A number of recent exhibitions and artist projects have utilized the architecture of the television studio. How does this tendency relate to TV’s shifting significance as a cultural form?
The shortlist for the second annual Jarman Award has been announced. Launched last year, the winner of the inaugural award was Luke Fowler. The 2009 shortlisted artists are below; follow the links for more about each of them from the frieze archives:
Aside from a useful £10,000 cash prize, the winner of the 2009 award will be commissioned to make four films for Channel 4’s ‘Three Minute Wonder’ series, which will be screened next spring. (Luke Fowler’s can be watched here.)
Included in the recent group exhibition ‘Against Interpretation’ at Studio Voltaire, as well as Nought to Sixty at the ICA last year, Sutcliffe is perhaps the least known of the artists on the list – athough he has a solo show at Cubitt coming up later this year. Seers’ work was included in Altermodern and had a recent show at Matt’s Gallery, while Kirschner & Panos and Martin have had exhibitions at the Chisenhale in the past year.
The winner of the 2009 Jarman Award (coordinated by Film London) will be announced at the Whitechapel Gallery on 22 September, following a short series of screenings at the CCA, Glasgow (10 September), Picture This, Bristol (16 September) and Whitechapel Gallery (19 September).
‘If anyone is on twitter, please set your location to Tehran and your time zone to GMT +3.30. Iranian security forces are hunting for bloggers using location/timezone searches. The more people at this location, the more of a logjam it creates for forces trying to shut access to the Internet down. Cut & paste & pass it on.’
An article from The Wall Street Journal on the sophisticated software provided by Siemens and Nokia that allows the regime in Tehran to monitor the Internet appears here.
This is an interesting article on the whole Tiananmen + Twitter = Tehran equation, on The Daily Beast.
One quick thought on the phenomenon that we get to see television news reports about the situation in Iran with newsroom commentators doing solemn voice-overs to chaotic, frantic YouTube clips. What is almost as disturbing as the footage as such is, when like in this CNN report on the killing of the young student Neda Soltani, it gets edited into loops and odd tracking movements – especially around 1 min 30 into the clip – that are like sadistic scans of the image itself.
Obviously the editing has to do with the lack of footage; same image over and over. But the question as to whether that either leads to numbness or to awareness is besides the point, this really depends – in the spirit of Susan Sontag – on the willingness and ability of the spectator to become a witness. And yet this short news clip shows how this process is complicated, and effectively hindered, if the one who presents and comments on the footage is not the reporter or photographer or camera man, but someone who has no access to its source, and thus reduces a political situation to an exercise in almost ritualist gawking.
It may be a glimpse of hope that information can be spread despite of strong forces trying to shut them down; these images and scenes testify to occurrences of people being injured or killed. But they obviously don’t provide any insight as to what exactly happened; no context, no witness account in the images themselves. And that gets a little lost in the jubilation for the ‘revolution being tweeted’.
As much as the nature of this kind of footage is inevitably a result of the danger and heat of the moment, it also achingly reminds you of the importance of experienced on-the-ground reporters; or – if reporters are prevented from being on the ground as in Iran – the need for social movements to quickly develop a journalistic language, as rudimentary as it might be, that doesn’t leave it all to the newsroom editor who helplessly tries to apply streamlined TV parameters to anarchic Internet sources.
Sat in the cinema the other day, waiting to see Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, I caught an advertisement for Absolut Vodka. In 60 syrupy and platitudinous seconds, we see a sequence of common transactions such as buying a bus ticket or giving money to a busker. Instead of exchanging money, a hug or a gentle peck on the cheek is given for each service or item bought. The range of people and locations is demographically and geographically balanced, in the heavy-handed, focus-group driven sort of way that only expensive advertisements seem able to achieve: good-looking white 20-somethings buying cinema tickets, an elderly Asian man (included, it seems, to represent some notion of kindly serenity in the midst of poverty) hiring out bicycles on a hot dusty road, two motherly Scandinavian-looking women in a market, hugging each other as one hands the other a great big fish. The colour palette of the film is graded in mute, pale tones – the sort that seem intended to convey artsy sensitivity, or, in their washed-out colouring, careworn memories. Accompanying the ad is a wretchedly cloying version of ‘Money Makes the World Go Round’; all cute electronic burbles, sickly sweet female vocals and bloodless, indie-ish guitar riffs. Worst of all, the final icky chorus of the song sounds as if it’s sung by a small child, presumably far too young to consume the gut-rottingly strong spirit the ad is selling.
