Miriam Leach
Fine art degree SAC117
Anya Gallaccio
Relevance to my work:
Gallaccio’s work is a contemporary approach to temporality as a reaction to contemporary consumerist culture, comparative to that of the historical Dutch artists. I took inspiration from Gallaccio's contemporary slant on a vanitas and her use of symbolism similar to that of the Dutch Still Life artists that draw the viewers’ attention to concepts of mortality.
Red on Green
"In her own work, she has become known for letting processes of decay and rot transform installations that appear fresh and delectable when first displayed. The effect hits the nose as well as the eyes, and can be both beautiful and disconcerting - particularly in the climate-controlled zones of art galleries, where everything is usually directed at preservation and permanence."
(SMEE, S. (2004). 'A dying art'. [article]. Available from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3617902/A-dying-art.html. [2/4/2014].)
"Among Britian's most impressive younger artists, Anya Gallaccio is at the forefront of the 90's generation, exhibiting in galleries and museums around the world. But, in contrast to many of her contemporaries, the significance of her work lies less in its conceptual origin that in its conceptual impurity. Her installations are like wonderfully unreliable experiments, in which a sense of what should happen is constantly subject to what is happening, as materials such as chocolate, ice and flowers grow, decay, melt, or otherwise change.
Generous and open in intention, at the heart of Gallaccio's art is the viewer, whoever that may be. The viewer sees, touches, hears, smells, walks upon the work, contributing to and participating in its richness and complexity."
(HOLT, A; BEWLEY, J; HERBERT, S. (1999). Anya Gallaccio Chasing Rainbows. Tramway/Locus+: Glasgow. 5.)
"after over a decade of creating exhibitions, Gallaccio has virtually nothing to show for it. Her many installations and evanescent sculptures have ended up not in the permanent collections of museums and art connoisseurs, but in the skip. Only a few traces and snapshots remain as proof that she has produced anything at all., and these are inadequate as evidence. So in the end, her work lives on only in the idiosyncratic musum of our memories - a house of uncertain repute renowned for its faulty storage systems.
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Like the still life vanitas of Old Master paintings, these works have little to do with an appreciation of natural beauty; indeed, Gallaccio has remarked that she regards gerberas as a kind of pop ready-made or found object, an instantly recognizable image not unlike a child's drawing of a daisy. Scentless and mass-produced all year round as disposable commodities, there is in fact little that is 'natural' about gerberas. Yet, like all organic matter, they inevitably decay.
In the vanitas tradition of painting, a bouquet of fresh flowers, caputured at the height of their effulgent radiance, served as a visual shorthand for the impossibility of sustained perfection and the inevitability of mortality and loss. Claude Monet's famous paintings of his carefully cultivated lily pond - the most ambitious of which were dedicated to the fallen soldiers of World War I - depict a lugubriously murky space of drowned beauty. But Gallaccio's decomposing flowers do not conjure death and extinction so much as they engage us as witnesses to complex transformative processes. Trapped behind glass which accelerates their decomposition, her floral compositions move from being brightly coloured and coherant tableaux to fascinating factories of change: mould blossoms, tiny flies appear and depart, sap drips and oozes, and humidity fogs the glss while the flowers themselves turn hard, brown and crispy, like petrified bog people. These are still lifes that do not stand still.
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In a sense, Anya's artworks are events rather than objects. Or perhaps, more accurately, they constitute a hybrid combination: performative objects that enlist us in elliptical slow-motion dramas.
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Nor does Anya pander to the possessive fantasies of collectros. Unlike many creators of ephemeral works, Gallaccio has refused to sell photographs of her art because, however beautiful or seductive it may appear in photos, images cannot convey the complex and varied sensations that arise from encountering the actual work. They fail to capture what engages and interests us in that encounter - the emotional and sensory responses triggered by the work's material attributes, and our own active role unfolding and engineering her art's latent narratives. A picture of a brown wall is virtually meaningless compared to the personal confrontation which might very well end with one of us stroking and licking its chocolate - coated surface.
And no photograph can convey the failure that hovers over each of Gallaccio's installations, which are created in public spaces without the safety net of trial and error enjoyed by a studio-based artist. Going against the grain of an art world which rewards thsoe who deliver guaranteed products, Anya's work involves unpredictable processes for which, like an improvised theatrical production, there cna be no dress-rehearsal. It is not a question of her courting failure, but of her insistence on creating 'live art' that requires risks.
