Contemporary contention

The Damien Hirst retropsective and musings on the contemporary art experience.

Damien Hirst is not an artist who is naturally uppermost in my thoughts – he gets placed there by perpetual media coverage, and now permanent enough to be cited in the end chapters of art history books. He is in the air again due to a retrospective on at the Tate, and the whole Hirstian iceberg has floated in front of my Titanic once more. Like him or not, the iconic shark-in-a-case once seen cannot be unseen. Nor can flies buzzing around a cow’s head, pharmacies, spots, bejewelled skull, butterfly collages and cut open sheep. Damien’s lexicon works rapidly on the conscience, and sticks fast. Perhaps these things should get me pondering on life, death, the universe and everything – and very especially death, but I’m too distracted by the troublesome question of my relation with contemporary, conceptual, “shock” art. Is there any value in it, was there once but it’s now worn off, am I trying to find depth where there is only “what you see is what you see”, is the market value getting in the way of the raw poetry, is artwork that should be ephemeral, mad and dangerous now too corporate, collected and habitual?
[Pic courtesy of Jen Deppe Parker]

So now it’s got me thinking about the wider philosophy of art, and what our expectations of it are. The art-going experience now comes in so many different shapes and guises, if you’re prepared to open your mind wide enough to let them in and acknowledge them as art. We can’t possibly expect the same experience from such divergent things, and directly comparing a renaissance painting with a Fontana slashed canvas, or with a Rachel Whiteread cast of a room – doesn’t seem constructive at all. There are so many different things art can do – be beautiful, rich in expression, devastating in telling truth, inspiring in showing a new idea, funny, poignant, story-telling, bamboozle us with enigmatic mystery, wrong-foot us with skulking banality, entertain us with eclectic references, let material speak for itself, give us something pure to zen out with…or just show us the traces of an artist’s actions.

We have to take each work as it comes on its own merits – and when it presents a thing transposed from real world to gallery with little or no mediation, that is the hardest to read, and to know how to respond to. What is more confusing, is that despite the complete difference of the conceptual shock work, we are still trying to respond to it with the same part of our receptive mind as any other work of art – hence the potential for disappointment, disbelief and derision. The shark isn’t neutral – it comes with its own connotations and physical aura, but it seems to be lacking any guidance from the creator, apart from the poetic yearning title “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” and the loadedness of its being placed into the sanctity of art gallery, which makes us want to go past just scientific scrutiny. Apart from the “it is what it is” hulking reality of what is before me, the after image coupled with the title do have a tendency to haunt the memory, without feeling a need to go back and re-encounter it.

The message seems simple, direct, and instantly “get-able” – Hirst’s pieces do that really well. Whether they will retain the power over time, and be seen as great artwork in decades/centuries to come is another matter. Although visceral contemporary art is incomparable to traditional artistic skills, ultimately we want to be moved by the work in some deep way. Technically competent portraits & landscapes are no guarantee of this experience, and something that at first sight might look unpromising might have surprising depths given half a chance. The greatest art may be that which keeps you coming back, and reveals new layers of meaning each time, working on several levels, allowing diverse interpretation. But someone else’s greatest art may be that which hits you over the head in the most powerful way, that packs a gut-wrenching punch, on one memorable level. Who am I to say? Obviously I want both, but they exist on different planes in my value judgement.

And so, I keep giving work like Hirst’s a chance. I think Hirst is a sincere artist, not merely an opportunist, who has apparently shaped his own success, with the help of the Saatchi machine. His golden talent for self-promotion doesn’t automatically mean he must be a con artist producing shallow claptrap, which is a very popular sentiment thrown at the man. There are many other artists ploughing similar furrows, without stellar bank accounts to match, and they keep it up for years when there must be surer established ways of making money. Ok, so these other artists could just be less successful artrepreneurs, would-be Damiens, but honestly I think they must do it for the love of it. Can you choose to be a cutting-edge artist as a career? Am I being totally naive? Hirst is one who got lucky early…or did he force fate’s hand with some canny media machinations? You can tell I’m never quite sure about that guy.

The 1990 work “1000 Years” is one of Damien Hirst’s most perfect statements. Live animals had featured in art before this, art povera Kounellis’s horses, Joseph Beuys’s performance art with a coyote. Beuys also staged a talk to a dead hare. Hirst shocks us by bringing in actual in-your-face life and death happening before your eyes in an art gallery. A bleak message that we know already, but shoved down our throats, that we are born, we mate, and we die – over and over again, and in an unflinching existential vision of the here and now, he is saying that is all there is. He is an atheist playing God. It is completely enclosed world, they can’t get out, we can’t intervene. The components are terrible – the smell of the rotting cow’s head, the congealed ribbon of blood, the constant motion of the flies; we imagine the noise of the flies buzzing and the electrocutor humming, though it is completely silenced behind the glass and against the gallery hubbub; the callousness of the locked-in cycle in its museum vitrine – a freak show of perpetual life, sex and death. The work is awful, but sort of elegant in its economic simplicity, from a distance even appearing to be a minimalist sculpture, but with something disquieting about it. As a piece of kinetic, ever-changing process art, it has clever intellectual dimensions. It is truly mesmerising, and it makes me feel guilty for wanting to allow it to exist, but I’m not sure I ever want to see the horrible thing again. [Pic courtesy of Saatchi Gallery]

