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.

Northern Stars and Southern Lights: The Golden Age of Finnish Art 1870-1920

On Sunday 10^th January 2009, I went with Carol to Northern Stars and Southern Lights: The Golden Age of Finnish Art 1870-1920. After the fitful genius of Paintings from Poland in November 2007, I had high hopes that this exposé of Finnish art would be as enthralling. I cannot say that it was, but then I was not in a good mood when I saw the show. I found the exhibition of Finnish Art a grim experience. Dublin was cold and snow was expected. I was feeling old and fearful for my mother’s health and for my future – so seeing parts of this exhibition was like being taken into a melancholy ward to die. I found many of these paintings gripped with a nihilistic hopelessness that I could easily identify with. However, for once I longed for more beautiful escapist art.    

                                                                                                  

The show was dominated by pictures of pretty children, sorrowful children, pretty women, working women, social deprivation, middle-class bliss, winter landscapes and strange Nordic myths. Overall I found the technical standard of drawing and painting quite high. It was Salon art with workman like draughtsmanship, unusual compositions and odd pallets dominated by whites, greys, greens, pinks and blues– often in an attempt to outdo photography with minute details, intense lighting, obscure narratives and symbolically laden subjects.                                                                                                         

The exhibition was divided up thematically into six sections; Naturalism in Finnish Art, Influence from France, Epic Landscapes, Legends and Myths, The 1900 World Fair and Early Modernism. In the first section there were some sorrowful paintings of children by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, but nothing compared to the apocalyptic looking painting Under The Yoke (Burning the Brushwood), 1893, by Eero Jarnefelt. It was an odd painting, combining the usually idealistic and flattering techniques of academic art - with agi-prop social record. The soot covered face of the little girl in the centre of the painting, her clothes in rags, standing in front of burning fires of wood, smoke billowing up around her - as she stared out bleakly at the viewer - haunted my nightmares for months to come. As social propaganda against; child labour, the exploitation of the poor and the ecological destruction of the land - it was compelling. Its grating Naturalism was unforgettable - however as art I did not think it worked. It lacked the universal vision of a true masterpiece.                                                                                                                                 

Albert Edelfet was represented by Conveying the Child’s Coffin, 1879, a large luminous painting of a group of people on a boat - bring a coffin across a lake. In was typical of much of the socially conscious academic art of the 1870s which was inspired by the socialist examples of French masters like Courbet and Millet. Edelfelt superbly deployed academic drawing, composition and tonal-shading – enlivened by a lighter more Impressionist inspired pallet - to record a grim moment in Finnish life. Edelfelt had captured the intense low light of the North excellently and the painting seemed to radiate. However, it had a staged, posed and wooden feeling that made it unconvincing as great art.

Fanny Churberg was represented by some wonderfully fresh alla-prima paintings of skies painted with vigorous and intense flat brush strokes. In fact they were some of the few - free and sensual paintings in the show. On the other hand Pekka Halonen in The Short Cut, 1892 and later in The 1900 World Fair section with Washing on the Ice, 1900, managed to paint some of the bleakest, most depressing and frigid pictures I had ever seen.           
                                                                                        
Later in the Influence from France section, Albert Edelfelt was this time represented by much more atmospheric, sensual and romantic paintings of pretty young women; reading books under trees, learning to play piano, or posed looking invitingly at the viewer. Other’s like Gunnar Berndtson and Akseli Gallen-Kallela also proved themselves adept at making attractive portraits of pretty middle class Finnish girls - and recording the easy going delights of family life. 

Some of the landscapes represented Finland as a barren, inhospitable, lonely wilderness. The extreme coldness of Finland depicted was unusually poignant to me - after weeks of temperatures as low as -3 degrees Centigrade in Dublin. So, I marvelled at these painters fortitude painting in an even colder climate – sometimes out of doors!                                                                                                   

The unsurpassed masterpiece of the landscape section (and maybe the whole show) was Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s Imatra in Winter, 1893. This huge canvas of an icy river, bounded by banks of deep snow and trees densely frosted with snowflakes was epic in its intensity. Gallen-Kallela had managed to go beyond the merely picturesque and animated nature. His masterful and evocative use of a Mirada of whites haunted my imagination. However most of the rest of the landscape section was undistinguished - apart from its unusual Northern topography. 

