Panicked Confession of A Modern Art Agnoistic
cypher
kind of moral order and understanding to my observations. I am a
painter through and through. Its is painting that matters most to me. I
may be a mediocre painter - but I would rather be a fourth rate painter
than a first rate conceptual artist. For me the important thing about
great art is its embodiment of sophisticated philosophical ideas in
sensual mediums. This call to the senses of great art - is what
separates it from most conceptual art which is utterly devoid of
sensual appeal. Since the late 1950's the term 'art' has become
utterly meaningless, if everything can be art then surely nothing is
art. And if anything can be art - what in God's name is the word we
should use to describe the work of Michelangelo, Titian, Rembrandt,
Goya, or Picasso? I did not start out hating much of Modern art. From
the age of ten to about the age of twenty-seven I was little more than
a sponge soaking up every work of art I saw without discrimination.
There was much art I didn't get like the work of Marcel Duchamp,
Jasper Johns, Jules Olitski, Donald Judd, or Cindy Sherman. But in my
youth and inexperience I thought the fault lay with me, not the art
world. I was angered by those I thought of as mindless philistine
conservatives who attacked modern and contemporary art. I presumed that
most of these people were outsiders to the inner working of the art
world, and their attacks were based on ignorance, stupidity and an
inability to deal with the new world. But by my late twenties I
realised that only certain kinds of art continued to surprise me and
repay revisiting, and 60% of that art was either broadly realist or
expressionist paintings, drawings, prints or sculptures. Only a small
faction of the art I admired was abstract painting, conceptual, video
or photographic art. Moreover as I began experiencing the real workings
of the art world (as opposed to its history in art books) I began to
see how talentless, egotistical and opportunistic most artists are. I
have been accused of all these things - but frankly if you think I am
egotistical, talentless and opportunistic then you have no real or just
measure of my talent, self-criticality, honesty and integrity in
contrast to that of so many others in the art world.
So much of the art of my day is little more than student exercises in
material and form - five finger piano exercise claiming to be great
symphonies. A fact often obscured by big budget productions and gross
over elaboration. However great art is more than an exercise in
conceptual problem solving or creative productive processes it is the
sensual embodiment of thought, observation and feeling. But frankly
most of the work in the art colleges and contemporary art galleries of
the world today are little more than gimmicky manipulations of style
and concept. Da Vinci was perhaps the most intelligent artist who has
ever lived, but even he warned of art theory, which led artists into
mannerisms and artistic cul-de-sacs. In every profession there are
cowboy traders, who do a half-assed job, and charge the earth for their
incompetent efforts. So it is in the profession of art. There is a
dishonest aspect to many artists - most choose to take the easy short
path filled with countless other artists keeping them company, and not
the long difficult and lonely road. They opt for the technically easy
options anyone can master and avoid the technically difficult ones. Why
try to paint like Manet, Balthus, or Freud when a few doodles in the
manner of Twombly, Beuys, Schnabel or Emin can bring you money, fame
and success. And if even doodling is beyond you, why not just throw
some objects together like Tony Craig or Jeff Koons!
Today the Trans-National bureaucracy of modern art is staffed by
pompous dullards, who promote an all-encompassing policy of conceptual
art - showing the same artists from San Paolo, Venice, Berlin and New
York. The globalization of art has not lead to diversity - instead
the exact opposite. The styles that are rewarded and enshrined are
those that most closely fit in with the tastes of the global art elite.
In today's art world there are thousands of artists with all the
right credentials, (seven years of training in Art College, MFA's,
scholarships, awards and an exhibition history as long as your arm),
yet the art they make is derivative, politically correct, and dead to
any real invention or feeling. How can such supposedly important art -
be so mind numbingly boring? Meanwhile the big art stars use their big
budgets to make clever but laborious reworking of established
conceptual models - their showing off on a large scale, used to hide
a lack of real invention. Because one of the dirty secrets of success
in the art world is if the dealers and collectors like your half dozen
little works (if it catches the trend of the day) they will finance the
making of hundreds of bigger and bigger works - until the sheer
number and scale of your work will cow your critics into believing you
actually are a genius. These big art world stars exhibit in countless
contemporary museums, are represented by chic galleries and sometimes
their work receives hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction. They
are well thought of in official art circles and obey all the currently
correct aesthetic principals of art. But their work is so calculated,
academic and unoriginal - how will their work be received in 2100?
