{"id":1805,"date":"2018-02-10T17:13:25","date_gmt":"2018-02-10T17:13:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=1805"},"modified":"2018-04-11T14:01:17","modified_gmt":"2018-04-11T14:01:17","slug":"laura-gascoigne-do-you-want-ice-with-that-may-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=1805","title":{"rendered":"Laura Gascoigne: Do You Want Ice With That? – May 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Kitty Kraus – Untitled http:\/\/www.galerieneu.net\/artist\/kitty+kraus\/1544<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ever since Anya Gallaccio made her name by exhibiting an ice block called Intensities and Surfaces in an East London pumping station in 1996, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been monitoring the advance of ice through the contemporary art world, where it seems resistant to climate trends prevailing elsewhere. While the polar ice caps recede, the phenomenon of ice art only grows.<\/span><\/p>\n

I wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mind if a) against the artists\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 professed intentions, this didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t actually contribute to global warming, and b) the ice wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t usually engaged in lecturing its audience in an uncool way. I remember grumbling at the time of Gallaccio\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s exhibition that if I was going to hear from an ice cube, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d rather it addressed me from a gin and tonic. Little did I suspect that over the next two decades I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d be on the receiving end of a chorus of sermons from ice cubes, not one of them accompanied by so much as a zest of lemon.<\/span><\/p>\n

The big attraction of ice to conceptual artists is that the medium is the message, and the message is obvious. Conceptual art simply adores the obvious, and so it has taken ice to its bosom where, as with climate change, a cool start has been followed by accelerated warming. Here is an easy-reference 20-year calendar to prove it.<\/span><\/p>\n

1997 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Francis Al\u00c3\u00bfs pushes an enormous ice block through Mexico City until it shrinks to a cube, then instead of popping it into a Tequila Ponche, like any normal hot and thirsty Mexican, he christens it Paradox Praxis and declares it \u00e2\u20ac\u0153an allegory about failed modernisation strategies in the region\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Que?<\/span><\/p>\n

2009 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Andy Goldsworthy cuts a circle of ice in a frozen river with a rope compass and lets it float away. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The circle was locked and then, suddenly, it was joyously made free to move and rejoin the flow,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he declaims poetically, before skipping off like Fotherington-Thomas. <\/span><\/p>\n

2010 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Karl Lagerfeld, scenting frost on the fashion breeze, imports a giant iceberg as the centrepiece of his spring Paris catwalk show for Chanel.<\/span><\/p>\n

2011 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Kitty Kraus, in a group show of international artists \u00e2\u20ac\u0153who explore ideas of flux and ephemerality\u00e2\u20ac\u009d at Manchester Cornerhouse, shows a block of inky water with a light bulb at its centre. Titled Untitled, it melts onto the gallery floor creating \u00e2\u20ac\u0153topographical patterns that viewers must navigate around\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. <\/span><\/p>\n

2012 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Neha Choksi, an artist drawn to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153scenarios of erasure, exhaustion, detachment and disappearance\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, creates Iceboat, a film of herself rowing across a lake in a frozen boat until it melts. <\/span><\/p>\n

2013 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Holy See climbs aboard the freezer truck, installing a refrigeration unit in its debut Pavilion at the Venice Biennale to keep a painting by Lawrence Carroll on ice.<\/span><\/p>\n

2014 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c For the Liverpool Biennale Norma Jeane installs a solar-powered ice-making machine in the Old Blind School, which \u00e2\u20ac\u201c for want of July sun in Liverpool \u00e2\u20ac\u201c leaks. In October, coinciding with the publication of the IPCC\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Fifth Assessment Report on Climate Change, Olafur Eliasson arranges 12 blocks of ice in the form of an Ice Watch in Copehagen\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s City Hall Square. Cut from the Nuup Kangerlua fjord in Greenland, the blocks\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 total weight of 100 tonnes is equivalent to the amount of inland ice currently melting every hundredth of a second. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153As an artist I am interested in how we give knowledge a body,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d explains Eliasson. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153What does a thought feel like and how can felt knowledge encourage action?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d <\/span><\/p>\n

2016 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c In Granary Square, King\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Cross Alex Chinneck erects a Christmas tree \u00e2\u20ac\u201c complete with lights \u00e2\u20ac\u201c contained in a 7m ice cube. Titled Fighting Fire with Ice Cream, it poses no risk to the station\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s power supply as it is actually made of clear resin rather than water, and the pool that accumulates on the ground around it \u00e2\u20ac\u201c which revellers presumably have to \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcnavigate\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c is made of wax.<\/span><\/p>\n

