25/06/2015

Trivial Contemporary Irish Art vs. the Grandeur of the Old Masters



On Tuesday 2ed June, Carol and I went into town at 11:30am to go to see the 185th Annual RHA Exhibition and then to visit the National Gallery of Ireland. I would not have bothered going to the Annual RHA Exhibition, but Carol, had wanted to see Tracey Emin’s neon writing piece Wanting You.  Frankly, by the age of forty-four art contemporary art had lost all meaning to me - and if it wasn’t for Julian Schnabel - I would have virtually no interest in contemporary art and even his work of the last twenty years had largely been one disappointment after another.                                       
                                                           

Still, Carol  was delighted to see Tracey Emin’s neon writing piece Wanting You immediately in the foyer - though for me it was a vacuous piece that formally had taken from Joseph Kosuth’s use of neon writing - and was only interesting because it took an expressive sentiment and turned it into an adult bookshop sign. Which made me wonder if any authentic expression was possible today - especially in an art world determined to embrace ironic conceptualism and rabid commercialism. Besides, I had long since fallen out of love with Emin after getting sick to death of seeing her on television  - and she had become nothing but a desperate, self-involved celebrity droning on about her suffering while raking in the cash and claiming that - despite all evidence to the contrary - that she could actually draw! Not only could Emin not draw, she couldn’t even make interesting bad drawings. In fact, I had long since lost interest in the whole yBa movement – which had proved to be so artistically limited and hypocritical in its early Punk posturing and then rapid commercial whoring and smug membership of the RA.               
                                    

To say I was unimpressed by the vast majority of what was on offer in the RHA is an understatement. Though at least it was an open submission exhibition that theoretically at least offered everyone a chance. I found the commercialism, snobbery and elderly, upper-middle-class nature of the RHA nauseating. It was certainly not a club I wanted to be part of - and never had. Despite applying to countless galleries and accumulating over ninety-eight rejections - I had never applied to the RHA and never wanted to! I considered it a betrayal of my anarchistic ideals.                      
                                                

As usual the Annual RHA Exhibition was a mixed bag and the sheer quantity of work on display made it more a treasure hunt in a junk shop than a contemplative experience. I was very fond of John Behan’s bronze sculptures - some painted white - in particular Famine Ship in which the emigrants were blowing like sails in the wind. Though I did wonder when Irish nationalists would stop milking the famine.   


I was very impressed by David Begley’s large charcoal drawing of an x-ray which was both quite contemporary and technically a tour de force, moreover it was far superior to previous paintings I had seen him make and there were other excellent charcoal life drawings and landscapes but by people whose names I instantly forgot.                                                                                                                                


Dorothy Cross’s Silver Plates one with a cast dead bird and the other with a castrated penis (though in the art world they call it a phallus that symbolises the penis), was just another pastiche of Louise Bourgeois by Cross and another sign of an art world run by women and ineffectual, chastised men that delighted in images of castrated males and repellent anti-sex images. Yet woe betide the male painter who continued to paint naked women especially in a sexy way!                             
                                    

I was baffled by Alice Mahar’s bronze sculpture Goddess after Canova which was on an Yves Klein blue pillar. Overall it reminded me of the short lived fad in the early 1980s for the Italian Anachronisfici pastiches of Neo-Classical art by the awful painter Carlo Maria Mariani - and Maher’s work was just as pointless. I wondered if there was anything Mahar was not prepared to pastiche? And was anyone in the Irish art world ever going to call her on it? Apparently not, because here at least - they thought her a genius - and nothing critical could ever be said of a female artist these days!                 
                                    

In fact most of the sculptures on display at the 185th Annual Exhibition, were dismally conventional or crassly wacky - in a desperate attention seeking way. The exception being Stephanie Hess’ March Hare - a sensual and deceptively simple abstracted hare in patinated bronze that actually looked like it had been carved in stone - and which I craved to touch.                                                                                
                
Eithne Jordan’s bland paintings of streets and interiors in a facile, generic, contemporary style left me cold - and all I could remember was that I had preferred her when she had been a more Neo-Expressionist artist back in the late 80s and I wondered if she would ever find out who she really was.  Diana Copperwhite’s painting Fake World II did little to impress me though everyone else seemed to think she was amazing. To me she had one idea – take a large 4 inch flat paint brush and apply different colours to its sides and middle and then swipe the rainbow of colours all around the painting in vaguely figurative shapes. It was a flaccid, crass and gimmicky version of what some might consider - seen at a considerable distance - to be a wonky, late, drunken de Kooning. Yet it was too pretty and desperate to please - to ever be as great as a de Kooning.                                                                                         


