The Jackdaw

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  • Disobedient Objects – Edward Lucie-Smith at the Victoria and Albert Museum

    A dwarf’s hat, as worn by 10,000 protesters at a 1988 march against communism in Poland

    It is understandable that, in current circumstances, major arts institutions should try to ally themselves with the more anarchic, contrarian elements in contemporary culture. Perhaps this is especially true of those dealing with the contemporary visual arts, committed as these still are to the myth of ‘avant-gardism’. One problem that immediately presents itself, of course, is that this myth is not itself contemporary – it is rooted in the very earliest years of the century before ours, and first blossomed before the outbreak of World War I. The myth has become so diversified in the course of more than a century of growth that what is indisputably avant garde today has become very difficult to define. One man’s ‘avant garde’ can easily be his neighbour’s idea of ho-hum, follow-my-leader conservatism.

    Another problem, allied to the first, is that the history of the 20th century avant garde was rather specifically a history of élites. Avant-garde artists relied on élite patrons for financial support – independently wealthy, high status individuals who were conscious of the fact that their championship of the radically new distinguished them from the mass. There is also the fact that the now-classical avant-garde art movements initially embraced right wing politics more enthusiastically than they did left wing ones. This was the case with Italian Futurism, the most publicised of the early avant-gardes. Later, when avant-garde artists began to identify with the left, it was nevertheless would-be mass movements, Nazism and Soviet Communism, which were particularly hostile to avant-garde art. When Surrealism tried to sustain an alliance with Communism, the relationship was always extremely uneasy.

    Disobedient Objects at the V&A (until February 1st) shows that this uneasiness has not gone away. Housed in one of London’s most important museums, its organisers have gone to some lengths to emphasise its democratic status. It is free entry, like the rest of the permanent collection (but unlike the other special exhibitions the museum offers as part of its regular programme), and it has been given an unusually long run – six months in all.

    What it offers is an anthology of objects connected will all sorts of anarchic projects, from the anti-nuclear protests at Greenham Common in England, to the Mothers of the Disappeared in Buenos Aires – all challenges to some kind of existing status quo, made in many different contemporary societies and national entities, democratic and non-democratic. Most of the objects concerned would not normally be classified as art, or even as craft or design. In fact, what one has here is a kind of religious treasury – the holy relics of a number of recent episodes of social agitation, some of which succeeded in their aims and some of which failed. If Christ had lived in our own times, it wouldn’t be surprising to find a relic of the True Cross as part of the display – always remembering that this now sacred item wasn’t, and was never intended to be, a work of art, despite the numberless times it has since been depicted in art. I say this in the full consciousness that, to anyone who reads the Gospels carefully, the texts do in fact seem to advocate a radical egalitarian revolution in society. This despite the famous verse that tells the convert to: “Render unto Cesar the things that are Cesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”  [Matthew 22:21].

    The introduction to the catalogue, by the two curators, Catherine Flood and Gavin Grindon, shows a queasy consciousness of this situation. On the one hand they say:

    “The position of this project, both ‘within and against’ an institution, emerges principally from careful attention to these objects [included] and their own and their own instituent power.”

    On the other they declare:

    “Exhibitions are moments of collective meaning-making. Bringing these objects and histories together, and presenting them to an audience that never encounters them outside the mass media, makes the museum a site for difficult questions and tests it claim to be a public space.”

    The phrase that betrays something here is “never encounters them outside the mass media”. The assumption seems to be that what is experienced within the sanctified space of the museum must necessarily be superior to the same thing experienced outside it. In other words, the official framework, just because it is official, offers a validation unobtainable in the non-official circumstances in which these ‘disobedient objects’ were first made. This paradox is a step too far. The objects concerned have, on the whole, no aesthetic value. They may have had force within the very specific contexts that provoked their production. But not here. They are dead fish on a slab. In an interview given in conjunction with the show, Catherine Flood claimed that the items displayed had not been ‘museumified’ – her word, not mine. I beg to differ. That is exactly what has happened.

    One reason for this is the kind of public that great museums attract. They like to pretend that they are for ‘everyone’, and this is indeed why, in democratic Western European societies, they are given large sums of taxpayers’ money. Any observant person knows, however, that this ‘everyone’ is not completely universal. Museums attract the kind of citizens every democracy would like to have, perhaps to the exclusion of other, more difficult cases. They pull in the bien pensants – people who get a nice glow from the idea of going there. Certainly not the bulk of the truly disadvantaged, the real outsiders. They get a much higher proportion of middle-class visitors than working-class ones, though this distinction is slowly breaking down.

    Where immediate, visceral access to the ideas being put forward in the show is concerned, the mass media win the contest, hands down. They know how to hit the public in the gut, and they operate in a fully public arena. You run up against them in your daily life, whether you want to or not.

    What the museum does here is to try to organise the ‘disobedient’ material to make it palatable to the kind of visitors museums already get. Having heard about the show, you have to make the decision to go, even though you don’t have to pay a fee for the experience. Which means, in turn, that your mind is probably made up about the ideas it puts forward, long before you arrive.

    As it happens, London has already seen a rather similar exhibition – Mark Wallinger’s Turner Prize-winning exhibit at Tate Britain in 2007. This, entitled State Britain, was a meticulous reconstruction of the ‘Peace Camp’ set up by the late activist Brian Haw in front of the Houses of Parliament, in protest against the Iraq War, and subsequently dismantled by the police because it contravened a hastily passed law against “unauthorised demonstrations within a one kilometre radius of Parliament Square”. Much play was made with the fact that the site of the installation within the museum building also seemed to fall within the forbidden zone. However, as the critic Tim Teeman, writing in The Times, remarked, “moving Haw’s protest from the street to the hallowed hush of the Tate denudes it of rawness and energy. The riot of colour, the anarchy of words and images, are dimmed; the weatherbeaten plastic coverings aren’t flapping in the wind anymore, but listlessly reflecting gallery spotlights.” He concluded by asking: “Does it ask new questions or challenge our preconceptions?” And answered his own query: “No, it merely confirms the liberal consensus.” This is exactly what has happened at the V & A, the second time round.

    In fact Disobedient Objects is a very good example of that hallowed middle-class liberal pastime – preaching to the converted. It claims to be radical and is in fact deeply conventional and self-congratulatory. It won’t change anyone’s mind.

    Edward Lucie-Smith

    The Jackdaw Nov/Dec 2014

  • The art market – selling the soul

    The art market – selling the soul

    American painter Christopher Wool (b. 1955) has been described by the New Yorker as “perhaps the most important painter of his generation”. Christie’s are in less doubt, describing him as “one of the last century’s most influential artists”. Even by the risible standards of bullshit spouted by auction houses and art dealers this is ridiculous. I’ve never heard anyone, artist or otherwise, ever say they were influenced by Wool. Have you? Well have you? Indeed, I’d never heard of him at all until about a year ago.

    Wool joined Gagosian in 2006, since when the noughts increased and the words got longer. In 2009, courtesy of an organisation called The American Fund for the Tate Gallery, the first of two Wools entered our national collection – the second, acquired in 2012, was also secured in part courtesy of this same influential body. No institution in the UK has ever staged an exhibition of Wool’s work, but let’s face it such a ‘celebration’ can’t now be far off. His backers will surely procure one soon. I wonder which gallery will be first to follow the money.

