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[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1967", "fc": "Georgie Hopton", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/georgie-hopton-12116" } ]

[ { "id": 999999779, "shortTitle": "Tate Collection" }, { "id": 999999782, "shortTitle": "Works with images" }, { "id": 999999961, "shortTitle": "General Collection" }, { "id": 999999956, "shortTitle": "Collection" } ]

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[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1967", "fc": "Georgie Hopton", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/georgie-hopton-12116" } ]

[ { "id": 999999779, "shortTitle": "Tate Collection" }, { "id": 999999782, "shortTitle": "Works with images" }, { "id": 999999961, "shortTitle": "General Collection" }, { "id": 999999956, "shortTitle": "Collection" } ]

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[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "1922 – 2008", "fc": "Peter Collingwood", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/peter-collingwood-29514" } ]

[ { "id": 999999779, "shortTitle": "Tate Collection" }, { "id": 999999782, "shortTitle": "Works with images" }, { "id": 999999961, "shortTitle": "General Collection" }, { "id": 999999956, "shortTitle": "Collection" } ]

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[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>\n<i>Macrogauze 116 No. 2</i> c.1975 is a large woven wall hanging that demonstrates the artist’s innovative approach to hand weaving. It is an example of the distinctive and ground-breaking technique Collingwood devised by 1964 which he called the ‘macrogauze’ method and for which he is best known. Constructed with linen thread, <i>Macrogauze 116 No. 2 </i>has woven into it seven horizontal steel rods that lie flat against the wall. The warp threads, as well as running vertically, would also traditionally lie parallel to the edge of the textile. Collingwood built a loom that freed the warp threads from this limitation and allowed them to lie at any angle of the weaver’s choosing. The warp threads of <i>Macrogauze 116 No. 2 </i>follow zigzag diagonal lines, criss-crossing each other in ways that were impossible before Collingwood devised his innovative technique. With the macrogauze method, a minimum of weft, or horizontal, threads are used. The horizontal steel rods are either woven in to keep the hanging flat, as here, or can be used to open up the textile into a three-dimensional structure, as seen in the earlier work <i>3D Wall Hanging</i> c.1960 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/collingwood-3d-wall-hanging-t15445\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T15445</span></a>) that predates the macrogauzes but exemplifies the artist’s drive towards three-dimensionality. However, in either case, the warp is dominant and it is the movement and direction of the warp threads that gives the macrogauzes their structure. </p>\n<p>Collingwood was one of the pre-eminent British weavers of the second half of the twentieth century. Having qualified in medicine and practised as a house surgeon for a number of years, he turned his attention to weaving, ordering his first loom in 1950 from George Maxwell in Ditchling, Sussex, where the sculptor Eric Gill (1882–1940) had previously established a craft community. There Collingwood met Ethel Mairet (1872–1952), an established and influential hand-loom weaver, who agreed to take him on as her apprentice for several months. In 1952 he set up his own workshop in Highgate, London, producing handwoven rugs, which were exhibited and sold widely. He later moved his workshop to Digswell Arts Trust in Welwyn Garden City, where he worked alongside other makers, including the potter Hans Coper (1920–1981).</p>\n<p>Committed to innovation with his craft, Collingwood tested and experimented with the limitations of weaving. He dismantled looms and then reconfigured them so they could achieve different results. Caroline Burvill quoted him in <i>Selvedge </i>magazine, highlighting his innovative approach which was nevertheless rooted in a deep understanding of the techniques of weaving: ‘Use the technique so that its limitations become a help rather than a hindrance … Start with what the technique gives willingly and from those elements construct your design.’ (Peter Collingwood, quoted in Burvill 2018, accessed 5 September 2019.) </p>\n<p>In 1965–7 Collingwood’s work was included in <i>Weaving for Walls</i>, a touring exhibition organised by the Victoria &amp; Albert Museum, London. In its selection of weavers, the exhibition emphasised figures who attempted to blur the boundaries between art and craft. Collingwood’s work was shown alongside such experimental figures as Tadek Beutlich (1922–2011) and Ann Sutton (born 1935). Sutton, having met and been influenced by the British constructivists Kenneth and Mary Martin (1905–1984, 1907–1969), renamed a course she taught ‘Textile Construction’. Beutlich was known to incorporate found materials such as charred wood, x-ray film and honesty seeds into his weaving. Collingwood, Beutlich and Sutton were conscious that their work represented a new aspiration and ambition for their craft. Collingwood made a distinction between what he called ‘craftsmen weavers’ and the ‘artist weaver’, describing the latter as ‘alive to contemporary trends in fashion, decoration, painting and all the arts’ and saying that they react ‘sensitively to the spirit of the time’ (quoted in Tanya Harrod, <i>The Real Thing: Essays on Making in the Modern World</i>, London 2015, p.268).</p>\n<p>\n<b>Further reading</b>\n<br/>\n<i>Ruth Harris / Peter Collingwood</i>,<i> </i>exhibition catalogue, Crafts Council Gallery, London 1981.<br/>Caroline Burvill, ‘The Master of Macrogauze’, <i>Selvedge</i>, no.81, 2 March 2018, https://www.selvedge.org/blogs/selvedge/peter-collingwood, accessed 5 September 2019.</p>\n<p>Helen Delaney<br/>September 2019</p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2021-11-17T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

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[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "1962–1994", "fc": "Hamad Butt", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/hamad-butt-22540" } ]

[ { "id": 999999876, "shortTitle": "Tate Britain" }, { "id": 999999779, "shortTitle": "Tate Collection" }, { "id": 999999782, "shortTitle": "Works with images" }, { "id": 999999872, "shortTitle": "Works on display" }, { "id": 999999961, "shortTitle": "General Collection" }, { "id": 999999956, "shortTitle": "Collection" } ]

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[ { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "8 May 2023", "endDate": null, "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": null, "endDate": null, "id": 15290, "startDate": null, "venueName": "Tate Britain (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/" } ], "id": 12559, "startDate": "2023-05-08", "title": "Galleries 44, 46-47", "type": "Collection based display" }, { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "5 December 2024 – 30 September 2025", "endDate": "2025-09-30", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "5 December 2024 – 30 March 2025", "endDate": "2025-03-30", "id": 15647, "startDate": "2024-12-05", "venueName": "Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, Ireland)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.modernart.ie" }, { "dateText": "1 May 2025 – 30 September 2025", "endDate": "2025-09-30", "id": 15648, "startDate": "2025-05-01", "venueName": "Whitechapel Gallery (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.whitechapel.org/" } ], "id": 12841, "startDate": "2024-12-05", "title": "Hamad Butt", "type": "Loan-out" } ]

[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>\n<i>Transmission </i>1990 is an installation consisting of nine glass books resting on metal stands, each individually lit by its own ultraviolet light. The books are arranged in a circle on the floor, connected by electrical cabling, each of their nine glass pages turned in progressively ascending order. On the same page of each book the image of a single Triffid from the cover of John Wyndham’s novel <i>The Day of the Triffids</i> (1951), a creature bulbous at one end but with an agile, probing snout at the other, is etched into the glass. The effect created is an image of the Triffid that, although always discernible upon close inspection, moves in and out of visibility as the viewer moves around the circle. The single Triffid seems to rise to the surface of the page, taking on an almost phallic symbolism. Butt was fascinated by the image of the Triffid from Wyndham’s novel and the relationship this iconic book had with the unease of the social body. In the novel the Triffids pray upon an unsuspecting populous, blinded by an apparent meteor shower. Describing the Triffid, Butt wrote, ‘On the cover of the book, an image of a creature that is not anything as distant as the castrated male genitalia, yet it creeps to that dreaded desire as it takes the power of mobilisation itself.’ (Hamad Butt, ‘Apprehensions’, in Foster 1996, p.50.) In one of his working notebooks, part of Butt’s archive held at Tate, he wrote that, ‘The Triffid exists in exile. The alienated exile of the dangerous, ejaculating, contaminated pudenda,’ reflecting a personal exile and alienation felt by Butt himself.</p>\n<p>When the work was first displayed in the 1990 student exhibition at Goldsmith’s School of Art, London, and for its subsequent presentation later that year at Milch Gallery, London (the only exhibitions of the work in Butt’s lifetime), the artist invited visitors to enter the circle of books and sit down in the centre. They were instructed to put on a pair of protective googles and approach each of the glass books in turn to decipher the image etched into the glass pages.</p>\n<p>In these two exhibitions of <i>Transmission </i>Butt also included nine statements, as follows:</p>\n<p class=\"cttext\">\n</p><blockquote>We have the ‘Black light’ that is Ultra-Violet.<br/>A penetrative radiation that damages human sight.<br/>A seductive invisibility that fascinates flies.</blockquote>\n<p class=\"cttext\">\n</p><blockquote>We have the eruption of the Triffid that obscures sex with death<br/>A stigmata of an era with the fear of invasions<br/>A mark of contagion that isolates others, defiles intimacy</blockquote>\n<p class=\"cttext\">\n</p><blockquote>We have the blindness of fear and the books of fear.<br/>We have the dangers of blind faith (prayer) and the transmissions of faithlessness (distraction)<br/>We have the apprehensions that regard these words before strategic withdrawal</blockquote>\n<p>In the first exhibition a glass vitrine was mounted on the wall of the gallery, containing sugar paper inscribed with the nine phrases. Inside were maggots placed at the bottom of the vitrine that would eventually hatch into flies, feeding on the sugar paper until they died. In the second exhibition the statements were sandblasted onto the glass of the Milch Gallery windows. At both there was also a monitor that displayed the same image of the Triffid.</p>\n<p>In a notebook of Butt’s from the time when he made <i>Transmission</i>, he broke the work down into six key elements: the Triffid, representing ‘historical periods of fear’; the ‘pervasive and invisible visible’ ultraviolet lights; the ‘transparent, sharp, penetrative’ glass of the books; the telephone cables that transmit electricity; the flies as the site of ‘decay and transmission’; and the book supports.</p>\n<p>In his essay ‘Apprehensions’, written to accompany the exhibition of <i>Transmission</i> at Goldsmith’s, Butt wrote, ‘The triffids blind their victims, the comet blinds the populace, light in excess blinds the viewer’ (in Foster 1996, p.50). If viewers were to attempt to discern the etched motif without wearing the protective glasses, the ultraviolet light would damage their eyes, drawing attention to what Butt saw as the violence caused by scientific knowledge in establishing its pre-eminence. Quoting the philosopher Paul Virilio, Butt stated, ‘Thus in this <i>mediated</i> or <i>information</i> society we are isolated in a state of <i>pure seeing </i>… we are <i>seeing without knowing</i>.’ (In Foster 1996, p.43.) Butt was preoccupied with the privilege of vision, in particular the diagnostic gaze in the understanding and cataloguing of human disease. He understood that a body treated as an object can no longer defend itself but, by engaging with the physiognomy of ‘fear’ in one’s experience of <i>Transmission</i>, Butt wanted to offer a way out. In this process fear could symbolically overcome death and, by ritualising the threat of death, he attempted to somewhat stabilise the disturbances of experience.</p>\n<p>Throughout Butt’s writings and art, a narrative of increasing vulnerability and worry concerning the invasion of the body by an alien substance (deadly chemicals) or disease (AIDS) occurs; a vulnerability that is captured in the title of this work. ‘Transmission’ suggests a blind or hidden exchange between entities that may be out of our control. <i>Transmission </i>is the site of Butt’s earliest exploration of the nexus between science and art, reason and danger and, ultimately, life and death; the ideas he would go on to explore and materialise in the related installation <i>Familiars </i>1992 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/butt-familiars-t14779\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14779</span></a>), also in Tate’s collection, which would become his final work.</p>\n<p>Even though Butt held a deep respect for reason, he resolutely interrogated the power of the intellect. In <i>Transmission</i>, the combination of mystery and popular culture and the suggestion that his malign, yet slightly comical Triffid character might overthrow established institutions of learning was earnest. This was an artist calling for nothing less than a revision of the conventional view of scientific knowledge, replacing it with what he called ‘a critique of the institution of science as, somehow, especially truthful’ and a shift to what he described as ‘a speculative science practice’ (quoted in <i>Alien Nation</i>,<i> </i>exhibition catalogue, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London 2006, p.103). <i>Transmission</i> reveals in Butt an idiosyncratic interest in the supernatural, juxtaposed with what he called ‘pure science’, based on empirical research and precise scientific calculation. These seemingly oppositional interests in fact reflect Butt’s training as a biochemist before entering art college.</p>\n<p>\n<b>Further reading</b>\n<br/>Clement Page, ‘Hamad Butt: The Art of Metachemics’, <i>Third Text</i>, vol.9, no.32, 1995, pp.33–42.<br/>\n<i>Rites of Passage: Art for the End of the Century</i>, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1995.<br/>Stephen C. Foster (ed.), <i>Hamad Butt: Familiars</i>,<i> </i>London 1996.</p>\n<p>Nathan Ladd<br/>March 2019</p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2021-11-18T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

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[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1940", "fc": "Tina Keane", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/tina-keane-25916" } ]

[ { "id": 999999779, "shortTitle": "Tate Collection" }, { "id": 999999782, "shortTitle": "Works with images" }, { "id": 999999961, "shortTitle": "General Collection" }, { "id": 999999956, "shortTitle": "Collection" } ]

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[ { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "5 May 2022 – 4 September 2022", "endDate": "2022-09-04", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "5 May 2022 – 4 September 2022", "endDate": "2022-09-04", "id": 14332, "startDate": "2022-05-05", "venueName": "Tate Liverpool (Liverpool, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/" }, { "dateText": "1 October 2022 – 22 January 2023", "endDate": "2023-01-22", "id": 15175, "startDate": "2022-10-01", "venueName": "Mead Gallery (Coventry, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.warwickartscentre.co.uk" } ], "id": 11820, "startDate": "2022-05-05", "title": "Radical Landscapes", "type": "Exhibition" }, { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "7 October 2022 – 18 February 2024", "endDate": "2024-02-18", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "7 October 2022 – 18 December 2022", "endDate": "2022-12-18", "id": 15035, "startDate": "2022-10-07", "venueName": "Mead Gallery (Coventry, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.warwickartscentre.co.uk" }, { "dateText": "6 February 2023 – 30 April 2023", "endDate": "2023-04-30", "id": 15325, "startDate": "2023-02-06", "venueName": "Art Explora (Liverpool, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": null } ], "id": 12363, "startDate": "2022-10-07", "title": "Radical Landscapes", "type": "Loan-out" } ]

