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David Lee

Sept/Oct 2021

I took a wrong turn on my bike recently near Russell Square and came upon Wallis Gilbert’s 1931 Daimler car hire garage in Herbrand Street. Set back almost hidden, and only yards from where I attended university, I had never suspected its existence. It now pleases me so much I regularly detour past it. Now used as offices it is attractively maintained in pristine white. Those arriving to work here must feel lifted and lucky as they approach. I would. Mr Wallis’s masterpiece is the Hoover building on the A40, now more or less just a facade. Passing this on school trips into London in the early ’60s was for me always an anticipated treat, a major capital landmark. Art Deco architecture is not everyone’s cup of tea but to me it is deluxe English Breakfast. I love its simple shapes and generous reticulated windows, its echoes of classical detailing from Egyptian to Greek, the courage of unusual forms not always symmetrical and the pride taken in its construction – look up Harry Weedon’s Odeon in York, it is a monumental poem in small bricks.

I also discovered recently, while being driven out of London, that one route north passes Charles Holden’s early ’30s stations for the Piccadilly Line; Wood Green, Turnpike Lane, Southgate, Arnos Grove, Cockfosters. These original and ingenious buildings stand out as beacons in often messy urban settings. I’d not been up this way for years but now find the stations falling into blistered, crumbling disrepair, lengths of concrete moulding chipped and eroded away, especially at Cockfosters. Restored and painted they would surely become central to the street experience of open-eyed commuters and local people, and undoubtedly a quiet source of pride that there was indeed a time when modern architecture was capable of visibly improving a locality.

Claiming poverty as a reason for neglecting good buildings is no excuse. Two recent examples of huge sums squandered by the Mayor of London come to mind. At Marble Arch, the old execution site of Tyburn tree, £6 million (the cost doubled in months due to maladministration) has been spent constructing a mound 75 feet high. The lack of judgement involved in this hideous intrusion astounds. Whoever dreamed it up should be barred from public office. The presiding committee must have sat on their fat behinds washing down blueberry muffins with caramel lattes like a circle of nodding dogs. ‘This’ll bring the shoppers back to Oxford Street all right!’ Cue more nodding: ‘Definitely!’. But how? How could a hillock skirted in plants and saplings uncomfortably vertical on steep slopes achieve this? Sadiq Khan, a man with a sixth sense for wasting money on barmy schemes, should have spent £6 million improving the capital’s air quality which is now worse than it’s ever been. The mound promises “unparalleled views”, a barefaced lie. It’s not even as tall as nearby Selfridges and the mature planes across the road at Speakers’ Corner look down on its summit so you probably can’t see much of Hyde Park either. Inevitably, this absurdity is referred to as ‘public art’ even though it has nothing to do with art and one member of the public described it as ‘The worst thing ever done in London’ – an exaggeration when considering Boris Johnson’s cancelled Garden Bridge which spent over £40 million without a spade of earth being dug. When public servants refer to money being tight you can only look at stupid piles like this and cry laughing in disbelief.

The second waste of money, part of a £7 million scheme of ‘public art’ (again) to boost tourism, is a series of bland banners and pedestrian crossings in Piccadilly painted in gaudy abstract patterns; a joint venture between the Royal Academy and Art of London (“a new cultural initiative” set up by the Mayor). In trecento Tuscany it was demanded of artists that they could devise an exciting public pageant. More recently, in the 1930s, Paul Nash might turn his skills to designing seat material for buses. Few artists nowadays are trained to do anything communally useful or entertaining. You look at these dreary RA efforts and wonder why they bothered; it is a waste of time, energy and resources. I spent half an hour walking up and down and no one paid any attention to any of it … because it was just there and is unrecognisable as anything which reaches out. Attract tourism? Talk about self-delusion.

Too much is spent in the visual arts on instantly forgettable temporary stunts serving only to line the pockets of the usual suspects and allow the Mayor’s office to pen self-congratulatory press releases. We waste millions on feeble diversions presented as art but without artistic content. 

