WALLS
ARE
TALKING
WALLPAPER,
ART
AND
CULTURE
STUDENTS’
RESOURCE
Contents • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Introduction Walls are Talking Themes Artists Case Studies Sonia Boyce, Clapping, 1994 Sonia Boyce Thomas Demand, Ivy/Efeu, 2006 Thomas Demand Bashir Makhoul, Points of View, 1998 Bashir Makhoul Matthew Meadows, Razor Wire, 2007 Matthew Meadows Nikki de St Phalle, Nana, 1972 Nikki de St.Phalle David Shrigley, Industrial Estate, 1996 David Shrigley Paul Wunderlich, Faltenwurf, 1972 Paul Wunderlich Catherine Bertola, Beyond the Looking Glass, 2010 Catherine Bertola
Introduction Wallpaper and The Whitworth Art Gallery •
The wallpaper collection at the Whitworth is one of our unusual treasures.
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Wallpapers became firmly a part of the Whitworth’s collection with a large donation in 1967 from the Wall Paper Manufacturers Ltd.
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The Collection comprises of wallcoverings produced across more than three centuries, including commercially produced designs to those created by artists.
A Brief History of Wallpaper •
Initially, wallpaper design and production was a craft skill carried out by artisans in small workshops, but now paper manufacture is a major high-tech industry.
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The decoration of domestic interiors with wallpaper has been common practice for more than 200 years.
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Wallpaper is usually seen as a way to make an ‘individual statement’ about our style and the way we like to live.
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Wallpaper has played a crucial role in Western culture, including literature and painting, for example by the painter Edouard Vuillard, or used as a component in a collage, Femmes à leur toilette, of 1938 by Pablo Picasso.
Introduction contd. Wallpaper as Social Signifier •
Wallpaper has been an important signifier of social and fashionable status since the 18th century. It could be found decorating walls from Boston to Brussels; lining Mme de Pompadour’s wardrobe; within the dwellings of ‘ordinary people’, as well as in grand houses.
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As the range of products increased, wallpaper became a major component of the decorator’s repertoire and decisions about the correct choice became crucial.
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Women were designated the responsibility to select appropriate home decoration to reflect the status of the household, with advice available in journals aimed at professional decorators and in women’s magazines.
Wallpaper as Health Hazard •
Wallpaper could cause health hazards, with fever arising as a result of harmful vapours from the wallpaper paste and the dust retained in flock.wallcovering. In 1932, there was still a ‘widespread belief’ that wallpaper was a possible source of arsenic poisoning.
Wallpaper as Patterned Pictures •
Throughout its history wallpaper has most commonly been decorated with repeating patterns of floral or geometric motifs, but the designer’s repertoire has always included pictorial or other ‘novelty’ decorations.
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By the 1880s, manufacturers developed ranges for children with moral and educational content.
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Cultural icons, such as Madonna, Elvis or Marilyn, depicted as images on wallpaper have proved popular products for followers of the icons.
Introduction contd. Artists and Wallpapers •
The main focus of this exhibition is wallpapers designed by artists.
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Their motifs are often arranged in familiar patterns, but they speak a different language and subvert wallpaper’s traditional function as innocuous background to daily life.
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Artists have not been traditionally associated with wallpaper design, as the fine arts have generally been accorded a higher status than the decorative arts.
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In the late 18th and 19th centuries, French and English manufacturers tried to raise the status of wallpaper to that of fine art.
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In France, artists were frequently employed to work on scenic wallpaper decorations and wallpaper manufacturers used images such as the artist’s palette or the Venus de Milo on their pattern books and advertising.
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The relationship between artists and wallpaper was reinvigorated in 1966, when Andy Warhol produced his Cow wallpaper and, in 1974, his Mao.
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In the late sixties, Marburger, a German wallpaper manufacturer, commissioned artists to design ‘one-off’ artworks, including the Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely, the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle and the English ‘Pop Artist’ Peter Phillips. These examples were pictorial using nontraditional subject matter represented in unusual ways.
Introduction contd.
Contemporary Artists speak through Wallpaper •
Since the 1990s, contemporary artists have been using wallpaper to explore themes of home, memory and identity.
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Some have used wallpaper to highlight issues around warfare or racism, others have made visually obvious the conflicts in contemporary Western culture, in particular those associated with gender and sexuality.
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Papered walls have always ‘talked’, but the involvement of contemporary artists engages the viewer in a radically different dialogue – one that employs some aspects of the traditional visual language of wallpaper, but also uses its power to challenge, oppose and disturb.
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Wallpaper’s perceived function is thereby subverted, causing anxiety and unease. However, in using wallpaper to reflect Western culture are artists revealing uncomfortable truths or, by repeating them, rendering them acceptable?
