Bill Berkson and the beauty of Art Writing not Art Research

“Frank O’Hara was born in 1926, a good year for births, it turns out: Marilyn Monroe, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Wallace Berman, Joan Mitchell, Fidel Castro, Tony Bennett, Chuck Berry, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Michel Foucault, Morton Feldman . . . Pretty good for openers, no? Doubtless, there are more.”  Bill Berkson- Sudden Address (p. 77)

I revamped my main website today.

In the revamp I pondered how to describe the stuff that might be considered ‘art criticism’ up to and including the Interview with Mathew Collings that was published in the first issue of Modern Matter magazine. A section that withered and died in the 7 years of being driven like a weary sheep down the road of ‘academic’ research. Now that I have finally got to escape into pastures new for a while I have at last had time to realise that ‘Academic Research’ means limiting oneself to something particular and narrow. This is why too much art research is by its nature closed off from the world and frankly irrelevant to most people as well as frankly being nonsense in most cases where it designated as fine art.

In the revamp I retitled the ‘art criticism’ blog to ‘Art Writer’ because writing about art is what it contained.  I then found this post on artcritical webzine (a fab resource by the way which I found through a link from Painters Table blog again an excellent resource for painters) about the poet and art writer ‘Bill Berkson, a friend of one of my favourite painters Philip Guston. What he stands for and reveals here is his insistence on ‘art writing’ not criticism and in another interview (Third Rail) he says such wonderful sensible things it was a joy to read.

This led me to the wonderful Cunieform Press website and his book Sudden Address:

http://cuneiformpress.com/?product=bill-berkson-sudden-address

On artcritical this is David Carrier’s description below:

Emphatically not art history, this certainly isn’t normal art criticism. No one else, except maybe Adrian Stokes, whom Berkson loves to quote, writes even a little like this.

Art writing is a strange sort of creative literature. Within the commercial art world, it is a comically marginal activity. But doing it well is oddly difficult, as every editor knows.  And so it is surprising that there are very few really good art writers. When we praise Diderot, Pater, Adrian Stokes, Roger Fry, Clement Greenberg and Arthur Danto, we acknowledge that whatever our disagreements with their tastes, they are grand writers. Berkson belongs in their company. Do you think I exaggerate? Well!, we art writers are much given to hyperbole. And so read for yourself and tell me if I am correct.  Koch’s conception of poetry, Berkson writes, “made me see not just poetry but the world in and outside poetry differently.” (p.94-5)

That seems to me to be as sensible a way to go as any..in fact the only way to go…

Do you know I really don’t give a shit about referencing or come to that about the shits who do give a shit about referencing either. In oither words not only is most art research worthless anyway but that which exists will be mostly full of broken links in a few years..houses built on sand:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/cobweb

I would rather be scholarly and interesting like Berkson.

Gesamkunstwerk – Saatchi Gallery

Andre Butzer – Ahnenbild 2411

From the banal to the sublime…

Volker Hueller – Self Portrait.

‘Gesamkunstwerk’ – ‘a total work of art’ – uses all or many art forms. (Dictionary definition.)

Intrigued by the title which has many facets and does not easily translate into English I made my first trip to the new Saatchi Gallery. A little late in the day but then I only visited the original one in North London a couple of times and missed out on the South Bank farrago. Intrigued however was not how I felt by the time I had left and I certainly had not seen an all encompassing show of the arts as promised by the title. Indeed I felt more like I had entered a time-warp and stumbled into the New Spirit in Painting show at the Royal Academy circa 1981 but without the same excitement or technique on display. The most impressive feature was the building itself which is a Wagnerian symphony of contemporary gallery chic and cannot be faulted. Indeed a more impressive set of floorboards I have never seen. If the building is intended to impress it succeeds but at what cost? Most of the work seemed quietly subdued by its illustrious surroundings and indeed a good deal of it sank altogether. Formerly famous for setting the ship of Britart afloat how does this show succeed in opening our eyes to New German Art of the 2010′s? Well, frankly, not very well.

There are good individual artists in this show but after finding ones way around all the floors and finally being overwhelmed by the frankly awful huge works at the top I felt I had no more idea about contemporary German Art than I had when I arrived. The picture-book ‘catalogue’ does little to enlighten and whilst I not keen on over explication a little more info would have helped greatly. My impression was that bar a rough correlation of ages there was little to tie the artworks together and this had been manufactured quickly and with little curatorial thought. The one common factor was an almost complete lack of digital works. This was about big, bigger and huge…almost all the works were over six foot and in some cases were collossal. In that there were echoes of the far better German artists of the R.A. show e.g. Penck, Middendorf, Baselitz, etc. but there comparisons ended. I did not see one painter on a large scale that really showed exceptional technique or content. It was almost as if a T.V. reality show had asked a bunch of fairly average artists to create a pastiche of German Art of the last thirty years in a week.

Some works were truly awful e.g. the reclining plastic coloured figures and the afore-mentioned ‘print’ across a hundred canvasses. Others were good but lost in the hang apart from the Tobias Brothers and the small shellac and watercolour works of Volker Hueller both of which I was impressed by. I will not add insult to injury by naming the worst of a fairly mediocre bunch but winners of irritating and downright stupid awards go to Andre Butzer ( New York Graffitti school overdosed on Penck with a horrible use of colour) and Isa Genzken’s tedious assemblages like a car boot sale organized by Rauschenburg if he’d been a pantomime Dame…tinsel and spray paint darlinks is so camp …yuk. It is easier to actually spot the reference in most works. Maz Frisinger and Alexander Bircken wouldn’t have a practice without Duchamp’s large glass basically and Ida Ekbald looked like a foundation art project to use concrete that had gone horribly wrong. It seems that such is the plethora of art students coming out of the academies that even basic aesthetics have been jettisoned. Maybe she networks really well..maybe you have to living in Norway..so how come she in a German show..ah she lives in Berlin well that’s alright then…shame they didn’t chuck Tacita Dean in too at least we could have seen something interesting. By the way Tobias Brothers were born in Romania so is this really New Euro Art? Again the contextual strings were missing…if a Norwegian then is this really German Art now or just a motley collection hastily cobbled together..methinks the latter. This is reinforced by the seemingly haphazard way works melt into each other. If Saatchi can afford to build such a place why does he not employ some decent designers to fashion some continuity and catalogue support. If ‘democratising’ the artworld means flabby shows with little thought I may not be so ‘democratic’ in future. Free to enter you do get what you pay for. It seems Saatchi is keener on being seen as super-patron than actually doing the right thing by the art he assembles. But then he is bigger (as his building) than any poor artist caught in their combined wash.

