Brown pebbledash

Visiting friends in Oxford at the weekend. I normally park around the corner of their house and was struck this evening by how perfectly suburbanly Oxford it was, and how I didn't like that. It was so strange as on trips back to Oxford I have been heartbroken by the 1930s-ness of it all and how much of that was there in the life I spent there, but this had so many memories of how mangy a lot of that was, and in particular how old fashioned those houses are. 

It is as if they have fared worse than Victorian ones and they speak so much of a homesickness of some sort for me. In the grey afternoon the dirty brown pebbledash was not attractive and they looked even worse in the dark as I returned to my car and saw the interiors illuminated in Saturday-night-dom.

There was something about the round window in one of them that should be a lovely 1930s feature but which just looked old and decrepid and second hand and had such an Oxford ring road suburn vibe about it that I never wanted anything to do with when I lived there all those years ago.

I am perplexed how strong my reaction is at times like this and also how at odds it can be with the idealised version in my heart that is tied up with the music of James (the band) and Virgin 1215 and all that all-i-tude of STUFF that just flavours my life all the time.

Being back there, there was something about being transplanted there and it not being the land of milk and honey that remains from the original move to Oxford, but also that tired out Oxford thing of the beautiful town and the blighted suburbs with bad buses and traffic queues and high rents and impossible prices and brown pebble dash and ugly replacement windows and old rotten gates and cars piled up on grass verge pavements and the acceptance of liberal Oxfordians that this is worth it for living in a town that demands high prices but doesn't really pay them back in wages.

I never liked that vibe years and years ago, long before I even was able to think about buying a house and long before I moved away, which, despite its problems has to have been driven partly by that. 

I am trying my best to explain it and not getting anywhere even close to it either.

Happy New Drear

Well here I am, start of a new year, Coughing my way out of a terrible cold, tired from being ill and a DIY project that isn't going well, and the isolation of dark old early January.

I should be painting the walls in the spare room but I wanted to write something down. 

I think January never shapes the rest of the year, either by decision or even perception. But effort put into January can often make the outcome of the year seem very bittersweet; I feel sad about the version of me in 2014 who was trying to turn things around and who got swallowed by the rest of life. The drifter in 2018 or 2020 was probably in a better spot - clueless about what would happen, but just making the most of the time of the season.

"Going For Gold" was always on after Neighbours in the late 80s. This symbolises my A-levels and that whole 6th form thing of not having to be in college if you weren't studying. 

The theme tune sounds like just having had lunch, peanut butter on toast and a yoghurt and an apple, and there being no one in the house, and being old enough to lock up and leave it to bike off to an afternoon of lessons, or just stay at home "studying" (usually reading old magazines or painting or playing guitar, everything but doing college work). 

The tune was 100% synthy and brassy but it sounded so modern and clean and 1980s, nothing nostalgic or 70's or anything, just NOW and VCRs and walkmans and the charts and perms and stonewashed denim and Ford Fiesta XR2s.

If you were there you would know, immediately, of the naff optimism of those keyboard brass sounds and the massed vocals. 

This is without even considering the programme itself - it was a sort of a sign to me of switch the telly off and get out and do something else. 

But I know this also sounds so incredibly old fashioned now, with there being people like nurses and shop managers making decisions about my life who were not even born in 1988. But just you wait, you'll start to feel old soon...

Jeff Koons at the Ashmolean, Oxford

Jeff Koons's reputation precedes him sufficiently that after decades of sensational artworks, even the act of going to see a Jeff Koons exhibition is a spectacle in itself.

Perhaps because of the breadth of Koons’s artistic activity, he is everything that cultural naysayers adore. Banality, pornography, pointlessness and ostentation, made all the more sensational by Koons's own gleeful indifference. 

Over the years, he has played with the art world, creating works that challenge the viewer just by their own fault of visiting the exhibition in the first instance. Now as we get well into the 21st century, he shows no sign of stopping.

The show features a small but well-chosen selection of classic examples of Koons's work. The major themes are all there; banal items elevated to the status of art through the mechanisms of the museum, and everyday objects that are transformed into art by being manufactured in materials that contrast their own formality.

So you can see the balloon bunny fabricated in polished stainless steel and the mystery of the basketball suspended in a tank. You can see the kind of kitsch china figurines your granny used to have, brought into the exhibition on an enormous scale.

Koons combines elements of all of these in his new work, including an oversized figurine of ballerinas, made not only in the same fabricated stainless steel as the bunny, but also now coloured, rendering them in a super saccharine, insanely glossy, shiny tinsel spectacle. 

