ARTIST / CURATOR
ARTIST / CURATOR
ARTIST CURATOR
Clare Carswell writes on contemporary art and art practice. She has had critical writing published in the UK and International Press includes ‘Barbara Rosenthal’ for Flash Art Online 2009, ‘Existential Interaction’ New York Arts Magazine 2008, ‘Cathy Wilkes’ AN Interface 2008. She has written art reviews for the Oxford Times newspaper. Catalogue essays include "Festa" Norbert Attard for IMMA Dublin 2008, Steve Mitchell for Brantwood Coniston Cumbria 2016, “Painting The Spark” essay on Nikola Irmer for Hemingway Art 2011.
She was an invited writer at New Life Berlin Participatory Arts Biennial Berlin 2008,
She now keeps an art writing blog IRIS
Here you can read a small selection of her archive art reviews, essays and interviews with artists. Some were published in print, some online. Some were commissioned.
Clare says of her art writing :
"I write about an artwork or an exhibition because I am moved, intrigued, or challenged by it. I then wish to move beyond my initial response to a deeper understanding of the work, and if possible the intentions of the artist. I write as an artist not an academic and I aim that my writing communicates the passion of art making and of viewing of it. I believe that I can bring particular insights as a maker, as I examine the content, technique and context of the work for the reader.
I hope through my writing, to showcase the work of artists and to help make what is often complex contemporary art practice more accessible for both experienced and new art audiences."
BARBARA ROSENTHAL 'Existential Interaction'
Performed Berlin June 2008,
Published NY Arts Magazine, New York, December 2008
New York avant-garde artist Barbara Rosenthal, an American art export with attitude, created her latest performance work, Existential Interact, in Berlin this summer. And she wasn’t the only American to choose this time and place to strut their stuff. Barack Obama came in July. Both Americans brought their national persona of self-invention, self-reliance, charisma, improvisation, and psychic connection to their fellow beings. But in contrast to the impulsivity that Milton Fletcher attributed to Rosenthal’s work in these pages, I saw an artist as prepared as was the Senator.
Obama spoke at the Tiergarten, because in requesting permission to speak at the Brandenburg Gate, he was informed it might stir controversy. Rosenthal, in her attempt to apply for a Berlin city street-performing permit, was happy to be grafted by German cultural organizations onto the Wooloo Berlin New Life Festival, a two-week, socially-engaged participatory arts series. But because she considers deliberate social commentary “retro-garde,” she participated in the festival selectively: on one hand, she fulfilled its mission of interaction with random Berliners, but on the other, she trod the fence between sanctioned and unsanctioned presentations, choosing her own degree of acceptability. As an independent, she brazenly chose her own art-squat: Berlin’s premier avant-garde showplace, KW, Kuns-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, which just happened to be hosting the desultory but prestigious 5th Berlin Biennale. Since she had once before, although by her own choice, grafted herself onto an above-ground art event (Performa05, NYC) and performed in front of White Box Gallery and The Guggenheim Museum, her alliance with Wooloo brought critical focus to the phenomenon of risk-taking by artists independent of cultural handlers. “Do not be afraid,” Rosenthal’s Alien Puppet intones to one passer-by, “of art not inside institution”—pause—“I certify it sane.”
Rosenthal chalks her name in a square she’s drawn at the entrance to KW. She’s wearing 15 of her ubiquitous “Button Pins”: I Am Not Myself Today, You Go First, Are You Jewish, etc. Rows of her artist books, like Clues to Myself, Homo Futurus, and Soul & Psyche, and DVDs like Nonsense Conversation, How Much Does the Monkey Count, Society, and Barbara Rosenthal Contemplates Suicide are lining the curb. And, defying chancy weather, her laptop is there too, chained to a lamppost and playing a loop of her loopy shorts. This is all new political media saying hot personal things: they tell us about our own existence as a society. Just reading the titles makes us think about who we are, and why we think so. If we linger in this magical chalk arena, we will learn more about ourselves, as individuals and as a species. And we’ll have some laughs.
