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The past is better The history of art is a resource so rich that it can't be exhausted even in a lifetime of dedicated study. If we accept the existence of this infinity of nourishment a question instantly poses itself: why bother seeking out new work when the odds of achieving an equivalent 'rush' of pleasure are as long as in any lottery? Daily, it seems, the art establishment wags a threatening finger at us from the pulpit warning us to guard against this dangerous line of free thinking. We are urged to resist the Devil's temptations to play safe. If we encounter the cutting edge we mustn't give it two fingers and pass by on the other side but hold it to our bosoms and give it succour, full board and a monthly allowance like a new-found brother. We must keep up, we are told, the alternative being the slow agony of intellectual sclerosis ... not to mention the altogether more punitive result of professional suicide. Well, the truth is I'm neither frightened nor convinced by these 'dead mind' threats. It's eyewash. To my way of looking the Devil has a point. Let's face it, condemnation for being uncool and reactionary is hardly that heavy a cross to shoulder. And if worshipping the Chapman Brothers is what is meant by “keeping abreast” then the condition is very seriously over-rated - but more about those chancers later. Obsessing about 'The Contemporary', as though it's some sort of New Messiah, is to waste valuable time which, in my experience, is better spent harvesting richer rewards elsewhere. I'd wager that there are more purporting to be artists today than there has ever been in all the rest of art history put together. Eliminating the flotsam from this supposed rip tide of 'creativity' we're living through is an impossible task, a job best left to time and those with nothing better to do than invent self-justifying criteria for their juvenile fads. In case you have pressing chores I'll state it baldly now so you've no need to read on: contemporary work is simply no match for the art of the past - and even the art of the quite recent past. It's like Australia versus England at cricket. The art called 'avant garde' and'cutting edge', whose importance we all pay the State Art clergy to exaggerate, doesn't make me shed a tear, move me to awe, enlighten and educate me, touch my heart's core, make me wish I could hero-worship the artist in person, or cause me to pause for long reflection. It never ever makes me want to see it twice. Very occasionally it can be amusing or knowingly clever and unusual - Fischli & Weiss at Tate Modern last year were, for example, an original antidote to the usual overhyped charlatans exhibited there - but rarely does State Art force a path into one's deeper affections. If all of this stuff was spontaneously vapourised I wouldn't weep for it and it would be missed only by those whose fortunes depend upon it. So my advice to anyone who wants to start discovering art is head straight for the pre-judged past from which anything but the best has already been streamed off (and doubtless sold over-the-odds to Peter Moores). In the end life's too short for State Art, so don't listen to modern Savonarolas with their apocalyptic rhetoric, silly baggy pants and dyed hair and steer well clear of it until, safely sifted and validated, it can't waste any of your valuable time. I read in the papers over Christmas that American Bruce Nauman, who some time back gave us the whispering Turbine Hall, is considered by those in the loop to be the Michelangelo of contemporary art. Whatever 'it' is, he did it first apparently. How on earth is this judgement arrived at? Is there, for example, a Nauman masterpiece accessible to everyone that we can all collectively pronounce a corker. For my own part, I can't recall a single piece of the dozens in the Hayward's Nauman retrospective five years ago. I suppose it must have gone in only to be fired straight out again at Mach 3. His prominence is undoubtedly more to do with the relentless publicity machine, fuelled and cranked by investors, which keeps placing his name before us. Likewise, if the familiar merchandise wasn't constantly promoted by State Art's expensive PR apparatus, the same would be true of the principal British brandleaders whose claims to artistic apotheosis seem as ridiculous as Nauman's. Damien Hirst is the most conspicuous example of this phenomenon. Astonishingly, he expects us to be taken in by his repeated, quarter-witted bletherings about “MORTALITY” and “DEATH”. He can surely only be kidding himself. My own experiences of these conditions are in no way unusual. At six I was terrified to sleeplessness by the corpse of an ancient relative, a proud and shiny railwayman who had been born when Disraeli was Prime