Anne Madden

On July 5th 2007, I visited IMMA with Carol and Edward - principally we went to the Lucian Freud exhibition again. First, we looked around the Anne Madden retrospective in the Irish modern art museum. To say that I didn’t like her work is an understatement - she was everything I hated about some women's art - technically glib and incompetent, derivative, kitsch, sickly feminine and superficial in the extreme. However, I tried to look around with an open eye.

             

The exhibition started well with her early self-portrait with a pallet (somewhat derivative of Bernard Buffet) and first abstracts in the 1950s. However, despite their subtle earth tones applied justly with the pallet knife - they were in effect worthless works of plagiarism by a student enthralled by the equally stupid paintings of Vieira Da Silva and the far greater paintings of Nicolas De Staël. Then in the 1970s her abstracts got larger and more colourful - but her zips and fields of colour came straight from Barnett Newman - and the compositions were an emasculated and feminized pastiche of his far more original and heartfelt canvases of the 1950s. By the time, I got to her recent abstract canvases I rebelled like a man who had spent too long in a perfumery - the smell though sweet at first had become nauseatingly toxic. By the final and most recent canvases, my eyes were virtually begging to be closed from the sight of her vast canvases painted in lurid Turkish Brothel colours on Opium - and applied with all the tricks of the home decorator - stippled, sponged, dry-brushed and mopped on.

             

I was convinced Anne Madden was not a great painter - in fact, I knew she wasn’t. She was typical of some women in the art world – strikingly beautiful, privileged, glibly intelligent, with a natural aptitude for art - the trouble was things came too easy for such women - there was no struggle to really swim the depths of existence, no hours spent exploring unfashionable ideas and authors, no attempt to push mere smug facility towards profound pathos, her intelligence merely for show and her beauty - fading every year. She had none of the dirty raw power of her female contemporaries like Paula Rego or Louise Bourgeois - they were great artists - she was merely a lady who lunched - with delusions she was part of a tradition stretching back to Cézanne. In one interview, I heard her drop his name and talk about how every brushstroke for her was a risk - what utter self-delusion, what abyssal self-analysis – it was utterly gob smacking!

             

Which is not to say that she had not been successful - she had in fact been disproportionately successful thanks to a 'lucky' marriage to Ireland's most revered living painter Louis le Brocquy an even more nationalistically over-praised, over-hyped and over priced Irish mediocrity.

            

  

Going from her hotel lobby art to Lucian Freud's muscular, grand, weighty canvases of raw human flesh and psychologically stripped human beings - was mind blowing in the extreme. I could have spent days in this Freud exhibition and found more and more in it. The internal, anatomical grammar to his brushstrokes - was astounding. They were so serious, so intelligent, so varied and ordered - yet passionate that I could weep. I spent so long trying to master his technique and yet I was hardly fit to clean his brushes. However, his art inspired me, it elevated me and it filled me with so much joy that I bowed in humility to this master - his art was truly a gift to humanity.

            

 Later Carol and I dropped into The Douglas Hyde gallery – housed in Trinity College Dublin. The gallery had made a reputation for itself exhibiting the most difficult 'cutting-edge' contemporary world art and this show was as tediously faddish as ever. In the main gallery, there were 'sculptures' by Nina Canell, Clodagh Emoe and Linda Quinlan in an exhibition called Come Together.  None of these artists - could draw, paint or sculpt in the ancestral sense - their art was the junk of the playpen of contemporary conceptual art. It was essentially an exhibition of odds and ends scattered around the big ugly gallery floor - signifying I don't know what - to me as Mrs Cravatte in The Rebel (1960) said:"it’s all a load of miscellaneous rubbish!"

