Georgia O’Keeffe vs Alex Katz

In the first week of March 2007, I went with Carol to the opening of Nature and Abstraction an exhibition of work by Georgia O’Keeffe at the Irish Museum of Modern art. I had seen a full scale retrospective of O'Keeffe's work in 1989 in the L.A. County Museum, and I had not been that impressed. But times change and so do people. Carol was a passionate fan of her work - and was utterly thrilled to see these great works by her hero. O'Keeffe of course was a female artist - who famously painted flowers that looked sexual in nature (the leaves of the flowers echoing the folds of the labia) was one of the first artists to develop an abstract vision, was the first woman to be given a retrospective in M.O.M.A. (the St. Peter's of the art world), posed naked for her photographer husband Stieglitz and later lived like a recluse in the dessert of New Mexico - so of course she was a great hero to many female art lovers. With artists like Gwen John, Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, and Paula Rego, she was among a select group of female artists to have established a major reputation in the art world. However, whereas the work of Kahlo, Bourgeois and Rego could at times be violent and ugly - O'Keeffe's work was rarely less than beautiful even when she was painting animal bones.                             

  

Unlike other over admired female artists of my day, O’Keeffe's work bore up to close scrutiny. Maybe as an American artist she was not in the league of Hopper, Pollock or de Kooning. However, she was an infinitely more serious artist than other American's like Thomas Hart Benton, Barnett Newman, Milton Avery, Alex Katz, or a league of painters touted as important in New York. I continually stress O’Keeffe's gender, because it seemed so central to her work. She was one of the first painters to express a uniquely female vision of the world, and countless female art students of my day were still in debt to her. While female art of my day, was often beset with visual clichés of natural forms, human hair, genitals, wounds - O’Keeffe and Kahlo were pioneers in this territory, and so I thought it was important to remember how personal and original their concerns were in the male dominated art world of the early twentieth century.                                                                              

The exhibition which concentrated on O’Keeffe's more abstracted canvases turned out to be unexpectedly good - mainly because it lacked the more illustrative aspects of O’Keeffe's work which I felt were her weakest efforts. O’Keeffe was a keen student of nature - the veins of a leaf, the bud of a flower, the crease in a rock, or the bulge in a mountain could all fire her imagination. She could take these natural objects and imbue them with mystery and an abiding female presence. Perhaps it was unfortunate that she was famous mostly as a painter of flowers (seen in close up - influenced by photography), which seemed vulvic or womb like. Because in truth there was far more subtlety to her approach in her landscapes and abstractions than a mere reduction of nature to a saucy postcard.         

Although I could see some similarities in her work with Cézanne's pallet, Kandinsky's sense of abstract rhythm, and Dalí's playful metamorphoses of forms - over all her work was very much her own. Her pallet of pinks, apple greens, creams, mauve's and browns was beautifully displayed in her oil paintings. But it was her use of white - which I found revolutionary. From a distance many of her oil paintings looked like watercolours on slightly crumpled watercolour paper. Up close, O’Keeffe's gentle and sure brushstrokes feathered the colour into place. Occasionally she would let the white, pink or brown undercoat show through as a vein in a leaf or as a cloud - a wonderful indication of her sensitive and witty approach to painting.          

               

                                                           

However while this was a small and well-judged exhibition, I was disappointed not to see any of her lovely watercolours or drawings, some of which I would have prized over her larger oil paintings. In fact it was beyond me why so many exhibitions I had seen had been devoid of drawings, even when the artists involved were known to have produced significant studies. After all, drawings were the secret blueprints of art - which could unlock so much about the ideas and levels of skill of an artist, not to mention explaining more clearly the development of an artist’s forms.                        

Before we went to the opening, we went early to see the Alex Katz exhibition also in IMMA What an utterly repellent exhibition it was! Katz's was an eighty-year-old oil painter who emerged in the late 1950s with stylish paintings - which took a flavour of Pop art and mixed it with illustration to create 'safe' modish works of the rich. Some people called his work beautiful - I thought it was some of the most vulgar painting I have ever seen. I found Katz's use of colour to be utterly stomach churning - turgid peach, cake icing pink, baby blue, and shit brown! As for his figurative skills - they were utterly contemptible. He drew no better than a high school teenager.                                                  

It so happened that I had spent my life painting portraits of people, and I knew from experience how very difficult an art it was. But all my life I had battled away. Each time I painted a person, I looked and looked and looked again. Every face was different, and the light falling on someone changed by the hour. As a painter I tried to paint what I saw - when I saw it and how I saw it at that time. That meant that I tried to avoid the mannerisms and illustrative shorthand that painters could fall into.                                                                                                                      

But Katz's approach was almost the exact opposite. He approached the world through the illustrative forms you would be failure with in clip art or the New Yorker magazine. For Katz, people were ciphers - almost interchangeable. His mouths were all the same misshapen and swollen shape, the noses were all half-formed and his eyes were all as dead and lifeless as those of a mannequin. But the real give away for me was the way he painted eyelashes - painted individually hair-by-hair with all the subtlety of a doll maker! To his admirers Katz with his clichéd long brush strokes and creamy paint was a modern day Manet - but in reality he was not an even moderately skilled billboard painter. Katz was one of those painters whose work looked better in reproduction than in reality. He mixed the scale of the abstract expressionists with the short hand of pictorial illustration and a dash of French 'alla-prima' painting (meaning painting a picture in one go without correction.) The result? Facile and empty work all style and no content.                      