The low point of the show for me was the Legends and Myths section, with its crude folk revival art that verged on the comically bad. It exposed the poverty of Gallen-Kallela and Hugo Simberg’s imaginations, the limitations of their technique and immaturity of their visions. Akseli Gallen-Kallela reappeared again with two of the most ridiculous looking paintings I had ever seen. Aino Myth, Triptych, 1889, which seemed like nothing more than an excuse to show lots of naked Finnish girls being chased by a long bearded old man. (Although I did enjoy seeing his use of the ancient Nordic Swastika all around the frame of the picture - long before in the hands of Hitler it became a symbol of race-hate, vengeance and death.) While The Forging of the Sampo, 1893, looked like nothing but a children’s book illustration rendered with all the skill and lack of imagination of an academic oil painter. I hadn’t a clue what any of these old myths meant and I didn’t care – I hated myths.  

At least Akseli Gallen-Kallela had technical skill, Hugo Simberg on the other hand was as crude as an adolescent. His work was too illustrational and rudimentary – he simply did not have the visionary power of James Ensor working in Ostend or Edvard Munch in Oslo at the same time. 

The final modernist section, like with that of ‘Paintings from Poland’ in 2007, displayed a noticeable decline in originality and authenticity as Finnish artists pastiched (with some skill and panache) the latest trends of Post-Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism in Paris. They were always four or five years too late, and never contributed anything new to these movements.  

Seeing most of this art only served to prove to me how necessary modernist’s like Cézanne, van Gogh, Munch, Matisse and Picasso had been - to render truly visionary and technically powerful art in an age of polite and commercial art. Their oeuvres had taken the same questions of; social life, form, subjectivity, primitivism, myth and sexuality – which these Finnish and a host of other minor European artists had been battling with - and given convincing, hard won and transcendent answers.                        

Overall, I found this show educational and enjoyable. Given my depressed mood, I felt I had not given the exhibition a fair enough look. So I instantly vowed to go back again when my spirits were better. However, unforeseen events would make that impossible.

Sold! Irish Art of The Celtic Tiger

Before Christmas 2008, I bought myself ‘Sold!: the inside story of how Ireland got bitten by the art bug.’ It was a superbly written study of the great Celtic Tiger art boom of 1996-2008. However, its subject – the rampant greed, vanity and stupidity of the art stars and mega collectors – made me feel sick. During that period I had sold over €43,000 worth of art - but only a third of that was left after dealers fees, framing and art materials. I simply spent the money I earned on more paint and canvas and stayed in my home. The height of the boom 2003-2008 was the period in which I had totally detached from Ireland, stayed in my house, rarely went out, had only a handful of friends and was totally forgotten by the Irish art world. So to see how insane the Irish art world had become finally put in print was shocking in the extreme for me. I felt like a total loser.                                                                              

  

The first wave the Irish art boom happened in 1996 when the prices at auction of Irish art shot up 26%. Dead Irish artists like Paul Henry, Gerard Dillon, Leech, Lavery and Orpen saw the prices fetched for their canvas double or quadruple. The boom in the prices of these painters was in part due to a streak of Patriotism in Irish buyers who wanted to support the prestige of Irish visual artists. However, buyers were still wary of living artists. The strength of Irish collectors in London, boosted English interest in Irish visual art. Meanwhile small private galleries began to open up with dizzying regularity, our major museums built extensions, older museums were renovated, new museums were founded and an art lover in Ireland suddenly had more to see and of better quality. Our museums had greater funding to stage tour exhibitions from abroad – something art lovers in Dublin were starved of in the 1980s. The drop of the Down after 9-11 and then the Dot-Com crash momentarily slowed the frenetic pace of the Irish art market but the from 2004-2008 it went into overdrive. The big sellers of art in the Celtic Tiger were Louis le Brocquy, Kenneth Webb, Basil Blackshaw, Kingerlee, William Crozier, Shinnors, Teskey, Mark O’Neill, John Doherty, Robert Ballagh, Kevin Sharkey, Guggi and Rasher.                                                                                         

