant dogs’ playground nearby.

En route here, you may stumble on an outsiderish artist’s compound studded with passive-aggressive warning notices, where you’re asked to pay with a small coin and leave cameras and phones at the entrance (“the artist lives here and doesn’t want his picture taken”, we were informed – well, they could just have asked nicely). I am advised by writer Paul Carey-Kent that this is Documanta work no 120, by Gareth Moore, but didn’t spot any sign to indicate this. Not to be confused with Pierre Huyghe’s (83)horrible junk-yard “garden”, this actually is an outsiderish artist’s compound, and not a Documenta work; it’s interesting, but we thought it funny these so-called free souls were more paranoid about enforcing civic rules than the whole of the rest of Kassel.

A rule-bound and convincingly outsiderish artists’ compound which is apparently an official Documanta work by Gareth Moore (120).

• Neue Galerie

Finally, on a promontory off to the other side of the park, is the Neue Galerie, the town’s newly refurbished actual art museum. This is worth seeing for the small permanent collection as well as the Documenta stuff.  Most impactful is Geoffrey Farmer’s (59) corridor-long chronological 3D collage of imagery from Life magazine 1935-85, and a somewhat incongruous room of canvases by famed Australian Aboriginal painter Gordon Bennett (27), whose rhythmic abstract surfaces enshrine memories of mythology and topography.

Geoffrey Farmer’s obsessive collage of Life magazines.

• Off-site shows overview

In addition there are lots of smaller “off-site” locations, situated in places such as cinemas, shops, bunkers and disused offices: these are interesting for the venues alone, and many house good exhibitions too. It looks overwhelming at first, but many are seminars, long films and performances, all of which I gave a miss due to lack of patience and time. I was following blogger Paul Carey Kent’s sound dictum that with limited time, it’s best to concentrate on the real big-hitters that won’t look as good anywhere else.

Standing with your back to the station, the off-sites fall neatly into two halves, divided by Wilhelmsstrasse: those to the left of the town (the slightly gritty Königsplatz side) and those to the right (the ironically less grim Brüder-Grimm-Platz side).  I’ve covered the standouts below, plus a couple of avoidables; and I can’t emphasise enough not to miss out the outlying Weinberg bunker / terrace / funeral museum combo, which is something of a trek from the Neue Galerie, but definitely worth the trip.

Adrián Villar Rojas’ weird sculptures on the photogenic Weinberg Terrace.

Decorated skulls in the funeral museum.

• Königsplatz area must-sees

These can be done together quite quickly on a pleasant stroll, as a light relief from the overwhelming major venues in this area.

• C&A department store: Cevdet Erek (56)

Long since closed down in Britain in due to its unshakeable “cheap & awful” image, budget clothes chain C&A is still a going concern on the continent. Enter through a side entrance of this shabby Mies-ish behemoth and in a top-floor disused link block with good views there’s an electronic sound installation based on different rhythms. It’s not exactly in the class of Florian Hecker, but the atmospheric venue’s interesting. Exit through the kids’ dept for a view of “normal” Germany, and some very dubious clothes.

The view from C&A, while listening to a rhythmic sound piece.

• Spohrstr. 7 (Ex-Finance Building): Tacita Dean (48)

Not conceptually groundbreaking for Dean, but a striking mise-en-scene: blackboard drawings of Afghan mountains on two tiers of an elegant old bank building with sweeping staircase (a recurring feature in Kassel). Usefully, it’s opposite one of Kassel’s remaining “old” landmarks, a bombed-out church where in 1732 JS Bach played the organ, now with a tense Antony Gormley statue outside the front door. Behind it rise latticework brick replacement spires, and a shockingly brutalist hall (which I genuinely thought was a car park at first), nicely setting up a spire-and-bunker theme we shall re-encounter soon.

Tacita Dean – beautiful drawings on a beautiful staircase.

JS Bach played ‘ere… and he didn’t even leave any graffiti.

• Youth Library: Matias Faldbakken (58)

The Norwegian bad boy artist-cum-novelist provides two tableaux of scattered books in city libraries, both worth visiting for the architecture as much as his “intervention”. This building is a stunning piece of mid-century modern in Royal Festival Hall mode, and you’re allowed to wander round peacefully photographing details without feeling like a latent paedophile, as in England’s vigilante culture. If you can only catch one of Faldbakken’s displays, this is the better, but note the library opens at 1pm most days.

Mid-century modern architecture at the Youth Library.

• Untere Karlsstr. 14: Walid Raad (143) et al

This shell of an office block behind the Fridericianum houses yet more spidery 1950s banisters, plus a few Arabic artists. Most space goes rightly to Walid Raad, whose whimsical installations playing on the rich Middle Eastern craze for fancy art museums looked initially daunting, but really drew me in with its light touch, sly digs, and visual imagination. I missed a couple of the other artists because I didn’t realise there were further rooms, and indeed the whole obscurely-named building is too easily passed by, so try to to plan it in, and allow around an hour.

A striking part of Walid Raad’s extensive installation around Arabic art museums.

• Brüder-Grimm-Platz area must-sees

This is where Kassel’s mountain-framed topography gets vertiginous, with the park sweeping away below and walkways leading across a decorous main artery to the town and, further down, the Weinberg bunker and terrace, which climbs up to the unusual Sepulchral museum. There’s a carillon in the area – we arrived at around 5pm one day to find it playing a pretty tune, which really adds to the genteel parkside atmosphere. The only main venue round here is the Neue Galerie, which makes a good mid-way point, assuming a start from City Hall. You could happily spend a day in this area, following the order of venues I’ve listed here.

Surreal animal skull columns in City Hall.

• Aschrott Fountain (outside City Hall): Horst Hoheisel (80)

The ex-Aschrott Fountain.

In front of City Hall is an invisible absence. At first you think there’s nothing there but a large cross flush with the ground. But read the label and you’ll see it’s the base of an upside-down fountain (allegedly) sunk into the earth, a replica of one donated by a Jewish businessman that was destroyed by the Nazis in 1939. It was created several Documentas ago, and apparently the artist comes back to personally hand-clean it every year, in a rather overwrought assumption of individual guilt. Personally I think it would have been better to leave the fountain the right way up as a permanent reminder – it’s too easily forgotten the rest of the time, situated as it is. It wasn’t till I got to some other exhibition (I forget which), that I found a photo of how the fountain had actually looked – a spire-like obelisk, unwittingly prefiguring all the other real spires which were later destroyed in WWII.

Spire and bunker (in fact part of the church) – two of Kassel’s many recurring themes.

• Zentral Bibliotek im Rathaus (City Hall Library): Matias Faldbakken, (58)

At the back of City Hall is the town’s general library, home to another Faldbakken bombed bookcase, as at the Youth Library. This one hardly needs an artist to mess up its stock, as the normal stacks provide enough surreal juxtapositions of titles unaided. What we discovered by getting there early (it opens at 11am most days) and getting lost was that you’re allowed to walk through this historically layered civic edifice unhindered by petty jobsworths, admiring its weird and wonderful column mouldings of rams’ skulls (I think). Head towards the Job Centre (which being in Germany probably does dispense actual jobs), and follow the main corridor right to inspect the grandiose courtroom doors before exiting through the wedding-party-friendly front door, where for some unknown reason we encountered a phalanx of rather aggressive bubble-blowers.

A bombed book installation by Matias Faldbakken in City Hall library.

• Hugenottenhaus (Huguenot House): Theaster Gates (70), Tino Sehgal (159)

This has been one of the hits of Documenta: Tino Sehghal’s fashionable participatory performances have made it all the way to Tate’s turbine hall, while Theaster Gates is a new darling of the art world, coming soon to London’s White Cube gallery. Trained in urban planning, he made his name with community projects around Chicago, revitalising poor neighbourhoods with a mix of redevelopment and art. Here he has turned a massive derelict old house into temporary studios, where a group of artists live while renovating and modifying it in sculptural ways with reclaimed building materials shipped over from another of his projects in Chicago. But in prosperous central Germany, as opposed to Chicago, it comes across as complacent bourgeois gentrification, albeit in a very lovely building. Maybe he should give Teesside a go.

Just what every home needs – two staircases going nowhere. Installation at Theaster Gates’ Huguenot House.

Punters in the artistically distressed Huguenot House.

Sehgal meanwhile is accessed out the back. You stumble into a darkened room, where large group of people are singing medleys of acapella hits ranging from Good Vibrations to what may have been a Beyoncé tune (I’m not down enough with the kids to be sure). I managed to stumble all the way across the room with only minor human buffeting, after which my eyes started to adjust and I could see other newbies bumbling round, and the happy-clappy young performers doing relaxed semi-choreographed routines while they sang. It’s obviously an unusual situation to find oneself in, but it’s hardly perception-altering, and personally I don’t think it’s visual art at all: it’s like a rather low-powered form of amateur theatre, town hall antics performed in a blackout. Nevertheless, it’s one of the “must-dos” at Documenta, so do it.

Exterior of the huge Huguenot House: today full of artists, tomorrow worth millions.

Also here is a Lawrence Weiner (186) work (with a name like that they should have put him in the Karlsaue clay-sausage-house, ha ha), but I forgot to look for it; no doubt it was a text piece high up on some wall. I’m not saying when you’ve seen one Lawrence Weiner you’ve seen them all, but… well, I am.

Speaking of Lawrence Weiner, here are more clay sausages from Anna Maria Maiolino’s bonkers Karlsaue installation.

• Friedrichsstr. 28: Paul Chan (40)
• Obere Karlsstr. 4 (Ex-Bakery): Francis Alÿs (10)
• Grand City Hotel Hessenland (Large Ballroom): Gerard Byrne (35)

These three venues surround the Huguenot House, and don’t take long unless you choose to watch Gerard Byrne’s (35) film all the way through. Housed in a glorious 1950s hotel, this is one of his highly effective multi-screen installations where actors, playing famous historical figures in meticulously realised period settings, have a scripted discussion based on real texts. Here, Surrealists converse frankly about sex; if you’re with someone who’d be disturbed by a discourse that moves from male anal intercourse to female self-pleasuring in a couple of sentences, step very quickly through.

Minimal – Francis Alÿs’ tiny paintings in a bakery.

Maximal – Paul Chan’s mountain- and moon-painted book covers.

Francis Alÿs (10), colonising an old baker’s shop, shows elements related to a film, but not the actual film; there’s just a few tiny stripy paintings here, some visible only through a window, apparently part of the “concept”. Paul Chan (40) is known for animated shadow-films, notably a priapic wall-long tableau at the 2011 Venice Biennale (in a style William Kentridge’s film reminded me of). Here however he shows a colourful room full of book covers painted with monochrome moon and mountain scenes – echoing the visual themes of Haris Epaminonda, Matias Faldbakken and Tacita Dean, amongst others. It’s fun looking at all the period book covers, and the fascination some viewers find in them.

• Brüder-Grimm Museum: Nedko Solakov (164)

As you may guess from the title of the museum and square, the Brothers Grimm were based in Kassel. This is worth a swing-through as it’s included in the Documenta ticket, and opposite the excellent Neue Galerie. But I was underwhelmed by Bulgarian art-cartoonist Solakov’s chaotic outsiderish takeover of the galleries to tell an incomprehensible and therefore uncompelling tale. Nothing stopped me in my tracks, so I hotfooted it through; with so much else on the agenda, it seemed non-essential, and I couldn’t help feeling the museum would be better in its “normal” state.

Not a surreal artwork (if only it were), but a real shop window in central Kassel, straight outta Grimm.

After this it would be a good idea to grab lunch at Mundo (below), then do the middle-sized main venue Neue Galerie (above) before heading off for Weinberg (below again).

• Mundo Kassel: Susan Hiller (79)

This is a restaurant, useful for both lunch and coffee breaks, which holds one of Susan Hiller’s (79) contributions. Many of the “official” eateries have similar 1940s-style jukeboxes: these are all Hiller installations, offering low-volume tuneage from her right-on personal record collection. Acting like a chippy 1970s teenager, or Danny Boyle soundtracking the Olympics launch, I subjected diners to quiet renditions of John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero” followed by the Sex Pistols’ “God Save The Queen” – pathetic, but satisfying.

Susan Hiller’s rebellious-1970s-teenager jukebox selection.

Mundo itself is a good help-yourself buffet with a scenic outside terrace overlooking the park’s treetops. Sit at a table, tell the waiter whether you want a large or normal plate and order drinks (which never seem to arrive together in Kassel), then go in and be tempted by the dizzying array to mix chilli con carne with pickled herrings. Reader, I did just that.

Looking back at the Neue Galerie from Mundo. The treetop view in the other direction is lovely.

• Bunker im Weinberg (Weinberg Bunker): Allora & Calzadilla (8)
• Weinbergterassen (Weinberg Terraces): Adrián Villar Rojas (179)
• Museum of Sepulchral Culture (aka the Funeral Museum): non-Documenta, www.sepulkralmuseum.de

Art that involves donning hard hats is always worth checking out, and this trio was one of my highlights. Go on Wednesday afternoon if possible, when the Sepulchral museum’s open till 8pm, to enjoy a leisurely pace; the route involves caves and steps, so if you’re hiring bikes, this isn’t the place to bring them. You can stroll here from the Neue Galerie, along a leafy footpath above the arterial road – don’t cross the footbridge, but continue to the pedestrian crossing at ground level.

Hard-hatted art punters head for the Weinberg bunker.

Opposite, you’ll see a line of massive stone arches holding up the escarpment; cross over, grab a hard hat, and enter the Weinberg Bunker’s labyrinth of tunnels. These were originally used for keeping ice and provisions cool, later as WWII shelters, and now to showcase Allora & Calzadilla’s (8) not particularly bunker-specific film, in which a flautist struggles to blow a prehistoric bone pipe, one of the earliest musical instruments ever found. Her experimental puffs yield only terrible sounds until at one climactic point she does get a few recognisable notes from it – but who’s to say the pipe ever worked?

This woman is playing the oldest musical instrument in the world (unsuccessfully). Film by Allora & Calzadilla.

Deposit the hard hat, and enter the door leading onto the vertiginous steps up the derelict-looking Weinberg Terrace, a tangle of concrete, weedy grass, and rusting railings. Don’t be put off – you climb in tiered stages, and there are great views back over the local landscape en route. All the way up nestle white cracked sculptures by Adrián Villar Rojas (179), resembling baked mud. They are in many styles, from abstract to rough-hewn to mechanistic, and though at first I thought they were stupid, they grew on me as I climbed the hill. At the top, under some graffitied concrete pilotis, they culminate in a row of buddhist-style bells or stupas – most effective.

The peculiar Weinberg Terrace, with sculptures by Adrián Villar Rojas.

Underneath the funeral museum, stupa sculptures by Adrián Villar Rojas mix with dubious graffiti, of which we saw quite a bit.

Blank gravestones beneath the funeral museum.

Amongst them are uncarved gravestones, a reference the surprisingly airy and modernist edifice above: the Museum of Sepulchral Culture, a repository of primarily European Christian-based funereal items from decorated caskets to painted skulls. It’s more like an ethnographic collection than something spooky, and well worth the €6 entry. After this you can wend back down to Brüder-Grimm-Platz via some more notable architecture, and grab a sundowner (assuming there’s sun) at Postillion, a friendly bistro with decent food and a leafily private little terrace.

Looking up from the Weinberg Terrace to the Museum of Sepulchral Culture, aka the funeral museum.

Painted coffins in the funeral museum.

So, that’s what I saw – and just some of it. Pretty intense, so here are the practicalities of tickets, navigation, transport and food.

• Practicalities

• Tickets

You can either get a 1-day ticket for €20, a 2-day for €35, or an after-5pm ticket for €10 (as most venues open till 8pm, though not some of the smaller ones so you need to check). If you’re serious and want to see everything then 2 days is the minimum, though I ended up doing 3 days in all, and definitely getting full usage out of the resultant €55 in tickets. Depending on your travel times you could always do a starter evening with a late ticket, or final half-day in the park without a ticket, as many things there are open access. But it seems a false economy – Documenta’s only on every 5 years, so best to splash out on full-time all-areas access.

Punters outside Francis Alÿs’ ex-bakery show – you can peer into many venues without a ticket.

• Photography

What’s nice is that you’re allowed to take photos of the art throughout, except in a couple of rare instances where individual works have “no photography” signs, presumably due to some over-officious art estate’s copyright rules. It’s striking that the Germans in general are so civically un-paranoid compared to the UK, despite privacy rules stringent enough to outlaw Google Street View – no CCTV cameras following you, and officials unconcerned as you wander round libraries, shops and government buildings in search of art. It makes for some pretty Littlejohn-esque reflections on which country the Stasi ethos really holds sway in today.

Snooping around inside the City Hall, with no CCTV in sight.

• Getting around

There’s a free map available from most venues, and although it’s complex (as it’s a complex event), it’s good enough that you don’t really need any other street map, although a GPS phone map is helpful now and again, especially in the confusing park.  All the info you’ll need is there, plus diagrams of all the main venues. All are within walking distance of each other, but cumulatively it’s a long way, with the park alone over 2km long. Fortunately a Documenta ticket gains admission to a free bus, the d13, which runs in a circular route every 15 minutes or so – handy for returning from the rear of the park, or getting to slightly further-out Weinberg. You can also hire Boris-style bikes, which would be especially useful in the park. There are also guided walks called d-Tours, but these are in German, rather crowded, and whenever I saw one I was glad I wasn’t on it.

The park really is huge. There are no boats, so get a d13 bus.

• Refreshments

The inequality of the Euro is clear in Germany: their strong economy is reflected in modest internal prices, making it somewhat cheaper than London for food. (Though hotels are a rip-off if the spartan museum of 1970s Soviet furniture known as the Grand City Hotel Domus, which I paid around £90 a night to stay in, is anything to go by – believe the bad reviews on Tripadvisor is my advice.) While Kassel doesn’t appear a bastion of fine dining, German food is generally reliable, and you’re never far away from somewhere passable.

Pit-stop at “gLASHAUS” – note how all Documenta typography follows this stupid reverse-capitalisation stylee.

