Tate Britain 2015

When I went round the Tate Britain I picked out several pieces I had not seen the previous year that I really enjoyed experiencing and that had some appeal to me and relation to my practice.

Susan Philipsz 'War Damaged Musical Instruments'
(Sound installation)

War Damaged Musical Instruments features fourteen recordings of British and German brass and wind instruments damaged in conflicts over the last 200 years.

The notes recorded are based on the tones of the military bugle call ‘The Last Post’, but the tune is fragmented to such an extent that it is almost unrecognisable. The tune signalled to lost and wounded soldiers that it was safe to return to base and is used today as a final farewell in military funerals and Remembrance ceremonies.

The artist has worked with the architecture of the space devising a sequence of sounds that travel the length of the Duveen galleries. Philipsz explains,

"I am less interested in creating music than to see what sounds these instruments are still capable of, even if that sound is just the breath of the player as he or she exhales through the battered instrument. All the recordings have a strong human presence."

Forming part of the 14-18 NOW arts programme to commemorate the First World War centenary, the work features several instruments from that period, and has a special resonance with the history of Tate Britain, as part of the site was originally a military hospital that treated soldiers injured in the First World War.

It is also a poignant reminder that conflict and loss are present in the world today. - Tate

Antony Gormley 'Bed' 1980-1
(Bread and paraffin wax on aluminium panels)

With Bed the artist returned to the theme of a sleeping place, this time using a double mirror-image representation of his recumbent body, delineated in the hollows eaten out of layers of sliced white bread. Gormley used 8640 slices of Mother's Pride bread (minus those he ate in making the negative spaces), which he dried and dipped in paraffin wax before stacking and layering them to produce the final form. The volume of the artist's body is represented by empty space, the contours of which are defined by a surrounding environment composed of bread. Referring to the inevitable destruction (or evaporation) of matter through consumption and digestion (solid to liquid to air), this work also suggests the body's ability to transform it into spirit. Gormley had a strict Catholic upbringing, both from his father's family (Catholic Irish) and the Benedictine boarding school he attended. Bed suggests the Catholic ritual of consuming the body and spirit of Christ, dually symbolised by bread, through the taking of the sacrament. The pose of the absent and supposedly sleeping figure, arms folded on the chest, replicates the traditional pose of the dead carved on mediaeval tombs. The growth of mould on the bread illustrates the life-death-life cycle literally: as one substance decays, another organism is able to take life. Bed, the usual location for conception, birth and death, becomes the ground for the transformative processes of life itself. - Tate

Eddie Chambers 'Destruction of the National Front' 1979-80
(4 screenprints on paper on card)

BANK: Simon Bedwell, John Russell and Milly Thompson 'Fax-Back (London)' 1998-9
(Laser jet print and ink on paper)

Cornelia Parker 'Pornographic Drawings' 1996
(Ferric oxide on paper)

Parker has made several works that involve items confiscated by Customs and Excise (see, for instance, Exhaled Cocaine 1996), stating in 2013 that she is interested in the way in which such authorities ‘block objects on behalf of society, denying access to what we can import, own, inhale, imbibe or indeed look at’ (Parker in Blazwick 2013, p.100). She originally conceived of re-editing the cut-up pornographic videotapes into a film, but instead chose to use them to make Rorschach drawings – abstract symmetrical ink blots that are presented to patients undergoing psychoanalysis for interpretation as a means of revealing their subconscious thoughts and desires. In 2013 Parker spoke of the chance connection between the erotic nature of the original videotapes and the sexual, although abstract, forms seen in the drawings: "In psychology, Rorschach blots are used to reveal information about the personality of a person through their interpretation of abstract shapes. Somehow, my blots turned out to be particularly explicit, betraying their figurative origins.

(Parker in Blazwick 2013, p.100.)" - Tate