Showing posts with label Anne Tallentire. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anne Tallentire. Show all posts

14/03/2014

The Morton Feldman Collection at IMMA



Spring had finally arrived in Ireland in mid-April 2009, after the coldest winter since 1963. Carol and I went out on a trip to IMMA on a beautiful Sunday when there was not a cloud in the cobalt sky. We got the DART into town and then the Luas tram up to Heuston station. Town was busy with day-trippers, parents with their children, tourists and young lovers. People looked as happy as I felt that spring had finally arrived. Normally the journey out to IMMA felt like an expedition, but for once, I enjoyed it. I felt like a man released from a dark prison and loved the feel of the sunlight on my face.       
                                                

I had finally been tempted out to IMMA one of my least favourite Irish art museums, by an exhibition dedicated to the avant-garde composer Marty Feldman whose friendship with painters of the New York School had inspired his own compositions. I had never heard of Feldman but apparently, he was one of the most influential composers of the 20th century, known for his experiments with musical notation and advocacy of ideas like indeterminacy. He was a contemporary and friend of John Cage and a critic of Pierre Boulez who he called with malice a “magnificent academician.” (Juan Manuel Bonet, Vertical Thoughts: Morton Feldman and the Visual Arts, Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2010 P.19.) Influenced by the Abstract-Expressionists, Feldman prized an unsystematic approach to composition and was thus a critic of systematic composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Boulez. Curious to listen to his music, I downloaded some online. It tried my patience, and most of it sounded like pretentious orchestral sound pieces, that may have been original and challenging to write, but where even more challenging to endure and enjoy. A music lover might have felt the same about the paintings on view, but they surely had the advantage of being consumable within a few blinks of the eye even if they could take years to understand fully.                                                                                                                                                       

The I.M.M.A exhibition in part, was a reviving of an exhibition Feldman had curated in 1967 called ‘Six Painters’ which had centred on Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Piet Mondrian, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko most of whom he had close friendships with. This show expanded on that one to include other artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauchenberg, Cy Twombly and Francesco Clemente as well as lesser known painters like Sonja Sekula whose surreal abstract paintings were a revelation and reminded me of large, mad Paul Klee’s. The exhibition was a large and richly rewarding selection of abstract paintings, drawings and prints by these artists as well as a selection of Turkish rugs that Feldman had also admired. Most of the works were abstract yet covered a full spectrum from the geometric to the gestural. They indicated a collector with sensitivity and soul. Together the works created a thrilling and passionate dialogue on the walls.                                                                                                                           

The exhibition explored the influence of these painters on Feldman’s who said, “I learned more from painters than I learned from composers.” (Juan Manuel Bonet, Vertical Thoughts: Morton Feldman and the Visual Arts, Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2010 P.7.) Writing about the Abstract-Expressionists Feldman wrote, “My quarrel with the term ‘Action Painting’ is that it gave rise to the erroneous idea that the painter, now being ‘free’, could do ‘anything he liked’. But it is not at all true that the more one is free, the more things one has to choose from. Actually, it is the academician who has the alternatives. Freedom is best understood by someone like Rothko, who was free to do only one thing – to make a Rothko – and did so over and over again... This type of freedom creates a problem for us because we are not free to imitate it.” (Morton Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street, Juan Manuel Bonet, Vertical Thoughts: Morton Feldman and the Visual Arts, Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2010 P.29.) I could not have agreed more with this clear insight into the hard-won signature styles of the various Abstract-Expressionists, and how while technically their work could easily be copied nearly any art student, it could not be imitated by anyone wanting to be taken seriously by a connoisseur or art world insider.                


