Guiseppe Penone at Haunch of Venison

Placed within a framing alcove above a formal staircase, a small sapling appears to grow out of a block of wood. Penone’s ‘To Repeat the Forest’ miraculously resuscitates a young sapling from a piece of commercial timber in which it has been entombed. Time has been stripped back and the facts of early genesis exposed. In this singular work alone, Penone demonstrates his lyrical interest in the irrepressible transitions that underlie all living and material forms.

‘Maritime Alps’, first made during the 1960s, documents how Penone retreats from urban life to photograph his physical encounters within the forest. With precision, he marks out where his body has touched the tree, using wire and nails embedded within the living bark. Elsewhere, the photographs record the action of installing a cage placed over a young tree which will ascend,  in tandem,  towards the light. Nature here expresses a primal response to human intervention. In the most pronounced gesture, he attaches a cast of his hand to the point of original touch oand subsequently documents how the tree grows around the tightly clinging hand. This ambivalent reaction appears both nurturing and suffocating. More recently, he subjects this invasive presence to radiography to create an eerie suggestion of disease, and the tree’s ensuing strategy for recovery.

‘Space of Light’is a hollowed trunk in which Penone strips out early growth leaving a vacuum filled with ambient light and a residue of resin as if the juices of the tree had pooled together in mortal exhalation. Richard Long’s ‘Stone Print Spiral’ shares the same room, a familiar unfurling circle on the floor harvested from a Danish river, which appears more assertive,  leaving less room for dialogue between fact and invention than Penone’s investigations of similar natural forces.  Long’s work, simultaneously shown in adjoining galleries, is more insistently concerned with the application of superimposed mathematical  and linguistic systems.

Penone also exhibits a remarkable new series of large drawings that extrude over paper backed by canvas.  Titled ‘Skin of Graphite’ these subtle works suggest patterns found on the surface of membranes, plants or rocks. The faint, silvery sheen of shapes made in pencil gradually emerge from the dark paper beneath and lock together in harmonious irregularity. These ambitious drawings serve to amplify Penone’s symbiosis of human culture and Nature, a dialogue of interdependence, control, impotence and renewal.

Miroslav Tichy at The Wilkinson Gallery

A burlesque dancer elegantly raises her arms and thrusts her chest forward with an exaggerated smile facing an unseen audience. Wearing a corset decorated with spangles, the performer is captured from below the stage. The image is hesitantly composed and clumsily cropped. Weak exposure produces a narrow tonal range and the surface is mottled with damage. Such poor formal qualities appear to be the work of a struggling amateur. But if a wider context is ever needed, then the work of Miroslav Tichy asks for patient consideration.

Born in 1926, Tichy initially made modernist paintings during the early years of Czech communism and lived through its subsequent repressions. Resisting socialist realism and prone to mental illness, he spent much of his life in a provincial town where he instinctively documented life on the streets around him employing a home-made camera. The exhibition illustrates how Tichy furtively creates a world exclusively inhabited by anonymous women. These tentative images exhibit an erotic fascination, but any contact with his subjects is detached, for they are passive and involuntary models. The camera instead allows the consolation of surrogate intimacy.

Through disguising foliage in a park, several athletic beauties play volleyball in communal pleasure. A couple of friends in bikinis leisurely talk beside a swimming pool. In another image, a woman’s head is cropped out completely, our eye drawn down to a large heart printed on the dress below the buttocks. Tichy’s photographs enlist our voyeuristic complicity. Occasionally he is discovered looking. One woman waits on the side of a road quizzically tilting her head towards him, aware of his gaze, which amuses rather than disturbs her. Cumulatively, these works assert a masculine isolation amongst so many women recorded in secret. They also bear an uncanny resemblance to state surveillance material.

Untitled and un-numbered, these tiny prints, float delicately in their frames without mounts. Having survived rats or prosaic usage as beer mats, they are curious remnants of a marginalized life that found some direction and self-expression through resilient image making. There’s a pathos in Tichy’s ‘outsider’ status being mediated through the lens, and therein lies the value of these strange images, as the products of a dedicated existential enquiry.