Minister and who slipped me five bob every time I saw him. There he was stretched out on a divan ceremonially togged up in his burial suit in the front parlour, in precisely the spot of his Failsworth back-to-back where, of a Sunday evening, we would sit quietly eating the rare treat of tinned pears and Carnation to the background accompaniment of Sing Something Simple. I can still see it and feel it and smell it all as clearly as if Luke Fildes had recorded these candle-lit obsequies. At seventeen I watched my desperately hard-working father die in twelve hours of domestic devastation and, like so many, I am now myself senior enough to have watched the deaths of family and friends, many slowly eaten to skin and bone by disease, and some of them prematurely removed by their own hand. Death is part of all our lives. So who the hell does Hirst think he is when he bleats about it as though he was in sole possession of unique knowledge concerning its significance and meaning? Does this clown really think that we need him to remind us of the finality of the oblivion awaiting us at any moment? We all understand these things far more intimately and profoundly than ever he conveys them to us in his work. These days, when words like “mortality” and “death” trip off artists' lips expletives flow uncontrollably from mine and I'd willingly trade my kingdom for an Uzi. I'm not moved to any more awareness of death's agonies and sorrows by Hirst's pseudo-religious confections and assorted pickles than I am by a tin of sardines. And it is certainly not that my own limited experiences of death preclude me being moved by the more powerful experiences of others. It is simply that in order to be forcefully poetic the evocation must be particular, felt and not generalised. The finality of one young life criminally squandered as described in a poem by Wilfred Owen, or the parasitical presence of death within life as conveyed in a verse by R S Thomas, or by a Tommy's dun helmet afloat in muddy water by Paul Nash ... these are more crippling to me than the entire corpus of in-yer-face DEADness put about by Hirst and the many other phoney pretenders to special knowledge like him. If he thinks at all, Hirst believes that talking about death and illustrating its literal condition are sufficient to establish his credentials as an artist. They are not. Neither am I moved, except possibly in a moment of desperation back to the ground, by Carsten Holler's fairground rides in the Tate. There is no art here to see or to feel, so what is it here for in an art gallery? To confuse fairground diversions with art is to have lost track of any sense of function or purpose. Perhaps the Tate's preachers really do know best and Holler's mettle will become clear to all in the fullness of time, but until then I could have saved myself half a day (and my Oyster card three quid) by not bothering with it. And I'm not moved or enlightened either by Sarah Lucas's puerile obsession with genitals and masturbation. That someone so old can get away with such infantilism for so long is a fascinating indictment of this age of easy, unearned celebrity. As a boarding school boy and thirty years a team footballer I've seen more genitals than a VD specialist and easily more masturbation than any Soho masseuse. So what is the fuss about? Is there anyone left in the country who finds genitals and their symbolism illuminating? The Savonarolas do. They need a life, badly. In visual art ours is a period of over-promoted and officially sanctioned banality, an era of the dumbly notorious with less to recommend them than Jade Goody. The only lasting response to art is not the scream of shock but the withdrawal to silent concentration and the gradual sinking and settling in of some moment of kinship between lost souls. Having spent four decades pursuing art, music and literature in an ad hoc fashion I am still discovering these stirring truths. Last year alone I was introduced by friends and chance encounters to the following, for me, new experiences: the novels of P G Wodehouse; the memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon; the poetry of Thomas Hardy; the piano music of Debussy; St Saens; the St Matthew Passion; Razorlight; Messiaen; Robert Johnson; the Farm Security Administration's colour photographs of the American Depression; and young painter Gordon Cheung. As with all such revelations it's hard coming to terms with the fright and disappointment that one has lived so long in ignorance of them, and that so very much more remains to be explored. The common ingredient of all these discoveries is that they each in their small way now help sustain and warm me while supplying useful idiom and instruction. Then there is the sheer joy and diversion they have caused. This is the glory of art. And