Visiting Dismaland; a 'bemusement park', complete with some woodcarving!

There has been a lot of talk recently in certain quarters about the 'Dismaland' exhibition in Weston-super-mare. I was kindly given a ticket by a friend and went along last week.

The exhibition has been laid out like a small theme park with a decidedly dystopian air. It has been put together at a tiny derelict waterpark on the seafront at Weston-super-mare near Bristol.

The 'Tropicana' was well-known in these parts and many from Bristol, Weston and the surrounding area  have fond memories of it. The artist Banksy is known to have strong links to the area and, I believe, was one of the main organisers of the exhibition. Perhaps he also remembers swimming there. It did seem the perfect place to stage the show.

Staff at the exhibition (identified by their pink "Dismal' tabards and Mickey-mouse-style ears) had been instructed to be deliberately rude to visitors and the ticket buying system was also deliberately made to be infuriating and random. Tickets were made more available to people living in the area via the local newspaper. One member of staff admitted in front of me that he'd stopped being horrible to people because everyone was being nice back and he couldn't be bothered to be nasty any more.

I have to say that I enjoyed Dismaland a lot more than I thought I would! I was slightly expecting an overhyped show full of irritating hipsters and, although there were quite a few art crowd types floating about, the exhibition was unusual and fun. A couple of heavy rain showers just seemed to add to the atmosphere and it was great to see it all lit up at night.

Fifty artists from 17 countries had been invited to show their work and these included some very well-known names such as Damien Hirst and Jenny Holzer. One of the pieces from Hirst's workshops was a white pony with a golden horn in a vitrine (a glass case full of preserving solution).

It didn't seem that particular fuss was made of the bigger names though, which was good to see. Many artist's work could only be identified by their names spray-painted with stencils on the floor or, like Mike Ross' 'Big Rig Jig' in the first photo, from the programme's descriptions. It wasn't possible to get photos of it all and, to be honest, you can probably find better images online anyway- as one staff member yelled at those taking photos near her. I'll just show a few that stood out for me and which I got reasonable shots of...

American Michael Beitz made this looping picnic table and the following toilet paper roll one. I like the sense of fun in his work.

Another American, Scott Hove, made a series of sculptures that look like vicious cakes:

Banksy put quite a few pieces into the exhibition, including the mermaid sculpture shown in a photo above and an installation with Death on the dodgems. He also showed the picture below.

I chuckled a bit to see that, despite all the other artists with work in Dismaland, the stencils on the pavements outside pointing the way to the show only had his name:

Jimmy Cauty showed a huge artwork called the Aftermath Displacement Principle. He and others made 3000 tiny figures of riot police for it over several years. Aged 17, Cauty produced a picture to illustrate the Lord of the Rings which became one of Athena's best-selling posters. He also co-founded the music projects the KLF, the Justified Ancients of MuMu and the Orb, all of which had a lot of success. He also, notoriously, burnt a million pounds as part of the K foundation with Bill Drummond. The piece at Dismaland was certainly epic too. It was a gigantic model diorama showing the immediate aftermath of a massive civil disorder, with the only figures visible being police.

I could have looked at it for ages as there was so much going on in the tiny world but the exhibition was closing and the staff were yelling even more than usual, so it was time to move on. In the programme, Cauty says that one of his favourite quotes about art is that:

'being an artist is like going on a journey and finding interesting artefacts, and bringing them back and showing them to people.'

Even though he's probably right when he also says that he thinks the sentiment in that saying is far more positive than the reality of being an artist, I still like it too.

There were a few artefacts by Maskull Laserre on display, including this one carved in wood:

Laserre's work has been mentioned in a previous post. He is based in Canada and often carves things into wooden objects. I wasn't sure about the finish left on some previous carvings, but it was possible to go right up to this one and the finish was excellently done even though some of the wood had obviously started to dote (softening up before rotting) and so must have been more difficult to work with. I also liked the sawdust and woodchips left inside the ribcage.

Laserre also works in other materials, including metal. A piece by him based around a chair and a trap was nearby.

Heading out into the town of Weston-super-mare after walking around this dystopia for two hours certainly felt strange! No loud music or shouting allowed in the local multi-storey carpark...

Sculptures that contrast carved areas with uncarved surfaces; The Idea emerging from the Uncarved Block

One of the most charged moments in producing many carvings, particularly when whittling a shape from a piece of rough timber, is the moment when the sculpture is cut away from the piece of wood from which it has been carved. Sometimes I have been really torn as to whether I should take that step, as the sculpted piece looks so right against the uncarved timber that it emerges from.

I want to talk, in this post, about a few other carvings in which original block to be carved is present in the final piece.

Perhaps some of the most famous examples are the unfinished marble sculptures by Michelangelo known as the 'Prisoners'. These were carved between 1525 and 1530. The one below is sometimes called the 'Awakening Prisoner', sometimes the 'Awakening Slave':

Image from:http://www.freethought-forum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=11589&garpg=7

It's not certain whether Michelangelo stopped working on them because the building project that they were intended for was reduced in scale (the tomb of Pope Julius II, which was never completed to the original designs). That is the the usual interpretation, but I wonder if he just decided that the sculptures expressed what he was looking for and left them at that. Michelangelo saw himself as freeing the image created in a sculpture from within the confines of the uncarved block and that is certainly the feeling that these marble sculptures get across.