Especially since their work is received today with such lack luster
applause. They address their art to the high priests of the art
establishment rather than to the public at large whose opinions are
largely irrelevant in contemporary art.
Art for me is a form of communication between myself and the world. The
more profoundly my art reveals the humanity of myself and the world
around me - the greater my art in my opinion. For me drawing and
painting are pure arts because they are so personal. In a world glutted
with machine made objects designed by committee and addressed to the
lowest common denominator and most faddish tastes - my paintings
declare the vision of one man alone in the world trying to speak the
truth. Although I have dabbled with abstraction, conceptualism,
installation and photography it is only in my paintings and drawings
that I feel I am truly expressing a complex and multi-layered
interpretation of the world. I believe in the primacy of figurative
painting as an art form. It is far superior I believe to abstract art,
photography, video work, installations, or ready-mades. As I have said,
I have dabbled in most of these forms, but I have always felt a con man
when making them. In my view they are essentially dishonest mediums
that require virtually nothing in terms of skill, craft, originality or
emotional commitment on the part of the artist. In Ways of Seeing, John
Berger attacked the oil painting as a commodity in the art market. But
history has shown that the market can and will make anything a
commodity - even the family photographs, old clothes or letters of
the artist. This is not the fault of painting - it's the nature of
the market. Anything that can be bought and sold will be bought and
sold. That is the nature of the capitalist system. Moreover if you are
going to invest money in something, why not buy an oil painting (that
could have had months of labour spent on its making and will last
hundreds of years intact), instead of a quickly thrown together set of
yellowing photographs, a rusty can of artist's shit, a lump of
decaying fat on a chair or a mouldy old bed.
As Robert Hughes noted in Shock of the New a Rodin sculpture in a
parking lot is still a Rodin, but a Carl Andre in a parking lot is just
a pile of building supplies. This dependency on the museum to rarefy
the object is a major indictment of conceptual art. As a confirmed
atheist I look at most conceptual art with the same kind of distrust I
felt when told as a boy by the Catholic church to believe that a wafer
and some red wine was the body and blood of Christ. Today the
contemporary art gallery is a form of church which exhibits the relics
of the modern saint - the artist. If like the boy in the Emperors new
clothes you see the relics as nothing but what they are; a urinal, a
pile of bricks, a shark in formalidia hide, or an unmade bed, you are
considered an insensitive, ignorant fool. Surely you can see they are;
a questioning of the nature of art, a questioning of aesthetic beauty,
an intimation of mortality and a record of existential anguish! This we
are told - is art that makes you think! Well if this is thinking -
then thinking really has little use. Its all far too obvious, far too
easy to understand and far to boring to pay much attention to. The fact
of the matter is that artists can claim anything they want to be art -
but it is the audience that will decide if it is worth more than a
quick look, never mind an art that can enrich the complexity of their
lives and how they imagine themselves. Don't get me wrong there are
artists working in the conceptual field I admire and I find pleasure in
some of their work - Ben, Klein, Manzoni, Broothers, Kippenberger and
Hirst. But very often I find their work is perversely better in
reproduction than in reality. Moreover, once seen their work seems to
gain little from renewed viewing
The concepts in conceptual art are usually utterly banal and have no
visual or aesthetic interest. A typical strategy - adopted from
tutors in art college and then extended ad naumus in fatuous careers
- is to avoid big issues and descend into details so banal and
insignificant that no one has ever bothered paying any attention to
them. So don't photograph a landscape -- photograph the road signs.
