"Criticism's legitimacy lies in its capacity to convince its readers that what they have seen is something other than what they first believed."
Juan V. Aliaga, Critic, Valencia. Critics' Night Out, 16 March, 1991
Seasonally, in Paris, galleries in each particular district hold a common official opening-day. This involves a commando-style training in art criticism consisting of a breathless sprint around up to eighteen different galleries in the space of three or four hours, sparkling with obligatory bonhomie. The most bonhomme amongst the crowd are the Belgian critics and publishers: low key, humorous and ravenously gourmand. They are the most astute critics of these events.
At present the Belgians are offering Paris some of its most effective minimalist art. Among this the video work of Eric Duyckaerts hopefully may be seen in Australia at the Sydney Video Festival. Dry-as-dry in wit, Duyckaerts ' work is related to that of other video, dance and theatre artists involved in the Revue Eclair group. In his Magister and Hegel ou La Vie en Rose Duyckaerts focuses on the typical stringy French intellectual (Henri Levy-Strauss): tall, dark, intense, dressed in loose black pants and white shirt, discoursing negligently through foggy Gaullois. By common consensus, this French intelligentsia with its peep-toed, woven, school-boy sandals is on its way out-made redundant since the French have declared themselves to be content.
Duyckaerts synchronized his videos with an installation by Jean-Luc Vilmouth consisting of a large railway clock and a hammer. This art-work appeared on the wall both in Duyckaerts ' videos and on the wall of the small private flat near the Hotel de Ville where it was viewed. It is possible to focus more intently on the screen in such a domestic space. Both clocks (real and filmed) showed exactly the same time. Throughout the whole sequence, which included work by other artists, the video returned to Duyckaerts lecturing with unshakeable French conviction, without pause, nor emphasis, nor change of facial expression. Gradually the space of the video and the space of the room merged as the clocks and the time became one moment in the present. It was mesmerizing and magically confusing. A meticulously crafted exercise in 'real time'.
Stephane Olry's video L' Abecedaire des Transformations was an ABC of sexual frustration and peeping Tomism with unusual alphabetic equivalents and a whimsied nasty narrative. It was reminiscent of Rebecca Horn's Villa Ferdinanda. Another video by Olry, Manipulations, included an account of an immaculately logical procedure, that is, how to change the filling of a open toasted sandwich from the piece of bread on the right to the piece on the left, passing through an empty toast in the middle, without changing the order of the layers of salami, lettuce, tomato and olive. A memory of compulsive juvenilia and the breaking of the great taboo about 'playing with your food '. It fortuitously recalled Robert MacPherson 's work of the early eighties lovingly documenting the fillings of his sandwiches and the order of the layers day by day in a Brisbane milk-bar.
The Beaubourg Galleries circuit had one outstanding example of minimalism amongst a group of half-reasonable tried and true. Still it was an improvement on the complete dullness of a couple of years ago. French wit is up and running and getting sharper. |
(In contrast, much of the London scene has abandoned contacts with other experimental centres. Most notably, there appears to be a loss of respect for New York post-modernism as well a lack of interest in a self-reflexive critical approach. Cork Street, New Bond Street and Dering Street sink into a middle, middle-brow, English tradition of figurative, painterly expressionism.)
Of the Beaubourg circuit, Patrick Corillon (Galerie des Archives) was the most impressive with his Quelques anecdotes veridiques tirees de la vie du celebre bulgaire Oscar Serti. It was a work in the tradition of elegant fictive literature created by conceptual visual artists. The show consisted of a variety of dark wood display cases with large surfaces of glass containing variously shaped white boxes crowded into a diminutive gallery space. Each case had a discreet text in French and English. It recorded all the spaces where the fictive Bulgarian, Oscar Serti, had leant, stood, hidden, which had triggered in him the experience of a variety of poetic, philosophically insightful, existential moments. The humour was sly and the fiction absolutely convincing at first. For example, one display case contained a box, about four foot square, in which Serti was said to have made his escape fromBulgaria, the fresh smell of the wood making him so homesick that he refused to leave the box on his arrival in the West (in any case he was stuck to the resin at the base).
Oscar Serti has figured before in Corillon's work. Corillon frequently marks sites of such narratives (including outdoor spaces such as river banks) reflecting on the East-West European cultural relationship. The theme centres around the absent body and is a type of performance work. Serti 's personality becomes more and more present as the text constructs his odd career and wonderfully fresh thinking.