The show is worth going to for the well hung Tobias Brothers room and for the Hueller small works both of which show grace and aesthetic consideration rather than the Pantomime Showiness of most of it. I came away with the impression that New German Art had fallen into a rut of pastiche of former glories and far from benefitting from new immigration the ‘Eurozone’ dizziness of it all had actually devalued some of the participants. If a single currency has devalued the economies of Western Europe then this show displays that Saatchi’s global reach and international obsessions are similarly dangerous to ‘national’ ideas of art. Post internet, post Berlin Wall what we see is a weak and diluted parade of imitators and hangers-on to concepts and working practices which were old hat in 1960. If you want to see post-war German art at its best go google ‘Mülheimer Freiheit‘. This is just a pantomime of the new wilds and honestly it as tame a collection of physical art as I ever come across..one almost yawned on exit. Maybe Saatchi can blame his ‘art-teams’ for nothing on this scale is supervised that closely…..commitee and buyers do the rounds hoovering up those who fit the bill.

Want to be in the next National Saatchi show…tick these boxes….International (i.e. not English) …large and technically inept and finally be devoid of real artistic merit…then you may stand a chance.
I would like to see a ‘opt-out’ clause for British native art from this circus before we all become clowns dancing to the same ringmaster.

CODA: Is Serota’s Tate any different?..same egos just different paymasters…

Why I despise the New Curators

Like a Circus tent the U.K. institutional art world is collapsing. The one that has spread like a virus from its home at ACE headquarters and The Hayward in particular and which liked to believe that it was always ahead of the curve and pushing back boundaries etc etc is finally entering its last and desperate phase. With its collapse we are also seeing the collapse of the visual arts as a saleable commodity in museum terms…they have no money to buy ‘stuff’.

So in its place are the new artist turned curator hybrids who are busy pretending that they are not failed artists but went to art school all along to metamorphose like butterflies or ugy ducklings into that far rarer creature ‘the new curator’. There are loads of them swarming out of new ‘curator’ courses hastily being set up. ….

Why? Simply because an unholy alliance of fine art courses that have lost their way and meaning in face of the new economic realities and an academia in thrall to statistics and ‘research outcomes’. Nothing helps boost a research outcome like a sensational non-event in a far distant land attached to a alumni’s C.V. Even better if that ‘curated’ mish-mash of baloney, philosophical wank and bullshit erudition is part funded by an arts agency and an academic institution.

Like vultures around the grave of the fine arts the new curators are not interested in the visual arts as such, nor the traditional forms of practice. No everything must be ironic, liminal, short-term, cheap (i.e. round up your mates who work for free because that’s OK and then you cannot blame the ACE or government.). Then sell this as a package to under-funded institutions desperate to back a ‘happening’ young project however daft or stupid and basically totally ineffective in getting any support from the wider public.

Having thus decided to turn inwards and destroy an already shaky grounding in reality the new curators have also turned on those practitioners who actually create traditional artworks with some intrisic value through craft, practice and sheer knowledge.

New Curation is rife and it is polluting an already unstable institutional artworld with short term fake interventions and ‘strategies’. Once it has collapsed post real fees being introduced in our universities and the final total deconstruction of the arts councils we will be left with a hollow shell of arts provision for the wider public. This void is already being ceaselessly mined by the likes of Saatchi and other ‘populist’ organisations hell bent on turning a profit.

The room for erudite, political and genuinely avant-garde works like those produced in the seventies is getting smaller everyday. The new curators are smart, urban networkers shoring up a ridiculous and damaged art world. They keep spinning their illusions like silkworms but unlike the real worms we will never make anything solid from their futile lives.

I believe in artists as being able, intelligent and strong masters of their own destinies. There is no need for this new bunch of arrogant, dull networkers hogging the limelight just to save their own failed careers. Like middle management everywhere they could be removed from the system completely but then who would the regeneration partners and government institutions point to as proof of their often vacuous  ‘creative’ successes.

In the art world’s fading circus the last thing the lions needed was a new bunch of lion-tamers pretending they are also lions.

Let’s hope they all get their heads bitten off.

Damien Hirst – Fish and a Failed Painter

The following is part of a recent debate on facebook about Hirst’s Fish piece:

Matthew Collings included it in a ‘Design’ album then contested its meaning especially with Paul Gladston. I joined in at this point.

Isolated Elements Swimming in the Same Direction for the Purpose of Understanding: 1992

I would like to put to one side the contest between ‘modernistic’ thinking and the ‘deconstructive’ approach ( I simplifying here but a brief read through the blurb for Mr Gladston’s book ‘Art History after Deconstruction’ suggests he believes that it a false dichotomy and that deconstruction is essential to all art history (I am sure he will put me right if that a glib analysis). If we are looking at formal principles only then the most striking element for me is that firstly this piece is a reworking of the shark (1991-2) with smaller items which also echoes pharmacy and secondly that the fish selected are not native British species at all which suggests they imported. Lacking definitive knowledge of this ( the Gordon Burn book doesn’t tell) suggests that there is no order or meaning in the fish of themselves apart from a slightly exotic selection.

The Burn book shows that Hirst basically failed as a painter (he exhibited cardboard boxes covered in household paint at Freeze in docklands before he switched tack entirely)- the spot paintings revamped a Schwitters influenced colour collage phase he went through on Goldsmiths M.A. before leaping into the contained sculptures specifically the head and flies.

John LeKay. This is my body, this is my blood. 1987

John LeKay who Hirst finally met in 1992 had been doing similar work throughout mid- eighties and from then on Hirst pretty much apprenticed himself to LeKay in intellectual terms. A quick look through LeKay’s catalogue shows a far more interesting and thought out set of works. Indeed Hirst interviews LeKay in PIG magazine (LeKay’s magazine) and it master and pupil in tone. Hirst himself describes the change as ‘putting a fucking box round everything’ after Cornell ( which where ‘pharmacy’ taken from) .