They should have painted Holden’s stations instead. David Lee 

P.S. May I humbly refer you to my interpolation in the letters’ pages.

David Lee

July/August 2021

The National Gallery has prostrated itself before what Orwell called  ‘the official mind’. It must have done because the less said about Rosalind Nashashibi, their current artist-in-residence, the better … but don’t worry I’ll bore you anyway. She is exhibiting her recent efforts among the 17th century Spanish pictures to which, it is claimed, her own works are said to respond. Any connections – and they will not be obvious to anybody with normal vision – are remote and in one instance, a parody of Philip IV’s legs, positively infantile. These daubs should not have been exhibited at all, anywhere, let alone here of all places. Surely no commercial gallery would consider showing them. And I can’t believe anyone would actually buy them … but then there’s no accounting for the taste of filthy rich fools itching to be fashionable. These pictures can only be exhibited because those in authority have lost the plot and are scared to express an honest opinion about them for fear of offending State Art mores.

This phenomenon of applauding or tolerating incompetence needs to be answered. The one thing a visitor might reasonably expect of anyone showing in the National Gallery is pictorial skill, but this is precisely the qualification conspicuous by its absence. Is there really no one at the National with the nerve to speak up? Why are some of the top curators of their generation prepared to tolerate a display of such obvious and insulting crudity? There is here no drawing, colour, touch, composition or intelligent insight. If Hodgkin’s pathetic account of Seurat’s Bathers or Peter Blake’s feeble-minded versions of the NG’s bare breasts didn’t look bad enough when exhibited among the Gallery’s collection, Nashashibi’s hopeless pictures are even more embarrassing than those.

What makes it worse is that some poor minion drew the short straw and had to write accompanying (presumably explanatory) drivel. As with so much official commentary on Contemporary Art there is no relationship between what is seen and what is written. If you mixed up pictures and captions to play Pelmanism no way could you relate any one image to any sentence except by a fluke. What, for example, in relation to two flat formless figures, one allegedly dancing in front of the other (for which we have only the writer’s word), is this supposed to mean: “[A Drop of Scent] explores ways in which a single moment can be experienced on multiple physical and emotional levels.” Don’t be stupid. No it doesn’t. Nothing is ‘explored’. These works couldn’t ‘explore’ if they had a map, because the basics of picture making have not been learned. Indeed, they are done by someone who clearly hasn’t a clue such requirements exist.

How can knowledgeable curators turn a blind eye to this nonsense? By going along with the State Art tendency to pretend that ineptitude is acceptable, cowardly people are doing permanent damage to the credibility of art by institutionalising incompetence. It is beyond belief that the Director of the National Gallery can have supported this, lending authority and status to daubs so undeserving. This display is typical of our present culture of fear, the terror felt by many of speaking truth. But for as long as those who should be defending painting turn a blind eye standards will continue to plummet. 

 It seems that where establishment-approved painting after about 1980 is concerned those with a grounding in art appreciation must suspend judgement and accept any scribble anyone produces on the grounds that new and mysterious criteria apply to its appreciation. But where are those who are supposed to be explaining convincingly this mystery to a wider public?

The idea that the National Gallery must show work by recent artists in relation to its own collection, and especially when there is no connection at all, is wrong-headed. It is yet another instance of ‘Let’s All Pretend’ that different species share the same DNA and are as good as each other. You might as well hang Bob and Roberta Smith in the Arena Chapel or Lynette Wotsername among the Villa Valmorana’s Tiepolos. There’s no point, it’s just silly.

And why bother appointing an artist-in-residence who can’t possibly benefit from intimate daily contact with the greatest masterpieces of the past?

We now regularly land robots on Mars and yet 30,000 years ago cavemen using only sticks, fingers, spit and coloured dirt could draw and paint more expressively than today’s State Artists. David Lee (See also Moping Owl overleaf and the review of the latest John Moores on p. 10.) 

