Hot Topic is not Punk Rock!
Reading Ben Street’s recent post Pop (and) Art, I started to consider links between music and art. It is easy to support Ben’s idea that the relationship between music and art was closest in the sixties, yet the music of the 60’s and 70’s seems to be a hot topic for contemporary art institutions today. Case in point, right now Malcolm McLaren is guest blogging about ArtBasel for “The Moment” on The New York Times. While art might not be comfortable with pop music, some curators are excited to draw on the nostalgia for rock and punk music of those bygone days.
Over the last year, there has been a wave of exhibitions that point to rock and punk music as inspiration for many artists’ practices. Double Album: Daniel Guzmán and Steven Shearer, currently on view at the New Museum, cites rock culture and male adolescence as strong influences on both artists. Music is a Better Noise, exhibited at PS1, looked at genre jumpers, “musicians who make art and artists who make music.” Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years explored the “vibrant art scene that emerged during these [punk] years,” at the Barbican; it included works by Art21 artists Barbara Kruger (Season 1), Raymond Pettibon (Season 2), and Jenny Holzer (Season 4).
It is Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967 that seems to be receiving the most press and perhaps the most scorn. The exhibition features work by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2), Mike Kelley (Season 3), and Laurie Anderson (Season 1) is currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami. Sympathy for the Devil is described as “the most serious and comprehensive look at the intimate and inspired relationship between the visual arts and rock-and-roll culture to date.” This assertion is troubling considering omissions of influential musicians like George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic, Sun Ra, and Bad Brains which makes me wonder, would rock-and-culture exist without black culture?
Considering this trend of rock and punk influenced exhibitions, I am left with a question posed by critic Pedro Velez in his artnet review of Sympathy for the Devil, “How do you tame counterculture into the prepackaged pretext of High Art?” Responses welcomed.
Pop (and) Art
The relationship between fine art and pop music is characterised most often by a specific historical period in Europe and America, the mid-sixties, which is probably the closest point there has been or will be between the two disciplines. Like its relationship with cinema, art was never completely comfortable with pop music, all smiles in public but laughing behind its back when the coast was clear. In reality, Warhol’s peelable banana on the first Velvet Underground record had little or no relation, aesthetically, to the music it contained. Double Elvis has more to do with Barnett Newman than The King. Maybe that’s partly to do with the unbridgeable gap between them: a still point of time versus three unfolding minutes; in market terms, coy flirtation (at most) versus out-and-out capitulation. In pop music, the commercial imperative has produced some of the greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century culture; in art, selling out retains its weird taboo. I imagine Rirkrit Tiravanija lost a few fans by designing a Gap t-shirt; pop music is so bound into commercialism that no-one bats an eye when Keith Richards poses for Louis Vuitton.
It’s usually implied, as befits Western cultural hierarchy, that art borrows from popular culture — that it redeems it, even — as part of a post-Duchampian mindset that lends the artist a kind of alchemical magic touch. Base matter becomes gold. But it’s when pop music returns the favour, taking art as its inspiration, that stranger and more interesting things happen. The Modern Lovers’ Pablo Picasso, David Bowie’s Andy Warhol, Lou Reed and John Cale’s Songs for Drella album — it’s often when art is transmitted by other means that you end up returning to it, refreshed. Who wouldn’t love Van Gogh after hearing Jonathan Richman’s Vincent Van Gogh: “He loved, he loved life so bad/His paintings had twice the colour other paintings had”?
Picture: Salvador Dali (standing) and Alice Cooper (sitting)
Pre-Teen Wolf
I spent last Sunday morning at the National Gallery with a large group of very small children in front of Sassetta’s early Renaissance painting of St Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio. Magic Carpet storytelling at the National Gallery is an enormously popular weekend activity; as the name implies, a large and magical carpet is rolled out in front of a chosen painting and an educator tells a story directly or indirectly related to the subject of the painting.
While inciting the group into a collective fist-thumping on the carpet (to simulate the wolf’s nocturnal scampering around the walls of the city), it occurred to me to consider the differences in using representational and abstract art within a gallery education context. Working with the modern and contemporary art collection at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, it became clear to me that the freedom with which children were able to engage with works of art was appropriate to the openness of the works themselves. Very young children, in particular, responded with ease and enthusiasm to many works that teenagers found more challenging. Art made out of splashes and drips to them was the very definition of art in any case. Interpreting its relation to the real world was occasionally a matter of somewhat impatient explanation (”that’s a fox, obviously“).
The National Gallery collection, however, which spans about 700 years of Western European painting, is entirely concerned with representational narrative work, to which children respond in very different ways. As an educator, it can be challenging to encourage children to think creatively about evidently devotional or didactic works of art, especially those of the early Renaissance. There remains in both cases a desire on the educator’s part to facilitate a measured response to a work that respects an object’s historical context and apparent intention.
