The Jackdaw

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  • The spin of art

    The spin of art

    Michael Daley describes how the main players in State Art have taken spin to a new level.

    Many people remain in awe at the legendary manipulative means by which the political spinmaster, Alastair Campbell, delivered to successive New Labour governments the media coverage they craved. What is not sufficiently appreciated is that compared with art world practitioners of those dark arts, Campbell was an also-ran. Some years ago, when our critical comments on the restoration of a Turner at the Tate were reported in a newspaper, we received a phone call at home from the gallery’s director, Nicholas Serota, demanding to know why we were, as he put it, “so hostile” to his gallery. When we asked why his conservation staff had been less than frank on the radical nature of their restoration, he rang off abruptly, but we knew that he knew that our card had been marked. Discussing the incident with colleagues, we learned that such seemingly intimidating phone calls to critics were common.

    Serota’s thin-skinned combativeness led him to invite the dealer, Jay Jopling, on to a “secret Tate committee” to change then prevalent press coverage of trendy contemporary art. Jopling later disclosed how, to thwart negative accounts, the tabloid press were fed a stream of colourful stories that presented these artists not as incompetents but as larky, larger-than-life characters, who made big waves without ever taking themselves seriously. Arts correspondents were invited to see the “Biggest fish and chips in the world” at a preview of Damien Hirst’s shark tank at which journalists were plied with paper cones of posh French fries. Tate-friendly art critics on broadsheet newspapers set about persuading their editors that attacking avant-garde artists made their papers look down-market and “tabloid”. The ploys worked: instead of incredulous “You call this art?” coverage, newspapers were flooded with entertaining tales of whacky new art world celebs “having a larf” at The Establishment and getting rich to boot. At the posh end of Fleet Street distinguished columnists who wrote critical articles were precisely blocked by editors fearful of “looking tabloid”. The scene was set for British Junk Art to go global – as Christie’s quickly appreciated.

    By neutralising the provocations of public sector artists making their names by spitting in the eyes of the public, those artists were turned successively into household names; art market powerhouses; national treasures; and even “iconic” public mascots fit to meet prime ministers and the Queen. If bigging-up art markets counts as a success, for the individual spinmaster the ultimate triumph is turning institutional calamities into perceived triumphs. In this department the Tate is the clear field leader. It boasts no fewer than a dozen press and PR staff, and no fewer than 16 “directors” when, in reality there is only one – Sir Nicholas Serota, who has honed art promotional skills throughout his presently 26 years-long reign of tenure.

    The most audacious conversion occurred in 2002 at a moment of great crisis at the Tate. As we described here in 2011-12, in 1994 two Turner paintings had been stolen in 1994 when lent to an insecure regional arts centre in Germany (see Michael Daley, “Ransom or Reward?” Jackdaws 99, 100 & 101). The Tate had taken the insurance money (£24m) and invested it so as to be able to buy back the paintings on their recovery. However, on the insistence of a Government Treasury minister, Paymaster General Geoffrey Robinson, the insurers were bullied into accepting less than a third of that insurance money and accrued interest in exchange for the Tate’s right to have the paintings on their recovery. This netted the Tate £22m at the insurers’ expense. It was done, the Minister said, to help meet Tate Modern’s rising building costs. Out of this ill-gotten windfall the Tate paid a £3m+ gangsters’ ransom demand.

    Although the paintings had been sent to Germany on Serota’s personal instruction without an accompanying courier, the task of recovering them was given to Sandy Nairne, the Tate’s Director of Programmes who was responsible for administrative restructuring in preparation for Tate Modern’s opening. Nairne, disappointed not to have been given the directorship of Tate Modern, left the Tate to become director of the National Portrait Gallery. In 2011 he published a remarkably informative book (Art Theft and the Case of the Stolen Turners) on the eight-year-long recovery operation. At one point, with half the ransom paid, one of the Turners had been recovered and secretly returned to Britain. Nairne wanted to release the news. Serota refused on the grounds that by holding back until both were recovered it would be possible to achieve a spectacular publicity coup. Hitherto, Serota said, most of the Tate’s “positive” press coverage had not been real news but “merely promotional material”.

    However, there was a serious threat to a first-ever genuine Good-News Story. As Nairne put it, “…someone had talked to the senior crime writer on the Mail on Sunday. He had heard that the painting was back in London… It was imperative to have help with press inquiries… On Nick’s advice, we brought in press consultant Erica Bolton.” (Readers of Jackdaws 112-115 will recall that Bolton & Quinn Ltd was called in at the tiny Serpentine Gallery to help its five-strong press department throttle imminent press coverage of The Jackdaw’s disclosure that astronomically high salaries were being paid to the gallery’s two directors.)

    The Tate’s top brass were groomed to deflect hard journalistic questions should news of the partial recovery get out. To the straight question “How much has this operation cost Tate?” the ideal answer was to be: “The combined costs over eight and a half years including insurance, travel, legal fees and investigative expensive accounts amounts to just over three and a half million pounds. Tate took on the additional costs for the investigation when it acquired the title of the two works in 1998.”

    This answer (almost identical to one given to ArtWatch UK by the Tate’s then Chairman, Lord Myners) concealed the reality that the “additional costs” comprised the £3.1m ransom payment to gangsters, permission for which had been sought and given at a secret High Court hearing. In response to an imminent threat of exposure in the Mail on Sunday and an already published damaging disclosure by Geoffrey Robinson that the Tate was pursuing connections with a “particularly nasty bunch” of Serbian gangsters, Bolton drafted a press release in November 2000. It read:

    “There has been much speculation over the years about the whereabouts of two paintings by Turner stolen in Frankfurt in 1994. And like the authorities in Germany, Tate has always been interested in any serious information which might lead to their recovery. But currently there is no new information, nor are there any current discussions being conducted. Of course, I remain hopeful that one day the paintings might return to the Tate. Nicholas Serota, Tate Director.”

    On the strictest possible usage, the last point was true: the already recovered Turner had not yet been returned to the Tate – instead, it had been hidden in a commercial store. Nairne does not say whether or not the Tate flatly denied the claims to the Mail but, either way, the subterfuge worked: the well-sourced and accurate story did not appear and the “Genuinely Good News Story” was broken at a triumphant press conference two years later on recovery of the second Turner.

    One of the commonest sources of museum world controversy (and therefore of PR spinning) is picture restoration. Another is attacks on works. On July 20th, 2011 we reported on the Artwatch UK website that the day before two Poussin paintings were attacked at the National Gallery. An artist visitor to the Tate who complained to a warder about people standing in front of paintings while having their photographs taken, was told that this was now allowed because staff cut-backs made it impossible to enforce the gallery’s own rules. Children had been reported treating a Donald Judd work as a climbing frame.

    When a visitor defaced a Mark Rothko painting at Tate Modern with a permanent marker pen on October 7th, 2012 a spokeswoman minimised the attack: “We can confirm that at 15.25 this afternoon there was an incident at Tate Modern in which a visitor defaced one of Rothko’s Seagram murals by applying a small area of black paint with a brush to the painting.” When the work was returned last month after the restoration the spin was different. The Guardian reported that “Tate Modern yesterday revealed the successful results of one of its most difficult restoration projects.” All restorations are spun in such terms. Restorers have been drilled by their trade associations on planting Good News Stories of miraculous discoveries and recoveries made during restorations. (The British Museum, under Neil MacGregor, Serota’s only, if less abrasively prominent, rival-in-spin, has run courses for restorers with co-opted professional arts journalists advising on the planting of restoration stories in the media.) The Tate issued a press release to a Turner exhibition that presented a restoration-wrecked picture, which had lost one of its two steamboats, as the star of the exhibition. On the Rothko incident, Serota duly described the Tate’s restoration team as one of the best in the world but on the laxness of Tate security he was unrepentant: “It is very important for us not to turn into Fort Knox. We are a gallery not a prison.”

    Although Serota’s loyal lieutenants come and go at the Tate (Sandy Nairne, as mentioned, to the National Portrait Gallery, and, in 2010, Stephen Deuchar, the director of Tate Britain, to the Art Fund) they are not necessarily lost to the gallery ideologically or financially.  Deuchar now serves as director of the Art Fund under a chairman, David Verey, who was previously the chairman of the Tate’s board. Shortly before leaving the Tate for the Art Fund, Verey advised Serota to get more funding for already-bought paintings by Chris Ofili, so as to reduce the embarrassing proportion being paid by the Tate for a mass purchase of one of its own trustees’ works.  Serota did so by applying for assistance to the Art Fund – against its clearly stated rules – for a cool £75,000, which he was given under the new chairmanship of Verey. When the hugely embarrassing news of this improper payment broke, Serota offered to pay the money back, but the Art Fund said it could be kept, notwithstanding the breach of its rules.

    When Deuchar arrived at the Art Fund in January 2010, he promptly announced a new ideological broom: money would no longer be used exclusively to help buy important works of art for the nation: “I have ideas for taking the Art Fund [previously known as the National Art Collections Fund] in new directions” – one being “investing in people, alongside objects” (emphasis added).

    At Deuchar’s leaving party at the Tate, Nicholas Serota said to him: “We feel that our friendship to you will be amply repaid.” In January 2010, the Guardian’s Charlotte Higgins noted: “The gallery has just announced that it has been able to buy eight beautiful (if disturbing) William Blake works on paper… with the help of a £141,000 grant from the Art Fund, now run by Stephen Deuchar [who] stepped down as director of Tate Britain in December, with Nicholas Serota, overall director of Tate, quipping that they expected to be the happy recipients of the charity’s largesse. And so, reader, it has come to pass – just a little bit quicker than expected.”

    If the Tate was not disappointed financially, nor will it have been disappointed ideologically as Deuchar pushed at a door already ajar. In 2001 the ‘conceptualist’ Martin Creed was awarded the Tate’s £20,000 Turner Prize for a “work” consisting of nothing other than a device to switch lights on and off continuously. When Madonna handed over the check at the Tate award ceremony, she said: “I want to support any artist who not only has something to say but who has the balls to say it.” Creed seems to have taken her literally: in 2005 he sold 800 variously sized balls to the Scottish National Gallery for Modern Art for £31,500, of which the Art fund contributed £11,500. As the Art Fund puts it today, Creed’s balls had been assembled so as to “roll free for the viewer to interact with.”

    Last year Creed’s prices received a hike: the Art Fund gave the Tate £40,000 to help buy a £122,000 “work” called Lights Going On and Off, the very work with which Creed had won the 2001 Turner Prize. Thus, in little more than a decade, a work which consists of nothing but is now described by the Art Fund as being “widely considered to be the signature work of one of the best known artists of his generation”, has been “saved” for the nation. On top of the money, the Art Fund generates Tate-friendly promotional literature for Creed by publishing an interview with him by Michael Craig-Martin, a former Tate and a present Art Fund trustee.

    On the back of such in-depth, officially endorsed vacuity, Christies feel emboldened to offer another version of Creed’s on-off work at a sale on July 1st with a guide price of £70,000. For this, a purchaser would receive nothing other than a certificate of “authenticity” giving permission, as Chris Hastings reported in the Mail on Sunday (June 8th, 2014), to use the idea. Copyright law holds that it is not possible to steal ideas, only a particular means of their expression or realisation. Anyone buying this work will, therefore, acquire the valueless part – the idea – but not its historically unique original means of expression (at the Tate). As we were quoted by the Mail as saying, this is “only art in the narrow, loopy confines of the modern contemporary art establishment. Christie’s are just selling pretentious junk to chumps who want to buy into ‘cool’”. Christie’s can of course shrug off all criticisms: on this basis the auction house will be able to sell certificates of authenticity on any of Creed’s hundred of works. Any number of people might wish to pay to buy permission to run up and down the Tate’s Duveen galleries, or to screw up A4 sheets of paper, or ring lots of bells simultaneously. State-sponsored art hype might strike many as state-sponsored tripe, but when combined with the hype of art market institutions it produces perfect money-making machines that can extract wealth from notions as ineffably precious as the licensed fictive possession of a past event.