Barbara Hepworth House and Garden, St Ives

Barbara Hepworth has now attained international status as one of the few twentieth century sculptors of first rank. Her work is collected by museums across the world and her practice exemplifies Modernist idealism that she shared with Henry Moore, her contemporary.  So visiting her former home in St Ives, now run by Tate, felt more like an act of respectful curiosity rather than devotion. But the modest house on the corner of a steep residential street set back from the harbour proved to be one of the highlights of my visit to Cornwall. Unlike the pristine, curatorial control of an art museum, an artist’s home returns the visitor to the character and preoccupations of the original occupant where they once worked in seclusion, an environment fashioned for inspiration and productivity.

Hepworth died several decades ago, in a fire that took her life in her 70s while she was continuing to work. Here her life is almost uncomfortably exposed: a daybed still sits shoehorned into a tiny gardening shed, whose quilt now has a blemished, moth-eaten appearance; her tools are aid out on a work bench with a forbidding instruction to her former assistants not to remove anything; original plaster maquettes are forever exhibited in situ for the tourist as if she had been preparing them the day before; and the plants she chose still grow on a modest patch of ground with views to the sea. Such details exhume the personality of the artist, whose life is also documented by a series of original photographs and letters arranged chronologically in glass cases in the main entrance. She uncannily resembles Bette Davis in looks and character too. There is a determined, confident quality to her features. Hepworth seems to have applied a forceful, driven energy to her ambitions and there is a hint that undeniable charm accompanied any obstinacy.

It’s difficult to develop a fresh eye on the work, which is now so iconic and familiar, a sculptural language that has in time with critical approval has become emblematic of modernist abstraction. Much of the work is carved in wood or stone, with visible marks of the tools she employed to determine positive and negative space. Hard and resistant materials are tempered, yielding up apertures, which introduce spatial relationships within the garden.  Sometimes as you look through the sculptures, visitors fleetingly cross into your field of vision.

But it’s difficult to deny the timeless certainty and purity that the artist aspired to engender. She is quoted in the entrance as having identified universal shapes as a child in the landscape where she grew up. Like Moore, she spent her life as a sculptor tapping into ‘significant form’ that she felt to be timeless and cross-cultural, an embodied humanism that could speak to all audiences and articulate enduring values. 

But the true revelation of the house is actually the garden, filled with succulents and other plants more commonly found in the Mediterranean and other temperate regions of the world. Closely planted on a steep hill overlooking the town and sea,  Hepworth’s garden exploits St Ive’s mild climate and generous sunshine. Instead of heading south to France or Italy, Hepworth remained attached to her English roots while taking advantage of this fishing port’s famous light that apparently arises from the being on a peninsular surrounded on three sides by the sea.

Hepworth’s passion has an undeniable English restraint and intellectual quality, but a sublimated passion is still present and surprisingly engaging. We might then think of her Yorkshire flintiness transported to the English Atlantic as a concession to European influence to produce an instinctive Modernism without Brancusi’s distracting eroticism. For all that, Hepworth’s work sited in its original studio context, gently guides one to the desired contemplation and pleasure that she intended above more mundane, earthly concerns such as earning a living on the waves below.

Douglas Gordon's 'K.364' – Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street, London

Douglas Gordon carves the title of his new show, ‘K.364’, into the soft, white plaster of the gallery wall. A chisel has chipped away at the surface leaving pronounced strokes like lettering on a gravestone. A residue of paint and dust gathers on the ground below this faint incision into the architecture. Nearby, an anonymous fist clasps a burning candle from which hot wax drips onto bare skin that might indicate an act of prayer or remembrance.  Both works introduce a film that documents a train journey by two Israeli musicians through Poland in the footsteps of relatives who survived the Holocaust in what Gordon describes as ‘a battle between history and the fleeting beauty of music.’

Running on two large screens, which sit at oblique angles, the images are echoed back by several adjacent mirrors.  The protagonists describe how Poland evokes memories of survival handed down within their families. Dark forests that line the tracks are linked to forced removals while simultaneously forming sublime landscapes today. Shots of railway tracks and signals allude to people shunted towards the camps along these very same lines. Subsequently, the musicians perform Mozart’s chamber piece K.364 in Poznan where their passion for the music achieves consolation rather than cathartic resolution.

The restrained narrative leaves us in a former synagogue converted into a swimming pool in 1939, which is still in use today. Shots below the water line of kicking legs suggest spontaneous pleasure but can any place so associated with tragedy be free of contamination?

