Reviews

This post had been up some weeks ago, briefly, but for the sake of not ruining the experience of potential gallery visitors I took it down; so here it is again…

In early 2004, I visited Jan Mot in Brussels only to encounter the gallerist himself, in an otherwise empty space, rendering a medley of Tino Sehgal pieces. This is how I described the scene at the time: ‘Jan Mot walked into the gallery backwards from his office; he began talking in a sober, self-absorbed way, but it wasn’t clear whether he was talking about Sehgal’s pieces or actually was one of them. Every time I tried to face Mot he would turn away, continuing to talk, throwing his arms and legs around in circles, and saying, “Tino Sehgal, This is good, 2001, courtesy the artist”. After a while he turned around, said “this is a piece by Tino Sehgal entitled this is exchange”, shook my hand and invited me to converse with him for five minutes about the notion of market economy [...] This [rendering of one Sehgal piece after another] could have gone on for ever, and in fact the piece does not stop until the visitor leaves (poor Mot).’ (Read the whole article here).

Dejá vu: five years later, I again entered an empty space. But Mot didn’t come out from the office this time. Instead I walked up to him; we greeted each other, and as I couldn’t detect a remark that sounded like it could be part of a Sehgal piece (no sudden mentioning of a newspaper headline or such) I started to feel a little unsure whether I had got something wrong and that maybe the exhibition had been postponed and the space was simply empty because it was between shows. I asked Mot something along these lines; he ignored the question and instead suggested to go for a coffee. Hmm. This was weird – it felt like the kind of thing that happens when someone you know well has just broken up with someone: you visit them, innocently ask them how their partner is, and they sternly answer ‘let’s go for a coffee, I need to tell you something.’ Was something wrong between Mot and Sehgal?

We went to the café on the corner and sat down. He had this ‘how shall I begin’ expression on his face. Poor Mot. He started to talk. Said that over the years his discontent with some major aspects of Tino’s work had grown. For example the sense of purity implied in the avoidance of using any, even the most basic technology, whether used by performers of a Sehgal piece (or interpreters, as the artist prefers to call them) or for the sake of documentation (no photos, no wall labels etc.) and the contradictions that produced. After all, he said, Sehgal did call people up or used email to prepare his pieces…

I asked – and doing so I already started to feel like a counsellor – whether he also felt this discontent in regard to the whole business of how Sehgal’s work is sold, with no written statement, only in cash and only in the presence of a notary and so on? He hesitated a little with his answer, or rather he more or less ignored it (the wound, I assumed, was still very fresh). Instead he said something more general about Tino’s purist avoidance of his work being connected to any kind of object whatsoever, as opposed to an old friend who spent a lot of his time decorating his house with all sorts of objects that held a lot of meaning and history to him. Mot added that he couldn’t see anymore why there should be anything wrong with that. Immediately it crossed my mind that by changing the subject he might have been trying to avoid admitting the most typical split-up-reason between artists and dealers – money.

Why should I be assuming that Sehgal and Mot might have parted company? Because of Mot’s strange behaviour, obviously. I’ve heard too many stories about gallerists and artists splitting up the way couples split up – cold text messages followed by heated phone calls, hurt feelings, accusations of betrayal, odd silence, bitter meetings in court. But the main reason why I suddenly had to think in that direction was that the time that had passed since around 2002 (the time when I had first seen several Sehgal pieces) and now suggested a seven-year itch. A seven-year itch that incidentally also seemed to be happening for the art world in general: after years of boom the downturn. And isn’t it typical that structural crises are often effecting personal crises?

I summoned my courage – and asked Mot straight to his face whether he and Tino had parted company. ‘Parted what?’ he replied, ‘what do you mean?’ I was perplexed. Was he saying that he didn’t understand why I could have assumed that? Or was he saying that he – as a Belgian talking to a German in English – didn’t know the phrase ‘to part company’? Or was he just in a sorry state of denial? Confused I asked if the Tino Sehgal show was actually supposed to be on, or whether it had been postponed? In the very moment I asked that question something dawned on me, but before I could say something, Mot answered my question, and I can’t recall what exactly he said, but the sentence definitely included the phrase ‘this is critique’.

Ouch. Shit. Of course. ‘Are we in the middle of doing the Sehgal piece?’ I asked, and felt silly the moment I uttered it. Of course we were doing it. I instantly felt a little embarrassed, because it had taken me – as someone who had been following Sehgal’s work for about seven years – so long to get it. But then I felt really embarrassed because I had asked Mot whether he and Sehgal had split (the kind of embarrassed you feel when you see a friend you haven’t seen in a while and congratulate her on being pregnant and then it turns out she just gained some weight). It’s usually annoying if someone leads you up the garden path. But after that initial rush of embarrassment I felt (in that order) relieved, amused, delighted. This was so simple, and yet so effective.

And then something remarkable happened. Even though the motivation behind Mot’s behaviour was now revealed, we didn’t stop the ‘critical’ conversation about Sehgal’s work. I talked about Sehgal’s refusal of the role of the ‘critical’ artist, or rather of the simplified criticality/affirmation divide, and his admiration for Jeff Koons’s work. Mot brought up Bruno Latour’s book We Have Never Been Modern (1991) and the idea expressed in it that we are not modern yet because we still cling to the paradigm of a strict division between the object on the one hand and the subject that beholds or treats it, rather than accepting that there are states of hybridity in-between (objectified subjects, subjectified objects), which in reference to Sehgal meant that his rejection of the object was still part of that paradigm. I found myself defending that aspect of Sehgal’s work by saying that his achievement was not least to draw attention to that fact, to bring the separation from the object to a logical extreme. But that on the other hand his ‘interpreters’, in the moment they enact his pieces, often came across as if possessed by the Sehgal demon, and thus objectified, de-subjectified.

I steered the conversation towards the inevitable meta-question about how Mot had been instructed by the artist to do This is critique, critically implying that it wasn’t possible to be critical when one was asked to be ‘critical’ as part of a piece. But he said he couldn’t answer that question now, maybe later. Which in turn brought up the question when ‘later’ would be. Despite of that, there was no real awkwardness at this point anymore. We finished our coffees and left the café.

Back in the gallery, I was ready to admit that the reason for speculating about a possible split between gallery and artist might have been that I had visited my second Sehgal show at the gallery after a long hiatus, suggesting the seven-year itch. Mot laughed, and then answered, if sketchily, my question about how he had been instructed by the artist: he was supposed to stay in the office if a visitor entered, wait for them to approach him rather than approaching them first, and then react with a slightly grumpy, critical remark about Sehgal’s work, thus possibly starting a conversation with them. He added that in my case, as I had called shortly before showing up and as we hadn’t talked in quite a while, he had decided to relocate the piece to the café, because otherwise it would have been too awkward. But why then can’t the critical meta-questions become part of the piece? He answered that he was instructed to only answer these meta-questions once he and the visitor had left the gallery together, or in my case the café, because they were not supposed to become part of the discussion as long as the piece remained in the space where it occurred.

Isn’t that chutzpah – a piece called This is critique which precludes answers to critical questions about its make-up? Chutzpah yes, but preclusion no. Because it doesn’t preclude the answering of these kinds questions – it just prevents that part of the exchange from becoming a part of the piece. Which in turn implies a critical meta-commentary about how the division between ‘critique’ and ‘affirmation’ itself is an often flawed and contradictory one. And accordingly the piece proclaims critique, but thus pre-emptively affirms itself, and the oeuvre it becomes part of. All of this is truly mind-boggling. And (in that order) embarrassing, amusing, delightful.

I saw more naked bodies on display on my one-day mid-winter trip to Warsaw then I am used to or comfortable with. Performances involving the body, primarily the naked one, have been and continue to play a large part in the Polish artistic tradition. But there is much more to the Polish art scene than men with no pants, which I had the chance to learn thanks to the incredible openness and frankness of the members of the small but ambitious artistic scene of the capital city.

Visiting galleries in Warsaw is what I imagine it might have been like to walk around Berlin’s galleries 10 or 15 years ago. There are no outward displays of wealth from these spaces, no opaque brushed-glass windows or large vertical metal door handles. For the most part, galleries are housed in modest, sometimes crumbling flats, or tucked away in backyard buildings. It’s hard to tell whether these traces of decrepitude are partially an affectation, or whether they’re due solely to a lack of funds. Either way, there is a refreshing lack of pomp and bling on show.

There are also apparently less rigid professional boundaries in the art scene. Colleagues talk openly about fellow colleagues, galleries are eager to promote not only their own artists, but others, too. There is a vague sense of patriotism – while galleries here might be able to cash in on artists from nearby burgeoning scenes in the Baltic states, Ukraine, Romania or Russia, they prefer to represent primarily Polish artists. Members of this tight-knit artistic community are glad to wear multiple hats; many galleries for instance, function simultaneously (if not confusingly) as commercial and non-profit spaces.

Another sign of the lack of precious elitism in the art world in Warsaw is that local and national politics are often tangled up in art – there is no high-brow disengagement from the national political landscape, as may be found in other countries. Political activity is a deep-rooted part of the artistic tradition. Artur Żmijewski, for instance, has recently joined the leftist political movement in Poland, openly mingling his artistic and political beliefs.

My first stop after exiting the train station and running smack into the ominous, looming figure of the Palace of Culture and Science stretching upwards into the sky and cloaked by swirling snow flurries, was a somewhat run-down former castle that is now the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle. The castle already hosts an International Artist-in-Residence programme, but the condition of the exhibition spaces leaves much to be desired. The castle is currently hosting two exhibitions: the first is a scrappy exhibition of production shots, set pieces, costumes and archival material from the films of the German independent film director Ulrike Ottinger. Homemade Viking helmets and crocodiles wearing boots joined ample video clips of little people and transvestites. But most striking was the shabby installation – bumpy carpet and fabric haphazardly stapled to the wall did little to help the cause. The larger exhibition spaces were dedicated to ‘May Man Rot’, which, as stated on the press release, celebrates the ‘300th anniversary of Lodz Kaliska’, a radical artist’s collective. As it turns out, this is actually their 30th anniversary (not 300th) and despite the feminist rhetoric, the collective consists of four men. Even more strangely, the exhibition comprised room after room of large photographic murals of naked, large-breasted women performing ‘male-oriented’ labour, such as naked, large-breasted women felling trees and naked, large-breasted women mining coal. I thought perhaps these were pioneering feminist performances from the 1970s, but that was impossible, since all the naked, large-breasted women were wearing brightly colored Crocs. According to Warsaw locals, the group of men responsible for these male-fantasy murals were once important members of the critical art scene in the late ’70s, but, since then, apparently, they may have failed to realize how out-of-step their current work is. Unfortunately none of their influential early work was on view to suggest otherwise.

A new gallery guide published by Zacheta National Gallery, ‘What’s On in Warsaw Galleries’, makes navigating the local galleries relatively easy. My first stop was Galeria Leto, a recently founded gallery which represents Wojciech Bakowski, one of three Polish artists who will be featured in the upcoming New Museum show ‘Younger than Jesus’. Director and founder Marta Kolakowska gave us a comprehensive overview of the current scene in Warsaw. All of the artists she represents are Polish, and many of them hail from nearby Poznan, which, according to Kolakowska, has a burgeoning artistic scene, developing at a distance from the current trendiness of Warsaw.

It was there that we also got our first lesson in a subject that has always confused me: the difference between Galeria Foksal [the not-for-profit space opened in 1966 and the most influential and important avant-garde gallery of its generation] and Foksal Gallery Foundation [the commercial gallery established by one of the founding members of Foksal Gallery, Wieslaw Borowski, in 1997, as a way of earning money to fund activities of Foksal Gallery and continuing its traditions]. Even the local journalists in Warsaw occasionally confuse the two, but in fact, the two spaces operate independently of each other, with none of the associations that their similar names might imply.

Though we didn’t have a chance to visit the original Foksal Gallery, we did make it to the Foksal Gallery Foundation just in time for the final screening of a film by young local artist Anna Molska (born 1983, freshly plucked from the influential studio of Grzegorz Kowalski at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw). But Molska’s work shows nothing of her youth and relative newness on the scene. The Weavers (2008) is based on considerable arcane references: the dialogue, uttered in Polish by three miners from the Silesia region, is based entirely on Gerhart Johann Hauptmann’s 1892 eponymous play. Though the original play is about the mid-19th-century revolt of textile workers in the Owl Mountains, the action and dialogue translate aptly to the current conditions of the Polish mining region, and, by extrapolation, to the global economy. The grizzled workers are shown working in dank underground tunnels and traipsing through poorly lit corridors, stripping out of their heavy uniforms, showering naked and soaping each other’s backs – while not oblivious to the young artist filming them. Molska’ work somehow has the feeling of both a gritty documentary and high artifice and theatricality, gracefully choreographed to an antiquated play.

