¡La Caixa!:- The Breathing Lesson and Other Stories.

Hola.

A couple of weeks ago I was down at the Whitechapel Gallery to see their small, two room, exhibition of works drawn from the renowned collection of "la Caixa" Foundation in Spain. I took a few photos, had a nose around, went home, uploaded them to my computer, and considered maybe writing a short blog about them. Then some pretty big stuff happened (which you can read about by clicking on here) and I pretty much forgot all about Whitechapel Gallery, art, and writing blogs in general.

Quite rightly so. Anything else would have been stupid. Psychopathic even. But life goes on and I find putting some music on, often classical, and knocking out these blogs to be quite therapeutic. Even when they're hard work or take ages or even both. In fact those are the ones that can often feel the most rewarding afterwards - especially if they get 'likes', shares, or views. I'm needy. I know that.

Don't expect anything too grand from this one. It's me dipping my toes back into the water, trying to get back into some kind of routine, and, if it's a little self-indulgent, then please forgive me. I am trying to make these interesting for other people and not just an exercise in navel gazing. Honestly!

Gerhard Richter - I.G. (1993)

This one will, at least, be short. "la Caixa" was founded in 1904 in Spain and is pledged to a mission of social engagement and outreach - part of which, since the eighties especially, has involved the collection, and promotion, of twentieth century art. Particularly by Spanish artists but also including works from Italy, Germany, Britain, the USA, and Latin America.

From January 2019 through to April 2020 the Whitechapel Gallery is presenting a series of exhibitions of works from "la Caixa", each curated by a writer and featuring an example of their writing. The one I went to was put together by one Enrique Vila-Matas. A new name to me but a novelist, apparently, "known for his metafictions" and one who has put together a small collection of portraits (and two landscapes) and named it 'Cabinet d'amateur, an oblique novel' in homage to a story by French writer Georges Perec in which a painting that contains other paintings is able to generate 'further fictions'.

So far, so highbrow. But what's the art like? Some's good. Some not so good. Gerhard Richter is, quite rightly, a giant of the contemporary art scene and his I.G. (that's the artist's second wife, Isa Genzken), from 1993, not only subverts the traditional portrait by showing the subject from behind but, in looking so akin to a slightly out of focus photograph, attempts to blur the line between painting and photography. I'm not quite sure it does that but its gauzy surface with almost an entire half given over to a lump of pure blackness does aid reflection rather well.

Carlos Pazos, despite adding a fluorescent light across the top of his painting (a nod to the Rauschenberg aesthetic?), has gone for a more typical pose. It's a self-portrait and the artist, pondering his own mortality after turning thirty (he's got some bad news coming) in the Barcelona dancehall Cebeles, could be any one of us caught in a moment. Milonga, the title, refers to a form of Argentinian tango but why this is remains unclear to me!

Carlos Pazos - Milonga (1980)

Miquel Barcelo - Une poignee de terre (A Fistful of Earth) (1989)

In, what seems to be the real theme of this exhibition, Miquel Barcelo's A Fistful of Earth things become further unclear. The obfuscation continues. We learn that Barcelo has included some actual earth in his work, that he came of age towards the end of the Franco dictatorship, and that he visited Mali in 1988. None of which really explains anything about the work. It's nice to look at though. It could be the surface of a far away planet, an overhead view of the desert complete with animal tracks, or perhaps a close up of a fried egg. If you know the answer to this riddle send me a postcard!

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster has got a whole room for her installation, Petite. The French artist has made a piece that plays on our old friends "spatial ambiguities" and "in-between spaces" and it's decent. Spectral shapes of children appear and fade away. Trees, buildings, and other people emerge and disappear behind them. It looked good for a while but I didn't stick around long.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster - Petite (2001)

Dora Garcia - La leccion respiratoria (The Breathing Lesson)

That's the problem with installations. I never know how long I'm supposed to engage with them for. I'm even getting like that with paintings now. At least video art usually tells you how long it lasts - normally way too long! The Spanish artist Dora Garcia's video of a girl being instructed on how to breathe (and also how not to breathe) lasts sixteen fucking minutes. 

I can't hang around that long. I've got blogs to write, pints to drink, sudokus to do. Much longer and it would have tested my increasingly weak bladder. There's lots of waving hands around and clapping and it's all, supposedly, "informed by literature and psychoanalysis" whilst being "interested in the relationship between art and society and the individual" (all that alphabet soup starts to really fill you up, you can get bloated). It fits the remit of the show, alright, but that doesn't mean it's either good, or interesting, art. I genuinely think my still photo, above, is as good (perhaps better) than the actual video!

So we're left with Andreas Gursky (who is, of course, a respected, famous, and rich artist and one I've written about in length at the past) and his, fairly modestly sized for him, photo of an archaeological site in Egypt. The vast sand desert slowly blurs into the verdant Nile valley and, that alone, makes it interesting to look at but further inspection reveals two more details that felt pertinent to both this exhibition and to life itself.

Firstly, look at all those tiny people, tiny excavating machines. No matter how hard man tries to tame nature he will fail. We can even destroy the planet and yet nature will remain elsewhere. Long after we're gone. In this respect it's a memento mori and that's pretty relevant to me both now and, in fact, at all times.

Finally, it turns out Gursky has manipulated the image anyway. So, despite giving the illusion of truth it is in fact a lie. Like all art and like very much in life. All those things we hold dearest to us will one day either crumble into the sand of the desert or, worse, turn out to not be what we thought they were in the first place. Art tells us a lie so it can live forever. In death there is an a honesty that can never be undone.

Andreas Gursky - Theben, West (1993)