           

 In what was known as The Paradise (a tiny gallery space inside the larger DHG one) there were three oil paintings on MDF by Maureen Gallace. To say I have seen these exact paintings about a hundred times already by other equally piss-poor imitators of Luc Tuymans’ school of oil painting was a understatement - they were everywhere in Dublin. Most of these pastisheurs of Tuymans' tended to take his bleached, faded colour and amp it up into garish colours reminiscent of the little pots of bright colour you find in a Paint-By-Numbers set - thus annihilating the meaning of Tuymans really profound paintings and covering their mucky stolen tracks. Stealing his brushstrokes was easier for them - he often painted the brushstrokes in vertical or horizontal strips that echoed the bands of a poorly printed photo - but I knew where they came from. Tuymans art was profound in the ways it intellectually and sensually reinterpreted the mediated images of the magazine, book, television, cinema screen and web-page. His work really did have both intellectual and formal integrity even profundity. However despite the fact that his technique (to paint alla-prima in oils on commercial shop bought canvases - disturbing crop-shots of sad and evocative photos - in dull whites, greys, powder blues, dull or glossy blacks, ochre’s and greenish creams and executed in less than a day) was arrived at from a place of great philosophical depth and seriousness. It was easily copied, and those copies had no such gravity. I honestly thought his influence had done more to condemn and destroy the art of more student painters than any other living master. By coping him so blatantly and so single-mindedly (most of these plagiarizers had not even the wit to add one other influence to their stolen art to make it more distinctive and original) they had pretty much abdicated all right to be called artists.

The Magnificent Lucian Freud

On Tuesday 5th June 2007, I went with Carol to see the Lucian Freud exhibition in the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. IMMA was housing 50 of his paintings and twenty of his etchings and drawings through the summer. It was a beautiful sunny day – though Carol (who hated the sun) thought it too hot. To say that I was hyperactive with excitement before hand is an understatement. Although I had seen isolated paintings by Freud in group shows - I had never seen any in quantity. Of the many artists who have influenced my own art (Picasso, Basquait, van Gogh, Schiele, Gerstl, Schnabel, de Kooning, Rembrandt, Goya, Baselitz, Bacon and Salle) Freud was the last painter I had yet to see in a major retrospective. To say that my expectations were met is to put it mildly. It was the greatest exhibition I had ever seen in Ireland – with the Francis Bacon show in 2000 a close second.

            

As you know, my infatuation with Freud began in early 1992 - at a time when I was executing a couple of life paintings in NCAD during the Easter and summer holidays. As a clumsy student - struggling to deal with the difficulties of life drawing and painting - I looked in awe at Freud's work - which because of their strange realist modernity effected me so much more deeply than any other painter of the figure. I also identified with Freud's somewhat naïve and self-taught approach to life-painting.

             

Although there was no doubt that Freud's work was riddled with the mannerism and naïve mistakes of the largely self-taught (he had some art training in his teens but nothing like the systematic drilling the old masters had to endure in order to achieve mastery) - his work had genuine integrity - something distinctly lacking in the modern art world of my day. He was also one of those rare artists like Courbet, Cézanne, van Gogh, Picasso and de Kooning whose awkwardness was compelling, heart-rending and honest.

             

Artists in the West since Raphael in the 1500s until Courbet in the late nineteenth century painted not only an idealized version of the nude - they typically painted the figure only as a prop in a larger visual story. Although western art had had its fair share of sexy nudes - typically, the figure was not painted nude in order to arouse sexual desire or even to analyze character - instead the nude was used as an expressive character in a visual play.                                                                                  

The breaking point in this tradition I would date to Gustave Courbet's The Origin of The World (1866) - an immaculately painted oil of a woman's lower torso - the bushy vagina at its centre. However, it was not until the turn of the twentieth century that artists like Lovis Corinth, Richard Gerstl, Egon Schiele, Max Beckman and Otto Dix turned the body into a psychological and psychosexual revealer of subjective truth - and it is by these artists that Freud had to be judged - he was part of their unofficial Expressionist/Realist school. This should have come as no surprise - he was born and lived in Berlin until the age of eleven - this was his cultural heritage. However, what England gave him was a sense of restraint and Conservative order.                                                    

I observed that in a world of noisy attention seeking loudmouths - Freud's reclusive silence spoke volumes. It was telling that in a world were simpletons wanted to tell you everything about themselves - none of which mattered a dam - a man like Freud kept his council (some of my readers might wish I had done the same.) This was part of his aristocratic baring (many of his closest friends were from the English Gentry.) Nagging Feminist's like Linda Nochlin who sought to attack him as a misogynist took great pains to tell of his philandering, his suspected 40 illegitimate children and his cruel abandonment of ex-lovers. I would simply have asked these women this: Do you really think I or any other male painter admired Freud because of his personal life? I can answer absolutely not! I admired Freud for one reason and one bloody simple reason only - his paintings! Personally, I found sniping attacks on Freud's supposed misogyny and misanthropy childish, simplistic and ignorant. So what if he was? He spoke his version of truth and that should have been good enough. From what I could see - he was as unflattering to men as he was to women. In a world of airbrushed photographs of super models - Freud's paintings were like a kick in the face to a culture of lies about the body and humanity.

