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Moping Owl ... from yonder ivy-mantled tow’r | ||||||
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Friezing the Tate Who can blame anyone for taking one’s chances, so why not keep the ball rolling up the ramp by getting the Tate on board. All you need do, which is all The Frieze Art Fair has done, is put up a £150,000 voucher for the Tate to spend on ‘new and emerging international artists’ showing at the Fair. Whoopee – the lasting historic importance of Frieze as a mediator of all that’s best and brightest validated at a stroke, to say nothing of whatever gorgeous, trend-setting, challenging, ground-breaking, rabbits come out of the hat. But does the Tate always know a good thing when it sees it, or even then? ìEach year two prominent international curators are invited to work along Tate curators to select worksî – whew: so that’s all right then. This year they are the prominent Thelma Golden of the Harlem Studio Museum, and Sabine Breitweiser of CIMAM, whatever that is. By the way, there are some major contemporary galleries down the road that haven’t seen a Tate curator in 20 years. And the Tate turns down gifts from elsewhere all the time. I mean, they can’t take any old tat they’re offered Ö A Bit of a Pong It was always a mistake, and an obvious one at that, for the Royal Academy to take on its back extension in Burlington Gardens with money it probably didn’t have. It certainly hasn’t had the money to do anything with it since, for all the grandiose plans and promises of Sir Architect This and Sir Sculptor That, other than let it out to any Flash Harry that comes along. The latest such is one Mr Blain, purveyor of all the usual fashionable and well-hung art meat (yum yum) to the passing punter (see above). He is now to move his commercial gallery and operation, Haunch of Venison, lock stock and ripe old game, into the place, which all seems a bit high to me – though I suppose the RA has been flogging up commercial interests when it suits it for some time now. A bit niffy it may be, but at least no public money is involved. ìThis arrangement will enable us to further our goals in the redevelopment of the RA, which will be of immense benefit to the art-going publicî says the man in charge of the chipped Staffordshire piggy-bank. I bet it will. I do like that ‘immense’ – can’t wait. Oh Dear A strange young bird called Ben Lewis, rather scruffy and perhaps a little short-sighted to judge by his by-line mugshot, perched on the Evening Standard art desk the other day to tell us what was what at the Frieze Art Fair. This is something of what he squawked: ìIt’s only a small exaggeration to say that George Condo [Simon Lee Gallery – £160,000] is a Francis Bacon in waiting. For three decades the artist has produced fabulously twisted cartoon-like portraits of characters with sharp teeth and bulging eyes, which convey the hysterical laughter of the traumatised. He’s my favourite painter at under a million.î Do stop laughing hysterically at the back there. Shall I go on? ìThe London-based photographer Sarah Jones [Maureen Paley – £6,000] makes a welcome departure from flowers, of which we’ve surely had enough in contemporary art [who could possibly disagree?], and takes a photograph of the after-image left by the removal of an object from a wall – judging by the title, a picture. Austerely beautiful.î Come come: this is no laughing matter. ìThis east London gallery [Hotel] specialises in showing difficult and sensitive art. New York painter Carter makes ‘self-portraits’ in which his image never becomes clear. In this large work [Untitled – £44,000] he distributes blobs of paint (previously prepared on glass), outlines of his face, ears and other bits and pieces and the odd inexplicable (sic) word over a blown-up photograph of a Fifties interior.î Look, take a deep breath, a sip or two of water, and go and lie down for a bit. Bacon Rind How many is it at the Tate by now – 6 retrospectives, 16, 26? It certainly seems like it. And is our Francis’s now one of the most over-blown reputations in the history of the world? There is a good case to be made for him as an important and even a great artist, certainly so in the context of mid-20th century British Art, but that would have been so had he died by the middle of the 1960s and not gone on, and on, and on, and on. No great painter is so great that the odd dud never slips off the easel, but with Bacon in his last 30 years need there have been quite so many? - thin, crude, over-blown, formulaic, out-of-scale, empty gestures the lot of them. Dropped Bricks I see, from Jackdaw 82, that our friend the Dixon Bird has got into quite a flap about the teaching of Art History in our universities (and who wouldn’t?), and in banging on no end about Modern Art in particular, brings up the good old Tate Bricks business yet again. No need to go into all that now, but there is a funny side to it. My understanding was that what Carl AndrÈ flogged to the then Director, Norman Reid, all those years ago, was the copyright to one particular arrangement of given number of said bricks, with all other possible arrangements therefore implicit in the one, if you see what I mean (that’s conceptualism