After the show, we were lucky enough to by given a tour of the former studio of Edward Krasinski, the Polish artistic legend whose reputation has been revived and preserved through the efforts of the Foksal Gallery Foundation, which has kept the studio intact and organized an exhibition and publication around it. Tours are available by appointment, and I can only say that a trip to this studio is worth a trip to Poland.

While FGF is located on the third floor of what could pass for a small office building or doctor’s practice, Raster can be found on the top floor of a dilapidated flat, and approaching the door is like knocking on the door of a college dorm room, complete with peeling paint and stickers. There’s no concern with pristine white-cubeness here. The front office hosts a cosy bookshop that also sells t-shirts and a selection of records and CDs. Serving multiple purposes, the gallery also publishes an online art magazine about the Polish art scene (in Polish). The exhibition space itself consists of two very modestly sized rooms, currently showing Aneta Grzeszykowska’s 2008 film Headache, which – and I was getting used to it by now – featured the performance of a naked dancer. Each of her four disembodied limbs performs a choreographed pantomime against a pitch-black background. The effect of the limbs performing in concert, yet detached from her body, is seamless, and the film ends at the exact moment when the woman’s torso is reunited with her dancing arms and legs.

The performance was a fitting prelude to the opening night of the ambitious exhibition ‘Performer’, on view at Warsaw’s largest contemporary exhibition space, Zacheta National Gallery of Art. The exhibition featured a crowded, rather overwhelming collection of film and video performances, primarily historical, which included violent or extreme mutilations of the body by well-known artists such as Marina Abramović, Carolee Schneemann and Hermann Nitsch, alongside archival documentation of performances and rehearsals with renowned Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski. Unfortunately the significance of the director’s work was overshadowed by the looming presence of works by artistic giants like Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman and Otto Muehl. To round out the already bizarre preponderance of male genitalia I’d seen on the trip, the museum was also showing a vast exhibition of drawings collaboratively made by Paul McCarthy and Benjamin Weissman, most of which featured their doodles, watercolours and sketches of testicles and penises.

Our last stop in Warsaw was the temporary home of the Museum of Modern Art, not far from its future site, which will be directly adjacent to the Palace of Culture and Science, and is slated to open (after considerable delay already) in 2014. The temporary site is a pleasant two-story glass-faced building, featuring a permanent neon installation by Paulina Olowska and a sculpture at the entrance by Monika Sosnowska. On view is the first retrospective of the influential Romanian artist Ion Grigorescu, ‘In the body of the victim 1969-2008’. The exhibition spans Grigorescu’s entire career, from his early 8mm films from the 1970s, which documented the changes imposed by Nicolae Ceausescu in Bucharest. The highlight of these early, political works was an imaginary conversation that the artist staged between himself and the Romanian dictator, Dialogue with Ceausescu (1978, 2007). Less interesting were his extensive series of films from the late 1970s, which documented the artist conducting various performances in the nude, and his latest work Sleep (2008) which recorded the artist’s thin, pale, naked frame while asleep on a sofa. Notably, the exhibition also contained a significant archival element, a row of vitrines displaying Grigorescu’s notebooks, diary entries, sketches and recordings of his dreams.

Before departing for the train station to get the six-hour ‘Warsaw Express’ back to Berlin, I dined on some traditional Polish soup and dumplings. For some reason, I just wasn’t in the mood for sausage.

‘Relational aesthetics’; like it or loathe it, the term coined in 1998 by curator Nicolas Bourriaud has become something of an industry standard. Its meaning used and abused in all manner of ways, the phrase nevertheless seems to have stuck as baggy shorthand for describing a variety of approaches to the way art engages with the broader world. Just how ‘Altermodern’, Bourriaud’s latest unifying theory of art, would manifest itself has therefore been the subject of much anticipation in the build-up to the Tate Triennial 2009, which opened in early February. The merits and demerits of the exhibition and its theme will no doubt be debated at length in the specialist art press. I won’t add my own assessment of the show here – a review will appear in the April edition of frieze – but the speculation surrounding ‘Altermodern’ within the UK art world has led me to wonder what ripples the exhibition might have made in the mainstream British media. Newspaper critics have access to far greater readerships than the specialist art press, and the occasion of large exhibitions such as the Triennial make it worth taking a moment to look at how current developments in art are interpreted and represented to a broader general public.

London was buried beneath a blanket of snow the day ‘Altermodern’ opened. Blizzards had brought the capital to a temporary and beautifully muted standstill. But soon the snow started to melt and the capital’s newspaper art critics began trudging all over ‘Altermodern’ with great big, grit- and sludge-covered boots. Anyone familiar with the art criticism in UK newspapers won’t be surprised by the cynicism with which the Triennial was greeted. With a few notable exceptions, critics tend to use contemporary art as a lightning rod for their disdain of a particular bracket of artists with high media profiles, and anything with a whiff of financial profligacy or conceptualism about it – often all three. The tools of their trade are sweeping generalizations and one-liner insults, thrown left, right and centre with little justification through example or description of the works under attack. Although it does my blood pressure no good, I find this remarkably consistent antipathy interesting it raises a broad range of issues: elitism and populism, specialism and accessibility, models of critical authority, the responsibility of critics, what expectations there are about art’s role in British society (this is a culture that has historically preferred the literary and performing arts over the plastic ones), cultural stereotypes, money, intellectualism and anti-intellectualism.

Reviews of ‘Altermodern’ have been mixed to say the least. Daily Telegraph critic Richard Dorment, whose apoplectic reaction to the Turner Prize last year was so violent it seemed he was in danger of hospitalizing himself, seemed sufficiently engaged by the Triennial to end his decidedly undecided review by stating: ‘My experience of the Triennial wasn’t nearly as satisfying [as ‘Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East’ at the Saatchi Gallery, also reviewed by Dorment], but I’ll return again and again. How’s that for a back-handed compliment?’ Charles Darwent in The Independent , was more positive: ‘some of the work in this show is extraordinarily good’, and with the odd caveat – ‘For a theory that spurns boundaries, Bourriaud’s seems strangely boundaried’ – concludes that it is also ‘a lot of fun.’ Even The Evening Standard’s Ben Lewis – normally outspoken in his suspicion of contemporary art – was broadly enthusiastic, declaring that Bourriaud ‘has performed the ultimate curatorial trick, challenging intellectually while entertaining theatrically.’

The Observer‘s Laura Cumming – who recently stated that ‘it is obvious to anyone with eyes that art has become more vulgar and rebarbative during our lifetime, as well as slicker and quicker’ (I’d argue that depends on where you look and how much time you spend looking) – began her review by giving Bourriaud’s new theory the benefit of the doubt, but concluded that it ‘does not work as an idea so much as a web of observations, a web with a weaver at its centre’, which actually seemed to me like a workable definition of what an ‘idea’ is. Theory aside, with the exceptions of Darren Almond, Marcus Coates and Tacita Dean, she did not like any of the actual work in the Triennial, branding Frank Ackermann’s work ‘teeth-grittingly awful’, Katie Patterson’s ‘a dead bore’, Walead Beshty’s box sculptures ‘broken in transit’, Olivia Plender’s installation ‘worryingly simple-minded’, Matthew Darbyshire’s work ‘pastiche décor’ and Gustav Metzger’s liquid crystal projections ‘monotonous’. As for Simon Starling, she ‘couldn’t even begin to describe the inanity’ of his work. But in each case why? Midway through her review, I began to wish she would expand on these remarks: little more than a sentence was spent discussing each artist. Cumming’s off-hand dismissals were, in her own words, ‘worryingly simple-minded’ and ‘monotonous.’

The Guardian’s Adrian Searle, respected within the art world for being the most measured and imaginative of British newspaper art critics, opened his review with an immediate assault on Shezad Dawood, Spartacus Chetwynd and Nathaniel Mellors (an artist who Searle seemed to mistake for two different actors in Mellors’ film and who Dorment, in his review, confused with eminent designer David Mellor). These opening blows would easily have led one to assume ‘Altermodern’ was in for a kicking. Yet, with spleen vented and after (by his own admission) a surprising tangential leap onto the subject of WG Sebald midway through his review, Searle went on to argue that ‘The show has its longueurs, but it is also the richest and most generous Tate Triennial to date. It is also the best-installed. There are clean, elegant rooms as well as clutter, a wide range of objects and installations, dramatic turns and quiet spaces.’

The Times’ Rachel Campbell-Johnston didn’t seem to mind certain aspects of the show, at one point giving the impression of quite enjoying what she understood to be ‘an iconoclastic show’. Unlike Searle, however, she only seemed to see junk and clutter: ‘After Brit Art with its easy one-liners, this confusing junk room of images feels full of possibilities.’ Ultimately, the range of work on display proved wearisome for her. ‘This show is all about distraction. Without any one focus, the eye hops restlessly about. The thoughts shuffle about in your head. At their most engaging, they are making unexpected connections. […] More often they drift off bored by conglomerations of clutter that, quite frankly, feel about as fascinating as a file of student research notes.’ Campbell-Johnston was highly critical of Bourriaud’s theoretical terminology, citing a rather convoluted sentence in his Triennial catalogue essay as an example of the curator’s highfalutin’ approach to art. Yet despite this, towards the end of her review, with no description of what the work in question actually looked like, she slipped in an assessment of Rachel Harrison’s work written in classic art jargon: ‘Rachel Harrison challenges our systems of classification and disrupts the orders of progression.’ Whose systems? What classifications – Dewey Decimal? Premiere League Football? And what on earth are the mysterious ‘orders of progression’? Did someone mention ‘easy one-liners’?

Campbell-Johnston’s review was mild by comparison with Waldemar Januszczak’s bilious and hectoring Sunday Times article. Januszczak opened his review – headlined ‘The Tate: pompous, arrogant and past it?’ – by reminding readers of his critical qualifications: ‘I love modern art. It’s been my life, my career, my sustenance. My wife is a modern artist […]. My children have been fed a diet of modern art ever since they opened their eyes. […] So I’m experienced at modern art; I’m supportive of it; I embrace it. If, therefore, I suggest that it appears to have reached the end of its journey and has begun annoying the bejesus out of me, you can be confident it’s serious.’ He then put the boot into Martin Creed’s recent commission for Tate Britain – Work No. 850 (2008), which involved people running the length of the Duveen Gallery at 30 second intervals each day – describing it as ‘meaningless’ and ‘a gross waste of effort’ – hardly supportive or embracing. (‘Meaningless’ is the favourite lazy put-down of the reactionary art critic, but please will someone explain how anything premeditated such as an art work, whether good or bad, can be entirely without meaning?) For Januszczak, Creed’s work ‘brought into focus how flaccid and indulgent and spoilt and grandiloquent and aimless and bloated and, yes, degenerate British art has become.’ It is sad to see a critic so loudly trumpet his expertise but then use the word ‘degenerate’ to describe an entire nation’s contemporary art. Anyone who has studied 20th-century history will know that ‘degenerate’ is the word used by the Nazis to describe the art included in their 1937 exhibition ‘Entartete Kunst’ (Degenerate Art), a show that featured, amongst many others, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, George Grosz and Piet Mondrian. I would not for a moment argue that this suggests anything sinister about Januszczak’s political beliefs, but I do believe a writer should be responsibly aware of a word’s resonance rather than just its dramatic effect. ‘Degenerate’ is not a term to be used lightly. He declares the art that developed around commercial art gallery Lisson in the early 1980s, along with that of the Young British Artists in the 1990s, to be the last ‘two truly significant modern movements’ to have come out of Britain, and contextualizes them as working in opposition to the Tate, which he conspiratorially denounces as ‘a cultural despot that has the government’s ear’. Januszczak argues that ‘Altermodern’ ‘makes an unanswerable case for the proposition that British modern art is clapped out’, and that the exhibition bored him, citing the inclusion of a number of long video pieces as particularly grievous in this regard. What’s wrong with something being long? One of the guilty films he mentions – Handsworth Songs by Black Audio Film Collective – is not part of ‘Altermodern’ but a separate display of new acquisitions of British art by the Tate. It was also made 23 years ago.