           

In 2007, pornography in the tradition of Raphael lived on in the high budget, slick, and never anything but beautiful porn of L.A. However, one only had to look at the home videos of amateur porn stars to see both the real world and the world of Freud - deathly pale or sunburned, stick thin or obsess and ugly bodies of both great humanity and repulsive imperfection. It was Freud's grandfather Sigmund Freud who changed our conception of self-hood more than any other thinker in western history - so it should have come as no surprise that Lucian Freud should have gone on to paint the human face and figure in a way almost unseen in art before.

             

Most of Freud's large paintings took up to a year to paint and he worked on a number of canvases at a time. He painted almost exclusively from life. Posing for him was a long and sometimes arduous experience. The vast majority of his models were friends, lovers or family. He had painted at least three of his daughters naked - but I will leave it to others to discern the ‘Electra Complex' implications of that!  During breaks, he treated his sitters to champagne and pheasant and his was known as a great conversationalist. Like his great friend Francis Bacon, he loved to gamble. Those who knew him spoke of his charisma, intelligence and energy.

             

Critics like Andrew-Graham Dixon and Brian Sewell had stated that Freud - although a great realist painter - was not up to the standards of old masters like Velázquez, Ruben's and Rembrandt - I disagreed. I thought that at their best - Freud's canvases were as good as anything ever painted. Technically, he might have been clumsy and wilful in a way those old masters seldom were - but in my era, he was unique. While it was true to say that his working methods and ethos was very different from the methods of the old masters - that did not mean that his work was any less compelling.

             

In my lifetime, Freud had become the standard-bearer of the realist tradition. This was in part to due to his genius and in part because the tradition was so utterly bankrupt. The trouble with 95% of the realist art produced world wide - was its triviality, crassness and historical nostalgia. I seriously thought that most of these 'traditional' painters were stunned personalities who liked to retreat into some kind of fantasy they had about a Utopian age of representational art. They were the same kind of people who built model railways and embroidered quilts - insular, timid and deluded. Freud on the other hand had no such delusions. He was a fully formed personality, intellect and practitioner. Most of these pseudo-old-masters - were terrified of the ugly, strident, or obsessive. Therefore, their work was fit for nothing but the top of a biscuit tin. Freud on the other hand embraced the ugly - and made it look beautiful - the sign of a truly great artist in my opinion.

             

I was less interested in Freud's early paintings from the 1940s to the 1960s, and I considered the high point of his art to be from the late 1970s to the turning of the millennium - as his brushes got broader and his paint thicker. However these early painting explained his late masterpieces. From the outset, he was obsessed with the eyes of his sitters – indeed had anyone ever made eyes look so hypnotic? From the outset, he was fond of using a stippling of lines to define the form. From the beginning he worked on a white canvas - allowing it to gleam through the thinly spread paint. From the outset, he had a knowing ability to give hyperactive details to certain parts of the subject - while treating other parts in a more general way. However, he always knew how to marry the parts to the whole - in a way that had always escaped me in my own work. He was a master of detail - yet never in the annoying crotchety way that other realists were. His detail was never anything less than visceral and exciting. I was less fond of Freud's drawings and etchings. However, they did give some important clues to his art. In their way, his drawings had echoes of Dürer's woodcuts. Like Dürer - Freud used very dark and strong lines to shape the volumes of flesh.                                                

Freud's technique in his late work was nothing short of magnificent. This was real painting! I was amazed by how bold and confident his brushwork was! I was thrilled by the way he went for it with every brushstroke! There was no mistaking that a man painted these paintings. They had a fierce muscularity and vigour utterly lacking in the flabby and academic work of imitators like Jenny Saville, Celia Paul (an ex-lover of Freud's), Tai-Shan and an army of art student plagiarizers.                                            

The masterpiece of the exhibition for me was his large canvas Two Plants 1977-80 - it was quite simply unbelievable! From a distance, it looked like a photograph - but up close, it was a thickly painted nest of paint. Each single leaf in this tangle of plants was recorded in all its individuality - he did not use any formula. This painting and others he had made of foliage recalled Dürer's famous watercolour of a great piece of turf.

