The marginalised, marginalised?

When dealing with outsider art, respect is due. Nay, respect is essential. But so is egalitarianism. The danger has always been to treat the savants and unexpected genii of the outsider world with something other than the same deference usually saved for normal artists. It is, of course, only the market’s imposition on the fruits of artistic labour, and the artist’s heed of its overbearing weight which differs between those artists slave to it and those removed from it…

And it is in this light that I approached three recent cultural exponents of the outsider cause: the opening of the new Museum of Everything in Primrose Hill, the Koestler Trust’s 2009 Art By Offenders, Secure Patients and Detainees exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall, and a wonderful opportunity to see Mr Daniel Johnston performing at the splendid Bloomsbury Ballroom.

Firstly, the Museum of Everything. Just around the corner from the tea rooms, bistros and cocaine residue of this illustrious corner of NW1 lies a treasure trove of outsider art – the collection of filmmaker James Brett – which has been promoted to the public as not only “London’s first ever space for artists and creators living outside our modern society”. The result is less than respectful.

The curatorial decision seems to have been to make the space, you know, kooky, like these kooky fellas on show. All slanted walls, badly drawn name signs and cobbled together display rooms both using and enhancing the space’s industrial backwater ambience. Unpainted/badly painted walls, breeze block walls and jutting out wires and bricks make for a space knowingly different… but not outsider. A gallery space doesn’t have to go this far to mark itself as distinct from the white space of the contemporary gallery. Indeed, one of the most celebrated and complete collectiosn of Outsider Art – the collection of Mr Art Brut himself, Jean Dubuffet, in Lausanne – is a perfect embodiment of this. At no point does this gallery impinge on the work it is celebrating, but rather takes a back seat letting the Dargers, the Scotts and the Gills take over. Similarly, the Whitechapel’s Inner Worlds Outside exhibition of a few years previously fully respected these works by placing them alongside their contemporaries illustrating the interaction of the arts in recent history outside of a framework potted with distinctions. The Museum of Everything seems to knowingly plays upon its difference from contemporary art at a time when the latters’ association with money and greed threatens to devalue it further than the market itself has managed.

As such, I left this new museum dejected, even having seen a wonderful collection of artists all worth noting and celebrating. The calligraphic meanderings of Dan Miller, for example, 

Dan Miller

or the troublingly post-propaganda Soviet ramblings of Alexandre P. Lobanov 

Alexandre P. Lobanov

On a more positive note, however, the museum’s decision to ask noted artists to write about its exhibitors was a fantastic one, and one which salvaged some sort of favour in my eyes. I was particularly fascinated by not only the speakers they chose, but the apparent linkages. Jamie Shovlin’s relation to Charles AA Dellschau’s stunted historiography, Tal R’s appropriate evocation of Judith Scott’s luxuriously colourful abstractions, and even Pete Townsend’s celebration of the extraordinarily powerful drawings of Donald Pass.

Donald Pass, untitled, 1984

 

I encountered similar problems at the Royal Festival Hall attending the 2009 Koestler Trust exhibition. Again, the work was fascinating and, at times, truly exceptional, not to mention largely devoid of the clichés and inanities of contemporary frieze-art. And, in fact, the exhibitions’ place on the Spirit Level of the RFH is well chosen and well-curated – by inmates of two women’s prisons as it turns out. Unfortunately, the Southbank appears to then kick itself in the foot by repeatedly failing to advertise the work sufficiently. In none of the flyer stands, of which there are many, can be found leaflets promoting this exhibition, and on encountering the few works which sit on the main concourse, you would be hard pushed to realise their were more works to be found downstairs. Such a wonderful opportunity to see the work and minds of these artists deserves better.

Particularly noteworthy were two works, one by an inmate from HMP Brendon, Bucks listed only as Michael entitled Is Masculinity Inevitable?, and another anonymously exhibition by an inmate from HMP Shotts, Scotland entitled Yours Sincerely, The Tabloid Press.

Is Masculinity Inevitable? , Michael, HMP Brendon, Bucks

Is Masculinity Inevitable? (detail)

 

Yours Sincerely, the Tabloid Press, Anon, HMP Shotts, Scotland

 

Both – though not necessarily proficient in high-art terms – exhibit a developed ability with their materials, whilst picking apart some of the more interesting questions which must reoccur within penal institutions. Masculinity is presented shot through with metaphors both expected and ambiguous, from matadors to molecular science, history lessons through to contemporary history. The result is a seeming meditation on the complexity of the human condition, exemplified in a way the tabloid press would be hard pressed to believe never mind appreciate. The second work, subsequently, embodies a more immediate and impassioned response to the Paparazzi’s approach to the accused and their families: slobbering, scrupulous and stoic in their hounding and, impressively, with more than one face as the sky curdles and surroundings haemorrhage.

