Reading around Nancy Spero

I am going to try taking notes using quotations, as recommended my previous tutor, Linden Reilly.  (I am still somewhat hacked off that my university, London Met, have made her redundant, while her course, MA By Project, is still running!).

Otherworlds, The art of Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith edited by Jon Bird.  Reaktion Books, London 2003.

Essay - Imagining Otherworlds: Connection and Difference in the Art of Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith, Jon Bird p13-45

"Otherworlds .. with all the connotations of the relations between self and other, the difference that is gender, the feminisation of the body that is the (m)other, and the contradictory promise of the redemptive aesthetic  … for our sense of embodiment.

"Feminist critics and art historians have been asking … how the social and historical circumstances of gender might be integral to deciphering the patterns of meaning of subjectivity and art making. … Art is made out of the narratives of individual histories and experiences formed from and against the cross currents of culture.

"Spero's experiences as a 'first generation' post war Americal feminist artist … were the visible and public expressions of the exclusion and alienation experienced by most women artists during the 19602 and 70s.  Spero developed a power metaphorical visual language combining word and image.

"The body is symbolically and psychically invested with lived experience, significant beyond our everyday engagement with the world of things.  … Bodies, specifically the female body, are the semantic units of the visual language of Nancy Spero … a language whose grammar is drawn from the characters of mythology, scripture, history and the contemporary world. … Her works include the carfnivalesque inversion of the codes and regulations of social normality … and encounters with alterity as a reframing of the self.  … Spero's mapping of the figure, from an emphasis upon the odd in pain (victimage) to the dance as a symbolic image of freedom and choice.

"There is a shifting aesthetic value of the decorative and the unstable boundaries of high and low art.  The ideologically binding aesthetic values to issues of gender is traced in Andrewas Huyssen's mapping of the gendering of mass culture as feminine since the late 19th century:

the political, psychological, and aesthetic discourse around the turn of the century consistently and obsessively genders mass culture and the masses as feminine, while high culture, whether traditional or modern, clearly remains the privileged realm of male activities.

"Even, into the late 1970s, the decorative could still be judged an interference or distraction in the critical artwork of some feminist artists.

"There are two rival aesthetic models - the engineer the machine, the functional and the reductive and which is implicitly coded as masculine; the other stresses the body, fashion, and the dance, all of which carry the cultural connotations of the feminine.  The initial tendency of critics and historians was to recognise the equal validity of craft-based and decorative forms and practices, recognised as feminine. … Now the decorative is seen as always intruding a subversive presence within the modern, unravelling its myths of progress, autonomy, masculinity and order.

"Colour has consistently been placed on the side of the decorative, subordinated to the power of line to define structure and form.

Nancy Spero, Marduk, 1986.  I like her use of script and line drawings.

City Lit class- Inspired by Nancy Spero - Female Archetypes.

Last Monday I started this 4 week class at the City Lit.  It promises to be excellent. Nancy Spero was an artist from the US who was prolific in the 1960s and 70s and whose work was feminist and controversial, often using violent themes and ancient female forms to comment on 20th century female issues.  She was inspired by ancient female forms from a variety of historical periods and used their gestures and body language to create contemporary imagery.

Nancy Spero. Energetic Moving Women.

The class has 8 women participants - culturally diverse but all appear to be well educated, middle aged women.  The tutor, Heidi Wigmore, will be great, I think.  She comes across as a very knowledgeable, feminist, art teacher, whose work focusses on the figure.  She is an approachable feminist, and very encouraging - the last seminar I did had a very angry feminist who put me off this sort of event, but I think Heidi makes a good contrast.

Nancy Spero.  Repeated prints and bold colour.

We started last Monday with a fantastic trip to the British Museum to draw ancient female artefacts.  I find it difficult to use museums in this way on my own, but as part of a group, it was a much easier experience.  I drew using a pen and a graphite stick, as I know museums prefer non-messy media.  I was quite astonished when one group member immediately started using open bottles of coloured ink in a free, dribbly style.  Quite soon a Museum Customer Services person came up and requested this be put away.  The artworks were very lovely, but had great potential for mess.  Other people were using charcoal, which gave lovely effects, especially when viewed the following week, as facing pages had transfer printed, giving depth and body to the drawing.

The class is designed to cover:

- The meaning of female archetypes in historical, contemporary and cultural contexts.
- Visual research of examples of female figures in the British Museum collection eg. Goddess representations in various cultures including Ancient Greek, Egyptian, Asian
- The objectification of the female figure in contemporary media as part of consumer culture 
- Dynamic drawing techniques to create 'expressive' figures
- Experimental mixed media approaches to making original imagery eg collage, mono-printing, photocopying, tracing, carbon copying etc
- Using a projector to enlarge and compose drawings to make a 'drawing installation'
- Composition and juxtaposition of found images and hand-rendered images to create meaningful personal narratives.

