Ten Leonardo da Vinci Drawings at The National Gallery of Ireland

On Thursday 9^th June 2016, Carol and I went into the National Gallery of Ireland to see ten drawings by Leonardo da Vinci from the British Royal Collection. Dublin was bathed in the golden light of dusk in late spring and the women on the streets seemed to glow with fecundity though none more so than a beautiful, slender, auburn haired, golden tanned, pregnant woman in a bright pale blue sun dress and with flip-flops - I saw passing outside the National Gallery.                                                                                                      
                        

I had not ventured out to see an exhibition in about four months and I was frankly sick to death of contemporary art and saw no point in frustrating and angering myself anymore with the trivial, commercial and eager to please crap of my peers and wondered why anyone still wanted to make or write about art. Art for me had ended in 1985 when Neo-Expressionism stopped being the major movement of the day and Neo-Geo took its place. I simply did not give a dam about the zillions of pastiches and rehashes of style done with such a waste of materials and human energy since 1985 and whose only merit was commercial, moralistic or as the embodiment of identity politics. I could not identify with an art world that had turned from an arena of truthful, personal, freedom of expression - regardless of the personal cost - into a gilded cage populated by extreme left-wing and Feminist moralisers who schizophrenically also hung around art galleries and private member’s clubs trying to sell their art to corporate billionaires. I was now just a highly informed philistine and carried on with my own art because it was the only thing that kept me sane. Moreover, as a middle-aged artist, I had long since stopped being influenced by other artists and had come to realise that no one could help me in the midst of my painting - than myself. In fact, I had to think hard to think of the last exhibition that had actually inspired or aided my own work. But I really would have a been a philistine - if I had passed up the opportunity to see drawings by da Vinci! And as it turned out, this was to be one of the most inspiring exhibitions I had seen in a long time.                                            

I had glanced at the drawings on the National Gallery website and was struck by how introverted and lacking in bravura flashiness they were but I hoped that in the flesh they would have more impact. Seeing them in the dimly lit gallery space was thus a revelation. Da Vinci’s drawing were on thin sheets of paper mostly no bigger than postcards and I had to peer to see all their details. What I saw in the flesh was a grandeur of vision on a small scale - I had never witnessed in any other artist. Only Dürer came close to da Vinci’s power as a draughtsman on a small scale. The paper da Vinci used was made of cotton rag, hot pressed and no more than 90lb in weight. The paper was so thin that one could see the marks from the verso of the sheets - which he frequently made use of on both sides. Those sheets that had drawings on both sides were exhibited in double sided glass frames which one could walk around. The exhibition started with a short and succinct video demonstrating the materials and techniques of da Vinci the draughtsman. As you know, I loathe video pieces of any kind in exhibitions, but as a technical geek, I found it highly informative and loved hearing about the materials da Vinci used.                                     
                           

You know one of the reasons, I got an E in my first ever essay on art in Art College at the age of eighteen, was because it was on Picasso’s Les Demoiselle d’Avignon and since I had never seen it in the flesh - I found it almost impossible to write about. I still haven’t seen Les Demoiselle d’Avignon and I still don’t feel fit to write about it. I was nineteen then and even now at forty-five - I find it as hard to write about art works I have never seen. Seeing da Vinci’s drawings in low resolution JPGs on the National Gallery website gave me little idea of the material quality of the drawings in the flesh. Even when I went home and looked at the drawings in high resolution photographs in various books on da Vinci at home - I found the experience strangely detached. But in the gallery, where I had to navigate other viewers, peer into the glass frames under dim light and strain to see all the fine details of da Vinci’s line - it was a full erotic experience.                                                                              
                                                      
The last time I had a chance to see da Vinci drawings was in 2007, in the Chester Betty Gallery, but I had come away from that very frustrated and disappointed. The Codex Leicester, actually contained no standalone drawings, and those on the margins of The Codex Leicester were restricted to water and engineering - a subject I had no interest in and even if I did, I did not speak Latin and did not have a mirror to reverse da Vinci’s famously reversed writing. So it was a relief to finally see drawings of real impact in this exhibition. The ten drawings captured some of da Vinci’s chief interests, a female portrait with da Vinci’s much copied enigmatic and benign smile, a study of blackberry bush, study of river water damage on an embankment, studies for horses, studies of cats and one drawing of from a series of ten about a deluge which reflected da Vinci’s pessimistic fascination with the end of the world. There was nothing narcissistically flashy or extravagant about these drawings. In fact, they seemed incredibly private and introverted works made for da Vinci’s own pleasure and understanding. They convinced slowly and devastatingly.                                                                                                                                  

