Showing posts with label documentary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label documentary. Show all posts

14/03/2014

Art and Money



Between late September and early October 2008, I watched Art and Money – a series of three documentaries on the contemporary art boom of the Noughties. The first show The Mona Lisa Curse was written and presented by my hero Robert Hughes. In it, the Australian critic gave a tour-de-force performance of old-school puritanical pulpit thumping against the greed, stupidity and cunning of contemporary artists, collectors and museum heads. Carol and I watched it together and I was pumping the air in passionate agreement with 90% of what Hughes said about the debasement of all artistic and critical values and their replacement with market values. Yet again – nothing Hughes said was that original – the inter-net for example – was fully of diatribes against the greed, stupidity and vulgarity of contemporary artists, dealers and collectors. However, unlike most grumpy old men – Hughes could back everything he said up with a cast-iron reputation in the arts since the 1960s. I would have recommended any young bleary-eyed artist despairing at their ill fortune to watch this documentary – for it would show them how sick, twisted and corrupt the art-game was.                           

My one dispute with Hughes was his use of Pop artist friends like Robert Rauschenberg and Jim Rosenquist to support his argument. Both of these elderly artists carping about the art world had become multi-millionaires because of the art market. In fact, many of the old, venerated and rich art world commentators in the programmes sounded like whores in a brothel complaining someone had let a few young porn stars in the building.     
                                                                                
The Second show The Oligarts presented by Marcel Theroux - was the weakest of the three documentaries – but gobsmacking all the same. Of the half-dozen or so billionaire Oligarch collectors he interviewed only two displayed any refined taste– and even they seemed mercenary collectors without any soul. While two or three of them had such bad taste in fashion, art and homes – that they made twenty-year-old Rappers look like Kenneth Clark. I thanked my luck stars - to have failed at art. I thanked my lucky stars - that I did not associate with people like that.  
                                             
The final show Outback Art: The Gold Rush was quite simply the most disgusting and heartbreaking documentary on art I had ever seen – and it opened my eyes wide to the patronizing, manipulating and racist exploitation of dirt-poor, illiterate, marginalized and utterly exploited Aboriginal artists by cunning white super-rich trash.                                                                            

The show dealt with the many fundamental sacrileges of the longest continuous culture in human history – dating back well over 40,000 years. The original Aborigines - before the white collectors came - drew in the sand, carved into trees and painted on rocks. They did not care if their work lasted – their land would always last – as would their relationship with it. They did not have money in their culture – and absolutely no tradition of the easel picture. Which we had developed in the West in the late 1400s and which John Berger saw as an adjunct to emergent capitalism.
              

We all know the British invaded their land. We all know, that they were treated like dogs by the British, Irish and European settlers most of them criminals - who stole their land. We all know they were pushed off their land by successive generations of settlers. We all know they gave them no help other than food and drink. We all know they got them dependent on alcohol. We all know that they took many of their children off them - and raised them as white. We all know that they marginalized and ignored their plight for decades. However what they then went on to do from the late 1960s to their culture, heritage and art – was a new one on me. They set up community art centres in the deserted heart of Australia were the white man had pushed them into. In these ram shackle wood and aluminium panel buildings - they gave these poor people acrylic paints and linen canvas. Then they let them paint. Then the money started to roll in and they pushed more and more paint and canvas under their noses - to paint and paint. Aboriginal artists like many native artists – worked on the ground – so they painted on unstretched rolls of top quality canvas and linen. Once the paintings had been completed by the artists’ – the white men would roll them up - and bring them to the white cities. Then the canvases were put on stretchers and framed like western abstract paintings.                                                                                                                                  