This week we brought in contemporary images of women, and used them to create carbon copy tracings, juxtaposing, repeating, mirror imaging etc.  We were encouraged to trace images, but using our own style and gestures so the imagery became our own.  It was amazing how the images different people had chosen, and the way each person interpreted the Spero inspirations, made each artist's work different and identifiable.

Our drawings will be used in a later class to compile a multiple image on a frieze.  We were advised to use several drawings of a repeated image.  Repetition enables a message to be read.  Don't use too many different images.  Keep it simple.

It was a great class.

Nancy Spero, Sky Goddess protecting the women.

Maggi Hambling - Touch - works on paper at British Museum.

I went to the Maggi Hambling exhibition as soon as it opened.  I was not sure what I made of her work prior to looking closely.  All the works were black & white, obviously by the same hand, but with significant variation of effect.  Some of the artwork descriptions gave comments that I as a student could do well to remember when I am working!

I started looking at a drawing of a stuffed rhinoceros from her early years … "just discovered ink as a drawing medium - risky, no correcting".  Then a reclining nude …"did not set out to use collage, but … necessary … to simplify".  "…to touch the subject with all the desire of a lover".

Energetic and gestural.  Gestural marks convey different emotions  soft, sensitive wispy - compassion (when drawing a very old tutor of hers, when visiting in hospital right at the end of his life).  Uplifted chin, listening to and conducting unheard music. (Cedric).  Is the energy of the gesture about the artist or the subject?  Artist statement adds narrative.

Portraits done in charcoal, mono print and monotype.  I have had to look up the difference between monotype and mono print although there is a fluidity in the use of the terms.  Monotype is where the plate is inked, paper laid, then drawn on - as done by Tracey Emin.  Monoprint is where the plate is inked, drawn, paper laid and pressed, or the plate is drawn, paper laid, and pressed.

Lots of different effects in the Wall of Water monotypes.  Beryl reclining - shows speed is of the essence - uses her hands to manipulate the ink.  Excellent range of effects.  Stephen falling asleep triptych was bold, gestural ink.  Death sketchbooks drawn in pencil, show sensitive images of both her mother and father when very close to death.

Maggi Hambling, Wall of Water
Courtesy of British Museum

Absolutely wonderful.  Only one room of drawings, right at the top of the British Museum, but small enough to spend serious time looking at them.  Ace.

Exhibitions in Scotland

While on holiday in Scotland, I went to a selection of exhibitions/museums/National Trust venues.

House for an Art Lover, Glasgow  This is a house, built in 1990, from plans designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh in c 1906 for a competition.  It meant he was unfettered by a client's wishes and designed to his wildest flights of fancy.  It was an amazing house.  At the start of the 19th century, most architects were focussed on Greek, Roman or Gothic Paris, and sex was taboo.  He was working with modern materials, Japonism, imagery and symbolism.  His symbolism was about growth, rebirth and the feminine form, moving radically away from Victorian woman repression.  Women were starting to become political although they had limited opportunity in public.  CRM was fusing meaning and reality.

The modern builders of the House for an Art Lover have worked in detail to create interiors from the plans - but they are interpretations not rigid copies.  As usual they are ambiguous designs which can be read as the awakening of the maiden, and to my mind look like they were designed by a woman desperate for a baby (Margaret MacDonald).

I particularly liked the drawing room - designed for ladies to withdraw to after dinner, which was circular, white, and meant to be feminine.  It felt wonderful.

Ladies drawing room, House for an Art Lover

Hill House, Helensburgh  I have been here several times, but each time, the house has evolved slightly, showing more interpretation of the interior.  This time I noted the variation in colour of the column of glass lights in the door leading from the family areas of the house, the hall, into the servants area which led to the kitchen.  This leaded light was were mostly purple, with one green panel, which subtly denoted it led from family to servant area.  Very subtle, but a clear indicator once you understood the code.

Another architectural detail was the difference between rooms designed for the 5 children of the family and their parents.  The children's rooms faced east to gain the early morning light, symbolic of early life, and the parents rooms faced west for the evening light, indicating the waning of life.  Great symbolism.

When in the bedroom, there was all sorts of sexual symbolism, once you knew the symbols.  On the settee, there were stylised thistle seed heads - indicative of fertility.

Thistle seed heads scarcely visible behind the white table
in the Hill House main bedroom

"Reason informed by emotion - expressed in beauty - elevated by earnestness - lightened by humour - that is the ideal that should guide all artists"  CRM.