Januszczak’s article contains a comparison that is worthy of mention. At one point he describes Nathaniel Mellors’ Giantbum film as ‘seemingly interminable.’ He goes on to mention the work of Iranian artist Tala Madani, currently exhibiting in the Saatchi Gallery’s ‘Unveiled’ show, saying that her paintings display ‘such astonishing courage and punchiness, the Middle East could be a significant location’ for new developments in art. (In the context of art exhibited under the banner of being Iranian, the word ‘courage’ here has patronising Orientalist overtones, almost suggesting that Madani goes to her studio everyday in downtown Tehran hiding paintings under her burqa.) The print edition of Januszczak’s piece was illustrated with a large image from Mellors’ Giantbum and Madani’s painting Holy Light. What neither Januszczak nor the newspaper’s picture researchers evidently know is that Mellors and Madani are partners, and that they exchange ideas and opinions about each other’s work on a daily basis. Admittedly, I have the advantage of insider information here and there is no reason why The Sunday Times should know this too, but the irony of this juxtaposition reinforces the impression that some of our newspaper critics are out of touch with the ways in which young, internationally mobile artists today maintain sophisticated dialogues across a range of media. Things have moved on since the days of the Lisson sculptors and yBas.

Likes and dislikes were one thing, but the facile cultural stereotyping that certain reviewers stooped to in order to make their points was downright ugly. Here’s how Campbell-Johnston saw fit to broach the Triennial’s theme in the Times: ‘So what will this new Altermodern era entail? Don’t expect the catalogue to help you. Bourriard is a Frenchman. He has svelte Gallic looks and a Left Bank aroma of Gauloises. And he seems to have been brought up on Baudrillard and Foucault in the way that the rest of us were brought up on our ABC.’ Does that really deserve to be called art criticism? Darwent described him as ‘co-founder of Paris’s impenetrably au courant Palais de Tokyo’. Translate the French and ask yourself what being impenetrably up-to-date actually means? In explaining his understanding of the term ‘altermodern’, Lewis of the Evening Standard opined that ‘The theory is complex and this is an incredibly uneven exhibition that, like the mind of any French theorist, contains flashes of genius, passages of stomach-churning political correctness, a bit of bean-bag art (art that you enjoy while lying on the bean-bags placed in front of it), and an afternoon’s worth of artists’ movies (some stunning). The whole mélange is served up with the thick buttery sauce of French art theory, and the catalogue essays will give anyone except a curatorial studies MA student a crise de foie.’ I wondered what, based on this line of thinking, someone from outside the UK might say the mind of ‘any’ British theorist contains – an Art & Language catalogue, ten pints of lager and a curry? After the laboured references to French cuisine, he went on to assert that ‘The weakness of Bourriaud’s theory — and of all French theory — is that there’s too much philosophy and not much historical perspective.’ I bow before Lewis’s encyclopedic knowledge of continental philosophy. All French theory? Really? I’d love to see him argue that down at La Sorbonne.

Jonathan Jones, reporting on the behind-the-scenes preparations for the Triennial for The Guardian observed of Bourriaud: ‘He is very French, by which I mean he is unapologetic about big ideas.’ It may be a back-handed compliment, but it nails a certain aspect of the critical hostility to Bourriaud. Skepticism towards ‘big ideas’ can, in some cases, be evidence of a healthy and down-to-earth pragmatism. The flipside, however, is a paranoia about pretension – an anti-intellectual fear of somehow being ‘caught out’ by ‘big ideas’ if, at a later date, they are demonstrated to be worthless. (It’s a position not too far different from the tabloid newspapers complaining that contemporary art is the result of a big conspiracy at the expense of some mythic Great British Public.)

One possible reason for the skepticism towards theory, I think, lies in our education system. In British universities, the teaching of philosophy is dominated by Anglo-American schools of thought, with logical positivists such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and AJ Ayer still casting long shadows. Continental philosophy is more likely found in art schools or social science faculties than it is in English and History departments. Anglo-American empiricism does not rub along well with Lacanian psychoanalysis or Deleuzian rhizomes. Of course, this does not fully account for the anti-Gallic subtext running through some of the ‘Altermodern’ reviews – you probably have to go back to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 for clues to that – but it might suggest a reason why British critics are not naturally pre-disposed to Bourriaud’s theoretical framing of art.

Of course you can say that these critics are just doing their job – that it’s all part of the game, of playing the traditional role of bourgeois critic outraged at the excesses of the avant-garde. Maybe they’re being unfair or maybe Bourriaud’s show just doesn’t do it for everyone – either way a few superficial comments about Left Bank intellectuals and lengthy videos aren’t going to stop curators and artists going about the work they believe in. But, as a reader, I felt I learnt little from them about what the show constituted. Scant information was given about simple things such as how many artists were in the show or how many were British and how many were from other countries. Only the most cursory descriptions of what works looked like were given. If a piece of art is really so bad, please tell me why properly – I’d rather read a well-reasoned critique of a work than a haughty barb.

In one sense, I sympathize with these critics. It can be extremely hard to review big sprawling group shows for a print publication where there is only so much page space allotted to each article, and I have probably wronged the odd artist myself by paring a sentence down to the bare bones in order to squeeze more words in. Editors give writers a maximum number of words they can use, and to discuss the work of nearly 30 artists with equal depth is often impossible. And all this is before the newspaper’s subeditors have attacked it with their scissors. The physical restrictions of print publications can make the coverage of contemporary models of exhibition-making (where they include many artists and with different parts of the show occurring in different locations and at different times) a little dysfunctional. Yet the reviews discussed above are by no means brief; the shortest is Charles Darwent’s in The Independent at 743 words, and the longest is Ben Lewis’s in The Evening Standard, which reaches a healthy 1603. The majority are longer than the reviews you’d find in most art magazines. The argument about lack of space therefore begins to look a bit shaky – these are hardly comparable with the short, sharp notices that theatre plays receive after their opening night.

Whether ‘Altermodern’ is successful or a theoretical hotch-potch is almost beside the point here. These critics are perfectly entitled to their tastes and opinions, and I don’t believe contemporary art is beyond criticism. But they have to remember that their readers trust them as experts in their fields. Critics have responsibility to these readers – the responsibility of arguing why something is bad, rather than dismissing it with one withering phrase. The responsibility of conveying facts. The responsibility of describing to readers what a work looks like or actually taking the time to sit through an artists video, no matter how interminable it may be, before criticizing it. The responsibility of balancing skepticism with open-mindedness. The responsibility of being sensitive to someone’s gender, race, age, sexual orientation or nationality rather than using them as an excuse for smuggling prejudice and cheap jibes in under the banner of art criticism.

frieze.com’s regular round-up of recent and breaking arts-related news.

Mark Wallinger’s proposal for a public sculpture of a 50-metre high white horse has been announed as the winner of a commission for the Ebbsfleet Valley in Kent. Based on a painting by George Stubbs, the proposed work has inevitably been dubbed the ‘Angel of the South’, after Antony Gormley’s 20-metre Angel of the North (1998) in Gateshead. At a cost of £2m, the white horse will be the UK’s most ambitious piece of public art to date and is expected to be seen by some 60 million people every year. The popular proposal beat entries from Christopher le Brun, Daniel Buren, Richard Deacon and Rachel Whiteread.

Somewhat fittingly, on the same day of the announcement Wallinger’s own racehorse, Riviera Red, won its first race – the 2.40pm at Lingfield – after years of bad form. (Riviera Red shouldn’t be confused with A Real Work of Art, the horse that Wallinger bought and named as part of a Turner Prize-nominated exhibition in 1995.)

Wallinger is curating ‘The Russian Linesman’, a group show that will open at the Hayward next week. (From issue eight of frieze, first published in January 1993, read ‘Fools and Horses’, Adrian Searle’s monograph on Wallinger here.)

It’s been a mixed week for public sculpture, as it was announed that B of the Bang, Thomas Heatherwick’s monument to the 2002 Commonwealth games, is soon to be dismantled due to ‘technical difficulties’. Several of its large metal spikes had fallen off or required removing. The ill-fated work was originally delivered two years behind schedule and, at £1.42m, cost twice as much as was originally planned. Heatherwick’s studio eventually paid Manchester city council £1.7m in an out-of-court settlement over subsequent safety problems.

The eighth edition of Manifesta, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, will take place in the region of Murcia in southern Spain in autumn 2010. This follows previous editions in Rotterdam (1996), Luxembourg (1998), Ljubljana (2000), Frankfurt (2002), Donostia-San Sebastián (2004), Nicosia (2006 – cancelled) and Trentino-Alto Adige last year. The International Foundation Manifesta (IFM) announced that Manifesta 8 will aim to explore the edges of Europe while engaging with Northern Africa. The biennial’s board is not inviting individual art professionals to fill the position of curator – it is instead inviting curatorial groups, artistic and interdisciplinary collectives, as well as institutions to be part of the biennial’s curatorial team.

A fire started by an illegal fireworks show in Beijing engulfed Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren’s CCTV complex on Monday night and was not extinguished until early Tuesday morning. The flames didn’t strike the torqued CCTV tower but an adjacent 34-storey structure in which a Mandarin Oriental Hotel was due to open later this year. A spokesman for Koolhaas’s firm in Rotterdam, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, called the fire ‘a great tragedy.’

Tate has announced that Miroslaw Balka will be the 10th person the receive the annual Turbine Hall commission. The Polish artist will follow Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster divisive TH.2058. Vicente Todoli, director of Tate Modern, described Balka as a ‘master poet’ – several of Balka’s works are already in the Tate’s permanent collection. Twenty million people have visited the Turbine Hall since it opened nine years ago – previous years have seen work by Doris Salcedo, Carsten Höller, Rachel Whiteread, Bruce Nauman, Olafur Eliasson, Anish Kapoor, Juan Muñoz and Louise Bourgeois.

The future of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative is in doubt after a property dispute has added to the troubles of the financially stricken organization. Last month, the New York-based cooperative received an eviction notice from their P.S.1-controlled office space and archive in TriBeCa. The space may be turned over to Alanna Heiss, who founded P.S.1 in 1972 and was its executive director up until last year, who will use the space for Art International Radio, an internet-based radio station. Talking to the New York Times, Jonas Mekas said, ‘We can’t understand why they are giving her so much space for a project that is just being formed and has not proved itself of any service to the arts community, and at the same time throwing out the only organization that independent filmmakers have to distribute their work.’ Founded in 1962 by a group of experimental filmmakers that included Mekas, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative has a collection of some 5,000 works made by some 900 artists.

I can’t bear it when artists use technologically advanced digital media to talk about the advancement of digital technology. All those web-based projects and interactive gizmos that are finger-grubby and unresponsive when you come across them in a gallery just don’t do it for me. Thank heavens for Mark Leckey, who used a blackboard and a stick of chalk to illustrate the phenomenon of ‘The Long Tail’ at the ICA last weekend.

The event was part-lecture, part-performance, part-experimental son et lumiere show. Its subject and title were taken from the term Chris Anderson coined to describe the way that the internet caters for the desires of an infinitely long tail of consumers with minority interests who trail behind (but ultimately exceed) the swollen head of the mainstream. Leckey is interested in this well-discussed area, it seems, because of its ramifications for the way in which we fulfil our libidinal desires (when everything is apparently available), and because of the socio-economic possibilities it opens up for communities of people who cut out the middle-man (the distributor) and freely share and exchange data – the new currency – between themselves.

In fairness, Leckey’s media were not limited to just the blackboard (which actually swung dramatically around on hinges at each side). At one point he even attempted to demonstrate the technique used to create the first television broadcast – an image of a figurine of Felix the Cat, turning slowly on a turntable. A homemade contraption consisting of perforated wheels and projected light began to spin, and with a bit of hesitation (and some distinctly fishy tapping on a laptop keyboard) a shaky grey image of Felix did indeed fade into view on a projection screen.

