Showing posts with label Now’s The Time. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Now’s The Time. Show all posts

14/03/2014

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.