    To investigate how the art market operates I’ll concentrate on the sale of one of his pictures for two irreconcilable reasons: first, like Polaris blasting from under the ice cap, his reputation has been suddenly, suspiciously meteoric; second, I can’t discover an atom of merit or originality in anything he does. He is, therefore, a revealing example of how the art market, which is so disproportionately influential in dictating what we see in public galleries, is run for the investment benefit of rich people. (One of the most important dealers in contemporary art said recently of his collectors: “They have no interest whatsoever in art; they look at paintings as a diversification of their investments.”)

    Illustrated opposite is Apocalypse Now. This 1988, 7’ x 6’ work, painted in polyester enamel on aluminium, was sold by Christie’s last year for $26.4 million, over three times the previous artist’s record. Manifesting more than a trace of evangelical fervour, the person who bought it gushed: “I wanted the absolute best work by that artist and this is the best of the best. It’s in another league. There is Apocalypse Now and then everything else.” Why it should be ‘better’ and more valuable than similarly fabricated Wools reading SEX LUV, FOOL, BAD DOG and IF YOU CANT TAKE A JOKE YOU CAN GET THE FUCK OUT, one can only speculate.

    The technique is stencil, in mimicry of the graffiti legends and adverts which are supposedly its inspiration. And before you commend the concise nihilism of the message, these words are not the artist’s own. They are the looney Kurtz’s exhortation to his abandoned wife in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now: “Sell the house. Sell the car. Sell the kids. Find someone else. Forget it. I’m never coming back. Forget it.”

    Nothing about this piece, either in its handling or conception, might make you think it is of remarkable value. Indeed, objectively there is no good reason why it might not be worth 25 bob instead of 25 million. What establishes its value is something you can neither see nor understand without being indoctrinated as to what it is … usually by someone with an interest in flogging it for as much as possible. Its value resides purely in its perceived status as a tradeable luxury. It has, curiously, no more intrinsic value than any other share certificate.

    In its short life Apocalypse Now has passed through ten billionaire collectors. All were Americans except one, Frenchman François Pinault, five back, who is the proprietor of Christie’s, the firm who sold it this time. Incidentally, the owner before Pinault was Donald Bryant, until recently a trustee of MoMA New York who is also on the aforementioned ‘American Fund’ committee of the Tate, which was instrumental in the Gallery acquiring both its Wools. Californian winemaker Bryant obviously likes Wool, but not sufficiently, it seems, to hang on to what is allegedly his pièce de résistance. You will have noticed that the world of posh art is a very small and incestuous one.

    The speed of turnover in Apocalypse Now – 30 months on average – tells us something about the motivation of modern collectors, for whom genuine discernment would appear to be the last thing on their mind. The very idea of connoisseurship or discernment in collecting contemporary art is an absurd notion when the relative value of a work can be made up so it flies in the face of the little you can actually see. Art is now a fund manager’s hobby, a gamble or a pitch from which, as with any other investment, profit is periodically milked.

    The last seller of the picture, hedge-funder David Ganek, is also a trustee of the Guggenheim Museum in New York where Wool just happened to be enjoying a retrospective coincident with the auction of Apocalypse Now. In 2010, Ganek’s business partner was convicted for insider trading. Though himself deemed a co-conspirator Ganek was never charged. He left his company and paid $25 million in fines. There is a book to be written about the connection between contemporary art and insider trading. Everyone has now forgotten that the first sponsor of the Turner Prize, Michael Milken, the inventor of junk bonds, got four years for related offences. No more telling indictment of the contemporary art market exists than that it appeals to high-risk investors, hedgers and generally shifty operators to whose activities the cachet of art ownership is used to lend a patination of social respectability.

    Was the sale of Apocalypse Now a straightforward auction? No it wasn’t. It was sold before the sale because a guarantor had underwritten the low estimate price of $15 million. A third of the works in the same auction were also the subject of pre-sale guarantees.

    Christie’s threw their all behind this lot claiming that Apocalypse Now “is the emblem of a generation” – an obvious lie. They continued: “Christopher Wool’s Apocalypse Now is the essential image of our times… It’s much anticipated appearance at auction, firmly places Wool amongst the pantheon of great masters of the 20th century.” There you have it: “the essential image of our times”. Not the twin towers, or Obama being sworn in, or Neil Armstrong, or Mandela striding victorious from jail, or tanks in Prague or Tianenmen Square, or even Sergio Aguero scoring in extra time, but this second-hand slogan.

    And what of the artist himself? He has said: “With the painting the inspiration comes from the process of the work itself. Like music making the work is an emotional experience. It’s a visual language and it’s almost impossible to put words to it.” Not half.

    What conclusions might we draw from all this perversion of genuine standards:

    1. Monetary value is unrelated to aesthetic worth. By looking at contemporary art you can’t even guess to within three noughts what it might cost.

    2. Once a powerful cocktail of mutually interested dealers and speculators get behind an artist their rise is unstoppable. The auction market in contemporary art is a game played by six of the world’s biggest dealers, two salesrooms, 40 artists, about 30 billionaires and a clique of subservient museum directors and careerist curator-clones. No one else matters. In 2012 11 of the top 20 artists sold at auction were represented by Wool’s dealer Gagosian.

    3. Most commentary on the art market is disgraceful advertisement.

    4. At the top end, the art market encourages a sort of religious cult participation by hobbyist fat cats eager to cash in on safe bets.

    5. When the auction market has nothing to do with liking art or actual visible qualities, the dealer is happy, the artist is happy, the seller is happy, the other collectors of the same artists’ works are happy, and the auctioneer is deliriously, pants-wetting happy.

    6. The cowardly complicity of State Art before this squalid system is a shocking betrayal of what they really ought to be standing up for.

    The whole thing is a filthy racket.

    David Lee

    The Jackdaw Nov/Dec 2014

     

     

     

  • Kenneth Clark at Tate Britain: the great panjandrum

    Edward Lucie-Smith discovers that their tribute to Kenneth Clark is not as complimentary as the Tate thinks it is

    The Tate Britain show devoted to Sir Kenneth Clark – ‘Lord Clark of Civilisation’, as he came to be called – was a slightly strange phenomenon. It defined a whole tract of the recent history of the visual arts here in Britain, but in the end fell short of being a genuine celebration. Going round it, examining what was on view, one noted how much things have changed. And at the same time, how much they haven’t.

    Clark’s career can be thought of as making a bridge between Roger Fry and the Bloomsberries on the one hand and the achievements (and failings) of Sir Nicholas Serota on the other. Brought up in what seems to have been gilded solitude – the only child of a very rich man whom the Tate catalogue describes as an idler – he was the privileged inhabitant of a variety of different but related social worlds.

    His ascent through the pre-war British art world, also through at least one major tribe of the international art world, was extremely rapid. From the circle surrounding Roger Fry he passed, with remarkable ease, into that surrounding Bernard Berenson at I Tatti on the outskirts of Florence. The famously formidable Berenson asked Clark, who was still in his early twenties, to work on a new edition of his celebrated catalogue of drawings by Florentine painters, first published in 1903, the year of Clark’s birth.

    The Tate catalogue makes some significant remarks about this, worth quoting here at some length, though with a bit of necessary compression: “The time Clark spent at I Tatti with Berenson was an education in a very different approach to art: that of connoisseurship. Having an ‘eye’ meant the ability to discern on the basis of simply looking at a work, who might have made it and when… Attribution was a gentleman’s sport, and for Clark it seemed at the time ‘the only game worth playing’. Not, he was careful to add, for the money, but for the glory of having an eye and being right.”

