Hey, you should REALLY check out factualtv.com's great series of documentaries on artists. They boast a strong pantheon of U.K.-affiliated artists, but others as well.
I really loved the documentary they have there on Barbara Hepworth, which is just the purest form of documentary imaginable: the narrator reads from her thoughts on art and life while her works are displayed in largely chronological order.
It's like entering the Rothko Chapel for the first time. The purity of Hepworth's art is just total catharsis. Her thinking is xyster-sharp. Her words often reminded me of the poetry of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, of that poet's meditations on landscape, place, topology, form denuded and denuded of layers of consciousness to arrive at more primal ways of seeing.
Anyway, I watched two other documentaries focusing on the work of Yinka Shonibare and Martin Creed.
Here are my thoughts on the work of those artists as they were displayed in beautifully capsulized form (those are shorter documentaries of approximately twenty-five minutes each).
Shonibare's early work in painting seems rather atavistic, even if quite pretty. He's not one of those artists who is afraid of visual beauty or sees beauty as yet another form of cultural toxicity.
His early work in painting and his first tentative forays into sculpture are unimaginative and retrograde. He begins working with the brilliant patterns of African kente cloth in these early works. He uses these to ironize his art, since he foregrounds the fact that these fabrics he is using are now being produced in the same countries (Holland and England) which were once colonial powers and exported African slaves throughout the world as human capital. These former colonial powers are producing "native" clothing for consumption by the descendants of those slaves. This foregrounding is done more in a humorous than a heavy-handed manner, because Shonibare knows how to gauge the cultural present, and its intolerance for literal critique.
Shonibare undergoes a metamorphosis from lackluster painter to astute sculptor, however, and taps into a powerful mode of expression by introducing headless mannequins dressed in this same African-patterned clothing in strange scenes from European and American history, and redrafting tableaux from the history of European art.
"Hound" is a fox-hunting scene which occurs in a white void of space; headless beings (Shonibare casually points out the pungency and humor of this reference to the French Revolution) who are supposed to be English aristocracy of centuries past are pursuing a terrified fox with hunting dogs. The aristocracy are wearing "period" clothing made from fabric covered with brilliant African patterns which makes them look like psychedelic flower children from Haight-Ashbury circa the late 1960s.
This is a devastating piece to encounter. The concept of bloodlust is made terrifyingly generic and frighteningly glamorous. One feels this piece is prescient, a glimpse of the future, where bloodlust and the hunting (or "hounding") of humans will be much harder to detect, because it will not be based on the easily-identifiable them/us markers of the historic past like race or class. One gets the sense that while the victim might be obvious, the predators will be cannier and better camouflaged by power. Bloodlust will get smarter. It's a terrifyingly effective work of art.
One gets the sense when Shonibare talks about money and privilege that he is nervous about the possibility that people (or he) will try to make his work conform to the expectations of what an artist with African origins should do, morally or thematically. And his feelings with regard to the entitlements that serious artistic recognition bring lean towards the indulgent and the decadent. He says this unabashedly, one senses, almost as a point of honor.
The last series of artworks by Shonibare discussed include photographic revisioning of Hogarthian tableaux, in which the artist has amusingly substituted himself for "The Rake," and has used living men and women (no mannequins) to portray the other individuals in his revisionings of those celebrated engravings. These are half-successful, if not particularly daring or imaginative.
But then Shonibare follows this up with an obsessive and narcissistic series of photographs on Wilde's Dorian Gray, whom the artist portrays in various dramatic moments from the novel. This is transparently bad art, and the work comes across as embarrassingly puerile in its facile critique of art world narcissism. Nothing is said in these works that could not have been said in a single sentence. The artist is a playful man and gives a delightful interview, but this sort of play is really much closer to fashion fetish than it is to art. (Shonibare admits his obsession with fashion in the interview.) The works are glossy and damn pretty, even in their silvery ugliness. This photoseries would fit nicely into the pages of one of the Parisian or Milanese anorexia Bibles.
