A Peep Through The Looking Glass | Alice in Wonderland | Tate Liverpool

Text by Liz Buckley

Since their original publication in 1865, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass have had an unprecedented influence on the visual arts. Charles Dodgson, working under the pseudonym, Lewis Carroll, created a kind of dream world that can be appreciated by both children and adults alike. Exploring themes of the uncanny, unexpected, irrational, absurd and fantastical, the story of Alice is one that we all know and love. Tate Liverpool’s current show, Alice in Wonderland, offers visitors everything from original manuscripts, sketches, photographs and memorabilia, to both traditional and contemporary painting, sculpture, and video responses to the Alice adventures. The pieces on show in this exhibit explore various ideas such as the temporary nature of time, the precariousness of childhood, the impact of the written word upon visual culture and issues of identity. As a collective, these works highlight the more sophisticated themes which, even as children’s books, the Alice stories still present.

This exhibition displays an exciting range of media which explore themes that have arisen from the Alice stories. Jason Rhoades’ playful neon lights which hang from the ceiling are colourful and stimulating, and portray how the written word still influences contemporary art. Whimsical pieces such as Mel Bochner's, Measurement: Eye-level Perimeter (Ask Alice)(1969/2011) takes the form of a black line marking 9 feet around the top of the exhibition’s first room, signifying the exact height which Alice grows to after consuming the contents of the ‘Drink Me’ bottle at the beginning of the book, which shows that the Alice stories are continuing to inspire fun and thought-provoking artwork, which can make all ages reminiscent of fairytales they have once enjoyed.

As many know, the tales of Alice were of course inspired by a real little girl named Alice Liddell, the daughter of one of Carroll’s good friends. In this exhibit visitors are treated to a whole host of photographs by both Carroll and other artists, of Alice and her sisters, ranging from when they were little girls up until their late teens. Carroll felt that childhood was so precious and short that he tried to preserve it using photography and story writing. As well as photographs of the real Alice, this exhibition also showcases many original manuscripts and sketches from the Alice adventures, as well as some of Lewis Carroll’s diaries and famous drawings by Sir John Tenniel.

In 1907, the copyright for the Alice stories ran out, allowing the public sphere to positively run wild with it. Innumerable other illustrated editions of the story were published and in a wide variety of languages, many of which are on show in this exhibit. Alongside these are fascinating cabinets of curiosities, containing early Alice memorabilia such as painted wooden figures, card games, lantern slides and crockery. This extensive and impressive collection shows visitors just a snapshot of how Alice became a worldwide phenomenon.

Many well known Surrealist artists such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst and Roland Penrose were inspired by the Wonderland adventures. Surrealism took great influence from Carroll’s Alice books, and the British Surrealist Group of 1936 were even dubbed the 'Children of Alice'. With the use of such vivid and odd imagery one can see clearly how Surrealism and Carroll’s dream world tie together. A particular highlight of this exhibition is Dali’s 12 illustrations for Alice in Wonderland. His famous melting clocks and ‘crutches of reality’ can of course be seen within the drawings, relating perfectly to the relativity of time and space in Wonderland.

Even by the 1960s, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass were still having an impact on visual culture. Part of this exhibition is dedicated to the way Carroll’s stories influenced the more psychedelic art of the era, bringing to light the ‘alternative experiences’ that came with drug culture, as well as questions of identity, and our perceptions of immediate reality. Here one can see the work of John Wesley, Paul Laffoley and Peter Blake amongst others.

There are additionally many video installations to be found relating to the Alice adventures, ranging from original silent film clips by Cecil Hepworth, Magritte and even Walt Disney, to contemporary video responses from Diana Thater, Gary Hill, and Douglas Gordon to name a few. These explore themes such as time, mirrors, double perceptions, space and more, putting a modern twist on the connotations of Wonderland.

It is clear from the sheer amount of paintings, illustrations, photographs, sculptures, installations, videos, and memorabilia in this exhibition that Alice has had a significant impact on visual culture from the word go. Alice’s whimsical adventures with talking cats, mad hatters and stones that turn into cakes have certainly made children and adults alike a little less sceptical of falling down the rabbit hole. As a story that can be enjoyed by all ages, Carroll has created an alternative reality to which, even well over a century later, one still enjoys escaping to, and the Tate Liverpool has celebrated it perfectly.

Alice in Wonderland, 04/11/2011 - 29/01/2012, Tate Liverpool, Albert Dock Liverpool. www.tate.org.uk/liverpool.

Aesthetica's December/January issue includes an interview with the curator of the exhibition, Christoph Benjamin Schulz. Pick up a copy in one of our stockists or order one here.

