Tag: Comment

Laura Gascoigne
January/February 2019

The buzz of anticipation in the COL Ballroom in Davenport Iowa is audible, the audience murmurating like a flock of starlings; then the first twangs of an electric guitar tuning up, followed by a smoky voice: “I’m going to ask one question before we start: Are y’all experienced?” “Yeah!” roars the crowd, unleashing a 10-minute guitar solo of yowls, howls, skitterings, screeches and kerrangs. August 1968. How experienced was Hendrix? He was 25.

I don’t know whose idea it was to call the band The Jimi Hendrix Experience – you can bet it wasn’t Jimi’s – but they were ahead of the economic curve. It would be a generation before America woke up to potential value of ‘the experience economy’, identified in 1998 by B Joseph Pine II and James H Gilmore in a ground-breaking article in Harvard Business Review: “Commodities are fungible (no, me neither), goods tangible, services intangible, and experiences memorable.” (Their italics.)

Economic trickle-down effects, like leaks, always debouch in the wrong places and the experience economy has now seeped into the art gallery, where the trickle is threatening to become a flood. One of the first to open the stopcock has been Tate Modern with its immersive Turbine Hall installations, the most memorable to date being Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project, which reportedly drew over two million visitors in 2003. I don’t remember it, not for the reason I’ve forgotten the 1960s but because I was never actually there. Which made me doubly keen not to miss In Real Life, Tate Modern’s latest show by the Danish-Icelandic artist who “puts experience at the centre of his art”.

Eliasson really understands this game: his exhibition ticks all Pine and Gilmore’s boxes, beginning with its theme: “An effective theme,” they recommend, “is concise and compelling.” Where the Hard Rock Café has rock music and Planet Hollywood has Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Eliasson has climate change. His show was swarming with Gen Zedders taking selfies of their coloured silhouettes cast on the wall by a row of lighting gels, or dancing in rainbow mist falling from the ceiling. There was something for everyone: for the sober-minded, a wall of before-and-after shots of shrinking glaciers; for the frivolous, a spiral mirror tunnel in which to admire their kaleidoscopic reflections; for the mystically inclined, a longer tunnel of radiant fog that made me feel I’d died and gone to heaven. As fog art goes, the experience was feet-in-front-of-your-face ahead of Gormley’s miserable pea-souper at the Hayward in 2007. So top marks all round. But at £18 a ticket? 

When you own a press pass you forget how the other half lives, but I looked this up and then, for comparison, I looked up the prices of other London visitor experiences: London Sea Life Aquarium – £22; London Dungeon – £24; Jack the Ripper Walking Tour – £19 for two (you’d look suspicious going alone); The Slide at the ArcelorMittal Orbit – £33 for two; The London Bridge Experience – £36 for two (now half-price, and bring your own narwhal horn); Save Humanity: Cocktail Infused Escape Room for Two at the Grid – £60, for which you get to play with AI tools, do crazy puzzles and try to defeat an evil corporation (while enriching the one that dreamt this nonsense up).

OK, the Eliasson experience offers something these don’t: a sense of satisfaction at being on the right side of ice age history. But face it, this is a competition art can’t win. True, Gormley’s golden-ager adventure playground at the RA was heaving when I went, mostly with bewildered biddies navigating the energised spaces, negotiating the slabworks (I so prefer slobworks) and gawping in disbelief at a roomful of muddy water describing itself as “a kind of primordial soup of matter, space and time”. Gormley’s “invasion of the inside by the outside” may be a novelty worth £22 to Londoners while the Thames Barrier holds up, though probably not to residents of Tewkesbury where primordial soup is free at the point of delivery. There was a tunnel here too, a dark cuboid cloaca which I chose “to navigate around the outside” as I feared it might get clogged with costive biddies and Dyno-Rod might have to be called to flush us out. Such are the risks of “embodied experiences in art”, as they are now known.

Still, one can’t object to contemporary art installations being sold as visitor experiences, because if they’re not then what is the point of them? The trouble starts when the experience concept is applied to displays of traditional art. The National Gallery has ventured down this path with its immersive extravaganza Leonardo: Experience a Masterpiece, entered through a sort of Alpine pass constructed of mirror blocks prompting visitors to “explore a landscape populated by the ideas of Leonardo as he set about painting the Virgin of the Rocks”. The pass gives access to a mock-up of a conservator’s workshop with a projected image of the painting’s underdrawing; a chiaroscuro room where you can fiddle with dimmer switches to ‘relight’ a photographic tableau of a seated model dressed as the Virgin; and an ‘imagined chapel’ where you can view the actual panel in a variety of different projected settings.

All of this for £18 standard admission. If the show was almost empty on a Tuesday afternoon, it’s because it breaks Pine and Gilmore’s cardinal rule: “Before a company can charge admission, it must design an experience that customers judge to be worth the price.” A cocktail infusion might have helped. As it was, the best bits were the quotes from Leonardo’s notebooks reflected in the mirror blocks of the mountain pass: “So we can say the earth has a vegetative spirit, and that its flesh is the soil, its bones are the arrangement and connections between stones which form mountains, its cartilage is the tufa rock, its blood the veins of water.” Match that for eco-sentiment, Olafur.

How memorable are these experiences? I had to go through my photographs before writing this to remind myself. True, no damage was done by the Leonardo experience if you discount the hit to the wallet of having to pay for what is normally free – visitors do eventually get to see the painting. That’s not always the case with Dulwich Picture Gallery’s old master experience Rembrandt’s Light, for which – to highlight the theatricality of Rembrandt’s art – cinematographer Peter Suschitzky (of Star Wars and Mars Attacks! fame) has been commissioned to design atmospheric lighting. For the night paintings, his lighting notes prescribe “darkness contrasted with a soft, warm light, recreating the feeling of Rembrandt’s candlelit studio” – with a consequent reduction in visibility. Meanwhile the spotlight on Christ and St Mary Magdalene at the Tomb is programmed to fade and brighten “emulating the dawn breaking over Jerusalem”. Oy vey! Gilding and lilies come to mind.

“Experiences, like goods and services, have to meet a customer need,” suggest Pine and Gilmore. Does Rembrandt really need help with his chiaroscuro? In one of his few recorded remarks, he advised a patron: “Hang this piece in a strong light”. No, there’s only one way to experience paintings, and that’s by looking. 

Laura Gascoigne
November/December 2019

In October of last year, under the title ‘The Midas Touch’, Sotheby’s held a special sale of ‘objets de vertu’ made of gold. “In a world that speaks 6,900 languages,” cooed the catalogue, “the language of gold remains universal”. To prove it, the auction house promised to take collectors “on a journey through the great civilisations of the world”, starting with an ancient Etruscan-style Greek 22ct gold wine cup (estimate £3,500-4,500) and ending with a Dom Perignon Gold Mathusalem 2002 (£15,000-20,000) of vintage champagne to quaff from it and a 24ct gold thread bedding suite by Federico Buccellati (£30,000-50,000) in which to sleep off the effects.

It was not all luxury items; there was art too. The lots included a Petit Barbu medallion by Picasso (£12,000-16,000); a Monogold Sans Titre by Yves Klein (£800,000-1,200,000); a Piccolo Miracolo by Marino Marini (£15,000-25,000); and a Marc Quinn head of Kate Moss titled Song of the Siren (£300,000-400,000). To keep things in perspective, Sotheby’s threw in a Madonna of Humility goldback by Jacobello del Fiore (£50,000-70,000) and a portfolio of 20 Sebastião Salgado photographs of the Serra Pelada Gold Mine, Brazil (1986) (£80-120,000).