Rehearsed and poised to perform her verbal manoeuvres, Rosenthal seems disarmingly dippy at first but is in fact locked on her targets, us! Her undercover performance technique is an impromptu chat with her or her three archetype puppets—The Monkey, The Artist, The Alien. She doesn’t have “an act;” if you speak to her or a puppet, they will converse with you. Rosenthal’s assumed voices and personae lure us closer. Electricity is sparked by a smile; a line is tossed as we negotiate her carefully prop-strewn street carpet. She may seem flirtatious, fluttering her arms upwards whilst making her pitch. At other times she’s a lean, mean, art toreador, her arm downward thrusting into our hands one of the Provocation Cards, her printed slogans. “Life Has a Life of Its Own,” says one of them, and others, “Time Plays Tricks,” “Put It In Writing,” and “Everything is Performance and Persona.” We are challenged to make ourselves known. In the 1980s, The Village Voice referred to Barbara Rosenthal as a “Media Poet,” and although this might be a category of one, she invites the rest of us to join. Like Obama, Rosenthal is an oracular outsider, not asking to be allowed in, but asking everyone to come on out.
Some Berliners get embroiled in her rare shows, a few with her overtly interactive pieces like You’re The Computer Poet, or You & I Cardgame, others with making improvements to online dictionary translations she prints on the backs of the cards. Mistakes by robotic translations delight her. “Meaning is masticated to puerile pulp inside any mouth kissed by the blistered lips of language,” The Artist Puppet devines.
For an artist so unyieldingly direct in her tongue-in-cheek, zany, poetic, and yet astonishingly literal transcriptions, Rosenthal’s work-method of ongoing revision over time yields imagery and text that are the product of collaborations between personality and persona, and between behavior and performance. Some of her pieces have been honed over decades. This is why I disagree with Milton Fletcher. In NYArts (March/April 2006), Fletcher characterizes Rosenthal’s essential work as organic; he calls it “the impulsive, non-processed act of performing itself.” His provocative article is entitled “Barbara Rosenthal During Performa05: Taboo or Not Taboo.” Rosenthal brings the poet out in all of us, so I parse the title: Fletcher playfully nods here to two of Rosenthal’s pieces: Old Address Book/Totem and Taboo, a 3-D photo book and wall sculpture, 1997, and Barbara Rosenthal Contemplates Suicide, a video riff on Hamlet, 2005. He says that her work “point[s] directly to Surrealism.” I believe that Rosenthal’s work is more pre-planned than Fletcher imagines. Based on my daily attendance at her rehearsals and performances on Augustrasse, as well as meetings alone with her in the Alexanderplatz apartment provided by Wooloo and at various cafes for drinks with her entourage, I think her street work is anything but “non-processed” art-making. Barbara Rosenthal is knowledgeable and knowing, and packs and plans every detail. Little is incidental or impulsive. Obsessive, neurotic perhaps, if she were a lay-person, but for an artist, “impulsive,” “non-processed,” no! In her world, performance and reality can only transcend disbelief if they can be mistaken for each other. And she works to make sure that will happen.
Please only reproduce this text with permission from NY Arts Magazine and the author.
'FESTA' NORBERT ATTARD
Irish Museum of Modern Art
July 2008
Published in artist catalogue and on IMMA website
Created especially for The Irish Museum of Modern Art, FESTA is an architectural intervention by Maltese artist Norbert Francis Attard. It is the colour you saw beckoning to you and that told you which door to come to. You looked through it before you entered the building at all. Without picking up a paintbrush Attard paints for us with light and colour as painters always have done. This is not surprising as he used to be an abstract painter and the memory of many acts of painting is certainly here, embodied, shining for us, revealing the shifting relationship between light and colour and how one makes the other.
