Greenland blog 14: arts centre med kaffemik

Folk dancing, Nuuk arts centre, Greenland. Image copyright Margaret Sharrow, 2008.

I always like to check out galleries and arts centres when I travel, not just because I’m an artist (although that is the main draw), but also because they often have good places to eat with an interesting atmosphere. I must admit to being spoiled, living as I do with the Aberystwyth Arts Centre on my doorstep, with three galleries, an excellent and filling salad bar in the main café, and even better treats in the Piazza Café downstairs, such as the salmon and cream cheese wraps and tasty pizza. And no visit to the Tate is complete without either shooting up the elevator to the fabulous views of the Thames over a mocha at Tate Modern, or, ideally, savouring devilled kidneys on toast with a glass of wine at the Rex Whistler Restaurant at Tate Britain (to say nothing of the possibilities of a drink on the sunny terrace overlooking Porthmeor Beach at Tate St Ives!) So naturally, when I stumbled on the ultramodern arts centre in Nuuk, with its distinctive exterior, undulating waves of smooth wood simulating the face of a glacier, I had to investigate.

And boy was I rewarded: the interior atrium, with its soaring ceiling and glass walls, was as funky as its exterior. There seemed to be a full programme of cinema, mixing popular releases with a few more arthouse offerings. However I never made it upstairs in search of galleries because I was detained by the cafe. I chose something from the tempting array of cakes, a moist carrot cake I think, but the star of the show was definitely the hot chocolate. Served in a tall glass, heaped with whipped cream, the chocolate was rich, the cream was the excellent Danish silky dairy, and there was more than a note of nutmeg. I honestly have never had such excellent hot chocolate in my life, thick as a sweet soup without being in the least cloying.

The next day I was back, late in the afternoon, wondering what cake to choose to accompany other glass of heaven. In the kind of dumb luck that is often a tourist’s serendipity, I didn’t have to choose: it turned out to be a demonstration of Greenlandic folk dancing, accompanied by that wonderful Greenlandic tradition of the kaffemik, the coffee-chat, usually taking place in people’s homes and thus difficult for the foreigner to encounter without tourist office mediation. But here was something obviously laid on for families and friends who had come to see the dozen or so dancers, ranging in age from about thirteen to retirement. And what a spread! Tables groaning with the full range of the cafe’s best cakes, accompanied by endless flasks of strong dark coffee. Here was a blessed chance to compare the fruit tarts, the rich chocolate cake frosted with dark chocolate, and the light heaven that was the raspberry pavlova (probably my personal favourite).

I just had time to settle myself into a corner with a good view of the action when the dancing started. The music was not dissimilar to what you would hear at a Scottish reel, a lot of jigs and toe-tappers in 3/4 or 6/8 time. They jumped, they jigged, they do-si-doed, they did a variant on strip the willow, they stamped, the held hands and galloped in a circle. And me? My hands flew over my shutter and zoom, quickly rejecting freeze frames that captured people in the uninteresting junctions between movements in favour of an evocative blur. I’m still thinking of how to weave them together in a video. I know, it’s been over two years, I should just get on with it. But first, I’ll need to track down suitable music. Luckily I know just the person to write to... but that will have to wait for another posting.

29 August 2008 16:37 recalled 18 January 2011

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and stay tuned for another episode tomorrow!

'Making Sense of the Turner Prize': Margaret Sharrow's latest 'Exploring Art' talk

Image: Outside the Turner Prize exhibition, Tate Britain, London. Photo copyright Margaret Sharrow, 2010.

It's all over now, bar the shouting, and maybe you didn't even get to see it. The Turner Prize exhibition, Britain's most prestigious art award, is always controversial, but then it was designed that way. The work shown is praised and pilloried, met with puzzlement, indifference or incomprehension. So what's it all about?

Artist Margaret Sharrow will attempt to unravel a little of the workings of this annual event in 'Making Sense of the Turner Prize', the latest in her series of Exploring Art talks. The presentation will be illustrated with examples of work by all the previous Turner Prize winners, as well as the 2010 contenders. 

The talk will take place on Wednesday 12 January 2011 at Lampeter's Women's Workshop, at St James Hall, Cwmann. The day begins at 10am with relaxation and discussion, a shared lunch, followed by Margaret's talk. The charge of £2.50 includes lunch. All women aged 16 and over are welcome. 

Can't attend? Read Margaret Sharrow's reviews:

Turner Prize review

Dexter Dalwood talk review

View 'Footfall', a video response to Turner Prize 2010 winner Susan Philipsz's 'Lowlands Away'

2 January 2011

Ai Weiwei, 'Sunflower Seeds', Tate Modern: a second look

Photo: Margaret Sharrow, 2011

Six months on, the hundred thousand sit, wait patiently. Only the ones on top are seen, and a few at the edges are all that can be examined in any detail. The rest are invisible, but known, present.

I have already reviewed this installation close to its opening, and now, having revisited it, I continue my tradition of reviewing exhibitions near their closing dates.

The seeds extend over a huge area, like a grey carpet when seen from a distance. It is possible to walk along one side, for the length of the installation. This is the compromise. After the first few euphoric days of the installation when the public walked over the seeds and could pick them up, as Ai intended, the gallery, in consultation with Ai, decided to keep the public off the installation because of the lead dust rising up. Of course the workers making the seeds, although some wore face masks, must have been exposed to far more dust.

On this visit, having more time, I was able to learn more about these workers. Adjacent to the installation are a video documentary with seating area, and a room of touch screens where you can post a video question or answer to Ai Weiwei, in either English or Chinese.

Photo of Tate documentary, Margaret Sharrow, 2011

The documentary shows the stages of production of the sunflower seeds, in the Chinese town of Jingdezhen, which has for seventeen hundred year been producing porcelain for Chinese emperors. First the kaolin is mined: men are shown pushing rail carts filled with huge chunks of the stuff out of the earth by hand, as if Welsh coal miners of the nineteenth century. Then the rocks are ground by log spikes powered by a waterwheel, again reminiscent of nineteenth century Wales. After a mechanical mixing process, the porcelain is poured into moulds that produce around two dozen seeds at once, growing like berries off a central stalk. Removed from their stalks, fired in the glorious sunset light of a large kiln, and sorted, they are ready for the ladies who paint the stripes, either in factories with groups of women at a number of tables, or production at home, with families working for short time periods in between childcare and cooking. A bit of tumbling, to give a more natural finish, then the seeds are packed in enormous sacks ready for shipping to the gallery, where they are spread around on the floor by facemasked assistants with rakes, as if tending a Japanese wabi sabi style garden. Throughout Ai is shown overseeing, photo documenting, chatting, interacting, and generally hanging around. He says that the Chinese workers, though delighted to have the work, really didn't understand what the seeds were for, and couldn't conceive of them as forming an art installation. Does it matter if the workers making the piece don't understand what it is for? Does it matter if people looking at the installation don't understand it? Does it matter if they understand it, but don't like it? Ai accepts the incomprehension of the porcelain workers, who, unlike Tate visitors, are not living in a local culture with a place for contemporary art. He says in the documentary, 'I always think art is a tool to set up new questions. To create a basic structure which can be open to possibilities is the most interesting part of my work. I want people who don't understand art to understand what I'm doing.' Here he trails off into a wordless reverie. Most of us wandering Tate Modern won't have memories of Mao represented as the sun to whom all the people, seen as sunflowers, turn for sustenance, or even of sharing unshelled sunflower seeds as a snack. But most of the visitors to Tate Modern would have the experience of crossing the Millennium Bridge, swept along in a never ending current of people, or of cramming themselves into the last possible space on a full Tube, ducking head to avoid decapitation by the slam of impersonal curved doors. One of many, many, many... yet each individual. Handcrafted, you might even say. I was distressed to hear on the radio this morning (4 April 2011) that Ai has again run into difficulties with the Chinese authorities, this time being stopped as he attempted to fly to Hong Kong. He may be unable to respond to tweets and video postings for a while.