As the film trailers continued, I thought about how the Absolut advertisement is the just the latest in a line of commercials released over the last few years – including the ‘bouncing balls’ (below) and ‘paint’ ads for Sony Bravia, Ford Mondeo’s floating cars, the rainbow and dance films for Orange, and Barclaycard’s rather more self-consciously bathetic urban waterslide – that form something of an advertising subgenre. Each ad presents a scenario in which we see a number of supposedly ordinary people, in everyday situations, either directly engaged with, or witnessing, some form of extraordinary activity or phenomena; millions of small, coloured balls inexplicably bouncing down the hills of San Francisco; cars floating from balloons above city streets; a household chore that turns into a graceful ballet across sun-dappled lawns; the inhabitants of a local community running a relay race through their streets with rainbow-coloured streamers. Invariably accompanying these ‘magic-realist-lite’ scenarios are emotively epic or gently melancholy songs designed to ramp-up the levels of pathos in the ad. They function as a kind of signal jamming device that helps detach our emotions from the product in question, and reattach our feelings about the brand to some woolly, warm, vague notions of innocent creativity, big ‘life moments’ (birth, marriage, having kids – no death though), community spiritedness and global harmony. Sat in front of the big screen, I slurped on my lemonade and wondered just what it was that these commercials were trying to convey. ‘Don’t worry!’ they seem to be saying. ‘Cars, mobile phones, banks and mass-produced spirits are just like animals, trees and fun, creative, homespun games with your neighbours – they are your friends!’
Eventually the ads ended, I wolfed down the last of my chocolate Maltesers, and settled into my seat to enjoy the main feature. Synecdoche, New York revolves around theatre director Caden Cotard (played by the ever brilliant Philip Seymour Hoffman), a man estranged from his artist wife, Adele, and their daughter, Olive, and in ill health. Covered in pustules, his eyesight malfunctioning, and his self-confidence atomized into a million shards of neuroses, Cotard is at the end of his tether when, out of the blue, he receives a MacArthur Fellowship – nicknamed the ‘genius’ grant – and a huge sum of money with which to work on any project he pleases, no strings attached. Given this new lease of life, he decides to embark upon a hugely ambitious theatrical masterpiece, which he intends to be ‘a work of brutal honesty’. Gathering an ever-expanding cast of actors in a vast warehouse in New York, Cotard sets about reconstructing key episodes in his life. He wanders through an increasingly elaborate replica of New York that fills the warehouse (and which, in turn, is itself replicated, like a Russian doll, inside the warehouse), watching his life being replayed over and over, as he gives actors notes on their performances, analyses his mistakes and regrets, and – in a Borgesian twist – ultimately begins to write himself out of his own life, deferring decisions to those actors playing him. If synecdoche is a literary device whereby a part is used to represent the whole, the ‘parts’ in this particular synecdoche – the actors – literally start to become the whole of Cotard’s life.
What, you’re probably wondering, do my idle ruminations on modern commercials have to do with Synecdoche, New York? Well, the first thing that struck me about the film – as with those of his sometime collaborator, the director Michel Gondry – is how much of a similar aesthetic it shares with the magic-realist-lite advertising subgenre, albeit with a far darker twist. As with Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004, co-written with Kaufman and artist Pierre Bismuth), The Science of Sleep (2006) and Be Kind Rewind (2008), Synecdoche, New York is a big-budget film that takes everyday characters, in supposedly ordinary environments, and subjects them to some form of pop-surrealist device. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for instance, Gondry tells the story of two lovers whose memories of a failed affair are scrubbed clean by a brain-wiping machine, and in Be Kind Rewind, that of a man whose body becomes magnetized, thus erasing the contents of all the VHS tapes in the beleaguered video rental shop in which he works, resulting in all its employees having to make their own lovably low-fi versions of all the shop’s missing blockbuster films. In Synecdoche, New York we are first shown Cotard’s creatively frustrating life in suburban Schenectady, before his theatrical Gesamkunstwerk is introduced and we enter his world of actors playing actors acting themselves, and the crazily huge New-York-within-New-York theatre set. I don’t mean to suggest that Kaufman and Gondry’s films are ideological peas-in-a-pod with the magic-realism-lite ads. Their films are, by-and-large, old-fashioned stories about love and loss wrapped up in pop-surrealist form. What is curious, however, is just that: why, now, is this kind of pop-surrealism so popular in cinema and commercial films?