The great criticism of da Vinci, was that he had so many ideas - but realised too few of his projects. That is of course true, which is why it is his drawings that are arguably his greatest achievement, because it is in them that we witness his encyclopaedic interest in the natural world and plans for his many inventions. Today, these are prized almost as conceptual statements worthy in their own right - irrespective of whether or not he actually ever carried them to fulfilment - and in fact a sketch by da Vinci is often more important and profound than whole frescoed rooms by his technically skilled and hardworking but dim witted peers. Not only was da Vinci an incomparable genius at the start of the Renaissance - he was a genius with an open arena to play in - and you can see the pleasure and intensity of experience he brought to all his studies. He was like Columbus discovering America - or more recently Steve Jobs at the start of the personal computer age – with limitless room for discovery and an unassailable right to call himself the first and best - before many. Moreover, da Vinci’s omnivorous intellect and knowledge meant that everything he drew no matter how humble - was freighted with such an intensity of scrutiny and understanding - that he could make even a few branches from a blackberry bush seem epic in import.                                                            

The last great artist to bring such fresh intensity to the sketchbook from life, was the teenage Pablo Picasso in Spain at the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, even though I have always considered drawing from life a vital part of one’s training, I have always had my doubts about the practice of students today being told to go out into nature and the city - to draw life - because so much of our real lives today are experienced through mediated images - that drawing from nature and physical human life - is actually unnatural and a hopelessly nostalgic, escapist fantasy. Scurrying out on expeditions into the real world - to do drawings from life today - is about as cliché, retrograde and mendacious as the nature poems of ‘poets’ living in tower blocks surrounded by digital screens, listening to Beethoven on their iPhones. In this Post-Modern world, real life only happens - when there is a power cut – and we don’t enjoy it!                             

Unlike like so many artists since the invention of photography and the cult of Impressionism, da Vinci’s drawings, did not superficially record the fall of light on bodies or objects – instead they recorded both the inner and outer structure of forms - and tried to find the source of their life. His vision of the body and nature was thus not of the fleeting and subjective but rather of the timeless and ordered. Moreover, da Vinci’s drawings proved that not only was he a great draughtsman working from life - but even more importantly - he was a great draughtsman working from his memory and imagination. Take for example his sheet of drawings of cats which are all perfectly realised in all kinds of rest, motion and fight. I have drawn periodically my cats and know that even when asleep they rarely stay still! So to draw them from life when they are resting is difficult enough - but almost impossible when moving. So da Vinci’s drawings of cats were as much about his almost photographic memory and knowledge of their anatomy as mere observation. Likewise, in the final drawing of a deluge, we see da Vinci’s knowledge and imagination create an image beyond mere appearances that may have been incorrect in minor details but overall - was epic in it cataclysmic vision of nature.                                                                                                          

For me da Vinci is the greatest draughtsman in art history because of the vastness of his range and subject matter - with only Dürer coming close to him. He continues to be an influence on young artists and Jean Michel Basquait for example was obsessed with reworking, blowing up and roughing up da Vinci’s drawings - particularly those related to anatomy. Da Vinci’s humble drawings for me were like a blessed liberation from the tyranny of the Post-Modern Neo-Salon artists of today like Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and countless other rich nobodies who try to cow their peers with vast projects executed by teams of hired underlings, skilful failed artists, technicians and factory workers. You could frankly pile up all the tonnes of ‘art’ produced by most of these Post-Modern, Neo-Salon Robber Barons and it would not mean a fraction of what a tiny, feather weight drawing by da Vinci means - not only to me - but to Art History. That is why da Vinci is so inspiring - he offers no excuses to the young artist. So you can’t afford to hire thirty lackey painters to paint vast oil on linen photo-realist confections or fifty foundry workers to take a toy you found in a Poundshop and turn it into a ten-ton bronze? So you can’t even afford a small canvas and oil paint? Surely you can afford a sheet of paper and a stick of black chalk? Let’s see what you can do with that! And if you do paint - just paint twelve small and medium sized - timeless masterpieces!