In the community centres, they said they gave the artists fifty percent of all sales. Yet the Aborigines were all in rags - lying on dirty beds and working in scummy studios that had not seen a lick of paint in decades. The galleries and offices of the whites - attached to these compounds though were very nice! The white people who claimed they worked for the artists were all well dressed. Many of the artists had large extended families that they had to support with quick sales. The buyers flew in on planes and then flew out to hang this ‘art’ in their million dollar apartments. I never once heard anyone of these collectors express a humane, ethical or aesthetic appreciation of the art that did not sound like sales talk and public relations. Carol started to cry and I felt like puking on the floor. I called the lot of these white people scum.                                                                                        

Even worse than the community art centres were the carpet-baggers who had swooped in to pick off the best (biggest selling) Aboriginal artists and move them to separate camps in even worse conditions to those of the community centres. These dealers did not have to reveal their accounting books and so we had to take them at their word when they said they paid the artists up to fifty percent commission. Again, I saw a major travesty of Aboriginal culture – the picking out of individual artists from their community and trying to make them “Picasso’s” of Aboriginal art. In the long term, I could only imagine what kinds of schizisms this would create in the Aboriginal community. I knew about the exploitation of artists, outsiders and other cultures but this documentary was quite simply the most sickening thing I had ever seen in art. If there was a Hell – then I was sure many of these collectors of Aboriginal art would end up there.                                   

The auction rooms and galleries they showed in the documentary were filled with arch, fat, grotesque white collectors who had only one concern – getting rich of the labours of poor people - they could not give a dam about.     
                                                                                                     
So western easel painting, western acrylic paints and linen, western individualism, western capitalism, western market values, western collectors, western ‘assistants’, western ‘carers’ – all used to foist ‘Aboriginal’ art on the western art world!                                                                                        

                                                                

What that made this cultural colonialism even worse – was the staggering beauty of what they were destroying – a proud and gentle race of people and an art older than the West. The art they made under these unimaginable conditions was utterly beautiful – like the dying cry of a lost world. At their best, these paintings were some of the greatest abstract and symbolic canvases I had ever seen. They were works of profound dignity – made in a squalid world.

The Art of Failure: Chuck Connelly Not For Sale



On July 23ed 2008, Carol and I watched The Chuck Show on BBC4 (tilted The Art of Failure: Chuck Connelly Not For Sale when shown on HBO in America.) The documentary was a fly on the wall film about the once famous but then forgotten alcoholic painter Chuck Connelly. I had expected to fall in love with this guy and his work – he hit all my usual buttons. However even I was utterly revolted by his attitude. I understood his desperation to succeed but I could not fathom his spoilt-brat tantrums.  
                 
The Chuck Show claimed that he had not had a show in New York since the early 1990s – yet a quick check by me revealed at least two shows reviewed in The New York Times – a group show in 1999 and a solo show in 2002! So I would caution trust in the other statistics given in the documentary. In the 1980s he had exhibited with the influential New York dealer Annina Nosei. During the 1980s he sold over one million dollars worth of art, some of his canvases going for up to $50,000 – again according to the documentary. For a short time, he was talked of in the same breath as painters like Schnabel, Basquait, Haring and Fishel as the next great American painter.        

However, his social skills were awful and he managed to alienate most of his old dealers and collectors. In 1989, his paintings were featured in Martin Scorsese’s short film Life Lessons in the larger multi-director movie New York Stories. Nick Nolte played the role of a tortured artist and his tumultuous relationship with his assistant and artist girlfriend. In the scenes where Nolte painted it was Connelly in the close up’s that was actually painting. Meanwhile Scorsese was planning to introduce Connelly to his movie friends and dealers in L.A. Then when the film came out - Connelly rather than talking the film up - said in interview with The New York Post that it was “mundane” and “cliché”! Talk about shooting yourself in the head! Even I doubted I would have been so stupid, so thoughtless and so thankless as to slag off even a really bad Scorsese movie. Yes the film was a mediocre work in Scorsese’s oeuvre - however the painting scenes were some of the best I had ever seen on film.                                                                                                                                    

