Spring had finally arrived in Ireland in
mid-April 2009, after the coldest winter since 1963. Carol and I went out on a
trip to IMMA on a beautiful Sunday when there was not a cloud in the cobalt
sky. We got the DART into town and then the Luas
tram up to Heuston station. Town was busy with day-trippers, parents with their
children, tourists and young lovers. People looked as happy as I felt that
spring had finally arrived. Normally the journey out to IMMA felt like an
expedition, but for once, I enjoyed it. I felt like a man released from a dark
prison and loved the feel of the sunlight on my face.
I had finally been tempted out to IMMA one
of my least favourite Irish art museums, by an exhibition dedicated to the
avant-garde composer Marty Feldman whose friendship with painters of the New
York School had inspired his own compositions. I had
never heard of Feldman but apparently, he was one of the most influential
composers of the 20th century, known for his experiments with musical notation
and advocacy of ideas like indeterminacy. He was a contemporary and friend of
John Cage and a critic of Pierre Boulez who he called with malice a “magnificent academician.” (Juan Manuel
Bonet, Vertical Thoughts: Morton Feldman and the Visual Arts, Dublin: Irish
Museum of Modern Art, 2010 P.19.) Influenced by the Abstract-Expressionists,
Feldman prized an unsystematic approach to composition and was thus a critic of
systematic composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Boulez. Curious to listen
to his music, I downloaded some online. It tried my patience, and most of it
sounded like pretentious orchestral sound pieces, that may have been original
and challenging to write, but where even more challenging to endure and enjoy. A
music lover might have felt the same about the paintings on view, but they
surely had the advantage of being consumable within a few blinks of the eye
even if they could take years to understand fully.
The I.M.M.A exhibition in
part, was a reviving of an exhibition Feldman had curated in 1967 called ‘Six Painters’ which had centred on
Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Piet Mondrian, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock
and Mark Rothko most of whom he had close friendships with. This show expanded
on that one to include other artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauchenberg, Cy
Twombly and Francesco Clemente as well as lesser known painters like Sonja
Sekula whose surreal abstract paintings were a revelation and reminded me of
large, mad Paul Klee’s. The
exhibition was a large and richly rewarding selection of abstract paintings,
drawings and prints by these artists as well as a selection of Turkish rugs
that Feldman had also admired. Most of the works were abstract yet covered a
full spectrum from the geometric to the gestural. They indicated a collector
with sensitivity and soul. Together the works created a thrilling and passionate
dialogue on the walls.
The exhibition explored the
influence of these painters on Feldman’s who said, “I learned more from painters than I learned from composers.” (Juan
Manuel Bonet, Vertical Thoughts: Morton Feldman and the Visual Arts, Dublin:
Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2010 P.7.) Writing about the Abstract-Expressionists
Feldman wrote, “My quarrel with the term
‘Action Painting’ is that it gave rise to the erroneous idea that the painter,
now being ‘free’, could do ‘anything he liked’. But it is not at all true that
the more one is free, the more things one has to choose from. Actually, it is
the academician who has the alternatives. Freedom is best understood by someone
like Rothko, who was free to do only one thing – to make a Rothko – and did so
over and over again... This type of freedom creates a problem for us because we
are not free to imitate it.” (Morton Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street, Juan Manuel Bonet, Vertical Thoughts: Morton Feldman and the
Visual Arts, Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2010 P.29.) I could not
have agreed more with this clear insight into the hard-won signature styles of
the various Abstract-Expressionists, and how while technically their work could
easily be copied nearly any art student, it could not be imitated by anyone wanting
to be taken seriously by a connoisseur or art world insider.
