A few of this distinctive artist's works go a long way, and although this retrospective dutifully covers his range, excess doesn't serve him well.
The
works are big and bright, even those in monochrome, and for the most part
vulgarly so, except for a charming series of Chinese landscapes executed at the
end of the artist’s life.
Once
he found his style, of scaling up a cheap, commonplace image (most notably
graphic art in comics), he explored it thoroughly.
We get
‘pop’ versions of Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian and others; ‘pop’ versions of
nudes, landscapes and still life, and so on.
A room
alternating early and late abstract works made me wonder whether Lichtenstein
had any talent for colour harmony. The later paintings are at least in his
distinctive style, whereas the earlier are routine abstract expressionism, but
in both the colours are too vivid, too clashing.
I
suspect a direct comparison with his powerful precursor Mondrian, would emphasise the relative
ugliness of the later artist’s distribution of colour.
Whether
an ugly style or not, in isolation, the immediate effect of the art is playful,
irreverent. In an exhibition that aspect is reduced through overexposure, so it becomes possible to more closely examine any message the style communicates.
If the
message is supposed to be critical of our society, it doesn’t work. On the other hand, even the least effective works here only hint at the wealth-obsessed,
inequality-enforcing vapid bling of the worst of Koons and Hirst. After the first pop artists, the deluge of crap.
But his works are seriously flawed. To
take the late nudes as an example, the artist’s variations on modern
advertising and preconceptions of a beautiful woman are more fond parody than
incisive criticism.
Some charm, then, but the conversation dries up quickly.
Untitled (This is to certify that). From Kunsthalle Mannheim. Found here.
An example of how a thoughtful, productive artist can almost will himself into being interesting, if only because some of his ideas are bound to work.
A dada outsider, if such a thing makes sense, Kurt Schwitters is one of a number of modernist artists who spent significant time in the UK following the rise of Nazism across most of Western Europe.
The British are finally appreciating this wealth of talent, as illustrated in a recent Mondrian retrospective. I hope for similar exhibitions.
Producing art from almost any found materials, Schwitters' work is irreverent but only dimly challenging or political. In some ways he could be a new patron saint for much contemporary British art, and it is interesting to see three newly-commissioned works inspired by this exhibition. Interesting, mostly because the original is much better.
One reason for this is that the German is simply funnier. Some of his collages are brilliant, often ironically commenting on his new, but hardly accepting country, as in 'opened by customs' or his transformation of a photo of the Duke of Clarence. Sometimes they are bitter comments on war, such as 'en morn'. Sometimes they are on the daft internationalist babel-babble side, such as his Ursonate radio performances.
It's otherwise a disappointing selection of work. Schwitters appears to have had something of the profligacy of Picasso, but on the evidence of this, at least by the time he got to the UK, his creative energies were flagging.
Many of these works are too garish, too simple, too uninspired to warrant much attention.
The artist was interested in the same big theme of many other movements in our belated Romantic era - how to live life as if it were an aesthetic experience, as if that were the key aspect of it.
It now seems irrelevant that he was not formally a dadaist. His approach seem completely in line with that movement, stressing the concept rather than the craft of artistic creation, pushing boundaries in order to jolt spectators out of our prejudices, and so on.
If in the end, I was unmoved, presumably that is because art galleries are not obviously the place to learn how best to live, a sentiment with which Schwitters, like many later artists, might have fully agreed. His late Merz Barn in the lake district sounds fascinating; the last in a line of similar architectural projects, sadly unfinished at his death.
A still from the film All Divided Selves by Luke Fowler, 2011. Taken from here.
A fractured documentary on psychiatry is the highlight of a fairly uninspired exhibition.
We are not so very different from the ancient Greeks. Their games were occasions for prizes to both athletes and artists, and despite some ambivalence on our part with regards the latter, we still have things like this prize for visual art.
The fours artists, Spartacus Chetwynd, Luke Fowler, Paul
Noble and Elizabeth Price, are all good, but none of their works are
exceptional.
