Parade of Impertinence

Journal entry for 13 Sep 2010 | Link

In an unsual but I hope increasingly frequent turn of events, I filed two writing assignments in the past week. The first was a review for The Arts Fuse of Alex Katz: New Work at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine. The Arts Fuse is a production of Boston University professor and longtime arts journalist Bill Marx, and as such this is an estimable project to be associated with. Alerting likers on Facebook to the review's existence, Marx called it "provacative." I don't aspire to provocation, but I do try to call things as I see them, even if that means telling an 83-year-old man how to paint. The impertinence is not lost on me. I stand by what I said.

The other review covered Morris Graves: Falcon of the Inner Eye, a Centenary Celebration for the October issue of The New Criterion. You'll have to wait to see what I thought about it. In the meantime, the article obliged me to learn more about a cadre of seminal, self-taught painters who are regarded as the granddaddies of Pacific Northwest art. Apart from Morris, there was Mark Tobey, the senior of the group who is widely known, Kenneth Callahan, who was a curator for the Seattle Art Museum for twenty years, and Guy Anderson, a figure of some regional importance. They all were fascinated with philosophy, the life of the spirit, neutral palettes, Asian art, abstraction, surrealism, and iconography. All of them except for one, William Cumming, who stands in such stark contrast to rest of them that it's hilarious to read his take on the world. "I've had seven wives and numerous other people's," he said to Regina Hackett in 2005. Back in 2003 he opined to Jen Graves:

I'm a boor and a peasant, and so I like [my non-painting students] and I like commercial art. Fine art is just an excuse for meaning, "I don't sell. I'm better than other people."

Cumming is apparently still painting his Fauvism- and California Funk-inspired figurative paintings. The burning palettes seem chosen to spite his former colleagues. Notably, he has outlived all of them.

Reader Mail

On The Independent's opinion piece regarding arts funding cuts, a British reader comments:

There is a refusal to accept that the current model of public funding may not actually be the only reasonable and civilised one, or that the present reliance on largely unaccountable quangos to fund and administer most arts bodies, small and large, is not necessarily a democratic one...

And that's the thing, or one of them. For all the blather about being "inclusive," the current funding arrangement isn't anywhere near democratic, and never could be. Every taxpayer has to subsidise the Arts Council, but a tiny, self-selecting caste gets to spend the money on a slightly larger self-selecting caste. Which rather casts doubt on the idea that what's in jeopardy is "the nation's culture."

As I've said, it's possible to wander around the galleries in Sheffield and feel no affinity whatsoever with the banal objects and "radical" texts on display. If you make an afternoon of it, it can be quite alienating. If I were in the mood for some ingenious and lovely visual art, the Site and Millennium galleries—our trendiest art venues—wouldn't be my first stops.

I went to the Site a few days ago and there's an "installation" by Tobias Rehberger. It's basically some Velcro strips coiled artlessly around wire hanging from the ceiling. Oh, and some wrapped parcels. That's it. And it dawned on me that whenever I've been to the Site, I've only ever seen the same handful of faces, mostly staff and their friends, and possibly a couple of students. It's like a private hang-out for, at most, two dozen people.

The irony here is that postmodernism was supposed to be an anti-elitist, diversifying effort. Another reader:

You might have been more charitable to Ken Johnson. He is, after all, afflicted with delusions of untouchable with-it-ness, whereby the sufferer fancies that sternly unyielding adherence to the dictates and interests of Officialdom guarantees both survival and success. It is a common, not to say vulgar malady, but no less pitiable for that. In any case, I hope the Governors Island fair is a great success, which is, of course, the best possible revenge.

Noted with agreement and thanks. Greg Cook wrote in regarding Alan Pocaro's review of Kara Walker, excerpted here.

I reviewed the same work. In retrospect I agree that "Walker signals that formally, she doesn't have much left to offer that we haven't seen before," though I wouldn't say it so firmly. But I don't think that's why these works aren't her strongest, and I probably should have emphasized that more.

I feel like the critical establishment keeps pushing Walker to do something else than her signature silhouettes, and praising her unconditionally anytime she does anything different. Hence all the love for her animations, her color collages, and so on.

But I keep thinking she should just stick to silhouettes—and push the subjects and the stories, like a writer would. The pressure for artists to keep changing and "renewing" themselves is overrated. It seems like a legacy of the Picasso public relations machine. Do Sargent or Rembrandt suck because they painted in just one or two styles all their lives?

