Held at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome over the weekend, ‘Functions of the Museum’ was the first in a series of symposia considering exhibitions and audiences in the run-up to the opening of the city’s first contemporary art institution. The Zaha Hadid-designed MAXXI Museum (or the National Museum of XXI Century Art), which will host both an art and an architecture institution, has been in the pipeline since 1998 and is due to open – after what sounds like a fraught gestation period – by early next year. The attitude of many of the speakers to the project was ambivalent. Some wondered whether the symposium would prompt real change in MAXXI’s programme, while the first speaker, historian and critic John Welchman, was most succinct, at one point showing a Monica Bonvicini cartoon of Hadid ordering a naked lackey to ‘cut you dick out and eat it’ alongside construction shots of the museum.
MAXXI will be, by some accounts, a tough place to stage exhibitions, due to a lack of initial guidance, and much discussion focused on the presumed end of the post-Pompidou period of glitzy architecture driven by economic policy rather than the contingencies of display. Held over two days, the event was based around four big-name speakers – Welchman, philosopher Boris Groys and artists Daniel Buren and Jimmie Durham – and two meandering panels, and hoped to offer something in the way of a self-reflexive approach to the museum’s programming.
Welchman, professor of art history in the Visual Arts department at the University of California, provided an authoritative survey of institutional critique that was echoed and referred back to by subsequent speakers. He described the major shortcoming of the Hans Haacke generation as being a too narrow focus on what an ‘institution’ is – going no further than analyzing or ironizing the exhibition space. Welchman presented relational aesthetics as the point at which critique had become institutionalized, the ‘90s being the decade in which the museum was ‘recalibrated as a global delivery system.’ This was a criticism continued by both Federico Ferrari (a professor in Milan) and art critic Giorgio Verzotti, who argued that institutional critique didn’t fade out, it simply continued with different preoccupations, such as the everyday (as with Felix Gonzalez-Torres), though ultimately finishing in hopelessly self-referential mannerism that reached its apogee with the Guggenheim’s ‘theanyspacewhatever’ survey.
Welchman recommended a reinvigoration of the terms of ‘institution’, following John Searle’s and Roland Barthes’ early writing on language as a primarily social institution, a system of contractual values – a line of thinking ignored by the first generation of artists to analyze the museum. Linking this to Foucault’s injunction of studying the state from the ‘bottom up’, Welchman cited Mike Kelley as an example of an artist working along the lines of ‘bottom up’ social formation, with work such as ‘Drawings for Repressed Social Relationships’ dealing with institutional recall, personal memories inscribed in structures other than the museum.
Welchman was followed by a roundtable that ran way over its allotted time, as these things often do, each of the four speakers treating their section as a lecture rather than short presentation. (The entire first day ran close to six hours with just a ten-minute break – not good.) A highlight of this first panel was a short presentation from Wouter Davidts, Professor of Modern Art History at the VU University in Amsterdam, who gave an overview of unbuilt museums in Antwerp, following their influence – or ‘ghost lives’ – on museums that had been subsequently realized elsewhere. With plummeting endowments, the value and purpose of new museums will surely be contested subjects over the next few years, and Davidts’ approach suggested a worthwhile consideration of both past follies and sadly derailed projects.
This sentiment chimed with Joanna Mytkowska’s presentation on the second day. Mytkowska is director of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, an institution still in its design stage (it is due to open in 2014). It will be the first museum to be built in the city since 1938, and is on a similarly grand scale as MAXXI (around 35,000 square metres). Given the bitter reaction to blatant representations of power in post-communist Eastern Europe, Mytkowska emphasized a conflicted approach to the museum as authoritative institution. They are working towards reconfiguring what a ‘public’ space means in this context, and have hung a large neon sign from a demolished public cinema in their temporary space; even if the museum is unsuccessful, Mytkowska sees this preliminary reflexive stage as being productive in itself. The design for the museum was run as an open submission, and the jury – which included Nicholas Serota, Daniel Libeskind and Deyan Sudjic – recommended modesty over iconic showiness. The winning design, by Christian Kerez, is a low-slung, almost Brutalist affair, far from the Guggenheim Bilbao that city government had hoped for – the original director resigned in the ensuing scandal.
