More than 110 of the world’s leading galleries will participate in the fair, with sections for emerging talent and historical art, the Frieze Artist Award commission, Frieze Film, talks and a Frieze Week festival of culture
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, reportsThe 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 Independentreports 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.
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 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 Journalreports 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.
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?’
Art director Pearce Marchbank recently launched a website that rounds up much of his excellent magazine work from the past 40 years, including many now-iconic covers for Architectural Design, Time Out and OZ.
Marchbank started at Central School of Art and Design, London in 1966, initially influenced by George Lois (whose work for Esquire is currently showing at MoMA ; some of Lois’s best-known covers have been revisited – or rehashed – a few times of late).
A precocious student, Marchbank was art-directing AD, a ‘design science’ monthly, while still studying at Central. After graduating, he worked on Friends, the short-lived Mick Jagger-funded UK version of Rolling Stone, before starting at the newly founded Time Out in 1970. Marchbank’s re-design of the Time Out logo, a slightly blurred Franklin Gothic only intended as a stop-gap, is still used today.
The covers are all the more impressive given that Marchbank would often have less than a day to come up with a design. Marchbank worked at Time Out until 1983, then moving to the Richard Branson-backed competitor Event. Interestingly, some of his layouts for Le Nez Rouge (pictured below), a house magazine for a wine club that Marchbank worked on in 1984, are close to those of well-designed new(ish)comers Fantastic Man and Bedeutung. It seems that his influence lives on.
We’ve just observed Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, and the sins and transgressions of the past year have been more or less absolved. Which may be just as well, since another major guilt-trip may loom on the horizon: ‘If Barack Obama doesn’t become the next president of the United States, I’m going to blame the Jews.’ Or so threatens Sarah Silverman, the aggressively sardonic and deadpan comedian (_Jesus is Magic_, The Aristocrats), in her new web video The Great Schlep.
Noting that Florida is yet again going to be a pivotal swing state in the upcoming election, Silverman made the video with the help of the political action committee The Jewish Council for Education and Research to urge young Gen-X and Y Jews to head down to the Sunshine State and badger, bully and coerce their retired grandparents to let go of their latent fears and prejudices and vote Obama in November. ‘Yes, OK, Barack…Hussein…Obama: it’s a super fucking shitty name. But you’d think someone named “Manischewitz Gooberman” might understand that,’ explains faux-exasperated Silverman regarding why normally staunchly Democratic nanas and zaides might believe all the right-wing blogosphere rumors about Obama being a Manchurian Candidate-like closet Muslim bent on the destruction of the state of Israel.
I first came across The Great Schlep while in Tel Aviv for the opening of Art TLV, where it started to get a lot of play, and in the two weeks since it’s release it has been watched by over 7 million viewers in the US, where it is circulating virally and is the latest instance of a brand of confident, informed, acerbic and focused satire that is fast becoming a significant insurgency tool against the Republican’s Rove-style disinformation machine. A tool that is actually having a measurable effect. (After Tina Fey nimbly lacerated Sarah Palin with her pitch-perfect impersonations of the VP nominee – using her own incoherent interview and debate transcripts as fodder – Palin’s solidly positive poll numbers immediately began to drop in inverse proportion to the rising TV viewership of NBC’s Saturday Night Live. Even Palin acknowledged during a campaign rally in Florida late last week that she is ‘providing job security for Tina Fey’ in an odd feedback loop between the parodist and the parodied.) All this stands in stark contrast to the lonely job description of the political satirist just a few years ago (think of Stephen Colbert’s bravely inspired roasting of President Bush at the White House press correspondents dinner in 2006 at the height of W’s mass popularity and the media’s timid self-censorship and how radical and nearly suicidal his speech then seemed).
Now former SNL comedian Al Franken is running a serious campaign for US Senate in a close race against the incumbent Republican senator in Minnesota, and it has become a familiar fact that a disproportionate and rising number of 20 and 30-something Americans get their news from such news parodies as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, not the major networks. Meanwhile, as Silverman assures her bubbe, using the kinds of carrots and sticks that only a grandkid can wield, Obama’s “brisket is beyond…it’s beyond”. If that doesn’t sway the election, what will?
A new, expanded edition of Lawrence Weschler’s classic, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin is a cause for celebration
