Diane Arbus: how did she get them to stare like that?

Now that digital photography is ubiquitous, everyone can, and does, shoot photos. Without difficulty, we conveniently take shots of our friends, who are more than willing subjects to pose for the moment. Our insane family members, who will only open up to us because they have to, easily give up their privacy while we have them at their weakest hour. But not everyone can get the best out of an unfamiliar, and potentially unwilling, subject. Asking complete strangers to stop for a quick snap is hardly going to happen, especially if you’re asking a team of leather-clad Hell’s Angels to pose for you.

Diane Arbus, the American photographer, resolved to capture these difficult and brazen shots, and she didn’t have the advantage of a tiny, unobtrusive digital camera in her pocket. She was able to get what she wanted through sheer will and canny persuasion.  I imagine Arbus to have been the kind of friend who would have been willing to go up to anyone to start a conversation. She’d have been very useful to us boys at about the age of 16.

At the Nottingham Contemporary, a sizable collection of Arbus’ photos are on display, albeit in a very low, almost sleepy light (I suppose it’s for the sake of the now decades-old prints). The evidence is fairly clear: Arbus could penetrate any group of outsiders from the 1950’s and 60’s, and let’s face it, that’s about the time when outsiders were at their zenith. Arbus wasn’t at all an insider to any of these communities of exotics. She grew up posh, while in another world, her photographic subjects inhabited what would have been a no-go zone for her and her kind.

By instilling confidence between her and the circus freak, nudist, or any other nutter/oddball on the other side of the camera, she was able to make friends through the assurance of professionalism, and get the straight-on shot that the subject rightly deserved. Imagine if you did that now? You’d probably be dragged by heavy chains behind some hillbilly’s pickup truck, or be sucked into an awkward, experimental religion you had no idea existed until a few short minutes ago. It’s not the kind of thing most sane people do these days.

Diane Arbus’ art is more about trust than about the subjects she shot, or the photographs themselves for that matter. But these days, these contemporary days, we could probably use more trust between divisive groups of war-mongering gangs. We need a Diane Arbus for places like Isreal, Afghanistan, Fox News, Millwall Football Stadium. Well, maybe let’s start with Israel and Afghanistan and see how that goes before attempting an all-or-nothing game at Millwall.

ground zero for paradise

While the popular cry for the slow demise of Earth has been heard from every person, state, corporation, and politician for the past two decades, the Garden of Paradise appears to be handling it like a tough old grandmother. Think of a place on Earth that sees minimal human imprint. A green, square patch of pure, awe-inspiring, not a Rainforest Cafe in site, natural hunk of land. It’s still out there, despite the over-worked contortions and knee-jerk spams from the doomsday machine that is global media. Sure, plenty of bad news, with oil spills, mud slides, slowly advancing tsunamis, over-fishing countries, land-pillaging corporations, because that’s what sells subscriptions and page impressions. While the fear mongering certainly has a foundation, it’s good to see that ever-present Nature still presses mankind between thumb and forefinger, no what matter what we throw at it. The Garden of Eden, it appears, has seen tougher foes than the likes of us.

The artist Sergio Vega thinks he’s located the original Garden of Eden: ground zero for paradise on Earth. Using a document called, “Paradise in the New World”, the coordinates for which are said to be located in Brazil, Vega films the natural and makes a comparison with the unnatural (that would be you and me). The state of Mato Grosso has been claimed as the centre of all Earth’s beauty, which, if you believe Wikipedia, that non de-foresting but sometimes questionable web site, translates to “thick woods”. I reckon the Amazon is as good a place as any to call the centre of beauty as we know it.

In Vega’s current exhibition at Birmingham’s IKON Eastside, entitled, “Paradise: Real Time”, he underscores nature’s influence on one of its dependents: man. Through multiple, and very large, high definition video images, it’s apparent that the mother of all form, line and colour holds sway over us in not only what we build, and how we build it, but what we do when we’re not busy destroying each other. Tower blocks in urban landscapes mimicking palm forests. Brightly saturated clothing imitating tropical birds, and Birds of Paradise. Bee-like tribal dance rituals stirring up mini tornado clouds of dust. My take away is that, while the human race endeavors to suck the life out of the planet, we often don’t recognise the force of strength coming the opposite way. I found the scenes to be a very positive, and pleasantly refreshing take on the Man versus Nature debate that usually leads headlines. Unfortunately, the gallery notes would have you believe otherwise - another reason to consume art before the usual suspects lead you in their pre-determined, and biased, direction.