This seems to be something very successful artists have in common these days. They seem very uncomfortable with the idea that art should ultimately be seen as anything more than product and commodity.
Yet they retain the museological apparatus, the cathedral itself.
Has there ever been a major artist who has refused to show his or her works in any gallery or museum? That would be sort of funny in that Andy Kauffman way. Well sure, there are outsider artists. But I mean somebody aware and not beautifully naive, somebody who refused it politically.
Or would this just be more branding, a superior way of competing through inferiority, and ultimately embarrassing?
There is a sense one must "get past" the cathedral idea. Is this a stand against hubris, an equalization of the playing field of ideas? Possibly.
Art is nervous. It feels whorish. Often, it makes jokes about its own whorishness, thinking the problem is solved that way, or insists that an aporia has been created by the artist acknowledging the impossibility of this problem of value, and an aporia is somehow sufficient.
Art has this aporia now like a PVC vagina from an adult store.
It fucks it in front of us, and says afterwards Did my cock stutter?
Martin Creed is interesting.
I suppose a harsh critic would point out how obvious the sources of his borrowings: the conceptualist artworks and happenings of the sixties which eschewed the object itself in creating art, the textual works of Jenny Holzer, Bruce Nauman's neon works and his elevation of quotidian activities (like walking around a room) into art by the mere act of documenting them, Warhol's balloons, the British punk sensibility, the numerical numbering of artworks a la Borofsky, and on and on.
I suppose he is not really a very original thinker or artist, but I like the works.
I don't think Creed would be particularly bothered by an imputation of a lack of originality.
He's probably beyond that.
He often tries to make art without producing objects; he often relishes the participation of the "art consumer" in co-creating the work of art through simply being there, foregrounding the individual and devaluing art itself; he makes art with the cheapest of materials, the simplest of ideas.
None of this is new, and it hearkens to different periods of art.
One thing those different periods of art which Creed valorizes had in common was their striving for liberation, their valuation on a common humanity. He tends to valorize anti-aesthetic, pro-human art.
He also has a fetish for the mathematical and Godelesque mathematical oddities. Take the quote above in the title of this post: "the whole world + the work = the whole world."
Cleary, this is playing with Georg Cantor's infinity equations. Infinity + 1 = Infinity.
One of his textual works simply says "Oh no."
He loves the clean and simple and he especially loves the subtractive.
He performs songs for you as works of art as well, in his primitive, punk-ethics way, and he is endearing when he does this.
He is a very sexy, somewhat ugly guy with really horrid English teeth. He has absolutely no pretensions, really, and even though his art might be thought (variously) very pretentious or playful or innovative or liberating by many people who are ignorant of art history, to the art world's cognoscenti he must be problematic. Is he an art nostalgist? Is he practicing recyling at the museological level? What is this creature?
Watching him during the interview and in action, I wondered whether Creed might have Asperger's. With artists though, one never knows truly what is affectation and calculation and what is natural (unless one lives with them I suppose).
As a closing note, I must admit I'm quite surprised that it is Creed who received the Turner Prize and not Yinka Shonibare (Shonibare was nominated in another year but did not win).
Because Shonibare's most successful sculptures are universally powerful and readable in a way Creed's work is decidedly not. Creed's work requires a certain cultural mainframe to even accept its existence. Shonibare's best works engage at the highest intellectual levels, but also function in a primal way transcending any individual culture. Of course, some of this is due to the nature of figuration itself.
I think one could make a plausible case for the argument that Martin Creed was the first artist to win the Turner Prize for art criticism.
I think you might find these documentaries interesting if you choose to check them out.
I plan on watching everything they have up there.
Oh, if you get there and you see prices, don't let that scare you off! You do have to register but you can watch all these documentaries for free if you don't download them. To download them and keep them you do have to pay a small sum.
I look very much foward to returning there soon and soaking up more of the U.K. art scene.
0 comments:
Post a Comment