    Read in the context of what was actually on view at the Tate, this paragraph made a very peculiar effect. True, Clark at this period wrote an authoritative catalogue of the Leonardo drawings in the Royal Collection at Windsor. As the Tate catalogue rather smugly remarks: “[It] remains unsurpassed (if in a quite specialised genre). And many of his identifications, both attributions and de-attributions, as well as datings of the drawings, have stood the test of time.” Two genuine Leonardo drawings, plus a non-Leonardo with the same provenance, were included to prove the point.

    It was the other Old Master items that formed part of the Tate’s exhibition that supplied a bucket – several buckets – of cold water. What one got was a parade of duds. The show included, for example, the four little panels by the very minor Andrea Previtali that Clark bought for the National Gallery during his period as Director, in the belief that they were by Giorgione. Worse were some items that the great panjandrum had actually owned himself. For example, a much scraped and over-restored School of Pontormo Madonna and Child that Clark thought was an original Rosso, and a dreary John Wootton landscape that he believed to be by Claude. Also a battered fresco fragment representing a putto that he hoped was the work of Giorgione. Even undoubtedly genuine works were sometimes the dullest possible examples of a particular master.

    Clark, for example, owned two paintings by Seurat. The one shown at the Tate, The Forest of Pontaubert, was painted in 1881, when Seurat was just 21 years old. It’s an uncertain, obviously juvenile work. I don’t think Clark himself thought much of it by the time he reached old age. I met him once, in his last years, to do an interview about Graham Sutherland, one of the British artists who benefited from his support and patronage. He was then living in a spacious but curiously characterless bungalow built at the gates of Saltwood Castle, which had been handed over to his son Alan. The Seurat was not on a wall, but was propped up on the floor of a cloakroom where I went to pee. It was fairly obvious that nobody loved it or bothered to look at it.

    There were some good things in Clark’s possession, notably a group of paintings and drawings by Cézanne that he had the good fortune to buy from the artist’s heirs in the 1930s. He also once owned (but it wasn’t in the show), a large icing-sugar sweet Renoir nude from the early 1880s, now in the Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin. This flamboyantly vulgar object would undoubtedly excite new-rich billionaire collectors if it appeared today in a Sotheby’s or Christie’s auction. Clark’s protégé Victor Pasmore said the Renoir nude set his teeth on edge, and painted a hostile paraphrase to prove it. Clark was sporting enough to buy it.

    As a practical demonstration of Clark’s pre-eminence as a connoisseur, a supreme aesthete, the exhibition was a bust.

    On the whole, the show served instead as a refutation of a once-powerful but now largely discredited myth, sedulously propagated by Berenson and his circle, and also by a platoon of other professional ‘art experts’ covering about three generations, that there existed, occupying deservedly privileged positions in civilised western societies, oracular figures who could produce the right attribution for almost any Old Master painting, drawing or sculpture, simply by gazing at it steadfastly for a few moments. Almost nobody believes that today.

    Kenneth Clark’s importance to the art world was quite other, and had nothing to do with his failings as a connoisseur. His gifts were as an administrator and, above all, as a communicator. As director of the National Gallery during the war years he saw to the safety of the collection and yet kept the gallery alive as a cultural focal point in a London battered by bombing. He brought a group of leading British artists together – prominent among them Henry Moore, John Piper and Graham Sutherland – who seemed to express some kind of national essence.  During the war they made works that successfully heroised and commemorated the national ordeal, drawing on pre-Modernist roots in the English Romantic tradition. This development did a great deal to reconcile a previously sceptical middle-class public to the ideas and theories of the 20th century Modern Movement.

     

    Above all, he wrote books that communicated ideas and theories about art in clear, non-specialist terms– The Nude and Landscape into Art are cases in point. And he engaged with the new mass medium of television. The Nude, with its crucial distinction between ‘the naked’ and ‘the nude’, remains influential today, though it was published as long ago as 1956. Some scholar needs perhaps to go through it now, and calibrate what it says with the rise of Pop Art, where representations of the nude play no inconsiderable a part. Are Pop nudes ‘ideal forms’? In a way, yes, they are. Come to think of it the sugar sweet Renoir nude that Clark once owned takes on a different inflection if one examines it in the light cast by the Pop movement.

    Most of all, Clark embraced the new medium of television. The marriage was at first sight a curious one. While being obviously at ease in front of the camera, he lost no trace of his grandee manner. In fact, it qualified him to tell us what he was confident we didn’t know.

    Looked at now, Clark’s conception of ‘Civilisation’ seems limited. It is essentially Western, though he had an early taste for Japanese art – Japanese prints were almost the first things he collected. André Malraux’s concept of an ‘imaginary museum’ or ‘museum without walls’, embracing all visual cultures, was first presented to the public in 1947. Clark’s Civilisation series began transmission as late as 1969, a whole generation after that.

    It is possible to see Civilisation as a very successful attempt made by the then existing establishment to retain control of the cultural narrative. A similar sort of attempt, though with somewhat less success, is currently being made by the collective of Tate galleries. One is the very space where the exhibition devoted to Clark took place.

    Something that has changed quite radically since the reign of Clark is the way in which ideas about art – indeed ideas about everything – are communicated. Television centralised communication, but its period of total domination was remarkably short. The Internet has instigated a rapid devolution, a change from the hierarchical to the democratically lateral. Our taste in presenters has changed too. In October 2013 Grayson Perry gave the first of the most recent series of Reith Lectures, one of the BBC’s most sacred occasions. It was recorded, sure enough, in the equally sacred halls of Tate Modern. Perry was as much at ease as his predecessor Sir Kenneth, while performing a very similar task, and addressing, one is permitted to think, a similar audience. The visual aspect of the event did at first seem quite different. What you got when you looked at the screen was not a grandee in a Saville Row suit, but the Widow Twanky in her best frock. Shut your eyes, however, and the slightly posh accent was exactly the same. Clark’s legacy lives on, despite the evolution of technology.

  • Matisse at the Tate: cut and paste

    Edward Lucie-Smith admires an ambitious exhibition but with the reservation that something is missing

    The big new exhibition of Matisse’s Cut-Outs at Tate Modern in London is, certainly on the face of it, everything that a major museum of Modern and Contemporary Art should be doing. It is beautifully presented, very professionally curated, has an extremely thorough, excellently illustrated catalogue and has been greeted with ecstatic reviews. It is thronged with visitors, but fortunately not to the point of suffocation (as was the case, alas, with the National Gallery’s recent Leonardo da Vinci exhibition). The rooms in which it is shown are big enough to allow the visitor enough space to view the exhibits from a variety of distances, and the works themselves are often on a suitably grand scale.

    I departed from it thinking that here was exactly the kind of show that an institution of this kind ought to present. Tate Modern is, currently, the most visited gallery of modern art in the world, outstripping both the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Pompidou in Paris, although, to be frank, its own permanent collection is not on a par with the stellar holdings of either of these rivals. It was only after I left that doubts began to make themselves felt, and I’m not sure that these doubts are the fault of Tate Modern or of the organizers of the occasion. Perhaps they are inherent in our present cultural situation, where the creative force of the Modern Movement seems to be inexorably dwindling away.

    Just over 113 years ago, in November 1910, the Grafton Galleries in London opened a show called Manet and the Post-Impressionists. It was apparently the first time that the term ‘Post-Impressionist’ was used in English. Matisse, who had sprung to fame at the Paris Salon des Indépendants of 1905, was one of the artists included. The British press was excoriating about the exhibition. The anonymous reviewer in The Times of London commented that the work shown “throws away all that the long-developed skills of past artists had acquired and bequeathed. It begins all over again – and stops where a child would stop.” How times have changed!