             

Critics had carped that Freud's paintings were all browns and greys! Were these people blind? Yes from a distance they could look brown and gray - but get up close - it was a fireworks display of pinks, blues, mauve's, purples, olives, tan, cream, white, apple green, peach, plum and so on. It was a mark of his genius for colour that he could embed in his flesh tones such bright colours and yet fit them all in to a realistic whole. Another remarkable quality of his late paintings was his use of thick impasto. One of the problems of using thick paint (as I knew) was that it reduced the artist’s ability to produce subtle effects of line and texture - but Freud managed it. His impasto was precise, firm and solid. He not only painted his figures - he sculpted them out of paint! I had never seen paint dry-brushed on with the loaded brush with such finesse and accuracy.

           

 In my view, Freud's art was a total rebuke to the corrupted nature of the contemporary art world. Could anyone honestly tell me that there was more depth and power in; Barnett Newman's zips, Frank Stella's stripes, Andy Warhol's candy coloured silkscreen portraits, Robert Ryman's all white canvases, Joseph Beuys' felt and fat, Donald Judd's steel boxes, Joseph Kosuth's definitions of words, Cindy Sherman's photos, Jeff's Koons' kitsch porcelains, Damien Hirst's spot paintings, or Tracey Emin's unmade bed! Frankly to my mind all that rubbish and so much more like it was exposed in an exhibition like this to be an utter fraud perpetrated by self-deluded morons with more salesmanship and skill in 'art-bollocks' than any actual creative vision, craft, skill, discipline or intelligence.

Georgia O’Keeffe vs Alex Katz

In the first week of March 2007, I went with Carol to the opening of Nature and Abstraction an exhibition of work by Georgia O’Keeffe at the Irish Museum of Modern art. I had seen a full scale retrospective of O'Keeffe's work in 1989 in the L.A. County Museum, and I had not been that impressed. But times change and so do people. Carol was a passionate fan of her work - and was utterly thrilled to see these great works by her hero. O'Keeffe of course was a female artist - who famously painted flowers that looked sexual in nature (the leaves of the flowers echoing the folds of the labia) was one of the first artists to develop an abstract vision, was the first woman to be given a retrospective in M.O.M.A. (the St. Peter's of the art world), posed naked for her photographer husband Stieglitz and later lived like a recluse in the dessert of New Mexico - so of course she was a great hero to many female art lovers. With artists like Gwen John, Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, and Paula Rego, she was among a select group of female artists to have established a major reputation in the art world. However, whereas the work of Kahlo, Bourgeois and Rego could at times be violent and ugly - O'Keeffe's work was rarely less than beautiful even when she was painting animal bones.                             

  

Unlike other over admired female artists of my day, O’Keeffe's work bore up to close scrutiny. Maybe as an American artist she was not in the league of Hopper, Pollock or de Kooning. However, she was an infinitely more serious artist than other American's like Thomas Hart Benton, Barnett Newman, Milton Avery, Alex Katz, or a league of painters touted as important in New York. I continually stress O’Keeffe's gender, because it seemed so central to her work. She was one of the first painters to express a uniquely female vision of the world, and countless female art students of my day were still in debt to her. While female art of my day, was often beset with visual clichés of natural forms, human hair, genitals, wounds - O’Keeffe and Kahlo were pioneers in this territory, and so I thought it was important to remember how personal and original their concerns were in the male dominated art world of the early twentieth century.                                                                              

The exhibition which concentrated on O’Keeffe's more abstracted canvases turned out to be unexpectedly good - mainly because it lacked the more illustrative aspects of O’Keeffe's work which I felt were her weakest efforts. O’Keeffe was a keen student of nature - the veins of a leaf, the bud of a flower, the crease in a rock, or the bulge in a mountain could all fire her imagination. She could take these natural objects and imbue them with mystery and an abiding female presence. Perhaps it was unfortunate that she was famous mostly as a painter of flowers (seen in close up - influenced by photography), which seemed vulvic or womb like. Because in truth there was far more subtlety to her approach in her landscapes and abstractions than a mere reduction of nature to a saucy postcard.         