[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>\n<i>In Our Hands, Greenham 1982–4 </i>is a thirty-eight-minute-long video with sound by Tina Keane which celebrates the women’s peace protest that began in 1981 outside RAF Greenham Common, in Berkshire, England. Greenham Common was used as a base by both the British Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Forces during the Second World War and Cold War, and subsequently as a storage facility for American nuclear cruise missiles until 1992. The goals of the women’s protest were the removal of the cruise missiles from Greenham Common and cessation of the use of nuclear weapons in general.</p>\n<p>Keane’s video layers imagery of a silhouetted pair of slowly moving hands, close-up footage of spiders, and documentation of the women at the peace camp outside Greenham Common. A woman’s voice on the soundtrack describes a personal moment of revelation about the threat to the world by nuclear weapons, and her subsequent decision to take action. She describes how the women, having initially marched for disarmament, decided instead to simply stay at the perimeter fence of the base and form a peace camp there. Press attention initially, she says, often focused on how the women’s husbands were ‘coping’ without them, rather than the issue of nuclear disarmament itself.</p>\n<p>Using what was then a new video superimposition tool, Chroma Key, Keane created composite images, so that the silhouettes of the hands, which are in constant motion, encircle and enclose the footage of the women singing protest songs, while also being bathed in a shifting and dreamlike spectrum of colours. The event that Keane filmed became known as Embrace the Base, at which 30,000 women held hands to form a human chain around the perimeter fence of Greenham Common. The soundtrack captures the women’s songs, with lyrics such as ‘take those toys away from those boys’. The footage sporadically cuts to images of spiders whose busy activity merges with the movement of the hands. In 1993 the writer and critic Jean Fisher described the hands and spider imagery in this work in terms of collective action and efforts at empowerment:</p>\n<p class=\"cttext\">\n</p><blockquote>Tina Keane takes up a primary metaphor in the peace camp: women’s industry (productivity) as it works to form the matrix of community, yet its exclusion from the site of power. Images of a spider spinning her web are juxtaposed with footage of the women’s activities – joining hands around the base, weaving webs of wool to symbolise strength in unity. <br/>(Jean Fisher, ‘Reflections on Echo: Sound by Women Artists in Britain and Ireland during the 1980s’, 1993, <a href=\"https://www.jeanfisher.com/reflections-on-echo/\">https://www.jeanfisher.com/reflections-on-echo/</a>, accessed 10 April 2019.)</blockquote>\n<p>\n<i>In Our Hands, Greenham</i> exists both as a single channel video, which can be shown on either a monitor or a flat screen, and as an installation comprising twelve monitors. Tate’s version is from the single channel edition of seven plus one artist’s proof and is number one in the edition. It is exemplary of Keane’s experimental film practice as also seen in <i>Faded Wallpaper </i>1988 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/keane-faded-wallpaper-t14991\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14991</span></a>). Since the mid-1970s, she has explored issues relating to female identity and empowerment across a range of media from performance and installation to film, video and digital art.</p>\n<p>\n<b>Further reading</b>\n<br/>Richard Dyer, Jean Fisher and Peter Wollen, <i>Electronic Shadows: The Art of Tina Keane</i>, London 2004.</p>\n<p>Helen Delaney<br/>April 2019</p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2021-11-18T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

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[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1967", "fc": "Vernon Ah Kee", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/vernon-ah-kee-24116" } ]

[ { "id": 999999779, "shortTitle": "Tate Collection" }, { "id": 999999782, "shortTitle": "Works with images" }, { "id": 999999961, "shortTitle": "General Collection" }, { "id": 999999956, "shortTitle": "Collection" } ]

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[ { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "7 June 2021 – 14 May 2023", "endDate": "2023-05-14", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "7 June 2021", "endDate": null, "id": 14379, "startDate": "2021-06-07", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 11857, "startDate": "2021-06-07", "title": "A Year in Art - Australia 1992", "type": "Collection based display" } ]

[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>\n<i>tall man</i> 2010 is a four-channel video installation with sound, originally exhibited at Milani Gallery, Brisbane as part of the artist’s exhibition <i>tall man</i> in 2011. It is eleven minutes and eleven seconds long and can be shown on a loop. It exists in an edition of three, of which this copy is number three. The work is concerned with the Palm Island riots of 2004. Palm Island is an Aboriginal community located on the tropical Great Palm Island, near northern Queensland, Australia. In November 2004 a young Aboriginal man, Mulrunji Doomadgee (also known as Cameron Doomadgee), died in in custody one hour after being detained by police. A week later, on 26 November 2004 at the public reading of the results of his autopsy, a riot ensued in which the police station, local courthouse and police barracks were burnt down and police officers and staff were forced to barricade themselves into the local hospital. It was later found, in 2006, that Doomadgee had died as a result of punches to the stomach; however, the Senior Sergeant was found not guilty of manslaughter in 2007. In 2008 two-time local Palm Island Councillor Lex Wotton was convicted and tried of inciting the riots. He served twenty months of a seven-year sentence. There continues to be widespread opposition to his sentence and the recent ‘gag order’ issued by the High Court of Australia.</p>\n<p>Ah Kee’s exhibition and the video installation <i>tall man</i> are an homage to Lex Wotton, specifically to the ongoing repercussions and events that unfolded on 26 November 2004. With footage sourced from mobile phones, handheld cameras and television news reels, the work shows the events that took place on that day. The video begins with each of the four screens showing different gatherings of the community. A woman speaks of Doomadgee’s death: ‘our young fella who died tragically… It is a mystery to all of us. There was an accident around the cell. There was a fall and an oppressive force on his body. Four ribs were broken. A huge blood loss occurred.’ Following this, Les Wotton enters the screen shouting ‘That’s not an accident … C’mon people we all wanted this. We wanted to know. Will we accept this as an accident?’</p>\n<p>The different screens of the video installation show the police station on fire and aerial views of Palm Island. The work incorporates the perspective of the police officers by showing them preparing for the riot and being forced to leave the police station and move to the barracks. Each screen includes the date and time ticking over in real time. Ah Kee uses the television test pattern, otherwise known as the SMPTE colour bars, to fragment the continuity of the footage and thus heighten the visual and emotional impact of the sequencing between screens. The test pattern is accompanied by the sound of a high-pitched video signal.</p>\n<p>\n<i>tall man</i> is characteristic of Ah Kee’s artistic approach in its investigation into race relations in Australia. The artist has written:</p>\n<p class=\"cttext\">\n</p><blockquote>While <i>tall man</i> is an idea of Lex Wotton’s involvement in the riot, it is also about the people of Palm Island and the circumstances in which they live their lives. It is about the lives of Aboriginal people and the way we see ourselves in times of this kind of trouble. As a people, the Aborigine in Australia exists in a world where our place is always prescribed for us and we are always in jeopardy. It is a context that we are continually having to survive. It is a context upon which we are continually having to build and re-build.<br/>(Vernon Ah Kee, unpublished artist’s statement, November 2010.)</blockquote>\n<p>Ah Kee is a member of the Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yidinji and Gugu Yimithirr peoples and a founding member of the Aboriginal artist collective Proppa Now. His work ranges from large-scale drawings of his family members and ancestors to text-based works and installations incorporating moving image. It fuses the history and language of colonisation with contemporary issues in an ongoing investigation of race and politics.</p>\n<p>Further reading<br/>Robert Leonard, Anthony Gardner, Aileen Moreton-Robinson and otheres, <i>borninthiskin: Vernon Ah Kee</i>, exhibition catalogue, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane 2009.<br/>Maura Reilly, ‘Vernon Ah Kee, Tall Man’, <i>Art Asia Pacific</i>, no.73, 2011, p.136.</p>\n<p>Natasha Bullock, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney<br/>December 2015</p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2022-04-14T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" }, { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>\n<i>tall man</i> reveals the ongoing effects of colonisation in contemporary Australia. The work depicts events from November 2004 on Palm Island, an island off the coast of Queensland. A local man, Mulrunji Doomadgee (also known as Cameron Doomadgee) died in police custody. Protests followed, and the police station, local courthouse and police barracks were burnt down. One of the central figures leading the protests was Lex Wotton, a member of the Palm Island Aboriginal Council. Ah Kee presents him as the ‘tall man’ – an Aboriginal term for a bogey man or spirit who elicits the truth from wrongdoers. Wotton later won a lawsuit, alongside other Palm Island residents, which found that the police had illegally discriminated against them. </p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Display caption", "publication_date": "2021-08-18T00:00:00", "slug_name": "display-caption", "type": "DISPLAY_CAPTION" } ]

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[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1979", "fc": "Helen Johnson", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/helen-johnson-26030" } ]

[ { "id": 999999779, "shortTitle": "Tate Collection" }, { "id": 999999782, "shortTitle": "Works with images" }, { "id": 999999961, "shortTitle": "General Collection" }, { "id": 999999956, "shortTitle": "Collection" } ]

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[ { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "7 June 2021 – 14 May 2023", "endDate": "2023-05-14", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "7 June 2021", "endDate": null, "id": 14379, "startDate": "2021-06-07", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 11857, "startDate": "2021-06-07", "title": "A Year in Art - Australia 1992", "type": "Collection based display" } ]

[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>\n<i>Bad Debt</i> 2016 is a large unstretched acrylic painting on canvas that depicts layers of overlapping disparate images. These include a bedroom interior with a smashed window; animals that are non-indigenous to the artist’s native Australia, such as foxes and rabbits; people dressed as a cat, a horse and a man; and representations of the smallpox virus. Foxes, rabbits and smallpox are notorious examples of the species and diseases introduced to Australia by colonists. The painting’s composition is based on the layout of Australia’s capital, Canberra, which is one of the few capital cities worldwide designed from scratch. In 1911 the Chicago-based architect Walter Burley Griffin won the international competition to design the city. Despite his idealist approach, his plan ignored the original inhabitants of the land. The imagery in Johnson’s painting is sourced from the internet and painted in close detail, alongside images of weeds that were either sourced online from the Agriculture Victoria website or based on photographs taken by the artist. On the wall of the bedroom hang two pictures; one is derived from a print by the Australian painter and printmaker Fred Williams (1927–1982), and the other is from an image of a man beating a woman that was published in an issue of the <i>Police Gazette</i>, a Melbourne publication from the mid- to late nineteenth century. The background image of people dressed as animals is adapted from a book about early circuses in Australia.</p>\n<p>This work is one of six new paintings co-commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and Artspace, Sydney for Johnson’s solo exhibition at the ICA from February to April 2017, and touring to Chapter, Cardiff and Artspace, Sydney. Two other paintings from the group are also in Tate’s collection: <i>Seat of Power </i>2016 (Tate X66564) and <i>A Feast of Reason and a Flow of Soul </i>2016 (Tate X66768). Painted on unstretched canvases, these works are displayed on tubular steel structures that allow them to be hung either at a distance of about 30–40 centimetres from the wall or suspended in the middle of the gallery.</p>\n<p>Johnson’s work often addresses Australia’s colonial history and its ongoing impact on the country’s political and social realities. The complex colonial relationship between Australia and Britain and the ongoing tension between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians are fundamental concerns of the three paintings in Tate’s collection. Australia is pictured as a country with an unstable and conflicted identity and a place where the constructed nature of history is more readily recognisable. Regarding the three paintings together, Johnson has said:</p>\n<p class=\"cttext\">\n</p><blockquote>They inhabit three different phases in Australia’s colonial history: <i>A Feast of Reason and a Flow of Soul</i> deals with the corruption and solipsism of the early colonists, focusing on the Port Phillip region (now Victoria) as land was stolen and sold off; the subject of <i>Seat of Power</i> is the sycophantic relation of the Australian government to that of the UK, embodied in the fetishistic production of a replica of the Speaker’s Chair at Westminster that was gifted to the Australian parliament in 1926; and <i>Bad Deb</i>t depicts introduced species that are today classed as pests and noxious weeds in south-eastern Australia, overlaid with a wireframe image of a bedroom that has been broken into and riffled through, theft in a register that we are more readily able to identify.<br/>(In email correspondence with Tate curator Sook-Kyung Lee, 4 February 2017.)</blockquote>\n<p>Rather than being overtly political or literal, however, Johnson’s work conveys a reflection of history and reality through the language of painting. She is acutely aware of the trajectory of recent debates around painting, from a conservative and outdated form of expression to a medium relevant to contemporary experience. These concerns resulted in her extending her PhD thesis into a book entitled <i>Painting is a Critical Form</i>, published in 2015. Traversing between figuration and abstraction and between image and text, her paintings connect disparate imagery with complex history and politics. The juxtaposition of historical and contemporary signifiers is typical of Johnson’s practice, adapted from historical and art historical material ranging from popular magazines and illustrated publications to internet photographs and Renaissance paintings. In her work some images are given precedence while others are made barely legible, implying that representation is always partial and subjective, rather than complete or absolute.</p>\n<p>\n<b>Further reading</b>\n<br/>\n<i>Helen Johnson, Painting Is a Critical Form</i>, Melbourne 2015.<br/>Jennifer Higgie, ‘History Pictures: Colonialism and Contemporary Australia in the Paintings of Helen Johnson’, <i>Frieze</i>, no.184, January–February 2017, published online 24 December 2016, <a href=\"https://frieze.com/article/history-pictures-0\">https://frieze.com/article/history-pictures-0</a>, accessed 31 January 2017.</p>\n<p>Sook-Kyung Lee<br/>January 2017</p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2021-12-01T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" }, { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>\n<i>Bad Debt</i> focuses on introduced animal species, diseases and ecological disturbance. Images of foxes and rabbits overlay drawings of circus performers dressed as a cat and a horse. These are species that have caused widespread damage to Australia’s unique biodiversity. Smallpox cells are too small to be visible, yet their introduction by the British from 1788 also had a devastating effect on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. <i>Bad Debt</i>’s composition is based on the layout of Australia’s capital city, Canberra. When the city was built, the planners ignored the concerns of the Ngunnawal, Ngunawal and Ngambri peoples whose land it stands on. </p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Display caption", "publication_date": "2021-08-18T00:00:00", "slug_name": "display-caption", "type": "DISPLAY_CAPTION" } ]

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[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1979", "fc": "Helen Johnson", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/helen-johnson-26030" } ]

[ { "id": 999999779, "shortTitle": "Tate Collection" }, { "id": 999999782, "shortTitle": "Works with images" }, { "id": 999999961, "shortTitle": "General Collection" }, { "id": 999999956, "shortTitle": "Collection" } ]

