Billy Childish: Unknowable but Certain 17 February – 18 April 2010 Written by Student Teachers at the Institute of Education: Johanna Dresner, Joy Laing-Buisson and Ania Hardy with ICA Learning Interns Andrea Lorenzi and Benoit Loiseau. ICA 2 / INTRODUCTION Billy Childish / 17 February – 18 April 2010 www.ica.org.uk/learning ICA ICA Learning Programme What We Do Artist Led Projects Our dynamic, artist-led Learning Our programme includes artist-led workshops with schools and Programme provides opportunities innovative collaborations between artists and community groups. for schools, families and Teachers Packs community groups to engage in These are available with each exhibition and include exhibition notes, suggested discussion points and activities for your visit, creative ways with the ICA’s how to prepare before attending the exhibition and proposed exhibitions. The gallery is open for activities for the classroom. school visits between 10am and Insets 12pm, Monday – Friday and is just The ICA offers professional development sessions for teachers as an opportunity to meet with artists and gallery staff, and five minutes walk from Charing discuss how best to incorporate contemporary art into young Cross Station. This pack is geared people’s learning. towards secondary school students Schools Mailing List pursuing Key Stages 3, 4 and 5. Keep up to date with the exciting learning projects, events and workshops happening at the ICA by signing up for our mailing Teachers may find it useful to visit list. the exhibitions before bringing a Teachers Previews group. If you would like to plan a These private views are dedicated to learning resources and trip to the ICA, get in touch and find offer ideas for your pupils’ visit to the ICA. Come as a teacher or out how we can meet the needs of as yourself to enjoy a relaxing evening in the gallery. your group. ICA Learning is focused The Fox Reading Room The Fox Reading Room, situated off the bar and café area and on creating opportunities for adjacent to the ICA’s lower gallery, is our new resource space exploration and discussion, providing artist-selected publications and related material to accompany our visual arts programme. providing participants with the Our new space also provides learning resources for teachers tools and assurance to become and educators linking our exhibitions to the national curriculum. The Fox Reading Room was made possible by the generous informed spectators, confident support of the Edwin Fox Foundation participators and inspired creators. Contact Vicky C armicha el, Le arning A ssistant Phone: + 4 4 ( 0 ) 2 0 7 7 6 6 1 4 5 8 E-mail: [email protected] For more information and to view our archive of previous learning activities, please visit www.ica.org.uk/learning The Fox Reading Room 3 / EXHibiTION CONCEPT Billy Childish / 17 February – 18 April 2010 www.ica.org.uk/learning ICA Exhibition Concept objects, places and people. They also demonstrate the deliberate rejection of the The ICA is proud to present a major solo contemporary world that is a feature of all exhibition by artist, musician and writer his work. Billy Childish. The ICA’s Upper Galleries present Childish’s The artist was born in 1959 in Chatham in output as a musician and writer, covering a Kent, where he still lives, and his prodigious career which began in 1977, and providing a range of activities can best be understood as a context within which the recent paintings can total work of art – one which centres on his be understood. One room concentrates on his own extraordinary persona. Childish is a cult music, which has involved a huge range of figure, and one who has gained an international collaborators and bands, and which maintains a following, but this exhibition is the first stubbornly independent ethos originating in the occasion on which a public institution has punk era. The other room features books and attempted to encompass his long and wide- pamphlets containing Childish’s writings, often ranging career. designed and published by him and illustrated by his own woodcuts. The display includes The ICA’s Lower Gallery features a group of polemical and campaigning literature, but also Childish’s recent paintings, which have an his more personal poetry and prose, much of unusual command and power. It includes which is profoundly autobiographical in nature. self-portraits of the artist, often shown hill-walking; images of boats on the Medway The exhibition has been curated by Richard Estuary, where he lives; still lifes with flowers, Birkett of the ICA and Matthew Higgs of White featuring pots made by the artist’s mother; and Columns, New York, and is staged concurrently paintings depicting the Swiss modernist writer with an exhibition of the artist’s paintings at the Robert Walser, including works based on police latter