    In May, Stephen Deuchar explained at a Mellon Centre conference that, although founded to buy traditional art forms, the Art Fund would now pursue newer concepts and had “generously funded” a Martin Creed project. As seen, it has funded many already. Coinciding with Christie’s July auction, Creed’s works are running at the Quay Arts Centre in Newport between June and September in a so-called “Artist Rooms” travelling exhibition. This follows another such at the Tate earlier this year which consisted of… lights going on and off. This Artists’ Rooms series of touring exhibitions is specifically aimed at inducting young people “primarily those aged 13-25” into the delights of modernism. Art world PR does not come darker or more blatantly propagandistic than this. The scheme was created with works donated by the dealer Anthony d’Offay and funded by the Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland on the express purpose of “engaging young people with the art of our time [sic] in order to inspire future generations.” Creed was not part of the scheme but, in order to be so, he donated a roomful of works in 2008, including… his lights going on and off. The Art Fund website promotes the present exhibition as: “Bringing together his works…[so as to offer] audiences the opportunity to experience Creed’s witty, joyful vision of the world around us.” That’s as maybe – but the hype does not disclose how much this latest “investment in people” has cost. Creed was given a retrospective show at the Hayward Gallery this year, called “What’s the point”. When asked what the point of the show was, Creed replied that he doesn’t know. Mandarins and auctioneers of the Tate-stream of contemporary art will know only too well.

     Michael Daley

    The Jackdaw, 2014

     

     

  • William Orpen reappraised

    Painter John Nutt reappraises the forgotten and routinely maligned William Orpen.

    Largely for historical and religious reasons, the Irish have been persistently marginalised in British society. Orpen was the youngest of five children of a prosperous Irish Protestant solicitor. He was born in 1878 in Oriel House, Grove Avenue, Stilorgan near Dublin, where he enjoyed a comfortable middle class Irish childhood. He became a stateless dissident in spite of his wealth and knighthood and he is arguably the most significant artist that Britain produced at the start of the 20th century. Recently there has been some revival of interest in his work. Re-visiting WW1 in 2014 it seems appropriate to look hard at Sir William Newenham Montague Orpen, KBE, RA, RHA.

    Orpen came back to public attention when a painting of Yvonne Aubicq, entitled The Refugee, was discovered by Rupert Maas on BBC Antiques Roadshow. This portrait of Orpen’s war mistress was a copy of the original painting entitled The Spy in the Imperial War Museum. A Roadshow spin-off recording the copy’s discovery is available on YouTube. The original painting caused the artist considerable difficulty. He tried to get it past the official British army censor, Lt Col Lee, by inventing a story to justify a private painting completed whilst engaged as a war artist. He told a tale about a fictional female spy who was to be executed and who removed her greatcoat to expose her naked body in front of the firing squad, all nonsense. Unfortunately this was 1919, and as Mata Hari and Edith Cavell had just been executed, this poor judgement was distinctly awkward for Orpen. Facing a court martial, it was the intervention of his friend Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook (who had just established the War Artists’ Advisory Committee in 1918) that saved his career. It is thought that the recently discovered painting is a copy painted for Lord Beaverbrook.

    One hundred years on we have difficulty with all of Orpen’s oeuvre. Its slick, tense and formal representation appears superficial – it was produced at the same time as Duchamp’s readymades. The effortless skill belies the psychological depth of which Orpen was capable. In June 1916 Charles Masterman, Head of the War Propaganda Bureau, set up the war artists’ scheme at Wellington House. The printmaker Muirhead Bone was very anxious to avoid conscription and was sent to the Western Front as the first official war artist. Orpen was the fourth artist to be enlisted in 1917. He was given the honorary rank of major, and provided with an official car, a driver and an annual salary of £500. He could never have been conscripted as he was only five feet two. He set out with an intention to record what he saw and adhered with single-minded industry to the army remit, suspending judgement and recording truthfully what was in front of him.

    What distinguished Orpen from other war artists was his overall excellence and his work ethic: Augustus John did practically no work while Nevinson suffered emotional issues. Masterman insisted that the artists should have a free rein and Nevinson didn’t know what was expected of him. Masterman also believed that they should make  documents as well as propaganda. His intention was that the avant-garde would storm the moral high ground, but Orpen wasn’t exactly avant garde. This is a measure of a century of cultural decline. Who could be sent today: Carla Black, Jeremy Deller or Martin Creed? There is nothing of the moral outrage, spite or anger of Dix,  Beckman or Grosz in his war paintings, only a resigned acceptance which developed into total disillusionment. In contrast, Paul Nash declared that, as a war artist, “Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter message and may it burn their lousy souls”.

    Orpen also produced many official army staff portraits and after the war he became a successful and wealthy society painter, portraying British post-war aristocracy. Following his early death at the age of 52 in 1931 his reputation faded and was completely demolished by the personal attack of his wife’s nephew Sir John Rothenstein, Director of the Tate, who disliked him intensely. “I have seldom known any man, and never a man of superior talents, with so little intellectual curiosity and so feeble an intellectual grasp, or with so contemptuous an attitude towards the life of the mind as Orpen”, he wrote in Modern English Painters. Rothenstein’s father William had offered his services to the war artists’ committee but because of his German connections he was initially turned down.

    Orpen was limited, in Rothenstein’s view, by not having had a public school education. His war diary, An Onlooker in France, is difficult to read and rarely describes his real feelings, except for an identification with the ‘poor bloody infantry’. Recording his disillusion at the end of the book the mask slips when he expresses anger with ‘frocks’ (politicians) for the lack of sympathy they displayed for the millions of dead at the Versailles Peace Conference. Rothenstein complained that when he was a boy he often had to ask Orpen to repeat himself. He was difficult to make sense of, he spoke so rapidly. His childlike character meant that he never turned down the opportunity to participate in a children’s game. It is said that on one occasion when leaving the Hibernian Academy in Dublin with a group of worthies he set off at a run at the head of a group of children joining in their game of kicking a can down the street. At the age of twelve when he was sent to the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, going on to the Slade at seventeen so, encouraged by his mother, he had worked continuously as an artist from childhood. His lack of literacy according to Rothenstein emerged in gauche imagery, in the form of an Irish naivety that wasn’t understood or appreciated. The Harvest, The Western Wedding, The Holy Well and Sowing New Seed are examples of paintings that exhibit weird narratives which are in reality satires upon Irish allegories.

    Rothenstein’s assertion that he had “little intellectual curiosity” and that he was a poorly equipped Irishman incapable of engaging intellectually with the momentous tragedy of the Western Front is unfair. Few who witnessed WW1 at first hand had any intelligent grasp of what they experienced, least of all the Army staff officers whose lack of training, imagination and flexibility have since become a paradigm in English culture for intellectual inadequacy. It took the privileged public school scholarship of a Rupert Graves or Siegfried Sassoon to chronicle the tragedy of the war, but Orpen succeeded in recording it dispassionately in images. Poor working class infantry had all left school at 12, so Orpen’s education may have been deficient but it was standard. His nephew also informs us that he was visually handicapped, that he had protanopia, a red deficiency which affects 1% of the male population. Some authorities assert that Orpen tried to compensate for this as his career progressed. Rather than paint what he saw, as other colour-blind artists have done, he exaggerated colours, and this may have been a necessary compensation as displayed in the colourful effects he used in some of his later portraits. His portraits of Dame Madge Kendal, Mrs Thomas Howarth and Mrs Charles Hughes are examples of a lurid and acrid palette. Rothenstein cites four elements as evidence of his failure as an artist (i) an Anglo-Irish family (ii) an exceptionally happy childhood (iii) a lack of formal education and (iv) attendance at art school whilst still a child. He asserts quite wrongly that while Orpen regarded Irish politicians with affection he never expressed admiration for any English public figures apart from Lord Derby. His main friends were Irishmen, gallery owner Hugh Lane and novelist George Moore, and that he was also quite incapable of reading anything serious. Rothenstein also repeats that he resented growing up because it led to disillusion with the world. This makes no allowance for the alienating experience of WW1.

    When not painting staff officers’ portraits, Orpen was recording devastated landscapes. Zonnebeke (opposite) is one of the greatest paintings to emerge from the trenches, and it proves that he could create a heart-breaking image when required – but, necessarily, portrayal of the general staff took precedence. Rothenstein maintains that Orpen was in the top ten draughtsmen that Britain has produced but both his imagination and his originality were second class. If Orpen could do anything he could draw as accurately as any renaissance master. Proof of this great ability as a draughtsman is demonstrated in On the Irish Shore (1910), a drawing containing all the elements of his character; the whimsical Irishness, the superb skills and the characterisation. One has only to compare his war portraits with those of his contemporaries, Sir John Lavery or Augustus John, to see that Orpen’s are more astute and concise in realisation. Grudgingly, Rothenstein admits to Orpen’s prodigious industrial-scale output, his meticulous craftsmanship and his capacity for a punishing work schedule.

    According to Rothenstein, Orpen was fortunate to attend the Slade at its zenith alongside Wyndham Lewis, Ambrose McEvoy, Augustus John and Edna Waugh (Lady Edna Clarke-Hall). Once there, he regularly drew into the early hours. He was taught by Wilson Steer, Henry Tonks and Fred Brown and it was here that according to Rothenstein he produced his only masterpiece “full of whimsy and eclecticism”, The Play Scene from Hamlet. This painting is a contrived student work, a confused old master rehash, yet according to Rothenstein it marks the summit of his career because of its numerous references to other great artists. By contrast, The Mirror (1900) is an honest painting. It is the portrait of a lover Emily Scobel, a Slade student whom Orpen was briefly engaged to but who had refused to marry him (she said he was too ambitious) and whom he abandoned for marriage to Grace Knewstub in 1901. Orpen laboured at the Slade with a draughtsman’s dedication that is inconceivable by today’s standards. George Lambert wrote: “Orpen draws with just the same accuracy a turnip, a horse, or a complicated arrangement of figures… He is a very methodical, business-like Irishman, despising the word ‘art’, and having no use for the word ‘genius’.” Rothenstein argued that his career declined after leaving the Slade. Orpen was content to make straightforward representations of the human figure and the face his main concern, and any intellectual preoccupations he treated as so much pretence.

    Rendered incoherent by the war he was ultimately a tragic figure of huge skill and talent who could not express what he could not verbalise. This tragedy according to Rothenstein resulted in tasteless and incoherent images such as The Thinker on the Butte at Warlancourt, derived from Rodin, Adam and Eve at Peronne, Harvest, Bombing Night and To the Unknown Soldier in France. In short, Orpen’s tragedy was cognitive dissonance, a disconnect between the expression of the life of feeling and an over-obsession with observed sentimentality, an Irishman who worked as an Englishman with no deep roots. He was manually skilled rather than having a developed mind. He had no settled opinions or convictions and he lacked the means to form judgements with a enquiring and disciplined mind. Rothenstein had nothing but scorn for lesser intelligences and intellectuals and, horror, “he could not read Ruskin”! He argues that Orpen was brought up on the Irish question but was incapable of defining it and he always spoke in epigrams. This personal attack degenerates into farce when he says that Orpen, like avant-garde painting of the early 20th century had “rejected intellectual curiosity”. He sneers at Picasso for saying that he did not know what he was going to put on the canvas before he started work, and at modernists for preferring primitives, children, the insane and having contempt for the Italian Renaissance (this man was director of the Tate?). This demonstrates a complete ignorance of what is now considered a normal creative process.

    A hundred years on WW1 still arouses passion as the recent spat between the Education Secretary and history teachers has demonstrated, and there are few UK families who didn’t experience real grief. Whatever one’s beliefs, WW1 demonstrated a complete failure in the education and training of an entire generation. Ford Madox Ford, the grandson of Ford Madox Brown (who wrote pamphlets for Masterson’s War Propaganda Bureau e.g. When blood is their argument), is a primary source for understanding this cultural fragmentation through his novels The Good Soldier and Parade’s End. Rothenstein priggishly insists that since the whole of British society was involved in the war it was very unfair of Orpen to identify solely with the poor troops. Yet there is evidence that Orpen felt guilty that he occupied a privileged and protected role outside the conflict.

