MA Week 35 - Artist Research : Revisiting the Constructivist works of Liubov Popova

In my tutorial the other week, I was reflecting that the pylon abstracts, particularly the red one, had Constructivist influences. I’d been interested in and influenced by Liubov Popova during my Access studies. Sharon suggested that I revisit my Access research into Popova to see what further I could now learn from her work. Ever the dutiful student, I’ve done as she said.

Painterly Architectonic, Liubov Popova [public domain] via Wikimedia Commons

Firstly I opened my Access contextual journal and was surprised to see one of the images of Popova’s work that I’d included. I remembered Painterly Architectonic (1917), which I’d loved as soon as I saw it, with its bold colours and mainly linear geometric shapes. But I hadn’t remembered Spatial Force Construction (1921). The curves and differing weights of lines within that piece were not dissimilar to those in my little abstract. Again and again I discover how I am carrying images and influences subliminally, and how I’m reworking them into my own work without realising.



Spatial Force Construction, Liubov Popova (State Museum of Contemporary Art of Thessaloniki)
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

My next thought was how Popova had repurposed her work when the Bolshevik regime required painting to become a medium for promoting communal aspirations (Tupitsyn, p.13). Similarly, I’d repurposed the colours of my urban wanderings to try to start creating a visual language of my lived experience. I chose a couple of library books to view some of her works again and to read a little more about her. It was then that I started to realise how she had also developed a visual language to describe what was happening in her context. This possibly relates to her life history, as Bathmaker would put it; her story in the context of her social situation. However, there are wider ramifications in Popova’s case. Constructivist artists believed they had a fundamental role in delivering the new Socialist reality (Lodder, p47). There was a push to create a more universal, impersonal visual language (Tupitsyn, , p.13).

Nevertheless, Popova had her own style and made strong use of the line, the colour and the volumetric (Lodder, p45). Lodder quotes Popova (p255): “A Cubist period (the problem of form) was followed by a Futurist period (the problem of movement and colour) and the principle of abstracting the parts of an object was followed logically and inevitably by the abstraction of the object itself”. This describes a very analytical approach to the development of a visual language which ultimately reveals itself as Suprematism. A scientific approach, almost? Could or should I take a more scientific approach to my own work? It may help with time and project management and also make me focus more on continuing to develop my own visual language.

Popova is further quoted (Tupitsyn, p160) as commenting on her drawings in 1921: “In Russia, as a result of the social and political conditions that we are experiencing, organisation has become the objective of a new synthesis”. Again, an acknowledgement of the social context and of development of a visual language. A further interesting twist is that she evidently started to develop the Painterly Architectonics after seeing Islamic architecture on a trip to Samarkand (Dabrowski, p17) – so, in response to the built environment. As I’ve mentioned many times in this blog, my own work takes the built environment as its starting point in many cases. Dabrowski’s comment was a surprise as I’d imagined these works would take industry as their starting point. However, I think that’s an example of me as the viewer putting my own interpretation on another person’s work.

Another surprise to me was Popova’s choice of colours. I always think of her (and more generally, Constructivist) work as mainly featuring red, black and white. But many of her earlier works feature blues, oranges, browns and yellows. However, each one has a limited palette (possibly an influence of cubism?). I wonder it that had also stuck somewhere in my memory.

The shapes of Popova’s curves and lines appear to me to describe not only the Futurist obsession with speed and motion, but also the turmoil of the aftermath of the October Revolution. I know very little about it, and have just quickly read the BBC Bitesize about it. The situation described touches a chord with the present day, post-Brexit vote. Our country is in turmoil. How are we, as artists, dealing with this? Only Bob & Roberta Smith springs to mind.

Something also very striking was the balance that Popova achieved in her abstracts; According to Dabrowski, (p11), she always remained rooted in painting. I’d grappled with the balance of a work when doing my pylon abstracts, particularly the red one. The result wasn’t bad, but it could be improved. Sitting at home leafing through the library books, soaking in her work, I realised I was receiving a lesson in balancing the abstract work.

Viewing her works again two or three years after first seeing them, I could perceive and understand her development of a visual language in a way that I hadn’t hitherto. My own journey to understand, experiment with and refine the marks I’m making starts to make more sense to me via reflecting on what Popova did. I really wish I had hours more to pore over both the texts and the images within the books and reflect on them.

MA Week 18 - Artist Research :”Cloth & Memory” exhibition

Based on : Millar, L. (ed), (2013). Cloth & Memory {2}[exhibition catalogue}. Saltaire, Salts Estates Ltd.