Don't paint a nightclub with people in it - paint the view of
people shoes on the ground. Don't video tape the actual events of war
- video tape the landscape of war from such a remove that its carnage
is only hinted at. Such is the road to utter pretentious banality! What
in God's name would Constable, Lautrec or Goya have made of this
rubbish! Instead of the great artists desire to record the world in all
its complexity and give it some kind of coherent shape you have the
autistic observers record and the snails eye view of the world.
By the age of thirty-five I have come to realise that Duchamp is in
fact a very limited artist whose flimsy oeuvre has influenced students
and artists with even less to say and lacking Duchamp's undoubted
originality as the father of the entire conceptual genre. I have always
felt that Duchamp's work is one of the greatest bores in the history
of art. None of his work is very interesting to look at per se. It's
all message - without any aesthetic pleasure or complexity of feeling.
His whole oeuvre is just an elaborate series of unfunny jokes - too poe
faced to be laughed at - too unfinished and obscure to be rationally
understood. They are comments on the nature of art but are not art
works one can enjoy on a sensual, emotional or visual level. There is
deadness to far too much of his work.
The language of Duchamp can not be extended only copied - which is of
course a very unDuchampian thing to do (since he himself hated to
repeat himself). These copies can be inventive like when Manzoni
substituted Duchamp's vial of 50cc of Paris Air 1919, with cans of his
own shit. But the meaning remained essentially the same - the
gullibility and crassness of the art market. In contrast, paintings by
Rembrandt, Cezanne or Picasso can be extended, and reinterpreted in
subtle ways by generation after generation. The art of conceptualist
like Duchamp, Kline, Neuman, Koons or Hirst reveal nothing of the
intentions, thoughts and feelings of their maker - in fact they often
seek only to confuse the viewer and create psydo-mystery. There is no
human communication. Only blunt objectness. No contract of humane and
honest dialogue is made between the viewer and artist. Instead the
artists acts like cult leaders revealing little but hinting that there
is a world of knowledge they are withholding for the enunciated (fat
chance). Unlike paintings, which can be minutely manipulated by the
artist, ready-mades cannot be changed, manipulated, modified or fully
created. They are borrowed objects displaced to an art gallery - not
fully born artistic objects of a human creator. Of course occasionally
ready-mades can create a higher degree of consciousness in the viewer -
framing reality in a way that creates new understandings - but the
viewer can never be sure if they are responding in the way the artist
of the object planned. Moreover there is no way of telling what the
artist was thinking or feeling when they chose the object and exactly
what they intend this artistic hijack to instill in the viewer.
Other than Duchamp, no other artist has done more to debase the notion
of art - by expanding it to include everything and attach to such
detritus mythical and psydo-religious bullshit as Joseph Beuys. This
German doctor Dolittle who thought he could talk to the animals, is the
father of much of contemporary art. His notion that 'every one is an
artist' was a meaningless hippie statement. Even if everyone is an
artist - there are some artists who are far better than the rest. The
world is crammed full of people who actually do call themselves artists
and nag the world for attention, but frankly only a few have the craft,
vision and personalities to deserve and hold ones attention. At the end
of the day the world is glutted with millions of art objects, most of
them hoarded in artists houses, or in the storerooms of museums, never
to be seen. Ultimately the art object must be able to stand on its own,
apart from biography, and theory. Its intrinsic, skill, visual power
and originality must be enough to make it stand out and hold ones
attention. Only later, if the viewer wishes, should sketches, writings,
and archival material, be sought out for greater understanding of the
artist and his/her working methods. After all if only one painting by
Bosch, Vermeer, Rembrandt or Balthus survived we would still recognize
their genius. But today all the junk of an artist's life is displayed
in museums in order to bolster their reputations. In fact today too
much art is just archive material raised up to the level of art - and
in this debased genre there are few as self involved as Tracy Emin. But
her artifacts are not art - they are the junk of human existence. I
too have archive material but I would never dream of displaying it as
art. After all truly great modern artists like Picasso, Warhol and
Bacon, all knew the difference between art and archive material. They
all hoarded vast amounts of junk from their lives - but they never
thought to show any of it as art.