By the time of the HBO documentary, Connelly was living with his put-upon, young, meek wife and off the small sales (under $500) he made with his last patron and on eBay. He ranted and raved at the art world, shouted at his wife to get him beer and then sobbed in his drinks. By the end of the film he had managed to lose both his wife and his last patron. In many ways his story was reminiscent of mine. I too can remember sending in my ex-girlfriend to galleries with my work because I could not even say hello to those people. I too can remember being filled with hate and poison for the art world – but it was when I was in my late twenties not my early fifties! Like me he was self-obsessed. Like me, he was a painter through and through. Like me, he was an outcast. However unlike me he was a raging, threatening, and nasty alcoholic. Unlike me, he had learned nothing from his twenty years in the wilderness – not humility, not compassion and certainly not objective reasoning. He continued to paint – but in a drunken stupor – ranting and raving at the age of fifty-two. Carol stridently reassured me that I was nothing like Connelly.   
              
There was no doubt that Connelly had talent as a painter but he lacked any original ideas. The major subject of Connelly’s work was oil paint itself – which he piled on in thick slabs with the loaded brush. His pallet was dominated by dark browns, greys, blues, greens and blacks. He might have seen himself as an heir to van Gogh – and maybe he was in a very small way. However, his style also owed something to the murky Romantic paintings of Pinkham Ryder the gritty realism of Ash-Can School painters like John Slone, George Bellows and Robert Henri and the saucy bad-taste of Reginald Marsh. All-in-all, a very conservative and old-school set of influences. Unlike Schnabel, Chia, Clemente or Baselitz he had never come up with a trademark style or gimmick. His work promised but rarely delivered. Most of his paintings looked too much like other paintings by better artists both dead and alive. Yet occasionally he could pull-off a real gem of open-painting - full of gusto and style.                                                                                       

As a man, I found him pitiful, unpleasant and not talented or disciplined enough for the A-League game he sought to play so desperately.  One of the most telling things Connelly said in the documentary was: “First they tell you to be a rebel, then they tell you to kiss ass. They tell you to drink, then they tell you not to.” This heartfelt comment showed up the deceitful contradictions of art-world mythology – which often relied heavily on racy stories of artistic rebels (usually safely dead and rotting in the ground and thus with a totally materialized and commodifiable oeuvre) yet demanded utter subservience of all but the most influential, powerful and rich super stars. Sadly, for Connelly he had swallowed the public’s mythology of the tragic artist and failed to understand the real secret of artistic success – salesmanship, net-working and cunning promotion. Overall I found the documentary very instructive on the real-world, do’s-and-don’ts of the art world.                    

13/03/2014

The Yellow House



"I used to be too subjective, and I was always tempted to find my inner self in the exterior and dissipate my imagination on other people and on life."
Oskar Kokoschka

Later that month I watched with great trepidation The Yellow House on C4. I was nervous, because if any artist was more in danger of being caricatured by a film it was Vincent van Gogh. Already the premises of the book and this film based on the book irked me - why isolate just this nine weeks stay of Paul Gauguin with van Gogh probably because it’s the most sensational part of the van Gogh story - when he cut the lobe of his left ear off after a fight with Gauguin. Besides, although art critics have sometimes laughed at it, I was so familiar with the great Hollywood film Lust for Life, which covered the whole of van Gogh's creative life and had great central performances from Kirk Douglas as Vincent and Anthony Quinn as Paul. I hardly imagined that Lust For Life could be bettered by this new film and it was not. I had never bothered reading Martin Gayford book of the same name, for the simple fact of van Gogh fatigue. I mean I adored him, his art, and his writings, but enough was enough! After all, there were plenty of other artists whose stories would have made good movies.


