I'm Beginning To See The Light:Brian Clarke @ the Newport Street Gallery.

It's nice to see art that has a profound and emotionally involving concept attached to it, it's good to visit exhibitions where the careers of great artists are shown in depth, and it's good to see shows that make you look, and think, about art in a completely different way.

But it's also nice, sometimes, to just look at some pretty pictures and Brian Clarke's A Great Light, a free exhibition at the Newport Street Gallery in London, is just that. Lots of pretty pictures. Made using stained glass. Which I don't imagine to be a medium that many artists are using in 2023 so perhaps it's no surprise that the Oldham born Clarke, now seventy years old, is seen as a leading light in the field!

 

 Ardath (2023)

Yes, light! You can see what I did there. The thing about stained glass is that it lets the light in and diffuses it. The light becomes a movable part of the art and today was a very sunny day so what with the Newport Street Gallery being impressively spacious and airy there was a lot of light in there. If not many people. Probably more invigilators than visitors to be fair.

Clarke's been working as an artist for over fifty years but much of what was on show at A Great Light was made in the last couple of years (he's very productive) and even the oldest works on show only went back to 2022. Some of his work would have been far too big to even fit it into this large gallery. An architectural fan, he's made work that's up to 2000 metres squared in size and many of them have been added to buildings in locations from Leeds to Jerusalem. 

Ardath, the first work you see in the first room, is a mere forty-two metres squared and it makes great use of the light streaming in from the window behind it. It's all flowery and it seems to go very well with the Sigur Ros album I'm listening to as I type this. It seems to me to be inspired by paintings like Monet's Water Lilies but it also reminds me of some of the recent immersive work David Hockney has made.

Stroud Ossuary (2023)

Stroud Ossuary (detail) (2023)

 

 HENI the Eighth (2023)

Stroud Ossuary was intended for a sixteenth century yeoman's house in Gloucestershire and we can only assume the owner of that house, or whoever lived there, liked skulls because that's a lot of skulls. Don't have nightmares.

HENI the Eighth is one of the more traditional looking pieces of stained glass on show and is inspired by Clarke's teenage visits to the cathedrals of York and Canterbury. There's a lad who know how to have fun.The heraldic symbols used, however, have been appropriated from a building less celebrated, Rochdale Town Hall. Check it out, it's an impressive Gothic Revival edifice.

Lead Night Orchid IV/V/VI/II/I/III (2015)

 

 Shopping List (2008)

 

 Shopping List (detail) (2008)

Don't Forget The Lamb (2008)

Things get a bit strange in the next room. There's some, comparatively, unremarkable if pleasant abstract daubs all either untitled or given the title Late Night Orchid followed by a Roman numeral and then there's some hands holding a book open and what almost looks like a map but doesn't quite fit the shape of any country I can think of. The latter has the legend "don't forget the lamb" and the former, as the title implies, has a shopping list attached.

Potatoes, onions, sprouts, tomatoes, lettuce, red pepper, cucumber, and various bits of dead animals. Buy why? The only clue is that he made these works following the death of his mother Lilian and my guess, and I think/hope it's a good one, is that he wanted to preserve her hand-writing in posterity and this seemed a good way of doing it. Often when people are gone it is the very small reminders of their absence that can be the most potent and once you understand that as regards this work it's not so strange after all. It's rather touching.

Study for Caryatids (2002)

Study for Caryatids (2002)

Though I'm not totally sure I understand what's going on with Study for Caryatids except Clarke showing off that he can use stained glass to make fairly realistic looking portraits. I'm a big fan of caryatids, and the sitter is a fine figure of a man for sure, but I'm not quite sure what the idea behind these works actually is. Maybe they just look nice. I'm sure they do to lots of people.

The Studies in Grisaille, which share a room with the caryatids, are taken from photographs of American warships off the coast of Thailand. They're very, intentionally, out of focus and if you walk up close to them you see a load of coloured dots - like when, as a kid, you used to put your eyes right up next to the television, but they're strangely moving and a little ominous.