Kevin Sharkey was a likeable buffoon who believed his own hype, faked it untill he made it, made it, then blew it through hubris. He was propelled along by sheer egotism making dreadful parodies of Jackson Pollock. “His output was colossal; hundreds upon hundreds produced in 17-hour working days, and Sharkey boasted to a British newspaper that he’d made £2.5m in four years. The art establishment sneered, but what did he care? When galleries wouldn’t accept him, he opened his own: in Dublin’s Francis Street, in London’s Mayfair, in Ibiza, Donegal and Mayo. He says he sold 450 paintings in 2007 alone. Many of these were at art fairs where, jealous rivals noted, Sharkey would leave buyers weakened with his charm, cajoling them in his lilting Donegal accent... Bob Geldof had one of his works, as did Kate Moss, Pete Doherty, Sinead O’Connor, Liam Neeson, Charles Saatchi.” John Burns, Sold!: the inside story of how Ireland got bitten by the art bug, 2008, P.211-212.                                 

Irish artists like this were given lots of easy life-style interviews, in which they regaled the viewers with funny anecdotes, funny stories of hard times and pretended to be men of the people. It was the era of the housing bubble, which saw the building of hundreds of thousands of houses in Ireland and an unknown hundreds of holiday homes abroad – all with wall space to fill. The book highlighted a selection of the most commercially successful living and dead artists, some I knew well others I had only vaguely known. None of them impressed me as painters of genius, in fact, most of them struck me as the worst kind of bimbo painting – all crass surface and no soul. Moreover key painters like Brian Maguire, Patrick Graham, Ciarán Lennon and Paul Doran who I considered impressive, intelligent, skilled and interesting artists were not mentioned.                                                

I knew of course of Robert Ballagh although I wished I didn’t. He was one of the most commercial artists we have ever produced. He was an illustrator who fancied himself as Van Eyke, a capitalist who flew the banner of socialism and a thinker in borrowed clothes.                                            

John Doherty was a far better painter from photographs and his choice was at least second year art student quality. But in an era of countless painters the world over painting from photographs nothing about his stood out as important.                                                                              

Donald Teskey painted drab, arty looking Irish landscapes of limited visual strength. It all looked like very unambitious Kiefer, or safe Hughie O’Donough.                                                                     

Percy French who though dead was highly collected, painted technically beautiful, limpid watercolours of Ireland, but was most famous for his music. As the holiday watercolours of the happy amateur they were up there with members of Royal families but as art they had nothing significant to say.       

                                                                                                              

John Kingerlee painted abstract blocks of impastoed oil paint, he was known to be eccentric, and had lead a colourful life – running away from the circus, working odd jobs, trying writing, pottery, living in squats and painting. His paintings had some small beauty – but it was undermined by over production, commercialism and hype.                                                                              

Martin Mooney painted technically accomplished classical oil paintings of the kind one saw a lot in traditional and reactionary galleries. Mark O’Neill specialized in syrupy soft-focus, oil paintings of dogs which sold for five figure sums at auction. I found his technique sickeningly cynical and manipulated – but knew why art lovers liked them so much – they pandered to the lowest common denominator – animals looking cute.                                                                                           

However, it was what the book revealed about the economic boom in Irish art galleries and the wealth achieved by a small minority of artists that was most shocking to me. “Some galleries did go to the wall during the boom, but far more opened than closed, and there were about 130 in the Republic at last count. A peek at their accounts in Companies House reveals a sheaf of healthy balance sheets. On The Wall Gallery LTD. Which owns the Kerlin, had €683, 207 cash in the bank when it filed annual returns in October 2007, with debtors owing €132, 335 and net assets of just under €0.5m. The Taylor Galleries’ directors – John and Patrick Taylor – paid themselves €203, 333 in 2004, €248, 012 in 2005 and €666, 666 in 2006. Dublin’s most prestigious gallery had €1, 811, 681 cash in hand in August 2006, up from €1.37m the previous year, although its debtors owed €986, 152.” (John Burns, Sold!: the inside story of how Ireland got bitten by the art bug, 2008, P.233.)                                  