    Orpen’s visual honesty is unquestionable. One of his better portraits is that of Field-Marshall Lord Haig, whom we find difficult to view objectively. Whilst repeatedly professing in his memoirs his admiration for Haig, Orpen painted a slight, weak-eyed and limited character, a depiction of Haig which is superior to that of John Singer Sargent’s. Contrarily, he wrote expressing his great admiration for the ‘chief’. Sean Keating, President of the Hibernian Academy said:  “This mental clarity and hatred of evasion led, as time went on, to the extraordinary breadth, simplicity and conciseness of his later work; the method sinks entirely into the background, and what the picture says is as forcible and laconic, as emphatic and as authoritative, as the shot of a pistol.”

    It isn’t useful to think of Orpen as an Irish lickspittle, servile to over-privileged staff officers. It seems probable that Orpen wrote his war memoirs in a way that connotes respect for the class system he had to contend with, and it is probable that he was acutely sensitive to the contempt with which the Irish male was viewed by the English establishment. His memoirs hint that his English war service involved playing the role of the quaint Irish jokester. After the war he wrote: “Could anyone forecast the tragedy that has happened to so many of these men since? That great Field-Marshal Lord Haig, the man who knows, works for them still and asks – but who answers? Great God it makes one think, remember, think and wonder, what impossibly thankless people human beings are. It is sad but very, very true.”

    The painting he was commissioned to produce recording the Peace Conference had a difficult conception. His honesty caused public outrage with the changes he made to what became an anti-war gesture, Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors (1919), above. This War Museum commission entailed removing all the ‘frocks’ which he had spent nine months portraying and replacing them with naked flayed infantrymen in the excruciating style of his gauche Irish imagery. He then removed these in response to public protest to leave the Union Jack-draped coffin and entitled it To the Unknown Soldier in France, opposite. The artist sent this picture to the Royal Academy in 1923 where it created an uproar. The idea for the ‘unknown soldier’ wasn’t his, it was that of war chaplain David Railton, who had noticed a grave marked by a rough cross, which bore the pencil inscription ‘An Unknown British Soldier’. The War Museum commission had specified a group of statesmen and they refused to accept the final image. Orpen lost his huge fee of £3,000. It is for this anti-establishment gesture he is remembered. Fulfilling his duty throughout the war but sickened, burnt out and nauseated by the experience, he couldn’t portray the hypocrisy of the Peace Conference, that demanded severe reparation from Germany and arguably laid the foundations for WW2. The genesis of this painting according to Rothenstein showed the defects of his entire career “writ large”. This criticism is ridiculous as it is one of his few paintings which evolved and changed with mature reflection upon his experiences. He said at the time: “You must believe that I painted it in all seriousness and in all humility. I have satirised nobody, nor did I intend to set any problem. All the meaning is in the title of the painting.” The Literary Digest of June 9th, 1923 also reported this: “Who needs to be told nowadays about the keenness of Orpen’s eye, or about the skill and sureness of his hand? We know all about these, but we do not know what is in Orpen’s mind. This wonderful painting should help us to find out what Orpen thinks about the war. It is a cri de coeur.”

    Now, when our greatest source of anxiety is global terrorism, Orpen can be viewed as having rendered a service. What Rothenstein regards as his character flaws may have been his strengths. The integrity and capacity to tell the truth to an age that is saturated with visual fiction and Photoshopped manipulation may be his real legacy. There is beauty in his paintings of mine craters, abandoned trenches littered with corpses and skulls and the glaring white chalk of the Somme battlefields. He is sometimes referred to as the most Spanish of Irish painters because of his affinity with Velazquez and Goya whom he studied in the Prado in 1904. He also made self-conscious attempts to explain himself to himself through self-portraits just as Rembrandt had done, adopting different disguises and roles. These self-portraits have received academic attention from commentators such as Lucy Cotter and are viewed as first attempts to define a modernist identity. Five images sufficient to speak for him are Miss Muriel Gore, Portrait of Mrs Oscar Lewisohn, W.G. Bennett, Lily Carstairs and Zonnebeke.

    Rothenstein asserts that his many affairs, his issues with ill health contracted on the Western Front and alcohol and his early death, destroyed his family, particularly his wife Grace, whom he abandoned but never divorced. Rothenstein’s opprobrium was motivated by his parents’ antipathy to Orpen. This persists; even today he is dismissed in the Encyclopaedia Britannica as a somewhat superficial, facile artist who achieved great popularity in his day. It is only recently that Orpen’s paintings have begun to regain their true status. A portrait of Lady Idina Sackville (who was immortalised as the bolter in two novels by Nancy Mitford) was sold by Sotheby’s for a million pounds in 2013.

    Orpen’s dual nationality has been analysed by the revisionist Irish historian R F Foster who argued in 2005 that his bohemianism was the result of real tensions born of his inability to come to terms with his Irish-English heritage. Foster counters practically all of Rothenstein’s criticism with research based on Orpen’s own correspondence and his daughter Kit’s insistence that he always saw himself as Irish. Whilst he was from the protestant colonialist strand of Irish history he had a natural revulsion to the unfair treatment of the exploited Catholic majority. The passage in Orpen’s book Stones of old Ireland and Myself, which Rothenstein quotes to prove he wasn’t aware of what the Irish question was, says that there were thousands of Irish questions and he mentions dozens of the pertinent Irish political issues of his youth. He read widely on many levels and although he despised Yeats as pretentious he particularly loved John Millington Synge. This indicates how Irish he actually was. He introduced Hugh Lane to Manet and his Homage to Manet is a painting of someone reading about painting to a group of painters, one of whom is painting. His friendship with the novelist George Moore supported the idealistic notion of modern art as a gospel of liberation for the old Ireland. The allegorical paintings which are artistic failures, such as The Well or Sowing New Seed, are calculated parodies of Irish devotional religious imagery. The bitter Anglo-Irish war and Easter uprising utterly estranged him from Ireland. He was working in France during this period and he could not comment as he was preoccupied with WW1 horrors. He was damaged by the emergence of the new Ireland just as he was damaged by the war. Ireland was going through its own trauma of an emerging republic even at the time Orpen was painting his last portraits. Although nothing is simple with Sir William Orpen’s painting, it does give us a deep insight into the early 20th century British class system, from how the aristocracy saw themselves to the hell of the trenches. A clearer understanding of his art can be obtained from Old Ireland and Himself – William Orpen and the Conflicts of Irish Identity by Roy Foster, than from any of the spite that Rothenstein penned.

     John Nutt

    The Jackdaw, 2014

  • Grayson Perry’s 2014 Reith Lectures – a missed opportunity

    Patrick Cullen explains why Grayson Perry missed an opportunity by avoiding the important issues he claimed to be addressing.

    Grayson Perry was a surprising choice to deliver the Reith Lectures given the list of senior academics, elder statesmen and those at the top of their profession preceding him in the job. One wondered why, when it came to contemporary art it was decided to break with tradition and hand the spotlight to one of its middle ranking practitioners with no track record as an intellectual heavyweight. But many enjoyed the change. Think of the Reith lectures and people tend to think dry, dull and probably pompous to boot. With his pantomime outfit and, in the second talk, brandishing a whip, Perry was anything but boring. The jokes came thick and fast, the lectures were even called “Playing to the Gallery”. Perry may be no John Berger but he’s a lot smarter and more articulate than all those YBAs he is keen to distance himself from. What we lost was any sustained argument about the nature of contemporary art, what justifies it as art and why. More than anything Perry reminded me of a court jester, clever enough to make his audience laugh and to tease the powers that be with the odd dig, yet never forgetting that he is part of this modern day art circus which has been very good to him. He acknowledged this at several points, in a humorous self– deprecating way, encouraging others to join this world that even allowed him, a transvestite potter, into its ranks. A classic court jester moment came in the second lecture (he was even wearing what Sue Lawley described as a jester’s hat). He teased Nicholas Serota (who was in the audience) about the often expressed criticism that Serota’s personal tastes are determining to an excessive degree the nation’s purchases of contemporary art. “Impossible” said the Fool leaping to his King’s defence, he had been to Serota’s home and admired his extensive collection of Cliff Richard memorabilia. It was a swipe but a pretty gentle one.

    Lecture 2 was supposed to be the one where Perry really addressed what art is and what it isn’t and especially the boundary lines between the two. Introducing it Sue Lawley said “Today’s lecture will explore what the boundaries of art are. Can it really be anything we like from a pile of sweets to a soundscape?” This is difficult territory for any contemporary artist wanting to be seen as contemporary. Ever since Duchamp and his urinal the idea of trying to define art by putting boundaries round it has seemed increasingly old fashioned. Perry began by admitting that if you asked people in the art world to define art “there’d be a lot of eye rolling and sort of like – Oh God! – you know – Not that question again. Like it’s been answered … You know there’s a kind of complacent idea in the art world that anything can be art now… We’re in a state now where anything goes… But the thing is I think there are boundaries still about what can and cannot be art…”  I was beginning to warm to his theme. If the art world complacently thinks anything can be art, but Grayson doesn’t agree, perhaps he was going to tell us what those essential qualities are that distinguish art from the merely banal and common place. He informed us that he wanted to establish the boundaries of art a bit like in mediaeval times people marked the territory of their parishes by a primitive process called “beating the bounds” (the title of this 2nd Reith Lecture). Hence the whip.

    Just prior to listing what he saw as the boundaries beyond which things ceased to be art, he paused to imagine how “his friends in the art world” would laugh at him for wanting to establish the limits of art. “But,” parried Grayson rather pathetically, “I want to know when to put my art goggles on. I want to know when – you know – when I’m going to look at something as if it’s art”. This was quite a confession. Only by knowing when to put his art goggles on would he be able to start looking at something “as if it’s art”. The idea that real art might just possibly have the power to announce itself as art because it moved you, took your breath away, was amazingly beautiful or wonderfully thought provoking was not considered. No, Grayson needs to know when to put on his art goggles or he’ll be unaware of what’s in front of him, rather like all those museum sheep who have no idea how to judge a painting unless someone is distracting them via headphones with a lot of facts to reassure them that what they are looking at is indeed important art. I don’t believe for a moment that Grayson Perry is so insecure about his responses to art, so perhaps it was just a cleverly timed piece of humility to allow the audience to identify with him, for in all probability many of them would have been part of “ the headphones brigade”. Now, brandishing that whip, he would tell them how to recognize this thing called art, which even he has difficulty spotting without some special goggles. “Afterwards,” he assured them to much laughter, “you might know when you’re looking at a work of art and not just at some old rubbish”. There would be nine boundary markers or tests to help them in this task.

    Test number one: “Is it in a gallery or an art context?” LAUGHTER. Well, you had to laugh. It’s the equivalent of saying, a few decades ago perhaps, “if you’re not sure if it’s art, has it got a big gilt frame round it?” Or try this one: How do you know if someone is a criminal? Helpful test: are they in a prison? It might just have been an initial bit of farce before the more serious stuff, if so many of his other tests hadn’t turned out to be in a similar vein. Yes, statistically, pieces of visual art are quite likely to be found in art galleries – surprise, surprise – but this tells you nothing about what makes them art, or how to distinguish them from the things in art galleries that aren’t art.

    Test number two: started off as “Is it a boring version of something else?” This might have led into whether art has to be original which would have been a serious line of inquiry, but he left off before he’d started on this one and it morphed into…

    … Test number three: “Is it entertaining? If so it may not be art because art is a serious business.” Perry immediately mocks this test, telling us that it reminds him how the worst thing you can call an artwork is decorative – a bit of a leap that, but no doubt this is a jibe he must at some time have had to contend with himself, unfairly in my view. Then he says: “I think it’s a very noble thing to be decorative”. So we got a glimpse of Perry’s differences of opinion from the dominant art world views on what is proper art. Prejudices he has encountered as a mere potter being another one he touched upon. But these differences featured very little in this light-hearted tour of the contemporary art world’s boundaries. He pursued the idea that a sense of dullness and lack of pleasure, (he cites all those video installations with uncomfortable benches to sit on), might be a sign that we are looking at art. This clearly struck a humorous chord with his audience, but it was beginning to feel like a very unenlightening way of teaching us how to know if a piece of contemporary art merits that appellation. Was it all going to be jokes?