Here is the world of the penal outsider, stripped of dignity and attempting to claw some back in paint and pen. Rather than working “outside our modern society” as, supposedly, are the outsiders of the Museum of Everything, here we find men and women working AS A RESULT OF modern society, or so they seem to say… There are few declarations of dissatisfaction with the results of their choices, and their position in society, but dissatisfaction with society – civilization in Freudian terms – abounds. The confines of the RFH appear an appropriately cultured and Liberal surround to showcase such views within.

And so finally to the admirable and incredible Daniel Johnston, whose surroundings at the Bloomsbury Ballroom appeared the perfect final resting place of my week of outsider art: triumphant, elegant and perfectly social. Here was a setting neither outside nor aware of its relation to culture.. this was HIGH culture, and brazenly so… and Daniel Johnston shone in the spotlight bearing all his fragility and fears as a badge of pride. 

Daniel Johnston w. David Tatersall of The Wave Pictures.

 

Starting off with just a guitar like a babe-in-arms for company, Daniel walked on stage nervous and awkward. He played a few songs to rapturous applause, and for the moment, I was uneasy. I am a big fan of Johnston’s music, but the response seemed almost out of kilter with the reality of Johnston’s rickety attempts at renditions. What’s more, I couldn’t hold in the feeling that the applause lay somewhere between appreciation and encouragement, and the awkward patronising sound of pity…

Yet as time went on, Johnston grew in stature. Never relaxed, but certainly enjoying himself and allowing himself a joke or two, songs such as Living Life and Bloody Rainbow, sung with accompaniment, were joyful and enchanting, and the final rendition of True Love Will Find You in the End couldn’t have been better judged.

And it was with the accompaniment of support band The Wave Pictures for this and indeed the last five or six numbers that Johnston truly came into his own. Their enjoyable brand of indie lounge rock sloped away behind him, providing the occasional glimmering solo, and most memorably a crunching and riotous embellishment of his track Rock N Roll, as Johnston yelped over the guitars his lyrics about how rock n roll, and more specifically the Beatles gave him something to live for as a young man with extreme Bipolar disorder. And as he screeched

        That Rock N Roll, it saved my soul

 one couldn’t help but feel glad it had, and that it was doing the same for a room full of people.

 **

In the Wave Pictures’ accompaniment of Daniel Johnston I witnessed the most disarming spectacle of the week. Three young musicians clearly alongside a hero, a hero with extreme difficulties who had to leave the stage to collect himself more than once during the concert. Yet playing alongside him they appeared to experience all the joy one would expect of such an opportunity. Almost goading each other on to rock out more heavily on Rock N Roll, they enjoyed every second of their evening with him, and so did he it appeared.

Similarly, the inmates given the opportunity to show their work by the Koestler Trust, and those invited to curate the exhibition, were treated with nearly all the respect due to them as artists standing alone.

Yet in the Museum of Everything, we have the ability to witness the work of some of the most interesting and truly wonderful artists of the last century or so, celebrated endlessly since Dubuffet and Hans Prinzhorn first acknowledged the proffers of those working “outside of society” decades ago, presented as the misfits hundreds of people have worked painstakingly to put an end to… it’s a disappointing rendition of an inspiring collection, and a continuingly important insight.

The sacred made real, the real made sacred

The greatest achievement of the new exhibition at the National Gallery, The Sacred Made Real, is its presentation of the 17^th century Spanish attitude to religion as more than just gory, sordid and self-lacerating. Instead, Christ’s death becomes full of both sorrow and hope. Retribution and redemption. The overstated ennui symbolic of Spanish Catholicism becomes instead a sustained and deeply felt meditation on the subjects of death, suffering, and injustice. The Christian fables become metaphoric and worthy, the emotions worth feeling and remembering. Anyone and everyone will be moved by this exhibition’s startling presentations of distress and anguish, and Christ’s narrative might be seen as the lesson it was originally intended as.

It is the success of these super-realistic works that they inspire emotion in their audience in and of themselves, and looking around this exhibition, even as an atheist, I found myself relating to the works, responding to the storylines delivered in canvas, wood, and paint, not to mention human hair and ivory, even where they were their most brazenly and shockingly sacrificial and Christian.

Pedro de Mena – Christ as the Man of Sorrows (Ecce Homo), 1673

 

In the above work, for instance, the brutality depicted – blood running down Christ’s back from the lacerations and from the crown of thorns – provokes heartfelt compassion. For me, the presented allegory oscillated within my anguished attempt to place my sincere reaction to it with recourse to my deepest problems with the Christian faith and the inherent cruelty of so many of its parables. 

