Amsterdam: Photographs via Instagram V

The following fifteen photographs were taken in Amsterdam between April and early May. A number of them feature the water and those streets around the top of the Amstel, including Staalstraat, and a view from Groenburgwal towards Zuiderkerk – the church where Rembrandt buried three of his children; and which was painted by Monet on a visit to Amsterdam in 1874.

There is a shot of Le Moulin de Gooyer, an old mill to the east of the centre; there are sunsets in the Vondelpark and along Prinsengracht; a bronze by gold dome and cupola on the Leidseplein, seen from Marnixstraat; the original façade of the Stedelijk Museum; the Museumplein; and a Dutch flag and orange folk on Queen’s Day, more photographs of which may be viewed here.

Van Gogh in Paris: The Radicalising of a Palette and a Brush

A few weekends ago, I began what is intended as a short series, impelled by the selection of paintings by Vincent van Gogh which have been on show at the Hermitage Amsterdam. The exhibition there, entitled Vincent, comprised a thematic arrangement of seventy-five paintings whilst the Van Gogh Museum was undergoing refurbishment. It came to a close – having run since September – at the end of last week; with the Van Gogh Museum to reopen this Wednesday, 1 May.

The purpose of my series is to consider and draw out some of the aspects and juxtapositions which the thematic display at the Hermitage Amsterdam suggested. I gave the first piece in my series the title ‘Gauguin’s Chair and La Berceuse: Conceptualising Red and Green in the Art of Van Gogh’. This is the second of the series; a third part will be published here over the next week.

Having essentially foregone an early career as an art dealer; then failing on his explicitly religious mission; Van Gogh turned to art around 1880, at the age of twenty-seven. He had drawn frequently while pursuing a religious ministry in the Borinage through 1879; dismissed from his post there by the authorities – due to his unkempt appearance and squalid living conditions, which rendered him indistinguishable from the miners and peasants he was supposed to be ministering to – Van Gogh embarked in earnest on an artistic pathway; and in 1880 was encouraged to travel to Brussels, where he enrolled, in November, at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, to study drawing formally.

He was in Brussels only a few months before moving with his parents to Etten, where he resumed drawing the countryside and the locals. After a string of arguments with his family concerning his lifestyle, his prospects, and his forceful and hasty attempts to begin a relationship with his widowed cousin, Kee Vos-Stricker, Van Gogh departed from his family in late 1881, and moved to The Hague. It was here that Van Gogh began painting. He was instructed in oil and watercolour by his cousin-in-law, the realist painter Anton Mauve. Though he continued to admire Mauve, and held him as a model artist, the pair soon fell out – owing, Van Gogh believed, to Mauve discovering and disapproving of his nascent relationship with Clasina Maria Hoornik, ‘Sien’, a prostitute who was pregnant when she and Van Gogh first met. Van Gogh lived with Sien, her young daughter, and her infant son, from the middle of 1882 until the autumn of 1883 – when he abruptly left, moving to Drenthe, then soon on to Nuenen.

Van Gogh’s first acclaimed artistic compositions were painted in Nuenen. Commencing at the beginning of 1884, the numerous studies Van Gogh made of weavers, of still lifes, of peasants’ heads, culminated in The Potato Eaters, which he completed in April 1885. There are some consistencies in these early paintings with Van Gogh’s later works: shared compositional characteristics, for instance a perspective when painting buildings whereby the top and front of the building comes towards the viewer, appearing both sturdy and dynamic (compare The Cottage (1885) and Old Cemetery Tower at Nuenen (1885) with The Church at Auvers (1890)); and a thick application of paint. Yet these Nuenen scenes were dark, often dimly lit and with brown the predominant colour; there are none of the vivid colour combinations, bold lines and lively brushstrokes for which Van Gogh is most recognised.

Van Gogh’s art changed in stages and owing to key influences. He left Nuenen for Antwerp in November 1885. Immediately enthralled by Antwerp’s bustling docks, and by the Japanese woodcuts on sale there, he conflated the two in a letter to Theo soon after arriving, on 28 November. In this letter, he evocatively describes the mass of contrasting figures and scenes which have caught his eye on walks about the docks; and tellingly for his art explains:

One of De Goncourt’s sayings was ‘Japonaiserie for ever’. Well, these docks are one huge Japonaiserie, fantastic, singular, strange — at least, one can see them like that.

I’d like to walk with you there to find out whether we look at things the same way.

