8 ★ FINANCIAL TIMES Friday2 August 2019

ARTS

Lucas Blalock’s ‘Donkeys Crossing the Desert’ (2019) is viewed through an app

T

he billboard across the

street from the High Line in

New York looks conven-

tional enough, if tricky to

interpret: the cartoonish

body of a distended black donkey, plus

cacti, palm trees and what looks like the

back of a wooden picture frame.

It’s when I hold my phone up and peer

through the screen that things get weird.

The donkey now appears to be travers-

ing a khaki-coloured desert with a blob

of pink ice cream in the background.

When I swipe right, orange bubbles

appear, wobbling crazily through the

sky. I swipe again: the donkeys have

bred, and there are now more than 20. I

begin to wonder whether Manhattan’s

ferocious summer heat is getting to me.

This isn’t street art in the sense we’ve

come to expect. What I’m looking at is a

work by the maverick American pho-

tographer Lucas Blalock, and part of the

Whitney Museum’s summer-long bien-

nial. It only comes alive when viewed

through a customised smartphone app,

and is the second piece of augmented

reality (AR) art the museum has dis-

played this year.

Up to now, the art world has mainly

focused on the possibilities of virtual

reality (VR). The consensus has been

ho-hum. Does donning Oculus goggles

and communing with Marina Abram-

ovic’s avatarreallycompare to the evis-

cerating impact of live performance art?

All this time, AR — sometimes called

mixed reality — has been stealing up on

the rails. Augmented reality enhances

what we already see, generally using a

smartphone or tablet to overlay the

“real” world with extra visual informa-

tion. The question is: can it create

interesting art?

Blalock and I meet a few days later in

his Brooklyn studio, surrounded by

bric-a-brac, prints and sculptures. At

40, he cheerfully admits to being no tech

wunderkind — “I’m still getting my head

around this stuff, to be honest,” he says.

But, captivated by how “real” photogra-

phy was becoming indistinguishable

from computerised imagery, for the

past decade or so he has employed clon-

ing and masking tools to tweak his

images. The results are eerie Rauschen-

bergian composites and droll cubist por-

traits, a mixture of analogue and digital

ingredients.

In 2016, as Blalock noticed the buzz

aboutPokémon Go, he felt that “aug-

mented reality seemed to offer such a

wild set of possibilities.” He found him-

self collaborating on an AR photo book:

viewed through a customised app, the

pictures on its pages animate, bursting

with sound effects or transmogrifying

into other images. Time magazine

picked it as one of its best photo books of

the year.

On his large-screen iMac, Blalock

shows me more. First he uploads a tar-

get image, which an AR-building pro-

gramme evaluates to see how easily it

can be “read”, and thus trigger whatever

imagery he wants to place on top. Then

comes the job of layering everything up:

animations, extra pictures, other visual

effects. As he flies around the virtual

world he has created, it’s rather like

floating through a stage set, with two-

and three-dimensional objects (wobbly

cacti, cartoonish clouds) arrayed

around us in “space”.

In front is the billboard “frame” that

visitors peer through. The app does the

rest, using GPS to match the position of

each person’s phone to the image on the

wall, and thus create a believable,

apparently 3D, image. Without your

phone, you’d have no idea that the herd

of extra donkeys even existed.

AR is making its presence feltbeyond

original art. Last December, Google’s

Arts and Culture division launched

Meet Vermeer, an AR “museum” that

unites all 36 of the Dutch painter’s

known works in one virtual space.

Install the app and the paintings hover

ghostlike before you, as if they’ve mysti-

cally appeared in whichever room

you’re in. So far, the technology is in the

learning-to-walk phase: Meet Vermeer

doesn’t do much more than “hang” 36

paintings on virtual “walls”. But it’s not

hard to see where things might go — for

museums, in education, and more.

I can’t help feeling that AR, innovative

though the technology is, echoes what

artists have always tried to do — offer

fresh ways of seeing. Think of the 14th-

century experiments in perspective by

the Florentine artists Brunelleschi and

Masaccio, or of Holbein’s “The Ambas-

sadors”, with its ghoulish anthropomor-

phic skull hovering to one side of the

picture plane.