    Test number four: “Is it made by an artist?” This is clearly of no use either since it begs the question of what an artist is. If an artist is defined as someone who makes art but we haven’t yet establish what art is, looking for artists means we’re just going round in circles. Perry offers no new definition of an artist to help us out. Reading between his lines it looks like artists are people that this cosy art world he delights in belonging to, recognizes as artists. These boundaries, far from revealing anything, were beginning to sound like the already established parish boundaries of the self same art world whose judgements about art we wanted Grayson to explain. But there were no explanations, just a series of markers (e.g. – it’s in the Serpentine Gallery, it’s rather dull and it’s by Cornelia Parker, a known artist, ergo it’s probably art).

    Test number five: this boundary marker concerns the question: “Is  photography art?” If Perry had made a stab at a definition of art in the first place he might have been able to say whether a photograph could fit within it. But without ever nailing his colours to any mast he could only make more jokes; e.g. a photo might be art if the people in the photo aren’t smiling. Or: it might be art if it’s bigger than two metres and priced higher than five figures. Plenty of laughs but zero insight.

    Test number six: “The limited edition test.” Another crack of Perry’s whip to indicate another boundary to this thing called art. He points out, as if we didn’t know, that if something is part of an endless edition, it loses some of its monetary value by virtue of the laws of supply and demand, and then goes on to declare that therefore “it’s giving away part of its qualification as art”. He draws this conclusion as if it were obvious and says no more on the subject. Actually it’s not at all clear why, because there is more than one of it, an object should be deemed any less a work of art. Less expensive probably, but why less a work of art? This could have been an interesting discussion and one which would have touched upon many things: the importance of uniqueness for the art world, the problem of multiples, the conflation of artistic and financial worth and the ways by which the latter is protected. The criteria lying behind Perry’s tests were turning out to be uncannily in tune with the vested interests of the contemporary art world. Since Duchamp the notion that anything can be art may well have won the day in theory, but limits and boundaries there must be in order to protect art’s monetary value. Duchamp himself, authorised a limited edition of his urinal (which was originally a standard mass produced one – and an important point about it, being that it was just that). Nearly five decades after the first urinal had been destroyed and when it had become a legendary (but, alas, unmarketable) landmark in the history of the avant-garde, Duchamp, agreed, in total contradiction to the spirit of the original, that ceramicists (i.e. potters Perry reminded us) should hand make an edition of “his” urinal, each of which he personally “validated” as art, whilst excluding all similar extant urinals. There are eleven “genuine” “Duchamp urinals”, each worth somewhere around a million quid, essentially because Duchamp waved his wand at them. (Think about the magical powers invoked here. How gullible the world to fall for such brazen sophistry!). The artificial limit placed on an edition of an art work is a classic case of how the art world establishes its “parish” boundaries for good old financial reasons. Perry probed this not one bit.

    Test number seven: “Who’s looking at it and is there a queue?” More jokes about the kind of people who go to galleries and look at art. If there are a lot of people with beards and glasses and single speed bikes……etc. If so, and if there’s a queue (contemporary art being so popular) there might be some art involved. I laughed along with the audience for I’d long since given up gaining any insight into what the intrinsic qualities are that make something art.

    Test number eight: “The rubbish dump test” Perry explains: “Throw it on a rubbish dump and if people walking by notice that it’s there and say “oh what’s that artwork doing on that rubbish dump?” it’s passed.” For a moment I thought he was on to something. May be, just may be, one defining quality of an artwork is its capacity to arrest you, make you stop in your tracks and gaze in wonder or surprise or even just puzzlement. But no, once again Perry undercut this possible signifier by another joke which got a big laugh: many good artworks would fail this test because the rubbish dump itself might be the art work.

    This time I realised I wasn’t laughing too. It was too near the truth. Yes, it was now official, from no less an authority than the giver of the Reith Lectures: there is no way of distinguishing between art and rubbish, the very thing he had promised to enable us to do. So Perry in effect told us to forget the rubbish dump test, the only one so far I thought of any use. The really sad thing about all this was that so many people – in relation to any other field of enquiry, perfectly intelligent people – thought Perry’s lectures not just funny (they were that), but thought provoking and insightful too. Also sad was the fact that Perry can express views at odds with State Art orthodoxy, but apart from his words in praise of the decorative in art, he kept them to himself.

    Test number nine: “The Computer Art Test” Grayson cracked his whip for the last time. As if knowing he’d really dodged the question with his suggestion that we drew a venn diagram of all his tests and where they met in the middle is pretty well guaranteed to be art, Grayson finally threw in a just about plausible definition of art from a friend of his called Charlie Gere. Gere says that you might be able to distinguish between a piece of web art and just an interesting website as follows: “You know it might be art when it has the grip of porn without the possibility of consummation or a happy ending” Perry then expanded on this: “In other words it’s all about frustrating our urgent need to double click our way to satisfaction whether in the form of a joke, an opinion, a fact, a sale, or indeed an onanistic experience, and to detain and suspend us in a state of frustration and ambivalence and to make us pause and think rather than simply react.”

    Well, well! Here at last, in the final gasps of his lecture, was an attempt at a definition. It begs as many questions as it answers, but at least it’s a start. Had he begun any one of his four lectures with this provocative definition he might have moved on into an inquiry about the true nature of art and why, although quite a lot of things may be art (when manipulated creatively) most things, like urinals, are probably not. At least I’ve never met one that had the grip of pornography but which suspended me in a state of frustration and ambivalence. On the contrary they tend to facilitate double clicking one’s way to instant relief in the form of a much needed bladder evacuation. Perhaps that’s why they’re not art. And perhaps that’s why all those people who claim not to know much about art but who know what they like, would at least recognise when a guy like Duchamp was taking the piss.

    Patrick Cullen

    The Jackdaw, 2014

  • Charity vaunteth not itself … except sometimes

    Friend of the Royal Academy, James Birkin, believes the RA is neither open nor giving enough considering its charitable status; and overly concerned with business.

     

    It is said that a true friend will speak truth unto power. How sad then that the Friends of the Royal Academy are denied the chance to do just this. Recent correspondence with this writer indicates that the RA does not see the necessity to allow its loyal supporters the chance to meet and thereby influence policy. Were there to be meetings questions such as those below could be asked and addressed. Surely it is right that if the RA receives millions of pounds a year from the Friends and benefactors it should in turn listen to (and indeed act on) what Friends might wish to say.

    The RA is a charity that massively assists the interests of the Academicians who are also ultimately responsible for how it operates. This has been a way of doing things since its founding in 1768. Time and status have together conferred a degree of protection from closer examination. Certainly the impression one receives when visiting Burlington House is that of being admitted as a guest to a St James’s club. Yet this politeness seems also to conceal an exercise of very real power. After 250 years perhaps it is time to ask exactly what is the role of the RA in the 21st century.

    The obvious first answer is education. True to its name the Royal Academy has a school which has a discerning annual intake of 17 or so wholly funded students. The RA’s 2012 report also highlights substantial efforts to involve schools and colleges under the rubric ‘Academic Affairs’. Under this title it is interesting to note the academic facilities also available to Friends. These are generally at a cost and of course, as such, exclude the majority of the public. Whether these are better categorised as fund-raising events  or ‘academic’ is, therefore, not entirely clear. It might be a little unfair, but nevertheless interesting, to note that if there was an intake of 17 full-time students per year for three academic years the school would comprise 54 students. The turnover of the RA per student would then be approximately £39,000,000 (gross RA turnover)/54 = £722,000 per student per year. This takes no account of the unique position of the RA and its other functions. It also relates to turnover not profit, but, nevertheless, it highlights the relative lack of importance of the RA schools in the overall picture. The figure also does not take account of the usage of the schools for external Charity work and education. The RA refers to this in its annual report. However, the degree to which this happens is less clear and should be at least further explained.

    The second answer is that we also know the RA puts on exhibitions. These might be seen as part of the charitable objective of educating the public, although the steep cost of tickets makes one question whether this relates only to a wealthier public who don’t need charity.

    Finally, it confers great honours on mainly British artists by appointing them Academicians. Since the RA has charitable status this raises the question of what degree of concomitant responsibility for the wider artistic community should be placed on this privileged group. Given that the RA takes substantial benefits from the public purse, and is also crucially supported by its Friends, the way it operates is the subject of legitimate criticism.

    Leaving aside benefits such as paying small business rates and no corporation or income tax, in financial terms the RA generates income of over £30 million a year. Were it just an art school it would be horrendously expensive (the private Heatherley Art School in Chelsea, for example, manages a far larger student intake for well under a million). This implies that the justification of the RA needs to be placed on a rather broader plinth than simply the education of artists. It needs genuinely to reach, entertain and educate a wider public. It is undeniable that the RA has a huge fan club, not least amongst those who can afford to visit the shows, but how widespread the support is in other areas is debateable.

    In addition the RA differs from an ordinary school in having to maintain the Grade 1 listed building (which it occupies at the public subsidy of a peppercorn rent). This is clearly expensive but it hasn’t stopped the RA having extensive rebuilding ambitions or prevented pay rises to senior staff well above the rate enjoyed by those elsewhere in the public sector. So one suspects (perhaps as a tribute to the Chief Executive) that financially it is in robust shape.

    It also houses what is effectively an exclusive club of self-selected artists, sculptors and architects – the Royal Academicians (RAs). This small club (80 in number) is highly influential. In view of the financial receipts from outside sources the way it operates needs to be transparent. Sadly, opacity seems to be the tint of the day.

    The most glaring conflict is the enormous promotion of Academicians’ own work by the RA. By definition these are already successful artists. So can the degree by which their work is promoted really be seen as a charitable object?

    Promotion of RAs and their work to some degree is understandable and desirable since the RA needs an identity. What is harder to understand is the degree to which this happens. This leads back to the question of how the ‘club’ relates to the ‘charity’.

    I would venture to suggest that lines of demarcation are needed. Distinct areas of operation seem to be: the legitimate promotion of the RA and its work; the preservation of the identity of the RA; and ensuring that charitable objects have primacy. Then perhaps splitting charitable objects into more specific aims such as promoting the interests of art and artists at a lower level than the RA, educating at school level, educating at degree level, and last but not least  educating (and entertaining) the public. The raising of money to achieve these objectives is of course vital and impinges on all these areas. This raises an obvious further danger that the operation becomes more about raising money than meeting core objectives.

    Most obviously contentious in terms of conflicts of interest is the Summer Exhibition. Academicians can hang six pictures in the show. Having some Academy input might at least preserve identity and lend kudos. But why so many works each? The works can be of any size and are often the largest. It is hardly surprising then that every Summer exhibition in recent years has extensive areas occupied by RAs, thereby squeezing other artists into leftover corners. This unjust imbalance needs to be reduced. This could be done either by substantially lowering the number of works permitted (to perhaps one) and/or to limiting their size.

    The process of selection from non-RA submissions at the Summer Exhibition should also be more transparent. If non-RA artists have been invited to submit, thereby short-circuiting the process of selection, the public should know the extent to which this occurs. It is galling to those who submit to the RA to see that the odds of acceptance have shrunk even further when it is revealed a large number of invitees have been included. For those who follow the usual route of submission, the process of selection of pictures has also perennially been alleged to be tainted with bias. Selection is by definition biased so there are massive problems in creating a more transparent system. No real answer has emerged as to how to deal with repeated prejudices (whether conscious or unconscious). What is achievable is better statistical analysis of the Summer Exhibition. What were the chances of getting in last year? How many invitees were there? How many first-timers were allowed in? How many have been repeatedly selected? More information will bring greater transparency and create more confidence in the fairness of the process.

    The Jackdaw has in previous issues analysed the money received for the Summer Exhibition. The receipts for non-RAs versus RAs is roughly equal. If one factors in the huge imbalances, the RAs do not produce anything near the same income as non-RAs per square foot. Indeed the real instrument for democratisation via purchase is the editioned print. Most of these are sold by non-academicians for reasonable prices. While taking up negligible space they generate substantial income. Of course it is always said that the whole ethos of being hung with Academicians is what gives the unknown artist more status. I would suggest that it is being hung at the RA itself that is the key factor.

    Another key question is how artists are selected for individual shows at the RA? My perception is that living artists recently shown have largely if not exclusively been from the RA or closely connected with it. Presumably any show must be “bankable” as a pre-requisite, but once that is established how are selections made? How are the commercial arrangements managed to ensure the charity receives good value? What chance do other distinguished living non-academician artists have of obtaining such a show?

