Art Writing

Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art: GOMA

Merchant City

Glasgow

The Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art or the GOMA is an interesting fusion of a traditional building with an interior space for modern art. It has pride of place in the very centre of Glasgow, in Merchant city. Like the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh it is a very small, it only has four art spaces in total, two balcony galleries, the main large gallery downstairs, for temporary exhibitions and a rooftop education studio. The building has had an interesting and varied history. It dates from 1778 when William Cunningham, one of Glasgow’s rich tobacco merchants built a mansion house. Glimpses of that Palladian architectural style can still be seen today. The building has also been a bank, an exchange and a library. In 1827 architect David Hamilton added many of the neo Classical features seen today. These are the giant Corinthian portico at the entrance, the impressive main hall, Gallery One and a distinctive clock tower on the roof. Other interesting areas are the ellipse area with its beautiful roof light and ornate plasterwork and the glass cupola inside the entrance to Gallery One.

The building opened as a gallery in 1996 and has been building up an impressive permanent collection of contemporary art since. Unique and quirky modern features that the gallery redesign added include the mirrored mosaic installed in the portico of the facade seen in the picture at the top of the page. Another of these features is the design of the vestibule. The walls are completely covered with a mirrored mosaic. I thought this was wonderful; the different colours which each different person who enters the vestibule is wearing make the area take on a different appearance. Another quirky feature I liked was a little alcove off one of the balcony galleries, it was designed in wood to look like the inside of a whale’s stomach. At the back of this little alcove there is a little windowed peep hole which gives the viewer a bird’s eye vista of Gallery One.

Gallery one is a beautiful traditional space. It is tall and cavernous featuring a central nave and two aisles. It boasts a coffered barrel vaulted ceiling which is reminiscent of the ceiling of the central aisle of the Musee d’Orsay. This gallery, pictured on the right holds rotating temporary exhibitions of sculpture. The room’s grand architecture and scale make it an ideal space to exhibit 3D works, allowing visitors to walk amongst the works seeing them from every angle. I visited in August last year when there was an exhibition called ‘The Material World.’ It included seventeen sculptural works, most of which have not been seen in Scotland before by contemporary artists like Damien Hirst, Shirazeh Houshiary, Grayson Perry, Kerry Stewart, Darren Lago, Michael Landy, Mark Wallinger, Rachel Whiteread, Richard Deacon and Paul Finnegan. They were chosen because of their visual interest and powerful physical presence.

The artists have explored new methods of creating sculpture using a range of materials. Some are interested simply in exploring the materials, whilst others show both serious and humorous elements. Some of the sculptures seem to possess soft, undulating curves while others show a stark contrast with sharp edges. One sculpture was called ‘This Girl Bends’ by Terry Stewart, dated 1996. This reminded me somehow of the story Peter Pan and the innocence of childhood when you had that feeling of invincibility and anything was possible. Another sculpture is ‘Untitled’ by Paul Finnegan, dated 1995. Finnegan creates sculptures and photos which give shape to nightmarish forms. This sculpture exhibits a powerful fluidity. It is supposed to be a human figure melted down in some way into a kind of supernatural trace of itself. The sculpture is however wearing shoes and leaning against a wall which adds a human element.

An example of a piece from the permanent collection upstairs is, ‘After a True Story: Giant and Fairy Tales ’ by Christine Borland. A close up of it is shown on the right. It is constructed with dust and glass and it is a powerful and haunting installation. It is a poignant tribute to two people, a giant (Charles) and a dwarf (Caroline), whose bodies were used for medical research. Their stories can be read from an open accompanying book. The installation includes outlines of casts of the skeletons of both Charles and Caroline, with the shadows engineered to fall at the height of each one. The use of dust to construct the skeletons echoes the fragility of the human condition.

I enjoyed visiting this Gallery, I thought it was an interesting fuse of the traditional building with a space for modern art and the added charming features were a delight. The exhibition I attended was also thoroughly thought provoking and whimsical.

