Leonora Carrington: The Celtic Surrealist at IMMA

On a murky Friday 24^th January 2014, I went with Carol and our friend Rob to IMMA. My main interest was in the Leonora Carrington: The Celtic Surrealist exhibition. At its best, Surrealism had provided art history with a few dozen images of such visceral power - they were a shock to the nervous system - and a number of those images were by women. Like most teenagers, I had briefly been fascinated by Surrealism, but I had quickly grown tired of it, save for the early works of Ernst and Dalí and eventually only Miró maintained my interest as a painter. Too many Surrealist paintings were illustrative (admittedly of an eccentric and often very original kind) and thus not very interesting as paintings per say. Moreover, surrealism was a victim of its own success, copied and parodied by everyone from advertisers, illustrators, comedians and eventually earnest teenage posers. The original freshness of its irrational world of dreams and nightmares quickly turned into clichés and a desperate scavenging of cult imagery to manufacture new hallucinations that actually did not mean much.                                                                                                                       

For the past few years, I had seen countless articles on Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), lauding her as the last great Surrealist painter, with an English father and Irish mother she also had interest to the culture industry in Ireland, and as a lover of Max Ernst one of Modernisms greatest innovators with a complicated love life on a par with Picasso’s, there was plenty of juicy gossip too. Add to that Carrington’s wild child personality, mental breakdown and final years living as a virtual recluse in Mexico and her story had all the ingredients for greatness. A cynic might have thought that just living longer than far more talented and important painters was no real achievement, that just sleeping with a genius did not make you one, that being rediscovered by Feminist art historians was faint praise, and the hunting down of ‘important’ foreigners with any vague connection with Ireland just a marketing ploy of Irish tourism and the culture industry. For me all that mattered was whether her art lived up to the late hype of it by an art market gone insane with indiscriminate speculation and greed.                           

                         

Carrington was fourteen when the first Surrealist manifesto was published and by the time she was twenty, the likes of Dali had already made their most important work. Carrington added nothing new to Surrealism except turgid symbolic confusion and the novelty of a token female painter. For me, this retrospect of around fifty paintings, eight sculptures, eight tapestries and twenty works on paper by Carrington proved to be quite the worst exhibition by a supposedly important painter I had seen in a very long time. As a female painter, Carrington was not only no Frida Kahlo, she was even a poor second to Max Ernst’s fourth wife Dorothea Tanning. In fact, technically Carrington’s work was some of the worst I had ever seen. Her drawings were the most lifeless and uninteresting by a supposed major artist I had ever seen and reminded me more of the work of an arty teenage girl. Even as an illustrator she was hopeless. As a painter Carrington did little other than colour-in-lines in a poor parody of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel The Elder. As for her imagery, it was nothing but a shameless and eccentric pilfering from Bosch, Breughel, Max Ernst, Egyptian mythology, Celtic mythology, alchemy, the occult, fairy tales, children’s illustrations and God knows what else. This visual tower of Babel may have made some sense to the unhinged Carrington - but I wasn’t going to waste my time trying to decipher her gibberish. Had Carrington made more of a direct revelation of her own insecurities like Frida Kahlo or Dorothea Tanning, maybe her work would had had more interest. Instead she liked to play a grandiose dance of the seven veils with the viewer. Only in some of her sculptures did I see any distilled elegance and talent, but then that could have been as much to do with the talent of her assistants.                                

For those interested in the symbolism and life of Carrington there was a blizzard of explanatory wall plaques, opened notebooks in vitrine’s and countless catalogues. Personally I regarded the plague of explanation in museums odious. For me museums were places to look not read.                            

Next we went to see In the Line of Beauty, a group exhibition of supposedly important contemporary Irish artists. It was a dismal and pathetic collection of odds and ends that faintly echoed conceptualist clichés in a harmless way. I thought beauty was something overwhelming in its power of seduction but these works were hopelessly feeble, ironic and cynical. Only Oisín Byrne’s brush and ink drawings on cloth banners stood out but so did his debt to David Hockney. Having spent so many years going to NCAD exhibitions, I was left baffled that these eleven artists or these particular works by these eleven artists could be thought important. I had in my mind the work of a dozen or so artists and artworks more interesting than these. This really made me wonder again at the art world. If everyone was now an artist and everything an artist made was art - then the only real criteria was who was in the golden circle of the top curators and who could really play the system.                                                                        