Jonathan Yeo: The Schizophrenic Neo-Society Painter

On Thursday 19^th September 2013, Carol and I watched a documentary on Jonathan Yeo who was incredibly being given an exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery in London. I frankly seethed with contempt for Yeo’s illustrative and mannered kitsch portraits. I noticed, that almost as an aside, we saw Yeo take photographs of his sitters even though he then went on to make a show of painting them from life. Yet his finished work looked more the product of the camera than real study from life. Carol pointedly compared Yeo’s style to the illustrations in Woman’s Way in the 1980’s. I thought his paintings said virtually nothing about Yeo’s sitters and the only thing they said about Yeo was his taste in illustrative artists which he pastiched. There was no there - there, in Yeo’s work which was superficial and devoid of spirit. I found his rendering of faces boring and lacking any real psychological depth and his scrubbed and splattered backgrounds offensively mannered. Another small, technical, studio related reason I hated Yeo, was my disgust at his affected piling up dirty cakes of half-dry oil paint on his dirty pallet – the kind of stupid, wasteful thing - only a painter with no sense of the cost or value of oil paint would do.                              

I had seen countless artists on deviantart as technically skilled and intellectually bankrupt - but I supposed they did not have Yeo’s easy entrée into high-society or gift for self-publicity. Like so many successful people, he was apparently easy to get along with, apolitical and happy to provide the rich with a glamorous lie about themselves. I wondered what it said about art and society in 2013 that the most successful portrait artist in Britain, was in the mould of the style over substance Giovanni Boldini from the tail end of the Belle Epoch a hundred years before.                                                                                    

As with late salon portrait painters like Giovanni Boldini and Antonio Mancini, I noticed that there was a dramatic discontinuity between Yeo’s faces and backgrounds – a schizophrenic schism between illustrative portrait conventions and attempts to be fashionably painterly in the areas around the face. This may seem like a minor issue but from the first time I saw Antonio Mancini’s portraits in The Hugh Lane Museum in the mid-80s - it was an issue I had thought about a lot. I found the difference between Mancini’s heavily impastoed - almost expressionistic backgrounds - and his more conventionally naturalistic face painting - odd and not fully convincing. Even though I liked Mancini’s work, I thought he had failed to reinvent the whole surface of the picture in the radical way that Cézanne had and thus it gave Mancini’s work a schizophrenic look - torn between the traditional past and the expressive future. As for Boldini, this schism between figure and ground, had led him to use bold gestural brushstrokes in the areas surrounding the figure - that suggested proto-futurism or even proto-Abstract-Expressionism but unlike de Kooning, Boldini did not go on to deconstruct the figure. Instead, Boldini rendered the faces of his society sitters, in a perfectly modelled naturalistic way that would have been acceptable to any academic hack.                                     

A hundred years later, Jonathan Yeo, painted faces in either an uninspired blended manner that was merely a pastiche of nineteenth century academic technique or painted them in a schematic and soulless pastiche of Lucien Freud’s method of building up form through a broken patchwork of brushstrokes. But Yeo painted these conventional faces on top of an artily scrubbed background that suggested nth generation Abstract Expressionism. So like his early twentieth century counterparts, Yeo’s work was a dishonest confection of styles whose instant success - was testament to its essentially kitsch character. The inherently theatrical nature of Yeo’s work was highlighted by his sitter’s love of dressing up and presenting themselves has ham actors - inventing their own media personas. Thus Yeo’s work was lie impacted upon lie to create a glamorous illusion that simply did not convince.                                                                                        

A couple of weeks later I saw Parkinson Meets Jonathan Yeo on Sky Arts, which I watched with the relish of a critic. I thought Yeo’s porno collage of George Bush gimmicky and typically neutered like most artistic attempts to appropriate porn. It also galled me to think, I had collaged porn into my paintings decades before Yeo - and had just got abuse - not the middle-class tittering that greeted Yeo’s wannabe bad boy posturing. As for Yeo’s paintings about plastic surgery (where Yeo had painted in the marks made by plastic surgeons before operating) they simply reminded me of poor imitations of Jenny Saville’s far superior work decades before. As I watched Parkinson’s banal, middle-brow, television show, without a shred of intellectual weight, I realized that another part of Yeo’s success was his shameless desire to be loved by such an audience and convince them that he really was up there with artists like Picasso and Sargent - and at the cutting edge of contemporary art.                                

