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Film by Tacita Dean in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern.
The lights are out in the Turbine Hall at the Tate and its as if a giant piece of film is propped up and backlit. In fact it is a projected looping film shot on 35ml with panoramic cinemascope lens turned on its side and the effects were created physically, not digitally. It is a moving collage; artist cut up images from her large postcard collection or used footage of waterfalls and a snail, like stock footage. She has hand coloured black and white film, exposed it many times through the camera and masked it to create the collage. The film is treated as a very physical material and Tacita Dean says she has been lead by the ‘magic’ of the medium and likes the unpredictable results. Though loved, analogue is being forced out and it is digital switch over everywhere, and the film labs are closing one by one. So this is her response, a homage to film.
Normal Rockwell painted over 300 covers for the Saturday Evening Post. I didn’t think I would be interested in Normal Rockwell’s paintings (on display in Dulwich Picture Gallery), but I was.
The pictures often show cute and sentimental caricatures. There are puppies, children, clowns, grandfathers, turned up toes of shoes, santas; these magazine covers are like greeting cards. They are controlled, realist in some ways, detailed, technically very well painted and the figures are very well observed.
Rockwell’s ability is to tell a whole story in one picture. He has the actor’s skill of working with poses and expressions and screenwriter’s skill of working with actions – people doing things – conveying all that is happening visually, rather than in words. On the magazine covers, the people are in action, playing, sitting, standing, playing music, mixing medicine, head scratching, Their gestures and faces show us their emotions. Frowning, pointing, crying, eating, pouting, there are some raised eyebrows. Sometimes we can tell what has just happened (the beginning) and sometimes what is about to happen (the end).
There are words painted on the canvas (most works are oil on canvas), like pop art. Unlike pop art the words are there for a functional reason – it may be the name of the magazine. Pop art inverted, in a way. Sometimes the backgrounds are plain, painted white in oil. He used cameras to compose some of his paintings, which you can see from some of the unusual angles such as the over head shot of the bridge game.
Rockwell went out and about looking for subjects. He looked around at ‘small town America’. He is said to have invented a way of looking at and thinking about America. He also found locations. For example, the armour room at a Massachucetts museum.
Looking at pictures of trees and foliage, I was reminded of the documentary David Hockney: A Bigger Picture . In the film, we see Hockney, having left life in Los Angeles, standing on the grass verges of Yorkshire country lanes with canvas and easel, painting the landscape in all weathers.
Here he has chosen a common sight of the English countryside, the hedgerow. I am interested in it because it is not a conventionally picturesque rural scene and could be unremarkable. He has included the road and a grass verge. It reminds me of a photograph and you get the sense that you are standing in the location. In fact, anyone could park at this spot and take a look. It has an unconventional composition and we look dead on at the elderflower which takes over the middle area. The simple house is tucked to the side.
Any hedgerow is incredibly complex. This painting makes me think of the physical energy of the artist, (some of the paintings were done at great speed) and very intense study and ‘looking’ to make sense of the foliage and light on that particular day. There is also a great feeling of pleasure at that July day.
>>LALouver gallery
I have been looking at this painting by Cézanne to understand how to give trees their three dimensional form.
The large area of shadow works in two ways. It pushes the tree in the foreground towards us and sends the smaller tree across the fields into the distance. This is with very simple means, may be two or three tones of leaf green. Light falls in a column on the large left hand tree, on its leaves and on the trunk, with a shadowy gap which sets the leaves still further towards us.
It is a very unsentimental and it makes you feels as if you are standing there in the countryside.
The Avenue at the Jas de Bouffan. Paul Cézanne 1868-70. Tate/National Gallery.
The New Decor exhibition is on at the Hayward Gallery.  In the show, sculptures and installations ‘take interior design as a point of departure’. German artist Nicola Werners has made a perspex bench which encases a row of boulders, each a different rock. She has also made an edition of ‘Rock Dispensers’.
A dispenser is rather mundane. I imagine a metal serviette dispenser. The pebbles are multi-coloured and created from unimaginable geological processes. The joke is that the rocks hardly need stacking and dispensing.
Photographer Edward Burtinksy was recommended to me by a client. Having visited Peak District quarries last winter, I was impressed by the Quarry and Mines series.
>> Edward Burtinksy’s website
I took this photograph with Durer’s study of a pine tree in mind.
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Elderflower Blossom, Kilham, July