The magic-realism-lite advertising subgenre tends to use three modes, often at the same time. The first is grand spectacle (Ford Mondeo cars floating from balloons, for instance), the second a form of low-fi, homespun whimsy (for example, the rainbow streamers in the Orange ad), and the third – usually by way of music – a kind of epic, epiphanic atmosphere. Both Kaufman and Gondry’s films use similar strategies. (Gondry, interestingly, made a name for himself directing television commercials, and a number of highly acclaimed music videos for the likes of Daft Punk, Radiohead and The White Stripes). Their films oscillate between two poles of spectacular visual drama (in Synecdoche, New York, for instance, we see stunning wide-shots of airships floating slowly through the warehouse, across replicas of New York tenements) and sentimental charm (_Be Kind Rewind_ gives us whimsically homemade interpretations of Ghostbusters or Robocop, whilst Synecdoche, New York depicts Cotard’s artistic masterpiece being lovingly constructed by theatre craftsmen, an old-fashioned experimental theatre world in which technicians and actors labour for nearly 20 years with little complaint, as if such hubristic projects were as commonplace as cars floating on balloons or high-rises exploding with paint). They also make strong use of music. Sony Bravia’s ‘bouncing balls’ commercial was given extra emotive heft through its use of José González’ 2003 acoustic cover of ‘Heartbeats’ by The Knife, and the Orange advert, featuring a couple dancing through their garden, ratcheted up the poignancy levels with Brian Eno’s ‘Music for Airports’ (1978). Grammy award-winning composer Jon Brion has supplied the soundtrack to both Eternal Sunshine… (which also made bittersweet use of the upbeat ‘Mr Blue Sky’, 1977, by Electric Light Orchestra) and Synecdoche, New York; his slow, mournful jazz ballad ‘Song for Caden’ shuffles through much of the film’s second half, juxtaposing melancholy torch-song intimacy against the surreal vistas of Cotard’s theatre set, a heartstring-tugging combination that helps maintain a constant sense of the romantic tragedy of Cotard’s epic but heroic failure as artist, father and husband. (This romanticism is further emphasized by the architecture of his warehouse set, which is that of a notably idealized NYC: brownstones, old warehouses and chicly decrepit apartments. This is the New York of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, 1977, or Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, 2001, the kind of fictionalized New York analyzed here in frieze by Steven Stern).
A number of commentators have remarked upon the bizarre similarity between Synecdoche, New York and writer and artist Tom McCarthy’s 2005 novel Remainder, in which a man receives a vast insurance payout after a freak accident (the equivalent of Cotard’s MacArthur Fellowship windfall), and with the money creates a huge theatrical set in south London where he employs actors and technicians to perpetually reconstruct and re-enact half-remembered vignettes from his life. Kaufman denies having read or even heard of Remainder whilst writing his film, and it’s not for me to say what grist the similarities between the novel and the movie might or might not provide McCarthy for his long-standing interests in repetition, duplication, authenticity and fakery. However, that two works of art so invested in ideas of reconstruction and simulacra should themselves turn out so close to each other is almost too neat to be true. What Synecdoche, New York certainly reminded me of was Alain Resnais’ astonishing 1977 film Providence, (pictured above) in which a dying writer, played by John Gielgud, struggles with both his haemorroids and the plot of his final novel. As the film unfolds, it becomes clear that his nocturnal mutterings and cursings are directly linked to the strange, emotionally cold scenarios being played out by Dirk Bogarde, Ellen Burstyn and David Warner against the backdrop of an un-remarked-upon terrorist war, in a non-specific European city (one minute it could be Vienna, the next, London) and all with the help of heroic quantities of chilled white wine. (If you’ve ever tried to play the Withnail and I drinking game, in which viewers match the on-screen characters drink-for-drink, then, I am reliably informed, you’ll probably also enjoy Providence.) Aside from the central ideas of paternalism, creative control and personal determinism explored in Providence – Bogarde, Burstyn and Warner turn out to be Gielgud’s children as well as his creative muses – Synecdoche, New York also borrows from Providence the idea of events played out amidst un-remarked-upon social turmoil (Alan Rudolph’s 1985 film Trouble in Mind also uses a similarly unexplained martial law situation as a backdrop to its plot.). As Cotard and his cast spend year-upon-year immersed in their vast recreation of New York, bomb explosions start to be heard in the background and troops begin to fill the ‘real’ New York streets outside the warehouse, as if to emphasize not only the enormous length of time Cotard spends developing his play (at one point an extra laments ‘When are we going to get an audience in here? It’s been 17 years…’), but also his self-absorption: society descends into violent conflict outside, whilst the artist ascends further up the backside of endless self-analysis, his giant theatre set essentially becoming one big therapy session.
