Dan Fox is a writer, filmmaker and musician. He is the author of Pretentiousness: Why It Matters (2016) and Limbo (2018), both published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, and co-director of Other, Like Me: The Oral History of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle (2020).
It was announced this weekend that the novelist JG Ballard has died, following a long illness. The author of 19 novels and numerous short stories, Ballard exerted a huge influence over many artists, writers and filmmakers with his disquieting and vivid meditations on modernity, technology, violence, ecological crisis and psychological breakdown.
Obituaries on the BBC and the Guardian websites can be read here and here, respectively. An interview with Ballard by Ralph Rugoff, published in issue 34 of frieze, May 1997, can be read here. The website ballardian.com provides a comprehensive source of Ballard-related information, criticism and links.
Here’s a link to an article by Sean Snyder, published in the latest issue of the e-flux journal. Snyder begins by describing the occasion he was detained and questioned at Tel Aviv airport by an El Al security official. He uses the questions he was asked at the airport as the structure for frank ruminations on the role of artists in relation to the mechanisms of the art system, discourse, and context. Worth a look for those interested in some of the issues also discussed in the March 2009 edition of frieze, themed around ‘Professionalization’.
Inhabitants of the British wing of the infinitely large walk-in-wardrobe that is 1980s revivalism have recently been looking through the rail marked ‘politics’:
1. This month sees the release of Yes, the tenth studio album by the Pet Shop Boys, which features Cold War allegories and songs about celebrity and consumer culture culture. April is also the 25th anniversary of their debut single ‘West End Girls’, a song that would become one of the defining soundtracks to deregulated, privatized, entrepreneurial, Thatcherite Britain. It was released the same year that the Miners Strike would ultimately come to symbolize the triumph of the political right over the left in the UK, a history of which is told in a new book by Frances Beckett and David Hencke. A recent interview for The Quietus is headlined ‘Pet Shop Boys: Our Back Catalogue is 25 Years of Social Commentary’.
2. The animal rights group, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), requests that the Pet Shop Boys change their name to the Rescue Shelter Boys.
3. The Specials reform for a 30th anniversary tour. If the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘West End Girls’, and its 1985 follow-up, ‘Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)’, described, albeit with ironic ambivalence, the free-market individualism of the 1980s, The Specials’ 1981 single, ‘Ghost Town’ and its bleak accompanying promo video, was one of the decade’s most succinct expressions of social discontent in the UK.
7. The divisions between ‘Thatcherite pop and Marxist funk’ are also traced in ‘Do It Yourself – The Story of Rough Trade’ an in-depth documentary about the influential record label and shop, Rough Trade, screened by the BBC in March. A central topic of the film is the collective, non-hierarchical principles along which the organization was run in the late 1970s and early ‘80s.
8. The documentary ‘ON/OFF: Mark Stewart – Pop Group to Maffia’ is premiered this month at the East London Film Festival. The film follows the career of Mark Stewart, whose career began in the early 1980s with the highly politicized Bristol band The Pop Group.
9. Former members of The Stone Roses continue to scotch the ever-optimistic rumours that they will reform for the 20th anniversary of their 1989 debut album. Released as the first wave of acid house was sweeping across UK youth culture, the sunny, 1960s-inflected melodies of their eponymous debut heralded the 1990s by taking the creed of Thatcherite individualism into a new realm of depoliticized hedonism with songs such as ‘I Wanna Be Adored’ and ‘I Am the Resurrection’.
10. In the past four months, ABC, Belinda Carlisle, The Cure, Depeche Mode, Echo and the Bunnymen, Erasure, Go West, Heaven 17, Magazine, Morrissey, Throbbing Gristle, Ultravox and U2 have all released new records, gone on tour, or announced that they would reform. It is surely only a matter of time until the Red Wedge bands regroup for old times sake.
How did that Billy Bragg song go? ‘I don’t want to change the world, I’m not looking for a new England’ …
‘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’sBen 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’sAdrian 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.
Over at Owen Hatherley’s blog, Sit Down Man, You’re a Bloody Tragedy, is an interesting piece on ‘austerity nostalgia’, extracted from a recent lecture he gave at Chelsea College of Art.
Hatherley tracks the recent trend in British graphic and product design for images and objects that consciously hark back to the paternalist, institutional aesthetics of the 1940s and ’50s: posters and pamphlets simply typeset in GillSans, catchy slogans that exude an authoritative ‘everything’s going to be OK’ calm. This ‘austerity nostalgia’ could be read as a British take on the ‘New Deal’ era graphics that inspired some of the designers working in support of Barack Obama’s US presidential election campaign, yet here in Britain there’s little of the sense of political optimism that reinvigorated the US electorate late last year. We’re mistrustful of both New Labour and the Conservatives, unemployment is on the rise, businesses are falling like flies and the country grinds to a halt at the first hint of snow. The misplaced nostalgia for the ‘simpler’, ‘happier’ times of 1940s and ’50s Britain – when class barriers were fiercely rigid, when racism and sexism was socially more acceptable, when homosexuality was illegal, when rationing was still in force, when half our cities were still bomb-sites – seems markedly more fantasist than based on any feeling that something concrete can be done to affect change here in the UK. If anything, the newspapers of late have been far more retro-1980s than retro-1940s: industrial action, economic trouble, threats of ‘three-day weeks’ and power outages, old Thatcher cabinet member Kenneth Clarke back in the political front line, the escapist ‘Brideshead Revisited' revisited once again (as it often is in times of national anxiety).