Local wildlife wearing Brazilian football jersey

It’s one of only two problems I had with this exhibit. In its gallery notes, IKON Eastside magnifies a “deterioration of the area’s natural beauty” when contrasting the side-by-side images. While certainly a valid, if not stale, viewpoint, it shows a true dramatic pessimism to emphasize what’s wrong rather than what’s right. The gallery notes chose to reflect despair and cynicism: “Rainforests, animals, insects and rivers - all filmed in real time - are projected across multiple screens around the gallery, juxtaposed with scenes of urban development, logging and local poverty.” After viewing beginning to end, I must admit not seeing any scenes of logging, or very much deforestation in general. If anything, the point made was toward the results from human progress, somewhat uninspired compared with natural beauty. As for poverty, it saw it more as a screen-shot for the natural way life is led in the Amazon, rather than an emotional tug for someone who isn’t donned with a Ralph Loren Polo shirt, clutching a chilled Coca-Cola, perched on a pink Vespa. Set closely adjacent to each other, the urban versus nature video images, if anything, suggests a dominion over mankind. More awe-inspiring than distressing.

The second problem with the exhibition is its overuse of the phrase: “Real Time”. The video wasn’t at all in real time, it was simply real, filmed in another time. It obviously reflected something that already happened, possibly recently, but who knows. Still, I think the artist missed a trick by NOT having a real time camera, or two or three, placed in choice areas that beam back real time images countering the urban with the natural. I understand this system would only work in a few time zones left and right of the Amazon, but even if delayed by half a day, the scenes would be closer, and truer, to our own daily lives, than what’s being claimed in the gallery.

But those are the only two problems I had with the piece. Let’s continue with the positive vibes and simply say it’s satisfying, finally, to see nature winning an innings or two. Even if we know the opponents (again, that’s you and me) to be more determined.

Ikon Gallery's summer offering of everything

Ikon Gallery violated one of my pet peeves from cultural institutions by organising a retrospective of its own existence. Ordinarily the realm of magazine publishers through distribution of anniversary issues, releasing new content is fairly non-existent. It’s like going to your granny’s 90th birthday where she recounts her memories of every year. In the end, it provides the average citizen a good reason to give it a miss. Especially in the summer.

To be fair, San Francisco’s MOMA is doing the same thing this summer, with the vast space of the museum devoted to its collection. Entitled, “75 Years of Looking Forward”, SF MOMA sneaks around the obvious reference to the past by assuming the collection was made for future generations. A neat trick, but it’s the same result as that of magazine publishers: an easy, and less interesting, content generator.

Usually these things are “activated” as they say in not very good art-speak - produced, as the rest of humanity would say - for revenue producing purposes. If National Geographic magazine, for example, has a 125th anniversary issue, other than the ad sales people who are thrilled beyond belief to have an accelerator to reach their target, it matters much less to readers. Because museums don’t profit much from this type of strategy, my guess is that someone at gallery central had a brilliant idea that didn’t pan out at the last minute, and the historical closet was raided for second-best ideas.

The Ikon summer show, entitled “This Could Happen to You: Ikon in the 1970s”, is Part Two of what probably retroactively became a bigger idea. Part One, as no doubt it will now be called, was a show exhibited in 2004 based on Ikon as a seed of an idea: “Some of the Best Things Happen Accidentally: the Beginning of Ikon”. Extrapolating to the future, my guess is that, sometime around 2015 we’ll see something like “Life Under Thatcher: How the Ikon was Plunged into Darkness”.

When these sorts of things pop up, in whatever medium they exist, my strategy is to blitz through the the event like Hitler in 1930s Poland. It won’t be important to remember the artist, because, like 95% of contemporary artists, most were forgotten in the memories of the public about 5 years after their arrival. Instead, I found two over-arching themes for this show: 1. drugs and 2. stuff.