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[ { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "7 June 2021 – 14 May 2023", "endDate": "2023-05-14", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "7 June 2021", "endDate": null, "id": 14379, "startDate": "2021-06-07", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 11857, "startDate": "2021-06-07", "title": "A Year in Art - Australia 1992", "type": "Collection based display" } ]

[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>\n<i>Seat of Power</i> 2016 is a large unstretched acrylic painting on canvas, which depicts a satirical image of the British parliament in session, derived from the Victorian illustrator Richard Doyle’s (1824–1883) <i>Manners and Customs of Ye Englyshe in 1849</i> (first published in 1849). In Johnson’s work, this image is presented as a cartoonish line drawing, illusionistically superimposed on a painted ground and itself overlaid with partially legible text. Around the perimeter of the drawing, in the painted margins, there are painted images of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century men’s shoes, as well as images adapted from nineteenth-century satirical cartoons from the Australian newspaper <i>The Bulletin</i>. The title and text of Johnson’s work refer to a chair that was gifted to the House of Representatives in Canberra, Australia by the United Kingdom branch of the Empire Parliamentary Association in 1926. Partially constructed from oak taken from the roof of London’s Westminster Hall and Lord Nelson’s flagship HMS Victory, the chair was a replica of the Speaker’s Chair at the Palace of Westminster, a symbol of the historical tie between the British Empire and its colony. In 1926, when the gift was made, it would still be over fifty years before Indigenous Australians had equal rights to vote in all states and territories, and Johnson’s painting highlights the persistent absence of an acknowledgement of Australia’s indigenous nations within the construction of post-colonial memories.</p>\n<p>This work is one of six new paintings co-commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and Artspace, Sydney for Johnson’s solo exhibition at the ICA from February to April 2017, and touring to Chapter, Cardiff and Artspace, Sydney. Two other paintings from the group are also in Tate’s collection: <i>Bad Debt </i>2016 (Tate X66561) and <i>A Feast of Reason and a Flow of Soul </i>2016 (Tate X66768). Painted on unstretched canvases, these works are displayed on tubular steel structures that allow them to be hung either at a distance of about 30–40 centimetres from the wall or suspended in the middle of the gallery. </p>\n<p>Johnson’s work often addresses Australia’s colonial history and its ongoing impact on the country’s political and social realities. The complex colonial relationship between Australia and Britain and the ongoing tension between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians are fundamental concerns of the three paintings in Tate’s collection. Australia is pictured as a country with an unstable and conflicted identity and a place where the constructed nature of history is more readily recognisable. Regarding the three paintings together, Johnson has said:</p>\n<p class=\"cttext\">\n</p><blockquote>They inhabit three different phases in Australia’s colonial history: <i>A Feast of Reason and a Flow of Soul</i> deals with the corruption and solipsism of the early colonists, focusing on the Port Phillip region (now Victoria) as land was stolen and sold off; the subject of <i>Seat of Power</i> is the sycophantic relation of the Australian government to that of the UK, embodied in the fetishistic production of a replica of the Speaker’s Chair at Westminster that was gifted to the Australian parliament in 1926; and <i>Bad Deb</i>t depicts introduced species that are today classed as pests and noxious weeds in south-eastern Australia, overlaid with a wireframe image of a bedroom that has been broken into and riffled through, theft in a register that we are more readily able to identify.<br/>(In email correspondence with Tate curator Sook-Kyung Lee, 4 February 2017.)</blockquote>\n<p>Rather than being overtly political or literal, however, Johnson’s work conveys a reflection of history and reality through the language of painting. She is acutely aware of the trajectory of recent debates around painting, from a conservative and outdated form of expression to a medium relevant to contemporary experience. These concerns resulted in her extending her PhD thesis into a book entitled <i>Painting is a Critical Form</i>, published in 2015. Traversing between figuration and abstraction and between image and text, her paintings connect disparate imagery with complex history and politics. The juxtaposition of historical and contemporary signifiers is typical of Johnson’s practice, adapted from historical and art historical material ranging from popular magazines and illustrated publications to internet photographs and Renaissance paintings. In her work some images are given precedence while others are made barely legible, implying that representation is always partial and subjective, rather than complete or absolute.</p>\n<p>\n<b>Further reading</b>\n<br/>\n<i>Helen Johnson, Painting Is a Critical Form</i>, Melbourne 2015.<br/>Jennifer Higgie, ‘History Pictures: Colonialism and Contemporary Australia in the Paintings of Helen Johnson’, <i>Frieze</i>, no.184, January–February 2017, published online 24 December 2016, <a href=\"https://frieze.com/article/history-pictures-0\">https://frieze.com/article/history-pictures-0</a>, accessed 31 January 2017.</p>\n<p>Sook-Kyung Lee<br/>January 2017</p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2021-12-01T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" }, { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>\n<i>Seat of Power</i> uses literal and symbolic images to refer to the continued relationship between Australia and Britain. Johnson presents this as ‘embodied in the fetishistic production of a replica of the Speaker’s Chair at Westminster that was gifted to the Australian parliament in 1926.’ At the centre, Johnson replicates an image of the British House of Commons from <i>Manners and Customs of Ye Englyshe in 1849</i>, a book of satirical sketches by Victorian illustrator Richard Doyle. She uses ‘images that acknowledge the corruption, sycophancy and greed of colonial culture that, to me, were emblematic of the male modes of power that were taken to Australia by the British.’ </p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Display caption", "publication_date": "2021-08-18T00:00:00", "slug_name": "display-caption", "type": "DISPLAY_CAPTION" } ]

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[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1979", "fc": "Helen Johnson", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/helen-johnson-26030" } ]

[ { "id": 999999779, "shortTitle": "Tate Collection" }, { "id": 999999782, "shortTitle": "Works with images" }, { "id": 999999961, "shortTitle": "General Collection" }, { "id": 999999956, "shortTitle": "Collection" } ]

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[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>\n<i>A Feast of Reason and a Flow of Soul</i> 2016 is a large unstretched acrylic painting on canvas that shows satirical images adapted from late nineteenth-century cartoons depicting debauched parties, stuffy rituals and corruption taking place in the Port Phillip region of Australia (now Victoria) after colonial invasion. Beneath the colonists’ clothes, a faint outline of their intestines emerges, all of the figures needing to defecate. Johnson, who was born in Melbourne, has explained, ‘I have sought to place an emphasis on the theft of land that was taking place in the context of all of this … referring to a fight-or-flight mechanism that makes one want to defecate in order to more quickly flee.’ (In email correspondence with Tate curator Sook-Kyung Lee, 4 February 2017.) The figures are farting out the original lyrics to what is now the Australian national anthem, ‘Advance Australia Fair’. The sun and moon in the upper corners serve as a reminder that the colonial invaders of Australia were always operating in one time zone whilst serving another. The title was taken from a cartoon dated 1856 depicting a party in Melbourne, in which a crowd of white men, dressed in their finest, reel about drunk, fight and hit one another with bottles.</p>\n<p>This work is one of six new paintings co-commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and Artspace, Sydney for Johnson’s solo exhibition at the ICA from February to April 2017, and touring to Chapter, Cardiff and Artspace, Sydney. Two other paintings from the group are also in Tate’s collection: <i>Bad Debt </i>2016 (Tate X66561) and <i>Seat of Power </i>2016 (Tate X66564). Painted on unstretched canvases, these works are displayed on tubular steel structures that allow them to be hung either at a distance of about 30–40 centimetres from the wall or suspended in the middle of the gallery.</p>\n<p>Johnson’s work often addresses Australia’s colonial history and its ongoing impact on the country’s political and social realities. The complex colonial relationship between Australia and Britain and the ongoing tension between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians are fundamental concerns of the three paintings in Tate’s collection. Australia is pictured as a country with an unstable and conflicted identity and a place where the constructed nature of history is more readily recognisable. Regarding the three paintings together, Johnson has said:</p>\n<p class=\"cttext\">\n</p><blockquote>They inhabit three different phases in Australia’s colonial history: <i>A Feast of Reason and a Flow of Soul</i> deals with the corruption and solipsism of the early colonists, focusing on the Port Phillip region (now Victoria) as land was stolen and sold off; the subject of <i>Seat of Power</i> is the sycophantic relation of the Australian government to that of the UK, embodied in the fetishistic production of a replica of the Speaker’s Chair at Westminster that was gifted to the Australian parliament in 1926; and <i>Bad Deb</i>t depicts introduced species that are today classed as pests and noxious weeds in south-eastern Australia, overlaid with a wireframe image of a bedroom that has been broken into and riffled through, theft in a register that we are more readily able to identify.<br/>(In email correspondence with Tate curator Sook-Kyung Lee, 4 February 2017.)</blockquote>\n<p>Rather than being overtly political or literal, however, Johnson’s work conveys a reflection of history and reality through the language of painting. She is acutely aware of the trajectory of recent debates around painting, from a conservative and outdated form of expression to a medium relevant to contemporary experience. These concerns resulted in her extending her PhD thesis into a book entitled <i>Painting is a Critical Form</i>, published in 2015. Traversing between figuration and abstraction and between image and text, her paintings connect disparate imagery with complex history and politics. The juxtaposition of historical and contemporary signifiers is typical of Johnson’s practice, adapted from historical and art historical material ranging from popular magazines and illustrated publications to internet photographs and Renaissance paintings. In her work some images are given precedence while others are made barely legible, implying that representation is always partial and subjective, rather than complete or absolute.</p>\n<p>\n<b>Further reading</b>\n<br/>\n<i>Helen Johnson, Painting Is a Critical Form</i>, Melbourne 2015.<br/>Jennifer Higgie, ‘History Pictures: Colonialism and Contemporary Australia in the Paintings of Helen Johnson’, <i>Frieze</i>, no.184, January–February 2017, published online 24 December 2016, <a href=\"https://frieze.com/article/history-pictures-0\">https://frieze.com/article/history-pictures-0</a>, accessed 31 January 2017.</p>\n<p>Sook-Kyung Lee<br/>January 2017</p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2021-12-01T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

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[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "1939 – 1993", "fc": "Ian Burn", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/ian-burn-27222" } ]

[ { "id": 999999876, "shortTitle": "Tate Britain" }, { "id": 999999779, "shortTitle": "Tate Collection" }, { "id": 999999782, "shortTitle": "Works with images" }, { "id": 999999872, "shortTitle": "Works on display" }, { "id": 999999961, "shortTitle": "General Collection" }, { "id": 999999956, "shortTitle": "Collection" } ]

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[ { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "19 December 2022", "endDate": null, "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": null, "endDate": null, "id": 14598, "startDate": null, "venueName": "Tate Britain (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/" } ], "id": 12025, "startDate": "2022-12-19", "title": "Gallery 36", "type": "Collection based display" } ]

[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>\n<i>Blue Reflex</i> 1966 is a portrait format monochrome blue painting on board. It followed a group of similarly blue monochrome paintings that had been painted using acrylic paint and a layering of glazes on stretched canvas. Burn wished to create a surface that would not be broken up either by the weave of the canvas or the irregularity of manually applied paint, and with the group of paintings that followed, of which <i>Blue</i> <i>Reflex</i> is one, he prepared ply-board with an epoxy resin before applying automobile lacquer with an airgun. The result was a painting that erased many traces of artistic gesture and achieved a uniformity of finish, but the use of automobile lacquer introduced a quality of reflection not apparent in his previous paintings that relied wholly on glaze for such effects. The choice to apply lacquer with an airgun gives the painting a character close to a manufactured object. Yet, although the quality of reflection draws attention away from the painting and towards its surface and what is reflected within it, the edges of the painting reveal its handmade materiality.</p>\n<p>The quality of reflection in the painting signals the degree to which Burn’s work addressed the nature and conditions of perception, and with works such as <i>Blue Reflex</i> he created paintings that moved from the perceptual space of modernist art towards a conceptual space. Even so, at the time, Burn equated a conceptual space with the idealisations implicit within Kasimir Malevich’s non-objective painting (something he held in common with his friend and collaborator Mel Ramsden [born 1944]); in a contemporaneous notebook Burn wrote that ‘conceptual space exists only in awareness of, having no fixed externalisation … but is centralised, expanding in a field of awareness (the scope of this field is a reflection of the spectator’s personal awareness).’ (Ian Burn, ‘Notes 1966–7’, cited in Art Gallery of Western Australia 1992, p.43.) This idea of a conceptual space was key to the challenge that he and Ramsden made to modernist art as it was defined by the American critic Clement Greenberg – as medium specific, autonomous, self-referential and defined by its own conditionality. For them painting had instead to draw its material, content and criticality from the world in which it existed and acted within. In the case of <i>Blue Reflex</i> this was identified by the use of an industrial process to make something that was both painting and object (the airgun delivering a paint surface and Royal Blue colour commonly associated with American REO trucks), as much as in the quality of its reflective surface, or ‘reflex’.</p>\n<p>The paintings that Burn made between 1966 and 1967 – like those made contemporaneously by Ramsden – emerge as a parody and critique of modernist painting, disrupting the blankness of the monochrome. Although the extreme abstraction and perceptual flatness of <i>Blue Reflex</i> chimes with modernist values at their furthest extent, its materials present the work with a degree of everyday fact and objecthood that oil paint on canvas could not. Furthermore, its reflective surface ensures that what is seen by the viewer is not solely the materials and surface of the work but that this is interrupted by the reflection of the environment around the painting. In this way the blankness of the monochrome becomes pictorial and subject to illusion in such a way as to dislocate modernist perception, so that the site of the painting and the movement of the beholder become key.</p>\n<p>Burn subsequently concentrated not just on the reflective qualities revealed by <i>Blue Reflex</i> but articulated these in philosophical or theoretical texts that, through their questioning of the condition of art, increasingly took the place of painting. An early realisation of this approach was his <i>Mirror Piece</i> 1967 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/art-language-mirror-piece-p80072\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>P80072</span></a>), made not long after his arrival in New York. This consists of a mirror, the size and proportions of a regular bathroom mirror that has been additionally glazed and framed, as well as thirteen sheets of text and diagram, entitled ‘Notes for Mirror Reflexes’. These notes act as instruction for the construction of <i>Mirror Piece</i> but also analyse how it might be perceived, for instance how images reflected in the mirror are refracted through the layer of glass that glaze it; the notes also address its definition as art or bathroom mirror. The sheets of text and diagram were pasted on the wall beside the framed mirror and for Ramsden the moves described by <i>Blue Reflex</i> and <i>Mirror Piece</i> – from a reflective painting with reflective qualities to an everyday object and then to text about that object – were a crucial shift towards conceptual art: </p>\n<p class=\"cttext\">\n</p><blockquote>this pulled the conversation into the work and the work into the conversation. The talk went up on the wall and he [Burn] was able to make more confident first-order claims for it. This instead of regarding the objects as furtive reminders of an unheard of almost forgotten conversation … The foregrounding of text and diagrams as ‘substantial’ work was new to me at the time, and it gave the ‘work’ a new home.<br/>(Mel Ramsden, ‘Making art from a different place’, in Art Gallery of Western Australia 1992, p.15.)</blockquote>\n<p>\n<b>Further reading</b>\n<br/>Charles Harrison and Fred Orton, <i>A Provisional History of Art &amp; Language</i>, Paris 1982.<br/>\n<i>Ian Burn: Minimal–Conceptual Work 1965–1970</i>, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth 1992.<br/>Robert Bailey, <i>Art &amp; Language International: Conceptual Art between Art Worlds</i>, London 2016.</p>\n<p>Andrew Wilson<br/>November 2017</p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2021-11-18T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" }, { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>Ian Burn wanted to leave no trace of how he made this work, and to give it a uniform finish. To achieve this, he smoothed ply-board, before applying lacquer usually used on car paint with an airgun. Burn created a work that reflects spectators and prompts our awareness of the act of looking. In doing so, he aimed to challenge the belief that painting should stand alone and be removed from everyday concerns. This was a dominant view championed by the influential US art critic Clement Greenberg. </p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Display caption", "publication_date": "2023-09-26T00:00:00", "slug_name": "display-caption", "type": "DISPLAY_CAPTION" } ]