The difficulty remains that this is well-worn territory loaded with problems for any creative enquiry and the film does not take us much further in comprehending a catastrophe for mankind that took place within living memory. Where Gordon is more successful is in asserting Art’s indispensability to human civilization and he skillfully links the consequences of history to life in the present. Staging this pilgrimage to ancestral roots through music gives concrete expression to sorrow but cannot ultimately remove the underlying horror. Gordon acknowledges this conundrum by framing 32 charred sheets of Mozart’s musical score against mirrored mounts. Destruction and creative endurance sit in suspended tension for perpetuity.

Gabriel Orozco at Tate Modern

The ornamental skull has become a familiar mordant feature of the artist’s box of tricks over hundreds of years. In the Western tradition, this can be traced back to Vanitas, still-life paintings that confront us with the irresistible trajectory of time, impelling all life towards mortality. More recently, Damien Hirst inimitably seized the enduring trope for an extended dialogue between art and money, by covering an anatomical copy with high carat diamonds, cut to fit the contours of the head. But several years before Gabriel Orozco had employed this subject when he was recovering from a collapsed lung. Spending many hours in recuperation, he purchased a real human skull in order to draw directly onto the surface (apparently there are two outlets in New York City where such an object can be legally sourced).

‘Black Kites is perhaps the most engaging object in Orozco’s retrospective at Tate Modern. Stripped of any individualising fleshy features, the ivory-toned skull now caries a chequerboard pattern of black squares that slip into elongated diamonds as Orozco moves with his pencil into the recesses of this bony head. The shock of standing before human remains, far from the catacomb or archaeological display, is upstaged by the skillful handling of the graphite two-tone effect by which the artist maps and probes this repository of human instinct, knowledge and experience. An evident uncanny, creepiness is overlaid with decorative excavation. Such a darkly humorous and ornamental approach to the skull returns to us Orozco’s native Mexico, to the religious iconography of Aztec heads and more recently the Catholic appropriation of pagan ritual in the Day of the Dead where skeletons are dressed up and decorated in an annual danse macabre.

Mortality takes on quite a different presence within the same room where large banners reproduce headlines from the New York Times obituary pages that Orozco has proportionally magnified by using the same fonts. A jumble of diverse lives is thus reduced to absurd summaries that clash and fight for prominence such as the ‘Actor Once Wed To Shirley Temple’ and the ‘Inventor of a Better Seat Belt.’

And so Orozco’s eclectic employment of differing sources and materials may explore a similar thematic interest.

La DS, a modified Citroen car, sits displaced from the street as a hyper-real object sharing the same distinctive profile but viewed from the front, it becomes clear that the artist has removed the engine, narrowed the body and welded together what remains to produce an uncanny alteration that leaves the viewer with enough information to read the object as a familiar product but shorn of its functionality. We are left with an exaggerated, streamlined approximation of speed and movement that is disconcerting.

A few metres away within the same gallery, Orozco places an irregular, stained ball of indeterminate material on the floor. We learn that it is in fact constructed of plastercine to match the artist’s exact weight. ‘Yielding Stone’ is an object that carries layers of experience and memory embedded in its crusty skin, for this humble, inconsequential blob has been rolled around as a witness to Orozco’s nomadic wandering in real physical environments. It becomes an autobiographical repository of multiple encounters and sin a subdued fashion articulates all that has shaped it.

In a series of photographs, the conceptual gives ground to a more lyrical quality: the moist residue of breath sits momentarily on top of a reflective, lacquered piano;  a squashed football hosts a rainwater puddle; a showerhead resembles a photograph of the comos taken from a satellite. These images play on the open-ended power of suggestion, which Orozco most fully realizes in a series of creased paper images conjured out of creased paper and oil based paint and begin to resemble ‘ink blot’ tests.

Elsewhere, Orozco reclaims the most abject and disregarded materials for the purpose of art. Stretched layers of fabric fluff, human hair and skin hang loosely on clotheslines. Formed around the drums of tumble dryers in New York Laundromats, these formless and indeterminate residues neatly summarise Orozco’s quixotic quest for revelation in the material world.