for you). And the Tate could then go on thinking about it, or run off to the nearest Brick Shop and so set the thing up, whenever it felt like it, and chuck them in the skip when it felt that enough was enough and a change would be nice. In short, any old bricks would do (that’s Conceptualism for you). So of course the day came, and Equivalent VIII (for that is the creature’s name) was dismantled and (Please Don’t Laugh) each brick was numbered and docketed and given its very own foam-lined box. And all together they have been ratcheting up their storage costs ever since. Still on Jackdaw 82 I know one shouldn’t peck at one’s fellows, and the young (I presume they’re young) should be encouraged, but, on the other hand, it’s for their own good, just now and again. Little Nigel Konstam writes a nifty piece, again about art history and the state it’s in, and why not. And then he blames the critics, not this critic nor that, but an elusive tribe of bogey-men called ‘The Critics’. Name names for God’s, by which I mean Art’s sake. All Is Not Lost A short flight to the top floor of City Hall cheers me up a bit. That great old Maori, Sir Keith Park, who saw off the Hun Hordes as head of Fighter Command in the Battle of Britain, is to have his statue put up in a year or two. And if the maquette unveiled the other day is anything to go by, by Les Johnson, it should be rather a good one for once – well modelled, lively pose, good detail and all that. We thought no-one did that sort of thing any more. It is hoped that a temporary version might even occupy the Fourth Plinth for a while, before the final bronze goes up in Waterloo Place. Making a Splash And while I’m twittering on about public sculpture, a large font, complete with running water, by that modern master of waterworks, William Pye, Purveyor of Superior Fountainry to Royalty, the Nobility and Gentry, has lately been installed in Salisbury Cathedral, and consecrated by Archbishop Cantor himself, no less, and used by him immediately on two miraculously unprotesting little girls. Strangely, the Cathedral has not had a fixed font since the middle of the 19th century. This new font too is pretty good – quite restores one’s faith, you might say. A Strange Noise Oh dear, what was that I heard just now? – a sort of splat or plop, like a large raindrop on a leaf, harbinger of a storm to come, perhaps: or something or other hitting a fan: or was it just a bubble bursting? I do hope not. I can see that the fat old Sotheby geese hope not too, to judge by the deafening squawk that has just come from the mucky old paddock up the lane, hotly denying (though by no means refuting) the wicked current rumour that the punters at turkey Damien’s recent effort to avoid Christmas yet again, were not coughing up as they should. Oh dear no: perish the thought. But if suddenly you can’t get what you want even for a half-decent Picasso or Van Gogh, which seems now to be the case, what chance will there be for your Doig or Tracey or Marlene Dumas, that you were so lucky to pick up at a record price only the day before yesterday. No wonder the punters are getting nervous – whoops, sorry Mr Sotheby: just a slip of the beak – no, no: of course they’re not. And that plop I heard? – it could have been a cheque bouncing, I suppose. Fading Away Even the Wisest Owl sometimes feels he’s no longer quite up to it, and is missing something. I’ve been puzzling all month over a scrap of paper that drifted past on the wind, blown from the vasty Bloomberg spaces in the City. Fade In/Fade Out it said, of its October to November exhibition. Four artists it seems were working together ìto draw the viewer into a landscape where beginnings and ending become blurred allowing an exploration of our relationship to space and time.î I know the feeling. One Kris Martin shows an airport or station departure board with nothing on the tags, which create a ìmesmerising whisperî as they whirr round. I expect we’ve all been in airports when that happens, at some time or other. Ceryth Wynn Evans’s contribution is just a glass chandelier from Murano hung from the ceiling (where else? Ed). ìIt’s flickering light Ö being a coded message (??**!?) releases its message into the atmosphere of the building and Ö creates a kind of subliminal echoî. Well, if you say so. Philippe Decrauzat’s ìexpansive wall drawing is both an opening up and a closing downî. I’m not sure I can go on. ìHe draws, with black and white across space (that’s unusual), what initially appears to be a simple geometric pattern, but which in fact holds other layers of subliminal information.î I bet it does. And Philippe Pareno has floated a cluster of white ‘cartoon speech bubble’ balloons, whatever they are, up to the ceiling, where ìthey jostle, waiting for their message to come to them, [occupying] a space between announcement and silenceî. Like them, I suppose, I too am still waiting for that message to come. I thought about it, I really did, but somehow, in the end, what with one thing and another, I couldn’t quite bring myself to go. The Jackdaw, Jan/Feb 2009 | |||||
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Moping Owl All of this site is | |||||
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