Art as a black hole

Barnett Newman: Untitled (The void), 1946

In 2009 the BBC aired a series called School Of Saatchi.  Several young artists competed in default reality tv style to win an exhibition in the Hermitage curated by art patron and advertising mogul Charles Saatchi.

One of the jurors, art critic Matthew Collings, spoke about the difficulty that the general public still had with modern art, especially with the techniques used today: ready mades, found objects, installations, video. “Get used to it, it’s here to stay”, he said.

Whenever a football coach gets the full support of the management of the club, he usually gets fired the next day.

I stopped being an artist now more than ten years ago. Apart from severe doubts about my own ability to make art with an impact, I got severe doubts about the ability of today’s art itself to make an impact. I am talking about the visual arts, the stuff that you find in museums.
I was never only in the art world. I met many well educated and intelligent people who knew nothing about art. Now that I am outside the art world, I can understand why: if you don’t actively go out to find art, it does not find you. A Dutch stand up comedian, Theo Maassen said: “I know a 1000 tunes from commercials, but I can’t quote a single philosopher”. The same goes for art: at this moment the trickle down effect of art is about zero.

I think it’s a horrible fashionable word, meme, but I’ll use it anyway. Meme: ideas or beliefs that are transmitted from one person or group of people to another.  Contemporary art fails to create memes that spread outside the artworld itself.

So the problem of contemporary art is that its impact outside the artworld itself is extremely limited, and this goes against the public nature of art. There must be so many  young, enthusiastic, inventive people with nice and strange ideas who start a career as artist only to find themselves marginalized in a marginalized world ten years later.  And if successful, they are successful in that marginalized world.

 

Art as a black hole: art itself

Part 2 in the series Art as a black hole.

I visit a museum less often than I used to. When I do, I feel not much has changed in the past 20 years and that the art world is struggling to keep up with the times. Video’s, installations, an occasional flare up of painting. Still lots of irony, and every few years a new fashion. Dinner parties as art, stuffed animals, the artist as scientist to name a few.

When Matthew Collings spoke of the modern art routine as something that was here to stay, I felt the opposite. I deliberately twisted Collings words a bit to use the word modern art routine: what was once a search for new means of expression is now a routine. On the one hand new techniques and materials are limitless. On the other hand I feel that the modern art routine has exhausted itself.
When watching School Of Saatchi I saw some nice bright young people scavenging a once fertile terrain for the last scraps of food. I felt a little bit sorry for them.

I feel it is time for a change in contemporary art. I have no idea how or what it would look like, otherwise I would still be an artist. I have some vague ideas: less conceptual, less contrived, a re-evaluation of the term beauty, rawer, more compact and more efficient.
Efficient? What a horrible business term to use for art! But I see so much art where effort and sheer volume are not in relation to the impact. It’s saddening to think of the warehouses full of installations not on display. A good painting in storage is still a good painting, an installation in storage is just stuff.
And one more thing, now that I seem to be ordering a new art: could this new art be less noisy, literally? On my latest visit to the SMAK in Gent, Belgium, I really could have used some earplugs.

Talk about memes. Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Indiana, Keith Haring.

I think Roy Lichtenstein -such a small step from Superman to Mondrian-, Robert Indiana and Keith Haring really helped in making art accessible. But I have noticed that Jeff Koons and Andy Warhol are not household names outside the art world. In the end the flirtation with pop culture, the blurring of the distinction between high and low art has not helped art to escape its gravity field.
Think of high art as a geostationary satellite. Way out there it can send back its observations. But when it comes too close it just gets pulled in and crashes into banality.

By its nature, modern art is experimental and therefore difficult to understand. It is not the lack of communication for me that is often a problem in appreciating today’s art, it is the failed attempt at communication. Someone is trying to tell me something, but I don’t know what, and in the meantime I can’t get lost in my own thoughts because someone is shouting at me.
In a previous post I wrote that artists are too eager to explain their art. Art as a means to convey something to the public that the artist already knows or thinks. Matthew Collings is not a bad critic at all, he wrote a very good article about meaninglessness in art: http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/32421/the-known-unknowns/

So, paradoxically, for me art communicates better when it tries not to.

Art as a black hole: the artist

Part 3 in the series Art as a black hole.

There is a passage in Frank Zappa’s Roxy and Elsewhere, where Zappa introduces percussionist Ruth Underwood: “Ladies and Gentlemen, watch Ruth. Right now Ruth is thinking what she can possibly do that will amaze the audience”.
Ruth Underwood was amazing, but I often think about this passage when I look at art.

