Spank the Monkey, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead
The folk of the north-east are perpetually grateful for the Baltic. We are fickle, often fluctuating between amusement and bemusement. But we are glad it's there.
The metamorphosis of the building from a derelict riverside flour mill in 2002 to a centre for contemporary art was significant. The use of the word 'for' contemporary art in its name rather than 'of' was an important one; the Baltic has no permanent collection, instead it has a rolling programme of events and exhibitions.
These started with the memorable Tarantantara installation by Anish Kapoor in the shell of the unfinished building, followed by a whole host of others including Antony Gormley's Domain Field and, more recently, the industrial landscapes of Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and the installations of Sam Taylor-Wood.
The Baltic has endured the coruscating criticisms of the art establishment. It has been scoured through by auditors who were appalled by poor fiscal controls, and faced a prurient media interest in the personal lives of its curators. Most serious of all, it has had to deal with the frustrations of those visitors who found too many of the floors closed for future installations.
Under the newish director, Peter Doroshenko, the Baltic has improved its programming while sticking to its mission. The current exhibition is billed as 'the first serious international examination of urban and suburban art', which leads one to ask if the previous ones were frivolous and, if so, what's wrong with frivolity?
Doroshenko in partnership with the Mexican curator Pedro Alonzo has brought together the work of 22 international artists working on the fringes of the art world.
Inspired and infected by independent magazines and music, manga comics, street culture, graphic design, and graffiti, their work is rarely shown in traditional art galleries or museums. 'Is this art or vandalism - whose public space is it anyway?' is the question posed to visitors, both in the Baltic and at the many sites in and around Tyneside where outdoor artworks (or as their creators prefer to call them - urban interventions) are to be discovered. Confrontation and visual disobedience are the order of the day… a kind of counter art in the same way that jargon is always a counter language.
The exhibition is called Spank the Monkey, a slang term for a specific male form of sensual gratification. In these liberated days, given the wealth of women artists represented here, I wonder why the name was so gender specific? Were the curators influenced perhaps by the carved name of J Arthur Rank still emblazoned high on their building? The title is nevertheless effective.
Contemporary slang is, after all, as the scholar Jonathan Green reminds us, 'the jackanapes lexicon of the dispossessed, the language of the rebel, the outlaw, the despised, the marginal and the young', the very audience being courted by the Baltic. But this global youth culture is not age specific. It includes, insists the catalogue, 'those who have grown up… but continue to dress like "kids", tag walls, play video games and skateboard - Contemporary Lost Boys.'
When it comes to role models, this reviewer feels closer to Captain Hook than to Peter Pan. I attempted to love this exhibition, knowing that to try would be 'an awfully big adventure'. And by and large I liked it a lot.
I took to heart the bright multi-storey banner by David Shrigley that confronts the Newcastle bank of the Tyne; You Cannot Help Looking At This. Some of the art, such as the political posters of Faile, is thought-provoking and shocking.
I was taken with the work of Os Gemeos, twin artists from Brazil, whose installations are simultaneously comic and serious. I much appreciated the subversive images of Banksy, although I did wonder whether he had been invited to exhibit or, as usual, had sneaked his work in.
But some work, such as the photography of Ed Templeton, was beyond me in its banality. Beneath contempt were the sexually exploitive images by Yasumasa Yonehara titled Yes, Sir, She Wants To. The unmitigated nastiness of this piece nearly converted me to prudery.
Exciting most interest among visitors was Kozyndan's caricature of the urban landscape, Battle on the River Tyne, with its myriad of visual jokes. In the piece, a horizontal version of the Angel of the North floats over the Baltic and the Sage Music Centre. Its passengers are all Gormley mannequins and they discard shampoos and other liquid containers over the heads of the usual daytime and night-time denizens of the Quayside.
Prints and especially postcards of this piece are needed quickly. And I would urge that somebody, Tyne & Wear Museums perhaps, adds this gem to their collections so that it can be shown with that fellow icon of Tyneside, William Irving's Blaydon Races.
Spank the Monkey seeks a 'dialogue with the urban landscape'. The external installations in streets and metro stations are excellent, although they do not seem to have caused the hoped for chagrin of the municipal authorities.
The other aim was to circumvent and subvert the established gallery system. Ironically, this is achieved, because the pieces within the Baltic seem tamer than those outside. Their power to shock has been weakened.
The catalogue that accompanies the exhibition is edited by Alessandro Vincentelli and is itself worth collecting, with fine illustrations of works by a number of the artists. It is also a collector's item if, like me, you are intrigued by the absurdities of artspeak; what the English poet Robert Southey once termed 'the arts babblative and scibblative'.
There you will find discussed in barely readable typefaces 'the aesthetics of cool and guerrilla marketing'. You will be invited to start 'flipping the tortilla' to consider 'the modes and nodes of collectivity', to discuss 'language both synchronistic and synesthetic'. Or, better still, ignore the words. Look at the art. Have fun.
Peter Lewis is a writer and a past director of Beamish, the North of England Open Air Museum
Project data
Main funders: Baltic, North East England, Newcastle/Gateshead
Curators: Pedro Alonzo, Peter Doroshenko
Exhibition ends: 7 January
The folk of the north-east are perpetually grateful for the Baltic. We are fickle, often fluctuating between amusement and bemusement. But we are glad it's there.
