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.

Trivial Contemporary Irish Art vs. the Grandeur of the Old Masters

On Tuesday 2ed June, Carol and I went into town at 11:30am to go to see the 185^th Annual RHA Exhibition and then to visit the National Gallery of Ireland. I would not have bothered going to the Annual RHA Exhibition, but Carol, had wanted to see Tracey Emin’s neon writing piece Wanting You.  Frankly, by the age of forty-four art contemporary art had lost all meaning to me - and if it wasn’t for Julian Schnabel - I would have virtually no interest in contemporary art and even his work of the last twenty years had largely been one disappointment after another.                                       

                                                           

Still, Carol  was delighted to see Tracey Emin’s neon writing piece Wanting You immediately in the foyer - though for me it was a vacuous piece that formally had taken from Joseph Kosuth’s use of neon writing - and was only interesting because it took an expressive sentiment and turned it into an adult bookshop sign. Which made me wonder if any authentic expression was possible today - especially in an art world determined to embrace ironic conceptualism and rabid commercialism. Besides, I had long since fallen out of love with Emin after getting sick to death of seeing her on television  - and she had become nothing but a desperate, self-involved celebrity droning on about her suffering while raking in the cash and claiming that - despite all evidence to the contrary - that she could actually draw! Not only could Emin not draw, she couldn’t even make interesting bad drawings. In fact, I had long since lost interest in the whole yBa movement – which had proved to be so artistically limited and hypocritical in its early Punk posturing and then rapid commercial whoring and smug membership of the RA.               

                                    

To say I was unimpressed by the vast majority of what was on offer in the RHA is an understatement. Though at least it was an open submission exhibition that theoretically at least offered everyone a chance. I found the commercialism, snobbery and elderly, upper-middle-class nature of the RHA nauseating. It was certainly not a club I wanted to be part of - and never had. Despite applying to countless galleries and accumulating over ninety-eight rejections - I had never applied to the RHA and never wanted to! I considered it a betrayal of my anarchistic ideals.                      

                                                

As usual the Annual RHA Exhibition was a mixed bag and the sheer quantity of work on display made it more a treasure hunt in a junk shop than a contemplative experience. I was very fond of John Behan’s bronze sculptures - some painted white - in particular Famine Ship in which the emigrants were blowing like sails in the wind. Though I did wonder when Irish nationalists would stop milking the famine.   

I was very impressed by David Begley’s large charcoal drawing of an x-ray which was both quite contemporary and technically a tour de force, moreover it was far superior to previous paintings I had seen him make and there were other excellent charcoal life drawings and landscapes but by people whose names I instantly forgot.                                                                                                                                

Dorothy Cross’s Silver Plates one with a cast dead bird and the other with a castrated penis (though in the art world they call it a phallus that symbolises the penis), was just another pastiche of Louise Bourgeois by Cross and another sign of an art world run by women and ineffectual, chastised men that delighted in images of castrated males and repellent anti-sex images. Yet woe betide the male painter who continued to paint naked women especially in a sexy way!                             

                                    

I was baffled by Alice Mahar’s bronze sculpture Goddess after Canova which was on an Yves Klein blue pillar. Overall it reminded me of the short lived fad in the early 1980s for the Italian Anachronisfici pastiches of Neo-Classical art by the awful painter Carlo Maria Mariani - and Maher’s work was just as pointless. I wondered if there was anything Mahar was not prepared to pastiche? And was anyone in the Irish art world ever going to call her on it? Apparently not, because here at least - they thought her a genius - and nothing critical could ever be said of a female artist these days!                 

                                    

In fact most of the sculptures on display at the 185^th Annual Exhibition, were dismally conventional or crassly wacky - in a desperate attention seeking way. The exception being Stephanie Hess’ March Hare - a sensual and deceptively simple abstracted hare in patinated bronze that actually looked like it had been carved in stone - and which I craved to touch.                                                                                

                

Eithne Jordan’s bland paintings of streets and interiors in a facile, generic, contemporary style left me cold - and all I could remember was that I had preferred her when she had been a more Neo-Expressionist artist back in the late 80s and I wondered if she would ever find out who she really was.  Diana Copperwhite’s painting Fake World II did little to impress me though everyone else seemed to think she was amazing. To me she had one idea – take a large 4 inch flat paint brush and apply different colours to its sides and middle and then swipe the rainbow of colours all around the painting in vaguely figurative shapes. It was a flaccid, crass and gimmicky version of what some might consider - seen at a considerable distance - to be a wonky, late, drunken de Kooning. Yet it was too pretty and desperate to please - to ever be as great as a de Kooning.                                                                                         