The flop of the openings, both the funniest and the most depressing, was the 'show' of thirteen (little known) European critics who literally were the show, glass in hand, at an ill-directed cocktail party organized by Ghislain MolletVieville. M. Mollet-Vieville is Paris' leading promoter of minimalism/conceptualism. He opens his flat as exhibition space on such occasions. Of course, the whole event becomes a sociological exercise in life-style. Let it be said, that M. Mollet-Vieville lives his art. His flat is the epitome of extremely expensive minimalism (possible only with acres of built-in cupboard space) and booby-trapped with conceptualist works of huge historical value. This time he issued a flyer with thirteen statements, of various degrees of inspiration, by the thirteen critics. However, they urgently need a party piece in lieu of persona, since they embody too convincingly Adrian Dannatt's dictum 'At times inactivity is preferable to mindless functioning ' . The evening provided both.
The Beaubourg Area is dirtier and rougher to walk through than ever. Beer-cans, chips and ice-cream land. The Pompidou 's main show was by La vier and William Wegman playing with popular and advertising images which were photographed and blown up to look like historical modernist works, (Mickey Mouse's elbow looking like a spiffy late Leger). On a wall hung a small section of a real gym floor (unaltered from its context): nasty yellowish boarding with painted semi-circles of red and green, vaguely like late sixties Stella or Stuart Davies from the thirties. (There was a focus on wood-veneer in the show. Nothing, but nothing, ever can redeem this dismal heart-wood of all boredom). The gym floor had the quality of one of those computer compilations of familiar faces made into one, causing the viewer to puzzle as to who it is, and whose is the art-work. So over-familiar that it could be anybody 's.
A work titled Painted Fridge was just that-a fridge painted. Same with the painted piano. A coloured mosaic of Monet's facade of Rouen cathedral, dismayingly, was exactly like the original. It caused the viewer to realize that both mosaic and Monet are the acme of contemporary bad taste. Seurat's paintwork copies mosaic inlay. Now that his formalist intentions have been realised literally, his work is no more than a decoration fit for a fast food chain. Decontextualized, the Impressionists have become florid and vulgar. In our own time they have been lost to us through over-reproduction. Gone, like Botticelli , Michelangelo, Leonardo. Will we ever see them again through the flowery drip of our mothers ' tastes in furnishings? The best work was the lit projector projecting nothing till two children played finger puppets in front of it. In the end the show grew repetitive. The point had been made half a mile back, that is, the paradoxical results of taking things literally and the nonsense it makes of critical theory. Can 'art ' only exist on the metaphorical level?
England
The years of Thatcher have increased the insularity of England 's regions as well as causing many main-line artists to withdraw from the public field into a private domain of work. In consequence, there is a break-down of those lines, which are so fertile in Australia, of links between mature professional artists, young artists, writers, educationists and the private and public galleries. This is as typical of London as of the provinces. Potential is underused, young artists in London (such as at the recent Whitechapel Young Contemporaries excursus) copy the correct ' look' of the time, while in the North , especially, there is a neoromantic revival (almost a Nashian English surrealism) among the young students. Painting, painting, painting. One looks in vain for the alternative spaces set up by young artists. Few. None almost.
Even Time Out and 20/20 enquired in recent issues as to why the English art-world is so formidably inept compared with the vitality of the Americans. Answer: the British still consider Francis Bacon to be the height of innovatory experiment. There have been quite a few generations since the late forties! The British totally ignore art-forms which are self-critical or demand much intellectual exercise. At the moment the ICA in London (supposedly the cutting-edge of the British avant-garde) is congratulating itself on the daring of its Art Language exhibition. (All the news from 1967 and you can buy your very own Art Language jigsaw puzzle for a mere twenty-six pounds. Not an easy one as it is mostly white).
The best sellers applauded by Sarah Kent's prestigious and prissy criticism seem to be neo neo-Fauvist paintings (pocket hankies by pseudo Derain). Her lead article in Time Out in January trilled shrilly over Hackney's discovery of mechanical reproduction (a Canon CCP 470 laser printer-photocopy art is still news in the UK!). Why does the Australian art world think it has much to gain from the import of such stuffy critics to promulgate their antique school-girl opinions at .great expense round the continent? In comparison to Australia (which has a much more vital dialogue with the States in querying the relationship of high art history to popular culture and the media) English art lacks edge and bite. Also, as has always been the case, it lacks much critical theory to support it. This is also due to the fact that English art never experienced a serious long-term influence from French post-structuralism which, at times, gave Australian post-modernism a confrontational force.