Feldman, nostalgically remembered the time in the early 1950s when painters were outsiders, battling poverty and neglect before people began to take art seriously as a form of commerce and study: “Now, almost twenty years later, as I see what happens to work, I ask myself more and more why everybody knows so much about art... To me it seems as though the artist is fighting a heavy sea in a rowboat, while alongside him a pleasure liner takes all these people to the same place. Every graduate student today knows exactly what degree of ‘angst’ belongs in a de Kooning, can point out disapprovingly just when he has let up, relaxed. Everybody knows that one Betty Davis movie where she went out of style. It’s another bullring, with everyone knowing the rules of the game. What was great about the 1950s is that for one brief moment – maybe, say, six weeks – nobody understood art.” (Morton Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street, Juan Manuel Bonet, Vertical Thoughts: Morton Feldman and the Visual Arts, Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2010 P.29.)                                                                                                                                


The Abstract-Expressionists had been like Gods to me when I was a young artist. I admired their toughness, originality, dedication and passionate pursuit of modernist gesture, stain and drip in the last credible attempt to capture the soul of being. In a sense, their canvases were the last credible attempts at religious art.      


They were also the last generation of mavericks who made art because they could do nothing else and not as an academic career move.     
                                                                                   

I remember as a teenager peering at tiny, jaundiced colour (or worse still black and white) photographs of their large paintings, trying in my head to imagine what their scale was. It was only in 1989, in L.A. that I first saw some of their work in the flesh, and I remembered being flabbergasted by their grandeur, painterly sophistication and engulfing expanses of colour. Their scale demanded first hand viewing, because standing engulfed in front of their large canvases created little sensations you would miss in reproduction.                                                                                                                                           

New York in the 1940s was one of the most exciting places for art in history. The youthful, insular and provincial America was about to be thrust onto the centre stage of the world in the most bloodiest of terms. World War 2 changed everything including art. Fleeing persecution and possible death, artists from across Europe boarded boats to Ellis Island, carrying with them, prized art works and heads full of ideas. A thrilling meeting of minds then occurred between these Europeans like Piet Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst and the American avant-garde.                                                                                            


Early modernist authors belittled American art before the Abstract-Expressionists. Yet to say that America was artistically backward was a gross inaccuracy. It had spiritual Native American art even if at the time it was only beginning to be appreciated by a handful of enlightened collectors and artists like Jackson Pollock. Then there was its distinguished canon European influenced masters of painting like Winslow Homer, John-Singer Sargent, Mardsen Hartley and Edward Hopper. Yet in Western America – the new frontier – few original ideas had emerged. Greenberg worried over this provincialism, as did many of the artists in Greenwich Village at the time. The question became, how could they learn from the painterly architecture of Cézanne, the spatial constructions of cubism, the abstract purity of Mondrian, the musicality of Kandinsky and the Surrealist automatism of Miró? How could they then push those ideas about form, medium, style and inspired vision in a new direction and give it a distinctly American voice. Many also saw this as a moral act – against the evil of Fascism and its reactionary cultural brutalism.                             


At the time, the supposedly large size of their canvases was taken as radically American. Yet in fact, their canvases were standard for Venetian Painters like Titian and Tintoretto as well as the French Salon. No, it was their scale that was radical. They were like a ten-inch segment of a Tintoretto but on ten-foot long canvas. In addition, how they chose to inhabit that space was radically different. As Harold Rosenberg wrote, “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act – rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyse or ‘express and object actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” (Harold Rosenberg, The American Action Painters, 1952, quoted from Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Ed. Charles Harrison & Paul Wood, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995, P. 581.) This emphasis on the actions of the artist would unexpectedly influence early Happenings and Performance art.                                                                                           


Unfortunately, Abstract-Expressionism was a victim of its own success. The grandiose claims made for it, the ease with which it could be parodied, its eventual commercialization and the parodies made of it by Pop Art meant it was finished as a viable model of art by the late 1950s. Besides the age of the macho, alcoholic, largely self-taught artist was over. The 1960s and 1970s would see the emergence of the college educated, theoretical and camp artist, women artists, multi-ethnic artists and gay and lesbian artists more concerned with content than form. The whole notion of the self-important macho genius battling the world took on the quality fiction. Therefore, the world of Pollock and de Kooning now seemed like the stuff of legend. This show revealed a far more intimate and humble side to the Ab-Ex’s and in a way, the works were all the more persuasive because of it.                                                                                              