The Ikon adds too much intellectualism into the drug addled days sandwiched in between the revolutionary 1960s and consumerist 1980s. Describing an animated piece by Ian Emes for Pink Floyd, the exhibition guide reads, “…it chimes in with a kind of abstract painting that came to the fore in the 1970s, hard-edged, flat and large-scaled, essentially formalist in its proposition.” Um OK, but really it was all about the drugs and watching the colours bleed and dance and bounce around our brains. Oh to be young and naive like the kids in the galleries these days.

“Stuff” was represented throughout the exhibition via not painting, but not sculpture either. The result of two floors of exhibits suggest the typical 1970s artist had tired of traditional art media. Canvas that is more sculpture than painting; medical equipment that bears no relation to its title; spray guns loaded with paint in place of brushes; drug-induced images resulting from reflections off a car bonnet; variants of the colour green on horizontal canvases. And of course the Pink Floyd animation, with, oddly, individual cells on display (something you’d more likely see in a Disney/Warner Brothers store of the 1990s).

An Ikon recap for those who have a summer to be using up, and have no time for indoor activity: drugs, stuff, materials, history, remembrance, waiting for part three, and when do the hallucinogenics kick in, are my take on 1970s art in Birmingham. Sounds like the 1970s generally.

Palais de Tokyo: where caring goes to die

Thank the Art Gods on High for someone in the universe who is watching over each and every one of us gallery hustlers and museum freaks who just don’t have enough time in the day. Enough time in the day to pore over, wrestle through, sneer at and wonder through as much contemporary art as our brains can digest (if that’s what brains could actually do). It can’t all be absorbed by one man on a stiff budget in an average lifetime of wine, art and song. No one person can do it all; gallery-hop like they’re an escaped banker, buying airline tickets like its beer on a Friday afternoon. For that, we are hereby and forever in your debt, kind sir or madam, M. Curator, for what is probably the least impressive collection of art in the known and unknown universe: the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. You have killed my soul. Prepare to die.

I give you, the fellow art traveller, full permission to strike it off your list of places to see before you leave this earth. I can confidently state that the Palais de Tokyo is not part of any travel diary with the words “un-missable, must-have, once in a lifetime”. Or, if it must remain on your bucket list, surely its just and true place is behind the largest sisal twine ball in Darwin, Minnesota. It might then all make sense, this crazy life of yours. Ball of string: check. OK then, we’re off to Paris for the one cultural dustball that will finally put me six feet under. Who wants whiskey?

Having just returned from visits to both the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville De Paris and the Palais de Tokyo (they are separated by only a cafe - of course they are, it’s Paris). The difference couldn’t be more stark. French roast on one side, decaf on the other. On the Musee d’Art Moderne side: a thriving art hive of busy public-ness, of well-intentioned learning for French and non-French alike, of well-lined walls and floor space with, well, modern and contemporary art. Administered by friendly locals throughout (are we still in France?), I am amongst the coherently curated thread of an argument, an idea, a point posited by the curator, using pieces from the Musee d’Art Moderne’s collection and non-collection alike. Fortune has looked favourably upon me, for I have used my depreciating roll of money wisely. I shall eat this evening.

Musee d'Art Moderne de Paris: warning, contains more life

On the other hand, and the other side of the cafe, there’s the Palais de Tokyo. A static storehouse of forgotten and rotting art pieces, watched over by what appear to be three former bank security guards on holiday; standing, smoking, chatting with each other in France’s most ill-fitted suits. They look more at home inside a Metro underground station.

And of course, there’s the art - sort of. While the programme title promises a solitary thought by way of its title, “Dynasty”, the truth is the pieces appear to be more “We give up, see what you can do with it”. The video and wall lighting installations are either not working, or possibly that’s the point of the show: the ‘dynasty’ of 21st century western values, slumped to an unworkable heap of electrical cords that someone has pulled from the wall. Nobody is even trying here. Alongside the pieces are the lazy curator’s old friend, the unhelpful and completely worthless label, “Untitled. Mixed Media. 2010″. Gee thanks, now I completely understand where I am in the universe of modern man. The continual struggle for meaning and identity.

The Palais de Tokyo itself, the building that is, not the vacuous anti-life inside, is a promising space. It’s not polished, it’s not shaped like a former power station, and it’s not designed by a 21st century starchitect. It’s simply a beat-to-hell space, and a very large one at that. Unfortunately, the space is so large it reveals the weakness of whomever is supposed to be upholding the responsibility of public service. Unless you count driving foot traffic over to the Musee d’Art Moderne as a civic duty. Which, in this case, I’m willing to support.