James Hanley’s comical drawings from monuments and sculptures were absurdly stupid works which proved to me why his work was so unconvincing, he aspired to classical values but he had the personality of a clown. Hanley’s huge unsubtle portraits in oils were so bad they reminded me of illustrational murals on a toy store wall.                                                                         

A far more convincing work was Geraldine O'Neill’s large Drawing which was similar to her large oil painting Is feidir le cat Schrödinger an dá thrá a fhreastal which had been shortlisted for the Hennessy Portrait Prize ’14 and I had hated. This time however, I found O’Neill’s Drawing to be a far more coherent and satisfying work, though I still found O'Neill caught between wanting to be a pretentious Old Master and gimmicky contemporary artist – resulting in work that satisfied neither desire.      

                                

Colin Martin’s painting of interiors like a sound studio were above average though not as good as work I had seen him do years ago - because they seemed comparatively rushed and unfinished. Donald Teskey displayed some actual soul in his expressive Irish landscapes though they were very conventional works.                                                                                                                                                           

Rapid Eye Movement an oil on panel painting by Darragh Dempsey of a woman’s legs seen poking out from under a bed and spot lit by a torch was a technically accomplished work that actually haunted my imagination.                                                                                                                               

       

There were probably many more quality works that I did not look at properly because I was so dazed or appalled by the surrounding rubbish. And trying to make sense of why some works sold and so many others did not - I could only think they did not match people’s interior decoration. I found, so much of the rest of the art at the 185^th Annual RHA Exhibition, posturing and pastiched art that was desperate to be liked, flattered to deceive and grandstanded its supposed technical skill which in fact was mostly nothing but the following of formulas, largely pointless and not worth the effort. So many of these works were trying to ape photography or were obsessed with memetic skill - but without any consideration for original ideas, deeply felt emotion or an authentic vision of the world. Mostly it was schooled art by technician’s who had learned some shortcuts but who were not real artists and who despite tricking out their work with contemporary themes were as bourgeois, conservative, sanctimonious, sentimental, twee, kitsch and unoriginal as their boring, ludicrous and instantly forgettable predecessors in the RHA a hundred years ago.                                                                                                       

                           

Moreover most of this art was politically and socially correct to a fault, parroting the new liberal consensus around sexuality, the nationalist consensus around Irishness and the political right wing consensus around economics. That, I too shared some of these views - did not stop me feeling uneasy in such an age of conformity, group think and rabble rousing - and I itched to be contrarian. Fed on bohemian myths of Modernist transgression and rebellion, I had decided as a youth to become and artist, but now as a middle aged man, I realised that rebellion in art was just a Hollywood fiction and the forces of coercive academic, commercial and stylistic conformity were vast in comparison.                                    

                        

Of course to these respectable professionals, my art was offensive, deplorable, unacceptable, and nothing to do with art as they saw it. Yet, I frankly did not care a wit what they thought of as art – in fact the whole idea of ‘Art’ had become questionable to me because; art had once again become; an academic exercise, success required such incredible networking and media whoring, styles had become as meaningless as musical one hit wonders, art was never going to be anything but a censored, glorified and moralised version of reality, artists would always strive toward ever greater self-aggrandising pretension and obscurity and art was largely nothing but a business like any other - where ‘rebels’ were nothing but entrepreneurs posing as Punks. After the blip of Modernism, art was again the most bourgeois, sanctimonious and conventional thing to do imaginable - yet it pretended it was still radical.                           

                       

So for me, the vast array of pastel and grey coloured paintings - mostly painted in a similar way - blended into one amorphous academic mass of conformity. Even the more youthful and gimmicky works by younger artists played with the same clichés of NCAD painting and Vitamin P (the much passed about book on self-consciously contemporary, arty illustrational painting) that I had become all too familiar. And the so called expressive works were risible cartoons of expressivity by buffoons not tortured souls.                    

