Sunday, February 21, 2010

Jane and Louise Wilson

We are trying to be stingy at the moment, so today we went to the Lisbon Centre de Arte Moderna, as Sunday is it's free entry day. Almost every museum over here seems to have some day or time when you can get in free or cheaper. In the USA most galleries have a suggested amount you can pay to get in, but if you ask about it, you can pay much less. In Europe a lot of the galleries seem to have special prices for people under 25 (yay) and the unemployed (still yay!). Anyway the Lisbon CAM had a smallish collection but was actually a pretty interesting gallery. The collection is mainly made up of British and Portuguese artists. Since I have had more than enough of the contemporary art gallery favourites, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein, this was a welcome relief. The featured exhibition was by Jane and Louise Wilson, British artists and twins. It included video and photography as well as sculpture/installation. I have been really impressed with the video art I have seen in Europe so far, there is a much higher level of production than in previous video art i have seen. This exhibition was entitled, 'Suspending time', or 'Tempo suspenso' in Portuguese, as the exhibition was held in Lisbon. I think 'Tempo suspenso' has such a nice sound to it, there is more of an actual feeling of the build up of time, the anticipation of something happening, which is what the first work we viewed felt like. It was a video piece entitled, 'Hypnotic suggestion' in which the two sisters were filmed apparently being hypnotised. As often happens when viewing video art at galleries, you do not enter the room at the start of the work, so may come in at a stage not normally intended for the beginning. I began viewing this video piece at a moment when all that was in view was a blue curtain and silence. After awhile maybe at least a minute, the camera pulled back to show the Wilson sisters in identically outfits and swivel chairs, heads lolling in a state of hypnosis as a heavily accented voice from an unseen speaker started to tell them to relax, first in English, then later in a language I was not familiar with but which made me feel nonetheless relaxed. The interest for me was what didn't happen, the suspense of waiting for something to occur. And for the length of time I watched, nothing really did. Often to me this is the issue I have with video art, an eventuality is promised, which never occurs. This was not the case with the later video works by the Wilson sisters which felt highly realised and developed.

The photography I have seen in recent exhibitions has also heightened my interest in photography. I'm sick of looking at rooms of tiny black and white photos all beginning to look the same, and only interesting because of the time period they were taken in or the conditions. It is nice to see photographs that are commanding not just due to their size, but also luminance and subject matter. as Louise says,"That's the trouble: colour brings in a different dimension, it heightens realism. Monochrome flattens it out ... And we've chosen not to shoot in black and white as you get so much visual pleasure, and so many emotional cues, from colour." Postemedia.net I loved the Wilson's series of photos of the oddments room in London's antiquarian bookseller, Maggs Bros Ltd., some including Louise Wilson in the shot, and some just of books. As a librarian it is nice to see something approaching a library and possibly a librarian depicted in art works. Apart from this, they are also interesting in other ways. The figure pictured is always shown from behind, so it seems as if you are following her into the rooms making the photo and the books like a kind of doorway. Artwork depicting books has historically signified that the owner is learned and/or wealthy, in this case it becomes even more obvious as the books in question are old, valuable looking books, even if these particular ones are in the oddments room because they are not quite complete, all are missing something like part of their spine or the frontispiece. I shall stop here as Postemedia.net states that Jane and Louise Wilson's 'Reluctance to overtheorise their work is what has enabled others to load so much onto their work instead'. Too much apparently, I think this is my longest post, oh dear.

images from artnet, CAM

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