In uncertain times investors turn to gold, and Donald Trump’s trade wars coupled with the global economic downturn have boosted the price of bullion to its highest level for six years. So it says something for the buoyancy of the art market that a single photograph should be worth more than a solid gold ancient Greek cup. If there’s going to be a rush for gold, it hasn’t yet started: the buyer of Jeff Koons’ Rabbit (1986) at Christie’s New York in May for a record $91m was none other than Robert E Mnuchin, father of Donald Trump’s treasury secretary. The rich like glitter. Mnuchin wasn’t bothered that the Rabbit was made of stainless steel; when polished to a high enough shine, steel passes for bling.

Still, the language of gold remains universal, and a smattering of it is an asset to any contemporary artist who wants to make it big. In 2010 that great critic of capitalism – or is it communism? – Ai Weiwei produced a glitzy gilded bronze edition of his Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, which he trotted around the world from New York to Montreal to Denmark to Moscow before achieving an auction record of £2.8m at Phillips London in 2015. “Maybe I’m just an undercover artist in the guise of a dissident,” he confessed in the auction catalogue. Maybe he’s just a good salesman who knows his market. 

As Oprah Winfrey once wisely remarked, when you’ve got all the necessities of life the only significant advantage money will buy you is thicker towels. Brought up against this disappointing reality, the mega-rich have to take comfort in exciting envy by splurging on such rarefied necessities as the 24ct gold-plated vacuum cleaner advertised for £800,000 by online retailer Firebox a few years ago, or the 22ct three-ply bog roll sold by Aussie company Toilet Paper Man for a similar sum. In the immortal words of Zero Mostel in The Producers: “If you’ve got it baby, flaunt it, flaunt it!”

So it showed a degree of sophistication on the part of the American President when in 2017 he turned down the offer of an 18ct golden toilet from Nancy Spector, artistic director of the Guggenheim Museum New York. Titled America, the fully functioning convenience was the work of Italian conceptual prankster Maurizio Cattelan, Padua’s answer to Bristol’s Banksy, and was valued at $6m. But Trump had requested the loan of Van Gogh’s Landscape with Snow and, to a notorious germophobe, a toilet 100,000 people had queued to use when recently plumbed into a gender-neutral restroom at the Guggenheim seemed a poor substitute. Much as he likes riding in gold-plated lifts, the presidential master of the playground cuss is not so stupid that he can’t recognise a piss-take from a libtard art curator when he hears one. Besides, as the Guardian suggested in its report, he may already have a gold throne of his own.

The Duke of Marlborough doesn’t, and leapt at the chance of installing Cattelan’s at Blenheim Palace for the artist’s autumn retrospective. Plumbed into the guides’ wood-panelled throne room opposite the bedroom Winston Churchill was born in, it was available for use by visitors for just two days before thieves broke in at 4.50am on Saturday 14 September and ripped it out of the wall, causing flood damage. The family had been aristocratically relaxed about security. Only a couple of weeks before, the Duke’s half-brother Lord Edward Spencer-Churchill, who set up the Blenheim Art Foundation, had told the Sunday Times: “It’s not going to be the easiest thing to nick… Firstly, it’s plumbed in and secondly, a potential thief will have no idea who last used the toilet or what they ate. So no, I don’t plan to be guarding it.”

As it turned out, the thieves were not that fussy. On any self-respecting burglar or cowboy plumber Spencer-Churchill’s press announcement will have acted as a challenge. Almost inevitably, it was taken up. A 66-year-old man was immediately arrested by Thames Valley Police, followed by a 36-year-old accomplice presumably responsible for the heavy lifting. It’s always the old lags, bless ’em, who rise to this sort of bait; they can’t resist the lure of a trophy heist. And what better trophy than a golden bog? I expect Michael Caine is already being fitted up for the part.

Cattelan, true to form, took it all in good humour, hailing the heist as a piece of performance art. As the work belongs to the Guggenheim it’s no skin off his Pulcinello-sized nose – Spector and Spencer-Churchill can squabble over the insurance. “America was the one percent for the 99 percent, and I hope it still is,” he told the New York Times. “I want to be positive and think the robbery is a kind of Robin Hood-inspired action.” I doubt there’ll be much of a trickledown effect to the poor of Oxfordshire when it’s melted down, as it surely will be. Burglars don’t waste time betting on art futures when they’re sitting on a pile of valuable scrap. 

The same fate almost certainly befell Douglas Gordon’s solid gold sculpture The Left and Right Hand Have Left One Another after it mysteriously disappeared from its box in Christie’s King Street warehouse in 2012, never to be seen again. Given that the gold was worth half the work’s £500,000 insurance value, this was hardly surprising. What was surprising was that the auction house only informed the artist of the theft more than two weeks after reporting the crime to the police. “I still own the work and I am the creator of the work,” Gordon sniffed to the press. “There’s something going on here about value and the way the artist is treated in all of this.”

Artists may fool themselves, but the hard truth is that the value of art as a marketable commodity is monetary. Which is why collectors, like burglars, are better off with gold than steel: when the bottom falls out of the art market, they can melt it down.

Laura Gascoigne
September/October 2019

Among the many examples of the wit and wisdom of Sir Thomas Beecham is the story of the great conductor seeing a tombstone inscribed: “Here lies a great organist and an excellent musician” and remarking in surprise: “What, both in the same grave?” 

I was reminded of this when seeing Wafic Saïd, a contributor to Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign, described in the press as an “arms dealer and philanthropist”. What, both in the same skin? You may recall the Syrian-Saudi financier as the fixer behind the notorious 1980s Al-Yamamah arms deal with Saudi Arabia, the investigation into which by the Serious Fraud Office was quietly dropped under Tony Blair in 2006. To salve what he has in the way of a conscience, Saïd likes to make charitable donations: a bit to the Royal Shakespeare Company, a bit to the Science Museum, a massive whack to Oxford University for his eponymous business school. Last year he funnelled £340,000 to the Tory party through his British wife Rosemary; the bung for Johnson’s leadership campaign was in her name, while their son Khaled supported Rory Stewart. Hedging your bets, as it’s known in camel racing.

No complaints from the Electoral Commission: politics is a dirty business, where dirty money is the norm. Higher standards are expected of culture, I can’t think why. Wasn’t Alfred Nobel an arms manufacturer? And the Hunting Art Prize ticked along happily here for a quarter of a century despite the sponsor’s rumoured involvement with nuclear weapons and cluster bombs, before decamping to the land of the free and the Second Amendment in 2006. (Your correspondent even sat on the judging panel and received a case of wine for her services, which she didn’t choke on.) But now that cultured folk seem to have forgotten that lucre is filthy, they’re getting as jumpy about sponsorship as a passel of cats on a hot tin roof. 

One campaigning group calls itself ‘Culture Unstained’. Culture unstained, eh?  I’ve been racking my brains for a major arts sponsor, from Cosimo de’ Medici on, whose hands have not been stained with dirty dealings of one kind or another. Lucre is filthy, and art depends on it. But this rather obvious fact seems to have escaped campaigners against BP’s sponsorship deal with four of our major cultural institutions: the British Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal Opera House. The focus of recent attacks has been the NPG’s Portrait Award, taken over by BP from John Player in 1989 when tobacco staining was considered the greater evil. (The RA, incidentally, still accepts £45,000 a year from Japan Tobacco International, which supported its 2009 exhibition of Anish Kapoor. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. The BM has also been quietly taking JTI’s yen for acquisitions for its Asia Department. It’s apparently OK to accept money from foreign tobacco companies; we don’t care if the Japanese die of cancer as long as our NHS doesn’t have to pick up the tab.)

But back to BP. So far the NPG and the BM have stuck to their guns, or pumps, though how long the RSC will hold out after Mark Rylance’s ostentatious resignation from the company is another question. In June Rylance announced that he did not wish to be associated with “anyone who wilfully destroys the lives of others… Nor, I believe, would William Shakespeare.” That’s quite a claim to make on behalf of someone who lived through the Elizabethan era of colonial expansion and legalised piracy, but on climate change, perhaps, the bard was blameless: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Though art more lovely and more temperate than global warming.” 