Being almost life-size, recognizably human in form and yet so synthetic and shiny, it's as if there is some kind of android future lurking within them. In their shininess the more you gaze at them the more you are reflected back with all the distortion of the fairground hall of mirrors.

As well as being a retrospective of his own work, the history of art and the future of Koon's methods are brought together with his “gazing ball” paintings, where classical painting is combined with the mechanized industrial forms of Koon's sculptures. 

Again as you stare and look at the painting, you see yourself reflected in it. You see everybody around you in the gallery reflected in the ball. But it also stares back at you, making me think of Hal from the film 2001 and it's cyclops, monotonal and stubborn refusal to help Commander Dave Bowman.

Also notable is a huge red metallic sculpture in the exhibition. There is something oddly feminine about it and yet visually it is reminiscent of the cellophane-wrapped sweets in Quality Street, or clusters of grapes, all rendered in this strange anodized coloured metal. It's as if Koons took the balloon concept and let it go wild to an almost obscene degree in its dimensions and ostentatiousness.

The very cute thing, of course, about Jeff Coons is his enormous pieces on display in the gallery translate down into perfect gifts, and if you can't quite work out what to do with a gigantic raspberry-coloured emblem of balloon-like femininity, you can buy a facsimile of a rabbit sculpture as if it was made from balloons, but cast in something shiny to put in your house and show to your friends as a sign that “you get what Jeff Koons is all about”.

Review by Francis Bookwood

Jeff Koons at the Ashmolean, Oxford runs from 7th of February to the 9th of June, 2019

“Absolute Vision” at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford

Subtitled “New British Painting in the 1990s”, Absolute Vision is a refreshing departure from the installations and sculptures that so many of the Museum of Modern Art Oxford's touring exhibitions tend to comprise, and is a collection instead of challenging but reassuringly vertical wall-mounted artworks representing British painting in the 1990s.

These are all examples of not only the craft of painting, but the role expected of the artist in this last decade of the 20th century, where having fought two world wars and landed on the moon, the human race is now wondering whether it really does want to dip its toes into the future or actually stay safely on the shores of what it understands. 

Scale and variety mark out this exhibition and the voluminous galleries of Oxford’s MOMA are put to good use. Although all standalone works of art, there’s a division between paintings that are about the act of painting, and works with recognisable figurative themes. 

In the former category are the monochromes of Clem Crosby and Jason Martin, the reductive wash-outs of Callum Innes and the additive pouring of Ian Davenport. 
Simon Callery's work is very large and almost monochrome; on the face of it nothing appears much to be happening. It appears on closer inspection to consist of meticulous hours with something like a scalpel scratching horizontal lines into the beige to reveal the colors behind it.

Fiona Rae, Jane Harris and Mark Francis bridge the gap with abstract works featuring strong patterns, and then getting into the figurative arena we have more intellectually challenging works.

Peter Doig presents Lump/Olin, a baffling, naive representation of somebody skiing on what looks like a dry ski slope. Meanwhile Glenn Brown's work, “I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper” looks like a traditional old master with chiarascuro and lots of expressive putty-like brushwork, but as you get closer, it's almost mirror-like in its flatness.  

Richard Patterson and Lisa Millroy top the charts in terms of technique in stark contrast to the monochromes with lifelike representations of Kimonos and minotaurs.

Elsewhere, Chris Ofili’s vibrant works attack both your vision and nostrils with their elephant dung additions, Richard Wright stands out by painting on the wall of the gallery, there's some slightly shocking work from Marcus Harvey, something from Gary Hume, and of course, everybody's favorite Young British Artist, Damian Hirst with a circular two metre diameter spin painting.

As everybody suspects, these probably aren’t made by Damian Hirst, and yet the fact that he’s the reason why they are created and the fact that they do give us a link to the darling of the young British artists remains worth going to see the exhibition for.

All of the paintings in the show have placards next to them where the artists have a chance to contribute something to help the viewer understand the works. In many of them there's an element of what feels like forced irony. Some are long lists of cliquey influences, some appear to be conversations with no context. Some appear to be witty quips revelling in a self-conscious naivety, and none of these do contemporary art much favors in terms of the “my kid could have done that” crowd. 

But whilst there is an abundance of scoffing and a knowing “can-you-believe-we-actually-get-paid-to-do-this?” artiness to much of this collection of new British paintings, there is nevertheless hope that the verticality of wall-hung art is not dead yet. The honesty of the still-lifes of the past may be absent, but there is still life in painters, brushes and pigments. 