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[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1950", "fc": "Imants Tillers", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/imants-tillers-27298" } ]

[ { "id": 999999779, "shortTitle": "Tate Collection" }, { "id": 999999782, "shortTitle": "Works with images" }, { "id": 999999961, "shortTitle": "General Collection" }, { "id": 999999956, "shortTitle": "Collection" } ]

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[ { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "14 February 2022", "endDate": null, "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "14 February 2022", "endDate": null, "id": 14678, "startDate": "2022-02-14", "venueName": "Tate Liverpool (Liverpool, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/" } ], "id": 12089, "startDate": "2022-02-14", "title": "Port/Legacies of Colonialism", "type": "Collection based display" } ]

[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>\n<i>Kangaroo Blank </i>1988<i> </i>is a painting that was commissioned by Daniel Thomas, the then director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide as the final inclusion in the museum’s exhibition, <i>The Great Australian Art Exhibition 1788–1988</i> (1988). Comprising seventy-eight canvas boards, numbered 16231 to 16308, an ongoing numbering system the artist has employed in his paintings since 1981, the work draws on a number of references from existing works of art, primarily the painting <i>The Kongouro from New Holland </i>1770 by British painter George Stubbs (1724–1806), in the collection of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, and the work of Japanese artist Shusaku Arakawa (1936–2010). George Stubbs was considered the foremost animal painter in Britain during the eighteenth century and was commissioned by Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820) to paint two paintings of native Australian wildlife (kangaroo and dingo) following his return from Captain James Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific (1768–71), the first British voyage devoted exclusively to scientific discovery. Stubbs was not on the voyage, and painted <i>The Kongouro from New Holland </i>working from written and verbal descriptions, sketches made by the onboard artist Sidney Parkinson, and a kangaroo pelt that Banks had brought back with him. Tillers came across Stubbs’ painting in a publication of Joseph Bank’s <i>Endeavour Journal</i> 1962 (Baume 1988, p.226).</p>\n<p>\n<i>Kangaroo Blank </i>is a direct appropriation of Stubbs’ painting, manifested across all seventy-eight panels. In Tillers’ work, the central figure of the kangaroo depicted in the Australian landscape is substituted with a dark rectangular void, ‘a blank’, suggestive of something missing or a vacancy left to be filled. In its place are radiating lines emanating from a single point perspective, which are a direct reference to the work of Shusaku Arakawa. Part of the conceptual art movement of the 1960s, Arakawa’s paintings, drawings and other works aimed to explore the mechanics of human perception and knowledge (Shusaku Arakawa biography, Reversible Destiny Foundation, <a href=\"http://www.reversibledestiny.org/arakawa-and-madeline-gins/arakawa\">http://www.reversibledestiny.org/arakawa-and-madeline-gins/arakawa</a>, accessed 29 November 2017). A recurring motif in his work particularly of the 1970s was the use of radiating lines from a single vanishing point that overlay the image. The concept of ‘blank’ in Tillers’ title also relates to Arakawa’s writing, in particular a publication by him and Madeline Gins,<i> Pour Ne Pas Mourir/ To Not To Die </i>(Paris 1987), which reflects on ideas of blankness, positing it as an emptiness with a fullness of its own.</p>\n<p>In <i>Kangaroo Blank</i> Tillers, in his signature style, appropriated two divergent images from distinctly different historical and geographical contexts. Australian curator Nicholas Baume has described the work as a ‘point-blank confrontation, a new thought emerging from a collision of types’ (Baume 1988, p.226). The eighteenth-century naturalist animal painting of Stubbs meets the twentieth-century conceptual abstraction of Arakawa and both are transformed through Tillers’ processes of quotation, bringing his interest in debates around cultural centres and peripheries to the fore.</p>\n<p>\n<b>Further reading</b>\n<br/>Nicholas Baume, ‘Where truth is no stranger to fiction: Imants Tillers, Kangaroo Blank 1988’, in <i>Creating Australia, Two Hundred Years of Art: 1788–1988,</i> exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery Board of South Australia, Adelaide 1988.<br/>Wystan Curnow, <i>Imants Tillers and the ‘Book of Power’</i>, Sydney 1998.<br/>Hart, Deborah (ed.), <i>Imants Tillers: One World Many Visions</i>, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 2006.</p>\n<p>Manya Sellers, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney and Katy Wan, Tate<br/>November 2017</p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2021-11-18T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

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[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1982", "fc": "D Harding", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/d-harding-27244" } ]

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[ { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "7 June 2021 – 14 May 2023", "endDate": "2023-05-14", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "7 June 2021", "endDate": null, "id": 14379, "startDate": "2021-06-07", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 11857, "startDate": "2021-06-07", "title": "A Year in Art - Australia 1992", "type": "Collection based display" } ]

[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>\n<i>The Leap/Watershead</i> 2017 is a large-scale work by the Aboriginal Australian artist Dale Harding. It is executed in coloured pigment on linen, fixed with a clear acrylic binding agent. The image appears to be abstract, with a concentrated area of dense brown emerging from the bottom left-hand corner of the canvas. The remainder of the image is more fragmented, reminiscent of dust particles and airbrushing techniques. Although given the designation of ‘painting’ by the artist, the work was created using a device through which ochre pigment was blown onto the surface of the canvas. The two types of ochre used, Ghungalu red and Garingbal light, are historically associated with the two Aboriginal Australian groups in central Queensland from which Harding is descended, having been used by these communities for hundreds and thousands of years for both practical and artistic reasons, including rock and bark painting, body decoration and mortuary practices.</p>\n<p>Harding has described how the work was initially an attempt to completely cover the surface in a single block of colour, in the manner of abstract colour field painting, but blowing the pigment onto the canvas. He began by creating a foundational under-layer of light ochre onto which the red ochre was intended to be laid as a blanket top colour. The final fragmented form was a consequence of the artist being prohibited by physical exhaustion in completing his original objective. He explained: ‘Working in close succession of days, and simultaneously working on the white ochre canvas also, the red came to a natural endpoint far from achieving a complete red field. I’d stressed and injured my body in an attempt to cover so much surface area by breath, and the red could not be completed.’ (Dale Harding, informal notes on the artwork, correspondence with curators at MCA Australia and Tate, October 2018).</p>\n<p>Upon seeing the angular form that emerged from the haze of pigment, Harding was reminded of the form of Blackdown Tableland – a dominant landform in the heart of Ghungalu country, and the headwaters of numerous creeks including the Mimosa Creek that supplies water to Woorabinda, in central Queensland. The title of the work refers to a nearby geographical location in the Mackay Region of Queensland that carries historical significance in being the site of a massacre of a large group of Aboriginal people in the 1860s. Fleeing certain rifle assault from a fleet of the Queensland Native Police, the group leapt to their deaths from the cliff edge of Mount Mandarana. There was purportedly one single survivor – a baby whose blanket became caught on a protruding branch, breaking its fall.</p>\n<p>\n<i>The Leap/Watershead</i> was originally conceived as one panel of a triptych. In the event, the artist decided that all three parts should be individual works in their own right. The other two paintings, both made in 2017, are titled <i>White Ground</i> and <i>Associative/Dissociative</i>, and are respectively coloured with solid white ochre and solid Reckitt’s blue. They are in two separate private collections in Brisbane, Australia.</p>\n<p>Although the work diverges from the stencilling technique of the site-specific commissions with which Harding made his name – such as those he completed for <i>Documenta 14</i> in 2017 and the Liverpool Biennial in 2018 – <i>The Leap/Watershead</i> shares the same thematic concerns of the artist’s wider practice. This includes the desire to highlight the ways in which stories and artistic techniques are passed down through generations, beyond written texts and mainstream narratives. Harding identifies himself as a descendant of the Bidjara, Ghungalu and Garingbal peoples of central Queensland and his work is informed by this heritage. Stencilling, for example, forms a core part of his practice in allowing him to perform the same techniques undertaken by his ancestors. Harding’s multi-layered practice gives visual expression to the complex and often painful hidden histories of violence and discrimination enacted against aboriginal communities. His work also addresses the wider legacies of colonialism and globalisation.</p>\n<p>\n<b>Further reading</b>\n<br/>Clive Moore, ‘Blackgin’s Leap: A Window into Aboriginal-European Relations in the Pioneer Valley, Queensland in the 1860s’, <i>Aboriginal History</i>, vol.14, nos.1/2, 1990, pp.61–79.</p>\n<p>Katy Wan<br/>October 2018</p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2021-11-18T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" }, { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>\n<i>The Leap/Watershed</i> was made using coloured ochre (clay pigments) from Ghungalu and Garingbal country, which Harding blew directly onto the canvas. The technique is used in the ancient rock art galleries of Carnarvon Gorge in Ghungalu country. After making a partial form, Harding was reminded of Blackdown Tableland, a plateau overlooking Ghungalu country. Many of the creeks in the surrounding area flow from there, hence the title <i>Watershed</i>. <i>The Leap</i> refers to a nearby rock formation in the Mackay region where, in 1867, around 200 Aboriginal people were forced to jump off a cliff to escape from the Queensland Native Police Force.</p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Display caption", "publication_date": "2021-07-09T00:00:00", "slug_name": "display-caption", "type": "DISPLAY_CAPTION" } ]

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[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1964", "fc": "Mark Leckey", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/mark-leckey-6877" } ]

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[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>\n<i>Affect Bridge Age Regression</i> 2017–19 is an installation by the British artist Mark Leckey comprising four elements: a floor-based cast concrete scale-replica of a motorway bridge, a set of three wall-hung sodium lights, a billboard papered with twelve printed posters, and an audio soundtrack. The work was made on the occasion of Leckey’s solo exhibition at Cubitt Gallery, London in 2017 where it was shown in its entirety. The version now in Tate’s collection is a slight reconfiguration of that site-specific installation. Though the central elements remain the same, the number of sodium lights has been reduced, and the posters that were papered directly to the gallery walls have been reconfigured into a more robust billboard.</p>\n<p>The title of the work, <i>Affect Bridge Age Regression</i>, refers to a technique used in hypnotherapy to associate recurrent bodily feelings back to their earliest memory – once brought back, the recollection can be vivified and events that are often stressful and laden with meaning may be understood. The bridge in the title has a dual meaning, referring both to this technique and to the form of the sculpture at the centre of the installation, a cast concrete scale-replica of a section of an actual motorway flyover bridge. The bridge is situated in Eastham Rake, in Leckey’s hometown of the Wirral in the North East of England, and was built in 1968, four years after he was born there. Leckey has commented that the flyover can be understood as part of then Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s vision of post-war Britain as ‘surging into the glorious horizon of the future’ (Leckey, quoted from his video work <i>Exorcise the Bridge @ Eastham Rake</i> 2017).</p>\n<p>The motorway bridge at Eastham Rake is a recurring motif in Leckey’s work, first appearing in<i> Dream English Kid, 1964–1999 AD</i> 2015 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/leckey-dream-english-kid-1964-1999-ad-t14666\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14666</span></a>). A large-scale section of the bridge featured as a central element of his immersive installations <i>He Thrusts his Fists</i> <i>Against the Posts but still Insists He Sees the Ghosts</i> at Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen and <i>Containers and Their Drivers</i>, MoMA PS1, New York, both 2017. <i>Affect Bridge Age Regression</i> can also be understood as a direct precursor to Leckey’s solo exhibition at Tate Britain, <i>O’ Magic Power of Bleakness</i>, in 2019, for which a vast life-size replica of the same bridge was constructed as the set for an audio play.</p>\n<p>The bridge is a symbolic space that represents a specific period of transition for Leckey. It was a place where he hung out with other local teenagers and believes he once had a paranormal encounter. By replicating the bridge down to the intricate detail of the graffiti scrawled at street level and the weeds sprouting from the pavement, Leckey has tapped into those teenage hours spent occupying this liminal space. On the significance of the bridge he has said:</p>\n<p class=\"cttext\">\n</p><blockquote>Many of my works have their wellspring in things and experiences from my childhood and youth that still haunts me. The motorway bridge is one of those things that have settled in my memory. That is why I have recreated it. It is as if memories of this kind take on too much importance, too much room. They become too overwhelming.<br/>(Leckey, quoted in programme for <i>BMW Tate Live Exhibition: Ten Days Six Nights</i>, Tate Modern, London 2018, p.23.)</blockquote>\n<p>The installation is lit by three sodium lights, the SOX lamps that were once commonly used in street lighting but have since been discontinued. These lamps have the effect of bathing the gallery in a distinctive monochromatic orange light which Leckey has used to create a specific atmosphere in a number of his solo exhibition and live performances. The colour of the light has the effect of rendering the space otherworldly, distinctly urban and toxic. Leckey has explained: ‘The Lucozade glow they give off was always an indicator that you were coming up on magic mushrooms, psychedelics would amplify that colour saturation, or rather that leaching out of all other colour. I want the lamps to do the same thing … put you in that altered state.’ (Quoted in Philomena Epps, ‘Artist Mark Leckey’s New Show is an Exorcism’, <i>Dazed</i>, 30 June 2017, <a href=\"https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/36569/1/artist-mark-leckeys-new-show-is-an-exorcism\">https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/36569/1/artist-mark-leckeys-new-show-is-an-exorcism</a>, accessed 2 July 2019.)</p>\n<p>The billboard papered in the manner of urban flyposting further establishes the sense of a city scene in this installation. There are twelve posters in total mounted on board. Three posters are a reproduction of the front page of <i>The Sun</i> newspaper from 11 August 1999. Describing his decision to reproduce this distinctive tabloid front page, Leckey explained that, ‘The Sun poster is from the eclipse of August 1999, an event which heralded both TEOTWAWKI [the end of the world as we know it] and a millenarian cleansing. I liked the juxtaposition of the masthead of The Sun with this giant black hole. I also thought it visually represented the void of morality at the heart of that paper. (Quoted in Epps 2017, accessed 2 July 2019.) The three reproductions of this front page are collaged alongside a number of other poster images: four posters for <i>Dream English Kid</i>; three blown-up details of a computer circuit board – a reference to the perceived threat of the millennial bug; and two posters of an absurdist scene in which a pack of Benson &amp; Hedges cigarettes appears partially submerged in deep water. The overall effect of these juxtaposed image is one of apocalyptic anxiety at the turn of the millennium.</p>\n<p>The three physical elements of the installation are brought together by an audio soundtrack that plays on a loop. The track is a recording of a chant that takes the form of an exorcism first performed and recorded when the work was installed in Cubitt Gallery, London in 2017, titled <i>Exorcism of the Bridge @ Eastham Rake</i>. The chanted sound piece was subsequently presented in a later iteration in collaboration with members of Tate Collective as part of <i>BMW Tate Live Exhibition: Ten Days Six Nights</i> in the Tanks at Tate Modern on 24 March 2018.</p>\n<p>The collective ritual of shared exorcism captured by the recording reverberates through the space in which the work is installed. The chant references ‘Exorcising the Evil Spirits of the Pentagon’ by New York-based band The Fugs: a live recording of an anti-Vietnam war protest held in Washington DC in October 1967 where protestors, including the band, attempted to levitate the Pentagon off its foundations with chants of ‘Out Demons Out!’. Leckey’s version focuses on exorcising the demons and ‘bad vibrations’ of the bridge that still plague him to this day.</p>\n<p>With these four elements Leckey has created a charged physical environment for the visitor to encounter. The work is representative of both Leckey’s approach to theatrical scene-setting and his relationship to the staging of ordinary physical objects. Curator Catherine Wood has described his approach to the art gallery as a collision point between two dimensions of perception or experience as, ‘a modern ritual based on close-up viewing of material-aesthetic objects under bright lights on the one hand; and the possibility of enhanced, spiritual communion on the other. It is a paradoxical place that mixes factuality and magic.’ (Catherine Wood in Tate Britain 2019, p.35.)</p>\n<p>\n<b>Further reading</b>\n<br/>\n<i>The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things</i>, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London 2013.<br/>\n<i>Mark Leckey</i>, exhibition catalogue, Verlag der Buchhandlung, Cologne 2014.<br/>Catherine Wood (ed.), <i>Mark Leckey, O’Magic Power of Bleakness</i>, exhibition catalogue, Tate Britain, London, 2019.</p>\n<p>Isabella Maidment<br/>July 2019</p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2021-11-18T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

