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?

like Amiga, but with paint

In October of 2009, the internet turned 40 years old.  Not the web, or as some would call it, the Google machine; I mean the internet, developed by ARPANET for the US military to withstand a Soviet nuclear missile attack.  Images on the internet arrived later, around 1990, when the CERN Institute developed the world wide web. I bring these dates up because they seem so long ago; the wow factor hasn’t been palpable since the late 20th century.  Or so I thought.

Digital art, while not widely accepted by the art buying public (i.e., merchant bankers), is widely followed by a global audience.  Its gallery, however, is mostly online so you’d have to know where to look to find it.  Even with limited appeal, however, there it is; raging wildly and completely toward the Next Big Thing.  Digital styles vary from futuristic, technology-pushing 3D imagery coded to audio, fireworks, and probably even orgasm, to something completely not that - sentimental remembrances of 8 bit digital: the old space invader imaging.  If you missed the digital art revolution, you were probably buried under a rock, or possibly banished to whatever the equivalent of the art gulag would be.  Crawford, Texas maybe.

Semyon Faibisovich isn’t from anywhere near Texas, at least not topographically.  He’s from Moscow.  But the digital distance between he and Crawford’s most popular citizen isn’t that far.  Faibisovich at one time painted in the realism style, but traded canvas for film in the past two decades.  During this time, the former Soviet Union was crumbling beneath the merciless weight of its arch enemy: Conceptual Art.  While Faibisovich was off conceptualizing, digital photography was busy happening.

Faibisovich is being shown at the IKON Gallery in Birmingham, where he’s uploaded (OK, hung) large format images on the IKON’s walls (or as I call them, old-style screens).  He’s back painting large formats using very small source material, and he’s done most of it within the past few years.  Walking around the Moscow district of Razgulyai, he’s captured what passes for life by way of a mobile phone camera.  As most of us know, camera phones today are terrible at reproduction, but handy when you need it.  Like when your friends are throwing shots of high octane alcohol down their necks at a Spanish bar and the moment Must Be Recorded.  Nobody pretends the quality is going to be any good, with the results eventually getting sucked down the drain of the digital dark underworld of forgotten photos.  Or maybe that’s just me hopin’ and wishin’.

Faibisovich seems to have just now discovered the technological fault of the ubiquitous comrade of the proletariat.  Starting with highly-pixellated mobile photographs, he then distorts the image further through either Photoshop filters, or his own paintbrush.  The result is the digital equivalent of Monet or Renoir.

just prior to the introduction of digital photography

Pixellation isn’t new to art. Digital artists have used old fashioned computer images to achieve a kind of distressed or atavistic effect.  Faibisovich is simply doing what the impressionists and post impressionists did, but with some help from a mobile camera phone.  It’s like he’s just discovered the 20th century world of pixels through photography and manipulation.  This doesn’t seem contemporary to me.  Faibisovich is just someone who’s playing catch-up with the rest of the world, and thinks he’s on to something. He’s like the Brendan Fraser Neanderthal character in Encino Man (California Man to British People).  The content is only interesting from one point of view, and it isn’t ours.

What I found more curious was the amount of manipulation that varied among the works.  Some sections of the pieces Faibisovich has left alone, where the final enlargement is magnified relentlessly from the original source.  Other bits were recorded over with oil, which to me would suggest that he must have had a reason for supplementing some bits and not others.  What were those reasons?  As I’ve said before, knowing why an artist does something can be more interesting than the way he does it.

In fact, let’s make a rule: art can only be called contemporary if it feeds the creative spirit of our time…events within the last 10 years.  If it’s just catch-up art, then maybe the work is best suited for the museums.  Or the nostalgia bin.