Sainte Chapelle

 Ile de la Cite, Paris

Just across the Ile-de-la-Cité from Notre Dame lies the Palais de la Cité. Within the modern-day walls of the ‘Hall of Justice’ rests a Gothic jewel: Sainte-Chapelle. It was commissioned by St. Louis (Louis IX) in 1242 to be a Royal chapel and a shrine for the relics of Christ’s Passion–including the most precious relic of all: the Crown of Thorns. St. Louis was the son of Hugh Capet, the first of the Capetian kings of France. To justify his claim to the royal throne, St. Louis used Sainte-Chappelle and the holy relics as important symbols of his authority.

As the viewer approaches Sainte-Chapelle it is noticeable how small it is in comparison to other religious buildings, such as Notre Dame. It is hidden within a courtyard of the Palais de la Cité with only the roof and small spire visible to the casual passers-by. Like many early Gothic structures, Sainte-Chapelle has simple buttresses–an architectural innovation that allowed taller structures to be built. Gargoyles protrude from the top of every buttress to guide water away from the chapel walls; however time and pollution have not been kind to them. The spire was added in the 15th century and rebuilt in the 19th. As it was the Royal chapel, only the Royal entourage and the palace staff were allowed to worship there. I entered Sainte-Chapelle via the entrance once used by the palace staff into the lower chapel, which is dedicated to the Virgin Mary, a full length statue of whom is on the central pier of the doorway, it unfortunately now houses a rather tasteless gift shop, it is pictured on the right. The first impression is one of ponderous darkness, little light reaches the lower chapel via the small and highly placed windows. The walls are decorated with blank trefoil arches, and its columns bear alternating designs of France’s gold fleurs-de-lys on azure, and the golden tower on a red field motif of Castile. The low vaults of the ceiling rest on thin columns with crocket capitals, linked to the wall by struts; these seem to resemble mini flying buttresses. The walls are decorated with black, trefoil arches and twelve circular insets which represent the Apostles. The ceiling of the lower chapel is painted to look like a starry sky, and the timeworn funerary slabs of the treasurers and canons of Sainte-Chapelle pave the floor. The upper chapel is accessed by hidden spiral staircases in the corner of the room. This chapel is very striking, over 6,400 square feet of stained glass occupy the walls of the chapel and there are one thousand biblical scenes. The framing around the stained glass consists of thin lead which is hardly visible and gives the effect of a wall of glass.

At the west end is a beautiful and unusual rose window in the picture on the left. It depicts the Apocalypse in eighty six panels of stained glass, it was a gift from Charles 7th in 1485. The glass fills the chapel with sparkling jewels of light that is truly stunning, the colours and therefore atmosphere change almost every minute. The interior height is almost twice the width of the chapel giving it an extremely lofty appearance due to forced perspective. Since the upper chapel was the shrine of the holy relics, the attention to its design was extremely lavish. The buttresses appear to be non-existent in comparison to the sheer area of the windows, and they are carved to seem as if they are delicate clusters of smaller columns so their mass is hardly noticeable.

The statues of the Apostles make up the most important sculpture work of the Upper Chapel. They exhibit two different styles, the first group is exemplified by flowing drapery, straight folds, faces with delicate features and hair carved in flat curls, and they display an aura of serenity. The second group shows the development of medieval statuary, the folds are stiff and angular and the faces are less detailed. About two-thirds of the glass in the windows is original, dating to the 13th century. The rose window is a 15th century addition to the chapel. As previously noted, Sainte-Chapelle was designed to promote St. Louis’ claim to the throne. This is most evident in the content and placement of several of the stained glass windows. The windows are arranged starting from Genesis in the North West corner of the chapel, and all but one lancet depicts a biblical story. Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, Isaiah and the Jesse Tree, the Childhood of Christ, The Passion, St. John the Baptist, Daniel, Ezekiel, Jeremiah and Tobias, Judith and Job, Ester, Kings, and the final lancet depicts the history of the Relics of the Passion.

The upper chapel of this cathedral is magnificent, fully deserving of its colourful description as ‘the gateway to heaven’ as it was called in the Middle Ages. The lower chapel was very different, it was dark and atmospheric complete with the cosmic starry ceiling but disappointingly it is now a gift shop selling things like keyrings of the apostles.