Tate Britain’s director claims the prize is neither a survey
nor a barometer of contemporary British art, but I don’t believe this Its aim is “to promote discussion of new developments in British art”, but I wasn't sure what was supposed to be new here.
In terms of medium, the mix
is unsurprising, indicative of what galleries are displaying and donors
supporting. Fowler and Price provide video or film based exhibits (perhaps better
expanded cinema), while Chetwynd’s is performance-based. This leaves Noble as
the representative of plastic art, in a series of drawings and sculpture.
Content-wise, Noble is also the most intentionally
old-fashioned, with surreal drawings and globular erotic sculptures. I longed
for some colour amongst these pseudo-architectural drawings, or perhaps some
three-dimensional models of the proposed structures.
Chetwynd is the most political, coordinating an ensemble of
amateur actors in anarchic events structured around the act of voting, in this
case. That the voting process is peculiar and readily manipulated is not the
most interesting thing about it, but that, along with some wacky humour, was
what I took away from this exhibit.
I’d seen Price’s video trilogy before, by chance, when it
was exhibited at the BALTIC in Gateshead earlier this year. It seemed much more
mysterious there; at Tate Britain I felt I could interpret it better, which may
say something about the ‘hanging’ of video art. The suggestive narrative,
linking architectural features in gothic churches with a fire in a department
store, made me rethink gothic churches as representations of hellish afterlife,
but nothing more. The handclaps in the soundtrack are effective though.
Fowler’s 90-minute film meditation on RD Laing’s views on
madness and psychiatry was the standout in the exhibition, for having a fairly
clear meaning and one that is not trivial, unlike Chetwynd’s. A kind of
biography of Laing, this focussed specifically on his still-controversial
observation of the importance of social factors on mental health, something
that by now ought to be acknowledged wisdom, but clearly isn’t. Laing is the
hero of the film, and fascinates as much for his powerful personality as for
his theories.
I’d give the prize to Fowler, if only because he addresses
himself to a serious subject and treats it seriously. That said, Chetwynd’s
irreverent approach to serious topics is interesting and I’d want to see more
of it, though this particular piece left me cold.
Laus Veneris by Burne-Jones. From the Tate website.
Nature depicted with such intense moral significance: are we in purgatory?
Their typical style is distinctive: strong lines, bright colours, and lots and lots of realistic detail. Their typical effect is also distinctive, a hypercharged naturalism, as if every blade of grass were contributing to a message.
Many of their pictures indeed have an explicit moralising message. It is a relief when we come across a Holman Hunt painting without one, as his belated protestant reimagining of devotional christian works are usually hectoring sermons, sometimes unintentionally funny, as in the muscular pop star depiction of Jesus dominating one of the rooms in this exhibition.
Within their peculiar style, each of the principle members of this movement were able to distinguish themselves. Throughout this exhibition it is possible to guess which painter was responsible for which painting.
Everett Millais, in particular, is shown achieving a dubious eminence. Technically, he was astonishing: the Isabella on display is as great as anything else shown, and he was a teenager when he painted it. But he appears never to have acquired gusto, so that his mature works are merely tasteful, or 'harmonious' albeit in an extremely refined manner.
Looking at Millais' famous Ophelia, a more fundamental ambiguity emerges. It is probably the extreme example of the pre-raphaelite tendency to make the background so detailed, so vibrant, that it overwhelms the foreground.
Only later in both the exhibition and in time, with the arrival of paintings by Burne-Jones, does this ambiguity seem to resolve itself, with compositions that balance subject matter and setting. But his paintings have as many points of contact with the broader Symbolist movement as with the pre-raphaelites proper.
The central artist here, appropriately, is DG Rossetti, the lynchpin of this amorphous movement. I'm perplexed that this great poet felt his true calling was painting. Yet he certainly possessed greater imagination than the others, shown by his hugely influential images of beatiful women.
