contemporary monkey

James Turrell; probably somewhere not very near you

Just how far would an artist go to alienate his followers, to the point of eliminating even the mildest of interest in the work?  I can guess your first response.  I’m discounting the witless wonders who produce harebrained art while claiming canonical importance, when nearly every left and right brain thinker (not including the sycophants of course) will disagree loudly.  They get more attention than deserve.  Take any old example, say, The Turner Prize, which consistently awards finalist-status to some or other oddball in the hopes of gathering steam for said oddball, along with oddball prize.  That’s far too many ears and eyes paying attention in my view.

I’m talking about an artist, followed by a knowing bunch of art-heads, deliberately making it arduous for anyone, let alone a handful of hangers on, to even find the produced artwork.  John Baldessari once burned all of his studio’s work in the 1970’s.  That’s the kind of oblivion-seeking I’m talking about; a real deal ender.  Unfortunately, Baldessari spent the following 20-30 years building up another oeuvre, kind of defeating the purpose really.  I don’t think his heart was really in this conceptual, guess-where-my-stuff-is-now, business.

Through the September issue of Art Review, I may have found the next Catch Me If You Can personality that really knows how to shake off the scent.  The artist is James Turrell, and his mission, for the past 30 years, has been to build a naked-eye observatory in an extinct volcano - that he bought - in the Arizona desert.  He’s nearly finished - it opens to the public in 2011.  Imagine how many fans he must have had over the years before they sort of forgot about him, or worse, died.  Should you ask that much from your support team, to wait out death?  Donald Judd worked not too far away (in distance and loneliness) but at least Judd surfaced every once in a while, and crated his work to a museum or ten.

The good news is Turrell just opened another project, so for those who can’t wait another two years (you should be ashamed of yourself - you’re nearly there!) you’ll be able to witness the wonders of Turrell in relative real time.  This project is named The James Turrell Museum, of course, and was built by one of Turrell’s long suffering fans in California.  A wine maker, by the name of Donald Hess, who no doubt has 30-year old wine stored somewhere in honour of the (potentially) Grand Opening Weekend and Beard Trimming, has been “collecting” Turrells since the 1960s.  Collecting in this case is a big stack of books with directions on assembling the final design, which in this case is exactly none.  Apparently, Hess never got around to any of it.  I guess the name Turrell is an antithesis to the word “exhibition”.  As in, my agent promised me this wicked solo gallery show in Chelsea, but this credit crunch really Turrelled me.

Inside the building, the works are more ocular science and 1970’s grooviness than art.  The rooms are psychedelically lit with various colours of light, both natural and manufactured.  Walking through each colour chamber requires your greatest, age-old hippie tricks to appreciate the strange sensation.  Art Review describes the space as “pre-history” , which nobody really understands, but from the sounds of it, has the making of being inside a Hopi Indian smoke tent with charged-up iPods of Yes or Pink Floyd or Flotation Toy Warning if you’re really current, floating through your ears.  The whole thing strikes me as belonging to a bucket list for burned out, space travelers from the 1960’s, but it’s not art.  Unless you count the drugs and music and Hopi Indian smoke tent along with it.  No, this is just a friendly reminder of a trip from the good old days.  Hey, come to think of it, this project would have been really really useful about 30 years ago!!

Still, it would be good to get an eyeful of the whole thing, except for one essential fact: it’s in Argentina.  Seventeen hours by car from Buenos Aires, 20 from Santiago, Chile.  Assuming you make the trip, what if you get there and it’s closed?  How do you explain that to your travel insurance company?

from The Ashington Group

Leave it to another art form, this time the theatre, to pierce through the fog of contemporary painting.  Art can’t seem to do that on its own.  It must be the only thing in the world that can’t (not counting Marmite, which, for the good of mankind, should remain mysterious).

Lee Hall’s “The Pitmen Painters” is showing at the National Theatre in London, and the story is placed in a time where modern art IS the contemporary art.  Lee Hall also wrote Billy Elliot, another humorous story set in Northern England where the perpendicular forces of rugged coarseness hurtles into life’s delicate sensibilities.