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Captions:
1. Jason Rhoades Tate Touche from My Madinah: in pursuit of my ermitage (2004). Courtesy The Estate of Jason Rhoades
2. Torsten Lauschmann Digital Clock (Growing Zeros) (2010). Copyright Torsten Lauschmann. Courtesy of Mary Mary Glasgow
3. Anna Gaskell Untitled #5 (Wonder) (1996). Courtesy of Yvon Lambert Gallery

Things Which Come Together & Then Fall Apart | Martin Boyce Wins The Turner Prize 2011

Text by Colin Herd

When Mario Testino announced Glasgow-based Martin Boyce as the winner of this year’s Turner Prize at the Baltic last Monday night, he accepted the award with modesty to the point of bashfulness: “Uh, well,” he said, “I didn’t expect that”, before going on to dedicate his prize to the importance of teachers and education. His reaction reflects a quiet generosity (as well as a sense of modest unexpected surprise) that is ever present in his art practice, which Tate-director Nicholas Serota has praised for the way it explores “things which come together and then fall apart”.

Boyce won the prize for an installation that was originally exhibited this year at the Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, and which built on the work that he showed at the Scottish pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2009. Do Words Have Voices (2011), the sculptural installation at the centre of the room, is a hauntingly thoughtful piece that evokes an urban, autumnal and distinctly Modernist atmosphere. A ceiling-based sculpture of angular white aluminium fans suggesting a shady canopy that, combined with the concrete structural pillars in the space, creates a sense of a concrete tree looming and sheltering above. The room is remarkably peaceful and quiet, the light refracted to a dapple by the aluminium leaves above. Boyce’s sculpture references a design for a Modernist garden from 1925, including four cubist concrete trees, by the French sculptors and designers Jan and Joël Martel, made for the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris . On the floor, scattered around the room, are delicate papery geometric forms the colour of toast, like autumn leaves.

The different sculptural elements in Boyce’s installation exist in curious counterpoint and balance to one another. The attention is drawn as much to the atmosphere created, the spaces between the works and the conversation between different elements as the individual pieces themselves. You find yourself threading carefully past his paper leaves for anxiety they could sweep up in your wake. Perforated and Porous (Northern Leaves) (2011) is a red metal sculpture, slanted like a parallelogram with a lattice pattern. Inside the sculpture is a grey soiled rag of a jumper, as if a ‘hollowman’ has got his head stuck at the base. This piece has prompted the usual criticism from Turner-phobes, who have christened it the ‘wonky bin’, but it is in fact a decidedly subtle and evocative work. It manages to appear both mangled, like something you’d just stumble across in an abandoned play- park, and fresh-off-a-Modernist-designer’s-pen, like something from Charles and Ray Eames, or Danish master furniture-designer and architect Arne Jacobsen. The forms in the lattice of the bin also evoke the angular lexical shapes in the Martel twins’ concrete trees, a motif that is also picked up in one of the most easy-to-overlook aspects of Boyce’s subtle installation, the grilles he’s designed for the air vents in his gallery of the Baltic’s third floor. Elegant and simple, these geometric white panels wouldn’t look out of place in the lounge of an art-deco hotel or ocean liner, but they also have the strange edgy geometric quality generated from Boyce’s recasting of the Martels’ trees.

Boyce has been creating work from these concrete trees since he first encountered a photograph of them in Berlin in 2005, where he shared a studio with Simon Starling, another Glasgow School of Art graduate to have won the Turner prize. On seeing the photograph in a book, Boyce began making series of patterned drawings based on their shapes. Gradually, these drawings developed into lexical forms and he began developing typographic pieces using the slanty geometric lettering devised from the drawings. A piece called No Brilliantly Coloured Birds created for his No Reflections show at Venice 2009 features the phrase from the title text on a wooden bird box. The letters have the appearance of tumbling to the ground, some upside down, some on their sides etc, and they require considerable effort in deciphering what’s a “t” and what’s a “y”. In the Turner Prize exhibition, this typographical work has developed into a large concrete wall panel created from the process of ‘shuttered concrete’, i.e. concrete that is set in a frame of wood so that it retains the grain when the frame is removed. It gives the pane the disquieting appearance of wall-mounted concrete floor-boards. The same Martel-inspired tumbling script spells out “petrified songs”, possibly in reference to the birds from the earlier piece.

One of the most compelling aspects of his Turner Prize exhibition is the way the environment Boyce has created feels both “inside” and “outside” at once. Both like a landscape and an interior scene. Boyce has long shown an interest in architectural space, particularly with reference to twentieth century Modernist architecture and design. His 2002 exhibition For 1959 Capital Avenue in the foyer of the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, constructed an interior space of a fictional address in the USA, drawing on and subtly altering designs by architect R.M. Schindler and Mies Van Der Rohe. The date in the house number connects Boyce’s project to the way that the cultural significance of these pieces of furniture alters over time; what once were relatively affordable and readily available become treasures of private collectors, as suggested by the exhibition’s loaded street-name. Constructed as it was in a foyer, (which itself seems a critique on the capital attributed to modern art, its transition from the up-market apartment-block foyer to the museum floor) the exhibition seemed on the cusp of being outside and inside, an effect compounded by the utopian quotation from Mies van der Rohe that Boyce had printed around the walls of the space: “punching through the clouds”.