The book also took aim at the controversial Artist Tax Exception Scheme which I myself had benefited from. “Due to the Freedom of Information Act, the Revenue Commissioners now publish the names of everyone who successfully applies for the artists’ exemption scheme. In the period from 1 April 2002 to 31 March 2008, some 1,146 “painters” got this exemption. Under the Revenue’s liberal definition this includes 81 “artistic photographers” and six cartoonists. There were 259 sculptors availing of the tax scheme, of which at least 30 were doing installation art pieces. So in total, 1, 400 or so visual artists joined the tax-free scheme in that six-year period.” (John Burns, Sold!: the inside story of how Ireland got bitten by the art bug, 2008, P.172.) Then Burns detailed the earnings of these artists: “Revenue has said that over half of those in the scheme had artistic income of less than €10, 000. This statistic has sometimes been used by art lobbyists to argue that most artists are living in penury. On the other hand, 59 artists who avail of the scheme declared income of over €200, 000, and grossed a total of €56m. Publication of that statistic caused considerable envy, and undoubtedly influence Brian Cowen’s decision, as minister for finance, to make artists pay tax on income over €250, 000 a year.” (John Burns, Sold!: the inside story of how Ireland got bitten by the art bug, 2008, P.172.) Personally, I had no strong feelings one way or another about the scheme. It meant a lot to me, because I made so little from art. I also approved of the original strategy to encourage Irish artists to stay in Ireland and to lure foreign artists into the country. However I did see its unfairness when it allowed a small minority to profit like U2 had.

Now’s The Time

On the last Saturday of November 2008, I went with Carol to the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, in order to see their exhibition Now’s the Time - an interesting group show of late Modern and Post-Modern artists - who had all died young. The show featured work by; Piero Manzoni, Eva Hesse, Bas Jan Ader, Gordon Matta-Clark, Jean-Michel Basquait, Keith Haring, Martin Kippenberger, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Helen Chadwick, Michel Majerus and Jason Rhodes. Basquiat who died at twenty-seven was the youngest of the artists while Michel Majerus who died at forty-five was the oldest. Most had died before their late thirties or early forties. Given the relatively short careers of these artists’ it was not surprising that the work looked vibrant, fresh and witty - but also lacked the grandeur and complexity of mature art.                                             
                                               

It was my first trip to an art gallery in many months - and my first trip into town in weeks. It was less than one degree centigrade, and the cities buildings were cloaked in a cold mist. I felt like a stranger in my own city. I felt confused by all the new shops and lamented the passing of many of the icons of Dublin past. At the time I did not enjoy being out of the sanctuary of my home. I hated the crowds, the bustle and the bitter cold. However when I returned home I felt the benefit of a day out.

I found Now’s the Time a delightful and inspiring exhibition that was both accessible and inventive. When I entered the first gallery of the show to see two large acrylic paintings and a very large oil-stick word drawing by Basquait - I let out a yelp of joy and grabbed Carol’s arm in delight. The drawing Untitled, 1983, featured diagrams and words mixed with crude childlike drawings of train lines, baseballs, skulls, lumps of coal - and seemed to be a brief treatise on; the use of Chinese labourers to build the American railway lines, the exploitation of the poor, the history of commodities and the history of African Americans. This I could all deduce from the words and images in the drawings and from over eighteen years studying his iconography. However, to the uninitiated this drawing must have seemed like a rambling list without rhythm-nor-reason - made by an artist who drew like a demented child. Even I as a rabid fan of Basquait’s work had to admit to Carol that it was a minor drawing by him. 