Feldman, nostalgically
remembered the time in the early 1950s when painters were outsiders, battling
poverty and neglect before people began to take art seriously as a form of
commerce and study: “Now, almost twenty
years later, as I see what happens to work, I ask myself more and more why
everybody knows so much about art... To me it seems as though the artist is
fighting a heavy sea in a rowboat, while alongside him a pleasure liner takes
all these people to the same place. Every graduate student today knows exactly
what degree of ‘angst’ belongs in a de Kooning, can point out disapprovingly
just when he has let up, relaxed. Everybody knows that one Betty Davis movie
where she went out of style. It’s another bullring, with everyone knowing the
rules of the game. What was great about the 1950s is that for one brief moment
– maybe, say, six weeks – nobody understood art.” (Morton Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street, Juan
Manuel Bonet, Vertical Thoughts: Morton
Feldman and the Visual Arts, Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2010
P.29.)
The Abstract-Expressionists had been
like Gods to me when I was a young artist. I admired their toughness,
originality, dedication and passionate pursuit of modernist gesture, stain and
drip in the last credible attempt to capture the soul of being. In a sense,
their canvases were the last credible attempts at religious art.
They were also the last generation of
mavericks who made art because they could do nothing else and not as an
academic career move.
I remember as a teenager peering at
tiny, jaundiced colour (or worse still black and white) photographs of their
large paintings, trying in my head to imagine what their scale was. It was only
in 1989, in L.A. that I first saw some of their work in the flesh, and I
remembered being flabbergasted by their grandeur, painterly sophistication and
engulfing expanses of colour. Their scale demanded first hand viewing, because
standing engulfed in front of their large canvases created little sensations
you would miss in reproduction.
New York in the 1940s was one of the
most exciting places for art in history. The youthful, insular and provincial
America was about to be thrust onto the centre stage of the world in the most
bloodiest of terms. World War 2 changed everything including art. Fleeing
persecution and possible death, artists from across Europe boarded boats to
Ellis Island, carrying with them, prized art works and heads full of ideas. A
thrilling meeting of minds then occurred between these Europeans like Piet
Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst and the American avant-garde.
Early modernist authors belittled
American art before the Abstract-Expressionists. Yet to say that America was
artistically backward was a gross inaccuracy. It had spiritual Native American
art even if at the time it was only beginning to be appreciated by a handful of
enlightened collectors and artists like Jackson Pollock. Then there was its
distinguished canon European influenced masters of painting like Winslow Homer,
John-Singer Sargent, Mardsen Hartley and Edward Hopper. Yet in Western America
– the new frontier – few original ideas had emerged. Greenberg worried over
this provincialism, as did many of the artists in Greenwich Village at the
time. The question became, how could they learn from the painterly architecture
of Cézanne, the spatial constructions of cubism, the abstract purity of
Mondrian, the musicality of Kandinsky and the Surrealist automatism of Miró?
How could they then push those ideas about form, medium, style and inspired
vision in a new direction and give it a distinctly American voice. Many also
saw this as a moral act – against the evil of Fascism and its reactionary cultural
brutalism.
At the time, the supposedly large size
of their canvases was taken as radically American. Yet in fact, their canvases
were standard for Venetian Painters like Titian and Tintoretto as well as the
French Salon. No, it was their scale that was radical. They were like a ten-inch
segment of a Tintoretto but on ten-foot long canvas. In addition, how they
chose to inhabit that space was radically different. As Harold Rosenberg wrote,
“At a certain moment the canvas began to
appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act –
rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyse or ‘express and
object actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but
an event.” (Harold Rosenberg, The
American Action Painters, 1952, quoted from Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Ed.
Charles Harrison & Paul Wood, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995, P. 581.) This
emphasis on the actions of the artist would unexpectedly influence early
Happenings and Performance art.
Unfortunately, Abstract-Expressionism
was a victim of its own success. The grandiose claims made for it, the ease
with which it could be parodied, its eventual commercialization and the parodies
made of it by Pop Art meant it was finished as a viable model of art by the
late 1950s. Besides the age of the macho, alcoholic, largely self-taught artist
was over. The 1960s and 1970s would see the emergence of the college educated,
theoretical and camp artist, women artists, multi-ethnic artists and gay and
lesbian artists more concerned with content than form. The whole notion of the self-important
macho genius battling the world took on the quality fiction. Therefore, the
world of Pollock and de Kooning now seemed like the stuff of legend. This show
revealed a far more intimate and humble side to the Ab-Ex’s and in a way, the
works were all the more persuasive because of it.