Daniel Buren began his enlightening talk with the surprising claim that his writing from the late ‘60s is now largely obsolete, given the degree to which institutions have changed since then. One major shift is the popularization of the museum experience, which has led to a vastly expanded public which is no longer in awe of the institution. Buren also noted that his earlier complaints about the economic power of the museum now seems ‘almost comical’ given how little money public institutions now have.
Opening the second day, Boris Groys was largely optimistic about the future of the museum, continuing his knack for pithy inversion – demonstrated in last year’s Art Power – with a series of unexpected arguments. He began by noting that, pace Beuys, rather than everyone becoming an artist, everyone has become a curator, linking the curatorial role to its etymological root as ‘curer’, nursing the ‘sick’ artwork back to recovery in the hospital-like museum. Groys focused on the points at which the institution’s ‘medical tricks’ cannot be hidden, the points at which the museum both cures the work and contributes to its continuing illness. By way of example, he compared a show of Marcel Broodthaers’ films some years ago, presented on the original equipment, with a more recent survey of Warhol’s films shown on flatscreen televisions. The supporting hardware of the former exhibition triggered a nostalgic response in visitors and meant that attention was diverted from the work itself, while the latter show was presented on means that were completely foreign to its mode of composition. ‘Every mode of presentation is ruinous to the work’, he concluded.
‘I’m going to tell stories, mostly about museums I like’, claimed Jimmie Durham at the beginning of his modest keynote, before noting that he had never visited a museum until the early ‘80s. He mentioned the Prado as his favourite museum, as, after kilometres of bad painting you finally reach the El Grecos and think, ‘Wow, even painting could be art…’ More seriously, Durham singled out Jan Hoet’s tenure at SMAK in Ghent as a model for how an institutional as social rather than educative hub, ‘not where the muses stay but where they might come to.’
A topic that was touched upon by a couple of the speakers, though not fully explored in any single presentation, was how digital and online work can be properly displayed in the museum. Groys told a short anecdote about visiting the first ‘net art’ shows in the late ‘90s and noting that the light of the computer terminals gave visitors the illuminated appearance of some baroque painting. It was only afterwards that he found out that most of the works had crashed so people were just checking their emails. New media of course calls for new approaches to display. Welchman quickly discussed the rise of ‘black box’ presentations of film work in the ’90s (the inverse of the white cube), before noting that new media seems to threaten the institution, its intrinsic qualities appearing to suggest a kind of ‘ubiquitous museum’. How to display works that are freely circulated online? How does independent and potentially infinite choice relate, in this context, to curatorial selection? Does YouTube mean that the collective experience is increasingly coming to be based on simultaneous private experience? These are all questions that MAXXI’s curators claim to be listening to, though we’ll have to wait another year to see how successful their answers are.
‘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.
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A lawsuit has been launched against Richard Prince in which it is claimed that images from his 2008 ‘Canal Zone’ exhibition were lifted from French photographer Patrick Cariou’s photographic survey of Rastafarian culture, Yes Rasta, published in 2000. The Art Newspaperreports that the suit also names dealer Larry Gagosian and publishing house Rizzoli as defendants. In addition to seeking damages for copyright infringement, the lawsuit demands the, ‘impounding, destruction, or other disposition’ of all of the exhibited works and unsold catalogues. Representatives for Prince and Gagosian have declined to comment.
Prince has been incorporating images from advertising campaigns and other sources for more than 30 years, a practice that has previously led to his being sued by photographer Garry Gross over Spiritual America (1983) – the suit was settled out of court. The ‘Cowboys’ series has been similarly controversial, drawing complaints from various commercial photographers involved with the Marlboro campaign.