Summoning the spirits of dead artists in support of one’s cause is an interesting gambit. I doubt Van Gogh would have been overjoyed at having his recent exhibition at Tate Britain branded with the initials EY, but short of appearing like Banquo’s ghost and spooking VIP guests at the private view by parading his bandaged ear among the canapés there wasn’t a lot he could do about it. With living artists, though, it’s another matter. In November Nan Goldin twisted the NPG’s arm by refusing to go ahead with a planned exhibition unless the gallery dropped its grant from the Sackler Trust, the philanthropic arm of the owners of the drug manufacturer Purdue Pharma currently facing lawsuits in 35 US states for pushing its addictive painkiller OxyContin across America. Goldin has appointed herself the avenging angel of OxyContin addicts, fronting the campaign that drove the Met to sever its ties with the Sacklers in May. Now the repercussions are being felt over here, though it’s not our problem, and the stink of opioids is overpowering the smell of petrol. Having held the line on BP, in February the NPG’s newly formed ethics committee drew it at the Sacklers, who gracefully withdrew their grant “to avoid being a distraction” – for which read “to avoid more bad publicity”. Yes, there’s no such thing as bad publicity but no, no one in their right mind wants to pay for it. 

Word has it that the NPG were shamed into action by the plucky little South London Gallery, whose trustees under the chairmanship of Frieze founder Matthew Slotover returned £125,000 worth of Sackler funding the month before. Now the gauntlet has been thrown down to Tate Modern, V&A Dundee, MK Gallery, the Ashmolean, the RCA, Dulwich Picture Gallery, the Science Museum, the Royal Museums Greenwich and all other recipients of Sackler generosity ­– the list of shame is as long as the tracks on a junkie’s arm. Woe to any institution that, like the Serpentine, has the Sackler name affixed in Roman capitals to its entablature; it cannot shed it without the family’s permission. While not wishing to be a distraction, the Sacklers may well balk at being erased from history without seeing a penny of their money back. 

It’s been a tough year for the Serpentine all round. In June its CEO Yana Peel was forced to resign over her husband’s partnership in Novalpina Capital, a private equity firm with a stake in the cyber security group NSO linked to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Peel didn’t go without a fight, complaining of “bullying and intimidation” and “toxic personal attacks” – none quite as bad as being dismembered with a bone saw in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on the eve of your wedding. In her resignation statement she threatened: “If campaigns of this type continue, the treasures of the art community [the community, note, not the art] – which are so fundamental to our society – risk an erosion of private support.”

I’m not sure she’s right. While there are donors in search of redemptive publicity, support will continue. What no one mentions is how small the sums involved are. The real scandal is not that our cultural institutions are selling themselves for dirty money, but that they’re selling themselves dirt cheap. The BP sponsorship deal at the root of all the fuss is worth £7.5m, split between four institutions over five years. On the scale of ‘big oil’, this is peanuts. Before staining our culture with dirty money, let’s at least make sure there’s plenty of it.

Laura Gascoigne
July/August 2019

It’s hard to know where to start with Ingres’s definition when nobody knows any more what probity means. And yet drawing is enjoying a resurgence. What is going on?

When David Hockney breezed into the Royal College from Bradford in 1959, he announced his arrival not with naïve etchings of naughty gay boys but with a drop-dead academic pencil drawing of the college skeleton. It proved to be an ironic last hurrah. Almost immediately after, the idea of drawing as an end in itself went down the drain with the rest of the academic wastewater. But ever since, like Incy Wincy Spider, it has been climbing back up.

The first sign that it was still alive and kicking was the launch in 1973 of The Cleveland International Drawing Biennale. By the time that ran out of puff in 1996 Anita Taylor had picked up the baton with the Rexel Derwent Open Drawing Exhibition (1994), subsequently the Cheltenham Open Drawing exhibition (1996), the Jerwood Drawing Prize (2001) and as of last year, the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize. Then came the Guild of St George’s jolly populist Campaign for Drawing, aka The Big Draw, and the Prince’s, now the Royal, Drawing School, both launched in 2000. Dedicated exhibition spaces opened in London in The Drawing Room (2002) and The Drawing Gallery (2004), and a smattering of public exhibitions with sexy titles promoting ‘new drawing practices’ followed: Tate Britain’s The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act (2004), Hayward Touring Exhibition The End of the Line: Attitudes to Drawing (2009) and Tate Liverpool’s Tracing the Century: Drawing as a Catalyst for Change (2012). Now, shazam! the DRAW Art Fair has made its debut at the Saatchi Gallery.

In the meantime, definitions of drawing have been flapping about like loose sheets on an unmanned vessel as curators have gone overboard with attempts to rebrand it. Announcing its exhibition Drawing in Progress in 2010, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art – call me mima – claimed the key to the show’s success was “the way in which the advisory panel refused to define the term ‘drawing’ in the traditional way… forcing a reassessment of all the criteria under which we might produce, view, or discuss drawing.” That was telling them.

In the 20 years since I’ve been keeping tabs, the reassessment has progressed in leaps and bounds: Richard Long’s 1967 drawing with feet on grass in a Wiltshire field now seems positively plodding after James Capper’s use of the ripper teeth of a mechanical digger to take a line for a walk round an Oxford housing estate in 2011. But mostly there’s been masses of drawings on gallery walls, aka ‘interventions in the space’. A leading exponent of this new drawing practice is Austrian artist Otto Zitko, who in 2010 covered three floors of the Arnolfini in an “all-enveloping drawing intervention in situ”. Zitko had previous, having already “improvised across the walls of cultural institutions around the world”. His “expansive abstract drawings”, the publicity told us, “seem to emerge from an unbounded desire to cover every surface – a primal urge to contain the whole of reality within a subjective cocoon or unbroken lines”. Good luck to him. 

Wall drawings used to be known as ‘muriels’ back in the day when decorating walls was considered a girly activity, before abstract painters like Blinky Palermo got in on the act in the late 1960s and made it macho. But Blinky’s murals were never as expansive as the 69ft wall drawing on the ICA’s concourse wall that won Toby Paterson the Becks Futures Award in 2002 – since when expansive abstract drawing has become a staple of gallery stairwells from Pallant House to Tate Britain. 

Why stop at walls? For her 2011 Raumzeichnung (‘Drawing in Space’) exhibition at the Sumarria Lunn Gallery, Berlin-based Polish artist Monica Grzymala contrived to “rearticulate the entire space” with sticky tape designed to “depart from the gallery walls” before eventually succumbing “to the will of gravity, the deterioration echoing humanity like some gigantic vanitas”. Never one to pass up the chance of a gigantic vanitas, Anthony Gormley was an early adopter of 3-D drawing or what he calls “activating the space”. (If he would only activate the space between his ears he might finally produce something worth looking at, though on past form we can fairly assume that his autumn show at his Royal Academy will be the usual waste of.)

Is change in the air? The DRAW art fair in May was largely works on paper, a substantial number of them in humble pencil. And on the evidence of the last Trinity Buoy Art Prize the standard of, whisper it, draughtsmanship is going up, partly thanks to an infusion of young blood from the Royal Drawing School. Yes, the heir to all those Leonardos currently on show at the Queen’s Galley has been doing his bit towards, as the jammy say, ‘giving something back’. DRAW was dominated by the usual array of approved contemporary drawing styles – obsessive, outsider arty, pop arty, cartoonish, illustrational, Twomblyish – but with the best examples the style was less important than the content. As with writing, it helps if you have something to say. Still, no contemporary artist came close to the throwaway line of Jean Cocteau, whose full-frontal nude pencil drawing of a chef with his toque still on his head and his trousers round his ankles made Warhol’s nude hunk on the same stand look flaccid. It would have knocked Hockney’s pretty boys into a cocked hat too.