Ron Mueck

Mueck's Wild Man Sculpture

Royal Scottish Academy Building

The Mound

Edinburgh

Aug 06

I spent a summer afternoon wandering around a ten foot naked ‘Wild Man’ gripped to his chair in fear, a massive, screaming new-born baby and a gossiping couple of pensioners standing six inches tall,  all courtesy of photo-realist artist and sculptor, Ron Mueck. The Australian sculptor’s early career was that of a model maker for children’s television and films. He is now known for faithfully reproducing minute details of the human body and then playing with scale which results in works which become jarring visual spectacles. These spectacular sculptures certainly jarred, displayed as part of Mueck’s exhibition at the RSA this summer.

I found myself mesmerised and fascinated with every work and spent a whole hour wondering round them. Although every human detail of the fibreglass works such as mottling of the skin and veins protruding underneath the skin was reproduced startlingly realistically, the scale of each work was very much unrealistic. Here I think is where the fascination lay for me. Because Mueck is a former model maker some narrow-minded critics like Jonathan Jones of The Guardian deem his work to be superficial and meaningless. However, I personally think Mueck’s aim to ‘elicit an empathetic, emotional response from us using all the properties of figurative sculpture’, stated in the exhibition guide is very much achieved.

Mueck deals with the themes of birth, infancy, youth, adolescence, sexual maturity, middle age, old age and death. He attempts to capture the feeling of key moments in our lives so realistically. All the rooms are painted a stark white so the viewer can concentrate completely on the works. One of the sculptures was called ‘In Bed’, dated 2005, it is a huge oversized work of a woman reclining in a bed complete with a real duvet and pillow, it is the only sculpture in this large room and takes up almost half the space. This is supposed to be a classic image of melancholia, her chin rests on her hand and her gaze is fixed on the middle distance deeply lost in thought, the oversized scale intensifies the woman’s apparent anxiety. Close up the sculpture is even more absorbing, the skin on her arm shows a kind of red mottling and the dark circles under the eyes are very realistic. It is so realistic that it is almost as if she might shift under the duvet any minute.

Another sculpture, mentioned above is, ‘Wild Man’, dated 2005, it is placed in the centre of a square room on its own. It is a giant pale, hairy and very naked man sitting on a simple wooden stool looking terrified. He grips the chair until his knuckles are white and his toes press down on the floor, his nakedness makes him even more vulnerable. Again, the detail up close is startling, all the body hair is individually punched in and the viewer can see all the pink veins under the surface of the skin. I think this sculpture is very captivating and whimsical as it is as if the man seems scared of the visitors of the exhibition wondering around him even though he is about four times the size.

‘Spooning couple’, dated 2005 is another enthralling work; it is one of the much smaller life-like works and is placed on a low square plinth so the viewer looks down on it. The work comprises a couple lying on the plinth curled into each other or ‘spooning.’ Although the man and woman are curled up literally it seems they have drifted or are drifting apart which is implied in other subtle ways. The expressions on each of their faces show they each seem deep in their own separate worlds, not really acknowledging each others’ presence. It is also important to note that the woman’s top half is naked but she is wearing underwear whereas the man is wearing a t-shirt but no underwear, this furthers their separateness.

Overall, I found Mueck’s work to be art in the truest and most raw form and one which is truly accessible to everyone.

Superhumanatural: Douglas Gordon: a Retrospective

The Gallery's facade during Gordon's Exhibition

Royal Scottish Academy

The Mound

Edinburgh

Dec 06

Walking down the length of Princes Street in the midst of the Christmas chaos, I took in the festive vista of Edinburgh, dressed up to the nines in her velvety Christmas splendour. However, amongst the blinking fairy lights dusting the trees and the seasonal reds and greens, a startlingly unfestive sight caught my eye. The usually traditional Royal Scottish Academy building had taken on a very different guise for its latest exhibition. Bright scarlet red floodlights lit the inside of the columned portico. This was not a festive red but a blood-red which gave the building a threatening and eerie feel. This theme continued with the addition of bright white light emanating from the eyes of the figure of Queen Victoria on top of the portico, also lit up red. The artist at the helm of this decidedly unseasonal, untraditional dressing down of the Royal Scottish Academy is Douglas Gordon, his exhibition is called, ‘Superhumanatural: Douglas Gordon: a Retrospective’. Gordon is a Glasgow trained artist who came into prominence in the 1990s. He works with film, video, photographs, objects and texts exploring issues such as memory and identity, good and evil. This exhibition features some of Gordon’s most famous conceptual artworks and exhibits created specifically for the Edinburgh show.

