Thursday 28 May 2015

"Rooted" by Sandy Middleton at NAC

When I went to the reception for Sandy Middleton's show "Rooted" I did not know very much about her. I had just heard that she is a very interesting photographer, but I know very little about photography. The only other photographer I know is Derek Richards, who does a lot with very bright colour and with people moving around in exotic locations. He is nothing like her.

As I sat down and rested from my walk to NAC, my eyes rested on photographs of trees that were greenish-brownish and quite hazy. They were dreamy, poetic, not quite distinct, thoughtful, and very treeish. No human or animal figures appeared -- just expanses of fields or water with a few trees. The trees seemed to have been singled out for special, loving attention, and some of them you could see through, like the ghosts of trees. However the scene did not look like a graveyard but rather like a well loved place that the tree had come back to haunt because it was so fond of it.

When I asked the artist about this, she said that she had not intended anything psychological. She was simply interested in the effect of double exposure. These tree scenes had all been taken in Port Dalhousie and the one gnarled old tree taken with double exposure had been superimposed on a scene with a younger, less individual looking tree because it was so representative. It summed up the whole history of the trees in that neighbourhood.

This is what first caught my eye when I glanced around. But when I stood up and started looking more closely, I was quite overwhelmed by a photograph of tangled tree roots with only a few leaves and branches sprouting from them which led off the exhibition, and which Sandy Middleton connected in a note to her own roots. It immediately made me think of Ents, Tolkien's treelike shepherds of the trees and of my first excited discovery of The Lord of the Rings in my last year as a student at Oxford.

I have never read a book which excited me so much. It all seemed so beautiful and fresh and new, such a change from the dreary, nerve-wracking work of trying to meet the impossibly high academic standards of Oxford. And it had been written by an Oxford professor! So there was hope and joy and magic and life after all! I had just sat down and reread the chapter "Treebeard" in The Two Towers and it is just as I remembered it. Yes, that tangle of tree roots conjures up the image of the toes of Treebeard, guardian of the Forest of Fangorn, which he always put down first when he went walking.

I asked Sandy Middleton about it and she said yes, she had been thinking of Ents. She told me about a huge Ent costume she had devised and that had towered over the onlookers for the NAC Festival of Wearable Art a couple of years ago. She said there is bound to be a photograph of it in the archives.

As I went through the show, I found a series of little circular segments of wood with photographs of leafless branches printed on them upside down so that they looked like roots instead of branches. On an adjoining wall were sheets of paper treated with beeswax showing the same thing. Sandy said she intended the shock of surprise created by showing the branches upside down but the people who bought them would probably want to show them right side up. Not everyone likes novelty and invention.

At the very end of the show there was an autumnal scene -- the one definite touch of colour, but even so rather muted. The avoidance of definite colour made the whole show seem like a stroll through a dream -- or rather like a poem about a dream.

Tuesday 19 May 2015

"Remnants" by Kristi McDonald at NAC

I am puzzled to know what to say about "Remnants." Judging by her Artist's Statement, Kristi McDonald has really thought about her show and worked on it, and yet it does not speak to me. Furthermore, there must be other people to whom it speaks, or her work would not be hanging in NAC and she would not have won awards, but even so, I still don't see it.

In an earlier era of art criticism, I would have set myself up as an arbiter of taste and listed my reasons for condemning it, like Ruskin accursing Whistler of "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." But as things are, I feel all I can do is try to state the limitations of my own mind which prevent me from responding to it.

There there is a h ierarchy of the arts is a long since exploded theory. Years ago a former colleague of mine invited me to his home and pointed to a reproduction hanging on his wall of "Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer." I forget which Great Master painted it. It could have been Rubens in a quite unusually sentimental mood. As he pointed to it, my colleague said, "This is the greatest painting in the world." I said nothing, but I was dumbfounded by the idea that this academic should think a) that there is such a thing as the greatest painting in the world, and b) that it is possible to identify it. Of course from there, it is only a step to thinking you can identify the worst painting, on a sliding scale of values.

André Malraux famously claimed that the 20th century was the first era in which every possible kind of art of every time and place could be appreciated as being of equal value. Even so, although Malraux did not say so, some artists such as Pablo Picasso can be seen as outranking everyone else as demonstrated by the prices people are willing to pay for their paintings.

I have discussed art with my brother, Malcolm Bucknall, more than anytone else and he was outraged to hear me say that I can paint as well as Picasso. He got me to admit that I could never have pained "Guernica" but that doesn't mean I want to live with it. To take another famous painting by Picasso as an example, I would not like to have "Les Demoiselles d"Avignon" hanging on my wall. But I do love and admire Picasso's drawings, particularly those of his old age.

Even though my brother does have a scale of art values, he repudiates what he calls Dogma and disliked being given art lessons. He is all in favour of risking sailing off the edge of the world, like Christopher Columbus. I am much more academically inclined than he is, and although I can be quite eccentric in my judgments I do bring a certain amount of cultural bagage to my appreciation of an art work.

I looked at Kristi McDonald's show and thought, "Ink blots! They must be Rorschach ink blots! But what are they doing combined with what look like fashion magazine illustrations? They don't go together at all." As a result, I was out of sympathy with her work. But that was a case of being limited by my own cultural preconceptions, which I am sure do not apply to her.

She may not even that that Rorschach ink blots exist as a means of psychological testing, since they were popular before she was born and she probably has no reason to consider fashion magazine illustration inferior. Consequently, she must have approached her ink blots and her graphite drawings with a degree of unprejudiced innocence, which I cannot hope to emulate. I am simply not the right person to be looking at her show. I throw the field open to those who are.