Crazy, Pretentious, Agitprop 'Love'

On Saturday 17^th October, my brother and sister brought Carol and me out to see What We Call Love: From Surrealism to Now in IMMA. It was the first major touring exhibition in IMMA since Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera in 2011 and a chance for me to see works by artists I was still unfamiliar with in the flesh like Rudolf Schwarkogler and Cecily Brown. Before going, I warned my elder siblings that there were some explicit images and sexual themes. However, as it turned out, they were amused by the sexual themes - but shocked by what passed for art in this conceptual age. I was delighted to get a lift in my brother’s car up to IMMA, which I had not been to in over a year, partly because I could not be bothered to make the long journey out to see mediocre conceptual art and partly because of my complete disenchantment with contemporary art. My sister kindly paid for our entry fees.                                                                                       

Before going to the exhibition, I struggled to think of many paintings or sculptures that I felt had succeed in portraying love. The best for me would have been Rembrandts Jewish Bride, though many painter’s both male and female had produced tender portraits of their partners, for example Egon Schiele’s paintings of Wally and Edith or Frida Kahlo’s paintings of Diego Rivera. Still, I felt visual artists found it harder to convey love as easily as poets, musicians or dancers. Often when presented with ‘lovers’ in paintings we are left wondering if their gestures towards each other, represent true love or lust, devotion or manipulation, self-sacrifice or convenience. Moreover, as a middle-aged man - with decreasing levels of testosterone - I had realised that love was not the same as sexual desire and often when young we merely ‘love’ with our genitals not our hearts.                                                                                                 

I have frankly never seen an exhibition in IMMA so heavily populated and mostly by young students - who seemed titillated by the whole experience. Whether they were really passionate lovers of contemporary art or just wanted to see some saucy pictures is debatable - but they were often taking photos of the rudest art works with their camera phones - and I soon found the number of girls giggling in front of the work aggravating.                                                                                                                             

If some viewers to this exhibition thought it too extreme, they would have done well to remember that in fact most of this art represented the safest versions of many of these artists’ works. The splayed vaginas of Picasso’s late work was absent, Salvador Dalí’s masturbatory and scatological works were absent, Rudolf Schwarzkogler castration images were absent, Carolee Schneemann’s film of herself copulating with her partner James Tenny, or orgy film of people rolling around with lumps of meat were absent and Cecily Browns’s hard-core, copulating porn stars were absent. So this was a strangely intellectual and impotent version of love that was more concerned with frustrated, neurotic navel-gazing than messy interaction. Personally, I did not find any of this stuff erotic or daring in the least - except perhaps in its manifestation of neurosis, fetishism and the exhibitionistic desire to be seen to be naughty.                                               

Much of this art was notable for what it refused to give the art lover; displays of skill - never mind virtuosity, coherent and comprehensible narrative, beautiful art objects that a collector would feel compelled to own, sexuality and courtship as a pleasure and so on – all of these were condemned as traditional, kitsch and counter-revolutionary. So instead of a warning about sexual content, this exhibition should have had a warning like: “This Exhibition Contains Virtually No Work of Conventional Skill or Talent”.         

There were very few pieces in this exhibition that struck me as embodying the idea of love, but the best and one of the first in the show was Brancusi’s The Kiss from 1923-25. This simple archaic looking sculpture of two lovers kissing, carved out of a single block of brown limestone, with the details of lips ears, hair, arms and hands reduced to their simplest terms - was so tender and pure in its heart - that I was truly touched.                                                                                                                                          

I found Picasso’s painting The Kiss from 1931, a surprisingly stupid and cartoony image that reminded me of present day George Condo - which was frankly unforgivable. I presumed that it came during Picasso’s stormy break up with Olga and represented the dark vision of women that Picasso fell into at the end of relationships. Yet, Couple, a tiny whittled sculpture, from 1930, of a couple embracing, restored my love of Picasso and yet again I marvelled at his ability to conjure humanity out of the least prepossessing materials.                                                                                                                                   