Contemporary art’s penchant for borrowing from its early 20th century history would never be so bluntly described as ‘nostalgic’ or ‘retro’, but arguably in some cases, I suspect this is exactly what it is. Art’s referencing of prewar Modernist sculpture and painting, or Russian Constructivist theatre, or social Utopian architecture as refracted through the lens of late 1970s postpunk culture, is often close to being itself an expression of ‘austerity nostalgia’.
In the case of design, Hatherley cites London Transport’s recycling of its own war-era graphics from a year or two ago – with added Orwellian overtones – as being an early example of this ‘austerity nostalgia’. I would add to this the influential retro tendency in ‘mainstream-alternative’ pop culture and fashion.
Take, for instance, the band British Sea Power. Back in 2003, they were already making hay with World War I and II clothing, insignia and lyrical references, an aesthetic that placed their rather conventional indie-guitar-based music in a world of brave fighter pilots, doomed lovers, lovable amateur ornithologists and eccentrics; a mish-mash of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger films and childhood visits to dusty small-town museums. You could argue that, as with contemporary art’s own fascination with artists and designers of the pre-war era, British Sea Power’s aesthetic (also their football-terrace stadium anthems) seems to express a yearning for a more straightforward way of being in the world; of times when ideals were, for better or for worse, more cut-and-dried and when there was more of a sense of shared goals – be it as a military hero or as a vanguard Modernist. But then, maybe what they represented in 2003 was more to do with white guitar music turning its back on anything faintly contemporary such as hip-hop, 2-step/garage (which was to become dubstep) or minimal techno and reaching back beyond their Britpop precursors’ infatuations with all things 1960s and ’70s to an era still relatively unprocessed by pop’s necro-retro recyclings.
More recently, in London, shops such as Melrose and Morgan and Labour and Wait have styled themselves on an idealized version of 1950s grocery and hardware shops – the tote bag produced by Melrose and Morgan being this winter’s must-have austerity chic accessory. (‘Must-have austerity chic accessory’ – what an oxymoron!) It’s an approach that might well extend to other product areas what already happened to the humble brown paper bag; making something signify both austere simplicity (what, after all, is more plain and pseudo eco-friendly than a brown paper bag) and also sophistication (the brown paper bag also comes with faint hints of how Manhattanites buy their groceries in the movies, and seems to say ‘you are smart because you do not need a bag to signal to others the places where you shop.)
Indirectly, it links in to the obsession throughout 2007 and ’08 with all things post-punk – not so much the music, perhaps, but the look, which already originally had a somewhat austerity-era feel about it: trenchcoats, shirts and ties, preppy haircuts, ‘sensible’ brogue shoes – the grimness of late 1970s Britain. This in turn linked into high-street fashion’s interest last year in all things vintage: an admixture of 1950s rock’n‘roll-meets-burlesque with the more austere 1980s post-punk take on the 1940s, which makes, in a funny kind of way, ‘austerity nostalgia’ a form of early 1980s nostalgia too.
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?
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?’
I’ve always enjoyed those seemingly small historical details that turn out to have huge ramifications for art. Take, for instance, the invention in 1841 of the paint tube, allowing the Impressionists to work al fresco much more easily. Or the introduction in 1967 of the Sony Portapak video camera: lightweight, portable and just perfect for capturing those long durational body art performances in the 1970s.
With that in mind, here is the start of an ongoing, occasional catalogue of details that might – albeit in a much less significant way than the paint tube or Portapak – be tugging and pulling at the shape of our own age. As these are all limited to things I’ve noticed in the course of working for an art magazine, they are observations that mainly concern the dissemination of information. They are listed in no particular order. Although I have not included anything quite so earth-shatteringly transformative as the Internet, a few inclusions have already been much discussed elsewhere. I won’t apologize for their inclusion; firstly because I think they have specific consequences for art, but secondly because part of the fun of reading lists like this is discovering that you’re not the only person to have thought something and that someone else has kindly said it for you to save the potential embarrassment of people sniggering at you for saying something stupid. A few of these will amount to nothing. However, it’s just possible that some of the epiphenomena noted below might have an impact that punches above the weight that their merely technical or administrative character might suggest.