Across the last 30 years the narrative of official Contemporary Art has unfurled like a Chinese scroll. We can follow how, from around 1990, those commercial techniques pioneered to manufacture reputations by Charles Saatchi were adopted as a template by other speculators eager to cash in. This was the start of a racket which turned the art market into an investment game of chance played by billionaires and super-dealers. Public galleries went along with it hoping for free scraps and helped along by telephone numbers of taxpayer cash. More recently these same strategies have been weaponised by State Art to engineer a preferred social character to the official art landscape. For them the process is a cinch. Whereas Saatchi only had one gallery to work with, State Art oversees a score of them as well as having access to the limitless potential blackmail offered by exclusive control of public subsidy.

And so the story continues… Clicking through Christie’s results for their recent ‘20th Century Sale’, an auction in which Banksy’s (21st century) NHS drawing (see p. 29) fetched a higher price than Picasso, Modigliani or Bacon, one lot leapt from the screen. This was a lively picture of Pop Art thrust called No Wahala (No Problem in Nigeria’s Hausa tongue), by a 26-year-old British artist from Dagenham, Joy Labinjo, who is also being sold as an ‘African artist’. My interest was aroused because this painting fetched £150,000, five times its estimate. I’d never heard of her, not least, I suspect, because she’s still a student, yet here was a work clearly being exchanged as an investment bond in an auction of the usual blue chip names. The work was painted two years ago, having been exhibited in a solo show at Baltic Arts Centre; that is, local to where Labinjo took her first degree in Newcastle. A sell-out dealer display at an art fair followed with works priced at ten grand each. Within months the Government Art Collection, always wide awoke, jumped aboard with a £70,000 purchase. Barely dry, No Wahala has thus already been through three owners. Labinjo’s prices, meanwhile, have been bounced upwards by 15 times in only 18 months to a level way beyond the means of public galleries. 

Labinjo is part of a State Art policy to race especially young black women painters into prominence. This demonstrates to the world that for all our past institutional and systemic racist failings we are now, at last, ‘diverse’.

No Wahala (5’ x 6’), done in a mixture of household gloss, acrylic and oil,   concerns, we are told, ‘racial identity’. This phrase is the go-to validation now routinely attached to all works by young black artists. Used here it is clearly untrue. Labinjo’s are pictures based on snapshots from her family albums which are fed into a computer and collaged on screen. They are no more about ‘racial identity’ than paintings of white people would be. Other promotional nonsense written about this work by a Christie’s hack made me laugh out loud.

Execution is in patches of colour like stained glass or painting-by-numbers. Figures are crude, faces twisted, clothes limp, limbs disjointed and background colours Dulux bright. Because the means to achieving precise expression of a figure’s feelings are unmastered, one can’t read properly the mood or sentiment of the subjects featured. Nevertheless, and naive as it is, the picture has presence and honesty. I sense an unselfish and genuine desire to communicate. There is no suggestion here of the fashionable sloganising so wearisome in work by other artists from a similar background.

Labinjo is one of several black British women painters, of which she is the most interesting, to be subjected to this market grooming process for political, social and profitable rather than for purely artistic reasons. Incidentally, a picture by the most famous of the group, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, who is currently showing at the Tate and whose work to my eye is meritless, sold a landscape in the same sale as No Wahala for an astounding £513,000.

Is it fair to so exploit a promising student artist? One can’t blame the young for going along with a system which lines their pockets – good luck to them. But is subjecting art and reputation to artifical inflation really considerate of an artist’s long-term development and welfare? It is a process, don’t forget, which regularly fails. Consider the vapid, repetitive merchandise produced by Saatchi’s more famous discoveries, for whom as prices rocketed and publicity snowballed so the work got thinner and thinner. The fear is that Labinjo will, like them, be turned by market gamblers into a one-trick pony. 

Meanwhile, painting that will last the test of time is being made elsewhere, out of the limelight. Not that State Art will ever let you know. David Lee