Looking at Dalí’s Untitled, Couple with Their Heads Full of Clouds from 1937, I was struck by how far I had come from my teenage love of Dalí. As a youth, I had believed the hype around Dalí which suggested that he had the skills of an old master, however, having spent a lifetime fitfully looking at many German, Dutch and Flemish old masters - I realised now Dalí had nothing like their power of verisimilitude and worse still he lacked their integrity of character. Besides, looked upon from a Modern perspective, I found Dalí’s painting style tedious and a dead end that had none of the painterly originality of the great Expressionists or even his Surrealist peer Joan Miró. Moreover, Dalí’s once so shocking and transgressive images had mostly become so obviously works of manipulative kitsch by a shameful exhibitionist.                         

I found Merret Oppenheim’s oil painting Daphne and Apoll from 1943, a rather generic version of Surrealism. However I found her sculpture, The Couple from 1956, which was a found pair of brown boots, joined at the toes - a witty metaphor for copulating - that still looked contemporary. Yet, once I registered the conceit - my mind wondered off to greater concerns like having a drink of coke to quench my thirst and falling blood sugar levels.                                                                                                                

As usual, I found Louise Bourgeois towered above most of her peers and the many acolytes who followed her. One of my favourite pieces in the whole show, was Bourgeois’s The Couple, from 2002, two felt figures embracing - surrounded by a global matrix of glass beads. I realised again, that Bourgeois had the almost unmatched power amongst contemporary sculptors - to give her sculptures fetishistic power - and only this piece approached the tenderness of Brancusi’s The Kiss for me.                                             

Rebecca Horn was represented by a complicated machine sculpture High Moon, which consisted of two Winchester rifles that turned on pistons and fired a red liquid - which fell into a trough on the floor and was siphoned back up into two large plastic see-through orbs – that then passed the liquid back into the guns. I had been a fitful fan of Horn’s work since the early 1990s so I was delighted to see this major work by her, however, although we watched the sculpture for a while, it had stopped firing and seemed to have broken down. Apparently its symbolism had something to do with Rosicrucian’s philosophy amongst other things and I presumed the title was a reference to the famous Western High Noon. But that was as far as I got without further research. Still, I found High Moon one of the most visually impressive sculptures in the exhibition.                                                                                                                                           

I was curious to see Miriam Cahn’s work from the noughties, since I remembered her as a powerfully expressive draughtswoman in the 1980s, of primal figurative images in dense fields of charcoal on vast sheets of paper. Yet these more recent works of radiated looking nude figures, proved she had absolutely no sense of colour or ability to make oil paint come alive. Her recent work struck me as God awful pseudo-Outsider Art type paintings, and they reminded me of the equally awful cartoony Expressionist paintings of Dana Schutz who for some reason (beyond me) was taken seriously in New York or Maria Lassnig who for some reason (beyond me) was taken seriously for her cartoony Expressionist paintings in Europe and America. This kind of Feminist Bad Painting, rose high on its political empowerment, the complete repudiation of the patriarchal Canon and its fashionable debasement of elitist notions like technique, skill, originality of vision, depth of feeling or soul. And frankly it was art like this and its success that made me happy to have nothing to do with the contemporary art world. In 1987, when interviewed for State of The Art a Channel Four art documentary Cahn had claimed that “men’s culture hasn’t proved its worth”, (State of The Art: Ideas & Images in the 1980s, Ed. Sandy Nairne, London: Chatos & Windus, 1990, P.113.) leaving aside the totally ignorant and philistine nature of such a misandristic comment, I can simply retort that after over fifty years of Feminist ranting - most female culture hasn’t proved its worth!            

Michele Ciacciofera’s thrown together, pseudo expressive drawings on paper, of blobby figures, self-indulgently influenced by Eastern mysticism - looked like the work of a not very talented high school student trying to emulate the far superior drawings of Francisco Clemente.                                                     

