I Love Tracey Emin

The following day in the pits of depression I watched The South Bank Show documentary on Tracey Emin with Carol. I loved the documentary and so did Carol who then spent the following two days reading every book related to Emin in my library. The Documentary was released at the end of January 2005, but I only decided to watched it a year later. I had had an immense love/hate interest in Emin for nearly ten years. In some ways our work was similar or came from a similar need to express private 'truths' in our art. In an art world awash with professionals of the most boring kind, Emin stood out because of her extrovert personality and guts to create the art her psyche demanded without censorship. In fact it was this rawness, lack of irony, and lack of professional calculation which made her work stand out from the sea of machine made, impersonal and utterly academic theory bound art of my day. There were literally hundreds of thousands of artists making this kind of academic art that was utterly lifeless, over designed and pompously blown up with ill digested theory - but there was only one Tracey Emin. To attack her for not being able to paint or draw (which even I thought she was hopeless at) or for being too personal and too much of a celebrity was to miss the point entirely. You could have put a camera in front of 90% of contemporary artists and just send people to sleep or reaching for their remote controls. Tracey on the other hand was real, raw, untutored, honest and had the common touch. As a person and as an artist she connected with people on a level that was never condescending or obscure. Damien Hirst was without doubt a better artist - but he just acted the drunken bore droning on humourlessly about death. Whereas Tracey's conversation had many levels; serious, funny, rude, sad, or pathetic. Identity art had been around for nearly twenty years, but it had mostly been made by people with no identity worth knowing. In many respects Tracey's art was very feminine, and much of the abuse she had received had been because of the preconceptions/ prejudices people unconsciously had about women. Her work taunted the viewers to expose their bigotry, and invariably she succeeded. Tracey's earthy commonness exposed the art world for the snobbish, elitist and bigoted world it actual was. Most artists, curators and collectors live mundane lives the main thrust of which is social climbing. Artists have for centuries used art to social climb, they follow strict rules of etiquette laid down by the upper classes and they manage their careers with all the cunning of a reader of Machiavelli’s The Prince. Tracey's art and life were a spit in the face of such narrow minded uncreative pompous bores. She was right when she said - she was her own best creation. In fact it was Tracey the person, not really Tracey the artist who beguiled me so much. In an art world run by bureaucrats, accountants, knaves, lick arses, and actors - she was real. It is true that many of the formal aspects of her work was derived by from artists like Munch, Kahlo, Beuys, Basquiat, Nauman, and Lucas to just name a few of her influences. But her sheer force of personality made these influences her own, and in many cases make her influences look like pale imitations. I loved Tracey, just for being Tracey.                                                                                                   

Louis Le Brocquy: The Naked Irish Emperor

At the end of February 2006, I saw a documentary on Louis le Brocquy. He was the richest most celebrated Irish artist of the last 50 years. Due to the Celtic Tiger and collectors who are concerned to look patriotic, his prices are outrageous. In 2000, over one million was spent on a 1950s canvas. Had Le Brocquy been born anywhere else he would have starved on his talents. However, he was Irish and in a country bursting to the rim of world-class writers and musicians he was one of the few old artists of any merit. So ipso facto he was rich and celebrated. To list all the artists he had ripped off to fuel his art would be tedious. In the documentary, he was quick to name a few, but also deadly silent on the key influences - Cézanne, Picasso, Fautrier, Wols, Giacometti and Bacon. The documentary was larded with literary references and illusions - the kind of crap that goes down so well in Ireland where writing was still king. The Poet of the Bog Seamus Heaney cropped up to eulogize every ten minutes - Heaney loved bogger art - the kind of art that relates to an Ireland that died about fifty years ago. Le Brocquy had talent and handled paint with some sophistication. And he could draw with some level of seriousness. But his art was passionless, stilted, plagiarized, and studied into mediocrity. The influences were too obvious, and Le Brocquy added nothing new in terms of subject matter, passion, or design. The list of French and English painters of the 1950s that were better than him would be a long one - Giacometti, Bacon, Freud, Auerbach, Stael, Dubuffet, Wols, Atlan, Fautrier, Sutherland - and this at a time when American Artists were supreme. That said, I had never heard a bad word spoken about Le Brocquy as a man. He seemed a supreme diplomat and smoothie - the kind the middle class ladies who lunch adore - an artist with no balls, who is polite and adds just a dash of colour - but not too much colour - that would be impolite.

Art Safari 2005

Art Safari reminded me of Gregor Schnider, who was featured on Art Safari the year before and was a huge hit worldwide. Schnieder made installations (a genre I think I hated even more than conceptual art) but his installations were so creepy, so psycho and twisted that they genuinely stayed in the memory. From the 1980s Schnieder had made alterations to his house in Rheydt, installing false walls, crawl spaces, extra windows, soundproof panels, the whole effect was creepy in the extreme. The kind of thing some murder or abductor might do. The power of his work came from realism; he did not bother with the ludicrous 'arty' interventions of lesser instillation artists.

              

The following day I went to see The March of the Penguins with Carol in the Irish Film Institute. What a beautiful documentary! It filled me with awe, dread, love and hope. The lives of these emperor penguins made my own life seem mundane and trivial. It confirmed my long held suspicion that animals were far more interesting and far more impressive than most humans were. It’s funny how we talk about civilization and being elevated above the brutish animals. What has our selfish elevation achieved? The practical destruction of the planet, and every living thing in it. The social camaraderie and love for their babies of those penguins filled me with shame. However, putting the politics and intellectualizations aside, I have to say it was one of the most romantic films I have ever been to with a girl. The story of these Penguins really was a love story! And it put a smile on my face all night - and that's not very easy to do!

In mid December, I saw Art Safari on the artist Serra Santiago. Santiago admitted that art was a luxury product for an elite audience, the self-same people who profit from globalization and the exploitation of the poor. He admitted that the art market was elitist and he admitted that he had very little power to effect real social change. However, he placed his art practice in a guerrilla role. By lying to curators about the real meaning of his work and his motives and politics, he managed to persuade them to commission art pieces that critiqued their institutions, corporate sponsors or political backers. Lying to curators seemed key to him achieving his aims. I could not lie, but I respected his strategy. Most curators deal in lies and promotional art-historical bullshit anyway, so it served them right as far as I was concerned.  Santiago also admitted that his art depended upon the exploitation of poor people. Nevertheless, his exploitation of poor people for art made one think again about the exploitation of poor people by the western corporations.