 

I noticed how stupid many of the abstract works looked amongst figurative paintings, photographs and sculptures - which made their aesthetics seem slim and insignificant. Even abstract artists I had previously thought highly of in solo exhibition like Richard Gorman - looked exposed and vacant and I was astonished his work had not developed or changed in nearly fifteen years. If ever a style need the unchallenged megalomaniacal solo exhibition space it was Abstraction - especially if it was very mediocre abstraction. There was a whole room full of artily staged looking photographs, many of them magazine supplement quality - but I simply did not care about the vast majority of photography as an art form.                                                                                                                                         

               

In the basement some head banger in a balaclava and army fatigues was in a cage pottering about, amongst new canvases still in their cellophane wrappers. In fact all he had seemed to do is scrawl on a white board for a few minutes and then go out for a cigarette break. I took one look at him and walked back upstairs. I had no idea what he was trying to say or why he chose to stage a revolution in the bowel of academia - and I didn’t care. Besides I had done a far better performance piece in an art gallery in 2002!    

Of course all the above was my own personal opinion and one not shared in the Irish art world by all accounts. In fact if one was to judge by critics like Adian Dunne and Cristín Leach Hughes most of this art was splendid. For Irish art, with it incestuous familiarity, did not operate on the principal of open critique but rather on the basis of opaque favours - handed out to those in the beloved inner circle - and wordless banishment to all those not deemed worthy. In other words, you were either exhibited by curators or not and mentioned by critics and praised - or ignored completely. Such a ‘humane’ system where if you couldn’t say anything nice you said nothing at all - allowed nothing in the Irish art world to be questioned and nobody’s position to be revealed. ‘Geniuses’ were presented to you and you either believed the hype or were a philistine - not worth inviting to their dinner parties. The unfashionable, obscene, ‘non-artists’ living in oblivion, were denied bad reviews - and the possibility of historical redress - that had been accorded so many of the heroes of Modernism. Thus in its way this new liberal consensus held an even greater death grip over culture than the conservative anti-Modernist culture it had over thrown.                                              

Getting a headache from the sea of mediocrity we left and headed to Hodges Figgis, where I bought The Essential Cy Twombly a beautiful tomb on one of my favourite artists of the past sixty years and one of the biggest influences on my own art. I also bought Keeping an Eye Open a collection of essays on art by Julian Barnes whose writing instantly impressed me – which was not easy. Barnes brought a novelist eye to the lives of many of the great French masters of Romanticism, Impressionism and Modernism and gave me a refreshingly jargon and theory free perspective to their art. In fact, when I started reading it at home a few days later - I could not put it down! Barnes instantly became one of my favourite contemporary literary writers on art up there with the sadly departed John Updike. (Then at the end of June, I was delighted that Barnes’s Keeping an Eye Open was the book at bedtime on BBC Radio 4 and even though I had read it by then - I enjoyed hearing Barnes reading extracts from it.)                                                            

Then we went to the National Gallery of Ireland and went around the Sean Scully retrospective which had a few surprisingly beautiful paintings from the mid-1980s which made me slightly reassess my poor opinion of him. However, he remained in my mind the most overrated painter of the past thirty years and a desperately limited one at that. Looking through a catalogue to the exhibition, I saw a large number of his early figurative works from the 1960s - which were sadly not included in the exhibition because they would have given me a great source of merriment! There were one or two promising life drawings, but overall his figurative work was appallingly bad – tenth rate at best – so I found it amusing that he had the cunning to ditch figurative art and become an abstract painter hailed as one of the foremost painters alive! Personally I thought there was more artistry in the stone wall makers of the Aran Islands (whose walls Scully photographed in some of the better works in the exhibition) than in him. Yet the likes of Scully, were the professional model to follow in the debacle after the death of Modernism. His academic pedigree, his teaching posts, his rabid commercialism, his incessant exhibitions of his over 1,400 paintings of rectangles - were acceptable to every country in the world from Communist dictatorships, Islamic Kingdoms and Western democracies where taking politically correct offense had become endemic and forming Twitter lynch mobs a sport.             

