A sanctuary from art-speak

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Sanctuary – Britain’s Artists and their Studios

Edited by Hossein Amirsadeghi with Maryam Homayoun Eisler

The publisher’s blurb talks about this ‘lavish, large-format book’ being ‘ full of insights, revelations and thoughts on the modern art world and contemporary art practice’. But this review offers an opportunity to be yet more straightforward, and to direct remarks to the reader and the potential buyer.  The book weighs in at a healthy 4 kilos.  It is big enough and heavy enough to rest happily on a sturdy bookstand specially constructed to support an old-fashioned, fat  Oxford English Dictionary. It cannot be carried to the park for an afternoon’s reading or used in preparation for a night’s rest.  It is not a ‘coffee-table’ book either, similar to those awaiting the estate agent’s photographer, because it is clearly overwhelming, too interesting, thought-provoking, irritating , annoying and informative… and so altogether too ‘weighty’ for such a mundane purpose.

Hossein Amirsadeghi, the publisher and editor, given the title of ‘creative entrepreneur for Thames and Hudson’, notes in his foreword that there was one criterion for artists to be included: they had to be British/have practised in the UK.  A list of names was then ‘filtered’ by curators, critics ‘institutional heads’, other artists and so on.  The editor was determined that the book was going to be anything but ordinary, it was not to contain ‘art-speak’, he says, but would include unguarded comments and indiscretions in order to reveal the character of the artists. Nonetheless, as if writing for a panel of stony-faced academics, the editor determined that ‘the writing would include social nuance, encapsulating architectonics and tautology’ (the latter hardly seems desirable!)

Amirsadeghi says he is a firm believer ‘in the social, political and economic transformative powers of art’ and (somewhat romantically) calls the artist ‘an alchemist, his studio [being] the laboratory’.   He is clearly committed to his task, regarding the project as a personal crusade to rescue the art book, which he views as a ‘dying species’. He is careful to tell the reader of his bravery in taking on such a project: ‘you feel’, he says, ‘as if you are cast adrift on a rickety raft on the seas of creativity’. Finally he gives some credit to his co-authors, to Richard Cork (who, he says, ‘uncorks the greats’) and the producers and project directors and so on, who are shown as if on a film-set posing for the photographer in a graffiti-decorated underground tunnel.  As to the choice of title, ‘Sanctuary’, the editor leaves it to the artist Shirazeh Houshiary to explain: ‘The world is a chaotic place.  When I come to my studio, it is a place where the chaos is unified.  To me that is the most creative force in the universe’.

The other essays are more grounded, less pretentious, but still lively.  In ‘Field notes on British art in the third millennium’, Tom Morton characterizes the state of art as a proliferation consisting of more, more, more — more art, more arts institutions, more curators, galleries, collectors and art fairs. Tate Modern on London’s Southbank and the first Frieze Art Fair together with the Internet, video and film stimulated a huge explosion of interest. 

He cites Anish Kapoor’s ArcelorMittal Orbit of 2011–12, produced for the Olympic Park in London, as his prime example of public art, ‘that strange beast’.  It was presented, he says, ‘like a Hollywood blockbuster in a flurry of statistics’, the tallest, most expensive work of public art ever.  Morton does not like the thing, he sees it as ‘monstrous, blood-smeared’, although fabricated from steel it bears ‘the colour of flayed human flesh’ and its central (and maybe only) narrative being ‘its own giganticism’.

To further demonstrate the ‘more-ness’ and variety of current trends in art, Morton cites a work by Roger Hiorns called Untitled, which is a pile of scattered remains of an engine from some ill-fated passenger plane spread out on the floor.  The powdery dust, curiously gentle and varying in tonality, appears like a landscape, somehow endless and futile; the pieces of the jet engine are reminders of pollution, the collapse of the twin towers, and inevitable climate change.

In ‘Fleeting thoughts on painting’, Morton puts in a good word for painting, which seems to be holding its own in this overwhelming, fast-moving art world.  Its vitality is its near-infinite variey.  The painters interviewed for this book seem to be aware that their method for image making is well grounded in history, predating mechanical reproduction. Even better, it retains a uniqueness, which is a special and precious quality, sometimes even unrelated to monetary value. 