All the signs are that we’re inching forward; now it’s public galleries that need to catch up. The British Museum hasn’t done the cause of graphic probity any favours by bigging up Damien Hirst’s beermat portraits of his former Svengali Frank Dunphy, dashed off during breakfast business meetings at The Wolseley and kindly donated under the cultural gifts scheme, thus saving Dunphy £90,000 in tax. The example released for publicity purposes, titled ‘Frank Eggs-ellent Dunphy’ – boom boom – shows the subject as a Dumpty in an eggcup. “Damien Hirst raised money-making and commercialisation of his art to a new level,” explained the BM’s curator of prints and drawings Hugo Chapman, stopping short of calling it an art form. The drawings he described as “very immediate… drawn with great energy… Damien can draw, there’s no doubt about that.” If there wasn’t any doubt, would it need saying? As a draughtsman Hirst is in a GCSE class of his own.

In his introduction to the catalogue for DRAW, the fair’s French founder Laurent Boudier quoted Ingres without defining either of his terms. So why is drawing the probity of art? Because it shows artists up. Hirst may have hidden his drawings under the table at The Wolseley, but there’ll be nowhere to hide in Room 90 at the BM. As Wyndham Lewis wrote in The Role of the Line in Art: “It is more difficult upon a piece of white paper, your means of expression reduced to a few lines, to deceive the expert spectator than it is with a lot of oil paint upon a canvas.”

But where, I hear you wail, are today’s expert spectators? Despair not. Given regular exposure to good drawing, spectators will acquire expertise. 

Laura Gascoigne
May/June 2019

In 2014 the Harvard-based science magazine Annals of Improbable Research presented its Ig Nobel prize for neuroscience to a team of researchers from China and Canada who demonstrated that seeing the face of Christ in a slice of burnt toast is perfectly OK. (That year’s Ig Nobel prize for economics went to the Italian government for factoring illegal earnings from prostitution, drugs and smuggling into the nation’s GDP, so you can see that these Harvard science dudes aren’t messing around.) 

The neuroscientists’ conclusion will have been good news to the assorted idlers, dreamers and general crackpots who not only see things in toast, but profit from their visions. Because there’s money to be made from this stuff. In 2004 Florida housewife Diana Duyser sold a 10-year-old toasted cheese sandwich with an image of the Virgin Mary on eBay for $28,000 to the Golden Palace internet casino, which proclaimed the sacred sarnie “part of pop culture” and used it to raise money for charity. The fact that it had stood on her bedside table for 10 years without rotting was, Duyser declared, a miracle.

Laugh, but seeing stuff in toast is a recognised phenomenon with a fancy name: pareidolia. I have this on the authority of Susan Hiller, who in 2012 designed a Christmas screensaver for the Guardian featuring a grid of 15 images of Turin Toasts. On the back of her 2011 retrospective at Tate Britain, Hiller’s collection of found pareidolia will, one imagines, have scored higher with connoisseurs of art crostini than the marmite-on-toast celebrity portraits that propelled young Ebbw Vale artist Nathan Wyburn into the semi-finals of Britain’s Got Talent that same year. “It’s so hard for an artist to get recognition,” he would later lament. No offers were forthcoming from the Tate, though Wyburn did make the front page of the Guardian in 2012 with a composite portrait of Rupert Murdoch incorporating 5000 photographs of hacking victims.

By now those of you with long memories will have a feeling we’ve been here before, and it’s true, we have. We touched on the topic of toast in 2010. But in the art world what goes around comes around in ever-tighter circles, and one has to keep up. So here, instead of Observer Food Monthly, we give you Jackdaw Toast Decennially (give or take a year).

I knew it was time to revisit the subject when Martin Creed chose Toast as the title of his recent Hauser and Wirth exhibition, promoted with a publicity shot of the great eejit holding a toasted slice of holed ciabatta in front of his face like a carnival mask. (Swizz, isn’t it, how with ciabatta you pay for the holes. Perhaps they factor them into the Italian economy.) Like most of Creed’s ideas, this one wasn’t new – Los Angeles-based artist Matt Johnson got there before him at the 2004 Frieze Art Fair with a Breadface in cast and painted plastic. But Johnson didn’t have the savvy or the dosh to cast a slice of toast in patinated bronze and butter it in gold as Creed did for his Savile Row exhibition, timed to open in December when the oligarchs were out shopping for stocking-fillers. This from the ersatz master of the ephemeral, whose progression from blu-tack to gold-plated bronze is more stomach-turning than a rack-full of celebrity portraits in marmite.

It won’t have gone down well with RA Schools student Tania Blanco down the road, whose contribution to this year’s Premiums exhibition featured a shelf stacked with packs of Medium Sliced White titled Emergency with accompanying text quoting Kropotkin’s declaration in The Conquest of Bread: “The social revolution must guarantee daily bread for all. After bread has been secured, leisure is the supreme aim…” Leisure presumably not supposed to be spent in Mayfair galleries salivating over slices of bronze toast buttered in gold.

As it happens, there’s a long and honourable tradition of bread art associated with artists in reduced or confined circumstances. Hans Prinzhorn’s collection of art of the mentally ill included sculptures made by asylum inmate Karl Brendel from chewed bread. Egon Schiele kneaded a thumbnail portrait of a fellow prisoner from bread while banged up in Sankt Pölten penitentiary in 1912 on charges of kidnapping and rape. (For those who can’t afford Creed’s gold-buttered, Ronald S Lauder’s Neue Galerie in New York is currently offering a bronze version of Schiele’s portrait in an edition of 200 at $250 each.) German-Jewish artist internee Pamina Liebert-Mahrenholz sculpted with her bread ration while incarcerated in Holloway Prison in 1939, and Kurt Schwitters, interned in Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man, saved leftover breakfast porridge to make sculptures. They filled his attic studio with a stink of mould that made the atmosphere very unpleasant for fellow enemy aliens who sat for portraits at £5 a pop. (A snip at the price, to judge from the examples currently on show in the exhibition Refuge at Abbot Hall, Kendal. Unfortunately the sculptures biodegraded before opportunistic gallerists could have them cast in bronze.)

There are good reasons for making art from cereals, and there are bad ones. Confinement and boredom are legitimate mothers of invention:  The Minories, Colchester’s 2015 exhibition The First World War in Biscuits demonstrated from 100-year-old examples what an inventive soldier in the trenches could do with a Huntley & Palmer’s No.4 standard whole wheat ration biscuit – baked so hard it had to be dunked but, unlike Schwitters’s soggy porridge, built to last. For creative purposes biscuits have a structural advantage over bread or toast, with the potential for large-scale projects such as the 12ft installation Eating the City created by Chinese multimedia artist Song Dong in the basement of Selfridges in 2006 from 72,000 McVitie’s biscuits. The starchitect of previous biscuit cities in Beijing and Shanghai, Dong was disparaging about the range of materials on offer – China apparently has a wider biscuit selection. Bad workmen blame their tools. Dong’s pre-fab biscuit city was as nothing to the 4ft replica of St Paul’s Cathedral – perfect in every detail, outside and in – built over three years by retired Willesden mechanic George D’Aubney from home-baked fruitcake and unveiled the following year.

Whether you have to be a fruitcake to make cathedrals from fruitcake is a question for the neuroscientists for another year. But there is a distinguished art historical precedent for D’Aubney’s creation in Andrea del Sarto’s mixed media model of an octagonal baptistery, described for us by Vasari in mouth-watering detail: “The pavement was a vast plate of jelly, with a pattern of mosaic in various colours; the columns, which had the appearance of porphyry, were sausages, long and thick; the socles and capitals were of Parmesan cheese, the cornices of sugar, and the tribune was made of sections of marzipan.”

