On Saturday 17th October, my brother and sister
brought Carol and me out to see What We
Call Love: From Surrealism to Now in IMMA. It was the first major touring
exhibition in IMMA since Frida
Kahlo and Diego Rivera
in 2011 and a chance for me to see works by artists I was still unfamiliar with
in the flesh like Rudolf Schwarkogler and Cecily Brown. Before going, I warned
my elder siblings that there were some explicit images and sexual themes.
However, as it turned out, they were amused by the sexual themes - but shocked
by what passed for art in this conceptual age. I was delighted to get a lift in
my brother’s car up to IMMA, which I had not been to in over a year, partly
because I could not be bothered to make the long journey out to see mediocre
conceptual art and partly because of my complete disenchantment with
contemporary art. My sister kindly paid for our entry fees.
Before going to the exhibition, I struggled to think of many
paintings or sculptures that I felt had succeed in portraying love. The best
for me would have been Rembrandts Jewish
Bride, though many painter’s both male and female had produced tender
portraits of their partners, for example Egon Schiele’s paintings of Wally and
Edith or Frida Kahlo’s paintings of Diego Rivera. Still, I felt visual artists
found it harder to convey love as easily as poets, musicians or dancers. Often
when presented with ‘lovers’ in paintings we are left wondering if their
gestures towards each other, represent true love or lust, devotion or
manipulation, self-sacrifice or convenience. Moreover, as a middle-aged man -
with decreasing levels of testosterone - I had realised that love was not the
same as sexual desire and often when young we merely ‘love’ with our genitals
not our hearts.
I have frankly never seen an exhibition in IMMA so heavily
populated and mostly by young students - who seemed titillated by the whole
experience. Whether they were really passionate lovers of contemporary art or
just wanted to see some saucy pictures is debatable - but they were often
taking photos of the rudest art works with their camera phones - and I soon
found the number of girls giggling in front of the work aggravating.
If some viewers to this exhibition thought it too extreme,
they would have done well to remember that in fact most of this art represented
the safest versions of many of these artists’ works. The splayed vaginas of
Picasso’s late work was absent, Salvador Dalí’s masturbatory and scatological
works were absent, Rudolf Schwarzkogler castration images were absent, Carolee
Schneemann’s film of herself copulating with her partner James Tenny, or orgy
film of people rolling around with lumps of meat were absent and Cecily
Browns’s hard-core, copulating porn stars were absent. So this was a strangely
intellectual and impotent version of love that was more concerned with
frustrated, neurotic navel-gazing than messy interaction. Personally, I did not
find any of this stuff erotic or daring in the least - except perhaps in its
manifestation of neurosis, fetishism and the exhibitionistic desire to be seen
to be naughty.
Much of this art was notable for what it refused to give the
art lover; displays of skill - never mind virtuosity, coherent and
comprehensible narrative, beautiful art objects that a collector would feel
compelled to own, sexuality and courtship as a pleasure and so on – all of
these were condemned as traditional, kitsch and counter-revolutionary. So
instead of a warning about sexual content, this exhibition should have had a
warning like: “This Exhibition Contains
Virtually No Work of Conventional Skill or Talent”.
There were very few pieces in this exhibition that struck me
as embodying the idea of love, but the best and one of the first in the show
was Brancusi’s The Kiss from 1923-25.
This simple archaic looking sculpture of two lovers kissing, carved out of a
single block of brown limestone, with the details of lips ears, hair, arms and
hands reduced to their simplest terms - was so tender and pure in its heart -
that I was truly touched.
I found Picasso’s painting The Kiss from 1931, a surprisingly stupid and cartoony image that
reminded me of present day George Condo - which was frankly unforgivable. I
presumed that it came during Picasso’s stormy break up with Olga and
represented the dark vision of women that Picasso fell into at the end of
relationships. Yet, Couple, a tiny
whittled sculpture, from 1930, of a couple embracing, restored my love of
Picasso and yet again I marvelled at his ability to conjure humanity out of the
least prepossessing materials.