    Yet it is immediately obvious that in some respects Matisse’s work during his last years did not move very far from what was shown in Paris in 1905 and in 1910 and in London. The famous Luxe, calme et volupté, shown at the Indépendants in 1905, and now in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, is a very recognizable ancestor of the compositions with nudes shown in London.

    What changed was the technique. The compositions were no longer painted, they were made with pieces of cut paper. Matisse did the cutting, and the papers he used were painted in gouache to his exact specifications. Once cut, they were pinned in place according to his directions.

    Matisse had already experimented with designs made from cut and pasted paper in the 1930s – the projects he tackled included decors for the ballet and maquettes for book covers. When he did these collage was already long established as one of the typically ‘modernist’ methods of image making. Picasso and other Cubists had made radically experimental use of it. Collage techniques had also been extensively employed by amateur artists throughout the 19th century. Interestingly the word ‘collage’ seems to be absent from the catalogue. Matisse was not completely an innovator in this phase of his work.

    The real starting point for the Cut-Outs was the serious illness that Matisse suffered from in 1941. He was operated on for duodenal cancer and nearly died from resultant complications. As a result he was unable to stand up for long periods, and had to make art while seated in a wheel chair, from another specially adapted chair, or reclining in his bed. Using scissors and cut paper he could, with the help of assistants, continue to create work on an ambitious scale.

    Because of Matisse’s long-established celebrity the process of making these works and the various stages they went through were extensively documented photographically. The catalogue published in connection with the current Tate Modern exhibition has a very rich series of illustrations of this kind, made by various photographers, some working under the artist’s direction, and some not.

    If one reads the Tate catalogue attentively, it is possible to detect a certain note of nostalgic regret that appears when these records of the images in situ in Matisse’s several studios are discussed. What the authors of the various essays seem to long for is permission to hail Matisse as the pioneer, perhaps even the God the Father, of the current Post Modernist tendency to promote installation as the pinnacle or ne plus ultra of late Modernist and Post-Modernist creativity. The problem is that they can’t quite bring themselves to say this in so many words. As it happens, their silence is justified by what one actually sees at the Tate.

    Wonderfully decorative as many of them are, it is clear that a certain loss of freshness took place when the Cut-Outs were removed from Matisse’s studio and made ready for public exhibition. All too often, one feels as if one is looking at an exquisitely beautiful, immaculately preserved corpse. There is another problem as well. The aged Matisse, armed with a pair of scissors, confidently slicing through the sheets of coloured paper prepared for him, was wonderfully skilful at simplifying natural forms – nude female bodies, birds, fish, leaves, even algae floating in water. Yet the compositions only occasionally add up to something more than decoration. Some extra dimension of emotion is missing.

    Towards the end of the presentation there is something not technically a Cut-Out – a stained glass window called Christmas Eve, commissioned by Time Inc. in New York. The composition is curiously perfunctory – banal symbolism for a safely ecumenical Christmas card.

    Despite the fame of the Matisse-designed chapel at Vence – maquettes for its windows are also included in the show – religious emotion was clearly not part of Matisse’s temperament. With this exhibition ‘What you see is what you get’. Exactly what you get – don’t ask for more. I left thinking it was 99% wonderful, and regretting the missing one per cent perhaps more than I should have done.

  • Painting Now – an alternative view

    Inspired by the lacklustre, boring effort of the Tate in their exhibition Painting Now, Edward Lucie-Smith nominates his own five painters

    Contemporary painting, according to many critics and curators, is a dying art form. In the big Biennales it gets pushed aside by more ‘relevant’ forms of expression – installation, video, achingly fashionable performance art. We are encouraged to go to the major official galleries not to look but to think. In other words, to have conversations about economics with the likes of Tino Seghal and his acolytes (winner of the Golden Lion at the most recent Venice Biennale, then narrowly pipped for this year’s Turner Prize). In Seghal’s case, you could even get cash for participating – £2 for engaging in conversation, and thus being part of the show. There’s no way you can get paid just for looking at a painting. As an activity, this still ranks as self-indulgence, rather than as self-improvement.

    It’s therefore been interesting, in more ways than one, to look at one of Tate Britain’s current exhibitions, demurely entitled Painting Now. Interesting to see the works themselves. Interesting to note the reactions of various reviewers. More interesting still to fantasize about what might have been. For the fact is that the art of painting has probably never been more alive in Britain than it is today. London’s studios are thronged with interesting young artists, and probably the majority of these are practitioners of this supposedly effete way of making art. If any one doubts this, they should look at the first volume of the iBook called 100 London Artists, which I recently put together in collaboration with Zavier Ellis, one of London’s savviest younger dealers. There are lots more who don’t live and work in the metropolis. You’ll find worthy contenders, already with established careers and reputations, almost wherever you look in contemporary Britain – in Glasgow, for example, in Liverpool, in Manchester and in Wales. They belong to an art world that is growing more and more isolated from that of our official institutions, but they are certainly not starving miserably in garrets. They hold exhibitions, they attract supportive collectors and they exist successfully within the framework of a capitalist society, where goods are produced in exchange for money. Which of course has been the basic pattern of the art market, at least since the later years of the 16th century. It’s the sort of world, economically, that Rembrandt and Vermeer were familiar with, not to mention our own Turner and Constable.

    The problem is not any lack of talented artists who are practitioners of painting, but the way in which the social context has become skewed. There are, I think, two reasons for this, rather than just one. The first is the slightly unholy alliance between the world of ‘official art’, as represented by museums and increasingly numerous and ambitious biennials, and art that is supposedly innovatory. The avant-garde has triumphed, and the price of its success is that it has lost its mojo. It has become the pacificatory element in a ‘bread and circuses’ culture. Its job is to entertain – to keep our minds off the more depressing aspects of contemporary society, even when apparently criticizing it. It has to embrace a slightly fictional credo of democratization, despite something we all know, but don’t always like to say, which is that museums of contemporary art remain the playgrounds of the middle-class. Painting Now at Tate Britain is a case in point. The price of a standard ticket is £10. This reduces to £5 if you are in possession of a National Art Pass, which will cost you £53 a year for a singleton membership, reducing to £25 if you are under 25. The current National Minimum Wage for adults is £6.31 per hour. For 18-20 year olds it reduces to £5.03, and for 16-17 years olds it is £3.72, The job-seekers allowance is £56.80 per week. You can visit both the Tates for free, but not their supposedly cutting-edge exhibitions. If you are in a crap job, or out of work, these events are pretty certainly too much of a luxury.

    The other factor is the ever-increasing emphasis on personal charisma, which, I think, at least partially explains the current fashion for Performance Art. A successful artist – the kind of successful artist who increasingly finds a showcase at major institutions – does not necessarily have to produce, only to be, like a certain type of medieval saint. With the decline of traditional faiths, contemporary art has become a kind of alternative religion. Yet this doesn’t alter the fact that, while an artist of this new charismatic type may convincingly display the stigmata, those eager to take a closer look at him or her usually need to have a bit of cash to jingle in their pockets. Medieval societies were more down to earth. If you enjoyed performances replete with subversive messages, you got to watch Dance of Death masquerades in your local churchyard. With any luck, you could also encounter an out-to-lunch high-as-a-kite visionary holy man right there in the street.