Unfortunately, Cotard’s endless self-analysis is just what prevents Synecdoche, New York from ever achieving much beyond a rather pedestrian level of faux-profundity. Early in the film, as we watch his marriage fall apart, and his health deteriorate, Cotard’s abject self-pity is balanced against amusingly disinterested and disdainful hospital specialists, or the shameless money-spinning of his sexually unhinged therapist. Although Kaufman does not go for out-and-out laughs in the same way he did with his screenplays for Being John Malkovitch (1999) and Adaptation (2002), there are some nice moments of levity, one of my favourites being the hilariously pretentious attempt, by his ex-wife’s American lover, at affecting a German accent after they move to Europe to become the toast of Berlin’s art scene. Over the final third of the film, however, as Cotard is surrounded by people eager to please and take part in his life-imitating-life project, Kaufman lets the dramatic tension go slack, leaving the visually impressive set to shore up trite ruminations on self-determination such as ‘There are millions of people in this world … and none of them are extras. They are all leads in their own story.’ The more interesting possibilities offered up by the script – such as the moments when actors start interacting with the actual characters they are supposed to be playing – are passed over in favour of too many repetitious scenes of Cotard agonizing over his personal and creative neuroses, ultimately rendering him a distinctly unsympathetic, cartoonishly tortured character. As a study of creative narcissism, it works all too well – each character is entirely wrapped up in themselves, unable to communicate with those around them, trapped in prisons of over-privileged self-regard. You sense that if you were to have a conversation with Cotard, he’d be the kind of artist who would never ask you any questions about yourself.
The subject of artistic hubris is certainly interesting, as is the idea of a life that begins to imitate art. However, if Kaufman has missed a trick with Synecdoche, New York, it is in tying these threads into a reflection on the mechanisms of spectacle. The film, for instance, glosses over Cotard’s desire to make a huge theatre piece that shows ‘the truth’, and the implicit assumption that a great work of art necessarily needs to be on a grand scale. It misses the chance to use Cotard’s play as a means to look at how such contemporary phenomena as television talent shows, celebrity gossip magazines or behind-the-scenes documentaries create a false sense of media transparency, whilst simultaneously setting up a false sense of accessibility and ‘you too can be famous’, individualist entitlement. Instead, Kaufman remains too much in thrall to Cotard’s old-fashioned auteur perspective, and as such gets stuck paddling around some rather wanly existential ideas about responsibility and destiny. In Synecdoche, New York, Kaufman’s undeniably fertile imagination seems to be adrift, like cars floating from balloons, or thousands of balls bouncing wildy down the street.
A few thoughts on the idea of humility halfway between art and politics: Obama’s inaugural address started like this: ‘I stand here today humbled by the task before us’; in his inaugural address of January 2001 George W. Bush’s stated that he wanted to be ‘viewed as a humble person that is not judgmental’.
Fred Barnard’s drawing of Dickens’ Uriah Heep (1870s)
Since enlightenment, the idea of humility is anything but undisputed: from François de la Rochefoucauld who asserted that ‘pride is never better disguised and more deceptive than when it is hidden behind the mask of humility’ to Karl Marx’ statement that, while Christianity preached ‘submissiveness and humbleness’, the proletariat needs ‘its courage, its self-confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread.’ Charles Dickens’ Uriah Heep, the scheming antagonist of David Copperfield (1850), incessantly saying he was a ‘very ‘umble person’, is the epitome of false modesty.
In Modernism, heroic tabula rasa attitudes allowed for anything but attitudes of humility. There are a few exceptions, like T.S. Eliot’s famous line that ‘humility is endless’, which acknowledges that the idea that age brings wisdom is deceptive (i.e. the humility is vis-à-vis the shock of realizing that knowledge can become worthless). Or in fact, as Jennifer Kabat points out in her piece about the influence of Depression-era posters on current advertising campaigns, the exception of artists, employed by the state, seeing themselves in the service of the common cause. But I guess as a movement, it wasn’t until the 1960s that some – not all! – parts of minimalist, proto-conceptual, post-beat, collectivist-hippie attitudes brought in the idea that the artist’s work can be a humble reflection of the everyday, from Yvonne Rainer’s integration of simple gestures into dance moves to Arte Povera artist Luciano Fabro, who in 1967 covered a piece of floor he cleaned with a square of newspaper pieces, in reference to simple housekeeping habits from his village (_Pavimento (tautologia)_, Floor, tautology). The idea was, simply, that it was about the work, not the artist; as Nietzsche (of all thinkers) put it: ‘There is true modesty (that is the knowledge that we are not the works we create).’
Which brings me back to Obama’s ‘humble’ vs. Bush’s ‘humble’: Obama’s sentence acknowledges that it’s not about him, but about the task, and everyone; whereas Bush, much in line with Uriah Heep, made a statement about himself…
In 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?’
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?
Hugs in an Absolut W..