All well and good, you’re thinking, but is it art? I refer you to the wisdom of nonagenarian collector Stefan Edlis who, in conversation with filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn for his art world documentary The Price of Everything, mentioned Swiss artist Urs Fischer’s timber-framed house made from bread, exhibited at the Milan Triennial in 2015. “Ask me if it’s art,” he told Kahn and Kahn, like a good comedy straight man, obliged. “Is it art?” he asked. “Well it’s not food,” said Edlis.

Laura Gascoigne
March/April 2019

During a bibulous press trip dinner a few years ago, a travel journalist laid into me about art criticism. How could I set myself up as a judge of contemporary art when it was all a matter of taste and no one could predict the verdict of history? I spluttered something about not sitting in judgment but informing readers about what artists were doing, when the arts editor of a local paper came to my rescue with the simple statement: “Art criticism is entertainment”. He took everyone at the table by surprise and put an end to the argument at a stroke.

The surprise was because most art criticism these days is too boring to be described as entertainment, but that was not always the case. Nineteenth century reviews of contemporary exhibitions crackle with coruscating wit, insights and insults, and still make rollicking reading today. But they were written at a time when painting and sculpture were popular art forms which everyone felt qualified to sound off about, before modernism invented specialist art demanding specialist art critics.

In the current anti-elitist climate, the modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg’s dictum:  “If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art,” would get him beaten up by yellow vests. In Victorian England he would have got the bum’s rush from the crowds that flocked to see John Martin’s Last Judgment triptych on its national tour, when it attracted 50,000 visitors in Glasgow and more than two million in Edinburgh, if contemporary visitor figures are to be believed. The fact that in 2011, after decades of neglect, Martin’s crowd-pleasers were re-anointed as art in a major exhibition at Tate Britain suggests that art and entertainment are not incompatible – dangling the possibility that if contemporary art were a little less boring our galleries would not have to struggle quite so hard to generate the impression of public enthusiasm for exhibitions that are nine-tenths empty.

Victorian art was moralistic but fun; too much of ours is moralistic and deadly dull. Our public galleries vacillate between serious exhibitions that are dry as dust and interactive ones with an element of play, on the principle that what is lost on the roundabouts will be gained on the swings. Yet even play apparatus is given a moral dimension. The kids taking advantage of superfuse three-person swings currently set up outside Tate Modern might not enjoy themselves so much if they knew the installation was “conceived as an assembly line for collective movement” and that their job was  “to combat social apathy through collaborative action,” challenging  “society’s apathy towards the political, environmental and economic crises of our age”. (I’d like to see a notice to this effect put up beside the swings in our local children’s playground to ensure that all that unproductive, morally neutral pendulism doesn’t go to waste.)

It’s a misconception that entertainment is essentially frivolous. It doesn’t have to be, as the American artist Steve Powers proved in 2008 when he installed a waterborne Thrill Ride on Coney Island, inviting trippers to pay a dollar to see hooded actors torture each other à la CIA. The nation that gave us Hollywood films understands that people can be entertained by anything, comic or tragic, that grabs their attention. Whether it’s “a clown with his pants falling down” or a plot  “simply teeming with sex… it could be Oedipus Rex,” as Judy Garland sang in The Band Wagon, “that’s entertainment”. The Jam took a rather different view of the subject in their homonymous punk era song, with its  “lights going out and a kick in the balls… a freezing cold flat and damp on the walls”. Each to his own: The British never really bought into Hollywood pzazz, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need entertaining. No one wants to be bored, especially not if they have to pay for it.

Like the rest of you, I suspect, I was initially shocked to hear that Jeff Koons has been given a show at the Ashmolean. What’s a university museum stuffed with treasures doing showcasing a load of pumped-up tat only famous for selling for inflated prices? I can’t be bothered to go and gawp at it myself – I prefer Samsung’s Michelangelo’s David mounted on a washing machine, an honest-to-goodness advertising stunt – but on reflection I’m not sure it’s such a bad idea. Not only will it get people who have never stepped inside the place through the doors – while relieving them of their money – it might also act like an expectorant to dislodge the phlegm clogging the visual faculties of the great British public. As Sarah Lucas once observed with her usual frankness: “I think the public does like contemporary art, and when they take a stance against it and think it’s a load of bollocks, that’s how they like it.”

Art, the stuff you love to hate: anything’s better than indifference. In Painting as a Pastime, Winston Churchill divided human beings into three classes: “those who are toiled to death, those who are worried to death, and those who are bored to death”. The first two classes are never going to visit galleries, so please let’s avoid piling on the boredom for the third class who might turn to art in the hope of relief. Would I rather a Jeff Koons exhibition to the terminal ennui and sanctimony of last year’s Turner Prize? A thousand times yes. At least Koons, bless his shiny baubles, isn’t trying to moralise. He knows he’s an entertainer and he’s justly proud of it, like any artist who achieves the miracle of becoming popular. Look at David Hockney, a consummate showman, and Grayson Perry ditto. If they’re honest with themselves, every artist who becomes a household name must accept this fact in the privacy of their studio. The confession “when I am alone by myself, I have not the urge to think of myself as an artist in the great and ancient sense of the term… I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time” may have been put into Picasso’s mouth by the Italian satirical novelist Giovanni Papini, but if Pablo didn’t actually say it he should have.

Until relatively recently, avant-gardists from the Dadaists to Dali were shameless entertainers  – the Italian Futurists Marinetti and Russolo packed out the London Coliseum with their Art of Noises. It was modernism that killed off art as entertainment, with art criticism as collateral damage. We can thank conceptualism, courtesy of Koons, Hirst and co, for reviving the corpse. It’s no coincidence that in 2016 the Hollywood entertainment conglomerate Endeavor reportedly took a 70% stake in Frieze ahead of its LA launch this February.

Purists will choke on their Pepto Bismol, but we have to stop being pompous about art if we want the general public to take an interest. “The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes,” Thomas Beecham recognised in his wisdom, and AJA Symons made the same point about art when he remarked: “Comparatively few people care for art at all, and most of these care for it because they mistake it for something else.” If we want visitor figures to justify public funding, then we’d better not correct people’s mistakes.

Laura Gascoigne
January/February 2019

It had to happen: The Apprentice has been let loose on the art market. For episode 8 of the latest series, contestants were corralled in the Centre Hall of Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery to be informed by Alan Sugar from a Big Brother screen: “The global art market is worth a massive £47 billion”, and told to get a slice of the action. Their task was to choose the work of one of three Glasgow-based artists – the line drawings of Sophie Morgan, the surreal animal sculptures of Solveig Einarsdottir or the semi-abstract canvases of Eleanor Carlingford – and flog them to a) corporate clients and b) the general public.

Two team members nominated themselves project managers, Jasmine of Team Typhoon on the grounds that she loves art and visits galleries and Jackie of Team Collaborative because she minored in Fine Art and her dream job is to be an art dealer. This did not, however, prepare her for the brief presented by the first corporate client, a maker of luxury sound systems, to find a piece that reflected “three key pillars: innovation, provenance and experience”.

“What would your interpretation of that be?” Daniel, appointed Team Collaborative’s art dealer, asked his colleagues. “Innovation, that was obviously, like, something innovative, out there,” hazarded Camilla, a member of the sub-team in charge of merchandising. “Do you know what provenance means?” interposed Jackie. “ I think it’s like, so, provenance, provoke?”, suggested Camilla. “I thought provenance was in relation to the province you’re from,” offered her sub-team-mate Sarah Ann. “Okay, so nobody knows,” concluded Jackie.