However familiar some of the works are from pictures and reviews, there’s nothing like experiencing them for real. There’s a deep vein of dark humour running through all the cigarette butts and pristine surgery tools. It’s like a dance of death, cavorting with the most profound subjects, but trying to make light of them by having a bit of a laugh. So the work is balanced on a knife edge – they can be philosophy and poetry, or a cabaret of curiosities for our (uneasy) titillation. It’s really up to you which way to take it. Or you can relax, forget about the art questions, and join the children in wide-eyed wonder at butterflies and pickled sheep. A beach ball perpetually turning in a stream of air brings the old children’s gallery at the Science Museum to mind. The immaculate beauty of hundreds of butterfly wings fashioned into windows is just awesome, as is the gaping jawed shark, though not as stupendous as the iconic original. A room with a black sheep in a tank has what looks like a huge black sun behind it. “What’s that made of, is it wool?” I innocently ask – of course it turns out to be dead flies, perhaps swept up from 1000 Years.  The grimness of the flies brings to mind a schoolboy’s cruel backyard experiments with insects “just to see what happens”. The later gold and diamonds riffing on the same old themes, reflecting on the bionic auction values Hirst could conjure up make up an irritating later work called Beautiful Inside My Head Forever. This sort of thing starts to feel like the artist disappearing up his own formaldehyded fundament. I did not queue to see the diamond skull. That was the first piece he conceived that made me want to despise him.

The art world would be that much more dull without the spikes in the graph of artists like Hirst. At his best he has been provocative, intelligent and unforgettable. At his worst he has been disappointing, repetitive and cynical. Walking around the galleries, I couldn’t help pick up some sort of resonance from his combined oeuvre, though this got weaker in the detail of most individual works. I am still intrigued, but I can live without any of that stuff. It could be this retrospective is the last we’ll hear of him in any big way for a while – who knows. (Art critic Edward Lucie-Smith maintains that his influence with young artists now is non-existent.) Meanwhile, these musings have seen me making temporary peace with contemporary art, though a gloriously uneasy peace.

Nb. I’ve read quite a few reviews of D.H. and the Tate exhibition, and I think Philippa Warr’s via Huffington Post is the one I can agree with the most.

Art book review: Painting Today, by Tony Godfrey

This book covers painting in the last 30 years, but particularly looking at contemporary painting and where it’s going. Like its near contender Vitamin P by Phaidon, this is a very large book, picture-rich as befits the subject, representing a great diversity of artists. The text needs a bit of concentration, but it’s not impenetrable artbollocks, takes a broad view of the subject, and satisfactorily ties in with the selected paintings. The format divides the book into themes such as abstraction, landscape, life and death, the figure, history painting, and so on, with several artists reappearing across several themes – for instance Marlene Dumas, Anselm Kiefer, Luc Tuymans, Dana Schultz. This layout works for me, and makes a change from the A-Z of artists approach that contemporary compendiums often go for. In forming these sometimes loose and overlapping areas of investigation, glimpses of patterns, trends and common approaches are identified by the narrative – a hard task in a post-postmodern era where just about everything is being practised by some artist somewhere.

The range of works is quite exhilarating to me, and gives good cheer in demonstrating that relatively traditional art-making is still very lively and can be just as contemporary as new(er) media.

Writing about artists

I have long been meaning to start a series of jottings about artists that interest and inspire me, or that intrigue and bamboozle me. Primarily visual artists, especially Modernists and contemporaries. Sometimes it’s their whole body of work that I appreciate, sometimes their methods or philosophy more than their results, perhaps just a couple of stirring soundbites, or even a sole painting or sculpture that excites me. I want to pay homage, or just throw a nod of recognition to those that have given me years of deep inspiration, as well as recent finds which seem to already resonate. My intended starting point has always been Picasso – other early loves are Van Gogh, Hieronymous Bosch and Rene Magritte. Pablo is slowing me down, because he is just so hard to write about – but I’m not changing my mind – him first or I don’t go ahead. (Update: One last read through and I’m there)

Birds

My friend Ian ‘Gubbins’ Williams is a keen ornithologist, who would rather be standing in a muddy field enjoying his solitude and a lively tree pippit, than jostling with a cluster of competing twitchers all comparing their binoculars and tripods to see who’s got the biggest.

Peter Madden @ Ryan Renshaw gallery http://ryanrenshaw.squarespace.com/maddenworks/

When we are out on a walk together, it’s hard to share his passion for studying the aerial antics of a sparrowhawk, especially when he’s in possession of the only pair of ‘nocs. However, it still delights me to spot a sudden flit of a wren in the garden, or the clumsy hoppings of a blackbird, and despite a loathing of anthropomorphism, the birds in the garden all sort of have “character”.