If this ‘abracadabra’ moment did seem to be somewhat over-concerned with effect rather than authentic method, so too did moments later on when Leckey began to race through his script so excitedly that it wasn’t clear whether even he fully grasped the finer points of his material, let alone his audience. However this was partly the point: the evening was (sometimes literally) concerned with smoke and mirrors, with the magic of things appearing and disappearing. Leckey began with a reading of Charles Sirato’s Dimensionist Manifesto (1936) which observed how literature was leaving the line and entering the plane, painting was leaving the plane and entering space, sculpture was stepping into the fourth dimension and finally proposing a ‘completely new art form’: ‘matter-music’, the result of ‘the vaporisation of sculpture’. While he gestures towards the fulfilment of Sirato’s projection, I think Leckey takes too much pleasure in the world of objects to go the whole way. The climax of the show was a huge inflatable head of Felix the Cat that loomed over the blackboard at the back of the stage, in a mist of dry ice. Sometimes you just can’t beat a bit of old-fashioned stagecraft.

Mark Leckey in a Long Tail World (2009)

Performance at the ICA, London

Photographs: Mark Blower

The comprehensive retrospective of Vito Acconci’s film-, video- and audio- performance pieces at ARGOS, Brussels, felt almost reassuringly traditional and straightforward in its presentation, with a long row of monitor after monitor and headphone after headphone. But it sparkled with bold self-reflectiveness. I readily admit I didn’t sit and listen through the entirety of each of the works. But even when subjected to a kind of zapping mode not initially or even now intended, Acconci’s early 1970’s use of video and the monitor as a kind of I’ll-creep-into-your-head box still is very effective. In Home Movies (1973) Acconci is seen seated in the dark, presenting a slide presentation of his previous work to a – real or imagined? – person sitting outside of the frame; he does so with a constant, creepily hilarious gesture of fraternization between in-the-know art people (‘They couldn’t possibly know these pieces the way you do…. you know how I took what was happening us and transferred it into the work.”) He describes the work in a fast, pressed staccato (“… cat in the box… I have the key to control …’) that feels like Ginsberg’s Howl (1955) crossed with Alan Vega ca. 1976. Sometimes it’s as if he was speaking in tongues, a kind of conceptual ecstasy not prescribed in the sobering up of art that had been prevalent at a point a few years earlier when other poets such as Lawrence Weiner had made the leap into conceptuality. In Turn-On (1974), the self-reflectivenness reaches a climax, as well as the breathlessness: ‘I’ve waited for the perfect time, for the perfect piece, I’m tired of waiting… but no, you want me to have something ready for you, something prepared.’ The viewer is the ghost being summoned here.

Upstairs, as a perfect complement, it’s not Acconci’s hyper-alert, late-modernist endgame, but the voice of hypnosis in the age of atomized samplemania. Karl Holmquist’s characteristically comatosed sing-song is heard, along with white letters on an otherwise dark projection. The title I’m With You In Rockland (2005) directly cites Ginsberg’s Howl, but the gesture is different: like half asleep with the iPod on shuffle mode, he keeps saying ‘how do you say…’ then rhythmically quoting famous lyrics: ‘… a kiss may be grand but it won’t pay the rental on your humble flat, or help you at the automat. Men grow cold as girls grow old…’ – Marilyn of course, but you immediately think of Madonna’s ‘Material Girl’ as well, as Holmquist continues to weave it all into a seamless flow, like a prayer, making it all – like true pop fans do – his own.

Next stop John Murphy at Erna Hecey gallery: after breathlessness and hypnosis, a return to structure, dry as the desert, but in a good way. Murphy – 1945-born UK veteran of conceptual painting and conceptualization of film – pulls off a show that is like a solo game of chess, i.e. without interest in winning against an opponent. Some exhibits are, for example, books about cinema, framed like a photograph or drawing. For example René Barjavel’s 1944 book Cinema Total. At first it’s as if the book is just presented as is, but on closer inspection it becomes apparent that Murphy added a few letters to the layout, which comprise the title of the piece A B C Z (2008). Then the next step: a page from that same book, a manifesto-like quote of Barjavel’s about his vision of the total cinema, ending on ‘le cinéma total, art populaire.’ – Only that Murphy has blackened the ‘populaire’. Other works like a still from Antonioni’s La Notte positioned centrally and accompanied by small, super-minimalist drawings addressing the question of filming framing etc., may suggest that Murphy has a lean towards the common, Debordian rejection of the ominous ‘spectacle’. But a catalogue from his previous show at Hecey from two years earlier also reveal an acute sense for ribaldry: the catalogue of … the stench of shit … starts with a latin quote from St. Augustine – Inter faeces et urinam nascimus – followed by a longer quote by Jonathan Swift with a proposal for luxurious public toilets; and it closes with a quote from a letter by the Duchess of Orleans sent from the palace of Fontainebleau in 1694: ‘You are indeed fortunate to shit whenever you may please and do so to you heart’s content! … We are not so lucky, here, I have to hold on to my turd until evening…’ So much for scatology in the Post-Surrealist vein.

My last stop in Brussels, before catching the train to Antwerp, was the Un-Scene show of 20 emerging Belgian artists at WIELS. The building’s four floors form an impressive succession of rooms. These kinds of survey exhibitions are inevitably a mixed bag, but some pieces stood out: Koenraad Dedobbeleer’s post-Artschwagerian, psychedelic-minimalist objects where tugged in a corner of the space which didn’t make it easy for his pieces, but they survived it with their stubborn resistance to give away their ‘content’, to spell out the odd conundrum they present. I liked Gert Robijn’s wall relief of half a melon, a life canary bird in a cage, a rubber show filled with water, a plastic bag filled with water, and a water-drenched shirt, all lined up as if to form a weirdly convincing, but undecipherable sentence, with the title In Concert (2007) adding puzzlement to surprise (shoot me for saying it, but I sense a Belgian tradition of Surrealism and absurdity here).

The artist group Agency presented an open archive of lawsuits over copyright infringement and authorship, the most intriguing one to me being the case of Scottish pop band The Bluebells: their slightly cheesy, but admittedly catchy pop song ‘Young at Heart’, originally released in 1984, had a surprise return in 1993 being used for a Volkswagen TV ad, and became a number one hit – after the band had already split.

The Clark Gable lookalike who plays the fiddle riff both in this TV appeareance and on the actual recording – a guy ridiculously named Bobby Valentino – sued them for a share in the royalties, claiming he had written the fiddle part, proving it by playing it live in court (as if that proved anything). He won. Can he be sued for trying to look like Clark Gable?

Next time Antwerp and Amsterdam.

frieze.com’s regular round-up of recent and breaking arts-related news.

A lawsuit has been launched against Richard Prince in which it is claimed that images from his 2008 ‘Canal Zone’ exhibition were lifted from French photographer Patrick Cariou’s photographic survey of Rastafarian culture, Yes Rasta, published in 2000. The Art Newspaper reports that the suit also names dealer Larry Gagosian and publishing house Rizzoli as defendants. In addition to seeking damages for copyright infringement, the lawsuit demands the, ‘impounding, destruction, or other disposition’ of all of the exhibited works and unsold catalogues. Representatives for Prince and Gagosian have declined to comment.

Prince has been incorporating images from advertising campaigns and other sources for more than 30 years, a practice that has previously led to his being sued by photographer Garry Gross over Spiritual America (1983) – the suit was settled out of court. The ‘Cowboys’ series has been similarly controversial, drawing complaints from various commercial photographers involved with the Marlboro campaign.

As Cariou’s lawyers have argued, ‘Canal Zone’ represents a new step for Prince, in that the images were taken from a fully researched photographic project rather than ad campaigns freely available in magazines. If the court deems Prince’s interventions to be ‘transformative’ then the artist could well win the case on the grounds of ‘fair use’. A recent precedent was Blanch v Koons (2006), where fashion photographer Andrea Blanch unsuccessfully sued Jeff Koons for incorporating a photo from one of her shoots.

Tate Modern yesterday announced that many of the 725 works donated to Tate and National Galleries of Scotland by Anthony D’Offay (pictured above) last year will be used in a large-scale touring exhibition. Incorporating work by some 30 artists, ‘Artist Rooms’ will tour to 18 museums throughout 2009, reaching an estimated audience of 9 million people.

The first leg of the tour, due to start in March, will make use of two-thirds of D’Offay’s donation, and will include work by Joseph Beuys, Vija Celmins, Gilbert & George, Jeff Koons, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, and Gerhard Richter.

S.H. Raza (pictured above), one of the India’s foremost artists, opened an exhibition of his own paintings in Delhi on Saturday only to discover that many were fakes. The Paris-based artist had contributed some works on paper to Dhoomimal Gallery’s retrospective, while the gallery had borrowed around 30 paintings – supposedly his early works – from Raza’s nephew.

‘As I moved from one canvas to the other, I realised that the works were just not mine, they were all fakes,’ the 85-year-old wrote in an Indian newspaper. Uday Jain and Uma Jain, the gallery owners, have apologized to Raza, saying that they had been duped; the exhibition was cancelled half an hour after opening.

A few thoughts on the idea of humility halfway between art and politics: Obama’s inaugural address started like this: ‘I stand here today humbled by the task before us’; in his inaugural address of January 2001 George W. Bush’s stated that he wanted to be ‘viewed as a humble person that is not judgmental’.

Fred Barnard’s drawing of Dickens’ Uriah Heep (1870s)

Since enlightenment, the idea of humility is anything but undisputed: from François de la Rochefoucauld who asserted that ‘pride is never better disguised and more deceptive than when it is hidden behind the mask of humility’ to Karl Marx’ statement that, while Christianity preached ‘submissiveness and humbleness’, the proletariat needs ‘its courage, its self-confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread.’ Charles Dickens’ Uriah Heep, the scheming antagonist of David Copperfield (1850), incessantly saying he was a ‘very ‘umble person’, is the epitome of false modesty.

In Modernism, heroic tabula rasa attitudes allowed for anything but attitudes of humility. There are a few exceptions, like T.S. Eliot’s famous line that ‘humility is endless’, which acknowledges that the idea that age brings wisdom is deceptive (i.e. the humility is vis-à-vis the shock of realizing that knowledge can become worthless). Or in fact, as Jennifer Kabat points out in her piece about the influence of Depression-era posters on current advertising campaigns, the exception of artists, employed by the state, seeing themselves in the service of the common cause. But I guess as a movement, it wasn’t until the 1960s that some – not all! – parts of minimalist, proto-conceptual, post-beat, collectivist-hippie attitudes brought in the idea that the artist’s work can be a humble reflection of the everyday, from Yvonne Rainer’s integration of simple gestures into dance moves to Arte Povera artist Luciano Fabro, who in 1967 covered a piece of floor he cleaned with a square of newspaper pieces, in reference to simple housekeeping habits from his village (_Pavimento (tautologia)_, Floor, tautology). The idea was, simply, that it was about the work, not the artist; as Nietzsche (of all thinkers) put it: ‘There is true modesty (that is the knowledge that we are not the works we create).’

Which brings me back to Obama’s ‘humble’ vs. Bush’s ‘humble’: Obama’s sentence acknowledges that it’s not about him, but about the task, and everyone; whereas Bush, much in line with Uriah Heep, made a statement about himself…

In response to Friday’s news round-up by Sam Thorne, I wonder what Vladimir Putin’s first painting, the Prado’s new presence on Google Earth, and Czech artist David Cerny’s monumental painting at EU Brussels headquarters have in common?

I.

Vladimir Putin’s painting which sold in a Moscow charity auction for more than 700.000 £ depicts, in simple faux-naïve strokes, a frosted cabin window with ‘Ukrainian pattern’ curtains. It is a stone killing at least two birds: one being that Putin, having added another skill to his portfolio at just the right time, can still consider himself – even despite basketball-playing, Nietzsche-knowledgeable Obama – the leading polymath amongst the world’s leaders. The other dead bird is of course the smouldering, or rather shivering, conflict over gas pipeline supplies to Europe, smugly alluded to by Vladimir ‘Frosty the Gasman’ Putin with the homey choice of motif. Early art aspirations of a notorious German dictator aside, it is Ike Eisenhower’s fondness for the canvas that comes to mind, famously put into perspective by Dan Graham in his essay ‘Eisenhower and the Hippies’ (1967), which on the occasion of an exhibition of Eisenhower’s paintings in New York ironically pointed out surprising parallels between the 1950s president’s and the hippies’ avoidance-of-conflict strategies. While we’ll have a harder time to detect the hippy in Putin, his variety of populism nevertheless does continue the tradition of tough-guy-folksiness.

II.