It is bright, showy even, but then artist Norbert Francis Attard is in playful mood here and the spangled allsort that is FESTA is an invitation to us to loosen up a little too, to question how we can behave in front of an artwork. Hospitality is implicit in this entrance space and this work reinforces it. We are received and welcomed by this work and invited to enjoy being ourselves within it. The ebbing and the flowing of the coloured light in the space offers us a tantalising floor of colour that begs us to step into it, move through it and as we do to observe how our presence and our movements change what we see and how we are seen. A dance across the floor will draw colour from the walls, a glorious train of light to follows us that is uniquely ours in the moment. There is every reason now to press up to the windows, to move from frame to frame and observe the changes in focus and detail, how seeing is different when our attention is really held. The newness of architecture that is embedded into the old looks newer than ever as the old looks older too.
Vibrant in its delivery, the invitation to us to participate in this work is warm and extrovert and characteristic of Attards Mediterranean background, where each year, as many as 60 religious festas take place in the streets of towns and villages in Malta. In FESTA the artist wants us to enjoy the dynamic as well as the static experience of his art.
Norbert Francis Attard is a former architect, now a multi-disciplinary artist, who is preoccupied with the physicality of architectural spaces and the sedimented layers of memory within them. He knows that memories are as much a product of place as people and is intent on making art works that shed light on this fact and heighten our awareness of the spaces we use and the changing histories of perception of them. As much intrigued by our memories as his own, he intends that we will make connections for ourselves of past and future, old and new and identify opposing forces such as inside versus outside, public versus private. He responds sympathetically to the existing architectural spaces and buildings and invites us to view them and ourselves anew, through the lens of colour and light that he holds up to our memories and attitudes, individual and collective.
FESTA tells us that although we are all rooted culturally we can travel and transcend, mix and blend just as the colour we see here does. We can acknowledge and celebrate contrasts and make new harmonies if we choose to.
Attard asserts that no location is neutral and that our sense of place is always shaped by past histories and contemporary ideologies. In FESTA Norbert Francis Attard challenges our understanding of the nature of matter and of experience and how the boundaries between ourselves, each other and the spaces we occupy can change.
Norbert Francis Attard has made site/context-specific installations in many countries including the UK, Cuba, Spain, Germany, Greece, Turkey, Israel, South Korea, USA, Taiwan and Japan. His work has been exhibited at the Liverpool Biennale, the Havana Biennale and in the Echigo Tsumari Triennale in Japan. He represented Malta at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999.
Clare Carswell Irish Museum of Modern Art, July 2008
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BARBARA ROSENTHAL
Directors Lounge / Lucas Carrieri Gallery
Berlin June 2009
Published FlashArtonline.com November 2009
Dual solo events by avant-garde artist Barbara Rosenthal in Berlin this June, “An Evening With Barbara Rosenthal” at Directors Lounge and “Aperitiv With Barbara Rosenthal” at Lucas Carrieri Gallery, presented a rare glimpse of the range and power of this zany but elusive New York artist who has operated just below the radar for over thirty years. Directors Lounge screened her mini-retrospective, 33 remastered Existential Video Shorts, prefaced and concluded by impromptu performance and discussion. Lucas Carrieri Gallery hung three rooms of print suites: “Button Pins Shirts Prints,” “Logo Images,” and “Provocation Cards Prints,” which Rosenthal navigated whilst performing Existential Interact to begin the evening, and reading from Homo Futurus (Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1986) at the end.
At Directors Lounge, rarely seen works (Playing With Matches, 1992, 15sec) ran beside better known (How Much Does The Monkey Count, 1988, 4min), and one premiere, Dead Heat (2009, 3min), a pun meaning “tied race.” This simple, profound work splits the screen into 4 horizontal layers in which moving subjects (bird, horse, Rosenthal, ship) start together, then repeatedly traverse at their own speeds, intermittently lapping, but starting and ending simultaneously. No matter our lives, our limits are the same, and no matter our limits, our lives are different, she seems to say.