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From small beginnings as a decorative novelty for the middle and upper classes, through its controversial passage as carrier of noxious vapours and instigator of mad episodes, wallpaper has become both the silent witness of and active participant in Western culture, acting as an important social and cultural signifier. In regarding wallpaper as nothing more than ‘white noise’we allow ourselves to ignore rather than address its power. It is this power that has been harnessed by contemporary artists.
Walls are Talking Themes • • • • •
Imprisonment Subversion Everyday Icons Transition Repeating Patterns
Artists Case Studies • • • • • • • •
Sonia Boyce, Clapping, 1994 Thomas Demand, Ivy/Efeu, 2006 Bashir Makhoul, Points of View, 1998 Matthew Meadows, Razor Wire, 2007 Nikki de St Phalle, Nana, 1972 David Shrigley, Industrial Estate, 1996 Paul Wunderlich, Faltenwurf, 1972 Catherine Bertola,….
Sonia Boyce (born 1962, UK) •
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Sonia Boyce is a British Afro-Caribbean artist who lives and works in London. She uses a range of media including photography, installation and text.
Glossary
In 1994 Sonia Boyce designed her first wallpaper, Clapping, for Wish You Were Here, an installation of domestic-style spaces created by the artists’ group BANK. It was shown in an orange and white colourway. For the Walls are Talking exhibition, Clapping uses a black and white hand print, evoking a feeling of claustrophobia and predatory menace.
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Another Boyce wallpaper, Lovers Rock was inspired by popular music and explores our physical interaction with the spaces we live in. The paper is white; the only decorations are the words at about hip-height that have been blind embossed, from Susan Cadogan’s hit ‘Hurt so Good’ (1975). At parties, when this song was played, couples would rub and sway up against the walls, responding to the intense sensual message of the music. The Lover’s Rock wallpaper would be rubbed and marked at hip height, evoking and to commemorates this tactile encounter between bodies and walls.
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Installation: an artistic genre of site-specific, three-dimensional work designed to transform the perception of a space. BANK was an artists’ group active in London during the 1990s. Their most significant contribution to UK contemporary art was a series of curated group shows, often with comical, and sometimes offensive titles. Colourway: a combination of colours in which cloth or paper is printed. Blind embossed: Printed or stamped into the paper, without using any pigment, to produce a pattern in relief. Lover’s Rock: A style of reggae noted for its romantic sound and content. Reminiscence: to talk about pleasant things that happened in the past Etching: the technique of creating art on the surface of glass by applying acidic, caustic, or abrasive substances. Concentric: Concentric circles have the same centre but are different sizes.
Sonia Boyce contd.
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Music is also the subject of Boyce’s recent Devotional Wallpaper (2008), which was created as part of some reminiscence sessions where a group of women (with Boyce herself) pooled their memories of black British musicians and singers.
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Boyce has represented these reminiscences in various ways, including an etching for the Rivington Place portfolio (2007), by inscribing the names on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery (2007), and now as silk-screened wallpaper, where 200 names are listed, each framed by radiating concentric lines.
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This roll-call of fame is also a memorial, a list of luminaries of the kind found in town halls, schools and sports clubs where the names of prizewinners are recorded in chronological sequence.
Learning Links www.iniva.org/library/archive/people/b/boyce_sonia www.tate.org.uk/learning/schools/soniaboyce2433.shtm “African culture has a strong oral tradition; and in this sense I'm trying to be an oral translator through pictures. gather things up which I remember, as a means of going forward to make certain cultural and political points. I'm making visible the warmth, as well as the confrontation of our daily lives as the basis upon which things can be discussed.” (Sonia Boyce in conversation with John Roberts, ‘Interview with Sonia Boyce’, 1987, p.64)
Thomas Demand (born 1964, Germany) • •
Thomas Demand is known as a sculptor/ photographer. At first sight Demand’s photographs appear to be records of real places, but in fact they are lifesize models of real places, using paper and card.
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His sources are images in books, postcards and the media.
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He has been referred to as an illusionist when presenting images, which appear solid and yet are ‘built’ from the most fragile and ephemeral of materials.
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The sculptures that he creates are destroyed once the photograph has been taken.
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Since it’s invention, wallpaper has produced illusions by faking the appearance of more costly materials such as wood panelling, plasterwork, tapestry and velvet.