Ai Weiwei, 'Sunflower Seeds', Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London, 12 October 2010 – 2 May 2011

More photographs of the exhibition and its interpretation on my Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/pages/Margaret-Sharrow/48770277575

You can view the documentary at the Tate website, http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/unileverseries2010/room3.shtm

Ai Weiwei answers the public’s questions, and asks some of his own http://aiweiwei.tate.org.uk/

Ai Weiwei news link: PBS Newshour, 4 April 2011 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFDtMVlJCHI

Guardian video interview with Ai Weiwei, 'Life is never guaranteed to be safe', 18 March 2010 http://gu.com/p/2fgav

Ai Weiwei: Sunflower Seeds: a field of could-be sunflowers... but not a beach

Photo: Ai Weiwei's 'Sunflower Seeds', Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London. Image copyright Margaret Sharrow, 2010.

I must admit I was quite excited at the prospect of the next Turbine Hall installation at Tate Modern, having enjoyed Mirosław Balka earlier in the year. And there was certainly quite a buildup: I'd read the article about Ai in Tate Etc, and heard the folk on Radio 4's Front Row enthusing about how much it was like a beach, how people were walking on it, sitting and lying down and making sandcastles out of the 100,000,000 ceramic sunflower seeds.

So imagine my disappointment to discover, first of all, that by the fourth day of the exhibition, access to the work was barred (i.e. you couldn't walk on it as Ai intended), and second, that it didn't fill nearly as much of the Turbine Hall as I'd imagined. This second disillusionment was entirely a product of my own fevered imagination, being a hazard of getting much of my art news from the radio: I had formed an image in my mind of a Turbine Hall packed nearly to the rafters with seeds, that were slightly larger than life size and made of unpainted grey porcelain. This image persisted despite the fact that I had watched Newsnight with Ai interviewed standing on his work, right there in the public library on iPlayer, so plenty of witnesses that I did not see Ai brushing his head against the ceiling. In fact one hundred million precisely lifesized porcelain sunflower seeds barely covers the floor to a depth of four inches (10 cm). I suppose a 30-plus metre depth of sunflower seeds would constitute a genuine health and safety hazard (tabloid headlines spring to mind: 'man, 46, drowns in art'), but porcelain dust? Surely visitors' time on the piece could be limited, or misters employed at designated times to settle the dust, or we could all be forced to read copious safety warnings before launching ourselves into the unknown. I appreciate that Tate must protect itself from possible lawsuits, but somehow the same gallery allowed us to experience Cildo Meireles' powerful installation that involved potential asphyxiation from impenetrable clouds of talcum powder in a confined space.

All this discussion of access to the work is bound to overshadow the meaning of the work, which had shown its potential to generate joy, playfulness and happy seaside memories in a culture that does not have the same associations with the sunflower seed as the Chinese (even if we snack on sunflower seeds, most of us buy them shelled). These pieces are meticulously crafted. A hundred million, all superficially the same yet subtly detailed in minor variations - they are extremely accurate replicas, stripey and unglazed, an amiable attendant having let me hold a few in my hand. Each one inevitably representing - a person, so less than one tenth the population of China, two thirds would represent the population of Britain with the leftover part accounting for, I don't know, annual tourists to Britain. Or maybe just annual tourists to London, I'm not sure. Each one quiet and humble. In fact many were obviously disappointed by the sheer ordinariness of it all. 'Is that it?' one woman cried. She might have been happier with ten thousand sunflowers in bloom, bright faces replicating Olafur Eliasson's The Weather Project, shown in the Turbine Hall in 2003-2004). Of course the seeds are the potential for a thousand times more sunflowers. And they are also like the infamous butter mountains and wine lakes of the European Union's notorious Common Agricultural Policy, a superabundance of food in a world where so many do not have enough to eat.

Given Ai's track record as an artist who is largely an activist (in some lights, perhaps an activist who is largely an artist), readings similar to this last may lie closer to the artist's intention. Millions dressed identically in drab Mao suits, five year plans to produce mountains of food to feed the millions, to produce grey metal to launch China's industries in the collective fervour of the past. Millions going to work in suits in the booming present, or perhaps millions of political prisoners over the decades, if prisoners wear grey? Millions of mobile phones, iPods, and all the other silver consumer goods. Millions of tons of rubbish, that will be left by the empty shells of seeds, and of consumer goods discarded. And while the numbers trapped by recent earthquakes are far less, that grey horde is never far from Ai's mind.

Still, all these possible readings have come to me after the event. When I was there, I just wanted to play on a beach. And so I sat forlornly behind the barrier tape like a kid at the pier on a rainy day, glumly tossing my sample seeds back into the multitude.

Unilever Series: Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds continues at the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London, until 2 May 2011 (according to the Tate link below; the bimonthly Tate magazine says 25 April 2011). Free.

Check with the Tate page for latest updates on the access situation

I wrote this review, then I read the others below, which are worth a look for further contextualisation, to learn that over a thousand people were employed in a Chinese pottery-making town to create the seeds by hand, and that Ai also sees the work as being like the mass of small contributions on Twitter:

Adrian Serle

Charlotte Higgins

23 October 2010

Margaret Sharrow's talk, 'Looking at art' - or how did we get to contemporary art?

Baffled, amused, or enraged by what's in galleries today? On Wednesday 29 September artist Margaret Sharrow will be giving an illustrated talk and discussion called 'Looking at art' - a friendly way into enjoying contemporary art. The event will take place at the Lampeter Women's Workshop, 10-3 pm, St James' Hall, Cwmann, on the Carmarthen road just outside Lampeter. All women aged 16 and over warmly welcome. £2.50 includes shared lunch, and the talk and discussion begin after lunch.

'It's a chance to explore some of the trends in art that have led to exciting contemporary work such as installations, performance art, and what's on at degree shows around the country,' says Sharrow. 'What are artists trying to say, and why are comment cards at the Tate full of statements like, "I could do better!"? Sometimes there's a gap between artists and the public. I'd like to try and bridge it, and to share some of the art that I find exciting.' And for men who'd like to attend? 'I'm sure I'll be giving the talk again, and others like it, at mixed-gender venues in the near future!'