The world expects artists to be visionaries and a semi magicians, but the search for the best one can do as an artist is agonizing and comes with many insecurities and failures.
An artist should not even think about what he can possibly do that will amaze the audience. To quote Philip Guston again: “I wanted to amaze myself”. One of the best quotes of an artist I ever read. It’s one of the best attitudes an artist can have.

But the artist can talk and write, and should do that a lot. Not to explain his art, but to carve out the areas that can be put into words, ideas that don’t need to become art. Artists should talk and write to get feedback, and to reach outside the art world. I don’t believe in the artist who only has his art as a means of expression. If that was true, there would be a lot of paintings of shopping lists.

Art as a black hole: the art world.

Part 4 in the series Art as a black hole.

The art world to me is everything and everyone that is in some way involved in art, minus the artists. Think of museums, schools, media, governments, galleries, critics, curators.

I can’t say there is lack of effort from the art world to promote art. Most museums have educational programs nowadays and are active on the internet. The BBC every now and then brings brilliant documentaries. Alan Yentob for example has done some great interviews with artists like Chuck Close -a verbal genius- and Gilbert and George in his series Imagine. The BBC is a positive exception. If you take television as the litmus test for the effectiveness of all these efforts, the art world has once again collapsed in on its own gravity.

Well, I can write a long essay of things that go wrong in the communication between the art world and its potential public, but frankly I am a little bit bored myself with the critical tone of this series. I still need to vent some anger, but I’ll keep it short.

What to do if you really don’t want art to be better understood

Writing:
-Write texts like:
The exhibition  explores distinct artistic practices engaged with notions of conceptual craft and intuitive industry. It seeks to collapse the persistent dichotomy between the practical and the intellectual, and presents a range of works that refuse the binary of concept and form.
-Write an elaborate description of a painting and show the picture of another.
-Assume everybody knows who or what you’re writing about.
-Offer no context.

Museums
-Be hip. It’s like a 61 year old using 16 year olds slang.
-Only show one small picture on your website because you’re afraid people won’t come to the museum.
-Open up your collection online with only a search field that returns 1000 irrelevant results.
-Offer no context.

Television
-Allow your film crew to get all artsy when making an art documentary.
-Talk about artists on a first name basis (really, I’ve seen this happen on TV).
-Accompany your documentary with modern music (Don’t get me wrong: I love modern music).
-Assume everybody knows who or what you’re talking about.
-Offer no context.

Curators and art officials
–Be really bitchy to artists who are the basis of your government funded job.
-Wear a paisley choker nonchalantly around your neck when interviewed and look really bored.
-Write quasi philosophical texts to impress your colleagues with your intellectual prowess.
-Offer too much context.

HTML

HTML used to be a simple markup language to put things in the right place. Today it is a complex markup language to put things in the right place.

Monet as a problem?

Claude Monet: Waterlilies, Green Reflection, Left Part 1916-1923; Orangerie, Paris

Monet as a problem? How can the most sunny, most painterly painter of all painters be a problem?

In the past decades philosophers have had a big influence in the art world as curators or as writers about art. Artists with a strong connection to philosophy were hot, and emerging artists started to use words like identity and sublime in their interviews and writings.
Google “Philisophy” and “art” and the typical philosophers artists will appear: Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, René Margritte, Joseph Kosuth. What binds artists like Warhol and Duchamp is that they are nice empty shells to project your own philosophical views upon. Margrittes “ceci n’est pas une pipe” represents the art that makes you think about art and reality.

Monets work is nearly a 100% visual. It’s colourful, tactile, painterly. There is nothing that makes you think.  If anything, you stop thinking. Yet I would not qualify Monet’s work as shallow. The moment that you stop thinking while looking at a Monet is more the moment that you think you stop thinking. It’s just your brain that says “I need some time alone” to your consciousness and wanders off. When it comes back it has met some other people and has new stories to tell.

I feel that visual, tactile art like Monets work is a problem for philosophers, and the reason why they concentrate on the very literal works of art. The word literal here is literally literal, as philosophers often favour art that contains text. I know this is a very broad statement, but in the end this conceptual approach to art has led to musea full of works that are maybe intellectually challenging, but are visually uninteresting. A  party without invitations.

I think there is a more powerful force at work when we are using our eyes, the visual is not a language with precise grammar and meaning. It can be -think of traffic signs- but art can go way beyond that. I miss that in art nowadays. The artists themselves are too eager to tell what their work is about, they want to show the public this or that. Well, write it down if you want to convince somebody.