Study in Grisaille I (2002)

Study in Grisaille II (2002)

Though, from there on in, everything else in the show is the proverbial riot of colour. Be it folding screen works or smaller more intimate pieces. Even if some of the works depict what look like mushroom clouds (judging by the name, Manhattan, they are) or potentially poisonous jellyfish (there's something of the Warhol with those ones) and it's a pleasure just to walk though the rooms containing these pieces.

So that's what I did. It wasn't art that was demanding either of my time or of my intellect (ha!) but it was art that was rather pleasing and that - and a Maltesers ice cream, sometimes, is enough.

Kabinettscheiben (2019-20)

Kabinettscheiben (2019-20)

Kabinettscheiben (2019-20)

Kabinettscheiben (2019-20)

Kabinettscheiben (2019-20)

Kabinettscheiben (2019-20)

 

Flowers for Zaha (2016)

 

Orchids and the Void of Lust (2017)

 

Manhattan (2018)

The Illusion of Logic (2017)

A Cure For Pain:Painkiller.

"Where is the sacrifice? And tell me where, where is the faith? Someday there'll be a cure for a pain" Cure For Pain, Morphine

"All human life is a combination of two things. Running away from pain and running towards pleasure" - Richard Sackler

"This shit is addictive as fuck" former Purdue Pharma employee

OxyContin is a very strong, very effective, painkiller. It's also a highly addictive drug and has been responsible for tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of deaths across the USA and elsewhere. The makes of OxyContin, Purdue Pharma, knew this very early on but they denied it strenuously. Purdue Pharma, and its owners - the Sackler family, were a very powerful organisation and the people who were getting addicted to, and dying from, OxyContin weren't powerful at all. In fact, as their addictions took hold they became ever less powerful.

In a sense, it's remarkable anything was done about it at all but Painkiller (Netflix, directed by Peter Berg, created by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster, and based on two books:- Patrick Radden Keefe's The Family That Built An Empire Of Pain and Barry Meier's Pain Killer:An Empire Of Deceit And The Origin Of America's Opioid Epidemic) manages to tell the story of the Sackler family, the drugs they pushed, and the incredible amount of damage they caused in a way that is engaging and easy to follow.n If, often, shocking.

It's also tense and, of course, addictive viewing. The story is told in four different strands and the most recent one involves Virginia investigator Edie Flowers (Uzo Aduba) arriving in Washington DC to meet with her colleagues Brianna Ortiz (Ana Cruz Kayne) and Bill Havens (Ron  Lea). Ortiz and Havens are trying to consolidate multiple law suits against Purdue Pharma into one because they believe that gives them a better chance of getting justice, or at least some kind of payment.

Flowers, who we soon learn has been on the case of Purdue for years, seems, at first, resigned to failure but when she learns that they've deposed the chairman and president of Purdue, Richard Sackler (Matthew Broderick), she becomes a lot more interested. Ortiz and Havens enlist Flowers to work with them and, as she does, she tells them the story of OxyContin, Purdue Pharma, and her attempts to bring them to justice.

There's so many digressions into the history of the Sackler family and big pharma, and so many images of explosions and fractals, that sometimes it's like watching Oppenheimer if it'd been directed by Adam Curtis. Or HyperNormalisation if it'd been directed by Christopher Nolan. 

Richard Sackler's dad, Raymond (Sam Anderson) and his two brothers, Arthur (Clark Gregg) and Mortimer (John Rothman), started Purdue Pharma with Arthur being the main man. He realised the pharmaceutical business wasn't about anything but sales and marketing - and lies, he branded lithium "a lobotomy in a bottle" (and he knew about lobotomies, he'd carried them out) but, even better - to him, it was a lobotomy with repeat custom.

That seems to me to be a direct result of the US giving it's health care system over to capitalist private providers (whose bottom line, always, is increasing shareholder's profits and, never, helping people with medical problems). The Sacklers moved into using cocaine for dental care and were awarded a contract for prescribing Valium. Described here as "the world's first blockbuster drug".