There are pleasantly situated eateries associated with each Documenta venue too, which all have leafy outside space and don’t get too crowded. I liked the cafes halfway through the station (after Hague Yang, no 198) and in the park (the Glashaus, between artworks 50 and 107), which do interesting salads in Kilner jars. Warning: take the jars back, or you’ll lose several euros in deposit as I unwittingly did first time. Many of these eateries have jukeboxes: these are artworks by Susan Hiller (no 79). We also found two decent places to eat round the Neue Galerie and Brüder-Grimm-Platz, though doubtless there are more: Mundo, a buffet with a scenic terrace, and Postillion, a friendly bistro with decent food and secluded patio, ideal to reach on a sunny evening (fingers crossed) after a tiring round-trip to Weinberg.

Well, that’s it for the words bit – here are a few more photos.

Coffee table dereliction at the Huguenot House.

Real dereliction at the enormous station – which is much nicer than it looks here during a shower.

Graffiti in the station. It was always disturbing to see the occasional Nazi-related scrawlings.

The gritty side of town as viewed from the C&A space.

Sound piece at C&A – they should try this approach in their changing rooms.

C&A again. Still bunkerish, even though it’s a roof space. Get me out of here!

Dachau inmate Korbinian Aigner’s obsessive postcard-sized renditions of apples and pears at the Fridericianum.

Oi! Look behind you! A row of Morandis at the Fridericianum.

Michael Rakowitz’s carved books at the Fridericianum all have their fascinating stories of destruction written in front of them.

I was endlessly fascinated by Thomas Bayrle’s animated anthropomorphic motors at Documenta-Halle.

A different kind of mechanism, at the equally engrossing Weinberg Terrace.

Sorry to bore on, but I really did enjoy the Weinberg Terrace. That’s the funeral museum above it.

Looking up from the Weinberg bunkers.

A cat looking at a thing. Fin.

Rosalie Gascoigne, Loopholes, 1997

Despite once representing Australia at the Venice Biennale and featuring prominently in all the major antipodean art museums, Rosalie Gascoigne (1917-1999) is an artist too little known outside her native New Zealand and Australia. The accidental similarity I noted here between a David Shrigley painting and her “Loopholes” (above), caused me to revisit Gascoigne’s famed retro-reflective assemblages, which the artist – who liked to work in materials-based series – embarked on in the late 1980s. At that point, having ended a run of monumental wall structures made from yellow wooden Schweppes crates, she turned to deconstructing these obsolete road warning signs, which glimmer softly by day but reflect car headlights with startling intensity at night.

Gascoigne was fascinated by the discarded and doomed detritus of housewives and workmen, transforming junk-heap finds into elegant memorials to the disappearing days of a more hardscrabble antipodean life. She had first noticed these signs singing in the darkness on evening drives through Canberra’s desolate hinterlands, while returning from hunts for her elegiac raw materials. By the time she started sculpting with them, they too were on the endangered list, forcing Gascoigne to scavenge what remnants she could from unhelpful navvies busy replacing metal signs with vinyl versions. And once she’d thoroughly harnessed the signs’ fierce, flaring energy, moving from acidity to mellowness, from exuberance to tranquility, from packed letters to blankness (making me think of Alighiero Boetti’s games with positive and negative areas of colour grids), she moved on again: to the weathered reds, whites and browns of old painted wood, making some of her most earthily minimal works.

A haunting glow: Rosalie Gascoigne's late retro-reflective works at Roslyn Oxley9, Sydney, 1999

I had thought the retro-reflective series ended at around this point, as Gascoigne rarely revisited earlier materials. So I was fascinated to come across a small group of very late examples, completed between 1997 and 1999, the year of her death. I interviewed Gascoigne extensively in 1996-7 for a monograph, the memories of which made these unfamiliar works emotional viewing: at the time I could never have imagined that this feisty and piercingly intelligent octogenarian, still making compelling art, would not be around for the millennium. So looking at these tender, energetic and cerebral assemblages was like discovering a reflection of the artist herself, after 15 a year absence.

Mainly compact in size and recalling book or album covers (items in their end-days, as ever with Gascoigne), they are among the most striking statements she made in this series, and show the variety she could wring from any seemingly limited material. While essentially a formalist – she admitted to moving things around till they felt right to her – Gascoigne’s assemblages were always far more than mere arrangements of stuff. Not just pattern as they may appear in reproduction, these works have real physical presence in a room: varying chunks of weatherbeaten signboard refracting the light, sometimes a haunting glow, sometimes a harsh glare, the random scratches and slashes recalling years lolling mutely in Canberra’s scrubby bush, reacting only to fleeting headlights and thumps from passing wildlife.

Rosalie Gascoigne, Grasslands II, 1998

As well as coaxing emotional resonance from unloved materials, Gascoigne was a shaper of fading words and a maker of fugitive messages. A deeply literary woman who loved poetry and crosswords, her art – literally lyrical – was very much informed by the verbal world. But while she paid great attention to writing descriptive titles, which run the gamut from playful to gnomic – “not wanting to lead the witness too much”, as she put it – she rarely left comprehensible words within the compositions themselves. The letter-based screeds instead resemble a recursive concrete poetry, or an abstract musical score, their shattered glyphs suggesting subconscious readings: open or enclosing, sinuous or jagged, flowing or jarring, all cues which lovers of the Latin alphabet can mine for non-verbal feeling.

This stuttering musicality always evokes for me Rosalie Gascoigne’s husband Ben, whom she followed from New Zealand to a remote Canberra mountain observatory as a wartime bride in the 1940s, and who outlived her by many years. One of Australia’s top astronomers, he had a most unusual and tortuous stammer; one which didn’t hamper his charming extrovert nature, yet did usher him into a profession where he felt verbal felicity would not be vital. It may be incredibly simplistic, but I always felt lifelong exposure to this endearing yet maddening tic, from the husband whose life shaped her own, whose career for 30 years overshadowed hers, and yet whose fame she eventually eclipsed, must have had some subconcious input into her mind-jangling text pieces. Shown here is a selection of these late works, beautiful individually but en masse a poignant late statement from an artist who departed at the height of her powers.

• The estate of Rosalie Gascoigne is represented by Roslyn Oxley9, Sydney, Australia, www.roslynoxley9.com.au

Rosalie Gascoigne, Birdsong, 1999

Rosalie Gascoigne, Solitude, 1997

Rosalie Gascoigne, Fishbowl, 1999

Rosalie Gascoigne, not yet titled (Little One), 1999

Rosalie Gascoigne, Medusa, 1998

Rosalie Gascoigne, Trumpet Voluntary, 1997

Rosalie Gascoigne, Printed Circuit, 1999

Rosalie Gascoigne, Cumquats, 1999

Rosalie Gascoigne, Downbeat, 1998

Rosalie Gascoigne, Reserve, 1997

We'll all be deader than the cow head in Damien Hirst's "One Thousand Years" before the true worth of his oeuvre is established.

Julian Spalding's pizza leaflet-style e-cover – all it lacks is a rogue apostrophe

How I laughed when uncompromising arts tweeter @FisunGuner, needing well under 140 characters, described frothing Damien Hirst critic Julian Spalding as simply “stupid”. Either stupid, or a man with a book to sell – on April Fool’s day he published a Kindle tome called “Con Art”, trouncing conceptual art as some kind of century-long inverted pyramid scheme with a urinal at the bottom and a heap of rotting sharks at the top. It’s a view that seems not so much brave as mercenary: there’s plenty of lucre to be made in taking an indefensible position that a lot of uninformed people agree with, as long as you can stand the flack. Which isn’t very hard when the flack consists of debates with people like venerable ex-Time Out critic Sarah Kent, who despite picking polite holes in all Spalding’s illogical arguments on the radio the other day, lost out comprehensively due to her lack of vehemence. For more robust but equally frustrating repartee, check out the dully repetitive streams of predictable sniping beneath any online Hirst review. It’s like spending a slow-motion millennium with the fly-blown cow skull of his “One Thousand Years”, accompanied by trolls. Give it up, folks – we’ll all be as dead as that cow before any meaningful worth for Hirst’s oeuvre is established. How the smirking spot-meister will be interpreted by future generations is unguessable; just the fact that he’s not a robot may ensure his fame 200 years from now. (Insert “his art already looks like it was made by robots” joke here.) But the arguers are all missing the point: Hirst is having a fine old time while he’s alive, and that means he’s won – until he gets his self-anticipated lung cancer or deliberately goes broke in the name of art or something, anyway. Julian Spalding, as well he knows, is merely feeding off fame at its hottest: a wily suckerfish wriggling after the droppings of a great, steaming shark.

Damien Hirst and Julian Spalding bigging up the kind of art that does it for them.

Damien Hirst's drawing of a great, steaming shark. Have you noticed how his signature looks like it says "shit"?

An unlikely echo: David Shrigley's "OoO ..." (2007) and Rosalie Gascoigne's "Loopholes" (1997).

I’ve just seen David Shrigley’s exhibition “Brain Activity” at London’s Hayward Gallery, but emerged disappointed: it wasn’t as playful or enjoyable as I’d expected. This wasn’t due to the work, which is by turns witty and doleful, but to the over-minimal curation – which didn’t just ignore, but seemed actively to run scared from, the artist’s bonkers fecundity of imagination. To be as reductive as the installation, and as taxonomic as Shrigley, his vast quantity of output basically breaks down into two categories:

1. The absurdness of things
   (and I do mean absurd-ness, as in an intrinsic quality, rather than the mere modifier absurdity)
2. The pleasure of shapes
   (which also falls under category 1, if you think about it)

Items from category 1 – the puzzling statements of a lone bemused voice – generally work best in isolation: a flyer for a lost pigeon, a thin doll in a fat pumpkin, a photo of tubers that look a bit like teeth.

Items from category 2 – variations on objects such as ceramic bombs, wiry insects, cartoonish boots – give most satisfaction en masse: it’s the relentless accumulation of slightly varied detail that evokes wonder. Hey, his teeming typologies seem to say, the world is like this too: full of peculiar everyday classes whose members are all essentially the same yet all a bit different, none of which have much reason to exist all, but all of which are worth noting and celebrating since they do. It’s an obvious message, but in Shrigley’s pseudo-cack hands a visually and viscerally pleasing one.

David Shrigley's two categories, the lone voice of absurdity and the pleasure of massed similarity: "Lost" (1996) and "Boots" (2010).

“Brain Activity”, true to category 2, was an agglomeration of parts from earlier shows. But not a dense enough agglomeration, and one that was too reverential for the material. Shrigley is notoriously prolific, yet the works here were spread thinly, and arranged with a polite reserve that was contrary to their natures. The puzzled statements were lumped together in endless non sequitur grids of randomly bizarre drawings, rather than exploring various recurring themes such as fatherhood. The sequences of similar objects were generally represented by just a few scattered examples, such as a plinth containing a miscellany of faux-naive ceramic sculptures, including a shiny black bomb. These unrelated items didn’t work well together, or convey any message; yet when a plinth containing only shiny black ceramic bombs was shown at London’s Stephen Friedman gallery recently, their alluring shop-display abundance and the exhibition’s mordant title “Arms Fayre” gave powerful life to Shrigley’s conceit of deadly-weapon-as-craft-object.

The massed allure of David Shrigley's "Bombs" (2012), at "Arms Fayre", Stephen Friedman Gallery, 2012

Even the painting of mouth-like Os entitled “OoO …” (shown at top), while seeming to be a self-contained collection, is actually part of a larger sequence of works which in one direction spin off to depict other letters, play on noughts and crosses, and evolve into words such as “horror”, while on another tangent they develop into an exploration of blobs, echoed in his many 3D collections of round forms such as peas and coins (in fact, you could curate an amazing Shrigley show by including blob-based works alone). None of which complexity can be demonstrated by isolating “OoO …” on its own white wall purely for its optical impact, as “Brain Activity” did.

Shrigley would be better served by an obsessive taxonomy, a packed exhibition space which led you along a maze-like path of his shifting forms and fancies arranged in a logical visual order. A bit like a book, in fact – it’s no coincidence that printed publications form one of his main artistic strands. And the accompanying text could point out his endless subtle riffing on the works of other artists, the most obvious riffee being Martin Creed – as his multi-sized letters attest.

A mini-survey of David Shrigley's blob-based works: "Happy Balls, Sad Balls" (2008) and "Peas"(2007).

But strangely, the acid yellow Os also made me think of an artist he’s probably never even heard of: the late Antipodean sculptor Rosalie Gascoigne, especially her 1997 work “Loopholes” (pictured at top). And wandering through Shrigley’s mis-firing “Brain Activity” on a nice sunny day, how I wished I was surveying Gascoigne’s lyrical assemblages of retro-reflective road signs instead. Formal yet playful, their take on the world’s excess of mundane messages are a considerable mental leap away from the mind-looping brain food of David Shrigley, so it’s not a sequence I’ll present here. But in the next post, that’s exactly what I’ll do.

Finally, more Shrigley plays on letters... some Xs, or possibly kisses; and "Horror", 2008

• David Shrigley: Brain Activity, until 12 May 2012, Hayward Gallery, London SE1, www.southbankcentre.co.uk; www.davidshrigley.com
• The estate of Rosalie Gascoigne is represented by Roslyn Oxley9, Sydney, Australia, www.roslynoxley9.com.au

Above: click for a bigger version, or go to the version on Google Maps here

About the area

Back in the late 1980s and early 90s, in the glory days of the YBAs, London’s West End was home to cutting edge galleries such as Karsten Schubert and Victoria Miro, but by the noughties rising prices had driven the emerging art scene Hackney-wards to Cambridge Heath. Such things move in cycles however, and despite the crowds that still gather there on First Thursday, the once-unmissable Vyner Street died as a credible art hub around the time of the 2009 crash. Although there are still several good galleries scattered throughout the eastern postcodes, critical mass has now returned with a vengeance to the West End.

At first, this manifested with gilt-edged galleries in the hedge fund heaven of Mayfair, but more recently there’s been a rush of edgier openings in Fitzrovia, the charmingly rackety rag trade/media haven lurking north of Oxford Street’s shonky eastern end. Plenty of publications have noted this new art district – for instance a shallow run-down by GQ, a much better piece by Spoonfed, and a local overview by Fitzrovia News. But none have given a comprehensive list of all the galleries on offer, or suggested a route for tackling them. Even Art Rabbit and the two free printed art maps – what I call the Orange One and the Blue One – don’t have comprehensive listings, and I had to refer to all three plus various press releases to compile this. And the 22 galleries here don’t even include the many print, illustration, graphics, street art, architecture and photography venues nearby – us art trawlers have to draw the line somewhere. My line is fairly rigorous, formal and conceptual – the kind of art shown at Frieze art fair and the Venice Biennale – although there are a few galleries showing more traditional skills-based and representational art in the list below as well. A clutch of big-name galleries in the area do actually show at Frieze, which is just a short walk north; indeed, chief among Fitzrovia’s attractions to gallerists, along with its relative cheapness, is that it’s handily close to squads of art-hunting billionaires once a year – but it’s equally handy for yachtless aesthetes all year round.

Oxford Circus and Goodge Street tubes are logical departure points for a Fitzrovia gallery walk. I’ve described a route commencing at Goodge Street then proceeding clockwise, but you could start and end anywhere, and go in either direction. Check with a listings guide or the gallery websites first to see what’s on, as not all galleries will be open on any given date. The area is small – a 15-minute trot from edge to edge – and the galleries are mainly small too, so barring lengthy video works, you could do it in half a day at a fair lick. More enjoyable would be to allocate a day, giving proper time to the works and blurbs (and, lets face it, there’s always at least one long time-based piece offering the chance of a sit-down), plus taking in pit stops and all the interesting architecture and shops along the way. Unlike Mayfair, Fitzrovia is flat and fairly traffic-free, with an understated buzz of creative work going on, rather than swarms of moneyed tourists ogling overpriced fashion. In fact, it’s one of the nicest bits of “secret” central London there is – and all the better now it’s awash with art. Maybe we’ll have to start calling it “Friezerovia”.

Places to eat (marked with knife and fork)

Even art needs sustenance, and Fitzrovia provides plenty. The area is full of cafes and restaurants from cheapo to high-end, but these three spots fall at natural break points. The walk starts along lively Goodge Street and Charlotte Street, where there’s a large variety of pubs, bars, cafes and restaurants. It’s a good place to grab a pre-art coffee, or spot places to return to at day’s end. Most places get rammed at lunchtime and evenings, so it may be worth booking, especially for popular spots like the excellent Salt Yard tapas bar. Coming after a concentration of larger galleries, Market Place is another useful point for a break. There’s a concentration of eateries here – mainly chains, but it’s quieter and more characterful than nearby Oxford and Regent streets. A less obvious lunch spot further along is the cafe at RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects, 66 Portland Place, London W1B 1AD), where you can snack in grand modernist surroundings – they also have good architectural exhibitions and a bookshop. Or walk five minutes north up Cleveland Street to the Warren Street area, home to many reasonably-priced coffee bars and cafes – some groovy, some old school.

Galleries, walking clockwise from Goodge Street

Rosenfeld Porcini
37 Rathbone Street, London W1T 1NZ (entry also in Newman St)
www.rosenfeldporcini.com
• Large sleek gallery which occupies two floors and two roads – usefully, you can enter in Rathbone Street and exit into Newman Street (alternatively cut through quaint Newman Passage, not on Google Maps, to reach Newman Street). Specialises in Italian and international artists not previously known in the UK, with work that’s generally figurative and painterly rather than visually challenging.

Paradise Row
74a Newman Street, London W1T 3DB
www.paradiserow.com
• Hip gallery showing the kind of international artists popular with curators, with work tending towards a particular kind of theatrical, self-referential conceptualism revolving around performance, film and photography.

Alison Jacques
6-18 Berners Street, London W1T 3LN
www.alisonjacquesgallery.com
• One of the area’s big hitters, this double-height museum-style space opposite the classic 1960s Sanderson building mixes Frieze-friendly international artists with quirkier up-and-coming fare.

Art First
21 Eastcastle Street, London W1W 8DD
www.artfirst.co.uk
• Recently moved from Mayfair, this gallery offers some of the more traditional work in the area, showing mainly current and mid-20th century British artists working in a representational or formal vein.

Regina Gallery
22 Eastcastle street, London W1W 8DE
www.reginagallery.com
• One of the Fitzrovia crew that shows at Frieze, this offshoot of a Moscow gallery has a fascinating roster mainly from Russia, France and Germany, including high quality artists such as Pavel Pepperstein.

