Cerith Wyn Evans

A Critical Analysis of the Installation Untitled (Flute Piece Incarnation White Cube Bermondsey) by Cerith Wyn Evans, 2011

Immediately I can appreciate the exactitude involved in manipulating air within the assembled bowels of a sound sculpture. The precision required to produce a desirable tone from the seven clear crystal flutes is commendable.

Image from - http://www.re-title.com/exhibitions/archive_GaleriaFortesVilaca12574.asp

I admire with intrigue its transparency, a recurring motif in Wyn Evans' work, which flaunts rather honestly its subdued and understated inner workings. Its visual presence is a mere whisper and although large in size, it cowers.

However, in showing the tubes and transparent component housings, what might instead be considered is the material of sound as it engulfs and shrouds the sculpture. Perhaps the sculpture's rigid body is disguised in an inadequate camouflage and thus showing a desire to take a back seat in the interwoven symbiosis with sound.

It would appear then, that this hanging structure would assume a skeletal role forming something of an internal structure in a body of formless sound, the necessary groundwork or footings for a much more ambitious and dynamic form. This is one that aims to infiltrate the listener directly and reciprocally share in the duration of staggered soundings.

In the conversational exchange, from within an aesthetic participatory position, I encounter only a breathing body, a further addition to the gathering viewers and listeners. Naturally, it invites a duet with my own. I question my relevance, I only contribute to found sounds in the soundscape and they curdle with the constructed, however this is an outsider's perspective. I realise from my own, the sculpture and I are both producers, my footsteps and breathing converse with its flutes.

Website - Online Research Folio

Below is a link to my online research folio.

www.timbarnesstudio.com

Entering the Whirlpool


Art and Spirituality

We don’t fully understand the world. It remains somewhat out of our control. Artists deliberately produce work that is mysterious, provocative and ambiguous, offering us the space to lose ourselves, or perhaps find ourselves.   

Below is a brief extract from ‘A Passage to India’ by E.M. Forster. A group of European tourists visit the Marabar caves in India and something extraordinary is expected to happen.

“There are some exquisite echoes in India; there is the whisper round the dome at Bijapur; there are the long, solid sentences that voyage through the air at Mandu, and return unbroken to their creator. The echo in Marabar cave is not like these, it is entirely devoid of distinction. Whatever is said, the same monotonous noise replies, and quivers up and down the walls until it is absorbed into the roof. ‘Boum’ is the sound as far as the human alphabet can express it, or ‘bou-oum,’ or ‘ou-boum,’ utterly dull. Hope, politeness, the blowing of a nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce ‘boum’.”

After experiencing this, Mrs. Moore, one of the visitors is sat motionless in horror.

“But suddenly, at the edge of her mind, Religion appeared, poor little talkative Christianity, and she knew that all its divine words from ‘Let there be light’ to ‘It is finished’ only amounted to ‘boum’. Then she was terrified over an area larger than usual; the universe, never comprehensible to her intellect, offered no response to her soul, the mood of the last two months took definite form at last, and she realized that she didn’t want to write to her children, didn’t want to communicate with anyone, not even with God.”  

This is the one part of the book I thought was most significant. It’s like that moment of realization in T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Waste Land’ - ‘On Margate sands I can connect nothing with nothing’. We squirm in the absence of God.

It seems that in our culture this might have something to do with the conflict between intellectual integrity and a sense of desire, - how we may long for something to happen. Maybe it’s the head over the heart, reason over bodily longing. We are split in two, pulled in different ways. 

When I saw the paintings by Robert Fry at the Saatchi Gallery, something happened. In my mind, I saw these painted figures suggesting both a physical and emotional energy and perhaps these might present that torn feeling or the terrible realization like Mrs. Moore sat outside the Marabar Caves. 

As a direct response I wanted to paint one of these figures in Fry’s setting, in his visual, energetic language.

'Entering the Whirlpool (Painting for Robert Fry)' by Tim Barnes,
100x80cm, Acrylic on Stretched Shower Curtain, 2011

  

The 'Id', the 'Art', and the 'Other'.

“I am fundamentally a beast –

But a beast that can’t get over the ceaseless thirst for god” – Evelyn Underhill.

Our personalities are unorganised in places. Its basic structure contains fundamental drives. The id is an inaccessible branch or corridor through which our unconscious mind strives to bring about the satisfaction of instinctual needs.

The id is a mechanism responsible for that which gives us a sense of completion or wholeness towards an absolute fulfilment.

