Late in April, I
went down to Cork with Carol, together we saw The Year of The Pig (the current year in
the Chinese astrological calendar) an exhibition of contemporary Chinese
art held at The Gluxsman Gallery -
which I later panned on my blogs. The Glucksman gallery, was a tasteful,
modern, purpose-built gallery of wood, glass and concrete - set in the
beautiful leafy grounds of Cork University. The whole of the Glucksman was filled with the brightly
coloured and large-scale works on loan from the Sigg Collection. Dr Uli Sigg
was a Swiss businessman and diplomat who had built up a collection of Chinese
art made exclusively from the 1990s onwards. The exhibition was broken up into
themes like: the individual and society, City vs. countryside and the influence
of western art on traditional practices.
For about the
last ten years I had heard rumours of great Chinese artists becoming the toast
of New York and Beijing, but every single time I had actually seen a few of
these works I have been utterly repulsed by the crudity of colour, incompetent
drawing and lack of originality. I wondered why the art looked so god dam awful
and yet was so over-hyped. Witnessing the insanity of the Irish art market of
my day, I realized the truth about art - Money Fucking Talks - And Opinion
Walks! It was as true in Egypt as it was in Venice, Paris, or New York. If you
threw enough money at your nations art - some sort of genius would turn up or
be manufactured.
I suppose The Year of The Pig had value if taken
as one big joke on the ignorant taste of a Chinese millionaire - whose taste
was formed and distorted by the west as were the artists he patronized.
However, aesthetically and intellectually I could not take it seriously as
'high-art'. This I felt was the artistic version of the Chinese market stall
selling fake Chanel perfume and Gucci handbags. However, that perhaps was
unfair to the market trader. Because while his sometimes superb rip offs might
be fake - it would only be recognizable so to the initiated. This art however
was blatantly aware of its plagiarism. In fact much of the work felt like a
two-fingered-salute to western modern art - a kind of anything you can do I can
do even worse. You may feel I was being too harsh, but frankly, I would have
deserved the exact same response if I arrogantly thought I could do calligraphy
to match the Sung dynasty masters!
Some of the work
was very effective as gaudy eye candy - but it was never in the slightest bit
original. It would be far too tedious for me to go through the whole show and
point out the not just subtle but blatant plagiarisms. However, suffice to say
- I had seen it all before – a long time ago. These Chinese artists were even
crasser, less educated and less technically competent than the artists of
London's 'cutting edge' in the 1990s. However, what they had in common was the
luck to be born in a time when crass millionaires with more money than artistic
taste were willing to fund their idiocy. Sadly, the same could be said for
Irish art in 2007 - which was hopelessly over priced and overvalued after
centuries of being undervalued and under-priced.
Much of this art
seemed adolescent both in terms of the individual artists and in terms of the
Chinese state. Lest we forget - China was one of the most brilliant
civilizations the world has ever seen. The artistry, spiritual depth and
dexterity of Chinese art was staggering. In bronze, jade, lacquer, porcelain,
calligraphy, picture scrolls, terracotta figurines - ancient Chinese artists
produced work that filled any connoisseur of art with envy and greed to covet.
What communism did was pulverize this cultural legacy into rubble - seeing it
as elitist and tainted by the misuse of power of the Emperors. So from
1945-1990 - Chinese art ceased to exist - and in its place came crude propagandist
art that strove to glorify the Chinese state, the communist leaders and the
Chinese people. All of this art had the flavour of the Orient, but its meat and
bones were no different to the sentiments and scenarios of Nazi or Socialist
art. I found this kind of art contemptible in the extreme - both in terms of
its style and its content. As for the crimes it endorsed and concealed - there
were no words I could muster.
In the late 1990s
however, Chinese artists began to create art works influenced by American Pop
and Conceptual art. The trouble was that this art was nothing but a piss-take
on western art. These artists clearly had no real understanding of the depths
and complexities of western culture and they merely copied its most iconic
elements - Duchamp's Urinal, Andy Warhol's Silk-screens, Bruce Nauman's video
pieces - you get the idea. Don't get me wrong - I enjoyed looking at much of
this art - but like a bad Chinese take away - it left me with a sick stomach.
The anti-masterpiece of the show for me was Shi Xinning's Duchamp Retrospective Exhibition in China, 2000-2001. In this very
crude photo-realist effort - bewildered Chinese officials inspect Marcel
Duchamp's Urinal (titled Fountain
1917, and signed 'R. Mutt') with a
mixture of incredulity and fascination. It neatly pictured a grand clash of
cultures and for me this work honestly evoked the utter bewilderment of the
Chinese when faced with a scandalous Western art icon.