Contact Margaret for booking future talks

More on the Lampeter Women's Workshop

Posted 23 September 2010

The next talk, 'Exploring Contemporary Art', 3 November

Review: Francis Alÿs and 'A Story of Deception' - narrative readings

If you haven't seen Francis Alÿs' retrospective 'A Story of Deception' at Tate Modern, you're too late. It closed on 5th September, and in my non-journalistic style, I am only getting round to the review now. However, it will be showing from October at WIELS in Brussels, and from May at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, with some differences no doubt, partly due to the architecture in the respective venues. For the arrangement in space of this exhibition is as important as the individual works themselves. It is this narrative reading of Alÿs' exhibition that I would like to consider in the first half of this review. Visitors who like to be surprised by what they see in a gallery, and how it is presented, should hasten to the second half of this article, in which I consider a way of reading Alÿs' oeuvre as having spiritual themes, concurrently with the more widely discussed political themes. Although it is impossible not to interweave some of my readings of these spiritual themes in with the discussion of the narrative; as Alÿs has said in another context, it is impossible to dissociate the one from the other. ['Meet the Artist: Francis Alys', Tateshots 30 april 2007, on the process of the production of the work inextricably linked with the final product]

A Story of Deception: Narrative in exhibition

This is intellectually stylish stuff, both the individual works themselves, and their visual/narrative presentation, on whatever level you choose to take them. Prepare yourself for a treat, whether remembering or anticipating.

Room 1

Introductory text panel
A Story of Deception (16mm film and slashed painting)
Sound audible in room: the whirr and click of a 16mm projector
Lighting: moderate

Most visitors tend to bunch up at the initial explanatory panel at exhibitions, which in this case is on the wall behind you as you enter. What confronts you face on is, I think, what Alÿs wants you to see first, and focus on: the looped projection of an ever approaching, and ever receding, mirage filmed while prone on the bonnet (hood) of a car trundling slowly along the eternally straight highways of Patagonia. The heat rising from the land, as well as the softening quality of 16mm film, renders everything slightly out of focus, a dream like quality, punctuated every minute or so by flashes of light produced by bands of dark frames where the film is spliced, creating a loop. Alÿs may well be saying with this piece, 'Here I am, this is what I do, come into the dream with me, the metaphor of the mirage as the eternally unreachable notion of progress in Latin America. I will be speaking to you throughout in dreams and fables, and all is not what it may seem. When you think you have grasped my meaning it may well prove to be just an illusion. Come deeper, and I will show you more.'

Already what I might describe as the intertextuality of this exhibition is at play here; at all times Alÿs is placing one work juxtaposed with another, perhaps made years earlier or later, and often picking up themes of other works not included in the exhibition but often referenced in the catalogue. So the blinding flash of light at the beginning and end of A Story of Deception foreshadows the sudden eclipse of nothingness that overcomes Alÿs and his camera as he plunges into the heart of a tornado, in Tornado at the climax of the exhibition.

Possibly unnoticed, in one's peripheral vision if standing behind the projector, is the other half of A Story of Deception - a small canvas depicting the afterglow of a pink-lit sunset, vertically slashed completely in half, wood frame and all, the blade having hollowed a groove out of the gallery wall. (I can't help picturing a technician having a fun time with a rotary saw.) The vision is not just illusory, but negated, expectations of wholeness literally torn in two. The exhibition, despite the best efforts of the curators and the insurers, is not to be precious or behind glass (though most of the ephemera are).

Room 2

The Loop (postcards and text panel)
When I'm Walking (powder on twin panels)
The globe (globe and elastic band)
Sound: 16mm projector, slide projector, bell tolling, occasional insistently rung handbell
Lighting: moderate

The state of fable and dream being established, the visitor rounds the corner to be confronted with a work that exists only as a description, a fable: Alÿs' participation in the 1997 exhibition InSite consisted of The Loop, in which he travelled for twenty-nine days round the Pacific rim in order to avoid crossing the US border between the adjacent border towns of Tijuana and San Diego. Maximum effort, minimum result, as one of his maxims goes (I can picture the scene at the travel agents' in Tijuana: 'But the tram stop is just over there - you can get to San Diego for $2.80!'). No video, no ephemera, just a stack of postcards with a map and a picture of the Pacific. Take one, visitor, and you have a work from this exhibition as valid as any of the paintings from Alÿs' collaborations with the Rotulistas (not exhibited), whose market value soared beyond the pockets of their producers despite the intention of saturating the market.

The eye is drawn to When I'm Walking, a credo of methodology in blue powder, used when stencilling the outline of the shushing finger of the Silencio motif over the walls of Panama City. Alÿs might be saying, 'You have now my themes of fables, unfulfilled dreams and politics - here then is one of my favourite methods of working explained, the walk, so simple compared to the endless global travel demanded by the art world.'

What the eye might have missed is the globe, with a loop of elastic around it. Should you spot this, inevitably you will look up, as it is mounted on a perspex shelf at least four metres above floor level. And what then is being recreated? Looking Up, as featured in the catalogue - when Alÿs stood in the Zócalo, the huge public square in Mexico City, simply looking up into the sky, until he assembled a crowd of passerby also straining to see something in the sky, whereupon he slipped away. I can picture him laughing, just knowing that it is so simple to influence the public - us. Harmless enough in this instance, but...

The quiet of the gallery is finished, for the cacophony of noise draws you swiftly on to Room 3 - indeed you inevitably glimpse Ambulantes, showing people doing a very different kind of walk, through the door while looking at While I'm Walking.

Rooms 3 and 4

Ambulantes (two slide projectors at floor level)
Paradox of Praxis (video projection)
Patriotic Tales (large video projection)
The Collector (objects and video)
Lynchados (paintings and ephemera)
Historic centre, Mexico City (drawing)
Sound: bell tolling, occasional insistently rung handbell, occasional siren, Tijuana brass band, soprano singing German lied intermittently, accompanied by piano, voiceover in Spanish
Moderate lighting, dark in Patriotic Tales seating area, the other side of The Collector, which forms a see-through barrier. Ephemera are displayed on a long glowing lightbox.

The next few rooms burst on the visitor with an overwhelming barrage of sound and ever-changing vision. It is an excellent simulation of the effect of suddenly being dropped in the middle of a very large, crowded foreign city - and this one can only be Mexico City. It is of course a metaphor for Alÿs' own experience, the experience of anyone who comes to a point in their life where they are transplanted to a completely different society on the other side of the globe. How to make sense of it all? In the room, most people will either start by investigating Ambulantes, a double slide projection of photographs of street sellers moving their goods in various ingenious ways without benefit of forklifts (a nice complement to the August Sander-inspired typologies currently on display on another floor of Tate Modern) - or the visitor will be drawn to the clamour of Paradox of Praxis, a video of Alÿs pushing a block of ice through the city for nine hours until it completely melts. These two works, so different in tone, have rather obvious points of comparison, as the non-motorised locomotion of trade in a place with terminally delayed modernity. Alÿs, of course, is not selling the ice, though he is, in a sense, selling the documentation of its demise. Is this right, or comfortable, we might wonder, when the people in Ambulantes are pushing awkward objects for real, so to speak, because they have to, to survive? The artist's survival is equally precarious, and an artist's work itself may be on the surface more difficult to justify, from a 'modern' society's point of view - if the production of the artist is something that is deemed either unnecessary, or in this case, if no object remains for the art market after the effort. The right of the artist to work in a way that could be seen as a parody of the work of the ambulantes may also be challenged particularly when the artist is in some ways the eternal outsider, even after years of being part of the local furniture, so to speak - though I believe Alys' sympathies to lie entirely with the ambulantes, and the joke to fall entirely on himself, as he doubles over to carry the precious ice down some steps. (Most visitors were watching with serious attention and I was relieved to spot at least one other person helplessly chuckling.) All the issues raised by the juxtaposition of these two works are themselves references to Turista, an action that took place a couple of years after Alÿs began collecting photos for Ambulantes, in which he spent a day standing behind a sign offering his services as a tourist, alongside others touting for work as electricians, plumbers, etc.