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[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1949", "fc": "Rainer Fetting", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/rainer-fetting-29304" } ]

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[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>\n<i>Red Head </i>(Roter Kopf) 1984 is a large-scale portrait by the German artist Rainer Fetting. It depicts a man’s head and shoulders, directly facing the viewer with an intense frontal gaze. The dominant colour is bright red, which constitutes the majority of the background and also of the man’s face; the figure itself is outlined and shaded in green and blue. The indistinct background is animated by areas of gestural brushstrokes, including a yellow area to the right of the head. The face is slightly elongated, with a strong nose, thick lips and large ears; a dark green area to the top left of the head suggests the presence of hair. There is a hint of white in the sclera of the eyes, but these also appear to be mainly red, with piercing dark blue irises.</p>\n<p>Fetting painted a large number of close-up frontal portraits in the mid-1980s, many of which are titled ‘heads’ and variations of this title. Some of these heads incorporate pieces of driftwood that Fetting collected from the piers on the Hudson River, a new development in his work inspired by his recent move to New York in 1984. In general, these heads are simplified yet intensely expressive faces, painted in unnatural colours and bright accents against a dark or hazy background. The level of detail in the heads can vary greatly, and sometimes the faces are reduced to little more than a silhouette with glowing eyes, as seen in the ‘Head in the Twilight’ series of 1983. In <i>Red Head </i>1984 the brushwork is pared-down but still conveys a sense of the volume of the facial features.</p>\n<p>Part of a generation of German artists who painted in a neo-expressionist figurative style in reaction to the dry, cerebral nature of the then dominant minimal and conceptual practices, Fetting uses colour in a deliberately anti-naturalistic manner inspired by the fauves and German expressionism. He also strongly identifies with Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), a recurring figure in his paintings, placed next to the Berlin Wall or in contemporary New York street scenes. Many of Fetting’s self-portraits depict him wearing a hat like that worn by Van Gogh in his <i>Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat</i> of 1887 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). The intensity of Van Gogh’s self-portraits is also echoed in the piercing expressions of Fetting’s heads.</p>\n<p>Fetting was one of the co-founders of the Galerie am Moritzplatz in Berlin, established in 1977 by a group of young artists – known as the ‘Moritzboys’ – who studied at the Berliner Hochschule für Bildende Künste (today known as Universität der Künste). This group, which included among others Salomé, Bernd Zimmer and Helmut Middendorf, achieved international success as the ‘Neue Wilde’ (‘New Savages’ or ‘Neo-Fauves’) following the 1980 exhibition <i>Heftige Malerei</i> (‘Ferocious Painting’), held at the Haus am Waldsee in Berlin. Fetting experimented with all aspects of the practice of painting as a way to reclaim and reinvent the medium at a time when many believed it to be an obsolete art form. In response to such views, the Moritzboys’ large canvases enveloped the viewer’s field of vision and shifted their sense of spatial presence, inviting a very direct and sensual engagement in a way comparable to large sculptures and installations. Hectic nightlife scenes were painted with a raw energy that conveyed the live nature of the events themselves, as well as the performative aspects of the very act of painting. Meanwhile, composition and framing were often strongly influenced by photography and film, presented as ways of visually processing reality that were by then second nature for both artists and viewers.</p>\n<p>Fetting’s portraits are often confrontational, either because of their sexually charged nature or because of the defiant stance of the sitters, and occasionally because of the way the composition positions the viewer as part of the scene, as an active voyeur. With their implied close proximity and penetrating gaze, his larger-than-life heads are intended to capture the viewer’s attention and to affect them on an emotional and direct level. Imposing their presence by unflinchingly staring back at the viewer, Fetting’s heads reflect his close involvement with Berlin’s, and later New York’s, countercultural movements, specifically at the intersection between the LGBT+ community and the nascent punk and New Wave music scenes.</p>\n<p>\n<b>Further reading</b>\n<br/>Christos M. Joachimides,<i> </i>‘A New Spirit in Painting’, in<i> A New Spirit in Painting</i>, exhibition catalogue, Royal Academy, London 1981, pp.14–6; plates 31–2.<br/>Jessica Thomas, ‘On the Brink of the Abyss: the <i>Neue Wilden</i> in 1980’s Berlin and Beyond’, <i>Art Criticism</i>, vol.19, no.2, 2004, pp.79–104.<br/>Jan Hoet, Arie Hartog,<i> Fetting</i>, Cologne 2009.</p>\n<p>Valentina Ravaglia<br/>May 2019 </p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2021-11-18T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

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[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "founded 1983", "fc": "IRWIN", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/irwin-16361" }, { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1962", "fc": "Michael Benson", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/michael-benson-30526" } ]

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[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>\n<i>Black Square on Red Square</i> 1992 is an editioned video lasting three minutes and fifteen seconds that can be shown on a monitor or as a projection. It documents an action that took place on 6 June 1992 in Moscow’s Red Square, for the duration of thirty minutes sometime between 14.00 and 15.00, initiated by the Slovenian collective IRWIN and the American artist and filmmaker Michael Benson (born 1962). The footage from the action shows a group of people getting off a bus in Red Square, hauling with them a large, heavy black fabric object; onlookers stand by, including uniformed police. Moscow’s St. Basil’s Cathedral and the Lenin Mausoleum, two of the city’s most famous landmarks, form a recognisable backdrop to the group’s action. The group proceeds to carry the object closer into the centre of the square, unfurling and stretching the fabric until it takes the form of a large black square. One participant audibly declares in English, ‘This is Black Square on the Red Square’. The participants of the action, as well as the onlookers, congregate around the edges of the space demarcated by the fabric.</p>\n<p>The action was led by IRWIN and Michael Benson, with the participation of artists from the circle of Moscow Conceptualists: Natalia Abalakova, Dmitrii Ariupin, Maja Breznik, Sergei Bugaev (Afrika), Charles, Eda Čufer, B. Edelman, Fiona Fleck, Juergen Harten, Julia Kollerova, Vesna Kesić, Irina Koulik, Galya Kurierova, Ellena and Victor Sagarev, I. Smirnova, K. Tschouvaschew, Ekaterina Turchina and Dragan Živadinov (list of participants confirmed by IRWIN member Miran Mohar in correspondence with Tate curator Dina Akhmadeeva, April–May 2018).</p>\n<p>\n<i>Black Square on Red Square</i> is emblematic of the group’s self-declared persisting interest in the ‘ambivalent inheritance of the historical avant-gardes and its totalitarian successors, and thus with the dialectic of avant-garde and totalitarianism’ (quoted at <a href=\"http://www.irwin.si/about/\">http://www.irwin.si/about/</a>, accessed 27 March 2018). In initiating the action, IRWIN brought an iconic symbol of avant-garde modernism – the black square of Kazimir Malevich’s (1879–1935) painting <i>Black Square</i> 1915 – into contact with the symbolic centre of the recently-collapsed Soviet state, Moscow’s Red Square. As IRWIN’s Borut Vogelnik described, ‘In Moscow, we spread out a 22-metre square of black canvas on Red Square in front of the Lenin Mausoleum in such a fashion that, combined with the red of the events the square is named after, it formed a composition, a painting visible from the air.’ (Vogelnik 2014, accessed 27 March 2018.)</p>\n<p>1992 was a pertinent year for such a project: in forming this composition, the collective combined the failed ambitions of artistic modernism with the failed ambitions of the Soviet state – which had collapsed in 1991 – in building communism, interrogating what became of those unrealised future-oriented projects. The art historian Gediminas Gasparavičius described the action as the ‘stitch[ing] together of two unrealised utopias: the Soviet state that never achieved communism and an artistic avant-garde that never became a form of life’ (Gasparavičius 2015, p.410).</p>\n<p>The action <i>Black Square on Red Square </i>was realised in the context of a series of events, lectures, discussions and actions that took place between 10 May 1992 and 10 June 1992 upon the invitation of the project Apt-Art International, organised by Viktor Misiano, Lena Kurlandzeva, Konstantin Zvezdochetov and Regina Gallery, Moscow, and which aimed to consider the consequences and relevance of so-called ‘Apartment Art’ after the collapse of the Soviet state. During this month-long residency, IRWIN forged dialogues with Russian artistic circles. Upon their return to Slovenia, the collective retrospectively conceptualised their time in Moscow into <i>NSK Embassy Moscow</i> and the first iteration of <i>NSK State in Time</i> 1992–present, the collective’s virtual, non-territorial state.<i> </i>The video <i>Black Square on Red </i>exists in an edition of five plus one artists’ proof. Tate’s copy is number five in the edition; numbers one and three are held in private collections, while numbers two and four are in the collections of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and The Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana respectively.</p>\n<p>\n<b>Further reading</b>\n<br/>Borut Vogelnik, ‘Irwin on Malevich’, <i>Tate Etc.</i>, no.31, Summer 2014, <a href=\"http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/irwin-on-malevich\">http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/irwin-on-malevich</a>, accessed 27 March 2018.<br/>Eda Čufer (ed.),<i> NSK Embassy Moscow: How the East Sees the East</i>,<i> </i>Loža Gallery, Koper, Slovenia 2015.<br/>Gediminas Gasparavičius, ‘Promises and Premises of Art as a State: NSK Embassy Moscow and its Contexts’, in <i>NSK From Kapital to Capital: Neue Slowenische Kunst – An Event of the Final Decade of Yugoslavia</i>, Cambridge, MA 2015, pp.205–16.</p>\n<p>Dina Akhmadeeva<br/>April 2018</p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2021-11-18T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

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[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1945", "fc": "Peter Kennedy", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/peter-kennedy-22830" }, { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1948", "fc": "John Hughes", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/john-hughes-26506" } ]

[ { "id": 999999779, "shortTitle": "Tate Collection" }, { "id": 999999782, "shortTitle": "Works with images" }, { "id": 999999961, "shortTitle": "General Collection" }, { "id": 999999956, "shortTitle": "Collection" } ]

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[ { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "7 June 2021 – 14 May 2023", "endDate": "2023-05-14", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "7 June 2021", "endDate": null, "id": 14379, "startDate": "2021-06-07", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 11857, "startDate": "2021-06-07", "title": "A Year in Art - Australia 1992", "type": "Collection based display" } ]

