14/03/2014

The Art of Failure: Chuck Connelly Not For Sale



On July 23ed 2008, Carol and I watched The Chuck Show on BBC4 (tilted The Art of Failure: Chuck Connelly Not For Sale when shown on HBO in America.) The documentary was a fly on the wall film about the once famous but then forgotten alcoholic painter Chuck Connelly. I had expected to fall in love with this guy and his work – he hit all my usual buttons. However even I was utterly revolted by his attitude. I understood his desperation to succeed but I could not fathom his spoilt-brat tantrums.  
                 
The Chuck Show claimed that he had not had a show in New York since the early 1990s – yet a quick check by me revealed at least two shows reviewed in The New York Times – a group show in 1999 and a solo show in 2002! So I would caution trust in the other statistics given in the documentary. In the 1980s he had exhibited with the influential New York dealer Annina Nosei. During the 1980s he sold over one million dollars worth of art, some of his canvases going for up to $50,000 – again according to the documentary. For a short time, he was talked of in the same breath as painters like Schnabel, Basquait, Haring and Fishel as the next great American painter.        

However, his social skills were awful and he managed to alienate most of his old dealers and collectors. In 1989, his paintings were featured in Martin Scorsese’s short film Life Lessons in the larger multi-director movie New York Stories. Nick Nolte played the role of a tortured artist and his tumultuous relationship with his assistant and artist girlfriend. In the scenes where Nolte painted it was Connelly in the close up’s that was actually painting. Meanwhile Scorsese was planning to introduce Connelly to his movie friends and dealers in L.A. Then when the film came out - Connelly rather than talking the film up - said in interview with The New York Post that it was “mundane” and “cliché”! Talk about shooting yourself in the head! Even I doubted I would have been so stupid, so thoughtless and so thankless as to slag off even a really bad Scorsese movie. Yes the film was a mediocre work in Scorsese’s oeuvre - however the painting scenes were some of the best I had ever seen on film.                                                                                                                                    

By the time of the HBO documentary, Connelly was living with his put-upon, young, meek wife and off the small sales (under $500) he made with his last patron and on eBay. He ranted and raved at the art world, shouted at his wife to get him beer and then sobbed in his drinks. By the end of the film he had managed to lose both his wife and his last patron. In many ways his story was reminiscent of mine. I too can remember sending in my ex-girlfriend to galleries with my work because I could not even say hello to those people. I too can remember being filled with hate and poison for the art world – but it was when I was in my late twenties not my early fifties! Like me he was self-obsessed. Like me, he was a painter through and through. Like me, he was an outcast. However unlike me he was a raging, threatening, and nasty alcoholic. Unlike me, he had learned nothing from his twenty years in the wilderness – not humility, not compassion and certainly not objective reasoning. He continued to paint – but in a drunken stupor – ranting and raving at the age of fifty-two. Carol stridently reassured me that I was nothing like Connelly.   
              
There was no doubt that Connelly had talent as a painter but he lacked any original ideas. The major subject of Connelly’s work was oil paint itself – which he piled on in thick slabs with the loaded brush. His pallet was dominated by dark browns, greys, blues, greens and blacks. He might have seen himself as an heir to van Gogh – and maybe he was in a very small way. However, his style also owed something to the murky Romantic paintings of Pinkham Ryder the gritty realism of Ash-Can School painters like John Slone, George Bellows and Robert Henri and the saucy bad-taste of Reginald Marsh. All-in-all, a very conservative and old-school set of influences. Unlike Schnabel, Chia, Clemente or Baselitz he had never come up with a trademark style or gimmick. His work promised but rarely delivered. Most of his paintings looked too much like other paintings by better artists both dead and alive. Yet occasionally he could pull-off a real gem of open-painting - full of gusto and style.                                                                                       

As a man, I found him pitiful, unpleasant and not talented or disciplined enough for the A-League game he sought to play so desperately.  One of the most telling things Connelly said in the documentary was: “First they tell you to be a rebel, then they tell you to kiss ass. They tell you to drink, then they tell you not to.” This heartfelt comment showed up the deceitful contradictions of art-world mythology – which often relied heavily on racy stories of artistic rebels (usually safely dead and rotting in the ground and thus with a totally materialized and commodifiable oeuvre) yet demanded utter subservience of all but the most influential, powerful and rich super stars. Sadly, for Connelly he had swallowed the public’s mythology of the tragic artist and failed to understand the real secret of artistic success – salesmanship, net-working and cunning promotion. Overall I found the documentary very instructive on the real-world, do’s-and-don’ts of the art world.                    

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