Morton reflects on Simon Starling’s Shedboatshed of 2005, which won the Turner Prize for that year.  This work of art began as a shed on the banks of the Rhine.  Starling then disassembled it and made it into a boat, which he sailed downriver, ending up at the Kunstmuseum in Basel.  At each stage in its trajectory there was a transformation, traces of the earlier structure remained, and the labour expended demonstrates a kind of idiosyncratic delight. (Curiously, Starling is not included in the book’s near-all-inclusive list of interesting artists). The variety and richness of ideas in contemporary art is mind-breaking; Morton’s essay attempts to sort out important trends in what he calls ‘Third Millennium British art’.  

Iwona Plazwick, who has been the Director of the Whitechapel Gallery since 2001, offers an ‘A to Z of the studio’ beginning with ‘A’ for ACME Studios. In the 1960s these were the first studios in London (in the 20th century) designated for artists. From very modest beginnings ACME and others now provide affordable working places for thousands. The alphabet continues through ‘B’ for boredom, and so on to: ‘mess’, ‘gallery, ‘politics,’ ‘studio visit’, all together giving an interesting insight into the, sometimes private, existence of today’s working artists.

The A to Z is followed by Richard Cork’s splendidly revealing essay on the studio life of the ‘greats’: Bacon, Freud, Caro, Riley, Hodgkin, Gilbert and George, Gormley and Kapoor – pretty well covering  the last 30 years of work by the most noted British artists.  Cork makes the absolute most of this rich subject when he uncovers little known facts about the artists’ working lives.  Bacon, for example, kept his studio unheated for fear of fire, and Caro’s yard was stacked with sheets and cylinders of rusted steel and a ship’s anchor in preparation for a Tate exhibition.   ‘We’ve had seventeen people working on it [Caro’s 25-ton Octagon Tower] and the noise has been unbelievable at times’, Caro told Cork.

The great bulk of the book is due to the  120 interviews with artists in their studios. Some are the ‘great and famous’, some are ‘up and coming’, and some are recent graduates who are relatively unknown.  We see them at work or not at work.  Their studios are in London, or New York or Berlin or in the country. A team of fellow artists (20 or so) assembled a range of questions to promote discussion and to explore ideas.  Some of the questions seem crass and superficial (leading to terse replies); others lead naturally into revealing unexpected and fascinating things.  Questions about ‘defining moments’, ‘artistic influences,’  or ‘is your art just cumulative imitation?’ do not tell us much; we are sometimes aware of a reluctance and resentment at the invasion of privacy. 

The best interviews, however, give us pause and refresh our ideas and convictions.  Frank Auerbach (in an extremely rare interview), in talking about the need for artistic expression, says:

To see great art reminds one of what matters…it cuts away the trivia of life.  The artists I admire are the ones who have this inner core of integrity—they’re the ones we remember—and who do the things that seem to them, and to no-one else, to be right.  

And in answer to a question about who is the best judge of a work of art, the artist, the viewer or the market,  Auerbach answers: ‘The best judges are people, who, without any commercial interest at all, find that they have an overwhelming love for some sort of painting.’

Sculptors, photographers, conceptual artists, film and video  specialists, performance artists and specialists in shadow works or taxidermy are all here. David Nash, a ‘land/environmental’ artist has his studio is a woodland he owns in the foothills of Snowdonia.  In one photograph he is tending his ‘Ash Dome’, a ring of 22 saplings and in another he surveys his collection of wood.  In the accompanying interview he says he hopes for a dialogue, not a dominance over the material.  He does all the cutting and carving and pruning and has ‘finders’ who tell him of fallen or dead trees.  His huge admiration is for Brancusi, who once remarked that ‘good art heals’. ‘That is what I want’, says Nash, ‘I want my work to have a tenderness to it’.

Sanctuary – Britain’s Artists and their Studios, edited by Hossein Amirsadeghi with  Maryam Homayoun Eisler (executive editor) is published by Thames and Hudson, 2012. 600 pp., many illus, £48 hardback. ISBN  978 0 500 977071