MIND GAMES : ARE YOU EXPERIENCED
Reviewed for FAD
Wide Open: School at The Hayward Gallery
Continuing until 11 July
(Booking essential - £10 per day)
Invisible : art about the Unseen 1957-2012
At The Hayward Gallery
(£8)
Serpentine Pavilion 2012 :
Designed by Herzog & de Meuron & Ai Wei Wei until 14 October
The purple haze of sixties attitudes, drifting across London right now, has settled on The Hayward Gallery & floated downstream to alight on Kensington Gardens. Perhaps it is overly simplistic to say the Wide Open School is a new take on sixties self discovery, outside convention, but it encompasses the same free spirit. Open to all, playful, with artists in direct contact with the viewer, in fact the division between artist and viewer dissolving, partners in the creative process. The curator, Ralph Rugoff of the Hayward’s aim was the ‘challenger to come up with a school I would love to go to’. So as a child of the 60’s it was just too tempting not to resist, especially as one of my heroes, Margaret Wertheim, was giving day seminars.
Other classes to come between 1st and 11th July are 30+ more day events, but take note, the school is so successful many are fully booked, showing the thirst for this kind of intervention for the public. Certainly the people at the day I attended were a mix of all ages & occupations. Perhaps the lack of art students was due to the fact there was no concession rate.
I recommend it. Just a couple of gems to come:-
Dorothy Cross with Philip Hoare on 8th July
Thomas Hirshhorn
Energy: Yes! Quality: No!
Not as an observer so be prepared to participate; no sitting on the sidelines.
My choice, Margaret Wertheim, is from the Institute for Figuring in L.A., she has been obsessed with ‘Space’ as a subject all her life.
“What I came to realise was that our conceptualising about space is irrevocably bound up with our conceptualising about ourselves. What we think “it means to be human is allied with our ideas about the cosmological space in which we conceive ourselves to live”.
Morning session she gave a quick run through of her book ‘The Pearly Gates of Cyber Spce – A History of Space from Dante to the Internet’. Eventually coming to explain the fourth dimension of space; space & time being relative, space shrinks and time stretches. As time bends space bends with it: that is SPACE IS NO LONGER A VOID. It is akin tom a rubber sheet bent by objects.
Afternoon session the class built a level One Menger Sponge out of business cards as – you can join in & see www.us:c.edu/libraries/sponge.
So no easy run through the gallery there either. Perhaps made fifty years ago, or this year, you complete the art work now, in the present. It depends on you being there and what ever you create (invisibly) is the work, there is no wrong, no right, so long as you follow any rules made by the artist. Written or inwritten.
It is a group show (26 artists) with a great catalogue with an essay by “Ralph Rugoff (again the curaor, same as the school). He takes the starting point of Yve Klein’s ‘The Void’ & goes on to explain ‘ How to Look at Invisible Art’. Well, its not so much only look at the show, as you read, & then your head does the rest. The now obligatory wall texts re written so faintly you might even hve to let your head do it all, which isn’t so hard if yiou just let go & play with the ideas.
Blank sheets of paper, Bruno Jacob / A4 sheets of typed instructions for Painting (but no painting), Yoko Ono / a room with nothing in but an Air Conditioner, Art & Language / an empty plinth, Andy Warhol / a taped off invisible object on the gallery floor, Carsten Holler / a room of total darkness, James Lee Byars / a labyrinth negotiated by sounds via headphones, Jeppe Hein. It s a run through every conceptual idea from 1957-2012. Why now, this new look back at old concepts, using perceptual conceptual ideas? Is it related to the invisibility of new media, the untouchable quality of the techy world? It doesn’t seem to be related to nostalgia. Whatever reason, at the Serpentine Gallery, Yoko ono’s ‘Into the Light’ is in many ways an echo of her 1997 show at the Museum of Modern Art , Oxford, ‘Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?’ The curse of having seen too much, as I well remember the clear maze – shown here as AMAZE 1971-2012 – shown there with a toilet at the end. So take off your shoes, make your way through the labyrinth to the end, here there is something else waiting to be discovered. Why should I spoil the surprise.
The retrospective is beautifully presented, all that sixties grit removed, but it makes good sense of the art work. These are often new variations of iconic pieces. Not re-created by re-seen. As in the 2 versions of CUT PIECE are shown opposite each other, one from 1965 in New York, ne from 2003 in Paris. The CEILING PAINTING 1966 cannot escape from the mythical image of John Lennon climbing up to see ‘YES’. And did I really see ‘Bottoms at Arnold Wesker’s Centre 42 at the Roundhouse or at the Ally Pally in 1967?Some work is timeless and can be looked at again in a different time.
‘It is made possible to explore the invisible, the world beyond time & space’
Yoko Ono
One project Ono is continuing at The Serpentine is ‘to make a film which includes a smiling face of every human being in the world’. There is a photo booth at the gallery for yiu to record your smile for her to present in digital form.
Outside the Serpentine Pavilion 1012 has arrived with a lot of fanfare – partly because it is a collaboration with AI Weiwie and Herzog & de Meuron. The image sof a still pool reflecting the sky above the dark seating area lead one to expect a different experience from the actuality. There are Saturday seminars at the gallery at 3pm on 21 July/ 18 & 25 August, perhaps the stated intent ‘to inspire vsitors to look beneath the surface of the park as well as back in time across the ghosts of earlier structure’ will be addressed there.
Kay Roberts 2012