The show started on the ground floor with some masterpieces by Piet Mondrian. Despite my usual scepticism towards geometric abstraction, I had always recognised Mondrian’s genius, and admired the intense handmade quality of his abstract canvases, which represented a lifetime’s distillation of visual thought. Along with Mondrian’s paintings, was a short colour film of his studio in Manhattan, which was like a three-dimensional painting all its own. His studio was immaculately ordered and on the white walls, were colour swatches and drawings that he was working on. It provided a great insight into his working methods and the rigor of his process.                                                                        
                           

In the next room were beautiful and suggestive early abstracts by Philip Guston. When I was a teenager, I had not thought much of Philip Guston, his work, or at least from what I could gather through reproduction, seemed less radical than Pollock, de Kooning or Rothko. Yet seeing his late Clans men paintings changed my view of him and as I grew older, I found myself returning more often to his work. Feldman’s collection included mid-career abstracts that shimmered with fields of rich, impastoed brushstrokes that echoed Monet’s late water lily paintings. They were hard won, self-critical and elegiac.


Much to my delight there was a large oil painting and a couple of ink drawings by Franz Kilne, whose work I had been looking at only recently. I found the small, brushed ink drawings surprisingly elegant and reasoned in their bold gestures. The large black and white canvas with a shot of dark violet Black Iris, 1961, shocked me with its scale and simplicity. Like his drawings, I found it stylish - yet somewhat empty and merely decorative.                                                                                                                                

The largish Rothko canvas The Green Strip, 1955, was a beautiful piece and seeing the way Rothko revised and corrected the floating rectangles that were stained, scumbled and dripped with a slow build-up of tragic fullness was very convincing.                                                                                                            


One of my favourite pieces in the exhibition was an A1 sized abstract on paper by Jackson Pollock, which entranced the eye with looping spirals of enamel paint on gesso that became within moments like a milky-way of life made manifest. It was an Apollonian masterpiece made after a long Dionysian struggle to master form.  The only tragedy in this work lay in the knowledge that its maker would self-destruct only a few years later.                                                                                                                                        

I loved the large oil on vellum on canvas painting No Title, 1970-74, by de Kooning. I admired his daringly bright colours and muscular and wristy drawing that bounced around yet retained its solid structural core - that was suggestive of a male figure similar to his meaty bronze sculpture Clam Digger I had seen in Amsterdam many years before.                                                                                                         


Twombly was represented by A Murder of Passion, 1960, a large spare white canvas scribbled with pencil, wax crayon and oil paint. There were also and two collaged charcoal drawings by Twombly from slightly later in his career. I loved them all, but my favourite was the intense drawing Untitled (Leonardo Drawing), 1971. I could not make out the meaning of the drawing or of the notations, corrections and words that he used. It seemed a private language or dialogue on which I was eavesdropping. Yet for sheer intense mark-making - I loved it.                                        
                                                                       

In the courtyard downstairs, we saw Le Temps du Sommeil, an exhibition of tiny oil paintings on wood by the Belgium artist Francis Alys, which in badly drawn and panted images and scrawled text recorded his compulsive wanderings in cities. The 108 paintings were monotonously similar in images, colouring and painterly conceits. They were in part poetic and in part sociological observations of an outsider/tourist/bum. Carol loved them, and told me he was quite a cult hero to the lecturers and students in NCAD but I thought they were some of the most uncreative and technically incompetent paintings I had ever seen.                                                                                                                                    

I had seen Alys’ video piece Rehersal I, 1999-2004, in the Douglas Hyde Gallery some years before. The video recorded the attempts of a red Beetle car to get up a hill and I remembered finding it both boring and pointless - but then these were the very qualities that were most admired in contemporary art. In other performances, Alys had pushed a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it melted into a puddle and pulled a magnetic dog through the city as it collected metal rubbish from the ground. All of these fey and frustrating efforts charmed art world insiders. However, given Mexico’s implosion due to drugs cartels, epidemic political corruption, poverty and mass emigration - they reminded me of Nero fiddling while Rome burnt.                                                                                                                    