Ad publication with some (cryptic) text

Take comfort, common man and woman, in knowing that the world’s finest museums and galleries are thinking about the plural “you” and your struggles in appreciating art. Don’t get the wrong idea, it’s not that they’re interested in your opinion. If they wanted that, as the saying almost goes, they’d box it up in a happy meal and demand that you swallow it whole. Instead, they’d rather suffer uninterrupted arguments between each other on strategies to get John and Jane Q Public (that’s you) into their world of Art of the Now, also known as contemporary art. They see the writing on the wall, and it says museums and galleries are for the likes of Lord and Lady Thickbottom, with their moneyed mansions, vast networks of wealthy friends, and Job-like patience to brave out the insane ranting of the world’s maddest and most mis-understood artist. Said writing-upon-wall also say museums are definitely not for most taxpaying suckers like you. Don’t blame me, you’re the wall writer.

Meanwhile, over at the (pick your favourite) music festival, (pick your favourite) 3D cinema, (pick your favourite) restaurant, concert hall, reading club, jazz house, cable show, or whatever else consumes the time of contemporary man and woman, people are discovering culture elsewhere. The endless sea of once common pounds sterling and dollars from 2006 are getting sucked down the drain of debt and bill paying, and nobody is finding the stopper anytime soon. Seems the precious museum and gallery are last on the list of invitees to the new economy of hunker down and turn the lights off.

For it is in the Summer 2010 edition of the Great Big Fat Book of Art Gallery Ads, or as they prefer to be called, ArtForum, where the condition of the present day museum is put before several insiders. By several, I mean 27. They are nothing if not thorough, these ArtForum publishers, and if they don’t have an ad from every single New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Tokyo gallery in their pages, I’d be shocked and disappointed at the same time. Of course by insiders I do NOT mean those that walk “inside” a museum or public gallery, flummoxed by what the artist considers to be art, with absolutely no clue as to why he or she bothered to re-construct this considerably sized mass of metal in the first place. By insiders, I refer to those that are currently museum staff, museum architects, museum owners, museum suppliers (or if you prefer, artists), as well as those anchored just off the tropically perfect island of Museumland: auction houses, universities, and even an ArtForum publisher. It’s like asking the owners of vinyl record stores what their views are on the iPod.

Art insiders are keenly aware of the problem, with the solution being a complex cocktail that includes you: Mr. Average and Mrs. Medium. Contributors of the issue use words like, participation, democratization, interaction, even “polyphonic exchange” (that’s discussion to you and me). They get the new media; the twitter, the google, the facebook, with their coarse and vulgar “inclusive” environments; they just have difficulty doing anything about it. It’s not that they lack intelligence, social commitment, heaps of money, to get you to see it their way; they simply forgot to ask you. Your phone must have been off.

The breed of people who buy Art Forum, however, don’t usually include the rough and unwashed of the world, which fits them snugly into the vertical market of art and academia. You’d only read ArtForum if you were interested in art. Not necessarily the appreciating of it, but the running of it and ensuring its bolt-hold onto exclusivity. If you’re a commercial gallery owner, you’d “read” ArtForum to ensure your ad is well placed upfront, well ahead of your competitors’ ads who are covertly stealing your well-placed clients. Unfortunately, museums and galleries are usually held in the public trust, so it’s quite obvious someone is missing from ArtForum’s jabbering on the state of play, and that “missing someone” is you. You and your small minded, limited thinking, shrinking bank account, politically correct choices, bringer of screaming children into the public realm, BlackBerry habit of typing at the wrong place and wrong time, burden of a citizen. But thanks for the tax dollars, Joe, we promise to spend it wisely.

After reading about half of the 27 essays (I’m not reading all of them - some aren’t even using this planet’s languages), it appears that the business life of a museum and gallery knave is one of hand-wringing and foreboding. Recommendations span from Crank up the Revolution (Olafur Eliasson) to the Capitalists are Coming to Replace the State (Jeffrey Kastner). By all accounts, you’d swear the museum system in the western world is crippled. Most essayists in this issue see the function of the institutions as an intermediary: provide the stage for what artists are currently producing. If the primary role of the museum is one of negotiation between you and the artist (or artists if you’re “polyphonic” enabled), then apparently the museum isn’t doing its job. I think we could have told them that if they’d just ask.

