Julian Schnabel at Hillsboro Fine Art 2009

Tipped off by a friend on MySpace, I learned that an exhibition of works on paper by Julian Schnabel was on its last day of display in the Hillsboro Fine Art gallery, which specialized in 20^th Century and Contemporary Art. So on Saturday 10^th October, at 9:45am, I left my house full of excitement and travelled into town on the bus over-flowing with expectation. I had hoped Carol would join me but she had to sleep after a night of collaging.                                                                                                      

Hillsboro Fine Art, was directly opposite the Rotunda Hospital’s new entrance on Parnell Square. However when I arrived at the gallery at 10:30am - when it was due to open - I found the door locked and the galleries lights off. In desperation, I rang the intercom three times and then knocked on the door three times, before realizing there was no one there. From the window, I could see a beautiful Schnabel painting on paper - under glass and framed in a lovely black frame. I was so close and yet so far!                                                            

I decided to go to Chapters bookshop in order to kill sometime - where I bought a small book on Egon Schiele. Then I went back to the gallery at 11am but it was still closed! So I went down to Easons’ to look around. It was absolutely packed with news people, photographers and slack-jawed heavy-metal fans, pressed around to see Ozzy Osbourne who was signing books. I saw the back of his head as he signed autographs but I felt contemptuous of the whole circus. I went to McDonalds and had a Big Mac meal, which I loved.                                                                                                                                       

Then I went back to the Hillsboro gallery only to find it still closed at 12pm. I was just about to leave when a gallery woman came and unlocked the door. “Eh, is the exhibition still open to view?” I asked her desperately. “Eh, yes you can come in, but I am only here to receive a delivery.” She replied in a kindly manner. “Oh, thank you! I’m not a collector, I’m just an artist but I came into town especially to the Schnabel’s! I am a huge Schnabel fan!” I exclaimed. She let me into the gallery and turned on the lights.                                                                                                         

Apart from Schnabel’s works, the exhibition New York Contemporary included small paintings on canvas by Ross Bleckner, Donald Baechler, David Salle and Jeff Schneider - none of which I was very impressed by - in fact I could think of countless Irish painters who had shown better works in Dublin in recent years. But, I was delighted and enthralled, by the Neo-Abstract-Expressionist Schnabel works on view.                                                                                                                

He was represented by about six hand-painted screen-prints, with resin dripped on them. They dated from 1995 and came from editions of 80. In fact, despite the fact they were in part screen-prints, Schnabel’s personality oozed from them. Again, I was struck by the Joie de Vivre of Schnabel’s Neo-Salon brand of Expressionism and its total lack of angst. The colours were bold and strong – fuchsia pinks, cobalt blues, and darker blues and burnt reds - brushed on in semi-thick, textured, gestural strokes - around which he wrote words like; La Blusa Rosa, Otono, Mujer, Invierno, and Primaveral’ which gave the works their titles. The works reflected Schnabel’s new life with his Spanish wife Olatz and his visits to Spain that year. They were inspired works, which relied on Schnabel’s subconscious manipulation of forms and materials. They reminded me of late Miró canvases that mixed surrealism with the sale and effects of Abstract-Expressionism and the later works of Cy Twombly with their ad-hoc mixture of classical words and abstract scribbles of paint. The largest pieces like La Blusa Rosa I were about 40” x 32” where as the others were slightly smaller at about 40” x 30.” They were all works on stiff watercolour paper of an average quality. Dripped and pooled on the paper, was thick golden looking resin, in anthropomorphic shapes, which proved very effective and suggestive of phalluses or torsos. Even if to the uninitiated, his work could have looked slap-dash, haphazard and crude - I was struck by the artfulness within the apparent chaos of Schnabel’s work. I found his abstract works emotionally engaging and his brushwork skilful and measured. He just had a knack for making beautiful splashes and swirls of paint - which evoked thoughts of places and people.                                                                            

There was also a colour lithograph based on a black and white photo of his stunningly beautiful wife Olatz. She looked out of the picture with a sultry stare, with her hands behind the back of her head - above which he had crudely painted in white My Wife. It was merely a family snapshot, given the professional artists gloss, of a fine art print enhancement and glorification. It was factory made Expressionism and the weakest work on show. The work was the 31st print, of an edition of 2000, and was selling for €2, 500! The more ambitious pieces were not priced. Despite the worst economic depression in Ireland since the 1930s, I was astonished to find all the Schnabel works had sold – though I agreed with the buyers and only wished I had that kind of money.                                                                

Also in the show were works by Jeff Schneider who used a cowboy motif repeatedly, but his efforts looked little-better than a young graduates efforts. There were a couple of black and white paintings in oils by Donald Baechler, which I liked, but did not think they added up to much.                    

            

I looked around to find the David Salle works but could not recognize them. Ross Bleckner was represented by two small oil still-life’s of flowers in a kind of fuzzy Post-Impressionistic style which left bare linen underneath to add to the fuzziness. I thought them utterly redundant works. So I concentrated my last few minutes looking again at the Schnabel’s and for once I was consumed with the desire to own art. I thanked the woman and left soaring on air as I walked back through the city.

Tracey Emin The Feminist Capitalist

“The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is "What does a woman want?"

Sigmund Freud

In mid March 2006, I watched What Price Art on channel 4, in which Tracey Emin explored the issue of the prices fetched by women artists in comparison to male artists. In the 1970s courses like Women's Studies propagated endless thesis and later biographies on neglected female artists. Those artists it highlighted Artemisia Gentileschi, Gwen John, Modersohn-Becker, and Frida Kahlo were good third-rate artists but not geniuses - you could easily pick a hundred forgotten male artists just as good if not better. It is a cold fact that the history of art is 99.999% dominated by dead white male western artists. This fact is a subject of intense outrage by people less interested in art and more interested in the gender, race, and religion of artists than in the actual quality of the art they make. In The Obstacle Race Germane Greer studied the history of female artists and concluded that while art history was full of female child prodigies - they never lived up to their early promise. The 1970s and 1980s saw a spate of women only exhibitions, which only further ghettoized women, and since most of the art exhibited was rubbish it did nothing to promote the cause of respect for women artists. Camille Paglia famously declared in Sexual Persona that there would never be a female genius like Mozart because there were not blood-lust killers like Jake the Ripper. Genius like psychopathic blood-lust killing she claimed was a peculiarly male phenomenon. Paglia claimed that feminist excuses for a lack of geniuses - like social neglect, prejudice or motherhood - were irrelevant because many great male artists faced prejudice, neglect, poverty and derision. I thought it was far too early in female emancipation to agree with this. And already many strong female artists had emerged like Louise Bourgeois and Paula Rego. But what really annoyed me about Tracey's utterly self serving and self-obsessed documentary  - was its reduction of art to money  - spawned as it was by her own anger that the likes of Damien Hirst's work sold for higher prices than her own. However, to me it was self evident that Hirst was an infinitely better artist than Emin and more importantly he was a far greater curator and promoter of the London Art scene. As far as I could tell, Emin had done nothing but promote herself and her art relentlessly for the past twenty years. Hirst on the other hand had worked in collaboration with others artists, and began his life as a curator of others artists work. Hirst along with Saatchi and Joplin made the London sense - Tracey just crashed it and screamed for attention.