I was fascinated to see my very first Rudolf Schwarzkogler pieces in the flesh. In my early twenties, Schwarzkogler had influenced my own auto-castration and phallic paintings. However, by middle-age I pitied Schwarzkogler more than admired him and wondered if he would still be alive if it wasn’t for his self-destructive vision of art. The first of Schwarzkogler’s performance pieces, Action Marriage, from 1965, was represented by six black and white photographs (the mildest ones in the series) in which Schwarzkogler’s male and female assistants were dressed up like a couple about to be married and then Schwarzkogler splattered them with paint, stripped them and then bandaged them. A traumatic kind of amateur dramatics, it was performance piece from the early days of the medium.  Yet it was saved by the genuine strangeness of Schwarzkolger’s vision, who in other increasingly sinister performances had his assistant Heinz Cibulka pretend to slice off bits of his penis (it was actually a fish in a bandage). A few years later, suffering from depression, Schwarzkolger threw himself from the window of his apartment to his death, he was only twenty-nine. I told my brother and sister how Günter Brus another Austrian Actionist, covered himself in excrement had sang the Austrian national anthem while masturbating at another performance piece, and was sentenced to six months in prison, but fled to Berlin. My sister could not believe such art was thought acceptable. But I explained how the Actionists were reacting to their countries complicity in Nazi atrocities and sought to debase the whole bourgeois and deeply conservative culture that they had come from. If nothing else the Actionist were truly ground-breaking in their day - unlike so many of the poseurs that followed them.                                                                                                                              

When we came to the photographs of John Lennon and Yoko Ono - which I actually thought were quite sweet - they sparked a conversation about Lennon and Ono’s relationship. My brother who adored the Beatles, thought Yoko Ono was awful to put it mildly - and so he was shocked when I told him how she was fêted in the art world today and a heroine to many young female artists. My brother who thought Ono completely talentless and manipulative - could hardly believe that in the art world people rated her. Personally, I leaned more towards my brother’s opinion on Ono - but I tried to at least present an objective perspective on her work.                                                                                                           

Marina Abramović and Ulay’s Rest Energy from 1980, was a photograph from a performance piece by the lovers, with Marina holding a bow while Ulay held an arrow loaded and pointed at Marina’s heart. It was a strikingly modern take on the myth of cupid, however, I was sceptical of the need of Marina Abramović to constantly place herself in masochistic situations - especially because it was usually a passive aggressive bid - to achieve the power of victimhood. Moreover, having outgrown my own self-mutilating and suicidal art, I no longer thought it necessary or admirable to undergo trials of endurance or maim or kill yourself for your art and the prize wasn’t worth it anyway.                                                                

Annette Messager’s collection of photographs from 1971-73, of lovers kissing in films and TV dramas mounted on olive coloured boards, had a certain charm, but seemed like the work of a not particularly talented graduate student.                                                                                                

Most of the work in What We Call Love: From Surrealism to Now, presented a very intellectual, exhibitionistic and sadistic version of ‘love’ - although anything more humane would have been dammed as kitsch by the establishment in IMMA. Yet, with lovers like this who needed enemies? So many of the performance pieces from the 1960s and 1970s recorded in photographs and video pieces - were like those mortifying couples who insist on fighting in front of you and dare you to intervene in their private cesspool. The reward of getting involved with most of these artists might have been some quickie sex - but the price was being lumbered with a head-case. While so many of these works claimed they were about love or desire, they were really about revolt against religious and bourgeois norms, attacks on traditional marriage and propaganda for feminist emancipation and gay relationships. With all this agitprop, there was little room left for something as pure, naïve, traditional and counter-revolutionary as true love. Besides in my experience, most artists were so egotistical, self-centred and narcissistic that it was impossible for them to ever truly love anyone but themselves and their own art.                                                                            

The stories behind Sophie Calle’s works, like her fake marriage or fondness for helping her lover piss and wish to feel what it was like to have a penis may have been risqué and the story behind Felix Gonzalez-Torres loss of his lover to AIDs, may have been tragic but the actual art works were as impersonal and boring as a PowerPoint presentation by an academic specialist in street signs.                                              

Nan Goldin’s series of eight verity photographs Marina and Jean Christian in bed with baby Elio, Sag Harbour, NY from 2001, showed a couple, the woman naked except for panties and the man naked on a bed, the man sucking her nipple as their young son watched, then the boy sucked his mother’s nipple while the husband watched. To all concerned it was obviously an innocent moment of fun, yet I could not help observe that if these images were found on your computer you might get a visit from the police and if it had been a man who took the photographs they would have been arrested. On the other hand, I wondered at how with our widespread disgust and horror about paedophilia and child abuse - had tainted the innocence of everybody’s existence. Goldin could be a talented, insightful and empathetic photographer, however, I wondered, if her subjects had been bourgeois members of the establishment - if the art world would have had any interest in her work. Goldin’s cult status in the art world surely rested more on who (trendy arty types, prostitutes and drag queens) and what she photographed (decadence, debauchery and alienation) rather than the actual quality of her photographs - which were rather amateurish and simplistic.