There is a psychological explanation for god. Materialism, having been significant in the early modern period, first two decades of the twentieth century, (1910 – 1920) sees a moral crisis, the domination of capital over existence. Freud is also writing his groundbreaking works during this period and as an atheist he sought to explain all mental phenomena in terms of science (whilst not being a scientist). 

God is now displaced from heaven and into the psyche. God is in the realm of the id or more specifically, the ‘god spot’ responsible for harbouring a sense of the divine.  

Tracing the Sacred

Titan - 'Venus of Urbino' -oil on canvas- 1538

When Titian painted ‘Venus of Urbino’ in 1538, he purposefully presented Venus on another plane as though it is different level of existence. From the annotated diagram, we can see that the perspective on the tiled floor in the background scene simply does not correspond with the height at which Venus is. She should be below the floor. I don’t believe there to be a hidden step between these spaces, descending into the room in the foreground.  

Venus’ other plane is an intriguing idea in my art.

Antony Gormley - 'Another Place' - Crosby Beach.

Antony Gormley’s ‘Another Place’ deals with a similar situation. The cast iron figures are positioned on the shifting sands at Crosby beach. This has the effect, in some cases, of burying the figures, or in others revealing the plinth-like supports on which each is stood.  Each figure stands looking out to sea. They appear to be observing something out of frame, something ‘other’.

Anselm Kiefer 'To the Unknown Painter' - 1983

Anselm Kiefer’s painting, ‘To the Unknown Painter’ - 1983, is a typical display of his consideration of space expanding from the canvas. Recalling the clarity of  the renaissance, perspective works to stretch the image into space, however no people inhabit it. There appears to be a feeling of disunion between the figure and it’s 

world.

We may be able to sense a figure present in this painting but outside of the frame, external to the image, in another place.

As we seek wholeness and find it a thirst forever unquenched, this quest for something ‘other’ or something greater than ourselves continues.

Ideas involving otherness and ‘out-of-frame-ness’, surround my latest performance work ‘ Departure From the Frame’.

Tim Barnes, 'Departure From the Frame', Performance, 2011

Tim Barnes, 'Departure From the Frame', Performance, 2011

Tim Barnes, 'Departure From the Frame', Performance, 2011

There is a desire here to be out of frame, but I refer to the frame in the sense that an art school may be considered a frame. The world is a frame in this sense. I wanted to become something ‘other’, external to profane things.

Economy, Materiality and Sensibility

'Junk' sculpture

Tim Barnes - 'Bin Tower' - 2010

Economy and ideas relating to worth proves to be a creatively fertile area in which I produce work. The questionable aesthetic is something I find exciting, It may in some cases determine the 'success' of an artwork. 

Good Bad Painting / Bad Good Painting. 

A painting seems to me to be an object. Relating closest to that of a sculptural, Fine Art object. The actual painting is only usually applied onto one surface of this object. In this case, the painting might exist at the expense of the sculpture. (The sculpture, being the unprimed and unpainted stretched canvas.) This can of course be considered beautiful, and indeed is, however if I was then to paint an awful painting with little consideration of composition, colour, line, e.t.c..., this would now involve two jarring properties. The 'beautiful' (good) object of the stretched canvas apposing the questionable, or failing image on it's surface (bad). This is an example of a 'Good Bad Painting'. Alternatively, a masterful painting on an unprimed shower curtain may be considered a 'Bad Good Painting'. 

Tim Barnes - 'Wheelie Bad, Bad Painting', Acrylic on Canvas, 2011

'Wheelie Bad, Bad Painting' is an example of a 'bad' painting painted on a 'bad' object.

The Heavenly Apparatus

Tim Barnes - 'The Heavenly Apparatus' - (250x400cm) Acrylic on Canvas, 2011

Tim Barnes - 'Studio',  2011

Extended brushes are used to distance myself from the canvas, 'at arms length', allowing the physicality of the stick to play a much more prominent role in the action of painting. Controlled chance and experimentation flings the door open to chaos.

'The Brushes', 2011

When the chaos intervenes in action painting, this is the voice of our harmonious universe, being governed by natural law and partaking in rational order, it intercedes and makes the painting 'beautiful' or harmonious.  

'The Art Objects' (Canvas Sculptures)

Tim Barnes, 'Art Object No.1', Canvas and Brushes, 2011 

                    
                                             Tim Barnes, 'Art Object No.2', Canvas and Brushes, 2011

Tim Barnes, 'Art Object No.3', Canvas and Brushes, 2011