so here I am on December 27th ignoring the Devil's whisperings, keeping in check my reactionary predispositions, postponing the imminent intellectual demise, arriving duty bound for the Tate Liverpool exhibition of those modest fellows, the Chapman Brothers. Regrettably, cheating railway franchise holders having taken their toll, there was insufficient time for Hogarth, Simone Martini, Richard Wilson, Ercole de' Roberti, John Gibson, Thorneycroft and other irrelevant historicals in the deserted caverns of the Walker opposite, but I halted anyway on the puddled steps of Lime Street station for a moment of homage. Here, at the end of 1916 on this very windy corner, Siegfried Sassoon, a convalescent from being sniped in the back on the Somme, bids farewell in few words to a loved friend and fellow officer headed ominously for Passchendaele. Forewarned a dozen times in reviews and puffing profiles that the Chapmans' works are terrifying and induce an anxiety second only to the surgeon's knife, I am not surprised to discover it's all a lie. Using the Owen/Sassoon Scale of fright and misery measurement, these works induce less horror than Harry Potter. And besides, what are the critics talking about? Surely they can't be frightened every time they see the same works, because all these hacks have seen most of this show at least three times before, so frequently are they shoved before us for worship. For example, I've encountered them at Saatchi's various shops, the Sensation performance, White Cube potboilers, art fairs, assorted mixed samplers 'curated' by State Art lickspittles, and of course at the brothers' own losing Turner Prize display of 2003 which has been shipped up in its entirety... Leaving aside the disgusting prick-nosed infants, the pointless Goya doodles (scores of them), the feeble playschool dinosaurs and the 'Primitive Art' adverts for McDonalds, all of them unneeding of a second glance, the main subject of their new models is WAR. They are really angry about WAR all right. They say they want to shock us out of our familiarity with conflict and offer, as they put it with characteristic pomposity, “a scatological aesthetics for the tired of seeing”. Do these same critics really enter the Liverpool Tate and start shouting “Oh no, don't, I can't bear to look, it's all too ghastly. Oh please, no more cruelties. Aaargh.” Even on a slow day the television news is more terrifying and scatological than this. One model, endlessly described and commented upon, and ever so naughtily entitled Arbeit McFries, imagines Auschwitz. In the style of their toy-soldier Hell, which was exhibited some years ago at the Royal Academy and was soon afterwards incinerated in the Great Fire of Leyton, they recreate what we have already seen more vividly a thousand times before. Alas, they forget to insert the pathos we need for it to rouse what they arrogantly presume are our blunted responses to the mass murder of innocents. Using these literal methods, what can they realistically hope to tell us about a genocidal enormity already so unforgettably described by Primo Levi, who was actually there and saw it, and which is so numbingly documented in the concentration camp photographs of Margaret Bourke-White and others? The answer is nothing. It is beyond them. As artists they are not good enough to carry it off. All they can do is pile up emaciated corpses and hope we collapse to our knees snivelling for mercy. Their tour de force of labour (by someone, possibly even themselves) tells us nothing new - it is effort wasted. There is neither new poetry nor authenticity in their familiar obscenities. For my own part, far from being moved I find their borrowing of such pre-loaded imagery glib and exploitative, their sincerity and motives suspect. There is more anti-war sentiment in Sassoon's wordless parting from his friend on those wintry Lime Street steps, pregnant as we know the occasion must have been with the probability that before having a chance to meet again one or both would be blown to bits, than in these thousands of heaped toy bodies and joke-shop creepy crawlies. In their list of influences the Chapman's typically include the scribblings of unreadable French cultural theorists, but this is humbug. Their sensibilities are identical to those of a generation conditioned entirely by X-Box and Play Station simulations of casual violence. Here is my plea. Ignore the Savonarolas. Ignore Hirst and the Chapmans. For clearly they know nothing. If an exhibition of contemporary art is reviewed in all the papers in the same week avoid it like the Black Death. It is a racing certainty that your short time is more profitably spent exploring the geniuses of the past than the mediocrities of the present. | |||||
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