Seen through the lens of a painter who influenced by Patrick Heron who was berated at Goldsmiths one can see that Hirst has never really succeeded in that area and that the spot paintings and swirls come from that and his lack of confidence as a painter…ending in the farcical Courtauld show which pretty much showed his ability starkly. However as a barrow boy he was ‘fly’ enough to see that spectacle was required and he would fail with the paint/collage approach.. also those around him were succeeding in sculpture not painting and that what he provided. I agree with Matthew’s take on exhibitionism and display…he tapped into a spectacular increase in office and retail space – the Thatcher legacy of service and supply…to me Hirst is a perfect analogy for an economy going through final post-empire convulsions. Just like his ‘fucking boxes’ the docklands he used for Freeze was contained and shipped and finally empty… again LeKay and Hirst in that interview in Pig …..

• Damien Hirst: “The work seems on the one hand to be very chaotic and on another level very organized”…
• John LeKay replies “Well there is a definite order in chaos and an indefinite chaos comes out of order, is that what you mean?”…PIG 1993

Alone Yet Together containing 100 fish was created in 1993….and to me is a perfect example of organized chaos…there is no order but that is presented in an ordered way…hence the same direction. It could have been worms or birds..I even suspect that visual readings are irrelevant and that Hirst may have placed dark against light..etc but in the end does that really matter as the fish were probably sourced randomly…even random placement can create harmonies….just like collage.. It my belief that without Thatcherism….Saatchi and Craig Martin Hirst would be a provincial colourist of minor repute now but he surfed in on a flood of post Hong Kong money and power shifts. He will never be able to paint ….he could however put stuff in boxes….

Parts of the piece were broken up and sold individually so that to me negates any more profound structural approach and fits with his ‘minimalist’ approach to effort.. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/hirst-hopes-to-revolutionise-art-market-with-golden-calf-851034.html?action=Gallery&ino=3

Hirst himself from Idler..

• “HIRST: What I really like is minimum effort for maximum effect. Like with Picasso’s Bull’s Head – a bike seat and handlebars making up the bull’s head. Such a brilliant thing because it takes that tiny amount of effort to create .”..

Hirst gave a fish shop in Leeds a fish “It was two years before Damien won the Turner Prize [in 1995] when he was just beginning to be a bit known.

“We saw some publicity about a work of his, a whole lot of fish titled Isolated Elements Swimming in the Same Direction and we joked that it would be nice to get something like that for the shop.”

That was a Trevally.. a Pacific predator…..the unusual thing about the collection is they not the usual tropical fish ..has anybody analysed their types and reason he used them? The Shark was ordered and caught probably through Joplin maybe these were ordered too.

There were two cabinets…source art newspaper online: –

• “In 1991, the same year in which he made his original shark, Hirst did a series of sister works of fish in formaldehyde, which are amongst his most elegant “natures mortes”
• Isolated Elements Swimming in the Same Direction for the Purpose of Understanding, for example, consists of six rows of individually encased fish in two cabinets and was once described as a “static ballet in an absurd movement toward nowhere.” The first formaldehyde work to be shown in London (in a group show at the Serpentine), it too was purchased by Saatchi, travelled with “Sensation”, and then was bought back by Hirst in a £6m-for-12-works deal in 2004.
• Hirst continues to produce exquisite works of suspended fish. One of the most dignified pieces in the “Beautiful” sale was a cruciform stainless steel cabinet containing fish skeletons on one side and fish in formaldehyde on the other. However, the “Beautiful” sale also contained a near replica of the iconic Isolated Elements wall-piece titled Can’t Live With You, Can’t Live Without You. It had 12 shelves rather than six and the fish were smaller but, formally, it was the same work.”

again Hirst puts it beautifully

• “Am I a sculptor who wants to be a painter,” he asks, “or a cynical artist who thinks painting is now reduced to nothing more than a logo?”…..

Sorry Matthew but I firmly believe in the second statement

R.A.Summer Show decomposes….

I have just had the good fortune/misfortune to catch the Culture Show take on The R.A. Summer Show. Up to now I have been unmoved by the Summer Show. I have never submitted. I have been once and it seems pretty similar every year. Sadly instead of being happy with being the the festival of British ordinariness beloved by Telegraph and Daily Mail readers this year in keeping with its new found edge….Perry, Landy and Hume are Ra’ers we have a special room of Michael Craig Martin’s ‘Fate’ and accompanied by his ex students…a kind of flatulent Reynolds and his school for the digital age. It is a triumph, on screen viewing, of corporate, pseudo pop-art a la Goldsmiths silliness. This is the triumph of the mediocre. Nothing I could see in the room (apart from Cornelia Parker) was either a good example of the artist’s oeuvre and in some cases was indeed , and let us not mince words, shite……arrogant, tedious shite.

It is meant to be a snapshot of the Great in Britart and it doesn’t even get past dull. The brightest thing in the room appeared to be Emin’s risible neon scrawl. There was a compulsory Deacon, Kapoor and Wilding to fill floor space and the walls…oh dear….oh fucking dear…… and I don’t mean bright intellectually.

Because this is all set up to boost not only Craig-Martin’s unassailability as art-guru to the nation but also his lifelong project to foist undemanding crap on us from Goldsmiths we are supposed to buy into it. I do not and I do not on a scale that is off the dial. One conceptual acorn in a bottle and we get years of bad computer assisted pop art that makes this particular critic yearn for an end to the sixties in the sixties. I suffered a few of his computer aided works in the eighties and thought they tedious machine made Caulfields then..they haven’t got better just brasher and more pretentious..FATE..yes folks that’s a heavy word. WOW factor ten.

This is the fag end of the real non-new media art world….it has not moved on since the Chelsea Arts Club heyday and getting pissed at the Groucho Club. Terminally in aesthetic arrears we are supposed to take seriously possibly another ‘work’ that the worst piece of Barnum Hokum disguised as art yet. Landy’s Cezanne copy is so bereft of talent, ideas and surely only survives as a pisstake..or is this serious…Feels to me like Fawlty Towers of the artworld? Or is this a postmodern joke on all of us..I am not laughing.