1. jpegs versus slides
When I first started working for frieze, in 1999, all documentation of art works received from galleries or artists for reproduction in the magazine was either on 35mm slide, a larger transparency format such as 5×4inches, or photographic print. A professional reprographic house could scan a high-quality transparency to virtually any size you wanted for the magazine. Today, all images are supplied in a digital format, and it is rare over the course of a year to have even one slide to scan. Of course, the great advantage to this is that an image owned by someone in, say, Johannesburg, can be sent to London in an instant. Magazine production schedules have become far more nimble, and much less dependent on postal services and couriers. The flipside, however, is that digital images can’t be blown up beyond the size they were scanned or taken at in the first place. In order for a digital image to be able to print properly, it must have a minimum resolution of 300 dots-per-inch. If an image file, at 300 dpi, is only 5×3cm then that’s the maximum size it has to be printed. If, however, it’s 50×30cm, then a magazine designer has more options available to them as to what size it appears on a page.
You might think this is all irrelevant geek-speak, yet the file size of a digital image directly affects how it is reproduced. A tiny, pixellated image can’t be magically made into a beautifully crisp and detailed poster-size reproduction, no matter how hard you push it in Photoshop. This has potential consequences for the pictorial emphasis of an article. In a given article, artist A’s work might, to the casual observer, appear less important than artist B’s work, because artist B sent the magazine a huge jpeg image that could be reproduced large but artist A just sent a matchbox-size screen-grab. As editors, we try very hard not to allow things to get skewed unnecessarily, but nonetheless we have found that questions of editorial design choice have changed.
2. Desktop publishing and the affordability of colour printing
Every day the frieze editorial team receives through the post, along with all the usual press releases, between five and ten highly produced books and catalogues. (That’s not to mention all the emails announcing even more books in the pipeline…) This number has increased from maybe just two or three per week ten years ago. Just look at how many full-colour art magazines and exhibition catalogues there are today: there has been an explosion in print material concomitant with the exponential expansion of the art world, but also in tandem with the increased availability and cheapness of DTP software and quality colour printing. For all the talk of criticism not being so important anymore, there’s a hell of a lot more print-matter out there. Everyone wants a catalogue and accompanying essay. Everyone wants a piece of posterity.
3. The limits of the page versus the infinite space of the blog versus ‘back-story’ art
A writer, when commissioned to produce an article for a print magazine, is given a word count, which is a guide to how long the piece should be, and their text must come within close range of this figure. One of the noted characteristics of post-Conceptual and ‘relational’ art has been work that requires the viewer to understand a complex and often lengthy back-story in order to be able to decode it, or assimilate large amounts of research material provided by the artist. A reviewer writing about such a work for a magazine must make some attempt to convey this ‘back-story’ in their text, partly because it cannot be assumed that every reader will have seen the work, but mainly in order to be able to construct a coherent and solid written argument about the piece. If they have 500 words within which to write, but the artwork requires lengthy description, then they can either detail it accurately in, say, 300 words, but sacrifice space for critical assessment in only 200 words. Alternatively, they can give themselves more room to argue a point – say, 450 words – but at the expense of giving a cursory and potentially inadequate recapitulation of the ideas in only 50 words. It goes without saying that an online piece of writing seldom has to deal with this kind of problem.
4. The anonymity of blogs
If I say something negative about an artist’s work in print, my name is always at the bottom of the article. It’s an old-fashioned convention that encourages a little circumspection about what you write. Log in as ‘artskeptik’ or ‘mud_slinger82’, however, and you can say whatever you like, with as much vitriol as you care to spew, and no one can call into question the integrity of your opinion by actually being able to know something about your background or position. (Or even just shout at you in the street.) Public debate about art has become, bizarrely, more diverse, inclusive and frank but simultaneously more dislocated, alienated and unproductive. Which brings me to…
5. …Punditry
Speaking only about the British mainstream press here, the expansion of contemporary art into the public consciousness that has occurred in the UK over the past 20 years has also resulted in the curious phenomenon of the non-expert art critic. Commentators with scarcely more than a basic working knowledge of contemporary art frequently opine in newspapers about high profile artists or are asked to sit on judging panels for prestigious awards such as the Turner Prize. In principle I have no problem with this, but I somehow cannot imagine Adrian Searle or Jennifer Higgie being asked to remark upon the Test Match or referee the FA Cup Final. Because contemporary art is viewed with some degree of suspicion, is it thus considered ‘fair game’?
6. A blindingly obvious one here: YouTube, googlevideo and ubu.com
Someone in the pub tells you about Andy Warhol starring in an advertisement on Japanese TV in the 1980s and in just a few seconds of getting back in front of your computer you can watch it. The easy availability of obscure music online – albums, for instance, that would once have taken half a lifetime (or half a life’s savings) to track down but are now easily found on blogs and fan sites – is massively transforming the development of new music being made today. There is now a huge amount of art-related content on YouTube, and specialist sites such as ubu.com. At a recent event at London’s Cubitt Gallery, I heard Tate curator Stuart Comer discuss the potential impact of ‘web 2.0’ sites like these on the work of moving image curators such as himself, which got me thinking about the domino effect that has on writing criticism and online publishing. Are all those music and art blogs packed full of mp3s of rare albums and film clips – absorbing though they can be – just a grown-up game of show-and-tell?
