Magnificent Obsessions on Front Row

I have a fascination with, and am attracted to collections. The psychology of collecting interests me, as well as the method of displays.

Damien Hirst, Birds display

 Danh Vo I M U U R 2, 2013 (detail)

The new exhibition, Magnificent Obsessions at the Barbican in London is featured on the BBC Radio 4 programme, Front Row. The exhibition focuses on the artist as collector. Many post-war and contemporary artists are represented, including the possessions of Howard Hodgkin, Edmund de Waal, Damien Hirst and Peter Blake. The show's curator Lydia Yee gives John Wilson a personal tour.

Edmund de Waal from the collection of a private man, 2011

Sol LeWitt, Autobiography, 1980

Featured on the BBC Radio 4 programme, Front Row, 11th February http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b051s2m1

Visit to the Great North Museum archive at the Discovery Museum

This afternoon we had a class outing to the Discovery museum where we met Dan Gordon, Keeper of Biology for Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums. 

Dan gave us a fascinating tour of the archives...

"Several extinct and endangered species are represented, including great auk, moa, dodo, huia, kakapo, blue-wattled crow or kokako, Inaccessible Island rail, passenger pigeon and the only surviving specimen of the extinct British race of the capercaillie.

The bird mount collection numbers around 2,000 specimens and a comprehensive range of British species, including the only known juvenile specimen of a great auk, the only surviving specimen of the extinct British race of the Capercaillie and at least one 18th Century type specimen. Other Extinct species, or those on the verge of extinction, are represented by the Huia, Kakapo, Blue-Wattled Crow, Inaccessible Island Rail and Passenger Pigeon, and there are many specimens of other rare and endangered species.

The study skin collection (around 12,000 specimens) is divided, for the purposes of cataloguing and storage into Palaearctic (the bulk of Eurasia and North Africa) and non-Palaearctic specimens. It is especially strong in material from the British Isles.

The collection of non-Palaearctic study skins includes 4,050 birds collected in Assam, Sikkim and Tonkin during the 1920s, areas which have suffered major environmental deterioration in recent decades. It also include a type specimen of Dickinson's Falcon, Falco Dickinsoni (donated 1863) from Zambia.

The historic egg and nest collection, housing around 28,000 specimens is predominantly British in origin, and provides comprehensive coverage of the national fauna. A small number of exotic specimens include eggs from Siberia.

The museum also holds several historically important marine collections, including the Alder Hancock collection of nudibranchs and tunicates, and George Brady’s ostracods. The marine specimens are complimented by 50 models of sea anemones made by the Bohemian glass-worker Blaschka in the late 19th Century: originally bought for scientific purposes, they are also superb examples of the model-maker's art.

A whale head!

Poisoned spears

The Great North Museum’s botany collections include over 79,000 specimens from a variety of taxonomic groups, including algae, bryophytes (mosses and liverworts), tracheophytes (flowering plants and ferns), and fungi, including lichens. Many of the specimens are from historically interesting collections, some of which are almost 200 years old. Local and national species are well represented.

Insect collections

The insect collection incorporates a large array of Lepidoptera, Coleoptera and Ditptera specimens. All include a large British component, and the Lepidoptera collection is strong in material from the Oriental region, containing a birdwing butterfly collection."

Butterfly collections

http://www.twmuseums.org.uk/great-north-museum/collections/natural-sciences.html

You can get a lot from looking at someone's book collection

As part of the London Art Book Fair, the Whitechapel asked the UK’s best artists to share their ‘shelfies’. They offer a fascinating insight into their work

Iwona Blazwick
Thursday, 25 September 2014

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/london-art-book-fair-some-of-britains-best-artists-share-their-shelfies-9754099.html?printService=print

Books have been important to artists as an artistic medium and rich source of inspiration for centuries.

You have only to look at examples such as the Book of Kells or William Blake’s illustrated book Songs of Innocence and Experience. Books deliver a microcosm of the artists’ work and through the writings of those who know and are passionate about art, we can better understand it. They are also beautiful objects.

Covers, margins, double page spreads, sequences of pages are all empty stages for artists to tell stories using images or texts. Pushing beyond merely reproducing their works of art, artists have taken every publishing convention – from science to literature – and turned it upside down. Books give artists a way of sharing their work with the widest possible audience. Unlike an exhibition, a book is for ever. And artists often create books as works of art in their own right – which is why they are a great investment that gains enormous value over time.

Shelf life: Selfies of some of the nations finest artists

Who better to showcase art books than artists themselves? London’s Whitechapel Gallery was inspired to reach out to the vast network of artists that we have exhibited, to get a glimpse into the books that prompt, provoke and enrich their practice.

