Pipilotti Rist at Hauser and Wirth, Somerset

Jenny and I went to check out the Pipilotti Rist show at Hauser and Wirth Somerset, Stay Stamina Stay was absolutely gorgeous; rich and mesmerising.

There are three works by Rist, an outdoor installation and two large scale videos. Mercy Garden runs along two perpendicular walls in a huge dark room. The floor is covered in sheep skins and the video is incredibly tactile and sensual, you can feel everything going on on screen. We watched the video through more than once and could hardly tear ourselves away.

Sleeping Pollen was a more complicated installation, consisting of mirrored globes or pods which slowly revolve. Some were passive, but others had projectors inside them. As the pods move around the videos slowly travel across the walls and become distorted. The videos were of plant life and it was like being underwater. Everyone in the space moved slowly, but kept moving, it was a fluid and calming room, truly immersive.

Having seen the Turner Prize show this year the Pipilotti Rist show brought back my faith in video art. The Turner Prize works were all incredibly sterile and intellectual, it was so good to see videos which are absorbing, transcendental and which really grab and hold you.

There was also an installation by Rist outside the gallery, Hiplights were pants hung over lights whimsically strung like bunting in the courtyard.

In addition to Rist's work there were two other, smaller shows. John Chamberlain with mangled Gondolas and great poems and Richard Tuttle with some small sculptural sketches hung on the wall. The Richard Tuttle works were the kind which just inspire you to make.

Overall Hauser and Wirth Somerset is a great place, it's in a beautiful setting and has a garden. Interior is lovely too very tastefully and perfectly renovated and there's a shop and bistro. It sparked a few conversations around accessibility (in that the visitors all looked like art students or part of the wealthy Somerset set) and comparisons with Yorkshire Sculpture Park which is much more accessible and pulls in a huge, diverse crowd. YSP is much more established though and is a public space, rather than a private gallery. In all H&W Somerset felt very generous, it was a great day out & we'll certainly be regulars. Perhaps more people just need to know about it?

Barcelona; Arts Santa Monica, MACBA & Sagrada Familia

Arts Santa Monica

There were three shows on at Arts Santa Monica when I went, a small one of Isabel Banal i Xifre's table top works, one on drawing, and another looking at scenery

The table top works were my favourite, it was the kind of room which throws up alot of questions and I felt like I really wanted to chat to the artist and discuss why the works weren't on the floor or shown in another way. I felt like I trusted her judgement too though, so it was a tiny room with only 5 works but was really engaging.

Trace, Drawing as a Tool of Knowledge, was set up beautifully. It was split into four themes and each theme had a room to itself, separated by plastic curtains, that you had to push through to get into the new room.

Drawings were shown on the wall and underneath glass on tables, allowing a lot of drawings to be seen together. It was easy-viewing, the number of drawings on display meant I glanced through all on them but only really looked at the ones which grabbed me. 

Tale of the Beautiful False Things looked at scenery. A couple of the works stood out to me; there was a video work I'm sure I have seen before but can't remember where, about children playing and the way they affect and interact with their environmant and each other. It is always strange seeing a work you have seen before in a different city at a different time, it is a little disconcerting as you always have a different opinion of it, or realise you have misremembered it. 

Pictured below is the work I liked the most, unsurprisingly for anyone who knows my work. It is (translated) 'Painting of Olot which has Given Olot it's Image Back' by Perejaume and consists of a canvas (presumably painted on) which has been dismantled, and presented in a perspex box with the title. I felt my lack of Catalan here though as I couldn't read the title at the time, and as you see it's pretty integral to the work. 

MACBA

The MACBA is a great building - not necessarily from the outside, but the atrium is lovely - it's a huge white, bright space. There's a great Lawrence Weiner work running the length of the far wall and the way up to the galleries is a series of slopes against the window. There is a huge sense of space and light.

Aside from the atrium I wasn't so taken with the MACBA as a space, it was very awkward to walk around. If you go to, for example, any of the Tates - you walk around a show and are thrown back into the atrium at the end. At the MACBA however you go in and out of rooms, start in the middle one, have to find the next and then walk back to find the last room. It's quite distracting when you're trying to look at a whole show. It's also interesting to note that the invigilators in MACBA are more like security guards than invigilators, there to protect the work than answer any questions on it, they certainly seem hired out and unapproachable. 

The image above shows a room that was tucked away at the end of the atrium. All the works in there were replicas and you were encouraged to 'approach the collection with your senses'. This was a great thing to be able to do, and it felt really strange to be asked to touch works on display! I got alot out of it and think it would be a geat thing to tag on to most shows, a room of replicas you can touch and engage with in a different way.  

The shows I saw were- Oskar Hansen, Open Form; The Immaterial Legacy, An Essay on the Collection and Art & Language Uncompleted.

Oskar Hansen, Open Form was interesting and I liked the way it was laid out. One of the pieces told of a polish apartment block, when it was being built the authorities had allowed the future residents to draw where they wanted the dividing walls in their apartments, so they could make the kitchen/living areas bigger/smaller as they liked. Unfortunately though when the block was finished the residents were assigned flats on a random basis, and so didn't get the one they had designed!

Above is a work I really liked, from the The Immaterial Legacy show. It seems incidental, almost escaping the gallery and squashed into a corner. I enjoyed looking around this show, it seemed relevant to MACBA and so to the city I was in, it was accessible and had some great works in it.

Art & Language Uncompleted looked good (see image above)- but was really dry, too much writing and way too high brow, I just wandered through the rooms and wasn't at all engaged. This was a shame and a huge mistake on the curator's part I think, especially as I glimpsed a couple of lovely, funny works and the last room was great but by that time I was bored and a little disillusioned. 

Sagrada Familia

Whenever I have seen images of the Sagrada Famillia it mostly looks disorganised and a mess of carved, bleak stone. However that's not at all what it's like in real life, there is so much colour both inside and out, and the views from the towers are great. It is however a bit of a tourist scrum and moneymaking machine, not even almost a place for contemplation and quiet reflection!

In life the building is lovely, there are coloured mosaics on the outside and the inside is drenched with colour from the stained glass windows. The detail is incredible, everything is designed and decorated to within an inch of it's life, but in a quite beautiful, clean and elegant way.