So this is what we poor underlings out in the shires have to aspire to….fucks sake I seen better art here in nottingham and consitently good art not this lazy, arrogant beached whale art we see here. I suppose my R.A. membership will be on hold now – not that I ever took it that seriously. A corporate whore flogging a mass democratic show that is nothing of the sort is a smokescreen for an intelligentsia in the artworld that long lost artistic credibility and rigour.

The best art in Britain is now isolated, ignored and all but extinguished by the new ‘economic reality’ but it still has a pulse….this show, especially the Martin room is just the worms of industry feeding on the beached whale corpse of Britart. It time to rest the compass and explore other territory for this will pretty soon smell as rank as it looks….

Oh but come now Belcher you cannot be serious these people are worthy of our adulation…….our respect and rightly so….

No in a word they are not…individuals can hold their head high..Hockney continues to surprise and extend..he has not grown lazy…..
Wilding probably deserved the prize but has also waited too long for it….Parker should have won it. Alastair Sooke showed a keen intelligence and I felt came as close as he dared to dismissing the whole sad farrago…i.e. as far as Telegraph readers and BBC editors would let him. His mother could actually paint too…

The only surprise there no shite Hirst …but then again Koons will always do when one wants something effortless, meaningless and covered in money…….bit like The Royal Academy itself.

Who would have thought that Goldsmiths and the R.A. were made for each other but then so were moneylenders and temples…

p.s. the image above is a stock Telegraph image which attempting to sell the image of the show as young and vibrant…bit like the Telegraph readership then or old Martin himself:-) Thank god Fate takes us all some day I couldn’t stand another twenty years of this….

The long slow death of visuality…a response to Matthew Collings

On Facebook ( that noted art history forum:-)
Matthew Collings posted the following: I have highlighted what seems to me the key lines. The second paragraph is his introduction to the set of photos which even I, as someone accused of convuluted and dense and unreadable sentences, found hard to fathom and only after several re-readings did I get a sense (I think) of what he on about. My interpretation is he is concerned that at a time when we surrounded by a tsunami of visuality (more artists, more imagery than ever) that there is no coherant ‘ethical’ and ‘aesthetic’ agreement of what is ‘good’ or ‘right’. i.e. that we live in immoral times and that affects judgement too. This chimes with the ‘Rediscovering Aesthetics‘standpoint. I do not know to what degree he agrees/disagrees with their views. The idea of visual achievement V visual success may be contrasting actual artistic creation with visual success i.e. cheap fame….low artistic worth..I am not sure. Below my response on facebook and a continuation of my ‘objective argument’ which I apparently regularly fall short on …woof woof:-)

Matthew Collings : On some very visual and recent art
If there is celebrating it’s celebrating the visual dimension, but the reason to post the album (and others) is not “let’s party” but to look at the possibility of visual substance, depth, richness in art, because in the general idea of what contemporary art “is” that operates at the moment this visual dimension is virtually either actually absent or else unseeable (and consequently undiscussuable or unappreciatable).

Some very visual current and recent art:

Reassurance of pre-modern and even modern art no longer available — universal Rembrandtian Shakespearean etc greatness out now — meantime fragmentary but very visual art does exist. Problem in heads is to get visual to connect with ethical. Many steps. First is to be visually observant. Then questioning. What is all this visuality for? How can we make it be for something else, something better? (That is not for wrong ideology, wrong life dictated by consumerism etc, as exemplified horribly by contexts in which this art is actually usually seen.) And is a visual system aiming at high visual achievement, or visual success — and which therefore has the possibility of failure — and therefore entails some kind of judging — is it connectable to moral and ethical dimensions, political dimensions etc? (Nazis judging good notes in symphony, still chuck victims in ovens etc.) Or do we have to accept visually abject art that has moral excellent credentials? Plus accept visual abjection that has excruciating pseudo thoughtful credentials (idiotic pretence at engaging with history society etc while remaining in-crowd smugness only)?

My response: Part one ( from facebook)

Ironically my period of intense engagement with painting coincided with the publishing of artscribe which was my bible in mid eighties. I stopped any meaningful production of art in 1992 and am now trying to begin again. So in some ways I am heavily influenced by the artscribe ethos and coming back to the art world I acutely aware of the marginalisation of visuality and the lack of a coherant and representative forum/magazine for that visuality. Both Modern Painters and Frieze seem to be ad driven fashion mags and art monthly is simply art monthly…long on theory short on images. My feeling (I will expand later) is we are at a watershed moment and that all this visuality is not looking, making and time based to the same extant it once was in the artscribe era. Fragmentation is an aspect of globalisation and the rise of the internet which may also mean a fragmentation of values as you hint at. Could artscribe exist now at all in the same ‘moral’ and ‘tightknit’ way it did in the 1980’s when it ringfenced not only a seriousness about painting etc but also a relatively coherant worldview and small set of tuned in artists? We live in a ‘bigger’ artworld but not necessarily a more serious or a more productive one. Was artscribe a magazine dedicated to ‘visuality’?

My response: Part two
ARTSCRIBE

• I have written about artscribe as part of a longer piece called Beyond the crisis in art ‘Making and Doing’ which covers the ‘artscribe years’. https://belcheresque.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/beyond-the-crisis-in-art-making-and-doing/

Whatever it was (for those too young or unaware of the magazine) artscribe was the most important magazine in the period 1976 -1985 after that it became Artscribe International and I felt lost its way and became a precursor of the fashionista art mags we have now. early artscribes were ad free tomes of high-seriousness where you could enjoy lengthy, erudite articles on painting especially from the likes of James Faure Walker, Matthew Collings and Adrian Searle. Collings himself is representative of the gradual change and led to the ‘Internationalisation’ of the magazine. My feeling has been that the success and failure of Collings’s internationalisation is a smaller model of the sea change in British Art at this point i.e. Sensation et al. Ironically Collings left the magazine in 1987 after which it went downhill fast and disappeared totally in 1993. My only surviving copy is ironically from Collings time as editor because I feature in it albeit in a very minor role as a model in a Gilbert and George painting called Gateway which featured in an article on them. That was about as close as I ever got to the International Art World. So any discussion of artscribe and visuality and its apparent ‘demise’ cuts heavily into my own artistic history or ‘suicide’ depending on your viewpoint. Now this is where things get interesting – in searching for the artscribe image I came across Matthew’s ‘Rant’ from the saatchi magazine.

