The Jackdaw

Recent Articles

  • Bone idleness at the Tate

    Bone idleness at the Tate

    For the last meeting of Tate trustees of which minutes have been posted on line (i.e. September 2012), only six of fourteen members bothered to show up. Perhaps it was raining. Trustees, you won’t need reminding, are there to oversee the vigilant running of quangos to ensure public interest is looked after. This is important when the Tate costs taxpayers at least £33 million a year in subsidy. You may be forgiven for believing that the trustees report to the Tate director. In fact, it’s the other war round; the director is – in theory – employed by the trustees and is responsible for implementing their sanctions.

    Trustees were in such short supply at the September confab they were outnumbered by Tate directors, eight of whom attended – incredibly, the Tate now has more directors than trustees, seventeen in total. Two of the three artist trustees failed to attend; in fact, at only one meeting in the previous year have all three artist trustees managed to be present at the same time, which is not surprising given that two of them, for reasons doubtless very convenient to Serota, are German. Magazine snapper Wolfgang Tillmans’s record is especially woeful: on average he attends every other meeting.

    Such lack of commitment is unacceptable in a body that effectively runs contemporary art. Trustees should take their jobs more seriously. Attendance ought to be obligatory not voluntary. After all, an afternoon every two months isn’t so arduous. If MPs have to be rolled in half dead on gurneys to vote, so should Tate trustees. This is an important public duty which many might consider a privilege, so if a candidate under nomination can’t give an assurance of attendance then others should be appointed who are prepared to commit themselves enthusiastically to the unpaid effort involved.

    Poor attendance by artist trustees, especially the Germans, highlights the error of appointing foreigners in the first place. Why weren’t British artists appointed? No, seriously, why weren’t they? Surely some can be found who are subservient enough to the President-For-Life not to preclude their consideration. Germans generally are more inventive, harder working, less squalidly materialistic and better educated than we are, but how can they be expected to feel and understand the historical significance of the Tate in British art life? Foreign artists should not be made Tate trustees because we have sufficient intelligent and independently minded candidates of our own. Naturally, it is very handy for the PFL to have a board of indifferent lackeys who will rubber stamp whatever he wants. After all, the process by which they were all vetted in the first place is controlled from his office. Officially, trustees are appointed by the Prime Minister but unofficially we all know they are chosen by him; his mucky fingerprints can be found over the whole process. (See The Jackdaw’s former investigation of Tate trustees on our website).

    No wonder the trustees have lost control of the Tate when they can’t even be bothered to show up to their infrequent meetings. For example, how could they have allowed building work to start on a Tate Modern extension when such a small percentage – under a quarter – of the required funds had been raised? This was surely irresponsible, with the result that this annexe is squaring up to be the longest building project in British construction history. They could have built five Shards in the time it’s so far taken to erect the shanty arrangement of concrete slabs behind the Turbine Hall – currently being augmented, on visual evidence, at the industrious rate of one breezeblock a week. As it is,  trustees have had to loot endowments given to the Tate for other purposes in order to maintain even this pathetic semblance of progress on the site.

    And finally, a snippet of late news to please trustee Herr Tillmans. Glasgow Art Gallery has just purchased two bog standard snaps by him. This adds to the 63 Tillmans held by the Tate, 9 by the Arts Council and 11 by the British Council. Of these 82 only two are currently on display, at Tate Britain. Why didn’t Glasgow save themselves scarce cash and borrow the 80 pictures expensively stored by the other three public collections?

    David Lee

    The Jackdaw, March-April 2012

     

     

     

     

  • Carl Randall – easel words

    Carl Randall – easel words

    Recent paintings made in Japan will be showing at my exhibition ‘In The Footsteps of Hiroshige: The Tokaido Highway and Portraits of Modern Japan’, at the National Portrait Gallery from June 20th to September 15th (then touring the UK until May 2014). The exhibition is the result of being awarded the 2012 BP Portrait Award.

    My proposal for the award was to travel in the footsteps of the Japanese woodblock print artist Ando Hiroshige (1797–1858), who in 1832 travelled along the Tokaido Highway, an old trading route that ran from Tokyo to Kyoto, producing a series of woodblock prints showing the people he met and the landscapes he experienced along the path. The prints now serve as a valuable artistic document of life in Japan at that time. I was interested in producing contemporary equivalents, documenting the people and places of modern Japan, 180 years after Hiroshige made the same journey.

    The journey started in the bustling capital city of Tokyo, and, drawn to its densely crowded streets, I painted hundreds of residents one by one, directly from life. Visiting other major cities along the route, I painted other features of modern Japan such as salary men, sushi restaurants and department stores. As the highway moves out of cities and into rural areas, elderly rice farmers work their fields, their backs permanently bowed, skin leathery and wrinkled from a lifetime of farming. While visiting these areas, I also had the opportunity to experience aspects of traditional Japanese scenes such as hot springs, fireflies and red autumn leaves.

    Finding the modern and urban ever present in the rural, I included elements of the industrial within images of nature: bullet trains cut through mountains, telegraph poles dot the landscape, tetrapods line the coastline. These, and other motifs, such as the mobile phone, are used to place the images in the contemporary world, while also helping to avoid nostalgic depictions of historical Japan. I would hope that my portrayal of familiar Japanese icons such as Mount Fuji, Geisha, Kabuki, Zen gardens and Sumo wrestlers have been presented in a fresh light.

    Combining a sense of the real and unreal in these paintings was important to me, with realistically painted figures set against flattening space and illogical scale. I painted some works in monotone, to imbue them with a feeling of solitude and silence, which relates to my interest in urban alienation – the idea of people sharing the same close physical space, but mentally existing in separate worlds.

