MAURIZIO CATTELAN'S "AMERICA": TEN LAYERS OF IRONY IN A GOLD TOILET

It's quite a hoot that the Guggenheim Museum offered to lend the White House Maurizio Cattelan’s America - a functioning gold toilet - after turning down their request for a Van Gogh landscape.  There are ten layers of irony in this:

• A toilet made of gold.

• A gift of a toilet made of gold to a man who is reputed to have chairs made of gold.

• A gift of gold that is intended as an insult to the President.

• A functioning toilet made of gold that visitors to the Guggenheim are permitted to use.

• A functioning toilet that Guggenheim guards protect closely and inspect regularly.

• A reference to Duchamp's readymade Fountain that is not a readymade at all.

• A precious, commoditised version of Duchamp's inherently worthless Fountain.

• A reference to the once-shocking Fountain that is now so clichéd that it causes no offence whatever in the art world.

• " One can imagine creating reverse readymades from some of Duchamp‘s pure readymades, such as shoveling snow with In Advance of a Broken Arm, or like an Italian conceptual artist actually did, urinating in Fountain. Of course, the irony is that in urinating in Duchamp's urinal, the artist created a reverse readymade by retuming it to the use for which it was originally manufactured." Derridada: Duchamp as Readymade Deconstruction, Thomas Deane Tucker.

Duchamp, In Advance of the Broken Arm

• Playing at political radicalism without being radical at all. So old hat. So fake. Duchamp imagined a readymade in reverse, for example, using a Rembrandt as an ironing board. The only artists who took him up were the students of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1968, who confronted the police with old masters from the walls of the school.

PHOEBE CUMMINGS, WOMEN'S HOUR CRAFT PRIZE

I eventually got to the exhibition of the Women's Hour Craft Prize at the V&A. I liked the prize piece, Phoebe Cummings' Triumph of the Immaterial, a construction in unfired clay of beautiful flowers, reminiscent of Dutch flower painting. There is a short video in the exhibition which shows Cummings using historical reference material, so I'm sure that sort of painting was in her mind. This is her description of the work:

“Historically, fountains have stood confidently (and apologetically) as sculpture, design and craft, with little regard for such categorisations. Triumph of the Immaterial is a fountain made from raw clay. It will enact its own performance, eroding and dissolving over time. The work celebrates the endless possibility for clay to be made and un-made, and considers craft skills and the decorative from a contemporary position.”

Every day at noon the fountain is turned on and this exquisite sculpture is gradually eroded. It is not an original idea - there is a similarly self-destructing piece in the V&A's exhibition of contemporary Korean ceramics - but the delicacy of the object makes the process more poignant here.

HIGH & OVER AND THE SUN HOUSES, AMERSHAM

We went to see High & Over and the Sun Houses in Amersham, modernist houses at the far end of Metroland in the stockbroker belt of Buckinghamshire. These four uncompromising buildings were the work of Amyas Connell, the New Zealand born architect who is credited with introducing the International Style to British domestic architecture. They were completed in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Connell and his Amersham development are well described by the Amersham Museum and I won't repeat what they have written.

Some of the gardens have sculptures.

I thought the recent development of  the street, Highover Park, with more ordinary houses works well.

Connell's admiration of Le Corbusier is established, but I was struck by the similarities between the Sun Houses and Loos's Villa Müller in Prague, built at the same time - not only by the cube-shaped buildings, the fenestration and the white stucco, but also by the hilly site and the necessarily sloping gardens.

The situation of Connell's houses is more striking than that of Villa Müller because the surroundings in Amersham have not been so extensively developed as those of Villa Müller, which is now in a Prague suburb, and despite the 1960s and 1970s houses around High & Over, the setting of Highover Park is still rural with splendid views over the Chilterns.

Is the ownership of Minis compulsory for owners of the Sun Houses? These (below) are even colour matched with the window frames.

Pathé News made an informative film, "The House of a Dream" in 1931 about High & Over, showing the interior as it was then - simpler and more austere than the interior of Villa Müller.

NICHOLAS VERGETTE TILE PANEL DISCOVERED (2)

I posted earlier about the discovery under a false wall of tile panels by Nicholas Vergette. I went to see them recently and was bowled over: they are interesting and a beautiful thing to have in a house. One panel decorates a chimney breast, another the lower half of a wall in a sitting room. They are signed “Vergette” and although there are no documentary records I have no doubt that they are by him.

The first panel, dated 1955, is of stoneware tiles, which were probably made by Vergette himself, glazed in a silk-matt white glaze and decorated in a shiny blue glaze applied over wax resist and with marks scratched through (above). Vergette often used wax resist and sgraffito on his ceramics and the blue-and-white colourway is characteristic of his work of this period. The floral design is free and asymmetrical and well scaled for the chimney breast and the small room it is in.