Artists often turn to books, either as inspiration or as sources of research. The works on their shelves often contain the kernels of their artistic ideas. Artists also have a tendency to have very particular (and often peculiar) tastes and collections. A glimpse into these is always tantalizing.

The studio library is a private space – rather than invade it, we asked artists to do what everyone in the world is doing – take a selfie. The screen shots we received were like glowing miniatures. Ironically, we are taking pictures of something that is ardently pre-screen. It’s a strange combination of the instantaneity of the screen, and the slow time of the book. I think books – and art – ask their audience to slow down and spend time with them. This slowness is refreshing.

The Whitechapel Gallery established the London Art Book Fair in 2009 to both celebrate and incubate art book publishing. The concept was to present a snapshot of the wide scope of art book publishing; to represent every manifestation of the contemporary art book, from museum catalogues and coffee-table monographs on the one hand to artists’ books, scholarly publications, and ’zines on the other. It’s also a platform for amazing design and thrilling new ideas about our visual culture and what it means.

Art book publishing is not exempt from many of the challenges facing the publishing world today, but as an experimental and highly versatile art form, it is in some ways in a unique position to respond to these challenges. As such, it is today more relevant than ever. Many of these issues will be discussed in talks, performances, conferences and other events. As a former library and one of the UK’s primary centres for contemporary art, the Whitechapel Gallery is ideally placed to bring this community together and engage in these discussions.

It’s worth noting that we don’t choose books for the Fair, we choose publishers. Part of our interest is in creating a lively gathering that will bring together interesting people who are as captivated by publishing as we are. One of the major aims for the London Art Book fair is to be a setting that offers an opportunity for, and to foster exchange between the various publishers, practitioners, and collectors. Art books, and artists’ books especially, tend to have a wholly different distribution model than mass-market books, and book fairs are one of the primary ways that artists’ books can be discovered and exchanged. We feel privileged that we can be a part of this mechanism.

I’ve always been fascinated, personally, by Richard Prince’s vast library of first editions. Especially his collection of the various editions and translations of Nabokov’s Lolita (Prince even owns Nabokov’s own two-volume Olympia Press edition of Lolita, with his handwritten corrections). You can see how he is as excited about the look of a cover as its contents, how it conveys the spirit of its age.

The London Art Book Fair, Whitechapel Gallery, London E1 (020 7522 7888) tonight to 28 September. See more on Instagram @WhitechapelGallery or Twitter @TheLABF

Iwona Blazwick is director of the Whitechapel Gallery

http://www.londonartbookfair.org/

Books: What do the stars think?


Damien Hirst

“As a kid growing up in Leeds, books and postcards were my way into art. The Brutality of Fact book of Francis Bacon interviews was published when I was about 16 and it was the most important thing I’d ever read. I couldn’t believe how visceral his words were, I hadn’t read anything like it. I’ll never forget him talking about the smell of fear coming off the cows at a slaughterhouse, the universal fear of death. It changed how I thought about art. I’ve made my own books ever since I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to, I love how democratic they are and that they live for ever and that you can read them on the toilet. The Jeff Koons pocket handbook is another favourite of mine. It manages to capture Jeff’s extraordinary use of material and colour in a way that feels tangible, and his words crack me up and inspire me in equal measure. They are both books that made, and continue to make me fall head over heels in love with art.”


Tracey Emin

“My first art book was a book on German Expressionism. My Mum bought it for me when I was 17. I was ill. She asked me what I would like. I lay in bed staring into every image. Egon Schiele... Käthe Kollwitz. That book influenced my entire career as an artist. I still have it.”


Liam Gillick

“I don’t organise books by artist, architect, writer or use any other system. I just put them together as they arrive and as I go through different phases and different thoughts. So sometimes it looks as if there is a system. I don’t know if I “love” books. Sometimes they sit there and taunt me. They remain unread and ignored. Some of them are not even very good but I have read them more than once. I am not sure why I do that.”


Simon Starling

“Here is a picture of my book shelves at home, or at least the non-fiction section. The cataloguing as you can see is a work in progress. It almost looks like you could play the book shelves as some kind of musical composition – pianissimo for the small ones, fortissimo for the massif monographs, adagio when they lean to the right, allegro when they lean to the left etc. One day, I’ll get around to giving the cacophony some harmony but in the meantime I always seem able to find the ones that matter.”

Liz West: An artist with extra Spice By Ian Youngs Arts reporter, BBC News

Liz West, a fellow artist, lover of colour, Glasgow School of Art alumni, and my ex-flatmate, talks about how her collection of Spice Girl memorabilia has helped fund her art practice.