Modern Art
23/25 Eastcastle Street, London W1W 8DF
www.modernart.net
• AKA Stuart Shave/Modern Art, another of the Frieze regulars showing a must-see stellar stable including Karla Black, Nigel Cooke, Ansel Krut, Jonathan Meese, Eva Rothschild and many others, plus museum-quality curated group theme shows.

Carroll / Fletcher
56-57 Eastcastle Street, London W1W 8EQ
www.carrollfletcher.com
• Brand new gallery with an amazing bunker-like concrete staircase to its basement and a refreshing line-up of conceptually-inclined young multimedia artists given plenty of space to express themselves, plus special commissions and collaborations.

Pilar Corrias
54 Eastcastle St, London W1W 8EF
www.pilarcorrias.com
• Another of the Frieze club with some world-class artists, this ex-Lisson director hosts some of the best shows you’ll find in London, all in a modest-looking space that was actually designed by conceptual starchitect Rem Koolhaas.

Haunch of Venison
51 Eastcastle Street, London W1W 8EB
www.haunchofvenison.com
• New Fitzrovia offshoot of the international gallery, founded by Harry Blain and Graham Southern but now owned by Christie’s, offering a similar range of high quality contemporary shows to Haunch’s larger Mayfair premises.

Bartha Contemporary
25 Margaret Street, London W1W 8RX
www.barthacontemporary.com
• Recently moved to this large space from west London, it’s a welcome chance to keep abreast of its serious yet stylish minimalist roster without a major trek in the opposite direction from most other worthwhile galleries.

Cole
3-4a Little Portland Street, London W1W 7JB
www.colelondon.com
• One of Fitzrovia’s smaller art spaces, this rough-and-ready chamber really is like a slice of Hackney in the West End and shows an exciting selection of young emerging artists, sometimes fresh from their degree shows.

Josh Lilley
44-46 Riding House Street, London W1W 7EX
www.joshlilleygallery.com
• Don’t be fooled by the small area viewable through the window – there’s a massive basement too. A pleasing space showing a variety of often quirkily representational international painters and sculptors.

TJ Boulting
59 Riding House Street, London W1W 7EG
www.tjboulting.com
• The green mosaic facade of this arts-and-crafts Fitzrovia landmark now fronts the handsome new incarnation of what used to be Shoreditch’s excellent Trolley gallery, whose new venture likewise showcases their publishing arm Trolley Books plus a selection of interesting emerging artists.

Vela
38 Langham Street, London W1W 7AR
www.galleryvela.com
• Co-founded by Ryan Gander’s ex-studio manager Alli Beddoes, this new gallery hosts a stable of young artists making approachable painting, sculpture and multimedia work, often with a representational slant.

England & Co (by appointment only)
90-92 Great Portland Street, London W1W 7NT
www.englandgallery.com
• Ex-Notting Hill stalwart known especially for intricate hand-crafted paper and book-based works plus a large stock of visually-accessible 20th and 21st century art. This “transitional” space is open only by appointment only, however.

Mummery + Schnelle
83 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 6RH
www.mummeryschnelle.com
• It’s always worth visiting this rather reticent gallery, successor to Andrew Mummery’s Shoreditch eyrie in the Tea Building. As with that venture, it specialises in contemporary painting that, while often visually appealing, pushes the boundaries of the genre.

David Roberts Foundation
111 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 6RY
www.davidrobertsartfoundation.com
• Groovy metal-floored space curated by Vincent Honoré and showcasing the interests of wealthy collector David Roberts, this operates much like a project space and tends towards the severely conceptual – expect no pretty paintings here. There’s a bigger Camden space slated to open soon.

Rollo
51 Cleveland Street, London W1T 4JH
www.rolloart.com
• A gallery oriented towards representational painting that specialises in themed group shows and the work of under-represented women artists, though they also show plenty of males including veteran abstractionist Frank Bowling.

Hanmi Gallery (opens fully Summer 2012)
30 Maple Street, London W1T 6HA
www.hanmigallery.co.uk
• New venture of a Korean gallery who also have a project space in Seoul. It’s due to open Summer 2012 but hosting occasional “interim” exhibitions while they undergo renovation, so there’s currently no need to make a detour unless there’s definitely something on.

Arup Phase 2
8 Fitzroy Street, London W1T 4BJ
www.arup.com/phase2
• Bit of a wild card as Arup is actually a world-famed architectural engineering practice, but they also have this project space for work exploring “the connections between art, design and engineering” – the website’s not very forthcoming so it’s worth just popping in and asking if anything’s on.

Woolff
89 Charlotte Street, London W1T 4PU
www.woolffgallery.co.uk
• More towards the illustrational / street art end of the art market than my remit here really accommodates, but it’s en route back to Goodge Street for a well-earned post-art drink, so there’s nothing to be lost by popping in…

And that’s it, though there will doubtless be still more galleries opening soon after I post this.

Tim Threlfall, “Sisters and Brothers” (1963), plus its label

I was about to discuss a few sculptures in Coventry’s fine Herbert Museum & Art Gallery, notably the above “Sisters and Brothers” (1963) by Tim Threlfall (1940-1999), when I became so enraged by their uninformative labels that I offer this rant instead. I’m not having a go at the Herbert in particular, as dumbed-down captions are an irritant at many museums and galleries. And I have no quibble with explanatory labels per se, or a simple paragraph to engage children. But why is it considered OK to cater for under-tens and the verbally-challenged (who won’t read them anyway), while ignoring intelligent, curious adults, who are far greater in number? This particular label looks rather impressive at first sight – nicely designed and clearly written, with much care obviously taken. An easy read for kids and the casual visitor, as presumably intended. But if you love art and want to approach the work seriously – as I did in this instance, and as a museum should provide for – the lack of rigour behind it seems to me not just wrongheaded and patronising, but actively depriving viewers of information that they have a right to know. So, allowing this hapless little card to stand as an exemplar for many other offenders, I quote in full:

“This piece is an example of a jagged style of sculpture from after the second world war, known as the Geometry of Fear. It powerfully evokes the radar dishes of the Cold War. This piece is welded together from slabs of iron and shows Tim Threlfall’s feeling for solid material. It is influenced by the work of Threlfall’s idol, the sculptor Eduardo Chillida. What does this sculpture remind you of? We think it looks like a monster form Dr Who!” 

Even by its own reductionist standards, the label doesn’t address the obvious question most viewers will ask: why is this abstract sculpture titled “Sisters and Brothers”? Sure, it looks a bit like a radar antenna, but it also – as the caption doesn’t observe – resembles enshrouding, protective wings. I learned from a Herbert educational PDF that the work was a gift from Threlfall to his mother, who returned it in her will, whereupon he kept it until his death. This was unusual, as he sold most of his other works, suggesting this one was particularly important to him. Point out these simple facts and the ostensibly “cold war” sculpture gains an emotional narrative of family and loss which would enhance anyone’s appreciation of it, but nowhere are they mentioned. And even on a prosaic level, we are given information-lite:  I cannot be the only viewer would find it helpful to know the dimensions of the piece, and when and how it was acquired. The gallery already has access to these particulars, so it is no hardship to include them in very small type. But apart from noting gifts and loans, they don’t – maybe it’s thought to look too scarily intellectual.

This basic curatorial recording and explication is what museums are supposed to do. Surely at least half the Herbert’s visitors would like more context about the artists: what were they aiming at, is it typical of their oeuvre, how did their career pan out – and if it’s a local artist, where else to see their work in the area. There’s virtually nothing about Threlfall on the internet, so the Herbert can’t deploy the “use Google” defence – and anyway, we need solid and informative public museums precisely to protect us from the ephemeral caprice of privately-owned electronic data. Yet in this label’s 80-odd words of primary-level prose, biographical facts are totally omitted, while Eduardo Chillida, who the presumed-dimwit readers will never have heard of, is namechecked with no explanation at all. Quite apart from some facts about Threlfall, the caption needs to expand briefly on what the Geometry of Fear was about (the educational leaflet I found noted that it was inspired by cubist forms), and a qualifying clause on Chillida including his nationality, time period and what his works looked like. This is elementary stuff that even a newspaper aiming at a general audience would do. A satisfying explanation needn’t be long; just one or two pithier paragraphs – 150 words, say – of smaller type below an initial large simplistic one, if that is still deemed necessary.

Instead, here over half the label’s space is devoted to a patronising comparison with Dr Who. “What does this sculpture remind you of? We think it looks like a monster from Dr Who!” This is a lazy pseudo-question, the kind of low-aspiration educational thinking that artificially limits childrens’ horizons. I’m no expert, and doubtless a teacher could come up with a better example, but more open-ended and creative enquiries to stretch young minds might be, do you think this looks scary or friendly? How would you feel about it if it was a different size, or shiny like a mirror? Where in Coventry would you put a giant one? Just the same questions that would get an adult mind thinking, in other words: notions that require imaginative discussion of inner feelings and the outside world, rather than than a non-relevant diversion into chat about TV shows and aliens. (If the captioner was aware of the more sophisticated parallel, that Dr Who also originates from 1963 so is a product of the same cold war unease as the sculpture, there is no hint of it here.)

Writing concise yet informative art captions that satisfy all educational levels while patronising none takes time and research and editing skill, but I thought that was the job description of a caption author. It may well be that there are hordes of talented Herbert staff chomping at the bit to write just such labels, but the powers-that-be demand this half-baked semi-information due to policy and dogma. Whatever the reason for their miserliness with the available info, the Herbert Gallery’s caption commissars should brain-up their description policy. By serving only the meagre scraps of fact they assume Coventry’s humble folk can digest, they are depriving the public who pay their wages of knowledge. It’s commendable that they provide explanations at all, but since they’re putting effort into it, they should do it properly. Their high quality holdings are currently let down by the labels’ shallow jottings, and any visitor who hopes to learn more about an artist or artwork that inspires them will walk away dissatisfied. To use some dumbed-down labelling myself, #epicfail.

Yes, it's a concise and well-curated selection of high quality items. So label them properly!

“Scenes from the Passion: The Fall” (1999)

• Though Coventry’s human memories of World War II are fading, its once-medieval streets are still in thrall to the Blitz: there are constant reminders of things that have fallen, and worthiness risen from ruin. One such edifice, the handsomely humanist Herbert Art Gallery and Museum (1957), even displays a meteorite that once struck the benighted city – as if having thirty thousand bombs rain down wasn’t enough. So although he was only born in 1966, it’s not surprising that one of local boy George Shaw’s most gripping paintings is titled “The Fall”, and was chosen to star on posters for the Herbert’s recent survey “George Shaw: I Woz Ere”. This modest show was exceptionally moving – the humble Humbrol devotionals of a bookish lapsed Catholic, prowling his suburban subconscious to revisit childhood scenes of mortality and wonder.

“Scenes from the Passion: Hometime” (1999)

Shaw paints a world of mundane migration routes, the muddy anthropology of his upbringing on the blandly benign Tile Hill estate. The unexceptional woods are as powerful to his small-town imagination as virgin forest to an explorer; the bus shelter a departure lounge, the garages hostile territory. Picture after picture shows well-trodden paths between scrubby nature and scrappy suburbia – gaunt trees shrouding quiescent dwellings, their borderlands a puddled waste of shattered lock-ups whose shadowy entries breathe faint menace. This is the dark fringe of civilisation, without a doubt: the sputtering end of all that’s welcoming and homely, as sharply delineated as the border between desert and city when observed from a high-flying plane.

“Scenes from the Passion: Ten Shilling Wood” (2002)

All his works pick away at the difference between what such sites might suggest to a child, what they connote to an adult eye, and their lesser meaning in the grand scheme of things, just lonely blips in cosmic time. Stoically his chosen spots endure the changing seasons: stark branches piercing evergreens, autumn leaves aflame above a decaying pub. Mutely they observe each ending day: eerie foliage massing into lurid enamel skies, in Shaw’s favoured hour of gloaming. In an almost Buddhist sense, his paintings are meditations on passage and stasis; everything changes, yet everything stays the same. Such scenes evoke the folk who inhabited these hills hundreds, even thousands of years ago. They too would have marvelled, and possibly shuddered,  at the same darkening skies, the same relentless changes – but in similar melancholy dusks, to what comforts did they retreat?

Left, “Scenes from the Passion: The Library” (1997); right, “Scenes from the Passion: The New Star” (1998)

In Shaw’s canon, the twin poles of human reassurance seem to be books and boozers (the church rarely gets a look-in). Two early Tile Hill tableaux, shown side-by-side at the Herbert, sum it up: soot-dark evening streets punctuated only by the welcoming lights of pub and library. Both are companionable forums of juvenile aspiration and adult release, suggesting spirit and flesh, nurture and nature, wisdom and oblivion. The pub appears more enticing, its reassuring bulk softened by glowing curtained windows; less approachable is the spindly library, only reachable through a gap in a forbidding wall. But for Shaw this was the entrance that beckoned: a gateway to other visions and voices, a miraculous portal to his adult self. As he once said to the writer Sean O’Hagan of this beneficent suburb, “I haunted the place, and now it haunts me.”

“Scenes from the Passion: Wednesday Week” (2003) – the gap leading to Tile Hill Library, Shaw’s route to his future

The Herbert has wisely purchased Shaw’s painting of the gap in the wall that led to Tile Hill library and self-discovery, entitled “Scenes from the Passion: Wednesday Week”, 2003 (above) – which should be a pin-up for the Save Our Libraries campaign. It’s the final work in the gallery’s small but well-chosen “Art Since 1900″ room, holding its own robustly against a neighbouring trio of masterly meditations on small-town unease by Carel Weight, Stanley Spencer ad LS Lowry. All three prefigure George Shaw’s oeuvre – it’s nice to imagine he may have studied them in his formative years. They are…

Carel Weight (1908-1997), “Fury (Furious Smallholder)” (1946)

Carel Weight, “Fury (Furious Smallholder)” (1946)

Carel Weight was a Londoner of German/Swedish extraction whose rootless, fearful childhood is evident in his work. A friend of Stanley Spencer, he specialised in disturbing tableaux of violence and visitation set in a nightmare suburbia (actually somewhere between Clapham and Putney) populated with warped, ghostlike wraiths. Though George Shaw eschews figures and has a kindlier vision, there’s a shared sense of anxiety in the clutching trees and encroaching barriers – delete the people and this could almost be one of his “Scenes from the Passion” series.

Stanley Spencer (1891-1959), “Miss Ashwanden at Cookham” (1958)

Stanley Spencer, “Miss Ashwanden at Cookham” (1958)

Leaving aside his visionary potboilers, Spencer’s “realistic” works equal Lucian Freud in icy observation, and suggest the poems of Coventry-born Philip Larkin remade in paint. Tenderer than most of Spencer’s portraits, this shows his neighbour’s daughter, looking much older than her 17 years, swamped by a pink jumper and flowery sofa, with her back turned to the window and village life. In fact Miss Ashwanden was dying, and both artist and sitter knew it; Spencer lasted just a year longer, this being his final painting. Oblivious, the trees and houses march on beyond reach of both, with stumpy brickwork – which Spencer could easily have edited out – emerging awkwardly from Miss Ashwanden’s head. Cookham’s quaint cottages, though so much older, bear a powerful resemblance to the mid-century boxes of Shaw’s Tile Hill, their modest proportions and unremarkable trees united by the eternal English palette of moss green, brick red, and grey running damp.

LS Lowry (1887-1976), “Northern Church” (1947)

LS Lowry, “Northern Church” (1947)

Lowry isn’t just about cloying stick-figures; he also painted some powerful unpopulated works where humanity is indicated only by its traces on the landscape. He often depicted hulking gloomy churches, notably a celebrated 1945 image of Manchester’s bombed-out St Augustine’s Church, gaping helplessly amidst heaps of its own destroyed body. This Cotswold scene was painted just two years later: a rebarbative jagged stump, black and blasted as Coventry Cathedral, recoiling from an anonymous troop of bleached-out graves. The Herbert is fortunate to have it – it’s a graphic reminder of the disturbing memories buried beneath the Midlands’ well-meaning civic temples, and the horror that mild post-war suburbs such as Tile Hill arose from. It may be a coincidence, but George Shaw’s first-ever work on the artistic trajectory he’s still pursuing, “The Little Shop” of 1996, has a distinctly Lowry-esque air – that’s it, below.

George Shaw, “The Little Shop” (1996)

Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room - Love Forever, 1994, installation view at Victoria Miro, 2008

Kusama has made many works in this vein, using mirrors, lights and space in inventive ways – Victoria Miro has been showing striking examples since 1999, and is currently hosting an installation of the artist’s less-compelling paintings, if you prefer your Yayoi with fewer punters. London’s Serpentine Gallery was also an early adopter, holding the UK’s first-ever Kusama survey in January 2000, when the Japanese artist – born in 1929 – was a mere youth of 72. I still remember the impact that show had on me: I visited expecting the dotty progress of an obsessive-compulsive madwoman, but emerged convinced that art and OCD can mix well (and often do, I reckon), having been utterly drawn into her all-enveloping textural world. Maybe it’s a first-time effect, because though the current Tate show is expansive, I remembered the Serpentine experience as being more overwhelming. Tracking down the few photos of it on the web (the internet’s riches decline in quality pre-2005), I realised this was a false memory: for though I’d become so immersed in the Serpentine survey that it’s stuck in my mind to this day, their display was far sparser than the Tate’s. And yet, as they admit at the start of the show, even the Tate extravaganza only manages to cover certain pivotal aspects of her vast archive.

Yayoi Kusama, A Snake, 1974, installation view at the Serpentine Gallery, London, 2000

One question the Tate glosses over is that of “outsider” versus what I suppose must be called “insider” art. Haunted by hallucinations since childhood, and suffering a major breakdown in New York in the early 1970s, Kusama has lived voluntarily in a Japanese mental health hospital ever since, and works in a studio nearby. Self-medication is a major driver of her work – she has said it saved her from suicide – yet within Kusama’s spotty fecundity are developing themes and an engagement with the real world that the pathologically inward-focused repetition of “outsider” and “theraputic” art lacks, compelling though such visions can be. Classic outsider art was championed as Art Brut by Jean Dubuffet, who viewed it as the product of artists working in their “raw” state, not knowingly responding to academic theory or cultural influences. It’s that sense of knowingness which separates, for instance, Paul Noble’s blokey Nobson Newtown from Henry Darger’s schoolgirl universe, or George Shaw’s dark Humbrol suburbs from Alfred Wallis’s childlike crayon ships, or a thousand polite Sunday painters from the occasionally riveting daubs of art therapy.