    This exciting opportunity allowed me to develop my interest in portraiture and create personal interpretations of Japan, while following in the footsteps of a great artist. I felt privileged to be the first portrait painter to respond to this subject matter, and I would hope that this exhibition generates further public interest in this fascinating country.

    Japan Portraits, a 120-page colour hardback catalogue of work made in Japan, is available at The National Portrait Gallery – foreword by Desmond Morris with an introduction by Donald Richie. A documentary about the artist painting in Japan is at www.vimeo.com/carlrandall/japanportraits.

    Artist’s website: www.carlrandall.com

  • Of cabbages and queens

    Of cabbages and queens

    This is the third portrait of the Queen unveiled in London in the last month … and the third dud. A dull formal portrait, it follows the standard, now threadbare iconography for a picture of standing royalty. Indeed, it seems every monarch since George III has been portrayed with a hand on that table. Like the ghosts of Banquo you can see the other pictures emerging from the mist behind. Do you know, equipped with some ingenious software, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a computer that might more convincingly paint one of these from now on.

    Background, robes and dogs are as slickly painted as you’d expect from a graduate of the Chocolate Box School. But as usual the real problem lies with the likeness. We know intimately the appearance of this sitter who is daily featured on television and in newspapers. Such familiarity means that, unlike painters of the pre-photographic past, today’s artist must get the likeness spot on. In Nicky Phillips’s effort, we recognise the sitter well enough, not least because the Queen’s hairdo and clothes are unique, but the facial features aren’t accurate. She doesn’t actually look like this, and never has; a distant foreign relative of the Queen perhaps, but not the Queen herself. The sad truth is that the basics of portrait painting aren’t taught in art colleges. We no longer train painters to have the drawing skills to catch a likeness with effortless precision every single time. The result is that our artists look as though they are labouring like slaves to get right even the basics.

    Earlier this month a newly unveiled portrait of the Queen looked more like comedian Stanley Baxter impersonating her. This one more resembles a bloke wearing a wig and earrings with a hint of Churchill. Isolate the face so you see only the features and it is unrecognisable as the Queen.

    David Lee

    The Jackdaw, June 2013

  • Evelyn Williams, and another case of the public denied

    Evelyn Williams, and another case of the public denied

    In the last issue I considered the case of a single-minded good artist,  David Mulholland from Middlesbrough, whose memory, in the absence of any official recognition or support, has to be kindled for posterity’s sake by friends and family. By The Jackdaw’s usual standard of eliciting no comment whatsoever, this caused a considerable mailbag from many mentioning other artists who deserved better than the obscurity and indifference they receive. Owing to the recent death of a special artist, there is cause for reiterating this line of criticism of an art establishment hopelessly out of touch with anything but ‘The Contemporary’, such as they choose to see it.

    Grief felt at the death of a memorable artist is mitigated always by the fact that their work – if it is properly accomplished and not merely the species that is famous for fifteen minutes – will live forever. Giotto didn’t need an ‘artist’s statement’ or incomprehensible catalogue introductions for his work to last, because his paintings speak for themselves in a universal language understood across the centuries. His work will continue to communicate clearly its observations of character and stories just as long as human beings are prepared to see,  feel and respond. This is the case also with the art of Evelyn Williams who died aged 83 on November 14th. Her work will endure in spite of the neglect she received from officialdom during a long and productive career. In the same Tate Collection which stores 274 works by Andy Warhol no space can be found for a single piece by Evelyn Williams, who is a far more interesting artist if not so much of a business-minded celebrity phenomenon whose market is carefully rigged. Even in the last two years alone, when 516 works were acquired by the Tate, there was no room for a single one by this important woman artist. There are even ten works in our national collection by American minimalist Robert Ryman, all of them white and doubtless extremely challenging to those of a devoutly all-whiteist fanaticism; but nothing by Evelyn Williams. Here is further evidence that at the nucleus of State Art breeds a deeply entrenched prejudice against anything but pseudo-intellectual nonsense.

    It is an appalling truth that the Tate has ceased to be a collection of British art preserving the very best of what is being done. Instead, it has been stealthily subverted under Serota to become a private collecting fief promoting a narrow orthodoxy related to a handful of dealers and auctioneers. Why is it that so much about today’s Tate stinks? Evelyn Williams is in a long line of single-minded British artists who refuse to run along the pre-ordained tramlines of conceptualism and modernism. She was a thoughtful, modest, intelligent and vulnerable person alive in a world – as she perceived and experienced it – of imminent dangers. Her paintings, sculptures and reliefs are about the fear and anxiety, the affections and frictions, of what it is to have lived the life of an anxious woman and mother. Hers is first and last a woman’s art, an uncompromising take on post-war relationships, intimacy, cares, depression, failure and even alienation. Her subjects take you inside the realm of senses and feelings, probing the unspoken secrecies behind the masks of propriety we all wear. In the way that art has of redeeming the awful, these are beautiful explorations of states of mind most try to avoid. Her work can be relentlessly intense, no question about that, but it is pure in spirit and purpose.

    Three of the more serious newspapers, the Times, the Telegraph and the Guardian, were eventually persuaded to publish obituaries of Williams. As with so many significant but neglected artists who are nevertheless considered worthy of an obituary, her exhibitions were scarcely even acknowledged let alone reviewed in the arts pages of these same papers. Critically, it was as if her work didn’t exist. She is, of course, among the many accomplished artists whose work is ignored for being conventional in appearance and technique and declamatory about emotions. To today’s State Art tyrants such characteristics are considered embarrassing drawbacks.

