Paper Landscapes and Music

Tags

art, Brontë Parsonage Museum, exhibition, installation, Jan Pieńkowski, landscape, Lotte Reiniger, Manchester Art Gallery, paper, Recycling, Su Blackwell, Walter Benjamin, Yuken Teruya

The Wonderful Story of London by Abigail Reynolds

Wuthering Heights by Su Blackwell

Going West by Andersen M Studio

The Harbingers by Claire Brewster

Down by Nicola Dale

Down by Nicola Dale

Theodora by Emma Van Leest

A Secret Heliotropism by Nicola Dale

EXODUS:8:13 by Andrea Mastrovito

EXODUS:8:13 by Andrea Mastrovito

Sequel by Nicola Dale

As Above, So Below by James Aldridge

Notice Forest (Burger King) by Yuken Teruya

Wonder Forest by Manabu Hangai

Wonder Forest (detail)

ROIL 2012 by Mia Pearlman

More images from the wonderful exhibition The First Cut still on at Manchester Art Gallery and then touring, with at least a couple more UK venues.

This exhibition had all sorts of resonances for me, from the making of paper dolls when I was a child, to obsessive cutting out or collecting of paper in all forms from newspapers, magazines, information leaflets, wrapping paper (ongoing), to papermaking and book art (more recent interests) to paper cutting, which I have always been fascinated by, particularly in the form of silhouettes in fairytale books (I blame Jan Pienkowski and Gallery Five cards, but Lotte Reiniger was an earlier source)

silhouette from the nutcracker by jan pienkowski (Photo credit: damselfly58)

and which has had such a renaissance recently mainly due to laser cutting techniques. It was reassuring to see so many of the artists in this exhibition working by hand, with scalpels and patience.

It was also the themes of the work that interested me – particularly of course the emphasis on landscapes of one sort or another. I have already shown some of those featuring trees and forests in an earlier post. Others with environmental concerns included Yuken Teruya, a Japanese artist now living in New York, who reflects on the impact of consumerism on the global environment in his Notice - Forest (Burger King) of 2009, a tree inside a burger wrapper.

Notice Forest (Burger King) by Yuken Teruya

Themes of the meeting of cultures , particularly through colonisation are picked up by Emma Van Leest in Theodora of 2011, a mandala with Javanese motifs.

Theodora by Emma Van Leest

Claire Brewster shows the ability of birds to transcend borders and countries in The Harbingers.

The Harbingers by Claire Brewster, 2011

This was one of a number of pieces with the theme of journeys. Nicola Dale, in Down from 2010, used Ordnance Survey maps to hand cut 12,000 feathers referencing journeys and places lost in time.

Down by Nicola Dale

Down by Nicola Dale

Going West by Andersen M Studio, accompanied an animation on the same theme using a novel by the New Zealand writer Maurice Gee as a source to represent a landscape.

Going West by Andersen M Studio

Another literary source inspired Su Blackwell‘s Wuthering Heights made when she was artist in residence at the Bronte Parsonage in Yorkshire, characteristic of her work which has been used both in books of fairy tales and in set design for a performance of The Snow Queen in London last year.

Wuthering Heights by Su Blackwell

She and several other of the artists recycle books, magazines and other found papers for their pieces. another piece by Nicola Dale A Secret Heliotropism from 2006 was made over a year, using 320 pages from a found book. She quotes Walter Benjamin‘s Theses on the Philosophy of History, “As flowers turn towards the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history.”

A Secret Heliotropism by Nicola Dale

EXODUS:8:13 by Andrea Mastrovito uses seed and flower catalogues to create a lush flower scene, invaded by frogs (the biblical reference is to a plague of frogs).

EXODUS:8:13 by Andrea Mastrovito

EXODUS:8:13 by Andrea Mastrovito

Kew Gardens is one of the places portrayed by Abigail Reynolds in her The Wonderful Story of London, bringing together old illustrations and published material from different periods, in this detail 1936 and 1950.

The Wonderful Story of London by Abigail Reynolds

Mia Pearlman‘s ROIL uses water as a metaphor for the passage of time, also referencing the Japanese Tsunami.