Similarly, Francisco de Zurbarán’s Crucifixion inspired from me an empathetic and tangible response, but as the wonderful accompanying film illustrated at the end of the exhibition, the artistic genius behind it advances the cause enigmatically. Shown in the image below in a mock up of its original setting, the work was originally positioned in a portico of an office, viewable from a window to the right and above… painted with a light source matching its intended light source, the painting looks not only sculptural but life like as the body hangs in its niche privately and forlorn.

Francisco de Zurbarán – Christ on the Cross, 1627

Marcel Duchamp – Étant Donnés, 1946-1966

The attestions of reality reminded me awkwardly of Marcel Duchamp’s great final work Étant Donnés,a work enshrined similarly in privacy, pain, suffering and the unknown. Comparing them feels tantamount to something worse than blasphemy, and yet the comparison seems to hold. It imbues the work with a physicality beyond parable. 

Indeed, just as other works in this exhibition remind of either Ron Mueck’s hyper-realist works, or the self-congratulatory airs of trompe-l’oeil, the whole exhibition became for me again and again an inroad into ways of thinking about non-Christian art, modern art, modern life. Comparative art history with me at the centre enabled me to understand and appreciate the message. The brutality of Christ’s passion became no more enigmatic of suffering than the young woman’s in Duchamp’s masterpiece.

And so, beyond the un-missable and emotionally wrenching manifesto of the exhibition itself, here are a few of my own personal reflections on particular work to be found therein.

***

As one might expect, it was the Velázquez works which truly stood out in the exhibition, and one particularly gave in to my internalised art historical dialogue.

Diego Velázquez, Immaculate Conception, 1618-19

Salvador Dali – Christ of Saint John of the Cross, 1951

In this painting of the immaculate conception, I was struck first and foremost by the surrounds. I remember visiting the Prado in Madrid with my cousin Judith and her Madrileño husband Pablo many years ago. Pablo shared with me some of his and his artist father’s insights into the collection. I particularly remember him drawing my attention to Velázquez’s skies and asking me to keep them in mind, as we walked back out into the Madrid sun and gazed upwards. I was astonished to find one of Madrid’s proudest secrets, and further proof of Velázquez’s talent. Indeed, the skies of the Castillian countryside are oft-referred to as Velasqueños in the master’s honour.

The comparison of the idealised classical world at Mary’s feet and the earthly grounding of the Velasqueño sky makes me for an interesting juxtaposition. Similarly, I thought of Dali’s Christ from the Scottish national collection and wondered about the roots of its details; whether the lake and mountains, or the clouds were Catalunyan. I have long been fascinated by the sheer detailing of Dali’s greatest works, and his declarations of their origins in dreams. I wonder where reality takes hold in this work, and where it took hold in the dreams of this surreal master.

***

Another work in the exhibition, Alonso Cano’s The Vision of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, also caught my eye. It was unavoidably reminiscent of the Murakami work I had seen a week earlier in the Tate’s Pop Life exhibition, Milk,

Alonson Cano - The Vision of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, also known as ‘The Miracle of the Lactation’, 1657-1660

Takashi Murakami – Milk, 2009

 

and this comparison helped me think about the importantly maternal elements of Mary’s character in the bible, and what this stands for more broadly, alongside the improbably maternal elements of this vulgar take on Japanese and contemporary culture. The distinction is startling, and apparently a shocking indictment on both parental and maternal respect in a society ravaged by pop culture.

What they and all the works mentioned above have in common is a distillation of the exhibition at hand’s title. The sacred made real. As I approached the works and my thought processes as they arose from it, it appeared to me that, similarly, and maybe more particularly for an atheist, what the exhibition, and the works viewed out of context achieved was an attestation of the sacred nature of reality. The maternal, the paternal, our brethren, humanity, all of these things are absolute in our lives. Such artistic accomplishments as are on view here only serve to heighten the importance of life, and the recording of it. The talents on offer testify to the need for glorification of the every day, and one one’s trials and tribulations are no more important than another. We are all in this together.

A Local Art History

On Tuesday evening, Malcolm Bull (Andrew W Mellon Foundation MA Visiting Professor from Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford) gave a talk at the Courtauld Institute of Art entitled World Art and Art World, part of this semester’s series of lectures grouped under the epithet “Globalisation and Contemporary Art”.

The premise was as follows:

… this lecture explores ways of mapping world art as a unified field, and the implications for current debates in art theory and political aesthetics.  

Bull started by considering the possibilities of truly and successfully navigating an art world (*shudder*) where the breadth of artists available for our indulgent eyes at manifold Biennials and galleries across numerous borders, as well as their interwoven histories, subjectivities and understandings of EVERYTHING, made for a web of knowledge limitless in its scope. This art world, he said, becomes problematic in its size, and unable to fully contain, before reasoning that a theory which made use of this reality was necessary for forward momentum into this interconnected world. 