http://magazine.saatchionline.com/magazine-articles/reports-from-new-zealand/put_downs_and_suck_ups_matthew_14

In it he discusses Peter Fuller. Ironically I was interviewed for Goldsmiths course in 1987 and 1988. The first time of interview I had recently completed a black empty canvas for painting and sat bewildered as Mary Kelly and Nick De Ville pontificated about it for what seemed hours (I too shy to point out it just a ground!) before telling me I ‘interesting’ and they would come back next year. Sadly my studio was demolished and penniless and therefore the next interview was in my legalised squat in Arnos Grove and a disaster…
Basically I uttered the name ‘Peter Fuller’ and it was if I had shat all over the assembled interviewers (and a postgrad student who hung bing bags on hooks who ignored me and spent whole time staring at out coathooks). Now reading the Collings piece I understand how evil I had been…Collings explains

“When Modern Painters began in 1988 it was the brainchild of an art writer called Peter Fuller, a man loved by fogeys and philistines, and middle class people who kidded themselves they were into art, while the art world as such couldn’t bear him. I couldn’t bear him either, at least not what he wrote. It always seemed so off the mark.”

MY BEAUTIFUL NON-CAREER (an aside)

Square Gallery Highgate London February 1988 – Serious Artist phase

Exhibited

1989 Pyramid Arts, Dalston, London.
1988 Solo show. Square Gallery, Highgate, London.
1987 12 Young Artists. Square Gallery, Highgate, London

Black Monday oil on canvas 5′ x 5′ 1987

MORE PAINTINGS

Influences – New Scottish painters like Campbell and Maclean, New French Painting and the post New Painting 1981 show at R.A. Italian Transavantguardia…Ivon Hitchins, Francis Bacon, Howard Hodgkin,John Bellany
Philip Guston, Fernand Leger, Malcolm Morley, Gillian Ayres,De Chirico, etc. etc… oh and Gilbert & George.. and artscribe!

My Response: Part three

In contrast I had actually read and re-read Fuller intensely ( especially Beyond the Crisis in Art)and loved him and Modern Painters under his editorship. He seemed then and seems now to have been way ahead of the YBA pack. Ironically Matthew seems to have revised his opinion somewhat…

“The bits I like are, mainly, his raving on (positively) about Ruskin, who in those days I didn’t know anything about and didn’t care to learn anything about. Now of course I think Ruskin’s great and in fact I believe only an idiot wouldn’t think the same. As a personality, Peter (who I got to know fairly well) was great too.”

So I was victim of an almost Stalinist rejection of a certain way of looking at art. The Goldsmiths tutors gave me short shrift refusing to even ‘look’ at my Bacon and Sutherland influenced self-portraiture. I was a rank conservative..an amateur who did not understand the mission that Goldsmiths and YBA about to launch…( obviously the offer of a place at the Royal College for painting by Peter de Francia in 1981 was a figment of my imagination….sadly I was scuppered by Thatcher’s plan to give working class children a place at public school..guess what she took the money from the R.C. ensuring a foreign student took my place and this working class boy ended up on the dole). Forgive me if the International Art World leaves me a little sarcastic..wouldn’t you feel the same? ….Goldsmiths or Thatcher it all the same to me.

I ran out of critical road and ended up back in my parent’s council house in Didcot and immediately spent a year drawing the hills around my hometown in charcoal on location and effectively became as conservative as possible in reaction to the Goldsmiths debacle. My art career effectively over I went to ground just as Hirst and Emin won the art lottery. I continued to read Fuller and Ruskin and to ignore the London art scene for the next 20 years and pretty much still do. My artistic career petered to a halt with some etchings at Edinburgh College of Art in 1994 and that was that…until Moogee in 2005. So that was then but what about now and what about this contested ‘visuality’ everybody banging on about?…..continues below….in it I hope to link the processes at play in 1988….Goldsmiths, internationalisation, YBA’s to my own career crash and the birth of Sattchi Land which more than anything both created and destroyed the ‘visuality’ bubble.

“Blewburton Hill charcoal and chalk on paper 24″ x 36” 1991

My Response: Part Four: VISUALITY?

Required reading : Abigail Diamond : The role of the art object in contemporary art
http://sitem.herts.ac.uk/artdes_research/papers/wpades/vol3/adfull.html

THINGNESS?
Responding to internet representations of art.

The artwork online by Sarah Morris and a Frank Stella from protractor series

Interesting point here is you probably encountered both works in reality whereas I think I only ever seen one actual Stella and no Morris so have no idea of scale or construction of Morris so how could I really compare which brings us back to key point re. visuality..whose visuality?….we engulfed in a pervasive media which displays versions of reality..how many dscourses based on actual seeing any more..perhaps we need an institute of looking?

If we could assemble all the paintings you have here and make people actually look the responses may be very different. What we have here is a virtual gallery that lacks the essential ‘thingness’ of objecthood…..if one not responding to that essential object but only a virtual mis-representation then we are always on dodgy ground. What I find infuriating about contemporary theorists of the virtual is they discount the essential veracity of constructed artworks…to them and their students (and NTU has its fair share) they are continually avoiding the real by dancing spectacularly in clouds of theory and networks…..never touching the ground and certainly never needing to look at all..Ruskin would be appalled.

Conversation re; Artscribe with Matthew Collings: from facebook June 2011

Has ‘visuality’ disappeared as much as you say across the board. I thought it just a Nottingham thing…..it almost eradicated from the fine art course because of all those elements I been ranting about for years….I didn’t even attend the PV of my own School as seen one blackboard with a Wittgenstein quote on and a screaming performance artist you probably seen them all;-) Really enjoyed selection could this not make a great ‘Art Commentary’ stand alone website…..or interactive TV show.