At LC, her text-art delivered pithy, poignant, prophetic commentaries (God Is The Idol Of Science; Life Has A Life Of Its Own; The Flaw Of The Ideal Is That It Does Not Encounter Time Or Touch,) high content, as usual, fabricated with low-tech materials. This is generous work by a mature and resilient artist. Finally, viewers are starting to “get” Barbara Rosenthal.
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FIELDWORK KAREN PURPLE
North Wall Arts Centre Oxford
April 19th - May 6th 2010
Published AN Interface
An exhibition of paintings by Karen Purple at the North Wall Arts Centre, Oxford invite the viewer to share with the artist the pleasure of walking in nature. Several large canvases as well as series of smaller works on paper and board bear marks that signal the artist’s recall of her daily walk through the fields and woodland surrounding her Oxfordshire home. Purple has made this same walk daily for the last six years engaging directly with the formation of the landscape as well as the organic materials within it.
As artists tend to do Purple sets the perameters of her own activity. Driven by the necessity of specificity, her quest for relevance leads the artist to limit her explorations and scrutiny to a specific locale which she can grid reference. The resultant paintings and drawings might be regarded as journals as well as schema for her growing archive of natural remnants. The works are made with pigments and dyes that are boiled, ground, pulped or distilled by the artist from organic materials she collects on her walks. Soil water, crushed cochineal beetles, stinging nettle or ink from oak gall contribute to a gentle palette with which the artist traces pictorially her profound sense of connection with the ancient landscape.
Several large works on canvas such as This Connecting Thread, Training, Of Oak and Iron, are understated yet command the large gallery space with their quiet but uncompromising persistence borne of artistic, and essentially human, wonder and enquiry. They are delicately coloured meanderings, elusively abstract yet hinting at the illustrative and invoking the experiential both for the artist and for we the viewer, or at least for those among us who have also drawn chill breath at the beauty and mystery of nature when trudging through it.
The ethos of this artist is encapsulated in the title she has chosen for one of the paintings Solvitur Ambulando is a Latin phrase meaning that ‘you can sort it out by walking’. Referencing conceptual art and artists such as Richard Long in proposing this act as work of art, Purple’s work is nonetheless most firmly painterly and post abstraction and it is particularly to British Abstraction that one inclines for reference and recalls the muted palettes of Prunella Clough, the constructed and tactile surfaces of Gillian Ayres and also remembers the assertion made by Mel Gooding in his essay of 1992 regarding aspects of British Abstraction since 1945 that
“It is with specificities of place that British Abstraction typically begins: with the changeability of its weather and its variegations of light, with its objects and their forms and textures. It starts in facts and ends in a transendence of the phenomenal, with painting as the poetic trace of the actual
Made in series with titles such as Field Verses 1-V or Leaf Verses 1-V, the most recent works on linen or board backed canvas offer up solitary figurative elements of leaf or tree, totems on a tiny scale of the impressive enormity and age of the land from which they are drawn. Accompanying the wall-mounted works are several old entomology wooden cases displaying drawings. One The Destructive Distillation of Wood holds piled lumps of charcoal wrapped in tiny drawings of the trees used for its production. Apparently slight in presence, these work reveal an archival impulse in Purple’s work that informs us not only of her dedication to research methods more readily associated with naturalist or landscape historian but of a timeless human impulse to record nature as well as to take from it and to use the seemingly intrinsic power of it. The charcoal was made in the charcoal burner at the University of Oxford where Purple has worked as artist in residence for the last year. A small exhibition of her research material is on display at The Lodge there throughout the exhibition.
It is inevitable that even today, a British artist who paints from landscape be viewed in relation to works of the 1930s and 1940s of artists such as Sutherland, Piper, Nash and Minton, English neo-romantics inspired by Ruskin’s attempts to unify the geological and spiritual but who sought modern equivalents for the visions of Turner, Palmer and Ruskin. Purple’s beautiful and gesturally abstract paintings reflect intrinsic associations with landscape and organic form and resonate with her highly individual associations of place and mood. In so doing she offers us her own visionary and timeless works that reveal her deep respect for the very Earth itself and reach beyond their specific corporeality to something ancient, primal and available to us all if we only know how to access it. Through her work Purple perhaps acts as signifier for us. How timely, how wise and how generous of her.