He followed this by suggesting two courses of action, one which he disparagingly termed a LOCAL ART HISTORY which explored only those factors closest to home and which continued to indulge itself in the simplest cases of cause and effect, and another course which sought to address the infinite…

Using Franco Moretti’s treatise of 2005 Graphs, Maps, Trees as a case in point, Bull compared these paths to the distinction between comparative literature and world literature, before going on, as far as I could tell, to attempt to break (dumb) down the hierarchy of major selling and important artists in the world right now into a single static graph and a few hollow titbits removed from reality into the seedy realm of theory.  A graph, furthermore, of little value to the non-economic historian, or to the art historian plagued by a passion for the subject.

Bull seemed to decide that the opposite to LOCAL ART HISTORY was following Moretti’s lead and attempting to explore the unlimited ramifications of a truly global art history by reducing art history to a graph exploring artists instrinsic value and monetary value by way of data provided by two websites on one specific date… (the result being that Bull identified Western Artists as still more powerful in the global art market, but that changes were beginning to take place… no shit Sherlock!) And while he did address reason that a fully interactive and transitive graph would be needed to fully appreciate the changing nature of said art world, he only served to undervalue art’s beauty in my eyes.

 Having said all that, the basic point was, I feel, a valid one. How do we map a globalised world. What is the difference between art world and world art, and how do we place ourselves in the matrix. What is the value, beyond the monetary, of scribblings from Mozambique to a young man from Coventry who has studied European Modernism.

I responded in the opposite direction to Bull. I saw value in a LOCAL ART HISTORY, but not the one he proposed. I envisaged an internalized art history, one created from within, gravitating towards and around one’s self… One understanding and respectful of the near before the far, but appreciative of the possibilities provided by international communications and travel.

I saw no reason for worry, and I will continue to delve into the world at my fingertips as the first world I have… the only world I have.

The local as distinct from the global appears increasingly important to contemporary discussions of science and technology-based studies and directions of intent, so why not in the arts.

If the world is too large to map, why place one’s self anywhere other than in the known, and work out from there, tentatively, and with the utmost respect to one’s backyard…

I don’t know what this means just yet, but it feels right.

Here’s is Bucky Fuller’s dymaxion map to help us appreciate the vastness surrounding us and our insignificance, but also our equalitarian value.

Halloween

YEAH!

Aqua Tower, 430 East Waterside Drive, Chicago, IL

Isn’t she a beaut!

The perfect marriage of Chicago’s iconic cubular verticality and its placid bedfellow, Lake Michigan, has emerged courtesy of the delightfully named Studio Gang, Jeanne Gang’s Windy City based architectural practise. Interested parties are waxing lyrical about “the largest skyscraper built/designed by a woman”, whilst sniggering about the insinuations of its phallic pomposity. I care not one jot, and I’m not going to speculate about the organic undertones of the design which may or may not expose the masculin sterility of the hard-edged modernist stalwarts who stand shoulder to shoulder with this treasure.

Indeed, I repeat with concern the lovely story of Ms Gang’s decision to impress the building with irregularly spaced windows so as to make birds aware of its presence, thus discouraging them from crashing head first into her… i don’t want to make these decisions sound maternal or feminised… the building deserves more than that.

What I am interested in is her aptness in a city of right angles, and at a particular moment in history.

at a time when the verticality of power structures appears devalued even if only in the public eye (ie, the revolution doesn’t appear to be expected just yet!). At a time when falling ice shelves and underwater disturbances threaten to raise sea levels and inflict Tsunami’s on defenceless coast lines. At a time when the public conscious is increasingly aware of its own impact on the geography of our planet, and the difference a little attention to nature can make.

The waves of this building appear to ripple up and out of lake Michigan with a syncopation reminiscent of jumping in puddles, and it is in such youthfully endearing activities that I want to find enjoyment again.

Puddles by M. C. Escher

As autumn falls into place, I want to fill hours kicking dry leaves into the ether, wrapping scarves around my shoulders and the shoulders of loved ones, enjoying nature’s stripping of itself in preparedness for a new start, in the hope that society might begin to follow suit. I see the building as an accidental manifestation of a more simple appreciation of things, where concrete becomes warped wood, glass becomes a still pond, and steel the framework of a decision to look at things differently.

Where Chicago might appear in one instance the perfect vertical manifestation of the American and indeed Western push upwards and forwards with pomp and grandiose flamboyance, this Odalisque sits amongst her brethren shiveringly aware of her own immortality; heartbreakingly conscious that in her puddles can be seen the reflections of a world taller than it deserves to be.

**

Will Alsop appeared to have a similar idea when building The Public

but on reflection (geddit!!), West Bromwich might not have been the ideal place to start a metaphoric evo-revo-lution.