Classically, art objects are meant to provide fixed points of reference. They are meant to be tougher than we are. As Bruce Chatwin has observed: 'Things are the changeless mirror in which we watch ourselves disintegrate. Nothing is more ageing than a collection of works of art.' Yet by mirroring our own precarious physicality, Gallaccio's art does not age us but engages us, encouraging a leap of faith into the open spaces of the present, that paradoxically timeless moment which is forever changing. There are enough things in the world already, her approach imples, and perhaps it is only by giving up our lust for possession that we can begin to recognize and pay attention to the quietly outrageous metmorphoses in process under our noses and under our feet."
(RUGOFF, R. (1999). Anya Gallaccio Chasing Rainbows. Tramway/Locus+: Glasgow. 7-16.)
The Story So Far – Mary Horlock
Anya gallaccio beat – Tate Gallery publications
Pg 11 ‘Vita Brevis Ars Longis – ‘Art Will Outlast Life’ as the saying goes; but for Anya Gallaccio the reverse has usually held more truth. Most of her sculptures and installations are temporal; from the moment they are created they change – disintegrate, grow, or decay. The materials with which she chooses to work – salt, sugar, water, wax, flowers, or fruit – are by nature unstable and ephemeral.’
'Landscape painting came into fashion as a means of celebrating property, reflecting the aspirations of a wealthy land-owning elite, and over time the idealised rustic scenes of Thomas Gainsborough, J. M. W. Turner and John Constable have become embedded in the collective consciousness.’
Less Apparent – Heidi Reitmaier
Anya Gallaccio Best – Tate Gallery Publications
Pg 37 ‘While most of these artists were concentrating on the art object, she was more interested in the process, and the work she produced was ephemeral and site-specific, following a tradition within contemporary art in which, through its very intangibility, queries the notion of objecthood and object-ness. In this sense her project in precisely about what constitutes or makes something a work of art, and about what gives it meaning. Throughout her career Gallaccio has continued in this vein, and is still making works that are often ephemeral, concerned with physical transformation, and conceived in response to the various nuances of the locality in which they are situated.’
Gallaccio also uses Biblical references in works such as ‘blessed’ and ‘into the blue’. ‘blessed’, an apple tree strung with a variety of apples that gradually rot, references the garden of Eden, Adam and Eve and the subjects of sin, nature, temptation and guilt. ‘into the blue’, a tonne of salt bricks placed on Bournemouth beach that gradually degrade and disappear, references Lot’s wife who was turned into salt when turning to look back at Gomorrah as it burned.
Pg 40 ‘Installed freshly picked, their eventual decay was part of the mechanism of meaning in the work, providing a clear illustration of her interest in the ephemeral and transitory, the ready-made , the feminine, as well as suggestions of loss mourning and beauty.’
'Since ‘preserve cheerfulness’, she has made continual reference, both celebratory and critical, to the long-standing domestic tradition of flower arranging , as well as to the varied historical and theoretical readings of still life and landscape paintings by nineteenth-century women artists.’
'In these works she subtly draws attention to the status of flowers in art as part of a greater allegory of feminine endeavour. The restriction of women artists in the nineteenth century to those genres considered less prestigious or thought to demand less intellect, such as flower painting, portraiture and watercolour landscape, has provided Gallaccio with recognisable occasion for the exploration of women’s role in art. Her simple appropriations of these forms, as ’landscapes’, in a variety of allusive ways, have allowed her to reinterpret and claim forms previously relegated to a minor status.’
Pg 43 ‘Gallaccio is drawn to a working process that is concerned with the properties of making, and whose aesthetic is based on natural systems and the modes of knowledge associated with them: an aesthetic of the organic as Lucio Fontana called it in 1946. He believed that art forms should combine time and space- just to explore the relationship between signifier and signified, between art and life. This could be done through the use of materials ultimately pointing got the human dimension and the experience of contemporary life.’
Pg 44 ‘As Robert Morris has stated: ‘the sculptural object is a means to contrive a specific experience for the viewer that will give rise to an idea.’’
(TATE. (2002). anya gallaccio beat. Tate Publishing. London.)