As difficult as these things are to assess, I suspect that most educators would see their role as enabling children and teenagers to gain both comfort and confidence in approaching art from any period, which necessarily involves directing them towards appropriate responses via observation and conversation. To what extent, though, are interpretations ‘guided’ by educators - and is this their role? I’d love to hear other educators’ experiences of working with art of all periods and the challenges involved.
Matthew Ritchie at White Cube
Matthew Ritchie’s Ghost Operator opened last week at White Cube and will run until June 28. The Season 3 artist’s enveloping installation transforms the entire gallery using an array of scale and media, including paintings, drawings, sculpture, projections, interactive components, and a floor covered in plastic tarot cards. The linchpin of Ghost Operator is The Green Language, a spectacular light-box painting of a quantum sky and sea that acts as an umbrella environment linking all the other elements. Ritchie’s work contends with chance, probability, the vastness of the universe and the human attempt to rationalize and process such infinite limits.
Do-Ho Suh in “Psycho Buildings”
New work by Art21 artist Do-Ho Suh (Season 2) is on view today through August 25, 2008 in the exhibition Psycho Buildings: Artists and Architecture at The Hayward Gallery in London. To inaugurate their anniversary season, ten artists from around the world have been invited to transform the indoor and outdoor spaces of the Hayward this summer. Suh will recreate a 1:5 scale replica of the house he grew up in South Korea crashing into a redbrick New England apartment block. According to a sneak preview report in The Guardian, Suh’s installation is inspired by The Wizard of Oz.
From the Gallery’s web page: “This exhibition marks The Hayward’s 40th anniversary as one of the world’s most architecturally unique exhibition venues. Taking its title from a book by artist Martin Kippenberger, the exhibition brings together the work of artists who create habitat-like structures and architectural environments that are mental and perceptual spaces as much as physical ones. Viewers enter and explore a series of atmospheric, spatially dynamic constructions that use elements of light, colour, smell and design to trigger profound visceral responses that heighten their attention to the relationship between the individual and their surroundings.”
Other artists included in the exhibition are Atelier Bow-Wow, Michael Beutler, Los Carpinteros, Gelitin, Mike Nelson, Ernesto Neto, Tobias Putrih, Tomas Saraceno, and Rachel Whiteread (installation pictured above).
Best Supporting Artists
Artists in films tend to act as shorthand for oversensitive loners, just as lawyers in films are shorthand for unscrupulous money-grubbers and people with British accents are shorthand for oleaginous bad guys. Jeffrey Wright as Basquiat, Ed Harris as Pollock, Salma Hayek as Kahlo, Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh: each presents the artist’s work as an inevitable byproduct of a life lived at maximum intensity.
Actors seem to enjoy playing artists because it’s the stuff of Oscars: lots of shouty scenes, gruff sex, and jittery tics. (It may also be because of an insecurity about the validity of their own status as artists: making artists behave like actors has, in its own way, a kind of symbiotic effect). “Vincent!” bellows Anthony Quinn. “Paul!” yelps Kirk Douglas, embracing him like it’s 1888. The best is Anthony Hopkins’ Picasso (Surviving Picasso), who capers around like a high camp sex dwarf.
Is it that the idea of being an artist is so alien to everyday experience that it can only be expressed through an actorly language reserved for reclusive mathematicians, effete eccentrics and serial killers? Perhaps this is too harsh. The truth is that the process of making art is often not very exciting to watch. Even Pollock, whose hoary myth would suggest some sort of high-kicking John Wayne, comes across like your boring uncle at Christmas in Hans Namuth’s 1950 film, painstakingly describing his technique with all the panache of Ben Affleck reading the ingredients on a packet of dried plums. Maybe what’s needed is a greater willingness to go completely off-script, acknowledge that the artistic process of necessity involves lots of sitting around, and go hog wild. Better yet, go Wild Hogs: how about John Travolta as Cy Twombly? Martin Lawrence as Martin Puryear? Tim Allen as Jasper Johns? Suggestions welcome.
Bacon: Whoopee
Roman Abramovich, the partially-bearded Russian owner of Chelsea Football Club (AKA ‘Chelski’), and 16th-richest person in the world (according to Forbes), was this week reportedly the purchaser of two paintings by significant British painters. Lucian Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping and Francis Bacon’s Triptych (1976) sold at auction in New York for a collective total of around $120 million.
Meanwhile, it emerged that the model for Freud’s vast canvas of a overweight woman reclining on a bulging couch, Sue Tilley, was paid about £20 ($38) a day to pose. While it’s tempting (and very high school maths exam) to work out how long she’d have to pose to be able to afford the painting she was posing for, it’s perhaps more interesting to consider the always-baffling disparity between an object and its value.
