contemporary monkey

Attention all aliens from extragalactic nebula outside Earth’s Solar System (third planet from our sun, in the Galaxy called the Milky Way). Consider this a human plea for what was at one time, righteously ours, and to many people, fondly remembered.  We would like to have our Russians back please.  The ones that were on Earth before the black hole of what was known as the Soviet Union, where those of us on the outside were completely blinded by a lack of hard data, while those on the inside were vacuumed up by your molecular-level, cell-parsing tractor beams.  There are 180 million of them - you can’t miss ‘em.

Before the Frost of Irrelevancy: Kandinsky

For those of us Earthlings devoted to the subject of art, and who were forced observers from beyond the Iron Curtain (look it up, it’s too depressing to describe here), there are more than 70 years which cannot be accounted for.  It’s during this massive time void that we suspect you’ve taken our most significant Russians and hoarded them for yourselves.  For this self-serving act, we can’t blame you, but we’d like them back now.

Prior to our Western Earth Year of 1917, our collection of gifted Russian artists included Kandinsky, Chagall, Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy, and more.  Now we’re left with the heap that’s thrashing about the walls inside the London art gallery, Calvert22.  Gutov, Khanyutin, Zakharov, are all speaking visual gibberish to us with no claim on story-telling.  These androids seem to be using your indecipherable language on us, and have yet to master the ability to communicate with what we call “Homo Sapiens” or “man”.  Maybe you can make sense of this twisted jabbering, but they might as well be speaking Martian to us (ref: Mars, the fourth planet in our solar system, with no life form…the reference to Martian language is a obviously a glib remark, because, oh forget it).  Let’s make it a straight swap: you give us our soulful, complex, but engaging Russian artists back, and in return you can have what ever’s inside Calvert22.

Video seems to be their choice of parlay with us, possibly because of your presumption that all human beings drink a form of electricity through reflected-light screens and energy-emitting monitors.  Only some of us, e.g. Paris Hilton, Pamela Anderson and Peaches Geldof, are able to accomplish such a feat, but assume that most of us cannot.  What’s more, your Russian replicants seem to enjoy duplicating each other’s work by using our black and white video format to shed light on their bleak, cheerless, barren land, with a life short on human emotion.  If that is indeed the point of their art, they had me at ten seconds of the first video.  The rest of the works were simply superfluous.  Next time, have your automatons draw straws and send down a single humanoid, armed with just one of his human videos, limited to 15 seconds in length (preferably shorter).  Oh, and can you beam down the latest human that resembles Kandinsky, or Malevich so we can remember what Russian artistic talent was like, before your photon-separating magneto-pulse device chemically reduced our Russians to their component parts.  You’re going to be in a lot of trouble if you can’t put them back together.

from The Ashington Group

Leave it to another art form, this time the theatre, to pierce through the fog of contemporary painting.  Art can’t seem to do that on its own.  It must be the only thing in the world that can’t (not counting Marmite, which, for the good of mankind, should remain mysterious).

Lee Hall’s “The Pitmen Painters” is showing at the National Theatre in London, and the story is placed in a time where modern art IS the contemporary art.  Lee Hall also wrote Billy Elliot, another humorous story set in Northern England where the perpendicular forces of rugged coarseness hurtles into life’s delicate sensibilities.

The Pitmen Painters is an endearing story about rough old coal miners “learning to appreciate” the art of the day.  The sensibility at the start is about as brutish as it can get.  These are uneducated labourers from the 1930’s who’ve left school at eleven years old to do what people in Northumberland did back then: work grinding hours underground to pull coal out of rock.  The miners come at the subject of art with the obtuseness of a charging rhino, making the story both comical and charming.  An opening salvo from one of the miners screws us in place:

George (miner): We just want to look at a picture, and know what it means.
Lyon (instructor): Ah but, what do you mean, ‘what it means’?
George: What do you think we mean?  ‘What it means’?  We mean the meaning.
Lyon: Exactly.  But what do you mean by ‘the meaning’?
George: What the hell do you think we mean by ‘the meaning’? That’s what we hired your for.  Listen mate, if you [don't know] the meaning of the meaning, what bloody chance have we got?

from the play, The Pitmen Painters by Lee Hall

The characters are based on real men called The Ashington Group who were miles away - both horizontally and vertically - from the Western World’s explosion of 20th century art.  Painting or sculpting couldn’t put food on the table, and art was seen as something to be appreciated, but not made.  Yet the miners shared an exclusive approach to not only viewing art, but making it: the point was, “to make one thing into another.  Whoever you are.”

“What does it mean?” is a persistent question in the play, a fair one to ask of every artist.  Each of us approaches art from a different deflection point, and it’s at this angle - ours, not the artists - which is most important.

The Tate Modern is just down river from The National Theatre, and The Pitmen Painters acts as a fitting anteroom for contemporary and modern art.  Someone should make a 15 minute film out of the play, and have it continually exhibited in the Turbine Hall.  Before taking the stairs up to the galleries, the view might be more revealing if you start at the bottom.

Something that Jeffrey Deitch said in the book, Collecting Contemporary (by Adam Lindemann) I thought was a very useful idea for understanding contemporary art.  Deitch is one of New York’s art dealers, with a background in finance as well as art.  Although he doesn’t come out and say it, his perspective is one where art is collectible for financial gain.  Still, what do you do with a Harvard degree, and Citibank Art Advisory on your CV?  I’m guessing the phrase “capital gain” comes up in his conversations with clients.

But everyone has their reasons for existing in the art world, and for a moment, let’s give Deitch credit for creative thinking.  He looks for an artist who “creates his or her own aesthetic world, as opposed to an artist who’s just making a nice object.  There are a lot of artists who make very nice objects, but you can’t really say that there is a whole vision of the world that you can grasp in their work.”

Creating worlds is a place where traditional story tellers excel, and artists should be held to the same level of expectation.  For example, in film, the Coen Brothers create their own worlds, and whatever the outcome to the protagonist, we’re always someplace we’ve never been.

Fargo: Joel and Ethan Coen

There was an online video once about a London artist by the name of Richard Galpin (Hales Gallery) where we followed along with him as he created his own invention using existing photographs.  Working with an enlarged C-Print of an existing city centre, he slowly peels away slices and sections of the original photograph, revealing his version of a futurist’s cityscape. The result shares very little with the original photo, but is useful as a “blank” screen for ground breaking results after a few hours.  It’s a revolutionary approach in that the world he’s given is not the world he’s taking.

Richard Galpin: Distructure 1