What to make of Google Earth’s new feature – Madrid’s Prado in its virtual version including a link to 12 of its masterworks displayed in ultra-high 14,000-megapixel resolution (amongst them Velsasquez’ La Meninas, or Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights)? Of course one could assert the obvious reservation that getting close up to the paintings as if under a digital microscope – it feels as if you where literally hitting the canvas with your nose – doesn’t mean you understand them better (you might even understand them less). But on the other hand there is no need to complain, like Jonathan Jones in the Guardian, that there are only 12 Prado paintings online (as if that precluded future digitalizations of this kind) or that this can’t replace a visit to the museum (no, really?). In line with Ron Jones’ recent argument on the occasion of Leonardo’s The Last Supper having undergone a similar treatment, I’d rather think this is a truly democratic achievement for both expert scholars and ordinary art lovers. I for my part can’t get enough of the brightly yellow trousers in Goya’s The Third of May, while being aware that this is like enjoying the pretty beach in Apocalypse Now. If these digital doublings are a populist distortion of what painting is all about, than I guess I’m a happy victim of that kind of populism.

III.

David Cerny’s works are jokes, and some of them work fantastically and some fall flat. His most famous work is the Soviet tank monument in Prague that in 1991 he painted pink. Another great piece is his parody of the St. Wenceslas statue on Wenceslas square, for which he made a same-size copy, only that this time the Czech patron saint is not sitting on the back of a great horse but on the belly of a dead, ‘inverted horse’ with its legs towards the ceiling. He’s also done a lot of crap, heavy-handed jokes that always make you wonder whether it’s worth moving tons of bronze or fibreglass for the sake of a lame joke.

Cerny’s scandal-provoking Entropa installation currently on display at the European Council building in Brussels sits, or rather hangs, somewhere in-between. What is boring about it is the over-used allegory of the plastic model kit blown up to monumental size, but quite entertaining is the use of cliché for each country (Germany’s Swastika-Autobahn, France on strike etc.), particularly since Cerny had created fictitious artists for each country (including short CVs and statements, see this pdf ) that supposedly contributed the respective designs. And so Sweden’s Sonja Aaberg presents her country as an Ikea-package, while Bulgaria’s Elena Jelebova’s turned her country into a Turkish toilet, and Britain’s own Khalid Asadi – true conceptualist – left the model kit space for the island empty, alluding to London’s distanced relation to Brussels. In a press statement Cerny says ‘we wanted to find out if Europe is able to laugh at itself.’ I’m sure he knew at least some wouldn’t be amused, but that was worth it: because at the same time he also exposed the incompetence of those who commissioned him, who not even bothered to do the slightest research on the work of the artists supposedly commissioned. If this is great art I don’t know – it feels like Maurizio Catellan minus the conceptual twists, or like Kippenberger minus the ‘serious’ engagement with what it means to make a sculpture or painting etc. – but it surely is entertaining spoofery.

IV.

So what do Putin’s painting, Google Earth’s Prado pictures, and Cerny’s fake EU-artists’ sculpture have in common? They all pretend to be messages about art speaking to large audiences – when in fact art only concerns them tangentially, or not at all. In other word’s, art becomes a pretext. The question is of course: for what? If the ultra-high definition images are actually simply about the nerdy enjoyment of making something technically possible, why not, so be it; and if Cerny’s stunt is all about, well, the stunt, again: why not. But if Putin’s latest demonstration of ‘skill’ – even if on the occasion of a charity event, and even if presented with a smug sense of irony – smacks a little of Kim Jong-Il’s poetry, then I guess that’s not a very good sign.

frieze.com’s regular round-up of recent and breaking arts-related news.

Flying fighter jets, horse riding, skiing and fishing – Vladimir Putin can, it seems, do most things he turns his hand to. The Russian Prime Minister has now directed his not inconsiderable talents towards painting, donating Pattern (2009), a roughly painted wintry scene glimpsed through lacy curtains (pictured above), to a charity auction that will take place this weekend. The Chagall-esque work is said to be on the theme of ‘Night Before Christmas’, a short story by Ukraine-born Nikolai Gogol, the bicentenary of whose birth is celebrated this year. The auction is organized by artist Nadezhda Anfalova, who the Daily Mail cruelly claim may have had a hand in ‘improving’ Putin’s effort. One Russian critic, who understandably wished to remain anonymous, questioned the provenance of Pattern, suggesting that it looks as though ‘it was painted by a sentimental woman.’ The Telegraph‘s Richard Dorment was kind enough to provide a useful critique.

Earlier in the week, Czech artist David Cerny’s installation (pictured above) at the European Council building in Brussels stoked some controversy due to its lampooning of various national stereotypes. Installed last weekend, the 16-tonne Entropa (2009) depicts Romania as a Dracula-based themepark, Bulgaria as a toilet, Germany as a network of motorways that seems to resemble a swastika, while Luxembourg is a lump of gold with a prominent ‘for sale’ sign and France is on strike – the eurosceptic UK is not included. Bulgaria were particularly offended, going so far as to summon the Czech ambassador to Sofia to explain.

Embarrassingly, Entropa was commissioned to celebrate the beginning of the Czech Republic’s presidency of the EU. There seems to have been some degree of confusion in the country: up until the work was unveiled, Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr Vondra was under the impression that the work was being produced by artists from all 27 EU states. Cerny admitted that he had deliberately misled ministers, having presented them with a catalogue describing all of his alleged collaborators. The artist noted that the work ‘lampoons the socially activist art that balances on the verge between would-be controversial attacks on national character and undisturbing decoration of an official space.’ Vondra has now officially apologized to Bulgaria, promising that the work would be removed if Sofia insisted.

Bloomberg notes that a similar furore was caused 12 years ago when the UK government held the EU presidency. A panel of 30 kids was given the job of blue-skying ideas for appropriate symbols for each of the then 15 member states. Italy was represented by a slice of pepperoni pizza – Romano Prodi, the then prime minister, raised the matter at an EU summit, suggesting that Leonardo da Vinci may have been a more suitable choice.

The Museo del Prado in Madrid has teamed up with Google Earth on a project that allows the public to zoom into 14 of the museum’s paintings – including Velázquez’s Las Meninas and Goya’s The Third of May – in minute detail. Javier Rodriguez Zapatero, director of Google Spain, announced on Tuesday that the images are 1,400 times as clear as those rendered with a ten-megapixel camera. The project takes a similar approach to the 16-billion-pixel version of The Last Supper that was made available online in 2007. The images can be seen by downloading Google Earth, then visiting the Prado’s website and clicking on the square with the museum’s name once it comes into focus.

Gavin Turk has accused British art schools of giving young artists false expectations about the likelihood of success. Prospectuses focus undue amounts of attention on famous alumni, he claimed. This comes after intake at art schools has expanded considerably more than universities over the last decade. Between 1998-99 and 2006-07, the number of art students at undergraduate level in the UK rose by 23.6%, compared with 20.6% across all subjects. Richard Noble, head of the art department at Goldsmiths, says that criticisms are ‘an absurd caricature’.

Coosje van Bruggen dies at 66, reports The New York Times. The critic, art historian and artist was known for the works she created with husband Claes Oldenburg. ‘I belong to the first Conceptual generation,’ she told Artnews in 1990. ‘I was involved when Jan Dibbets dug up the foundations of the Stedelijk and Ger van Elk made a sidewalk out of bathroom tiles. I wanted to push the parameters of art.’ Van Bruggen maintained an independent career as a critic, writing monographs on her husband’s early work as well as that of Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari, Hanne Darboven and Frank Gehry’s design for the Guggenheim Bilbao.

Czech architect Jan Kaplický dies at 71 – reports the LA Times. Kaplický, who founded Future Systems in London nearly three decades ago, died after collapsing on a Prague sidewalk. His designs included the Selfridge’s department store in Birmingham (pictured above) and didn’t shy from controversy – none more so than his proposed National Library for Prague (pictured below), which was panned by both critics and politicians. Up until his death he was battling to get the library built.

In other News

Following LA MOCA’s troubles and talk elsewhere of possible widespread deaccessioning, The Art Newspaper conducted a survey of around 40 museums. The survey revealed that most institutions have lost at least 20% of the value of their endowments and that budget cuts of up to 20% were planned for 2009. (Elsewhere , LACMA boss Michael Govan discusses the museum’s deaccessioning.)

The Independent reports that paintings shown at a Melbourne gallery turn out to be by a two-year-old girl.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy promises free entry to France’s museums for under-25s.

Getty researchers discover new ways to date photographs – reports the LA Times.

While there are plenty of examples of contemporary artists being commissioned for album sleeves – Sonic Youth covers have included work by Richard Prince, Raymond Pettibon and Christopher Wool, while Talking Heads hired Robert Rauschenberg for Speaking in Tongues (1983) – I can’t think of so many bands that have used paintings from before the dawn of rock’n‘roll.

Last year there were two high-profile exceptions, neither of which I paid too much attention to until I saw that both had appeared on a list of 2008’s best album artwork. Topping the chart is the cover for Fleet Foxes’ self-titled debut, which is – somewhat surprisingly – a crop from Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs (1559).

As frieze‘s associate editor Dan Fox pointed out yesterday, it could be the cover for a Deutsche Grammophon recording of 12th-century Flemish plainsong – which was, I assume, exactly Fleet Foxes’ intention (or rather that of designers Dusty Summers, Sasha Barr and Robin Pecknold). The brief is easy to imagine: ‘Please cloak our lovingly crafted, close-harmonied hymnals with something, you know, old.’

So is this a new direction for mainstream indie bands, or is it further evidence that, as Adrian Shaughnessy argued in Cover Art By: New Music Graphics (2008), the album cover is a dying art form? The idea of awards for cover art itself feels somewhat anachronistic; record labels are yet to find a convincing way of packaging downloaded music.

Also on the list is the cover for Coldplay’s Viva La Vida (2008) which uses Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830) (though the album title is a nod to Frida Kahlo). Here, Fleet Foxes‘ unintrusive copy is ignored in favour of enthusiastically daubed white paint. Ingres’ great rival certainly makes for a surprising match for a band that, according to a 2008 poll sponsored by hotel chain Travelodge, produce the music most likely to help people fall asleep. Indeed, on the day of the album’s release, rather than talking up the July Revolution of 1830, Chris Martin made this mild claim on the band’s website: ‘I hope there’s songs on there that will make a shit day slightly less shit, or a good day even better.’ My guess is that the image was either chosen to coincide with the band’s vaguely military-inspired restyle, or suggested by the album’s producer Brian Eno (whose Another Green World, 1975 used a detail from Tom Phillips’ After Raphael, 1973).

So are there many other precedents? The most obvious one that I can think of is Peter Saville’s use of A Basket of Roses (1890) by Henri Fantin-Latour for New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies (1983) – the title of which was, intriguingly, taken from a line that Gerhard Richter, whose Kerze, 1983 adorns Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, spray-painted on the outside of Cologne’s European Kunsthalle in 1981. The National Gallery, so the story goes, refused reproduction rights until Factory record label boss Tony Wilson pointed out that the painting was part of the national collection belonging to the people of Great Britain and that ‘the people wanted it’.

frieze.com’s regular round-up of recent and breaking arts-related news.

The record for the number of visitors to a contemporary art exhibition – set 12 years ago by ‘Sensation’ at the Royal Academy – has been broken by ‘The Revolution Continues: New Chinese Art’, the inaugural show at Charles Saatchi’s new London space – reports the Guardian.

The beleaguered LA MOCA accepts Eli Broad’s US$30 million bail-out, while chancellor emeritus of UCLA Charles E. Young is appointed as the museum’s first CEO.

The LA Times has an interview with outgoing director Jeremy Strick (pictured above).

After the National Academy Museum, New York received criticism for selling two paintings from its collection,The New York Times asks what’s so bad about deaccessioning.

Two weeks before President-elect Barack Obama takes up office, The Art Newspaper looks at his arts policies.

Antonio Villairagosa (pictured above), the mayor of Los Angeles, announces January 2009 as LA Arts Month, claiming L.A as ‘the Venice of the 21st century’. The city has a total of 900,000 employed in the creative industries, who generate a total of US$100 million revenue each year.

The Victoria and Albert Museum, London looks to establish an exhibition centre in Blackpool, reports The Art Newspaper.

Cities in the UK will compete every four years for the title of British capital of culture, following the success of Liverpool as the 2008 European capital of culture, reports the Guardian.