                                                        

Katz played up the fashion of his sitters - the Jackie O hairdos the leisure suits and the fur coats - which paradoxically made his work look very old fashioned. His paintings were needlessly big and about as deep as a puddle. Yet, despite their huge size - Katz's handling of details was fumbling and botched - god knows how bad a painter he would have been working on a small scale! There were some like Mathew Collings who rated Katz very highly, and considered him an important influence on young painters. God help them! I thought. If these were the idiots they choose to teach them, then all they would ever learn was incompetent modish pomposity.                                                

In fact, if Katz could teach young artists anything - I would have suggested – it was how to wine and dine the rich. There was a symbiotic relationship between the fawning Katz and the WASPS of Park Avenue, which resulted in vomit inducing portraits of rich Americans, but also a constant source of income for Katz. One painting of two middle-aged male wasps - was quite the most 'gay looking' painting I had ever seen and a psychopathic low even for Katz. The moral of the Katz story was that a tenth rate painter with good 'people-skills' and who painted rich people in New York, would be touted as important by the American Juggernaut - while painters of real talent who were unfortunate not to be born in an art world capital - would be forgotten. Even in Ireland, there were a handful of painters better than Katz - Robert Ballagh to name just one.                                             

The big surprise of our visit to IMMA was Thomas Demand's exhibition L’Esprit d’Escalier. Demand was forty-three and one of a handful of great photographers to come out of Germany at the turn of the millennium like Thomas Ruff and Andreas Gursky. Since I never read the blurb on the wall to exhibitions (preferring to go in cold, and tending to feel that if something needed a text to explain it then it was probably not worth bothering with) I was puzzled by Demand's huge photographs of office tables and security x-ray machines. They looked real, but odd. Something was not quite right about them. I felt they had the feel of Andreas Gursky's brilliant photographs in which he photographed places like the stock exchange, and then photo shopped them to make the places look bigger and more complex. Carol who had worked as an illustrator also thought that maybe the photographs had been photo shopped. So for once I went to the wall text and read... It turned out that Demand made cardboard sculptures to look like - phones, boxes, stairs, escalators, and cups of tea you name it. In fact, nothing in these photographs was real - it was all made of cardboard! I laughed my ass off! What fun! So then, we looked around the exhibition with a whole new take on things. This was the kind of conceptual art I liked - witty and very clever, but accessible to everyone. Of course, like many of the artists of my day, Demand questioned the nature of the 'reality' we were given in photography and the media - but like very few others he did it with humour, skill and real invention.                        

Michael Craig-Martin

Late in November, I went with Carol to see the Michael Craig-Martin retrospective at IMMA Had Carol not been so keen to see it I probably would not have gone. Craig-Martin dubbed the Godfather of Brit art, taught such artists as Damien Hirst in Goldsmiths Art College, and it was easy to see what a seminal influence he had been on artists of that generation.  He was a monkey-see-monkey-do conceptual artist – borrowing and stealing the ideas of others freely. Craig-Martins conceptual sculptures of the 1970s formed and consolidated many of the conceptual innovations of the 1970s - which for better or worse had formed the lingua-franca of the art world. What surprised me about his retrospective was its depth and quality, and its diversity of ideas.                                   

I had expected to hate it, but in fact I found quite a lot to admire, and I was glad Carol had dragged me along. But what depressed me about it, was the realization, that success in the art world, gave one the ability to inflate and make claims for ones work impossible to the failed or unfashionable talent. Entering IMMA's beautiful courtyard I discovered its entire lower flower covered in one long continues print of one of Craig-Martins colourful collections of household objects, drawn in outline only and overlapping each other. All I could think was: “How much did this cost to make, and install? And who paid for it?”                                                                                   

Craig-Martins work plagiarized many of the key ideas of 1960-70s art. One of the key victims of this had been Patrick Caulfield, whose colourful pop arty paintings of ordinary objects; Craig-Martin had converted into colourful overlapping line drawings of ordinary objects. Many of these canvases were beautiful to look at and very well made. However, Craig-Martin had also hijacked Duchamp's use of ready-mades, Sol LeWitts use of wall drawings, Warhol's use of designed wallpaper with painted canvases placed over it, and so it went on and on. Elsewhere in the exhibition, I was reminded of Joseph Kosuth, Robert Morris, Brice Marden and others whose work, Craig-Martin seemed to convert into conceptual variations. I would have to have had specialist knowledge of conceptualist history to know just how grave these various acts of appropriation were, but I frankly could not give a dam.                                                                                                                

Overall, what struck me most was the use of conceptualized pastiche. One normally thinks of painting or sculpture when one thinks of pastiche, but Craig-Martin had adopted a newish strategy of taking the works of others and giving them his own conceptual-sculptural take. The most witty and effective of these for me were his Blinds, which seemed to convert the Minimal canvases of the likes of Brice Marden into muted coloured blinds, opened or closed to various degrees. Thus allowing each artwork to incorporate an almost endless element of variation. This idea of variation underlined most of Craig-Martin’s work and was seen at its best in his computer light boxes in which his illustrated day-glow objects emerged and disappeared randomly according to a computer program.                 