The viewer is at first confronted by two collections of about twenty small televisions arranged on different levels on the left and right at the top of the Academy stairs. Each television shows different, quite disturbing scenes on a continuous loop. Included, were scenes like a fly on its back with its legs twitching, a close up of a man pressing and kneading the skin between his thumb and forefinger and another close up of a man painting his hand with black paint. These are a selection of Gordon’s previously seen video works, made between 1992 and the present. I felt the juxtaposition of so many different scenes next to each other had a jarring effect and made it difficult to focus. Gordon claimed this was a comment on the individuals primal fears, however this exhibit did not have that effect on me, most of the scenes were simply irritating and cringe worthy.

Another part of the exhibition consisted of two huge screens placed on opposite sides of a darkened room. Both screens played an endless loop of the famous scene in Martin Scorcese’s ’Taxi Driver’ when Robert Deniro utters the immortal words, ‘Are you looking at me’. On some obscure level this reminded me of Rothko’s famous colour fields in the Tate Modern as like Rothko Gordon also casts the viewer in his work. Standing in between the two projected scenes, of which one is reversed it seemed like the viewer was in the scene with Deniro. The artist has added atmospheric echoing to Deniro’s voice and other sinister sounds to disarm the observer. This theme of physically involving the individual in his work was thread throughout the exhibition as a whole. Long narrow mirrors were installed in the framework of the doorways between the rooms so the visitor caught their own reflection in the darkness. Another room also contained two large screens on either side. This time life-size images of circus elephants walking around and playing dead were projected. In the dark it seemed like the elephant was endlessly walking around the viewer creating quite a threatening atmosphere.

Gordon’s retrospective was designed to disorientate the visitor and certainly to challenge traditional forms of perception. Its sinister themes appealed to the dark and eerie side of human nature and I found it quite enthralling and thought-provoking. The show received a poor reception in Edinburgh which is difficult to understand, the sight of the Royal Scottish Academy building having been given such a modern makeover just seemed too intriguing to resist to me. However, with regard to the time of year, Gordon’s exhibition is hardly very ‘Christmassy’!

Museum Review: Musee D’Orsay

The Rhinoceros on guard outside the Musee d' Orsay

Rue de Bellechasse

Paris

This is a fascinating Art Museum, it is not as imposing and overwhelming as the Louvre. Also, unlike the Louvre, the façade of the Musee D’Orsay belies the interior. The building began life as a railway station, then it was a lavish hotel, the ‘Gare d’Orsay’ in 1900, designed by architect Victor Laloux (1850-1937). His aim was to conceal the massive steel framework of a railway station behind a monumental stone façade, which had to blend in with the elegant urban surroundings of the area. The building reopened in 1986; reimagined as the ‘Musee D’Orsay’. Laloux achieved his aim effectively; by simply viewing the façade of the building, the visitor has no inkling that it was a railway station until he/she steps inside. It still has the distinct feel of a train station in the vastness and airiness of the central atrium where the tracks were and the neck craning height of the steel vaulted ceiling. Also a reminder of the building’s beginnings are two huge original ornate station clocks mounted high at opposite ends of the space.

The gallery’s collection includes painting, sculpture, architecture, decorative arts, architecture and also two art forms that came into being in the 19th Century, photography and cinema. It spans the period between the 1848 revolution and the First World War and it is displayed historically and chronologically. The Musee D’Orsay also boasts the greatest collection of French impressionism in the world, which is housed in the upper part of the building. As this gallery houses such a large collection this review will concentrate on the lower section.

On first entering The Musee D’Orsay, what strikes the visitor is the openness of the lower section, there are no completely enclosed rooms or spaces, even the individual galleries to the left and right of the central aisle have portions cut out of the walls to always remind the visitor of Laloux’s original architecture. This feature also enables the viewer to look down on some of these smaller galleries from a vantage point, as there are many galleries housed on different levels. The lighting constitutes wall washers and is directed upwards to simulate daylight and possibly echo the format of the galleries in the upper level, which are lit by natural daylight from above. The passageways, which lead the visitor to the upper levels of the gallery, are also designed as to not distract from the original architecture and to give different vantage points to view the main atrium. The walls of the various galleries seem to be made up of light-coloured faux marble blocks which complement the natural and artificial light and offset the paintings nicely. The central space where the train tracks once were is now an aisle full of beautifully arranged sculptures. It has the feel of a sculpture garden beneath the huge glass vaulted ceiling, which lets natural light flood in.