The Pitmen Painters is an endearing story about rough old coal miners “learning to appreciate” the art of the day.  The sensibility at the start is about as brutish as it can get.  These are uneducated labourers from the 1930’s who’ve left school at eleven years old to do what people in Northumberland did back then: work grinding hours underground to pull coal out of rock.  The miners come at the subject of art with the obtuseness of a charging rhino, making the story both comical and charming.  An opening salvo from one of the miners screws us in place:

George (miner): We just want to look at a picture, and know what it means.
Lyon (instructor): Ah but, what do you mean, ‘what it means’?
George: What do you think we mean?  ‘What it means’?  We mean the meaning.
Lyon: Exactly.  But what do you mean by ‘the meaning’?
George: What the hell do you think we mean by ‘the meaning’? That’s what we hired your for.  Listen mate, if you [don't know] the meaning of the meaning, what bloody chance have we got?

from the play, The Pitmen Painters by Lee Hall

The characters are based on real men called The Ashington Group who were miles away - both horizontally and vertically - from the Western World’s explosion of 20th century art.  Painting or sculpting couldn’t put food on the table, and art was seen as something to be appreciated, but not made.  Yet the miners shared an exclusive approach to not only viewing art, but making it: the point was, “to make one thing into another.  Whoever you are.”

“What does it mean?” is a persistent question in the play, a fair one to ask of every artist.  Each of us approaches art from a different deflection point, and it’s at this angle - ours, not the artists - which is most important.

The Tate Modern is just down river from The National Theatre, and The Pitmen Painters acts as a fitting anteroom for contemporary and modern art.  Someone should make a 15 minute film out of the play, and have it continually exhibited in the Turbine Hall.  Before taking the stairs up to the galleries, the view might be more revealing if you start at the bottom.

the exciting job of a gallerist can be yours

Want a job?  I know, you’d think in these desperate times what job could possibly be so readily available.  Unemployment stretching toward 10% in the US, skyrocketing toward 8% in the UK, and probably just as bleak on the European continent, how could such an unforeseen opportunity exist?  What, the fleeing Third Worldians from Calais didn’t find it interesting enough?

This sure-fire job is completely within the law, above board, tax paying, licensed, and approved by the authorities.  Nope, no law breaking here.  What’s more, you wouldn’t really have to work that hard.  Sure, you might have to render a fuzzy appearance of busy-ness and possibly erudite bookishness, but hardworking?  Never.  Still, we ask that you please don’t doze off in your chair.  We do have a few protocols, and appearances must be retained.  You’d be required to exist in the public realm, so personal hygiene is compulsory.  The last thing we need is for someone to notice that you’re there.  Still, it’s a paycheck, and the appeal is, the less you do, the more likely it is you stay.  What do you say sailor, interested? Well then, read on:

Gallery Assistant: Must work days (but certainly not all days; in fact, not even close to a full week).  Hours are minimal - think Bank Teller.  Starting time is definitely nothing earlier than, say, 11:00 a.m., but at times you’d have to work into the night.  Naturally, on those particularly harsh work days you’d be drinking cocktails with journalists, curators, artists, and on rare occasions, a buyer or two.  The good news is you can stay out late because, let’s face it, we wouldn’t expect you to come ’round the joint until lunch time the next day.  In which case you need enough energy to unlock the door, ignore a gallery visitor or two waiting for someone to arrive about an hour ago, then shuffle toward your happy desk where your friend Mr. Computer and Mrs. Internet will keep you company for the rest of this miserable hung-over, why can’t people leave me alone, day.  With any luck, visitors won’t be bothering you, but just in case the odd character has an annoying question, you’ll have a friendly phone nearby to keep up the pretense of any sales activity (yeah right!).  On some days, we’ll schedule you with another gallery assistant, where one of you is guaranteed a late morning sleep-in.  Also, once your colleague does make it in, the endless discussion of gallery business nonsense will keep the visitors from approaching your forbidding fort of prevention until the Flintstones-like horn assures you that the day has indeed ended, thankfully, and nobody has stolen any of your valuable time, let alone the artwork  This is where the most difficult part of the job will test even the most lethargic of gallery assistants. On your way out of the shop, before closing, and hopefully locking, the door, you’ll have to remember to turn the lights out.  All of them.  Otherwise, you’re only making it more difficult for the gallery assistant working the next day (this will likely be you) because the shop will actually appear open to unsuspecting art collectors and visitors. Those pesky customers; why can’t they just come back some other time.  Like, never would be good.

Pay: Well, let’s be honest, you won’t be doing much, so we’ll be paying appropriately.  Still it’s “value for money” as the punters say, and the benefits are enormous in comparison to the mean sum you’ll collect each week.  Plus you’ll have somewhere to go.  Think of it as a paid holiday, surrounded by whatever we call art.  You’re guaranteed heaps of the latter by the way, because, as the gallery isn’t open very often, the works of art don’t usually go very far.  It’ll be just you and the art.  Or possibly you, one of your friends, and the art.  But definitely the art, because as far as we’re concerned, nobody’s leaving with those.

