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Rather than "gone out of control" this is clearly a case of the satellite achieveing sentience, tiring of watching the flatlanders below on behalf of some other flatlanders, and deciding to pursue only its own interests going forward.
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Lovely, aged photos of riverside London (distressed, patinated) and Canadian wilderness (colourised, solarised?)
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All the heist tropes: the impressive sums, the performance during the event, the over-large team, the mistake, the turncoat squealer, the prosecutor warning against heist movie romance...
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Amis's The Second Plane: the positive review: "bound to bring all of them into conflict with the man who is possibly the most fully engaged writer of our age"
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Amis's The Second Plane: the neutral review: "His writing remains capable of anything, except perhaps humility"
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Amis's The Second Plane: the negative review: "The result is a book that is not just wilfully ignorant, a triumph of style over knowledge, but that, for all its panache and gloss, is at its heart disturbingly bigoted."
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"For years a large part of my life has moved at her pace and I feel as though I'm being ushered - very slowly - into my own grave. [...] She is my mother; she isn't my mother." - I quote the bad bits in a good piece.
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Chris's walking piece made me feel proud of our Plowonida. "I can’t think of any other city that can offer both the long deep history of a river like the Thames, nor the public right of way from one end to the other"
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"when you push it down, it clicks very loudly, and with a great mechanical feeling. And then, when you spin it… there’s no resistance. It spins entirely freely; the ratchet disengages"
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Very good piece by Tom Lubbock.
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January 29, 2008
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January 26, 2008
January 23, 2008
Sublime mundane edgelands: Carol Rhodes at Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
Carol Rhodes at the Gallery of Modern Art was a bit of a revelation --
'functional' landscapes manipulated by human activity - industry, landscaping, transport and quarrying. These terrains are distilled from imagined, observed and photographed views, with high viewpoints suggesting clarity and logic yet also unreality and disorientation. Recalling a range of art-historical precedents from early Netherlandish pictures to Indian miniatures, these paintings have an intensity and metaphoric richness that belies their apparent reserve.
The paintings wobble uncertainly either side of landscape and abstraction, but the content is somewhere between rural and man-made, the landscape painting is somewhere in between panoptic coldness and celebratory sublime, and the abstraction manages to be both restrained and painterly. Many levels of interzonal in-between, then. They're particularly reminiscent of photographs: Emmet Gowin, Edward Burtynsky or Sophie Ristelhueber's "Fait" (meaning "done" or "fact") project - the aerial images of post-Gulf War I Kuwait sands.
If I wait any longer to write about Rhodes it just isn't going to happen, so as a placeholder here are some quotes from the catalogue and the reviews. Firstly these dog-eared snippets from Tom Lubbock's playful essay in the catalogue on landscapes, seeing, bodies and paint:
The ground is remote, but not astronomically remote [...] these views refrain from a radically alienating perspective on the world [...] they also lack the usual scenic dramas of high and low, near and far. [...] There is a name for the kinds of places Rhodes typically paints: Edgelands. [p7]
And other features of this 'interfacial' [Marion Shoard] region include 'electricity sub-stations, motorway interchanges ... distribution depots ... recycling centres'. [...] Built up ad hoc and collage-wise by their developers, not grounded in the realities of long standing settlements, treating the site as a tabula rasa [p8]
'we carry culturally prefabricated mentally templates with us wherever we go, and what we see and reflect upon is continually adjusted to these templates' [Andrews, Landscape and Western Art, 1999] [p9]
'but as one approaches it becomes houses, tress, tiles, leaves, grass, ants, ants' legs, and so on ad infinitum. All that is comprehended in the word landscape. ' [Pascal, Pensees, 1996] [p10]
lacks the peripheral, irrelevant details, the background noise, which are a mark of realism and reality. It carries its own simple narrative description [...] it's like a tale being told, or the report of a dream, or the abrupt topography of Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress [...] a surprising figure, which [...] takes off like a sudden and inappropriate overture from the road to the hill, an extended foot, a tongue stuck out, a blurted speech bubble, a gob of spit, a bit of landscape comedy. [p11]
