I admire J.G. Ballard, who died last year, but much of his writing leaves me cold — as if abandoned in one of the lunar jungles or deserts that Max Ernst’s paintings so often depict.
I admire J.G. Ballard, who died last year, but much of his writing leaves me cold — as if abandoned in one of the lunar jungles or deserts that Max Ernst’s paintings so often depict. It’s a deep chill of the psyche, a numbing of the human warmth that makes life bearable, and Ballard rightly identified it as taking over our culture. He wasn’t really a science fiction writer so much as a social commentator, dissecting our present dystopia — a remarkable and original voice, unafraid to describe the dark psychopathology of the human race, however ominous his predictions. At Gagosian Gallery (6-24 Britannia Street, WC1, until 1 April) is an exhibition entitled Crash, in homage to his famous novel (and the film based on it), an evocation of the Ballardian. I hesitate to call it a celebration because of the violent and destructive nature of much of the material on view.
Apparently, Ballard would have liked to have been a painter himself but lacked the requisite skills (that doesn’t stop a lot of people), and there are examples of work by artists here he deeply admired, such as Hopper, de Chirico and Delvaux. He was drawn to where science fiction and surrealism meet and had a sophisticated appreciation of art, but I wonder what he would have made of this gallimaufry. The Small Viewing Room is given over largely to pornography and perversity (Dali, Bellmer, John Currin), and in the main rooms a number of the big names have been corralled to demonstrate the commodification (rather than apotheosis) of technology and violence. Warhol, Koons, Lichtenstein, Richter, Hamilton, Bacon, Rauschenberg, Hirst — they’re all here. Of course there are good things (and I don’t include Paul McCarthy’s twitching pig, dreaming of ‘O Lucky Man!’), such as Mike Kelly’s imaginary cities, the paintings by Richard Artschwager and Malcolm Morley, and Roger Hiorns’s wonderfully blue dangling engines, but the cacophonous glut of materiality left me reeling. A lavish souvenir catalogue costs £65. Not for the squeamish.
Ballard was fascinated by pataphysics, the invention of Alfred Jarry, and neatly defined as the science of imaginary solutions. It was a philosophy that also appealed to Barry Flanagan (1941–2009), sculptor, wit and hare enthusiast. Waddington Galleries (11 Cork Street, W1, until 17 April) is currently showing Flanagan works from 1966 to 2008. The show is dominated by bronze hares — on anvils, boxing, dancing, standing on an elephant. There are other sculptures: a coiled and curly unicorn, brief hessian banners, a granite bollard, bronze towers and a tantric figure in beer stone, even a flattened cone of sand originally conceived in 1966, but the hares are predominant. Hares are big powerful creatures, yet Flanagan slims them down radically into witty pipe-cleaner paraphrases. The hare is a symbol of unpredictability, resurrection and renewal. Not a bad alter ego for a sculptor.
There are a number of poignant Flanagan line drawings in an intriguing exhibition at Austin/Desmond (Pied Bull Yard, 68/69 Great Russell Street, WC1, until 1 April), entitled Seven British Artists in Milan, 1965–75. The work comes from the famous Galleria dell’Ariete, which closed in 1980, but was a centre for contemporary art from its founding in 1955. The show consists of an interesting group of paintings, sculptures and drawings by the likes of William Tucker, Richard Smith and John Hoyland, and by the Cohen brothers, Harold and Bernard, who tend to be rather overlooked today. (I particularly liked Bernard Cohen’s ‘Untitled’ painting from 1965.) This is work from a period when art seemed to speak of a hopeful future, not a condemned and frightful present.
The vast underground space of Ambika P3 in the University of Westminster (35 Marylebone Road, NW1) is also redolent of that more innocent age, and currently houses a mixed show called From Floor to Sky: British Sculpture and the Studio Experience (Wed–Sun, until 4 April). It brings together early and recent work by a host of sculptors, including three Richards — Deacon, Long and Wentworth — Hamish Fulton, Brian Catling and Alison Wilding. Thirty years ago I would have loved it, and no doubt spent hours attempting to decipher these convoluted metaphors and occluded meanings. Today, more than anything else, it seems indicative of the self-referential exclusiveness of so much modern sculpture. Apart from admiring certain objects, such as Roger Ackling’s ‘Sun Days No 8’, Gillian’s Cook’s large wall-leaf and bronze head stuck with nails, and Terry New’s painted steel ‘Totum’, I found this visit a sadly draining experience.
A welcome contrast then in the mini-retrospective of Keith Grant’s paintings at Chris Beetles Gallery (8–10 Ryder Street, SW1, until 3 April). Grant (born 1930) has spent a lifetime in celebration of the elements, painting the sea, the night and the forest. If at times his work comes uncomfortably close to illustration, the best of it is a dazzling paean to nature’s marvels, from the Aurora Borealis to icebergs.
Two shows to be recommended out of town. First, Arena by Mark Francis (born 1962) is at Abbot Hall in Kendal (until 3 July). At one time, the grids and tadpoles of Francis’s imagery were familiar to London gallery-goers, but he’s been showing more abroad these last few years, consolidating an international reputation. He’s an interesting artist whose work takes geometry and undermines it with organic possibilities, like the maggot in the apple. The smudged clusters of cellular structures he made his name with have been recently subjected to increasingly rectilinear systems, as if a virus might be contained by shutters and netting. Meanwhile, red and blue have infiltrated his resolutely black and white images. Intriguing and often beautiful.
Second, Present Wonder by Mick Rooney (born 1944). Rooney goes from strength to strength. Recently settled in the Cotswolds, he is showing new work at the Fosse Gallery in Stow-on-the-Wold (18 April–15 May), work that demonstrates a glorious freedom of subject for this ever-inventive artist. Rooney comments: ‘I’m informed by every book, every journey, language learnt, culture sampled. Mine is the post-war generation which experienced austerity and tasted optimism…Sure, each generation has its time and responds in its own way. It inevitably often sees the previous age as almost out of touch. Why should the many miles of the artist’s journey be forced into a ghetto of obscurity by the mafia-like machinations of an art elite?’
Why indeed? Rooney is subversive. In his work the dreaming world mingles freely with reality. Rooney’s images combine the unlikely with the closely observed, from girls having a night in, trying on clothes, to monsters of the aquarium. Young lovers sprawl across a moonlit picnic, or nest in a tree, a master chef ruminates on his favourite dish, the toy cupboard makes a takeover bid. Imagination never flags and the stories just get curiouser and curiouser. Rooney on top form.
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