James Hanley’s comical drawings from monuments and sculptures were absurdly stupid works which proved to me why his work was so unconvincing, he aspired to classical values but he had the personality of a clown. Hanley’s huge unsubtle portraits in oils were so bad they reminded me of illustrational murals on a toy store wall.                                                                         

A far more convincing work was Geraldine O'Neill’s large Drawing which was similar to her large oil painting Is feidir le cat Schrödinger an dá thrá a fhreastal which had been shortlisted for the Hennessy Portrait Prize ’14 and I had hated. This time however, I found O’Neill’s Drawing to be a far more coherent and satisfying work, though I still found O'Neill caught between wanting to be a pretentious Old Master and gimmicky contemporary artist – resulting in work that satisfied neither desire.      
                                

Colin Martin’s painting of interiors like a sound studio were above average though not as good as work I had seen him do years ago - because they seemed comparatively rushed and unfinished. Donald Teskey displayed some actual soul in his expressive Irish landscapes though they were very conventional works.                                                                                                                                                           

Rapid Eye Movement an oil on panel painting by Darragh Dempsey of a woman’s legs seen poking out from under a bed and spot lit by a torch was a technically accomplished work that actually haunted my imagination.                                                                                                                               
       
There were probably many more quality works that I did not look at properly because I was so dazed or appalled by the surrounding rubbish. And trying to make sense of why some works sold and so many others did not - I could only think they did not match people’s interior decoration. I found, so much of the rest of the art at the 185th Annual RHA Exhibition, posturing and pastiched art that was desperate to be liked, flattered to deceive and grandstanded its supposed technical skill which in fact was mostly nothing but the following of formulas, largely pointless and not worth the effort. So many of these works were trying to ape photography or were obsessed with memetic skill - but without any consideration for original ideas, deeply felt emotion or an authentic vision of the world. Mostly it was schooled art by technician’s who had learned some shortcuts but who were not real artists and who despite tricking out their work with contemporary themes were as bourgeois, conservative, sanctimonious, sentimental, twee, kitsch and unoriginal as their boring, ludicrous and instantly forgettable predecessors in the RHA a hundred years ago.                                                                                                       
                           
Moreover most of this art was politically and socially correct to a fault, parroting the new liberal consensus around sexuality, the nationalist consensus around Irishness and the political right wing consensus around economics. That, I too shared some of these views - did not stop me feeling uneasy in such an age of conformity, group think and rabble rousing - and I itched to be contrarian. Fed on bohemian myths of Modernist transgression and rebellion, I had decided as a youth to become and artist, but now as a middle aged man, I realised that rebellion in art was just a Hollywood fiction and the forces of coercive academic, commercial and stylistic conformity were vast in comparison.                                    
                        

Of course to these respectable professionals, my art was offensive, deplorable, unacceptable, and nothing to do with art as they saw it. Yet, I frankly did not care a wit what they thought of as art – in fact the whole idea of ‘Art’ had become questionable to me because; art had once again become; an academic exercise, success required such incredible networking and media whoring, styles had become as meaningless as musical one hit wonders, art was never going to be anything but a censored, glorified and moralised version of reality, artists would always strive toward ever greater self-aggrandising pretension and obscurity and art was largely nothing but a business like any other - where ‘rebels’ were nothing but entrepreneurs posing as Punks. After the blip of Modernism, art was again the most bourgeois, sanctimonious and conventional thing to do imaginable - yet it pretended it was still radical.                           
                       
So for me, the vast array of pastel and grey coloured paintings - mostly painted in a similar way - blended into one amorphous academic mass of conformity. Even the more youthful and gimmicky works by younger artists played with the same clichés of NCAD painting and Vitamin P (the much passed about book on self-consciously contemporary, arty illustrational painting) that I had become all too familiar. And the so called expressive works were risible cartoons of expressivity by buffoons not tortured souls.                    

