Simon Ings

“Ah, bankers, students, workers, officials, servants, you are the cock-suckers of the useful, the masturbators of necessity. I shall never work. My hands are pure.” — Louis Aragon

Northern lights

Posted on July 25, 2016 by simonings

Penelope Umbrico, 30,400,020 Suns from Sunsets from Flickr (Partial) 04/04/16, photographs, machine c-prints, in the Collection of the Artist

The Starry Skies of Art, Serlachius Museums, Mänttä, Finland, to 8 January 2017. For New Scientist, 20 July 2016 .

A FEW hours north of Helsinki, Finland, on the shores of a lake, sits an art museum, opened in the 1930s and much expanded since. Now one of its galleries is filled with 200 years’ worth of artistic visions of the skies, the work of Helena Sederholm, an art-education professor, and science writer Markus Hotakainen.

Scientific approaches to the cosmos are affectionately parodied in Andy Gracie’s Drosophila Titanus – a breeding project to adapt fruit flies for life on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon – and Agnes Meyer-Brandis’s Moon Goose Analogue: Lunar migration bird facility (MGA), which tries to realise, NASA-style, English bishop Francis Godwin’s story The Man in the Moone, whose hero flies to the moon in a chariot towed by “moon geese”.

Reductive approaches to the cosmos reach pathological levels in Marko Vuokola’s Been There, Seen It, Done That, in which the phases of the moon are reduced to a pattern of shadows cast by glass discs resting on a glass shelf.

A more elegaic exploration of the same idea (that we murder to dissect) lies in Petri Eskelinen’s 2016 installation Dying Star. After a few minutes, the viewer’s dark-adapted eye makes out a beautiful and convincing cloud of stars. At regular intervals, lights come on, revealing the cloud for what it is: smeared, worn Perspex sheets stuck with scraps of Post-it note and scrawled over with whiteboard pens: “Yes”; “No”; “No life field”. The night sky is reduced to a bitterly precise, tiresome, anthropocentric hunt for an earthlike planet.

The lights go out. The magic reasserts itself. To comprehend the world, we must reduce it. But as Penelope Umbrico ably reveals in 30,400,020 Suns from Sunsets from Flickr, the world is big enough to take our abuse. And in the moonlit landscapes by 19th-century artists Fanny Churberg and Hjalmar Munsterhjelm, it swallows us whole.

Art reveals the fragile and devastating world of microbes

Posted on November 5, 2015 by simonings

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Visiting Impermanence: The art of microbiology at Gallery Elena Shchukina for New Scientist, 5 November 2015.

HALFWAY along a pleasant foot passage in London’s exclusive Mayfair district, death is waiting, clad in motley both rich and strange.

On the ground floor of Gallery Elena Shchukina, it’s gone gigantically viral. All around are deadly viruses blown into million-times-magnified life by a host of glassblowers under the close direction of UK artist Luke Jerram.

The academic and scientific community have been commissioning Jerram’s flus and fevers for nearly a decade, but it’s good to see them out of their scientific setting. Free from the sneaking suspicion that they illustrate some important medical point, these head-size viruses grow even more magnificently strange.

Jerram is the gallery’s entry drug: downstairs there’s something altogether darker – something that has festered for anywhere between a day and a year under the watchful eye of South Korean artist Seung-Hwan Oh.

New Scientist Default Image

Oh, who studied film and photography in New York before returning to his native Seoul, has found a way to corrupt photographic portraits by soaking them in baths infested with microbes of one sort or another. Penicillin is his favourite. Each species of bacteria metabolises the chemicals of a photograph in a different way: the men and women in Oh’s solo portraits are variously cracked, bled, stained and ravaged – sometimes in beautiful ways.

More often they are ruined, their proportions and perspectives monstrously skewed. Beyond setting the initial conditions, Oh has no control over how his images will distort. Here, a man grows horns. There, some inner demon breaks through the tatters of a human face.

Quite what Oh means by all this isn’t made clear. One senses he is still enraptured by the experiment for its own sake, and looked at this way, as a very advanced work-in-progress, the show – his first in London – does very nicely.

Barbara Hepworth at Tate Britain

Posted on June 24, 2015 by simonings

Let us begin, at least, with a glimmer of humour.

There you are. That’s your lot by way of larfs, should you visit this truly gimlet-faced retrospective of the art of British modernist sculptor Barbara Hepworth.

Tate Britain’s show, which runs from 24 June to 25 October, is billed as the first major Barbara Hepworth exhibition in London for almost 50 years, and features some key sculptures in wood, stone and bronze. These, then, are the treasures which languish under insipid ersatz daylight, against walls painted in the sort of bluish neutrals you find in the toilets at Heathrow.

The first room is the worst, incarcerating Hepworth’s early torsoes under cheap plexiglass vitrines like so much pick-n-mix. But it is not the conspicuous lack of budget that disconcerts, so much as the way the show struggles to establish the young artist’s identity. Every artist operates in some sort of social fluid. Hepworth appears to have damn-near drowned in hers.