Entertainment & Arts

25 October 2013

Liz West: An artist with extra Spice By Ian Youngs Arts reporter, BBC News

 

Liz West is known for her artworks that use bright coloured light

 

Artist Liz West is gaining a glowing reputation for her colour-drenched light installations - but her art career might not have taken off if it were not for her world-record collection of Spice Girls memorabilia. Art and pop can go hand-in-hand, she explains.

 

West is taking part in two exhibitions this week - one featuring her strips of coloured light radiating from the corner of an old warehouse, which is in the Synthesis exhibition as part of Manchester Science Festival.

She has a growing reputation as a contemporary artist thanks to her arrangements of lights in precise, pleasing patterns and her collections of objects bathed in bright, bold hues.
For the other exhibition, she has lent some of the 5,000 Spice Girls items she has amassed since the age of 11, including branded clothes, crisp packets and a clock, to an exhibition celebrating 40 years of Virgin Records in London.

As well as being an artist, West holds the Guinness World Record for the largest collection of Spice Girls memorabilia.

 

 

The Spice Girls collection comprises 5,000 items of clothing and merchandise

"The way I see it is that installation art is high culture and Spice Girls is pop culture," she says. "Although the two hold hands, they're separate."

When looking to launch her art career, West's Spice Girls obsession came in useful when she found she could get paid for loaning her girl-powered pop collection to museums, film crews and events.

"Because I was given that financial boost to start with, my art practice has been able to roll and roll," she says.

"Now I'm able to fund my art practice through my art. I don't have to work in Starbucks part-time. A lot of artists do have to work part-time, and I think that would kill any creativity for me. It really would."

West was born into the art world - almost literally - almost born on the floor of the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, she says, when her mother Jenny was artist in residence there 28 years ago.

A five-day-old West attended the opening of her mother's exhibition.

 

 

West recently staged a solo exhibition in an empty office unit in Manchester.

 

When she was seven years old, West remembers putting nail varnish bottles on a bedroom shelf in line according to their colour. It is not difficult to spot a link between her love of colour as a child and the artworks she now creates.

Then when she was 11, the Spice Girls arrived.

"A very impressionable age, I think," she says. "I was hooked. The colour, the energy, the different personalities. That appealed - more so probably than the music."

When the Spice Girls' second album came out in 1997, West decided to collect any and every recording and item of memorabilia she could get her hands on.

"I'd go to the pound shop and buy bags of things as a 13- or 14-year-old. They brought out the dolls and I went to London to the Hamleys sale.

"Of course, when eBay appeared when I was 18, I had a student loan, went a bit mad, and it just continued."

 

 

West owns Emma Bunton's 1997 Brit Awards dress - but not Geri Halliwell's

 

Influenced by her parents (her father Steve is also an artist), West attended the prestigious Glasgow School of Art.

"When I was a student, I'd go into the studio all day and then I'd go into the library in the evening and just bid and bid and bid [on eBay]," she says. "I'd have a day of art and an evening of Spice."

West says she has spent "tens of thousands" of pounds on her collection, which also includes outfits from the Brit Awards, the Spiceworld movie and the jacket Mel B wore to meet Nelson Mandela.

But it does not include the most iconic Spice outfit of them all - Geri Halliwell's union jack dress from the 1997 Brit Awards. That was bought by the Hard Rock Cafe in Las Vegas for £41,000.

"That's the holy grail," West says. "And it's in storage. That's quite upsetting."

Now, West's art career is taking off thanks to her luminous installations that look like she has dismantled and rearranged a rainbow.

 

 

West has been in exhibitions at Manchester's Cornerhouse and Blankspace

 

"Did you see the rainbow the other day over Manchester?" she says excitedly at the mention of rainbows. "This was a double one and it was a proper arch. I stopped in the street for about five minutes and stared at it.

"I thought, forget James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson and all the artists that I absolutely love - this is true absolute beauty. There's something in that that I could never create, even if I tried."

West says she is not worried about her Spice Girls obsession undermining her reputation as an artist.

"It's completely in keeping with my personality," she says. "And because I've got such a passion for it, I win people over with that passion. It's not just about T-shirts and dollies.
"As a serious artist, this is my career. I want to be nominated for the Turner Prize.

"If you look at other artists, there are quite a few that have quirky collections out there and haven't hidden them. I don't have a problem with it."

What do other artists say when they find out about the collection? "They think it's quite funny," West replies.

"You know, it would be really boring if I didn't do anything else. People tend to think that it's a quirk, and quite a nice one."

For the original article and to watch a video of Liz West on the BBC news, please visit

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-24655947