    Williams was, however, appreciated in the past. As a youngish artist in 1961 she won the sculpture prize (for Two Heads) at the John Moores in Liverpool, when other winners were Peter Blake, David Hockney and Ron Kitaj. These were the days when the Moores was worth winning, well before it was subverted to the cause of State Art where daubs of no merit are greeted by fools with preposterous superlatives. A retrospective exhibition was held in 1972 at Whitechapel Art Gallery; once again well before that gallery’s prostration before the winds of Biennale bluster. Williams continued her brave exploration of inner places that made her work then so widely admired. She worked every day of her life and although her commercial exhibitions continued, sometimes at long intervals owing to the complexity of ideas and their necessarily prolix gestation, a retrospective was never offered in her lifetime. Approached by friends in the last decade of her life, the Walker Art Gallery turned her down for such an honour. She couldn’t exert the pulling power of a Rolf Harris or Paul McCartney.

    Will Williams now receive the lifetime retrospective her work deserves, and which a wide audience should see? It isn’t likely.

    But why should this be, when there are more galleries nationwide which are more spacious than ever before? The answer is that as the public gallery network expands the same orthodoxy is spread across even more outlets. More galleries does not mean a wider selection of work on display; it means the same work by the same few artists spread across even more galleries even more frequently.

    What are called ‘Artists’ Rooms’ are a symbolic example of what is wrong with this rotten system. These ‘Rooms’ are organised by the Tate, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Art Fund (how long will it be before the Art Fund can only be contacted via the Tate switchboard?), and they resulted from a bulk purchase, jointly by the Tate and the SNGMA in 2008. We bought for £42 million (£27 million in cash – the figure varies in different reports; we’ve never been told the exact sum – and £15 million in waived tax) retiring art dealer Anthony d’Offay’s gallery stock, which he called his private collection.  A cynic might say that Artists’ Rooms is the process by which the personal collection of one commercially motivated individual now dictates what a large proportion of the art-seeking population is allowed to see in the name of recent art. The same cynic might further add that Artists’ Rooms is the opportunity by which established reputations – such as Warhol’s – are constantly hammered home, and for the smaller ‘Room’ names, it is the instrument by which a more significant brand name can be nurtured.

    Under the auspices of the Art Fund, an organisation which luckily is headed by a former director of Tate Britain, 30 rooms featuring 760 works by 26 artists have been touring the country for four years, mostly as small one-man retrospectives. Some of these are marvellous, not least the extensive collection of photographs by August Sander. There are 232 works by Warhol alone, who gets two rooms to himself travelling at the same time. At the moment they are in Sheffield and Hull, and then Birmingham for four months. That is apart from relatively recent major exhibitions for the same artist at the Tate, the Hayward and other Arts Council galleries.  Warhol is showing somewhere all the time. We will not be allowed to ignore him.

    One of the Artists’ Rooms deals, inevitably, with Damien Hirst. This is currently on show in Walsall Art Gallery. It has been there for two months already and will remain in place for another year. What is happening when a fifty-year-old artist, already over-exhibited at a time when so many unexposed artists can’t get their work shown, is having a thirteen-month long exhibition? What is the reason for such indoctrination? Too often the Artists’ Rooms represent those who are already widely exhibited and who are bastions of the art market.

    Artists Rooms are a blunt instrument whereby approved taste is circulated (inflicted) from the centre. They constitute cheap exhibitions for Arts Council venues up and down the country, whose curators don’t have to originate their own programme. The laziness and ready compliance of these jobsworths is a godsend to State Art.  They can merely exhibit the same few approved brand names for ever. And make no mistake their career will depend upon them favouring these “right” kinds of artists for no individual prospers in State Art by demonstrating initiative or investigating the unorthodox.

    Visit the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield and you will discover the other reason, besides the dreaded Artists’ Rooms, why thought and broad knowledge among curators is unnecessary. There is a new species of art collectors who caught the disease of wholesale, apparently random acquisition from Saatchi. These people fuel the market for State Art which they buy in quite staggering quantities. Their houses, full of wince-inducing tat bought for eye-watering sums, feature frequently in glossy magazines. Usually they are rewarded for their commitment to the State Art cause with the accolade of a position on a Tate committee, of which there are now dozens. At Serota’s Tate money not knowledge is the essential qualification for co-option.

    One such überbuyer – who has not yet been brought on to any Tate committee – is one David Roberts, a property developer, who has accumulated so much clutter he’s opened his own ‘space’ and has begun feeding pieces to regional galleries, Wakefield being the first venue. Works selected are linked as follows: “This exhibition examines ways in which modern and contemporary artists represent the human

    body in various media to explore psychological and emotional life.” What a perfect criterion that is for the inclusion of a major work by Evelyn Williams. Unfortunately, the trouble is that among Roberts’s 3,000 plus works there is nothing by Williams. But have a guess whose work he does own and whose efforts are on show in Wakefield: enter Warhol and Hirst.

    David Lee

    The Jackdaw January-February 2013

    http://www.evelynwilliams.com/index.htm

  • Manet at the Royal Academy

    Manet at the Royal Academy

    Seven years ago the Courtauld Institute mounted a thrilling exhibition by showing only two works by Manet. Admittedly they were both undoubted masterpieces, the Barmaid at the Folies Bergere of 1883 and The Luncheon from Munich of 1868. It demonstrated that an absorbing experience could be staged with the import of only one picture. We all know what a brilliant, enigmatic piece the Barmaid is, but the earlier scene of post-prandial insouciance was equally dazzling and also ambiguous, even mysterious, in subject. Of both pictures one asks in genuine bewilderment: ‘What is going on here?’ And the answer is up to you to make of them what you will by considering every last detail.