[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p class=\"cttext\">\n</p><blockquote>\n<i>On Sacred Land </i>is a post-modern video composed of archival film footage, photographs, and drawings combined with new filmed scenes. It is an examination of the continued resistance by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders within the ongoing context of colonization in the land now known as Australia. Alongside these protests to protect sacred sites on unceded lands, Kennedy and Hughes reveal the brutal history of colonisation and its evolution in Australia through archival evidence. Originally created as a video work and later transferred to a digital file, this artwork can be encountered looped on a monitor or as a projection up to 3 metres (gallerist Josh Milani, email correspondence with Tate curator Lena Fritsch, 19 January 2017). It has also been shown as part of an installation with an accompanying painting of the same name, made by Kennedy, which similarly problematises Australian history painting. The video is fourteen minutes and twenty-six seconds long and does not follow a chronology. Instead, it uses the post-modernist strategy of juxtaposing images from different moments in time to reveal how modes of colonisation have evolved. <i>On Sacred Land </i>begins and ends with the voice of a male Aboriginal singer accompanying a drawing by nineteenth century Wahgunyah artist Tommy McRae (c.1835–1901), reflecting 65,000 years of continuous living culture shared by Aboriginal peoples. The video then introduces the imposition of Western economic ideology onto Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures with a quotation from the Western Australian Kalumburu Mission Diary, written by the Benedictine monk Fr. Perez in 1915, ‘... In their natural state they are communists of the crudest sort. Now an attempt is being made to invoke their sense of individuality.’</blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<i>On Sacred Land </i>symbolises how 200 years of British colonisation has evolved with clothing of 18th Century British military, Christian clergy, court judges, and businessmen, alongside studio photographs of white men posing in these costumes. These scenes are interspersed with historically significant imagery depicting British exploration of what they would later call Australia. This includes Australian Emmanuel Phillip Fox’s 1902 impressionistic painting <i>Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay</i>, 1770 and English artist Benjamin Duterrau’s 1840 painting <i>The Conciliation </i>showing George Augustus Robinson negotiating with Tasmanian Aboriginal people, resulting in their removal from their lands and consequential turmoil. Early archival film footage and photographs shows evidence of Aboriginal men in chains, ethnographic studies of women, and children in missions. The latter is demonstrative of a series of Australian government policies from 1910s to 1970s which forcibly removed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, often placing them in Christian missions, as part of what would later be referred to as the Stolen Generations.</blockquote>\n<blockquote>Historic imagery is interspersed with colour documentary video from the early 1980s, showing the continued effects of colonisation. A moving image in colour shows 1980s Sydney with its harbour and high-rise skyline follows with the word ‘imperialism’ written across the image in blue cursive writing. Scenes are also taken from Oliver Howes’ 1980 film <i>On Sacred Ground</i>, which Kennedy and Hughes paid homage to in the title of their video. They show the well-publicised Noonkanbah dispute when the Yungngora People and their supporters blocked the path of drilling rigs and police, defending their sacred sites. It reflects the 1980s context where national debates focused on the contestation of land rights and self-determination for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. The significance of Aboriginal connection to Country is reinforced at the end of the video with a text quotation by Larry Lanley, former Chairman of the Aboriginal Arts Board: ‘It all goes back to the land. It is our culture … The whole Aboriginal way – painting, songs, dance, laws, medicine – fits properly with the land. We can teach Europeans all about these things – they are things we have known always.’</blockquote>\n<p>Kennedy and Hughes collaborated on <i>November 11 (Red)</i> 1978–9 and <i>November 11 (Blue) </i>1980–1 which are also videos drawing from post-modern strategies to examine Australia’s political landscape and the continued legacies of British political power. These videos analyse the constitutional crisis instigated on 11 November 1975 when the democratically elected Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, was dismissed by the then Governor General John Kerr. As Governor General, John Kerr acted as the British Monarch’s representative in Australia and was not elected by the people of Australia, and therefore his actions instigated one of Australia’s most contested political crises.</p>\n<p>Kennedy also worked across performance, installation and other media, and in reflecting on the significance of video within his practice he remarked, ‘“Video” or, as we now refer to it, “moving image” work, has allowed me to bring writing to a cluster of expressive options and this expands the work in interesting ways, aesthetically, politically, poetically,’ referring to <i>On Sacred Land</i> as one of his key video works. (In transcript of interview between Peter Kennedy and Chris Meigh Andrews, Melbourne, 14 October 2011, <a href=\"http://www.meighandrews.com/writings/interviews/peter-kennedy\">http://www.meighandrews.com/writings/interviews/peter-kennedy</a>, accessed 31 January 2017.) In 1986, Jonathan Holmes declared <i>On Sacred Land</i> ‘provides an eloquent critique of the idea <i>aboriginal</i> in documentary and fiction film and gives an excellent account of the way in which the European projection of the term “aboriginal” in cultural terms has been used to justify white domination of the land and what constitutes the concept <i>Australia</i>’ (<i>Istoria: Peter Kennedy and John Hughes Selected Works 1978-1986</i>, exhibition catalogue, Centre for the Arts Gallery, Hobart 1986.</p>\n<p>Lena Fritsch<br/>January 2017<br/>Revised by Valentine Umansky and Tamsin Hong<br/>February 2023</p>\n<p>\n<b>Further Reading</b>\n<br/>\n<i>Istoria: Peter Kennedy and John Hughes Selected Works 1978-1986</i>, exhibition catalogue, Centre for the Arts Gallery, Hobart 1986, Chrome extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://eprints.utas.edu.au/18373/1/Istoria_-_Peter_Kennedy_with_John_Hughes_selected_works_1978-1986_Final.pdf, accessed 3 February 2023.<br/>\n<i>Peter Kennedy: Selected Works 1970–2002</i>, exhibition catalogue, Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, Melbourne 2002.<br/>\n<i>Peter Kennedy, Light Years, 1970–71, </i>exhibition catalogue, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane 2011.<br/>John Cumming, <i>The Films of John Hughes: A History of Independent Screen Production in Australia</i>, Australian Teachers of Media, Melbourne 2015.</p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2023-11-16T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" }, { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>\n<i>On Sacred Land</i> addresses attempts to impose Western culture and capitalist values onto Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Combining photographs, drawings, archive footage and newly filmed scenes, it presents images of exploitation and resistance. These include photographs of slavery, and a drawing by 19th-century Aboriginal artist Tommy McRae depicting a corroboree (a meeting of Aboriginal people, usually for a celebration or ritual). Contemporary scenes show Aboriginal protests against the takeover of sacred sites for mining and oil drilling.</p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Display caption", "publication_date": "2021-07-09T00:00:00", "slug_name": "display-caption", "type": "DISPLAY_CAPTION" } ]

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[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1982", "fc": "Andy Holden", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/andy-holden-13757" } ]

[ { "id": 999999779, "shortTitle": "Tate Collection" }, { "id": 999999782, "shortTitle": "Works with images" }, { "id": 999999961, "shortTitle": "General Collection" }, { "id": 999999777, "shortTitle": "Artangel Collection at Tate" }, { "id": 999999973, "shortTitle": "Tate Members" }, { "id": 999999956, "shortTitle": "Collection" } ]

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[ { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "10 February 2024 – 6 May 2024", "endDate": "2024-05-06", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "10 February 2024 – 6 May 2024", "endDate": "2024-05-06", "id": 15710, "startDate": "2024-02-10", "venueName": "Tate St Ives (St Ives, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/stives/" } ], "id": 12899, "startDate": "2024-02-10", "title": "Andy Holden", "type": "Collection based display" } ]

[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>\n<i>A Natural History of Nest Building</i> 2017 is a three-part video<i> with sound lasting thirty minutes and produced in an edition of five with one artist’s proof. It can be shown as a projection or on monitors. The video </i>employs a pedagogical model to investigate how birds make nests. Divided into three chapters, <i>Nest Type</i>, <i>Nest Site</i> and <i>Material</i>, it concludes with a post-script on the bowerbird, the only animal to make a structure that is for display only. The film is narrated by Andy Holden and his father, the ornithologist Peter Holden. Standing on the left and right of a central screen which shows examples of different nest types, Holden and his father adopt different positions on the significance of the bird’s nest. Holden examines the nests as sculptural objects with poetic affect, while his father discusses them through the traditional lens of ornithology and theories of evolution.</p>\n<p>The film begins with shots filmed from a drone, giving a bird’s eye view of Holden’s home in Bedfordshire while the introduction explains that the work originated as a result of the artist needing to return to living at home for a period as an adult. The voiceover tells the viewer that, despite his father’s best efforts, Holden was not interested in birds as a child, but that on returning home as an adult he became interested in the sculptural qualities of birds’ nests. The work was developed over a period of five years as a performance which took place in various venues including Bristol Museum; the Royal College of Art, London; the Collective Gallery, Edinburgh; Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge; Penzance Convention; and London Festival of Architecture. These various performances were marked by a series of six silkscreen prints, entitled either <i>Lecture on Birdsong </i>or <i>Lecture on Nesting </i>(see Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/holden-lecture-on-nesting-london-festival-of-architecture-p20977\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>P20977</span></a>–82). A sense of the performative and of a carefully rehearsed two-person play is present in the dialogue of the film, which is presented together with filmed sequences that draw on the tradition of natural history television programmes. The use of green-screen presentation enabled father and son to move with subtle irony through details which include a discussion about the creative process and the suggestion that comparisons can be made between nest building and making art.</p>\n<p>Through an investigation into often overlooked subjects, Holden’s work explores different areas of enquiry such as morphology, evolution, intelligence and creativity, as well as reflecting on the nature of collaboration and parental influence. As the film unfolds, the scripted exchanges raise questions about what is genetic or inherited from the parent and what is learnt through experience. <i>A Natural History of Nest Building</i> is one of two film works which were presented as part of the Artangel Commission <i>Natural Selection, an exhibition at the f</i>ormer Newington Library in south-east London; the show<i> </i>marked the culmination of Holden’s seven-year collaboration with his father, who worked for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds for forty-five years. Using film, sculpture, music, archive material and natural specimens, the exhibition explored the natural art of bird nest building together with the tradition of egg collecting.</p>\n<p>\n<b>Further reading</b>\n<br/>Artangel website, <i>Andy Holden / Peter Holden: Natural Selection</i>, <a href=\"https://www.artangel.org.uk/project/natural-selection/\">https://www.artangel.org.uk/project/natural-selection/</a>, accessed 12 September 2018.<br/>Darian Leader, ‘Laws of Motion’, <i>Frieze</i>, no.188, June–August 2017, pp.150–3.</p>\n<p>Clarrie Wallis<br/>September 2018</p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2021-11-18T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

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[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1945", "fc": "Suzanne Lacy", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/suzanne-lacy-13736" } ]

[ { "id": 999999779, "shortTitle": "Tate Collection" }, { "id": 999999782, "shortTitle": "Works with images" }, { "id": 999999961, "shortTitle": "General Collection" }, { "id": 999999956, "shortTitle": "Collection" } ]

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[ { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "10 June 2016 – 18 November 2018", "endDate": "2018-11-18", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "10 June 2016 – 18 November 2018", "endDate": "2018-11-18", "id": 10232, "startDate": "2016-06-10", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 8448, "startDate": "2016-06-10", "title": "Suzanne Lacy", "type": "Collection based display" }, { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "20 April 2019 – 23 August 2020", "endDate": "2020-08-23", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "20 April 2019 – 4 August 2019", "endDate": "2019-08-04", "id": 12602, "startDate": "2019-04-20", "venueName": "San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, USA)", "venueWebsiteUrl": null } ], "id": 10394, "startDate": "2019-04-20", "title": "Suzanne Lacy: We Are Here", "type": "Loan-out" }, { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "27 February 2022 – 30 July 2022", "endDate": "2022-07-30", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "27 February 2022 – 30 July 2022", "endDate": "2022-07-30", "id": 14826, "startDate": "2022-02-27", "venueName": "Queens Museum (New York, USA)", "venueWebsiteUrl": null } ], "id": 12195, "startDate": "2022-02-27", "title": "Suzanne Lacey: The Medium is Not Only the Message", "type": "Loan-out" } ]

[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p class=\"cttext\">\n</p><blockquote>\n<i>The Crystal Quilt</i> is a major participatory performance project by Suzanne Lacy that aimed to bring to visibility older women whom, in the artist’s view, are generally marginalised by society. The title of the work derived from the name of the Crystal Court shopping centre within Minneapolis’s IDS building, designed by Philip Johnson and completed in 1974. Lacy’s work comprises a patchwork quilt, a 16mm film, thirty-six framed colour photographs, a signed poster, a soundtrack and documentary video. The pattern on the quilt was inspired by Native North American quilting practices traditionally carried out by women. </blockquote>\n<p class=\"cttext\">\n</p><blockquote>The original performance was held on Mother’s Day, Sunday 10 May 1987, in the Crystal Court, and 430 women over the age of sixty became performers in an hour-long tableau that was broadcast live by KCET public television. The work was a large-scale participatory performance with a stylised choreographic aspect, comprising mass action, spoken word and sound. Around 3000 people attended the performance, which was staged on an 82-foot-square rug with tables placed to resemble a quilt, which had been designed by painter Miriam Schapiro (born 1923). The accompanying soundtrack by composer Susan Stone mixed the voices of seventy-five women talking about aging. Participants all wore black and engaged in simple actions using their hands, manipulating tablecloths to create a ‘quilt’ pattern that created a large-scale spectacle of participation. Recordings of the women’s own voices mixed personal observations and reminiscences with social analysis about the unutilised potential of the elderly. The event was staged within the open, public space of the shopping centre, with a live audience standing on the balconies around the work.</blockquote>\n<p class=\"cttext\">\n</p><blockquote>While the audience listened to the soundtrack, real time conversations between the women echoed the same themes. At ten-minute intervals, a loon cry or thunderclap rang out through the space, signalling to the women to change the position of their hands on the table, thus changing the design of the quilt. At the end of the performance, the audience flooded onto the stage carrying hand-painted scarves, disrupting the austere order of the quilt design to create a crazy quilt of colour, and greeting the triumphant performers.</blockquote>\n<p class=\"cttext\">\n</p><blockquote>The original ‘event’ for <i>The Crystal Quilt </i>was in itself part of a research and development project with a community of women that was titled ‘The Whisper Minnesota Project’ and took place in 1985–7. Lacy worked with selected women participants who were trained as ‘leaders’ in the run up to the Crystal Center event, and who each took responsibility for organising sub-groups of participants on the day. Lacy also organised classes, art, mass media and community events as a part of the research process. Her interest was not simply in the successful choreography of the event, but in the transformative process of this leadership programme and related educational events for the participants themselves.</blockquote>\n<p class=\"cttext\">\n</p><blockquote>The sponsors for the project were Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), the Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs and the Minnesota Board of Aging, with support from institutions such as the Walker Art Center and At the Foot of the Mountain Theater. Lacy and the participants also worked with a team of over 150 local people to create actions and programmes with the dual purpose of exploring how the media portrayed aging and the role of older people in public life. Included were two classes at MCAD; a lecture series at Carleton College, where Lacy taught; a premier screening of the video of Lacy and Sharon Allen’s 1983–4 performance ‘Whisper, The Waves, The Wind’ at the Walker Art Center; a coordinated media campaign throughout the state that produced articles featuring older women; a photo series by Larry Fink commissioned by First Bank; and the Humphrey Institute Leadership Program. Subsequent to the performance, a state-wide leadership training programme for older women and two major exhibitions of documentary photographs were funded. Lacy was interested in multiple levels of dissemination for the piece in order effectively to communicate her message. <i>The</i> <i>Crystal Quilt</i> can either be displayed in full with all of the elements present (photographs, 16mm film, video, soundtrack, the quilt itself, poster and programme), or individual elements such as the quilt or the film can be displayed alone. </blockquote>\n<p class=\"cttext\">\n</p><blockquote>\n<i>The</i> <i>Crystal Quilt</i> is one of the most well-known and widely publicised of Lacy’s works from the 1970s and 1980s, her most significant period. It can be seen as the culmination of her projects of the late 1970s that involved participation on a smaller scale. For example, in 1977, with collaborator Leslie Labowitz, she combined performance art with activism in <i>Three Weeks in May</i>. This event combined a performance piece on the steps of <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_City_Hall%22 \\o %22Los Angeles City Hall\">Los Angeles City Hall</a> with <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-defense%22 \\o %22Self-defense\">self-defence</a> classes for women in an attempt to highlight sexual violence against women. Lacy has established an international reputation in the historical field of feminist art through such participatory performance and protest events. Her works have a basis in live, often collaborative action, but are often accompanied by drawings and texts, as well as photographic and video documentation, meaning that they have a life both inside and outside the gallery. A core aspect of Lacy’s practice is a concern with collaboration as a means of exploring and challenging assumed socio-political realities. She has frequently worked with other artists and with groups of volunteer participants to explore questions around notions of the female body, as well as using workshops, conversation and teaching as methods of engaging an audience in her work.</blockquote>\n<p class=\"cttext\">\n</p><blockquote>The artist observed after <i>The Crystal Quilt </i>event:</blockquote>\n<p class=\"cttext\">\n</p><blockquote>We interviewed several of the women afterwards, and they were just so high. They loved the experience. They understood that they were being honored, that they were special, and there was a deep connection to each other they expressed. I remember one of the Native American women saying to me in the interview afterwards that there was something very powerful about the spirituality of women – that she felt it very palpably in that space.<br/>(Moira Roth, ‘Oral History Interview with Suzanne Lacy, 1990 Mar. 16–Sept. 27’, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 16 and 24 March and 27 September 1990, <a href=\"https://www.aaa.si.edu/download_pdf_transcript/ajax?record_id=edanmdm-AAADCD_oh_215585\">https://www.aaa.si.edu/download_pdf_transcript/ajax?record_id=edanmdm-AAADCD_oh_215585</a>, accessed November 2011.<b>)</b>\n</blockquote>\n<p class=\"cttext\">\n</p><blockquote>Although the artist spoke about the work in terms of the specific theme of women and aging, the wider significance of the piece lies beyond just its feminist import, and in its exploration of relational participation and social choreography. From a contemporary perspective, Lacy’s interest in social engagement, in enabling self-organising groups, and in the use of public media to expand awareness of her practice, can be seen as influential in a way that is beyond the specific political themes she set out to address.</blockquote>\n<p class=\"cttext\">\n</p><blockquote>\n<b>Further reading</b>\n<br/>Moira Roth, ‘Suzanne Lacy’s Minneapolis Crystal Quilt’, <i>Art in America</i>, March 1988, vol.76, p.162.<br/>Diane Rothenberg, ‘Social Art/Social Action’, <i>Drama Review</i>, vol.32, no.1, Spring 1988, pp.31–7.<br/>Miwon Kwon, <i>One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Local Identity</i>, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2002.</blockquote>\n<p>Catherine Wood<br/>November 2011 </p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2021-12-02T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