 
I noticed how stupid many of the abstract works looked amongst figurative paintings, photographs and sculptures - which made their aesthetics seem slim and insignificant. Even abstract artists I had previously thought highly of in solo exhibition like Richard Gorman - looked exposed and vacant and I was astonished his work had not developed or changed in nearly fifteen years. If ever a style need the unchallenged megalomaniacal solo exhibition space it was Abstraction - especially if it was very mediocre abstraction. There was a whole room full of artily staged looking photographs, many of them magazine supplement quality - but I simply did not care about the vast majority of photography as an art form.                                                                                                                                         
               
In the basement some head banger in a balaclava and army fatigues was in a cage pottering about, amongst new canvases still in their cellophane wrappers. In fact all he had seemed to do is scrawl on a white board for a few minutes and then go out for a cigarette break. I took one look at him and walked back upstairs. I had no idea what he was trying to say or why he chose to stage a revolution in the bowel of academia - and I didn’t care. Besides I had done a far better performance piece in an art gallery in 2002!    


Of course all the above was my own personal opinion and one not shared in the Irish art world by all accounts. In fact if one was to judge by critics like Adian Dunne and Cristín Leach Hughes most of this art was splendid. For Irish art, with it incestuous familiarity, did not operate on the principal of open critique but rather on the basis of opaque favours - handed out to those in the beloved inner circle - and wordless banishment to all those not deemed worthy. In other words, you were either exhibited by curators or not and mentioned by critics and praised - or ignored completely. Such a ‘humane’ system where if you couldn’t say anything nice you said nothing at all - allowed nothing in the Irish art world to be questioned and nobody’s position to be revealed. ‘Geniuses’ were presented to you and you either believed the hype or were a philistine - not worth inviting to their dinner parties. The unfashionable, obscene, ‘non-artists’ living in oblivion, were denied bad reviews - and the possibility of historical redress - that had been accorded so many of the heroes of Modernism. Thus in its way this new liberal consensus held an even greater death grip over culture than the conservative anti-Modernist culture it had over thrown.                                              

Getting a headache from the sea of mediocrity we left and headed to Hodges Figgis, where I bought The Essential Cy Twombly a beautiful tomb on one of my favourite artists of the past sixty years and one of the biggest influences on my own art. I also bought Keeping an Eye Open a collection of essays on art by Julian Barnes whose writing instantly impressed me – which was not easy. Barnes brought a novelist eye to the lives of many of the great French masters of Romanticism, Impressionism and Modernism and gave me a refreshingly jargon and theory free perspective to their art. In fact, when I started reading it at home a few days later - I could not put it down! Barnes instantly became one of my favourite contemporary literary writers on art up there with the sadly departed John Updike. (Then at the end of June, I was delighted that Barnes’s Keeping an Eye Open was the book at bedtime on BBC Radio 4 and even though I had read it by then - I enjoyed hearing Barnes reading extracts from it.)                                                            

Then we went to the National Gallery of Ireland and went around the Sean Scully retrospective which had a few surprisingly beautiful paintings from the mid-1980s which made me slightly reassess my poor opinion of him. However, he remained in my mind the most overrated painter of the past thirty years and a desperately limited one at that. Looking through a catalogue to the exhibition, I saw a large number of his early figurative works from the 1960s - which were sadly not included in the exhibition because they would have given me a great source of merriment! There were one or two promising life drawings, but overall his figurative work was appallingly bad – tenth rate at best – so I found it amusing that he had the cunning to ditch figurative art and become an abstract painter hailed as one of the foremost painters alive! Personally I thought there was more artistry in the stone wall makers of the Aran Islands (whose walls Scully photographed in some of the better works in the exhibition) than in him. Yet the likes of Scully, were the professional model to follow in the debacle after the death of Modernism. His academic pedigree, his teaching posts, his rabid commercialism, his incessant exhibitions of his over 1,400 paintings of rectangles - were acceptable to every country in the world from Communist dictatorships, Islamic Kingdoms and Western democracies where taking politically correct offense had become endemic and forming Twitter lynch mobs a sport.             