The show started on the ground floor
with some masterpieces by Piet Mondrian. Despite my usual scepticism towards
geometric abstraction, I had always recognised Mondrian’s genius, and admired
the intense handmade quality of his abstract canvases, which represented a lifetime’s
distillation of visual thought. Along with Mondrian’s paintings, was a short
colour film of his studio in Manhattan, which was like a three-dimensional
painting all its own. His studio was immaculately ordered and on the white
walls, were colour swatches and drawings that he was working on. It provided a
great insight into his working methods and the rigor of his process.
In the next room were beautiful and
suggestive early abstracts by Philip Guston. When I was a teenager, I had not
thought much of Philip Guston, his work, or at least from what I could gather
through reproduction, seemed less radical than Pollock, de Kooning or Rothko.
Yet seeing his late Clans men paintings changed my view of him and as I grew
older, I found myself returning more often to his work. Feldman’s collection
included mid-career abstracts that shimmered with fields of rich, impastoed
brushstrokes that echoed Monet’s late water lily paintings. They were hard won,
self-critical and elegiac.
Much to my delight there was a large oil
painting and a couple of ink drawings by Franz Kilne, whose work I had been
looking at only recently. I found the small, brushed ink drawings surprisingly
elegant and reasoned in their bold gestures. The large black and white canvas
with a shot of dark violet Black Iris,
1961, shocked me with its scale and simplicity. Like his drawings, I found it
stylish - yet somewhat empty and merely decorative.
The largish Rothko canvas The Green Strip, 1955, was a beautiful
piece and seeing the way Rothko revised and corrected the floating rectangles
that were stained, scumbled and dripped with a slow build-up of tragic fullness
was very convincing.
One of my favourite pieces in the
exhibition was an A1 sized abstract on paper by Jackson Pollock, which
entranced the eye with looping spirals of enamel paint on gesso that became
within moments like a milky-way of life made manifest. It was an Apollonian
masterpiece made after a long Dionysian struggle to master form. The only tragedy in this work lay in the
knowledge that its maker would self-destruct only a few years later.
I loved the large oil on vellum on
canvas painting No Title, 1970-74, by
de Kooning. I admired his daringly bright colours and muscular and wristy
drawing that bounced around yet retained its solid structural core - that was
suggestive of a male figure similar to his meaty bronze sculpture Clam Digger I had seen in Amsterdam many
years before.
Twombly was represented by A Murder of Passion, 1960, a large spare
white canvas scribbled with pencil, wax crayon and oil paint. There were also
and two collaged charcoal drawings by Twombly from slightly later in his career.
I loved them all, but my favourite was the intense drawing Untitled (Leonardo Drawing), 1971. I could not make out the meaning
of the drawing or of the notations, corrections and words that he used. It
seemed a private language or dialogue on which I was eavesdropping. Yet for
sheer intense mark-making - I loved it.
In the courtyard downstairs, we saw Le Temps du Sommeil, an exhibition of
tiny oil paintings on wood by the Belgium artist Francis Alys, which in badly
drawn and panted images and scrawled text recorded his compulsive wanderings in
cities. The 108 paintings were monotonously similar in images, colouring and
painterly conceits. They were in part poetic and in part sociological
observations of an outsider/tourist/bum. Carol loved them, and told me he was
quite a cult hero to the lecturers and students in NCAD but I thought they were
some of the most uncreative and technically incompetent paintings I had ever
seen.
I
had seen Alys’ video piece Rehersal I,
1999-2004, in the Douglas Hyde Gallery some years before. The video recorded
the attempts of a red Beetle car to get up a hill and I remembered finding it
both boring and pointless - but then these were the very qualities that were
most admired in contemporary art. In other performances, Alys had pushed a
block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it melted into a puddle
and pulled a magnetic dog through the city as it collected metal rubbish from
the ground. All of these fey and frustrating efforts charmed art world
insiders. However, given Mexico’s implosion due to drugs cartels, epidemic
political corruption, poverty and mass emigration - they reminded me of Nero
fiddling while Rome burnt.
