Hauser and wirth – Anne's Landscape Learning Log

Last Saturday 6 of us from the South West OCA group met at Hauser and Wirth, Somerset to hear Swiss sculpture, Not Vital, talk about his exhibition, ‘SCRATCH’ which had opened the day before. Also opening on January 25th was an exhibition of Don McCullin’s work, The Stillness of Life’ so we were able to take advantage of both.

My hearing always causes a problem when listening to foreign artists in particular but the fact that we were moving round the exhibition rather than sitting still helped. I also took the opportunity to record some of the talk on my phone AND it helped having a press release and noted of each of the exhibits.

Many of the exhibits are very large and imposing and I found them all beautiful ‘Cannot Enter, Cannot Exit’ ( Vital, 2020), a stainless steel and ceramic structure standing in the grounds just outside the gallery has a highly polished reflective surface that picks up everything around it.

This sculpture, standing at just over 5 meters high, the same height of Michelangelo’s David, according the the press release, is typical of Vital’s use of towers. In the grounds scattered around the this sculpture are a series of ‘Bales’made of stainless steel and painted with white varnish. Vital expressed his surprise that most bales in this country are covered in black plastic rather than white, which I assumed they must be in Switzerland. One of my favourite outside exhibits has to be ‘Date’ (Vital 2016)

My only experience of dates has been the sort you put in date and walnut loaf or the ones you get in a box at Christmas and my recollection of those is that they have been shiny on the outside and quite dull inside. Not so, Not’s date, forgive the pun, which is the other way round, according to the press release, ‘enveloping the viewer in an inverted world’ (Hauser and Wirth 2020). So the outside of this 3 meter high ‘fruit’ is dull on the outside and highly polished within. You could go inside, through we were asked not to. We were also asked not to touch the exhibit, though many people followed Vital’s example in stroking the sculpture. One thing I noticed on this sculpture that I didn’t on any of the other were scribbled numbers on the outside, I assume for the purpose of reconstructing the sculpture when it was installed.

Back inside the building the first sculpture we saw was ‘House to Watch the Sunset’ (Vital, 2005). This aluminium tower which is modelled on an ongoing international series currently in 3 locations, Niger, Brazil and Switzerland, consists of 3 stories which an unconnected but accessible from separate staircases. Vital talked about sourcing local materials for each of his houses, so each is different in that respect but identical in design. This house is not about home or the comforts we expect to find there but the way we look out at the wider world.

I find these works quite fascinating and thought provoking and would really like to go back and view them again, having learnt a little bit more about the artist.

One of the things that really intrigued me about this exhibition was a series of experiments on paper, looking for all the world as though they had just been torn out of a sketchbook – maybe they had.

Things like a pair of knee high tights, glued to paper with what looked like straws coming out of the bottom of them called ‘2 Pavilions for Tarasp’ (Vital 2018) and ‘Nest’ (Vital 2018) which looked like a lock of hair twisted round but was in fact made of straw.

One thing that Not Vital did say which I thought was interesting was that if you asked him again tomorrow what these experiments were about, he would probably say something completely different. So having started something, it obviously continues to evolve in his mind.

This artist deserves much more time in terms of exploration and comment than I have given here. I will attempt to get back to this exhibition again before it closes but in the meantime, I am really glad I made the journey.

As is sometimes the case with me, the other exhibition, the one I really looked forward to, was a little disappointing and I’m wondering if I should maybe just try to see one exhibition at a time.

The ‘Stillness of Life’ is an exhibition of Don McCullin’s landscape work and as I had explored some of McCullin’s ‘war’ photography when studying the Documentary module, I was intrigued to see what this would hold.

The introductory sentence in the press release is a quote from Mark Holborn, ‘If you look again at McCullin’s landscapes, you start to sense the figure who made the pictures’ (Holborn, 2018, quoted in Hauser and Wirth, 2020) and for me, that says it all.

I can’t get my mind away from McCullin’s work as a war photographer, though in the film just outside the gallery that we could tune into, he is adamant that he is not and never was. Grim scenes of battle and those scarred by battle are indelibly carved into his mind, they can’t not be, and though there may be stillness and beauty in the landscape scenes he was photographing, those on display here were very dark, too dark for me. They made me think of the recent announcement made by Fergal Keene that he was stepping back from his role as Africa correspondent for the BBC due to post traumatic stress disorder (PSTD), the same condition that affected Sabastiao Salgado causing him to rethink his photographic direction a few years ago.

Whilst acknowledging that war and disaster have never left McCullin, the press release goes on to say that ‘it is through his ceremonial journeys across familiar corners of the landscape that he sentences himself to peace and seeks to find stillness in life’ (Hauser and Wirth, 2020). Looking at this work, I don’t think he has found it yet.

This is the first time I have been to Hauser and Wirth in Somerset a even though it was a dreich day, it is such a beautiful place. Although it might have made the journey trickier, I was wishing it has been frosty as the grasses in the gardens were lovely and this would have enhanced them even more.