    Manet’s best paintings rarely fall easily into any genre; an ulterior motive, even in what might appear to be a straightforward portrait, is never far away. For example, what is this interrupted reader in The Railway doing beside the track with a bunch of grapes on the parapet, a puppy dog, a hissing loco and an apparently bored daughter? Whatever it is, there is clearly more than meets the eye in the painter’s relationship with his favourite model Victorine Meurent, for it is she who appears in many of the better works, including The Street Singer.

    The Luncheon features again in the Manet exhibition at the Royal Academy (until April 14th) and by itself is worth the £15 admission fee. The right hand vertical quarter of the painting showing an unknown man still wearing a hat and smoking a cigar beside the wreckage of lunch, itself a still life so brilliant it’s hard to recall anything anywhere comparably so fine, has got to be among the most amazing passages of painting on show in London.

    The exhibition as a collection is a mixed bag. Besides The Luncheon there are half a dozen masterpieces – the aforementioned Street Singer (from Boston), which knocks spots off anything even roughly equivalent by Whistler; The Railway (from Washington), which looks to have been disadvantageously cleaned to a jarring sheen; and four portraits depicting Zola, Astruc, Mallarmé (no larger than A4, this picture is breathtaking, and a brilliant character study) and Duret are all you really want to trouble yourself with. The rest are varying degrees of stocking filler. The poor old RA, struggling desperately on its uppers and fending off poverty, had to fill up the rooms somehow and this is what the dears could get. Most of it isn’t much to write home about but it will be perfectly sufficient to get the nuke-proof knicker brigade of Adelstrop reaching for their rail passes and lorgnettes and gagging to fork out fifteen quid.

    The best Manet in London, the Barmaid, is not here, though familiar items from the National Gallery are; the uniformed Tuileries consortium of stuffed shirts for some reason receiving a room to itself. An invented gathering of Manet’s friends from every sphere of progressive cultural life (and what an anal bunch they look) in the familiar setting of ornamental gardens in central Paris, this must be some sort of assertion of class or caste pride, for there’s no sense here of bohemianism or the avant-garde at play. Looking at this bunch, with their underpants full of thistles, it’s hard to think of them getting up the Establishment’s nose.

    Most intriguing is the lack of finish evident in many pictures, some of which  were not exhibited during Manet’s lifetime; perhaps he was fearful of the inevitable opprobrious response. As early as Degas came to the same conclusion, Manet also discovered that a painting might reach fruition well before it appeared complete in conventional terms. Thus begins here with genius the reductiveness which soon descended into absurdity.

    Ever respectful of its charitable obligations, the Academy is offering a chance for a few to view the exhibition on a Sunday evening throughout the run in a less crowded gathering conducive to actually seeing the work on display. For thirty quid the ever-giving institution will even chuck in a glass of wine, doubtless from its own cave.

    David Lee

    The Jackdaw January 2013

    http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/manet/

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Bargain basement royal portraiture

    Bargain basement royal portraiture

    This is the portrait of an intelligent, thoughtful and educated sitter with no less than a degree in art history. It is perfectly adequate for the boardroom of a supermarket but entirely inadequate for a national collection. Kate deserves better. We deserve better too, and so does the future.

    This commission – Kate’s first official portrait – demanded an artist, not a slavish and banal illustrator and certainly not the bargain basement of royal portraiture. It is an artless mistake that should have been foreseeable by those who commissioned it. Emsley was the wrong painter. He is essentially a wildlife artist used to painting every hair on a gorilla. We have fine portrait painters in this country – Ben Sullivan, Phil Hale, Stuart Pearson Wright and Paul Benney among them. Any of these artists would have produced something more taxing, deeper, and interesting than this. We could have been surprised by an artist with something to say.

    We are not asking for any surreal or bizarre interpretation but merely for something beyond a bog-standard likeness. This is the most bland and predictable royal portrait in living memory. It is the sort of safe, uncomplicated, pedestrian image one might expect to see in a high street photographer’s window. It looks as if the painter asked the subject to “Say cheese!” and then told her to scram and buy some clothes while he painted the photograph.

    It would have been cheaper and more honest to exhibit a photograph; indeed this portrait adds nothing that we didn’t already know from a million photographs. Even her smile is half-hearted.  There is neither character nor personality here beyond the obvious. Neither is there gravitas, profundity or any sense of narrative. Instead it is the image we see repeated daily in our newspapers and magazines.

    Saving grace? It is not by Rolf Harris.

    David Lee

    The Jackdaw January 2013

  • Tate trustees and the public interest

    Tate trustees and the public interest

    In 2011 the Tate named two new trustees, one of whom is painter Tomma Abts. She is a 44-year-old German, recently appointed Professor of Painting at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, who won the Turner Prize in 2006. As an artist trustee, she replaced Jeremy Deller, who won the Turner Prize in 2004. Abts’s paintings are all the same small size (48 x 38 cms) – it is claimed this tic is conceptually crucial for a reason never convincingly explained – and consist of polite abstract designs which might have looked original on curtains at the 1954 Ideal Home Exhibition. So much for the Cutting Edge. The Tate claims her pictures “possess a formal definition and coherence that suggests that they could never have existed any other way … [and] seem to achieve what only painting can, inhabiting both this reality as an object or ‘thing’, and a parallel world with its own set of rules and relationships that demand to be judged on their own terms.” As per with their interpretive literature, all helpful stuff. Am I being cynical? Yes. Why? Because using any sensible criteria Abts doesn’t deserve to be a trustee of an important British museum.