Tenement House, Buccleugh Street, Glasgow  This was a turn of the century tenement house, which was lived in by Miss Agnes Toward (1886-1975) from 1902 to 1975.  It was a middle class tenement, 1st floor.  She worked for a shipping agent, office work - not manual work, and she and her mother were members of the Church of Scotland.  She moved there with her mother, and continued to live there alone after her mother's death.  Miss Toward hoarded trivia so many postcards, theatre programmes and other ephemera indicating her interests were present when the flat was vacated.  It was a rented property and was furnished with her grandparents furniture, so she had few outgoings, which presumably meant she was able to travel and enjoy a social life.  She worked until the age of 73 (for social contact?) as a spinster, with no family.  She lived in the tenement until the age of 80, then spent a further 10 years in hospital (dementia?) until her death.  She kept the flat and paid the rent to the end, so it was a detailed, undisturbed, archive of her life.  The tenement was set up as it would have been in her lifetime, including the range, and box bed, in the kitchen, deal table and jars of jam she had made!

Kitchen of Tenement House

Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow  This has the Mackintosh House which was the last Glasgow residence of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald before they moved away from Scotland.  I drew one of Margaret Macdonald's banners for the Scottish section of the international Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art in Turin, 1902, 15" x 20'.  I also looked at her metalwork fire screen panel 1899.  My opinion is that this shows her desire for a child.  They married in 1900, when she was in her mid 30s - late marriage for the era.  They never had children.  They had one nephew, Sylvan, who inherited their estate and who gifted it to Glasgow University in 1947 when he emigrated to South Africa.

Margaret Macdonald, 1899, metalwork firescreen

Additonally I looked at Margaret Macdonald's mirror surround, Honesty.  I am thinking about personal values as part of my inspiration, and honesty is something I identify with, and feel strongly about.  I was thinking about how to represent it as a concept in my stitch work - and the plant as used by MM is inspirational!

Charles Rennie Mackintosh was engaged to his employer's sister, Jessie Keppie, prior to settling down with Margaret Macdonald. Was this mirror made around the time of the change of relationship?  Perhaps I am reading too much into it, but it would typical of their symbolism that a plant in a design should be used to make a significant comment!

Glasgow School of Art Walking Tour

I have done this tour several times since the fire at the GSA meant the tour could not be inside the building, and it changes every time - yippee!

"The Art School taught me to look at the world and see that there is art in the mundane and obvious, as well as in the exotic"  Peter Capaldi (b1958 graduated GSA 1980)

Willow Tea Rooms is being refurbished as CRM heritage centre for 2018 in the name of Miss Catherine Cranston's Tearoom.  (Willow Tea Rooms is a copyrighted name and is being kept by the current owner.  I think the new branding promotes a Victorian woman as an innovative business woman and fits with 21st century agenda to celebrate the achievements of diverse people).

Glasgow buildings can be approximately dated from the materials.  Blonde sandstone was 19th C and red sandstone was 20th C (when the blonde sandstone quarry ran out!).  GSA designed for 14,000 GBP : the east wing alone ran to 42,000 GBP partly due to blonde sandstone being used when it was in short supply 1906-14.  West wing done 1914-16, also in blonde sandstone.

Lots of red sandstone buildings by other architects using greek, roman and continental design features carved into the facade - none of which was my taste.

Mackintosh style became increasingly simplified.  But increasingly ambiguous.  CRM was never a member of the Glasgow Art Club (men only), but associated with the Glasgow Society of Lady Artists.  He redesigned their premises ( which backed on to the GAC) and even put an oval design over their front door!  Symbolic of femaleness or what?!  He associated the oval with the feminine.

Doorway to Society of Lady Artists

Much of CRM design is ambiguous.  His round window design for a door at the Glasgow School of Art, of grass and seed head, can equally be read as a pregnant stomach with a swollen bosom.  I like it whichever way it is read.  It could be male, female, or about nature, growth, and the cycle of life.  I can't find an online image of it, although I have a postcard from GA.

Facing the World, Self Portraits Rembrandt to Ai WeiWei.  Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

Great exhibition.  Key ones I liked:

James Nasmyth - back of hand as portrait.
Angela Palmer - brain of the artist.  16 sheets of glass engraved with brain images from scan.
Frits Klemm had reduced his self portrait to a line for his head and shoulders, surmounted on a heavily textured painters table.
Samuel Van Hoogstraten had painted a serious of object associated wit thin.

Analysis shows men and women represent themselves fairly respectably and play on their positive attributes in a self portrait.  However, when men include women in self/group portraits the woman is often portrayed unflatteringly - prostitute, sexualised, or less in some way to the men/man.

The Weavers Cottage  This was a small NT property, that demonstrated what a traditional weaver's cottage was like.  I had an interesting conversation with the lady hand weaving on a 200 year old loom.  She was obviously a bit of a feminist (yippee!) as she had made sure her name was associated with the tartan fabrics she made to commission for various NT purposes.    The building also had a chest of drawers full of old tartan samples … including ours!

Hand woven tartan samples

Our MacTaggart tartan