They were more successful at flogging art to the public, though Jackie was marked down for jumping the gun and selling Einarsdottir’s welcome mat spelling HOME SWEET HOME in Gummy Bears to a punter off the street while her corporate clients were away making up their minds. Innovation, tick. Provenance, query. Experience, nil. But she did better than Jasmine, who achieved the extraordinary feat of being fired by Lord Sugar for being too corporate.

The interesting thing about this experiment in salesmanship is that the contestants who claimed some knowledge of art fared worse. Team Typhoon’s art dealer Tom, who came from a family of artists, opened negotiations with Carlingford: “We’re looking at 40-50% commission” and earned the riposte: “Which half of the painting did you paint?” But Daniel, who confessed: “My and Jackie’s selling styles differ in the sense that she knows what she’s talking about and I haven’t a fucking clue,” was a revelation even to himself. He breezed into Carlingford’s studio and verbalised thus: “My eye was initially drawn to this one here. It almost seems quite dark and sinister from one perspective but then, when you keep looking at it, it’s got this brightness that emits from the centre of the picture. Could I ask what your personal take on this one is?” “I could only reiterate what you’ve just said,” the artist beamed. “Top blagging” was the verdict of The Sun’s reviewer. “A load of Jackson Pollocks,” was Lord Sugar’s. Whatever, it worked. Daniel had an instinctive grasp of the business: “There’s a fine line between interpretation and blagging, a fine line that I’m probably treading very dangerously at this moment, but that’s art for you.”

The programme aired the week after the cinema release of Nathaniel Kahn’s art market documentary, The Price of Everything. Shift location to New York and Chicago and tack a few zeros onto the sums involved, and the film is a high-end carbon diamond copy of Glasgow Art Apprentice. The artists, this time, include Jeff Koons, George Condo and Larry Poons; the dealers/auctioneers Jeffrey Deitch, Dennis Yares and Amy Cappellazzo, and the collectors the nonagenarian Stefan Edlis, a gift to any documentary filmmaker. Pearls of wisecracking wisdom fall from Edlis’s lips like Mel Brooks one-liners: “To be an effective collector, deep down you have to be shallow…” and “We’re lemmings… In the art world there are a lot of followers and few leaders, which is OK if you follow the right leaders,” are just two of them.

Edlis and the octogenarian Poons are the stars of the show. Having committed the crime of abandoning the style that made him famous in the 1960s, Poons went to ground in upstate New York, where we catch him shuffling through snow to his studio barn to daub canvases twice his height with delirious colour. “A lot of people thought I was dead for a long time,” he freely acknowledges, but in a Koons v Poons contest he wins hands down through sheer conviction. He demolishes the idea that the best artist is the most expensive with the simple question: “How could it be true?” There’s a poignancy to his childish delight at being brought back from the dead by Yares for a show on Fifth Avenue. Dwarfed by his multicoloured canvases, he’s like a kid in a sweet shop, but art critic Barbara Rose casts a damper on the proceedings with her explanation of the renewed interest in his work: “They do a calculation – it’s sick – which is the most undervalued painter.”

For a masterclass in sick calculations apply to Amy Cappellazzo, Sotheby’s Chairman of Global Fine Arts. Asked how you value priceless art, she responds pragmatically: “You say something is priceless and then you sort of work backwards.” There’s a wonderfully bitchy exchange between her and Edlis about Koons’s sculptures being seen in lobbies. “It’s going to hurt him,” predicts Cappellazzo. “You never get out of the lobby once you’re in there”. Koons himself comes across as the charlatan you’d expect, standing in a factory full of assistants knocking off copies of old masters for his Gazing Ball Paintings. He talks more reflective balls than our own dear Antony Gormley, insisting in his silky-soft snake oil salesman voice that all these images painted by other people “are created through systems. I’m responsible for every one.” As blagging goes it’s not a patch on Daniel’s, but it works on Americans. Deitch’s description of Koons as the archetypal American salesman is intercut with footage from The Wolf of Wall Street. Interestingly, Daniel also compares himself to Jordan Belfort.

The unholy marriage between art and money is not new; as curator Paul Schimmel observes in Kahn’s film: “There’s no golden age without gold”. This much was obvious even to Gulley Jimson, who offers this cogent analysis of the relationship between artist and patron in The Horse’s Mouth: “It’s all in the game. Hickson is a business man. And I’m a painting man. He makes money for fun and needs art to keep him alive. I paint pictures for fun, and need money to keep me alive.  He wants to boost the pictures and get fun out of them, and I want to get some money and paint new pictures.”

Kahn hopes his film will encourage audiences “to open their eyes to seeing art again on their own terms”. Not everyone, though, is capable of seeing. Cappellazzo distinguishes between “three kinds of people in the world: those who see, those who see when they’re shown, and those who will never see”. If you can see, and you can blag, you’ve got it made. Daniel, my lad, you’re wasted on The Apprentice. In a £47 billion global art market, what sounds like Jackson Pollocks to Lord Sugar is gold dust.

Laura Gascoigne
November/December 2018

It’s official: you can no longer walk into a room and say: “Hi guys!” In July Woman’s Hour host Jane Garvey objected on Twitter that she is not a “guy” and doesn’t wish to be addressed as one, since when that mode of address – friendly, casual, non-committal – has been formally outlawed. An office-worker friend of my son received an email to that effect from his employers.

I don’t know about other Jackdaw readers, but if it’s a choice between “guys” and “dolls” I’m with the guys. Because there is now a choice, and it’s getting wider by the minute: the acronym ‘LGBT’ recently acquired an added + sign as the possible permutations are now so numerous that it seems discriminatory towards dyslexics to tack on more letters.

I realised how far we’d come when the black singer Gabrielle joked in an interview with Simon Hattenstone in August: “I’m coming back as a white male, honey,” and I took her literally. But it’s no use yearning for a simpler time when a tranny meant a white van and a white van man was accepted as a man on face value, no further examination necessary. Those days are past. Then people worried about STDs; now their most pressing anxiety is sexual IDs. No wonder they feel compelled to wear their sexuality on their sleeves, lapel badges, sweatbands, dog tags, wherever – or, in the case of artists, on their art.

Fifty years ago, when swinging sixties activist Caroline Coon painted large canvases of vaginas, they weren’t pretty. The poet Christopher Logue, who was given one (not in that sense necessarily) by the artist, was embarrassed to hang it and passed it on to my husband, who kept it in a cupboard before handing it back. But Coons wasn’t making a statement about her sexual identity, she was basically just letting it all hang out. Now the statements are getting personal, and the scale bigger.

Four years ago, the Japanese artist Megumi Igarashi made a kayak with a cockpit modelled on her own vagina and rewarded crowd-funders of the project with complimentary copies of 3D-printer data allowing them to reproduce the work. Igarashi, who describes herself as a ‘decorative vagina artist’, was amused and somewhat flattered when ten policemen turned up to arrest her. After a complex legal battle during which the nation that invented the shunga print struggled to define obscenity she was eventually released, only to be rearrested six months later. In modern Japan, apparently, a woman can’t model her own canoe. Fortunately here in Britain our police force is so enfeebled that it can no longer get it up for obscenity charges, so when Leeds art student Jenna Tilley installed a wall of multicoloured Plasticine labia in her graduation show last summer the local constabulary turned a blind eye. True, her flower arrangement was unexciting; Constance Spry would have done a better job.