The Wall Street Journal reports that artists are taking advantage of a fall in recycled materials.

In an interview with The Independent, Nicholas Penny (pictured above), the director of the National Gallery, argues that blockbuster exhibitions are a thing of the past.

Go back and check out my last blog from LA and you’ll see a photograph of a sign posted in Runyon Canyon, a local LA hiking spot, warning visitors to wear proper footwear because of steep slopes. I liked the ‘fear of falling’ aspect of that sign, until yesterday, when, hiking up the exact same canyon, I watched a pretty dramatic helicopter rescue of an ill-footweared hiker. The whole spectacle lasted about an hour, with the helicopter circling over our heads to lower the paramedic to the ground, then returning to pick up the hiker and hoist her up precariously by a cable, as dust and dry brush blew in our faces. When I talked to one of several firemen left on the ground after the helicopter flew off to the hospital, he said the woman had ‘twisted her ankle pretty bad’. Um, all that for a twisted ankle? Yep.

And speaking of dramatic rescues, since my last entry, another rescue has taken place, as MOCA has been bailed out by Eli Broad. No helicopter necessary. But MOCA’s predicament did make me think about how the museum got stranded like that in the first place, and about a particularly LA trait. Okay, so I’m oversimplifying a bit, but it seems like, here, much more so than in New York or London, for instance, it’s cool not to care. In fact, not caring is way more important than caring. LA is laid-back … on the surface. You’ll see people wearing sweatsuits while they’re out shopping, carrying giant lattes in paper cups and looking like they just rolled out of bed. It’s a kind of blasé, show-offy self-deprecation. Maybe the art world here adopts the same strategy. I’m thinking of some of the galleries in Culver City that purposely haven’t changed the facades left behind by their former tenants, so that you could drive by, or even walk by them, without noticing what’s inside.

Probably the highest concentration of galleries in LA at the moment is along a generic, seemingly shuttered stretch of busy La Cienega Boulevard, near the concrete banks of the LA River. Its an unlikely place for gallery hopping – buildings are so nondescript you’re not sure whether to enter from the front or the back, and if you enter from the street you’re pretty much guaranteed to be the only pedestrian out there. Along this stretch, though, are some of LA’s best galleries, hidden behind the metal gates of modest former stores or offices. Though Anna Helwing has gone, Peres Projects, Cherry and Martin, and David Kordansky are moving in. When I visited, shortly before many shows closed for the holidays, the shows on view were spotty, and between good galleries you’re bound to find at least one bad one. By far my favorite show was at Taylor de Cordoba – a refreshingly earnest photographic collaboration between Sasha Bezzubov and Jessica Sucher called ‘The Searchers’. These medium-format images of Western tourists in the spiritual meditation and yoga centers of India transcend the medium and their potentially banal subject matter. They could be on the scale of Andreas Gursky’s or Thomas Ruff’s work, but these photographs show that images don’t have to be blown up to huge dimensions to be monumental. Other stand-out shows in the area were George Stoll’s sculptures at Kim Light and Yishai Jusidman’s square format paintings after photos from ‘The Economist’ at Angstrom Gallery.

In another world nestled behind the skyscrapers of downtown, the galleries on the tiny strip of Chung King Road might as well exist on a studio back-lot. This might possibly be the smallest pedestrian zone in LA, a former home to gift shops and restaurants and now almost entirely revamped and taken over by galleries populating the tiny, narrow two-storey buildings. While some galleries have recently moved on, others have moved in – like Chung King Project, which was showing attractive 3-D collages made of strips and swatches of fabric and other found elements by Maeghan Reid. These modest works had a an unselfconscious, free-spiritedness that excused their potentially cliché subjects. Galleries here are hit and miss, too, though David Patton had a Darren Almond exhibition that you might expect to see in blue-chip gallery or a project room in a museum. Here, Almond showed his recent work ‘Bearing’, a 35-minute, almost silent video of workers appearing and disappearing in the billows of noxious yellowy-orange smoke in a sulfur mine in Indonesia. This arresting video had an unearthly quality – the ground inside the volcanic crater is almost never visible, cloaked by layers of sulfuric fog, and you can almost smell the toxic gasses.

Nearby, at the recently bailed-out MOCA, Martin Kippenberger’s long-awaited retrospective is an unexpected flexing of male muscle. I thought the show would help me get to the bottom of Kippenberger’s seemingly outsized influence on art students and young artists today. It’s certainly not his painting style – the paintings in the show, with the exception of the series ‘Lieber Maler, male mir’ (Dear Painter, Paint for Me, 1981), which he hired a sign-painter to paint – are uniformly ugly. The sculptural installations are scattered and unwieldy and almost seem like furniture amid the overcrowded walls. Kippenberger was nothing if not prolific, and his authentic impulse to create is definitely captured in this show. Kippenberger was the ultimate dude – his body of work is varied and irreverent, and he was never afraid to turn his sarcastic, lewd humor inward on himself, as evidenced by the abundance of self-portraits of him wearing bike pants or striking embarrassing poses. Maybe what appeals to young artists about Kippenberger was the degree to which he appeared not to care. He constantly downgraded the status of painting, and himself as a painter. He was bawdy and self-deprecating, and, somehow, in the slacker culture of LA, he fits right in.

If you don’t live in LA, it’s a good place to come to gain some perspective. If you do live here, it’s the easiest place to lose it. When you’re just visiting, it’s simple to recognize what you already think you know about the city from movies and TV. But when you actually live here (or grow up here, like I did), you walk around in this weird Truman Show bubble, viewing the place as if it’s playing out on a screen in the distance, and seeing yourself like you’re being filmed on some hidden camera.

While driving in West Hollywood this morning I passed a crush of paparazzi wildly pressing themselves and their zoom-lenses against the glass of a store window, but couldn’t see beyond them or tell who were they photographing. In a local dog-walking spot, Runyon Canyon, joggers pass slowly enough to eyeball each other, hoping for a celebrity sighting. From the top of the canyon, you can see the Hollywood sign in the distance and view the rest of the city from a dizzyingly high perspective, giving you a view on things you can’t notice while you’re driving through it. I grew up in a house that afforded a view of the LA basin, from downtown and even toward Long Beach, and west to the Pacific Ocean. Not until I left did I realize what a good perspective it gave me of the way the city’s sprawling and segregated neighborhoods relate and connect – something much harder to discern from a car window.

Naturally, LA’s museums and contemporary art spaces try to use views like these as a means of removing themselves from the sprawling surface streets. The Getty Center has a stunning one, which probably attracts more tourists than the exhibits. The new Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) tries to create one with its grandiosely steep escalator, which takes viewers three stories into the sky, where they come out to overlook the Hollywood Hills in the distance, and directly beneath them, the giant red lettering announcing the new LACMA pavilion under construction.

It’s hard not to read something ominous into this proud announcement of things to come, particularly amid the scandal surrounding MOCA’s possible closing and Eli Broad’s and LACMA’s possible role in bailing them out. (Just this morning, following the meeting of MOCA’s board of trustees, the Los Angeles Times announced that LACMA proposed a merger with MOCA, to save them from their financial troubles.)

Inside Broad’s BCAM, however, there are no traces of recession. The top floor features a collection assembled according to groups of works by individual artists, and it’s the first time I experienced a collection of American contemporary art that I can confidently describe as ‘patriotic’. The first work to greet you is Jasper Johns’ Flag (1967), followed by areas dedicated to works by Robert Rauschenberg (including a painting featuring a portrait of JFK), Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, Cy Twombly, John Baldessari, Andy Warhol, and Jeff Koons. It’s an undeniably impressive collection, one that feels fresh and current, if not somehow uniform in spirit. Each mid-size, colourful canvas seems to repeat the same masculine artistic gesture. And though there is something patriotic about the mood, there is also something brazen and even slightly vulgar about these works too. Traveling from Rauschenberg and ending up at Koons, works that might have intended to criticize or comment on a crass American consumer culture now seem comfortably part of that very same culture, and proud of it.

It’s impossible for me not to say something biting about the obvious fact that every artist represented here is male – with one concession – a mural by Barbara Kruger installed inside the elevator shaft (only visible when the elevator has descended), aptly and acerbically entitled Untitled (Shafted). There’s no excuse for not at least making some effort to correct this gross gender imbalance before opening the collection to the public, and the installation of Richard Serra’s monumental sculptures on the first floor seems only to add insult to injury.

On the other side of the courtyard, at LACMA, the temporary exhibition ‘Hard Targets: Masculinity and Sport’ is tucked away on the top floor of the Hammer Building. A fairly academic thematic of how artists contend with the typical heterosexual and competitive male stereotypes that dominate athletics, including works by Mark Bradford, Harun Farocki, Brian Jungen, Shaun El C. Leonardo and Collier Schorr. Of these, Schorr’s studies of male wrestlers are the most engaging and sensitive. But a picture printed in the exhibition’s pamphlet – Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph of a young Arnold Schwarzenegger in only a tight swimsuit, taken in 1976 – provides the most insight into the exhibition’s inspiration.

Not far down the street from LACMA, the small complex of galleries at 6150 Wilshire continues to provide a concentrated and intimate collection of impressive shows. Of these, Anne Collier’s exhibition at Marc Foxx is the best. Collier shows an incredibly rigorous and disciplined series of her conceptual still life photographs, which address the very idea of the photographic image – including images of photographs already hanging on gallery walls and 8×10 prints in photographic developing trays. These might all seem a little too restrained if it weren’t for the inclusion of a close-up of a vintage 1950s porcelain figurine of woman holding a small camera that’s aimed straight back at us. At the neighboring galleries, 1301PE has a show of thick drippy forest paintings by Kirsten Everberg – groves of birch trees loosely rendered in shades of blue in gray – and ACME is showing large sculptures made of painted foamcore by New York artist Davis Rhodes.

Of all of LA’s museums, the most consistently interesting programmes take place at the Hammer, which at the moment features a group exhibition called ‘Oranges and Sardines’. (Group shows and Hammer Projects are also rounded out by the stellar events programme: when I was there, a few teenagers were already camping out in line for an advanced screening that night of the new Mickey Rourke film, The Wrestler.) ‘Oranges and Sardines’ is a group show about abstract painting, in which several artists, largely known as “painters’ painters”, were invited to select and exhibit works from the collection alongside their own. It’s one of those exhibition concepts that might briefly enter a curator’s mind and then quickly get dismissed as too gimmicky or too much of a one-liner, but here it’s been played out to the end. Mark Grotjahn, Wade Guyton, Mary Heilmann, Amy Sillman, Charline von Heyl and Christopher Wool each selected several works, in what I imagine is probably an interesting show for art students. But it’s fascinating to see the strong and pervasive influence especially of Phillip Guston and German artists of Isa Genzken’s generation. The highlight for me was a work selected by Heilmann – David Hockney’s intimate, quintessentially LA painting, Little Splash.

The three Hammer Projects on view at the moment – by Nathalie Djurberg, Erin Cosgrove and Aaron Curry – are skillfully curated to reflect a common interest in the use of child-like, imaginary yet all-encompassing worlds to describe much broader and darker themes. I’m looking forward to seeing Shirana Shahbazi’s upcoming project, which opens in a few days, on 20 December.

From the Hammer I took advantage of the clear weather to head up to that giant office building on the hill (where I used to work), The Getty Center. The ride on the futuristic monorail from the parking lot to the hilltop where the massive galleries and buildings are located provides a vertiginous look down on the 101 Freeway, where you can get a sense of traffic conditions for the way back. Once you’re up there, the weather seems to change and you feel removed from the city. I went to the Getty for a lecture in the auditorium between the brilliant writer Lawrence Weschler and Robert Irwin (who, among other things, designed the Getty Center’s vast garden). The two cut a curious pair on stage – an aging intellectual with a sped-up, nasal voice wearing a tweed coat, and a relaxed gray-haired dude in a baseball cap and jeans. They’ve been friends for 30 years and the discussion started with a picture of them both back in the day; remarkably, they’d changed little. But their banter on stage was sometimes tense, almost fraternally competitive. They were ostensibly there to promote Weschler’s new collection of his conversations with Irwin (_Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees_), but the most interesting aspect of the talk was the perspective they inadvertently provided on the state of the art market – from two guys who’ve basically seen it from the birth of the contemporary art market to the crisis today.