    The job of Tate trustees is to oversee the efficient running of the gallery “as guardians of the public interest” – and please note that it says ‘the public interest’ not ‘State Art’s interest’, for as you will discover these two mutually exclusive agendas tend to become blurred in the minds of certain individuals. Improbable as it sounds, guidelines for the functions of trustees are drawn up by the Tate itself, not by  independent arbiters. Such complacency hardly reassures an outsider that the public interest, rather than the Tate’s, is being looked after. Indeed, such self-scrutiny is hardly better than the continuing disgrace of policemen investigating their own mistakes.

    In 2008 the number of trustees was increased from 12 to 14 and as required by the Museums and Galleries Act 1992 “at least three” of these must be artists. Thirteen are appointed by the Prime Minister and the last is nominated by the trustees of the National Gallery from among their own membership. Unlike their fellow trustees, who are mainly those with business expertise, and who can serve up to two terms of four years (a period of office trimmed recently from five), artist trustees currently serve only one term of four years. You may find it odd – I certainly do – that while there are three contemporary artists with gilt-edged State Art credentials on the Tate’s board of trustees there is no place for a single art historian. I’m obviously old-fashioned because a museum of historical art with no art historians sitting on its governing board seems verging on the perverse.

    When an artist trusteeship becomes vacant it is widely advertised in the papers, giving the impression that any capable, knowledgeable, articulate artist of repute might apply. Nothing could be further from the truth, for there is a codicil written in invisible ink along the bottom of these ads, which reads: “If you have not won or at the very least been nominated for the Turner Prize, kindly fuck off and don’t waste our time.” The Tate squanders scarce cash paying for these advertisements which are nothing short of a calculated deception. Artist trustees are in fact a self-appointed clique comprising only winners of the Turner Prize with a couple of reliable also-rans chucked in. Since new regulations were imposed in 1992 the only exceptions to this rule have been Julian Opie, who famously refused his nomination for the Turner on the grounds that the prize “had become a frivolous publicity stunt”, and Bob and Roberta Smith, the sobriquet of a dimwit called Patrick Brill, who is otherwise a regular purveyor of infantile stunts at Millbank – you may recall his Tate Christmas tree whose lights visitors were asked to illuminate by peddling a generator. He’s very concerned about the environment apparently.

    Being a trustee involves attending six meetings a year and is said to require a day a month in reading and preparation. I must point out that the Tate’s artist trustees are easily the worst attenders at these meetings, and are frequently absent. In the case of Anish Kapoor (Turner Prize winner, 1991) his absenteeism, which included missing half the meetings in two consecutive years and scarpering early from others, would have surely seen him sacked from the board of any efficiently run private enterprise.

    Of currently serving artist trustees two are Germans – besides Abts the other is magazine photographer Wolfgang Tillmans (Turner Prize winner, 2000). Could they really not find a British photographer, or even a British abstract painter, worthy of these positions? Admittedly, Germans do most things better than we do but surely this is insulting to British artists. And how can a professor at a German art school, which presumably requires her to actually attend some of the week, perform the duties of a trustee required to be resident here?

    The process by which artist trustees are selected ­– laughably characterised as “an open competition” or “an open competitive process” – is indicative of what happens when a clique achieves a complacent monopoly and is allowed by servile arts commentators to get away with it. Minutes of meetings make it clear that artist trustees are encouraged to invite applications from those they consider suitable as their own replacements, especially when candidates who have responded to the ads are not considered worthy, which one may reasonably surmise is always. Indeed, I wonder if there was ever a case of a successful artist trustee having responded to the ads rather than having been – that weasel word – ‘invited’ to apply… And so Turner Prize winners beget other Turner Prize winners, or at the very least other near-misses of that persuasion.

    Candidates for artist trusteeships are interviewed by a panel comprising trustees, including the artists, plus an “independent assessor” who is present to ensure that legal niceties, “best practice” etc., are observed and everything looks above board. But how can it be above board when only Turner Prize winners are appointed? Perhaps this independent assessor ought to be involved from the start of the process in order that more than Turner Prize nominees might be seriously considered, if for no other reason than to keep up appearances of openness. Eyebrows would be raised at such a narrowness of potential candidates in any other sphere of public life: imagine, for example, the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces always being selected from the same regiment.

    You may ask why is it so important for the convenient running of the Tate that its artist trustees are always winners of the Turner Prize. The answer is for the obvious reason that having been awarded a career-changing gong by the institution of which they are now overseers, they will never rock the boat by asking too many tricky questions about the Tate’s direction in its dealings with contemporary art. This is one of many ways by which State Art has become institutionalised: no one but the reliably subservient is ever allowed on the inside to question Tate, or indeed Arts Council, policies.

    On the other hand these parti pris trustees can be useful when outside criticism of the Tate becomes noisy. For example, in July 2004 Trustees discussed newspaper coverage of a Tate work, Rodin’s The Kiss, which Cornelia Parker (who was nominated for the Turner in 1997, the year it was won by Gillian Wearing, inevitably herself a recent artist trustee), had the previous year controversially wrapped up with a mile of string. This stunt was claimed by the artist to be “challenging the claustrophobic nature of relationships”. Artist trustees present in the meeting (which included the aforementioned Wearing) were able to defend their fellow artist for the benefit of other sceptical trustees. They pointed out that it was the job of the Tate to provoke controversy and discussion, which this work did.

