Last Friday evening Brian Griffin gave a talk on his photographs on display at the London NPG as a part of their London 2012 project until 26 September 2010 as a part of the late night opening there. I’d arrived over an hour earlier, having walked across from the Royal Festival Hall where I’d been meeting someone earlier who was on her way to an earlier start at the Royal Opera House, and thought I’d spend some time looking at the NPG collection and some of the other special activities on offer for the NPG’s ‘Late Shift‘.
I started by sitting for a portrait booth from ‘Take Away Art’ with Artist Joceline Howe hidden inside. I have to say I found the two minute sketch of me disappointing, and the figure could have been anyone in a silly hat and a fancy frame, though I did rather like the portrait of the young lady who sat before me, but then she was considerably more attractive anyway.
I also took the opportunity to look at the exhibited work from this year’s BP Portrait Award, and have to say I found that disappointing too. There seems to be a current vogue for producing painted portraits that have a photographic look to them, and most of them I would have found rather disappointing as photographs. There were some other portraits I found more interesting but none of them were among the winners.
Also rather disappointing was the display ‘Twentieth Century Portraits‘, photographs taken by Dmitri Kasterine, that was due to open the following day but was actually in place for the Late Shift. Kasterine (b1932, England) whose father was a White Russian and mother English, began taking portraits in the early 1960s for Queen and other leading magazines, and the works on display include many well-known figures from the arts. A few of the pictures are rightly celebrated, the icons by which we remember, for example, Francis Bacon, but in the main I found most a little ordinary.
I think there is some more interesting work on his web site, and a family group I rather like on his blog posted last month that shows he is still busy.
Walking around the gallery it struck me that many of the more interesting pictures on display are not actually portraits – and that quite a few of the portraits are actually rather tedious, including much of the modern work. This came home to me particularly in a gallery entitled Expansion and Empire, where one of the more fascinating works shows Queen Victoria presenting a bible to an African guest, and another Florence Nightingale receiving the wounded at Scutari. (There is also another large image of the Queen visiting the wounded and also a picture of the relief of Lucknow.) There are other portraits of Nightingale, the best of them certainly one of the small photographs on display but not shown on the web page. But it is the larger group images that dominate the room, and not just because of their size.
In a way I think Brian Griffin’s work for the Road to 2012 is a twenty-first century equivalent of these paintings of historical scenes, though of course he has not tried to portray actual scenes (though nor really do those historical examples.) But his work certainly does have something of their sense of theatre, although I don’t think Jerry Barrett or Thomas Jones Barker would have understood or sympathised with Anna Raybon‘s statement that the ‘Road to 2012‘ “was to be art, not PR“; clearly for them, even if the term was then unknown, PR and Art coincided.
His talk was fairly well attended although there was plenty of room for more. Introduced by Raybon, the NPG’s Commissions Manager, the event started with a showing of the film clip of the live performance by Griffin and musician Steve Nieve on the Late show in 1988, which you can also watch on YouTube. Entitled ‘The Big Tie‘, it shows Griffin’s work on Broadgate, with a very young looking Griffin both talking and singing.
Friday he didn’t sing, but engaged in a conversation with Braybon about project and the making of some of the pictures. At one point Griffin demonstrated how he posed models “like puppets“, pushing and pulling their limbs into the positions he wanted, engaging them as actors in producing the scene he wanted. But he and Raybon stressed, the scenes only really came to life when one of the sitters added something of their own, such as when a young boxer leaned out of the tight sculptural group of four figures and raised his gloves to the camera.
Like most of his pictures, this image of the ‘young ambassadors’ from an East Ham school who had played a large part in swinging the decision to London was based on a painting, Griffin had an image of it in his mind but only actually identified it several months later on one of his frequent visits to the National Gallery.
Some of the sitters also had their own games to play. Griffin had wanted to photograph then minister Tessa Jowell kneeling on the office carpet and draping herself onto a chair. But she came in and told him she wasn’t getting on her knees for anyone and he had to rethink. Is it just me that sees the picture that resulted with her arms out on a chair back as her with a Zimmer Frame?
Griffin also stressed the teamwork involved in making these portraits, working with Braybon and others including his assistants on location – usually with two hours to make a picture. Towards the end of the performance he brought four of that team up onto the stage to answer questions – something that certainly came as a surprise to his printer, Mike Crawford.
After the talk I went with Griffin and half a dozen of his friends to a show in the basement of the Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury, ‘Fake Food & Fast Cars: The Pop Couture of Kate Forbes‘, an incredible display of the “highly conceptual costumes” created by this film designer. It continues until 2 October 2010, and is certainly worth a visit. I asked her if I might take some pictures, but failed to persuade her to move out of deep shadow in the dimly lit gallery.
1/5s handheld and not quite sharp – Kate Forbes & Brian Griffin
Griffin, born in Birmingham in 1948, grew up in Lye, between Halesowen and Stourbridge in Dudley and his show at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris from November 19 2010 to January 23 2011, ‘the Black Country’ is based on his memories of growing up there, with portraits based on people he knew as a child, including his family.
A couple of weeks ago he went back there to photograph some of the places that played an important part in his growing up including Ma Pardoes (The Old Swan pub) in Netherton, Netherton butchers, The Black Country Living Museum and Solid Swivel Engineering. After showing in Paris the pictures will go on display in Dudley in 2012.
Kate Forbes worked with Griffin on this project to ensure that the costumes reflected the period and location of his youth. The single picture from it on the web page, My Mother, 2010 shows a woman representing Griffin’s mother when he was a child, with hands soaked in some kind of black oily substance, in a factory overall.