Nonetheless, the English do draw well and cover their canvases very thoroughly with a good, solid range of cheerful colours. They are rediscovering the Kitchen Sink school of the fifties and the work of John Bratby, in particular, (Mayor, Cork Street) as well as the low-life everyday smuttiness of East End London (Jock McFayden, William Jackson
Gallery, Cork Street). It is engaging, immediate and appealing in its strong social narrative and its implications of some sort of critique. Sellable chiefly. A wander round London yields loads of interest but chiefly for the art historian. In particular, there seems to be a lot of selling-off of private collections. Totally unrecorded Picabias are appearing, as well as a flood of Dubuffets (including a wall-full at the Tate). Brutism is definitely a seller.
Similarly, there have been some magnificent postmodern master shows, some of which have shown the artists in a very quirky and vulnerable light. Sigmar Polke's ten drip drawings at Fabian Carlsson were a real challenge to interpretation due to an apparently purely formalist and revivalist intention. Ambiguous and eclectic as could be, both Romantic and reductive in their simple layering of gouache, they seemed to move away from his tense experiments with matter/materiality. The touring exhibition of Kounellis' drawings, La Stanza Vede, seen so far only in Amsterdam and Leeds, similarly emphasized an innate Romanticism as well as elements of fantasy, frequent recourse to figure work and, on occasion, positively rainbow colour. They were a total shock in terms of the publicized body of his work.
Still on the track of art-history, the Max Emst survey at the Tate is a breath-taking charge through Ernst 's Oedipus complex, leaving the viewer giddy and cross-eyed after furiously trying to work out the joins in his diminutive collages and the subtle frottage techniques of the mammoth subterranean oils. This totally exhausting exhibition demonstrates the genius of Ernst 's use of materials. He was the one and only male Surrealist painter who transcended infantile , sexist, self-indulgence to create really surprising and very uncomfortable new imagery. There is still a wealth of knowledge at all levels to be gained from his prolific work.
Against the current of historical expressionism, the Victoria Miro gallery showed a group of young female minimalists. They dealt with the minimalist vocabulary of formal visual ambiguities, geometry/mathematics, the spatial relationship of form and human body, ironic word games, form visa- vis movement. It was a quietly enjoyable show, intelligent, humorous, not cold and cerebral but delicately personalized and self-referential. In comparison with many of the London shows, the viewer left feeling thoughtful rather than emotionally raped. The exhibition was advertised by an image of the ladies ' football team of Dick Kerr engineering works, Preston, 1920. The idea behind the grouping was not specifically feminist in intention, so much as simply grouping together eleven women working in a similar vein in order to gain exhibition space for under-represented women artists.
Of these, Yoko Terauchi placed five large black squares over the window onto the street and onto the wall and the ceiling above them. In theory they were dimensionless, as in Euclidean geometry, with neither front nor back, yet, the real architecture of the room distorted their original shapes into sundry rhomboids. They in turn changed the shape of the room. Very odd indeed. Marina Abramovic reduced her performance work of the sixties to three terracotta blocks placed at the height of a female body to touch forehead, chest and genitals.
Kate Slacker's Outer Space was wittily self-referential to her earlier work with corrugated iron. A perfect black cube, referring to Euclid and to the tradition of abstract logic, but made out of gross industrial material, corrugated iron: privileged knowledge turned into the mass-produced. Beautifully crafted, the cube was painted a sparkly black to represent the void of space. The implication in the title was that its presence altered the space of the room, much as would a black hole, only this one was square. Moreover, since the cube's own space was contained within it, it was the viewer who was in the outer space in relation to the cube. The viewer/art work relation was neatly inverted. Kay Rosen's Feud was a plaque leaving out the R of the name Freud .. A wise wit, indeed. The variety of materials ranged from Rachel Whiteread 's monumental bath cast in plaster to Lesley Foxcroft 's stack of corrugated cardboard cards. Most of the works had rich conceptual implications.
The North-East
In many ways the North-East of England has a startling resemblance to Queensland. The same wealth, the same pride and the same sense of region. At the same time there is a half-forgotten history of radical activism, not least in art, and the same uneasy sense that it is over-due for an awakening, a renaissance to use its genuine energy and potential. A few prestigious institutions in the area continue to uphold the experimental art tradition , such as the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Leeds City Art Gallery. Collections of rarities of all kinds litter the hillsides in weird and marvellous Gothic museums: the world's largest collection of Tiffany glass on the Manchester end of the moors; a collection of Bakst ballet costumes from Sacre at the Whitworth, Manchester; the missing centre panel of Duccio's Maesta altar nailed to the wall in a dirty corner of red wallpaper at Manchester City Art Gallery; miniature totem poles at Warrington; Tibetan bronzes and carpets at Knaresborough. New Age the length and breadth of the sheep fells.