Looking at Dalí’s Untitled,
Couple with Their Heads Full of Clouds
from 1937, I was struck by how far I had come from my teenage love of Dalí. As
a youth, I had believed the hype around Dalí which suggested that he had the
skills of an old master, however, having spent a lifetime fitfully looking at
many German, Dutch and Flemish old masters - I realised now Dalí had nothing
like their power of verisimilitude and worse still he lacked their integrity of
character. Besides, looked upon from a Modern perspective, I found Dalí’s
painting style tedious and a dead end that had none of the painterly
originality of the great Expressionists or even his Surrealist peer Joan Miró.
Moreover, Dalí’s once so shocking and transgressive images had mostly become so
obviously works of manipulative kitsch by a shameful exhibitionist.
I found Merret Oppenheim’s oil painting Daphne and Apoll from 1943, a rather generic version of Surrealism.
However I found her sculpture, The Couple
from 1956, which was a found pair of brown boots, joined at the toes - a witty
metaphor for copulating - that still looked contemporary. Yet, once I
registered the conceit - my mind wondered off to greater concerns like having a
drink of coke to quench my thirst and falling blood sugar levels.
As usual, I found Louise Bourgeois towered above most of her
peers and the many acolytes who followed her. One of my favourite pieces in the
whole show, was Bourgeois’s The Couple,
from 2002, two felt figures embracing - surrounded by a global matrix of glass
beads. I realised again, that Bourgeois had the almost unmatched power amongst
contemporary sculptors - to give her sculptures fetishistic power - and only
this piece approached the tenderness of Brancusi’s The Kiss for me.
Rebecca Horn was represented by a complicated machine
sculpture High Moon, which consisted
of two Winchester rifles that turned on pistons and fired a red liquid - which
fell into a trough on the floor and was siphoned back up into two large plastic
see-through orbs – that then passed the liquid back into the guns. I had been a
fitful fan of Horn’s work since the early 1990s so I was delighted to see this
major work by her, however, although we watched the sculpture for a while, it
had stopped firing and seemed to have broken down. Apparently its symbolism had
something to do with Rosicrucian’s philosophy amongst other things and I presumed
the title was a reference to the famous Western High Noon. But that was as far as I got without further research.
Still, I found High Moon one of the
most visually impressive sculptures in the exhibition.
I was curious to see Miriam Cahn’s work from the noughties,
since I remembered her as a powerfully expressive draughtswoman in the 1980s,
of primal figurative images in dense fields of charcoal on vast sheets of
paper. Yet these more recent works of radiated looking nude figures, proved she
had absolutely no sense of colour or ability to make oil paint come alive. Her
recent work struck me as God awful pseudo-Outsider Art type paintings, and they
reminded me of the equally awful cartoony Expressionist paintings of Dana
Schutz who for some reason (beyond me) was taken seriously in New York or Maria
Lassnig who for some reason (beyond me) was taken seriously for her cartoony
Expressionist paintings in Europe and America. This kind of Feminist Bad
Painting, rose high on its political empowerment, the complete repudiation of
the patriarchal Canon and its fashionable debasement of elitist notions like
technique, skill, originality of vision, depth of feeling or soul. And frankly
it was art like this and its success that made me happy to have nothing to do
with the contemporary art world. In 1987, when interviewed for State of The Art a Channel Four art
documentary Cahn had claimed that “men’s
culture hasn’t proved its worth”, (State
of The Art: Ideas & Images in the 1980s, Ed. Sandy Nairne, London:
Chatos & Windus, 1990, P.113.) leaving aside the totally ignorant and
philistine nature of such a misandristic comment, I can simply retort that
after over fifty years of Feminist ranting - most female culture hasn’t proved
its worth!
Michele Ciacciofera’s thrown together, pseudo expressive
drawings on paper, of blobby figures, self-indulgently influenced by Eastern
mysticism - looked like the work of a not very talented high school student
trying to emulate the far superior drawings of Francisco Clemente.
