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Losses in the name of artistic freedom Another visit to the Walker Art Gallery, another wander through blissfully deserted galleries, including those new ones allocated to the biennial John Moores “exhibition of contemporary painting”. In the past the Moores was considered the country’s most important and eagerly anticipated painting show. Not any more. The only living distraction in the exhibition was an attendant being hectored by a colleague, who I’m almost certain was speaking English, on the advantages of timeshare holiday accommodation, of which I’d always believed there were none, and still do. This year’s John Moores is the 22nd and following even the recent run of disappointing assortments the present one (until December 8th) is by some distance the worst ever. If these 38 are the best of the 1,500 painters who submitted slides for consideration then the show should be postponed until regime change is achieved and artistic renaissance is on the wind. The exhibition looks and is thin and, more than usual, a strong suggestion of selection by ear, commercial loyalty and friendship is apparent; for example, Waddington Galleries artists Ian Davenport and Lisa Milroy are obviously included for better reasons than that the other youngish Waddington artist, Fiona Rae, was a judge. The ludicrous victor ludorum, Peter Davies, and two of the other four prizewinners are mere stunts. Except in the loosest possible sense they have little connection with painting and, indeed, one of them isn’t a painting at all. With the exception of the better 70s-style abstractions and its incurably formalist devotees, there is scarcely a single passage or colour rhyme of subtlety. None of these pictures seizes attention. On the evidence of this etiolated misrepresentation of painting in 2002, a Martian might logically conclude that our life and times have become so bland, so uniform, so easy, so routine and predictable, and our art so self-referential as a result, that nothing remains for artists to do than stir colours and shapes around in order to arrive at a satisfactory pattern. Our extra-terrestrial might also conclude that we arty-farty earthlings are strangers to self-criticism and addicted to repetitive behaviour. One day, perhaps soon, someone will realise that there is no audience for demotic slogans, graffiti, monuments to egocentricity and an absence of subject matter, because pictures of this ilk fail to reward scrutiny. Why make the effort to trek all the way from Huyton or Hoylake, or even Hackney, to a gallery in order to be insulted by having the ordinary passed off as exceptional? No one will do it more than once. Having made the effort to get to Liverpool, the only alternative is to saunter off and find something to look at, which is easy. One of the paintings from the Walker’s permanent collection close to the entrance of the John Moores is And When Did You Last See Your Father? by William F Yeames (1835-1918), which is among those famous paintings we think we know well from many a cartoon. Compositionally by-the-book and looking as if each figure were modelled separately and slotted in as seamlessly as possible, it is not the most inspired work, but place it alongside anything in the Moores and it transforms into art of unrivalled genius. The artist worked hard and it shows. There is more of anecdote to discover in this one minor canvas than in all the Moores’ pictures together. Yeames’s is an unashamed narrative painting of a sort now considered dead and habitually derided as dully academic. Painted in 1878 it depicts an imagined scene which might have taken place 235 years earlier during the Civil War. Roundheads have surprised a Cavalier’s country house whose owner has either fled or is in hiding leaving his wife and children captive. An inquisitor cross-examines the family. Shrewdly, he starts with the youngest, most innocent and, therefore, potentially the most unwittingly truthful. They are hoping the boy, who is dressed in his best ‘Royalist’ Van Dyck silks, might be tricked into divulging his father’s refuge. Will the golden-locked boy be honest or deviously loyal? His mother, who looks on concerned from the door, realises the potential tragedy of the moment. She is willing the lad to be mature beyond his years? Meanwhile, the stern expressions of the po-faced Parliamentarians apply silent pressure to the boy whose erect posture hints at defiant courage. We, like Yeames, root for the lad. The cold interrogator, whose leanness and focus obviously betrays a fanatical puritanism, plays Mr Patient But Stern. By light, spacing, colour (powder blue against the Model Army drab), and the fact that he is a cynosure for all alert senses, the boy hinges the scene. He is cleverly related to his hereditary surroundings by the breastplate directly over his head and by the clever detail of his ornately ribboned shoes which identify him as the descendent of the feet – the only part visible – in the ancestral portrait on the wall behind the questioner’s head. His weeping older sister is next up for interrogation. A suggestion of pillage and confiscation pervades this quiet, momentous interlude between bouts of purposeful expedition. Eager guards await instructions outside. Everyone wants to get on with the job but this pesky boy in a silly suit stalls progress. The actual painting is competent, the mise-en-scène square and lacking in flair. The gallery caption to the picture states: “The work became enormously popular with the public, who liked a painting which told a good story.” The implication of this terse put-down is that to like a good story was quaint, wasn’t it, but we are far more sophisticated than that now, aren’t we. To which my answer would be: ‘You might be too sophisticated for a good yarn, Mr Walker, but I’m not’. The only vaguely narrative comparison with this picture in the Moores is Martin Maloney’s prizewinner, Bloomsbury Square, WC1, illustrated above. In order to be credibly fashionable, modern painting has now to be resolutely anti-pictorial. So, deliberately anti-compositional, this picture was made by clipping figures from snapshots, projecting them on to a filthy sounding material called ‘plasticated canvas’ and collaging the image using tiny, jagged strips of coloured vinyl, all of which might provide a therapeutic exercise for the mentally challenged in a day centre. This collage process renders all textures and expressions unreadable as anything resembling life. Necessarily the process extirpates nuance and detail. Medium becomes subject. We have no idea what any of these gargoyles think, or how they feel, because the process kills stone dead such explanatory vividness and individuality. Two youths, girls perhaps, are looking at something but we can’t tell what. Two women knit? Another pair, one is an amputee, knit as well? Three pantomime dogs, one of them on a lead, rear up in the foreground begging with their tongues out. Is the flaxen-haired woman with a dog scratching her belly button? Are we indoors or out? Who knows. Where the pleasure of visual interrogation is removed what hope has a picture of deep engagement with a viewer’s imagination? There are those who believe that Maloney’s stunt is a clever, daring disavowal of everything painting is supposed to be, and that this of itself makes it good. In the guff that passes for explanation in such Saatchi art – and Maloney is well in with the Chief Puppeteer – we are informed by the self-promoting artist: “I wanted to make a painting [?] that is both a believable representation of a real life scene and that reconsiders abstraction’s decoration and patterns.” He has failed. It is not “a believable representation of a real life scene”. How could it be? No decipherable human drama exists here. The picture tells us only what happens when figures are collaged without drawing or compositional and expressive skills. Maloney’s stunt is the fag end of State Art’s indulgence of opportunistic incompetence ... but don’t forget he got away with it. He won a prize. He sells and is in the swim. Today’s artists are allowed the freedom to do whatever they want and to be applauded for it in proportion to how much they refute convention. This may occasionally throw up absorbing work, but if this year’s John Moores is anything to go on the results of the freedoms gained are far less absorbing than the stories and painterly subtleties lost. We are left with the fact that Yeames’s painting drew crowds whilst Maloney’s strategies are admired by a few brainless fanatics with the power to impose their fads on us to the exclusion of almost everything else. David Lee | ||||||
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