    The Academicians’ privileges do not stop with the Summer Exhibition or their own shows. On leaving the Summer Exhibition one is met by a shop exclusively selling books and merchandise about or by Academicians. One can even buy a giclée print of work by the late Mary Fedden RA for the outrageous price of £800. This specific item seems to epitomise the conflict between garnering funds and helping educate the public about art and the artist. It is hard to see that selling a giclée reproduction in this way and at such a price can do anything except harm the work of traditional printmakers who struggle daily to educate the public to the subtleties of genuine prints.

    Looking at income of the RA (£39 million in 2012) – the  three most substantial sources are; trading subsidiaries (£15.9m), exhibitions and charitable activities (£8.5m); and from voluntary income (£15.1m), which includes income from the Friends (£8.8m).  In addition Friends’ subscriptions were swelled by a further £1m in gift aid.

    Unlike most other institutions that have a ‘Friends’ arm, the RA is massively dependent on the support of the 93,000 friends. Friends’ income is vital to its survival. Friends receive a magazine and now have access to the recently and expensively furnished Keeper’s House. They are increasingly pampered but are not allowed a voice. If Friends have questions they can contact the Chairman of the friends. The problem is that the “guests of a club” model is a false analogy. The Friends (guests) actually empower (pay the subs for) the club. Without the Friends the RA would have the greatest difficulty in functioning.

    Such a process of separation should bring a re-examination of objectives. For example, is the Summer Exhibition about money or education? Are there other objectives for the Summer Exhibition, such as the helping of lesser-known artists to establish a toe hold or allowing the public to buy affordable art? It would also force an evaluation of how RAs benefit and what they should contribute to the Charity in return. Common to many commercially successful charities, the Academy’s main weakness is the maximisation of profit at the expense of charitable objectives.

    To counter this, the Academy should make efforts to seek out criticism and alternative opinion. Giving the Friends a voice by allowing an annual meeting might be a productive first step.

    James Birkin

    The Jackdaw, 2014

     

  • Performance before content – Eric Coombes is disappointed…

    Performance before content – Eric Coombes is disappointed…

    …by the frivolity and lack of ambition and academic rigour in the 2014 Reith Lectures.

    Immediately after his predictably rapturous greeting at the first performance, Grayson Perry raised the question of why he was asked to give this year’s Reith Lectures. Well, for the first time in their sixty-six years, they were to be given by a “visual artist”. Could one imagine the BBC not to have chosen a winner of, or at least nominee for, the Turner Prize? Gormley having withdrawn a couple of years ago, how many remotely entertainable candidates lay in that small heap of the capriciously favoured? “Professor” Tracey Emin?  Damien Hirst? Even the BBC might have balked at the near-catatonic inarticulacy of a Martin Creed. But Perry vacuously claimed that his selection was explained by his being “a practising artist” – which, in reality, was not even a sufficient condition of eligibility.

    This limitation of the field of candidates was not, of course, mentioned. Does inadvertency, naïvety or cheek account for his drawing our attention to another factor a few minutes later, when he said “… anybody can have a life in the arts ­– even me! An Essex transvestite potter … the mafia has even let me in”?  As he proclaimed this, dressed and painted in a flamboyant caricature of femininity, Perry basked in the sycophantic admiration of that “mafia”, including such luminaries as Nicholas Serota. In a video clip, we glimpse the Lord Patten, laughing with respectful indulgence. Was Perry, brazenly, knowingly but deniably, mocking the ideological conformism of his audience? Far from erecting an obstacle to advancement, his ostentation of social and sexual deviance augmented his value for an establishment delighted to advertise the orthodoxy of its ideological commitment to “inclusiveness”. He is surely far too intelligent not to understand this.

    This is not to say that he was or is acting out a pretence. I have no reason to suppose that he exaggerates his compulsion to indulge in cross-dressing, either for the purpose of publicity, or to exploit the politically correct fashion that inverts the cruelty towards deviance often prevailing in the past. There is neither reason nor need to question his own account of his idiosyncrasies. But a pretence that matters very much lay in the BBC’s affecting to suppose a series of pantomime acts to be the vehicle of serious thought. There is no surprise in the corporation’s colluding with that dispiriting regime of compulsory frivolity, which everywhere imposes itself. But the Reith Lectures have had a special symbolic significance in upholding the BBC’s claim to “enrich the intellectual and cultural life of the nation”, despite the tinyness of their contribution to its total output. They constitute a significant test of the corporation’s commitment to its responsibilities. Previous lecturers have been a somewhat mixed bunch, and, as well as very eminent thinkers, the list includes some whom the criterion of intellectual integrity might have excluded. And one wonders about obvious absences, such as Isaiah Berlin or Ernst Gombrich, whether they were ever invited. Nevertheless, there seems to have been, hitherto, a serious effort to recruit serious thinkers – even if, in some cases, their seriousness might be questionable. There has, of course, been a relaxation of tone in recent years, the talks being given before live audiences and sweetened by the familiarity of their compère, Sue Lawley. But their presentation for the first time this year as pantomime suggests that the assertion of the high-flown sentiments in the foregoing quotation is the bluster of pretence.

    The background to this pantomime is the dominating cult of celebrity, which now draws everything into its moral ambit, where the very notion of an argument’s requiring an attention span longer than a five-year old’s becomes an elitist affront to the general public. With its huge resources, the BBC has not only the duty, but also the capacity to resist this dominance. The blame for the debacle of this year’s Reith Lectures therefore falls squarely on the BBC and, of course, on the state-art establishment to which it complacently defers. Perry himself, like his largely fawning reviewers, was probably unaware of how far he was out of his intellectual depth.

    What was said in the “lectures”?  Many matters connected with the visual arts – practical, sociological, financial etc. – were raised, often autobiographically, and usually flippantly. Specific observations were sometimes shrewd, but never enlightening to the undeluded; and no path of consequentiality led from one to another. Essentially, there was no argument at all, although individual points of unconsummated discussion were half identified by confused gestures. And the failure to take the slightest trouble to get things right, would – or would not that long ago – have disgraced a sixth-former.

    One illustration: In the first “lecture” he announced himself to be “very sceptical of the idea that you can find a kind of empirical way of judging quality, particularly in art”. How bizarre! Would we say of a sonnet by Shakespeare, or a painting by Turner, that it achieved “high quality”? Are these samples of a commodity? His “scepticism” amounts to doubting that there could be non-aesthetic criteria, readily and “empirically” applicable, by which to determine an aesthetic judgement. Who exactly has ever held such an “idea”? The manifest impossibility of such criteria has standardly been taken as central to the philosophical discussion of aesthetic judgement. His confusion here exemplifies a characteristic inability of the uneducated to understand that there is a distinction between empirical and conceptual questions (a distinction that may not be easy to make in a particular case). To be “sceptical” about the existence of such criteria is a little like being “sceptical” about the possibility that two plus two equals five. Since it is not the kind of thing about which further information might show us to be mistaken, it is idle to fuss about purported practical examples. Nevertheless, we should perhaps note that it would be difficult to imagine anything better chosen to illustrate his state of confusion, or his failure to get things right, than his main example of the supposed acceptance of such “empirical” criteria. This was the content of the “Venetian Secret”, a notorious hoax played on Royal Academicians in the late 18th century. But the “Venetian Secret” did not even purport to offer criteria of aesthetic judgement, being concerned only with the technique of painting.

    To the extent that a unifying theme can be discerned, it was identified in the toe-curling words of the embarrassingly unembarrassable Sue Lawley, introducing the third “lecture”.  “So far we’ve tried to assess the nature of what art is”.  Oh dear.  What is art?  A dauntingly big question one might think. Or possibly a small and unimportant question. If a genuine question at all, it is a philosophical question, and the questionability of its genuineness might itself raise philosophical questions, as could the question of whether, if genuine, it is big and grand or small but noisy.

    Such big (or small) questions have, together with their gratuitously assumed burden of objects and practices, entered and colonized the world of state art, as if the philosophy of art – or rather, one part of it, eccentrically construed – were central to, or even constitutive of, the work of artists, qua artists. It is not obvious why competence in this subject should be conferred by the practice of art, nor why it should purport to feature as central to the education of art students, as if directly relevant to artistic practice; rather than arising, if arising at all, in a complementary area of study, established to enhance the humane benefits of that education. When that still happened, these matters were sometimes in the hands of the intellectually competent.

    One consequence of the comprehensive destruction of our system of higher education in the visual arts, from which Perry emerged as a graduate, is a glut of people who deludedly suppose themselves competent in matters entirely beyond their intellectual scope. In the second “lecture” Perry asserted “anything can be art … but I think the boundaries are sociological, tribal, philosophical and maybe even financial.”  Well, can anything “be” art or not? What does that mean?  Does one and the same thing become or cease to be “art” according to whether it falls under the jurisdiction of one or other of this strange ragbag of disparate conceptual regimes? Or is this just a confused way of noticing the obvious point that what is accepted, valued or promoted may vary with circumstances or interests? In this “lecture”, Perry did not notice himself making two crucial but eminently challengeable assumptions: first, that to ask what is art is equivalent to asking how to determine whether some object is a work of art; and secondly, that such a determination would be a matter of definition, or decision procedure, to establish the boundary of a category.  Those assumptions provided Perry with his title “Beating the Bounds” and hence with his pantomime prop, a riding crop, which he brandished at intervals to signify “beating” at some supposedly significant “landmark” on the boundary of art.

    This amused an easily amused audience; but it was hardly enlightening. First: the concept of art cannot properly be considered without some attention to other arts besides the visual, even if the latter is one’s main concern. Secondly, the concept of art is a mental capacity which we exercise in certain kinds of human activity: it is not primarily a principle for categorizing objects in the world. The question of how objects are identified as works of art, if interesting at all, is interesting only if it throws light on that capacity – and that cannot be simply presupposed. And thirdly, though widely assumed, the notion that we grasp a concept only if we can adequately define a corresponding word, or precisely determine the boundary of a category, is fallacious. A distinguished philosopher suggested that it should be dubbed “Socrates’ fallacy”. With much of human life, especially in the arts, it is the central areas that matter: the boundaries are often indeterminable, precisely because their determination is unimportant.

    There is a large philosophical literature on these issues, only some of which is difficult. But the foregoing points are very simple; and although they might not occur spontaneously to every educated person, they would be encountered in the course of a modest dip into that literature, which is enjoined – one might have supposed – by the responsibility of maintaining the intellectual standing of the Reith Lectures. But Perry is not an educated person. I hope that this is not interpreted as a sneer, for I have a good deal of sympathy with him. To learn about his appalling childhood and abusive upbringing – recounted without self pity – is to admire him for defeating the power of conditions which deprived him of most of what we normally take to be needed for healthy mental growth. (I assume that the published account is essentially truthful.) Despite those squalid circumstances, he gained a place at one of the most successfully academic schools in the country, and, for a while, did very well. He is certainly not stupid.

    But these “lectures” exhibit, in some respects, the limitations of an intelligent but previously uneducated first-year student: inability to sustain argument, or even to understand what it would mean, or the need, to do so; complete unawareness of important distinctions; and so on. They also betray that ignorance of one’s own ignorance which imprisons the minds of many beginning students and prevents their progress – an imprisonment from which, of its nature, it is hard to escape, since awareness of the need to escape is absent. It is, of course, impossible here to consider why much of alleged “higher education” not only fails to deal with this problem, but in many areas actually aggravates it – perhaps by continuing that practice of systematically flattering intellectual immaturity which, especially in the arts, appears to constitute a significant part of secondary schooling. The intellectual level of this year’s Reith Lectures surely reflects the diseducation Perry received in the chaos of fraudulence which has engulfed “higher education” in the visual arts.

    And they betray not in content, but in form, the destructive effect on humane discourse of the crass utilitarianism destroying us, which can understand only linear explanations, in which everything is reduced to something other than itself – something simpler and grosser.  In his supposed tour of art’s boundaries, Perry considered not what art is, but only which “art” is most promoted, sold or otherwise rewarded, or what is, for any reason, accepted as art. (And if this is held to be a false distinction, then that needs to be argued.) He was, perhaps, not so much the fraudster in this ridiculous pantomime of pretence, as the contentedly defrauded – the victim of what we laughingly call “higher education” and of the BBC’s irresponsible frivolity.