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[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1953", "fc": "Ingrid Pollard MBE", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/ingrid-pollard-mbe-15859" } ]

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[ { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "11 March 2022 – 25 September 2022", "endDate": "2022-09-25", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "11 March 2022 – 29 May 2022", "endDate": "2022-05-29", "id": 14176, "startDate": "2022-03-11", "venueName": "MK Gallery (Milton Keynes, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": null }, { "dateText": "9 July 2022 – 25 September 2022", "endDate": "2022-09-25", "id": 14737, "startDate": "2022-07-09", "venueName": "Turner Contemporary (Margate, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": null } ], "id": 11708, "startDate": "2022-03-11", "title": "Ingrid Pollard", "type": "Loan-out" }, { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "21 November 2024 – 5 May 2025", "endDate": "2025-05-05", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "21 November 2024 – 5 May 2025", "endDate": "2025-05-05", "id": 15490, "startDate": "2024-11-21", "venueName": "Tate Britain (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/" } ], "id": 12717, "startDate": "2024-11-21", "title": "The 80s: Photographing Britain", "type": "Exhibition" } ]

[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>\n<i>The Cost of the English Landscape </i>1989 is a unique multipart work comprising a number of framed photographs and collaged elements. A central section consists of four frames, two of which are divided into three sections, with the other two divided into twelve. They contain photographs, in both black and white and colour, and a range of collaged elements including maps, postcards and printed text. Six further framed photographs, three on each side, flanking the central section, depict the artist climbing over a stile. Signs reading ‘keep out’, ‘private property’ and ‘no trespass’ are placed between them.</p>\n<p>All the images relate to the area of the Lake District, arguably the most idealised rural landscape in England. Alongside images of flora, rivers, fields and lanes, Pollard has depicted herself in the landscape: in one shot she is rowing a boat on a lake, in others she is a lone figure walking. The collages and captions point to a darker aspect of this rural idyll. Short pieces of text taken from tourist brochures extolling the beauty of the area are juxtaposed with statements such as ‘nuclear energy: don’t be left in the dark’, ‘plutonium is stored or manufactured into fuel for fast reactors’, and the question ‘what is radiation?’. <i>The Cost of the English Landscape </i>explores the public face of tourism within the Lake District National Park, contrasting the language used around writers such as Beatrix Potter and William Wordsworth and tourist marketing with that relating to Sellafield Power Station, a nuclear power station commissioned in the Lake District in 1956. Infamously, in 1957, it was the site of the worst nuclear accident in British history, spreading a plume of radioactive vapour around the region due to a nuclear reactor fire. It subsequently became a key target for protests by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.</p>\n<p>In 2016 Pollard wrote:</p>\n<p class=\"cttext\">\n</p><blockquote>During the 1980s and 1990s I produced photographic artworks that challenged ideas of the British landscape as a romantic rural idyll of timeless, unchanging nostalgia This was done through an interrogation of photographic aesthetics and British landscape histories … the work has been primarily addressed through certain notions of ‘Britishness’, including race, identity, and exclusion.<br/>(Ingrid Pollard, <i>Home and Away: Home, Migrancy, and Belonging Through Landscape Photographic Practice</i>, PhD thesis, Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media, University of Westminster, London 2016, pp.15–16, <a href=\"https://westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk/item/q56vq/home-and-away-home-migrancy-and-belonging-through-landscape-photographic-practice\">https://westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk/item/q56vq/home-and-away-home-migrancy-and-belonging-through-landscape-photographic-practice</a>, accessed 25 May 2019.)</blockquote>\n<p>Pollard was one of a generation of young Black and Asian artists who came to prominence in Britain in the 1980s and challenged their comparative lack of visibility in the art world with works that engaged with the social, cultural, political and aesthetic issues of the time. Pollard became known for work that explored issues around migration, family, home, ethnicity and public spaces (see also <i>Seaside Series </i>1989, Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/pollard-seaside-series-t13884\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T13884</span></a>, and <i>Oceans Apart</i> 1989, Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/pollard-oceans-apart-t13885\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T13885</span></a>). By picturing the black figure in the Lake District, with both its much-heralded natural beauty and its association with the dangers of nuclear power, <i>The Cost of the English Landscape </i>suggests that the constructs of national identity, race, class and landscape are inherently linked. With <i>The Cost of the English Landscape</i>, Pollard deconstructs historically dominant codes of Britishness, contesting the supposed notion that the black experience in Britain is a purely urban phenomenon.</p>\n<p>\n<b>Further reading</b>\n<br/>\n<i>The Lie of the Land</i>, exhibition catalogue, MK Gallery, Milton Keynes 2019, reproduced pp.74–5.</p>\n<p>Helen Delaney<br/>May 2019</p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2021-11-18T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

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[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1962", "fc": "Xiao Lu", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/xiao-lu-26854" } ]

[ { "id": 999999779, "shortTitle": "Tate Collection" }, { "id": 999999782, "shortTitle": "Works with images" }, { "id": 999999961, "shortTitle": "General Collection" }, { "id": 999999956, "shortTitle": "Collection" } ]

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[ { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "25 June 2018 – 24 November 2019", "endDate": "2019-11-24", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "25 June 2018 – 24 November 2019", "endDate": "2019-11-24", "id": 12488, "startDate": "2018-06-25", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 10288, "startDate": "2018-06-25", "title": "Xiao Lu + Niki de Saint Phalle", "type": "Collection based display" } ]

[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>\n<i>Dialogue</i> is an installation that comprises two life-size aluminium alloy telephone booths, a mirror, a pedestal, a red telephone and cement paving stones. On the left phone booth, an image of the back of a female figure holding a receiver is silkscreened over the glass, and on the right phone booth the back of a male figure is depicted. In the middle of the two phone booths is a red telephone on a white plinth, with the receiver dangling down. Behind the phone is a mirrored panel with two bullet holes referencing an action carried out by the artist when the work was displayed in the exhibition <i>China/Avant-Garde</i> at the National Art Gallery, Beijing in 1989. The sculpture is raised on cement paving stones, and purposely resembles the public phone booths found on the streets of China in the late 1980s.</p>\n<p>This is a replica of the work made by Xiao Lu in 1989 for her graduation show at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou. The original was discarded by the artist in the 1990s. In 2003 she made an initial replica as a unique object, now in the collection of Taikang Life insurance company in China. In 2015, with permission from the owner, she decided to make a second replica – this time as an edition of three artist’s proofs with no main edition – to a slightly different scale from the first replica, being ten centimetres shorter in height. This copy is the second of these three artist’s proofs.</p>\n<p>The <i>China/Avant-Garde</i> exhibition was a landmark event conceptualised in 1986 by a group of Chinese art critics and academics, with a focus on experimental and radical approaches to art. Unlike socialist realism or other academic styles that dominated artmaking in China at the time, this exhibition showcased new and more experimental forms of photography, installation and performance, as well as conceptual paintings and sculptures – representing the first generation of avant-garde artists in China. Almost three hundred artworks were included in the exhibition, all by Chinese artists, spread over the three levels of the National Art Gallery in Beijing. It opened on 5 February 1989, on the eve of Chinese New Year, but was shut down immediately by officials after Xiao Lu, unbeknownst to the exhibition preparatory committee or any of the exhibiting artists, shot two bullets of a pellet gun at the central mirror panel of her installation <i>Dialogue</i>. Xiao’s action caused a huge controversy and her immediate detention by the police, since using or carrying firearms is illegal in China, as well as the arrest of fellow artist Tang Song, who was at the scene. The incident was quickly picked up by the international press in Beijing, resulting in widespread news coverage. Alongside other unauthorised performances that occurred on the opening day of the exhibition by Wu Shanzhuan and Wang Deren, Xiao’s action provoked heated debates on the limits of artistic expression, and specifically performance art, in communist China.</p>\n<p>Xiao’s ‘shooting’ performance was filmed by her friend Wen Pulin on his video recorder; a still photograph of the artist pointing a gun at the work exists as documentation of the performance and can be displayed alongside the installation. This image was produced in an edition of ten, but Tate’s copy is aside from this edition and of a different size. The documentation of Xiao’s performance has been shown in several international exhibitions including <i>Inside Out: New Chinese Art</i> at Asia Society Galleries and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York in 1998, and <i>Global Conceptualism: Points of Origins 1950s</i>–<i>1980s</i> at Queens Museum of Art, New York in 1999. The event remains one of the most mythologised moments in the history of Chinese contemporary art, especially evocative given the Tiananmen Square Massacre that would follow just four months after. When the Tiananmen Square Protest (also known as the June Fourth Incident in China) occurred, Xiao’s performance was quickly dubbed ‘the first gunshots of Tiananmen’, partly due to the close proximity of the National Art Gallery to the square.</p>\n<p>At the time, Xiao’s action was presumed to be a political comment, but she later explained in her novel <i>Dialogue</i> (published in 2010) and several media interviews that it was more of a personal act related to her emotional and artistic anxiety. Discussing the subject matter of the <i>Dialogue</i> installation, she stated that, ‘I made <i>Dialogue</i> just because at the time I felt very stifled, really quite suffocated. I felt I could not communicate with men. <i>Dialogue</i> was about that.’ (In an interview with Tate researcher Monica Merlin, November 2013). The images of the woman and man with their backs turned away and the phone with its receiver dangling between them seem to suggest the absence or difficulty of communication between the sexes. Xiao’s later works, such as <i>Sperm</i> 2006 and <i>Wedding</i> 2009, show her continuing struggle with relationships and the conventional roles of women in Chinese society.</p>\n<p>There is a view within the Chinese artistic community that Xiao’s shooting was an irresponsible act that overshadowed the ambition and purpose of the most experimental and modernist art exhibition in China up to that time, but her actions remain an iconic performance. The installation is a symbolic reminder of the new artistic ideals that enabled the organisation of the <i>China / Avant-Garde</i> exhibition and an important reflection of the political, social and artistic discourse taking place during a period of transition in China.</p>\n<p>\n<b>Further reading</b>\n<br/>Xiao Lu, <i>Dialogue</i>, Hong Kong 2010.<br/>Hu Xiaolan, ‘Focus and Freeze – Revisiting Dialogue’, in <i>Image, History, Existence: Taikang Life 15th Anniversary Art Collection Exhibition</i>, exhibition catalogue, Culture and Art Publishing House 2011, pp.135–43.<br/>Liau Shu Juan, ‘Redefining Art in the China / Avant-Garde Exhibition’, <a href=\"https://mondaymuseum.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/1989-china-avant-garde-exhibition/\">https://mondaymuseum.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/1989-china-avant-garde-exhibition/</a>, accessed 17 July 2017.</p>\n<p>Sook-Kyung Lee<br/>July 2017</p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2023-03-23T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

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[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "1931 – 2004", "fc": "Mikhail Roginsky", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/mikhail-roginsky-27674" } ]

