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• 21 Nov 2009

  Ursula Schulz-Dornburg at The Lichfield Studios

  The photographs of British aristocrat Patrick Lichfield and Dusseldorf-based Ursula Schulz-Dornburg couldn’t be more different; the former immortalized sixties glamour with his pictures of models, royalty and pop stars, while the latter epitomizes the intellectual, landscape-focused German school, spearheaded by the likes of Hilla and Bernd Becher and their water towers. But thanks to a renovation by French architect Jean Michel Wilmotte and the arrival of dynamic young curator Tristan Hoare, both photographers are to go on show - though not at the same time - at Lichfield Studios, west London’s newest gallery space.
  
  The former garage was Lichfield’s studio from 1984s until his death in 2005, at which point Wilmotte snapped up the space, and converted upstairs into his London HQ and pied-a-terre, and downstairs into a gallery. With input from Wilmotte and Hoare, the space will host three to four exhibitions a year of artists little seen in the UK.
  
  For her first show in this country, Hoare has selected Schulz-Dornburg’s images of ancient Spanish chapels that line the medieval pilgrimage route from Barcelona to Santiago de Compostela, and desert landscapes in Iraq, from a portfolio which spans 40 years and covers the globe. Now in her 60s, Schulz-Dornburg was part of New York’s conceptual art scene in the 50s, where she befriended Lawrence Weiner.
  
  Hoare called on him to provide a work for the exterior of the gallery which reads: ‘Turned as the World Turns,’ and which has caused dismay to many local residents. ‘They thought it was some sort of advertising slogan,’ says Hoare, ‘but it’s a reflection on the passing of time which is the theme of the show.’
  
  www.tristanhoare.com
  
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• 19 Nov 2009

  Less and More, Dieter Rams at the Design Museum

  It’s not an overstatement to say Dieter Rams is perhaps the most influential living industrial designer of modern times. His 500-strong output of electronic designs for Braun, between 1955 and 1995 changed the language of appliance design as we know it today and his ‘Ten Principles’ of good design have become a mantra – a checklist and a rule book – for industrial designers the world over. With the same reductive efficiency he applied to his own designs, in ten simple commandments, Rams succinctly defined what design for a post-war modern world should be.
  
  Simplifying and humanising Bauhaus principles, marrying them with the electronic and engineering advances born from the Second World War, Rams’ appliances are lean and clean. Switches are small and ordered, different components are arranged geometrically, colour-coded in a muted palette and finished with a combination of wood veneer and the pioneering plastics he developed. You didn’t have to be part of a financial or cultural elite to own or appreciate a Rams-designed appliance.
  
  His design legacy continues today apace, most stringently in the work of the super-normalists Naoto Fukasawa, Jasper Morrison and Industrial Facility and most widespread in the work of Jonathan Ive whose i-products are arguably the closest anyone has come to achieving ten ticks against Rams’ ten principles.
  
  A retrospective of Rams’ seminal designs are on show at the Design Museum together with archive footage, models, sketches and film interviews with Ive, Morrison, Hecht and Fukasawa. The exhibition isn't just a chronological survey of his work for Braun and furniture for Vitsoe, it provides comprehensive insight into the man behind the designs, how his work evolved and how widespread his influence, both details and overall, has been.
  
  Given his status is the design world it was only fitting that Rams was one of our inaugural guest editors of issue W*103 – for which Matthew Donaldson, as the centrepiece of Rams’ edited section, brought to life the ‘Ten Principles’ in a photographic essay. In addition to Rams’ retrospective we've resurrected Donaldson’s shoot here, which captures perfectly the quiet magnanimity of Rams’ designs, from principle to product in ten photographs.
  
  www.designmuseum.org
  
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• 16 Nov 2009

  James Turrell show, Wolfsburg

  James Turrell is one of the most important artists in the world dealing in light and space. He looks like a well-combed cross between Grizzly Adams and Karl Marx and has an aura of a man who has found his place in the fabric of things. He is in the German town of Wolfsburg (home to the Volkswagen car and an hour’s train ride from Berlin) for the opening of a new exhibition of his work.
  
  Born in Los Angeles in 1943, Turrell studied mathematics, psychology and sensory synesthesia as well as art at university. He flies around the desert in little planes and has devoted the best part his working life to turning a volcano into a piece of land art.
  
  As a pilot, Turrell has witnessed some of nature’s greatest artworks in the sky and says they were his inspiration for his art: ‘The spaces you encounter during flight can be amazing: meeting the dawn or watching the Aurora Borealis' he says and describes an experience of taking off once at dawn and seeing the sunlight trapped between ground fog below and cloud cover above. ‘Everything was completely orange’ he remembers, ‘and there was a trail from a jet taking off that cast a shadow in blues and greens. I thought: “That’s nice, I’d like to make that”’.
  
  Turrell is best known for his two main categories of installation work. His ‘skyscapes’ are where he creates or manipulates spaces from which to observe sections of sky. They can be quite disorientating or transcendental, depending on weather or time of day.
  
  The largest and most famous of these is his vast ongoing project in an extinct volcano, the size of Manhattan island, in the Arizona desert called ‘Roden crater’. Turrell’s other main type of work are his interior light tunnels, projections and Ganzfeld (whole field) pieces which saturate interior space with light in such a way as to make the viewer feel they are immersed in it.
  
  ‘Usually we just use light to illuminate things, but I like the “thingness” of light’, he says by way of explanation. ‘This idea of the luminous filling emptiness, like there is something there to touch is also something I like to work with’.
  
  The high point of the Wolfsburg exhibition is a huge new installation – the largest Turrell has even built inside a museum. Entitled ‘Bridget’s Bardo’, it is a Ganzfeld piece but relates directly to the Roden crater in that it is intended to be an inversion of it. It deals with inner rather than outer space as well as artificial rather than celestial light.
  
  Bridget’s Bardo occupies 700 sq m of floor space and is 11m high. The result of some highly complex technical wizardry with the help of Austrian lighting company Zumtobel, it has two interlocking spaces: a ‘viewing space’ and a ‘sensing space’, both entirely empty yet saturated with a diffused, slowly shifting spectrum of coloured light.
  
  The viewer, (participant is perhaps a better term) enters the installation from above via a steep slope and walks down into a palpable bath of light. It is an extraordinary experience, something between sensory deprivation and a kind of LED-induced Nirvana. The colour, shifting from blue to grey to orange, pink and then red is defined within the space but seems infinite at the same time. Other figures within the space become silhouettes floating within it and perspectives become strangely distorted.
  
  Bridget’s Bardo is a subtle play of light and space that comes pretty close to Turrell’s ambitious aim of calling down the sky from the heavens. For a quite reasonable fee you can also rent the space for an hour at a time from the museum and experience what must be the best ‘chillout’ zone this side of the Northern Lights.
  
  www.kunstmuseum-wolfsburg.de
  
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