Yayoi Kusama with her work Dots Obsession at the Serpentine Gallery, 2000

It would make a neat bit of art-speak to suggest that Kusama patrols the borders between these two states, but that’s not strictly true. As her early surrealist paintings show, she has always operated knowingly within art world territory, her feel for the zeitgeist taking her to New York in 1957, where she launched herself so early into the trendy art genres of that era – installation, film, happenings – that the Tate suggests she influenced Andy Warhol’s famous cow wallpaper. Far from being the ascent of an idiot savant, this was the career path of a savvy, formally-trained artist, and one who did not emerge from an art-historical vacuum. The Japanese avant-garde of the 1950s has not been much feted in the west, but ideas we often think of as crystallising in 1960s America and Europe – performance, environments, arte povera – were already being explored by the Gutai group in 1950s Japan, as described in Ericka Schiche’s informative essay on Kusama’s relationship to the Japanese art scene. Western ignorance of their achievements can probably be ascribed to a checklist including World War II, protectionism, and straightforward prejudice, though Beatlemaniac antipathy towards one of Gutai’s alumni, Yoko Ono, probably didn’t help much either. I look forward to the day some pioneering gallery mounts a proper Gutai survey in the UK, perhaps based on the revelatory reconstructions – all originally dating from at least a decade earlier than you would have guessed – curated by Mattijs Visser and Daniel Birnbaum in “Making Worlds” at the 2009 Venice Biennale.

Gutai group installation at Making Worlds, Venice Biennale 2009, which showed a selection of work dating mainly from the 1950s

In fact Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrored Room” at Tate reminds me of 2009 and Gutai in more ways than one, recalling three other transfixing installations I saw twinkling repetitively in darkness that year. Though not directly influenced by one another, all were by non-western artists and owed a clear debt to the elegant time-based electronic constructions of On Kawara (Japanese, b. 1933) and Nam June Paik (Korean, 1932-2006), neither of whom were ignorant of the Gutai group or the Zen concepts that informed them. In “The Shock of the New”, Robert Hughes describes the energy underlying Mondrian’s vision of New York as “quotidian chaos” – a catchily accurate phrase that applies equally well to today’s networked 24-hour world, and an idea that’s expounded magnificently in all three of these works. Like disco globes or mirrored amulets, each one envelops its surroundings in a glittering stillness that bewitches the gaze, reducing the world’s unknowable randomness to points of friendly electricity, the comfort of firelight in a cave. So, to end with another Three Things game, this trio of contemplative installations are:

1) Tatsuo Miyajima (Japanese, b. 1957), “Spirits in the Water with Cuban Artists”, 2009.

Tatsuo Miyajima, Spirits of the Water with Cuban Artists, at Ad-Infinitum, Palazzo Fortuny, 2009.

It doesn’t translate well into photography, but this depicts a shallow pool filled with a multicoloured network of Tatsuo Miyajima’s trademark LEDs counting endlessly from 1 to 99 at different speeds. Part of the artist’s ongoing “Time in Water” series, it was shown in Palazzo Fortuny’s atmospheric group show “In-Finitum”, held during the 2009 Venice Biennale. The LEDs were set to count down in time to the heartbeats of around 300 Cuban artists, all of whom helped rebuild their country – like Venice, an island – after the destruction of Hurricane Gustav in 2008. An unusually harmonious meeting of water and electricity, this serial music-like visualisation of phasing repetition was spiritually as well as optically reflective, and seemed to still the time it was racing through.
• Websites: www.tatsuomiyajima.com / www.lissongallery.com

2) Chu Yun (Chinese, b. 1977), “Constellation No. 3”, 2009.

Chu Yun, Constellation No. 3, Venice Biennale 2009.

Also at Venice in 2009, this inhabited its own pitch black corner of the Arsenale, a glimmering constellation which on closer inspection turned out to be the standby lights of a shop’s-worth of variegated household appliances, designed to wink wakefully while their owners sleep. Chu Yun’s wider work is quite disparate, mixing personal references with comments on the structural organisation of society and the transience of life. His oeuvre includes an archive of 6000 photos of his tiny apartment and arrangements of worn soap left over from washing his friends’ bodies, but he’s most famous for the 2006 installation at New York’s New Museum, “This is xx”, in which he paid young women to sleep sedated in bed as temporary human “artworks” amidst the milling throng of gallery-gawpers.
• Websites:  www.chuyun.net / www.vitamincreativespace.com

3) Cildo Meireles (Brazilian, b. 1948), “Babel”, 2001.

Cildo Meireles, Babel, 2001, pictured at the Museum of Vale do Rio Doce, Espírito Santo, Brazil.

Returning to Tate Modern, this was part of the Cildo Meireles retrospective held there in 2009, although it’s pictured here in Brazil. Meireles’ work is sociable and diverse, but he often masses large accumulations of similar items, here creating a room-height stack of radios dating from the 1920s to today. Arranged by size and age, from carved wooden valve cabinets at the bottom to plasticky moulded trannies at the top, each was switched to a different channel and set to its lowest audible volume. The result was a twinkling tower of quietly babbling babel, which rather than the chaotic cacophony a different presentation could have evoked, suggested a friendly, generous presence – all those purposeful voices, all that creativity, and all free for any interested party to argue with or enjoy. A lot like art, in other words.
• Websites: www.galerielelong.com / www.galerialuisastrina.com.br / www.arevalogallery.com

Posters of tube map art at Piccadilly Station – coincidentally my most and least liked, David Shrigley and Gary Hume, are side-by-side.

Jock McFadyen, Aldgate East 1, 1997 – you should see what he made of Kennington

I remember the days, not actually that long ago, when London’s tube stations were so run-down that some were like outposts of Hades, as notably celebrated in Jock McFadyen’s grimy 1990s underground paintings. These days most are sparkling clean, and even incorporate specially-commissioned projects by major artists. So while you’re travelling to see Yayoi Kusama at Tate Modern, and David Shrigley at the Hayward Gallery (I recommend going to Waterloo first for the Hayward, then strolling along the riverbank to Tate Modern), you can gaze lovingly at a map leaflet decorated with Kusama’s contorted dots; and a few years before, you’d have been bearing a tangled cloud of Shrigley’s colourful lines.

They’re just two of the 15 art-fronted tube maps that have been produced in their millions since 2004 – there’s a poster exhibition of them up at Piccadilly station right now. It’s a simple yet life enhancing intervention that flows from the public service ethos of Frank Pick’s pioneering commissions, one of those little pick-me-ups like Michael Landy’s “Acts of Kindness” poster campaign, Dryden Goodwin’s staff portraits on Southwark’s hoardings, or Poems on the Underground replacing advertisements on the trains. It’s no easy task to design a concentrated tube-appropriate statement that will work on the cover of a tiny leaflet, and doubtless involves much to-and-fro between artist and commissioner, but the results have generally been striking and, in the best cases, thought-provoking. In a spirit of tube-spotteriness I’ve listed them all below, with my thoughts on their relative success – you can still pick up examples cheaply on eBay, if you’re that way inclined.

Clever

1 David Shrigley, Map of the London Underground, February 2006:
The simplest and the best. A mad dashing scribble of tube lines suggesting mind maps and mazes, entanglement and anarchy, its bright tube line colours keeping it cheerful rather than cloudy.

2 Eva Rothschild, Good Times, March 2011:
Looks inspired by Richard Long’s effort, but a more satisfying composition that cleverly echoes her fetishistic sculptural work. By making a broken decimal clock out of tube-coloured line fragments, she suggests a dashed circular whirl through the night time tunnels, lending the concept of a “Good Times” a slightly menacing air.

3 Liam Gillick, The Day Before (You know what they’ll call it? They’ll call it the Tube), January 2007:
A typically wordy title from the verbose Gillick, but the idea – the date of the day before the first underground line opened, treated typographically in tube colours – works well visually.

4 Richard Long, Earth, September 2009:
Imposing order on tube lines as he does on rocks, this is clever in its brutal simplicity, a lopping-off of all the lines (including the non-tube DLR) into stubby branches on Northern Line black. Not being an old hippy, I assumed the title referred to travelling through, or returning to, earth; in fact, the design echoes an I Ching hexagram symbolising earth.

5 Cornelia Parker, Underground Abstract, January 2008:
Kind of a cerebral twin to Shrigley’s spirited scribble, this Rorschach blot in tube colours cleverly suggests the mental journeys we make – and for anyone who doesn’t get the reference, it’s a true Rorschach test, suggesting a nice butterfly, or perhaps something more sinister…

Worthy

6 Yayoi Kusama, Polka Dots Festival in London, December 2011:
OK, so Kusama’s known for covering everything dots, but she usually gets quite a bit of variety out of them. Anyone could have done this bland pattern that looks designed for an umbrella – intense and obsessive dots, or something based on her amazing infinity rooms, would have been more exciting.

7 Michael Landy, All my lines in the palm of your hand, August 2011:
Sensitive and human-centred as ever, you hold his hand in yours and follow the tube lines on it, foretelling who knows what future – but somehow it doesn’t really add up to a coherent whole and comes across as a bit trite.

8 Emma Kay, You are in London, August 2004:
The first and least well-known artist commissioned, Kay appropriately makes works about knowledge systems, and once drew the entire world from memory. This map was a bit easier, turning every line into a circle line, and suggesting London is at the centre of things; it makes an attractive start to the series, but looks more like graphic design than art.

9 Jeremy Deller with Paul Ryan, Portrait of John Hough (Transport for London’s longest serving member of staff – 45 years of service), July 2007:
A charming and typically democratic idea from Deller, this veteran employee sketched in tube coloured lines is worthy, but a bit delicate and impersonal in appearance – until I researched this, I’d always thought it was a Hockney.

10 Pae White, …fragment of a Magic Carpet circa 1213, October 2008:
A rather optimistic interpretation of the average underground journey, this complex Persian carpet fragment is woven from tube line colours, but its intricacy is the opposite of the tube map’s simplicity, and the Liberty-like lusciousness suggests shopping rather than stopping.

So-so

11 Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Tube Map), May 2010:
This looks too much like a normal tube map to have impact, and the idea of renaming tube stations was done better in Simon Patterson’s “The Great Bear”. Here, stops such as Envy, Joy and Compassion seem arbitrary, though they’re apparently named after her experience of those areas. One of her trademark big slogans would have been better, or changing the colours of the lines to represent the stations in some emotional way … and she used to be a graphic designer, too.

12 Yinka Shonibare, Global Underground Map, June 2006:
A world decorated in tube colours to represent London’s multi-culturalism, this uses the Peters projection to show continents in their correct proportion. But the map’s so small it looks lost (presumably not a visual pun) – he could have turned it on its side or used an imaginary projection to make it more striking and less apologetic.

13 Paul Noble, Troubadour Carrying a Cytiole, March 2009:
I know Noble generally works in this very restricted monochromatic manner, and I admire his 15-year pencil-drawn magnum opus Nobson Newtown, but to me this chunky busker says more about the artist than the London Underground and could have been for anything – in a word, arbitrary. One of his turd-folk squeezing into an apocalyptic tube train would have been more fun.

14 Mark Wallinger, Going Underground, May 2008:
The official explanation is that this celebrates the RAF roundel and Londoners using tube tunnels as bomb shelters in the Blitz. To me it reads as a blokey comment on The Jam’s eponymous hit (which went straight in at No. 1 in 1980), referencing Paul Weller’s appropriation of the Mod target, which was of course copied from the RAF. It may use two tube colours (Victoria and Central lines), and the colours of the tube roundel too, but seems more evocative of backwards-looking British culture than modern-day journeying. Hmm, the more I write about it the cleverer it seems. But I still think it’s boring to look at.

15 Gary Hume, Untitled, July 2005:
A queasy crayon drawing of an abstract backgammon board that’s not really representative of Gary Hume or the tube – unless he’s suggesting the whole thing’s a gamble – and the layout’s different from all the others. If he’d done one of his typically amorphous print images in hard-edged tube colours, it could have been great.

And finally, all the maps in order of release, from left to right, top to bottom…

Daniel Sturgis, Oscillate Mildly, 2011, acrylic on canvas

I was enthused recently by a talk at the Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London, staged to mark end of their abstract painting show, Means Without Ends. This collated a nicely-matched quartet artists – Ian Davenport, Mark Francis, DJ Simpson and Daniel Sturgis (images throughout) – all of whom veer towards strong, hard-edged colour, and have narrative or performative concerns underlying what at first appears strictly non-representative work.

All four artists took part in the conversation, which was moderated by the academic Richard Dyer, and attracted a full house. I generally find art talks dull, which doesn’t mean not interesting, but I think they are of more fascination to the “trade”, ie practising artists and curators. This however was pleasingly engrossing, and Dyer did a good job of keeping things going and raising pithy points, as did the audience once questions were opened to the floor.

DJ Simpson and Ian Davenport have performative practices – their work being based on physicality rather than traditional painting – and perhaps not coincidentally they were also the more direct and animated speakers, concentrating grippingly on the practical aspects of their craft. Mark Francis and Dan Sturgis, who wield brushes conventionally, took a more verbose and cerebral approach, using metaphor and theory to quietly ponder how their semi-representitive abstracts respectively engage with – to be reductionist about it – grids and microscopy, and the place of design in modernism. The points that stayed with me were as follows…

DJ Simpson, Isovist, 2011, powder coated aluminium

• DJ Simpson spoke compellingly about wrestling with large pieces of metal before binding them up with high-tech tape ready for powder coating. (“You sound as if you work in a frenzy,” commented one audience member amusingly.) Like his earlier work routing serpentine channels out of Formica-veneered boards, this is a reverse-reveal process, and as with Formica it restricts him to an “off-the-shelf” palette. He waxed lyrical about the technicians he works with at the powder coating factories, and what brilliant colourists they are, although they wouldn’t think of themselves as such. Other than that he prefers not to use assistants, and seemed conflicted as to whether this was because it was too much hassle, too uncontrollable, too unsettling having someone else in the studio, or because he couldn’t afford them. A mix of all four, I suspect: once artists can afford serious help, they learn to deal with the first three reservations, and it can free them up to expand their practices much further, though not necessarily to good effect (insert your least favourite rent-a-sculptor here).

Ian Davenport, Puddle Painting (Yellow, Lime Green, Study), 2010, acrylic paint on aluminium mounted on aluminium panel

• Ian Davenport admitted to an early fascination with Jackson Pollock, and said he sometimes bases his colours on other artists’ palettes. He agreed his work was definitely performative, explaining that he hones his series by practice, until in a zen-like way he can achieve the perfect drip, the ideal arc. Due to the expense of paint there is a lot of forward planning, often on computer, but for him the making, not the conceptualising is the fun part. Even as a schoolchild he would push media beyond accepted norms, mixing glue with his powder paints because he liked the texture.

Mark Francis, Duality, 2011, acrylic on canvas

• Mark Francis reckoned the biggest step change in his work recently has come about by moving to a studio with natural light, which he had never worked under before. He found he was using different colours than in his previous strip-lit environments, and also making more informal pieces by working at a large scale on the floor. He used to have to be in exactly the right mood before starting a painting, then complete it in one fell swoop. Now for the first time he can paint every day, and work on about five pieces concurrently, whereas before it was strictly one at a time.

Daniel Sturgis, The Social Question, 2011/12, acrylic on canvas

• Daniel Sturgis, in contrast, said he’d get confused if he worked on more than one piece at once. While his oeuvre clearly comments on modernism, and the use of pattern within it, a less expected revelation was that he’s inspired by Baroque architecture, with its mix of decoration and simplicity. The unusual crimson of his socks precisely matched his bright yet subtle paintings, and reinforced that, like the other three, colour is a major theme for him. The least well-known of the quartet, Sturgis is currently head of BA painting at Camberwell. I’ve followed his work for many years and it’s good to see he’s stuck to his chosen path rigorously, developing but not diversifying from his chosen themes.

The Indiscipline of Painting book

He recently curated a show of abstract painting for Tate St Ives and Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, entitled The Indiscipline of Painting: International abstraction from the 1960s. While starting with a brief to choose from the Tate and Warwick collections, he ended up branching out and calling in work from all manner of private and foreign collections, creating a personal and compelling visual essay on colour and geometry within painting. It’s the best kind of optical, rather than theoretical curation: making really good use of untypical works that fitted his visual thesis, while also developing a coherent analytical journey. The accompanying book is superbly designed and edited, full of stunning images, and introduced me to lots of work I was unfamiliar with. The show continues at Warwick till 10 March – I’m hoping to go see and it.

Means Without Ends, installation view, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, l to r, Ian Davenport, Mark Francis

The audience raised interesting concerns too, the main discussion points being:

• The use of the artists’ hand versus employing assistants or computers, specifically referencing Damien Hirst and Renaissance studios. Bridget Riley cropped up a lot too: she uses all her assistants “like a computer” apparently, working things out basically then getting the assistants to do all the maths, draw up and paint the works; and of course long before Ian Davenport she was using palettes from art history.

• How we judge the future worth of current artists, again with much reference to Damien Hirst, who came in for a fairly good kicking. There seemed to be much elision between monetary and cultural value, surely Hirst’s point; but he’s so far beyond the bell curve it’s really not a representative example. The moderator mentioned Vermeer, whose works could be picked up “for 40 quid” a century or so ago; and I always think of Edwin Longsden Long, who had queues round the block for his dreadful biblical epics in Victorian times, while all that remains of his reputation now is a room at Bournemouth’s bonkers Russell-Cotes Museum. But sadly it’ll be around 200 years before the jury returns on Hirst…

• A fear of Romanticism and conveying emotion in painting still persists, probably thanks to Clement Greenberg, contended the moderator. Aptly, when he raised this point, there was a massive uncomfortable silence from all four artists – enough to force an embarrassed laugh from the audience – so the subject was never really interrogated.

Finally, in an extra-curricular point, I’ve now seen 10 male abstract painters in two group shows in five days (the other one was at Cul-de-Sac).  Maybe more men do abstract painting than women, or maybe they’re simply more clubbable and visible. I really don’t think the former point is true – and I have learnt recently of at least a couple of galleries who are attempting to bear women artists more in mind (an art version of putting more females on the board, perhaps). There are plenty of women in high art administration positions, so the imbalance is strange. But at least Bridget Riley proved to be the leitmotif of this particular show.