This bathetic teasing strategy is most explicit in his empty shoe box first exhibited at the Venice Biennale which feels firmly established in post- Duchampian tradition but instead of outrage induces little more than ennui. Orozco is capable of overreaching in his hunt for lyrical transformation. In a site-specific work made for the exhibition, ‘Chicotes’, fragments of left lying in the road after car tyres have exploded, which lacks either beauty or surprise. He over-eggs this pudding by dripping pools of liquid aluminium over some of these frayed rubber strips resembling melted wheels and car parts, so suggests the curator grasping at a viable interpretation for a piece that does not feel fully formed. But the work still manages to embody entropic inevitability within the material world and perhaps unconsciously reminds us yet again of vulnerable flesh for the piece is unavoidably reminiscent of animal parts and pelts found dismembered in an abattoir.

This ability to work in different media and scale articulates the artist’s hungry observation of the world. He seems tireless and constantly inspired, resembling an illusionist who draws gasps from a crowd. Showmanship runs through the exhibition but sometimes the work can consciously embrace bathos and deflation too. Orozco engages with shamanic illusions, transforming the familiar and banal into objects of considerable resonance and power. However, unlike Joseph Beuys, Orozco’s is more intimate, quizzical and less charismatic. A chopped up car and an ornamental skull entertain and surprise simultaneously but they are not invested with transformative social or political symbolism. Orozco remains attached to the wry gesture that operates with subtlety rather than mesmerisation. This is an art of interruption and alteration, momentarily shifting meaning gently along to a new position. We may stand before ‘Black Kites’ and feel entranced, but the broken jutting tooth returns us to its origins and the point of departure

Martin Creed's 'Mothers' at Hauser and Wirth

It’s rare that a work of art entails genuine danger, but Martin’s Creed’s new sculpture is a billboard – sized, illuminated sign that rotates at increasing speed. Giant neon letters construct the word ‘MOTHERS’, which illuminates the surrounding space with a harsh light. To step into this space is to risk significant injury, confirmed by a sign on the wall anxiously imploring us not to touch. This work demands a tentative encounter. Elevated by 2.03 metres, there is sufficient height to stand beneath the beam, but it is still low enough to instill serious trepidation. 

The absurdity of this object on a scale suitable for a Los Angeles Freeway is evident. Squeezed into an interior, the sheer physical impact of the sculpture is shocking and yet undeniably funny. With all its universal significance, the word here becomes a menacing and mesmerizing obstacle. This maternal surrogate literally threatens to give you a smack round the head. Our filial ambivalence is given discomforting, concrete form and we are compelled to survive this confrontation. To Ed Ruscha’s questioning the size of words, Creed replies that they can be as large as you want to build them.

MOTHERS has an audacious self-sufficiency, but it is accompanied by work that might stem from another practice entirely. Creed paints geometric shapes and patterns onto small canvasses. Using wide brushes, he builds broad strokes of uniform or contrasting colours that narrow upwards like an stepped ziggurat. Elsewhere, he stacks thin and loose horizontal stripes in acrylic, enamel, ink, oil and watercolour pigment, meeting at varying lengths in a spectrum of blues or reds. Avoiding a finished quality, these small, raw paintings convey direct sensation and an aesthetic authenticity.

Incongruously, three large photographs of a big hound and a tiny lapdog suddenly appear in the hang and interfere with any hint of seriality. The dissonance is intentional. Furthermore, a silent black and white film of closely cropped female breast floats in a dark room without any apparent relationship to the adjacent work.

Creed’s disavowal of linked scale, subject and media is, he explains, a conscious enjoyment of freedom and a denial of expectations. However, such an exhibition strategy runs the risk of upstaging the value of the works themselves, which tend to embody a brave and playful artistic enquiry.

Decay and illusion

Recently, The Guardian published some remarkable photographs by two young French photographers, Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre taken from their new book, The Ruins of Detroit (www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jan/02/detroit-ruins-marchand-meffre-photographs-ohagan?intcmp=239). Discovering images of the abandoned Michigan Central Railway online, they embarked on a spontaneous project involving several trips to Detroit over five years. What they have captured is a tragic collapse of civic life in the heart of one of America’s greatest industrial cities.

For anyone with an attachment to American history, design or culture, these images starkly illustrate pervasive decline in Detroit, which seems to characterise an irreversible loss of America’s legendary economic power and accompanying confidence.