Another point of intertextuality of Alÿs' oeuvre in the narrative of this exhibition: Ambulantes is projected at floor level, so that the viewer, even the child viewer, is looking down on the people in the photographs. This positioning problematises the viewer-subject relationship in the same way as Beggars, not exhibited here, but shot from above and always projected onto the floor to replicate the positioning of the viewer.

Alÿs continues to say, 'So this is Mexico City, where I have practiced most of my walking - these are the streets, the people, the politics' as you are inevitably drawn to the loudest piece in the room, Patriotic Tales, a mainly black and white video projection filling the entire wall of Room 4, partially glimpsed through open metal shelving that marks the boundary of Room 3, on which are displayed about fifty of Alÿs' magnetised metal dogs on roller skate wheels, and the video for their project, The Collector. At first you are looking through the dogs to see sheep - for Patriotic Tales is the documentation of Alÿs walking a series of sheep around the enormous flagpole in Mexico City's Zócalo square, in homage to the 1968 protests of civil servants in that place. Here is another kind of walk, but destinationless, going nowhere, and therefore as 'unproductive' as dragging a block of ice around, or indeed as the labour of those of the ambulantes who manage to sell little or nothing after their huge efforts. A loop, but a much smaller one, with a more specific target for its commentary. It is hard, watching, not to marvel at how the sheep continue to walk assuredly in the established circle, especially once they are being called out of the circle one by one, leaving a growing gap behind Alÿs. The animal choreography and performance of this single take is flawless, and the viewer becomes hypnotised by the ever changing yet predictable pattern of sheep, and the regular, endless tolling of the bell. This tolling takes on a new significance if, upon emerging from Room 4, one looks at the tiny painting Lynchings (Linchados), dwarfed by a long light box of ephemera, including materials relating to this phenomenon of people seeking 'justice' against accused community outsiders, in frustration at the perceived failures of the Mexican legal system. The bell tolls endlessly, for these dozens of victims, as it tolls too for the frustrations of hundreds of civil servants, for the wasted efforts of thousands of ambulantes. For us who laugh with Alÿs, seeing in his struggles with the ice a metaphor for our own hapless tilting at online forms that freeze, call centre menus that lead to no human voice, or jobs that seem to make no difference in the world, there is only the clanging of a handbell to signal us to start all over again, and the laughter of children at the inevitable end.
Finally, in a neat piece of circularity, the visitor might tear their eyes from the larger screens and see a fourteen-inch monitor with most of the colour drained from it, depicting Alÿs in a nightly perambulation with The Collector. This screen is at dog height, so that the best way to see it is to sit down on the bare floor, at the level of the Ambulantes. While it is impossible to see what magnetised detritus the dog might be collecting, instead what the viewer collects is more glimpses of Mexico City: late night lights of tiny shops and bars, rubbish sweepers, a street seller with a cart that lets off a dramatic blast of steam, rubbish, rubbish, rubbish, and a drunk leaning against a post. Like the metal dog, you have been rapidly collecting impressions of Mexico City, and one more remains: upon leaving the room, you might notice an architectural drawing of the historic centre, a surprisingly straight grid belying the apparent chaos of the dog's wandering through tumbled backstreets.

Room 5

Re-enactments (video projection and ephemera)
Sound: bell tolling, occasional sirens, occasional insistently rung handbell, slide projector, German lied, commentary, Tijuana brass band, roar of car engine
Lighting: subdued. The ephemera are displayed on a long lightbox.

The sense of chaos and possible danger intensifies as this room confronts the visitor with a double video projection of Alÿs' walk through the city with a loaded gun. Alÿs has expressed regret at allowing this representation to reinforce the stereotype of Mexican urban violence; however from the ephemera displayed, it is obvious that the media there focus on the gangs. I also cannot believe that those in the population who can afford satellite television, or who live close to the US border, are not exposed to police documentaries featuring the very type of re-enactment Alÿs presents here - complete in its details of unrealistic dramatic closeups, police and public as 'actors' playing themselves, and the sudden point of view shot as Alÿs is bundled into the police car. Certainly the meticulous storyboarding displayed with the ephemera does a lot to unpack the contrived 'reality' of such programmes. I also don't think that the piece necessarily highlights incompetence in the Mexican police: the timecode on the tape of the original action, though condensed by editing, appeared to roll for only twelve minutes from the time he left the shop with the gun. It depends where you are, I suppose, but I think twelve minutes is a pretty good police response time.

But returning to consideration of narrative in the exhibition: one continues being immersed in the physicality of Mexico City (shops with shutters drawn, a man carrying a cello), while considering the political and social milieu. 'This is how it is here now,' Alÿs seems to be saying. 'Now come into the next room and I will show you the mechanics of it, and how it came to be this way.'

Room 6

Politics of Rehearsal (video on television, small projection and ephemera)
dog fetching ball (video on laptop)
Caracoles (video projection of boy and bottle)
La Leçon de Musique (painting of two men blowing on paper)
Sound: more chaos of (German, European) piano and song versus (Latin American) Tijuana brass band, roaring car engine and sporadic handbell, with occasional sirens and constant speech with intermittent additional Latin American music from documentary in Room 8
Lighting: subdued, mainly from projection screens and light boxes with a few spotlights on the painting

The mechanics behind the current Mexico, where ambulantes and civil servants alike struggle, where garbage lines the streets every night and where anyone can buy a gun and walk down the street with it, Alÿs suggests, began with Harry Truman's inaugural speech in 1949, in which he positioned the United States as prosperous and progressive, and said that the way to safeguard this prosperity was to recognise Latin America as undeveloped, and to give aid so that they could embrace modernity. This speech opens the video Politics of Rehearsal. However, Alÿs suggests through the voice of commentator Cuauhtémoc Medina, in order for the United States to remain prosperous and to keep the upper hand, this modernity must be forever delayed. This room is full of metaphors for the delay: the rehearsal, in which a song is never sung straight through, and a stripper stops her act and begins to dress again every time the musicians pause; the dog who endlessly fetches a ball, eager for reward but only to have the ball thrown away again; the papers that are endlessly ruffled in a third projection, or blown to a fragile and pointless verticality in the painting; the circle of men who draw on each other's backs, a sort of Ouroboros of eternal labour; the boy who is determined to kick a bottle up a hill, even though it will always fall down again.