Ironically my period of intense engagement with painting coincided with the publishing of artscribe which was my bible in mid eighties. I stopped any meaningful production of art in 1992 and am now trying to begin again. So in some ways I am heavily influenced by the artscribe ethos and coming back to the art world I acutely aware of the marginalisation of visuality and the lack of a coherant and representative forum/magazine for that visuality. Both Modern Painters and Frieze seem to be ad driven fashion mags and art monthly is simply art monthly…long on theory short on images. My feeling (I will expand later) is we are at a watershed moment and that all this visuality is not looking, making and time based to the same extant it once was in the artscribe era. Fragmentation is an aspect of globalisation and the rise of the internet may also mean a fragmentation of values as you hint at. Could artscribe exist now at all in the same ‘moral’ and ‘tightknit’ way it did in the 1980’s when it ringfenced not only a seriousness about painting etc but also a relatively coherant worldview and small set of tuned in artists? We live in a ‘bigger’ artworld but not necessarily a more serious or a more productive one. Was artscribe a magazine dedicated to ‘visuality’?

          

• Well ironically Artscribe was very much a visual celebrating mag under the editorship of its founder James Faure Walker, but when I took over, in early 80s, it became much more oriented to bringing news to UK of international trendy developments, and ultimately to airing info about those developments back to places where they originally came from — I wouldn’t say ethos of mag in my time was at all like ethos of these FB threads, which is because my true interests, while they were always there, were a bit buried in those days beneath my drive to make the mag buzzing and powerful.

That is really interesting Matthew ..so you are more naturally attuned to JFW content than your own in hindsight? Do you think there a current magazine that caters for ‘visuality’ and here I using term loosely to denote contemporary visual art where the emphasis on ‘objecthood’….I struggling to put it more clearly maybe in sense defined by Abigail Diamond here …The role of the art object in contemporary art – http://sitem.herts.ac.uk/artdes_research/papers/wpades/vol3/adfull.html i.e. are we talking about art that reveals itself primarily as an object..in which case ‘OBJECT’ would be perfect title for such a magazine 🙂

The Tactile Deficit

John Perreault performing in Alphabetical Tshirts in 1969

 

These are a few thoughts in response to a John Perreault Interview and his Facebook discussion available below

http://www.scribd.com/doc/34036860/Will-the-Internet-Destroy-Art

The interview in Art Experience New York City available here:

http://artexperiencenyc.com/home.aspx

In it he says :

“The internet will not destroy art but will destroy galleries and museums and art books.”

He specifically refers to the Google Art Project. He also reflects on the concept of ‘tactile deficit’ that he created in 1998 in

‘In Touch: The Internet and the Re-Materialisation of Art’

His idea then was that increasing quality of internet art provision would eventually force a return to tactile values – that is the real.

This in some ways reflects the analogue -recording and back to vinyl movement within music which is now gaining ground. He seems to now regard this as a mistaken assumption and that instead of embracing tactility the ‘genius’ of the web is to offer a flight from it. However in the remarks in the ‘Death of Art’ facebook discussion many artists also refer to a ‘lack ‘ of sensation and true ‘looking’. Whilst he may be currently regarding this premise as failed a scratch below the surface of the present tablet/ipad fashion reveals there may be more to come.

The music world took a while to come to terms with downloadable music and it is only now that wholesale e-books seem possible. Once this entrenched especially amongst the young like MP3s, we wil probably see a revision of values just as we have had in music. The days of a ‘tactile deficit’ are I suggest just beginning.

Perreault is scathing in the interview about Graduate Art and the chances of success. Basically if you do not sell out your degree show these days you are a failure. This was ever the case but accelerated careers boosted by internet visibilty and the heavy hand of internet-savvy dealers mean it more true now than ever. To this end any graduate degree show is stuffed with shallow poseur art vying to be the next ‘sensation’ with no idea of quality or indeed a history of whatever medium the ‘artist’ trying to perform in.

We used to pride ourselves in the U.K. on a certain degree of craftsmanship in the creation of ‘art-objects’ but now even at MA level that gone to wind. Tiresome egos flaunting not only their technical feebleness but also intellectual shallowness are legion. The internet has enabled a good deal of good practitioners in middle to late career to be discovered but it has also sawn away the roots of the next generations of technically proficient practitioners.

Left with a bloated generation of fame seekers we have many thousands of sound installation artists, new media video artists, performance artists..all existing solely through their youtube profiles…..’pick me pick me’ the saatchi generation wail before my facebook friends evaporate, my tweets are ignored and I wake up (usually about 30) to the realisation that I am a failure…….and a failure that actually has done very little….

The Myspace generation of artists mostly exist in an ‘interzone’ of publicity seeking, networking and very rarely actual physical art objects. The reason is simple – why bother learning to craft something over years when your next door student just picked up a B.A. and a sale for masturbating online (literally or metaphorically I expect somewhere some grad doing it) and getting it shown in a top gallery.

I believe that Perreault’s prediciton will eventually come true. As the waves of ‘event’ driven networks implode in the U.K. as the helium that inflated them runs out from funding we will see not only less artists but less ‘Virtual Art’ of all kinds. The attempts to create a separate ‘Internet Art’ as a new medium, much as Photography grew into an artform that replenished and almost superceded realistic painting, have so far stalled. This is because the internet is a mirror not a medium. It mirrors our actions in life not replaces them. We desire friends, we desire images, we desire the surface not the reality of things.

To be an artist now there are only two mediums that exist within the internet and thrive -Photography and Film (Moving Photography)….nothing else works….(with the possible exception of cartoons which created quickly thrive on the 30 second attention span) but to my mind nothing else works. Drawings even if created digitally are not as effective as a decently framed print..paintings are not present in their time-based ‘aura’ at all. Digital reproduction destroys the tactility of time. We cannot feel the presence of the author and if the author dead then is not the work too?

One can create a gallery of artists who cannot exist within a contemporary frame……Morandi, Cezanne, Hodgkin…all are about a process that evades the instant snapshot. They are not names contemporary art students can recognize as it not only a lack of edcucation but a lack of awareness of a certain ‘otherness’ that not present in the flood-tide of ephemera and trash that is the present internet.