Alys
had said, “I entered the art field by
accident: a coincidence of geographical, personal and legal matters resulted in
indefinite vacations which through a mixture of boredom, curiosity and vanity,
led to my present profession. The rather mixed media practice is the
consequence of ignorance: not being skilled in any specific medium, I might as
well pretend to all of them.” I wondered why I had bother spending thirty
years learning to draw and paint, given my heart and soul to everything I had
made and tried to produce work that had ambition - when art had become a
avoidance of craft, skill, ego, elitism and confrontation.
We then moved on to the other
exhibitions in the main part of IMMA We had a quick look around the Anne
Tallentire exhibition This, and other
things, 1999-2010. It was a tedious
collection of; scaffolding nested with TV monitors showing dull video pieces of
construction works, an interactive power-point presentation of even more
mundane photographs of Dublin including things like trashcans, as well as other
passé conceptual texts pieces that looked like the tired efforts of a very
untalented art student in a minor art college. I had absolutely no desire to
stay any longer to try and figure out what any of it was supposed to say. In a
side room on a table lay stacks of coloured paper with short text/poems by Tallentire
- they were trite and predictably quirky. A sign on the table asked us to take
one of the top pages. I did not want her work even if it was free. I could have
gone back around the exhibition and tried to fathom its meaning, but my life
was too short. While writing about it, I could have studied Tallentire life’s
work on line – but I simply did not give a dam.
We quickly moved on to the East Wing
Galleries, and the work of the Cuban-American artist Jorge Pardo (supposedly
“one of the most influential artists of his generation”) whose sole exhibition
was a very expensive wallpaper piece of what looked like all his life’s work
including sculpture, installations, design and architecture - laid out on
wallpaper in a grandiose time line. I thought the idea of putting your life’s
work up on massive wrap-around wallpaper was a clever conceit. Most art was
just wallpaper anyway, no matter how grand its maker intends it to be. Yet it
was also a work of the internet age – in which information flowed anarchisticly
and fragmented meaning was in the eye of the atomised consumer. It was also a
work unthinkable without photo-shop or adobe illustrator. It was only a shame
the subject of its visual cacophony was such an incessantly productive
mediocrity. How I wondered was I to experience this visual vomit? Did the
artist expect me to look in humble devotion to every single photograph of bad
abstracts, boring furniture, dutiful assistants making his art and family
photos? Was I expected to read every single historical timeline and all that
was written on the oval shaped benches that ran through the space? Or was I to
be bombarded into submission and dazed into credulity? I would have preferred
to see one – just one image or object of excellence, summation and beauty.
Personally,
I could not understand how Jorge Pardo was considered an artist at all. His
unoriginal and flamboyant designs - struck me as nothing more than decadent
decoration. A designer of ‘sculptures’, ‘paintings’, furniture, architecture
and interior decoration his work fitted in perfectly with art in the noughties
- which had become nothing more than uncritical accoutrements to conspicuous
wealth. An exhibition of his work in Brown
Thomas would have been far more appropriate. I imagined Duchamp and Warhol
turning in their graves at the realization that they had fostered such posers.
What
Happens Next Is a Secret
in one of the downstairs courtyard rooms was one of the worst exhibitions I had
ever seen! It struck me as a kind of curatorial assault upon IMMA’s own
collection. How much of the maliciously incompetent display of the art works
was a deliberate deconstruction of the traditions of artistic display I could
not tell. The labels for the paintings were (deliberately?) just stuck up
crookedly like post-it-notes and meters away from what they were indicating.
The pictures were hung together with no discernible rhyme nor reason. The sculptures
seemed just thrown around the room often preventing any clear-passage for the
viewer. Frankly, a high-school student could have installed a better show. Was
it to be seen alongside Tallentire and Pardo’s work as a parable about the
complete bankruptcy of Western culture? A culture at a point of Alexandrian
exhaustion - that had ended not because it had too little. But because it had
too much and most of it was decadent trivialities.