I have finally made some time to look at this exhibition catalogue which my tutor kindly lent me. It accompanied a 2013 exhibition in the empty spinning room of Salts Mill, Saltaire, with all the connotations of past and present, memory and experience, that such an exhibition might bring. I’m pleased that I waited until after reading some of Harrison’s book on heritage as a critical perspective, as this catalogue seems to make sense in that context. I’ve just chosen a few artists whose words and work spoke to me, and I comment on these below. 

Lesley Millar (introduction, pp15-18)

Millar argues that history is a linear construct with day following day. However, memory is much more malleable. She contrasts “learned memories”, e.g. multiplication tables, with memories of experience that come to mind unbidden, re-constructed, dissolving into other memories. The self of the present puts its own view on each memory; the memory becomes layered and ambiguous. We destruct and destroy, as well as re-construct and re-purpose, our memories. She goes on to discuss the idea of our memories being quite literally wrapped in cloth due to our relationship with textiles as clothing and quotes Reiko Sudo ; “ ‘I am interested in the life of fibres and textiles, how they are reborn and recycled”. As with cloth, so with memory”. 

Caroline Bartlett (p30)

“Stilled”

Bartlett had produced embroidery hoops into which are stretched pieces of woollen cloth, and a small porcelain roundel is placed into each one. A web of stitching spreads from the roundel, forming a drawing. The fabric is allowed to soak up spillages, absorbing memory and experience. This is a response to the presence of the bygone era and the absence of the bygone industry. The embroidery suggests hints and cracks, and the ugliness of the stains contrasts with the beauty of the stitching.  

Maxine Bristow (p39)

“Mutable Frame of Reference”

Bristow had installed some steel frames draped with various cloths. This was a play on the structure of our memories vs their fragility and frequent re-working. The use of cloth,as a familiar material, allows the viewer a way into relating to the work. The steel and cloth together form hard and soft edges, inviting the viewer to think about their own relationship with cloth and also with nostalgia, memory and heritage. The following quote is quite long but really seemed to sum up some of my recent understanding of identity and heritage:

“On the one hand memory and heritage (as a materialisation of collective memory) provide a sense of continuity and stability. As a way in which we make sense of ourselves in the present through reference to the past, they are important in the construction and representation of identity providing a sense of individual and social coherence in an ever-changing world. However… both heritage and memory make selective use of the past for contemporary purposes”.

Caren Garfen (p50)

“Reel Lives, 1891”.

Garfen undertook a detailed analysis of the 1891 Saltaire census. She then produced cotton reels with hand stitched roundels as “memory plaques”, each giving details of a married woman’s name and details. She also hand-embroidered two apron strings, one with occupations open to women and one with occupations open to and men; unequal opportunities giving unequal length apron strings.  

Philippa Lawrence (p74).

“The Fabric of making”

Lawrence researched the language used at mill, in both technical and everyday terms, and produced a list which she called a poem (e.g. “cording”, “winding”, “laughing”). She then had this woven into selvedge edge of a bale of cloth, thereby depicting the making of fabric and the fabric of living. Usually the selvedge is disposed of, and she draws a parallel between this and the forgotten lives of the millworkers.

Karina Thompson(p102)

“1 Hour’s production = 1 ½ miles = 15 lengths”

Thompson ran up and down the massive empty spinning room and collected imprints of her running shoes. At the same time, she wore monitors and collected images of her ECG and ultrasound triangles of her heart. She then created these three sets of images into a 100m long embroidery.  

Discussion 

I am not a textile artist by any stretch of the imagination, but within these works and words there are some ideas and perspectives that are interesting or familiar (or both) to me. 

Bartlett’s embroidered mark-making, black and red stitches into the white cloth, is of interest thanks to my own interest in the marked line, particularly the black line. I would never render it in thread, but that is the beauty of art; the same idea can be depicted in so many different ways. Her stained cloth brings to life the idea of industry, of the grime and dirt of that time, and offers a hint to stop us looking back with a completely nostalgic perspective as per Millar’s introductory comments. 

Bristow’s words of tension around memory and heritage as important, beautiful and stabilising, yet at the same time deceptive and selective, are deeply meaningful to me. Our life is a linear passage of time, as Millar says, yet our experience is not; our memories dip in and out of our past, always with the view of the present. There is a continuity because we are alive one day to the next, but stability is something different. What made sense of our past on this day 10 years ago is quite different to what makes sense of our past today, because there is both another 10 years of lived experience to unpick and add to the past and another 10 years of lived experience through which to view it today. 

Garfen and Lawrence have both used qualitative and quantitative analysis to arrive at subject matter, i.e. words. I keep trying to resist the appearance of text in my own work, but these pieces are inviting me to think again. They are both very neat pieces of work in every sense of the word. 