When Philip Guston broke with already traditional abstract expressionism he said: “I wanted to amaze myself”. Every artist should want to amaze himself. If they succeed -it takes courage- they will also amaze the audience. Specific subject matter does not have to be a hindrance in this: think of Gustons Ku Klux Klan drawings and paintings. Still amazing works in my opinion.

Art is free. Art has the power to open up a freedom in the mind, let it wander. Art that tells one what to see or think is not art, it’s advertising. The artwork should not be the view in the artists mind, it should be a thick wall of reinforced concrete between the artist and the viewer. At the same time it should break down walls in the head of the artist and of the viewer.

Philip Guston, Jail, 1969

Death of Marat and SUV’s

Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat (1793)

I had seen the painting Death Of Marat (1793) by Jacques-Louis David long before I decided to find out what the story was about.
The painting depicts a man in his bath, blood and a knife on the floor suggest he was murdered. The large black space above Marat evokes a sense of contemplation and tragedy.
Please read about Marat somewhere else (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Marat). The bottomline is that Marat was a ruthless murderer.

With this knowledge, can you ever look at the painting with the same eyes as before? Can you completely separate morality and aesthetic experience? Kant wrote about this. To him beauty and morality were comparabale values.

I think of morality as a complex system of beliefs and feelings that is probably partly embedded in our brains through evolution.
Opinion is another thing, it is specific and more subject to change. What influence does opinion have on aesthetic experience? An example from a personal point of view.

I don’t drive a car, I was never really that interested in cars. When the environment became a big issue, I had a pretty good reason not to drive cars. Well, a much better reason than lazyness and a fear that my motoric skills are not suited for driving. Most cars I find ugly, and the cars I do like are usualy vintage, so from before the time the world became massively aware of the environment.

Somewhere in the 80’s, early 90’s, the newspapers were full of alarming articles about the environment. I was also the time SUV’s or space wagons as they were called became popular. I couldn’t believe that people were so selfish that they would ignore the general interest above their need to impress the neighbours. Looking at a SUV was looking at pure evil.

You saw it coming: let’s look at it from another perspective. I am almost two metres tall (6’6″) and that’s probably one of the reasons that most cars are a bit of a joke to me: I simply don’t fit. The scale looks all wrong like they should have a handlebar on the roof so you can carry your car when you feel like walking.

All disadvantages of a SUV are indirect: fuel economy, parking space, road space, price. Take these away and no one would ever buy a smaller car. And that’s the reason most normal cars are ugly: they are so clearly a result of compromise.

An art historian once said that there are no ugly airplanes. I agree. So what about warplanes? They are the result of  man’s inability to accept each others differences, and our limitations. Warplanes should be the most ugly things in the world if there is a connection between morality and beauty. Yet I nearly got tears in my eyes when I first saw a picture of  the B2 spirit stealth bomber, and not because I was so sad: it was absolute beauty. And I can name a few other absolutely beautiful warplanes: the A-10Thunderbolt, the SR-71 Blackbird and the MIG 29.

Is beauty immoral, or does the appreciation for cleverness, for quality outrank morality? When I am forced to answer who my favorite living artist is, I have to confess it is Jeff Koons. Yet his approach to art represents everything I resent in art: irony, art as a comment on art, the flirtation with popular culture. But he does it so well that I can’t resist it.  Maybe there is a connection between beauty and morality, but something that others may call the sublime overrides it.

Back to Davids Death of Marat. I can’t look at it without thinking about its history, without thinking about David as a war collaborator. I have already found out that I am capable of admiring morally dispicable things, so it must be that the painting simply is good, but not hood enough.

Quote I heard lately: the sublime is a matter of quantity.

Brilliant moments in mainstream movies

Some movies I remember only for one scene, one idea, or an atmosphere. For the rest these movies can be bad, average or sometimes even good, but the one scene makes me remember them for ever. The articles about these scenes are filed under the category good movie scenes.

Of course I am not the only one to write about this:
http://io9.com/5510050/when-a-bad-movie-has-one-incredibly-great-scene
and
http://jeffwinbush.com/2010/06/12/bad-movie-good-scene/

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Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972)

There are many memorable scenes in this great movie. From childhood of course I remember the “duelling banjo’s”, but when I saw this movie again I was most moved by the scene where the group of four finally launch their canoes. It is a beautiful idyllic scene that gives a great sense of freedom and boyish joy.