One could do anything there, townscapes — figures of the most diverse character — the ships as the central subject with water and sky in delicate grey — but above all — Japonaiseries.

I mean, the figures there are always in motion, one sees them in the most peculiar settings, everything fantastic, and interesting contrasts keep appearing of their own accord.

…

The overall effect of the port or of a dock — sometimes it’s more tangled and fantastic than a thorn-hedge, so tangled that one can find no rest for the eye, so that one gets dizzy, is forced by the flickering of colours and lines to look now here and now there, unable to tell one thing from another even after staring at a single spot for a long while.

Whilst in Antwerp, Van Gogh took exams at the city’s Academy of Fine Arts. However, he was drinking heavily and became sick, and in March moved to Paris where he stayed, despite his brothers’ reservations, with Theo. The two years Van Gogh spent in Paris before departing for Arles were full of experimentation; he was able to view the Impressionists and Cézanne, but was propelled most by his fervour for ‘Japonaiseries’, his introduction to the works of Monticelli, and his acquaintance with Paul Signac. His palette became progressively brighter and more colourful, and towards the end of 1886, and through the spring of 1887, his brush came to life.

A number of paintings from this period – the endpoints and focal paintings of this piece – demonstrate this conflux of influences. In late 1886 Van Gogh began a group of portraits which evince looser brushstrokes and highlights, resulting in more nuanced and energetic works of art. These include Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat; Portrait of a Man with a Skull Cap, the first two of three portraits of Père Tanguy (the first a typical portrait, the second highly colourised with Tanguy seated in front of a Japanese screen and Japanese prints – which Van Gogh reworked a year later for the third piece); and Portrait of the Art Dealer Alexander Reid.

Compared with these portraits, around March 1887, Agostina Segatori Sitting in the Café du Tambourin is less posed, Van Gogh capturing Agostina from a short distance, seemingly lost in thought, with a single Japanese print suggested on the wall behind. All of these paintings are radical extensions – in colour and in brushwork – upon the portraits Van Gogh had painted previously. Some of the street scenes and landscapes which Van Gogh produced in the same spring appear more radical departures than extensions in any linear sense.

Boulevard de Clichy is comprised of short, narrow, but consistent lines, and an almost neon palette with prominent greens and pink-purples. The thin application of paint, with the canvas apparent between brushstrokes, is quite unlike the impasto of Van Gogh’s later career. The colours and the dress and poise of the figures show the effects of the Japanese woodcuts Van Gogh was continuing to collect. View of Paris (or View of Paris from Vincent’s Room in the Rue Lepic) demonstrates a thicker application of paint, and the marked influence of the pointillism practiced by Seurat and Signac; quick lines are joined and overlaid by dots of paint, with juxtapositions of blue and yellow, green and red.

The Stedelijk Museum recently altered those Van Goghs showing from its collection; La Berceuse has left the wall, and in its place has appeared one of a group of paintings Van Gogh made of vegetable gardens in Montmartre. Completed towards that summer, Vegetable Gardens in Montmartre (also known as Kitchen Gardens in Montmartre) shows the same utilisation of thin lines and vibrant colours, here moving rhythmically in all directions to produce a coherent composition. These paintings, as much as Van Gogh’s emerging qualities as a painter, emphasise his skill as a draughtsman; echoing his drawings, predating his revolutionary use of the reed pen in Arles.

Mike Kelley Retrospective

The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam’s home of modern and contemporary art and design since 1874, was forced to close for renovation in late 2003. Moving into the Post CS building – situated in the docklands to the north of the city centre – for four-and-a-half years, from 2008 the Stedelijk’s collection was without a home, the museum maintaining a presence through a series of smaller, temporary exhibitions and a programme of seminars, lectures and educational events. With the renovation works progressing, and a new wing, designed by Dutch firm Benthem Crouwel Architects, added to the existing structure, the Stedelijk’s reopening on the Museumplein was scheduled for late September, 2012.

