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.

Art, if you haven’t noticed, doesn’t pretend to know boundaries. I’m pretty sure it couldn’t find them if it had night-vision goggles, taped up with sonar-enhanced earplugs, connected to Scoville Chili Pepper Heat Index tongue extensions.  The common law of physics that applies to everything else we know, anything within the upper limit of the planet’s atmosphere, is just a bothersome, trifling annoyance for art.  Art doesn’t adhere to science, doesn’t care about it, doesn’t bother listening to it.  Or does it?

The other world, Science Inc., seems to play the game nicely.  The unambiguous world of science throws off a division of itself called Theoretical Physics.  Scientists who are Theoretical Physicists are the comedians of their dull, pragmatic, un-humorous industry.  Forget what you hear about popular stage comedians, these wacky revolutionaries are truly our comic geniuses.  They think of bizarre realities, and try to interpret what life would be like inside this unconventional city.  What’s the distance of the British coastline?  Infinite, say theoretical scientist, because the more you magnify the rough edges, the more undiscovered gaps will appear.  How about days with 25 hours instead of the earthbound, rotationally stuck, 24 hours we usually complain about not having enough of.  We could simply ignore the bothersome planetary rotation thing and make up our own arbitrary rules and abide by a new, albeit flaky, order.  We’d get to see fireworks in the middle of the day.

the art of science

Sean Carroll is one such Theoretical Physicist at California Institute of Technology.  What he thinks about, he admits, isn’t science, and some of it isn’t even theory.  It’s just a different direction in which to take the messy business of reality.  His new book, “From Eternity to Here” wonders why it is that we can remember the past, but can’t remember the future.  In space, we can go up or down, left or right, forward and backward, but time is a dimension with a one way street.  The arrow of time, despite what Hollywood tells us, goes only forward.  It never moves toward yesterday.  Even heavies like Newton and Galileo wondered this, and suggested that we could remember the future, if we only knew everything there was to know.  In theory, the events in our half-baked, unhinged blue marble of a planet could be determined because we’d know fully why things happen in the order that they do.  Say you lose your wallet every twelve years.  You’d plan on carrying no money and credit cards in your wallet on the day you were due for a shocker.  On the other hand, it wouldn’t be a shocker because you would have been prepared for it.  Oh this damned warping of space-time is so confusing!  Someone get Michael J. Fox on the phone.

But you see what I mean about the art of science.  Science at least gives the sinister “other” a go.  A close example from the Art Camp is Anne Truitt, who creates minimalist sculpture.  To sum up her work in a brutish and not very kind phrase, think of very colourful, tall-as-a-woman, square-ish, wooden posts.  Art Forum claims that photographs don’t do the pieces justice, but as I try not to listen to the pretension of Art Forum, I’ve included one of her pieces here.  Art Forum also warns of danger when categorizing Truitt’s style as Minimalist, because, well, categories are for doormats like the scientists, and not for the gallant artist. They don’t like leaving their safe houses, these artists.  Struggling onward into the wooly world of science, however, is Anne Truitt’s concept of life as a sculpture.  Not a life as a sculptor, but that which sculpting begets - the mysterious 3D spawn of artistic invention.

pillars of the community

One morning, while standing in the front room of her house, probably wondering, as all artists do, just what the hell she was thinking graduating with an art degree, Truitt was focused on passing shadows as the sun continued its formidable and inevitable slipping into sunrise.  To paraphrase Truitt’s quote from Art Forum, it is we people, as sculptures, who stand firm, while the sun continues forward.  In that sense, we disarm time; and while we’re not subject to it, we are illuminated by it.

OK, a neat trick, you’re thinking, and we should applaud the metaphysical breakthrough for art in escaping its earthly white cube, and into the chilling cosmos of scientific law.  Scientifically speaking, of course, what she said is not true, but it lends itself to thoughtful poetry, and certainly useful to Truitt as a devisor of art.  You can imagine that a stationary person waiting patiently for a bus, might notice more of life, and therefore time passing, than someone running for that same bus, falling down, spilling a double latte on themselves, with the stationary person not helping at all by laughing loudly.  By the way, this didn’t really happen to me anytime, ever.

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?

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.