My Kid Could Paint That

In the last week of July 2008, Carol, Steve and I watched My Kid Could Paint That another great art documentary featured on BBC4. The documentary tracked the media sensation of Maria Olmstead a four-year-old ‘child-prodigy’ of abstract paintings - whose reputation and that of her parents - was then undermined by questions about the father’s involvement in the making of the little girls paintings.                                                                                                                            

When I was a child my mother did everything in her power to belittle my artistic ambitions, my drawings and my study – so to see these parents bill-and-coo over every childish scrawl made by Maria made me pause for thought. 

At first, her father showed her paintings in a bar. Later in a gallery run by a disgruntled photo-realist painter - who wanted to get back at an art world that valued his paintings which he had worked on for months – lower than a canvas by an abstract painter who had slapped his together over a long night. She became an overnight media star on American television and started selling her canvases for up to £20,000. Then a Sixty-Minutes special on her – questioned whether she had painted her large canvases by herself. The family had agreed to let the producers film her painting. However the painting she painted on film - lacked the polish, finish and focused intensity of the canvases she had previously exhibited and sold.                                                                                                 

The documentary recorded the sudden fall from grace of this little girl’s parents and her innocence amidst some very unsavoury adult characters.             

                                           
The parents then made their own film of Maria painting – and that canvas too, lacked the power of her exhibited paintings. However, it did look like the last painting she had made on film. I was convinced that her shifty father had been responsible for most of the final work on her paintings. Not that it mattered a dam – her abstract paintings – regardless of who made them – were pointless and crude pastiches of Abstract-Expressionist painters like Pollock, Hoffman, Still and Kline – over sixty years after the fact.      
                                                                                             

For a six year old, to paint abstract scrawls on canvases - with paints bought and put in place by her father – and under his advice was outrageously crass. That she became so successful only proved again to me how senseless art had become. She was nothing but a pawn in an adult game of promotion, hype, greed and deception. You could have taken any half-way talented six year old – supplied them with large professional canvases and paints and achieved the same results. Picasso was a real child prodigy – he made things even very talented adults couldn’t make. ‘Prodigies’ like Maria simply made paintings anyone could make.        

                                                                                

The Abstract-Expressionists were not children – they were mature men who had paid their dues and pursued their vision through many hard times. The originality, ambition and vision of their art, was based on complex avant-garde ideas - not traditional hard won techniques. Pollock, Rothko, Kline and de Kooning spent decades learning their trade, developing their vision and evolving their signature styles. To parody them was easy. But, to come up with something as original and groundbreaking was far harder – just ask any young art student.

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.                    

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.

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.