    It is in the interests of these artist trustees to support the Director. They know they will be serving only for a brief period following which they might reasonably look forward to the reward of a Tate retrospective or other continued patronage, purchases etc..

    Serota has stated a preference for such younger trustees. Referring to the trusteeship of Anthony Caro many years before, he remarked in 1998 to the Sunday Times: “Tony was well over 60 when he became a trustee. He was a very effective trustee, actually. He cared passionately about certain things and was a powerful force … but it just seems to work better when you have artists who are a new generation, or indeed erring on the younger side, really.” And we know why he thinks it “seems to work better”, because older artists of a more independent, more knowledgeable, more experienced character might argue cogently for a policy or direction other than the one being pursued by the Director. They have nothing to lose by disagreeing with him. Let’s face it, the current crop of artist trustees is in Serota’s pocket. They owe him and he knows it. He can rely on their support without a second thought.

    In a 2008 interview Serota said of his trustees: “I don’t have any part to play in their appointment”. Remember this, it’s important and we’ll return to it in a second.

    Many years ago Serota said that public nominations for the Turner Prize (perhaps you don’t remember that ridiculous charade whereby we all wasted our stamps and faxes) were seriously considered by the judges. We discovered in 2006 what we already knew, courtesy of an indiscreet Turner Prize judge, that this was in fact a lie and they were binned with risible disregard. We also discovered at the same time, and from the same source, that Turner Prize judges were given a list of appropriate artists and exhibitions – just to help them along you know, point them in the right direction. And there we were thinking in the innocence of our ignorance that they might nominate anyone…

    Serota also stated in 2005 that the Tate only rarely acquired work by serving trustees. The Jackdaw checked up on that and discovered (see the editorial for Dec/Jan 2006 on our website) that he wasn’t telling the truth. Indeed, this whopper cost him a bollocking from the Charity Commission. There were also a number of other flagrant economies with the truth concerning the Tate’s acquisition of work by serving trustee Chris Ofili, who was naturally a Turner Prize winner (1998), which also resulted in another six of the best from the CC. (I almost mentioned here the fact that in the last editorial – also on our website – we indicated how the Tate recently misled us over their attendance figures, but you must be getting fed up with that one.)

    So, bearing in mind Serota’s far from perfect form, when he remarks “I don’t have any part to play in their appointment” I need to ask myself: ‘Do I give him the benefit of the doubt and believe him this time?’ Well, as it happens, no I don’t. Even cursory familiarity with the Trustees’ minutes betrays this one as untrue. On the contrary he is frequently involved in their appointment; indeed, the process of Trustee appointment is administered by his own office. He even attends candidate interviews “in an advisory capacity”. Presumably he offers ‘advice’ which plays no material part in the process, so why is he there in the first place? Indeed, we read on: “The key stages of the appointment are overseen by a panel which will normally include the Director.” (Who, presumably, doesn’t play any part.) On one recent occasion he encourages artist trustees to nominate likely candidates for their replacement knowing only too well the sort of artists they are likely to suggest. No part?

    Let’s have this one straight: Serota is ‘advising’ on the appointment of someone, a trustee, who will function as his own employer. This is a wretched abuse of the supposed ‘independence’ of process and would be considered as much in any other public body. It is, as usual, as blatant a conflict of interest (not to mention a betrayal of ‘the public interest’ about which the process purports to be so concerned) as you would expect to find at the Tate, whose management of conflicts of interest, incidentally, was declared woefully inadequate by none other than the Charities Commission.

    The Tate should not be involved with either the compiling of its own trustees’ duties, or in the nomination or selection of Trustees themselves. How can ‘the public interest’ be considered served when the organisation under scrutiny is writing the job description of its own scrutineers. If we are to have artist trustees let’s have them from a cross-section of the artist community and not just those representing the Turner Prize. And let’s have some eminent art historians in there too.

    David Lee

    The Jackdaw May-June 2011

  • In the course of justice

    In the course of justice

    Damien Hirst has loaned for 20 years to the north Devon seaside resort of Ilfracombe – in which he has one of his many residences – a 20-metre high sculpture of a pregnant woman wielding a sword and scales, called Verity. Made of glass fibre with a bronze effect finish (which is a bit tacky-Essex even by Hirst’s usual vulgar standards), it now stands overlooking the harbour deterring all-comers, especially Welsh privateers heading across the Bristol Channel intent on rape, pillage and illegal benefit claiming.

    We must stop building public art work for the wrong reasons of regeneration, “community cohesion”, “putting Ilfracombe on the map”, and other egregious bollocks. We need far fewer public art pieces of all sizes, and far better ones; those that are built because they are accomplished art and will stop and perhaps inspire people with the beauty and originality of their form. Art is art, not a tactic.

    Conveniently, it is a matter of yards from an expensive fish restaurant, proprietor: D Hirst.

    Hirst’s figure stands on a bronze plinth of legal books. Justice … legal books … clever stuff. Is it of any artistic merit? It can’t be as he’s not a sculptor. All we’ve seen so far are “artist’s impressions”, presumably by an “artist” other than Hirst himself, who can neither model nor draw. Inventing such a figure might defeat a Michelangelo or a Bernini, so what chance has a stunter like Hirst got? Like everything concerned with him, this project reeks of self-promotion and deriving maximum personal gain. Nowhere in any of the blanket publicity about this has there been a single word about the artistic merit or about the form or deeper meaning of the work.