The Stedelijk had been planning, for the first major exhibition after its reopening, to show some of the latest works of American artist Mike Kelley. When Kelley died in January 2012, found in his bathtub in Pasadena, just outside Los Angeles, having apparently committed suicide, the Stedelijk’s plans inevitably changed. Instead, a retrospective of Kelley’s career was organised, and opened at the Stedelijk on December 15. It is the largest exhibition of Kelley’s work ever shown, occupying the expanse of the museum’s new wing; and it is the Stedelijk’s first major international exhibition since it reopened last 23 September. The retrospective will run at the Stedelijk until the end of this week, before moving on to the Centre Pompidou in Paris; MoMA PS1 in New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

The retrospective is organised broadly chronologically, rooms on the basement floor showing pieces from the earlier decades of Kelley’s career, while the first floor focuses on his most recent work. Kelley’s artworks span a great variety of media, from found art objects to video installations and performance art, painting, drawing, sculpture, collage, architectural sketches, and pieces which emphasise writing and quotations. The endeavour of any retrospective is to give a full sense of an artist throughout the course of their career, and the Kelley retrospective succeeds in showing and appositely suggesting some of the central themes to which Kelley returned time and again in his work. These themes feel both intensely personal and deliberately social; and demonstrate both figurative and abstract aesthetic concerns.

The first room, a sort of passageway onto the exhibition, shows a group of wall textiles, and a series of drawings which Kelley made after the Sad Sack comic strip – an American comic created during the Second World War, depicting life in the American military. Kelley’s drawings take panels from the comic and remove everything but the rubbish in them, leaving only whatever garbage, dirt and grime appears in the frame.

Opening out, the second room of the exhibition features works from the series Memory Ware Flats (2003). These consist of canvases made up of found objects – predominantly jewellery, but also badges, buttons and bottle tops – and adopt the practises of Canadian folk art. A sculpture of a reptile sits in the middle of the room, reminiscent of Gaudi’s salamander at Parc Güell, but shorn of colourful tiling and looking depressed; and a sound installation hoots away, speakers calling and responding stretched between two boards painted black and white on silver, one depicting a foot, the other something which looks like a toad wearing sunglasses.

Another room shows those related works which make up the assemblage John Glenn Memorial River Reclamation Project (Including the Local Culture Pictorial Guide, 1968-1972, Wayne/Westland Eagle) (2001). There are four facets to the assemblage, which Kelley developed over a couple of visits to Detroit, the city in which he grew up, in 1998 and again in 2001. Kelley’s ‘Artistic Statement’ on the John Glenn Memorial River Reclamation Project ties it to the earlier Memory Ware Flats, through its similar utilisation of found objects, and because it too plays upon philosophical and medical conceptions of memory, figured through the real and reconceived childhood of the artist. The centrepiece of the room is a statue of John Glenn – the first American to orbit the earth, who maintained a long political career after leaving NASA in 1965 – made of shards of coloured glass and ceramics which Kelley obtained by dredging the Detroit River. Glenn’s figure is slightly extended, and Kelley expressed the influence of Alberto Giacometti on the sculpture. Spreading from the plinth on which Glenn stands there are piled deposits of glass and ceramics, organised by colour, and some pushed, stacked or arranged into rising mounds.

Two cabinets bookend the mass of glass and ceramic. These contain vertical drawers, which can be pulled out; and the drawers encase photographs which Kelley took of Detroit local newspaper editions published between 1968 and 1972. On one of the room’s walls, the Black Out project consists of a series of black and white photographs strictly documenting Kelley’s journey down the Detroit River. A further group of colour photographs were intended to show the river’s shoreline, but a camera malfunction left predominantly black images with only slithers of colour.

Kelley ultimately considered this malfunction ‘providential’, feeling the black images served as a point of connection with another project, Educational Complex (1995). Here an extensive architectural model, several rough architectural sketches, and a couple of suspended mobiles endeavour to bring into a single space all of the educational institutions which Kelley attended as a youth; as well as depicting those gaps, those blank spaces and empty sites, which represent facilities and areas which Kelley either does not remember, or does not want to remember owing to upsetting events which occurred there.

The mounds of ceramics; the Sad Sack drawings which were part of Kelley’s Half a Man project, completed in the late 80s; a series of black acrylic paintings of inner organs, painted around the same time and shown elsewhere in the exhibition; and Lumpenprole (1991), a large floor-rug with unidentified lumps: all demonstrate Kelley’s repeated interest in volume and amorphous shapes. That these shapes protrude and exist seems to allow for discovery and for knowledge; yet the shapes consistently subvert knowledge because they are imprecise, posited between different contexts, and cannot be accurately identified. The mounds of the John Glenn River Reclamation Project alternately appear like volcanic rock formations, unplanned yet still somehow designed; or as emergent cities, with the sort of inner logic and ethereality which is expressed in literature in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. In these sculptures, in Black Out, and in Educational Complex, Kelley’s work simultaneously emphasises the importance of place to us as individuals, whilst suggesting its incompleteness, its incapacity to serve as a ground for our memories, feelings and personalities.