Freud’s painterly insistence on the quiddity of his subject - the lunar impasto of paint on the bulge of Tilley’s stomach, the layers of tone gradually ‘becoming’ flesh - is predicated on the idea that paintings are in their essence traces of elapsing time, time that (here) directly corresponds to a financial transaction. The thought that each brushstroke translates into a before-and-after set of specific values is weirdly giddying, like comparing the price on the menu and the price on the bill.
(Artist) Frays Book
The Victoria and Albert Museum’s latest exhibition, Blood on Paper: The Art of The Book, showcases book-based work by a wealth of modern and contemporary artists, including Cai Guo-Qiang and Richard Tuttle (Season 3) and Louise Bourgeois (Season 1).
Since the book form implies a beginning, middle and end, it’s always been a popular form for artists looking to meddle with heads, from Max Ernst’s superlative The Hundred Headless Woman onwards. The exhibition traces a significant transformation in the definition of the artist’s book: from a kind of freeform improvisation on textual illustration (Matisse’s Jazz, Sol LeWitt’s take on Borges’ Ficciones) to an artwork taking the form of a book as its conceptual jumping-off point (Dieter Roth and Richard Hamilton’s Inter Faces and Richard Tuttle’s NotThePoint). The connotations of books as cornerstones of religious doctrine are underscored by Damien Hirst’s New Religion, a huge, plinth-mounted mixed-media sculpture in the form of a shelved Bible, set off by a display of Francis Bacon’s much-pored-over ephemera, battered Muybridge photos and snaggly Polaroids, displayed in glass like the fingerbones of a saint.
The most fun is to be had in the illumination artists’ work can cast on a canonical text; Balthus replays Wuthering Heights as a pas de deux of feral adolesence; Paula Rego turns Jane Eyre into a mad psychodrama of Gothic puppetry. Serialism found an easy home in the book form, with Ed Ruscha’s deadpan series of swimming pools and gas stations repeated on every page of a pocketsize book, insouciance itself. Meanwhile, the pages of Cai Guo-Qiang’s Danger Books, charred with the spidery remainders of fireworks, indicate the book as a site of explosive excitement, and anyone who’s ever been 7 will probably agree.
Turner: New Leaf?
The announcement of the shortlist for this year’s Turner Prize has coincided neatly with a short-lived heatwave in the UK that sent Londoners leaping out of their winter clothes to bask grimly on any available patches of unshaded ground. Notwithstanding the capricious British weather, these two incidents tend to run together; the Turner Prize has long entered the national consciousness as a summer season space-filler, dependably absurd and apparently easy to describe in a breezy article next to some breasts. The fact that the YBAs made (some still do) art of a graphic bluntness that made their work translatable in the punchy prose of the tabloids (Shark in a Tank! Unmade Bed! Cow in a Tank! Lights Going On And Off! etc) is of a piece with the now sometimes embarrassing ballsy nationalism of the late 1990s, which reached its nadir, in a classic example of her inverse Midas touch, with Madonna stepping in and swearing live on TV, British art’s very own ‘Mission Accomplished’ moment.
The media exposure, though, did at least mean that contemporary art was, for perhaps the first time, a regular staple on letters pages, editorials and gossip pages, a position which has arguably had an effect on artistic practice itself (see the gradual domination of Banksy). The latest Turner Prize line-up, though, is largely in line with current vogues in contemporary art: cautious, careful arrangements of found objects with a fairly disturbing suggestiveness; quiet, contemplative, somewhat minimalist video; tongue-in-cheek allusions to modernist art history and popular culture; post-Hans Haacke blurring of curatorial and artistic boundaries. None of which has resulted in much of a fuss. Even the usually dependable Daily Mirror has struggled to find much to get upset about, not generally being known as Haacke purists.
Is this a sign of the growing acceptance of contemporary art by the broader public? Or are artists retreating from engaging with the language of popular taste?
Martian Museum show at Barbican features real Art21 artists
Examining contemporary art from the perspective of an extraterrestrial, the group show Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, which opens this week at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, features the work of Art21 artists Bruce Nauman (Season 1), Eleanor Antin (Season 2), Mike Kelley, Cai Guo-Qiang (both Season 3), Jenny Holzer, and Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla (both Season 4). This unusual exhibition’s starting point is the fantasy of an alien anthropologist attempting to understand and explain human culture solely from contemporary art, and it builds from there to offer a quirky look at recent art practices. The curators invent a humorously imprecise classification system designed to raise questions about the practice of anthropology, as well as the role misunderstanding plays in the understanding of contemporary art. Interested patrons will also want to download mp3’s of the the exhibition’s audio guide, narrated by the director of the Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, the “esteemed” Dr. Klaatu.
The show is open until May 18. Find more information, images, and the audio guide here.