'Seen thus, from above, the whole landscape looked immovable as a picture [Flaubert, Madame Bovary] [...] We see it all together. Everything falls into place - or is put in its place. Flaubert's downward gaze casts an absurdity onto its subject, making the destination city [Rouen] into an assemblage of stranded bits and pieces. [...] This is one way in which Rhodes uses the overview: to emphasise what gets lost, when the world is made into a picture. [p12-13]
'Aerial photographs taken from a perfect point directly above Heathrow show it as a diagram of itself' [Wentworth, Thinking Aloud, 1998] [...] Rhodes's paintings often employ a kind of colour-coding that maps out a scene into its distinct fuinctions or materials. Each different kind of thing has its own hue-area - a painting by names. [...] Playful visual similes supervene, as the forms of Trees and Works suggest a cellular structure, or a printed circuit, or the tracery of fat in a cut of meat, or the separate parts of an Airfix kit, neatly 'plotted and pieced' on their sprue. [p14]
These incidents punctuate scenes where the brushstrokes do not elsewhere cling tightly to their tiny subjects. They're like 1:200 models, added to a much less detailed construction [...] Only the central handful of land [in Car Port, 2004] retains its safe, model-like clarity. The rest of the scene is a true spatial fantasia, its construction dissolving like a Piranesi dungeon. [p16]
marks that promise something but yield nothing in particular [p18]
hand-made image making is cack-handed. [...] 'the monotonous infirmity and inaccuracy of drawings' [George Bernard Shaw, in comparison to photography, which] 'evades the clumsy tyranny of the hand' [...] a basic truth about painting: how infirmity and clumsiness, all kinds of bodily friction, compulsion, slippage, are its grain, its medium. Just as walking is interrupted by falling over, painting is managed botching, though the art may wish to deny it. [...] The painting hand never quite grasping the features of a scene, isn't trying to render them, is merely filling them in - as if the scene was understood to be there already, requiring only the brush's token acknowledgment. [p19-20]
It gives a remarkable display of 'negative capability' in paint [... the question of real/imagined] is an uncertainty that the painting carries over into itself. It keeps its man so infirmly defined, that though it's there to be picked up, we're never wquite sure if the artist has really put it there, or if we're just seeing things in a vaguely suggestive shape. The way it's made preserves a doubt about whether it has been made at all. Holding back, the picture gives to what it shapes something of the opacity and possibility of the unmade world [p22]
Elsewhere:
Rhodes, a careful painter, has a strong and sensitive feeling for the places where ground is being broken, for fields of paint that are also fields by the airport, for the moment before the world goes away and the plane heads into the clouds. [Artnet]
For instance, Friedrich’s paintings depicted a time when nature’s force equalled God’s force, where man confronted God via the landscape, gazing with admiration and awe into the sky. By contrast, in Rhodes’ paintings we actually assume God’s elevated position: looking down, not up. Similarly, given that all the paintings are of a similar, modest size no larger than a couple of feet it is clear Rhodes does not want to bombard us with a near-religious experience of nature’s power – these are not en plein air paintings, nor do they reveal the seasons, nor the weather. [List]
The ground area equates with the picture area. The buildings and plots and roads that mark and punctuate the land are analogous to the paint marks that depict them. These functional sites, with their different departments and their linking roads become like diagrams, flow-charts, operating systems. [Lubbock again, Independent, 2003]
The main impression is of yawning emptiness; these places, which Ms. Rhodes makes up using photographic sources, have the look of rural wastelands. Though adroitly handled, the flip-flop between picture plane and deep space is nothing new; nor is the equation of aerial landscape and abstract design. What is distinctively appealing in Ms. Rhodes's work is a mood of numbed lonesomeness. The distanced view, the unpopulated vacancy and the repressed color evoke a state for which a therapist might recommend Prozac. [NYT, 2002]
A very good show.
*
It had just started to snow as the train left Waverley station and we'd later sit for an hour on the tracks south of Durham, looking out at a couple of inches of white. It looked like a flood-plain version of Caspar David Friedrich mountain-sublime paintings, but a version a bit like the Carol Rhodes paintings: viewed from the other side of safety glass, motionless on high-speed tracks, sublime, mundane.
Related: earlier the same day: Turner and the National Gallery Complex, Edinburgh; Map Magazine on Rhodes
January 21, 2008
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