Sean Scully and The Bullshit of Hype

On Friday May 5^th 2006, I watched the Irish/English painter Sean Scully being interviewed by Pat Kenny. Sean Scully who had lived in New York for years was being interviewed on The Late Late Show (Ireland's Tonight Show - without the humour and a lot of serious debates) on the eve of the opening of a whole room devoted to his art in the newly expanded Huge Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin. It was a cringe-making interview and in a way I felt sorry for Scully. Serious and I mean really serious big art world artists like Scully do not appear on stupid popular television shows - not only because popular culture does not want them, but because even if they do - serious artists find these kinds of interviews - centred around childish notions of 'genius', 'the greatest artist in the world' and discussion of the ludicrous and vulgar price of their paintings insults the seriousness of the high minded artist. I cringed when Pat Kenny the host of The Late Late Show pointed to one of Scully's abstracts 'Yellow Yellow' and delighted in informing the audience that it was worth €400, 000. I nearly vomited when Barbara Dawson director of the Huge Lane described Scully to Kenny and the audience as 'one of the greatest artists in the world' and 'the greatest abstract painter alive" - pass the fucking bucket! I could have listed a hundred artists alive that were better than Scully and thousands more who were infinitely more interesting to look at.

But I continued to watch and my ears pricked up when Pat tried to get Scully to describe his paintings. I had painted quite a few abstract paintings in my time and I had always found them hard to describe to the common man. So I was eager to hear the feted multi millionaire and art teacher describe his abstract works. What a fucking let down! Scully squirmed in his seat and trotted out bullshit about how Beethoven's music was abstract, how our memories are not literal but in fact abstract and other very lame and unoriginal clichés. Where was the mystical gibberish of Kandinsky or the “I am Nature” intensity of Pollock which were at least more convincing? Scully’s explanations of his abstract art were no more intelligent or convincing than the ramblings of some spotty, sincere teenager. 


Scully had in fact had a blessed existence in the art world - Robert Hughes loved his work - Now I loved Hughes as a critic and a writer - but his judgments concerning contemporary art was depressingly narrow minded - for example Hughes hated Basquiat, Schanbel, Celement, Koons, and Hirst. Part of Scully's success I thought was the aura around Scully the “black belt in karate”, youthful gangster and thug with a painful sincerity about the deep meaning of his paintings made up of rectangles of muted colours butted against each other on expensive French linen canvas stretched on thick 3" stretchers. In an art world of pathetic effete whims that had never had a cat-fight never mind a bar room brawl - Scully was intimidating. Surely someone so imposing, anguished, and sincere was making art of serious import! But he wasn't. He was a lucky chancer who had turned out hundreds of monotonous abstract canvases without any real intellectual invention or for that matter passion. Scully's work told us absolutely nothing about the world in which we lived and was in fact a parasitic reheating of early modernist abstraction - but without any of the spiritual meaning, originality or iconoclastic edge of the originals. 


So why was it that he had come to mean so much in the Irish art world? Because Ireland's art elite was desperate to fabricate a visual tradition for Ireland and would do anything to get it - or fake it. In 2000 the Huge Lane installed the Bacon studio - creating a myth of Bacon's Irishness (Bacon left Ireland at the age of 16 and his parents were English) with Scully they took a man born in Ireland but who grew up and studied in England and had lived as an uber rich art celebrity in England, America, and Germany but never Ireland - and enshrined him as an Irish master! 


Growing up as an artist in the dissolute and dead art world of Dublin in the 1980s-90s was depressing. Real art happened in Paris, Berlin, New York and London, and all we had was magazines like Artforum to inform us of what was going on elsewhere. Even if we didn't believe all the hype and bullshit surrounding art world stars like Beuys, Warhol or Koons - we had no real way of judging for ourselves. Like dogs in a kennel we ate what we were feed and knew no better. How could one judge the quality of Schnabel, Basquiat, or Barney on the basis of a few tiny photos and a few paragraphs of philosophical bullshit in the art magazines? It was impossible! But one of the good things was to live in a country with no vested interest in art. None of us had any part in the fabricating of art myth and were immune to its effects. All that had changed by the turn of the millennium. Ireland wanted its own artistic heritage and with that came the fabrication of myths about artists of very average ability.