Xu Zhen is at least one part of MadeIn. Or not.

Can you ever really know someone, a country, or a culture? Armed with the worldwide inter-webby thing, a plane ticket to just about anywhere, and a credit card that purchases just about anything on the planet, you’d think our capacity to be global pals of the highest order is a cinch. What is it we don’t know? Want to meet people from all over the world, but don’t have the wherewithal? Line up a four week holiday to South Africa in June and the world comes to you. Constantly wondering what all the hub-bub is about of, say, the politics in Georgia, shifting borders in Armenia, or football teams of Togo? An iPhone in your pocket is all you need to pull down as much data as your battery allows. But honest data doesn’t make it easy to grasp the details.

This month at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery is a show from a Chinese art collective called MadeIn. There is a large amount of work in the gallery, so the term “collective” could mean a small Chinese village of 200,000. And this is exactly the point MadeIn are making in their show called, “Seeing One’s Own Eyes”, how much of the world is understood through cliche. MadeIn’s work enables the platitudes of the Middle East, including the sympathies of the region’s locals, with the caricatures of the “tourists” (that would be us westerners with our ample supply of guns and ammo).

In one section, enclosing about 8-10 mixed media works, each about 8 feet by 15 feet wide, reflect someone’s interpretation, or subjective opinion, of the current realm of the Middle East. American’s like me will see this as one more smirk at our country’s muscularity, bullying, short-sightedness; just more censure that the world piles onto every American, as if we’re all standing shoulder to shoulder against the world. And while the trite remarks might be somewhat warranted, it’s becoming an increasingly old story. I was mostly annoyed.

anti-American? or anti-indolent?

However, while the work uses mixed media, the images are painted cartoon-like, suggesting less than earnest comments. The images reflect what someone in Shanghai might perceive the Middle East to be from thousands of miles away, viewed through a skewed lens of the Chinese media, knowing it’s probably not completely true. The proposition is one that hints toward our inclination to shape subjective, even lazy, views into absolute fact.

I can’t leave without commenting on the over-zealous copy from the exhibition guide suggesting that MadeIn is a Chinese collective, that pretends it’s a Middle Eastern collective. Ikon Gallery state that Xu Zhen, a single man, is indeed MadeIn, which in itself pretends to be a Middle Eastern Art Collective. That’s more than a bit optimistic, as firstly, I don’t think one has to go that far to make the point about cliche which they were successful in constructing. Secondly, no visitor is going to think that, so why even make it up? It’s not like MadeIn needs to be more than once removed to prove their point. In fact, if you’re going to the trouble of inventing another layer, why not keep inventing layer; why stop at two? Why not suggest the Chinese artist Xu Zhen is pretending to be a Chinese artist collective, which is pretending to be a Middle Eastern Collective, which in itself is pretending to be an American collective, which might really be a British collective, pretending to be Chinese. Isn’t it all so circular and mind-bending, and self-reflective and black-hole-like? Who’s got drugs?

Antony Gormley: Breathing Room III

When men imagine themselves driving cars; we usually picture ourselves in an environment that suits the particular model. A Bugatti Veyron on Germany’s Nurburgring with the landscape visibly blurred as we roar through the air. Inside a Mitsubishi Evo, we’re tearing up a dirt track off-road, sliding around sharp bends in the trails of Northern Europe. Tucked away in a polished Bentley, we maneuver quietly through a quaint village nestled in the middle of England, with a name like, Chipping Bloodlet or something equally outdated, secluded away from the ugly world of commerce.

The English: a fashion unto themselves

Ladies, when you shop for fashion, you’re likely picturing yourself wearing a black slinky dress at the next opening gala, or a comfy but fine leather jacket for a first date, or perhaps a massively large, conspicuous looking hat at a Derby Day lunch. Again, such a hat requires a suitable place; a town with a fitting name like Paisley-upon-Biscuit. Oh dear me, such is the life of the leisure class.

Back in the land of the cosmopolitan, when the artist Antony Gormley thinks of people, because he often does think of people, he prefers to put the human being in its/our proper environment. Given a comparative act of measurement, how do the average joe and jane bloggs stack up. Where do they belong, and is there really a need for towns like Chipping-before-Wenlock?