Hepworth and her lover Ben Nicholson together evolved an atelier identity, exhibiting together in 1932 at the gallery Arthur Tooth & Sons. Photographs of that show suggest an energy that’s wholly missing here. Nicholson and Hepworth got under each others’ artistic skins, but for reasons I don’t know enough to unpick, the image we’re left with in this show is not so much of Hepworth growing as an artist, so much as being easily led (by Nicholson, by Moore, by Laslo, by political affiliations of one sort or another).

It seems unfair to blame the subject of this show, but I did begin to wonder whether Hepworth herself ought to take some responsibility for what’s gone wrong here. The wall texts several times refer to her determination to control her own image, and I wonder if there isn’t some curatorial frustration peeking through here. What do you do, after all, with an artist who parlayed her way into a most insipid type of celebrity, who fashioned art innocuous enough to grace the UN, and counted its director general Dag Hamarskjold as a friend: arguably the least interesting famous man in history?

Something has failed here; it could well be me. I took a couple of snaps. The photographs aren’t up to much, but just look at the work. That has to be worth a visit, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it? How is it my iPhone had a better time than I did?

“I have nothing to say as an artist”

Posted on April 22, 2015 by simonings

An interview with the sculptor Anish Kapoor for New Scientist.

I have said this over and over again: you make what you make, and you put it in front of yourself first of all. Inevitably, a certain concept arises, and exploring that concept is the real work. If I started off with some big message for the world, it would keep getting in the way.

There is an emotional world and an objective world, and the two mesh. Thirty years ago I began working with the idea that for every material thing, there’s a non-material thing alongside it – sometimes poetic, sometimes phenomenological. For example, I once made a stone chamber and painted it a very dark blue. Thanks to the psychological implications of the colour, if you look inside the chamber it’s as though this stone thing had a non-thing inside it. The cavity becomes an object. You get an effect like that when you look at a polished concave surface. The eye wants to fill the hollow with a sort of convex ghost.

I’ve been interested in what I call “void works” for many years: applying deep, dark colour to mostly concave forms so the space and object are confused. This lead me to Vantablack, a superblack made from carbon nanotubes. It’s extraordinary – the light gets in and is not able to get out. (Indeed, Vantablack absorbs all but 0.035 per cent of visual light.) The discovery of a new material like this opens up the most incredible possibilities. I love the idea that one could walk into a room that isn’t dark and at the same time isn’t there. You could have lights on, but the room wouldn’t be there. There’s something magical about that. It’s that wonderful, liminal moment between wonder and fear – that’s what I aim for.

I don’t mind too much when people call me an illusionist. I’m pretty sure that everything we consider to be real is illusory, or has an illusory element. From a psychological point of view, there’s more deep truth in the unreal than there is in the real. After all, objectively speaking, colour doesn’t even exist. So that’s the game. Keep your balance. Whenever subjectivity and objectivity are put into opposition, never come down on either side.

I’ve always been deeply fascinated by raw pigment, which is at once a colour – a pure, psychological idea – and a real substance. It has this otherness you can’t quite point at. My latest works at Lisson Gallery are made with silicone, all very red and very visceral. I work with red a lot, because of its darkness. The psychology of the red generates a much darker dark than black or blue.

And I’ve always been deeply interested in geometry, and I’ve put some of my pieces into motion to get at forms I can’t produce by any other method. Descension is a whirlpool that produces a natural parabola. It took me 20 years to get it to work, because it needs to be built at a certain scale, and be spinning at a certain rate. What surprised me, once I’d achieved those wonderful parabolic curves, was what happened at the bottom of the pool. A void opened up, a form I never expected to find there, for all the world as though this thing was boring its way the centre of the Earth!

Art and science do sit naturally quite close to each other. But making a statement of that sort in a piece of art is just going to get in the way. Science is apparently rational and art, perhaps, more confused. But they both start out as experimental processes, and both are contained by rules. A poetic purpose is every bit as real as an apparently scientific one. There’s objectivity in art, just as much as there’s subjectivity in science.

Supersize me

Posted on May 19, 2014 by simonings

Anyone wanting a bloodless, contemporary vision of hell should visit Bermondsey, off London’s south bank, and boutique coffee shops that compete to pun on the word “espresso”, and smashed and discoloured prepubescent seventies nudes on old shop signs made modern antiques, and clothes made of 3D-printed string, and Pop-Up Shopping Events, and White Cube.

White Cube, with its high-gated, cobblestone forecourt expressly CAD-designed to accomodate the public executions of the future.