Thompson’s work is very much based on her own experience of the space, in contrast to the other four artists mentioned here. It also uses modern technology to produce subject matter, which has been sewn by a programmed sewing machine into the cloth. Her approach is very much about herself and about the now; the only nod to Salts Mill seems to be the use of textiles to produce an outcome. There is no nostalgia or memory, apart from a snapshot of the day she did the run. I found it quite divorced from the feel of the exhibition as I’d picked it up from the other artists’ entries. 

The artists’ approaches were something of interest generally. I thought that Garfen and Lawrence had worked very meticulously and that their outcomes were quite literal in their interpretation. Bristow and Bartlett seemed to have taken a more “open” approach, with the viewer required to do more work to understand their installations. The different approaches provide some food for thought for my own approaches to future briefs and also how to respond to a space; archive analysis (Garfen and Lawrence), psychological approach (Bairstow), current perspective (Thompson), heritage perspective (Bartlett). I suppose the overall message is to stand back from the situation in hand and try to see what it tells you before diving in with any particular approach.

 

 

MA Week 9 - Artist Research : Stuart Whipps

Stuart Whipps, "The Kipper and the Corpse" (2015), installed at BAS8, Leeds Art Gallery

 

Stuart Whipps has come onto my radar via his piece in the British Art Show 8 (BAS8), “The Kipper and the Corpse” (Leeds Art Gallery (2), 2015). It is the carcass of a mini built by British Leyland in 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher came to power and the year Whipps was born. Whipps’s work explores the “slippery relationship between memory and truth” (Leeds Art Gallery (1), 2015) and as such I feel it relates to some of the work I’ve done on de-industrialisation – pulling from my own memories. I had quite a strong emotional reaction to this piece; it reminded me of what my family went through with the de-industrialisation of Leeds. There was a sense of emptiness, starting into the shell of the car… where had it travelled to? What had gone on inside it? Who owned it? A stark monument to the Thatcherite chapter of our collective history. Whipps intends to restore the Mini with the help of ex-Longbridge employees as BAS8 tours over the next year.

The piece is the third part of a series of works which investigate the demise of the Longbridge motor works in Birmingham. For the first part, Whipps photographed the plant between 2005 and 2008, and also travelled to Nanjing in China to photograph the motor company that had bought the property rights from MG Rover. (Colin & Yee, 2015, p 120)/

The second chapter was exhibited at the “East International” exhibition in Norwich in 2009. This included photographs of the recently closed plant and archival documents including “text pieces that use the cumulative word counts for all of Margaret Thatcher’s Speeches, Interviews and Other Statements between her election in May 79, and the sacking of Derrick (Red Robbo) Robinson at British Leyland in November 1979. They are presented by the categorisation method utilized by the Margaret Thatcher archive”. (Whipps. S.,(1) n.d.). Herbert (2009, p329) also comments on the inclusion of a script from an episode of Fawlty Towers, mentioning striking car workers– the name of the episode gives its name to the current piece.  Herbert considers the 2009 piece underlines and opposes the Thatcherite line of de-industrialisation’s inevitability and affirms the move to a post-industrial economy.

All three chapters in this series seem to resonate directly with me. One of the first pieces of practice I undertook concerned the de-industrialisation of the UK and the rise of China as a superpower. The piece I produced commented on the loss of industry in Yorkshire in particular, and the vigorous and bullying rise of Chinese imported goods. The saddest thing to see on the Mini carcass was the British Leyland works plate next to the museum exhibit number. British industry now only exists as some memory in the Museum space.

 

How are the mighty fallen

 

Another piece of work by Whipps which deals with archive and memory is “Birth Sprse in Peckham. Latham was a Zimbabwean-born British experimental artist who was concerned with processes, and the recording of sequences of events and patterns of knowledge (Stiles, n.d.).  Whipps investigated Latham’s archive and interpreted it as a fragmented display, including an animation of text from books in Latham’s collection, which he made during the exhibition itself (Street, 2013). Whipps deliberately disturbed Latham’s archive by collapsing together the various events and their representations. (Whipps. S.,(2) n.d.).

In all these pieces of work, Whipps is taking archival material –photographs, documents or a car – and re-interpreting it. He builds upon the memory, but he also re-works it, and so by implication distorts it. He gives his own viewpoint; it’s not his own lived experience, he is giving his version of someone else’s history. He is often creating randomness from order, as with Latham’s archive and the archival documents in the East International exhibition. He also makes works in progress ; the restoration of the Mini, the animation of Latham’s books. Here I believe he is creating new experience – something existing, viewed differently – and thereby new memories.