Means Without Ends, installation view, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, from l to r, Daniel Sturgis, Ian Davenport, DJ Simpson

• Means Without Ends
Artists: Ian Davenport, Mark Francis, DJ Simpson, Daniel Sturgis. Times: 20 Jan-18 Feb 2012. Address: Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, 6 Heddon Street, London W1B 4BT. Web: www.houldsworth.co.uk

• The Indiscipline of Painting: International abstraction from the 1960s
Address: Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, The University of Warwick, Gibbet Hill Road, Coventry, CV4 7AL. Times: Until Sat 10 Mar 2012 Mon-Sat 12-9pm. Web: www.warwickartscentre.co.uk

That's the fifth plinth down at the end of the road.

There are signs that, edged out of their traditional east end haunts by gentrification, some of London’s less gilded art enterprises are crossing the Thames to Southwark and beyond (and even some gilded ones, because White Cube has followed suit). The area is spread out and lacking in tube lines, so after a freezing afternoon touring various far-flung warehouses I was pleased to end on a high note at Cul de Sac, a newish artist-run space just a short walk from Elephant and Castle underground station. It would be great if this new south-east art tendency regrouped round the Elephant, as with regeneration just starting, it’s got lots of big empty buildings, feels less intimidating than of yore, and is still quite cheap. A rich area historically, socially and architecturally, it has the gritty Hackney-esque feel that adds an off-piste frisson to art hunting, but also has loads of bus, tube and train options and is less than two miles from Trafalgar Square.

The welcoming windows of Cul de Sac.

Cul de Sac gallery, lurking at the end of a crumbly dead end road, feels even nearer to Trafalgar Square, because looming up outside it is a monolith that at first glance looks exactly like the empty fourth plinth. And at second glance, that’s just what it is: “Phantom”, a breezeblock replica of that temporary home for mainly useless blockbuster sculptures (giant rocking horse, come on down), nobly screening off a rubbishy razor-wired vista reminiscent of one of Jock McFadyen’s more dystopian works. And where else but at the arse-end of Elephant and Castle could you build a full-size replica of the fourth plinth and have nobody notice for nearly a year? To me, it looks better here: the creators should call up Sarah Lucas and ask to top it with her brilliant birdshit-streaked abandoned car “This One’s for the Pigeons (Oi! Pigeons, over here!)”, which was stupidly rejected for the real plinth. Or they could even make their own, as there are plenty of suitably aged motors in the vicinity – indeed, two were parked right beneath it.

A close-up of the fifth plinth, aka Phantom, 2011.

This “fifth plinth” literally and figuratively overshadows the show within the gallery, “Painting, is a Painting, is a Painting”, described in the blurb as being about “artists who rework the paradigm of painting as representational and complete … instead of relying on the canvas as an ultimate facility”, which means they don’t always use canvas, let alone anything so gauche as paint. The curator is Rod Barton, who works with an interesting roster of abstract painters, of whom I particularly rate Michiel Ceulers and Daniel Pasteiner. This project includes a concise selection of work by Nicolas Deshayes, Roman Liska, Oliver Osborne, Oliver Perkins, Dan Rees and Hugh Scott-Douglas (images at end), but is one of those shows where the sum is greater than the parts due to good curation and hang. If I’d been forced to take one piece home it would have been Oliver Perkins’ “The Bridge” (2012) – a splashy confection of ink on rabbit skin and canvas that prettily and lightly references a whole history of painting – but you’d need to see more from each artist to decide if you thought they were worthwhile or not, so it was really just a teasing introduction to some emerging names.

The New Primitives in blokey action.

Or should I say, emerging male names. I’m not into form-filling, box-ticking, right-on art worthiness, but I do find a genre show of six artists where all are men odd these days. I think if a woman had curated, in all innocence, a serious show of six women painters it would be viewed by many as some kind of exclusionist feminist statement, even if it wasn’t; whereas such a large gathering of men can easily pass without notice, let alone question, which shows the reduced forces women still work with. This was especially pointed up since I’d just come from a Brixton group show called “Mesolithic Pop (The New Primitives)”, where the blurb – aka “a newly commissioned text by author and psychoanalyst Anouchka Grose on the subject of masculinity” – had jokily tried to explain away the essential laddishness of the enterprise as a return to supposedly mesolithic days when men were men and women did the cooking (which I think serious research would prove fallacious). While amused by Joel Gray’s life-size stone carvings of modern technology (he also carves stone for Anish Kapoor), and Francis Thorburn’s lashed-together alternative vehicles, my abiding memory was of a shaky video showing a bunch of pallid loinclothed art geezers pushing each other on planks and barrels – basically a DIY beer wagon – down a Dundee hill, tottered after by a brace of giggling girlies on improbable heels. Jeremy Clarkson, eat your heart out.

Even the business cards are clever.

Still, I can’t blame the far better “Painting, is a Painting, is a Painting” for that, and it’s one of the more intriguing small shows you’ll find in London currently. Professionally presented in an attractive space, Cul de Sac radiates the sort of energy that has evaporated from the Vyner Street environs as rent-a-space chancers and braying First Thursday mobs progressively edge out the serious original gallerists. Cul de Sac don’t have exhibitions that often, but they do partake of the “South London Last Fridays” initiative, and if this is the typical standard, it’s worth keeping an eye on their future projects. Meanwhile the uncredited “Phantom” is open to view 24/7 and highly recommended – visit it, and at the same time you’ll get an excellent introduction to a fascinating off-the-radar area. (Local hint: the Elephant & Castle shopping centre is a thriving 1970s gem that’s not as horrible inside as it looks outside, and has some good cheap ethnic fooderies, including noted Polish and South American outlets – or walk up to The Cut at Waterloo for slightly posher pubs and grub.)

• Painting, is a Painting, is a Painting / Phantom – Artists: Nicolas Deshayes, Roman Liska, Oliver Osborne, Oliver Perkins, Dan Rees, Hugh Scott-Douglas. Address: Cul de Sac, 65-69 County Street, London SE1 4AD. Times: until 26 Feb 2012, Thu-Sun 12-6pm, open till 9pm Fri 27 Jan and Fri 24 Feb. Phantom 24 hrs access, no end date. Web: culdesacgallery.com

• Mesolithic Pop (The New Primitives) – Artists: Joel Gray, Francis Thorburn, Cedar Lewisohn. Address: Workspace Group, Unit 2, Canterbury Court, 1- 3 Brixton Road London SW9 6DE. Times: until 19 Feb 2012, Fri-Sun 12-6pm. Web: new-primitives.blogspot.com

Below: works from “Painting, is a Painting, is a Painting” at Cul de Sac, London SE1, Feb 2012

Dan Rees: untitled, 2011

Oliver Perkins: The Bridge, 2012

Hugh Scott-Douglas: untitled, 2012

Roman Liska: untitled (dazzle), 2011; Déjà Vu, 2011; untitled (wicked, sis!), 2012

Oliver Osborne (right): NIMM LIEBER EIN TAXI!, 2012

Nicolas Deshayes: Collective Naturals, 2012

Bye bye Cul de Sac – the Phantom plinth viewed from inside the gallery

One of Hockney's better Yorkshire paintings: "Woldgate Lane to Burton Agnes", 2007.

• I feel as if I should apologise for writing about David Hockney – there’s already been more verbiage about his Royal Academy megashow A Bigger Picture than here is foliage in it, and that’s too much. But people keep asking my opinion of it, and I thought I should do more than keep answering, flippantly if honestly, that I felt he could have said more with just one good tree painting than a forest of mediocrities. The pip was taken the other day when, after gushing uncritically about how enthralled by it he had been, an earnest student started quizzing me about how Hockney had broken all those iPad drawings up into multiple canvases. I couldn’t work out which room the guy was referring to at first, then twigged: he had thought that every single artwork in the show was produced on an iPad. Complete with giant swishy oil paint strokes and all, perhaps from some magic giant oil paint printer. Which just goes to show that people read the blurbs, they mill around anything with a number having their thoughts directed by the audioguide, but they don’t actually look properly at the art. And whatever your opinion of this particular overblown exhibition, the best of David Hockney’s work is precisely about looking.

Compare and contrast: Lucian Freud's "Paddington Interior, Harry Diamond", and Hockney's "Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy", both 1970.

I mean looking in its literal, retinal sense: what Hockney excels at is exploring the many ways an artist can represent the appearance of things, varying his method and materials to suit the subject, aided by the perfect pitch of his drawing skills. I haven’t seen Lucian Freud Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery yet, but it should make an interesting blockbuster comparison, for Freud offers the reverse proposition – digging slowly beneath the skin of things with a dogged, unflashy technique that he developed consistently over the decades. And whereas Hockney mainly conjures his studio works from memory or visual notes, Freud allegedly needed the sitter in the room even when he was painting the background, so sensitive was he to atmosphere. Graphical analysis versus Freudian analysis, to put it glibly – one artist celebrating the outer world, one questioning the inner. With Hockney, it’s all about how he sees it; with Freud, it’s about what he sees.

Hockney's hedges, old and new: "Fields, Eccleshill", 1956 and "The Big Hawthorn", 2008.

Hockney’s pivotal works can be summed up as Percy, Pools and Polaroids: the slick paintings he made in his thirties, epitomised by “A Bigger Splash” (1967) and “Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy” (1970), and the groundbreaking multi-photo panoramas of the 1980s. Traces of both periods are represented in the RA’s scene-setting capsule collection of his landscape career, which whips smartly from a sooty 1950s Yorkshire hedgerow, to sunny self-discovery in 1960s LA, to ever-expanding experiments with medium and technique during the 1980s and 1990s. It’s all presented as preparation for diving out into yet more Yorkshire hedgerows, now candy-coloured and surreal, flowering over half a century after that first gloomy verge. But this small room deserves proper scrutiny, because there is more visual invention contained here than in all the bosky salons beyond.

Some relation: Richard Hamilton, "Hommage à Chrysler Corp", 1957; David Hockney, "Ordinary Picture", 1964.

The most exciting moments are when Hockney really starts to toy with representation. “Rocky Mountains and Tired Indians” (1965) includes, purely for the look of it, a beautiful blue chair in graduated paint which recalls David Hamilton’s sinuous car parts, while “Ordinary Picture” (1964) presents the multiple visual planes of sketchy billowing curtains framing a ruler-straight fence blocking hazy pastel mountains, again with a touch of the Hamiltons. Sadly the glory days of patio pools and tense couples in smart houses are bypassed in favour of the era where he gets bored, goes all post-modern, and churns out jokey efforts like “Kerby (After Hogarth) Useful Knowledge” (1975), with its art styles from many eras colliding (a bad idea he revisits with some terrible Claude Lorrain pastiches in the main exhibition). Finding renewed vigour in the 1980s, he started tackling the vivid, fragmented, multi-viewpoint landscapes which continue to this day, first in Polariods and then in paint. The scale expands like a bubble economy, until by 1998 you could literally jump into the monstrous red maw of his 60-canvas “A Closer Grand Canyon” – exactly concurrent with his first visual forays back into the utterly different Yorkshire countryside.

"A Bigger Grand Canyon", 1998, concurrent with Yorkshire landscapes such as "The Road Across the Wolds" below.

But as his canvases grow, their treatments become less sophisticated; in retrospect, Hockney’s photocollages appear fresher than the paintings they presumably inspired. The most subtle, “Grand Canyon Looking North September 1982”, has the muted quality of an etching, with striated rock and pointillist scrub the only “marks” defining the vast arena. There’s a playful fringe of blurry netted fence in the foreground, for we’re on a viewing platform – all proof that Hockney is perfectly capable of tackling his recurring themes of viewpoints, texture and theatre without bombast. The famous “Pearlblossom Highway, 11-18 April 1986 #1” is more strident, but just as meticulous a study of contrasting surfaces as the tightly controlled early paintings, a compelling agglomeration of spiky cactus, scrubby desert, gradated glass, graphic signage and shiny metal, all beneath a glittering cubist sky. It’s a late celebration of Pop, once again recalling Richard Hamilton, whose 1956 photocollage “Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?” was critiquing the glamorous US lifestyle while Hockney was still making kitchen-sink daubs at Bradford School of Art.

Early and late Pop collages: Richard Hamilton's "Just what is it...?", 1956 and David Hockney's "Pearblossom Highway, 11-18 April 1986 #1".

Since then, Hockney has worked through enough styles to sustain several lesser careers (tellingly, mainly illustrators). But this relentless scaling up has sometimes been his downfall. Rather than representing with paint, using it to sculpt and suggest and tease as he did in the 1960s, on a large canvas he has a tendency simply to fill in geometrical areas with patterny brushstrokes, in a patchwork of garish textures not dissimilar to 1980s Kaffe Fasset knitwear. It is an ailment that afflicts a surfeit of the pumped-up works parading through A Bigger Picture, which some critics have suggested were too quickly created to fill up the show, and even compared to sunday painting. It’s a convincing argument, for the endless array of very similar landscapes don’t really seem to add anything to each other, or to the genre: I often found myself wishing I could be alone with just one small Eric Ravilious hillside instead.

Inspired by a drive to visit a dying friend: "The Road Across the Wolds", 1997

Another problem is emotion, or rather lack of it. Before I saw the exhibition, I was expecting intimations of mortality from the 73-year-old artist, what with all those tunnels, tree stumps, wintry vistas and vanishing points. And Hockney’s rediscovery of his native landscape has a literally funereal genesis, as he first started looking closely at the area in 1997, on a regular drive to the Wetherby sickbed of his close friend Jonathan Silver, founder of Salts Mill, who died aged just 47. It was Silver who suggested painting the Yorkshire landscape, but though Hockney watched his old colleague fade away over a period of many months, the bright crumpled hillsides produced as a result give no hint of the bittersweet experience of driving through the world’s blooming beauty en route to a terminal patient. Not that they should do, and that was presumably not Hockney’s intention; but they would be better works of art if they did (or if he was able). And as for those endless vanishing points, Hockney’s always done them – there’s one in the first room dating from when he was 18, so they’re more about geometry than mortality. Some people do see mortality in the “totem” tree stump series, though I found them awkward and too obvious, while the cigarette-like logs of the “felled tree” paintings descend into pseudo-symbolist mannerism. One is even called “Astray”, which is surely an egregious pun on “ashtray”, if not a nod to the similarly fag-obsessed Damien Hirst, who really does deal with death.

Vanishing points, stumps and logs like cigarettes in "Winter Timber", 2009.

Hockney’s naming schemes are usually pedantic, simply stating subject, place and date, and often incorporating a modifier of size or distance, as if on a spreadsheet (though I was pleased to learn there’s a place called Thwing). There’s even one where he dictates the pronunciation – “The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (Twenty-eleven)” – heaven forbid we should say it “two thousand and eleven”. This matter-of-factness pervades the paintings too, and no matter what the weather, sunny or snowy or misty or autumnal, the same air of decorative, optimistic note-taking prevails. Perhaps that’s why so many commentators loved his crazy writhing hawthorn bushes: a room full of mad blossom captured from memory in what Hockney calls his “action week”, they look as if fat white witchetty grubs are seething from the trees, while cartoony shadow fingers crawl the hot pink road. They were too over-the-top for my taste, but the couple of more “realistic” treatments stood out too – the one at the top of the page, “Woldgate Lane to Burton Agnes” (2007), is one of my favourite works from the show, for its unforced splashy simplicity.

One of his psychedelic blossom series: "Hawthorn Blossom, Woldgate No.3", 2009.

With their blast of openness and light, the hawthorns’ surreal verve makes the surrounding roomfuls of towering woods seem dutiful. For all their powerful physical presence, these grand seasonal series are at heart schematic – you can’t help suspecting Hockney was painting by numbers at some points to complete the set. The worst come at the end, with enormous looping spring glades such as “Under the Trees, Bigger” (2011-11), whose beds of flowers look (possibly deliberately) like floral duvets, and are reminiscent of art nouveau-inspired municipal murals. Best are the serene and restrained late autumn and winter pieces, which due to being leafless and more linear are not so in thrall to strident colour and mark-making as the squelchy spring and blobby summer scenes, though the branches still writhe.

"Three Trees near Thixendale, Winter 2007", from one of the many seasonal series.

It’s advisable to ignore the jarring roomful of self-pleasuring knock-offs of Claude Lorrain’s “Sermon on the Mount” (c.1656), which nestle amidst the trees like a stash of guilty porn. These are a return to his 1970s po-mo posturing, in which Claude’s dark and mysterious mount becomes various psychedelic shapes – coil, conch, pyramid, polyhedron – and most embarrassing of all, with “Love” written above it. Apparently Hockney was interested in the compression of background space (in camera terms, a long lens effect), but it’s all a bit stupid, and Turner pastiched such things better. Taking hubris one step further, he also does iPad plays on the American sublime, with technically impressive banners of Yosemite scenes, immersive in their size but with surfaces as as shallow and slippery as their digital birthplace. They cry out to be projected, or even animated (in which case they’d look like one of those tacky moving waterfall pictures you get in Chinese restaurants), rather than have their pixels rendered in flat ink. The smaller series of 51 spring drawings made on iPad aren’t quite as bad as the harsher voices claim, but they too prove that pixels behind glass are no match for particles on paper. Tucked in a far more rewarding back room of sketches, “Blossom, May 25th 2009, Sketchbook (pages 7 & 8)” is a tiny black ink, watercolour and charcoal drawing of a row of trees, each one wittily varied in its treatment, that is a more telling comment on the nature of woods than all the 60-odd iPad works put together.

Google Street View on steroids: the multi-screen HD extravaganza "Nov 7th, Nov 26th 2010 Woldgate Wood 11:30 am and 9:30 am".

There’s a better use of technology in the multi-panel HD films, which have met with a luke-warm reception, but which I found mesmerising. Not Wayne Sleep’s colourful dance games, though they are fun in a clever-clever way (especially some Matisse mats); wait till the music stops and catch the long, silent glides through the very scenes depicted elsewhere in paint, caught on multiple cameras like an electronic compound eye. Two three-by-three banks of HD screens abut, presenting a series of serene tableaux: sometimes driving us into the same tunnel view at two different times or seasons, and sometimes panning sideways along one undulating grass verge, 18 panels wide. Although each camera catches the same area as it passes, the views are slightly out of synch, and the effect is similar to an animated version of the multi-Polaroid pieces. They make the familiar unfamiliar, allowing us to observe as minutely as a woodland creature while in crystalline detail Hockney contrasts fog and snow, bright and misty blossom, vibrant thunderlight and pallid dampness. It’s like cubism in action, or Google Street View on steroids, and makes you wonder how anyone would even dare to try and capture all this existence for posterity. Yet Hockney seems to be trying to fit the whole world and all of its art history and seasons into his oeuvre, by churning out work ever faster with whatever means come to hand. It’s his most overt nod to mortality, but comes at the expense of many kinds of quality.