This man lives in a Chipping-upon-village

You might have encountered a Gormley sculpture, as he’s famous for installing human-type shapes in, mostly, the British landscape. Perched on top of buildings, rooted in rocky beaches, fondly overlooking English cities, even submerged in flooded cathedral crypts. Gormley was also responsible for One and Other, the idea of placing the public on the fourth plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square to give them their hopeful 15 minutes (x 4) of fame. If Gormley isn’t obsessed with modern man’s position in space, I don’t know who would be.

In London, at White Cube Mason’s Yard, Gormley reverses the perspective to work on the perimeters that instead surround the human in its habitat. He lets us maneuver about the place, providing an occasion for us to measure not only ourselves, but other visitors and how we compare with each other. Sealed in the basement of the White Cube, following endless stairs downward, filled with the sudden dread of thinking do I really want to walk back up, is an intersecting group of 15 white frames made of glowing, wooden scaffolding, taking over the whole of the room. Think of a Damien Hirst installation without the shark, formaldehyde, or the glass. And definitely without the the stupid title (”The Feeling of Looking Silly in the Mind of Someone Who Claims to be an Artist”). Also, very much larger than Hirst’s productions.

Hirst-Super-Mare

When I say glowing, I mean each 1×1 inch length of wood, joined to make multiple boxes, is painted with some sort of phosphorescence that glows for about 15 minutes, before needing a recharge. The recharge, as it happens, is a blinding bolt of white light from heat lamps concealed in the ceiling, flipped on for about 30 seconds. This of course suggests that viewers are all walking around in the dark when the overhead lamps aren’t on, bumping into each other if it weren’t for the brightly lit wooden posts giving off residual energy. Ugh, that light was on far too long. I probably looked horrible, and I know some of my fellow gallery-goers, who were until recently cloaked ghosts, could use a fashion do-over.

Now that the light’s are dimmed again, time to get on with the business of measuring ourselves. The installation includes my favourite activity in art: participation. Because it’s (nearly always) dark (ish), you have free clearance to touch things. Well, not people of course. You can fondle the structure as long as you don’t leave the sculpture wobbling, because the remonstrating Irish girl at the front will otherwise hurl her way toward you, possibly unsheathing a weapon, to “caution” you. Not that this happened to me, of course. I’m much more surreptitious. Still, visitors are encouraged to walk amongst the wood, as it were, and do their best not to damage anything on the way through the “pine forest”. Also, because this is the British Republic of Health and Safety and Please Pray that England win the World Cup, the sign at the front door says you’re on your own if you clobber yourself on the head. Clobbering oneself, however, would be a good use of the structure for personal measurement: “I guess I was too tall for that wooden timber, must be about 6 feet tall that beam. By the way darling, do you have a tourniquet?”

“Breathing Room III” (or 3, or Three, however you want to confuse your guests) as it’s entitled, is not only a probe for how we as humans fit in with the world - including other people in it - but it’s a great place where you literally cannot read anything; including any redundant titles or copy for the installation. My first instincts on entering galleries is to avoid what some over-ambitious young gallery employee might have written about the importance of the installation. It’s much easier, and more interesting, to get straight on with the art - minus the enthusiastic wordsmithing. Gormley’s site is one that must be experienced directly as an image and structure to be a part of. And if it’s in a dark room with other curious individuals, even better. The only things missing are beer and wine.

The upstairs neighbors at White Cube

Tom Friedman: funny man

Pubs are probably a fertile incubation space for art. All sorts of unhinged, but nonetheless possibly valid ideas begin life in a pub amongst friends, usually after at least four quick pints. Laced with alcohol, people say the most outrageous things which nearly always require proof of concept outside the fantasy world of your local pub. Proof that must come at a later time, because, well, everyone’s busy drinking and saying rubbish things at the moment. Remind them in the morning.

The artist Tom Friedman, I imagine in my mind’s eye, must be a pub drinker with several demented friends at the ready. The results of his imagination actually do prove something half-baked to be possible. I can imagine Friedman saying, “I’ll bet I can make anything out of styrofoam and a lick of paint.” To which his friends laugh uncontrollably, and bet him even more pints that he couldn’t. Then I can imagine Friedman having a staggering memory, and recalling the next morning his bet about making anything out of “…what was it…oh yeah, styrofoam and pints…wait it was paint. Styrofoam and paint. Right, I’ve got my day ahead of me….”

