On Monday 7th April 2014, I went into town with Carol at half ten in the morning. I bought two books in the National Gallery bookshop; Love and the Erotic in Art by Stefano Zuffi and Herbert Read’s A Concise History of Modern Painting which I had owned and loved years before but had sadly lost.
Then we went to the Royal Hibernian Academy were we saw mini exhibitions by Paul McKinley, Ciarán Lennon, James Hanley and Dorothy Cross. All in their different ways illustrated the rise of the Neo-Academics because they married conventional technical skill with modish philosophical awareness and a desire to wow the masses – yet at the same time they lacked real individuality, anarchic creativity or intellectual dissention and thus their politics was totally in keeping with the new liberal elite consensus. Having had very little sleep the night before, I was in an exhausted critical mood, and all these artists struck me as different forms of pastichers - with stilted academic skill and little original to say. Not that they were unique in this, since 1979, contemporary art had stopped being about original ideas and become all about reshuffling the cultural and media deck albeit with often great skill, desperate ambition and the support of corporate and public funding. So in an age when virtually all art was academic, establishments like the RHA had regained their lustre. Worn out from a sleepless night, a failed career as an artist and the effects of middle-age, I had a tremendous sense of an art world - despite its gaudy fecundity and grandiose spectacles - similarly running on theoretical empty.
At first sight, I was charmed by the brightly coloured paintings of Paul McKinley that hung in the lobby of the RHA, but quickly became queasy looking at their slippery surfaces that did not add up to anything. Apparently McKinley wanted to question the cultural tourism to sites of genocide like Rwanda but his paintings offered nothing critical in anything other than his artist statement. Like many post-Warhol artists, Paul McKinley wanted to have his cake and eat it - he wanted to wallow in genocide voyeurism and decadent oil painting while claiming he was critiquing our puerile voyeuristic culture. His work reminded me of Richard Mosse’s pink tinted infrared photographs of soldiers in Africa which some thought a profound statement on African tragedy but I found insufferably tarted-up, post-colonial, atrocity voyeurism. Similarly the colours in Paul McKinley’s paintings were sweet and eager to please as was his trendy imagery of Rwanda. Paul McKinley was like a modern day hallucinogenic Impressionist seeing only picturesque subjects in photographs which he painted safely back in Dublin, exhibited in the RHA and sold to the nouveau riche under the guise of Post-Modern critique. When Leon Golub painted the brutalities of modern war, he left the viewer in no doubt of his political position and visceral disgust – apparently McKinley was too sophisticated and Post-Modern to have such simplistic political or emotional responses. Likewise when Luc Tuymans appropriated public domain photographs he transformed them into truly unsettling and uncanny indictments of man’s inhumanity to man - largely by restraining the hedonistic pleasures of oil paint – rich colour, sexy impasto and illusionistic depth - and reducing oil painting to its driest and most dour mourning after humanity. McKinley on the other hand made paintings of atrocity sights with all the pleasure of an accomplice who then turns around in artist statements and says he was only kidding. Which made McKinley’s work more saleable in the provincial short term but also more meaningless.
The strongest works in the RHA that day I found - were also the most deceptively simple. Ciarán Lennon’s two oil paintings on large and thick aluminium shaped panels raked with blunt yellow, red and blue paint applied with a squeegee - had a frantic yet measured power that drew me back to look and look again at them. Still while I admired the aluminium panels and vigour and directness of the paint - I found the blunt yellow, red and blue colours rather crude and unsophisticated. Moreover, Lennon was no more original than any other Irish artist - his process painting style and shaped canvases having been a staple of contemporary art for nearly fifty years - if only because it created the kinds of impersonal and socio-politically neutral tokens of ‘Western freedom’ so beloved of banks and corporate headquarters. In particular Lennon’s early black canvases had been poor additions to the work of Pierre Soulages – but you would be hard pressed to find any mention of Soulages in the philosophical blather of texts that promoted Lennon early on.