The Sacklers became very very rich and soon began a process of culturewashing. Or, as Wikipedia has it, reputation laundering. In Britain alone, the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery were taking donations from the Sacklers until as recently as 2019 and the Serpentine Sackler gallery in Hyde Park didn't change its name to Serpentine North until 2021.

When, in 1987 - aged 73, Arthur Sackler died of a heart attack, his nephew Richard took over (once he'd negotiated a big and hugely dysfunctional family) Purdue Pharma and the drug the Sacklers would then become most associated with was OxyContin. It began its life as a niche drug for terminal cancer patients and that's, quite clearly, where it should have stayed.

But it didn't. Richard Sackler pushed it just as illegal drug dealers push their wares. He'd been warned of the potential for abuse but he expertly sidestepped concerns and made excuses before going on to use emotional and controversial language to promote the drug. By this point, Purdue Pharma are operating like a pyramid scheme or even a cult and that's where Shannon Schaeffer (West Duchovny) comes in.

There's a lot of young, attractive, quite often blonde women (Edie calls them 'Purdue Malibu Barbies) driving round in Porsches and using their looks and their guile to persuade pharmacists to buy (and sell) their OxyContin. Or even threatening to run over people and crush their skulls if they stand in their way. This reminded me of the way Donald Trump has lots of young blonde women speaking on his behalf. He thinks everyone's as weak as him and will simply fall for a pretty face.

Sadly, a significant number of people are that weak and we soon see Purdue pushers like Shaeffer, her ambitious protege Molly Dover (Maddy Hills), and the woman who recruited Shaeffer, Britt Hufford (Dina Shihabi) living high on the hog, touring pharmacies, using aggressive marketing spiel, and even handing out cuddly toys designed to look Oxycontin pills. You quite often see teddy bears at the scenes of untimely deaths but people normally at least wait until after the death. It will get far worse later on when a man dressed as an Oxycontin cuddly toy fucks another man up the arse during an orgy in Miami.

They manage to bring some big names on board. There's sleazy Dr Tim Cooper (Johnny Sneed) who expects more than just a cuddly toy from the girls as reward for doing business with them but most importantly of all there's Dr Curtis Wright (show co-creator Noah Harpster) who begins as "the one guy who gives a shit" about the dangers of OxyContin before eventually approving the drug.

The Sacklers had worked Wright very effectively. They'd used the MICE technique on him and it had worked. MICE standing for money, intelligence, coercion, and ego. If you can work some, or all, of these features into your psychological seduction of a person you can sway them to do your bidding.

It worked with Wright but it certainly didn't work with Dr Gregory Fitzgibbons (John Ales) who refuses to prescribe OxyContin to anyone who isn't dying or doesn't have cancer. Or isn't dying of cancer. Because he knows how dangerously addictive it is. He calls Schaeffer "a fucking drug dealer with a ponytail" and you can't help warming to his decency in the face of huge pressure.

As OxyContin deaths rise, and addicts start holding up drugstores, and it becomes clearer to more and more people that it's as dangerous as heroin, Richard Sackler realises he's got a big problem on his hands. So he doubles down on it and starts on a programme of utterly unforgivable victim blaming. The drug he is pushing, legally, isn't the problem. It's the people taking it.

But Painkiller doesn't just focus on those at the top and those investigating them. It follows the story of Glen Kryger (Taylor Kitsch), a North Carolina owner of a small family tire (sorry, tyre) business. OxyContin comes into Glen's life as a result of an accident at work that leaves him with terrible back pain but soon he's addicted to it, sneaking out at night to crush pills up and alienating his wife Lily (Caroline Bartczak) and stepson Tyler (Jack Mulhern).

What Painkiller shows is that the Sackler family were, and are, extremely intelligent people but that they were completely amoral. When Edie Flowers first appeared I thought she was too good to be true, everyone has some faults - surely, but as the series progressed and we learned her back story she became the heart of it all.