Enough woods, already: "Woldgate Woods, 7 and 8 November 2006".

Hockney is brilliant at times, and has had periods of being a truly original visualiser and commentator. His explorations into how earlier artists used lens-based aids such as the camera obscura are a valuable addition to art historical debate, written from the viewpoint of a super-observant practitioner. His experiments with photographs and film have been groundbreaking, and remain relevant to this day. My gaze could rove around his 1960s paintings for hours, their nuanced surfaces transcending overfamiliarity. But how I wish he would try making a smaller splash and start painting intimately again, without all the mannered grandiosity and clashing colours. I’d love to see what he made of an intimate interior, a humble still life, a minutely observed patch of ground; still employing his different painterly voices, but reporting honestly on the objects rather than falling back on bravura technique like an old rock star lashing operatically through a stadium gig. By filling 13 rooms with hundreds of large artworks created to very short order, Hockney has certainly shown, and shown off – now it’s time to start telling again.

• David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture, 21 Jan–9 Apr 2012, Royal Academy, London,www.royalacademy.org.uk

Hockney with the bedspread-esque and pedantically-named "The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (Twenty Eleven)".

Rodin's "The Kiss" in front of Daniel Buren's "Borrowing and Multiplying the Landscape" at Turner Contemporary, Margate

• Margate’s new Turner Contemporary gallery currently has a hit with a show of, you guessed it, Turner: which is good for the run-down town, but a bit of a bore if you’ve seen one squillion works by Turner already, superb though some of the evocations of weather in Turner and the Elements are (especially as they’re mainly watercolours, so much more immediate than his hefty oil works). Currently the Contemporary aspect of the gallery’s name is provided by Hamish Fulton: Walk, conceptual yomps commemorated by giant posters resembling homages to Edward Johnston’s London Underground typography and colour supplement ads for mineral water, adorned with poorly-letterspaced texts of de Botton-ish vapidity. A less ponderous meeting of new and old can be found on the ground floor, where two French stubs of previous exhibitions temporarily enhance each other: Rodin’s ever-fresh and ever-realistic “The Kiss” (1901-04) making a striking focal point to a massive picture window banded with translucent yellow stripes.

At first I thought the window stripes were an above-average Liam Gillick, or a follow-up to Sculpture Remixed, Wayne Hemmingway’s mirrored disco salon of sculpture at Tate Liverpool, in which a century of wildly divergent figuration pranced and preened equitably together in a fun but non-dumbed-down new context. Pleasingly, the window turned out to be by a far more substantial figure, 1960s French conceptualist Daniel Buren, who while famed for a rigorous adherence to stripes, has made architectural interventions using all kinds of beautiful plays on geometry and light, as this Lisson Gallery page shows. However for Turner Contemporary the wily stripemeister has indeed stuck to stripes, and stripes by the seaside can’t help but evoke deckchairs, which may seem a bit obvious; but as there is something wistfully seasidey about Buren’s work at the best of times, from the cheap fairground colours to the beach-hutty panelling to the decaying concrete public art, it was a clever commission.

The view that inspired Turner reflecting into infinity from the upstairs balcony

Entitled  “Borrowing and Multiplying the Landscape” (2011), the installation was a response to the site for the gallery’s inaugural show Revealed, and remains though that has ended, while Rodin’s famous couple are the lingering remnants of a display about youth culture, Nothing in the World But Youth. As might be expected of canoodling teens, they turn their backs on the view that inspired Turner – literally from this spot, as the gallery is built on the site of a boarding house he used to frequent. That bleak vista is now entrapped by Buren’s own spot: an untaped circular area of clear glass, like the blank pupil of a Big Brother eye logo, revealing sea and sky and container ships through sunny stripes that are mirrored into cloudy infinity on either side of the double-hight space. But attractive though the Buren is, especially on a dark winter’s day, it does obscure the seascape. While the mirrored walls enhance the space, it would be a shame if the stripes were permanent, as the window would be more spectacular unadorned, offering an unmediated frame for the scenery that so affected the gallery’s namesake (not that a specific sense of place is always apparent in his paintings).

Whatever your views on Turner, Buren, Rodin and co, a visit to David Chipperfield’s jagged white sheds – reviled as “Slough-on-Sea” by Brian Sewell and loved for its “genius loci” by Edwin Heathcote – is recommended. Just a step away is the rejuvenating old town with its quirky buildings and regulation arty-regen cupcake’n’retro outlets (see also Folkestone), and even on a stark Sunday when most were closed, there was enough on offer to pass a pleasant afternoon. For those in search of a grittier reality, the magnificently tawdry Margate of Tracey Emin stretches gappily along the heavy ochre sands, still home to many classic facades and attractions despite the shutters and burnt-out lots; lovers of decay should catch it before the historic Dreamland is restored as a vintage amusement park. In case any further reminder of the haves and have-nots were needed, Turner Contemporary currently has its own Occupy camp, a gaggle of plastic humpies wilting in the lee of the pristine concrete bulwarks like an offshoot of Mark Wallinger’s State Britain – nice to know that art can provide shelter when the Church of England can’t. But whether you visit with or without art intent (geddit), I have one vital piece of advice: go on a day when the weather’s too nice for Turner to have painted it.

Exterior view of David Chipperfield's shed-like Turner Contemporary: note the mini-Occupy encampment, bottom left

What I have always assumed to be the very cool mailbox of Bernd and Hilla Becher, 2005

• I was just filing some old photos when I came across this enigmatic image, souvenir of an embarrassing art moment that, with retrospect, I’m glad I had. I was visiting Düsseldorf, which isn’t as dull as it sounds, being home to numerous well-stocked museums, and the one-time base of genre-busting figures from Stockhausen and Kraftwerk to Paul Klee and Joseph Beuys. So I checked out the Joseph Beuys boulevard (pretty dull, but imagine having a road named after him in your town, especially if you found a dead hare on it), did a mad dash through the art-historical treasures of the Kunsthalle and Kunstsammlung, and drank lots of surprisingly good coffee. And then it was time to seek out the unsurpassable documentary photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher, influential teachers of so many of today’s art photographers: Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Candida Höfer, et al. At the time Bernd Becher was still alive, and my companion had an address for what he thought was his public gallery and archive, so off we set through the clean-scrubbed Düsseldorf suburbs to locate it. This proved strangely difficult, but we finally came upon a large warehouse-type building in a quaint leafy quarter which looked the part, especially as one of the mailboxes read “Becher” – which I was enough of a fan-girl to photograph, as you see here. Previous experience had taught us that smaller German galleries aren’t as efficient as national stereotype suggests, and don’t always open at the advertised hours. So we weren’t deterred by the closed doors, and buzzed persistently on the bell. Eventually, a bemused old geezer poked his head out of an upstairs window, and gruffly informed us it was a private house and we’d just woken him up. Internet image searches were more primitive in 2005, so after running away we were unable ascertain if it was Mr Becher himself whose ire we’d unintentionally aroused. But as he seemed about the right age, we reckoned it was; and when in 2007 he sadly died, the obituaries offered photographic proof that it had indeed been the great man. Thus, although I never got to see his “public archive” (which was obviously an urban myth), I did get to see him. And his very cool mailbox.

Andreas Gursky's supra-real landscape photo, "The Rhine II" (1999)

Five non-mailbox things to see in Düsseldorf

There’s lots of other art-related stuff to do in Düsseldorf – here’s a bit of it

1 Kunsthalle Massive, somewhat brutalist concrete museum in which to contemplate the impressive contemporary collection in relatively punter-free Modernist splendour.

2 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen The art collection of the state of North-Rhine-Westfalia, stuffed with historical gems from Caspar David Friedrich to the Brueghels, and with dedicated 20th and 21st century wings and a sculpture garden.

3 Rheinturm Aka the Rhine Tower, not as Dr Who as East Berlin’s ball-topped TV tower (immortalised by Tacita Dean in “Fernsehturm”, 2001), but like all such structures a tragi-comic memento of the past’s idealistic future, complete with tacky rotating cafe.

4 Joseph-Beuys-Ufer A road named after the great hare-slapper. It’s a dull dual carriageway that runs along the Rhine. But, wow, it’s named after Joseph Beuys…

5 The Rhine Visitors to Tate Modern may be familiar with Andreas Gursky’s $4m photo “Rhein II” (1999), a quintessential northern European view of slime-green grass sandwiching stripes of flat grey river and sky. It looks like a deliberate abstraction but stand on the banks of the Rhine in Düsseldorf and that’s what you see (even if it wasn’t the bit he expressly photographed). Like the best landscape work (eg the Australian deserts of Fred Williams), it’s so supra-realistic it looks like an exaggeration until you’ve experienced the real thing. But then, Gursky was a student of Bernd and Hilla Becher.

Other resources:
• Düsseldorf Tourism – a useful starting list for Düsseldorf art sites, if a bit old.
• Düsseldorf art calendar – has a list of museums and galleries, though it’s in German.
• Becher exhibition – the only one I could find in Europe currently is at the Winterthur photography museum in Switzerland till 12 Feb 2012.

And here's the Becher mailbox again in all its full, nerdy glory

James Yamada's "The summer shelter retreats darkly among the trees" – a poetic anti-SAD bus shelter behind Parasol Unit

• The other day I came across these two very different shelters sharing a weedy stub of the Grand Union Canal: a domed wooden hut atop a DIY scaffolding jetty, and an icily-lit plastic pavilion borne on white aluminium branches. In the gloom of a winter afternoon they had a fairytale air, though both proved to be artworks, the former relating to Victoria Miro and the latter to Parasol Unit, who share a terrace overlooking the backwater. The ethereal bus shelter, an installation by James Yamada poetically entitled “The summer shelter retreats darkly among the trees”, is perfectly placed to sit and contemplate the colourful patchwork hut and its crazy stack of external hutches, which looked to me like a tramp’s rabbit farm (who knows, maybe it is – locally-sourced food is popular in east London). If the view doesn’t cheer you up then the bus shelter itself should, as it’s illuminated by full spectrum light, which supposedly alleviates SAD – aka Seasonal Affective Disorder, or feeling a bit grim in winter – an effect negated by the fact that you’d die of hypothermia while alleviating it.

Alex Hartley's DIY geodesic hut, his weedy canalside home for the duration of "The World Is Still Big" at Victoria Miro

The hut it overlooks was built by artist Alex Hartley, who makes work inspired by counter-culture refuges such as Colorado’s 1965-founded “Drop City”, one of the first rural hippie communes. Its inhabitants were early adopters of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome, using car roofs to build their hemispherical shelters; Hartley’s hut is a wooden reconstruction of one such home, in which to reside for the duration of his Victoria Miro exhibition, “The World Is Still Big”. Within the gallery’s sleeker confines he has mounted a set of large-scale photos of wilderness landscapes, each bearing a tiny 3-D model, in trompe l’oeil perspective, of an architectural structure. Some are industrial, some are folksy, but most look lashed-together with available materials, making temporary shelter in unpromising surroundings. The theme is continued on the top floor with a tragi-comic yellow tent, just big enough for one hunched human, floundering amidst a cartoony meringue of fake snow. This is part of Hartley’s ongoing project “Nowhereisland”, a utopian imaginary island inspired by two trips he made to the high arctic, whose citizens will collectively shape its constitution  (you can sign up on Facebook). The Miro show ended on Saturday 21 Jan 2012, but apparently the dome will next be sheltering Hartley’s teenage son at the nearby Occupy camp in Finsbury Square, while “Nowhereisland” will be taking a 500-mile jaunt around England’s south west coast as part of the Cultural Olymiad’s rolling behemoth. An artist definitely worth catching, with or without a sad bus shelter to view him from.

• Alex Hartley: Victoria Miro, 16 Wharf Rd, London N1, until 21 Jan 2012, victoria-miro.com,  nowhereisland.org
• James Yamada: Parasol Unit, 14 Wharf Rd, London N1, until 18 Mar 2012, parasol-unit.org

Arctic tent as collapsed lemon meringue: an installation view of Alex Hartley's "The World Is Still Big" at Victoria Miro, London

Art orbit is my art-specific blog; and Art Anorak is me tweeting about art and other stuff too

I used to keep a sporadic Tumblr blog called Art Anorak. I’ve now moved all the art content to this WordPress blog, which will be art-specific and updated regularly, with the intention of being useful. I’ll keep tweeting as @ArtAnorak though.

Pipilotti Rist's underpant light installation at the Hayward, "Hiplights Or Enlighted Hips" (2011)

"Homo Sapiens Sapiens" at San Stae, 2005

• I once saw some underpants entangled in a tree outside the Hayward gallery, and they were not an art installation. But at the end of 2011 there were hundreds of underpants strung outside it which were an art installation (above), allowing much lowbrow media punning along “art is pants” lines. They were part of the exhibition Eyeball Massage by Pipilotti Rist, a Swiss artist and folk-punk performer, who was a surprise hit at the 2005 Venice Biennale with an ambitious son et lumière in the canalside church of San Stae, normally more famous for Tiepolo’s Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew. Here footsore art yompers could recline on curvaceous foam platforms and watch the less exalted Homo Sapiens Sapiens (2005), a film starring two naked Eves in the Garden of Eden, projected across the building’s expansive ceiling. Anecdotal evidence suggests it was popular largely because you could get a free lie-down, normally impossible to find in park-starved Venice; given the mix of art overload, physical exhaustion and slight hysteria that characterises Vernissage week, whether the film was worth watching or not was probably irrelevant.

Big chairs in "The Room" at Fact, 2008

The first Rist show I ever saw, at Fact during the less exotic 2008 Liverpool Biennial, also offered a welcome chance to lie down. I was hugely grateful to the artist, because it was pouring with rain and my feet were killing me, but despite spending much time with her substantial survey I remember nothing of it bar a giant chair and a heap of Scouse hipsters nodding out to the warbliness of the films. It’s a vagueness that speaks more of the work than incipient Alzheimer’s, as I can recall plenty of other art from that trip. I thus assumed that equipping her installations with facilities to lie down and chillax must be the secret of Rist’s success, as her projections’ content – naked women, wet nature, woozy close-ups, strategic grunge, whimsical muzak – struck me as the same filmic wallpaper in varying formats, and meaning-free to the point of inconsequence. So would the Hayward tell a different story, or is Pipilotti Rist really, to quote the philistines, “pants”?

"Lap Lamp", 2006

At the Hayward too, there were plenty of opportunities to lie down, but thanks to the hefty entrance fee, its floors weren’t strewn with weary Christmas shoppers. Only a few punters wandered the wanly-lit installations dotted sparsely around the concrete acres, and far from the “thrillingly immersive” experience many reviewers raved about, the ambience was more reminiscent of an unpopular Occupy encampment, or an ill-attended indie rock festival in a 1970s library. The rebellious teenage bedroom feel reminded me that, as a teenager, the artist renamed herself after a figure from childrens’ literature, fearless seafarer Pippi Longstocking (Pipilotti being a diminutive, apparently). Super-strong Pippi was also my favourite childhood heroine, so I wanted to like the show, but it was tough. The films flickering from arrangements of handbags and retro-chic eBay furniture were not greater than the sum of their parts, and the ricketty self-made low-tech machines did not evoke their intended personalities. True to Rist’s adolescent self-reinvention it was all a bit child-like and child-centred, but in the sense of a groovy teaching assistant entertaining toddlers – CBeebies on party drugs – rather than a grown-up intellectual encounter. Fittingly the most engaged participants were a bunch of kids, dutifully tugging some headless-torso-cum-bean-bag things around as if they were in the world’s largest, most depressing, nursery.

Still from "Ever is Over All", 1997

When people praise Rist, and quite a lot do, they always refer to Ever Is Over All, a film from 1997 in which she smashes car windows with a flower. This was on display here, and you can see the allure: a pretty young woman skipping past a row of parked cars in slo-mo, swinging a massive, overtly phallic red hot poker flower and occasionally hefting joyful swipes at car windows, which quietly shatter. The female cop trailing her adds a note of tension, till she saunters briskly past with a cheery salute and the film loops again. One reading posits this scenario as an alternative feminist ecoverse, but though it’s fun, it’s not that deep, and it’s certainly not immersive. You can’t help but ponder the mechanics of it – did they just park certain sacrificial cars, was filming permission gained, who cleaned up the glass, how did they get a metal bar in the flower – not to mention snigger at the over-literal symbolism of a stiffened rod, whose flowery bell-end looks like it’s encrusted with tiny breasts. Rist’s background as a musician means the piece also reads as a clever one-trick pop video, by which definition all sorts of things could be presented as art which actually aren’t.

"I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much", installation view

The other standout, the obviously Bruce Nauman-influenced I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much, was an even earlier play on the MTV generation: her first-ever video work, made in 1986 when she was still a student. It’s worth watching on YouTube (where the artist makes many of her works available), but the installation here added another level. It was shown inside a large triangular box sticking out from the wall, with holes in the underside through which to stick your head, all low enough to make it – presumably deliberately – fun for kids but uncomfortable for most men. Inside you were confronted by a blurry, black-dressed Pipi, her breasts exposed in the manner of a Minoan priestess, frenziedly gyrating and screeching a line adapted from John Lennon’s Happiness Is a Warm Gun at crazily fast and slow running speeds. This provided the only genuinely immersive sensory experience in the show, as your head felt totally divorced from your body, floating in enforced intimacy with other heads in a strange disembodied plane, getting no input from anything but the film. It was like being trapped in a garret with a voluptuous, capricious madwoman, intended perhaps to evoke claustrophobic childhood dependence on the mother, or conversely a mother stuck at home with a hysterical mini-me – the one truly visceral reference to childlike states that I found.