The results of his big night out (remember, the pub night out part is my addition to the story, not his genuine working habits) can be seen in a London gallery with a wide range of everyday items. When I first read about this in the May issue of Art Review, I must admit my eyeballs nearly floated back in my head. Another replicant from the ready-made moment 100 years ago wants to prove they can re-animate Marcel Duchamp. After reading the materials list, however, my mind was changed forever. You’d never know by looking at it, but what resembles strings, are actually paint fibers. A peeled banana, a breeze-block, a rose, a gavel, pencils, even torn cardboard - all styrofoam. Random objects arranged in haphazard compositions are not so much ready-made, as just-made. Friedman has persevered to construct a paper towel dispenser made of styrofoam that looks more like something out of Wallace and Gromit’s Big Day in the Toilet. Flowing from the mouth of the dispenser is a thin layer of paint made to look like paper towel. It’s a brilliant riposte to any artist who pulls a tin can out of a rubbish bin, calling it art because the ready-made represents man’s inhumanity to man.

Tom Friedman; user of everything

Tom Friedman, I’ve also discovered, is obsessive about finding beginning and end points of art, employing Buddhism in large measures to hunt down these mileposts. Based on his earlier works, he certainly has the monastic patience of a man in solitary. Friedman once started a day off with one toothpick, resolving then to create something more grand, with more toothpicks. 30,000 toothpicks later, his sculpture resembled a splintery galactic explosion. He stopped at 30,000 because, well, the project could go on indefinitely; and really, doesn’t 30,000 get the point across? Personally I would have stopped at about 100 toothpicks because I wouldn’t have thought to purchase the 30,000 to begin with. Also, I can’t imagine a project with 30,000 of anything in front of me. Think of the missed pub time.

Thankfully someone like Tom Friedman exists if for no other reason than assigning him the patience to wait out an idea and jumping on it before the flimsy idea floats off to the lost island of forgotten ideas. The search for the beginning of something; or maybe it’s the end of something else, was a key starting point for him. To Friedman, beginnings and endings can be the same thing. When he says that filling something up is the same as making it completely empty, it sounds like something the physicist Richard Feynman would say. Once when he,  Friedman, not Feynman, couldn’t quite figure out his next move, he cleaned out his studio, boarded up the windows, and painted the whole space completely white, with the intention of determining a new starting point for his art education. It must have been a personal, big-bang moment. The very next day, Friedman began focusing on one object each day in his freshly constructed clean room. On Day 1, a metronome; day 2, a plate; and so on. Each day he asked questions of the thing’s existence. What is it, what’s it called, why does it take up the space it does, what’s it doing here, why am I talking to it…He then asked questions of his relationship with the object as a viewer. He was playing you and me as gallery and museum groupie. For a time, Friedman did nothing but think about the object and himself in this universe of one small white room, like a mini-museum, seeking out his “point A”.  More importantly, hoping it led to something worthwhile, like “point B”. His process reminds me of the end of the film “Castaway” when the Tom Hanks character is literally at a cross roads to his future. The difference is that Friedman has more to think about than simply turning left or right. He’s got infinity ahead of him.

about as useless as a real one

Another of his projects involved a jigsaw puzzle. As he got closer to the end of seeing the final image, he pulled all the pieces away from “interlock” mode, separated the pieces with a few inches of floor space, and laid everything out in grid-like fashion. You couldn’t tell what the puzzle was a puzzle of, until you looked at individual pieces. Only then could you make the synaptic leap to imagine the bigger picture.

Tom Friedman may be my new comedy art hero, even if he doesn’t think his work is supposed to be amusing. But there I am, just me staring at his objects, asking questions like, why is this here, what’s its purpose, what’s it doing near me, why am I laughing?