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[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>\n<i>Railway Platform</i> 1964 is a painting in oil on canvas by the Russian nonconformist artist Mikhail Roginsky that depicts a typical Soviet suburban railway station complete with Stalin-era benches, rubbish bins and a standard issue station clock. The metal electric cable posts double as pillars for boards with train timetable and station announcements. Above the posts, and dominating the composition, is the date ‘1964’ with a small Cyrillic ‘г.’ – meaning ‘year’ in Russian – roughly painted in red. Three railway lines trace the brick-red ground and disappear beyond the blue horizon. A lonely passenger reads a book while waiting for his train. The scene is dramatically lit from the left. While the setting is mundane and recognisable as depicting the daily commute, its composition is based on flattened surfaces, simplified perspective and bold colours, evoking the appearance of posters and information boards. <i>Railway Platform</i> is one of the artist’s earliest paintings, in which he explored varying themes and stylistic approaches that would become key characteristics of his practice. A much later work, <i>Interior with a Ladder</i>, is also in Tate’s collection (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/roginsky-interior-with-a-ladder-t15481\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T15481</span></a>).</p>\n<p>In 1964 Roginsky, along with other nonconformist artists in the Soviet Union such as Oskar Rabin (born 1928), began to introduce verbal and visual properties of written language into his paintings, releasing text from its traditional descriptive role. In <i>Railway Platform</i> as well as in <i>Pokrovskoe-Streshnevo</i> or <i>Mosgaz</i> (The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow), all created in 1964, he utilised a distinctive red colour and typeface reminiscent of official Soviet warning signage. In the visual environment of the Soviet Union in the 1960s, ostensibly free of advertising but filled with noticeboards announcing slogans or warnings, Roginsky was particularly interested in railway posters. Paintings relating to the visual language of boldly coloured railway placards constitute one of the key themes in his work throughout the 1960s to the 1990s. He progressively increased the visual role of words and text in his pictures, switching to French after his emigration to Paris in 1978. Prior to taking up painting, Roginsky, having trained as a stage designer, worked for provincial theatres. Speaking about how stage design taught him to approach setting a scene, he commented: ‘The landscape is to be painted using just a few details featured on a homogeneous background of a bold blue skyline. It’s the play, it’s the theatre, it’s the method.’ (Mikhail Roginsky, ‘Khudozhnik oformliaet spektakli v narodnom teatre’, in <i>Obraz sovremennika na stsene narodnogo teatra</i>, no.3, Moscow 1964, pp.56–7.) <i>Railway Platform </i>perfectly illustrates this approach.</p>\n<p>The year 1964 was marked in the Soviet Union by the dismissal of Nikita Khrushchev as head of state, which signalled the end of a brief period of cultural and political appeasement known as ‘the Thaw’ that had seen the emergence of the first generation of unofficial artists in the Soviet Union. Roginsky’s official employment as an art professor at the Moscow City Art School from 1963 provided him with a studio space and necessary tools for his own practice. The result was his first series of paintings of suburban landscapes and still lifes featuring individual everyday objects that he gradually imbued with an existential subtext. He referred to the works as ‘documentary paintings’. His next step would be to move towards treating the painting itself as an object, which was achieved with <i>Door</i> 1965 (State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow). This piece of plywood, painted an intense red, had a red tin door handle complete with a keyhole and was considered the first Russian pop art work. The same year Roginsky participated in his only group public exhibition, which authorities closed on its opening day. His first retrospective in Russia, at the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, did not take place until 2002, just two years before his death.</p>\n<p>\n<b>Further reading</b>\n<br/>Alena Romanova, Nadezhda Vasilevskaia (eds.), O Mikhaile Roginskom. Duraki ediat pirogi. Vospominania, intervyu, stati, Moscow 2009 (in Russian).<br/>\n<i>Mikhail Roginsky. Beyond the Red Door</i>, Moscow 2014.<br/>Olga Yoshkova, <i>Mikhail Roginsky: narisovannaia zhizn</i>, Moscow 2017 (in Russian).</p>\n<p>Natalia Sidlina<br/>April 2019</p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2021-11-17T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

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[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1977", "fc": "Olivia Plender", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/olivia-plender-12600" } ]

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[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>Olivia Plender’s <i>Set Sail for the Levant: A Board Game About Debt (or a Social Satire)</i> 2007 is a board game based on the sixteenth-century British ‘Royal Game of the Goose’, the earliest commercially produced board game involving dice. Plender’s game parodies the historical struggle of the commoner to achieve social and material success in life by presenting debt as the only realistic outcome in life. The game tells the story of the ‘enclosure of the commons’, which began in Britain during the sixteenth century and continued into the nineteenth century. It was the legal process of consolidating (enclosing) small landholdings into larger farms. Once enclosed, use of the land became restricted to the owner, and it ceased to be common land for communal use. This was a period when wealthy landowners used their control of state processes to appropriate public land for their private benefit. Enclosure was essentially a privatisation of the land, whereby ‘commoners’ lost their traditional rights of access to ‘the commons’. </p>\n<p>When the game begins, the player – a commoner – has been forced off the land and is obliged to take to the road. The player is given ten gold pieces and a loaf of bread, represented by small hand‑painted lead components, but is immediately forced by the rules of the game to pay two gold pieces to the authorities in lieu of rent. The commoner is instantly disadvantaged due to their position in society. From that point on, the game is rigged so that capitalism always wins, and the commoner can never improve their circumstances. The only way in which a player can escape penury is to steal or borrow money and then ‘set sail to the Levant’, to escape the repercussions, as explained by Angus Cameron in an essay on Plender’s work:</p>\n<p class=\"cttext\">\n</p><blockquote>If at any point you want for succour or funds you may go back to the square marked <i>The Church </i>to beg for monies and miss a turn. If you have no capital to secure the loan then the interest is equal to the loan itself and your debt doubles, at which point you may beg for more monies to repay the increased debt and so on. So it would seem that there is only one way out of this predicament: to set sail for lands where the law can’t reach you. The winner absconds to the edge of the known world leaving their debts unpaid. The losers are financially ruined and cast into a state of penury where they are greeted by <i>Death</i>.<br/>(Angus Cameron, ‘Games of Exception’, in de Blaaij, van Noord and Plender 2015, p.189.)</blockquote>\n<p>\n<i>Set Sail for the Levant: A Board Game About Debt (or a Social Satire)</i> exemplifies Plender’s practice, much of which is research-based and interrogates the ideological frameworks underpinning the narration of history. Her work has addressed such subject matter as early twentieth-century social and religious movements, educational systems, the history of the suffragettes, and the collapse of the distinction between work and leisure and the new identity of the entrepreneur.</p>\n<p>\n<b>Further reading</b>\n<br/>Remco de Blaaij, Gerrie van Noord and Olivia Plender (eds.),<i> Rise Early, Be Industrious</i>,<i> </i>Berlin 2015.</p>\n<p>Helen Delaney<br/>March 2019</p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2021-12-01T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

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[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "1923–1998", "fc": "Denis Williams", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/denis-williams-24668" } ]

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[ { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "1 December 2021 – 3 April 2022", "endDate": "2022-04-03", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "1 December 2021 – 3 April 2022", "endDate": "2022-04-03", "id": 13522, "startDate": "2021-12-01", "venueName": "Tate Britain (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/" } ], "id": 11148, "startDate": "2021-12-01", "title": "Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s - Now", "type": "Exhibition" }, { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "19 December 2022", "endDate": null, "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "5 November 2021", "endDate": null, "id": 14607, "startDate": "2021-11-05", "venueName": "Tate Britain (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/" } ], "id": 12034, "startDate": "2022-12-19", "title": "Gallery 32", "type": "Collection based display" } ]

[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>\n<i>Painting in Six Related Rhythms</i> 1955 is a geometric abstract painting on wood, the square panel being displayed in a diamond format. The basis of the painting is a marked-out grid of one-inch squares that are bisected and segmented to create a lattice representing an irregular crystalline form. A vertical tapering shaft of white divides the painting centrally, running vertically from the red square that marks the bottom corner of the painting and cutting through the grey square that marks the top corner. Either side of this shaft is a succession of grey similar elongated shapes that frame it but also ambiguously define a point of view as both looking-in and looking-out. Filling the rest of the panel, the latticework provides a structure that is syncopated by irregular areas of blues, whites, greys, ochres and reds. Evelyn A. Williams, the artist’s daughter, has observed that:</p>\n<p class=\"cttext\">\n</p><blockquote>the painting has not been developed ‘on a wholly systematic basis of mathematical proportion. Whilst a geometric control is supplied by the grid, the painting is spontaneous in its balance of relationships and in its use of colour … In places, the underlying grid comes to the surface above the colours; in other areas it disappears or is masked; sometimes the grid is scratched back through the paint … He uses a wide range of techniques, creating a richness and subtlety that counters the severe geometry. Scumbling, sgraffito, fine brush hatching and overlays lead to soft textural effects.<br/>(Williams 2012, p.53.)</blockquote>\n<p>The painting was made in London and is the last of a series that Williams designated as <i>Plane Compositions</i>, some of which were exhibited in his exhibition at Gimpel Fils, London in 1954 (shared with Roger Hilton [1911–1975]) and at the New Burlington Galleries, London in the <i>Young Artists’ Exhibition</i> of 1955. A related painting also entitled <i>Painting in Six Related Rhythms</i> of 1954 won a prize at the latter exhibition and was acquired by the Beaverbrook Foundation (Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, New Brunswick). The paintings exhibited at Gimpel Fils had titles such as <i>Painting in Five Related Rhythms</i> and <i>Painting in Four Related Rhythms</i>, both 1954, or <i>Vertical Composition with Arc of a Circle</i> 1953, and were exhibited with a group of works designated <i>Reliefs</i> and another group designated <i>Constructions</i>. Although none of these works appears to have survived, they attest to the artist’s closeness to the constructionist group of artists working in London at this time.</p>\n<p>Prior to this, in his previous exhibition at Gimpel Fils in 1950 (shared with the outsider artist ‘Scottie’ Wilson [1889–1972]), Williams had shown paintings whose imagery reflected the landscape and experience of his native British Guiana – as typified by his 1949 <i>Plantation</i> series of oil paintings and the cycle of paintings <i>Four Dimensions of Anguish</i> 1950, in particular <i>Human World</i> 1950 (National Gallery of Art, Georgetown, Guyana). In contrast, his 1954 exhibition reflected the allegiances he had formed with the constructionists and related abstract painters while he was teaching at the Central School in London through the early 1950s – alongside artists such as Victor Pasmore and William Turnbull, John Ernest, Anthony Hill and Roger Hilton. Many of these artists gathered and exhibited in Fitzroy Street at the studio of the painter Adrian Heath (1920–1992) and, in 1953, Williams exhibited two of his column <i>Plane Compositions</i> at the third such exhibition in May 1953, alongside Hill, Hilton and Pasmore, as well as Robert Adams, Terence Conran, Kenneth Martin, Ben Nicholson, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Scott. His connection with these artists and the constructionist tendency was short-lived, however, culminating in his involvement with Group 5’s presentation within the exhibition <i>This is Tomorrow</i> (Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1956) – for which Ernest, Hill and Williams positioned their own work alongside replicas they had also made of work by Soviet constructivists Aleksander Rodchenko (1891–1956) and Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935), as a way of expressing a direct linkage between their work and pioneering abstract work from the second decade of the century. By this time, however, Williams felt typecast within the London avant-garde, and the following year he left Britain having accepted a teaching post in the Sudan. </p>\n<p>\n<i>Painting in Six Related Rhythms </i>signals both an integration within the mainstream of British modernism and a clear break with the artist’s earlier paintings that directly evoke figurative motifs. Evelyn A. Williams, however, has observed that, although ‘the influence of non-European sources within the iconography of twentieth-century modernism is readily appreciated in the figurative legacy, as a vital source these influences are less immediately apparent in abstract art’ (Williams 2011, p.166). She then describes how the artist Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) had compared the sustained use of yellow in many of Williams’s paintings to the effect of a tom-tom; that the Guyanese writer Wilson Harris referenced the timbre and rhythms of the West Indian steel bands; and that Williams himself recalled this particular painting as being described as ‘Mau Mau Mondrian’ (Williams 2011, pp.166–7). In this way the ‘rhythms’ of the painting can be defined formally through the interplay of the lattice composition and the restricted palette that evokes the action of a crystal. The rhythms can also be understood through Williams’s own understanding of books then current and inspirational for those artists in his circle, such as d’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s <i>On Growth and Form</i> (2nd edition 1942), Paul Klee’s <i>On Modern Art</i> (1948) and Charles Biederman’s <i>Letters on the New Art</i> (1951) that, taken together, suggested a rational formal language that translated structures in nature into abstract composition. However, Evelyn A. Williams has further observed that ‘it is interesting to consider to what extent non-European “survival rhythms” are embedded in the subconscious personal iconography of Williams’ abstract work … a resounding repetition of motifs around the central composition; a roughly vertical symmetry, a primal punctuation of line; a balancing of massive three-dimensional form; parallel hatching; interlacing curves and the interlocking of planes.’ (Williams 2012, p.57.)</p>\n<p>\n<b>Further reading</b>\n<br/>Charlotte and Evelyn A. Williams (eds.), <i>Denis Williams: A Life in Works. New and Collected Essays</i>, Amsterdam 2010.<br/>Evelyn A. Williams, ‘Denis Williams in London: 1946–1957’, <i>Third Text</i>, vol.25, no.2, April 2011, pp.157–68, reproduced p.166 (incorrectly identified as <i>Painting in Six Related Rhythms</i> 1954).<br/>Evelyn A. Williams, <i>The Art of Denis Williams</i>, Leeds 2012, reproduced p.53.</p>\n<p>Andrew Wilson<br/>December 2019</p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2021-12-01T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" }, { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>This painting was inspired by organic growth, mathematics and geometric abstraction. Denis Williams structured it on a grid of one-inch squares that he then segmented to create a lattice. The result resembles an irregular crystal or a complex architectural space. This was a brief exploration into geometric abstraction for the artist. Williams’s daughter Evelyn A Williams has observed that ‘it is interesting to consider to what extent non-European “survival rhythms” are embedded in the subconscious personal iconography of Williams’ abstract work.’</p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Display caption", "publication_date": "2023-09-26T00:00:00", "slug_name": "display-caption", "type": "DISPLAY_CAPTION" } ]

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[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1983", "fc": "France-Lise McGurn", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/france-lise-mcgurn-26294" } ]

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[ { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "29 June 2019 – 8 September 2019", "endDate": "2019-09-08", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "29 June 2019 – 8 September 2019", "endDate": "2019-09-08", "id": 13578, "startDate": "2019-06-29", "venueName": "Tate Britain (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/" } ], "id": 11140, "startDate": "2019-06-29", "title": "Art Now: France Lise McGurn", "type": "Exhibition" } ]