Looking down on a tsunami of images barely ordered is the current state of the internet. We can barely swim in its push and pull. All we can do is grasp onto current theories, flashes of inspiration, trendy magazines and the forlorn hope that we will catch a wave and land up on some dealer’s lawn…..it a myth. It a myth we have to sell to keep ourselves going.

However if we stop even for an instant and consider the sheer volume and physical work required before the internet eased our path we see a very different picture. It may be that the true generation of artists of this epoch are hidden unable to grasp the flow of (mis)-information that buoys us along.

If that is the case then a practical negation of the internet and all it stands for may be required. Artists may have to be weaned off its lure and sparkle and return to tactility and thought over a period of years. We may even have to consider the unthinkable and actually teach our students to think through actions and through manipulating mediums rather than grasping at fashionable straws.

As I have researched and trawled through current theories for this M.A. I have become increasingly convinced that the processes I am investigating are not ‘art’ nor particularly interesting. Art as the application of thought processes and revisions over a large body of time is all but invisible. It does not sell.

I can create a good many ‘digital artefacts’ in no time at all and probably will have to for the M.A. invigilators however none of it will be worth one afternoon’s drawing on location in front of a subject. We are talking about different ways of seeing. The race to virtual heaven is paved with failed artists and their wares…..the ‘tactile deficit’ a bit like the national debt is growing. How long can we live on its false credit?

 

Death by a thousand cuts: How contemporary art killed itself..

The latest figures are spine-chilling. Cloaked in a fake Liberal shroud the right-wing zealots behind Cameron and Osborne’s ‘realignment’ of British politics are systematically closing down the founts of opposition. Its a tactic worthy of sixties France but because the arts fraternity are trapped like rabbits in the headlights nobody seems to be able to respond. A well aimed boot at Millbank does not change the agenda one iota.

In the Telegraph’s list of most affected humanities Universities Nottingham Trent is near the top. Along with Falmouth, Goldsmiths and Norwich it one of those ‘arts-based’ Universities ( pace old Polytechnics) singled out for attack. The reason simple. A right-wing government will not fund centres of excellence however well or badly run that career too close to a left-wing perspective. Despite years of market-driven forces and business orientated management that all but driven the Marxists to the wall the arts colleges are the last bastion of free-thinking leftism. As Stewart Lee rightly points out this is worse than Thatcherism. She would have loved to have destroyed the ‘luxury’ of such institutions. Now before she slips into history her bidding being done by her political spawn.

Does this matter? Well yes because alongside a direct attack on the fundamentals of a liberal society e.g. education for all is a direct attack on the ideological foundations of that society. You can now express any opinion as long as it free-market.

The long road to the present car-crash is a minefield of good intentions but contemporary art and its institutions and apologists has paved the way for their own slaughter. When a modern University can respond to students with the message ‘we do not want your life-drawing’ we do not ‘do’ painting’ we know we in a sorry state. Justifying further funding against a backdrop of nepotism, slack intellectual foundations and clearly lacklustre and befuddled cohorts no wonder the rightists having a feld day culling the weak and unnecessary.This is not just one institution it has crept virus like into the whole body from the Goldsmiths injection point.

It is almost impossible to defend a system that grew fat on easy money and gorged on flatulent theory. Even a smattering of old-school rigour and skills based training…you know all that messy drawing and painting would have stood us in good stead now. But a lame conceptualist blowing bubbles and chanting Kant is probably as good as it gets. It has been a slow artistic suicide that all conived in to further and feather their own nests and lo and behold now the whole tree being chopped down.

There will be no last-minute reprieves and most if not all fine art courses as we have presently configured will shrink or disappear. We are back in Royal Academy pre Pop-Art territory with only the most cushioned able to learn and create. In the new landscape only commercially viable artists will survive. We will see a rise in conventional conservative buying and creating and curating habits it comes with the ‘new reality’. The Arts Council as a golden goose is finished and only the most partisan advocates of its waste and confusion will miss it (i.e. those most rewarded by its skewed sense of smug righteousness..we are saving art darlinks…yes well done ACE … like the Vietnamese Village that was destroyed to save it.).

I take no pleasure in watching the corpse shudder and leak unto its last breath but unless the leftist arts-world coheres and starts building a coherant and skills-based response it game over. Deader than Marysas we will be left with nothing but the skin of the conceptualists to wonder at. Did we ever really fund their flaky musings?

Brit Art Show?

Watercolour in Britain: Sheffield : review

A touring exhibition which started in Norwich and currently at Millenium Galleries Sheffield this Tate Gallery touring show comes with a specific tagline i.e. ‘Part of the Great British Arts Debate’.

Now, if you are not aware this Great British Art Debate commenced during the first wave of Arts Council ‘restructuring’ about two years ago. This seems to be a spin off from that ‘debate’. At the time that debate really amounted to no more than carefully chosen individuals talking in a ‘closed shop’ about how best to redeploy funding in face of cuts by the then blah

Any attempt to genuinely ‘widen’ debate and participation is to be welcomed. That the Tate should choose to wrap a watercolour exhibition in such terms says more about current arts politics than any real ‘debate’ out in the Shires. This exhibition highlights the deep uncertainty and failure of contemporary art to address notions of both identity and place and technique properly. It raises more questions than answers but not in the way intended.

The exhibition contains a great deal of stunning work and no-one can complain about seeing (even if in very low light to preserve the fragile colours) a collection that shows Turner, Blake, Sutherland, Burra and Offili in the same space. The Millenium Galleries, to their credit, are showing both local war artists and local ‘amateur/professional’ painters work alongside the ‘masters’. However all of this is constantly being drawn into the shaping argument that a leaflet posits thus:

“Watercolour paintings have become shorthand for a comforting, conservative world view, rooted in the English countryside and largely rejected by the contemporary art scene. It wasn’t always so”

This statement has no author. It is presented as essentially true when it is, of course, contestable. It is illustrated by Burra’s ‘Soldiers at Rye’ which is in the exhibition (see illustration above). Again our anonymous author cannot help but shackle a political point to it –

“”..is no portrayal of a pastoral idyll”

before drawing a comparison to oil painting which is just plain silly.