I was fascinated to see my very first Rudolf Schwarzkogler
pieces in the flesh. In my early twenties, Schwarzkogler had influenced my own
auto-castration and phallic paintings. However, by middle-age I pitied
Schwarzkogler more than admired him and wondered if he would still be alive if
it wasn’t for his self-destructive vision of art. The first of Schwarzkogler’s
performance pieces, Action Marriage,
from 1965, was represented by six black and white photographs (the mildest ones
in the series) in which Schwarzkogler’s male and female assistants were dressed
up like a couple about to be married and then Schwarzkogler splattered them
with paint, stripped them and then bandaged them. A traumatic kind of amateur
dramatics, it was performance piece from the early days of the medium. Yet it was saved by the genuine strangeness
of Schwarzkolger’s vision, who in other increasingly sinister performances had
his assistant Heinz Cibulka pretend to slice off bits of his penis (it was
actually a fish in a bandage). A few years later, suffering from depression,
Schwarzkolger threw himself from the window of his apartment to his death, he
was only twenty-nine. I told my brother and sister how Günter Brus another
Austrian Actionist, covered himself in excrement had sang the Austrian national
anthem while masturbating at another performance piece, and was sentenced to
six months in prison, but fled to Berlin. My sister could not believe such art
was thought acceptable. But I explained how the Actionists were reacting to
their countries complicity in Nazi atrocities and sought to debase the whole
bourgeois and deeply conservative culture that they had come from. If nothing
else the Actionist were truly ground-breaking in their day - unlike so many of
the poseurs that followed them.
When we came to the photographs of John Lennon and Yoko Ono -
which I actually thought were quite sweet - they sparked a conversation about
Lennon and Ono’s relationship. My brother who adored the Beatles, thought Yoko
Ono was awful to put it mildly - and so he was shocked when I told him how she
was fêted in the art world today and a heroine to many young female artists. My
brother who thought Ono completely talentless and manipulative - could hardly
believe that in the art world people rated her. Personally, I leaned more
towards my brother’s opinion on Ono - but I tried to at least present an
objective perspective on her work.
Marina Abramović and Ulay’s Rest Energy from 1980, was a photograph from a performance piece by
the lovers, with Marina holding a bow while Ulay held an arrow loaded and
pointed at Marina’s heart. It was a strikingly modern take on the myth of
cupid, however, I was sceptical of the need of Marina Abramović to constantly
place herself in masochistic situations - especially because it was usually a
passive aggressive bid - to achieve the power of victimhood. Moreover, having
outgrown my own self-mutilating and suicidal art, I no longer thought it
necessary or admirable to undergo trials of endurance or maim or kill yourself
for your art and the prize wasn’t worth it anyway.
Annette Messager’s collection of photographs from 1971-73, of
lovers kissing in films and TV dramas mounted on olive coloured boards, had a
certain charm, but seemed like the work of a not particularly talented graduate
student.
Most of the work in What
We Call Love: From Surrealism to Now, presented a very intellectual,
exhibitionistic and sadistic version of ‘love’ - although anything more humane
would have been dammed as kitsch by the establishment in IMMA. Yet, with lovers
like this who needed enemies? So many of the performance pieces from the 1960s
and 1970s recorded in photographs and video pieces - were like those mortifying
couples who insist on fighting in front of you and dare you to intervene in
their private cesspool. The reward of getting involved with most of these
artists might have been some quickie sex - but the price was being lumbered
with a head-case. While so many of these works claimed they were about love or
desire, they were really about revolt against religious and bourgeois norms,
attacks on traditional marriage and propaganda for feminist emancipation and
gay relationships. With all this agitprop, there was little room left for
something as pure, naïve, traditional and counter-revolutionary as true love.
Besides in my experience, most artists were so egotistical, self-centred and
narcissistic that it was impossible for them to ever truly love anyone but
themselves and their own art.
The stories behind Sophie Calle’s works, like her fake
marriage or fondness for helping her lover piss and wish to feel what it was
like to have a penis may have been risqué and the story behind Felix
Gonzalez-Torres loss of his lover to AIDs, may have been tragic but the actual
art works were as impersonal and boring as a PowerPoint presentation by an
academic specialist in street signs.
Nan Goldin’s series of eight verity photographs Marina and Jean Christian in bed with baby
Elio, Sag Harbour, NY from 2001, showed a couple, the woman naked except
for panties and the man naked on a bed, the man sucking her nipple as their
young son watched, then the boy sucked his mother’s nipple while the husband
watched. To all concerned it was obviously an innocent moment of fun, yet I
could not help observe that if these images were found on your computer you
might get a visit from the police and if it had been a man who took the photographs
they would have been arrested. On the other hand, I wondered at how with our
widespread disgust and horror about paedophilia and child abuse - had tainted
the innocence of everybody’s existence. Goldin could be a talented, insightful
and empathetic photographer, however, I wondered, if her subjects had been
bourgeois members of the establishment - if the art world would have had any
interest in her work. Goldin’s cult status in the art world surely rested more
on who (trendy arty types, prostitutes and drag queens) and what she
photographed (decadence, debauchery and alienation) rather than the actual
quality of her photographs - which were rather amateurish and simplistic.