The metamorphosis of the building from a derelict riverside flour mill in 2002 to a centre for contemporary art was significant. The use of the word 'for' contemporary art in its name rather than 'of' was an important one; the Baltic has no permanent collection, instead it has a rolling programme of events and exhibitions.
These started with the memorable Tarantantara installation by Anish Kapoor in the shell of the unfinished building, followed by a whole host of others including Antony Gormley's Domain Field and, more recently, the industrial landscapes of Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and the installations of Sam Taylor-Wood.
The Baltic has endured the coruscating criticisms of the art establishment. It has been scoured through by auditors who were appalled by poor fiscal controls, and faced a prurient media interest in the personal lives of its curators. Most serious of all, it has had to deal with the frustrations of those visitors who found too many of the floors closed for future installations.
Under the newish director, Peter Doroshenko, the Baltic has improved its programming while sticking to its mission. The current exhibition is billed as 'the first serious international examination of urban and suburban art', which leads one to ask if the previous ones were frivolous and, if so, what's wrong with frivolity?
Doroshenko in partnership with the Mexican curator Pedro Alonzo has brought together the work of 22 international artists working on the fringes of the art world.
Inspired and infected by independent magazines and music, manga comics, street culture, graphic design, and graffiti, their work is rarely shown in traditional art galleries or museums. 'Is this art or vandalism - whose public space is it anyway?' is the question posed to visitors, both in the Baltic and at the many sites in and around Tyneside where outdoor artworks (or as their creators prefer to call them - urban interventions) are to be discovered. Confrontation and visual disobedience are the order of the day… a kind of counter art in the same way that jargon is always a counter language.
The exhibition is called Spank the Monkey, a slang term for a specific male form of sensual gratification. In these liberated days, given the wealth of women artists represented here, I wonder why the name was so gender specific? Were the curators influenced perhaps by the carved name of J Arthur Rank still emblazoned high on their building? The title is nevertheless effective.
Contemporary slang is, after all, as the scholar Jonathan Green reminds us, 'the jackanapes lexicon of the dispossessed, the language of the rebel, the outlaw, the despised, the marginal and the young', the very audience being courted by the Baltic. But this global youth culture is not age specific. It includes, insists the catalogue, 'those who have grown up… but continue to dress like "kids", tag walls, play video games and skateboard - Contemporary Lost Boys.'
When it comes to role models, this reviewer feels closer to Captain Hook than to Peter Pan. I attempted to love this exhibition, knowing that to try would be 'an awfully big adventure'. And by and large I liked it a lot.
I took to heart the bright multi-storey banner by David Shrigley that confronts the Newcastle bank of the Tyne; You Cannot Help Looking At This. Some of the art, such as the political posters of Faile, is thought-provoking and shocking.
I was taken with the work of Os Gemeos, twin artists from Brazil, whose installations are simultaneously comic and serious. I much appreciated the subversive images of Banksy, although I did wonder whether he had been invited to exhibit or, as usual, had sneaked his work in.
But some work, such as the photography of Ed Templeton, was beyond me in its banality. Beneath contempt were the sexually exploitive images by Yasumasa Yonehara titled Yes, Sir, She Wants To. The unmitigated nastiness of this piece nearly converted me to prudery.
Exciting most interest among visitors was Kozyndan's caricature of the urban landscape, Battle on the River Tyne, with its myriad of visual jokes. In the piece, a horizontal version of the Angel of the North floats over the Baltic and the Sage Music Centre. Its passengers are all Gormley mannequins and they discard shampoos and other liquid containers over the heads of the usual daytime and night-time denizens of the Quayside.
Prints and especially postcards of this piece are needed quickly. And I would urge that somebody, Tyne & Wear Museums perhaps, adds this gem to their collections so that it can be shown with that fellow icon of Tyneside, William Irving's Blaydon Races.
Spank the Monkey seeks a 'dialogue with the urban landscape'. The external installations in streets and metro stations are excellent, although they do not seem to have caused the hoped for chagrin of the municipal authorities.
The other aim was to circumvent and subvert the established gallery system. Ironically, this is achieved, because the pieces within the Baltic seem tamer than those outside. Their power to shock has been weakened.
The catalogue that accompanies the exhibition is edited by Alessandro Vincentelli and is itself worth collecting, with fine illustrations of works by a number of the artists. It is also a collector's item if, like me, you are intrigued by the absurdities of artspeak; what the English poet Robert Southey once termed 'the arts babblative and scibblative'.
There you will find discussed in barely readable typefaces 'the aesthetics of cool and guerrilla marketing'. You will be invited to start 'flipping the tortilla' to consider 'the modes and nodes of collectivity', to discuss 'language both synchronistic and synesthetic'. Or, better still, ignore the words. Look at the art. Have fun.
Peter Lewis is a writer and a past director of Beamish, the North of England Open Air Museum
Project data
Main funders: Baltic, North East England, Newcastle/Gateshead
Curators: Pedro Alonzo, Peter Doroshenko
Exhibition ends: 7 January