    Eric Coombes

    The Jackdaw, 2014

  • Why shit can never be art – painter Patrick Cullen contests the commonly held view that a relic of an idea is a work of art

    If any Jackdaw readers were still in doubt about just how rigged the contemporary art market is after numerous articles on the subject, many from the editor, then Phil Redman’s piece “The Crap Art Market” (The Jackdaw, no 108) should have put the matter beyond doubt. So I take all that as read. Less obvious is why the domination of that market by a cartel of a few large players means the only kind of art that benefits from their attentions will be crap. All art, from the least worthy, through to the mediocre and moderately good, and on to the truly excellent is capable of being hyped and having its value ramped up in a rigged market. It is by no means clear why such investors would only be interested in inflating the value of crap art.

    We need to look at the supply side of this market. If the contemporary art scene has more than its share of rubbish art, why are so many so-called artists supplying it? The obvious answer is easy money: the corrupted market, with its over-emphasis on novelty and sensationalism, has opened the doors to all kinds of chancers and charlatans who are simply seizing the opportunity to make a quick buck. I think this is too glib and the reality more complex.

    Deep down in the psyche of every artist is the desire to create something valuable – not initially in monetary terms though this may later serve as confirmation of the achievement of this desire – but intrinsically valuable, and to create it, like the spider’s silken web, out of nothing but him or herself. Freud saw very early signs of artistic ambition in the over-evaluation that the infant playing with its faeces makes of its precious productions. It is a deeply narcissistic and omnipotent yearning and probably accounts for a certain unworldly and childlike quality that has become part of the artist stereotype. If however such ambitions remain at this level they are doomed, since to succeed artists must reach out to the world and draw inspiration from things other than themselves. Only in this way will they have something of value to reflect back to the world, which in the end will be the measure of their success. (Tracey Emin with her almost entirely self-referential oeuvre must be living proof that this uncontroversial statement no longer applies at the lunatic top end of the contemporary art world). Yet the desire to be an alchemist, creating something highly treasured – be it art or gold – out of mere paints or base metals remains at the core of the artistic endeavour. And the same is true for writers and composers: mere words and notes replacing the painter’s pigments. Artist, writer and composer all soon learn that alchemy doesn’t happen by magic and that hard work, fine tuning of skills and an engagement with the world will all be necessary for colours to enthral, notes to sing and words to tell a story. But what happens if the market doesn’t demand art that enthrals? What if the market’s over-riding requirement is novelty and surprise and being different at all costs? If nobody is demanding excellence, there will be a race to the bottom in both senses of the word.

    In 1961 the Italian artist Piero Manzoni famously exhibited a tin of his own faeces entitled Merda d’artista, translated on the tin in English lest the cadences of the Italian language left anyone in doubt about the bluntness of his intentions: Artist’s shit. He priced his faeces according to their equivalent weight in gold. Had he simply evacuated his bowels on a gallery floor he would almost certainly (in 1961 at least) have been thrown out as a mere exhibitionist and public nuisance. But by canning his shit he created just enough distance from the vulgarity of his conceit and, even more importantly, created an object which could be traded as a work of art. Untreated human ordure might have stumped even the most Duchampian of curators and dealers, but a can of shit, especially when produced in an edition of 90 – smart that, even with its weight in gold, one motion would hardly have made Manzoni wealthy – gave the critics plenty else to write about other than whether shit can really be art. Otherwise, back then at least, the answer might just have been a resounding “No”. On the other hand, mass production, irony, contextualization, valuation, the gold standard, alchemy and so forth all became legitimate talking points which could imbue the cans and their contents with artistic significance. Yet the original impulse behind the “work” remains the same: Manzoni was challenging the world to accept his excrement as a work of art, the very thing which Freud suggested lay at the root of many artists’ earliest motivations to pursue a career in art. Freud would have enjoyed too the Oedipal overlaying to this story. Manzoni claimed that what had prompted him to create the piece was his father’s taunt that his work was shit. Recently one of Manzoni’s tins sold at Sotheby’s for £97,250, seventy times its weight in gold. They have become collectors’ items and are held by many national museums, including the Tate (which bought its tin for £22,300 in 2002).

    One has to hand it to Manzoni. With one simple gesture he became a far more renowned artist than before, made himself well off, and by that success produced a strong rebuttal of his father’s insult. But crucially it was a gesture. To some a witty and succinct gesture, to others an infantile one, but a gesture none the less. If it is deemed a clever and profound enough gesture to be regarded as a work of art, then its status as an artwork has more in common with a performance piece, a stunt or a comic sketch. The context is all. A can of shit unmitigated by some action can only ever be shit. Placing it in a gallery and linking its price to its equivalent weight in gold is the meaningful, possibly artistic element. This action, this gesture is no more and it should be stressed no less a work of art than many stunts or comic sketches which leave no marketable art object behind. It is also less a piece of visual art than a comic sketch because one does not have to have seen either what Manzoni did, or the can of shit itself, to “get it”. The art work, if we concede it to be one, is a purely conceptual work, entirely dependent on the profundity of the artist’s gesture for any evaluation of its merit. A blind person could equally appreciate the wit and significance of Merda d’artista as a sighted person. Since the art lies in the gesture, the can of shit itself is not the art work but merely a relic or prop reminding us of it. To treat it as otherwise, to exhibit it in a museum for people to look at as an artwork and to value it at many times its weight in gold is to collude with a kind of fetishism.

    We may be fascinated by the original scores of Mozart or Beethoven’s music but we go to a concert to hear what they wrote because their art resides in sound. Looking at the original manuscripts does not, any more than looking at a newly printed copy of the score, give us that experience. The manuscripts, like Manzoni’s cans, are art relics albeit of much greater artistic achievements. We go to a museum to look at a great modern masterpiece like Picasso’s Guernica because only by looking at it have we any chance of “getting it”. But a conceptual work that functions on the level of a gesture can be fully appreciated (or despised) without being seen at all. To exhibit the ghost of that gesture in a museum alongside artworks that are truly visual experiences is to confuse two entirely different animals. Giving them equal status as works of art is to further confuse the public, already largely persuaded that art can be anything that an artist chooses to call art. The tautologous absurdity of this idea ought to be enough to prevent its rise and rise, but it continues to make headway and is close to becoming accepted by vast swathes of the populous. Grayson Perry’s Reith lectures, well received by Radio 4 listeners it would seem, takes this nonsense as a given. Saying that art is anything an artist calls art simply shifts the problem of definition on to what is an artist. Since an artist is someone who makes art (but art can be anything the artist says it is), we’re no further on. We arrive at the nonsense of everything being art and everyone an artist, at which point both words become quite meaningless.

    I’m not arguing that a good case cannot be made for regarding what Manzoni did as art. It strikes me as being a wittier and cleverer piece of conceptual art than many. My point is that the art happened in 1961 and the can of shit is but a relic of that event, and relics should not be confused with living art works. A great Rembrandt self portrait is as potent today as the day it was painted. It isn’t the relic of an idea Rembrandt had three and a half centuries ago. It is that idea, an entirely visual one, and one that can only be appreciated by looking at it. Whereas the exact appearance of Manzoni’s can matters hardly one jot to the strength or weakness of his idea. Yet it is in the interests of the market, and the artist, to fetishize the object in order to make money out of it. In this sense it is a con and its artistic status spurious.

    The same applies to Duchamp’s bog-standard mass produced urinal. If there was art involved, it was in what Duchamp did with it. The art, if any, lay in the audacity of Duchamp’s submitting it for an art exhibition, turning it upside down, calling it Fountain and signing it R. Mutt. If this series of actions are felt by enough people to be profound, thought provoking and witty enough, then for them at least Duchamp’s stunt is a piece of art. The urinal remains just that: a urinal. It cannot itself be magically turned into an art work because an artist points at it and says it is. This is omnipotent and magical thinking of the most primitive kind.

    It is rather remarkable how much conceptual art, and likewise its fore-runner “found art”, as well as much other contemporary art, mirrors the alchemist’s dream of magically turning the basest of materials into gold. Often, as with Manzoni, this involves crap itself. Many others reference faeces and urine more obliquely. Since Duchamps urinal we’ve had Warhol’s “Oxidization Series” (involving urination), Gilbert and George’s “Naked Shit Paintings”, Helen Chadwick’s “Piss Flowers”, Andrea’s Serrano’s “Piss Christ”, Paul McCarthy’s “Shit Face Painting”, Chris Ofili’s use of elephant dung and Martin Creed’s “Body Docs” – videos of people defecating and vomiting – to name but a very few. Fortunately we have been spared Damien Hirst’s plan to cast an enormous turd in bronze, (why not gold, Damien?). But may be we’ve still got it coming to us. Even more common is the use of rubbish to make art, giving rise to a whole genre of art known as trash or junk art. A great many other contemporary artworks include rubbish or detritus. Tracey Emin’s unmade bed with its used tissues, condoms and discarded underwear is a good example as well as being a classic case of “it’s art because I say it is and I’m an artist”. We’ve moved from the realm of the nursery and any special pleading for the value of poo-poo, to that of adolescence. A cartoon at the time had an exasperated parent yelling at his teenage daughter and her unmade bed “I don’t care if it’s art, make it!” Which goes right to the point: Emin wants us to accept her messy adolescent life (represented by her bed) as art without her having to make anything.

    As with Manzoni’s Merda d’artista the use of faeces or rubbish does not preclude a work from being art. This must in the end depend on the skill with which such materials are employed and the depth of feeling and intellectual rigour that informs the finished art work. What I am suggesting is that the unconscious motivation that underlies the artist’s preference for such materials with their potential to generate quick publicity, as well as the penchant for found objects or “ready mades” is likely to be a wish to magically transform shit into art. The clues are in the puerile feebleness of so many of the ideas behind such art and the childish need for instant attention they so often betray. If Freud was right that at the deepest level of motivation artists were once infants playing with their poo and imagining it to be precious, none of this should surprise us. If the art market colludes with these primitive omnipotent fantasies by overvaluing infantile impulses and stunts, artists will surely supply it with crap.

    Patrick Cullen

    The Jackdaw, 2014

  • The importance of being Erno – Eric Coombes questions the reputation of a Brutalist architect

    The importance of being Erno – Eric Coombes questions the reputation of a Brutalist architect

    Sometimes material appears in a “serious” newspaper which—even in our  current cultural condition—is at an astonishingly low intellectual level to come from the prominent “authority” who wrote it. Disagreeable though it is, perhaps one should occasionally draw attention to such material, and subject it to closer inspection. Those who can bear to do so, should read Stephen Bayley’s article in the Daily Telegraph about Ernö Goldfinger’s Alexander Fleming House (now renamed Metro Central Heights), which can be found online at:

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/architecture/10171321/Look-away-Prince-Charles-Goldfingers-Tower-is-wonderful.html

    The quotation from it on p.43 of the Sept/Oct issue fails to convey the scale of the self-important imbecility displayed in the article as a whole.  It begins with a baffling non-sequitur. Having invoked the Japanese notion of “wabi-sabi” (roughly, a spiritual quality conferred by the patina of aging), he continues

    “To be aware of wabi-sabi is to be aware of the language, even the poetry, that mute buildings and dumb things speak.  Until recently, few people thought fine Zen thoughts while passing through the grimly urban and diesel toxic Elephant and Castle in south London. Now we all can. Indeed, will.”

    “Until recently”! By virtue of what power, on what recent occasion, have casual passers-by suddenly been granted this momentous epiphany, which they not only “can” but “will” experience? Is it the power of Bayley’s own eloquence in the article itself? If not, it must be the event of the building’s being listed by English Heritage, which was also the occasion of Bayley’s article; for no other reason is given to expect the rapid transformations of human experience which would justify this astonishing claim. Must we, then, according to Bayley, attribute to English Heritage powers we had not dreamt of its having, powers of a supernatural or, at least, sacerdotal character? Or is English Heritage held in such popular esteem by all those thousands of people moving through that “grimly urban and … toxic” environment every day (some slight relief here in observing Bayley’s immersion in fantasy to be less than total) that the wisdom of its pronouncements fills their minds, and is received so eagerly and uncritically as to transfigure and regulate their perceptions?