The Musee D’Orsay is the first art gallery to attach great importance to sculpture within the art world, it had long been neglected. This fact is reinforced by the many sculptures outside at the entrance to the gallery. Some of these are quite eccentric and give an effective foreshadowing of the originality of the gallery’s interior, for example, instead of a lion guarding the entrance, there is a Rhinoceros!

On either side of the central aisle are huge concrete structures with pseudo crenulations at the top of them, this breaks up the smoothness of the structures and relates them to the steel work of the ceiling vault. These structures conceal quite intimate galleries of paintings. In the galleries on the left of the central aisle are artists who sought to represent the reality of their time, landscapes, life in the fields and realist representations including artists such as Millais. On the right are artists who were loyal to traditional subject matter, such as Delacroix and Ingres.Room fourteen houses a painting called ‘Olympia’, dated 1863 by Manet, it is one I was most looking

Olympia by Manet

forward to seeing. It is placed on its own on the left wall as you enter the room. Something that stood out for me was that the painting was placed on a wine coloured red wall, the only coloured wall that I noticed in the gallery. This draws the eye to the famous painting and I think is quite a clever idea because when the painting was first exhibited in the Salon of 1865 it famously caused outrage in the art world due to its subject matter of a nude prostitute. The red colour could signify the indignation the painting caused at that time. ‘Olympia’ is directly influenced by Titian’s ‘Venus of Urbino’ however; Manet’s nude is more contemporary, it is not Venus but a prostitute. Startling to the audience of its time, is the way in which the figure confronts the viewer, she seems to stare defiantly out of the picture and her gaze seems to follow the viewer around the room. She is definitely not coy and her directness is echoed in the aggressive arched back of the black kitten at the end of the bed, which is an interesting replacement for Titian’s sleeping dog at the end of the bed in, ‘Venus of Urbino.’ What is also interesting to note about room fourteen which houses ‘Olympia’ is the painting placed directly opposite, ‘The Birth of Venus’, also dated 1863 by Alexandre Cabanel. It has long been an art-historical cliché to contrast Magnet’s scandalous ‘Olympia’ with Cabanel’s conventionally titillating mythological nude; historically this contrast is made because both paintings were exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1865 and 1863 respectively. It is interesting to see these paintings together as you can view what the public at that time are used to and then compare it with what was outrageous to them.

Room seven is also interesting to view; it is situated on the left side of the central aisle and is one section of the gallery which has retained the same form as it had when the building was a station. It is the former passenger entrance along the Seine River, the architects who redesigned the gallery, the ACT agency wanted to leave something of the actual form of the railway station behind. This room is dedicated solely to Gustav Courbet (1819-1877), the leading avant-garde painter of the mid-nineteenth century. The room houses the monumentally huge, ‘The Burial at Ornans’, dated 1849-1850. In this painting, Courbet depicts the inhabitants of his village and paints them in the form of a history painting. The scale and detail of this painting is startling when viewed in reality. It is a very complicated figure composition, the colours are mostly very sombre, almost exclusively very dark on the left side where the mourners are gathered reflecting their grief and the mood of the occasion. The sky is also painted to look quite stormy and foreboding which also reflects the occasion.   The fact that Courbet’s paintings are allotted their own particular space means that they cannot easily be compared with other artists of the time and I think puts the artist on a pedestal. This idea is reinforced by the fact that this particular space opens off the central aisle or nave halfway along on the left, which makes it seem like a side chapel or transept in a church. This could be viewed as a very canonical idea as it promotes a sense of reverence towards Courbet who was thought to be one of the ‘saints’ of the established canon of nineteenth century art.

Overall, I think the ‘D’Orsay is very absorbing and you could spend hours and hours in it. Some critics have stated that it does not exhibit its collection effectively because it clutters the eye with all the different forms of art and the monumental architecture in one space but I personally believe this makes it more of a treat for the eyes!