I don’t quite understand the idea of trompe l’oeil, the french phrase for fooling the eye.  Other than the obvious: to prove you can make something so good it fools others into thinking art is reality, it seems to be more science than art.  To be accomplished at it is to be technically skilled, and enormously patient at your special ability.  But that also describes people who make Ferraris.  You’re proving your own virtuosity. Although you could be having a laugh at fooling other people.  Like the roadrunner and coyote in Warner Brothers animation, where the coyote paints a tunnel on a solid face, only for the roadrunner to make the trick a reality.

This week I made my way to see this sort of thing firsthand in Sheffield.  I’ve never been to Sheffield before, itself a trompe l’oeil of English pastures from the Victorian era.  The show was called “Out of the Ordinary” at Sheffield’s Millennium Gallery, and focused on craft usage in contemporary times.  Among the handful of artist was a Japanese person called Yoshihiro Suda.  The short biography of him is, “He creates hyper-realistic flowers and weeds from wood.”  I get the irony, but isn’t that like carving the perfect pebble from a rock.  Or to use the Ferrari analogy, making a car out of a new refrigerator.  His flower “sculpture” was protected by walls and a security rope where you couldn’t get any closer than about 12 feet.  I was beginning to doubt the quality.  How good can it be if I’m standing across the room to look at it?

Yoshihiro Suda

Trompe l’oeil comes up in the Autumn issue of Tate Etc. magazine as well, where a section of the magazine is devoted to the history of fooling the eye, back to the early 15th century.  Back then the point was to make it as realistic as possible because until then, I guess, nobody did it.  The article continues to 20th century artists like Rene Magritte, Duane Hanson, Andy Warhol.  I remember seeing my first Duane Hanson “statue” of an overweight tourist.  It was more creepy than sublime, but nonetheless it made me flinch, which is what good quality art is supposed to do.  Let’s add that to the list of results from trompe l’oeil: in addition to be impressive by way of its craft quality, it can creep you out too.

In the same article is a reference to a work at the Venice Biennale: a mural by Thomas Demand called “Clearing”.  It’s a very large photograph of the very thing it’s supposed to hide: the forest behind it.  This one goes one loop further though; it’s a photograph, of a sculptural stage, of a photograph of trees.  A long way to go, right?  The sculpture is made from 280,000 separate pieces of coloured paper, constructed by 30 people working for three months.  That IS a long way to go.  Apparently not only do you need the technical mastery to do these things, you have to have a lot of friends, or a lot of money.

Thomas Demand: Clearing

Discoveries this week are this: trompe l’oeil requires loads of patience, technical ability, friends, money and a sense of humour.  All this work to prove one thing: you can do something better than anyone else.  Just like making a Ferrari.

Increasing knowledge about art is every expert’s recommendation to new collectors.  See as much as you can, is the typically quoted piece of advice, and you’ll learn what quality looks like.  But art stays put, and you can’t be everywhere, not even at different times.

If you’re fortunate enough to live near a major metropolitan city, you’ll have a small notion of the depth of contemporary art currently on show in the world.  Even so, I suspect you could miss seeing about 95% of unaccountable art styles, trends, flavours, etc.  You wouldn’t know what you’re missing.  We’re just so all over the place as humans in contemporary society that styles vary greatly regionally, never mind nationally.

AbsoluteArts.com does its best to help our cause in this effort, with tens of thousands of artists siphoned through their internet pipes.  The organisation of the site is somewhat haphazard, but the image data is replete.  Through absoluteArts.com, it’s quite easy to find artists that you would have never come into contact with in the real world.  While digits are no replacement for physical art, it’s better than not having seen the work at all.

The business end of absoluteArts.com is to match buyer with seller, and they appear to be successful.  Otherwise, why would they exist; to upload art to the web out of the goodness of their own heart?

But another reason I like absoluteArts.com is its service MyAbsoluteArts Collection.  This allows me to collect art I don’t own.  I can visit my collection whenever I want to, and, if I have the budget, even purchase my favourite pieces.  I can see this type of utility going a long way for both artists and collectors.  Imagine creating a slide show on a flat screen monitor at one of your cool, impress your friends type parties.  Every 60 seconds, your painting changes  More artists are exposed to more art lovers - what’s not to like about that?

AbsoluteArts.com doesn’t provide that type of service yet; that’s just something from my imagination.  But what artist wouldn’t want more exposure to their images, even if it’s only a digital edition?  And what collector wouldn’t love discovering new and different art from around the world without hopping their private jet?