ROIL 2012 by Mia Pearlman

Interviews with the artists can be found here:

http://www.manchestergalleries.org/whats-on/exhibitions/index.php?itemID=92

Apparently the opening of the exhibition included a musical performance incorporating paper music. An account can be found here:

http://www.dyversemusic.com/2012/10/kirsty-almeidamanchester-weekender.html

Related articles

• Su Blackwell’s paper fairyland (rvampie.com)

Mudlarking, Merz and Metamorphosis: Found Landscapes

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art, China Miéville, Claude Lévi-Strauss, collage, Dada, found objects, Kurt Schwitters, landscape, London, Manufactured Landscapes, Merz, mudlarking, Recycling, Thames

‘Found Landscape I’, acrylic and found objects on board, by Diana Hale, 2010

A walk along the Thames river bank at low tide, near Barnes, mudlarking

‘Found Landscape II’, acrylic and found objects on board, by Diana Hale, 2010

Aesthetics and rubbish, Merz, found objects – art as a form of chance

‘Found Landscape III’, acrylic and found objects on board, by Diana Hale, 2010

Recycling, upcycling, Salvagepunk, bricolage, assemblage

Bricolage was a term used by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. He referred to the cultural significance of found objects as a “superabundance of objects, heavier, denser and imbued with many things that we have eliminated from them” (in Charbonnier, Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, published in 1969).

‘Fragments’, Acrylic on canvas, incorporating Thames mud, by Diana Hale, 2010

Reinterpretation, realism versus abstraction, metamorphosis

In one of those strange series of coincidences, several things recently have reminded me of these pieces I did a couple of years ago. Firstly an article in the Guardian on the threat to the Merz Barn near Elterwater in the English Lake District, created by Kurt Schwitters in 1947 when he lived there in exile, which has had its Arts Council grant cut. The interior end wall art work had already been saved from the then derelict building by Richard Hamilton in 1965 when it was removed to the care of Newcastle University. It is on permanent display in the Hatton Gallery. The building itself, incomplete when he died in 1948, is still in situ and there are plans to create a museum. It was reconstructed in front of the Royal Academy in London last year for the Modern British Sculpture exhibition.

Merz (the term came from the 2nd syllable of Kommerz Bank, from an advertisement he used in a collage) - “the combination, for artistic purposes of all conceivable materials”. Schwitters also said of his assemblages or Merzbilder “The artist creates through the choice, distribution and metamorphosis (Entformung) of the materials.”

In a premonition of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Schwitters wrote in 1926 “New art forms out of the remains of a former culture.”

To quote from the caption to Schwitters work ’(Relief in Relief)‘ on the Tate web site “Initially associated with the irreverent Dada movement in 1920s Germany, Schwitters developed an interest in collage and the complex visual inventions this technique made possible. He coined the term MERZ to describe his highly idiosyncratic approach to making art. Schwitters stayed true to these principles even when he left Germany after the rise of National Socialism and emigrated to Britain. He often took months over his constructions, painstakingly searching for the appropriate elements. In wartime Barnes, where glossy magazines for his collages were scarce, the artist used driftwood from the Thames.”

There is to be a major Schwitters exhibition at the Tate Gallery next year.

The Merzbau, Hanover, 1933 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

An image of Schwitters destroyed Merzbau in Hanover was used by China Miéville and Evan Calder Williams in their Salvagepunk presentation at the Serpentine Memory Marathon recently.

Their dystopian vision of a world surviving on salvaging rubbish is not such a fantasy as might be thought.

As part of the Metamorphoses – Transformations and Conversions festival at King’s College recently I saw the film Manufactured Landscapes based on Ed Burtynsky‘s photographic work. Images of people in China and Bangladesh inundated by, and living from recycling, all the detritus of the West are both humbling and horrific and make my efforts seem rather trivial.

As part of the 19th-21st October Bloomsbury Festival a temporary one person gallery appeared in Brunswick Square, another manifestation of Merz.

Designed by Peruvian artist Fernando Caceres and Philipp Dorstewitz it was constructed entirely from materials salvaged in the surrounding area, to reflect both the history of the Foundling Estate and its 18th century slums and the favela type constructions of South American city dwellers, but intended as a positive comment.

A good note to end on.

Related articles

• Merz Barn faces closure (guardian.co.uk)
• ‘Degenerate art’ memorial planned (bbc.co.uk)
• ‘Degenerate artists’ tribute is a mistake (guardian.co.uk)
• Mudlarking (brilliant-london.com)