A far more major work was the large acrylic and oil-stick diptych Grazing – Soup to Nuts, MGM – 1930, 1983. Painted with vibrant candy pink, baby blue, white, black and green oil-sticks on top of a ground of an eggy yellow - which had then been partly over-painted, with a matt black - making the whole diptych look like a demented school blackboard. In parts of the painting, Basquiat - had scuffed and smeared the oil-stick lines with the heel of his hand – giving the work a more raw, intense feel. Basquiat played off images of dinosaurs with diagrams of pelvises, intestines, and leaves - conjuring up in my mind - images from old Ray Harryhausen monster flicks from the early days of Hollywood and the jottings of a teenager in a copybook. I absolutely loved it - and would have been ecstatic to own it.                                                                                                                
The final painting by Basquiat in the show Fat’s II, 1987, was a far more minimal and stripped down text painting - clearly influenced by the abstract word paintings of Cy Twombly. In parts of the painting – snapped-off lumps of oil stick stuck to the canvas – like exclamation marks of haste. This huge canvas with a few dozen words related to Jazz - on a plain grey ground was a lesson in scale - it hurt me to take. How much more impressive would my paintings have looked - if I had been able to paint them on large canvases like Basquiat?  

The rest of the show was a come down from the Basquiat’s. The zany Keith Haring acrylic and oil painting Aids, 1985 - simply looked like the kind of trippy, Robert Crumb inspired doodles - made by countless teenagers who fancy themselves as creative. As a painting, it had minimal interest in the flesh. Apart from the fact that the eye-popping, wriggly, drawing of monster figures having sex on a zany, yellow ground - looked black from six feet away – but close to revealed itself to have been painted in indigo blue. The lines in Harings painting were almost print-like – so limited was his exploitation of the subtleties of the brushed line. Like an Op-Art canvas this Haring was wearing on the eyes after less than a few minutes – leaving me in a daze.

             

Far more impressive was a suit of pencil and marker drawings on hotel stationary by Martin Kippenberger. The nine drawings that formed Untitled (The Invention of a Joke) 1991, came courtesy of The Kerlin Gallery – which made me wonder if I had seen them in 1991 as part of Kippenberger’s show with Oehlen in The Kerlin. However, I could not for the life of me - remember seeing them before – not a sign of truly great art. The drawings depicted Mexican’s in Sombreros and with rifles at cafes, in buildings or in landscapes. Their very lightness as art, their cool humour and humility struck me with delight – like a refreshing sorbet after a main course of meaty Basquait’s.                                     

The Kippenberger’s were hung in the same room as Untitled, 1996-2001, a large multi-panel painting by Michel Majerus - who had clearly been influenced by his older German contemporary who had frequently created similar multi-panel paintings done in contradictory styles. Carol liked Majerus’ work a lot - but I found it a limited example of abstract and graphic design pastiches. His work was neither passionate nor cynical – merely decorative - Neo-Salon Pop. I was also irked - by Majerus’ use of photographic silk-screens - for his images of people. Was he incapable of painting figuratively? Overall, I found his work not much better than that of mediocre graduate students.   

Felix Gonzales-Torres’ with Untitled (NRA), 1991, - a perfect stack of large sheets of paper printed with a red boarder and black insert which visitors could take away with them -  played witty games with the history of minimalism stretching back to Kasmir Malevich and later Ad Reinhard. I could see why Gonzales-Torres had been such a success in the New York art world in the 1990s. His art was humble, smart, politically-correct and utterly harmless.           
                                                         
The great surprise of the show for me was Gordon Matta-Clark whose architectural interventions in which he cut holes into buildings - struck me as sculpturally groundbreaking - and unexpectedly moving in a week of home repossessions and a terrorist assault on Mumbai. They struck me - as Cubist inspired deconstructions of buildings - which we tried to take shelter inside in the hope of safety. 

