Showing posts with label The Year of The Pig. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Year of The Pig. Show all posts

13/03/2014

The Year of the Pig



Late in April, I went down to Cork with Carol, together we saw The Year of The Pig (the current year in the Chinese astrological calendar) an exhibition of contemporary Chinese art held at The Gluxsman Gallery - which I later panned on my blogs. The Glucksman gallery, was a tasteful, modern, purpose-built gallery of wood, glass and concrete - set in the beautiful leafy grounds of Cork University. The whole of the Glucksman was filled with the brightly coloured and large-scale works on loan from the Sigg Collection. Dr Uli Sigg was a Swiss businessman and diplomat who had built up a collection of Chinese art made exclusively from the 1990s onwards. The exhibition was broken up into themes like: the individual and society, City vs. countryside and the influence of western art on traditional practices.
             

For about the last ten years I had heard rumours of great Chinese artists becoming the toast of New York and Beijing, but every single time I had actually seen a few of these works I have been utterly repulsed by the crudity of colour, incompetent drawing and lack of originality. I wondered why the art looked so god dam awful and yet was so over-hyped. Witnessing the insanity of the Irish art market of my day, I realized the truth about art - Money Fucking Talks - And Opinion Walks! It was as true in Egypt as it was in Venice, Paris, or New York. If you threw enough money at your nations art - some sort of genius would turn up or be manufactured.
             

I suppose The Year of The Pig had value if taken as one big joke on the ignorant taste of a Chinese millionaire - whose taste was formed and distorted by the west as were the artists he patronized. However, aesthetically and intellectually I could not take it seriously as 'high-art'. This I felt was the artistic version of the Chinese market stall selling fake Chanel perfume and Gucci handbags. However, that perhaps was unfair to the market trader. Because while his sometimes superb rip offs might be fake - it would only be recognizable so to the initiated. This art however was blatantly aware of its plagiarism. In fact much of the work felt like a two-fingered-salute to western modern art - a kind of anything you can do I can do even worse. You may feel I was being too harsh, but frankly, I would have deserved the exact same response if I arrogantly thought I could do calligraphy to match the Sung dynasty masters!
            

 Some of the work was very effective as gaudy eye candy - but it was never in the slightest bit original. It would be far too tedious for me to go through the whole show and point out the not just subtle but blatant plagiarisms. However, suffice to say - I had seen it all before – a long time ago. These Chinese artists were even crasser, less educated and less technically competent than the artists of London's 'cutting edge' in the 1990s. However, what they had in common was the luck to be born in a time when crass millionaires with more money than artistic taste were willing to fund their idiocy. Sadly, the same could be said for Irish art in 2007 - which was hopelessly over priced and overvalued after centuries of being undervalued and under-priced.
             

Much of this art seemed adolescent both in terms of the individual artists and in terms of the Chinese state. Lest we forget - China was one of the most brilliant civilizations the world has ever seen. The artistry, spiritual depth and dexterity of Chinese art was staggering. In bronze, jade, lacquer, porcelain, calligraphy, picture scrolls, terracotta figurines - ancient Chinese artists produced work that filled any connoisseur of art with envy and greed to covet. What communism did was pulverize this cultural legacy into rubble - seeing it as elitist and tainted by the misuse of power of the Emperors. So from 1945-1990 - Chinese art ceased to exist - and in its place came crude propagandist art that strove to glorify the Chinese state, the communist leaders and the Chinese people. All of this art had the flavour of the Orient, but its meat and bones were no different to the sentiments and scenarios of Nazi or Socialist art. I found this kind of art contemptible in the extreme - both in terms of its style and its content. As for the crimes it endorsed and concealed - there were no words I could muster.
             

In the late 1990s however, Chinese artists began to create art works influenced by American Pop and Conceptual art. The trouble was that this art was nothing but a piss-take on western art. These artists clearly had no real understanding of the depths and complexities of western culture and they merely copied its most iconic elements - Duchamp's Urinal, Andy Warhol's Silk-screens, Bruce Nauman's video pieces - you get the idea. Don't get me wrong - I enjoyed looking at much of this art - but like a bad Chinese take away - it left me with a sick stomach. The anti-masterpiece of the show for me was Shi Xinning's Duchamp Retrospective Exhibition in China, 2000-2001. In this very crude photo-realist effort - bewildered Chinese officials inspect Marcel Duchamp's Urinal (titled Fountain 1917, and signed 'R. Mutt') with a mixture of incredulity and fascination. It neatly pictured a grand clash of cultures and for me this work honestly evoked the utter bewilderment of the Chinese when faced with a scandalous Western art icon.
             