Glossary • • • • • • •
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Media: newspapers, television and radio Illusionist: an entertainer who performs tricks where objects seem to appear and then disappear Ephemeral: lasting for only a short time Tapestry: a picture or pattern created by sewing different coloured threads onto heavy cloth. Abduction: kidnap Naturalistic: similar to what exists in nature Arts and Crafts Movement : A British, Canadian, Australian and American design movement that flourished between 1880 and 1910. It was instigated by the artist and writer William Morris in the 1860s and was inspired by the writings of John Ruskin. It influenced architecture, domestic design and the decorative arts, using simple forms and a medieval style of decoration. It advocated truth to materials, traditional craftsmanship and economic reform. Colourway: a combination of colours in which cloth or paper is printed. ‘The Shining’ : A Horror Film based on a Stephen King novel starring Jack Nicholson, and featured some scary scenes in a maze.
‘I simply want to know what I’m actually seeing, what I’m actually being shown, to see it from the inside, work it out again.’ Thomas Demand
Thomas Demand contd. •
The ivy was created originally as part of Klause/Tavern 2. The tavern was the site of the abduction and murder of a child.
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In this context, the ivy conjures up fairy-tale associations of menace and danger. The ivy also suggested the covering-up of what goes on behind ‘closed doors’.
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In 2006, Demand first used wallpaper as a backdrop for his photographs at the Serpentine Gallery, London, using paper cut-out leaves from one of his own photographs - Klause/Tavern 2.
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He created a naturalistic ivy pattern, which referenced the patterns characteristic of the Arts and Crafts Movement, in four different colourways to create different moods. This had the effect of turning the space inside out – since ivy normally grows on the outside of buildings.
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For the Walls are Talking, the Ivy wallpaper covers the entire walls of the South Gallery making it appear as an over-sized, three-dimensional hedge and thus dwarfing the viewer, leaving them feeling as if a bit player in ‘The Shining’.
Learning Links www.iconeye.com/index.php?option=com_content&view.. www.frieze.com/issue/review/thomas_demand2 www.serpentinegallery.org/thomasdemand/index.html www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?id=2641
Bashir Makhoul (born 1963, Israel) •
Makhoul’s work is based upon using repeated motifs with the power of aesthetic seduction.
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He is not just interested in creating a beautiful pattern. Economics, nationalism, war and torture are frequently woven into the layers of Makhoul’s work.
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Bashir Makhoul brings the realties of war into the domestic context with a powerful graphic immediacy.
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Points of View show repeated details of plastered walls pock-marked with bullet holes (derived from photographs taken in Beirut).
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The wallpaper design, narrowly focused on these details, avoids the specificity of time or place, becoming a comment on the way in which distant wars and hatreds are undifferentiated background noise unless or until they impinge directly on our own lives.
Glossary • • • • • • • •
Motif: A repeated pattern Aesthetics: idea and study of beauty Pock-marked: blemished or indented Beirut: capital city of Lebanon Undifferentiated: uniform Gaza: A Palestinian city on the Gaza Strip papering over the cracks: to try and hide faults or difficultuies Plight: unfortunate condition/difficulty
Bashir Makhoul contd. •
But because Makhoul is a Palestinian, we also read his wallpaper as a dramatization of a particular conflict; with this simple bullet-hole motif.
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Makhoul confronts us with the fundamental crisis of daily life for Palestinians in Gaza and the Occupied Territories. Their homes do not offer the certainty of safety or security; they are fragile, and as vulnerable as the lives of their occupants.
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Instead of ‘papering over the cracks’, and disguising the realities of the Palestinians’ plight, Makhoul uses wallpaper to make their circumstances explicit, reminding us that Palestinian homes have been repeatedly bombed or bulldozed, literally invaded by violence.
Learning Links http://www.bashirmakhoul.com/ http://www.diaspora-artists.net/display_item.php?id=1109&table=artists http://www.pbs.org/art21/education/war/lesson3.html http://www.artcity.co.il/Eng/ http://www.iniva.org/library http://waltzwithbashir.com/
Matthew Meadows (born1968 in UK) •
Matthew Meadow’s practice engages decorative surface design applications through print digital processes, with particular reference to the Pattern and Decoration Movement.
Glossary
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Razor Wire was inspired by his interest in adapting historic patterns and by his experience of teaching in prison.
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The design of this piece incorporates different patterns; the underlying motifs derive from 18th-century damask, and mock-flock wallpapers, as well as 19thcentury floral stripes, printed in shades of blue, black, white and grey.
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‘Woven’ into these patterns are stripes created by the cut-out negative silhouettes of strands of razor wire. The ‘over’ and ‘under’ layers of pattern are so subtly interlaced that it creates a kind of trompe l’oeil effect.
