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Be silent be serious It is easy to forget that more important things exist in art than whether the Tate has been caught bending the rules again, or what fast speculations the art trade's mercenary phoneys have been up to, or even what foreign nonsense Arts Council dullards are talking up this week. Fun though it is - and doubtless we'll return to it soon - the politics of art is only the fungus on the peel. The main object for most of us is the fruit itself, and whilst so much on today's menu is tasteless it makes a rare encounter with the sweetest fare a welcome event to be savoured. Negotiating the slope into Tate Modern has, I find, a similar effect on my spirits as when the twin-prop DC3 on which I made my first hop across the Channel in 1964 plunged into an air pocket somewhere over Boulogne. No gallery or museum has the capacity to deflate mood quite like Tate Modern. Bankside Power Station was converted principally for the flawed purpose of making its architects and its director look good. Like the outclassed loser in a one-sided war the collection came second. In one of the largest buildings in London the art didn't (doesn't) so much surround the visitor or smack him in the face as appear, instead, to be marginalised behind the shops and showcase escalators. Half the available volume is empty nearly all the time yet the Tate has recently published plans for an extension which in its obsession with looking the swanky ticket on the architects' website compounds the errors of the original conversion. I have never looked forward to visiting Tate Modern and wouldn't dream of wandering in for a few minutes, as I do weekly with the National Gallery and the British Museum, to escape, to draw, or simply to sit and think. I've no idea where anything is in Tate Modern. Even after it's re-hang in the spring it's still a noisy mess. Besides, I haven't the foggiest idea under which silly, pseudo-academic stone a picture will be hidden this week, or even if it's on display. It's the least user-friendly gallery imaginable for those who know a little about what they're looking at and, besides, far too much of what is on display is distinctly ordinary - Waddington Galleries is quieter and the work frequently better. Perhaps it's the assault-ship camouflage of the artfree Turbine Hall, or the joyless sanctimony of the place, its spartan galleries and preachy tone. Whatever it is, it will need a change of régime and a complete refit before this extraordinary building is exploited to its full potential as a place in which to celebrate art and which, this artlover at least, will look forward to visiting. But we've come to praise Caesar not bury him. Despite the tendency of its tightarsed curators to leech the life from everything they touch, they occasionally encounter work of such shocking originality that no matter how hard they try it remains impregnable to assault. The superb Moholy-Nagy exhibition earlier this year was an example. Moholy was an artist to his fingertips, “Let's see what happens” his motto. The fearless spirit of his dark-room experiments especially thrills me to pieces and I always measure the vaunted originality of other photographers against the fine tuning of the Hungarian's uncompromisingly precise eye. How bracing would have been his approach to digital cameras. The current Kandinsky show (until October 1st) is another triumph. Kandinsky was a poor draughtsmen, an awful Symbolist and, as all art history students know to the cost of their drinking time, wrote complete and utter nonsense at immodest length. I've given up pretending to fathom 'Concerning The Spiritual', which for some reason is a fixture in the Pentateuch of Modernist art literature. But of all works currently on loan to us, the Russian's Composition VI from the Hermitage - painted 93 years ago - is the greatest Modernist picture on show in London. No reproduction is preparation for for the original's authority: it is shocking, crude, pretentious, arrogant, and looks as though it needed to have been made. We talk glibly nowadays about the 'challenging originality' of this or that fashionable ass, but what on earth must the earthlings of pre-Sarajevo Europe have made of this when they saw it, for they had seen nothing remotely like it before? Kandinsky is marketed as “The Father of Abstraction”. He wasn't (but Mondrian was). There isn't a single abstract picture in a show which is even called 'The Path to Abstraction', a sub-title which is wrongheaded by implying that the non-figurative was for the Russian a journey with a goal. Using hindsight and convenient simplification, we tend wrongly to regard the progress of art history as a relentless drive towards single important moments: Kandinsky... 1911... abstraction... Bingo! Wrong! If this exhibition proves anything it is the error of our assumption that for Kandinsky abstraction was an inevitability, a high mountain whose north face he was intent on conquering following which he could quit with the job sorted. The fact that he came close in some works to a style in which nothing is immediately recognisable as a real object was not the result of a predetermined goal but more the outcome of pursuing further and logically the profound lessons and probings of Gauguin, the Fauves and the German Expressionists of both Bridge and Blue Rider persuasions. We can witness this because his style in consecutive works and years ricochets backwards and forwards, in and out of the readably figurative and the pictorially convincing. Abstraction per se was for Kandinsky an irrelevance. His work is better described as either more or less figurative, but never in a million years is it abstract. His purpose, it seems to me, is to make us see the painting as a surface covered with shapes and colours before attention is deflected by the narrative. He stopped well short - as so many of his lesser followers have not - of throwing the baby out with the bath water. In Composition VI he had reached the stage where the subject has apparently almost completely escaped - but it never quite gets away. The collapse into a swamp of random colour and effect, as occurs in so much recent abstract painting, is avoided. With the muddled and overwrought Composition VII, also on show in the next room, Composition VI is the largest and most ambitious of Kandinsky's works (ca. 9 feet wide by six). Having worked his way from Russian fairy stories depicted in a horrid stained-glass-meets-divisionism style to the very limit of pictorial intelligibility, VI is the most convincing summary of his experiments to 1913. Intended as an evocation of the Deluge, that is, God's flood as retribution for the sins of the world from which only arkwright Noah and his pedigree menagerie were permitted to survive, it is an explosive burst of physical energy and light rushing from left to right. Curiously, in its drive, masses and lines