    Given the situation I have outlined here, it is not surprising that critical responses to Painting Now have been somewhat confused. In his piece for the Sunday Times, Waldemar Januszczak began on a high note, saying “The curation and concept of this exhibition is fantastic and we wish other institutions would take gambles on shows like this…” Yet the review concludes with a savage parting shot: “This, then is a collection of painters who paint for the wrong reasons: not because they feel the joy or exhilaration of paint, but because using it is a means to an end.”

    Richard Dorment, in the Daily Telegraph, took an almost diametrically opposite route. He begins where Januszczak leaves off: “What strikes me about these five artists is how suspicious they are about the expressive possibilities of painting, how they distance themselves from their subjects, damp down emotion, and refuse to use colour, texture or dynamic brushwork to seduce the viewer with an easy visual fix.” But then he changes tack: “I’d call them cerebral, but that’s not quite right. Nearer to the mark is the word integrity. This is painting you can respect.”

    What does this all add up to? Basically, if you take the two reviews together, a sub-text emerges. What the two panjandrums are telling us is this: “Excuse me, folks, I really don’t want to say it outright in the columns of my big-circulation newspaper, but this is a thoroughly boring show. Not exactly bad, but very limited and – er, boring. Now will somebody please bring me a stiff drink.”

    Reader, I went to see Painting Now, and believe me, this reaction was spot on.

    Lucy McKenzie, also singled out by Januszczak, is the most engaging artist in the exhibition – apart that is from a galumphing and rather tacky installation in the middle of her space. The booklet informs one that this “painted architectural structure [is] a model of the marble cladding of the central living room of the Villa Müller in Prague, designed by the Austrian architect Adolf Loos (1870-1933).” To which the only relevant reaction is ‘So what?’ The rest of her offerings are smaller but much more skilful examples of the ancient art – or craft – of trompe l’oeil.

    The interesting thing here is that stories about, and indeed debates about, trompe l’oeil effects form part of the very earliest literature about painting. The Historia Naturalis of Pliny the Elder, who died in the eruption that destroyed Pompeii, contains a famous story about a contest, long before Pliny’s own time, between the two Ancient Greek artists Zeuxis and Parrhasius, as to which was the more gifted artist. Zeuxis painted a still life of grapes so realistically that the birds flew down to peck them. Parrhasius then produced a work that was apparently concealed by a curtain. When Zeuxis asked him to pull the curtain aside, it turned out that this was in fact a painted illusion. Zeuxis conceded defeat, admitting that “I have deceived the birds, but Parrhasius has deceived Zeuxis.”

    There is a modern footnote to this story. Discussing it in a seminar held not so recently – in 1964 – the innovative French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan suggested that it represents the fundamental difference between human and animal cognition – animals are attracted by superficial appearances, while human beings are enticed by what is apparently hidden.

    It does, however, occur to me to apply Lacan’s analogy in a different way. Januszczak, in his review, offered a fairly deadly quote from the catalogue of the show. Here it is again: “As painting is no longer in a position of autonomy — alone and apart — this also entails a move away from an idea of medium specificity, defining a practice as ‘painting’ or ‘film’, and towards a post-medium age, what a recent conference at Harvard examined as the ‘medium under the condition of its de-specification’ ”

    One glance tells you that this is a prime example of contemporary curator-speak. It is designed to hide meaning rather than to clarify an aesthetic and philosophical situation. Does it, however, arouse curiosity, like Parrhasius’s fictive curtain? I fear not.

    It does, however, offer clues why Painting Now has such a blank, repressive effect. It is in fact an elitist show that attempts to convince the audience that it is, on the contrary, populist, because that is the remit that our great official galleries now have to follow. To translate: this is the condition that central government imposes when it gives them the money. Curators (of a certain sort) feel that painting is past it, no longer viable, hardly worthy of their notice. To survive, they think, it has to ape, however clumsily, the supposed higher values of more contemporary forms of ‘art’ – the inverted commas because this art, like the activity of Tino Seghal, whose contribution to the recent Turner prize show I cited earlier, may not be visual in any recognisable sense, while painting remains stubbornly addressed to the eye. What I carried away from Painting Now was a sense that the organisers – no fewer than three curators for just five artists – were muttering to themselves “I wish we didn’t have to do this kind of stupid show, but the public, dammit, persists in liking this old-fashioned past-it stuff, so let’s make it as close to respectable avant-garde intellectualising as we can get.”

    I’m conscious, at this point, that the retort I am likely to provoke here is “Do you really think, given the present situation in British art, that you could do any better?” Well, yes, I believe I can – although the show I’m now going to propose is most unlikely to find itself on the walls of any gallery here in Britain. If it were to be presented abroad, I think well-informed spectators on the continent of Europe, or in the United States, would immediately recognise it as offering a fairly convincing image of what is happening in British painting today. For the time being, however, an imaginary museum in my head, and perhaps in that of the reader, will have to suffice. The five artists I now suggest all seem currently significant on the British art scene, though they are so for different reasons. They are, of course, not the only possible choices, but they do give an idea about how rich the British art scene currently is, and what some of its key preoccupations are. One thing it is not is timid and repressed, which is what the Tate Britain show benightedly suggests.

    My first pick for such an event would be the work of Charming Baker. Baker is a recent phenomenon who seems to have passed the Tate and its acolytes by, while having a very considerable impact elsewhere. His career has been a slow burn. He was born in 1964, and thus belongs to exactly the same generation as the now declining YBAs. After working for a while as a manual labourer, he enrolled at Central St Martin’s, and later held a post there as a lecturer. For many years, however, his main source of income was derived from working as a commercial artist. Things changed for him when he attracted the attention of an American management company whose main business was not art but popular music. Since then he has done a series of high profile, hit-and-run type exhibitions, usually lasting just a few days. The most recent took place last March, at Milk Studios in Los Angeles, and lasted just three days. Milk Studios is a converted aircraft hangar, and describes itself as a creative hub, standing “at the crossroads of the fashion, music, photography and film worlds”. Usually he sells out, though Tate Britain, tellingly enough, has yet to acquire a work, even a print, by an artist who has attracted many of the most savvy collectors of contemporary art.

    The basic attractions of Charming Baker’s work are easy enough to see. He is extremely fluent and inventive technically, but uses a wide array of skills with wit, combined with lightness of touch. He is, like many contemporary artists, interested in appropriation, but never in the rather crude fashion exemplified by Richard Prince’s versions of billboards advertising Marlborough cigarettes or Glenn Brown’s enlarged copies of SF book covers. What he does is to trawl the vast ocean of the Internet, finding unconsidered trifles, and magically transforming them. For example, a photo of a dead cat – road kill – found on some teenager’s web site – is magically transformed so as to bring the creature to life again.

    My second pick would be Iain Andrews (b. 1974). Andrews is an example of the increasing vitality of art outside the all-devouring metropolis. He did not train at a London art school, and now lives and works in Manchester. He too is an appropriationist of a sort. He describes his creative process in this way: “My paintings begin as a dialogue with an image from art history – a painting by an Old Master that may be rearranged or used as a starting point from which to playfully but reverently deviate.”