When I suggest that perhaps he’s the

new Holbein, Blalock demurs, then

grins. “If you think about it,” he says, “a

painting on a wall is the original aug-

mented reality.”

March of the Manhattan donkeys

David Smith’s ‘Untitled (Candida)’ (1965) at Yorkshire Sculpture Park is named after one of his daughters— Alamy

to follow Smith’s voyage from Picasso-

inspired juvenile to a maturity which

saw him weld steel plates into a flimsy,

silvery thatch, name it “Candida” (1965)

after one of his daughters, and plant it

outside to drink the shifting East Coast

light. On a grassy crest at YSP,

“Candida” shimmers under Yorkshire’s

rain-troubled skies with equal felicity.

Smith’s devotion to expressing land-

scape through materiality was shared

by Barbara Hepworth, who once said:

“I, the sculptor, am the landscape. I am

the form and I am the hollow, the thrust

and the contour.”

One could argue that Hepworth’s

desire to merge with the curves of the

natural world is a typically feminine

contrast to Smith’s masculine will to

bend metal into his own intransigent

lines. But a more subtle and exhilarating

notion of gender and landscape is elabo-

rated through the art of Rosanne Rob-

ertson. One of the Yorkshire Associate

contingent, Robertson — who hails from

Hebden Bridge — is paired with The

Hepworth Wakefield. Her response to

the project is “Stone Butch”, a sculpture,

film and drawing which takes inspira-

tion from rock formations in West York-

shire’s Calder Valley. Known as Bride-

stones, these craggy, wind-battered

clefts are regarded by Robertson as

“queer bodies... fluid as the water that

shapes them and as plural as the grains

of sand that erode them.”

Sharing a gallery with Hepworth’s

works, Robertson’s installation re-

imagines the rocks in plaster so that

they fall open like pale floppy petals,

their central parting coloured in

terracotta. She films herself wedged in

their V-shape, a pair of long legs perched

precariously over a void into which she

urinates — an action invisible to the

viewer who simply witnesses a sudden

mysterious splashas the liquid hits

stone; when she draws them, it is as a

rocky fragments which course through

and around disembodied torsos and

limbs, in a jittery yet sensuous river.

The fusion of intention and expres-

sion of “Stone Butch” stamps Robertson

as an artist who, like Smith and Hep-

worth, works out of an “inner declara-

tion of purpose” while maintaining her

faith in what Smith described as “lan-

guage as image”.

In truth, rare is the successful sculptor

who does not accept that form and

material matter as much as concept, if

not more. Over at the Leeds Art Gallery,

that conviction plays out with downbeat

Y

orkshire, with its big skies,

undulating countryside and

ancient trees, produced

Britain’s two most signifi-

cant modern sculptors.

There, the young Barbara Hepworth felt

“the hills were sculptures, the roads

defined the forms.” Henry Moore,

according to his daughter Mary, was

“still seeing the landscapes of his child-

hood” at the end of his life.

The pair’s legacy has been fruitfully

exploited by the region’s cultural guard-

ians. Seven miles from Wakefield, art

lovers can find Yorkshire Sculpture

Park (YSP), a verdant canvas that is

home to works by Moore, Hepworth

and a galaxy of contemporary artists.

Meanwhile The Hepworth Wakefield

museum burnishes its homage to the

eponymous sculptor with the shine of a

stunning contemporary building and a

rich programme. And in Leeds,Henry

Moore’s legacy is conserved at theinsti-

tute that bears his name.

Now those three institutions have

joined forces with Leeds Art Gallery to

create Yorkshire Sculpture Interna-

tional (YSI), Britain’s largest ever

sculpture festival.

YSI is about more than just display.

The project has developed an engage-

ment programme to “support artistic

talent development in the region” and

introduce “new audiences to sculpture”.

It has a budget of £1.5m, comprising a

£750,000 grant from Arts Council Eng-

land and funds raised by the institutions

themselves alongside a host of support-

ers (chiefly public bodies, as private

funds are notoriously hard to raise for

culture in the north of England).

