Showing posts with label Salvador Dalí. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Salvador Dalí. Show all posts

27/10/2015

Crazy, Pretentious, Agitprop 'Love'




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.