Particularly poignant in this context was a story Irwin told about representing the US at the Venice Biennale toward the beginning of his career. According to him, his minimal concept for his contribution – to outline a square on the ground and let leaves from a tree fall within it, which would constitute the work – actually arose after he’d been told he didn’t have any budget to exhibit his original concept. This might be a prelude to the kind of inspirations and changes that could follow in the upcoming years. And as Weschler succinctly put it, ‘Any work of art is somewhere between priceless and worthless. To call it anything else is comedy’.

More postcards from LA to come.

What does it mean when an extraordinary series of paintings currently on view at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt by René Magritte, which look so uncannily fresh and new, were actually produced in a five week period in 1948, in a style that the artist invented purely to confound and annoy the Parisian public? Magritte’s période vache is an anachronism, an exercise in perversity in which was the celebrated artist’s response to the opportunity for a solo show in a city that he’d left in 1931 and with which he’d had a fractious relationship ever since.

These 17 oil paintings and 20 gouaches combine to form a kind of anti-Magritte, an incoherent rattlebag of styles and techniques that through their joyful freedom actually embrace what he so emphatically resisted in the neutral, anonymous painting style for which he is still best known. I am in fact reminded of Rodney Graham’s recent foray into the history of Modernist painting, ‘Wet on Wet – My Late Early Styles’ (2007) – a similarly mischievous digression into dilettantism, and the unapologetically transgressive pleasures that go with it. Tellingly, however, following the exhibition of these works Magritte wrote to his friend Louis Scutenaire that it was primarily his ‘abhorrence of sincerity’ that prevented him taking ‘further steps along this path’.

On reflection, these works are an important (first?) step on a journey through painting that was joined just over two decades later by artists such as Jörg Immendorff and Georg Baselitz in Europe, or Philip Guston in the USA, and then subsequently by artists such Martin Kippenberger, Maria Lassnig, George Condo, Sean Landers and even Paul McCarthy. These figures all like to play in the same mucky sandpit of grotesque figuration, dark comedy and bawdy sexuality. It is pleasing to think of Magritte clearing the space for such an important and fruitful discourse in a brisk two-month career cul-de-sac to which he’d never return. I almost want to say that what is remarkable here is that he achieved this by making paintings that ‘didn’t really mean it’. Remembering however his comment to Scutenaire, what makes the series really extraordinary in the wily artist’s oeuvre is that he meant it too much.

Memory (2008), installated at the Guggenheim, reignites debates between multiculturalism and universalism

A new and regular round-up of recent and breaking arts-related news.

LA MoCA is down, but not yet out – from the LA Times. Critic Roberta Smith offers some advice on how to rescue the ailing institution.

The renovated Whitechapel Gallery is due to reopen in April 2009. The New York Times reports that planned exhibitions include an Isa Genzken retrospective and a show of works from the British Council, whose collection has never had a permanent home.

Damien Hirst demands £200 from a 16-year old street art – from The Independent.

To coincide with the opening of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Washington Post considers Frank Gehry’s fraught legacy.

REDCAT reviewed five years since it opened – from the LA Times.

Designed by I. M. Pei, Museum of Islamic Art opens in Qatar – from The New York Times.

Interview with Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey – from the Guardian.

Sao Paulo Biennial under threat – from The Art Newspaper.

A new report from London-based think-tank Demos claims that museums alienate the public.

Ignoring the looming recession, two new galleries open in London – from The Art Newspaper.

An update on the UAE Pavilion at Venice 2009 – from the Guardian.

A notable feature of reportage about the world’s current financial situation is how little imagery there is with which to illustrate it. The language used in newspaper and television coverage is that of high drama – reports are liberally peppered with words such as ‘disaster’, ‘meltdown’, ‘chaos’, ‘crisis’ and ‘crash’, but the pictures that accompany them do not depict hundreds of people queuing for bread, families walking the streets with their worldly possessions, piles of valueless banknotes carted around in wheelbarrows or bankers throwing themselves from tall buildings. Rather, our images of economic catastrophe so far amount to commodity traders barking prices at each other (much the same as during boom time, then) or silver-haired CEOs looking ashen-faced before governmental committees; panning shots across the London or New York skylines; businesspeople entering steel and glass corporate headquarters (or leaving with the contents of their desks); graphs depicting plummeting prices and computer screens displaying numerical information incomprehensible to the average person.

In the absence of visual subject matter that might inspire a latter-day Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange (at least for the time being), how can today’s artists make work about the relative abstraction of the current economic recession? For an early response check out Melanie Gilligan’s online film Crisis in the Credit System, a four-part drama commissioned and produced by Artangel Interaction. ‘Crisis in the Credit System’ is, according to Artangel, ‘the result of extensive research and conversation with major hedge fund managers, key financial journalists, economists, bankers and debt activists’ and it is an attempt to convey something of the strange gap between the human cost of economic breakdown and the abstract financial mechanisms that have led to it.

Gilligan’s film takes as its starting point a brainstorming workshop run by an investment bank. The characters are asked to take part in a role-playing game, which develops from the familiar (hedge-fund managers spinning profit from the misfortune of others) through to the surreal (a financial analyst is put under hypnosis in order to forecast stock market activity, and ends up delivering gnomic utterances on the state of the markets). In one enjoyably absurd but thought-provoking scene, the role-playing bank employees discuss how financial instruments can be abstracted from the nature of the material asset, likening the weightlessness of share trading to a language in which words do not necessarily have to have the meaning commonly ascribed to them: ‘I could say ‘tree’ but it doesn’t have to mean ‘tree’, it could mean ‘jet’, and suddenly we have expanded our word-generating profit margin exponentially and we can take profit from more meanings and numerous positions on it.’

I am entirely unqualified to say whether the film engages successfully or not with the complex systems of futures, derivatives and hedge funds, so if I have any reservations they are minor aesthetic ones. The task of articulating the broader themes occasionally has a clunky effect: characters tend towards stereotypes (in one instance, a brash businessmen boasts: ‘I crave the battle’, which somehow comes across more like Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie’s health club managers than Michael Douglas in ‘Wall Street’) or struggle to deliver lines about abstract financial theory without sounding like they’re reciting from a textbook. Although the ‘Crisis in the Credit System’ theme tune by Petit Mal (Gilligan and writer Benedict Seymour) is fun and reminds me a little of The Red Krayola’s soundtrack to 1980s feminist sci-fi film ‘Born in Flames’, it is a little too retro-sounding – I felt it needed to be as steely and corporate as the film’s graphic title sequence, rather than reminiscent of Stereolab’s fusion of Marxist theory and Francoise Hardy.

For the most part, however, ‘Crisis in the Credit System’ is compact, pacey, and finishes with a neat twist, using the current economic downturn to ask what I think is an old-fashioned art question: what is the relationship between the abstract and representation?

Documenta has named Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev the Artistic Director of documenta 13, which will take place in Kassel, Germany, in 2012. Christov-Bakargiev is Chief Curator at the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art in Turin; before, from 1999–2001, she was Senior Curator of Exhibitions at P.S.1, New York. The international finding committee of nine included Kathy Halbreich of MoMA, Udo Kittelmann the new director of the Berlin National Galleries and Hamburger Bahnhof, and Manuel J. Borja-Villel of Reina Sofia, Madrid.

After documenta 12, curated by Roger M. Buergel and Ruth Noack with great ambition but also undeniable flaws in conceptual and practical realisation, the vote seems to have settled on a figure who has already proven she can master the large-scale survey beast. Christov-Bakargiev curated the Biennale of Sydney 2008, an exhibition of more than 180 artists, encompassing avant-garde genealogies from Constructivism through Gutai to Arte Povera, as well as current works by artists such as Renata Lucas or Sam Durant. According to Max Delany writing in the September issue of frieze, Christov-Bakargiev ‘s Biennale ‘was a tour de force, comprising dizzying discursive loops and spiralling trajectories of avant-garde aesthetics and political reprisals. […] Christov-Bakargiev brilliantly marshalled artists and theorists to rethink the terms of “revolution”, agency and effect, and ways that contemporary art might activate new modes of critical understanding and revolutionary potential.’ (read the whole review here)

(here’s the official documenta press-release, and a profile of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev from the Sydney Morning Herald)

In an interview with Charlotte Higgins, published today by The Guardian, 2008 Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey makes two remarks that I think are well worth further consideration.

First: “What I was warned to expect, but still shocked me, was how much obloquy and hatred the prize generates.” Secondly: “I love the Stuckist conspiracy theory, that Nicholas Serota is a kind of machiavellian Skeletor who manipulates the government and the people.” (For the benefit of non-UK readers, the Stuckists are a group of British artists vehemently opposed to contemporary art but who have a disproportionate voice in the mainstream press mainly due to the fact that a now ex-Stuckist, Billy Childish, was many years ago the boyfriend of Tracey Emin. More on them below. And Skeletor, I seem to remember, was the evil arch-enemy of He-Man in the children’s TV cartoon series ‘Masters of the Universe’. I have no critical reflections to share about Skeletor. All I can say is that he was undoubtedly very evil.)

Why, I wonder, is the Prize is always such a lightning rod for bewilderment, bile and blood-vessel-busting debate? Although I find it very difficult to believe that all 60,000-plus people who have visited this year’s Turner Prize despise contemporary art in the same way that those newspaper critics and bravely anonymous bloggers who profess hatred for it do, I think the levels of vitriol and indignance that the British media foregrounds and exacerbates say more about British culture than they do about the merits or demerits of the Prize itself.

In late October 2008 I was asked by the Tate adult education department to give a talk about the Turner Prize. I was not asked to give a certain spin on it, to be gushingly positive about the artists and the Prize. And I wasn’t. In fact, I couldn’t see much point in me banging on about the exhibition itself, given the reams of information and press already available, and that the talk was held in a room adjacent to the show so people could see it for themselves. I also had misgivings about some of the work in the show. However, I was interested in talking about the public reception of the Prize. Leckey’s interview in The Guardian today has prompted me to share the following edited passages from the talk.

Here are some newspaper headlines about this year’s Turner Prize:

‘Nurses and Curses: A model on a toilet, smashed crockery, two love affairs and a cat lecture’ – The Guardian

‘The Simpsons and Squatting Mannequins’ – The Telegraph

‘The Turner Prize 2008: who cares who wins.’ – The Telegraph again

‘Don’t Scream, It Doesn’t Mean Anything At All’ – The Times.

‘Turner Fight Begins Again’ – The FT

‘Simpsons vie for Turner Prize’ – that’s from the ever analytically-sophisticated Sun newspaper.

Some choice quotes from the critics:

Ben Lewis in the Evening Standard suggested that “Usually, the only thing an art critic can enjoy about the Turner Prize is the chance to pretend he’s a racing pundit for a day.” I disagree that it’s the only thing to enjoy, although whether or not many would admit it, a lot of critics do enjoy the racing pundit side. “It was gratifying to see that even members of the live audience were talking and getting up to leave.” – said Richard Dorment of Mark Leckey’s lecture ‘Cinema in the Round’ in The Telegraph. “[Her work] has the theatricality of a bike-rack outside an office window [...] as visually intriguing as an airport lobby.” Wrote the Times’ Rachel Campbell-Johnson of nominated artist Goshka Macuga’s installation. The Financial Times dismissed Cathy Wilkes’ sculptural installation ‘I Give You All My Money’ as ‘a feeble piece’, whilst the Observer remarked: “it is too busy hammering its point home with all the didacticism of a fifth-form project.” Of Runa Islam’s films, the Times argued that her work “analyses the language of cinema [...] so slowly and minutely that you start to want to scream”. Having dismissed the exhibition as a whole as ‘so willfully opaque it’s irrelevant’ – yes, you guessed it, this the good old Telegraph again – Dorment said of her film ‘Cinematography’, “without the intervention of the curator it is virtually impossible for the viewer to figure out what we are supposed to find that’s interesting. This art is academic because it was made not to communicate but to be explained. It exists solely to give lecturers and gallery guides a reason to get up in the morning.” “[Watching Cinematography] is torture.”

