Showing posts with label The Pampered and The Cursed. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Pampered and The Cursed. Show all posts

13/03/2014

The Pampered and The Cursed 2006



Later that week I went to see Inner Worlds Outside in IMMA with Carol, we both adored the show and bought the catalogue. That day by chance two very different art worlds collided (the first the raw fevered world of outsider art which we saw in IMMA and the second in a documentary on the Irish painter Anne Madden (wife of Louis le Brocquy) which I saw later that night on RTÉ 1 was the effete world of upper class snobs who painted as a kind of glorified hobby made big business. These worlds could not be more different. In the first we had poor imprisoned lunatics making art out of a deep inner compulsion - in the second we had the upper classes making pastiches of other major artists work, quoting Cézanne and Da Vinci and talking in their upper class voices of how every brush stroke they made was a risk!
 

Anne Madden the daughter of rich Chilean/English parents - went to the fashionable Chelsea arts school, and married Le Brocquy. Together they built a house and studio in the south of France and made art - so spineless so pretty and vacuous and so much the work of other major artists that it was unbelievable to me that it was taken so seriously. But as upper class toffs they made quite a living for themselves and were considered two of the greatest living Irish artists. The world they inhabited was so contrived, pretentious, and snobbish it made me puke. But then that was the art world for you - it was the playground of the rich and feckless, and as socially contrived and neurotic as any Victorian tea party. Plenty of working class men and women made it as artists and were feted and courted by the rich, but the fact remains - the rich made the rules and the rich held the purse strings. This was something Madden and Le Brocquy understood very well and was part of the reason for their success. It is easy to see why Maddens work sold so well - it was pretty and pretentious but with no edge. It seemed to be challenging but at the same time because it was so much the work of pastiche - it was familiar and unthreatening. Madden took the work of Barnett Newman, Graham Sutherland, and Jackson Pollock and robbed it of any threat, iconoclasm and difficulty - then prettified it to the point of interior decoration. 


In stark contrast the work of Outsider artists like Henry Darger, Adolf Wölfli, and August Walla in Inner Worlds Outside and great modernists inspired by outsider artists like Nolde, Klee, Miró, and Dubuffet - throbbed with compulsive creativity at its rawest and most authentic. Contrasting Madden and Le Broquey with these outsider artists was like contrasting a manufactured pop star, whose producers had used every trick and gimmick in the book to lend gravitas to their pap and a great neglected and marginalized Blues guitarist who you hear soulfully without backing tracks, dubbing, or orchestration. Yet again - guess which sold! Inner Worlds Outside, was not an exhibition to go to if you were after oil on French linen paintings. Virtually all of the work was small, on paper and often just with the most modest drawing materials - but what invention - what compulsive filling in of each sheet with a world of ideas! Going around the Inner World Exhibition I was struck again and again by the poetic genius of many of these artists and thought how in the hands of a professional artist with a MFA the same ideas and forms would had been over blown, and spiritlessly conceived and produced. I did not only marvel at the greatness of outsider art - I also lamented at the state of contemporary art and wonder at the causes for the malaise. How was it possible that the more education you gave someone, the more bursaries, travel aids, residencies, and prizes that you loaded upon them - the worse the art they produce? How many of those that stumbled into art - were really born to be artists? How many really had a burning urge to make art - and how many were just in it for what they could get - out of dealers, collectors and arts boards? 


I was convinced that the greatest crime of the artist was vanity! It was only natural for one to seek to be admired by others and have ones efforts endorsed and respected. But this should have never been the driving force of the great artist - other concerns like the communication of ideas and feelings should have take precedence. But far too often the professional artists I observed became crazed with their own creative vanity - wanting to paint bigger and bigger (not better and better) paintings or sculptures. And often this bloating of arts size was a deception meant to hide the fact that the artist was creatively bankrupt. Seeing such small and humble work in the meagre materials - was a shot in the arm to me. It showed just how much could be done with so little - provided one was really a true artist. To be a great artist one had to produce a significant body of work, which could be compared with and evaluated against the work of other masters. But what tribal art, non-western art and outsider art proved was that the greatest artist the world will ever see - could just be living in a cardboard box by the side of the street - the pity was - he or she would never get the chance to prove themselves to the world - because they didn't fit into our society or the world of art. Their talents, like their lives would be thrown away.