    In addition to working as a painter, he also works as an art psychotherapist with emotionally damaged children. It is not surprising to find him saying this: “My recent work is concerned with the struggle to capture the relationship between the spirit and the flesh, incongruous subjects that are expressed in my work through the conflict of high religious themes with sensuous painterly marks. I look to the tradition of great religious painting throughout art history, and often reference particular images through my work. This is done in a way that plays between the borders of figuration and abstraction, and hopefully presents the audience with new possibilities of viewing the work. Paintings are often stained or blurred to create the effect of an image viewed through the faded layers of time and history and to further disrupt the literalness of what is depicted.”

    For me his work has resonances that are completely absent from anything I saw in Tate Britain’s Painting Now.

    My third choice is the work of Joe Machine (b. 1973). Machine, born Joe Stokes, was nurtured by the Medway Arts scene – a provincial avant-garde entity that originally sprang out of the Punk Rock upsurge of the 1970s. Tracey Emin, unsinkable queen of the YBAs, came from the same background. Machine is a founder member of the Stuckist Group, inveterate opponents of Tate’s self-congratulatory Turner Prize. He, like, Iain Andrews, has strong links with the world of therapy. After a troubled adolescence and early manhood, including a spell in Borstal, he has used his art as a way of recognising and controlling his own demons. He has recently produced two remarkable series of paintings – one about the Book of Genesis “as the account of a failure”, the other about the Russian Revolution, also considered as a failure.

    Machine belongs to a couple of important traditions in the history of British culture. One is that of radical provincial efforts to challenge the complacency of the centre. The Medway Scene was the successor of the Liverpool Scene of the 1960s. Both were as much about poetry and pop music as about involvement with the visual arts. The other is that Britain has always produced powerful Outsider artists, with little or no formal training. Francis Bacon, now the darling of the great auction rooms, had no training of this sort. Lucian Freud had very little. The artist Joe Machine most reminds me of, however, especially in the Genesis series, is William Blake. And he, like Blake, is also a poet.

    My roster of artists – five, to equal the number whose work is now on show at the Tate – is completed by two figurative painters, John Stark (b. 1979) and Emma Bennett (b. 1974). Both are intensely interested in the work of the Old Masters. Stark says, for example: “Zurbaran’s monks in meditation have always struck me. They are mirrors which I literally fall into, and they become Avatar. David Teniers alluring paintings of caves with Saints in penitence fighting off demons and alchemists toiling away in their grottos have always captivated my imagination. I’m intensely drawn to the Flemish painter Joachim Patinir and his depictions of St. Jerome as a scholar in study, a hermit retired to the rocky wilderness of the Syrian desert in search of divine consciousness and sublime union. The landscapes are like models of earth, maps on kilter, a stage for the narrative of existence.”

    The press release for a recent solo exhibition held in Milan declares: “The pursuit of truth through the creation or perception of these works leads us towards an experience of the true meaning of occult: that which is clandestine, recondite, and perhaps inherently unknowable. Here, within foreign lands, Stark becomes the foreigner offering us images that operate between immersion and reinterpretation, fragmentation and the whole, and which ultimately confront the apparent self with the necessity of its dependence upon the vertiginously unfathomable.”

    Bennett makes faithful transcriptions of things borrowed from Dutch 17th century still life and marine painters, presented in fragmented form against a black background, with occasional disruptive interventions borrowed from the 20th century Abstract Expressionists.

    Both painters use their borrowings to create fascinating and slightly troubling metaphysical universes. Bennett says: “I describe my paintings as personal explorations of the emotions associated with death and the fact that we die, yet also as contemplations of the value of life and of living things, and – again – as amusing explorations of paint and the act of painting.”

    I admire their work, just as I admire that of the other three painters I have cited, because it resonates in my imagination. This is exactly what the paintings presented in Tate Britain’s Painting Now fail to do. There is also the fact that it very obviously reflects a much broader and more complex cultural situation than anything that exhibition has to offer.

  • London: the place for a painter

    This article is essentially a follow-up to a piece by The Jackdaw’s editor David Lee, published in The Times on July 25th of this year. In it he detailed just what a fiasco the Arts Council’s contribution to an otherwise successful Olympic year was with £5.4 million spent, and nothing to show for it.

    “Twelve months on,” he noted, “[and] we can evaluate more clearly what we received for a sum that approaches the council’s entire visual arts budget. The short answer is nothing; nothing memorable or of enduring merit – it was all frittered away on trivia. Not a single painting, print, sculpture or ceramic in any gallery. Not a mural or stained glass window in any civic building. No worthy public sculpture. Not even a sprawling installation or soporific video destined for a gallery warehouse. The sum total is three crocheted lions at Twycross Zoo and a boat made from 1200 donated wooden objects currently moored… somewhere.”

    As he also noted, it’s remarkable that this series of abject failures has generated so little concern. Clearly no one is going to be held responsible. The standard reaction, in the cosy world of Britain’s culturati, has been a shrug of the shoulders and a murmured aside: “Poor things, they didn’t really have that much to work with – they did their best.”

    Much of the support material for the Arts Council’s Cultural Olympiad is still up on the Council web site. What one notices about it now is a certain jolly Blue Peter quality, a note of “won’t this be fun for the kiddies”. Also, elsewhere, a note of Pooterish self-satisfaction. This is how the Cultural Olympiad was originally heralded:

    “The London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games will be a global event with enormous potential to help deliver our mission of great art for everyone. We have been closely involved in the development of the Cultural Olympiad programme since the bid stage. As a result of our investment, we hope to achieve three things: increased participation in the arts; increased profile for our artists on the world stage; and new collaborations that push boundaries, and leave a legacy of a strengthened sector.”

    Yeah, sure – look at the results: fiasco on every count.

    The context within which this failure, or series of failures, took place is fascinating – also in many respects bizarre and unsettling, though it gives some room for hope. The top end of the market for contemporary art remained strong throughout the early years of the global recession, though some elements are now showing signs of weakness. Sales in China are down, despite a continuing push by major auction houses to find new clients. In mid June, Christie’s announced that it would be the first international fine art auction company to be given a license to operate independently in mainland China. Their first sales in Shanghai will take place this autumn. “In addition to fine art auctions,” they announced, “we will also bring exhibitions, art forums, private sales and other exciting events to Shanghai, offering collectors in China a more direct access to our global network and expertise.”

    The big international art stars, some of them British, on the whole continue to flourish, supported by what one can only describe as warehouse collectors – hoarders and accumulators of work by a relatively small group of ‘approved’ contemporary artists, though it is increasingly noticeable that most of those who reliably make huge prices are now safely dead: Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Roy Lichtenstein, Jean-Michel Basquiat. There was a delicious incident last May when the extremely rich London diamond dealer Laurence Graff (net worth $4.3 billion according to Forbes) fought off considerable saleroom competition to buy a Lichtenstein canvas entitled Woman with Flowered Hat for $56.1 million including fees. The painting, dated 1963, is in fact just a fairly faithful copy of a Picasso of the same title dated 1939-40, though now with cartoon-strip dots. The Picasso itself probably wouldn’t have fetched quite as much.

    There are, nevertheless, a few signs of cracks in the cement. Damien Hirst, once a darling of this market, is opening a hugely ambitious exhibition in Qatar this coming October, even bigger and grander than the one he held in Olympic Year at Tate Modern. However, as Jonathan Brown, once a big fan of Damien, reported in The Guardian in November of last year: “According to figures from the international art company Artnet quoted in an article in Bloomberg Businessweek works by Hirst produced in his most lucrative period between 2005 and the £111m direct sale of his art in 2008 have sold for nearly 30 per cent less than their original purchase price. Since 2009 one in three of the 1,700 pieces offered at auction has failed to sell at all.”