    It is intended to be “a modern allegory of truth and justice” and locals hope it will stimulate tourist activity – that old bogus regeneration chestnut. Realistically, how many are likely to visit Ilfracombe to see this? Four? We repeat: there is no connection between large sculptures and the regeneration of a locality. Newcastle has the Angel of the North and Middlesbrough Gibbereesh Kapoor’s gigantic string underpants. Both were claimed to be important instruments of regeneration yet, years on, both places are top of any indices of social deprivation, unemployment and poverty. Bombastic works like these, and Hirst’s, are only ever about the sculptor’s vanity, bank balance and visibility in the papers. They are not about art or sculpture. In Verity’s case she is out of scale, inappropriate and irrelevant to Ilfracombe.

    And, naturally, like all the large sculptures of Hirst it won’t be the only one. There will be an edition of them (plus any number of artist’s proofs) appropriately priced according to what some thuggish tosser billionaire from Uzbekistan is prepared to pay to have it mounted on the roof of his gold palace.

    David Lee

    The Jackdaw, October 2012

  • Faking it

    Faking it

    “Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much.” (Orson Welles in F For Fake)


    As so many gifted painters have discovered to their cost, having an unusual talent is not necessarily a passport to a meteoric career. So many whose abilities deserve to be recognised, or at the very least acknowledged, struggle cruelly in obscurity if not in the proverbial garret. Such neglect may drive certain temperaments to desperate measures. The inability of the meritorious to make a living is doubly harsh when the infantile antics and stunts of contemporary art are plastered daily across the newspapers. When only the most strident and outrageous get noticed the world of art becomes a strange and unfair place.

    An art college lecturer recently advised her imminently graduating painters and sculptors that if they wished for a successful career they should employ with immediate effect the most expensive public relations company they could afford. She was effectively informing her charges of the unpleasant truth that in contemporary art it’s not the quality of the work produced that will make you famous, but more importantly how shrewdly and relentlessly you are marketed and branded as an individual. In terms of high sales and escalating prices, success in art is unfortunately directly proportionate to the public visibility of the artist. Thus has our age of mindless celebrity worship sullied even the hallowed halls of art.

    As the last hundred years have proved, dealers in Modern Art can sell any old rubbish against the perception of success and a secure investment. In the world of those collectors desperate to be fashionable it won’t matter what a work looks like, because to them art is like so many shoes, cars, handbags or jewels – they will buy anything if the label is recognisably expensive and their friends are suitably impressed by them having paid so much for so little. These few words tell you most of what you need to know about the depressing condition of official contemporary art and its market. It is also why good artists of more conventional abilities have a harder time of it than they deserve.

    There is, however, another way to make it as an artist, though it is not one recommended for those of a nervous disposition. This requires being that increasing rare species a gifted painter … and serving four months in Brixton for wholesale faking of works by famous artists. No better way exists of getting noticed and nothing on an artist’s CV looks quite so impressive as a stretch for forgery. It is hard for many of us to resist a talented and essentially harmless rogue. The names of these great fakers live in folklore: Hans van Meegeren (Vermeer), Elmyr de Hory (Picasso, Modigliani, van Dongen), Tom Keating (Samuel Palmer, Cornelius Krieghoff), Eric Hebborn (old master drawings, including Leonardo da Vinci), the great Shaun Greenhalgh (Lowry, Gauguin, Hepworth) – and in the case of the avuncular and telegenic Keating he became better known to the public than the names of the artists he faked. In a world where publicity is the key to artistic success, money can’t buy the quantity of front-page publicity received for perpetrating an infamous crime. Ironically, fakers frequently enjoy stellar careers once they are going straight. Cynics might even argue that it’s well worth enduring a brief diet of bread and water in order to enjoy a comfortable career thereafter.

    John Myatt is only the latest in a long line of great British forgers with notoriety and infamy as his calling cards. The extent and audacity of his crime were breathtaking – I still can’t believe he got away with it. He was part of arguably the most sophisticated fraud in the faking of paintings ever perpetrated, and certainly the most impressive in recent memory. Over a period of nine years beginning in 1986 he faked as many as 200 works by assorted 20th century painters and draughtsmen, only sixty of which have ever been recovered by police. Some of the remainder are undoubtedly still hanging in museums and private collections where they are being revered and enjoyed as originals.

    Many puritans will find John’s record objectionable. He was, after all, polluting the oeuvres of famous artists with lies: is there a more serious crime against art than this? Perhaps not. Others may sympathise, and even admire his exposure of bogus expertise among those claiming special insight. Let’s face it, few revelations are as satisfying as seeing a self-important connoisseur covered in egg. Unfortunately, I have personal experience of this. Awarding first prize in a landscape painting competition to an unknown artist for a work far more accomplished than the amateurish standard of the other entries, I remarked to the organisers how the picture looked vaguely familiar. Indeed, the winner had copied accurately a work from the reserve collection of the Tate Gallery and passed it off as his own invention. I ought to have recognised it instantly, but didn’t. When the deceit emerged, newspapers and colleagues enjoyed sport at my expense.

    John reminded us how the apparent superiority and invulnerability of those in the art trade is in fact all too often a trick of the light, and the flash suit. He deserves our thanks for that.

    Always a keen painter at school John moved on logically to art college and for a while thereafter he was – like so many frustrated painters – a teacher of art in a secondary modern. Confident in his technique, he fell into faking at a time when, as a single parent, he was struggling to support his children. Then, like so many other fakers, once illegality and its ready profits had him in its clutches he couldn’t extricate himself. There is no question he boasts all the requisite qualifications for a top forger, principle among which is being able to examine the works of a celebrated artist and absorb their subjects, forms and colours to the degree that he is then able to create a convincing new work from scratch. He came unstuck only when his ‘Giacomettis’ and ‘Ben Nicholsons’ were shown to scholars so steeped in the work of these artists they were probably as adept at identifying a fake as the artist himself would have been.