As Cariou’s lawyers have argued, ‘Canal Zone’ represents a new step for Prince, in that the images were taken from a fully researched photographic project rather than ad campaigns freely available in magazines. If the court deems Prince’s interventions to be ‘transformative’ then the artist could well win the case on the grounds of ‘fair use’. A recent precedent was Blanch v Koons (2006), where fashion photographer Andrea Blanch unsuccessfully sued Jeff Koons for incorporating a photo from one of her shoots.
Tate Modern yesterday announced that many of the 725 works donated to Tate and National Galleries of Scotland by Anthony D’Offay (pictured above) last year will be used in a large-scale touring exhibition. Incorporating work by some 30 artists, ‘Artist Rooms’ will tour to 18 museums throughout 2009, reaching an estimated audience of 9 million people.
The first leg of the tour, due to start in March, will make use of two-thirds of D’Offay’s donation, and will include work by Joseph Beuys, Vija Celmins, Gilbert & George, Jeff Koons, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, and Gerhard Richter.
S.H. Raza (pictured above), one of the India’s foremost artists, opened an exhibition of his own paintings in Delhi on Saturday only to discover that many were fakes. The Paris-based artist had contributed some works on paper to Dhoomimal Gallery’s retrospective, while the gallery had borrowed around 30 paintings – supposedly his early works – from Raza’s nephew.
‘As I moved from one canvas to the other, I realised that the works were just not mine, they were all fakes,’ the 85-year-old wrote in an Indian newspaper. Uday Jain and Uma Jain, the gallery owners, have apologized to Raza, saying that they had been duped; the exhibition was cancelled half an hour after opening.
A few thoughts on the idea of humility halfway between art and politics: Obama’s inaugural address started like this: ‘I stand here today humbled by the task before us’; in his inaugural address of January 2001 George W. Bush’s stated that he wanted to be ‘viewed as a humble person that is not judgmental’.
Fred Barnard’s drawing of Dickens’ Uriah Heep (1870s)
Since enlightenment, the idea of humility is anything but undisputed: from François de la Rochefoucauld who asserted that ‘pride is never better disguised and more deceptive than when it is hidden behind the mask of humility’ to Karl Marx’ statement that, while Christianity preached ‘submissiveness and humbleness’, the proletariat needs ‘its courage, its self-confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread.’ Charles Dickens’ Uriah Heep, the scheming antagonist of David Copperfield (1850), incessantly saying he was a ‘very ‘umble person’, is the epitome of false modesty.
In Modernism, heroic tabula rasa attitudes allowed for anything but attitudes of humility. There are a few exceptions, like T.S. Eliot’s famous line that ‘humility is endless’, which acknowledges that the idea that age brings wisdom is deceptive (i.e. the humility is vis-à-vis the shock of realizing that knowledge can become worthless). Or in fact, as Jennifer Kabat points out in her piece about the influence of Depression-era posters on current advertising campaigns, the exception of artists, employed by the state, seeing themselves in the service of the common cause. But I guess as a movement, it wasn’t until the 1960s that some – not all! – parts of minimalist, proto-conceptual, post-beat, collectivist-hippie attitudes brought in the idea that the artist’s work can be a humble reflection of the everyday, from Yvonne Rainer’s integration of simple gestures into dance moves to Arte Povera artist Luciano Fabro, who in 1967 covered a piece of floor he cleaned with a square of newspaper pieces, in reference to simple housekeeping habits from his village (_Pavimento (tautologia)_, Floor, tautology). The idea was, simply, that it was about the work, not the artist; as Nietzsche (of all thinkers) put it: ‘There is true modesty (that is the knowledge that we are not the works we create).’
Which brings me back to Obama’s ‘humble’ vs. Bush’s ‘humble’: Obama’s sentence acknowledges that it’s not about him, but about the task, and everyone; whereas Bush, much in line with Uriah Heep, made a statement about himself…
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?’