    Bayley’s claims are supported by nothing whatsoever but the assumed authority of the workings, or rather lurchings, of his own mind. The entire article consists of mere assertion and egregiously transparent non-sequiturs. What exactly, for instance, is the argument supposed to be in the following?

    … his Trellick Tower in Notting Hill and its twin sister Balfron Tower in Poplar (already listed) are hatefully remembered icons of infamy for those who lazily condemn all modern architecture as heartless and inhumane. Yet a thoughtful appraisal reveals as rich a variety of historical sources in their design as you would find in Vanbrugh: the bravura Futurism of Antonio Sant’Elia, the bold shape-making of Auguste Perret and the structural theories of Le Corbusier, for example.

    Whether or not Bayley has correctly identified them, and whether or not the richness of their “variety” is comparable with what we find in Vanbrugh, why should the discovery of “historical sources” for Goldfinger’s designs have the slightest tendency to establish that the buildings are not “heartless and inhumane”? Is a lack of “historical sources” a necessary condition for a building to possess these regrettable attributes? Would it be impertinent to ask Bayley where he finds grounds for that principle, other than at some chance place where his mind was brought by its randomly veering motions, and came briefly to rest? Not to overstate the point, the principle is not self-evidently true. Since the absence of “historical sources” is unknown in architecture, or even in “architecture”, it entails the intriguing conclusion, which is not—shall we say?—intuitively convincing, that there can be no such thing as a heartless or inhumane building.

    Bayley claims that the listing of Alexander Fleming House “recognises several important things. For example: the fragility of prejudice, the permanence of concrete (which if we are honest, weathers very beautifully) [sic] and the way the solemn gravity [“overbearing joylessness” would come closer here] of great [sic] architecture transcends the spiky little fits and pricks of temporary taste.” Here again we have pure unsupported assertion.  But of what exactly? What does it mean to “recognize” the permanence of concrete?  Was that permanence in doubt, and would such a doubt be allayed by listing the building, any more than listing it would oblige concrete to “weather very beautifully”? How on earth does the listing “recognize” the “fragility of prejudice”? In what sense can prejudice (as the word is now commonly used) be fragile, rather than merely wrong? If this means anything at all, it means that the adverse judgement of the building is wrong, and must be dismissed as prejudice. What is here implicitly alleged to be prejudice is, in fact, the judgement of most people who are aware of the building, including those who have had the misfortune to work in it; and, far from being “fragile”, that judgement appears to remain remarkably robust and stable.

    It is, in any case, unclear, to put it mildly, how far praise of this kind is consistent with the statement that “Alexander Fleming House is confrontational, exactly as its architect intended it to be.  But it was designed as a manifesto, an idealistic statement.” Surely this means that, whether through the beauty of its weathered concrete or in any other implausibly supposed way, it was never intended to please those forced to endure its presence in our capital city—still less to engender the “mystical” experience of “Wabi-sabi”. And this raises a crucial question, never answered or even recognized by the likes of Bayley, who, by carefully ignoring it, aggravate the impotent rage of so many people, when they contemplate the state of our cities and towns: by what moral authority are the Goldfingers, or any of the ego-maniacs practising as “architects” today, licensed to transform huge areas beyond recognition, with enormous oppressive buildings?  Who decreed that the public should be permanently confronted with manifestos that they have never asked to see, but should be forced, repeatedly, to read?

    Are these manifestos au fond religious or quasi-religious?  This thought could lead us, finally, to notice one curious passage, which is extraneous to the main topic, but may nevertheless be significant.  Having emphasized that Goldfinger was “not plagued by any lack of personal confidence”, Bayley adds that “[h]is personal sense of self-worth was practically enhanced by marrying the heiress to the Crosse & Blackwell soup fortune.” Now the wealth of a spouse is not usually regarded as a matter for regret; but this seems to imply not merely that Goldfinger, like most of us, preferred to have more money rather than less, but that he regarded wealth as constitutive of virtue—that he worshipped at the altar of Mammon. This most corrosive of all idolatries, is now a dominant cult (perhaps to an unprecedented extent), which spreads its poisonous doctrines widely, finding many followers among the powerful in all walks of life, including those in government at every level. They worship with dementedly implacable conviction, apparently believing that everything, including personal merit, can and must be assessed in monetary terms. Nowhere do we see this more plainly and forcefully symbolized than in those gigantic temples of Mammon which loom threateningly over once agreeable streets, their repulsive ugliness embodying the ugliness of what they signify. Here, then, Bayley touches, no doubt inadvertently, on an important point, which is caught in a brief flash of indirect illumination. The spoliation of our towns and cities is imposed by the brute power of large property companies, against which local communities are almost defenceless, which have the planning system blatantly stacked in their favour, and which corrupt government, both central and local. Almost limitless, their financial resources are used, one might say, to satisfy both the greed and the vanity of the architects they employ, as if those vices were clearly distinguishable. But the contemporary world of big business, where predatory property developers are in league with big architectural practices (and ruthless lawyers), must cultivate an atmosphere in which merit is identified with the possession of wealth, or the ability to gain it. This is what Bayley suggests, presumably unintentionally, about Goldfinger.  In the church of Mammon, refined distinctions of morality are otiose: the virtues of greed, vanity, arrogance and ruthlessness become inextricable, as they coalesce in the righteousness of ego-mania and megalomania. Our cities and towns have become arenas for the display of zeal in the service of Mammon.

    Even I was surprised to find such drivel, written by a well-known figure, published in a supposedly “serious” newspaper.  I would challenge anyone to find, in the entire article by this alleged critic, anything that could be considered criticism. There is no attempt to discuss Goldfinger’s building in a way that might help the reader to see it as Bayley thinks it should be seen. All is assertion and non-sequitur.

    Postscript

    I was not quite sure how to take The Jackdaw’s own remark about the listing of Alexander Fleming House under News on p.34 (Sept/Oct issue): “Like it or not it is among the great buildings of the New Brutal style and deserves to be preserved.” Is that “great” as in “great painting”, “great poem” or “great mind”? Or “great” as in “great crime”, “great fool” or “great mistake”, where “great” means something like “notable example of its kind”, irrespective of whether that kind is itself good, desirable or admirable? The building is certainly great in the latter sense, and buildings are now, apparently, listed merely on the grounds of their exemplifying some episode of cultural or social history which is of interest and which they record.    One wonders how far the principle might be taken.  Already a zebra crossing has been listed because of its association with the Beatles.  Is a city a museum? Do we regret, for example, that no one had the foresight to insist on parts of the East End of London remaining in conditions which would have continued to foster squalor, disease and infant mortality? Those conditions are undoubtedly a matter of historical interest; but documentary and visual records of them are surely enough. Far from wanting to wipe New Brutalism, or any other manifestation of architectural insolence and crassness from the record, I think it should be fully recorded, if only as a warning. But I fail to understand why that should entail its continuing to deface our towns and to blight the lives of those forced to endure its oppressive presence.

    Eric Coombes

    The Jackdaw, 2014

     

  • Lament for a lost, semi-innocent world: Giles Auty remembers St Ives, half a century on from when he first painted there

    Lament for a lost, semi-innocent world: Giles Auty remembers St Ives, half a century on from when he first painted there

    I paid a first visit to St. Ives in the late 1950s and will never forget my first glimpse of the town from the hill above the railway station. For someone to whom the word ‘sea’ had hitherto largely meant the pebbly beaches and endless mudflats of the coast of East Kent, the turquoise water, dazzling white sands and rows of granite or whitewashed buildings cascading down steep hills towards the town’s harbour were an utter revelation. Not a single yard of dual carriageway existed at that time between London and Land’s End. The old A30 still ran through every town, village and hamlet on its route as it pursued a narrow, twisting and dangerous 300-mile course.

    At least part of the magic of West Cornwall lay at the time in its relative isolation as well as in the extreme cheapness of property there which attracted painters, potters and poets – to say nothing of sculptors and assorted scribes – of national and international as well as purely local substance to its welcoming embrace. Because an artist cousin of mine – John Peace – lived in the town already I enjoyed instant introductions to many of the area’s resident talents.

    During the last two months of the 1950s I returned to St. Ives with the aim of living and painting there full-time myself – an arrival which coincided closely with a highly unlikely sojourn there by Francis Bacon – and I was then resident in that general area, on and off, for the next twenty years.

    What I propose here is that those two decades – from 1960-1980 – formed the last era which may ever exist in which some degree of communal sense, purpose and integrity will ever prevail again in British art which now, by contrast, generally seems to grow more cynical, corrupt and purposeless by the day. To my mind, at least, one of the factors that underwrote the significance of that era was its relative proximity to the ending of the Second World War which, in spite of all its horrors, at least provided some inkling of a reality with which it was difficult to argue. Some of the older artists such as Peter Lanyon had served in that war with distinction while others had suffered years of captivity e.g. Terry Frost, Adrian Heath and Roger Hilton, the last having been captured during the unsuccessful commando raid on Dieppe. Karl Weschke, by contrast, spent youthful years as a prisoner-of-war of the British. It was therefore not just artistic freedom that all were keen to enjoy after years of restraint but the liberty to live and act more or less normally again. Hedonism was certainly in the air and West Cornwall became, however briefly, a kind of Bohemia-by-Sea.

    Ben Nicholson had recently left St. Ives for good at the time of my arrival there but others such as Bryan Wynter, Patrick Heron, Barbara Hepworth, Bernard Leach and the excellent poet W.S. Graham were still very much in evidence, as were Alan Davie and William Scott for at least part of the time. I was merely one of a raft of younger artists which included Trevor Bell, Anthony Benjamin, Brian Wall, Bob Law, Jeff Harris and Roy Conn. Large numbers of purpose-built studios still existed from earlier artistic eras and for a time I was lucky enough to share a vast example, built originally for Stanhope Forbes, at the top of Newlyn Hill.

    In the long run I came to disagree increasingly with much of the tenor of the art – and art criticism – that came out of West Cornwall at that time because its doctrinaire emphasis on abstraction seemed to me at once unnecessarily coercive and contrived in the face of the overwhelming majesty of the local landscape and coast.

    My maternal great-grandfather, a railway engineer, originally left his home at East Looe in east Cornwall to build a railway in East Kent and I have never ceased, wherever I have lived in the world, to feel a kind of ancestral tug which continues to identify Cornwall for me as a homeland. Rather unusually, for an artist, I represented the county at cricket and am still probably remembered there, if at all, more for my former prowess with a cricket ball than with a paintbrush.

    All of the artists I have mentioned already were certainly ambitious but not necessarily in the degrading way which in more recent times has almost become a norm. It was at the Royal College of Art in 1962, I think, that I first heard the ominous expression ‘making it’ used in connection with David Hockney to whom I had just been introduced. To artists such as Peter Lanyon or Roger Hilton such an expression would rightly have been anathema. What precisely was the ‘it’ the artist was supposed to be ‘making’? Money and largely unearned fashionable fame? Or a reputation blown up simply with a giant public relations bicycle pump?

    During the last two and a half years of his life Roger Hilton, who was confined to bed with a painful illness, produced a series of small, colourful gouaches of unending wit and good humour. Roger had a very sharp tongue indeed, however, and it would be intriguing and instructive to have known what he might have thought of future events such as the Turner Prize which have consistently divided the world of British art since his death. Both he and the amiable and elegant painter Bryan Wynter died within a fortnight of each other in 1975. After attending Bryan’s funeral, in fact, at the lovely little rural church at Zennor a small group of us travelled on to see Roger. I was seated at the end the latter’s bed still clad in the black overcoat I had worn to Bryan’s funeral when Roger suddenly cried out to me – rather prophetically in the event – “You are the Angel of Death come to carry me away”. Roger had always possessed a strange, almost psychic awareness.

    Read, if you possibly can, the two deeply moving and remarkably beautiful poems which W.S. Graham wrote as a tribute to his departed friends: Dear Bryan Wynter and Lines on Roger Hilton’s Watch. Both feature in W.S. Graham Collected Poems 1942-1977 (Faber & Faber 1979) and both capture the departed magic of West Cornwall as an artists’ colony with an eloquence I cannot hope to match. Who remembers figures such as Hilton and W.S. Graham today less than 40 years after their passing? Both were true to their respective callings as painter and poet in ways we are less and less likely to encounter again.