This show more
than any I had ever seen - proved to me the disastrous effects of Globalization
- which had reduced the world to a vulgar set of approved styles, logos and
brand names - gutting in the process centuries of indigenous cultural
development. Surely I thought - the really great artists of the future would
not be the globetrotting rich trash that were currently are in power - they
would be artists who had both a profound sense of their race and their national
heritage.
On our way back
into town, we visited the Fenton gallery one of Cork's premier private galleries
- which had a lovely space in a converted warehouse. I had never heard of any
of the artists on show (Alan Boardman, Ciarán Cronin, Tonia Kehoe) - and I
doubted I ever would again. All three were abstract painters but their work was
the kind of bland insipid and unoriginal abstract art that hotels and
restaurants buy thinking that some fools will consider them cultured. Well I
didn’t. This stuff and all the other mountain of abstract art produced in the
world was nothing more than wall filler. It may have been a fact that 99.99% of
all the art bought and sold in the world was of a similar ilk - but I wasn’t
going to lie down and pee on my chest like a tame puppy - the way everyone else
seemed to! Artists like this in my opinion were little better than home
decorators – though often a lot less skilled. Why in god’s name would anyone
buy this crap I wondered. I could only think of one reason - because they
thought that these were 'major' artists. The fact was they are not - they were
parasites on the corpse of a long dead idiom. So if you knew you are not
looking at the work of an abstract genius like Kandinsky, Kupka, Malevich,
Pollock, Rothko, Marden or Richter - why bother paying good money for something
you and your kids can knock up at home - the way home-decorating programs on TV
taught you.
Finally, we went
to the Crawford Art Gallery - which had
grown on me, as I had become more failure with it. Although the Crawford had
one of the most minor collections of Irish art I had ever seen - it did have a
few gems by Jack B Yeats, John Lavery, Barry Cooke and Dorothy Cross. My
favourite painting in the museum by far was a portrait in oils of a redhead
holding a small yellow Cannery –called The
Fugitive. This ravishing redhead vixen painted in luscious thick hog-hair
brushstrokes - her pale hair set off against her flame red hair and pillar-box
red lips captivated me. It was painted by Wilfrid G De Glehn (1870-1951) – a
now forgotten member of the English White
Stag school.
While there we
saw Irish Art of the 1970s which we had also seen in IMMA the year before. This
retrospective made perfectly clear that the two dominate trends in Irish art in
the 1970s' was abstract minimalism (as practiced by Cecil King, Anna Madden and
Michael Farrell) and photo-realism (as practiced by artists like Edward
Maguire, Martin Gale, and Robert Ballagh.) I found Martin Gales work tedious,
brain-dead, photo-realism of the worst kind. The abstract minimalist canvases
came off looking more significant than the photo-realist work - though this I
think was because of how technically simplistic they were to make. Maguire and
Ballagh were really pushing themselves to the limits of their technical
abilities - something their abstract contemporaries could not claim. The
trouble was - their technical skills were not up to the job. Some people
thought like these artists - that a good painting was one in which you painted
every crack in the floor, ever hair on the dog, and every wrinkle in the face
of a fat artist looking at himself in the mirror - but this was not art it was
taxidermy! Moreover, it was certainly not painting as Raphael, Rembrandt,
Poussin, Ingres or Picasso would have understood it. What this show proved was
just how seamless Irish artists’ attempts at intellectual theft were in
comparison to their Chinese counterparts. Artists like Farrell subtly infused
their work with Celtic designs without overdoing it. However, their work was
still little more than theft devoid of technical challenge. The stand out piece
of the show for me was Farrell's Political
Presse Series (1980) - a masterful and wonderfully inventive piece which
proved to me again what talent Farrell had - but it saddened me to also think
how much of it he squandered in drink and acting up artistically in pubs.
On the second
floor of the Crawford Art Gallery, we saw the
collection of The Great Southern Hotel
collection. As hotel collections, it was not that bad - but it was typically
unadventurous. Nora McGuinness seemed to have been very popular with the
collections head, as she was represented by over a half a dozen oils and
watercolours. Frankly, I have never seen as many of her works. As an
Expressionist artist working in 1950s Ireland she appears a strong figure - but
her work overall is too technically limited, too dour, too gloomy and too
devoid of the spiritual depth that all great expressionist art must have.