Ecce Ancilla Domini! (The Annunciation) by Rossetti. From the Tate website.
Something of the character of his poetry (and life) can also be seen in other paintings here, such as his Annunciation, in which Mary looks terrified of sexual abuse by the archangel. This is the most memorable and disturbing image in the exhibition.
Given this, I'm not surprised that Rossetti could not finish Found, with its piously misogynistic moral worthy of Holman Hunt.
Proper appreciation of this movement's achievement must also consider poetry and other works. In particular the poetry and prose of Rossetti and Morris significantly transforms the model of Tennyson, who might otherwise be falsely seen as the key pre-raphaelite poet, given that his poems provided many of the subjects for the paintings, though these were equally transformed.
And of course, several other major poets were associated with the movement, including Swinbourne, Meredith and Holman Hunt's poetic counterpart, the powerful Christina Rossetti.
The curators claim that these painting represent the Victorian avant-garde, which doesn't really guide the visitor through these earnest, intense pictures. A glance at the Turners in the Tate is enough to show where the the persisting 'avant garde' lies. How did his abstract late paintings, all created before any of the works in this show, fail to influence Millais et al?
The catalogue is a thorough reference work on the paintings and their reception.
Sicherheits, by William Easterley, shown in the Tanks
(more videos have been uploaded and available from YouTube)
An exciting failed attempt to find meaningful alternatives to narrative cinema.
When I think of a major contemporary art gallery, at least
the municipal galleries used to celebrate the culture of some city or other, I
think of cavernous rooms and large installations or video art. It’s as if the
building, needing to be big to make the appropriate statement, requires these
art forms in order to justify itself.
A parody, I’m sure. But Tate Modern, already dominated
(oppressed?) by its Turbine Hall, now has further caverns to fill, in the Tanks.
Last week, the task of entertaining visitors to these spaces
fell to Filmaktion, a group of British pioneers of ‘expanded cinema’.
One of these pioneers, Malcolm Le Grice, is also a theorist,
and his essay in the Expanded Cinema book published by Tate, is fascinating, an attempt to
define different aspects of his art that is both clear and though-provoking.
Le Grice develops ideas from two assertions –
firstly that narrative cinema is a special case of the options open to
filmmakers and audiences, and secondly that narrative cinema is oppressive.
Le Grice is
extremely interesting on the different types of non-narrative cinema, both when
writing and also in putting these ideas into practice. But it isn’t clear that these artworks truly go ‘beyond narrative’, for I
find myself providing a narrative, something Le Grice admits is possible at the
very end of his essay. I have greater problems with the second assertion, that
narrative cinema is intrinsically oppressive. This is also a fatalistic
assertion if it turns out to be impossible to create non-narrative cinema. Yet
I'm still thrilled to witness artists exploring a new approach in order to free us
from oppression, whether or not this happens.
This sense of doing something liberating and important is
present in the artworks, though humour and lightness are also present, so that
I didn’t find anything portentous, though I did find some of the works pointless.
An example is 'Chase Film with Clocks' by William Raban,
where an alarm clock is shown on a screen, and a further two are present in the
gallery itself. The sound of ringing is on loudspeakers so appears to come from
everywhere, but images on the screen and use of a flashlight in the actual
gallery suggest that first one, then another of either the physical clocks or
the filmed clocks are the culprits.
I explained that artwork in detail because that description
is pretty much the whole of the effect of the work.
Being present as spectator seems unnecessary. It is
extremely conceptual, and identifies several areas that might be interesting,
such as the relationship between sound and vision in a cinema, and the links
between ‘screen reality’ and ‘spectator reality’ and so on.
But like other conceptual art, it is like a skeleton
awaiting flesh, or better yet, life. My experience is similar to that of
watching someone solve a puzzle – I might admire the ingenuity, but I am
uninvolved. I didn't see how it could be liberating, except in the facetious sense of 'liberating' myself from any meaningful aesthetic experience.