"The Innocent Collection", 1985-

Perhaps those two works were Pipilotti Rist’s career high points. Elsewhere her themes went under-examined in a jumble of psychedelically-hued, overlapping light projections and unsubtle Freudian found objects, relying for effect on physical rather than conceptual layering, or basic show-and-tell, such as The Innocent Collection (1985-), a banal wall of found white detritus, reminiscent of a first-year graphics project (she did after all study graphic design). Apologists claim she talks about complex subjects like evolution, religion and the law, but there’s a difference between simply presenting things, and making a serious comment on them. Maybe some see a fragile poetry in her work – there’s a fragile poetry in anything, if you contemplate it for long enough – it but to me Rist trades on rave installations for the easily pleased, without any hint of the transformative rigour that characterises truly rewarding art. However, I may be lonely in that view, as she has many fans in the art world. A couple of male art writers whose opinions I rate certainly remain entranced with her, perhaps reading those bloopy, bubbly panoramas of floating body parts and pouting lips (mainly belonging to attractive women, it should be noted) as sexy encounters with a fanciful feminine ego, though to my jaundiced eye they look more like the twee antics of some wacky bird you’d meet at an art therapy group.

George Condo: Mental States, exhibition view

To be kind to the Hayward’s greater curatorial vision, the Rist show’s light and playful female mind-spaces contrasted intelligently, though not to her benefit, with the darker male psyche evident in George Condo: Mental States, a survey running concurrently on the floor above. Although a bit paint-by-numbers at times, Condo’s warped de Kooning-paints-the Muppets schtick was chewier viewing, partly due to his work’s obvious influence on queasily kitsch art market stars John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage, and partly due to a mordantly humorous salon hang exploring male cliches and classical tropes that demonstrated an unexpectedly rigorous development.

Still from "I'm Not the Girl Who Misses Much"

But it’s Rist who got the plum spot downstairs, and while she’s obviously a godsend for curators looking to fill a large space with modish audiovisual work, the promise of her early productions seems to have dissipated. There’s a bit at the end of her disturbing dance in I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much where the blurry thrashing stops, and John Lennon’s original song kicks heart-stoppingly in, punctuated by an image of Rist’s bared teeth. After some non-sequitur scenes of a tree and the artist dressing, the dancing returns in brief echo, before being engulfed by a sudden whining blackness suggesting off-screen catastrophe. That grimace as the poignant “real” music (meaning real life?) plays out is ambiguous: it could be read as a fierce look, but also an accommodating grin. The latter aspect of her muse held sway: instead of pursuing an inner dancing demon she wandered off into the nature-and-nakedness shallows signposted by the non-sequitur scenes, a woozily feelgood landscape despite the recurring elements of blood and minutely-inspected orifices. As in the recent Tate Britain show of Barry Flanagan, which sensibly concentrated on his inspiring Arte Povera riffs and terminated once he found success making appalling hare sculptures, in this show – to work a metaphor – you could map the ghostly traces of a strange artistic path left untrod in favour of an unchallenging, crowd-friendly highway. Personally, I’d have preferred to see more of the adventurous Pippi Longstocking, and a lot less of the pants.

• Eyeball Massage, Hayward Gallery, London, 18 Oct 2011-8 Jan 2012

A load of old pants in “Massachussets Chandelier”, 2010

Chilliaxing to a rave-style installation

A headless bean bag torso

Punters watching "I'm Not The Girl Who Misses Much" in its triangular box

A video in a handbag

The rebellious teenage bedroom feel was explicitly referenced in this mini-room set

Installation view of her famous car-window-smashing video

Magical environment or 90s exhibition display?

Inside the underpants chandelier

And more pants outside. I rest my case.

MARK by Mark Wallinger, found in Alaska Street, London SE1, 2010. The wall is opposite a patisserie, so maybe he'd popped in for cake

• I couldn’t decide if “Mark” was a moniker or a conceptual statement when I first spotted this mysterious piece of graffiti politely chalked in the middle of acres of brick wall, but it struck me as a clever, so I photographed it. It was a good move – I later learned it was part of a Guardian/Frieze project by Mark Wallinger, so it was both a name and a conceptual statement, with the triple whammy of converting the wall into a frieze. It was one of many such he chalked on various brick walls in summer 2010, which were then incorporated into a 113 minute video called “MARK”, often paired with “According to Mark”, an installation of miscellaneous chairs all tethered by cords to the same lofty vanishing point, and magic-markered with his name – or possibly a word meaning dupe – on the back.

Two views of selfhood: Mark Wallinger's "According to Mark" (left) and "Self Portrait" (right)

Colin McCahon, "The Days and Nights in the Wilderness" (1971)

He has also made a series of works called “Self portrait”, paintings of the small but meaningful word “I” in different fonts. Many artists have done variations on this – there’s a page of them here – though to me Wallinger’s seem most inspired by the compulsive “I am” paintings of that late struggler after faith Colin McCahon, too little known outside his native New Zealand, who had an impactful London show at the ICA in 1990. But while “MARK” and “Self Portrait” may seem superficially similar in their concepts, they present diametrically opposing aspects of the self. The letter “I” presents the inward self, different for everyone and impossible to really know from outside, yet a word that when written or said is exactly the same for vast numbers of people. Whereas Mark, in the sense of a name, represents the outward self: again a title shared with many others, but with differing socio-historical readings imposed from the outside, depending on the hearer. A name can even confer qualities on its owner that were shaped by other bearers: Queen Victoria in my case say, or  the Gospel of St Mark – alluded to in the aforementioned “According to Mark”, and whose writer is in fact disputed – in Wallinger’s. His first name is felicitously also the word for the basic component of what his “trade” is traditionally deemed to be about – which in itself is an extrapolation of the most primitive indicator that an entity was present, from an animal to a glacier to a meteorite to a hoodie. But of course even the basic mark is not a given in contemporary art; though there’s no doubt that this Mark is indeed a clever and subtle (much more so than he at first seems) artist.

Below are two other images I stumbled across while researching this that, in very different ways, seemed to refract echoes of Wallinger’s “MARK”: “The Resurface”, 2010, by Turner prize loser (shame!) George Shaw, whose brick walls also allude to the mysteries of human lives passing; and a 1450-ish imaginary portrait of St Mark the Evangelist raising a singular digit by Andrea Mantegna, the only artist of that period known to have painted self-portraits. See the Mantegna in the Städel Museum, Frankfurt; or for more of Mark Wallinger’s self-contained marks and non-marks there’s an exhibition at the De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art in the Netherlands (it’s in Tilburg, an hour from either Antwerp or Amsterdam) until 12 Feb 2012.

Sublime to mundane: Andrea Mantegna's "St Mark the Evangelist" (1498-9), left, and George Shaw's "The Resurface" (2010), right

Memento mori: On Kawara, Amy Winehouse and Stuart Cumberland

The offending tweets: Amy found dead, On still with us

• So, I was on one of Paul Carey-Kent’s excellent Saturday gallery route marches. It was late in the day. The sensitive artists had all left, and just three of us hard-core yompers had made it to Stuart Cumberland’s show of new paintings at The Approach. Correctly described by their creator as “posh decorations”, they had echoes of Keith Coventry and Gavin Turk in their concept, and quotes from Lichtenstein and Warhol in their bright stencils of dotty, drippy, hand-drawn circles. Most interesting were their titles: the names of people whose newspaper obituaries had been printed on the day they were made. There were only four works, and not much else to say about them, so after a short period we departed. As we trailed off to Wilkinson for the last stop of the day, I ruminated on the grey plastic Lidl sandals of a protagonist in an art video I’d seen earlier. I knew they were from Lidl because my brother, an impecunious writer, swears by them. As so often happens when you think about people, at that very moment my brother texted me. Thanks for the birthday card I’d sent him – and did I know Amy Winehouse was dead? Being a fiction writer, his relationship with the truth is at times tenuous, so I turned to Twitter to check it out. And, as shown above, under the first bald confirmation in my stream was an almost shocking counterpoint: On Kawara’s reassuring daily declaration that yes, he is still alive (at least I assume it’s On Kawara; he paints the current date every day of his life, so it seems perfectly plausible he now relentlessly tweets “I AM STILL ALIVE” every day of his life too). It occurred to me that in naming his works after obituaries dating from their day of production, Cumberland is almost creating anti-Kawaras – painted memorials as evidence of permanent snuffing out, rather than glorious, continuing existence. So whatever he finishes today could be called Lucien Freud; and tomorrow, Amy Winehouse. It’s a clever idea, and a haunting conceit. But it doesn’t make me feel any less upset about an avoidable, pointless, early death.

Stuart Cumberland: Leslie Nielsen, 2010. Oil on linen, 195 x 160 cm

On Kawara: JAN. 4, 1966, 1966, from Today series, 1966-. Acrylic on canvas, 8 x 10 in / 20.3 x 25.4 cm

Junk table, Cambridge Heath Road, London E2 (not by Phyllida Barlow)

• Languishing outside some artists’ studios in Bethnal Green I found this abandoned table – it looked to me like a sculpture by Phyllida Barlow (though sadly not, or it would be worth a few bob). Below it are a few shots from her recent show Rig at Hauser & Wirth, to show the resemblance. It’s not in insult – I’m a huge admirer of her work, and she’s influenced a large number of younger sculptors, from Rachel Whiteread to Graham Hudson, both by being a tutor at the Slade school of art, and simply by being an inspiringly adventurous artist.

Phyllida Barlow, RIG: untitled; broken shelf 3, 2011. Steel bracket, timber lengths, fabric, plaster, scrim, tape

Phyllida Barlow, RIG: untitled; blocks, 2011. Polystyrene, fabric, timber, cement

Phyllida Barlow, RIG: untitled; emptyunits, 2011. Plywood, plaster, paint

Phyllida Barlow, RIG: untitled; stagechairs, 2011. Timber, cement, paint. Right: untitled; tubes, 2011. Polystyrene, wire-netting, fabric, cement

Phyllida Barlow, RIG: untitled; hoops, 2011. Plywood, cement, paint

Phyllida Barlow, RIG: untitled; blocks, 2011. Polystyrene, fabric, timber, cement

Graffiti tourist photographing street art left over from Banksy's Cans Fest, Leake St, London SE1

• In a grotty tunnel under Waterloo Station, Banksy once launched a weekend of street art called The Cans Festival (Cannes Festival, geddit?) – and this guy’s photographing some of the remains. Since then the artistic graffiti has mainly been covered by swathes of dross, so I thought I’d memorialise it in its heyday. It coincided with the Tate’s Street Art initiative, hence their tag, below; and there were a couple of references to a real artist, namely Andy Warhol. Arch-Warholian Gavin Turk also featured with a couple of stencilled signatures, the fate of which are discussed here. The most valuable works however were  Banksy’s own contributions, though like everything else of note they were soon defaced.

The Tate gives its imprimateur to Banksy's festival

A reference to Andy Warhol's classic banana cover for the album The Velvet Underground & Nico

Another Warhol reference: the soup can-style spray cans read "Tomato Spray"

A Banksy helicopter hovers over a "Missing" poster for his work "Money Man", a hanging banker figure

And finally, watched over by George Orwell and a reboot of the world's oldest wall art, a Banksy cleans up

Gavin Turk's stencilled artwork in Leake Street, London as it looked in 2007 – it really is lost now

• Pictured here are two stencilled Gavin Turk signatures found two years ago in Leake Street, a disused subterranean road which runs under Waterloo Station on London’s South Bank. They were created as part of the Banksy-initiated Cans Festival in June 2008, an open-to-all extravaganza of street art – and just this bit of fine art. Less accomplished graffiti has proliferated in Leake Street ever since; the paint-swathed tunnel is now a tourist draw, and home to Kevin Spacey’s experimental Old Vic Tunnels theatre (the original Vics, Young and Old, are nearby). It’s also where Banksy premiered his film, Exit Through the Gift Shop – he donated the deco-style red plush cinema seats to Spacey’s theatre afterwards. Despite all this it’s still a dingy and avoidable short-cut, so it wasn’t till today that I discovered Turk’s works have disappeared, as the before and after images below show: one behind a grey-emulsioned bin station, and the other beneath some extremely poor generic graffiti, which also shamefully hides the cheerful ceramic tiles. Damn – too late to chip those Turks out now!

Turk's Waterloo works before and after: left in 2008, and right in 2010 (ie gone)

Punters kill time watching The Clock at White Cube, Masons Yard

• The idea of Christian Marclay’s 24-hour art film The Clock is simple: a montage of time pieces drawn from the history of cinema, shown in chronological order. There are at least 60 glimpses of the time in every hour, and  whatever time it is outside the art gallery, inside it Marclay’s film will be showing a movie representation of that exact minute – viewers need never consult their watches, because someone on celluloid will soon be displaying theirs. This may suggest a schematic treatment featuring one time piece per minute, every minute, on the minute, but it’s far more subtle than that. Marclay is famed for his work with sound, and this too is a choreographed, rhythmic performance, the tempo varying from lulls to crescendos, with mini-collages and sub-plots inserted between – such as compilations of dream sequences, or egg timers, or clocks with no hands at all. The narrative is fragmentary, yet engaging: some movies contribute several excerpts, providing navigable plotlines that weave in and out. Cutting is clever, with one clip’s action leading into or commenting on the next, and soundtracks too often bleed from one clip into subsequent ones, altering their intended emotional tone. It took Marclay three years to make this piece and the amount of logistics, editing, rights gathering and sheer hard work involved makes the mind boggle. But the result is truly a magnum opus: The Clockis the ultimate time capsule.

A scene from George Pal's The Time Machine

Watching the film in an art gallery is like being HG Wells in George Pal’s haunting 1960 movie of The Time Machine (right), sitting rooted to a time-travelling couch while lives from ages past flicker briefly by. Cocooned on comfy sofas in a darkened auditorium, The Clock‘s audience similarly observes time yet feels outside of it, while just a short distance away, real-time people come and go and daylight changes unseen. Onscreen, the experience is parallel: Marclay has sampled an international medley of films ranging from early monochrome talkies to recent productions, and famous actors flit through the scenic mosaic at many ages and stages of their careers. You can’t help trying to name and date the movies, studying the myriad directing and acting styles like a time detective examining clues. The one constant is the clock as metaphor, and the limited repertoire of things directors tend to do with it: look, listen, punch, throw, and sometimes cuddle. Then too there is a sub-theme of time-travelling movies embedded reflexively within this uber-time-travelling movie – for instance Groundhog Day pops up reliably at 6am, and the Back to the Future trilogy recurs. On another level, The Clock hints at our personal relationships with time: sometimes characters watch their clocks, and sometimes their clocks watch them. Activities peak and trough with the real world, so after 4am we get slow waves of crime and dreaming; by 8am, brisk cuts of curtain-pulling and work-going; and at the top of every hour, a hail of bing-bongs as endless plot points are reinforced by striking the time. Taken as an over-arching whole, Marclay has orchestrated a masterly taxonomy of how cinema portrays times of day, akin to a modern-day devotional book of hours, or an attention-deficit sufferer’s dream version of TV show 24. The possibilities of deconstruction, like the film itself, seem endless.

The Clock is routinely described as compelling, which is accurate: it’s like the best film trailer you ever saw, each clip leaving you wanting more. White Cube mounted three 24 hour performances for punters with time to kill; some fanatics planned staggered 24-hour viewings, and there were reports of huge afternoon queues. Therefore when I visited at 4am, I expected to find a sea of slumbering arties and smashed post-clubbers reminiscent of Scala all-nighters in their flea-infested heyday. Yet instead White Cube was somnolent, containing only a handful of die-hard art fans plus two friendly if slightly sceptical security guards, which made for a civilized and meditative viewing experience. Unfortunately when the small hours became the wee hours I discovered the gallery’s loos were out of action, and had to gatecrash the Marie Celeste-like grand hotel next door for bladder relief. After an hour or so of total immersion in The Clock‘s pre-dawn scheming and dreaming, sneaking past a lone toiling cleaner into the hotel’s empty, over-lit washrooms was like being in a film of my own. And to re-emerge from White Cube at 8.30am, segueing from Marclay’s breakfast-time frenzy of clock-punching and commuting into a real London just awakening to Saturday morning, was surreal: the bustling passers-by looked no more alive than their on-screen avatars, and every clock appeared magnificently significant.

Like the 24-hour completists I too would happily watch more of The Clock, especially since in the few hours I’ve viewed so far I spotted one strange anomaly: at around 7.55am, a black-and white boy awakes to an alarm clock showing 6.55am. Is this a deliberate error to test the concentration, like the phantom roads on London’s A to Z map that catch out plagiarists? Or is it a recurring plot point, later to be corrected by the boy realising his clock was one hour behind? Or is it simply an honest mistake, a tiny disruption in Marclay’s perfect filmic fabric such as those left in Islamic carpets in order not to usurp Allah? I have no idea, but it would be nice go back and find out, perhaps photographing that anomalous moment on a digital camera with the “real” hour burnt into the frame, my own personal clock-based art object. If only I could find the time…

• White Cube, Masons Yard, London W1, www.whitecube.com 

Clicking the image above opens the actual Google map in a new window. Pictured: a work from Hauser & Wirth's Louise Bourgeois show

• I tailored this short West End walk for a friend visiting from Australia, who’s into art, ceramics and fashion – find the map here. The shows were on in November 2010 but it’s a good route any time, and passes innumerable other art galleries, not to mention loads of high end fashion outlets. It’s a circular route starting at Green Park tube station, though we started at the V&A’s world-class ceramics gallery, which at the time was showcasing the hugely influential Richard Slee. An afternoon isn’t really long enough to take in everything here, especially if sidetracked by the fashion shops, hence the optional extensions. But a full day would be able to take in all these galleries and more (eg the RA, Sprüth Magers, Helly Nahmad), plus some civilized snack stops. For a full list of the galleries see the map, but below is a selection of works on show in early November 2010.