“Everything is still too London-

centric,”says Simon Wallis, director of

The Hepworth Wakefield. “One of the

things we’re proving here is we can

devolve cultural power. London

doesn’t have a building of this quality,”

he adds proudly, gesturing at the lumi-

nous spaces of his museum, which

enjoys spectacular views over a fast-

flowing millstream.

Despite its global moniker, YSI is

using its funds for local good. Its engage-

ment programme, which encompasses

workshops, artist visits, teacher sup-

port, public seminars and work place-

ments, is targeting more than 300

schoolchildren, 200 art and design col-

lege students and 1,500 university stu-

dents. YSI has also funded staff and

materials to revive a cancelled sculpture

module at Leeds City College and

Wakefield College.

When it comes to the artists, Wallis’s

contention that “our strength lies in dia-

logue with art with an international

dimension” is borne out through a

line-up of 18 participants from 13 coun-

tries. But there is also an initiative, YSI

Associate Artists, which has paired five

Yorkshire-based sculptors — Rosanne

Visions of metal,

stone and wool

whimsy in the display of Nobuko Tsuch-

iya. So meticulous about her materials

that shebrought raw Yorkshire wool

with her from a specialist shop in Tokyo,

Tsuchiya creates objects that balance

the gauzy fluff with discarded industrial

scraps such as slabs of resin, TV aerials,

corrugated plastic and a quivering blob

of pink latex. Only an artist who says

“materials are my friend, they talk to

me” could have spun such captivating,

acrobatic tension out of such gritty,

disparate ingredients.

It’s a long time since Damien Hirst was

at one with the stuff of his creations. He

may be Leeds’s most famous artist, and

therefore a shoo-in for any Yorkshire-

branded project — there are five of his

sculptures included in YSI and two more

in the city centre — but the sight of his

“The Virgin Mother” (2005-06) rearing

out of the valley is a blot on YSP’s land-

scape. Cast in bronze treated to resem-

ble cheap, coloured resin, this enor-

mous naked woman sports a pregnant

belly which peels away to reveal —

shock, horror — a baby in a womb.For

those of us not requiring a biology les-

son, this a piece of vulgar bombast.

Asked to justify Hirst’s inclusion,

Lilley said his works have already

brought in “a sea of people” who

wouldn’t usually visit. But are we not

wary of populism by now? If this is art

for the people, we should run for those

green hills.

To September 29, yorkshire-sculpture.org

With strong talent from across the world, Britain’s largest ever

sculpture festival is under way in Yorkshire. By Rachel Spence

In the first of four columns

on the relationship between

art and technology,

Andrew Dickson looks at

augmented reality

Robertson, Ryoko Akama, Rhian

Cooke, Natalie Finnemore and Jill McK-

night — with the various institutions

and displayed their work at YSP.

The festival’s overall theme was a

“provocation” from Phyllida Barlow

that “sculpture is the most anthropolog-

ical of arts.” It’s a canny choice, for it

anchors the exhibition in the notion of

humanity in a manner so open-ended

that pretty much any work made by

human hands can be included.

Nevertheless, David Smith’s vision, on

show at YSP, feels genuinely relevant.

Born in 1906, the American sculptor was

the first artist to work in welded metal,

material that embodied “movement,

progress” but also “destruction and

brutality”. His sculptures are the love-

children of Wild West machismo (one is

called “The Wagon”) and ethereal

Mother Nature. These twisty, asymmet-

rical, abstract lyrics inscribed Smith into

the spectacular landscape of upstate New

York as determinedly as the cowboy set-

tlers stamped themselves on the prairies.

This show, the first solo in a public

institution since Tate Modern’s 2006

retrospective and the largest ever out-

side London, is a fantastic opportunity

Henry Moore’s

‘Three Piece

Reclining Figure

No. 1’ (1961-2)

at Yorkshire

Sculpture Park

Alamy

Works by Nobuko Tsuchiya are on

show at Leeds Art Gallery

Damien Hirst’s ‘The Virgin Mother’

(2005-6) at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

                 

РЕ

ЛИ

ЗППП

ООД

ГО

ТО

ВИ

ЛА

ГРР

УУПППП

ППААА

"What's

News"

VK.COM/WSNWSVK.COM/WSNWSVK.COM/WSNWS