More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin (1987) is perhaps Kelley’s most famous work. On a canvas covered by Afghan rugs, there hang numerous stuffed toy dolls and animals. This has variously been interpreted as an homage to childhood; as a comment upon nostalgia; and as criticising the system of labour which results in the production of such toys; whilst Kelley himself most frequently discussed the work within the context of family relations, and their complex patterns of giving and receiving, which for Kelley implicate impossible obligations and unpayable debts. Ah…Youth! (1991) makes similar use of stuffed toys. It features a row of eight portrait, passport-style photographs, seven showing stuffed animals, with Kelley’s face in between. Concepts of animism are evoked, with the stuffed animals appearing more overtly expressive, more full of character, than the portrait of Kelley. Kelley worked with Sonic Youth on several video pieces through the 80s; and the band used one of the portraits from Ah…Youth! for the cover of their 1992 album, Dirty.

Other rooms on the ground floor show collections of photographs which, in the diversity of their subject matter, prefigure an Instagram ‘explore’ page; the corridor from Kelley’s Pay for Your Pleasure (1998), with posters quoting canonical artists and philosophers who repeatedly stress the link between art and crime, but which, as an exhibit, lacks purpose detached from the rest of the Pay for Your Pleasure series; a group of birdhouses which Kelley built out of wood in the late 70s, and named after different architectural movements; and The Banana Man (1983), comprising a costume, drawings and video installations based upon a childhood television character which Kelley never saw himself, but recreated based on the recollections of friends.

On the first floor, the Kandors series involves sculptures and found object art meant to be representative of Krypton, the native world of Superman. The canisters and tubs of Kandor 15 (2007) show the same fondness for bold, discrete colour that is evident in the arrangement of the ceramics in the Detroit River project. In the adjoining room, Day Is Done (2004-05) features 32 installations, utilising video, sound and light. The series was part of a planned but never completed wider project, entitled Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions, which was to comprise 365 pieces which would show as a cycle over twenty-four hours. The Day Is Done installations feature reenactments of scenes which Kelley interpolated from reading high-school yearbooks and local newspapers. As with much of his work, there is a playfulness here that is equally engaging and unsettling; an acting out into excess of what is most layered and difficult to grasp in mundane life.

________

Mike Kelley’s ‘Artistic Statement’ concerning the John Glenn Memorial River Reclamation Project (Including the Local Culture Pictorial Guide, 1968-1972, Wayne/Westland Eagle) (2001): http://dia.emsix.com/exhibitions/artiststake/projects/multimedia/kelley_statement.html

A Bomb magazine interview with Kelley from 1993, in which he discusses a number of his earlier projects: http://bombsite.com/issues/38/articles/1502

amsterdamarm: A Blog and a Guide to the City

amsterdamarm

Over the past couple of days, or really since the weekend, I’ve been working on a sort of hybrid, a cross between a blog which will consider daily life in Amsterdam, with an emphasis on art and culture, and a cultural guide to the city. The site is ready to ‘go live’, I think; and this post serves to recognise and declare the fact. The site’s address is:

http://www.amsterdamarm.com/

and it will be linked from this moment on at the top of the page, via the lowercase ‘amsterdam’.

The site is supposed to complement this one, and its related tumblr. pages, culturedarm and visualarm. Lengthy reviews of musical events, art exhibitions, and restaurants will remain here and be linked via amsterdamarm. Obviously all extensive discussion, hypotheses and analyses and explorations regarding pieces of art will remain here. The site will, in its first endeavour, essentially be a place where I can blog about some of the more immediate goings on in the city, providing briefer, more throwaway, but nevertheless engaging comments, depictions, reviews, highlights, and so on and so forth. I’ll post pictures of the city on a regular basis too.

The second part of the site consists of a series of guides to the city. At the moment, I have produced fairly extensive guides to the city’s musical venues – popular, classical and jazz – and cinemas, featuring pictures, descriptions, directions, and links. Another guide currently details what may be found upon visiting the city’s four most prominent art museums: the Van Gogh, Stedelijk, Hermitage Amsterdam and Rijksmuseum. These guides, the latter in particular, will be updated in the coming days and weeks, and continually thereafter. A fourth link will, provisionally at least, simply collate all those postings on the front page which relate to food, to restaurants, bars, and cafés. I roughly intend to produce a guide to the best shops and markets in the city for music, for art, for literature, for food. The site may also develop and extend in unintended ways.