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Pattern and Decoration Movement: A movement in American art, originating in New York in the mid-1970s, in which painters and other artists produced works that consist essentially of complex and generally brightly coloured patterns Motif: A repeated pattern Damask: decorate fabric with pattern Mock: imitation Flock wallpaper: wallpaper that has a raised pattern in a soft material Woven: created by weaving Silhouettes: shadowed contour Interlace: weaving things together Trompe l’oeil: artistic work that tricks the eye Domesticity: home life Woodblock: same as woodcut
Matthew Meadows contd.
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The traditional wallpaper patterns combined here suggest domesticity, security, comfort, and also luxury (the paper is hand-printed from woodblocks), but these associations are contradicted by the imagery of the wire, which suggests darker feelings of pain and confinement.
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The choice of colours also contributes to the way we read Meadows’s use of pattern. The blue represents ‘outside’ – space, sky, freedom, hope – whereas the black seems to stand for the negative of these qualities and emotions, and embedded in the overall design, the wire motif cancels out the optimistic associations of the blue.
Learning Links http://www.matthewmeadows.net/ http://www.theseer.info/3278.html http://www.amazon.co.uk/Insider-Art-Matthew-Meadows/dp/1408102668 "the pleasure of pattern lies somewhere between boredom and chaos. Meadows works in this gap there is a visual order, but it is always on the point of dissolving." Emma Biggs "Decoration, colour, pattern, craft - all areas traditionally associated with women's practice – these horror areas of bourgeois complacency are the territory he is not so much claiming, as planting a few seeds in." Emma Biggs
Niki de St. Phalle (born 1930, France) •
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Niki de St Phalle first began as a painter in 1950. Her paintings developed into assemblages in plaster and finally into more sculptural works. In 1965, de St. Phalle created her first ‘Nana’. These curvaceous, larger than life and brightly painted female forms became a recurring theme within de Saint Phalle’s work.
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This ‘heroine’ features once again in the candycoloured wallpaper, Nana, which was created in 1972.
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It is peppered with hearts and flowers as well as with serpents. In this colourway, 'Nana’ appears with black skin, generous thighs and uneven breasts and she highlights the push towards women conforming to physical ideals and celebrates a different kind of beauty.
Glossary • • • • •
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Assemblage: the process of joining or putting things together Curvaceous: curvy, rounded or shapely Serpent: a snake Colourway: a combination of colours in which cloth or paper is printed. Glamourpuss: a sexually attractive woman who wears decorative clothes and make-up so that she will be noticed. Archetype: a typical example of something Cult – liked very much by a particular group of people Stereotypical: having the qualities that you expect a particular person to have Gender: the physical and/or social condition of being a female or male
Niki de St. Phalle contd. •
Saint Phalle herself was a ‘glamourpuss’: a thin and gorgeous French archetype, attending fashionable private views and modelling for Vogue.
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She made numerous Nanas, most of them sculptural, which have been interpreted as expressing anger about the cult of female beauty and the pressure on women to be ideal mothers
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Nana confronts the complexity of adult experiences that struggle with the stereotypical gender roles learnt in childhood.
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Niki de St. Phalle brought out a range of fragrances with a distinctive blue and gold bottles with a logo of entertwined serpents. She has also designed flower vases and jewellery.
Learning Links • • •
www.independent.co.uk/.../well-hung-theres-nothing-cosy-about-this-wallpaper-1880930.html?... www.nikidesaintphalle.org http://www.squidoo.com/Niki-deSaint-Phalle-andtheQueen#module43935762
"Nana means 'chick' or 'girl' in French," said Marcelo Zitelli, trustee of the Niki Charitable Art Foundation, who visited St.Louis in April to help launch Niki de Saint Phalle garden exhibition at the Missouri Botanical Gardens. Zitelli for 16 years had worked as an assistant to Niki, who died in 2002. "She wanted to tell people that women were capable, able to do art, to think and be active in society,” Zitelli said..
David Shrigley (born in Macclesfield) •
Although he works in various media, he is best known for his mordantly humorous cartoons released in softcover books or postcard packs.
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Shrigley finds humour in flat depictions of the inconsequential, the unavailing and the bizarre.
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His freehand line is often weak, which jars with his frequent use of a ruler; his forms are often very crude; and annotations in his drawings are poorly executed and frequently contain crossings-out.
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Industrial Estate is a cartoon vision of the anonymous uniformity of the contemporary urban landscape with buildings all inhabiting the same kind of blank shed.
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It is a visual pun on wallpaper’s reputation for being bland and boring, but it also takes a swipe at the increasing homogenization of our towns and cities. interior.