Although I could see some similarities in her work with Cézanne's pallet, Kandinsky's sense of abstract rhythm, and Dalí's playful metamorphoses of forms - over all her work was very much her own. Her pallet of pinks, apple greens, creams, mauve's and browns was beautifully displayed in her oil paintings. But it was her use of white - which I found revolutionary. From a distance many of her oil paintings looked like watercolours on slightly crumpled watercolour paper. Up close, O’Keeffe's gentle and sure brushstrokes feathered the colour into place. Occasionally she would let the white, pink or brown undercoat show through as a vein in a leaf or as a cloud - a wonderful indication of her sensitive and witty approach to painting.          

               

                                                           

However while this was a small and well-judged exhibition, I was disappointed not to see any of her lovely watercolours or drawings, some of which I would have prized over her larger oil paintings. In fact it was beyond me why so many exhibitions I had seen had been devoid of drawings, even when the artists involved were known to have produced significant studies. After all, drawings were the secret blueprints of art - which could unlock so much about the ideas and levels of skill of an artist, not to mention explaining more clearly the development of an artist’s forms.                        

Before we went to the opening, we went early to see the Alex Katz exhibition also in IMMA What an utterly repellent exhibition it was! Katz's was an eighty-year-old oil painter who emerged in the late 1950s with stylish paintings - which took a flavour of Pop art and mixed it with illustration to create 'safe' modish works of the rich. Some people called his work beautiful - I thought it was some of the most vulgar painting I have ever seen. I found Katz's use of colour to be utterly stomach churning - turgid peach, cake icing pink, baby blue, and shit brown! As for his figurative skills - they were utterly contemptible. He drew no better than a high school teenager.                                                  

It so happened that I had spent my life painting portraits of people, and I knew from experience how very difficult an art it was. But all my life I had battled away. Each time I painted a person, I looked and looked and looked again. Every face was different, and the light falling on someone changed by the hour. As a painter I tried to paint what I saw - when I saw it and how I saw it at that time. That meant that I tried to avoid the mannerisms and illustrative shorthand that painters could fall into.                                                                                                                      

But Katz's approach was almost the exact opposite. He approached the world through the illustrative forms you would be failure with in clip art or the New Yorker magazine. For Katz, people were ciphers - almost interchangeable. His mouths were all the same misshapen and swollen shape, the noses were all half-formed and his eyes were all as dead and lifeless as those of a mannequin. But the real give away for me was the way he painted eyelashes - painted individually hair-by-hair with all the subtlety of a doll maker! To his admirers Katz with his clichéd long brush strokes and creamy paint was a modern day Manet - but in reality he was not an even moderately skilled billboard painter. Katz was one of those painters whose work looked better in reproduction than in reality. He mixed the scale of the abstract expressionists with the short hand of pictorial illustration and a dash of French 'alla-prima' painting (meaning painting a picture in one go without correction.) The result? Facile and empty work all style and no content.                      

                                                        

Katz played up the fashion of his sitters - the Jackie O hairdos the leisure suits and the fur coats - which paradoxically made his work look very old fashioned. His paintings were needlessly big and about as deep as a puddle. Yet, despite their huge size - Katz's handling of details was fumbling and botched - god knows how bad a painter he would have been working on a small scale! There were some like Mathew Collings who rated Katz very highly, and considered him an important influence on young painters. God help them! I thought. If these were the idiots they choose to teach them, then all they would ever learn was incompetent modish pomposity.                                                

In fact, if Katz could teach young artists anything - I would have suggested – it was how to wine and dine the rich. There was a symbiotic relationship between the fawning Katz and the WASPS of Park Avenue, which resulted in vomit inducing portraits of rich Americans, but also a constant source of income for Katz. One painting of two middle-aged male wasps - was quite the most 'gay looking' painting I had ever seen and a psychopathic low even for Katz. The moral of the Katz story was that a tenth rate painter with good 'people-skills' and who painted rich people in New York, would be touted as important by the American Juggernaut - while painters of real talent who were unfortunate not to be born in an art world capital - would be forgotten. Even in Ireland, there were a handful of painters better than Katz - Robert Ballagh to name just one.                                             