I used to like jays, partly for their plumage, and their less frequent appearances as they passed through, but also because my sister and I were called “the J’s”. Then I was very fond of robins, firstly because of their ubiquitous appearance on greetings cards, but later in memory of father who was Robin. Next up were puffins, a singular and memorable bird, but immortalised for me by Jill McDonald who supplied the Puffin book club with endless illustrations. I enjoyed watching the noisy squabblings of the sleek starlings, and the feeding acrobatics of blue tits, but my other avian fav is the blackbird, what I call the “archetypal bird”. One of life’s more exquisite pleasures is to listen to the improvisations of a blackbird as the sun nears the zenith on a perfect Spring or Summer’s day, and looking up to see it perched on high, almost as if it where holding forth in rhapsody. This will always give me an ache of the infinite.

I learned at school, whether true or not, that if you lay down ill out in the woods, you risked having your eyes pecked out by birds. Maybe Alfred Hitchcock also picked up this rural myth in his childhood, fuelling his paean to the frightening wildness of birdkind “The Birds”. I read how John Dolittle MD ran a Post Office in Africa with the help of the world’s bird population, and how Rupert the Bear is taken to the Bird Kingdom to explain why he has possession of a large brown egg (his rugger ball). And it all started off with six and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. Mmmm, blackbirds.

Now, as a music-listening adult, I have discovered that the French composer Olivier Messiaen went out recording birdsong, and then transcribing it, first for piano, and then for orchestra. His music is infused with a joy of life, which for him was very religious. My desert island Messiaen would be his Quartet for the End of Time, which he composed when in prison camp during WWII. An astonishingly life-affirming work, for the motley forces available in his prison: piano, violin, cello and clarinet. (Not so much bird in that one.) Finnish composer Rautavaara inserted actual bird recordings into his Sinfonia Antartica, all of which works very well. It’s a haunting piece that I never tire of hearing. And there’s a fabulous 2004 piece for string quartet by Edward Cowie “Birdsong Bagatelles” that paints 24 different portraits of birds in their environs.

To end, Frank Key has a word on the ‘Ignorant Ornithologist’ in The Dabbler, as well as the many feathery, fictual and factitious references that abound in his Hooting Yard writings. Ian Williams is certainly a notch or two above the Ignorant status, but it feels like I have come full circle, because he has a similar love of wry wordage, and relishes a bird name with absurdist potential.

Many Few demo

Last year my band, The Many Few, acquired a new drummer, and we spent a few hours in a budget recording room getting some demos down. Here are the tracks on Soundcloud. Now we are a fivesome we hardly ever all meet at the same time, but its guaranteed that I’ll be there if a rehearsal’s on. Gigs ahoy soon, I am alledging.

Some Many Few members post rehearsal.

Little Kindnesses (warning, first section is quite dismal)

My 4am fretting the other morning was about how little kindnesses keep us all human. I was half dreaming a quite disturbing state of mind where I had spiralled off the bottom of the ladder into the sort of dangerous mess that society would naturally shun. I was all over a bleak tangle of spikey shards, shattered and hopeless, and it felt like I would never recover until the day I died, shut off for ever from the warmth of other human contact. The only way this debased, dehumanised, abject condition could be ameliorated – so my thought process ensued – was the shaft of light brought by some small kindness shown by someone, anyone. Just a brief gesture of sympathy, of understanding, a touch, a smile, something unironic, a simple reaching out, even just for a moment. This kindness wouldn’t have saved me – not charity to place me back on the straight and narrow in a practical way. My imagined state of removal from normal life was too far gone for that. This was all I could hope for, and so given, I would be reminded that I am still human, that there is still something connecting me to some sort of salvation, or redemption – at least in my own mind.

Then in a lighter frame of mind (the dismal one only lasted an instant), I dwelled on little kindnesses, and how we may forget to act them for what ever reasons of busyness, embarassment, lack of courage, past rebuttals, ingrained selfishness, etc – and how easily they can be to do, and how rewarding they can feel. The sort of small acts that have no strings attached – you’re not trying to look good, score brownie points, manipulate somebody, and so on – almost an involuntary move to help somebody else. I optomistically believe that the human genetic makeup is wired for us to find the capacity for this, even seemingly out of nowhere, and that this  doesn’t depend on the motivation of Christian or other faith either, but that our religions have grown out of what we already naturally are. That this goes awry in people is unfortunately true, but is that more likely of a non-believer as it is in a Christian? Discus (sic).

Blundering in.

Winter and procrastination are gripping my bones. I seem to be in a state of non-communication and feeble creativity, but I have faith in this being a temporary morass. well you’ve got to really. I cast a glance at this blog, and see that the Twisty Turny Lanes have got fallen tree trunks causing impediments to the usual traffic of my darting mind. So the only way to get around this without laborious chain-sawing is to just nip into the undergrowth, tangling with the briars, pulling away not minding the scratches, but just blunder in and on. So that’s what I’ve just done here, and that’s what this place was for anyway.