The cartography of Grayson Perry

Victoria Miro’s current Grayson Perry exhibition is an absolute must see. Not only for the acclaimed new work Walthamstow Tapestry - of which a detail appears below – but  also for its wider presentation of his ability, his ideas and his attitudes. I left this exhibition convinced that here is an artist worth noticing and taking notice of.

detail from Walthamstow Tapestry by Grayson Perry

Although I have long been a fan of Perry’s ceramics, and consider him one of the few truly worthy winners of the Turner Prize in recent times, this exhibition stood out for me as both exciting and important. This was all the more remarkable when considering I went in expecting not to like the work… neither the image above, nor the guardian’ write-up of the piece dampened my whistle one jot. To be blunt, the tapestry, whilst certainly a grower, is perhaps the least interesting work on show.

In the main space of the Victoria Miro gallery one finds a number of large crowd covered canvases, decorated with rich colours used subtley on neutral grounds. People and animals interweave across the canvas with no apparent canvas, as though seen from above in a barren field. Hoards of elephants dash across one, whilst the crowds unfurl banners of colour in another. Remarkably un-Perry like, these works appear Middle Eastern in origin, akin in composition to something like Indian manuscripts, such as the V&As Akbarnama by way of Where’s Wally?, and are joyous if somehow unwantonly restrained… nothing of Perry’s exuberance and flamboyance appears in them, yet in them we find the perfect mediator before confronting the Tapestry et al next door in the recently built extension above the neighbouring Parasol Unit.

Entering the room, one finds the tapestry stretching away to one’s left and thus somehow unremarkable, as was my first impression of meeting Picasso’s Guernica at Madrid’s Reine Sofia gallery. Its size and detail, however, make it only fully enjoyable up close and at length anyway, so any initial disappointment soon seeps away.

The work, whilst it is probaly fair to call it either obvious or overly brash in its cynical portrayal of modern society (brand names, cartoonish stereotypes, life thru death cycle depicted as an allegory remindful somehow of Victoria Wood’s creations), somehow strikes a note. The stereotypes are endearing, not to mention amusing, the pronounced evocations of birth, life and death are more palatable than, but remindful of the popularism of Beryl Cook, and the figures each tagged with the names of brands, divorced from their logos, become a fractured narrative of a day in the life of E17 by way of Bayeux…

detail from the Bayeux tapestry

…and I think this is the best way to approach the work. What at once might seem a corny, sentimental and juvenile use of brands as “bad”, employing the oft-stated and oft-disparaged that, like, we are all just brands man! (See Slipknot fans tattooing barcodes on themselves… “we’re all products of the system”) becomes instead a simple and indicative commentary on this same argument loaded heavily with sarcasm and irony.

idiot

The same is true of two more works in the same room which I enjoyed even more. Firstly and most particularly, the older work Print for a Politician, linked below to a zoomable reproduction courtesy of the Guardian, in which a Warhammer-like fantasy narrative occurs on a similarly role-play landscape in which small colonies/groups of people battle against one another whilst jostling for space and for power it would seem. The groups of standardised social sections ( journalists, communists, racists, catholics etc, through to more absurd groupings which I fail to recollect) appears divided and encumbered with fear or another whilst all gathered together on a small island contained within the image (but for the tabloids who, hilariously, fire rockets aimlessly from a ship removed from this microsociety!).  The labels could be contrived in anothers hands, but in Perry’s the commentary is both facetious and cutting. I was overjoyed to read that this work is, in fact, owned by the House of Commons.

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Arts/Arts_/Pictures/2006/03/31/perry_big.jpg

Another work whose title I forget makes an island of a man with Perry’s head in its apposite place, similarly delineated into groupings of conflicting parties. Humorous confrontations abound, each represented by small buildings analytical of said groups purpose. The result is a wonder to behold, and the cartographic nature of the works makes them subtley if not subconciously somehow trustworthy and informative, not to mention instructioning and inciteful.

Numerous pots enrich the exhibition, and show off Perry’s flair for juxtaposition and confrontation even within the sphere of ceramics. You will find yourself laughing heartily at his commentaries on societies both new and old.

Finally, in the upstairs space of the main gallery, a series of small floor works depicting groups of simple mundanities cobbled together, bananas, cucumbers etc if my memory serves me well, gathered inside tissue paper, and at the end of the room a wonderful pair of floor works made of splintered wood layered ontop of one another, one natural, and one painted a glowing gold only viewable from above. The simplicity is a joy to behold, and a celebration of everything playfully denigrated next door.

You never feel lectured to, but again and again, you find yourself nodding along in agreement, much like a good Charlie Brooker or David Mitchell article.