During their time, Sargent and Rembrandt didn't have so many styles to paint in. The whole structure of the critique in academia is to suggest that the student start doing something different when his work looks consistent and to narrow down when it's too diverse. This is completely arbitrary, and it spills over into the academicized establishment. Certain limits are fruitful, while others just reveal limitations, and those aren't mutually exclusive propositions. People long suspected Franz Kline's otherwise powerful work because of its lack of color, and when he started using color he demonstrated beyond a doubt that he couldn't handle it. Walker is essentially in the same boat in that her style was strong enough to get her where she is but no stronger.

Readings

Meanwhile, Pocaro directed me to a delightful essay by David Lee, Is the Arts Council Brave Enough for Suicide?

This is an organisation which isn't elected, is not answerable to anyone, spends approaching half a billion of taxpayers' money and whose meetings are conducted in secret. Neither, incidentally, are we allowed to know beyond the most insulting platitudes what criteria inform their assumptions and judgements about art. Even its former Chairman, draconian Irish businessman Gerry Robinson, who at least had the common sense to extirpate the more blatant duplications in bureaucracy, could do nothing about the shocking staff prejudices under which it operates. What we need in the visual arts is not a re-tuned version of what happens now but something completely new in which none of those responsible for the present cesspit play any part.

Via Ryan McCourt, Lance Esplund karate-chops the Baldessari retrospective.

The exhibition, jointly organized by Leslie Jones at LACMA and Jessica Morgan at London's Tate Modern, where it first appeared (it was also shown in Barcelona), is titled "John Baldessari: Pure Beauty." And although the show is far from beautiful, it is certainly pure something. "Given the choice between an elegant idea and a dumb idea," Mr. Baldessari has said, "I'm going with the dumb idea," of which "Pure Beauty"—the most extensive Baldessari exhibition to date—is chock-full.

Walter Darby Bannard forwarded an essay by Robin Greenwood, whose exhibition is opening this week at Poussin Gallery in London. (Note too the essay at that link, about which I'll have more to say next time.) It was circulated by e-mail, and Mr. Greenwood has kindly granted me permission to reprint it here.

Fourth Plinth—A Dissent

Robin Greenwood, August 2010

A giant blue chicken, a cake made of bricks, and a pipe organ are three of the six shortlisted proposals for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. The other three are equally daft. Ekow Eshun, chairman of the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group and artistic director of the freefalling ICA, describes the proposals, by a six-pack of artistic jokers, as "world class". What do you mean, Ekow? Up there with Titian's Diana and Actaeon? Matisse's Bathers by a River?

Eshun is a recent addition to the pseudo-intellectual cultural mafia that have gained a grip upon what one has to laughingly describe as the "visual art" establishment. I say laughingly because such art is not the least "visual" in any meaningful way. We can see it, but for it to be meaningfully described as "visual" its meaning would have to be visual, which it isn't, if you see what I mean. In fact, its meaning is so very non-visual, so very literal, like just about every other bit of contemporary art out there at the moment, that we can already partake of the meaning before they are even made. Wow, what a breakthrough.

Here are some examples of this sub-Duchampian meaning-in-advance; Katharina Fritsch, obviously another intellectual leviathan to rival Eshun, says of her giant blue cock "It is playing with the double meaning of the word...It is dealing with the male presence in Trafalgar Square". Really, I had no idea that Kenneth Williams and feminism could be squared away so neatly. But please explain, how, pray, is it exactly "dealing with" this issue? Could you write about this issue (if indeed there is an issue, not being personally aware of it as a pressing matter during my own visits to Trafalgar Square) perhaps to more effect? Could you explain better what you mean in writing, Katherina? I expect not, sadly. Making a sculpture about it is a slick way of avoiding the fact that it is a non-issue, isn't it? And the issue is a way of avoiding the fact that the sculpture is in fact a non-sculpture. Will the full-sized version be a revelation?

Let's move on to the cake made of bricks. This sculpture - and don't forget it not been built yet - "transforms the Battenberg as a symbol of teatimes past into a contemporary comment on commodity, commemoration and collective identity", according to Louise Jury, who has the satisfaction of being Chief Arts Correspondent to the Evening Standard. Well, this one's got three issues, so I guess it must be better than the blue cock.

But hang on. The pipe organ, which will play music when you use the attached ATM machine, "addresses a range of themes and subjects such as personal banking, global financial systems, commerce, the sacred and profane, music making and personal and public space in a humorous manner" (Jury again, Evening Standard, 19.8.10). Well, that's six issues, and humour to boot. Must be a winner!