    Since he came out of prison John has turned his dishonesty to honest profit, producing versions of masterpieces for those who admire but can’t afford the multi-million pound originals. And he is brilliant at it, the adopted styles being instantly recognisable. A fascinating aspect of what John does is the way looking at what he paints is complicated by a personal history one can’t overlook. You aren’t just getting a copy of a masterpiece or an interpretation of a style by a great copier, you’re getting the work of someone whose efforts were at one time actually confused with the real thing. He is asking us to decide for ourselves if the authenticity of what we see is quite as important as we are led to believe it is. Scholars and historians will, naturally, want to know they can rely on the veracity of what they are looking at, but for the rest of us does it really matter that much? Most of us can live with a harmless deception. Viewing a work which is not by the artist you suppose is hardly the end of the world.

    Ask yourself this: what is the difference between looking at a Monet and viewing something which you believe to be a real Monet? The answer is nothing; that is, at least while ignorance prevails. It has recently been proven by psychological experiment that belief in the authorship of a painting is not only crucial to its appreciation but also seriously affects how long we are prepared to look at it. Belief in the originality of what we are looking at, its association with a famous name, causes greater enjoyment. But if we appreciate a painting why do we not continue to like the same painting when its authorship is downgraded. Should it really make so much difference?

    Consider this very recent example of faking. A wealthy resident of Venice from a noted family visited his friends’ houses socially for years and coveted their collections of Old Masters. Using quite exceptional guile and planning, he had created exact facsimiles of their works and placed the copy in the original frame while the owners were out of town. Over a period of years he amassed several dozen original old masters using this method, which he proceeded to sell. So brilliant were the copies that the paintings’ owners were none the wiser that they weren’t looking at the originals, until police alerted them to the truth. The perpetrator of this crime realised that for most people who look, or glance, at art there is no difference in impact between an original and a copy. How many of us could honestly tell the difference? Where art is concerned most of us believe what we are told by those we assume know more than ourselves. We accept appearances at face value, and are happy to enjoy innocently.

    So why not indulge yourself in a little self-deception with an original John Myatt? If you can’t afford a real Monet, Matisse or Modigliani then a Myatt is undoubtedly the next best thing. It is expertly done, pleasing to look at … and just think of the stories, true or false, you might tell your friends about it. http://www.washingtongreen.co.uk/artists/john_myatt/

    David Lee
    October 2012

     

  • Rothko vandalism

    Rothko vandalism

    Last year it was Poussin in the National Gallery, this year Rothko at the Tate. There will have been other examples of vandalism in between these which galleries hushed up, and it is likely that you wouldn’t have known about the Rothko episode had it not been witnessed and photographed. Museums don’t like admitting to attacks on their collections because they wouldn’t want to suggest it’s easy to get away with… The truth is that vandalism is undoubtedly more prevalent than is admitted.

    Outrage is the knee-jerk reaction on such occasions, but by now we should expect damage. Every work of art in every museum is a sitting duck to unintended injury as well as to deliberate vandalism. This is because museum visitors, and especially children, are ignorant and ill-mannered. They get too close and prefer to look with their fingers. Sculpture is especially at risk. Simply by putting art on show so it can be seen properly ensures its vulnerability. Vandalism, and the ease with which it can be perpetrated, are risks that have to be taken despite the potential for disaster.

    The perpetrator of the Rothko graffiti is wearyingly typical of  the Identikit gallery vandal. He is a white, male, disgruntled, barely sane ‘artist’ of no discernible ability. His website, Yellowism, is in the grand tradition of Modernist art manifestos, it being a ragbag of  pompous, semi-literate gibberish. He is also without the true courage of his proclaimed anarchic convictions. Scribbling half-heartedly in the bottom corner of a painting for no good reason other than ephemeral self-advertisement is a feeble stunt. Whatever happened to the grand statement born of blind belief? When suffragette Mary Richardson savagely attacked Velasquez’s Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery with a kitchen knife in 1914 she was perhaps misguided in her choice of target but my word there’s no doubting her vehement commitment to the cause. In comparison to Richardson, this Rothko attacker is a pathetic wimp. They should film him being given a good thrashing outside Tate Modern, call it a ‘Conceptual Video’ and enter it for the Turner Prize.

    With the arsenal of chemicals and sci-fi gadgetry at a modern restorer’s disposal, the painting will be back on display within weeks and exhibit no evidence of its recent tribulations. And alarmist headlines about the financial value of the picture being affected are just crass populism. The Rothko will never be sold, therefore it can have no financial value. If anything the picture’s artistic stock will have risen, given the notoriety it has now achieved and the fatuous incentives some people require to visit museums.

    More perplexing is the accelerating frequency with which damage to important works is occurring. With museums having annual grants from central and local government frozen or reduced, security may not be what it should be. The idiot responsible for damaging the Rothko was able to do his worst and then calmly walk out of the Tate unhindered. This suggests laxity. When the Poussin was damaged last summer in the National Gallery, wardens had only weeks before been instructed to oversee two galleries instead of one. At the time it was suggested the damage would not have happened had the gallery been fully patrolled as before. Maintaining proper surveillance despite cutbacks will not eliminate vandalism, but it might impede its worryingly increased incidence.

    It would appear that enhanced searches at the entrance of national museums, like the airport security imposed already in some continental galleries, is inevitable here also. It may help, but sadly nothing will stop determined unhinged artists from getting through.

    David Lee

    October 2012