In a sense, the nine weeks Vincent and Paul spent together were atypical in van Gogh's story. He was a profoundly lonely man who spent most of his adult life in isolation, in one run down room over a cafe, after another - 37 different places in total. He probably suffered from manic depression compounded by epilepsy, absinthe poisoning, frantic over work and malnutrition. He wandered, he painted, he drew, he read, and he wrote incessantly seeking salvation in his art.  But perhaps because of his isolation he had always dreamed of an artist’s community, where he could work together with other like minded artists on the project of late Impressionism. Vincent hoped that Gauguin would just be the first artist to join him in Arles. The trouble was that as characters they were an explosive combination. Gauguin was sinister, manipulative and domineering while van Gogh was passive-aggressive, argumentative and needy. They had met before in Paris many times, usually near the art supply shop of Pere Tanguy, where Tanguy showed artists paintings he had received in receipt of art supplies. At this time, van Gogh was still trying to find himself in a variety of sub Impressionist experimentation's. Gauguin on the other hand had slowly but surely started evolving his own very private style in Brittany. However when Gauguin walked off the train and saw Vincent's recent efforts he was walking in to a full-scale revolution in art. Seeing the huge number of canvases that Vincent had made in less than a year must have been gob smacking. However, Gauguin defended his own self-esteem by attacking Vincent’s slap dash approach to painting. Paul took on a tutor’s attitude towards Vincent, trying to get him to paint from memory, slowly and with consideration. 


As artists, they were in many ways opposites. Gauguin would in his later years in the South Seas, produce highly coloured exotic nudes that were built on a drawn foundation handed down from Ingres and Degas - they were modern and primitive and yet also strangely classical. Gauguin thought deeply about his paintings, and painted them slowly, often over years. Van Gogh on the other hand was all about capturing the moment. He painted in a frenzy, which had an inner logic of its own, and he described his best paintings pouring out in feverish bursts. But there was far more intelligence in van Gogh's manic painting than one might imagine, and despite Gauguin's classical leanings there was far more of a whiff of sulphur about his work - he was a decadent familiar with drugs, whores, drink and later underage Tahitian girls. 

Of course, the high moment came when after they had a fight, Gauguin stormed off and Vincent cut off his left ear and then handed it in a letter to a girl in the local brothel. This was just the latest in a series of what today would be called 'self-harming episodes' in Vincent's life and it would not be his last - that was when 18 months later he shot himself in the chest and died a day later. The best explanation I have heard about this episode, is that Vincent would go to the bullfights in the local arena and saw the way the matador's cut the ear of the bull off as a trophy. In cutting his ear off, Vincent was acknowledging Gauguin as the victor of their psychic battle of wills. However, it was also typical of a passive aggressive man boiling with rage, but who could not bring himself to strike out at another man so turned upon himself - the man he truly hated. However, he cut his ear lobe off - not his painting hand! He was not that beaten! 


Therefore, you would expect that with material like this, any drama could not lose. Well 'The Yellow House' bombed. Over acted, under-acted, theatrical, tedious and laughable at times - this film was rubbish. I did not believe a word of it, even when I heard them quote directly from their letters. The lowbrow nature of this film was summed up at the end when they told us that the 40 paintings they made together are now worth $1.5 Billion. So Fucking What! What in God’s name does that tell us about their work or the meaning of their lives! Just another example of the way the capitalistic, consumerist, and celebrity-driven culture of the devoured all higher meanings and shitted it out as sound bite adverts for consumption, capital and fame. The fact of the matter was that Paul and Vincent were just two among many artists, thinkers, socialists, philosophers, decadents, and writers in the late nineteenth century who imagined a better world, one driven by higher morals, shared wealth, and belief in the power of art to change the world. They may have been wrong or naïve, but they had principals. This was part of the barrier to the modern worlds understanding of them and their art. The kids on the ramparts in Paris in 1968 were the last people to understand these men. 


Neither John Simms as Vincent nor John Lynch as Gauguin, had any understanding of them. Neither of them had the volcanic and tortured personalities to live up to their parts.  If alive in 2007, Gauguin might have been in prison for paedophilia, and van Gogh would have been on lithium, unable to paint. But we still had their art and their example.