Room 7

Rehearsal I (El Ensayo) (maquette version, video projection)
Rehearsal I (large video projection)
Sound: very loud Tijuana brass band, still louder gunning of a hapless VW engine
Lighting: the interior of this room is dark, lit only by the projection screen

Never one to shy away from reworking an idea again and again, here Alÿs presents the musical rehearsal and the bottle rolled into one. There were always people watching these videos, laughing as the jaunty red car failed yet again to ascend the Tijuana hill, or make it to the US border beyond. The rules were as with Politics of Rehearsal: when the music rehearsal stopped, the progress of the car stopped. Of course Alÿs was controlling not only the car, but also the brass band: explaining his ideas for a composition without a score or musical terminology, a hundred pauses and reworkings were inevitable. The use of music of his own composition will be echoed in Room 16, and in the extract of Bolero (Shoeshine blues) playing in the documentary shown outside the exhibition.

Room 8

When Faith Moves Mountains (large video projection)
Sound: diegetic speech, soundtrack music, with intrusions from the car and brass band from Room 7
Lighting: Dark except for projection screen and light spilling in from the doorway of the next room

Our artist guide might well continue, 'Well, if eternally delayed modernity is the mirage resulting in the chaos and poverty shown in Rooms 3 to 5, what can we do about it? However absurd it seems, faith can literally move mountains!' One of the most popular pieces in the exhibition, it was apparent in this 'making of' documentary that the Peruvian student volunteers for this intervention on a grand scale found the experience of shoveling sand up one side and down the other of a massive dune an overwhelmingly uplifting one. While initially treating it as some kind of bad joke ('A Mexican, a Belgian and a tutor walked into the union bar... I said, "Don't they have sand dunes in Mexico?"'), afterwards participants spoke of being made to 'think' when they saw the shanty towns near the dunes; of the elation at coming over the ridge and seeing the view; of the euphoria of physical activity and communal spirit ('I felt really great!'). And, as so often with Alÿs' work, it immediately became the stuff of fable, tales to be passed down to next year's freshers; dreams of 'future projects' they might do: 'Drink the Atlantic, melt the Antarctic, paint the sky... simple things like that!'

Room 9

Silencio (array of rubber mats filling the floor)
Sound: Not silent! as the speech and music from When Faith Moves Mountains spills in, though people tended not to talk in this room, often walking through the shortest possible route on tiptoe in case they weren't allowed to walk on the artworks
Light: optimistic, with natural light from a large window, subdued by a translucent shade, supplemented by bright artificial light

As you salsa your way out of Room 8 (an exuberant chorus of 'Si! Si! Si!' plays out the credits) you are confronted by a floor of rubber mats, each bearing a differently coloured finger raised to lips, but no verbal explanation. Only diligent reading of books other than the Tate catalogue, or a sharp eye for some tiny print in the foyer outside the exhibition, might hint that Alÿs went to Panama trying to spread a minute's silence, rumour style (One Minute of Silence, 1993). But the message, in this room filled with more light than any so far, seemed to be getting through; aside from the noise of the soundtrack from Room 8, there wasn't much conversation here. 'I want one of these for my front door!' cried a woman, laughing at the prospect of finally being able to silence noisy family and friends.


Room 10 (corridor)

Sandcastles (video screen embedded in wall)
Déjà vu 1 (small painting under glass)
Sound: waves and spades on sand, commentary from The Green Line, speech and music from When Faith Moves Mountains
Lighting: dim, lit entirely by light spilling in from adjacent rooms

A miniature version of When Faith Moves Mountains, and shown on a smaller screen. Except this little mountain was hopeless; it would inevitably be washed away, despite the diligent efforts of the boys who built it. But that was the whole point; a game, just as the stones that will be so earnestly skipped in Room 12. Perhaps taking things as a game, or at least poetically, is the best answer to the deferred mirage of progress. It was mainly the children who enjoyed walking on the Silencio mats, without fear of damaging valuable art work.


Room 11

inner room:
The Green Line (Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic) (large video projection and laptop with map and commentary menu)
Sound: the voices of the commentary
Light: lit only by the screens

outer room:
The Green Line (text panels, maps, ephemera)
Camguns
Small paintings of Israeli landscapes
Sound: the commentaries
Light: ample natural light from large windows, with a view of the Thames and St Paul's Cathedral

'Now, as the outsider showing you Mexico from the inside, I move you to just one of the many places round the world where I work in my guise as an international artist. Behold the situation in Israel and Palestine: so entrenched and seemingly intractable; so absurd when a grease pencil draws a line on the map that is actually sixty metres wide when scaled up. So here I will show you how I made a 1:1 map, by doing another walk, this time with a can of leaking green paint. And just as I have shown you that the video or painting is the tail wagged by the dog of sketches and ephemera and a long, vibrant process of creation, here I will show you a variety of commentaries and critiques of my work, results of my work seen while viewing the work itself.'

This last is actually very clever: by interviewing around a dozen people with varying points of view on the conflict and the work, and playing them as a rotating soundtrack to the video of himself doing the walk, Alÿs created a captive audience who were willing to stay to see the video several times. The commentators were listed on the laptop, and changed automatically if no one selected a particular name. Meanwhile an animated map traced Alÿs' route as he walked it while the reactions of passerby were juxtaposed with both Alÿs' progress and the commentaries.

Camguns: here we come to the inevitable device signalling 'this is precious: do not touch' - the little rope slung across the corner, gamely protecting the assemblage of Camguns, made from found film reels and assorted junk, emblems of violence, or a kind of media violence, or the possibility of tempering violence through photographic / artistic intervention. What good is this rope really doing, aside from providing a distraction from the work? I wonder if it was some sort of compromise; at Tate St Ives they have these strips on the floor that emit a guilt-inducing wail whenever anyone looks too closely at a painting. The Camguns, though no doubt valuable, are also pretty robust. Alÿs is doing his best to bring the life of the studio into this exhibition, with the lightboxes of sketches, and the Le Temps du sommeil paintings with hi-top sneaker prints where the artist has stepped on the work. Reality in most studios is that things get chucked around, certainly not treated with the white-gloved hagiographic reverence they do once entering the gallery. Speaking of playing, and chucking things around, it might be time for the next room...


Room 12

Children's games (large video projection, replacing Retouque/painting)
Sound: relatively quiet, stones on water
Light: dark except for light from projector screen and natural light from adjacent rooms pouring through two open doorways

I wonder what technical, copyright or artistic decision caused the substitution of this video, after the exhibition booklets were printed. Retoque/painting, in which Alÿs repainted sixty road stripes in the former Panama Canal Zone, would have continued the theme of borders after The Green Line; instead the video of Moroccan boys skipping stones provides an intellectual rest after concentration on the varying points of view in the Green Line commentary. At any rate, there were always a few people seeking quiet refuge in here. This video continues the theme of loop; it is seamlessly cut from top to tail with no title or credits, so that I watched for a good ten minutes before realising I must have seen it all (the piece is only a few minutes long). Another little joke or mental displacement, like Déjà vu or the 'looking up' globe in Room 2. Of course it is really only the post-medieval/Renaissance Western culture that sees time almost exclusively as linear progress rather than circularity, something Alÿs would have encountered in his studies of medieval urbanism. This circularity gives a dreamlike quality which leads on nicely to the next room.