But here’s a strange thing. You would think, wouldn’t you, that in these enlightened times when Courbet’s Origin of the World is censored by Facebook, pussies would be off limits to male artists, but no: everything is now up for grabs. In 2015 when Anish Kapoor installed his 60 x 10m rusted flower titled Dirty Corner on the lawns at Versailles and announced that it represented “the vagina of the queen”, vandals inevitably reached for the spray cans – well, it was asking for it – but they turned out to be anti-Semites, not feminists. Jonathan Jones even went so far as to compliment Kapoor in the Guardian on seeming “much more interested in vaginas than he is in penises, which is rare and commendable in a modern male artist” – an interest attributed to “his desire to imagine the body from within and open our imagination to the mystery of being”. Actually this interest is not so rare in modern male artists. JJ would presumably also have approved of Jamie McCartney’s The Great Wall of Vagina, constructed that same year from plaster casts of 400 vulvas with the commendable aim of promoting “freedom from genital anxiety”. 

While British artists get in touch with their feminine insides, it has been left to Russia to keep the male end up. In 2010 the guerilla art collective Voina spray-painted a 65m phallus, Penis in FSB Captivity, on the underside of a drawbridge facing the Federal Security Service’s offices in St Petersburg. Astonishingly, it was nominated for a prize by Moscow’s National Centre of Contemporary Arts. Less astonishingly, despite being renamed Member in FSB Captivity at the Culture Ministry’s request it was eventually withdrawn from competition. The FSB doesn’t need lessons from artists in standing up for Mother Russia. But Russia is not the last redoubt of unreconstructed artistic masculinity: there is also Australia, where ‘the world’s only penis painter’ Tim Patch, aka Pricasso, has taken Renoir literally and made a career of painting with his prick. Unlike Renoir he does not use his tool to conjure titillating visions of sun-dappled nudes: in a live appearance in 2016 on ITV’s This Morning he wasted his creative energies on a double portrait of Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby.

Though technically impressive, Patch’s effort was nowhere near as striking as the tachiste effects achieved by the paint-filled Plop Eggs hatched from Swiss artist Milo Moiré’s snatch at Art Cologne in 2014. (You can watch it on YouTube, if you’re old enough.) In this artistic battle of the sexes the girls are on top and, unlike the empathetic Kapoor, they’re taking advantage. Their depictions of the male organ are unchivalrous – instead of magnifying their subject, they belittle it. Look at their disrespectful treatment of Donald Trump. It was bad enough when Illma Gore’s nude portrait Make America Great Again (2016) gave the wannabe POTUS a teeny weiner, but imagine the germophobe pussygrabber’s horror at seeing himself immortalised in menstrual blood by Sarah Levy in her portrait, Whatever (2016) – a startlingly good likeness, especially the flesh tones.

Even when inflating male endowments, women artists don’t flatter them. When Canadian ‘art-pop provocateur’ Peaches climbed into an 11m penis-shaped windsock and crowd-surfed the audience at Glasgow’s SWG3 in 2016 during a rendition of her anthem, Dick in the Air, I’m not sure it was entirely complimentary. That said, actress Kate Beckinsale did look very lovely inside the inflatable penis she donned for an Instagram picture posted that year with the caption: “Just a girl trying to make it in a man’s world.”

How confusing it all is. Perhaps it will become clearer in Nottingham Contemporary’s autumn exhibition Still I Rise, which promises to apply “a gendered perspective, grounded in intersectional, queer and feminist thinking” to the problem. Or perhaps not. I can’t help sympathising with the Liverpool ReSisters responsible for the rash of stickers reading ‘Women don’t have penises’ that appeared in August on the knobs of Gormley’s iron avatars on Crosby Beach (illustration). Needless to say, their protest against proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act allowing guys to ‘self-identify’ as dolls unleashed a torrent of accusations of trans-phobia. All the poor girls wanted was some certainty in an uncertain world, but in matters of sexual identity nothing is certain – not while we’re on this gender-bender, anyway. Let’s hope it doesn’t leave us with a splitting headache.

Laura Gascoigne
September/October 2018

“This is an urgent message. Time is running out!” warned an automated voice on my phone one morning. I slammed the phone down assuming it was a sales pitch, but whatever the voice’s motive it wasn’t wrong. According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists the election of Donald Trump in 2016 inched the Doomsday Clock forward to two minutes 30 seconds to midnight, closer to the apocalypse than at any time since 1953, when America embraced the hydrogen bomb. God knows where it stands after the recent fusillade of incendiary tweets from the Potus with the shortest fuse in history; our best hope is that it’s quivering with indecision.

I don’t know how seriously we should take the BAS’s prophecy of doom, given that another contributory factor to its risk assessment was the danger posed to humanity by self-driving cars. But it does lend a sense of urgency to the question: is life too short for artists’ video?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against the art form per se. In the 15 years since I first sounded off in this column on the subject of Tate Modern’s inaugural film and video exhibition, Time Zones, focused on artists who aimed “to mimic the passing of time”, so-called ‘moving image arts’ have moved on. Art schools may no longer teach painting and drawing but they do teach filmmaking, and some of their graduates have gone on to make successful features and (in the case of Steve McQueen, though not Sam Taylor-Johnson) win Oscars for them. As with any art form, there is good and bad. The problem is no longer quality, it’s quantity.

With a few exceptions, this year’s Liverpool Biennial is wall-to-wall film. In less than a week you haven’t a hope of seeing them all, let alone starting at the beginning and watching through to the end. In a day and a half I managed this feat with a few of the shorter ones, others I dipped in and out of before rushing onto the next thing. Living as we do under what French cultural theorist Paul Virilio has defined as a ‘dromocracy’ in which time = money and speed = power, ‘durational arts’ ought by rights to be regarded as a waste of time. Yet our art institutions are devoting more and more of this precious commodity to them. Why?

The easy answer is that moving images hold the attention in a way still images don’t. A recent study published in the American journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts found that people spend an average of 28 seconds in front of ‘important’ works of art (ie ones they need to tick off their bucket list). No change there – the figure has remained more or less constant for 15 years. The difference now is that most of those seconds are spent taking selfies, or what the authors of the study have dubbed ‘arties’.

Another advantage of video art, then, is that it’s screened in the dark. But apart from this, what’s in it for the artists? Most filmmakers, one imagines, structure their films in the expectation that audiences will watch them through from beginning to end. So it would be a courtesy to artists and audiences alike for organisers to provide some sort of timetable or app enabling footsore biennial trekkers to time their arrival at different venues to coincide with the start of the film they’re interested in seeing. But this seems to be beyond the capacity even of individual museum spaces. At Tate Modern’s Joan Jonas exhibition I totted up the running times of the dozen films on offer and the total came to four hours, two minutes and 30 seconds. (A little sad, I know, but I was bored.) That didn’t include the other half dozen films screened in The Tanks whose running times weren’t listed. There was no apparent attempt to stagger the screenings. Given that it took me nearly an hour to get around the show just reading the wall texts, it would have taken a devotee of Jonas – someone who had made a pilgrimage to the exhibition – the best part of a day, even if the films were programmed so that one finished as another started.

Jonas’s whimsical works were not meant to be seen like this. Many are records of performances now mostly of interest to aspiring performance artists or art historians, made over the course of a 50-year career with modest means for screening in makeshift venues, not for consuming in bulk in a Blavatnik Building gross-out. No surprise, then, that on a Sunday afternoon even the free section of the exhibition in The Tanks was deserted apart from a few people drifting aimlessly about. If the Psychology of Aesthetics boffins had come and timed the average attention span of this audience, I doubt it would have stretched the full 28 seconds.

In his review of last year’s Edinburgh Art Festival, Jonathan Jones thanked god for video art. Yes, he actually pronounced those words. “In the shadows of an instant-culture age,” he went on, “perhaps only time-consuming video installation can make us lose track of the world and be truly absorbed in art… Good video art,” he concluded, “can set us free from time”. So can good feature films, and for longer periods. They do it by means of narrative, a device once despised by video artists but increasingly in evidence at the Liverpool Biennial in short films such as Mathias Poledna’s Indifference – a gripping piece of cinematography that is basically a mini-feature, just as Mohamed Bourouissa’s equally watchable Horse Day is a documentary by any other name.