Touchingly, each episode begins with footage of parents who have lost their children to OxyContin addiction (including Christopher Trejo who died, aged 32, all alone, freezing cold, in a gas station parking lot) and that brings home the severity of OxyContin addiction in a way that perhaps the drama can't fully do.

There's a good soundtrack, quite a druggy one in places, which features the likes of Iggy Pop, Talking Heads, Ol' Dirty Bastard, Spiritualized, The Velvet Underground, Beastie Boys, The Raconteurs, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Mase, Rick Ross, The Lovin' Spoonful, Bow Wow Wow, Los Del Rio, Deee-Lite, Fleetwood Mac, and Simon & Garfunkel and there are good supporting performances from Tyler Ritter as lawyer John L.Brownlee and Trenna Keating as Deborah Marlowe, a former Purdue employee who was treated no better than shit during her time there.

There's some squeamish stuff (I'm very squeamish), there's some interesting history about smack being stealthily, and with racist intention, introduced into California in the 1980s and there's even an appearance by Trump's old buddy Rudy Giuliani (played here by Ned Van Zandt). Giuliani, described even by those who employ him as a "swamp creature", works as a lawyer for the Sacklers proving that he is a man who will shill for absolutely anyone if he's paid enough to do so.

The Sacklers, like Trump, had the money to pay this utterly despicable individual and, as again with Trump, they had the money, and power, and influence, to fight ever having to face the same kind of justice the rest of us would. How will it all end up for the Sacklers and, more importantly, their victims? Watch and find out. This is some pain you can run towards.

Nothing Means Nothing:Life Is More Important Than Art.

Life Is More Important Than Art. That's the name of the Whitechapel Gallery's current, free, exhibition and by the time you leave the gallery you'll be in no doubt whatsoever that life is more important than art. Especially this art. Most of which is extremely underwhelming. I mean, even if it had been the best art ever it still wouldn't have been more important than life. You need life to appreciate art. You don't need art to appreciate life. Many people I know have no interest in art whatsoever. Some are openly dismissive of the very concept of it.

Anyway, why is the exhibition called Life Is More Important Then Art? It doesn't sound like a very good way to entice people in. Well, apparently the title of the show comes from the celebrated African-American writer and journalist James Baldwin who proposed that "life is more important than art ... that is why art is important". I'm with him on that. Art is, or can be, important. But not most of this art.

Susan Hillier - Untitled (1999)

There's some guff on the wall about "the cost of living crisis" (for which we should always read as a distribution of wealth crisis, Rishi Sunak's not feeling the pinch) but the overarching theme seems to be about migration, about mixing of cultures, and, site specifically, London and the East End. These are all interesting, and important, themes that should lend themselves to making interest and important art but out of the twelve artists on show maybe two of them have done something interesting with the themes.

Susan Hillier's baggage trolley almost looks like something that's been left in the gallery by mistake and you could just as easily go to Paddington station and see one of these actually being used. That would tell a far more interesting story about travel and migration than one stuck in a gallery looking a bit sad.

Janette Parris, for me, was probably the best of the bunch. Eight digital drawings with text on in which she reminisces about her youth, her identity as a black woman in the East End, and anything else that crosses her mind. There's the Ford plant in Dagenham, the Ilford Palais, a post office, the Boleyn Cinema, West Ham's (old) football ground, and her old school. It's not a part of London I'm all that familiar with but is surely worth further exploration at some point soon.

Janette Parris - This Is Not A Memoir (2023)

Janette Parris - This Is Not A Memoir (2023)

She talks about not getting 2001:A Space Odyssey when she first saw but now thinking it's a masterpiece and she talks about going to watch West Ham play football and how she actually likes the better toilets and the more family friendly atmosphere (gentrification) at the new London Stadium more than she misses the old ground.