I was initially delighted to see Damien Hirst’s I’ll Love You Forever, from 1994, since
I had not seen many any of his works in the flesh since 1995. However, Hirst’s
readymade collection of medical waste buckets, explosives and a gas mask in a
locked blue steel cage was a blundering attempt at a metaphor for love,
sickness and death - but without any epiphany or resonance. Thus, I wondered at
a world in which this kind of replicate art was bought and sold for millions.
Hirst was just one of the more talented and successful examples of a replicate
artist who had emerged since the 1960s when Art Colleges had moved from a hands
on, studio based practice of vocational types, to an academic, theory bound
practice - that turned art into a series of theoretical and commercial formulas
- at the expense of feeling and integrity of vision. The increased scale and
spectacle of this Neo-Conceptualism merely served to cover up the aesthetic
void at the heart of such work. My sister was completely stumped by Hirst’s
work and was incredulous that just putting objects together was considered sculpture
today!
Cecily Brown’s These
Foolish Things, a huge oil painting of lovers lying on a bed mutually
masturbating was like an Eric Fischl on a huge cream cake that had been whisked
up to look like a parody of Willem de Kooning. I found Brown’s paint handling,
eager to please, facile and lacking any depth or significance. Her mannerist
and frivolous paintings presented emotionally loaded, sexual images, in an
expressively pastiched style - devoid of lust - or any other real feeling for
that matter. Like so many academic hacks since the 1990s like John Currin and
Jonathan Yeo, Brown’s cynical and bloodless appropriation of pornographic
imagery had become a fig leaf of mock transgression - used to cover up her
complete lack of ideas, aesthetic depth or truly crazy sexual desire.
Dorothy Cross was represented by three pieces the best of
them Passion Bed from 1990, a wire
mesh mass imbedded with wine glasses, which I thought one of her best pieces -
even if it was a pale shadow of Louise Bourgoise.
I have grown up and lived through many phases of Feminism and
Post-Feminism, but I remember how, not so long ago, it was fashionable to blame
men for every ill in life and to claim an astonishing level of blameless
innocence and purity for femininity. Yet many of these contemporary Feminist
art pieces presented a rather demented and sick version of feminity - nowhere
more troublingly expressed than in Mona Hatoum’s Incommunicado from 1993, a stainless steel children’s cot which
instead of a bed at its centre had a string of sharp wires strung out like a
shredder. I frankly could think of few works by men that by implication were as
heartless, sadistic or desperate to shock.
There were over two hundred works in the exhibition, but frankly
I think half of them should not have been included, especially a lot of the
later conceptual pieces that were just an accumulation of documentation, the
many video pieces that demanded too much attention and most of the Irish
contributions that were academically dire exercises in pretension or pointless
whimsy. Much of the work especially from the 1960s and 70s were an archivist’s
delight and a traditional art lover’s despair. So many of these artists thought
it was only required to document an event – in order to turn it into art. The
trouble with so much of this text and photo based later work, was that it
offered virtually no aesthetic or visual pleasure and its merits required a
lengthy investigation of its theoretical strength - which by the time we
reached the end of the exhibition - I was too tired and bewildered to do. Too
much of this ‘art’ was like being subjected to the most pretentious and passive
aggressive slide show of an acquaintance’s love life - which made you lose the
will to live - and vow to avoid them at all costs the next time. In fact, I
found the dancers on Strictly Come
Dancing on BBC 1 later that night - far more arousing and romantic than
most of what I had seen in IMMA earlier that day.
After going around the exhibition, my brother bought us
coffee and cake in the café. Then we went around the new book shop and my
brother bought me the catalogue to What
We Call Love: From Surrealism to Now and the catalogue to Damien Hirst’s
retrospective in Tate Modern in 2012. I did not particularly like Hirst and
already had three old books on him - but it was good to know my enemies! My
brother also bought Carol a new printing of a famous book on drawing from 1913
and a toy robot. All in all it was a very enjoyable day out for us all.