                                                                                                                     

In many ways Craig-Martin’s exhibition, was an ideal show for art students. For it showed how with unstinting diligence, money, self-belief and the neck to steal anything from anyone, one could make interesting art about just about anything. One did not have to have technical genius, or emotional depth or anything in particular to say about the world. One merely had to make (or have professionally made) objects of some craft and professionalism, on any subject what so ever, no matter how banal (in fact for institutional support, the more banal the better), but above all else – respect and work within the framework of the institutional and academic system. Craig-Martin’s work I felt had not and never would change the world, but it had and would cause a murmur within the walls of contemporary art institutions – a game of minor aesthetic delight for those who thought art was nothing more than an intellectual trivial pursuit.   

                                                              

The self deception and cultish insularity of the institutional art world was summed up for me when I entered one of the rooms that held Craig-Martin’s infamous sculpture Oak Tree which was a glass half-full of water on a glass shelve about eight feet high up on a wall, with a plague with a conceptual interview in which Craig-Martin asserted his right to describe it as an oak-tree. “Oh look there’s the glass of water that’s an Oak tree!” I chuckled to my girlfriend. “No it is an oak tree!” The invigilator exclaimed to me. “Oh right.” I murmured, not wishing to talk to her. “It is an Oak Tree! Read the sign!” She haughtily proclaimed. I had no desire to tell her I had seen the ‘Oak Tree’ in the Tate in London in 1996, or that I thought it was utter bullshit. Instead, I dutifully read the conceptual sign that accompanied the glass of water on a shelf and moved on. But as I did my spine shivered with the same kind of disgust that had filled me, when I had been forced to sit through Catholic mass and go along with the religious delusion that wafer and wine were in fact the body and blood of Christ. I frankly couldn’t care less if Craig-Martin chose to make the artistic point that whatever the artist claimed was art – was art. I certainly did not think it an original statement; it was in fact just another pastiche this time of Duchamp and Kosuth. But I did mind being told what to think by some snotty nosed gallery intern. The art world could claim anything they wanted to be art, but I and everyone else had the absolute right to deny it was art, or that we thought it to be part of a very smug, pseudo-intellectual, irrational and boring kind.                                                                        

 The truth about art I had come to believe was – that there was no eternal meaning to it, it’s grand theories were largely obscure, elitist and subject to fashion, and it had little or no power to effect any kind of change in society. Art was nothing more than a mode of communication – part of a cultural exchange. Sometimes it connected profoundly with its audience (as it had done in the work of artists like Raphael, Rembrandt, van Gogh, Rothko and Warhol) but most of the time it was nothing more than a form of wall filler, decoration and distraction – a form of amusement. Great art works formed part of a visual debate about existence, and as in any debate some ideas and expressions were more convincing than others. It was the right and duty of every artist to pursue their art to the fullest, but there was no entitlement on the part of their audience to accept their work as profound, meaningful, and beautiful or something that could enrich their lives. I could see how Craig-Martin’s work would be highly instructive to young art students, conceptual artists and even graphic designers, but for me it had no meaning to my work.                                                

Before we left I.M.M.A we quickly went around Irish Art of the 1970s which proved to be a very strong representation of Modern Irish art, but also a store house of artistic ideas and styles now redundant. Le Broquey was represented by some of his strongest works, which reminded me that he did in fact have some small talent.

But my favourite work of the whole day was the photographic work Portrait of Alice Liddell, after Lewis Carroll (2004) by Vic Muniz in the Hearth exhibition downstairs. This photograph consisted of the image of a girl made up of hundreds of brightly coloured children’s toys on a white background. From a distance it looked like a beautiful Fauvist cum Pointillist painting, but up close one delighted in seeing all the different kinds of children’s toys that were piled up to form the shape of the girl. The meaning of the work was further deepened by being based on one of Lewis Carrol’s Victorian photographs of young girls (in this case Alice Liddell) which with my day’s concern for children were controversial to say the least. However, the full implications of this choice of image, was beyond me at the time – all I marvelled at was the cleverness and beauty of the way the image was made. Not only was it a beautiful image it was also smart and knowing in the best Post-Modern sense – summing up as it wittily did so many of the ideas of modernist representation and Post-Modern re-representation.