contemporary monkey

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.

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.

decode: oneDotZero

Surely, this means War!  The Victoria and Albert Museum, the traditional bearer of arch conservatism in London, the safe-house for fine arts and antiques, has fired a Victorian cannonball at the young, art-drunk pirates across the river at Tate Modern.  So, it is with pressed trousers and starched, button-down shirt, I managed a clean and not so proletariat taxi to the West End.  My initial reason for a V&A visit was a view of the new Renaissance Wing, otherwise, I wouldn’t have thought to visit the Big Shed of Old Man Art.  At the front door, however, I was spirited in a different direction by the V&A’s latest design show, “Decode” which is a collaboration with the digital arts force: oneDotZero.  So, in the forefront of the V&A’s normally dusty, historical collection, was a lively contemporary show, which, normally, is released on DVD, to a select group of art futurists, technology enthusiasts and general digit heads like myself.  How very dare they assume righteous enthusiasm for the art of our time!

I say war, but really I mean sneaky, underhanded. tunnel-building, get ‘em while they’re not looking, volley of contemporary art flung mildly (West End style) in the face of the young thugs on the south side of the Thames.  While Tate Modern were busy building massive empty steel boxes, reminiscing on mid-century Pop sentimentalism, and gearing up for a 100 year, look-back on the glorious days of de Stijl, those ruthless ninjas at the V&A caught us off guard with their own digital stealth.  What happened to knowing one’s station in life?

digital use of non-digital media

These sorts of easily-consumed shows are usually a museum’s amuse-bouche for the main course further inside, so I wasn’t expecting complex or deep.  Watching others wander in and out of “Decode”, however, was like watching stag and hen crowds coming leaving a Broad Street bar.  While none of the exhibits were overtly deep, all were engaging enough to divert attention away from other sections of the museum (if not other museums).  Every Tom, Dick and Harry, not to mention Jane and Joe Bloggs, seemed to be occupied with a sense of joy and play.  As regular V&A attendees know, merriment is a word that is rarely put to use in an official brochure.  But then, such human impertinence is invariably closely shadowed by its arch enemy: The Fun Cops.

William Wiles, in Icon magazine says of the show, “Decode is a lot of fun, but is it anything more than that?  There’s plenty of sideshow candyfloss (cotton candy to Americans)  - where’s the design nutrition?”  He says that because people in attendance are having a rollicking morning interacting with the exhibits, and apparently that isn’t allowed in his particular land of art.  Children, mind your manners.  Need I remind you that you are a guest of the Victoria and Albert Museum?  Tut-tut.

Wiles goes on to say that, “the text refers more to art than to design… But really the work is in a new field; digital crafts.  It’s the 21st century equivalent of William Morris wallpaper.”  So what if it is?  Is van Gogh the 19 century equivalent of William Morris because he was adept at working paint?  Is Michelangelo the 16th century equivalent because he saw his final figure in the marble before arming himself with hammer and chisel?  Craft is only dull if the final product is dull, and as far as I could tell, nobody in Decode was laughing and cavorting from dullness.

From mid-20th century, most art was created with one person in mind: the artist.  Toward the end of the 20th century, about the same time the world wide web broke down social barriers, Relational Art synthesized what was already known by the technologists.  If you don’t involve people, they’ll come anyway.  The V&A seems to understand this, and, every once in a while, reminds itself not to take itself too seriously.

Anyway, if sensing joy is a sign of candyfloss, then Anish Kapoor is the fast food captain of carnivals.  Most Kapoor exhibits draw a crowd of smiles and worthwhile chatter amongst the groundlings and commoners.  It doesn’t have to be cryptic, profound, or ironic.  Sometimes effective art simply makes a difference in people’s daily lives.  Otherwise, why do it?  More importantly, why engage with it?

Jean Tinguely

Do you ever wonder what artists were like when they were young; when they were a mere five paintbrushes high?  I had a visit to Tate Liverpool this past week, where an exhibit for Jean Tinguely had been in place for a few months.  Tinguely is the perfect artist for men, or as women would say, for boys.  In the 1940s and 50s, Tinguely constructed kinetic sculptures made from bits of metal, electric motors, and some cardboard.  His machines revolved, turned, pivoted, spun, rolled, drew, and even painted, for no other reason than just to move or make marks.  Tinguely was young at heart, and interested in amusing himself first.  His concepts had no other purpose, no bigger reason, than just to exist.  In a 1960’s filming of the construction of one of his mechanized events, a television interviewer asked him what he was trying to express.  Tinguely refused to be caught up in meaning, and said he did it only to express himself.  More artists should be so forthright about the real purpose of their work.  If nothing else, it keeps the curator-speak at bay.

Although difficult to prove, I can imagine Jean Tinguely must have spent tireless hours constructing robotic mechanisms from Meccano (Erector Set in America).  Mecanno was invented in Liverpool during Victorian times, and the city is also the site of a recent James May video which documented the making of a Meccano-built bridge over a canal.  The historical centre of the universe for mechanized rigs seems to be focussed at Liverpool’s Albert Dock these days.

The mechanized artist for the 1950's

Most of the Tinguely’s machines at Tate Liverpool couldn’t be turned on, which was a great shame.  Restoration goes on for a great many oil-based masterpieces; why can’t someone replace a motor, or strengthen a steel joint?  Still, if you have an active imagination, the guts of the machines are visible enough for recreating the motion in your head.  Which is exactly what I did, and enjoyed the show produced in the theatre of my mind.  Those pieces that did work reminded me of watching a factory; like one of those industrial films where cars are snapped together on assembly lines.  This was the real stuff of boys.

Supposedly Tinguely built his mechanisms with the possibility that part of it might not work as predicted.  This bit of predisposed, random chance provided the machine with its own unsupervised form of life, eliminating the artist to at least some extent.  Tinguely didn’t mind this, and in fact knew it would upset the hierarchy in art-dom at the time (1950s).  In this way, he’s the Everyman’s hero.

a mechanized artist - one that can swim

Expressing himself was Tinguely’s main concern, which, in many respects, is what we humans do every day.  For me, Tinguely formalized what art is all about.  It’s something that any one of us does, nearly every day of the week.  If anyone asks what you do for a living, you could always say you’re an artist, and you wouldn’t be lying.