Room 13

Le Temps du sommeil (dozens of small paintings arranged around the corner of two adjacent walls)
Sound: intermittent roar of tornadoes
Light: well lit by large windows

One half of this room is empty, or occupied by windows. The other half contains a little snake of people making their way from left to right along this collection of very private dream-like paintings, often produced late at night. The whole collection may suggest some kind of narrative, at least the sort of nonsensical narrative with erratic changes of scene typical of dreams. Besuited figures performing mysterious acts on grassy moonlit swards, glimpsed through an ochre haze that is itself torn with incised drawings and date stamps. And of course, the occasional footprint. 'When the problems of politics are too big, and poetry and even play fail you, it is best to fall back into the subconscious and dream. Perhaps a solution will emerge.'

As you leave the room, there in the darkened passageway is a painting of a man skipping into a puddle. Was there one like it somewhere else? It's Déjà vu.

'And consider, visitor: have you seen what you think you have seen? And does it mean what it at first appears?'

Room 14

Tornado (large video projection)
Déjà vu 2 (hallway outside projection room)
Sound: a huge dynamic range from the video, ranging from silence to quiet breathing, pounding footsteps and ragged breath, to roaring winds off the scale of the microphone's recording range. During the quiet times a distant siren can occasionally be heard, not ambient to the location of this film, but coming through the wall from Re-enactment on the other side of the exhibition
Light: only from the wall-size projection in this windowless room with no window in the corridor outside

If I say too much about what a possible dream solution might be, I will stray into my topic for the second part of this review. I can only say that whatever intellectualising may be going on in the room that follows this one, all thought was absent in the sheer intensity of this experience - and that is just for the viewers, never mind Alÿs.

Room 15

Tornado / 'situaciòn dada' (ephemera and small paintings)
Sound: quiet punctuated by the periodic roaring of the tornadoes
Light: well lit by natural light from large windows or overhead lights during late openings

A return to the intellectual, and the ephemeral. A collection of small paintings, newspaper articles, post it notes and even a spoon (shades of the catalogue photograph from the early work Péchés de jeunesse, featuring a girl with a spoon hanging from the end of her nose?). All dealing with - ways of accepting the inevitable. More on this in Part 2 of my review, but acceptance may be part of Alÿs' possible proposed answer.


Room 16

Song for Lupita (Mañana, Mañana) (small 16mm film projection and 45 rpm single on record player)
Sound: whirr of the projector, crackle of the needle in the groove of the record, and of course the lullaby repetition of the woman's voice in the song, and the guitar accompaniment. A sudden rush of crowd noise when the exit door is opened.
Light: very subdued, only from the projector and natural light spilling in through the open doorway from the previous room

A delicately drawn animation shows a woman pouring water endlessly from one glass into another, and back again. A circle, and the path through the exhibition has come full circle. Time to sit in the dark corner on the leather sofa, or to be hypnotised by the song and the motion of the record player (who has 45's any more, or anything to play them on?). 'If modernity is a mirage, time is a circle and activities lead to nothing when the ice melts and the sand dune blows back and the song is never completed, then just go with it. Relax and accept. And when you're ready, exit through the gift shop. But you won't find any of my postcards there - you've already had one, my gift to you.'

It does well to be grateful. Not just for the postcard and the work, but for the way it is presented. How much more imaginative than the chronological approach so typical of retrospectives. And how much in keeping with Alÿs' style of working, where multiple projects are developed concurrently over overlapping durations of years, giving critical distance as he flits between projects during the course of a day, and where he examines all items in his oeuvre in relation to each other, looking for gaps in an overall lifetime narrative.

Exit foyer

documentary (video on widescreen tv)

Just as you emerge, blinking and a little overwhelmed from a full dose of Alÿs, there is the possibility to experience a little more, over coffee, as a sort of appendix. The video was actually a very good thing to come back to after a meal and a stroll along the Thames; it features interviews with many people who know or collaborate with Alÿs, including a very engaging mariachi musician, as well as extracts from some of his works not included in this exhibition, such as Railings, Barrenderos, If You Are a Typical Spectator What You Are Really Doing Is Waiting for the Accident to Happen and Bolero (Shoeshine Blues).


Gift shop (Alÿs-related items)

- A Story of Deception catalogue
exhibition posters (sold out)
- Fabiola book (documenting Alÿs' exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery and other venues)
- DVD of the documentary playing in the foyer (sold out by the last weekend)
- tornado watching book
- a few books of philosophy
- no further merchandise (the merchandise related to Exposed, the other Tate exhibition, was endless)

I wonder whether the comparative lack of merchandise was also at Alÿs' direction. It would be in keeping with his and critic/collaborator Medina's concerns about the art world moving ever closer to the world of entertainment, and with his (failed) attempts to saturate the market with copies of his paintings in order to keep the prices low ['Meet the Arist: Francis Alÿs', Tateshots 30 April 2007, and Rotulistas, 1993-97].

Area in front of entrance

The Nightwatch (bank of 16 televisions playing 16 CCTV videos)
summaries of actions (small stencilled labels running along wall)

The videos, recording the capers of a fox released in the National Portrait Gallery in London, was a taster for the exhibition, something to observe while queuing for admittance, or a background to coffee and cakes afterward. It was also nice to have a work that people who could not afford tickets or membership could see for free. People really enjoyed looking for the fox; one woman jumped up and down with glee, squealing, 'I saw the fox, I saw the fox!' Not just little hops; these were full, joyful, heels-smacking-the-bum jumps.

The stencils went largely unnoticed by the public, until the final evening at closing time when I saw people, herded out of the exhibition, desperately reading and photographing them in an attempt to squeeze the last drop of experience out of the event. Many of them address the reader in the second person - you do this, then observe that. I wonder how many people will try staring into the sky to attract a little crowd, or dragging a bottle cap with their shoe against the pavement until it magically transforms into a coin.

Some final thoughts on the exhibition narrative:

When moving through this exhibition, it was very difficult to backtrack and visit early rooms for comparison with the later, because of the bottleneck at When Faith Moves Mountains. Really the visitor was being forced into a linear, or rather circular, narrative; the pattern of rooms formed a loop, when the same space has previously been more open, as with the Vorticists or Cildo Meireles. I don't know if this was Alÿs' intention (to prevent backtracking through a bottleneck; the linear / intertextual narrative almost certainly was), or if anyone could have foreseen the crowds towards the end of the exhibition's run. Usually late night Friday openings means having the rooms to yourself: I found it so at Arshile Gorky at Tate Modern, and even Picasso at Tate Liverpool, both earlier this year. But Alÿs was packing them in, and they were staying for hours. The sofa in front of Politics of Rehearsal was crowded with men ('I'm appreciating art! Honest!'), twenty feet of leather sofa was continuously occupied and the doors nearly blocked with people standing to see When Faith Moves Mountains, it could be hard to elbow your way into the slow moving line 'reading' the series of Le Temps du sommeil, and as for The Green Line! It would have taken white-gloved Japanese train conductors to shoehorn more people into the room. They sat on all the seats, and on the floor, and leaned on the low wall that fed along the entranceway, and stood in the entranceway, peering over each other to read the subtitles. One expects great crowds at blockbusters such as Van Gogh at the Royal Academy, also earlier this year. But a solo show by a living contemporary artist? Maybe I don't get out enough, but I've never seen such crowds, so engaged for so long, come to see the work of someone who has a long and happy career still ahead.