Alys had said, “I entered the art field by accident: a coincidence of geographical, personal and legal matters resulted in indefinite vacations which through a mixture of boredom, curiosity and vanity, led to my present profession. The rather mixed media practice is the consequence of ignorance: not being skilled in any specific medium, I might as well pretend to all of them.” I wondered why I had bother spending thirty years learning to draw and paint, given my heart and soul to everything I had made and tried to produce work that had ambition - when art had become a avoidance of craft, skill, ego, elitism and confrontation.                                                                          


We then moved on to the other exhibitions in the main part of IMMA We had a quick look around the Anne Tallentire exhibition This, and other things, 1999-2010. It was a tedious collection of; scaffolding nested with TV monitors showing dull video pieces of construction works, an interactive power-point presentation of even more mundane photographs of Dublin including things like trashcans, as well as other passé conceptual texts pieces that looked like the tired efforts of a very untalented art student in a minor art college. I had absolutely no desire to stay any longer to try and figure out what any of it was supposed to say. In a side room on a table lay stacks of coloured paper with short text/poems by Tallentire - they were trite and predictably quirky. A sign on the table asked us to take one of the top pages. I did not want her work even if it was free. I could have gone back around the exhibition and tried to fathom its meaning, but my life was too short. While writing about it, I could have studied Tallentire life’s work on line – but I simply did not give a dam.                                                                                                               

We quickly moved on to the East Wing Galleries, and the work of the Cuban-American artist Jorge Pardo (supposedly “one of the most influential artists of his generation”) whose sole exhibition was a very expensive wallpaper piece of what looked like all his life’s work including sculpture, installations, design and architecture - laid out on wallpaper in a grandiose time line. I thought the idea of putting your life’s work up on massive wrap-around wallpaper was a clever conceit. Most art was just wallpaper anyway, no matter how grand its maker intends it to be. Yet it was also a work of the internet age – in which information flowed anarchisticly and fragmented meaning was in the eye of the atomised consumer. It was also a work unthinkable without photo-shop or adobe illustrator. It was only a shame the subject of its visual cacophony was such an incessantly productive mediocrity. How I wondered was I to experience this visual vomit? Did the artist expect me to look in humble devotion to every single photograph of bad abstracts, boring furniture, dutiful assistants making his art and family photos? Was I expected to read every single historical timeline and all that was written on the oval shaped benches that ran through the space? Or was I to be bombarded into submission and dazed into credulity? I would have preferred to see one – just one image or object of excellence, summation and beauty.                                                                               


Personally, I could not understand how Jorge Pardo was considered an artist at all. His unoriginal and flamboyant designs - struck me as nothing more than decadent decoration. A designer of ‘sculptures’, ‘paintings’, furniture, architecture and interior decoration his work fitted in perfectly with art in the noughties - which had become nothing more than uncritical accoutrements to conspicuous wealth. An exhibition of his work in Brown Thomas would have been far more appropriate. I imagined Duchamp and Warhol turning in their graves at the realization that they had fostered such posers.                                
            

What Happens Next Is a Secret in one of the downstairs courtyard rooms was one of the worst exhibitions I had ever seen! It struck me as a kind of curatorial assault upon IMMA’s own collection. How much of the maliciously incompetent display of the art works was a deliberate deconstruction of the traditions of artistic display I could not tell. The labels for the paintings were (deliberately?) just stuck up crookedly like post-it-notes and meters away from what they were indicating. The pictures were hung together with no discernible rhyme nor reason. The sculptures seemed just thrown around the room often preventing any clear-passage for the viewer. Frankly, a high-school student could have installed a better show. Was it to be seen alongside Tallentire and Pardo’s work as a parable about the complete bankruptcy of Western culture? A culture at a point of Alexandrian exhaustion - that had ended not because it had too little. But because it had too much and most of it was decadent trivialities.