contemporary monkey

Primary competition for the average museum

Lately, the over-busy mega-populated, push-to-shove city of London has been overloaded with single artist shows at the Tates; Arshile Gorky and Van Doesburg at the Big Smokestack, Henry Moore at Old Tate.  After being blitzed through the eyeballs with a supermarket full of Pop artists a few months ago at Tate Modern, it’s a relief to have a quiet rendezvous with an individual artist while nobody’s looking.  The solo artist exhibits are especially useful, not to mention more interesting and comprehensible, for those who have few chances to visit museums and galleries because, well, the pub is just that much closer to work.  But hear me out, denizens of the Lamb And Flag.  Discovering the early life of the artist, along with their first works, their collection of weird and debased friends, and the scrapes with the law and/or disease that accompany a lifestyle so destitute, is not a million miles away from the danger inside The George and Dragon.  If nothing else, it’s a mysterious window into a fighter’s life.

The Pop Art show presented earlier by Tate Modern, by comparison, was merely one big jug of Kool-Aid after another.  While enjoyable in the way that someone from Texas might enjoy a gun show, weaving the web between Andy Warhol and the copycat artists who followed, doesn’t produce much in the way of historically memorable moments.  It was just a big day of fun with colour, noise and packaged goods…and a reminder you have to buy more stuff on the way home.  At the Pop Art show you get a sense of the life and times of the population (albeit with an ironic and scolding attitude).  At the same show, however, you don’t get a sense of the artists and their motivations.  I could have been in Las Vegas and met with the same, quasi-depth of philosophical arguments.  Honestly.  I have those sorts of friends.

Arshile Gorky: a man without name and age

With the single artist shows, however, it feels like someone’s told you an important story about someone you thought you knew enough of already.  It’s like reading the obituaries, but without the gloomy mandate.  Did you know that nobody knows Arshile Gorky’s age when he passed away?  Even he didn’t know what year he was born.  His mother died of starvation without, apparently, telling him his age, and he didn’t think to look it up before producing a passport.  As professional, Gorky was fierce in his erudite education, and copied the modern masters proficiently.  Left with few choices, Gorky’s work shows evidence of Picasso’s point of view, the bioforms of Joan Miro, and the colour composition of Cezanne.  At one point, however, he found his individual voice, and became what he’s know as today: the link between the European Moderns and America’s Abstract Expressionists.

Theo van Doesburg was rule-committed...

Opposite Gorky on the third floor at Tate Modern, was the mammoth exhibition of the European Avant Garde in the 1920’s and 30’s.  This exhibit is easily an afternoon of standing on your poor feet, searching for the nearest bar just to have a time out, before recovering with an obvious nap.  Theo Van Doesburg seems to be at the centre of not only the de Stijl movement, but, as I discovered, secreted amongst the Dadaists as well.  That probably explains the largess of the show.

...until he wasn't.

Van Doesburg was also at the apex of the moment in time when art turned into design.  He was inclined to be rule-bound on form, line, and colour.  That is, he was rule-bound until he wasn’t, like when he used the name I K Bonset to write for Dadaist publications.  At the time, in the years after the apocalyptic First World War, re-creation of a better world was in the air.  In the re-build, or Population 2.0 as I’m sure some over-zealous PR person must have wanted to call it, modern life was clipping along swiftly, providing wide berth for artists to not only create art, but to imagine new architecture, furniture, visual graphics, films, even music.  Entire design industries owe at least a slight nod to Van Doesburg and his avant-gardian pals.

Henry Moore relaxing after work

Finally, in Henry Moore at Old Tate, a broad mix of materials is presented with impressive results.  Moore could have been the multimedia specialist of his day.  It’s not often when a sculpture artist has a large collection in one place, and in this case, it provided a sense of variety in materials.  Having that sort of well-explored, primal education is like learning to make ice cream by trying out every possible flavour.  Think how good you would be at making ice cream.  Think how big you would be.  Maybe that’s how we got to Pop Art in the first place.  It’s all making sense.

Felix Gonzales Torres, "Untitled", aka flaccid light bulb thingy

“In 1992, he commenced a series of strands of low-watt white lightbulbs, which he strung along walls or vertically, from ceilings.  Alluding to purity, spirituality, and enlightenment, these delicate and flaccid garlands, which willfully surrender to the forces of gravity, are also a campy commentary on the phallic underpinnings of numerous Minimalist creations, particularly Dan Flavins’ rigid light sculptures.”

Um, OK…get much sleep last night?

If you want to get to know the inner workings of someone, the part that allows you to walk in their shoes,  take them to a museum and make them stare at the most inexplicable art piece on the property.

Dan Flavin's electric rods of...sensual-ness-ity-ish?

It’s a difficult job, art analysis.  It’s what binds the middle-men of writers, critics, PR hacks, gallery marketing assistants, museum curators, and most confused art insiders charged with the Herculean effort of decanting contemporary art.  In the end, nearly all share the same results: irrelevance, confusion, disorientation, muddiness, bewilderment  If nothing else, they’re a consistent lot.

I think the quote above was written by someone aching to forget last night’s experience of one-too-many rigid phallic “sculptures”?  Placing the comment back in context - if that’s still possible, because, well, we’re all now thinking about rigid light sculptures - it originates from the Guggenheim Museums’ web site identifying an installation from the works of Felix Gonzales-Torres called Untitled (Arena), 1993.  Gonzales-Torres was considered a pioneer for what was “the next ism” in the 1990s: Relational Aesthetics.  Relational, in that you and a community of people like you as viewers, are creators of the artwork, along with the artist.  In Untitled (Arena), 1993, it works like this: there you are, with a friend that you dragged along to the museum, and who probably didn’t really want to be there in the first place.  Instructions are given for you and your new partner to dance within the confines of the “flaccid garland” of low-wattage light bulbs.  At the time the Guggenheim show took place, in 1993, a walkman was available with dual headphones so the two of you could keep time without looking like goofy white people.

Anyway, that’s Relational Aesthetics, and the point made by Gonzales-Torres was to participate.  His art has absolutely nothing to do with comparing it to a previous, minimalist artist whose chosen medium was fluorescent light tubing.  I know, I know, contemporary art is personal, so maybe someone does see a relation to another artist, and can visualise the comparison of rigid v. flaccid.  But doesn’t that make the Guggenheim complicit in adding more smoke into the fog bank of contemporary art?

On the other hand, it’s OK for you and I to take a guess at meaning, because we’re not art professionals.  According to the Relational Aesthetics people, we’re artists, and we add meaning to objects.  Any creation found in a MOMA, SFMOMA, COMA or even OKLAHOMA was set forth by the artists’ hand, but now it’s our turn.  We don’t need a referee from the Guggenheim to witness the man hug of artist to artist.  It’s our turn to attach some twisted, shape-shifting, amorphous meaning to the still-oozing object/painting/creature we see before us, and hopefully we don’t embarrass ourselves on verbalization.  If the artwork that is currently furrowing your brow says to you, “Ah, clearly  a canonical correlation via plasticity between the Manson family and Paris Hilton,” well that’s fine by me.  It’s probably a passive aggressive tendency with a side order of Reaction Formation, but good for you.  Whoa, look at the time, let’s pick this up next week.  That’ll be £100 Bubba.  Please pay the museum guard on your way out.