It's a personal, unshowy, piece of art and that's why it stood out. You can relate to it. It's heard to relate to William Cobbing's plywood, perspex, and jesmonite Written In Water because it's hard to read it. Lots of boards arranged a grid with writing on. Some of it about chewing gum. Some of it too high up for people to read. I couldn't figure out why it existed.

William Cobbing - Written In Water (2022)

John Smith - The Girl Chewing Gum (1976)

The same could be said for John Smith's 1976 film The Girl Chewing Gum in which various people walk along, or cross, a road and the director, Smith presumably, shouts instructions out at them telling them to point, to look behind themselves, to chat as they walk. All for, as far as I can see, no reason whatsoever.

Osman Yousefzada at least got the memo regarding the show's theme and he's mocked up the room of an immigrant. A bed and lots of cases that remain unpacked, suggesting the possible need to move again very quickly. Perhaps said immigrant has been housed in a barge that has undergone an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease or perhaps they're preparing to follow the advice of the Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party Lee Anderson and "fuck off back to France".

Osman Yousefzada - An Immigrant's Room Of Her Own (2008)

Mitra Tabrizian - Film Stills (2017-18)

Mitra Tabrizian - Film Stills (2017-18)

Jerome - Action Black (2018+)

Jerome - Action Black (2018+)

Mitra Tabrizian's supposed film stills are alright, they look like scenes from The Sweeney or something, and Jerome's riff on abstract expressionism is visually pleasing at least but once you go upstairs things start to go downhill. Which isn't what's supposed to happen when you go upstairs.

Alia Syed's Fatima's Letter is video art. Fucking video art. It tests your patience at the best of times but this was particularly lame.So lame that within an hour of watching it I had pretty much forgotten everything about it.

Alia Syed - Fatima's Letter (1992)

Matthew Krishnau - Boy On A Climbing Frame (2022)

Matthew Krishnau - Four Children (Verandah) (2022)

Matthew Krishnau - Bows And Arrows (2018)

It was a relief to come out to Matthew Krishnau's charming and innocent paintings. I didn't see how they fitted in the show but they were one of the best things in it. 

But it wasn't long before there was more video art and, worse, video art that featured the voice of our hugely unloved former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. There was no way I was sitting in a darkened room listening to that entitled, braying cunt talking for sixteen whole minutes. To be fair to John Smith (the artist responsible), I believe the work is a criticism of Boris Johnson but then, for me, the very existence of Boris Johnson, or the mention of his name, is a criticism of him.

John Smith - Citadel (2020)

Rana Begum - No.1272 Chainlink (2023)

I'm sure Rana Begum's numbered Chainlink says something about barriers, borders, and frontiers and I'm sure Susan Hillier's J. Street Project says something about the holocaust and how Germany has come to cope with it's antisemitic past (it's a series of photos of street signs in Germany that have the word Judin (German for Jew) or similar in them. It seems a worthy project but it's not very good art.

Susan Hillier - The J.Street Project (Index) (2002-2005)

Susan Hillier - The J.Street Project (Index) (2002-2005)

Susan Hillier - The J.Street Project (Index) (2002-2005)

Susan Hillier - The J.Street Project (Index) (2002-2005)

But perhaps I'm being a bit harsh because the next two rooms, both containing the dreaded video art, were even worse. Sarah Dobai had made a film of a donkey wandering about and it lasted nearly twenty fucking minutes and Mark Wallinger (who has made great work in the past) had filmed people arriving at an airport somehwere in Britain and set it so some bombastic music. I'm sure both these works have things to say about displacement, transit, and identity but, alas, they don't have interesting things to say about any of those themes.

Which was the general feeling I got from this show. An interesting, if half baked, concept where most of the contributors don't seem to have really made any serious effort to engage the viewer. Self congratulating art, a circle jerk, a waste of an afternoon. Or it would have been had I not had a nice long walk back over Tower Bridge afterwards. Life, it turns out, really is more important than art.

Sarah Dobai - The Donkey Field (2021)

Mark Wallinger - Threshold to the Kingdom (2000)