This show more than any I had ever seen - proved to me the disastrous effects of Globalization - which had reduced the world to a vulgar set of approved styles, logos and brand names - gutting in the process centuries of indigenous cultural development. Surely I thought - the really great artists of the future would not be the globetrotting rich trash that were currently are in power - they would be artists who had both a profound sense of their race and their national heritage.
             

On our way back into town, we visited the Fenton gallery one of Cork's premier private galleries - which had a lovely space in a converted warehouse. I had never heard of any of the artists on show (Alan Boardman, Ciarán Cronin, Tonia Kehoe) - and I doubted I ever would again. All three were abstract painters but their work was the kind of bland insipid and unoriginal abstract art that hotels and restaurants buy thinking that some fools will consider them cultured. Well I didn’t. This stuff and all the other mountain of abstract art produced in the world was nothing more than wall filler. It may have been a fact that 99.99% of all the art bought and sold in the world was of a similar ilk - but I wasn’t going to lie down and pee on my chest like a tame puppy - the way everyone else seemed to! Artists like this in my opinion were little better than home decorators – though often a lot less skilled. Why in god’s name would anyone buy this crap I wondered. I could only think of one reason - because they thought that these were 'major' artists. The fact was they are not - they were parasites on the corpse of a long dead idiom. So if you knew you are not looking at the work of an abstract genius like Kandinsky, Kupka, Malevich, Pollock, Rothko, Marden or Richter - why bother paying good money for something you and your kids can knock up at home - the way home-decorating programs on TV taught you.
             

Finally, we went to the Crawford Art Gallery - which had grown on me, as I had become more failure with it. Although the Crawford had one of the most minor collections of Irish art I had ever seen - it did have a few gems by Jack B Yeats, John Lavery, Barry Cooke and Dorothy Cross. My favourite painting in the museum by far was a portrait in oils of a redhead holding a small yellow Cannery –called The Fugitive. This ravishing redhead vixen painted in luscious thick hog-hair brushstrokes - her pale hair set off against her flame red hair and pillar-box red lips captivated me. It was painted by Wilfrid G De Glehn (1870-1951) – a now forgotten member of the English White Stag school.
             

While there we saw Irish Art of the 1970s which we had also seen in IMMA the year before. This retrospective made perfectly clear that the two dominate trends in Irish art in the 1970s' was abstract minimalism (as practiced by Cecil King, Anna Madden and Michael Farrell) and photo-realism (as practiced by artists like Edward Maguire, Martin Gale, and Robert Ballagh.) I found Martin Gales work tedious, brain-dead, photo-realism of the worst kind. The abstract minimalist canvases came off looking more significant than the photo-realist work - though this I think was because of how technically simplistic they were to make. Maguire and Ballagh were really pushing themselves to the limits of their technical abilities - something their abstract contemporaries could not claim. The trouble was - their technical skills were not up to the job. Some people thought like these artists - that a good painting was one in which you painted every crack in the floor, ever hair on the dog, and every wrinkle in the face of a fat artist looking at himself in the mirror - but this was not art it was taxidermy! Moreover, it was certainly not painting as Raphael, Rembrandt, Poussin, Ingres or Picasso would have understood it. What this show proved was just how seamless Irish artists’ attempts at intellectual theft were in comparison to their Chinese counterparts. Artists like Farrell subtly infused their work with Celtic designs without overdoing it. However, their work was still little more than theft devoid of technical challenge. The stand out piece of the show for me was Farrell's Political Presse Series (1980) - a masterful and wonderfully inventive piece which proved to me again what talent Farrell had - but it saddened me to also think how much of it he squandered in drink and acting up artistically in pubs.
             

On the second floor of the Crawford Art Gallery, we saw the collection of The Great Southern Hotel collection. As hotel collections, it was not that bad - but it was typically unadventurous. Nora McGuinness seemed to have been very popular with the collections head, as she was represented by over a half a dozen oils and watercolours. Frankly, I have never seen as many of her works. As an Expressionist artist working in 1950s Ireland she appears a strong figure - but her work overall is too technically limited, too dour, too gloomy and too devoid of the spiritual depth that all great expressionist art must have.