As the Tate catalogue says, we look forward to Alÿs presenting himself again. [Vicente Todolí, p. 6]

on to part 2: A Story of Deception: A Spiritual Reading

back to blog home

Francis Alys' website

Tate Modern, London

The exhibition continues at WIELS, Brussels from 9 October to 30 January 2011

then travels to MOMA New York from 8 May to 1 August 2011

All image sources copyright Francis Alÿs, and rephotographed by Margaret Sharrow, 2010. Pen sketches and text copyright Margaret Sharrow, 2010.

21 September 2010

Margaret Sharrow v. Fiona Banner: or, why it's not safe to let me into the Tate, part 2

Interactivity has become a buzzword in art these days. Walk around any art school and you are liable to be beseiged with posters and signs begging you to interact with someone's current project. And major galleries these days all seem to have 'art carts' or similar, crammed with crayons, coloured paper, and worksheets attempting to interest the young in art. Occasionally, however, the urge to play overtakes me, as it did last weekend at Tate Britain. One current exhibition, 'Rude Britannia', begs you to create your own political cartoon, and then in the Harry Hill-curated room, presents a sort of spoof on a cash machine, where you are shown a reproduction of a work from Tate, asked to write a caption, and then to post it in the slot. Suitably primed by these activities, by the time I saw Fiona Banner's Duveens Commission, Harrier and Jaguar, two decommissioned fighter planes, I wanted to do more than take photos, as everyone seemed to be doing (one woman lying nervously under the nose of the suspended plane while her man snapped away). So I attacked the nearby art cart and created my own fighter plane... leaving you with the results.

Images: My fighter jet (2 views), caricature of Labour MP in the expenses scandal.

Images copyright Margaret Sharrow, 2010

Why it's not safe to let me into the Tate, part 1

London reviews: Per Kirkeby, Futurism and Richard Long at Tate, BP Portrait Competition and arctic photos at Canada House

For me, there were two reasons to go to the Per Kirkeby retrospective at Tate Modern. One was a chance to see the work of one of Denmark's most important artists, including some of his watercolour sketches of Greenland, where I travelled myself exactly a year ago. The other, pedestrian, penny-pinching reason, was to make more use of my Tate membership.

I wasn't prepared for the breadth of the work, from art school collages to pop art of his early career, to abstracts, sculptures, and a fascinating series of books he has published of both his own work, and monographs of artists who influenced him. The one of Michelangelo, in which his own work is juxtaposed with that of the master's, clearly shows the relationship between the two.

The Greenland sketches did not disappoint, either, coming as they did after my impromptu visit to 'The Accessible Arctic', Canada House's fine exhibit of Canadian Geographic photographs of the Canadian arctic, mostly in colour (and there's a great arctic film season coming up there in September/October!) Here I went through airport-style security (when trying to switch on my digital camera I had to confess to the attendant that my batteries had run down. After that he didn't look too concerned about me, correctly assuming that I was far to disorganised to be plotting some kind of a heist.) Even better was the display deep in the bowels of the ground floor, a magnificent room with columns and ornate furnishings and a full wall mirror (possibly two way, I mused, as two small girls pulled faces and showed off their dresses in front of it), which contained glorious colour enlargements of Robert VanWaarden's documentation of the the British Council's 2008 Cape Farewell project. This involved a group of high school students chosen from many countries, journeying by Soviet cruiser MV Academik Shokalskiy from Iceland to East Greenland, passing me in West Greenland when I was in Narsarssuaq / Nanortalik (could they have been the 'scientists' who were spending a couple of days up the fjord? according to Nils at the tourist office?) and on to Baffin Island in northeast Canada. Anyway it looked a tremendous experience, as the youth dashing bare chested into Baffin Bay seemed to symbolise. The photographs brought my own Greenland trip back to me, so my imagination was able to finish Per Kirkeby's wonderfully unfinished sketches, the wall of rock and water that move so far across the page and then stop, leaving a white void. The detail with which he renders mountains and morraines bely his early career as a geology PhD. He has been going to Greenland since the late 1950's when he was completing this postgraduate studies, and says that he doesn't feel right in himself if once a year he doesn't make a trip to Greenland, Iceland or the Faroe Islands. The north Atlantic / Arctic regions certainly have that pull. And the colours show up in his abstract or semi abstract work: the jewel blues and emerald greens that have a tawny, mossy quality; the swirl of grey-green like a fog descending on a fjord, the brilliant mustard yellows and hot pinks of the summer bloom. All these are in the wonderful abstracts with titles such as 'The Northernmost House', and even in one of the large abstracts which I must find the title of, which has obvious points of comparison in the palette and overall effect, if not the linear quality of the markmaking, to Monet's famous waterlilies at Giverny (which I had recently seen some of at the National Gallery).

It was an eventful couple of days, gallery-wise, for me, Emerging from the Per Kirkeby exhibition, Tate membership card in hand, it was inevitable, after browsing samples of his publishing oeuvre in the cafe area, that I should go straight into the Futurism exhibition. Now I must say that fans of Futurism will be delighted to see so many works from so many countries assembled in one place. That said, I must confess myself not to be a particular fan of Futurism, nor did this exhibition change my mind. It is hard to say whether my reaction would have been different if it hadn't been towards the end of two and a half days of intense art digestion. But given my more positive reaction to the National Portrait Gallery later the same evening, I suspect not.

Not to say that individual works did not delight, for examples Marcel Duchamp's chess players, and his tiny painting on panel of a coffee grinder in assembly-sheet form, made for a present for his brother to hang in the kitchen. Or Picasso's Head of a Woman (Fernande), vaunted as the first Cubist sculpture, from 1909. And here, in admiring the chunky simplification of the head, I came to one fundamental problem I have with Futurism: I just don't like cubism. I think I've always had a problem with cubism - I think there are a lot of examples of it, poorly done, and more importantly, I think the premise of breaking the subject into different planes never quite achieves the sense of looking at the thing simultaneously form/from different views. Instead of showing a unity of simultaneous viewpoints, to me the results usually look cluttered. There are exceptions of course, some of the better Piassos, or Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (not in this exhibition), but that is my general opinion. However, it must be said that the sense of motion conveyed by Umberto Boccioni's two series of three paintings, States of Mind (1911) about emotions of people on a rail platform / those who are going/ those who are staying, was fantastic, perhaps more so in the loose studies than in the more finished versions, with their increased angularity (shades of cubism again?) and incorporation of greater detail such as numbers in that futurist font.

For this exhibition it was extremely important to read the eight foot high manifesto panels at the start, and again in the room with books, photos and ephemera (n.b.: content of this last link may be blocked by zealous web-watchers). Here another detail was well observed: the glass cases displaying books etc. were set at a forty-five degree angle to the walls, and the exhibits were at a forty-five degree angle to the cases, which were arranged in a zig zag - a very futurist layout for an exhibition!