Let’s get the process out of the way first. Eberhard Havekost (I just love saying the name, for no other reason than it sounds like a maker of pencils), takes a photo snapshot of something. Usually anything. The snapshot is then filtered through Photoshop. For those of us who use Photoshop quite a bit, know not to touch any of the filters because filters are simply for the technophobe, the blind, and the creatively bereft. Unless of course you’re eight years old, then it’s brilliant because it’s subversive in a childish sort of way, and it puts you well on the road to revolution. But if you’re not eight, like most of us, using filters is sentimental at best, and sad and overwrought at worst.

After the Photoshop filter dabbling, Eberhard Havekost moves onto, believe it or not, painting! Eberhard Havekost paints, using his newly Photoshopped photo, on canvas. Just like real painters. To some extent I see the irony in the process; like old media taking back the streets from new media, and hey, if you think you’ve got gestures down Mr. Photographer, you just haven’t seen an Eberhard Havekost. This seems to be a trend amongst Germans. Gerhard Richter does it, and because some folks refer to him as the 20th century’s greatest living artist, his work is probably a magnet for others to photo copy. How ironic (or does that, because I’ve found it to be ironic, make it no longer ironic - I never know with these things). Usually in these instances it’s a big pissing contest between art and photography.

Richter's "Reader"...image of an image.

Anyway, we digress; back to Eberhard Havekost. I bring up the subject, not only because, again, I like saying Eberhard Havekost, but that I’ve just popped into London’s White Cube recently in hope of all hopes to find something that captures the imagination. Instead, I found Eberhard Havekost. After about 15 minutes inside, I make haste to the handy leaflet at the front of the room. It starts off:

“The point of departure for my paintings”, Havekost commented in a recent interview, “is an emotional quality or a factuality - in other words, something I can feel.”

Whenever art people say things like, “point of departure” it means they’re the type of person who searches for an explanation to every part of their lives and woe betide the unlucky person standing next to them. Here’s my own example: “The point of departure for my breakfast this morning was a strange and vacant sort of empty feeling I witnessed in the pit of my stomach.” While most of us are getting on with life, and finding art in the everyday magnificence of life itself, others have nothing better to do than to seek out meaning in the minutia.

To get right to the art, here’s a glimpse of Eberhard Havekost at The White Cube:

Eberhard Havekost: they all look like this

There are nine of these trees, and they all look the same. It’s almost not worth the bother to put a nail in the wall for any of it, really. The point for Eberhard Havekost is to photograph a tree in winter, from different angles, at night, and then apply a Photoshop filter. He then uses theses abstract images, and effectively paints a realist image of the blurred image. Let’s pause to hear from the White Cube’s web site: ”

“… increasingly Havekost uses the photograph as a starting point or base structure.”

[For anyone before Andy Warhol, we would have called that either copying, or just being lazy. Here it's euphemistically called a starting point.]

“…a material quality distinct from the photographic original.”

[Um, yes, that's why we call it painting, and not alt-photo.]

“The resulting atmosphere is spooky and surreal: the trees sway and droop, the greens hang like thick ooze from the pendulous branches.”

[Spooky and surreal? Really? My first thoughts were: monochrome, grey-green, dull, multiplicity for no real reason. I'm not sure this is even art school material.]

“The tree is, of course, one of the oldest motifs in Western art: with ‘Gast’, the artist has created a proliferating forest that seems to haunt this rich history, a gang of spectres that persist in provoking awe and wonder.”

[Oh right, that's where the spooky and surreal come from. Now I'm with you. Still, it isn't spooky, and it isn't haunting. It's really just navel gazing, and dull. If you want to navel gaze, Mr. Eberhard Havekost, find something of higher value to society, like the CERN particle accelerator, or unravelling cryptic Mayan symbols, or, what makes Jaffa Cakes so good.]

“Havekost enacts a process of de-materialisation and re-materialisation, from thought to object. And when confronted anew, the process is reversed again: the painting now provokes a range of interpretations and associations in the mind of the viewer.”

[I don't know if you know this, but that's what "us viewers" do with all art.  Reinterpreting your work isn't a mind-boggling, just-stumbled-upon theme that you've opened our eyes to.  We ALWAYS do that.]

Generally I see what Mr. Eberhard Havekost is doing, but the result is fairly vapid in intellect, and aesthetically mute.  Focusing on subject matter, and “filtering” is the point of being an artist, and rendering an interpretation is the enjoyment of the viewer. Welcome to life as we know it Mr. Eberhard Havekost, how does it work on your planet?

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.