Aesthetics of Christmas Past

// December 21st, 2011 // View Comments // b-legendary, featured

Deck the halls with boughs of holly fa la la la la la la la…… What makes you feel Christmassy? Is it the transformation of familiar space into a winter wonderland? Decorating the tree, putting up lights, hanging a wreath, making paper chains – these are the rituals of Christmas, the traditions that centre us down the years. The whole family or office or class participates in making over their surroundings, bonding as they do. Then there’s the food. To you, Christmas might taste of mince pies and turkey. It might smell like pine. It could feel like an itchy jumper. Christmas is a familiar feast for the senses.

But the sensual worldof a 21^st century Christmas is a rather new invention. What told the Jacobeans or the Georgians that it was the most wonderful time of the year? What were their traditions? Neon reindeer and the X Factor single didn’t feature. A seasonal show at the Geffrye Museum of the Home celebrates British Christmas traditions in Christmas Past: 400 Years of Seasonal Traditions in English Homes. The museum’s eleven period rooms are painstakingly decorated and marvellously evoke long gone Christmas aesthetics.

One room shows a feast in the hall of middle class London family in 1630.  The table’s set with the second course, comprising sweet and savoury foods. Sugar was an expensive commodity in the 17^th century, so the family might have looked forward to this meal all year. Some sweets were made to look like boiled eggs, bacon and walnuts instead. You can also see crystallized fruit and a silvery chequerboard of leach, a milk jelly sweet not unlike Turkish Delight. Ancient pagan traditions still informed many of the major Christmas celebrations at this time. For example, Britons used to celebrate the end of Christmas at Twelfth Night with elaborate games and role-reversal. Cooks would prepare a Twelfth Night cake containing a bean and a pea. The lucky man and woman who discovered the hidden prizes became the King and Queen for the night, served by the other revellers.

The 1695 room looks rather different. Christmas was banned by the Puritans between 1644-60 and many ancient customs had fallen out of favour. Celebrants munched anchovies and olives and drank punch as they listened to flute music. One pagan symbol of eternal life had survived the Puritans – decorating with evergreen branches.  By 1745, Christmas was still an austere affair. People drank cordial, received guests and went to church instead of holding raucous feasts. Christmas presents became popular during this time, supplanting the earlier practice of giving alms to the poor. A 1790s parlour is also on display, but with no turkey and stuffing in sight. The traditional Christmas meal of this period was roast beef served alongside plum pudding.

In the 1830 room, you can tell that the Victorian era saw a revival of the old customs. For example, there’s a pack of Twelfth Night cards. Celebrants picked a card at random and played the character on it, turning the role-reversal into a game similar to today’s charades. The Twelfth Night cake has become an elaborate Christmas cake, decorated with a sparkling crown and plaster of Paris.

Then you come to the 1870 room, which the viewer recognizes immediately. Many of our modern-day Christmas traditions come from the Victorian era. Although Britons had always decorated with evergreen, it took Queen Victoria’s German husband to popularize Christmas trees. Christmas cards are often on display, written in beautiful copperplate handwriting. Parents used to send them out as proof of their children’s penmanship, not unlike today’s parents displaying their charming offspring in card form. It would take another thirty years for the Dutch tradition of leaving out stockings to reach Britain by way of America.

Christmas Past is a fabulously nostalgic exhibition. As we bustle into the next few days of chocolate and Downton Abbey, it’s interesting to look back on how much we’ve changed. Merry Christmas from blur. And if you want a historically aware piece of artwork, you could be choosing pitches before Twelfth Night if you brief the Exchange.

Wild and Wonderful Winter Art

// December 19th, 2011 // View Comments // b-inspired, b-scene, featured

Baby, it’s cold outside. For centuries, the harsh beauty of wintry weather has inspired artists. Here are our favourite winter artworks.

Avalanche in the Grisons Here, Turner shows us the awesome power of winter. Tonnes of snow cascade down the mountain, ripping up trees and smashing boulders. The pine trees give us some idea of the scale of the avalanche. Turner is well known for his depictions of the sublime, extreme forces of nature, which I explained earlier. The snow is moving at such a steep angle that it looks as if it’s coming directly out of the sky, about to crush the viewer. A stimulating antidote to twee winter scenes.

Piss Flowers When it snowed, Helen Chadwick didn’t roll snowballs or build snowmen. She made sculptures. Chadwick urinated into deep snow and made casts of the melted spaces. It’s a rather disgusting methodology, immediately bodily. But the resulting forms are abstract and beautiful, like alien fungi or underwater growths. Even if you don’t how they were made they’re recognizably organic. A great example of how art can make the familiar strange.

Blotter I’ve been a fan of Peter Doig ever since his 2008 exhibition at the Tate Modern. Doig is fascinated by reflections in water and ice. This painting shows a typical Canadian winter scene. See more here. But Doig puts his own unsettling twist on the composition. Off-kilter horizontal lines dominate the composition, with clashing patterns in between. There’s no easy place for the eye to ‘rest.’ The horizon is also unusually low, forcing our attention on the lake. Although the boy appears to be standing on the lake, ripples run out underneath him. Is the ice solid? Is the boy about to fall through, or could he be walking on water? Doig’s paintings toe the line between fantasy and realism, so anything is possible.

Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch Clearly, Rev. Walker takes skating very seriously. No slipping or flailing for him. He skims along in perfect balance, arms folded in, looking off into the distance. The indistinct wilderness in the background emphasizes the precision of his clothes and movement. Henry Raeburn transforms the fun and comical act of skating into a controlled meditative exercise. Guardian critic Jonathan Jones wrote that this reverend represents the Scottish Enlightenment, the triumph of Protestant reason over Catholic superstition.

Lavacourt Under Snow What colour is snow? You’d probably say white. But in this painting, Monet shows us how colourful snow can be. Amazingly, there’s no pure black or white here. Instead, Monet uses blues and pinks and greens to pull out the different tones and shapes of a country snowscape. His impression of the frozen Seine, the bleak sky and shuttered cottages make the viewer feel cold over a hundred years later.

Do you need seasonally-inspired artwork? You can have a piece before springtime when you Brief the Exchange.

Street Artist Swoon

// December 13th, 2011 // View Comments // b-street, featured

Swoon has captured our imagination with her decaying street art. She’s not a graffiti artist, rather she prints her works on paper before hand-painting them and pasting them onto walls. The pieces decay after a while, becoming ragged and faded. Eventually they disappear completely. Right now, her installation ‘Murmuration’ is on display at Black Rat Projects in Shoreditch. We’d encourage you to go.

Swoon, real name Caledonia Dance Curry, is worlds away from more traditional street artists like Banksy. There’s something macho about Banksy’s graffiti work. He uses stencils to quickly spray cheeky or shocking images onto walls and bridges, often touching on political themes. Rats often appear in his work, and he filled his exhibition in Notting Hill with over 100 live ones. We’re Banksy fans, but we have to admit his work his impactful rather than subtle.

By contrast, Swoon draws ordinary people, often women and children. The images are large-scale reproductions of her drawings with the pencil lines clearly visible. They retain that hand-drawn feel, meaning they feel intimate despite their size. Swoon also hand-paints each image, after printing them using a linoleum block. You can watch a video of Swoon putting up a piece and explaining her methodology here.

It’s clear that Swoon puts a lot of thought into her images. The woman she pastes up in the video is her vision of Thalassa, an ancient Greek water goddess. Swoon came up with the drawing in New Orleans, where she worked after Hurricane Katrina. She sketched her friend Naima, a performer in a show called Hurricane Season. The original print was over 3m and formed part of an installation at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

We often associate street art with political statements. And some of Murmuration’s images like this one could be interpreted as political. It shows a cut-out of a fat and evil-looking man towering over a woman adjusting her headscarf. The woman’s dress shows the corrugated rooftops typical of a refugee camp. Other drawings could be inspired by Swoon’s time living and working in post-earthquake Haiti. She doesn’t belabour the point though, allowing the viewer to reach his or her own decision.

So who is Swoon? Her real name is Caledonia Dance Curry and she grew up in Florida. Like countless aspiring artists she was drawn to Brooklyn, where she fell in with other hippie types. She wandered the streets and papered the walls before becoming interested in working collectively to tackle bigger projects. Her band of helpers is now known as the Toyshop Collective. They’ve built houses from local materials in Haiti and New Orleans. More famously, they created performance art by sailing down the Mississippi and up the Venetian Grand Canal in ragtag collections of handmade boats.

Swoon is pushing the boundaries of street art. Do you need a groundbreaking piece of art? Let our artists help – brief the Exchange.

Intelligent Installation: the Turner Prize

// December 7th, 2011 // View Comments // featured

Controversy is the lifeblood of the Turner Prize. Each year, the public thrills with horror at the entrants, proclaiming the death of art. Pieces like Tracey Emin’s My Bed, Martin Creedy’s The Lights Going On and Off and Simon Starling’s ShedBoatShed have made the British public ask “What is art?” each year. Of course, the amount of criticism directed at the Turner Prize also raises its profile.

So we were surprised by the lack of buzz around this year’s Turner Prize. Many people didn’t even realize it was happening. This might be because it’s moved from London to the Baltic gallery in Gateshead. But it might also be because this year’s winner Martin Boyce presented a more palatable piece.

Do Words Have Voices is an installation starkly evocative of an urban park. Light filters through aluminium leaves, a bin structure is lined with a rag and a desk has letters scratched into it. Boyce depicts organic structures using entirely straight lines. He was inspired by a 1925 Modernist park design containing four concrete trees, by Joel and Jan Martel. In this interview, he explains that the tree “just sort of blossomed” in his mind. He created iterative works and sketches of the layout, which evolved into a unique typeface. The letters cascading down the walls and scratched into the desk structure are written in that font. Do Words Have Voices is full of layered references to modernism, making it more academic than previous winning works. It’s an intelligent installation, which might explain the lack of public outcry.

The judges praised Boyce’s installation for its “new sense of poetry.” Boyce seemed to agree – he replied to a question with with “I guess it has something to do with hope and finding the poetic in the abject.” This philosophy may have been informed by his experiences of studying and living in the bleak city of Glasgow.

Press reaction to Boyce’s victory has been mixed. The Telegraph pointed out that the public favoured George Shaw to win, criticising the judges’ choice as “a conscious slap in the face to popular taste.” The Telegraph is apparently opposed to “the increasing academicisation of contemporary art.” Perhaps they preferred the dismembered cow. A Guardian blogger was “enraged” by the selection. Elsewhere, though, The Guardian described Boyce’s piece as a “quietly atmospheric, lyrically autumnal sculptural installation.”

Do you need a Modernist installation? Or perhaps an art-noir vision of urban parks? We can help, brief the Exchange.