I mentioned about the National Portrait Gallery. Thanks to late opening Thursdays, I managed to pop in to see the BP Portrait Award 2009 and BP Travel Award 2008. The latter was, as last year, the most exciting thing for me in the exhibition. Emmanouil Bitsakis has travelled to the Uigar region in the far North West of China, taking with him his ubiquitous small notebooks, in which he incessantly records his thoughts, which generally take the form of meticulously drawings of people, scenes, buildings, and animals, in immaculate biro. Sometimes a portrait is juxtaposed with a Maoist monument, or tiny illustrations of animals flank the endless list of Uigar phrases, pronunciations and English or Greek translations he made. I wondered how long he was over there to learn so much of the complex grammar. I suppose that even for a short visit, it would be essential to learn as much as possible. It also made me wonder how long it would take, to produce a page of this kind of dense material. A book on Emmanouil Bitsakis accompanying the exhibition states that he is quietly observant, almost invisible as he unobtrusively sketches the people round him. Invisible perhaps in his native Greece, but how invisible in a place where foreigners stand out like a sore thumb, where children run chanting, 'Farang! Gaijin!' or the local equivalent, to strangers? But perhaps I am making assumptions; Bitsakis shaves his head, from his self portraits, and if wearing local attire, or a dark Mao suit, he might well be invisible, at least from the back.

The sketches were presented with a couple of the notebooks laid open, in the inevitable glass case, Bitsakis insists, according to the book, that his drawings are never removed from the notebooks for any reason. A key ring with detachable card fobs (such as I had recently seen for sale at Heaton Cooper Studios in Grasmere) did not suffer this restriction, so an array of tiny drawings on card were fanned out and spread round. These depicted musical instruments and other suitably oblong subject matter. Each was meticulously labelled and numbered in a tiny hand. In order to display more of the two notebooks, a slide show was playing on a small screen. Enlarged, each page was only around A5 (half US letter paper size), the original size being more like B6. While watching the pages on a five minute loop (and one might well want to watch all the way through more than once), the visitor was invited to listen on (only one set of!) headphones to delightful excerpts from Uigar traditional music.

The outcome of the notebooks was a series of appropriately tiny portraits painted in oil on tiny tiles / patchwork squares of canvas, the detailed heads nearly filling the frame, with background details crammed not just into the remaining space but into the same perspective plane as the main subject, giving a flattened effect more reminiscent of the Russian Orthodox icon than the telephoto lens. I found these unfailingly delightful: while others in the exhibition may have painted perspective more accurately, or given the glossy surfaces mimicking liquid digital colour, these simple flattened colours, with their flattened bu exquisite detail, spoke something of a culture, and the imagery of a culture, unimaginably removed form our own and set (partly), it seems, in another era. And yet the familiar and the modern are both there: the small child juxtaposed against the industrial progress of a city: the Old Man (my favourite) shoved off centre by a collection of clucking chickens bursting over one another, one tiny perfectly rendered beak curving round the side of the panel; the young man confronting us head on, wearing modern clothes but not completely blocking out the past, represented by a temple oozing up to the sides of the frame, an exaggeration of an idea of a head juxtaposed onto the lower part of a temple, seen in the notebooks. (These works have a similar feeling to the tiny portraits on copper by Eloiza Mills.)

For me this was the highlight of the BP exhibition, and it got my vote for People's Choice (even though not voting for the 2009 portraits may have disqualified me from the competition to win Daler-Rowney materials). My second and third choices, by the way, were
Broken Heart by Donald Macdonald, the heart surgery scar on his future father-in-law's chest echoed by occasional patches of rough overworking to the oil? surface, including a blue line bleeding into the lower left edge of the canvas, and Black Mirror by the Israeli artist David Nipo, a moody sfumato study that is the oils equivalent of a mezzotint, the merest highlights of cheeks and chin emerging from an all-enveloping blackness.

Again this year I was looking for departures from the photorealist style that seems to dominate portraiture; this year, when I found it, it often seemed to signal a drop in quality, with a few other exceptions than those cited above.

Afterwards there was time for a brief foray into the main collection (my first!). Up the grand escalator I went, seeing no similar conveyance to bring me back down, I was trusting that I wasn't on a one-way journey into an eternity surrounded by Tudor miniatures, not exactly what I had planned for myself. I just had time to wander through the eighteenth century, and said hello again to Hogarth, at his easel, wigless, bald, and by the relaxed outstretching of a stockinged leg, clearly enjoying himself while painting the comic muse (having only that morning seen him, and his dog, strapped to a cart loaded with DIY goodies that I assume were conservation/restoration materials, and unceremoniously wheeled away through Tate Britain, much to the consternation of the tall white-haired lady guide: 'Oh, they're taking him away! I do so like to show him to people!') Without pausing to detail the National Portrait Gallery room currently devoted to engravings of Samuel Johnson and his circle, I must pursue this easy link back to the first visit I made that day, to Tate Britain, to see a little of Bacon, Auerbach, Bloomsbury and Blake, before walking the line into the Richard Long exhibition. This retrospective features so many walks, recorded in photographs and enormous text panels enlarged on the wall, that I began to wonder if he had ever been home since the 1970s. It would certainly have taken me that long to have gone distances of hundreds of miles that he trips through in a few days, sometimes walking continuously for twenty-four hours. The large room with seven or eight of his stone sculptures on the floor was striking, with sun pouring in through the skylights. (Incidentally, there is another less spectacularly displayed Richard Long floor stone sculpture on show at Haunch of Venison.) Two walls were also painted with natural materials from specific geographic location; these were quite striking but are presumably about to be destroyed when the exhibition is taken down. And the photographs, as always, are as much documents as works of art, sometimes more so as the grain of colour films he used in the 1980s do not enlarge particularly well, certainly not to the large sizes currently favoured by galleries displaying art photography at the moment. There were also some maps. In the whole, I felt like most of the experience of the walks is being missed. Perhaps that is part of the point; perhaps we are supposed to fill in the blanks ourselves. Perhaps we are being spared the kind of 'my boots hurt' narrative that tends to dominate autobiographical travel writing. Perhaps the texts on the wall work better as poems than as works of art. Perhaps it would have been more interesting to see a series of photographs representing a single walk, rather than one photograph representing each walk. Of course each photograph was representing one of Long's site-specific, impermanent works of art, the traces of footprints across sand or snow, arrangements of stones or sticks. Long began his work long before constant documentation of digital photography and blogging. What, then, did he think he was doing by making circular walks or cycle rides, that would be largely unrecorded and unobserved, represented by lines drawn on a map, hung on a wall? Was he actually able to keep to these shapes, or did the terrain dictate changes? I found the idea of so many walks appealing, but couldn't help thinking that my own pace and means of documentation would have been very different. I did, however, draw inspiration from the room at the side (free entry, as opposed to the main exhibition), which displayed dozens of his publications: books, posters, and postcards advertising exhibitions since the 1960s, accompanied by a video. Here, I thought, might be another way to respond to a walk, one which Long has himself so studiously ignored.

Richard Long has just closed at Tate Britain, but continues at Haunch of Venison, London.

Per Kirkeby has just closed at Tate Britain, but the Futurism continues there until 20 September.

The BP Portrait Award 2009 and the BP Travel Award 2008 continue at the National Portrait Gallery until 20 September, and Samuel Johnson & friends continue there until a date I cannot specify at this time...

'The Accessible Arctic' exhibition continues at Canada House near Trafalgar Square until 30 October 2009, and the films continue there on Tuesdays until 20 October. A related exhibition, 'The Northwest Passage – an Arctic Obsession', runs at the National Maritime Museum until 3 January 2010. Read about the Cape Farewell project at http://www.capefarewellcanada.ca/.

Please vote for me to become the official blogger / artist for an expedition to the North Pole!