Fieldwork runs until 6th May 11-4pm
The University Of Oxford Arboretum at Nuneham Courtney Opening Hours 10-5pm
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'SHIFT' CENDRINE COLIN
AYYO Contemporary Art
23rd Sept – 27th Oct 2013
A catalogue introduction to accompany the exhibition.
There is not much comfort , much reassurance, in the art of Cendrine Colin; it does not delight or please me, if anything it repels as much as it attracts me. She seems to be pushing and pulling at the images she has found as well as at me, the viewer she has found. It is hardly a new experience to feel manipulated where images of war are concerned. The digital wallpaper of the news media excels at reshaping and distorting if not inventing them, presenting the case for or against war, as suits the editor or oligarch owner, or government. There is nothing new in that.
But there may be something new in the work of this diminutive and passionate artist, in the staring directness of these compositions that convey a sense of determined intention, perhaps compulsion, to show us that utterly senseless and dreadful acts have happened and do happen. Cendrine Colin takes images that emblemize the global “human madness” as she sees it, she selects them from newspapers, strips them and thrusts them forward at us, they are in our face and that is where she means them to be. The extreme cropping, exquisite mark making and use of colour are from the toolbox of the artist not the journalist, and her tools are wielded with the skill, urgency and desire to save of the sweating surgeon in the field hospital.
Yet their very power lies in the fact that there is no attempt to campaign here and that the images themselves are not unfamiliar. Regrettably we know what a bombed Dresden looked like, the nuclear mushroom, the lens view of the drone as it strikes, the terrorist with balaclava and gun. They are lifted from the lexicon of modern conflict and there can be no surprise at the existence of these images. What is so unsettling is that there seems to be no desire to explain why the acts they represent exist, simply that they do. There is no depiction or reportage, no battle tale of acts of sacrifice or heroism to give some human fleshing let alone rationale to these bleak images. There is no story here, no account of the experience of war for the artist, how it was for her and how it made her feel. The images are surgically excised and re-grafted, isolated and stripped of anything resembling explanation, let alone justification for the atrocious acts that they represent.
It is the anonymity of the hand that made them, the isolation of these images and the refusal by Colin to clad them in anything personal or even human for us to hang our fear and horror on that makes them so very hard to look at. It is precisely the anonymity of the suicide bomber or drone operator that makes conflict now so utterly inhumane that it can make the muddy bloody swill of the trenches, the rip of the bayonet through belly seem almost honourable, the decent way to conduct a war, seeing the whites of their eyes. There is no chance of that now.
There is no attempt to convey or interpret feelings at all here, let alone the ones that no-one ever wants to feel. There is no effort made to make it bearable for us to know that such feelings are even possible. Yet feelings and strong ones are what surely has made and that are evoked in me by this work. Shocked at first encounter by the directness of Colin’s images, it felt a relief to see the skill and beauty in the drawing itself. Moving so close to the pictures that the image itself became just marks I felt on firmer ground to view and appraise. Her drawing can be almost lyrical and it was a relief to find it and to wonder at it, but the resultant pictures, what all that pigment amounts to is it feels to me, a yawning black chasm of a mouth, lips curled from teeth, from which a primal scream shrieks into my face from the paper, it is the scream of utter horror and rage and shame. My rage, our shame. Experiencing the art of Cendrine Colin has changed me and not all art does that.
“What do you think an artist is ? An imbecile who has only eyes if he’s a painter, or ears if he’s a musician, or a lyre at every level of his heart if he’s a poet, or even, if he’s a boxer, just his muscles ? On the contrary, he’s at the same time a political being, constantly alive to heartrending, fiery, or happy events, to which he responds in every way (…) No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.”
Pablo Picasso, Statement, in Chipp, Theories of Modern Art.
© Clare Carswell, Oxford October 2013
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