Is any of this non-narrative, or just a different type of
narrative? For centuries visual art (paintings, frescoes, sculptures, etc)
implied a narrative, even if that was just ‘I was here, I existed’. For the last
hundred years, artists claiming to be modernist or something similar have
tried to create non-narrative, abstract visual art. But it seems to me that
something is still communicated, even if it isn’t a full story (and what is a
full story anyway?)
Perhaps instead of seeing narrative cinema as a special case
of all the options, we should see all art as communicating something, and then
the special case would be a simple story conveying precisely what the
storyteller wished.
Directly opposing that special case would be another special
case, where the artist had no clear idea or ideas to communicate, and didn’t
attempt to communicate anything. And the spectator subsequently filled in all
the gaps. A close approximation to this second case would be the aphorism, a
literary device for appearing clever while actually leaving
all the hard work to the reader.
I suspect conceptual art is a better example, and sadly
while Filmaktion artists are pioneers in creating different ways to
tell a story, their apparent belief that a story is a bad thing means their
work is conceptual in this exhausting way.
Maybe someone will pick up Le Grice’s first assertion, with
its interesting technical implications for expanding narrative, and neglect the
second assertion. Then these artworks will genuinely be pioneers of a new
approach to cinema.
Edvard Munch: Self-portrait. The night wanderer. 1923-4. Munch museet.
Amajor Tate Modern exhibition serves to reveal its subject
as a latecomer rather than an innovator, despite its claims.
Sometimes curators claim too much for their subject, and
here is a case study. Whatever might be said of Munch, I saw nothing in this
exhibition to suggest he was a precursor of modernism, or modern in any other
significant respect, aside from the fact he died in 1944.
The curators claim
his aged self-portraits are unflinching depictions of his fragility, yet
whether he had just experienced a life threatening illness, or was so old that
death must have seemed imminent, Munch consistently portrayed himself as a
hero, intense, stoic, resolute.
Edvard Munch: Self-Portrait: Between the Clock and the Bed 1940–3
Munch Museet
On the evidence of this exhibition, which
collects photographs, woodcuts, prints, drawings, paintings, sculptures, even
amateur films, the artist’s self image was the same throughout his life, at all
ages.
Given the failure of these curators to make him modern, I
feel confident in asserting that Munch was a late Romantic, in fact a Decadent,
his whole life, regardless of the changes that surrounded him.
Almost
everything about his art confirms that he was born too late, with the partial
exception of his chosen media, though it is clear his reputation will continue
to rest on his paintings rather than his photography and films.
Some of the rooms are impressive despite contradicting the
curatorial plan. A room of some of his more well-known paintings in early and
later incarnations is interesting. Munch compulsively repainted his earlier
ideas, though I think the general rule is: earlier is better.
Perhaps as time
passed and he became more detached from his preferred period, which is clearly
the late Romantic twilight of vampires, screams, nights and forests, the harder
it became to recapture his original inspiration.
Well then, a belated figure. How does he stand, considering
his concerns in themselves, so far as we can assess this? Pride, obsession,
angst: these are his High Romantic themes, and as we might expect from a
decadent version of romanticism, his art induces unease, claustrophobia,
spleen, even nausea.
Colours clash; faces (or masks of such) are prominent;
viewpoints are vertiginously dramatic. The exhibition is useful in showing he had more ways of achieving these effects than I thought. Not everything is wibbly-wobbly.
A room filled with minor variations on a single theme – a downcast near-naked woman – made me think that having a good visual idea mattered more to him than anything else, and he recreated it in various media. So at his best he is an imaginative graphic artist, with descendents in that field science fiction, comic books, poster design.
Having a characteristic approach is a strong selling point
for an artist, and Munch had that. But if we compare him with his older
contemporary, Ibsen, for whose dramas he sometimes produced scenery, we
discover his limitations. Munch’s best paintings reflect our doubts, our fears.
Ibsen takes this basic material and uses it to investigate how we might
overcome these anxieties, whether successfully or not.