The big surprise of our visit to IMMA was Thomas Demand's exhibition L’Esprit d’Escalier. Demand was forty-three and one of a handful of great photographers to come out of Germany at the turn of the millennium like Thomas Ruff and Andreas Gursky. Since I never read the blurb on the wall to exhibitions (preferring to go in cold, and tending to feel that if something needed a text to explain it then it was probably not worth bothering with) I was puzzled by Demand's huge photographs of office tables and security x-ray machines. They looked real, but odd. Something was not quite right about them. I felt they had the feel of Andreas Gursky's brilliant photographs in which he photographed places like the stock exchange, and then photo shopped them to make the places look bigger and more complex. Carol who had worked as an illustrator also thought that maybe the photographs had been photo shopped. So for once I went to the wall text and read... It turned out that Demand made cardboard sculptures to look like - phones, boxes, stairs, escalators, and cups of tea you name it. In fact, nothing in these photographs was real - it was all made of cardboard! I laughed my ass off! What fun! So then, we looked around the exhibition with a whole new take on things. This was the kind of conceptual art I liked - witty and very clever, but accessible to everyone. Of course, like many of the artists of my day, Demand questioned the nature of the 'reality' we were given in photography and the media - but like very few others he did it with humour, skill and real invention.                        

Michael Craig-Martin

Late in November, I went with Carol to see the Michael Craig-Martin retrospective at IMMA Had Carol not been so keen to see it I probably would not have gone. Craig-Martin dubbed the Godfather of Brit art, taught such artists as Damien Hirst in Goldsmiths Art College, and it was easy to see what a seminal influence he had been on artists of that generation.  He was a monkey-see-monkey-do conceptual artist – borrowing and stealing the ideas of others freely. Craig-Martins conceptual sculptures of the 1970s formed and consolidated many of the conceptual innovations of the 1970s - which for better or worse had formed the lingua-franca of the art world. What surprised me about his retrospective was its depth and quality, and its diversity of ideas.                                   

I had expected to hate it, but in fact I found quite a lot to admire, and I was glad Carol had dragged me along. But what depressed me about it, was the realization, that success in the art world, gave one the ability to inflate and make claims for ones work impossible to the failed or unfashionable talent. Entering IMMA's beautiful courtyard I discovered its entire lower flower covered in one long continues print of one of Craig-Martins colourful collections of household objects, drawn in outline only and overlapping each other. All I could think was: “How much did this cost to make, and install? And who paid for it?”                                                                                   

Craig-Martins work plagiarized many of the key ideas of 1960-70s art. One of the key victims of this had been Patrick Caulfield, whose colourful pop arty paintings of ordinary objects; Craig-Martin had converted into colourful overlapping line drawings of ordinary objects. Many of these canvases were beautiful to look at and very well made. However, Craig-Martin had also hijacked Duchamp's use of ready-mades, Sol LeWitts use of wall drawings, Warhol's use of designed wallpaper with painted canvases placed over it, and so it went on and on. Elsewhere in the exhibition, I was reminded of Joseph Kosuth, Robert Morris, Brice Marden and others whose work, Craig-Martin seemed to convert into conceptual variations. I would have to have had specialist knowledge of conceptualist history to know just how grave these various acts of appropriation were, but I frankly could not give a dam.                                                                                                                

Overall, what struck me most was the use of conceptualized pastiche. One normally thinks of painting or sculpture when one thinks of pastiche, but Craig-Martin had adopted a newish strategy of taking the works of others and giving them his own conceptual-sculptural take. The most witty and effective of these for me were his Blinds, which seemed to convert the Minimal canvases of the likes of Brice Marden into muted coloured blinds, opened or closed to various degrees. Thus allowing each artwork to incorporate an almost endless element of variation. This idea of variation underlined most of Craig-Martin’s work and was seen at its best in his computer light boxes in which his illustrated day-glow objects emerged and disappeared randomly according to a computer program.                 

