Good at Looking
  • Good at Looking blog
  • About Good at Looking
  • Contact Good at Looking

Popular art and Merz – Black Eyes and Lemonade

25/8/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture
Black Cat advertising on The Hatch, Colemans Hatch, Sussex
A person’s heaven is easily made. 'Tis but black eyes and lemonade.’
Thomas Moore, 1813

Catch it while you can! The exuberantly fun Black Eyes and Lemonade exhibit at Whitechapel Gallery is on only until next month. It celebrates the work of Barbara Jones (1912-78), the collector and curator of English popular art and author of The Unsophisticated Arts (1951). Specifically, it celebrates an exhibition curated by Jones for the Festival of Britain in 1951.
What is popular art? Is it as simple as the art of the everyday? Jones herself found it hard to define, but said the best of it is bold and fizzy (hence the name for the exhibit chosen by the curators). It certainly is that.

In effect it’s an archive exhibit, re-creating much of the original collection exhibited by Jones at the Whitechapel as part of the Festival of Britain. The gallery blurb describes the original exhibit as:

“…divided in categories such as Home, Birth-Marriage-Death, Man’s Own Image and Commerce & Industry, reflecting Jones’s ideas on popular art and museum culture, questioning the cultural values attached to handmade and machine made objects.”
Picture
Jones celebrated and championed the judgements made by collectors, makers and consumers and the collective desire for beauty. The 1951 exhibit, in the final years of post-war rationing in Britain, had the feel of a bazaar, a celebration of consuming, with every object pleasing and of equal value.  Even better is hearing how she did her collecting - driving around England with a friend in a converted taxi.

Art director Simon Costin writes about Jones and the Black Eyes and Lemonade exhibit in a post on blog Caught by the River.  Jones, Costin says, collected objects with "long folkloric histories, such as horse brasses, corn dollies, canal boat artwork, ships’ figureheads, and the pearly King & Queen outfits." But in bringing these together with "post-industrial advertising devices like the Idris Talking Lemon, beer mats, pest control adverts, shop posters", Jones

"...gave ‘folk art’ or ‘popular art’ a cultural currency, she made it relevant, exciting. And by putting the machine-made and the hand-made side by side, she blurred the boundaries between what was considered art, liberating a way of seeing that continues to widen our appreciation of the ordinary, the everyday."

I was reminded of Kurt Schwitters, the German artist who devised the concept of Merz in his collages. (Tate Britain recently had a fascinating retrospective of Schwitters’ work.) He incorporated found objects and litter, sweet wrappers and used bus tickets in his work, giving equal value to the everyday and the fine, the costly and the cheap.
Picture
In 1919 Schwitters defined Merz as:

“essentially the combination of all conceivable materials for artistic purposes, and technically the principle of equal evaluation of the individual materials….A perambulator wheel, wire-netting, string and cotton wool are factors having equal rights with paint.”

A refugee from Germany to Norway, then to England when the Germans invaded Norway in 1940, Schwitter was interned as an enemy alien for more than a year. After he was released he moved to London, where he collected discarded litter on the streets to use in his work. He was fascinated with English words and phrases and often used bits of newsprint and magazines in his collages. Unlike Jones, however, his work shows an ambivalence, even cynicism, about contemporary popular culture, especially the post-war plenty in the US and its contrast with the austerity that governed daily life in most of Europe at the time.
In very different ways, both Jones and Schwitters found treasure in the ordinary. 

Black Eyes and Lemonade, Whitechapel Gallery, free, until September 2013.
0 Comments

    About me

    I'm Margaret Doyle, a mediator and researcher in administrative justice. I'm also a Welcoming Ambassador at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the world's leading museum of art and design.

    Categories

    All
    Alessi
    Althea McNish
    Anna Maria Garthwaite
    Architecture
    Barbara Jones
    Bermondsey
    Blue
    Breakfast
    British Library
    Cemeteries
    Charles Sargeant Jagger
    Christopher Dresser
    Colour
    Cornelia Parker
    Craft
    Democracy
    Edmund De Waal
    Embroidery
    Enid Marx
    Etal Adnan
    Folk Art
    How To Look
    Kaffe Fassett
    Kurt Schwitters
    Mae Architects
    Magna Carta
    Marie Gudme Leth
    #metoo
    Mona Caron
    Pat Taylor
    Phyllis Barron And Dorothy Larcher
    Plants
    Popular Art
    Public Art
    Rachel Whiteread
    Rule Of Thirds
    San Francisco
    Shared Spaces
    Tapestry
    Tate Britain
    Textile Design
    Tracey Emin
    UK Parliament
    Utility Covers
    V&A Museum
    Walking
    White Cube

    RSS Feed

    Archives

    May 2019
    January 2019
    August 2018
    February 2018
    December 2017
    September 2015
    May 2015
    March 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    September 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    January 2014
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.