    There are other indications of stress. Hirst has parted company with the powerful Gagosian Gallery, which used to represent him worldwide. Recently, both the press and the Internet have been strangely silent about Hirst’s project for a personal museum in Vauxhall. This was announced with a great flourish of publicity in May of last year. It is meant to open in 2014. The most recent mention I can find on the Web dates from as long ago as October 2012. There is currently no mention of the museum on Hirst’s elaborate personal web site, either in the News section or the Projects section, or elsewhere.

    Meanwhile the Tate, which was quite a faithful supporter of Hirst during the boom years, and which owns a not inconsiderable number of examples of his work, though usually fairly trivial ones, has been seized with a huge enthusiasm for Performance Art. One can quite see the rationale for this – it is in intention populist. No inconvenient legacy of objects is attached to the programme – one gets the impression that the Tate’s storerooms are bursting at the seams. Each Performance Art event is just that – an event, which supplies a springboard for another burst of publicity, and makes the institution look active not passive, virtuous and involved with society.

    Cultural Olympiad launch

    The problem is that this initiative, though it hasn’t fallen quite as catastrophically flat as the Cultural Olympiad, has failed to catch fire with the public. If you are looking for ‘official’ successes then the German-Punjabi (but born in Britain) Tino Sehgal, who did an ambitious interactive performance piece at Tate Modern last year, is the hottest thing there is: Golden Lion at the current Venice Biennale, nomination for the Turner Prize, five-star review from The Guardian. Yet major public enthusiasm has been lacking. Maybe the reason for this was nailed down in another (but only three-star) review, by Alastair Sooke in the Daily Telegraph. “There is an atmosphere of ritual, “ he said, “but the rules of the game are not apparent.”

    This, perhaps without the writer being completely aware of it, puts a finger on an aspect of contemporary art that I find disturbing. It is well on its way to becoming a substitute religion, with museums as its cathedrals (Tate Modern, Pompidou, MOMA in New York), curators as its priesthood, and charismatic or would-be charismatic artists as its shamans and miracle workers. The process started with Joseph Beuys and reached a recent peak of publicity with Marina Abramovic’s 2010 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Random visitors to the show were invited to sit on a hard chair directly opposite the artist, seated on a similar chair, and to stare at her for as long as they liked, though they were forbidden to talk. Many of the participants – but not the artist – were so moved by the experience that they burst into tears.

    Today you don’t have to go barefoot and in rags to make a useful reputation doing this kind of thing. Living in a modern capitalist society you can retain your charismatic aura while wearing Prada and Armani. You can make serious dosh without having to hide the fact. No need to paint the stigmata on your palms with a bit of red nail polish. Abramovic, for example, sold a Soho loft for $3.2 million in June 2012, and this year a two-family townhouse in the same trendy part of New York for just over $3 million. Nice work if you can get it.

    Given what has just been said here, it may seem surprising when I go on to say that London seems, at the present moment, to be the most vibrant art city in the world – a present day equivalent of Paris in the 1920s. One reason for this is that it has the most complete roster of facilities – world-class museums, major commercial galleries, art fairs catering to every level, from the big names to artists just at the beginning of their careers, who are trying to find representation. It also has other necessary facilities, though some of these are under threat. Artists can still find affordable studios in the less popular parts of the capital, because London is so spread out. This situation is, however, under threat – there is a growing exodus. There are major art colleges in London, but often staffed with people who are better at theories expressed in immaculate art-speak than they are at passing on skills. In fact, in some institutions there is hostility to passing on skills of any sort. The cry is “Oh, we have to let them find themselves!” Do the mentors now, after several generations of this kind of thing, have any practical skills of their own to pass on?

    Nevertheless, when one looks at London it is visibly better equipped than possible rivals. Berlin has cheaper studios and a city government that encourages artists to settle there – but not a strong commercial scene. In New York, the once vibrant Soho art scene is long gone. Its loft apartments, smartened up, are in the hands of A-list film stars, escaping from Hollywood, or the heroes and heroines of high-end couture. Abramovic sold her Soho town house to Ricardo Tisci, who designs for Givenchy, and her loft to Melissa Ormond, a president at Madison Square Garden Entertainment. Artists are lucky if they can find a place they can afford in some corner of Brooklyn or the Bronx. As for Paris, where’s that? It’s hard enough to find a French artist who is a major contemporary figure. Harder still to find a real community of younger artists in Paris. There are still some older ones who live in the Bateau-Lavoir, though most of it burned down in 1970.

    The really fascinating thing when one examines the London art community is the way it diverges from the official or bureaucratic view of what is happening, or ought to be happening. The Arts Council may lust after a certain kind of populism, framed in their own, unconsciously condescending terms. Tracey and Damien may still be capable of causing a flurry in the tabloids, or be ready to star in an issue of Hello! Their credibility among the younger generation of London artists has long departed. It’s not so much that their juniors dislike what they do – it’s more that they feel no real connection with the once dominant YBAs. “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” as the novelist L.P. Hartley once said. In this case a country where the 1997 Sensation! show looked  wonderfully new and exciting. Three years from now there will be kids starting in art school who weren’t born when Sensation! happened.

    It’s the fate of all once-established avant-gardes to be overtaken and left behind. The one constant in the art world we now have is a perpetual appetite for change. Radical change is what seems to be happening now. Zavier Ellis, of the gallery Charlie Smith London, who is the best informed person I know when it comes to surveying the younger end of the London art world, and I have been preparing an iBook called 100 London Artists. For reasons of space and convenience,‘100 London Artists’ has been divided into two volumes, each featuring the work of 50 artists, mostly in their twenties and thirties. It should appear in time for the upcoming Frieze art fair. These fifty artists are all painters – not because we have any particular bias in favour of painting, as opposed to other forms of visual expression, but because there is now such an abundance of gifted young painters at work here in London. So much so that it has been really difficult to choose. Zavier and I are the technological radicals, choosing to make a digital book rather than something in print on paper. Our subjects have found something new – to be exact, many new things – in this most traditional of mediums. Far be it from us to contradict their radically creative impulses. This number of painters also implies the existence of solid, if non-official, financial support. Much of this isn’t British. London has found a new way to sell to the world.

    Edward Lucie-Smith

  • Ai Weiwei at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

    Such is Ai Weiwei’s predictable status as a heroic dissident, that he could select an object blindfold and if he then exhibited it under his name it would automatically be said to be ‘about’ oppression or, as is more frequent these days, the individual’s place in the collective.

    The recently refurbished chapel in the grounds of the park (see illustration), which seems to be breeding new roads and pathways through what used to be naturally and pleasurably wild countryside, has been renovated to make an agreeable new exhibition room lit from one end by a grand Palladian window. Inside, filling the main chapel area, are 40 wooden chairs of charming rustic design, each of which has occupied, one imagines, pride of place in some Chinese home of the 18th or 19th century. The seats and armrests are worn smooth with age and use. Though similar each is different. We are here trawling the same territory as Bernd and Hilla Becher, the German photographers who also identified variance in similarity. It is a lovely collection of chairs, make no mistake, although one suspects any two of them would have served the job well enough. This is a typical ploy of the conceptual artist where the objects breed to fill the space available with no addition to the profundity of the work. Outside the chapel is an ugly iron tree (above) made of cast sections from different trees bolted together in what, we are informed, is a traditional Chinese manner – again disparate bits making up a whole. The chairs are prettier and offer more to look at.

