To most people art and submarines don’t seem like natural companions, their one moment of closeness being when The Beatles sang about living in a yellow submarine. Alexander Ponomarev, a Russian submariner with a love of Rembrandt, sees no logic in trying to deny the technical bravado and flights of imagination that are shared by the maritime and art worlds. Like a hidden depth charge Ponomarev cracks open what might seem to be hermetically sealed environments. The results of this seismic activity include a flotilla of multi-coloured submarines which are in some small sense the children of the Beatle’s yellow sub and the transformation of the humble polystyrene cup.
Ponomarev’s new exhibition at Calvert 22 is in part art as a work of diplomacy. The artist, a sailor trained at the Higher Naval Engineering College in Odessa, has access to places and experiences closed to non-professionals. Even so his plan to cover a submarine with brightly coloured patterns called for advanced negotiating skills including “important drinking sessions” and leading “grizzled seamen” in Yellow Submarine singing sessions. Eventually the singing and drinking translated into permission to surface and get painting.
Ponomarev’s urge to graffiti a sub was a response to Leonardo da Vinci’s Atlantic Codex in which he thought out the logistics of submarining but then shied away from the idea for fear that it would be used “for murder at bottom of the seas”. By turning a submarine into something that pops up from the water like a surprised and surprising psychedelic zebra Ponomarev hoped to return what had indeed become a war weapon to the world of art and culture.
The original anti-camouflage, anti-submarine eventually grew into a fleet that took to surfacing in a range of locations from the Arctic to the Mediterranean, including alongside the Kremlin in the Moscow River and in Paris’s Tuileries Gardens. As nations continue to compete for control of undersea oil and gas reserves Ponomarev’s painted subs look increasingly like a cloud of rogue bubbles, erupting in defiance of geopolitical fault lines.
A full size diving/surfacing submarine not being an ideal tenant for an art gallery Calvert 22 has instead become host to Base, a nine metre long water-filled tube through which a model submarine glides. At each end of the tube the submarine is raised from the water by a rather Heath Robinson system of wires and winches and toasted by electric elements. As it dries it changes colour, its dark veneer melting away to reveal the vivid colours of a tropical fish.
Interestingly Base, a miniature, fast forward version of Ponomarev’s submarine painting projects acts in a way as the canary in the mine or the yellow sub. By emphasising the superficial, skin deep nature of a paint job the installation plays on our suspicions and uncertainties. Is anti-camouflage just another subterfuge like those devilish landmines disguised as children’s toys? The tropical fish may be poisonous.
Surrounding Base is a selection of drawings and watercolours, some sketched directly on to naval charts which are themselves works of art, patterned with contour lines and depth readings. Cutting of the Atlantic – drawn across three charts each just over a metre in length – is a cross section of the Atlantic at latitude 60, the only landfalls a sliver of South Africa and the tiny island of Tristan da Cunha. Ponomarev strings the three charts together with a surface line, a horizontal membrane that sits between air and water. Balanced between the two elements ships glide across the calm patches and battle their way through storms, dwarfed all the while by the enormity of what lies above and below. As might be expected from a submariner when it comes to the rendering of depth Ponomarev turns in a virtuoso performance. His ocean is a combination of natural wonderland and industrial scrap yard where whales do headstands amongst splintered ship wrecks. Tristan da Cunha – reduced to a sandy dot and a blue lagoon on the chart – is imagined by Ponomarev as a rocky tiered throne rising from a swirl of currents on the ocean bed. Growing in height but losing surface area it starts life with the ambition to be a continent and finally emerges from the waves as something resembling a very large turtle shell.
Notwithstanding his efforts to draw the worlds represented as lines and figures on naval charts Ponomarev’s exploration of the power and mystery of depth is most succinctly expressed in this exhibition by Deep Water Graphics. Enter the polystyrene cups decorated with a series of self portraits, packed into heavy weight containers and then lowered into the Arctic Ocean to depths of up to four kilometres. At these depths the cups shrink under pressure, some of them ending up not much bigger than a thimble. One cup has ballooned at the base giving Ponomarev a rather impressive bust.
The process of creating Deep Water Graphics took place on a Russian scientific research ship and is recorded in a set of photos. One photo in particular drew my attention – a deserted room with a long table surrounded by chairs, some of them knocked over as though the last occupants had left in a hurry. A window looks out on to a rough grey sea. Scattered over the table are charts and drawings, pencils, a pair of glasses and a Stanley knife. It’s a capsule of human ingenuity, of all those neat little inventions we’ve come up with to help us know and record the world and survive in inhuman places. This urge to invent and survive is there too in the polystyrene cups, product of some chemical manufacturing process or other, etched with a human face and turned into strange underwater blooms by their journey to the depths.
An argument ‘for’ art is that one of its purposes – if indeed it’s meant to have purposes – is to open up new worlds to us and make us see things in new and different ways. This exhibition certainly does this in spades, taking visitors into unknown territory in terms of natural history, science, engineering and imagination.
Sea Stories runs until 21st November 2010 at Calvert 22, 22 Calvert Avenue, London E2 7JP
Image: Base by Alexander Ponomarev Photo Steve White courtesy of the artist and Calvert 22