While on the subject of melting ice caps, it may interest you to know that this year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Venice Biennale will see the launch of an exhibition of highlights of something called the Antarctic Biennale which, under the patronage of UNESCO, advertises itself as \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcdeveloping Antarctica\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cultural potential\u00e2\u20ac\u2122. Tell that to the penguins. Its most prominent partner is Kaspersky Lab, a Russian global cyber security company based in Moscow. Smell fishy? It is. As it happens, Kaspersky Lab has just been named as one of the companies with ties to the Kremlin that paid Michael Flynn a sledload of cash for a speaking engagement in Washington. You want ice with that, or would you prefer oil and gas? Kaspersky is not the only greenwash merchant dealing in ice art. In 2015 Rolls Royce commissioned Isaac Julien\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s glacial video installation Stones against Diamonds, set among the glistening ice caves of Vatnaj\u00c3\u00b6kull in Iceland. No doubt BP is even now planning something. Ice art is not as transparent as you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d think.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Gallaccio wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t the first to make art from ice; she trod in steps already dinted by 1960s masters Gyula Konkoly, Allan Kaprow, Ian Baxter, Rafael Ferrer and Paul Kos. More memorably, perhaps, in the 1970s naked cellist Charlotte Moorman performed avant-garde compositions by Jim McWilliams with a melting instrument between her legs and Serbian ice queen Marina Abramovic, in a performance titled The Lips of Thomas, cut her stomach with a razor before prostrating her naked body on a frozen cross \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a display of sang froid that provoked a homage from Lady Gaga, who stripped off and wrapped herself around an ice block in 2013 in a fundraising drive for an institute of performance art.<\/span><\/p>\n

There is no new thing under the sun, quoth Ecclesiastes, and in the matter of ice art the hole in the Antarctic ozone layer doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t seem to be helping. Heather Phillipson has done her best to inject a bit of novelty with her knickerbocker glory sculpture, THE END, for the Fourth Plinth, intended as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a monument to hubris and impending collapse\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Unfortunately by the time of THE END\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s unveiling in 2020 the collapse will probably have happened and a pool of sticky cream with a cherry and a dead fly floating in it will seem a more fitting monument to hubris \u00e2\u20ac\u201c which, with the pace of modern life, is faster-acting than in Ozymandias\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 day. When we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re frozen out by Europe and the rest of the world, Phillipson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Mr Whippy vanitas will leave us cold. <\/span><\/p>\n

The fact is that while variations on vanitas painting are endless, the creative possibilities of ice and cream are limited and were long ago exhausted by the Italians. Often it takes the imagination of a non-artist to realise the transformative potential of a non-art medium. In the winter of 2012 in China\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s north-eastern city of Jilin, Wen Hsu, a 58-year-old tenant dissatisfied with the compensation on offer for his vacation of a condemned apartment block that had been his home for 35 years, made his discontent visible by opening a window in his 7th floor flat, turning on the taps and leaving them running. The result was a spectacular icefall down the building\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fa\u00c3\u00a7ade that collected in a frozen wave on the pavement below. No mere artist ever produced such a thing of beauty from solid water or achieved such a practical result. Media coverage shamed the developers into improving their offer, an instance of felt knowledge encouraging action.<\/span><\/p>\n

Laura Gascoigne<\/strong>
\nThe Jackdaw May\/Jun 2017<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ever since Anya Gallaccio made her name by exhibiting an ice block called Intensities and Surfaces in an East London pumping station in 1996, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been monitoring the advance of ice through the contemporary art world, where it seems resistant to climate trends prevailing elsewhere. While the polar ice caps recede, the phenomenon of ice […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[666,657,543,655,663,670,662,669,658,668,659,664,660,656,661,665,667,228],"class_list":["post-1805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","tag-alex-chinneck","tag-andy-goldsworthy","tag-anya-gallaccio","tag-francis-alys","tag-holy-see","tag-ice","tag-iceboat","tag-isaac-julien","tag-karl-lagerfeld","tag-kaspersky-lab","tag-kitty-kraus","tag-lawrence-carroll","tag-manchester-cornerhouse","tag-mexico-city","tag-neha-choksi","tag-norma-jeane","tag-olafur-eliasson","tag-venice-biennale"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1805"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1805\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1848,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1805\/revisions\/1848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}