I was initially delighted to see Damien Hirst’s I’ll Love You Forever, from 1994, since I had not seen many any of his works in the flesh since 1995. However, Hirst’s readymade collection of medical waste buckets, explosives and a gas mask in a locked blue steel cage was a blundering attempt at a metaphor for love, sickness and death - but without any epiphany or resonance. Thus, I wondered at a world in which this kind of replicate art was bought and sold for millions. Hirst was just one of the more talented and successful examples of a replicate artist who had emerged since the 1960s when Art Colleges had moved from a hands on, studio based practice of vocational types, to an academic, theory bound practice - that turned art into a series of theoretical and commercial formulas - at the expense of feeling and integrity of vision. The increased scale and spectacle of this Neo-Conceptualism merely served to cover up the aesthetic void at the heart of such work. My sister was completely stumped by Hirst’s work and was incredulous that just putting objects together was considered sculpture today!                                                                   

Cecily Brown’s These Foolish Things, a huge oil painting of lovers lying on a bed mutually masturbating was like an Eric Fischl on a huge cream cake that had been whisked up to look like a parody of Willem de Kooning. I found Brown’s paint handling, eager to please, facile and lacking any depth or significance. Her mannerist and frivolous paintings presented emotionally loaded, sexual images, in an expressively pastiched style - devoid of lust - or any other real feeling for that matter. Like so many academic hacks since the 1990s like John Currin and Jonathan Yeo, Brown’s cynical and bloodless appropriation of pornographic imagery had become a fig leaf of mock transgression - used to cover up her complete lack of ideas, aesthetic depth or truly crazy sexual desire.                                                                                                

Dorothy Cross was represented by three pieces the best of them Passion Bed from 1990, a wire mesh mass imbedded with wine glasses, which I thought one of her best pieces - even if it was a pale shadow of Louise Bourgoise.                                                                                                                    

I have grown up and lived through many phases of Feminism and Post-Feminism, but I remember how, not so long ago, it was fashionable to blame men for every ill in life and to claim an astonishing level of blameless innocence and purity for femininity. Yet many of these contemporary Feminist art pieces presented a rather demented and sick version of feminity - nowhere more troublingly expressed than in Mona Hatoum’s Incommunicado from 1993, a stainless steel children’s cot which instead of a bed at its centre had a string of sharp wires strung out like a shredder. I frankly could think of few works by men that by implication were as heartless, sadistic or desperate to shock.                                                                

There were over two hundred works in the exhibition, but frankly I think half of them should not have been included, especially a lot of the later conceptual pieces that were just an accumulation of documentation, the many video pieces that demanded too much attention and most of the Irish contributions that were academically dire exercises in pretension or pointless whimsy. Much of the work especially from the 1960s and 70s were an archivist’s delight and a traditional art lover’s despair. So many of these artists thought it was only required to document an event – in order to turn it into art. The trouble with so much of this text and photo based later work, was that it offered virtually no aesthetic or visual pleasure and its merits required a lengthy investigation of its theoretical strength - which by the time we reached the end of the exhibition - I was too tired and bewildered to do. Too much of this ‘art’ was like being subjected to the most pretentious and passive aggressive slide show of an acquaintance’s love life - which made you lose the will to live - and vow to avoid them at all costs the next time. In fact, I found the dancers on Strictly Come Dancing on BBC 1 later that night - far more arousing and romantic than most of what I had seen in IMMA earlier that day.                                                                           

After going around the exhibition, my brother bought us coffee and cake in the café. Then we went around the new book shop and my brother bought me the catalogue to What We Call Love: From Surrealism to Now and the catalogue to Damien Hirst’s retrospective in Tate Modern in 2012. I did not particularly like Hirst and already had three old books on him - but it was good to know my enemies! My brother also bought Carol a new printing of a famous book on drawing from 1913 and a toy robot. All in all it was a very enjoyable day out for us all.