A few years ago I canoed, no,  kayakked  in Belgium with my colleagues from work. It started out as a touristy thing with crappy gear, but soon I found myself practically alone, gently floating down a small river with trees on the banks, sunny reflections in the water and kingfishers flashing by. It was the extended version of that scene from Deliverance.

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Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)

I love the street scenes in Blade Runner. It was hard to extract a nice shot that says it all. Although a lot of effort has gone in the design of the street scenes, apart from the beginning none of the shots  explicitly say: this is what the future looks like. They just provide the atmosphere, the background for the story.  This works so much better than trying to explain everything.

Blade runner is a great movie to watch on DVD, and pause the scenes all the time to see how much detail there is in most of the shots.

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Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan (1984, Hugh Hudson)

When this movie is on television the tv guide of my intellectual newspaper always gives it the same bad review about the movie being vague. This is exactly what appeals to me. There are strange jumps in the storyline, the characters of The Sixth Earl of Greystoke and Capitaine Phillippe D’Arnot are nicely absurd, and of course Tarzan himself is ambiguous in his humanity.
There are several great scenes in the movie: Ian Holm as D’Arnot being totally frozen when the natives attack the expedition, Tarzan who perfectly imitates animals and posh English accents. The scene that stands out for me is when Tarzan is in a museum of natural history. In the next shot, he bursts out a door into the fresh air. I always think of that scene when I feel confined.

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Independence Day (1996, Roland Emmerich)

Visual perfection: the giant spaceships hovering over the cities. Strange thing is that I am sure I dreamt of this long before the movie came out, including the concave top of the spaceships.

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Alien (1979, Ridley Scott)

Not the drooling alien or the belly piercing baby alien or the beautiful Sigourney Weaver or the in another way beautiful leathery face of John Hurt, but the casual atmosphere when the crew wakes up is what struck me most. Smoking, teasing, complaining about food and money. Before this, space crews in SF were always depicted as highly organised, almost robotic people.  You can almost hear the scriptwriter thinking: let’s not do that this time.

Sigourney Weaver as Ripley and one of four cats as Jones (Jonesy).

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Truman Show (1998, Peter Weir)

Boat hits horizon. No need  to put this evident metaphor into words.

 

Géricault

I found some images from paintings and drawings by Géricault in my images folder. His “The raft of the Medusa” (1818-1819) is a painting that is often on my mind. It is not in my top ten list of most beautiful paintings, and technically it is a bit of a failure because Géricault used bitumen that is slowly turning the colors black.

So why is the painting so often in my mind?

On july 2 1816 the french frigate Méduse with 400 men and woman on board, ran aground about 90 kilometres off the coast of Mauretania. The 6 longboats of the Méduse could only carry 250 people. On july the 5th 147 peole were put on a makeshift raft in an attempt to reach the shore. The longboats would tow the raft, but soon they cut the lines when the raft partially submerged.

On July 17, 1816, the raft was rescued by the Argus, wich was part of the convoy the Medusa belonged to. Only 15 people had survived. The news of the shipwreck caused a scandal in France. The captain of the Medusa was inexperienced and incompetent, and had got his assignment for political reasons.

Today, when we see a painter depicted in a movie, he has wild eyes, full of concentration. Nothing can stop him from his urge to paint, the emotion is slapped onto the canvas without intervention.

So there is Géricault -no movies yet- maybe truly outraged at the scandal, maybe truly driven by the desire to make a name for himself with a scandalous painting on a scandal. His approach to his subject was meticulous. He spoke with survivors, made a scale model of the raft, and went to the morgue to study corpses and limbs. Before he started the final painting of about 5 x 7 metres Géricault made numerous studies and drawings .

There is no slapping of emotions on the canvas here. How can you stay truly angry and outraged for more than 1 1/2 years? In the end, everything must have turned into a formal problem to solve. How to draw attention to that tiny spot that is the Argus? Where to leave that body and does it look dead enough?

And yet the painting IS dramatic, is doesn’t take much effort to become moved by it nearly 200 years later.  At the same time you can enjoy the cool, intelligent approach to the painting.

Géricault is not the wild eyed artist from the movies. Had he lived today, he may have been the director of one.  His version of Titanic I would have loved to see.

A small sign of change?

The most remarkable news this week is that in America a law is going to pass that will limit loud volume of tv ads.

In 1991 I lived in New York for a year, and in the almost two decades after that all the advertising techniques that I saw there found their way to Europe. It killed television.

Is this law a sign that the power of advertising has reached its limit?