The Leeds/Bradford area, once the great heart of The Industrial Revolution, is the size of outer London and dormitories and as rich in the arts. Add Manchester and it's impossible to keep up with it all, at least in drama and music. The visual arts, as usual, are limping. The dance and experimental theatre worlds in England are enormously fruitful, despite savage financial problems which are growing worse. Leeds especially has an outstanding reputation for innovative dance/performance work.
In Manchester the Cornerhouse continues to support experimental art. Its strongest shows recently tended to be in photography. Leeds City Art Gallery with its new extension and the phenomenal resource of its sculpture study centre (courtesy of the Henry Moore Trust) needs to have more contact with the local art scene and to give more encouragement to young contemporaries-especially since the Henry Moore Trust studio in Halifax seems to show only major international names. At least, Leeds City Art Gallery continues to show advanced experimental performance work. Its education department has an outstanding record and it must be one of the most accessible public galleries in England in regard to its archival collections. Even more so as it has now dragged everything out of reserve and it is all on the walls in the ultimate hang. A stunning record of advanced artistic patronage of its day-Gaudier Brzeskas, Duchamps, Constructivists-and a bottle neck of seminal modernism. There is a delightful openness about the gallery which augurs well for the region.
There may be other changes too. Early retirement is finally causing some shifting of jobs in the UK and the stale crust of sixties institutionalists is going out to pasture. Continued art school ' reforms' under economic duress turn most of the country's Fine Arts courses into media, communications and graphic design pre-vocational studies. But, the situation in the North looks ever brighter in comparison. The institutions in the Leeds area doggedly preserve the tradition of art for art's sake, of hoping for future experimentation and groan when it doesn't happen. At least they know something is wrong. In the early seventies the Leeds area was a battle-ground of innovation in art and art-history, with Tim Clark at Leeds, Leeds Art School , Hockney at Bradford Art School and the super-realists of the early seventies. There is an increasing questioning as to where all the enlightened patronage went.
It does still continue, the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust has an extraordinary space for installations, sculpture and performance, easily one of the most desirable in the world. It is in the still firmly industrialized old Dean Clough factory mill near the centre of down-at-heel Halifax which, however, is also a thriving artists' colony. It is not safe to go by outer appearances in the North. Treasures can be hidden. The recent installation by Jannis Kounellis caused a large stir in the UK. It was one of his most effective and carefully constructed installations and was visually stunning. The studio was crowded out at the weekend, since the local inhabitants show a strong interest and pride in their institutions (the Yorkshire Sculpture Park at West Bretton has 10,000 visitors a year).
The Henry Moore studio overlooks the river whose power operated the industrial machinery and it provided the theme for Kounellis' discourse on industrial energy, its past and its future, which has been a frequent concern of his (ageing memories, unlamented, of former industrial power). In the past year in an installation in Berlin he also looked forward to the halting first steps of the high technological revolution and the beginning of a new measure and balance.
In the two roomed studio at Dean Clough, the entrance room is an almost perfect cube. Through five large windows and two doorways it looks onto a much longer, narrower room over the river. Supported by a series of iron columns, the roof consists, as in all these old factories, of a parallel series of springing barrel vaults. In the first room at the right angles of a corner Kounellis installed eight large sheet steel panels, some covered by heavy industrial mesh netting, pierced with six oblong panels on whose edges were rivetted small pieces of rough sacking. A large silver miner 's torch (set at right angles to a vertical railway line laid on the final panel) cast a small shaft of light across the steel.
Across the corner onto the next wall hung a series of heavy metal hooks, carrying large lumps of coke used for stoking furnaces. The square windows looking onto the adjoining room were filled at their base with coke. In the second room Kounellis placed vast cast-iron plates onto the iron pillars at the height of a man's chest. The plates were made locally, as were the hooks, by a Huddersfield firm. Two antique Singer sewing machines were hung at the base of a pillar in the first room.
Kounellis is not an industrial archaeologist and his historical references reflect our own contemporary culture which lacks a mean, a common system of proportions in values of any kind. Like most of the original arte povera artists, Kounellis' work has a spiritual Utopian impulse to transmute base matter into a higher form through art and, thus, society with it. But is that really possible in the present time? He makes no pretence at a definitive finished statement or at a grand heroic work, though the Halifax installation was inevitably heroic by virtue of its size, its grand siting and the references to a powerful past. But Kounellis always refers to the human scale, to the diminutive body among the inhumanity of his weighty and ponderous materials. He did so in this installation through the torch, the delicate sewing machines. His show of drawings at Leeds included three installations which had, among his familiar vocabulary of sheet steel, rocks, wrapped objects, sculptured fragments, and soot, also bedroom lamps and blankets. Kounellis speaks of history and of individual memory, culture and domesticity, of the biological round of life and death alongside art and industry.