White Cube, passe and oppressive in the same breath, if you can call it a breath: one last, cripplingly painful act of agonal respiration as you wrench open the door and

You’re in. Andrea Gursky is a German photographer whose large-scale photographic work perfectly conveys the human toll wreaked by buildings like this one. (The show’s on until 6 July.) A small, silhouetted human form seeks (and does not find) shelter from the brazen walls of an overlit cathedral-sized faux-gold microwave oven. The stairs and atrium of some presumably pleasant, publicly funded arts venue are collaged into a grotesquely outsize (always outsize) overlit (always overlit) Piranesi dungeon. Spiderman and Batman stand slightly out of kilter before collosal, oversimple seascapes and cityscapes, overwhelmed by the scale of things, turned to clowns.

Imagine turning on an extremely expensive wall-sized television and watching cancer developing in your own lung. This is not an oppressive show, so much as an oppressed one, and your abiding impression of the artist – assuming you can put aside his considerable reputation and the seven-figure prices fetched by his canvases – is of an intellectually sanctioned Roger Dean on a truly epic downswing.

And out.

And look – no, really look at this bloody travesty of a street. The sad and important thing about Gursky is not that he himself is sad, but that he is very obviously right.

A grin without a cat

Posted on May 16, 2014 by simonings

What happens to a body of artistic work when its presiding genius dies? It’s hard to imagine anyone finds it hard to hold in mind the cumulative effect of the works of J G Ballard, say, or even Dame Barbara Cartland. Mythomanes are, above all else, consistent.

But it’s consistency that matters – not personality. While he lived, the writer-artist-filmmaker Derek Jarman practically personified British metropolitan intellectual life. But it was his living personality that held his wildly varied (and variable) world together. Within a couple of months of his death, those of us who’d rated him were beginning to avoid making eye contact: day by day, the pleasures we had shared were ceasing to make any sense.

Time will heal Jarman’s reputation, but very slowly – and I think the work of Chris Marker – the videos, the writings, the photographs, the documentaries, the films, the CD-ROMs, the installations and all the rest of it – is likely to require as long a recuperation.

The Whitechapel Gallery in the East End of London has put together a tremendous retrospective of the life and work of the French artist and documentary maker, who died in 2012. But the experience, as you move dumbfounded from screen to glass case to screen to keyboard, is neither one of pleasure, nor even admiration. In fact it’s cumulatively disturbing.

How can none of this mean anything any more? Is it the gallery, or is it you? (It’s you.) Even Marker’s filmed photo roman La Jetee (the easy one, the entry text, the one that got turned into Twelve Monkeys) slithers over your eyes as slick and as cold as an eel. Are you having some sort of stroke?

Alain Resnais called Marker “the prototype of the twenty-first-century man” and he wasn’t kidding. Marker was Mr Media Saturation, the living incarnation of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. His video mash-ups didn’t just capture the future. They somehow made it inevitable.

And that, of course, is the trouble. We are living in Marker’s world now, just as surely as we are living in Jarman’s. It’s damned hard to map a forest when you’ve been dropped slap-bang in the middle of it.

Feel your way, purblind, from one wall-mounted explanatory text to another. Most are in Marker’s own words. He understands your pain. He even gives it a name: “the megalomanic melancholy in the browsing of past images.”

For now, at least, Marker, the unwitting and posthumous author of his own explanatory texts, lives more fully and more vividly than his work, his subjects, his photographs of 1968, and students demonstrating against “a largely imaginary fascism”.

“In another time I guess I would have been content with filming girls and cats,” he writes. “But you don’t choose your time.”

Dialling out

Posted on May 10, 2014 by simonings

Bumper, Blackspot and Stateless. Three short films by the critical designer and futurist Tobias Revell, with cinematographer Joseph Popper.

Silent, Mostly unpeopled. Still. Lighthouse, Brighton’s digital agency, commissioned these films for House 2014, the town’s annual visual arts festival, which runs until 25 May.

A woman hunts out a digital shadow from where, unmolested, she can dial up vital personal information.

A man hunkers down on Dungenness beach to access domestic French web-servers in an attempt to evade trading restrictions.

A journalist wipes his personal identity and assembles a new one in minutes, to evade the forces of state security.

This is what these films are about. What they actually do is different. What they give you. Calm, and silence, and – oddly – a sense of there being nothing to see.

Roll film again: a woman walks through an industrial estate, studying her smart phone. A man crouches inside a fisherman’s tent, his back to the camera. Another man sits down in a library, then leaves.

The events, the implications, the politics of states and borders, are clear enough, and are what gives these films their pompous portmanteau title – The Monopoly of Legitimate Use, indeed – and their utility for a festival centred around ideas of “migration, refuge and territory”.

But these events, these transactions and transgressions, aren’t really taking place in the physical world at all. They are taking place on-line; on and in and behind glass; at most, in the reflections of tears.

They are not cold films, but they do locate their human action in the digital elsewhere, leaving their actors largely inexpressive, their turmoils and triumphs implied through the plot. Told, not shown.

The result is strangely hopeful. Revell’s is world of borders and restrictions, by-laws and embargoes. But his people, through the cumulative effect of countless subtle transgressions, have already evaded it. They are not escaping, they have already escaped, to the Other Side.