Philip Tracey and Howard Hodgkin 2006

At the end of the month I went with Carol to see When Philip Met Isabelle at the Collins Barracks Museum of Decorative arts, in had previously been on shown in the British Design Museum in London. Carol had suggested we go along to see it and I had agreed but with little enthusiasm. But what a show! It was absolutely brilliant! Isabelle Blow was a real throw back to the English eccentrics of the 1920s crossed with the avant-garde of the Brit art scene and punk. She discovered Tracey when he was studying in London and became his muse. Isabelle had Tracey move into the basement of her Belgravia house and made his name in London. Their hilarious story was the stuff of myth and every art student's dream. She had a passion for hats and the courage to wear the most outlandish creations Tracey could conceive. Together they made art - there is no finer way to put it. The exhibition was superbly staged - the all black walls adding super glamour to the whole affair. The hats inspired by flowers, shells, modernist sculptures and paintings, were at once hilarious and deadly serious - truly eccentric! The hats were objects of supreme craftsmanship and attention to detail combined with zany wit and a desire never to repeat the same design twice - a rebuke to so much so called 'art' of my day that failed to achieve any of the aforementioned. Leaving the exhibition my girlfriend I were giddy with life, thankful that such original minds and persona's can exist in the midst of the dreck of a tediously multi-national, pop culture world.                                                                     

Later after a Mocha and delicious sticky toffee pudding we went to IMMA where I wanted to see the paintings of Howard Hodgkin. As usual I.M.M.A served up a mixed bag of exhibitions of varying degrees of quality. First we looked around Abstraction x 3 a group show featuring the work of Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz and Agnes Martin. It was claimed that their work “...developed artistic means for expressing, diagramming and understanding philosophical, scientific and transcendental ideas.” Such was the bullshit of contemporary art speak and it meant absolutely nothing. Inspecting the work gave no idea of such lofty ideals being met in plastic language. Instead, one saw tedious spirograph like abstractions by Emma Kunz and utterly pointless graphed white abstractions by Agnes Martin. That work that was so utterly useless as explanations for philosophical and relativity ideas could be passed off as such just showed the cretins and self absorbed solipsism of the art world at its worst. But the real crime was that as art works they were so dull, unskilled and boring. After all Mondrian and Kandinsky believed a lot of Theosophical mumbo-jumbo - but they also made plastic works of great beauty, colour and order.                                                                                                                          


The next exhibition we saw was Orla Barry's Portable Stones. Barry was a contemporary of mine. But unlike her I had not been offered bursary's, awards, residencies and countless exhibitions in Dublin and London. I was crippled by an ability to draw and paint, to think outside of the academic conceptual box and had a desire to make images that dealt with real meaty issues. Barry's work read like an earnest teenager who has a MFA and decided to bequeath to the world the weight and depth of her linguistic genius. The fact that her aphorisms were so utterly banal, so utterly contrived and so utterly irrelevant had meant that to those in the art world she was seen as highly significant and worthy of exhibition after exhibition. In my studio I had 51 notebooks crammed full of one liners and thoughts on the world, sometimes they made it into a painting or drawing, mostly I reserved such mental masturbation to my private life. But even if I did as Orla did, mechanically fill canvas after canvas with them, they would not have been shown, because they were filled with hate, originality and despair - nothing that could be politely contained in the Irish art world.                             

  
After the dross of Barry's work, we viewed the exhibition of drawings in the permanent collection. Many of the works were of dubious merit. One dismal and limp pencil drawing of a woman's head by Matisse stood out because if it were not for the name behind it this doodle would not stand up to anybody's judgment. Matisse I thought was a very over rated draftsman, but he had done so much better than this! However, there were some very strong drawings of poor Brazilian children by Brian Maguire, pencil drawings of Oak leaves by Tom Molloy, Satirical Post-Modern drawings by David Godbold, lithographs by Terry Winters, and a kitsch but beautiful permanent marker drawing on linoleum by Stephen Brandes.   

                                                                          
  
Once again, the seesaw of quality swung as we viewed the video work Silver Bridge by Jacky Irvine. This eight-piece video of footage of the bat enclosure of Dublin Zoo and other assorted animals culminated in a video piece of Jackie hanging off a silver bridge in a black dress like a bat. It took the prize from Orla Barry for self-indulgent artistic wank by someone who should have just quit art and gone into therapy, or join a hippie commune. These were the cretins that were exhibiting in the very gallery's that had turned me down flat over and over again! While I went mad with regret and failure - they exhibited and taught other in Art College to produce equally pretentious and obscure works for art world insiders.   
                                                                                           

I saved the Howard Hodgkin until last and it did not disappoint. Hodgkin's work had no great meaning; it was a call to the senses. Much was made of memory and the recollection of lost moments, but since these were Howard's memories, I had no way of telling how accurately his splashes and dashes of colour depicted his life. Hodgkin confirmed the rule that most abstract painters were never more than fourth rate figurative artists, and their conversion to abstraction was a clever strategic move. But as an abstract painter Hodgkin was really first rate. Sometimes his over use of dabs and dots of colour could be off putting. But at his best he was wonderful. In his best canvases his taste for colour was delicious. His best work from the late 1970s to the early 1990s were clearly the result of constant and renewed readjustment. His paint was also wonderfully nuanced, from thin glazes to rich creamy impasto's, from jabbed splashes to feathered lines to sweeping lunges of the loaded brush. This was art - as pure unadulterated joy. Sadly the work from the late 1990s were woeful - sloppy and hastily thrown together. There was none of the readjustment and rich calculation of the great works, and the larger scale was usually disastrous. I would not have been surprised if I had been told Hodgkin had an elephant helping him to paint these later work.