By now I was fuming and regretting bothering coming out to IMMA and I had to apologise to Rob for my foul mood. We went down to the cafeteria to have a coffee and as we did I came across large carborundum etchings by Hughie O’Donoghue entitled Three Studies For A Crucifixion from his Episodes of The Passion series from 1996. “Now this is real drawing! This is real art!” I exclaimed. Yet it was fitting for IMMA that such work of power and integrity was stuck between the toilets and the cafeteria. How dare O’Donoghue have real talent! Stick him in the basement! Such is the art world these days.                                     

After a coffee and cake, we went up to the main galleries, where I was struck by Klara Lidén’s Untitled (Poster Paintings) from 2007-13. These accumulated stacks of posters covered with a blank white sheet and hung on the walls like paintings, genuinely delighted me. They had a painterly feel, as though the different coloured sheets were layers of paint finally cancelled out by the white sheet. It was a simple idea but I found it very rewarding.  I was less interested in her video The Myth of Progress (Moonwalk) from 2008, where she moonwalked slowly through Manhattan by night, or her photographs of herself appearing and disappearing in various city streets. I had no time for these kinds of amateur performance pieces when they had at least been original in the early 1970s so I could see no point in rehashing them.             

You had to pay in to see the Eileen Gray exhibition which Carol and I were not willing to do for a bunch of once fashionable but now dated furniture. So we saw One Foot in the Real World, a mixed exhibition on the theme of the real. It was a potluck show with a predictable postmodern bias. As the art became less and less interesting to look at - so the rhetoric and length of the expletory plaques grew. This was a version of reality that was purely intellectual and given to riddles. I got many of them, but was infuriated by the general feeling of being kidnapped by university quizmasters and forced to prove my Post-Modern, leftwing, feminist, multicultural and patronizing middleclass credentials. It was nice to see a lithograph of a story by Tracey Emin which had eventual wound up in her autobiography Strangeland. However, visually it was a bore. The exception to all this rubbish was a spooky pink, fake-fur head in a metal and glass case by Louise Bourgeois from 2001, which had a genuinely eerie quality that transcended mere ideas. I also liked Still Falling I, 1991 a faecal like lump of bronze hanging from the ceiling by Antony Gormley even though I preferred Schnabel’s faecal like lumps that predated them. Then there was Juan Muñoz Dublin Rain Room from 1994, a scaled down model of one of the gallery rooms, which was an interesting if rather crudely rendered sculpture which was ruined by the fact it did not rain in the scaled down room due to technical difficulties. There as another video piece that was also out of action due to technical difficulties. They called painting an outdated medium - but I had never been unable to view a painting due to technical difficulties!                                                                                              

Within the grounds of IMMA, I was briefly divorced from the dirty reality of our bankrupt existence and the bombardment of misery on TV. No mention of the Syrian civil war, the Ukrainian protests, the floods and natural disasters, our environmental catastrophe, the slaughter of endangered animals, the great recession, the epidemic of sex crimes, the random murders on the hourly news, the billion dollar debased porn industry or any other number of real world crisis that made the making of art seem like the vanity of all vanities. Contemporary art I rued could not offer any meaningful commentary on our fallen world, nor even offer a shred of feeling – all it could offer was the distraction of tangential puzzles.    

All in all, I was left more disillusioned by art than ever before. Was this what I had devoted my lifetime to become a part of – this capricious and pretentious accumulation of echoes? For even if you succeed, all you would become is a murmur in a museum to entertain or befuddle optimistic art students with unrealistic dreams and all the giddy excitement of lambs to the slaughter. As for me, I had long since given up on the delusions I had for my own art to change the world and bring an end to the phoney home decor of the bourgeoisie and the spectacle of goodness. I had become an arch cynic, despairing of the spectacle of the media and art world which only concealed the hopeless reality of existence. As I left IMMA, I remembered Julian Schnabel saying that when he needed inspiration, “I go and look at other people’s paintings and see how shitty they can be.” (Anthony Haden-Guest, True Colours: The Real Life of the Art World. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press 1996, P. 86.) It was the only thing I could take from such a crumby collection of exhibitions.