Setting us free from time is not video art’s USP. Rather than freeing us from time, the best artists’ films and videos focus our attention on its passing by finding unusual ways of measuring it. In The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann pooh-poohed the idea of ‘telling time’ as narrative: “That would be an absurd undertaking. A story which read: ‘Time passed, it ran on, the time flowed onwards and so forth – no one in his senses would consider that a narrative. It would be as though one held a single note for a whole hour and called it music.” He was obviously not familiar with durational art. With hindsight, though, I’m prepared to admit that Tate Modern’s Time Zones exhibition had a point: the obvious subject for time-based art is time. It’s the principal theme of the tragicomic video animations of David Theobald – measured out in winking kebab shop signs, crazy golf courses and naff rite-of-passage greetings cards – and of Mark Formanek’s Standard Time, a record of a 2009 performance outside Rotterdam Central Station in which a team of 36 workmen in hard hats equipped with ladders scrambled to keep a digital clock constructed from planks of wood ticking for 24 hours.

But the most successful exercise in ‘telling time’ is Christian Marclay’s The Clock, coming to Tate Modern in September. “It doesn’t just tell the time, it also tells us that we are going to die,” was how Charles Spencer sold this 24-hour durational marathon to modern art-averse readers of the Telegraph. Not only does Marclay turn clockwatching into an art, he entertains us while the seconds tick by to Doomsday. 

Laura Gascoigne
July/August 2018

When the betting opened on this year’s Turner Prize in April, Forensic Architecture were favourites to win at 13/8. Architects just can’t stay away from art; they keep turning up in the Turner like bad pennies. It’s only three years since the prize was won by Assemble, that well-meaning group of socially minded young things who repaired sink estates with bits of hardboard and sticky-backed plastic. This lot are different, international, flashier, more hi-tech, more pretentious – based at Goldsmiths – and more obviously political. They’re part of a Turner Prize shortlist which, Tate Britain’s director Alex Farquharson proudly announced at the press launch, shows “how artists are tackling the most pressing political and humanitarian issues of the day”. The work of the other three nominees, Naeem Mohaiemen, Luke Willis Thompson and Charlotte Prodger, deals respectively with post-colonial identity, violence in minority communities and – I quote from the press release, because I have no idea what it means – “relationships between queer bodies and landscape, language, technology and time”. (“Is that a Henry Moore I see in the distance, Mummy? No darling, it’s a queer body in the landscape”).

Forensic Architecture are not single-ishoo artists, nor are they artists at all in the usual sense. They are a self-styled ‘research agency’ including among its 15 or 16 members (there seems to be some doubt about the actual number) designers, lawyers, investigative journalists, archaeologists and scientists as well as architects and yes, a couple of artists, on a mission to fight human rights abuses around the world. Like capeless crusaders armed with a burning sense of righteousness, overweening confidence and advanced computer skills, they fly in to support NGOs and human rights groups involved in court cases and official enquiries into miscarriages of justice, from the neo-Nazi murder of a Turkish-born internet café owner in Kassel in 2006 to the forced disappearance of 43 Ayotzinapa students on their way to a protest in Mexico City in 2014. Their support is technological and, on the evidence of exhibitions with titles like Towards an Investigative Aesthetics, consists mainly in constructing scale models of crime scenes, plotting the ‘narrative timelines’ of key players in human rights violations on maps, splicing video footage with CGI animations and summarising the results on enormous wall charts they call ‘murals’.

Muriels of the arty old-school sort they ain’t. The investigative aesthetic – as developed so far – is that of a corporate presentation at a global business convention designed to sell you something, in this case the concept of Forensic Architecture, Aesthetics, Oceanography, whatever. Adrian Searle tied himself in worse than usual knots trying to explain to Guardian readers how the group members “interrogate not so much architecture as space itself – the spaces between walls and windows, borders and intentions”. Their work has been described as “data-driven spatial investigation”. Basically it’s CSI with CAD or Tin Tin with blueprints, depending on your generation and cultural perspective.

As one of the shows for which they’ve been nominated, Counter Investigations, was at the ICA earlier this summer, I went along to see what the fuss was about. Not since visiting the Joseph Beuys exhibition at Tate Modern in 2005 have I seen so many pairs of eyes glued to wall texts, though to be fair in this case there really was nothing else to look at apart from maps, charts and videos with robotic mid-Atlantic voiceovers. What all this actually contributed to any of the group’s chosen causes was hazy, but an air of sanctimony and self-congratulation hung over it all. I was struck by the fact that all their interventions were in places like Syria, Palestine and Mexico where they could play a hipster version of the classic ‘white saviour’ role – there’s a distinct lack of BME faces on their website. I wondered why they didn’t occupy themselves like Assemble with domestic problems, before I discovered that they’re developing a 3-D video of the Grenfell Tower fire using crowd-sourced phone footage – imagine, our very own Towering Inferno for Google Glass-wearers! – and began to feel sick.

So, if they care so much about humanitarian causes, why are Forensic Architecture fannying around in art galleries? Why not join the NGOs they ‘support’? More to the point, why are they showing in an exhibition ‘supported’ by BNP Paribas, a French bank that – like so many corporate entities known for their philanthropy – has a multitude of sins to cover. This is a multinational that in July of last year was fined $246 million by the US Central Bank for rigging foreign exchange rates, two years after paying a settlement of $8.9 billion in the US Courts for sanctions-busting in Sudan, Iran and Cuba. In the interim, the bank that shares initials with the British National Party paid out $40 million to a former Israeli employee who successfully sued it for anti-Semitism after being penalised for objecting to a training video in which an actor dressed as Hitler, accompanied by staff in Nazi uniforms, played the CEO of German rival Deutsche Bank. Well, it does sound more entertaining than Forensic Architecture’s videos.

Funny, isn’t it, how the more disengaged from politics we become, the more political art is rammed down our throats. I suppose it’s meant to distract us from the mess we’re in: bread and circuses for the ABC1 classes. It works best when the politics is foreign, less well when they get too close to home. In America last December when Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph Büchel had the bright idea of posting a petition campaigning to have Trump’s Mexican wall prototypes in Otay Mesa, San Diego, designated a national monument, it caused an outcry. Why? Given that they cost around $4 million dollars it seems a pity to waste them, and in photographs they do look very like a henge – a modernist Mexican Carnac. Büchel has previous. During the 2015 Venice Biennale he turned the deconsecrated church of Santa Maria della Misericordia into a functioning mosque only to have it closed by the authorities two weeks later, despite a long and venerable history of church-mosque conversions and vice versa. His Trumphenge idea drew the loudest protests from fellow artists and ‘cultural professionals’, more than 500 of whom signed an open letter of condemnation. Ben Luke argued in The Art Newspaper that it “could be compelling if allied to a condemnation of Trump’s extremism” but, as signatories to the letter had complained, Büchel was more interested in “spectacle and irony” than “critically dismantling oppressive structures that undermine the lives of the most vulnerable”.

Surely spectacle and irony are what the political art of the past, from Goya to Grosz to Guston, was always about? Critical dismantling is for critics; artists compel through visual imagery, sometimes involving humour, always touching nerves. In one of the interminable texts in their ICA show Forensic Architecture referred dismissively to “photojournalistic trophy shots”, but I’d have given the whole of their exhibition for one truly memorable news photograph. Everything may be political, but not everything political is art. Art requires a degree of visual interest and a modicum of imagination, two ingredients conspicuously missing from Forensic Architecture’s nerveless brand of political posturing, which could only ever find a place on the self-serving merry-go-round of international contemporary art. ‘Ring-a-ring-o’roses, A pocket full of poses, At-ishoo! At-ishoo! We’ve won the Turner Prize.’ Let’s hope not.