Review by Francis Bookwood.

“Absolute Vision” at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford runs from 10th of November, 1996 to the 23rd of February, 1997.

Blooming in Arms, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford

Heri Dono's installation at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford is a chilling reminder of the realities of war, but also the transformative nature of war.

It occupies one gallery in Oxford’s Museum of Modern Art and when you enter, the space is lit with only red lights. Camouflage netting hangs from the ceiling and the room is filled with a selection of hanging human-like figures made from camouflage netting, prosthetic limbs and elements of militaria.

These are a horrific concoction of humanity and terror, personifying war in the invasive presence of gigantic, ugly amorphous creatures that seem literally the stuff of nightmares, whether that's for the civilian population or the soldiers themselves.

One thinks of landmines and their ability to mutilate. Then there is the horrific power of war to change the landscapes it permeates, turning fields that grow the crops for life into battlefields of death and destruction.

In the center of the room is a brick construction filled with soil. It is not clear whether this is a grave or a monument, but its smell permeates the gallery, adding to the unreal and unpleasant atmosphere generated from the monochromatic lighting and the discarded, mouldy smell of the camouflage netting.

Part of the exhibition is a persistent, muffled radio transmission, hinting at the voices of State propaganda, perhaps the sound of the parents of the nation telling its children that war is necessary; destruction and terror are what we must face almost in the way we're told we have to go to school.

With the gallery attendants also wearing military uniforms it's a horribly effective way to encapsulate war, and made all the stranger because over here in Western Europe the struggles of territories like Indonesia are not simple foreign wars. The guilt of colonialism is never far away.

But even without in-depth understanding of any of the politics, the lighting, the sound, the smell and spectacle of the prosthetic limbs and the size of the horrific statues are so unwelcoming that the urge to escape is high, and in that gesture we are reminded that we can walk away from this. 

Just outside of the gallery the shops and the comforts of life in our own country that isn't suffering from war. We should be glad of that.

But if you have time to visit the exhibition, there is ample food for thought about how lucky we are to live in peace and the mystery of why war is ever seen as any kind of solution.

Review by Francis Bookwood. 

Blooming in Arms by Heri Dono runs from 14th of January to 11th of February, 1996 at the Museum of Modern Art in Pembroke Street, Oxford.

Marina Abramovich. Objects, Performance, Video, Sound. Museum of Modern Art, Oxford

One of the great things about the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford is its modus operandi of either instigating or paying host to touring shows. Despite the name museum, the institution has no permanent collection, instead choosing to provide the citizens of Oxford with a varied selection of exhibitions five or six times per year.

In the case of Marina Abramovich, a Serbian conceptual artist and performer, visitors to the gallery are presented from the very beginning with an exceedingly strong statement. After buying your ticket, you enter the gallery straight into literally the firing line of a sound installation called “War”.

To enter the exhibition, you pass through a dark corridor, rather like a tent, whilst the very realistic sounds of gunfire appear at you from either side. It's a very stark and effective way to illustrate the terrors of war and in particular the harrowing nature of the spiritual attack that comes with the sounds of war. Gunfire has to personify the uncertainty of living and surviving in such an environment.

Elsewhere, the exhibition lives up to its name. There are examples of objects, performance, video, and sound. We can see photographs of past performances, objects installed in situ, and of course video art. 

The most striking of these is “Cleansing the Mirror”, a tower of television sets showing Abramovich ritualistically cleaning a dirty skeleton. The tower of television sets is as tall as a standard adult and we're presented up close with a metaphor for how history leaves a mark on the individual.

Abramovich embraces the skeleton like she would a child, scrubbing at it with soapy water and attempting to restore an emblem of death to some sort of pristine state. This isn't the act of an embalmer or a technician working as a taxidermist. 

It is instead almost a caring, nurturing exercise, cleansing, as the title implies, the skeleton of some kind of unknown burden that it had to endure, and that this somehow will help all of humanity, not just the lone individual for whom the skeleton represents.

Elsewhere there are crystals, puddles of pig's blood and whips made from Korean virgin's hair. The meanings behind these works are multiple and deep. To try and summarize them here would be discounting the experience of seeing them in person. 

I would urge anybody curious to visit this exhibition whilst it's on show at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford between 9th of April and the 2nd of July 1995.

Review by Francis Bookwood