According to this lot – artists, critics and curators alike – meaning can be just dolloped out like so much custard on a pudding. So, let's recap. The artist has an idea, the commentators ascribe it meaning, the curators throw some money at it, the public gets to think they are a part of the wonderful, exciting, meaningful world of contemporary art. The communication of the "idea" of art is that simple, so we are led to believe. We don't really, as consumers of this pudding, have to do any work for ourselves. We don't have to work at discovering meaning, it's a given. We have the issues. We could even stay in bed and get the whole thing over the internet.

Well, maybe. The late, great Bryan Robertson had something to say (in meaningful words!) on some of the real issues surrounding both the use of visual art as a means of communicating a literal or literary message, and on the portrayal of art via media such as the internet: "Art is many things but it is not primarily a means of communication as we normally understand that utility. There are easier and certainly less laborious ways for one person to express an idea directly to another than by painting a picture or making a sculpture. In itself, the action would be unreliable. Conversely, no written or printed document, film or TV program, the proper media for communication in the usual sense, could ever convey with any compensatory degree of accuracy the true imaginative quality of Piero's Baptism of Christ or The Moroccans of Matisse. For media is an intermediary device: concerned with visual art, it uses inaccurate or irrelevant language; finally it involves falsification."

With regards to the selection of work for the fourth plinth, we have already been subjected to a gross falsification. Actually, there is another element in this crude little chain of events which pre-empts the public finding their own meaning in visual art. It is an insidious element, which has crept upon us without check. This is the rise and rise of the "creative" curator. Because let's not forget, none of these pathetic and academic statues of silly things on a plinth would be conceived without the existence of the commissioning body. This sausage-factory of sculpture would not happen without Eshun providing the hole through which to extrude it. These artists would not make this nonsense left to themselves. Of course, Eshun and the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group think they are doing us all a big cultural favour by promoting new art in such a high-profile public space. In fact, like the even-more-high-profile and big-money Turbine Hall commissions at Tate, their intervention is screwing any real appraisal of where sculpture actually is at the present time. It may seem to many people quite a normal and indeed enlightened thing to do, to commission ideas for sculpture in the full glare of all the publicity that this recurring charade engenders, but it is absurdly fallacious and is destructive of the most precious thing in art, the private vision of individual artists. Such commissions simply lend credibility to the conceit of thinking that art, and sculpture in particular, is about dreaming up dafter and dafter ideas.

Here are a couple more examples of our cultural elite's take on the current art scene: Sir Nicholas Serota was quoted on the Guardian website as saying of Tate that "In the past, there has been an imperfect communication between visitors and curators. The possibility for a greater level of communication between curators and visitors is the challenge now." If there is to be a "communication" involved in any interaction with Tate gallery, should it not be between the artist and the visitor? Is not the curator's job surely and simply to facilitate that process, rather than be the source of it, or indeed even editorialise it? How about this from Hans Ulrich Obrist, co-director of exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery, and a pro-active curator and instigator of numerous exhibitions of contemporary art, and Christian Boltanski, a French conceptual artist well in with this elite: "We'd be having a conversation in a cafe and I'd say, ‘It would be marvellous to paint the Eiffel Tower in pink', and he'd (Obrist) say, ‘Oh yes, it's possible, but I think in violet it would be better.'"

Yes, it's that easy to make art! Have an idea, talk to a big-fish curator. That's it. Don't do anything until you have the go-ahead from the curator, and don't forget to sort out with them what the issues will be! Obrist, by the way, is according to Art Review "the most powerful figure in the artworld". Lucky us, to live in such a time!

To return to our plinth, what a sad fate for sculpture, to be publicly humiliated as a series of literal jokes. Such literalism is the destroyer of properly visual content in art. Yet literalist art has attained recent popularity because it so easily begets a superficial and popular explanation of itself, in the manner of an everyman's interpretation. This is generally thought to be "what it means", and we can all join in and get the punch line. Well, the potential of sculpture is a lot bigger than that.

We do need new art. We need it not least to keep alive and extend our understanding of visual form and meaning (so we don't forget how to look at and find meaning in truly world class art, such as Titian and Matisse). For art to be real and free and meaningful, it needs to be experienced in a manner largely liberated of interpretation, whether intellectual or technological, and free from the interventionalism of modern curatorship. Properly visual art is not a language, and its meaning is not, therefore, translatable into words. It is created by visual artists, not intellectuals. It is not about ideas, no matter how clever, or how puerile. Its real meaning is not to be found on a label, or in a newspaper, or on the internet; its meaning is embodied in the work itself, and we have to find it for ourselves. Visual art is, as Robertson says, a revelation.