October 2008

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‘I hear your energy! I will respond to your energy!’ So said the celebrated Miami art collector Mera Rubell down the phone to William Burlington, who was proposing to exhibit part of the Rubell collection at his family’s house in Ireland – Lismore Castle, Co. Waterford. It is just the kind of encouragement a young art patron wants to hear. That was last year and this year is the fourth that Burlington, son of the Duke of Devonshire, has staged a summer exhibition at Lismore. Unlike some aesthetically minded owners and residents of country houses who have gone for dreary exhibitions of bronze hunting dogs, twig rabbits and so on, Burlington is among a small group of energetic enthusiasts of contemporary art who can see the potential of utilising the family house and grounds. And with great effect. The Rubell collaboration meant that visitors could enjoy Matthew Barney, Gregor Schneider and Anri Sala in conjunction with Devonshire Collection treasures, including Van Dyck, Reynolds and Gainsborough. The previous year was an exhibition by Richard Long. This year’s exhibition – ‘A Life of Their Own’, curated by Richard Cork, concentrates on contemporary British works that could loosely be described as sculptures. It is a coherent mix of works that share a meaty physicality of form, albeit in very different ways. Conrad Shawcross’s Slow Arc Inside a Cube (Fig. 2), displayed in a room of its own, fills the space with eerie shadows, thrown onto the wall by a light bulb, attached to an armature that whirls on its axis inside a steel cage. In the main room, Eva Rothschild’s Black Window, a sculpture made of interlocking black triangles with holes that looks part-hillscape, part-3d Constructivist homage and part-cartoony cheese wedges – sits alongside Roger Hiorns’ bmw engine coated in brilliant blue copper sulphate crystals (Fig. 1; left) and Matt Calderwood’s plasterboard and timber cantilevered structures.

It helps that Lismore is the most beautiful castle in Ireland, and that it has a stirring history. The site was an important place of monastic learning from the early 7th century. Its south side sits over the River Blackwater – so if you happen to be staying there you could drop large crumbs out of the windows for the salmon below. What Burlington and his team are doing is inspiring. The expansive site of the castle and its proximity to both the river and the friendly village of Lismore mean that he has a great opportunity for more ambitious, site-specific installations in the future. Imagine what Olafur Eliasson could do here.

Together with Lismore, and the contemporary art exhibitions at Sudeley Castle, Gloucestershire (see pages 42-47), the keepers of Mount Stuart house on the Isle of Bute are commissioning contemporary art. Since 2001 Sophie Crichton-Stuart has brought artists (including Anya Gallaccio, Moyna Flannigan and Christine Borland) to make new work on site. The current show is film and photography by Mark Neville. His new film Fancy Pictures (Fig. 4) reinvents and gently subverts a pictorial tradition by featuring slow-motion sequences of animal life in front of backdrops taken from portraits by Raeburn, Ramsay and Reynolds in Mount Stuart’s dining room.

Sometimes when historic works mingle with contemporary art, the relationship can be symbiotic. However, it didn’t work with the Louvre’s decision to give over the Richelieu wing to Belgian artist Jan Fabre. The wing consists of 40 galleries of Flemish, Dutch and German painting that includes works by Van Eyck, Van der Weyden, Rembrandt and Rubens. As well as shuffling the works in these rooms, Fabre has installed his own work – from blue Bic biro drawings to the trademark sculptures covered with blue-green scarab beetles. The central piece is a large pile of Belgian marble tombstones on which lies a giant worm, likened by one critic to ‘a beige draught-excluder’. Surrounded by a room of fleshy, kitsch Rubens paintings, this is an object lesson in the over-kill that pervades the rest of the wing.

Beside the sea: the Folkestone Triennial
It is hard to imagine that H.G. Wells, Marcel Duchamp and Jimi Hendrix had anything in common, but as some pub-quiz enthusiasts undoubtedly know, they
all spent time in Folkestone. Wells wrote War of the Worlds, Duchamp played in the Chess Olympiad of 1933, while Jimi Hendrix spent a chilly New Year’s Eve here with his bassist Noel Redding. Now, the town is undergoing a substantial regeneration, led by the Creative Foundation. A school designed by Foster & Partners has already opened and a new rail link is set to open next year.

Visual arts often kick-start such projects and the first Folkestone Triennial, curated by Andrea Schlieker, has an impressive line-up of artists. Unlike many biennials that simply drop in work that happens to be available (which often means: for sale), Schlieker has insisted that each artist makes works after having spent a bit of time in Folkestone. And judging by the works that were finished at the time of going to press, it makes all the difference. Mark Wallinger has created a permanent memorial on the promenade to the 19,240 soldiers who died on the first day of the Somme (see pages 84-89). By an ironic twist, it is placed behind a bench that has a plaque in memory of one Stanley De’Ath. Similarly evocative is Christian Boltanski’s sound project The Whispers, which features letters, some sent by soldiers from the Front, and some sent by mothers, lovers or family, read out by the current owners. The recordings have been installed on four benches on the seafront. In one letter, dated 24 June 1915, Marjorie writes to her fiancé, Toby, and can only ask with strained casualness: ‘how goes the shooting?’ In another, dated 4 June 1917, ‘just before a large push’, Will writes to say, ‘you are the best little mother…I will say au revoir and not goodbye’. Even the most banal of details is heartwrenching.

Other artists reflect on the fun aspect of a seaside town. In the old ballroom of the Metropole Hotel, David Batchelor has made mirrorballs from coloured plastic glasses. When the sun is out, the light passes through Disco Mécanique (part-homage to Léger’s Ballet Mécanique) to create a kaleidoscopic array of colours. A cream-bun’s throw away is Kiosk 5: Kite Kiosk by Nils Norman, with Gavin Wade mit Simon
& Tom Bloor (Fig. 4). Here free kites are distributed with little booklets on Marxist theory blended with slogans. The kiosk, a Modernist structure based on Lubetkin’s design for a kiosk in Dudley Zoo, is a perfect contrast to the Edwardian buildings behind.

It is often the case when you are looking for art in public spaces, map in hand, that your sense of space and place seems heightened. Things that you might not normally notice – curlicued streetlamps, discarded breakwater boulders on the beach, the shifting colour of the sea, builders’ waste shutes – all take on new meanings. Folkestone is no exception. The ‘Seaside Surrealism’ associated with artists such as Paul Nash still seems to lingers in the air.

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