Contrary to what Mr Dorment thinks, I have reasons to get up in the morning other than in order to deliver light critical disquisitions on high-profile contemporary art exhibitions. But what I do find interesting is why – aside from Dorment and other critics views on the exhibited work – he might assume that the Turner Prize is the result of conspiracy, of boosterism, of vested interests shoring up careers and market price. This is nothing new. In 1984, the year of the Prize’s inception Waldemar Januszczak, writing in the Guardian, bellowed that ‘The British art establishment, having already shown unforgivable ignorance and wickedness in its dealings with Turner’s own bequest to the nation, is now bandying his name about in the hope of giving some spurious historical credibility to a new prize cynically concocted to promote the interest of a small group of dealers, gallery directors and critics.’ As far as I can remember, unless I have been drugged and hypnotized against my will, ‘Manchurian Candidate’ style, by a shadowy Masonic cabal comprising Sir Nicholas Serota, Charles Saatchi and Damien Hirst in a futuristic bunker miles beneath the Tate, nobody has ever been considerate enough to tell me just what interests I am supposed to be vested in and defending for my own, presumably financial, gain. Believe you me, art criticism and the lunchtime museum lecture circuit simply don’t pay well enough to make cronyism worthwhile. There is an assumption that if a critic defends one contemporary artist, they must therefore be defending all contemporary art. This simply isn’t true. I could probably name just as many artists whose work I don’t find interesting but who have been Turner Prize winners and nominees, as I could those whose art does make me want to get out of bed in the morning and engage with my imagination.

The sport of Turner Prize-baiting is as predictable as rain at Wimbledon. Why is this? Well, art has a long and venerable history of upsetting people. The controversy and furore surrounding JMW Turner’s own paintings during his lifetime is often cited as the reason why his name was given to the Prize: once he was vilified, and now he is regarded as one of this country’s best loved painters. In 1936, Sir Jacob Epstein’s public sculpture ‘Night and Day’ was tarred and feathered, some sources say, by members of the Royal Academy of Arts. Abusive poems about his art were published in the Evening Standard. (Incidentally, Epstein and public sculpture are both subjects that have been engaged with in past work by Leckey.) Carl Andre’s sculpture ‘Equivalent VIII’ – better known as ‘the pile of bricks’ – was, and remains today, an exemplary example not just of 1960s Minimalist sculpture, but also of the British public’s love/hate fascination with contemporary art. It was the sculpture that launched a thousand newspaper cartoons depicting hapless bricklayers cementing and grouting Andre’s sculpture, and many a pub conversation along the lines of ‘my five year old could have come up with that one’ ‘well why didn’t they?’. I could mention countless other examples, but historical relativism can be a weak defence – it suggests that just because something has been, so it must continue to be.

So, again, I ask, why do people get so hot-under-the-collar about the Turner Prize? Without wishing to make simplistic and gross generalizations about such a diverse population as that of the UK, one reason I would tentatively put forward is that the British have an uneasy relationship to visual culture. Very much taking a kind of all-embracing long view on the subject, art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon has argued that the moment of trauma that scarred the nation’s visual psyche forever was the 16th-century English Reformation, which saw the country’s ruling church and state break from Catholic Rome in favour of establishing its own Protestant church. In the late 1530s, monasteries across the country were dissolved, and Catholic churches sacked. Protestant doctrine prohibited the idolatry and manufacture of graven images of God, which resulted in the wholesale destruction of much of the country’s visual art. Here’s a quote from Graham-Dixon:

“The peculiarity that characterises the British approach to British art is a perennial love-hate relationship with it. Take, for example, a 14th-century Lady Chapel in Ely, which wasn’t always as bare and restrained as it is now. The space was transformed some 200 years after its creation when the Reformists smashed every trace of painted statue telling the life of the Virgin Mary. They not only destroyed the images but also left the trace of their rage. Although the walls had been hacked flat the visual residue was in the form of a destroyed image of their own hatred of images. This was a terribly British form of art criticism; we call it putting the boot in.

My concern is for what was at the centre of the British artistic experience. One of the reasons Protestants of the Reformation wanted to destroy art was that it beguiled people, the result of the very fact that it was so alive, to believe in it: the worry that ignorant people might actually start worshipping this Madonna rather than that Madonna and go to that church as a site of pilgrimage rather than another because they believed that the statue in that church was embodying her holiness more fully than another statue.

Essentially the legacy of British art is that neither the abolished Catholic tradition nor the Protestant century of destruction will ever triumph.

The Britishness of British art rides on a tension between two aspects of a sensibility; a Protestant distrust of religious exuberance, colour and decoration and, on the other hand, a tremendous yearning for what has been lost (as a result of the Reformation).

The British tradition has developed as a dialogue between these two things.”

Although Graham-Dixon is perhaps stretching the point a bit, as a nation we nevertheless tend to have a much more open-minded relationship to literature, to the word. Perhaps, as Graham-Dixon argues, this really is a long-lasting side-effect of the Reformation. I’m not entirely convinced: the population of the UK today is far more multicultural and sophisticated than it was during the Reformation and we don’t go around smashing up church art anymore. So maybe this is a question of ownership – we can all share in the English language. Possibly, because language exists everywhere, it is much harder to criticize. Language also intimidates people: it is the tool of clever politicians, of bureaucrats, and fluency and confidence in language is a symbol of education and power. When the Man Booker Prize for fiction comes around each year – an award worth £50,000 (that’s £25,000 more than the Turner Prize) – there is little or no controversy in the newspapers, certainly not on the scale of that which surrounds the Turner. Why do the headlines never scream: ‘Woman awarded £50,000 for making up story!’ or ‘Top Arts Prize Awarded to Man Who Sat Thinking Behind Desk for Two Years!’ When will the papers carry stories of all the politicking and vested interests of publishers, agents and writers who decide on the Man Booker? Why do the British tug our forelocks and genuflect to the terminably middle-class re-workings of the 19th century novel that constitute ‘serious’ literary fiction? Ian McEwan? Martin Amis? They can turn a nice sentence but it’s hardly innovative stuff. This is a country that has produced a good deal of radical art, from Virginia Woolf’s novels to the countless youth subcultures we look back upon so misty-eyed: Mods, Rockers, Hippies, Punk, Rave – think of the wild fashions they created, the energetic revolutions they instigated in music, and the social mores they overturned, all of which have now been thoroughly absorbed into the mainstream.

This leads us to the queasy and difficult issue of money. How do you reward cultural labour? Why is a work of art worth what it is? We are brought up to equate technical proficiency in art – rather than proficiency in thinking, or imagination, or experimentation – with monetary reward: the more something looks like something, the more cash you should get for it. Our newspaper editors and – with few notable exceptions – its writers, are fatally obsessed with the idea of money, the market and art. Vast acres of column inches are spent attacking the amount of money that floats – though may well soon cease to float – around the art world. (You don’t get that in sport: we seem perfectly happy, for instance, to pay grown men millions of pounds to run around a field kicking a leather globe.) Yet by and large, the main mistake the papers make is to confuse the small number of artists who sell their work for vast (and in some instances vastly inflated) sums of money with the whole art world. As Jörg Heiser, co-editor of frieze, recently remarked, to talk about art only in terms of Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons is like talking about literature but only discussing Martin Amis, JK Rowling or Stephen King. I very much doubt that any of the four nominees this year earn huge sums of money through selling their art and I know that if they did they would not be representative of the thousands of artists living in the UK who work hard to scrape by. Only a tiny percentage of the art world – and let’s not forget also that the art world comprises the general public, the people who work in museum education departments, in outreach programmes, in art schools, on academic journals, as technicians and framers and fabricators – earns the colossal amounts of cash reported on so frequently from the high horses of our most supposedly enlightened and intelligent cultural commentators. It must be remembered that exhibiting internationally, in high-profile museum shows or biennales, does not necessarily go hand-in-hand with having a fat bank account. In Leckey’s exhibition for the Turner Prize this year, there is a film, entitled ‘Made in ‘Eaven’, depicting Jeff Koons’ Bunny, on its own in a tiny, bare room. This is his flat – not a mansion on Primrose Hill next door to Kate Moss and Jude Law.

Over the past 15 years, public interest in contemporary art has grown exponentially. Tate Modern is one of the most popular tourist destinations in London. Just go there any weekend, and see how packed it is. You can barely move through its halls and galleries for people: young students, elderly sightseers, families with pushchairs and excitable children. All there, looking at modern and contemporary art. Why then, is the attitude of the British media to something such as the Turner Prize so aggressive? Why is contemporary art treated as guilty until proven innocent? Partly, I think the media – obsessed as it is with celebrity and personality (just look at the Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand controversy last month and how that overshadowed in the UK papers the American presidential elections, or the humanitarian conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo) – is stuck somewhere around 1997. It seems to think that Tracey Emin, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Damien Hirst are still livin’ it up at the Groucho Club, causing controversy everywhere they go, still the young British art bad boys and bad girls on the block, and that the exhibition ‘Sensation’ was only yesterday. The truth is that British art moved on from all that a long time ago. Artists, believe it or not, are more often than not quiet, thoughtful types. They are suspicious of the media because they have seen what it does to people. They get on with making art, with spending time in the studio.

An anecdote: last year, I went on BBC World Service News the night the Turner Prize award was made, for a live response to the verdict, along with David Lee of the normally apoplectically anti-Turner Prize publication ‘The Jackdaw’. This was the year that Mark Wallinger was awarded the Prize for his performance video work ‘Sleeper’ in which the artist, in a bear costume walks at night around the deserted Modernist architectural landmark that is Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. What surprised me was how Lee was actually quite amenable to the work of half the nominees, and we had a good chat about Mike Nelson, in particular, and what his work might mean in terms of sculpture. What depressed me was how the researchers and presenters could only think of goading questions to fire our way. ‘It’s all a con, right?’ ‘Anyone could do this, right?’ ‘Why is it art?’ Why, I wondered to myself, could the imagination not be engaged a bit more. Why, I wonder, was the question not, ‘why is a man in a bear suit walking around a deserted museum called art?’ but ‘what do you think the act of dressing in a bear suit walking around a deserted museum might represent?’ Or even, ‘what do you find interesting about it?’ Whatever happened to the old idea of using your imagination? A work of art should not need too much explication. I am not, I’m afraid to say, and this might sound strange coming from someone who makes a living generating reams of words about art, a fan of museum display panels. They can be very helpful, yes, but they should be kept short and to the point, and not lapse into impossible confused artspeak that ends up closing down for many people the responses they might have to a work, rather than allowing their minds and imaginations to work at their own rate and in their own way in engaging with the work. (Unfortunately, I don’t think the Tate’s own interpretation panels are always helpful or illuminating, beyond factual or biographical information.)

To return to Leckey’s remarks, the other perennial beast that rears its head each year is that of Stuckism. The Stuckists are a small but high-profile group of artists who argue for a return to the traditional values (whatever they are) of figurative art. They have declared themselves the sworn enemies of the kind of art you see in the Turner. They accuse the art establishment of intellectual and artistic bankruptcy in supporting conceptual art, installation art, or any art that isn’t their own, and – yes – speak in hushed tones of those mysterious, sinister vested interests. They declare the Prize to be ‘crap’. Thanks for the insight, guys. Sophisticated stuff. I don’t like the Stuckists work. This not because I don’t like figurative painting – and let’s not forget that a number of those have been nominated for the Turner Prize, including the Prize’s first winner, Malcolm Morley, and more recently the painters Glenn Brown, Michael Raedecker and Gilllian Carnegie, something the press often conveniently chooses to forget in its rush to fulminate against the prize – or because I don’t like people taking an oppositional stance against contemporary art. It is because I don’t think any of the work I’ve seen by artists who define themselves as Stuckists (even the idea of a ‘movement’ seems an outmoded and impossibly limited way of approaching the world, approaching art) is particularly good, interesting, or essentially even well-crafted or technically proficient figurative painting. I also dislike their demands for adherence to a particular aesthetic creed. Whatever happened to inclusivity, to variety, to exploring a full and rich range of ways to express oneself, be it in painting, sculpture, printmaking, video, film, performance, ceramics, dance, writing, music, architecture? We live in 2008, not 1958. We live in a complicated world. Images bombard us as never before – from the screen of your mobile phone or home computer to advertising billboards. Digital culture – blogs, torrents, YouTube, Myspace, Google – allows us unprecedented access to information and culture as never before. Our age is the age of 24/7 access to every other proceeding age, of the airless, immaculate surfaces of HD animation and CGI. The idea of everyone making garish paintings of bowls of fruit seems an inadequate response, to say the least.

The crucial question, I think, is ‘what is an adequate response?’