Eva Hesse’s Addendum, 1967, a grey papier-mâché wooden board, with small teats with grey painted cords - falling onto the gallery floor in coils and spirals - made me come back to look at it again and again. I loved its subtlety, tenderness, craftsmanship and its echoing of both modern macho minimalist work and prehistoric nature inspired art. I admired the soft-spoken feminism of Hesse’s work - which played off the more aggressive work of Minimalists - like Carl André, Donald Judd and Richard Serra.                                
                                                                                      
Piero Manzoni’s Magic Base, 1961, a wooden pyramid plinth with felt foot-pads placed on top of it - gave a chuckle. Manzoni had originally intended visitors to stand on the plinth and thus become one of his art works. However, the plinth was now too fragile and valuable to allow this. Like his famous cans of ‘artist shit’ (which may in fact have been just plaster) Magic Base was typical of Manzoni’s attempt to making everything art. I had always admired Manzoni - and been delighted - by his light metaphysical jokes. The trouble is as art they could only be done once – many later copied his ideas but they failed to emulate his timing. Unlike so many of the academic bores who copied him at the crossroads of the millennium – he was never pretentious, elitist or over did it.                      

Helen Chadwick’s glossy photographs of flowers arranged into vulvic shapes made me feel a bit sick – like after a night of looking at too much internet porn.                          
                           
I found the Bas Jan Ader video of flower arranging - utterly pointless and cliché and like most video work - I did not give it a second look.           
                                                                    

The Jason Rhodes collected rubbish sculptures with purple neon - reminded me less of great art and more of the junk sculptures Malory’s boyfriend Nick used to make - on the 1980s US comedy Family Ties.                                                                                                                
Majerus, Torres, Ader and Rhoads all struck me as symptomatic of the intellectual bankruptcy of most contemporary artists – who despite their lengthy educations, faddish popularity, commercial promotion and the vast scale of many of their works – had nothing important to say.                    

Before we left The Hugh Lane - we had a quick look around at the other exhibits. Carol wanted to look at the Fergus Martin (b.1955 in Cork) exhibition because he had recently given a talk in NCAD – so I reluctantly agreed.                                                                                         

So what did I see? Vertical rectangular canvases with thick stretchers - painted in one flat acrylic colour (dull brown or green, or electric blue) – with a horizontal (squarish) rectangle of bare canvas left at the corner.                             
                                                                                        
On the floor, there were some sculptures. So what did I see? Shinny purple cylinders - about the length of baseball bats - lined up perfectly in a line on the floor. “The fucking plaster work in this room is more interesting!” I exclaimed to Carol - and stormed out of the beautiful Georgian rooms and left the tedious, redundant, minimalist pastiches behind.    
                                                 
Then when I was researching this rubbish, I read the blurb on the Hugh Lane about Martin’s work. I am still laughing. Here is just some of it: “Fergus Martin’s exhibition at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane draws from a new body of work in the medium of sculpture and painting united by a sense of drama and raucous reflection, the placement of which leaves the viewer in an unsettled state of calm. He has called his paintings ‘the carriers’ of colour but the colour is not restricted only to its structured composition. Mediated by the viewer's gaze, it belongs to the entirety of the world as the eye sees it, and renders it accessible.”        


All I can say is that I felt an unsettled state of anger at seeing a provincial mediocrity produce tenth rate, minimalist rip-offs, nearly forty years after the fact - and then go on to have a credible career in Ireland – exhibiting, selling and lauded in our major museums.    
                                   

Not wanting to leave the Hugh Lane on such a dull note, we revisited the newly hung permanent collection. I was delighted to see that Antonio Mancini’s Portrait of Lady Gregory was back on display. I explained to Carol how I had loved looking at this painting when bunking off from Sandymount High-School in 1988. Seeing it again after a long time, I was struck by its obvious painterly skill, but also its rawness, neurotic quality and visionary beauty. The painting was scarified by a squared-up grid - which was the result of Mancini’s use of a wire grid on his paintings - to aid the rapid execution of a portrait. It was a novel method of painting in keeping with Mancini’s eccentric approach to art. Parts of the portrait, was painting in thin washes - while highlighted areas were painted with a thick nervous impasto - creating even more peaks over the reliefs of his grid. It should not have worked – but it did. I thanked God that there were inspired painters like Mancini in art history – men and women who took risks with every brushstroke.