                                                                                                                     

In many ways Craig-Martin’s exhibition, was an ideal show for art students. For it showed how with unstinting diligence, money, self-belief and the neck to steal anything from anyone, one could make interesting art about just about anything. One did not have to have technical genius, or emotional depth or anything in particular to say about the world. One merely had to make (or have professionally made) objects of some craft and professionalism, on any subject what so ever, no matter how banal (in fact for institutional support, the more banal the better), but above all else – respect and work within the framework of the institutional and academic system. Craig-Martin’s work I felt had not and never would change the world, but it had and would cause a murmur within the walls of contemporary art institutions – a game of minor aesthetic delight for those who thought art was nothing more than an intellectual trivial pursuit.   

                                                              

The self deception and cultish insularity of the institutional art world was summed up for me when I entered one of the rooms that held Craig-Martin’s infamous sculpture Oak Tree which was a glass half-full of water on a glass shelve about eight feet high up on a wall, with a plague with a conceptual interview in which Craig-Martin asserted his right to describe it as an oak-tree. “Oh look there’s the glass of water that’s an Oak tree!” I chuckled to my girlfriend. “No it is an oak tree!” The invigilator exclaimed to me. “Oh right.” I murmured, not wishing to talk to her. “It is an Oak Tree! Read the sign!” She haughtily proclaimed. I had no desire to tell her I had seen the ‘Oak Tree’ in the Tate in London in 1996, or that I thought it was utter bullshit. Instead, I dutifully read the conceptual sign that accompanied the glass of water on a shelf and moved on. But as I did my spine shivered with the same kind of disgust that had filled me, when I had been forced to sit through Catholic mass and go along with the religious delusion that wafer and wine were in fact the body and blood of Christ. I frankly couldn’t care less if Craig-Martin chose to make the artistic point that whatever the artist claimed was art – was art. I certainly did not think it an original statement; it was in fact just another pastiche this time of Duchamp and Kosuth. But I did mind being told what to think by some snotty nosed gallery intern. The art world could claim anything they wanted to be art, but I and everyone else had the absolute right to deny it was art, or that we thought it to be part of a very smug, pseudo-intellectual, irrational and boring kind.                                                                        

 The truth about art I had come to believe was – that there was no eternal meaning to it, it’s grand theories were largely obscure, elitist and subject to fashion, and it had little or no power to effect any kind of change in society. Art was nothing more than a mode of communication – part of a cultural exchange. Sometimes it connected profoundly with its audience (as it had done in the work of artists like Raphael, Rembrandt, van Gogh, Rothko and Warhol) but most of the time it was nothing more than a form of wall filler, decoration and distraction – a form of amusement. Great art works formed part of a visual debate about existence, and as in any debate some ideas and expressions were more convincing than others. It was the right and duty of every artist to pursue their art to the fullest, but there was no entitlement on the part of their audience to accept their work as profound, meaningful, and beautiful or something that could enrich their lives. I could see how Craig-Martin’s work would be highly instructive to young art students, conceptual artists and even graphic designers, but for me it had no meaning to my work.                                                

Before we left I.M.M.A we quickly went around Irish Art of the 1970s which proved to be a very strong representation of Modern Irish art, but also a store house of artistic ideas and styles now redundant. Le Broquey was represented by some of his strongest works, which reminded me that he did in fact have some small talent.

But my favourite work of the whole day was the photographic work Portrait of Alice Liddell, after Lewis Carroll (2004) by Vic Muniz in the Hearth exhibition downstairs. This photograph consisted of the image of a girl made up of hundreds of brightly coloured children’s toys on a white background. From a distance it looked like a beautiful Fauvist cum Pointillist painting, but up close one delighted in seeing all the different kinds of children’s toys that were piled up to form the shape of the girl. The meaning of the work was further deepened by being based on one of Lewis Carrol’s Victorian photographs of young girls (in this case Alice Liddell) which with my day’s concern for children were controversial to say the least. However, the full implications of this choice of image, was beyond me at the time – all I marvelled at was the cleverness and beauty of the way the image was made. Not only was it a beautiful image it was also smart and knowing in the best Post-Modern sense – summing up as it wittily did so many of the ideas of modernist representation and Post-Modern re-representation.