Then we went to look at the new paintings by James Hanley. I was curious to see James Hanley’s work in the flesh having only seen a handful of his works in exhibitions. I had seen numerous paintings and drawings by Hanley in Irish publications and on TV and been baffled that such an illustrative and paint-by-numbers academic could be taken so seriously. Hanley’s paintings were even more stilted and robotic in the flesh than any reproduction could hint at. Hanley utterly lacked any feeling for line or paint and was devoid of even a whiff of originality or genuine artistic creativity. His attempts to be taken seriously as an artist - and not just the portrait painting hack of those in power - looked strained and desperate. No more so than in his choice of subjects for these ruler and paint-by-number renderings. His oil on linen pictures, with painted blue mount around them, followed by a canvas mount, glass and old fashioned frame bespoke a control freak to me. His obsession with soviet era statues, macho architecture, bull fighting and images of power was also unconsciously revealing. Perhaps he thought he was Gerhard Richter when he painted a tourist snapshot of the barbed wire fences and train tracks of Auschwitz but I just thought he was a deluded Sunday painter with no sense of real history, pathos, tragedy or the dangers of appropriating imagery you had no right or ability to use. In fact, Richter had considered for some time whether to paint Auschwitz and realized that such a work was unpaintable. In the end, Richter collaged the collected photos of the holocaust alongside pornographic images - contrasting one kind of horror with another. Incredibly John P. O’Sullivan writing in the Sunday Times wrote that James Hanley’s painting of the barbed wire fences in Auschwitz “capture the essence of that bleak and blighted spot”. What fatuous nonsense, Hanley’s painting of Auschwitz was merely an unconscious reflection of the transformation of unspeakable and unpaintable tragedy into touristic kitsch.
Finally and already in a dispirited mood we went upstairs to see the Dorothy Cross exhibition. Looking at Dorothy Cross’s work, I was reminded of how impressed I had been of her when I had seen her Powerhouse exhibition in the Douglas Hyde gallery in 1993. At twenty-two, I was shamefully unfamiliar with allot of contemporary women’s sculpture and I thought she was a genius! Then about five years later I discovered the work of Louise Bourgeois and realized with a jolt that Dorothy Cross was not a genius but the woman whose work she (and virtually every other female sculptor) had so tougherly plagiarised was. Out of curiosity, I reread the catalogue to Cross’s Powerhouse exhibition from 1993 and found that Bourgeois was briefly mentioned only once in the footnotes! I looked in another book on Cross and again there was only a brief mention of Bourgeois and then only one of her early paintings was illustrated - though there was a lot of strained references to ancient art – another trick of contemporary obscurantism. So since 1995, I pretty much stopped paying attention to Cross’s work thinking that virtually everything she did had some origin elsewhere in contemporary women’s art.
To me this overview of Cross’s Neo-Surrealist work related to Connemara, looked hopelessly dated and second-hand - especially the forced surrealism, sexual innuendo and penis envy. Each individual work struck me as a tamer version of the likes of Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin. While the passé Surrealist juxtapositioning of objects reminded me of more original and subtle works by the likes of René Magritte and Meret Oppenheim over seventy years before. Of all Cross’s work, perhaps her work related to the sea were her most original, though my favourites were her cow hide sculptures which were not in this show. As for her video pieces in the exhibition - I found I had thankfully developed a totally unconscious reflex ability to ignore video work. In the end I was left wondering what, if anything, Cross’s career added up to that was uniquely her own. Cross’s lack of autobiographical or handmade gestures, plundering of artistic sources, and techniques and use of found objects meant that after over twenty years I was still not sure who Dorothy Cross really was. I was left feeling Cross was just a clever Neo-Academic creator of Irish versions of Post-Modernism. I still thought she was the most ambitious and accomplished female artist in Ireland though that wasn’t saying much – and I could think of a handful of Irish male artists (mostly painters) I preferred. However, like them I found every Irish artist including myself dammed as provincial pastchiers of real geniuses in London, Germany and New York. For over three hundred years in Ireland, original ideas in the visual arts have been something that happens abroad and which we belatedly make Irish versions of - for equally ignorant Irish buyers. Despite the funding of the Art Council which enable our provincial mediocrities appear more substantial than they are and the often virtuoso skills with which we parody these foreign ideas - we are always playing catch up with the real centres of artistic creativity and debate.
Later
we went to Hodges Figgis were I bought The
Self-Portrait: A Cultural History by James Hall, which turned out to be
probably the best book on the subject. Then we had mochas and cheesecake in
Starbucks before walking up to M. Kennedy & Sons where I bought €120 worth
of art materials. I bought oil and watercolour paints, Sennelier pastels,
Liquitex matt varnish and a couple of sheets of Arches watercolour paper.