venue (5 March – 17 April 2010). photographs showing the author dead in the snow. Childish’s paintings are highly expressionistic, conveying a sense of the Mark Sladen visionary significance that he discovers in Director of Exhibitions, ICA Self Portrait, woodcut, 2006 Courtesy of the artist and L-13 Light Industrial Workshop, London EXHIBITS 5 / EXHIBITS Billy Childish / 17 February – 18 April 2010 www.ica.org.uk/learning ICA Lower Gallery Painting has been a consistent part of Childish’s practice since the late 1970s, and for many years he concentrated his painting into a few weeks of the year, during which time he would work intensely to produce a large number of canvases, most of them made in just a few hours each. In the mid 1980s Childish shifted this pattern, since when he has spent most weekends painting at his mother’s house in Whitstable, Kent, where an upstairs bedroom serves as his studio. The paintings in the ICA’s Lower Gallery are all made since 2007, in oils (with charcoal under-drawing), and display subjects and compositions that have recurred in the work of this period – while Childish does not consciously work in series, he often returns to certain themes and motifs. Across thirty years of painting Childish’s work has been largely autobiographical and expressive, often employing the self-portrait as a means to register experience and emotion. While his approach to the act of painting is intuitive and physical, his compositions consciously echo the work of artists with whom he has an affinity, including the early modernist painters Edvard Munch, Mikhail Larionov and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, along with the writers Fyodor Dostoevsky, Knut Hamsun and Robert Walser. This network of influences is echoed in Childish’s depiction of the artist as anti-hero, a creative archetype that embodies the intensity of worldly experience and the problematic attempt to translate it into art. Walser, a Swiss modernist writer who died in 1956, is the subject of a group of recent works by Childish, and a number of these paintings are exhibited here. Walser’s most radical works coincided with his committal to a mental home, and he died from a heart attack while walking in the snow near the sanatorium. Childish’s Drinking Tea, High Atlas, Oil and charcoal on linen, 2008 paintings of Walser include images of the Courtesy of the artist and L-13 Light Industrial Workshop, London writer’s death, based on original police 6 / EXHIBITS Billy Childish / 17 February – 18 April 2010 www.ica.org.uk/learning ICA photographs of the scene, and imbued with contemporary living that is very characteristic Upper Galleries Poets (a performance poetry group including elegiac and dream-like qualities through the of the artist. Childish, Ming, Bill Lewis, Miriam Carney, and use of thick impasto to build up the snow- The ICA’s Upper Galleries are devoted to Charles Thomson) and Tracey Emin. Childish bound scene. Walser was known for his habit of If a sense of temporality and mortality is central presentations of Childish’s work as a writer, has also made numerous connections with taking long nocturnal walks, and walking in the to many of the paintings within this exhibition, musician, and filmmaker, covering a period of other independent presses around the world, landscape is important to Childish as well. then a group of still lifes provides an equivalent over thirty years. Operating in parallel to his leading to his work being translated and The painter has often returned to the image of meditation on the vibrancy of existence. visual art, his output in disciplines rooted in published internationally. the flaneur, and in his pictures of Walser this Evoking the composition, gesture and intense text, music and performance has been equally figure takes on a special poignancy, and the hues of Van Gogh’s flower paintings, these prolific, standing as testament to a totalising notion of walking a wider resonance – as a works are also marked by Childish’s choice of approach to creative endeavour. metaphor for the artist’s attempts to order his vases. Each brown vessel appears to be a kind experience of the world. of totem, bearing primitive human or animal The left hand room in the Upper Gallery features that are sometimes menacing, at other focuses on the written word, featuring poetry The pictures of Walser overlap with a group of times comedic. These vases have a very and prose produced by Childish from 1977 to self-portraits by Childish, which show the artist specific meaning for Childish, as they are made the present. Childish’s writing, and specifically in the midst of towering landscapes, including by his mother, June Lewis, a practice she his poetry, has a special place in his practice – the Atlas Mountains. In some of these pictures began after a trip to Bali.