According to Rick Steves (mentioned in http://thosecrazyschuberts.com);
'Michelangelo believed the sculptor was a tool of God, not creating but simply revealing the powerful and beautiful figures he put in the marble. Michelangelo’s job was to chip away the excess, to reveal. He needed to be in tune with God’s will, and whenever the spirit came upon him, Michelangelo worked in a frenzy, often for days on end without sleep.'

Another sculptor who used the shape of the rough, unfinished block in their final sculptures was Auguste Rodin. This sculpture, produced in 1898, is 'The Hand of God', sometimes known as 'Creation' or as 'The Hand of the Devil':

Image from:http://bycommonconsent.com/2011/05/08/religious-art-the-hand-of-god/

In common with a lot of famous sculptors, Rodin would have modelled the sculpture in clay and then one of his assistants would have carved it into the marble. However, Bernard Champigneulle wrote that  his use of uncarved areas in the design was influenced by Rodin's initial career as a stonecutter. He would have understood the 'exhilaration' that came from 'the tussle between man and recalcitrant matter, with the removal of stone which could never be replaced, with the contest between a hand-held tool and an inanimate block from which life was about to spring.' On possible influences for this design technique, Champigneulle noted that 'Rodin's visit to the unfinished tombs of San Lorenzo (partly designed by Michelangelo for the Medici family in Florence) had taught him that to leave some areas unfinished could enhance the impact of others. Where Michelangelo had left marble untouched because time did not permit him to complete his task, Rodin did so deliberately. The delicacy of his modelling benefited by this contrast, which displayed the sculptor's skill to even greater advantage.'

Gilles Néret says that 'Though accused of making excessive use of the unworked surface, Rodin was again far ahead of his time; he appealed to the imagination rather than to the roles of sculptural convention.' It was certainly a controversial technique and ruffled the feathers of the nineteenth-century art establishment.

Whilst chatting to Joachim Seitfudem (who carved the sculptures below), he noted that many traditional Bavarian limewood sculptures use the unworked surface of the log (with bark removed) to frame the carvings emerging from within. Jo's father is a master carver in Bavaria.

Giuseppe Penone is not specifically a woodcarver, but was one of the leading figures in the influential 'Arte Povera' movement that developed in Italy in about 1967. Artists associated with Arte Povera used inexpensive, often found, materials to make artworks. Penone was very interested in making sculptures that reconnected people to the natural environment and since the 1970's he has been making these sculptures, in which a growth ring inside a wooden beam is revealed by carefully cutting away the wood around it. 

This reveals an echo of  the tree at one point in its growth. In 'The 20th Century Art Book' published by Phaidon, each of these works is identified as 'an act of reclamation, an attempt to discover the natural shape of the tree within the man-made form.'

The resulting sculptures seem to me to share a lot in common with the others shown in this post and must be every bit as painstaking to produce. Sometimes, Penone would make the work in a gallery during the course of an exhibition.

Image: Sphilbrick from wikimedia.org

One piece of sculpture that really made an impression on me when I first saw it is 'Hinewai Calling from the Mist' by the New Zealand sculptor Paul Deans. The piece is carved from an old, found gatepost and illustrates a Maori legend about 'Uenuku and the Mist Girl', which you can read by clicking on this link to a previous post on this blog.

Image courtesy of Paul Deans

Apart from the great, dynamic use of contrast between the smoothly carved areas, areas of toolmarks and the rough, weathered original surface of the post, the way that the rough texture of the weathered timber is used to portray the thick mist around the face really appeals to me. 

Maskull Laserre, who is based in Montreal, Canada, carves delicate forms emerging from everyday objects. I like the way that he will use more than one object put together to form the timbers into which he carves. Maskull works mainly with power tools to get these delicate sculptures. Personally, I'd prefer to see some of the carved skeletal shapes sculpted to a smoother, finer, more bone-like finish so that they would stand out more clearly from the tool marks in the timber around them. That doesn't take away from the fact that it's a great idea and these pieces are getting a lot of well-deserved attention at the moment.

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/01/maskull-lasserre/

Finally, here's another one of my sculptures from about 1998. It was carved from a weathered piece of beech wood found in Derbyshire's beautiful Peak District. At the time, I was interested in imagining a world where every detail could be synthetically created, down to stones and pieces of wood, so that they could also have 'intelligence' and interact with their environment.

So, sometimes areas of a sculpture might be left uncarved as part of the story that the sculptor is trying to convey, sometimes those areas frame carved areas and sometimes those areas are just the result of the project being unfinished. The narrative and aesthetic tension that Rodin tried to convey, between carved and uncarved surfaces, still seems to be an important reason for carvers including this contrast in a design. 

Perhaps another attraction for a carver is that the sculpture emerging from the block allows them to reveal another narrative, that of the work that went into producing such a carving, in a way that a completely finished sculpture might not show.

There is also something very compelling about seeing the carved work emerge from the block. It is like a glimpse of the making process, a way for the viewer to connect more closely with the hands of the maker.