                                                                                                                      
Finally after an afternoon in the bogs and foothills of art we ascended near the peak with a look around the permanent collection which though largely mediocre - compared with the likes of The National Gallery in London, Louvre, Prado, Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie or the Metropolitan Museum of New York - still possessed paintings of a technical skill, sophistication and humane ambition that made what we had seen earlier in the day look like the pathetic efforts of remedial students. Perversely, this more quietly spoken art revealed truths of beauty, which the noisy shouting of mediocrity could not even envision, and rather than bludgeoning the viewer with claims of importance, which turned out to be nothing but a sales pitch, this great art uplifted and inspired in ways we today are not even fully conscious of - because our visual awareness and attention span has become so scatter-brained, distorted and debased. Compared to the garish sound bites of contemporary art these paintings by the Old Masters were visual epic poems of the most entrancing kind. However, I wasn’t even interested in looking at the overly familiar world class masterpieces by the likes of Titian, Vermeer or Goya. Instead I wanted to spend some time looking at other quality works that I had not seen in a while, like the stunning 14th century altarpieces replete with old gold leaf and displaying naïve but endearing form and intense and loving faith in God. Though looking at them I felt a shiver of sadness at these alters ripped from their churches and reduction to aesthetic objects - as well as a curiosity about how they originally looked in the churches they had been painted for. Still, in their thick, wooden, amputated reliefs - they had a tremendous suggestive power. Some young women laughed nervously at their naïveté - yet surely they were whistling past the graveyard – unnerved by an uncanny vision so alien to our modern world. For who are we to judge their work? Yes, their perspective and anatomy was naïve by later standards - yet this was compensated for by an obsessive faith in God we cannot even imagine. Personally, I did not believe in God, but if anything artistic was going to persuade me - it was these paintings.                                                                                                                                                 

As for portraits, there was not a woman or man able to paint as convincing and regal a portrait as Sofonisba Anguissola’s Portrait of Prince Alessandro Farnese from around 1560 and which was a far better proof of female talent in painting than the hysterics of Feminist artists since the 1960s. I also was entranced by the torch light painting The Image of Saint Alexis attributed to Georges de La Tour with its mixture of chiaroscuro, dramatic torch light and classical solidity of form  - which made the efforts of RHA members look like gaudy computer generated graphics.                                                                                          

As for still-life, just take Jan Weenix’s Game-piece: the Garden of a Château, from the 1690s. It was a relatively minor genre painting by a minor painter, however its mastery illustrated to me the tragic technical and intellectual gap between our contemporary efforts in paint with those before the advent of photography. I remember first seeing this painting as a young boy teaching myself how to draw. I studied How-To-Books in which almost the first lesson was how to draw an apple - that was rendered as a schematic line drawing of what looked more like something made of quartz. I could not imagine then, just how far I would have to go to ever attempt something like Jan Weenix nor did I know that I would never reach that point nor have the temperament or sanity to achieve it. Moreover, I did not know that the whole idea of representational painting would be called into question by my later study of Modernism and Post-Modernism and embrace of Expressionism and Neo-Expressionism.                                                       

Yet, I was delighted to see this old friend again, and marvelled at its sumptuous display of atmosphere and sensual and tactile surfaces from; the damp dusky sky above a limpid classical landscape in the background, to the ripe fruit and brace of birds, cockerel and the dead hare hung by its right paw and slumping forward in a diagonal pose that was reminiscent of Ruben’s The Elevation of The Cross. It took the sad death of an animal and made it tragic and lamentable. Yet it did so without the psychotic ranting of vegans today, and it made it clear that this was simply the way things were in the natural world where men still killed what they ate. Every object in Game-piece: the Garden of a Château had its own feel, from the damp of the sky, to velvet feel of the flowers, to the fuzz on the peaches to the fur on the hare and every inch of the canvas had hidden details like classical sculptures in the background and busy insects on the fruit. There was not a single painter alive who could paint like that convincingly nor was society set up to encourage such patient and selfless labour nor was any audience willing to spend as much time contemplating it as the painter had on painting it. Neither today’s painter nor his audience had the patience or focus to look for hours at the same image and forsake all the millions of others spewed out by the internet daily. Nor did we believe in ancient symbolism or understand their meanings in the visceral way those schooled in them once did. So Jan Weenix’s painting illustrated for me all that we had lost and could never regain - but which we would be fools not to at least acknowledge. That was the glory of art history - it proved a constant rebuke to those contemporary manipulators who try to pretend things can never be any different or we are living in a golden age of geniuses or that we are progressing toward some kind of utopia.

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