He learnt to paint a bit too late

My father has written some wonderful poems. Indeed, he wrote an entire collection’s worth largely about my brother and I growing up… well I say my brother and I… only two were about me amongst a sea of beautiful reflections on my brothers early years, neither of which quite embody joy or happiness. See for youself:

Bottom bubbles, bottom bubbles, floating in the bath                                                                                                                                     Bottom bubbles, bottom bubbles, make my brother laugh

Daddy doesn’t like the smell and has to go outside                                                                                                                                            But I shout back after him, “Come back and get me dried!”

**

My little baby brother He likes crunchy peanut butter                                                                                                                                    He likes munchy peanut butter more than anything else.

Peanut butter sandwiches, or spread on thick brown toast                                                                                                                          And of peanut butter sandwiches, he will always make the most.

But one day I saw his mummy change his nappy and it’s true,                                                                                                                    She wiped off all the nasty and revolting thick brown goo.

And guess where she put it, my craft dear old ma,                                                                                                                                            She scraped it back into the old peanut butter jar.

So you see, my father’s artistic output with relation to me is imbued and underpinned by the scatological and the profane. That isn’t all though. I hold these two poems very close to my heart. They do somehow explain something about me, or at least the young me that my dad still waxes lyrical about, the innocent me, the clueless me, the me untarnished by frustration, ennui and society’s pitfalls.

The me that, one morning before nursery, responded to my mother’s question “aren’t you taking your spectacles with you today?” with the comic genius of “aren’t they attached to my penis?”

–

So it comes as something of a surprise that Damien Hirst has been speaking about his newest Blue Paintings, on show at the Wallace Collection as though they are the first proper paintings he has succeeded with.

I did two years of absolutely rotten paintings and I wouldn’t want anybody to see them. They were just awful. For two years when I was painting them I thought, fucking hell, if I die now they’re going to come in here and go, ‘Oh, he fucked it up at the end. He was brilliant up to that point and then he did these and they’re awful.’ I was painting skulls and I couldn’t paint them properly so I put a fag in their mouth and a red jacket and it was like ‘Death having a fag’. And then I started painting the smoke and they were just awful. And then I told myself, just go back to the skull.

Has he forgotten to consider, or did he never really consider in the first place, the personal significance and the domestic magnitude of the subject matter in his Birth Paintings exhibited at the White Cube in 2007.

What’s more, did he have any involvement in these works at all. As Andrew Graham Dixon recently said of his latest works where he has now sought fit to “learn to paint”,

That Damien is trying to paint pictures now seems like a very odd thing to do, because what he has spent so much of his life doing is creating work that doesn’t require the touch of his hand or the craft of skill.

And so the paintings of his son Cyrus’ birth by caesarean section in 2005, painted without the touch of his father, showcased an unemotional, documentary-like approach to his son’s birth evocative of TV hospital dramas, all scrub green, tile white and blood red. Little of the “intense joy and deep-set anxiety we can all feel in hospitals where we are surrounded by both creation and decay” proffered in the press release can be found anywhere close to these works.

My reaction to them at the time was a heaped-on dose of contempt for an artist I find abhorrent. In these works I found an almost voyeuristic, fetishised approach to his son’s birth emblazoned across the walls in gloss paint and cartoon-strip-like banality. Moreover, I found nothing of HIM, the artist, the FATHER! Suddenly my dad’s reflections of my bowel movements appear both moving and incontrovertibly personal. They were by HIM, about ME.

These should have been moments worth learning to paint for. Worth rhapsodizing about in rhyme and meter, pen and ink, song and syntax. Worth MORE than diamonds, more than just toys off the end of his production line.

Worse still, however, in all this familial exploitation, was the works’ – and by default, the metaphorical importance of these works’ –  neglect in reviews of the time which all concentrated on addressing his DIAMOND SKULL! Outweighing and, most depressingly, out-selling these candidly repeated, aura-empty snapshots (crap as they were) of what should have been and should still be moments worth celebrating rapturously, the skull became the talking point. The skull was more sellable to a public hungry for tales of excess. The public lapped up this commercialised bullshit from the granddaddy of post-post-post-post pop-sickle-y artlessnes. Before the D-word was thought of deemed truly possible, this skull represented everything wrong with the market.

But alas, whatever history holds, Damien HAS now learned to paint…

 

 

 

Damien Hirst- The Meek Shall Inherit The Earth, 2009

 

 

Pale, monotonous, castrated attempts at placing himself between his forefathers. Failures. Rotters; eaked out from the pages between Bacon, Giacometti, Van Gogh, van Claesz etc etc etc, reprinted in a jizzmag between the lonely-hearts and the tits. Nothing new, nothing worth talking about.

Even now, he can’t see beyond himself, his skull (brain missing) and his carniverous, fame-hungry sharks, mouth aghast, continuing to swim around and between the points worth considering and eulogising in his life.

Life itself.

