contemporary monkey

Eberhard Havekost; every heard of him? Me neither. Knowing who he is, at this point, is unimportant as he’s unlikely to be remembered by anyone in say 10-20 years. But Eberhard Havekost deserves a look, if only to be example-boy for What’s Wrong With Contemporary Art.

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?

JMW Turner

I have a new art theory: the big difference between 19th century art and that of the 20th century are the parties.  It’s a tale of two Tates, in this instance, and ultimately it serves only to fortify the boundaries between centuries.  We’re just better at entertaining ourselves today than we were in Victorian times.

“Turner and the Masters” at Tate Britain is a subdued, thoughtful, quiet, whispered event.  I saw a security person reprimand a scholarly gent for delivering a reproachable glare to an underling.  So much musing and rumination going on.  And this was a Friday (Friday day, but still, you’d think everyone would be looking forward to a big weekend of ripping up the garden or cleaning guns for a field day of clay pigeon shooting and other horsey things).  Manners were the rule of day at Tate Britain, and you’d have to blame it on the Turner exhibit.  There was a mass of teenagers in the Duveen’s galleries above, but none skipped downstairs to the Turner exhibit.  The £12 entry fee was steep enough no doubt, but you’d think there would be just one old lady accompanied by a caring grand daughter.  Nope, just old ladies and old men being cared by more old ladies and old men.  I could have been at the dog races, and the crowd wouldn’t be much different.

The curation itself was very insightful, and a successful means to reveal the life of Turner, the man.  I learned a lot about Turner’s inadequacies, competitive streaks, and other incapabilities to gain some true insight into why geniuses do what they do.  It was a very impressive and learned time, and I imagine many others would have enjoyed it as well.

It’s not that the place was lacking a crowd.  Each room was filled with more gray hair than a Cotswold village.  Anymore and it would have seemed like a Sunday morning in church.  The type of people at this event were what one might call traditionally British: older, certainly middle age and beyond, and mostly white.  Maybe even all white.  All if this is unfortunate because it was a great chance to get inside the head of Turner; to see what professional competition and the pressure of history does to a man.  Plus, all those Turners next to all those Rubens, Canalettos, Claude Lorraines.  This is what art education is supposed to do - place the subject in historical perspective.

Pop Life at Tate Modern

Still, if you not going to throw a good party, don’t expect anyone to come.  At Tate Modern down the river (and frankly, on the happening side of it as well), they were doing just the opposite.  While the Millbank-induced sleep session at Tate Britain was in full snooze for its afternoon nap, Tate Modern had the pedal to the metal.  All sorts of age groups and colours were thumping about “Pop Life”, and the ticket price was no more than the Turner exhibit at £12.  Pop Art, as a subject, is always going to be more of a party than landscape painting will ever be; and for that day, more people learned about Pop Art than Turner’s art.  Tate Modern made you feel like you were in Warhol’s Factory alongside his contemporaries, while Tate Britain made you feel like you should be studying something important under a tree.  Because Pop art is really about people, it’s more entertaining to look at art about yourself than art about someone from 150 years ago.  I guess that’s why pop art is so appealing to artists in the first place: it comes with its own built-in customer base.  Like buying a photograph of yourself going down a roller coaster.

In the end, no matter how much you know about art, or how “good” the art is, it’s the parties that get folks to come down.  It’s a shame that Tate Britain couldn’t have thrown a better one.  Maybe the next Turner exhibit should be a big drunken barbecue; the contemporary landscape art happening of our day.

Frank Stella

Are the colours of modern society, un-natural?  The argument made thoughout a recent exhibition at Tate Liverpool is that off-the-shelf colour (their term: ready-made colour) can’t be found in nature.  Surely man invented the hyper-active, vibrant colours of such stuff as cars, signs and iPods.  Wouldn’t their alien surface properties have to be natural because, well, we’re natural, aren’t we?

The theme threaded throughout the show, “Colour Chart: Reinventing Colour, 1950 to Today” is the absolute nature of modern colour, and in this case the reference is to the commercial type - the cans you buy off the shelf.  In fact, for some pieces the point is that colour itself is art, not to be subsumed by a larger spiritual, cultural, or political meaning.

I love the suggestion made at the event, because I found myself liking many of the works simply because they were colourful.  The argument could be made that modern colour itself is more pleasurable than the shapes and forms constructed by contemporary artists.  In fact, rather than constructing the cliche vitrine with this year’s dead farm animal, I wish Damien Hirst would just write down the colours he’s thinking about at the time, and paste the Pantone list onto a stretched canvas.  I’m willing to bet it would be an improvement.

Ellsworth Kelly

Man invented machine with his hands, the productive results from which are no more than extensions of man himself.  Andy Warhol claimed he wanted to be a machine, and I think he was successful in his search.  Showing that machine paint applied through a machine process (silk screening) by a Factory employee suggests colour might be only one element to the finished work.   If post-mid-century colour is un-natural, then so are we humans.