    Also showing in the Park, dotted throughout the grounds, are even uglier lumps of material by “important international sculpture” Ursula von Rydingsgard who wouldn’t recognise an ‘important’ sculpture, or a beautiful one, if she surprised herself by opening her eyes. Christ only knows how much it cost to ship this substantial tonnage of crap from New York but it wasn’t worth the effort. She was born in Germany under the Nazis, so that’s alright then.

    In the large hangar on the other side of the vale beyond the lake are works from the Arts Council collection housed in a shed next door – no transport costs here. Called Uncommon Ground it is a conspectus of fashionable Land Art from the 1960s onwards. If you’ve seen the documentation of Richard Long’s and Hamish Fulton’s assorted walks and rock-shiftings you’ll have the measure of this lot. Plenty of prose, not even a phrase of poetry. Only Mark Boyle’s and David Nash’s work were alive in this mausoleum. Long’s work is an epiphenomenon of its age, a mere curiosity without the form or visual thrill to make it timeless.

    David Lee

  • Public art: Richard Wilson’s slipstream

    Richard Wilson’s 77-tonne, £2.5 million sculpture Slipstream in Terminal 2 at Heathrow looks better in small, professionally taken photographs. In the flesh it disappoints. Looking more like a plane crash or an imploded barrage balloon than the rolling Spitfire which is claimed to have inspired it, it is so huge and so easily disappears into the building that many passengers walk past it without noticing, which defeats its stated purpose to stop passengers in their tracks. Nobody breaks step to look at it not least because a busy airport is an inappropriate space for sculpture requiring not just attention but a walk around it. And if you spotted it, short of identifying a connection with aircraft construction, you would have to be told what it was there for and what it signified, for no way might you work it out from observation. Indeed it is too large for its space, and there is no one vantage point from which it can be understood clearly. At the blunt end its shapes seem unresolved even coarse. Like many new buildings, the Lowry Centre in Salford Quays comes to mind, the flimsy aluminium panels covering it are bent and rippled from being badly riveted together lending it an amateurish appearance. If nothing else it makes you realize how well-made aircraft are; the boilersuits of Seattle and Hawarden would laugh out loud if shown this effort. Formally it makes no sense and progresses randomly, on and on, from one passage to another.

    Like many oversized sculptures it implies the nasty decadence of an age impressed by scale in which demands for something more than the merely superficial are derided for their lack of brash ambition. This is an unpleasant object suspended in an atrium which would be more agreeable without it. With this work the elephant in the room is meaningless public art.

    Richard Wilson is a surprising artist, but this baggy mess defeated him. It landed stillborn and perhaps of all his works it is, unfortunately, the one which will last the longest.

    David Lee

  • Serpentine Gallery: charity begins at home

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    The ever so charitable Serpentine, which gives the public indigestible quantities of what it can’t stomach, held an annual summer bash for all its rich mates, and, blow me down, guess who deigned to show up. He’s probably not been at the gallery since last year’s hooley, but he broke into a heavy work schedule abroad – very heavy don’t yer know – in order to attend. After someone had reminded him where his desk was and the location of his private lavatory since the new building work, he had his picture taken (above) with co-director Dorelia Lipstick-Cleavage and some dwarf Bolivian gatecrasher caught panhandling the stars for change. We’re referring, of course, to Hans-Uber Obrist, who gets paid more than the director of Tate Britain to do fuck all except write unreadable books and curate exhibitions for continental galleries. You can tell by his specs he thinks he’s clever but someone really ought to teach the Swiss slob to eat without splattering food all over his suit – Sir Les Patterson finds his gob more easily.

    Typical, isn’t it, that the lazy bastard should finally turn up only to sup fizz in what, given the stick insects in attendance, must have looked like a very challengingly immersive conceptual art stunt about eating disorders. (They didn’t bother organising nibbles this time as last year cleaners were finding cocktail sausages behind the radiators for months afterwards.) And we have it on the best authority that the Obrist phaeton was waiting to rush him back to Heathrow for a red-eye special to Zurich, although he had trouble locating it among the cavalcade of other limos. What an exemplary giving enterprise the Serpentine has become.

    All of the above is, you know well enough, grossly unfair as the gallery’s summer party is a well-known fundraiser … for charity. It raises funds to, well, to put on exhibitions by the world’s wealthiest artists and dealers who couldn’t possibly afford to pay for the exhibitions themselves. And when directors are awarded 50% pay increases in a recession you need to devise ingenious methods to raise funds. And how better to do this than by rattling cans in front of celebrities so desperate to have their photos taken they’d turn up to the opening of a manhole. So let’s hear it for the philanthropic ethos of the Serpentine.

    See you next year Hans, if you’re not too busy.

    David Lee

     

  • BBC arts coverage (part 34)

    Two months ago, having been criticised for their useless visual arts coverage, which tends to be levelled at children and others of grotesque collective ignorance, the BBC promised us a raft of excellent arts programmes. Perhaps things were looking up.

    One of these has now hit the screen … with a splat. The organisation has clearly learned nothing from the criticism levelled against them. It’s more of the same; windmill-gesturing commentators mouthing repetitive mantras who emphasise their earnestness by raising the volume and begging to be believed.

    The programme – and the Jackdaw only watched the first episode (life being literally too short in his case for the following instalments) rehearses the now familiar territory of the women artists in art history who, women claim, have been neglected and overlooked because of some terrible male subterfuge refusing to admit their quality. Seemingly, there is now an annual television programme dealing with this ‘travesty’. We know the names of the women artists before they are mentioned, for they are always the same ones. The source manual for all these series is Germaine Greer’s original book, The Obstacle Race, published decades ago. Greer ought to receive a royalty from programmes like this. Honestly, based on the title you could have written down the shooting schedule for this series in under five minutes.

    The programme was presented by social historian Professor Amanda Vickery who repeated herself throughout in order to get across her four soundbytes whilst falling foul of the criticism she meted out to others. Instead of showing work which would convince us that this neglected artist was unfairly overlooked we saw the Prof’s decent little arse disappearing around corners, up aisles, down passages, climbing staircases. In many instances it was probably more of a work of art than most of the stuff we were prevented from seeing because of the director’s obsession with it.

    In the case of Properzia de Rossi (1490-1530), a Bolognese sculptor, we were shown a couple of crudely carved cherry stones and a relief carving of Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife (left). By the standards of Renaissance sculpture this is a so-so carving of the quality you might find in a side corridor at the back of the V&A, and I think Professor Vickery would have admitted as much if she had been any kind of expert on the subject. Arms revolving uncontrollably like a compass at the north pole, she indicated a crudely carved arm (marked on the illustration) and claimed it had the power of a Michelangelo carving. Even small on the screen this was embarrassing bollocks.

    The programme fell foul of the BBC’s usual problem of showing too much of an over-enthusiastic presenter forced to behave like a second-hand car salesman. In one instance the crew went to the Prado to show us a Sofonisba Anguissola portrait but focused on the presenter stood next to it. We didn’t get an opportunity to take in properly the whole picture. By all means have the presenter talking over the visuals but for heaven’s sake let us see the picture so we can make a judgement.

    One assumes the series went on to discuss Artemisia Gentileschi, truly an accomplished painter and a fascinating individual, but most  interested viewers would not have stayed around to find out.

    Art, not presenters, is important.

    It is essential when claiming neglect for certain artists that we are shown work of a standard disabusing us of unfair preconceptions. Some women artists deserve better than this annually served up nonsense.

    David Lee