                                                                                                                      

Finally after an afternoon in the bogs and foothills of art we ascended near the peak with a look around the permanent collection which though largely mediocre - compared with the likes of The National Gallery in London, Louvre, Prado, Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie or the Metropolitan Museum of New York - still possessed paintings of a technical skill, sophistication and humane ambition that made what we had seen earlier in the day look like the pathetic efforts of remedial students. Perversely, this more quietly spoken art revealed truths of beauty, which the noisy shouting of mediocrity could not even envision, and rather than bludgeoning the viewer with claims of importance, which turned out to be nothing but a sales pitch, this great art uplifted and inspired in ways we today are not even fully conscious of - because our visual awareness and attention span has become so scatter-brained, distorted and debased. Compared to the garish sound bites of contemporary art these paintings by the Old Masters were visual epic poems of the most entrancing kind. However, I wasn’t even interested in looking at the overly familiar world class masterpieces by the likes of Titian, Vermeer or Goya. Instead I wanted to spend some time looking at other quality works that I had not seen in a while, like the stunning 14^th century altarpieces replete with old gold leaf and displaying naïve but endearing form and intense and loving faith in God. Though looking at them I felt a shiver of sadness at these alters ripped from their churches and reduction to aesthetic objects - as well as a curiosity about how they originally looked in the churches they had been painted for. Still, in their thick, wooden, amputated reliefs - they had a tremendous suggestive power. Some young women laughed nervously at their naïveté - yet surely they were whistling past the graveyard – unnerved by an uncanny vision so alien to our modern world. For who are we to judge their work? Yes, their perspective and anatomy was naïve by later standards - yet this was compensated for by an obsessive faith in God we cannot even imagine. Personally, I did not believe in God, but if anything artistic was going to persuade me - it was these paintings.                                                                                                                                                 

As for portraits, there was not a woman or man able to paint as convincing and regal a portrait as Sofonisba Anguissola’s Portrait of Prince Alessandro Farnese from around 1560 and which was a far better proof of female talent in painting than the hysterics of Feminist artists since the 1960s. I also was entranced by the torch light painting The Image of Saint Alexis attributed to Georges de La Tour with its mixture of chiaroscuro, dramatic torch light and classical solidity of form  - which made the efforts of RHA members look like gaudy computer generated graphics.                                                                                          

As for still-life, just take Jan Weenix’s Game-piece: the Garden of a Château, from the 1690s. It was a relatively minor genre painting by a minor painter, however its mastery illustrated to me the tragic technical and intellectual gap between our contemporary efforts in paint with those before the advent of photography. I remember first seeing this painting as a young boy teaching myself how to draw. I studied How-To-Books in which almost the first lesson was how to draw an apple - that was rendered as a schematic line drawing of what looked more like something made of quartz. I could not imagine then, just how far I would have to go to ever attempt something like Jan Weenix nor did I know that I would never reach that point nor have the temperament or sanity to achieve it. Moreover, I did not know that the whole idea of representational painting would be called into question by my later study of Modernism and Post-Modernism and embrace of Expressionism and Neo-Expressionism.                                                       

Yet, I was delighted to see this old friend again, and marvelled at its sumptuous display of atmosphere and sensual and tactile surfaces from; the damp dusky sky above a limpid classical landscape in the background, to the ripe fruit and brace of birds, cockerel and the dead hare hung by its right paw and slumping forward in a diagonal pose that was reminiscent of Ruben’s The Elevation of The Cross. It took the sad death of an animal and made it tragic and lamentable. Yet it did so without the psychotic ranting of vegans today, and it made it clear that this was simply the way things were in the natural world where men still killed what they ate. Every object in Game-piece: the Garden of a Château had its own feel, from the damp of the sky, to velvet feel of the flowers, to the fuzz on the peaches to the fur on the hare and every inch of the canvas had hidden details like classical sculptures in the background and busy insects on the fruit. There was not a single painter alive who could paint like that convincingly nor was society set up to encourage such patient and selfless labour nor was any audience willing to spend as much time contemplating it as the painter had on painting it. Neither today’s painter nor his audience had the patience or focus to look for hours at the same image and forsake all the millions of others spewed out by the internet daily. Nor did we believe in ancient symbolism or understand their meanings in the visceral way those schooled in them once did. So Jan Weenix’s painting illustrated for me all that we had lost and could never regain - but which we would be fools not to at least acknowledge. That was the glory of art history - it proved a constant rebuke to those contemporary manipulators who try to pretend things can never be any different or we are living in a golden age of geniuses or that we are progressing toward some kind of utopia.