The comments also include a statement that this exhibition illustrates a ‘remarkable diversity’ and also asks ‘where next’.

This is, I presume, continued in the exhibition catalogue which I did not buy for the simple reason that the interesting local artists and the work illustrated did not reflect what shown in Sheffield. It appears that if one wants to see the David Jones and John Piper work shown in the Tate publication one has to travel to Tate Britain next year.

The exhibition addresses two fundamentals of the watercolour tradition ‘sense of place’ and ‘technique’ and tries to map them to a contemporary notion of ‘diversity’.

Watercolour paintings have become shorthand for a comforting, conservative world view, rooted in the English countryside

‘Shorthand’ is an unsatisfactory term based on a shallow perception of the tradition. ‘Shorthand’ suggests watercolour painting is somehow inferior to the ‘easel painting’ tradition and involves an almost throwaway sense of gesture usually ‘en plain air’. Anyone with a slight knowledge of the painstaking care that went into a Cotman or Turner can already see there a problem of some mis-aligned value systems here.

Instead of starting with the ‘tradition’ the commentator is explaining the tradition backwards with a rather ‘secondhand’ shorthand of their own. The suggestion they make is that watercolour is merely an amateur’s playground and the contemporary refuge of the conservative artist only. This smacks of the contemporary arts graduate view of art history and technique based on little real comprehension of its true history or creation.

i.e. in short – Watercolour + Landscape = a moribund ‘white male’ tradition.

This notion is so embedded that the whole last part of the exhibition is set up as a failed retort to this assumption which instead of making one applaud the ‘beyond’ as ‘groundbreaking’ simply reinforces that there has been a break in both technique and value system which leaves no ‘beyond’ – simply a sense of closure of that particular tradition.

If the instructional videos and cases of ‘this is how you do it’ sketches and paintings littered around the show inspire one person to try the technique that is fine. However the examples used were illustrative in the manner of the conservative tradition the exhibition is supposedly challenging. Instead of inspiring true engagement it suggests an administrative dumbing down, reflected again in the noble but ill advised attempt to show and sell local work at the exhibitions end. It would have been far better to have a decent contemporary artist showing the technique ‘live’ and ‘signpost’ people to good watercolour artists in the community or have their work for sale in the ubiquitous ‘shop’ than hang a frankly weak bunch of works next to William Blake which is doing neither party much good in comparison.

Because the Millenium contains an excellent Ruskin museum (all be it small) there were a couple of Ruskins and a large scale although slightly mad Burne Jones (a similar problem to most of the Burras being evident where scale and surreal subject matter outweigh a lumpiness and lack of touch in the works). Watercolour is a light and spontaneous medium which gets bogged down into sticky gouache when over-worked. Having said that a single ‘constructed’ Burra landscape retained that effervescance.

The exhibition makes a very good fist of showing (albeit in a fragmented manner – i.e. Offili then Burra then Turner then Ruskin then Blake) some classic work in the medium. Nobody could walk away from the Cotman and not feel that they have seen an illustration of the very finest technique. It is almost as if one is in a hall of greats onto which a slightly amateur exhibition has encroached.

Now before the ‘post-modernists’ cry foul and contest any suggestion of a “hall of greats” or “artistic canon” let me be clear. I do not buy into the notion that certain works of greatness can be explained away by socio-marxist reductionisim or are part of a white male tradition that needs ‘re-examining’. The reason the predominant works in the exhibition are from white males is simple. Historically, the only people able to safely travel the countryside and have the independent means to do so thus creating the topographical tradition, were men and white men of independent means at that. There were as few farm labourer watercolourists (male or female) as there were poets because of a harsh bondage to land. Arguments about impediments to joining ‘tradition’ whilst valid do not change the available corpus of work we are left to examine.

So if one removes the ‘diversity’ framework and examines the work one finds a fairly consistent and challenging set of works created by white males over a two hundred year period. The historical ‘romanticisation’ of the ‘wilderness’ occurred in this time frame. When the anonymous PR person spouts about a ‘conservative’ tradition it is one built on socio-economic changes and predominantly male for a reason. Far more interesting would have been a ‘debate’ centred on notions of ‘sense of place’ not ‘diversity’ as both are loaded terms.

The ‘contemporary’ works undermine that tradition by both their subject matter and their technique, or lack thereof, and in my opinion this should have been divided into two shows maybe run concurrently.

Nowhere in the contemporary works do we see a similar level of technique displayed except maybe in the Blackadder (an illustrative painter whose work influenced a swathe of eighties illustrators). Other contemporary artists range from the slightly cack-handed (Offili) to the downright awful..Kapoor and Paolozzi or Houshiary. Indeed worst of all was a very contemporary bunch of splodges on paper by a ‘conceptual’ artist I didn’t even bother looking at. All used watercolour in varying ways, none successful, and none with an understanding of the technique itself. Rather we were in the post-modern’s favourite place i.e. “Irony Island”.

Were these works selected simply for their possible ‘diversity’ tick-boxing? Paolozzi not Peter Blake, Kapoor (not noted as a painter per se?) instead of Michael Andrews? The whole show fell between two stools in trying to concoct a ‘diverse’ and ‘contemporary’ ‘beyond’ that didn’t exist and in so doing it competely ignored a far deeper and questioning use of the ‘watercolour tradition’ that could have included Conrad Atkinson amongst others. That would have been a real debate. Instead we are left holding the bath whilst baby and bath-water both lost and the bath increasingly leaky as a container for ideas……

To that degree ‘Tradition and Beyond’ did reflect the current lack of confidence at the heart of arts organisations trying to hit targets in all areas..footfall, diversity, engagement and failing to concentrate on the matter at hand…..a word no longer politically acceptable above all others.

QUALITY.

Quality is now so disparaged amongst academics and administrators that one is admonished for just mentioning the word. However all artists can be judged by that criteria if all could agree on a suitably diverse criteria to encompass works.

At present there is no such consensus and until there is we continue to drift through shows like this……like Turner strapped to the mast in a storm the water blurring our sense of vision….