Jeremy Deller at the Venice Biennale

Jeremy-Deller-will-represent-Britain-at-2013-Venice-Biennale.

In the book A Bigger Conversation Hockney had this to say; "I was very struck when one of the Turner Prize winners some years ago, Jeremy Deller, remarked that 'Artists don't paint these days, just as we don't go to work on a horse,' I blew that up and pinned it on my studio wall."


Whilst Hockney's reaction to Deller's claim was based on a supposed misunderstanding about the role of photography in art, I can't help but admire Hockney's reaction to take the quote and stick it on his wall, as a direct challenge to himself.


Alastair Sooke's review in the Telegraph offers a different point of view;


"Jeremy Deller is an artist – but you’d never think he was, at least not in the traditional sense. He won the Turner Prize in 2004, yet he didn’t go to art school, and readily admits that he cannot sculpt or paint. Since his earliest exhibition, in his parents’ house in Dulwich in south London in 1993, he has resisted making objects that can easily be bought and sold, preferring instead to build up a more nebulous oeuvre which primarily involves staging events and collaborating with others. He makes documentary films, organises processions, prints T-shirts, and once invited a brass band to play acid house music anthems....But here’s the thing. Deller has spent his career purposefully making art outside galleries – so a retrospective of his work inside a gallery is inherently problematic. The rush of being caught up in one of his live events is absent. Instead, visitors are offered too much tedious archival material and ephemera, little of which has much to offer from an aesthetic point of view to compensate for the fact that it mostly feels second-hand. It’s a shame: “Joy in People” is Deller’s mantra – and yet this exhibition of thin pickings cannot communicate the communal delight his work often engenders."


The comment "so a retrospective of his work inside a gallery is inherently problematic" is interesting as one wonders how an exhibition in the clinical environment of the Venice Biennale would hold up...

Landscape/Scroll Drawing

This is the video footage that I used for the drawing project using the landscape as a subject matter. The idea for translating this footage into a handscroll came about after listening to an interview with David Hockney on Radio 4, who talked about having seen one in the British Museum.  What surprised me was that in the exhibition of his work that we went to see in London, "The Bigger Picture," was that none of his work incorporated the scroll. 


Research in Wikipedia shows many different examples of Chinese Handscrolls. Chinese Handscroll of Early Autumn


Chinese Hand-scroll for the "Ten Thousand Miles of the Yangtze River" Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) Information on this website http://tech2.npm.gov.tw/cheschool/zh-tw/index.aspx?content=c_2_02 says it to be 11 meters long, which is nearly forty feet. Near to the end of the scroll of the Yangtze River there are many trees and these contain marks that are highly similar to those of Hockney when he is painting trees, so this shows a clear link. 


There are five visible seams where the painting doesn't quite match and which also feature red seals which I'm assuming is the mark of the artist. This means that each panel is approx 2 meters long and were either stitched together at the end or were stitched together as the painting was being made. It was a relief to see this as I ended up sewing two panels together for my scroll, and I didn't know if that was standard procedure or was it more typical to use one continuous sheet of fabric.

The photo on the left shows the two separate panels I was working on, before deciding to combine the two together, as shown on the right.


Along The River. Qing Ming shows the working of a busy city, with many people and buildings. In the book "A Bigger Message; Conversations with David Hockney" by Martin Gayford, Hockney describes viewing a ninety feet long scroll dated from around 1770, that had been unwound on the floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He said there must have been two thousand figures in it, and in a similar way to "Along The River" he says "you are journeying through the landscape. When you get to the great city of Wuxi, you go over the wall into courtyards, backstreets...You can't go over a wall in a Canaletto."


He also describes seeing an early nineteenth-century circular panorama of Versailles, and the difference between this and the scrolls; "You had to go and stand on a platform in the centre to view it. Then if you turned round, you saw the palace and gardens and so forth. I said, 'I see why you brought us here. We're stuck in a fixed point. But in the Chinese scroll we've just been travelling through a great city. There's a big contrast.'"