The second, dated 1956, is in some ways more remarkable. It is large, comprising 189 six-inch tiles. It has an eight-colour design with a deep violet and blue-grey background and with floral and animal motifs in royal blue, sky blue, olive green, primrose yellow, brown and red. The background, with the violet cross hatched to reveal grey lines, is original. Vergette painted the motifs first, then covered them in wax and then washed in the dark background. Today we have water-soluble wax emulsion to get resist effects, but Vergette would have used hot candle wax, which is difficult to control and produces noxious fumes - I stopped using it after I almost passed out in my studio.

Vergette's panel is painted on tiles made by Johnson’s of Stoke-on-Trent, probably bought unglazed and then covered by him in a tin glaze and decorated using the maiolica technique. He may have decided at this stage that manufacturing his own tiles was too difficult and that it was best left to a specialist - tile making takes up a lot of space and the problems of warping and estimating shrinkage are considerable. To decorate the tiles, Vergette would have laid them in position on the floor and painted them, then numbered them, fired them and later re-assembled them on site. This way of decorating was illustrated by Kenneth Clark, a contemporary of Vergette, in his book “Practical Pottery and Ceramics”, showing Tony Hollaway at work (below).

Applying the design to a large tile panel

At the time he made these tiles (just before he went to America) Vergette was working with William Newland and Margaret Hine in a studio in Bayswater, where they received commissions to decorate the coffee bars that were springing up all over London. Vergette and Newland were also teaching at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. Newland thought that British troops advancing through Italy had developed a taste for good coffee and demanded it when they got home. The coffee bars were certainly part of the Italian wave of the ‘fifties, with Gaggia machines, names like “Moka Ris” and openings by Gina Lollobrigida. The maiolica plates and tiles designed by the Bayswater three enhanced their Mediterranean feel. Newland observed that coffee bars gave young people for the first time somewhere to sit indoors without supervision, without having to drink alcohol and without having to spend a lot of money. By the late 1950s, youth fashion was also Italian-influenced.

Nicholas Vergette demonstrating at  the Ceramics in the Home exhibition in 1952.

Dora Billington, under whom Vergette worked at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, said  in“The New Look in British Pottery” that his work, “though much of it is in the round, somehow suggests a painter’s approach. His best work is evocative, always suggesting more than is actually stated.  … it is good to see him turning seriously to tiles." Billington illustrates a contemporary tile panel, but its present whereabouts are unknown, if it still exists. Nearly all the decorations made by Vergette and his colleagues are lost or destroyed, and if he ever made any tile panels for coffee bars they no longer exist, so these recently discovered panels are outstanding as the only surviving example of tile work by him. The fact that the polychrome tiles were covered up indicates that they weren't much valued, and it's fortunate that they weren't hacked off.

The details of the commission are unknown, but there is a clue in two artists associated with the Central School who lived near the house, Newland and the illustrator Val Biro. They may have introduced the owner to Vergette.

GARCIA SANABRIA PARK, TENERIFE

The García Sanabria Park in Santa Cruz is a restful evergreen space made in honour of a city mayor, though the Rambla de Santa Cruz on which it stands, with its central avenue of shady trees, is restful enough. All paths in the park lead to a fountain monument, erected in 1938, conceived by architect José Enrique Marrero Regalado and designed and executed by sculptor Francisco Borges Salas.

On one side is a relief portrait of Sanabria, on the other, in the fountain pool, is a far-from-idealised female figure, Fecundity (above), who gives her name to the sculpture. On the third side is a figure representing Work, on the fourth, a nude male (below) that struck me because he holds a six-pointed star, a symbol not to be expected in a fascist country with no Jews (Franco began his rebellion in Tenerife), though in fact the star represents The Future.

“Fecundity” has had a chequered history. Long regarded as the most significant piece of public art in the Canary Islands, in 1950 it was condemned as immoral and removed from the park until 1970. It is thought that the censorship was a cover for jealousy of Salas by influential colleagues.

TENERIFE NATIVITY

We stayed in Santa Cruz de Tenerife for Christmas and discovered the elaborate nativity scenes that institutions and neighbourhoods make, each outbidding the other in size and complexity. The Canarian belén portrays imagined street scenes and trades of Bethlehem, and potters are often included. I liked these, with their small, perfectly made terracotta and maiolica pots, in the belén in the parliament building.

NICHOLAS VERGETTE TILE PANEL DISCOVERED

A hitherto unknown tile panel by Nicholas Vergette has been discovered in a house in England. I was contacted by the owner who wanted to authenticate it and from the photos he sent me I am almost certain it was made by Vergette. I have yet to see it, but there is little doubt it was by him. It is dated 1955 and is from the period of the plate illustrated above, in the V&A collection.

Vergette was one of the Bayswater Three, the studio he shared with William Newland and Margaret Hine, who had a successful career in the 1950s decorating coffee bars with colourful plates.

The house owner was refurbishing his old property and took down a false wall to reveal the tiles beneath, covering the entire room. More tiles were discovered in another room. This is an exciting find. The panel is larger than anything by Vergette from this period that I have seen before.  The details of the commission are unknown but there are indications that the person who ordered the tiles may have been acquainted with Newland.

I plan to visit the house in the next few weeks and hopefully will post pictures of the tiles here.

POSTSCRIPT
More details about the tiles, with pictures, here.