Above: Louise Bourgeois at Hauser & Wirth, 5 Savile Row, London W1

Above: Trevor Sutton at Flowers Central, 21 Cork Street, London W1

Above: Edmund de Waal at Alan Cristea, 31 Cork Street, London W1

Above: John Virtue at Marlborough, 6 Albermarle Street, London W1

Above: Henry Krokatsis at FAS Contemporary, 148 New Bond Street, W1

Above: Damien Hirst at Gagosian, 17-19 Davies Street, London W1

Above: Beatriz Milhazes at Stephen Friedman, 25-28 Old Burlington Street

Clicking the image above opens the actual Google map in a new window. Pictured: the must-see Nottingham Contemporary gallery

• Nottingham has quite a lot of art activity, and though the well-regarded Moot gallery closed in 2010, there’s still plenty left to see if you choose the right time. Note that Derby is a short train ride away, and hotel-wise it’s cheaper (and, at weekends, quieter) to stay there and commute to Nottingham – so I’m also posting a separate art map for Derby. The map above lists the main places in Nottingham to investigate – there’s also a list below. Most venues only have intermittent shows, and experience suggests that the smaller places don’t necessarily open when their websites say they will, so phone in advance to check. If short of time the main venues are the best bets anyway: New Art Exchange, an impressive venue a fun tram ride from the centre, with a cafe which serves lunch; the sprawling 1960s Lakeside Arts Centre housing the Djanogly and Wallner galleries (get a bus on Castle Boulevard and ask for the Uni); and best of all, Nottingham Contemporary. Designed by Caruso St John, its lacy yellow and green exterior looks a bit like a kitsch easter cake, but the spacious three-storey interior makes tardis-like use of the steeply raked triangular site. (To see it being built, go back in time via Google Streetview here.) There’s a nice bar/cafe serving a good range of drinks including “craft” beer and euro-lagers (the new trendy thing); it’s open late and has a sunken terrace nestling beneath the tramway, so it’s a pity they don’t do evening meals. And the art? Well, at time of writing I’ve only seen the venue’s second show, Star City: The Future Under Communism (in April 2010) – but if that thoughtful, varied and fascinating take on the Soviet space race represents the typical standard, then I’ll be visiting again. Inclusive but not patronising, enlightening yet entertaining, and with a nice cafe attached – it’s what public arts venues are meant to be like. London’s ICA should take note. (2012 update: I did go back, and it was just as good.)

LISTINGS

• The best web resource I’ve found for Nottingham art is Nottingham Visual Arts Magazine at nottinghamvisualarts.net, which lists all venues and upcoming events. However it doesn’t currently list the venues’ addresses, URLs and opening times alongside the show details (why is this easily-remedied oversight so common?), which necessitates quite a bit of page-hopping and note-taking. To save time, I’ve collated all the main venue details together below.

ART VENUES

BIG HITTERS
The major public arts venues 

Nottingham Contemporary
Weekday Cross, Notts NG1 2GB
• As detailed above, the must-see place if there’s a big show on. It’s right by the tram line so makes a good start and end point; indeed, you could end it all here if things get too bad. Or end up at the bar if not.

New Art Exchange
39-41 Gregory Boulevard, Notts NG7 6BE
• Unworthily, I thought this attractive multi-cultural art space would be full of worthy box-ticking work. There was a bit of that, but in fact I saw some of the best art of my trip here, and the website shows this standard continues, with a really energetic mix of exhibitions. It’s right opposite a tram stop, and well worth the nice 10 minute ride.

Djanogly Gallery & Wallner Gallery
Lakeside Arts Centre, University Park, New Lenton, Notts NG7 2RD
• Part of the university, this is one of those low-rise, slightly crumbling, hessian-vibe venues that doesn’t really do fine art any favours. Its main raison d’etre seems to be performance / smelly food / keeping the kids happy, and the two galleries are hard to locate, even on the website. Nevertheless the Djanogly sometimes has major touring shows, while the Wallner hosts smaller local shows, some of merit; it’s definitely worth checking what’s on.

ARTIST-RUN PROJECTS & SPACES
Interesting, but not always open (understatement)

Tether / The Wasp Room
7a Huntingdon Street, Notts NG1 3JH
 • Almost wilfully confusing, in best “edgy art space” style. Tether is the outfit, and The Wasp Room their main exhibition space – if you can find it, and if it’s open. Even the geezer in the junk shop next door didn’t know it was there, and clearly thought I was mad. When I did find it, it was closed, contrary to what the website said (they didn’t answer their phone, so I went on spec). This despite, apparently, being supported by the Henry Moore Institute and National Lottery. It was pretty annoying – I was on a tight schedule, and would have liked to see the installation, Trans Chaosmos Facility. For the record, their website says: “The Wasp Room is located within Tether Studios, above a carpet shop at the top of Huntingdon St in Nottingham.” But don’t build up your hopes. (2012 update: The Wasp Room is no longer with us, and Tether seem to have mutated into an online TV project. Details of both are still available from the websites, above.)

Surface Gallery
6 Southwell Road, Notts NG1 1DL
• Thanks to messing around at The Wasp Room I ran out of time to visit this experimental co-operative, which is a pity as it’s in an interesting-looking area (in my lexicon, “interesting area” usually equates with “decaying semi-industrial wasteland”), as described on their website: “located behind the Ice Arena, just off Huntingdon Street, next to the Old Drum Centre and opposite Pretty Windows Day Nursery”. (2012 update: still in action, though not much on. No change there then.)

Backlit / Box
The Factory, Dakeyne St, Notts NG3 2AR
 • Ditto, though I went there on Google Streetview and it looked like a good building. It’s a studio complex founded by Nottingham Trent students in 2008, which sometimes has shows – check the home page of the rambling website for details. Backlit is the main space, while upstairs Box is a purpose-built 12 foot square space in which 12 shows will open on the 12th of each month in 2010. Should have been 2012, surely? (2012 update: status uncertain as Backlit’s website is under construction, and Box’s dormant since June 2011.)

Max Warburg Space
17a Huntingdon Street, Notts NG1 3JH
• New experimental art space, with not much info available at time of writing. (2012 update: an obscure Tether offshoot which now seems defunct.)

Broadway Media Centre
14-18 Broad Street, Notts NG1 3AL
• As Hermann Göring almost said, “when I hear the words Media Centre, I reach for my gun”. Only joking – this is actually a lively art-house cinema which shows digital and film-based art in its public spaces – or, when I visited, in its public toilets. And it was a 12-hour work, which adds a whole new dimension to the phrase “pushing it”. But the art seemed like a bit of a sideline; the staff weren’t very clued-up about it, and it was easy to miss. (2012 update: still there, still hard to work out if there’s any art on show.)

One Thoresby Street / Trade Gallery
1 Thoresby Street, Notts NG1 1AJ
• The one-time home of the well-regarded Moot Gallery (it closed, after five years, at the end of June 2010), this hosts occasional shows. There are lots of art organisations in residence, including Trade, Annexinema and The Reading Room, which can all be accessed from One Thoresby Street’s website. (2012 update: still reasonably active.)

AVOIDABLE
Historic buildings, iffy experiences

Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery
Friar Lane, off Maid Marian Way, Notts NG1 6EL
• The castle is tacky and unpleasant, thronged with families pretending to murder each other with arrows, but it does host occasional art shows – though one must pay handsomely to enter. Sadly the exhibition I saw was much worse than expected, even though organised by Moot.

Malt Cross
16 St James’s Street, Notts NG1 6FG
• It sounds good on paper: a friendly community cafe with food, bar and gallery in an attractive restored music hall overlooking a tiny lane. In practice the burger and beer were tasteless, and the art sixth-form dross. The building lived up to expectations, at least.

ALSO SEE
Occasional exhibitions, quality may vary

Nottingham Society of Artists
71-73 Friar Lane, Notts NG1 6DH
• Old-skool daubing.

The Art Organisation
21 Station Street, Notts NG2 3AJ
• Community art in an ex-hardware shop.

The Bonington Gallery
The Bonington Building, Dryden Street, Notts NG1
• The exhibition space of Nottingham Trent University.

Lacemarket Gallery
25 Stoney Street, Notts NG1 1LP
• Show space for New College Nottingham’s art, design, fashion and media students.

Harrington Mill Studios
Leopold Street 1st Floor Turret H, Long Eaton, Notts NG10 4QE
• Big old warehouse with studios for “wet and dirty work” plus a gallery for hire. There would have to be something pretty amazing on to trek out this far.

The Moss Gallery
179 Wollaton Street, Notts NG1 5GE
No website found
• Occasional exhibition space in Wollaton Street Studios. But the only place it shows up in Google is on my own blog, so I doubt it exists any more.

And finally…
• In addition, there are all sorts of other bitty arty venues – see Nottingham Visual Arts Magazine at nottinghamvisualarts.net for up-to-date details.

ART EVENTS (NOW ENDED)

Sideshow, 22 Oct–18 Dec 2010
http://www.sideshow2010.org/about
• 15 new artists’ commissions involving 100 artists from the UK collaborating with 50 organisations, selected by a powerhouse curatorial cast including Rob Bowman, Artangel; Lotte Juul Petersen, Wysing Arts Centre; Phil Duckworth and Ben Sadler, Juneau Projects; and Kitty Anderson, The Common Guild.

British Art Show 7, 23 Oct 2010–9 Jan 2011
http://www.britishartshow.co.uk
• Organised by Hayward Touring, it takes place every five years and tours to four different cities across the UK. This one, the seventh, starts in Nottingham across three venues: Nottingham Contemporary, New Art Exchange, and the horrible Castle. It then moves on to London, Glasgow and Plymouth, altering focus each time. Subtitled (for art-speak reasons) Days of the Comet, it features 37 artists, lots of whom were also in Tate’s “Altermodern” Triennial (and some of whom were pretty half-baked there). The good names include Karla Black, George Shaw, Varda Caivano, Roger Hiorns, Ian Kiaer, Christian Marclay and – hoorrah – Phoebe Unwin, someone I’ve had my eye on for ages, but who rarely peeks above the radar.

Clicking the image above opens the actual Google map in a new window. Pictured: the ever-welcoming Quad Derby

• An idiosyncratic selection perhaps – find the map here – but then there isn’t that much actual art to see in Derby. My building choices may suggest urban decay, but the reality is a stolidly built small provincial town with interesting buildings from many eras dotted between a predictable array of tired malls and shops. It’s an industrial heritage area with pleasant strolls along the Derwent River and three noted real ale (aka craft beer) pubs, though two are somewhat unreconstructed – which would be a plus point for many. Highlight is the art and multimedia venue Quad Derby, whose rolling programme of arthouse films means there’s usually evening entertainment for the transient art fan; they do decent light meals and good bottled beer too, at half London prices. Note: the train station is a long, confusing and rather unpleasant walk from the centre, the so-called Catherdal Quarter, but it’s nicer if you go via the riverside path.

THREE DERBY EXHIBITION VENUES

Quad Derby
Market Place, Cathedral Quarter, Derby, DE1 3AS
• I stayed in Derby while visiting Nottingham, and it’s fair to say that without this cultural oasis I’d have been pretty lost, especially on a quiet Sunday evening. The art shows are intermittent, but there’s a civilised cinema with a fast-changing roster of films, performances, talks and events, plus a BFI Mediatheque with free access to over 1,700 film and TV classics, so there’s always something new to see. I was able to amuse myself with an extensive Ian Breakwell exhibition, followed by Banksy‘s film, which I’d missed in London, topped off with a good value locally-sourced burger/poncey beer combo. The glass-walled cafe/foyer/bar area is quite small and starkly trendy in an Ikea-baroque kind of way, but it’s got comfy corners and a panoramic view of the square outside, not that there’s much to admire out there unless skateboarding goths are your thing. It opens till late, spilling light onto its bleakish surrounds, and is a pleasant place to while away time; so it was heartening to see a wide mix of ages and races enjoying the facilities, from trendy asian youngsters to crusty caucasian ancients – all seeming equally at home. With the high profile failure of provincial noughties archi-star venues such as Nigel Coates‘ drum-like Hallam Union in Sheffield (once a pop museum, now a student dive) and West Brom’s The Public (a Will Alsop-designed multimedia pink elephant, fighting back from administration), it’s good to see a millennium-style arts emporium confidently meet, and even exceed, local needs. For more on noughties architectural hubris, see Owen Hatherley’s The New Ruins of Great Britain, discussed here.

Derby Museum and Art Gallery
The Strand, Derby DE1 1BS
• A typical small municipal museum, worthy but frozen in hessian-clad time due, presumably, to lack of funding. The world’s largest collection of Joseph Wright of Derby paintings (which means one medium-sized room-full) is genuinely worth seeing, and deserves finer surrounds than this dowdy gallery – which won an award in the 1990s, but must have lacked love since then. It was also sad to see a collection of 1960s ecclesiastical sculptures – made by a local artist and rescued from a hospital chapel, details of which I’ve been totally unable to excavate via Google – distributed across three floors, and literally propped up in corners. On the plus side, there are regular shows of local and national contemporary art, and it’s an interesting accretion of buildings melding Victorian Gothic with a classic early 1960s frontage. It just felt as if the decent art holdings could be displayed much better. (Update 2012: in 2011 the Joseph Wright room closed for refurbishment with planned reopening on 25 February 2012.) 

The Silk Mill / Derby Industrial Museum
Silk Mill Lane, off Full Street, Derby, DE1 3AF
• An industrial relic housing yet more industrial relics, this was one of the first factories in the world: the Lombe brothers’ Silk Mill, completed circa 1723. It is now part of the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site and currently showcases, in slightly ramshackle fashion, historic examples of local industry – which will be of most interest to those with an insatiable curiosity about the innards of Rolls Royce jet engines, which are manufactured nearby. It’s a subject which was more artfully treated in Jane and Louise Wilson’s film installation “Spiteful of Dream” (2008), specially created for the launch of Quad Derby. (Update 2012 – it was “mothballed” in 2011 due to cuts; there is no set reopening date, though it’s interesting from the outside too.)

THREE DERBY REAL ALE PUBS

The Brewery Tap
1 Derwent Street, Derby DE1 2DE‎; T 01332 366 283‎
 • Offers a superb array of beers, including some Belgian fruit varieties, plus beer’n'cheese sampler trays; a top pub with nice decor, though considered a trifle identikit-sub-gastro for the knowledgeable punters on beerintheevening.com. I can see their point, as it was a bit characterless and suit-friendly, but I still preferred it to the two real ale dens below – maybe because I’m not a bloke.

The Old Silk Mill
19 Full Street, Derby, DE1 3AF;  T 01332 369748
• Swirly carpeted old-style boozer with around 12 beers and two cats. It’s favoured over The Brewery Tap by beer purists but a bit old skool for my taste; it used to be a bikers’ pub apparently, and still has that grotty feel.

The Flowerpot
 23-25 King Street, Derby DE1 3DZ; T 01332 204 955
• This has a big fan following for its in-house brewery and multiple ales, but both times I attempted entry I was instantly repelled by a mixture of shouty men, amplified rock music, and sticky-looking decor. Guess I’m just a girlie sap.

THREE DECAYING DERBY BUILDINGS

Bath Street Mill
Bath Steet, Derby DE1

  
Above: the ruins of Bath Street Mill from the river (l) and hill behind (r)

• Or ex-mill: Google satellite view shows this as still intact, but what was once a historic ex-silk mill is now a sorry if romantic ruin on the riverside, just upstream from Derby’s only high-rise tower block. Built around 1850, for most of the 20th century Bath Street Mill was home to various small industries, but in 2009 it was bought by a developer and subsequently went up in flames – a similar tale to the Hippodrome, below. There seems to be a lot of “mysterious” developer-related destruction in Derby, which is sheer cultural vandalism given the town’s industrial heritage. For anyone who’s interested, there are a few links to this intriguing building below.

• derelictplaces.co.uk - Some photos inside the derelict building, including a bonkers orange sofa (relic of a furniture workshop)
• picturesofderby.co.uk - Historic photos
• flickr - A good photoset including the mill on fire
• thisisderbyshire.co.uk - Video of the fire
• wikipedia - Historical overview

Derby Hippodrome
Green Lane, Derby DE1 1RT

  
Above: the decaying Hippo in early 2010 from in front and behind

The Hippodrome's ex-roof

• Another tale of destruction in the name of development: an important building that, under shady circumstances, has become a burnt-out wreck – though rescue may be on the horizon. This historic theatre started life as Derby Hippodrome in 1914, became a cinema in 1930, and was more recently a Walker’s bingo hall. It was sold to a property developer in 2007, and while the locals tried to save it, the poorly-protected premises became a target for vandalism and arson. Then, while “renovating” the roof in 2008, the owner’s contractors started “accidentally” smashing the walls with an immense digger, as the videos below demonstrate. The unauthorized demolition was stopped, and the case went to court, but the damage was done. The Hippodrome was left in an unhappy state, its frazzled auditorium open to the elements (you could peer in from the car park behind), and many original features lost. Meanwhile, the developer submitted plans to erect a multi-story car park on the site, and further demolish the building. Derby’s citizens have been putting up a fight against such philistinism, and there’s lots more info at the links below, including a Save Derby Hippodrome Facebook campaign. The latest news is that the council appears to have rallied behind the campaigners, threatened to bankrupt the developer, and a realistic rescue operation may now be possible. Good luck to them – you can support their Facebook campaign above, and there are links below giving the fuller story.

• youtube - The disgraceful demolition in progress
• youtube - The back-story and the developer’s so-called plans
• derbyhippodrome.co.uk - Excellent site with all you need to know about the Hippodrome and the campaign
• youtube - Mini-history-doc on the Hippodrome
• derelictplaces.co.uk - Inside the ruin with Derelict Places
• facebook - Save Derby Hippodrome Facebook group

Public loos and clock tower
The Spot, St Peter’s Street, Derby DE1
• A bit of easily-missed architectural interest: Victorian-style civic pride in an art deco stylee. You often see these thrusting clock tower / public loo combos in Victorian and Edwardian guise (draw what Freudian connotations you will), but this rectilinear 1930s version is less common. It’s opposite a large curved terrace of run-down shops in matching style, which was probably Derby’s finest mall in the 1930s, but is now at the fag-end of town (in the British sense). And it’s at the fag-end of my Derby guide, too.

  
Above: the art deco loos and matching shopping precinct

Venice and Glasgow, two of my art maps. Click the image to go to the maps

• I love travelling to see art, and usually do a lot of research before making a trip, in order to pack the maximum art into the time available. There’s rarely a single web resource listing exactly the mix I like – small independent art spaces, contemporary public venues, worthwhile commercial galleries, museums of “old” art, plus interesting architecture, urban walks and decent food and drink – so I have to do a fair amount of info-trawling beforehand, which I often compile on a Google map. It seems a pity to waste all this work, so I’m sharing my efforts on this blog, in case they’re of use to any other art wanderers out there. At least they make a good starting point. I’ll be making detailed posts on some of the destinations later, but in the meantime there’s a page with some of my maps – Venice, Glasgow, Nottingham, Derby, Sheffield and Bath – here.

Maps include Venice, London, Glasgow, Sheffield, Nottingham, Bath, Derby