Surfing with the MOR alien

I can’t believe I almost missed the most hilarious music news of recent times. Apparently, Coldplay’s recent single Viva La Vida was ripped off from Joe Satriani’s If i Could Fly, and the matter has been settled out of court.

Firstly, if this is true, my zealous dislike of the MOR kings has eleviated somewhat, Coldplay listen to axe-god shocker!!! and secondly, if this is true, where did they go wrong.

At the tender age of eleven or twelve, having recently started to learn to play guitar (or perhaps having reached my first of many plateaus of disinterest – learning instruments has always been antithetical to my patience for learning manual skills), my father booked tickets to see the famous G3 tour – every guitar heros dream before Playstation 3 was invented – in which the fearsome trio of Yngwie J. Malmsteen, Steve Vai and Joe Satriani performed back to back, and then together a little bit… oodles of fretboard canoodling.

The spectacle was enlightening and one i’ve never quite forgotten. The noise was phenomenal. My first concent: still one to be rivalled with (but for my friend Mark’s enviable boast of Meatload). Seeing the mikly gleen of Satriani’s barren forehead nodding gently along as his fingers raced across the surface of his silver-surfer of a guitar was a spectacle indeed. So was the trip home, headache and tinitus in tow, where a brummie woman lay passed out across four seats of the train brandishing a half full glass of wine and a teddy bear inexplicably.

 

What’s more, the soft metal on offer was inspiring and exciting to a young indie/rock fan. I had never before met the beast that is the metal spectrum, at which point a thirst was awoken.

As such, to hear that the staid peddlers of soft radio-friendly singa longa pop ditties might have incorporated into thei stadium-aimed sounds (when did stadium ‘rock’ start being so wet?) something of their stadium ROCK forefathers seemed to complete the cycle, so to speak. Son embraces and repeats lesson of father!

My befuddlement, however, fell somewhere in line with what Coldplay’s lawyers originally presented as a defence based on Satch’s lack of “originality”.  The similarities lie surely in the chord progression and the chord progression alone, something one can hardly hardly lay claim to possessing any more than artist can of their tools: style, colour mixing, brushwork etc.

In art, such flagrant copying is kindly referred to as “reference”.

In hip hop, it’s called “sampling”.

Whatever the name, it reveals a sense of respect paid, and what’s more, can be no more curtailed than it can be called out.

Picasso devoted much of his career to flagrantly stealing the ideas and experiments of his artistic friends and forefathers. “Bad artists copy, good artists steal” he once said. “If there is something to steal, I steal it” was another. Except such a notion not only exonerates Coldplay (and every other band accused of theft), but also aggrandises them. Coldplay don’t need to be any bigger. God damn, let them go away!

The Chapman Brothers, too, have peddled a career in theft brazenly and arrogantly, annotating and re-selling Goyas, and painting gaudy rainbows in watercolours by none other than Herr Hitler.

 

Even a recent exhibition by Jasper Joffe seemed a continuation of the pattern whereby every ten years or so since Baldessari, an artist destroys/ gets rid of/ renounces his lifes work/ possessions in order to start again/ make some money. My father even did it c. 1973., after which he became the wonderful watercolourist he is today.

http://andrewmjsutton.com

The final nail in the coffin of all this is youtube’s lesson to me that it would appear Satriani much more closely ripped off the Argentinian band Enenitos Verdes than those little foppish twats ripped him off.

Call it pastiche and lighten up I say. Satriani should be glad of the coverage and that someone might still care, I hadn’t thought about that evening when I first embraced him for years, and since then I have returned to his classic album Surfing with the Alien with both amusement and delight; cheesy soft-cock-rock at its best, and a salutation to the axe.

Anselm Kiefer – Palmsonntag, 2006

At the weekend I made a final visit to the Futurism show at Tate Modern to see a few favourite pieces, Fernand Leger’s La Noce, David Bomberg’s In The Hold and Robert Delaunay’s L’equipe de Cardiff to name but a few. The exhibition, though neither fantastically received, nor fantastically curated, did harbour some incredible works. I am more than happy to look beyond the unexciting and largely unusable white walls of the Tate when the works on show are fantastic.

What’s more, I am more than happy to look beyond the usual lazy attacks on futurism for its fascistic dalliances, being as they are entirely removed from the true wonder of futurism. Art is supposed to talk of its zeitgeist, great art particularly so. Bring back the days when artists cared about something I say. I’d rather a great revolutionary/extremist artist than a feeble minded inbetweener cashing in on a fad.

And so we come back to that great meditator, Anselm Kiefer.

I had almost forgotten that the Tate had been fortunate enough to acquire his Palmsonntag as part of the d’Offay donation, and was overjoyed to stumble across it. What’s more, the experience of seeing out far outweighed that of seeing even some of my favourite works, mentioned above.