    During the latter years of West Cornwall’s artistic heyday the trio of Wynter, Hilton and Graham drank regularly at a large, isolated and often almost deserted pub on the coast road from Zennor to St Just. This was the Gurnard’s Head whose landlord bought the lease, I believe, with the gratuity he received as an officer when leaving the Parachute Regiment. On nights of heavy rain or fog when the pub was almost deserted ‘Jock’ Graham would write and direct, off-the-cuff one-act plays for those privileged to be present. Very occasionally a lost visitor would stumble out of the inclement weather outside into one of these proceedings. “There came a mighty wind”, Graham shouted on one occasion as he leapt out of a dark corner just as a lost visitor staggered in.

    As a landlord Jimmy Goodman’s particular bêtes noires were men who drove Jaguars or who were connected in any way with advertising, the making of television commercials or films. Alone among those living in the area therefore he refused to acknowledge the fact when the film Straw Dogs was being shot just down the road at the village of St. Buryan. One evening, however, the strikingly pretty actress Susan George, who was featuring in the film, apparently burst into Jimmy’s pub saying “I’m Susan George and I’m looking for my co-star Dustin Hoffman”. Jimmy pondered her request slowly before finally replying thus: “I’ve been the landlord here for many years m’dear and can assure you there are no coastguards of that name working in this area”.

    Clearly, given the way the modern world has subsequently developed, such times were too wonderful to last.

    Giles Auty

    The Jackdaw, 2014

     

     

  • Frieze – state art’s closed shop: artist John Keane exposes a cabal

    Frieze – state art’s closed shop: artist John Keane exposes a cabal

    In 1986 I did a large painting which I called The Emperor’s New Pose and was subtitled The Importance of Being Important. It poked fun at art market darlings of the time, such as Julian Schnabel and Georg Baselitz, and included felt that I had stolen from a Joseph Beuys installation at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London.

    Now, more than a quarter of a century later, the excesses of the 1980s look paltry by comparison, and the art market has multiplied to proportions then unimaginable. With the increasing polarisation of wealth distribution since then, the apex has become more and more removed from the base of an increasingly distended pyramid. As with society itself, so with the art market, and nothing has exemplified this more graphically than the Frieze Art Fair.

    Although as a practising and exhibiting (though not at Frieze) artist I am inevitably implicated, I cannot help but have profound misgivings about this world whose margins I inhabit. The commercial art world has always had an unpleasant whiff of bluster and disingenuousness, but as the pyramid has expanded and distended, the high end has provided a kind of currency for mopping up the excessive disposable income of a super-rich international élite who may be seeking alternative, less vulgar trophies with which to display their wealth than yachts, Ferraris and Louis Vuitton.

    It is therefore unsurprising that enterprising brokers in the form of gallerists have emerged to service and exploit this concentration of wealth. Enjoying a certain amount of inscrutability, contemporary art has been an ideal vessel to absorb this wealth in need of a home, and as the alchemists of old relieved the greedy of cash in the pursuit of turning base metal to gold, so galleries now can transmute art into objects of desire, whilst at the same time cleverly conferring both a cachet of cool and membership of a social élite onto their clients. The somewhat inscrutable nature of some aspects of contemporary art complements this, since it often requires validation by cognoscenti of impeccable repute, and this is where museums and curators fulfil their invaluable role.

    These museums have assumed the status of latter-day cathedrals, whilst curators and directors form the high priesthood who confer ‘importance’ with their patronage. Uniquely amongst the arts, reputations of artists are determined by a limited number of individuals (see the Art Review Power 100). Collectors and gallerists will look to these institutions to reinforce the reputations of artists they collect by purchasing and exhibiting their work (or appointing them as a trustee). And whilst these collectors bask in the perceived generosity of lending to museum exhibitions, they may also draw satisfaction from the resulting enhanced value of their investments.

    It may be argued that it was ever thus, and that artists have always enjoyed a somewhat unsavoury relationship with wealth and power. That may be true, but it is still not a pretty sight. And in these days of ever-more obscene disparities of wealth, the fact that art provides such a public forum of ostentation makes it even more ugly.

    I have never felt comfortable at art fairs, and it is some years since I have visited Frieze, not only balking at the outrageous admission price, but, if truth be told, also from a twinge of resentment. This is, after all, a club to which I cannot belong, having been represented for the last 25 years by a gallery which has been consistently excluded on the grounds, I imagine, of not being hip enough. In fact the gallery was told that they could save themselves the trouble and cost of application, as there was not a chance of being offered a stand.

    As I watch the Tate video of Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate for nearly a quarter of a century, with his retinue of acolyte curators, domestic and ‘international’, scurrying through Frieze as though it were the Harrods sale, a few seconds ahead of the oligarchs in their dash for ‘important’ work, my heart sinks. They have £150,000 (not much, I admit) provided by the Outset/Frieze London Fund to Benefit the Tate Collection to acquire works for the national collection – works that have been selected by commercial galleries that have been selected by Frieze Art Fair. What sort of way is this to acquire art that will be in the national collection for ever more? Is there not a conflict of interest in Tate endorsing the work of artists in an art fair, where by virtue of that very endorsement their value will be immediately enhanced?

    Outset, the charitable fund secured from donations from wealthy art collectors, profess a remit of collecting ‘challenging’ work, a patronising term if ever I heard one. Who, I wonder, is challenging the decisions of this élite cabal?

    John Keane’s work concerns important aspects of current affairs: www.johnkeaneart.com

    John Keane

    The Jackdaw 2014

     

  • Christopher Wool and the art market: selling the soul

    Christopher Wool and the art market: selling the soul

    American painter Christopher Wool (b. 1955) has been described by the New Yorker as “perhaps the most important painter of his generation”. Christie’s are in less doubt, describing him as “one of the last century’s most influential artists”. Even by the risible standards of bullshit spouted by auction houses and art dealers this is ridiculous. I’ve never heard anyone, artist or otherwise, ever say they were influenced by Wool. Have you? Well have you? Indeed, I’d never heard of him at all until about a year ago.

    Wool joined Gagosian in 2006, since when the noughts increased and the words got longer. In 2009, courtesy of an organisation called The American Fund for the Tate Gallery, the first of two Wools entered our national collection – the second, acquired in 2012, was also secured in part courtesy of this same influential body. No institution in the UK has ever staged an exhibition of Wool’s work, but let’s face it such a ‘celebration’ can’t now be far off. His backers will surely procure one soon. I wonder which gallery will be first to follow the money.

    To investigate how the art market operates I’ll concentrate on the sale of one of his pictures for two irreconcilable reasons: first, like Polaris blasting from under the ice cap, his reputation has been suddenly, suspiciously meteoric; second, I can’t discover an atom of merit or originality in anything he does. He is, therefore, a revealing example of how the art market, which is so disproportionately influential in dictating what we see in public galleries, is run for the investment benefit of rich people. (One of the most important dealers in contemporary art said recently of his collectors: “They have no interest whatsoever in art; they look at paintings as a diversification of their investments.”)

    Illustrated opposite is Apocalypse Now. This 1988, 7’ x 6’ work, painted in polyester enamel on aluminium, was sold by Christie’s last year for $26.4 million, over three times the previous artist’s record. Manifesting more than a trace of evangelical fervour, the person who bought it gushed: “I wanted the absolute best work by that artist and this is the best of the best. It’s in another league. There is Apocalypse Now and then everything else.” Why it should be ‘better’ and more valuable than similarly fabricated Wools reading SEX LUV, FOOL, BAD DOG and IF YOU CANT TAKE A JOKE YOU CAN GET THE FUCK OUT, one can only speculate.

    The technique is stencil, in mimicry of the graffiti legends and adverts which are supposedly its inspiration. And before you commend the concise nihilism of the message, these words are not the artist’s own. They are the looney Kurtz’s exhortation to his abandoned wife in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now: “Sell the house. Sell the car. Sell the kids. Find someone else. Forget it. I’m never coming back. Forget it.”

    Nothing about this piece, either in its handling or conception, might make you think it is of remarkable value. Indeed, objectively there is no good reason why it might not be worth 25 bob instead of 25 million. What establishes its value is something you can neither see nor understand without being indoctrinated as to what it is … usually by someone with an interest in flogging it for as much as possible. Its value resides purely in its perceived status as a tradeable luxury. It has, curiously, no more intrinsic value than any other share certificate.

    In its short life Apocalypse Now has passed through ten billionaire collectors. All were Americans except one, Frenchman François Pinault, five back, who is the proprietor of Christie’s, the firm who sold it this time. Incidentally, the owner before Pinault was Donald Bryant, until recently a trustee of MoMA New York who is also on the aforementioned ‘American Fund’ committee of the Tate, which was instrumental in the Gallery acquiring both its Wools. Californian winemaker Bryant obviously likes Wool, but not sufficiently, it seems, to hang on to what is allegedly his pièce de résistance. You will have noticed that the world of posh art is a very small and incestuous one.

    The speed of turnover in Apocalypse Now – 30 months on average – tells us something about the motivation of modern collectors, for whom genuine discernment would appear to be the last thing on their mind. The very idea of connoisseurship or discernment in collecting contemporary art is an absurd notion when the relative value of a work can be made up so it flies in the face of the little you can actually see. Art is now a fund manager’s hobby, a gamble or a pitch from which, as with any other investment, profit is periodically milked.

    The last seller of the picture, hedge-funder David Ganek, is also a trustee of the Guggenheim Museum in New York where Wool just happened to be enjoying a retrospective coincident with the auction of Apocalypse Now. In 2010, Ganek’s business partner was convicted for insider trading. Though himself deemed a co-conspirator Ganek was never charged. He left his company and paid $25 million in fines. There is a book to be written about the connection between contemporary art and insider trading. Everyone has now forgotten that the first sponsor of the Turner Prize, Michael Milken, the inventor of junk bonds, got four years for related offences. No more telling indictment of the contemporary art market exists than that it appeals to high-risk investors, hedgers and generally shifty operators to whose activities the cachet of art ownership is used to lend a patination of social respectability.

    Was the sale of Apocalypse Now a straightforward auction? No it wasn’t. It was sold before the sale because a guarantor had underwritten the low estimate price of $15 million. A third of the works in the same auction were also the subject of pre-sale guarantees.

    Christie’s threw their all behind this lot claiming that Apocalypse Now “is the emblem of a generation” – an obvious lie. They continued: “Christopher Wool’s Apocalypse Now is the essential image of our times… It’s much anticipated appearance at auction, firmly places Wool amongst the pantheon of great masters of the 20th century.” There you have it: “the essential image of our times”. Not the twin towers, or Obama being sworn in, or Neil Armstrong, or Mandela striding victorious from jail, or tanks in Prague or Tianenmen Square, or even Sergio Aguero scoring in extra time, but this second-hand slogan.

    And what of the artist himself? He has said: “With the painting the inspiration comes from the process of the work itself. Like music making the work is an emotional experience. It’s a visual language and it’s almost impossible to put words to it.” Not half.

    What conclusions might we draw from all this perversion of genuine standards:

    1. Monetary value is unrelated to aesthetic worth. By looking at contemporary art you can’t even guess to within three noughts what it might cost.

    2. Once a powerful cocktail of mutually interested dealers and speculators get behind an artist their rise is unstoppable. The auction market in contemporary art is a game played by six of the world’s biggest dealers, two salesrooms, 40 artists, about 30 billionaires and a clique of subservient museum directors and careerist curator-clones. No one else matters. In 2012 11 of the top 20 artists sold at auction were represented by Wool’s dealer Gagosian.

    3. Most commentary on the art market is disgraceful advertisement.

    4. At the top end, the art market encourages a sort of religious cult participation by hobbyist fat cats eager to cash in on safe bets.

    5. When the auction market has nothing to do with liking art or actual visible qualities, the dealer is happy, the artist is happy, the seller is happy, the other collectors of the same artists’ works are happy, and the auctioneer is deliriously, pants-wetting happy.

    6. The cowardly complicity of State Art before this squalid system is a shocking betrayal of what they really ought to be standing up for.

    The whole thing is a filthy racket.

    David Lee

    The Jackdaw, Nov-Dec 2014