Boyce’s work manages to capture some of this utopian vision and filter it (through an intricate critique) into a peaceful and compelling architectural environment, the spaces between the sculptural objects in his installation seeming as if they’re pulling away from each other in perfect tension. Ilfracombe-based painter George Shaw may have been the popular choice for this year’s Turner Prize with his highly detailed enamel landscapes of the Coventry estate where he grew up, but to my mind, Boyce’s exploration of our engagement with architectural space is far subtler, and more magical.

The Turner Prize 2011, Baltic, Gateshead, 21/10/2011 - 15/01/2012

balticmill.com
tate.org.uk/britain/turnerprize

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We hope you enjoy reading the Aesthetica Blog, if you want to explore more of the best in contemporary art and culture you should read us in print too. You can buy it today by calling +44(0)1904 479 168. Even better, subscribe to Aesthetica and save 20%. Go on, enjoy!

Caption:
Martin Boyce
Turner Prize 2011 Installation view
BALTIC presents Turner Prize 2011
© BALTIC & the artist
Photo: Colin Davison

40:40 - Forty Objects For Forty Years | Craft Council Online Exhibition Launches Today

The Craft Council celebrates 40 years of the Crafts Council Collection with a major online exhibition 40:40 - forty objects for forty years that launches today. It's an innovative concept, with forty objects from the Collection, selected by makers, writers and curators, presented with a personal response from their selector alongside a range of archive material including exhibition catalogue texts, films, audio clips, sketches, press articles, loan correspondence and installation instructions. Essentially, by installing the exhibition online, the viewer is encourages to do all those things you promote yourself you're going to do after you've seen a gallery exhibition - read a bit more about the artist, their work, what people are saying about them, and critical responses to the work.

There are pieces by some of the most important makers of contemporary craft from the last 40 years, including Fred Baier's Star Wars Chair (1978), a small yellow bowl by legendary potter Lucie Rie (1983), pioneering jewellery by David Watkins (1983), Caroline Broadhead's Wobbly Dress (1990), Grayson Perry's anarchic Mad Kid's Bedroom Wall Pot (1996), Toord Boontje's Wednesday Light (2001) and Arcady (2007) by Edmund de Waal.

Our favourites are listed below, but given that it's only a click away, we recommend you take a look for yourself.

Laura Potter Cliché (1997):
Cliché is a bottle of tiny silver sheep to be taken out and counted at bedtime. Exquisite.

El Ultimo Grito (Rosario Hurtado & Roberto Feo) Miss Ramirez Chair (2006):
The Miss Ramirez Chair is named after the Spanish-speaking bar owner in the 1952 Western High Noon. Husband and wife partnership, El Ultimo Grito's work questions our relationships with objects and culture, exploring them across disciplines in projects ranging from interiors to graphics. Playful and humorous.

Grayson Perry Mad Kid's Bedroom Wall Pot (1996):
Grayson Perry was never motivated by a desire to work in clay as such, but chose pottery because studio ceramics was in thrall to a formal idea. Perry challenges the idea, implicit in the craft tradition, that pottery is merely decorative or utilitarian and cannot express ideas. Deeply psychological.

Maria Militsi Ballet To Remember (2009):
Ballet to Remember is a collection of 11 pieces choreographed by Felicity and Edna Dean's book published in 1944 demonstrating a variety of ballet poses. Militsi's series reassesses the object's function by filling their empty space with precious metals.

Michael Eden Wedgwoodn't Tureen (2010):
Playfully entitled Wedgwoodn't Tureen, this reinterpretation of a classic Josiah Wedgwood pottery is a strong example of the successful fusion of traditional craft skills with digital technology in the Crafts Council Collection. Designed using a rapid manufacturing machine, which prints in three dimensions from a digital file, the sheer beauty of this piece belies its wit and historical resonance. Truly striking.

40:40 - Forty Objects For Forty Years, www.4040.org.uk & www.craftscouncil.org.uk

Aesthetica Magazine
We hope you enjoy reading the Aesthetica Blog, if you want to explore more of the best in contemporary art and culture you should read us in print too. You can buy it today by calling +44(0)1904 479 168. Even better, subscribe to Aesthetica and save 20%. Go on, enjoy!

Captions:
1. Laura Potter Cliché (1997). Image courtesy of Nick Moss.
2. El Ultimo Grito (Rosario Hurtado & Roberto Feo) Miss Ramirez Chair (2006). Image courtesy of Heini Schneebeli
3. Grayson Perry Mad Kid's Bedroom Wall Pot (1996. Image courtesy of Nick Moss.
4. Maria Militsi Ballet To Remember (2009). Image courtesy of Nick Moss.
5. Michael Eden Wedgwoodn't Tureen (2010.Image courtesy of Nick Moss.