Kiefer is the sort of artist we desperately need in society right now. I look at his works, and I respond to them with awe, with interest, with hints of scepticism, but most of all, with excitement. Here is an artist making big comments, and yet giving us nothing in the process. Here is an artist who I feel we will be speaking about for generations to come, even after his works have rotted away or fallen apart, or crumbled, maybe, into something more closely approaching the destruction they embody.

This works speaks, fundamentally, of Christ’s return to Jerusalem, but also the biggie of life and death. Of course, Kiefer makes no comment on the Passion to come, and hints more closely at Christ’s reception than the man himself. Receptions of death and life. Receptions of the unknown.

It is impossible to speak about Kiefers work in soundbits, more impossible to describe it to a friend who has never encountered him, as I found shortly after my visit.

Suffice it to say that in a world of kitsch dross, day glo advertising boards and inane comments on the aforementioned, a man whose works emerge from the barron landscapes of his home in Provence, imbued with tangible recollections of the earth, the ground, base matter and decay, might we find something more transcendental than the refuse of society’s want.

In a felled tree might we see ourselves and our consumption.

In Kiefer might we find something more real than the reality we have adopted for ourselves.

Generation Corn on the Cob

In this week’s Douglas Coupland interview in the Guardian – a short and wanton piece which left me entirely unspent – a few points appeared from the rabble of words which appeared to merit further consideration. (I’m not attacking Coupland here, his thought process was almost shown to be illuminating, rather the decision to waste two of the four allocated pages on a headline and a head shot which contributed little to the study of the man in question).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/07/decca-aitkenhead-douglas-coupland

Hmmm. I remember the 70s really well, and the thing about the 70s was everything was just decaying, nothing worked, either politically or in any other way. And the only technological changes were that phones went from rotary to push-button. Then in the 80s there were a few more things, and in the 90s there was email, but even if you had it there weren’t many places to go with it.

And then, suddenly, collectively, since 2000, we’ve had Google, Ebay, Facebook, social media, the digitisation of the world’s economic system, the iPhone. My friend’s got an iPhone you can point at a sudoku puzzle in a news-paper, and it recognises the numbers and builds you a new electronic one, and then it solves it for you in about three seconds. It’s just voodoo, it’s totally spooky…

…Soon it won’t be the internet any more, it’ll just be like air, like somehow they’ll integrate the internet into the air. And God’s name will have ended up being Google, because that’s the way it worked out.

Scary stuff. Coupland’s attitude towards modernity and everything he has so long been heralded as the harbinger of as a result of 1991’s Generation X appears incomplete throughout this interview, ranging from pro- to anti- in a heartbeat. So it should be. The big questions which lie dormant, waiting to take the 2010s by force, oscillate emphatically between utopian and dictatorial. The internet’s levelling power in a globalised world versus the unaccountable and unelected few behind its biggest weapons stands to wreak havoc on democracy.

Moreover, the accessability of things makes for a world increasingly full of clutter, removing room for the enjoyment of the everyday. We need to ween ourselves away from the multitudes and enjoy simple existence. I smile every time I watch populist cookery programmes propulgating the wonders of home cooking and, indeed, home growing. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s campaign to get Britain gardening brings a pang of joy to my heart, even if he is a pig-nosed Etonite toffee chewer.

In one second, I consider modernity as too big and unimaginable. Yet the grandiose conflab in the above interview also made me think of a work by James Rosenquist featuring a huge telephone cable, like a celebration of technology’s infantesimal details on a scale suitable to those unable to process such complexities. Like a reader’s digest or something. Power is big. In the 60s and seventies, things became big. Increasingly, things, ideas and reality are almost tooo big.

I saw this work by Rosenquist at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art years back, Leakey Ride for Dr Leakey. The idea inherent pervades Rosenquist’s career, even now thirty/forty years on. Similarly, Claes Oldenburg’s sculptures, such as those exhibited in New York’s Green Gallery in ‘62 (below) propose something similar.

What was once a celebration of, and hyperbolation of commerce and consumerism now appears almost homely. A pompous uprising for the things in your cupboards, not the ethereal beams of stuff which enable the internet to run amok.

All of these things were on my mind after reading the above interview, sitting down to a tasty corn on the cob, and BOY was it tasty.

Here is something worth celebrating, worth idolising, pure flavour, unidirectional synapse response, its just you and the sweetcorn. REALITY.

I heard nothing. People were speaking, I heard nothing. Just the sound of my on chewing, the slap of saliva on corn, and the gracious sound of mmmmmmmmmm from my lips, like Bill Murray in What About Bob?

Lovely Chicken, Lovely Potato Salad. Mm mm mm mm mm mm mmmmmmm. ummmhhhhhhh!

And God’s name, for those few seconds, had ended up being sweetcorn. And second by second reality existed, and wireless connections failed to interfere.