Once a majestic terminus and the tallest station in the world, Michigan Central Station constructed in the architectural language of Ancient Rome, now stands as an empty shell, stripped of purpose and dignity. What ought to be a landmark building and an exemplar of civic pride, is now an architectural ruin, a memorial to an age within living memory of America’s immense industrial ingenuity and productivity.

Motown’s world beating automobile industry which pioneered mass production in the 1920s and in the 1950s made cars that became the ultimate embodiment of post-war aspiration, are now on their knees fighting off competition from newly emerging economies. But with the wilting of demand for American-made cars is an accompanying faltering of an entire city. The Vanity Ballroom, built in 1929, where Duke Ellington, Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman once played is also a husk. Only the wonderful Art Deco chandeliers, still hanging from the scarred ceilings illustrate how seductive this Aztec-styled pleasure palace was for up to a 1000 dancing couples. This is the type of room influenced by hundreds of Hollywood sets built firstly for the silent screen and then the early days of sound during what we continue to call the ‘Jazz Age’ .

There’s something inevitably melancholic about seeing great buildings decay before our eyes. It’s too close to the bone perhaps, reminiscent of mortality and the entropic collapse of fantasy and entertainment embodied within extraordinary buildings. Detroit’s historic place at the heart of the industrial Mid-West made it a popular destination for the great migration of African-Americans heading north from the rural south in the early 20^th century. This huge demographic dislocation largely produced a distinct musical culture in the city, which came of age during the 1960s with the emergence of the Motown sound.

Another website I found called Detroiturbex.com compiles even more extensive photographic archives documenting the social collapse of Detroit produced in a less glossy style than Marchand and Meffre but neverless as painfully haunting. Numerous schools, apartment buildings, churches, libararies, hotels and clubs stand empty and disintegrating. This blogger explains that Detroit lost a million inhabitants between 1950 and 2010 as if the energy of the city just seeped away. To see the structures that housed an entire society with all its aspirations simply abandoned is to experience some of the trauma of walking through Pompeii in the Bay of Naples.

At White Cube in the West End, Gregory Crewdson is exhibiting a new series of photographs employing a similar theme of decay and the irrepressible march of time. Instead of staging his now familiar theatrical mise-en-scene of suburban fantasies in lush technicolour, Crewdson has opted for the subdued subtlety of black and white prints. Furthermore, he now opts to take images on the outdoor sets at Cinecitta, Rome’s dream factory. These images austerely record the strange ambiguity of sets built to resemble either Roman cities or historical periods such as the 19^th century. What may appear to be accurate reconstructions are persistently subverted by Crewdson’s exposure of scaffolding, ropes and props designed to facilitate a fantasy in the movie theatre. So the viewer is invited to participate in a simulacra of history while simultaneously being encouraged to appreciate the elaborate pretence that defines the entire process of film-making.

Titled ‘Sanctuary’, the series aptly demonstrates the artifice of film itself. On the one hand the sets are painstaking re-enactments down to the intricate details of brickwork, friezes and sculpture but on the other we witness the sheer flimsiness of these constructions shedding plaster and wood before our eyes as they sit devoid of activity. Entirely two dimensional and propped up at the rear, the sets are flimsy two-dimensional facades allowing the camera to skim across the surface but not to penetrate any deeper.

Of the 41 prints, only one illustrates any human presence. Hung on it’s own in a side room, this last photograph shows a female gate keeper at the entrance to the studio, oddly resembling one of those ticket sellers from the 1930s who used to sit outside the elaborately themed cinemas. Crewdson seems to link the process of film making to the history of its distribution in an era when film-making on the grand scale of Cleopatra and other movies made on this lot in Rome are being superseded by new technologies and audiences.

So this elegiac, nostalgic quality is present in both the Detroit and Cinecitta series. Photography is a superlative medium for evoking a profound sense of loss, of time washing irretrievably over buildings and places like a corrosive high tide. But we can enjoy the immense layering of information that both photographic practices achieve. We could spend hours isolating elusive and obscure details that appear to be literally fading before us.

Crewdson successfully captures that uncanny, mysterious quality of ‘make-believe’ intrinsic to film. Ironically these sets are built close to the authentic historic site of the Roman Forum. But only a set will suffice because it can be manipulated in a hyper-real fashion. While across the Atlantic twentieth century ersatz derivations of Roman architecture already lie in ruins little more than a 100 years after they were constructed.