Cultural decentralisation: engaging with the Towner’s non-elitist approach

Rather than travelling on a swifter inland route along the Sussex coast from Brighton to Eastbourne, we took the coastal drive that, at several points, offered magnificent sea views. Through the incessant rain and mist, a typically rough winter sea battered the chalk coastline in a palette of monochromatic tones, with the force of the wind blowing in from the English Channel adding to the sense of visual drama that conjured a Turneresque sense of space and atmosphere. Eastbourne is where French composer, Claude Debussy, completed his ‘La mer, trois esquisses symphoniques pour orchestra’ in 1905 – more commonly known as ‘The Sea’.

 

Debussy, who saw Turner’s paintings in London 1902, has been attributed with saying that he found more inspiration in paintings (and literature) of the sea than being near the sea itself. So, how fitting then, that our destination was the relatively new Towner gallery where Marlborough Fine Art artist, John Virtue, was represented by a selection of a new body of work entitled, ‘The Sea’. We had been appropriately prepared by the journey.

 

The Towner’s history in the town goes back many years, but was relocated to Devonshire Park (also home to international tennis tournaments) in 2009. The gallery has won many awards over the past five years, including a Condé Nast Traveller Innovation and Design Award in contention with such buildings as the Eden Project in Cornwall, Tel Aviv’s Design Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. In terms of ‘cultural decentralisation’ the Towner joins the Jerwood in Hastings and the Turner Contemporary in Margate as a major contemporary gallery in the south east of England. This burgeoning of public galleries is particularly interesting as arts funding for organisations relatively near to London can be less than for those in other areas of England. Another positive attribute of the Towner is that it gained National Beacon Status for Culture for Hard to Reach Groups in March 2006, as a result of working with the most disadvantaged groups in society. A non-elitist approach to an engagement with ‘high culture’ is a marked feature of Arts Council England who partly fund the Towner.

 

On view in Virtue’s ‘The Sea’ exhibition were a dozen huge and visually commanding canvases, including six triptychs, which varied in size at approximately 2.8X4.3, 2.5X2.5 and 1.8X6.4 metres in dimension. In addition, there were twenty-four framed works on paper, each 54X76cm in size. In every work Virtue had employed his typically limited palette of black and white acrylic paint and black shellac, from which a range of intermediate tones had been mixed.

 

Also on display were 70 or more sketchbooks, or visual diaries, as Virtue refers to them in an accompanying video interview with art critic, Andrew Graham-Dixon. The variously sized books (many as small as A6) made a welcome addition to the exhibition. Sketchbooks are often a missing ingredient from exhibitions, where the artist has used them in support of the production of the paintings. In this case, Virtue’s sketchbooks are invaluable, as they are literally the starting point for the paintings as they are completed on walks made on the north Norfolk coast over an eight-mile trek, from Cley to Blakeney Point. This has become a ritualised journey, where despite repetition and force of habit, the drawings are always unique to the experience of a succession of moments. Unfortunately (but understandably) the books were not available to pick up and leaf through as they were presented in three adjoined display cases, although the piled up and strewn arrangement of the journals gave some indication of how they are laid out on Virtue’s studio floor when he makes the paintings.

 

Over a long career, Virtue has resolutely explored a monochromatic, visual response to the landscape and the sea (notwithstanding various series of paintings and prints from sabbaticals in London and Venice). He purports to have “no interest in making topographical paintings” and this is clearly obvious in these works that record his personal, experiential, response to the phenomenon of the power and overwhelming nature of the sea. Virtue’s chiaroscuro-rich images emphasize the position of the viewer/artist in relation to this force of nature. The coastline is both a ‘performative’ and an ‘observing’ space for Virtue, and by the time these individuated experiences are processed and sythesised into paintings, the gallery viewer can take over and respond accordingly – possibly with awe.

 

In contrast, Ori Gersht’s ‘Don’t Look Back’ provides a very different experience of the landscape – though if there is ‘awe’ it is of the negative kind. As we viewed his ‘Evaders’ (2009) (an HD film for dual channel projection), a moving and tense film that traces the journey of the German/Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin in his final days as he escaped Nazi-occupied France through the Pyrenees, we heard, coming from elsewhere in the gallery, what felt like a powerful, explosive soundtrack from ‘The Forest’ (2005). Knowing that this film was shot in Ukraine, where war once again has returned, the crashing sounds of the felled trees that punctuate an otherwise peaceful and bucolic soundscape, humming with birdsong, suggested an overlay of jet engines and exploding missiles. But these were the natural sounds of trees being felled in a woodland area where, in 1942, the Nazis had shot many local Jewish inhabitants from nearby Kosov. One sensed that now the trees, once silent witnesses to horrific events, had been metaphorically ungagged by their felling and the recorded sound on Gersht’s film evoked the otherwise unrecorded scream of victims: the silence between the notes that Debussy referenced in his musical scores has perhaps been reinterpreted as the silenced chapters of history that recede over time, but are required for a more complete engagement and understanding of place. In Gersht’s own words, the trees “bear with them the memory of all previous events and at the same time keep a certain silence and are impenetrable.”

 

Related to this work were the photographs taken on a train journey in a project entitled, ‘Liquidation’ (2005). The landscapes around the southwestern Ukrainian towns of Kolomyia and Kosov are realised as blurred, out-of-focus, but seductively quite beautiful images. Also with, ‘White Noise’ (1999-2000), a compelling series of photographs documenting a train journey from Krakow to Auschwitz, the viewer might enjoy the atmospheric and impressionistic landscape views. However, the tragedy is that these woodlands and ancient European landscapes have witnessed so much inhumanity during the 20th century. Gersht’s practice, using 16mm film, video and still photography, bears witness to history and attempts to preserve a memorial space, where pathos must characterize these environments. As with white noise in a scientific sense; a flat, random signal experienced, perhaps, as the sound of a modern train speeding quickly through the landscape, hurrying passengers to their destination, the mind-numbing message itself is flattened, no longer perceptible or readable, as on a tabula rasa or in Gersht’s blurred photographs. Much of humanity’s history is reduced to an apparently undistinguished, or ‘non-space’, so that events from the past are erased by an inadequate human measurement of time.

 

Both exhibitions, apparently miles apart in subject matter, represent two categories of engagement and witness to place and space. Virtue’s expressionistic paintings are personal and individual: whilst Gersht’s films and photographs address a more collective, political anthropology of place.

March 11, 2015