it echoes Uccello's Battle of San Romano (the National Gallery version more than the other two). Amidst the clouds of coloured steam are lance and equestrian motifs familiar from his own previous works. Compared to VII, a chaotic scrapyard of a picture with its Chagall-like horned cow prancing in from the left and the other stock boat and horse symbols, VI is more controlled, altogether sparer. Populated with the ghosts of predatory bodies and grasping, wraparound mitts, here is an apocalyptic Hell. (The exhibition catalogue, by the way, contains no proper catalogue entries and couldn't be less helpful on the subject.) Like so many of Kandinsky's 'abstract' paintings after 1910, identifiables are here few and have to be studiously sought out like concealed shapes in a children's puzzle, but the picture itself is still a habitable space capable of penetration. If you could walk in you might discover only the sulphurous atmosphere of Venus, but there is distance to penetrate and palpable misty presences to negotiate. No painting in which aerial perspective has even a minor role can ever be truly abstract because it will always act, as VI does, like a window. Interestingly, there is in this piece none of the aleatory solutions we've come to expect from abstractionists who chuck paint about and hope it falls pleasingly. Instead, Kandinsky's 'abstraction' is worked up from dozens of sketches, although the grands machines were completed apparently in marathon bursts of a few days. I was reminded of Degas who, although he exhibited with the Impressionists, never considered himself either stylistically or temperamentally a member of the club: “No art was ever less spontaneous than mine,” he warned. Kandinsky would have drunk to that. Like any careful figurative artist the Russian solved his problems in sketches before starting. The originality of Composition VI must have stopped painters in their tracks as they absorbed the significance of a picture without immediately apparent objects but which still bore the impress of narrative. Gorky, Miró, Pollock, Kline, and others painting 30 years later, could not have existed without the signpost of this ground-breaking picture. Composition VI is that rare thing, a masterpiece which is also historically momentous and totally absorbing for as many hours as one can allow it. On the quiet weekday I sat on the upholstered sofa thoughtfully provided opposite Composition VI, it became impossible to concentrate because a swarm of unruly schoolchildren had entered the gallery ragging and jostling. This will doubtless give deep satisfaction to the Department of Culture as a successful demonstration of their witless, bullying 'Access' initiatives. For some of us, one of few pleasures we own is to be lost inside a picture, so I was angry because my transport was interrupted by those who, showing no interest in the work, had, it seemed to me, no point at all in being there. Oblivious to gallery protocol children loped past works stopping briefly, if at all, and in some cases took illegal flash photographs with mobile telephones. Theirs was a hideous intrusion which, for all I know, daily ruins the experience of adults who have paid ten quid for what is perhaps their one-and-only lifetime privilege of seeing Kandinsky's masterworks. Once oases of civility and silence, galleries have generally become intolerably noisy places where concentration is next to impossible. In pursuit of meeting age and ethnic quotas museums probably have of necessity to put up with locust swarms of squealers so they can fiddle attendance figures. But I don't see why the rest of us - who are there out of genuine interest - should have to suffer their presence. Groups of children under 18 should be banned at the very least from paying exhibitions and restricted to the permanent collections only on certain days. When they are admitted they should be warned that galleries are places for concentration and study where you either keep your mouth shut or speak considerately (and briefly) in a whisper. If they transgress they should be kicked out. To move the classroom to an art gallery is stupid, invasive and probably counter-productive. I am increasingly unconvinced in general of the worth of allowing schoolchildren into an exhibition of such as Kandinsky's work. In theory it is desirable to encourage young people's familiarity with eclectic styles of work, but it is surely pointless expecting any understanding of profound and exacting things from adolescents when they are accompanied by classmates motivated only by the tendency of the unleashed to frolic and show off. To expect a group of children to get anywhere at all with Composition VI is liberal thinking taken to insane extremes. The situation is not helped by the fact that many contemporary art galleries are now theme parks, places for short-term enjoyment which probably convince children that museums are also extensions to the playground. My 12-year-old son recently enjoyed visiting the Baltic largely, I suspect, because what was on display was indistinguishable from a fairground. Outside there was a talking house. The first 'installation' encountered indoors featured a couple of Fender Strats, a drum kit, little motorbikes and skateboards which visitors could use for scooting about. In the top gallery was a mansize tube containing blaring television screens which snaked up, down and around and ended with a steep bumslide back into the gallery. In between were the trick videos of Sam Taylor-Wood - now there's a shallow phenomenon if ever there was one. Nothing in the entire building demanded more than three seconds of attention. Apart from the disruptive presence of uninterested children, there is now also in galleries and museums the irritating crackle from groups of uniformed attendants armed with walky-talkies, as if they are here defending Goldfinger from 007. Like those placed in minicabs, these radios are left on so visitors can hear half of every fatuous exchange in the building. These days security guards, apparently unable to bear the sensory deprivation of silence required of them in a gallery, keep these grating devices turned up for company like ghetto-blasters. They should be banned immediately in all national galleries. During a recent visit to the Walker in Liverpool the din from competing sets was unbearable. I could hear three or four blaring from all directions - no wonder the Walker is always empty. Guards never used to need these damn things and if they have to have them on they should use an earpiece. Over the last few years we have transformed museums and galleries into places where it is too often impossible to immerse oneself completely in what is displayed. This could only have happened on the watch of a Department of Culture which hates art and despises all those poor souls for whom it is truly one of the last retreats. | |||||
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