Tag Archives: Nottingham Contemporary

Alfred Kubin: The Other Side

Posted on by

By Alfred Kubin – https://www.wikiart.org/, Public Domain, at wikipedia.

 

Nottingham’s favourite concrete bunker has notched up yet another UK ‘first’ in exhibiting Francis Upritchard collection, ‘A Hand of Cards’. Upritchard’s recent works feature human figures on elaborate bases that come in acid-bright colours or clothed in woven textiles. This exhibition includes 20 new works, 9 of which are ‘soldier’ figures which taps nicely into the medieval myths of the area – the gallery itself, remember, is the site of both a Saxon fort and the medieval town hall. It wasn’t always just about Delilah’s and Jamie.

There are also 11 melancholy hippies, or “holy fools”, that appear to be marooned in an alternative universe and represent the failure of the Woodstock generation to find an alternative means of living and clearly haven’t heard about the Sumac Centre in Forest Fields. One massive blue figure looks like an extra that didn’t quite make it on to Avatar, and instead sits, with legs akimbo, as if wondering when his time will come (don’t worry mate, they’re doing a sequel). The collection also sees collaborations with her husband, the renowned furniture designer Martino Gamper (we reckon, to save on cash) as well as contemporary writers such as Ali Smith. So there’s a little bit for everyone in this collection.

Alfred Kubin began scribbling around the 1900s and as you would expect from that period, his work is pretty disturbing. His drawings deal with violent death and psychic trauma and were influenced by the nihilistic ideas of Nietzsche and My Happy Pants personified – Schopenhauer. So if the weather and our rammel performance in the Euros wasn’t enough to get you down, this certainly will. Kubin had a pretty messed-up adolescence after his mam popped her clogs and then a pregnant woman tried it on with him. But it didn’t stop there. At 19 there was a failed suicide attempt followed by a complete nervous breakdown at 20. To ordinary folk out there, this would be the perfect excuse to get kaylide and then confess all on Trisha. But Kubin opted for a different route. He jumped on a train to Munich, studied art and then began knocking out these amazing drawings. Misery and misfortune to an artist are like bacon, eggs and tom to a hungry builder. He wolfed down these experiences and began to create works that would go on to influence the dystopian world of Kafka’s The Castle as well as anticipating the dreamworlds of both the surrealists and the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund ‘I loves me cock’ Freud. So next time things aren’t going your way, don’t lamp the nearest youth you see. Get out a pen and start drawing.

This preview was published in issue 48 of LeftLion

Nottingham Contemporary website

Francis Upritchard A Hand of Cards & Alfred Kubin The Other Side  Nottingham Contemporary 21 July – 30 September 2012

What’s the Alan Moore?

Posted on by

 

Original image by Fimb – Alan Moore, CC BY 2.0 at Wikimedia. Design James Walker. 

It’s been a truly mental and surreal week, with each night worthy of a blog. But I just haven’t got time to document my life with such precision so here’s just one thing that happened and it happened on the bog. Monday night I popped over to watch the footy with Jared Wilson (LeftLion Editor-in-Chief) as I haven’t got a telly. This basically entails both of us sitting on the couch with laptops perched on our knees, occasionally looking up at the screen when the commentator sounds a bit excited – which wasn’t often. Later on that evening I was sat upstairs on the toilet when I heard this booming voice coming out of a telephone on loud speaker in the other room. It was Alan Moore who had very kindly agreed to do an interview with LeftLion. This is an amazing scoop as he very rarely gives interviews to the media but agreed to this one as he respects the LeftLion ethos e.g. we do it for free because we love it and we take the piss whenever we can.

Prior to the interview, Jared asked me to have a look at his questions. I just laughed. Having seen Moore give a spellbinding talk at the Contemporary a week ago it was clear there was little point worrying about wording because the minute you asked him a question he would go off on one. At the Contemporary he made a particularly salient point about the dangers of turning art into a commodity (Saatchi). Art, he said, is there to offer an alternative view of reality, and that it should challenge the establishment to enable things to change. When art is reduced to a commodity it dilutes in purpose and reinforces the norm. He also talked about reclaiming pornography in Lost Girls so that sexuality becomes natural and beautiful again rather than the aggressive, male-oriented perspective that reduces this communion to the clichéd world of Nuts et al.

Having heard him give these long, eloquent observations at the Contemporary I knew it would be very difficult for Jared to pin him down to the punchy responses that are required of a 1,200 word mag interview.  The medium is the message after all. This is the problem with doing phone interviews over email. But there was no way you could cut Moore off in midsentence given his suspicion and contempt for the media. The role of the journalist here is to take those wonderful, lengthy provocative observations and break them down by interjecting questions in the mag piece so that the article has a natural flow and rhythm. The next issue of LeftLion will take a poke at the Olympics and it would have been great to ask Melinda Gebbie to redesign the Olympic rings in the style of Lost Girls as the shape lends itself to the curves of the human form. But we didn’t want to push our luck given Moore’s generosity in agreeing to the interview.

But back to the toilet. I knew Jared was going to speak to Moore that evening, I just didn’t realise he would start when I was in his bathroom. Joe Orton once said the toilet was the last refuge of the male, in Chapter 16 of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Alan Sillitoe described a corporal who found the toilet ‘marvellous’ and a place for gathering thoughts, but having inadvertently experienced this with Alan Moore booming his shamanic wisdom out in the distance, the toilet has taken on a whole new realm of meaning, an experience that will never be bettered. I suspect that the devilish Moore would find the whole episode amusing.

For info on future talks and lectures at the Nottingham Contemporary, please see their website