Sunday, January 31, 2016

Tit For Tat For Tates

In a recent visit to both the Tate Britain and the Tate Modern in London I saw a huge range of work which I found interesting both in terms of content and curation/presentation:


Gustav Metzger at the Tate Modern - heat-sensitive liquid crystals between
glass slides inserted into projectors - bean bags on the floor for the viewer to
sit or lie on creates a deeply immersive atmosphere


Bernd and Hilla Becher - Water Towers (Wassertürme) - a room full of
identical documentation style photography makes for an endlessly
fascinating account of one particular industrial landscape feature


Lorna Simpson - 5 Day Forecast (above) and 20 Questions (below) - 
a touch of humour and irony in the repetition of images and labelling


Rachel Lowe - A Letter To An Unknown Person No. 2 - film, Super 8 mm, shown as 
colour video, artists drawing the landscape on glass from a moving vehicle,
the landscape is the letter, something satisfying about not writing words


Rebecca Horn - Unicorn

Rebecca Horn - Finger Gloves

Rebecca Horn - Pencil Mask
Interesting sculptural performances - focuses on the
movement or the inhibition of movement of the body


Wade Guyton Untitled at the Tate Modern

'Guyton's painting was made by sending a digital file to print on a primed canvas fed through a large Epsom printer. In this case, the canvas was folded in half, passed through the printer, flipped, then passed through again. This process resulted in misregistrations between the two halves of the canvas and a white seem down the middle. Further aberrations were created by the printed head clogging with ink, and the canvas falling into the studio floor. What finally emerges is a texted surface whose delicacy cannot be predicted from the original image in a computer screen.'


Unknown - screen inside a screen inside a screen