PHOTOGRAPHY
ROCK ICONS BY GERED MANKOWITZ
Phoenix Contemporary Gallery, Glasgow, until Sun 30 Dec.
Gered Mankowitz is responsible for some of the most recognisable images in the rock canon. And when you step into the Phoenix Contemporary’s exhibition space, everyone from Mick and Keith to Noel and Liam, via Suzi Quatro and Paul Weller, stare moodily back at you.
Mankowitz’s career began, in true 608 fashion, with a lucky break in his teens, after being introduced to Marianne Faithfull by pop duo Chad & Jeremy.
‘Andrew Loog Oldham saw my work with Marianne and asked me to work with the Stones,’ Mankowitz explains. ‘I worked with them in early 1965 and had a huge success getting the cover for the Out Of Our Heads album. Then in the summer they asked me to join them on tour. I was eighteen when I first started working with them, and I think I was terribly arrogant, a really cocky sort of a bloke. I don’t think I
appreciated what I was going to find, and it was only when I got there and the screaming fans were bouncing on the roof of the Cadillac that I thought, “Oh my God,
this is really something .
In stark contrast to today’s hurried photo-shoots and swarms of publicists, Mankowitz was granted full access to the stars of the day, and his early work seems stronger as a result. ‘It was easier,’ he confirms, ‘because there was a sort of innocence abroad, a na'i'vety, and we thought we were doing new things. Personally speaking I thought I was taking mould- breaking images, but from a position of ignorance. Because of that innocence, because I wasn’t shackled by experience, it was so much easier. The picture of Oasis in the show is more self-conscious, because I was
" MIXED MEDIA
BEUYS TO HIRST: ART WORKS AT DEUTSCHE BANK
Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun 13 Jan .000
The Deutsche Bank might seem like an unlikely investor in contemporary art. but with a collection amounting to 50.000 works. its fair to say it has a serious interest in the art world. Beuys To Hirst brings together 100 works of art by both German and British artists. The common theme running through the exhibition is the inversion or subversion of meaning.
The work of German artists such as Richter and Polke is ironic and witty. creating new interpretations of the meaning of art. Gerhard Richter's abstract oil painting Abstraktes Bi/d (Faust). spread across three canvases. looks like an exploded rainbow. a mixture of Vibrant and delicate hues that jump out in three-dimensional brightness. Richter was more concerned with how to paint and not what to paint. thus this wonderful work is Quite literally the colour of brushstrokes. The fourteen prints here by Sigmar Polke are very amusing. They depict reconstructions of ODJOCIS SUCh as palm trees and Polke's deIuSional relationship with a hollow in
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Rolling Stone: Mick and Aston, 1966, by Gered Mankowitz
setting out to pastiche my work with the Stones, and because they’ve got years and years of references, whereas in the 605 all we were doing was trying to break
away from the smiling, frilly-shirted shots that had gone
before.’
Tony Cragg’s fascination with plastic: Secretions
a tree that has appeared so he can coexist with the tree.
The British work on display is also full of abstract fun. Simon Patterson‘s The Great Bear is a remake of the London Underground map where you catch a train from Angelica Houston to Tony Curtis (but Humphrey Bogart is shut on Sundays). Tony Cragg's iascination with plastic has led to him to create Secretions. large skittle-like sculptures made from dice: and Marc Quinn
Today, then, it seems Mankowitz’s work with musicians has come full circle, whether it’s with self- referential snaps of a band such as Oasis - themselves 60$ copyists - or his forays into screen-printing with collaborator David Costa, which re-work iconic images of Jimi Hendrix for a new generation of fans. And, whether you’re a photography buff or a straightforward music fan, Rock Icons is an unmissable retrospective of four decades of Gered Mankowitz’s distinctive, epoch- defining work. (Jack Mottram)
suspends flowers in silicon so that they are perpetually fresh. Newcomers Charles Avery and Moyna Flannigan cleverly create fictional groups of characters where the boundaries between reality and fantasy merge.
Although some of the work on display has subverted meaning to the incomprehensible. the exhibition is a chance to see that contemporary art does have meaning after all. (Isabella Weirl
Artbeat
art@list.co.uk
NEWLSICQ’HK’E Y‘Z‘BCI‘ZPI é”?
FINLAND COMES TO Glasgow as part of IDOL the annual celebration of Finland's independence from Russia. The Arches is the venue for music video screenings and live performances on Sunday 2 December from 4pm. Meanwhile at the CCA on Thursday 6 December at 8pm is Pon'. a collaboration between Finnish band Circle and film director Mika Taanila. Also on that day from 10pm is Connected? a showcase of video-based work by leading artists based in Helsinki including Sally Tykka and Hell Rekula (who represented Finland at this year's Venice Biennale). Fanni Niemi-Junkola and Elia-Lisa Ahtila.
Girl at Ki sma by Heli Rekula, part of Connected?
REMEMBER GLASGOW’S FREE Gallery? Well, it’s back. After twelve months of closure, the gallery, situated underneath a hairdressers, has been refurbished and will reopen on Sunday 9 December with a group show including Alex Frost, Ryan Exidore and Helen Hemsley. Set up in 1997, Free Gallery provided many emerging artists and curators with their first exhibition outside college. The gallery is also looking for a voluntary curator. Send your application (no longer than A4 sheet of paper) to: Curators Wanted, Free Gallery, 31 Chisholm Street, Glasgow, G1 5HA by Saturday 15 December. For more information log onto www.freegal|eryglasgow.co. uk
SUBMISSIONS ARE sought for the Collective Gallery‘s New Work Scotland Programme 2002/3. Launched in 2000. the project gives emerging artists the opponunity to show and develop their work. The next instalment will commence in September 2002 and IS open to Scottish-based artists who have graduated from art college within four years Out of BA or three years Out of MA. or final year BA and MA students. Send an A5 SAE addressed to NWSP 20022003. Collective Gallery. 22—28 Cockburn Street. Edinburgh. EH1 lNY by Monday 14 January 2002.