Unlike photographs, video, installations, or ready-mades - my paintings
are totally hand made objects the product of one human mind at one
particular moment in time. What you see is exactly what I intended you
to see, unaffected by decay, curatorial fiddling or misrepresentation.
Painting is permanent, its message remains clear, unlike decaying
photographs, video tape and the found objects of contemporary art. My
work is not dependent on arts grants to create exhibit and store it -
even my meager recourse can run to the cost of a canvas and some paint.
When I paint a picture its essential character will remain intact for
hundreds of years. The same cannot be said for video pieces which are
already replaced by dvd's, or installations, which are chopped, and
changed everytime they are installed in new venues. Moreover painting
is an independent art form. When I paint a picture I do not have to
first think; how I will get the arts council to fund its making, what
gallery will install it, what dim witted curator I will have to arse
lick to 'mediate' it, or how I will store the finished work. I simply
paint it and put it aside for eventual exhibition - free of the mucky
compromises of the art world. Installation artists on the other hand
are intricately bound to the curatorial system - like whores around a
pimp. All of this is ironic given that the initial impetus behind
conceptual art was the undermining of the art market and curatorial
system - today nothing could be further from the truth.
Compared to painting, photography is just the casting of light by
machine, moreover its is a medium of super abundance - so ubiquitous as
to be worthless no matter how arty the image. Any two-year-old can
point a camera and get a good photograph (if they take enough of them)
but it takes ten or twenty years for a painter to reach his maturity
and paint a masterpiece. Moreover photography is far more dependent
upon a good subject to capture. If the subject is eye catching enough,
even the most talentless photographer can make images of a compelling
nature. While in the commercial photographic world this might mean,
scenic views, sexy nudes, or battle scenes, in the art world this
generally means mundane details of empty rooms, poor third world
beggars on rubbish tips or 'ironic' pastiches of pop culture
phenomenon's like shopping malls. A typical example of this -
reminiscent of John Waters satirical movie 'Snapper' came in the
late nineties in the form of Richrad Billingham. For a few years
Billingham was the toast of the English art world, because of his
gritty snap shots of his parents in their council flat. Such images
were delightful to a politically correct art world that knew nothing of
this poverty stricken world and he was touted as a major artist. But
then he moved on to images of housing estates and all the fire went out
of his work, and the art world moved on.
But compared to video art, photography is practically the genre of the
old masters. Video art is just a poor man's cinema, which constantly
avoids real comparison or competition with films true geniuses like
Eistenstien, Hichcock, or Kubrick. Video art is to cinema as finger
painting is to real painting - anyone with any real talent avoids it
like the plague and gets into the big game of cinema. But despite its
amateurism, stupidity and banality, Video art is greedy - demanding
whole rooms in galleries to be darkened and emptied save for a monitor
or screen flickering its boring projection. Rooms that could have held
ten or twelve paintings or four or five sculptures are emptied for this
pretentious rubbish!
Art photographers and video artists avoid real comparison with fashion
photographers and documentary journalists, because their work would
pale by comparison. In fact much of the art of today calls for special
pleading in the art world - because it cannot compete in the real world
with cinema, architecture, graphic design, or photography. Ironically
paintings do not date as fast as video or photography which become
arcane in years simply because the technology moves on so fast -
leaving older work looking as outdated and primitive as the unicycle
and biplane. But painting is part of a sovereign tradition stretching
back to the dawn of time - photography's history is barely one hundred
and fifty years old and the history of video is only forty years old
- so artists with an inferiority complex quickly flock to these new
mediums because its easy to make an original statement in a medium with
no history. Painters on the other hand, compete and are in dialogue
with a canon spanning 20,000 years and littered with geniuses. This is
the standard by which all painters are in competition with and grow
from. This very difficulty to make an original and worthwhile
contribution to such a daunting tradition is what terrifies many
artists and leads them to jump on trendier and easier mediums.