Glossary • • • • • • •
Mordantly: ironically Inconsequential: unimportant Unavailing: useless Bizarre: strange Freehand: unguided Pun: use play on words Homogenization: all the same
David Shrigley
Learning Links http://www.davidshrigley.com/ http://www.vogue.com/voguedaily/2009/09/pringle/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACBSR1Hvrps http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoiW5-uA3_E "I sit down and do a bunch of drawings and when I look at them later on one or two seem to mean something that I didn't intend and they become my art." David Shrigley "I don't think I have ever had a portfolio as such. Perhaps the books I published served this purpose. They were pocket-sized and amusing and people enjoyed looking at them. These days I think it’s important to have a website.” David Shrigley
Paul Wunderlich (born 1927, Germany) •
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Paul Wunderlich began making graphic work, including woodcuts, lithographs, aquatints, engravings, and drypoints.
Glossary
Wunderlich belongs to the second generation of Fantastic Realists, sometimes called Magical Realists, who have remained faithful to tradition techniques whilst depicting contemporary imagery.
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He emphasizes the human form within a context that blends together contemporary and historical references.
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Wunderlich’s cool aloofness transports the viewer into a world of surreal eroticism and aesthetic symbolism.
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Faltenwurf (a German word referring to the folds of hanging fabric) repeats a subtly erotic image in which a pair of disembodied breasts appears to be pushing through a drapery.
Learning Links http://www.kettererkunst.com/bio PaulWunderlich-1927.shtm http://www.hartgallery.com/searchresults.php?artistId=7360 http://the-artists.org/artist/Paul-Wunderlich
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Fantastic Realists: a 20th century group of artists in Vienna combining techniques of the Old Masters with religious and esoteric symbolism Magical Realism: an aesthetic style in which magical elements or illogical scenarios appear in an otherwise realistic or even "normal" setting. Aloofness: unfriendliness Surreal: strange Eroticism: arousing sexual desire
"I refuse to try to explain everything, because if you know too much about yourself, you become impotent. Better not to know what it is that makes you tick." Paul Wunderlich
Catherine Bertola
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Along with materials such as lace, textiles, paint and dust, wallpaper has offered Bertola a substance through which to investigate the way things and spaces are made, and, how we live with them.
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This concern with everyday materials and objects belies a preoccupation with the ways in which time and the passing of time become inscribed and materialized in the things around us.
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Much of Bertola’s work has focused on the aesthetic conditions and experiences of the domestic interior, providing her with a rich theme of inhabitation, memory and place.
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In Bertola’s 2002 residency, in a condemned tower block in Liverpool, If Walls Could Talk …, she used a scalpel to trace out the leaf pattern of the plain, white-painted textured wallpaper in one of the derelict flats. The leaves peeled away from the flat surface of the wall, as if the paper leaves had taken on a life of their own and begun to reclaim the space from the man-made world.
Glossary • • • • •
Preoccupation: obsession, concern, fixation. Aesthetic: artistic, visual Inhabitation: living in a place Scalpel: surgical or artist’s knife Apposite: appropriate
Catherine Bertola contd. •
The role of storyteller and craftsman seems particularly apposite to the characterizing Bertola’s work, as this work is defined by the unfolding process of its creation. In fact, it could be argued that her work almost resists some final moment of completion , that it always remains ‘open’. – requiring imaginative completion by the viewer.
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In Beyond the Looking Glass, (2009), Bertola turns explicitly towards the worlds of fiction and imagination, inspired by the fictional wallpapers from classic novels, the work visualizes for the first time wallpapers previously unseen. She uses the wallpaper collections of the Whitworth Art Gallery as a source of reference against which to ‘interpret’ the written design,
Learning Links http://www.axisweb.org/ofSARF.aspx?SELECTIONID=16403 http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1637_outoftheordinary/artists_detail.php?artistTag=bertola http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuYlsasVqgQ http://trendsblog.co.uk/?p=358 "I use local archives, museum collections and other historical resources to draw out and uncover stories, people, objects and imagery from which the work is then developed." Catherine Bertola
Optional Extras The Knowledge Series – Post 16 & HE FREE
Artist Talks FREE
Wednesday 3 March, 11am Friday 5 March, 11am Friday 5 March, 2pm Friday 12 March, 11am Wednesday 17 March, 11am Friday 19 March, 11am Friday 19 March, 2pm Wednesday 24 March, 11am Wednesday 24 March, 2pm Wednesday 21 April, 11am
Catherine Bertola gives an illustrated talk about her work, past and present. Includes a tour of the exhibition.
www.manchester.ac.uk/whitworth
Saturday 27 February, 2 - 4pm Saturday 27 March, 2 - 4pm Saturday 17 April, 2 - 4pm
0161 275 7450