Abstract art has also caused me problems as an art lover. Staring at
works by Kandinsky, Mondrian, Newman, Kelly, Rothko or Skully for ten
minutes I can never be sure if I am feeling what the artist intended.
And when I have had feelings of awe in front of them, I have never been
sure it was not just a cheep theatrical mind/eye trick or a real
glimpse into the void of being. I could not tell if my feelings in
front of theses artists works was real or merely the imposition of my
knowledge of their careers and life on the meager stuff of their actual
paintings? Now I have painted many abstract works myself in the past -
but again I often feel that the abstract is a cheat. It requires a
tenth of the skill of figurative painting and often seems to be more
reliant on little more than the lucky accident and the stylish
invention. Of course it requires so skill and panache to come up with
an original form of abstraction, one which is clearly its own. But
technically they are simply never of the same level of difficulty as a
realist painting. So is it any coincidence that many of the key
abstract artists (Pollock, Rothko, Twombly, Skully, Hodgkin, Schnabel)
were fifth rate figurative artists - what did they really have to
sacrifice to make their art, after all it is easier for a man with no
talent in drawing or painting to renounce those skills in favor of
abstraction. Neither Picasso nor Matisse made abstract art - they had
too much to lose!
Since the 1950's art theory, the spawn of academia, has killed art
stone dead. Often making critic's like Clement Greenburg, Lucy Lippard,
Arthur C Danto and Donald Kuspit, more important than the artists they
write about. Art has become the arena of obscure writers - who write in
a poxy jargon worth of occult priests. Their writing is elitist,
insular and a pox on real prose. Virtually no one reads this rubbish,
but most of those that do form the taste makers of the art world elite
who decide what is and is not art. So it has a disproportionate and
deceitful effect on the art world. Again I must confess that I have
dabbled in this kind of writing myself - over twelve years ago when I
started writing my auto-biography in 1994. So I can say that such
writing is extremely easy to write. It requires virtually no life
experience, no literary ability, and no knowledge of the real workings
of the art world. All it really requires is a hap-hazard knowledge of
art history and a familiarity with philosophical, artistic and feminist
theory. In other words - a bookish insularity, familure with the
inside of a library - not the resistant world. Such writing is often
little more than a miss-mash of ill digested philosophical quotes, and
turgid prose - all written with a blissful ignorance of how the
actual world works, and a fanatical belief in the ability of
politically and aesthically correct theory to change the world. This
elites mandarin style art writing, serves to justify contemporary art
to a miniscule audience - with no effort to reach out to the
generally well educated individual. Such texts have no place in the
real common sense world, and can only exist in the rarefied atmosphere
of the art college. The jargon, one reads in these texts is not heard
in television or radio interviews - because it would go down like a
lead balloon. So frequently one sees that artists and critics who sound
so articulate and intelligent in their texts are nothing but mumbling,
confused fools in real conversation. That is why articulate painters
like David Hockney and critics like Robert Hughes are such a welcome
relief in a world of such poseur frauds.
Charl...@gmail.com
Charl...@gmail.com
a Cezanne still life are no more or less important than the scale and
movement of a Pollack. Viewing Michelangelo's Pieta is not necessarily
anymore fulfilling than chuckling at Olenberg's Bat Column. I think
good art evokes a response by the viewer wether it's awe or chagrin. I
don't think great skill in rendering or applying paint make an artist;
Warhol or Koons as examples.
I believe critics exist to steer collectors, naturally they're well
informed and great students of art history, but they ultimately help
create an art world that is self fulfilling.
Personally, I find as much pleasure falling into a Rothko as viewing
the Sistine Chapel (which I have recently btw) . But then this is from
a painting major turned automotive business owner that hand screens
esoteric dribble on to T shirts in the basement.
