David Barrie

A painter speaks...

Here's another antidote to the daily news of irredeemable credit default swaps and synthetic collateral debt obligations that don't, er, add up.

It's a call to arms to the visceral by German artist Gerhard Richter:

I pursue no objectives, no system, no tendency; I have no program, no style, no direction. I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes or variations that lead to mastery. I steer clear of definitions. I don't know what I want. I am inconsistent, noncommittal, passive; I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty.

So there.

Picture courtesy of Jorge Franganillo.

What the f*ck have you done?

If you're faint-hearted, don't read this post - and simply follow the instructions given on the TV news before a sports highlight show: if you don't want to know the results, look away now...

In his almost incomprehensible - but actually quite good - book of essays, British artist Liam Gillick writes about

frustration with an art world which seems content to merely re-process an overload of cultural signifiers in a state of hypnotic reverie...

He's right. We're frustrated.

But for a moment, as banks risk collapse, Sarah Palin is treated as some kind of babe and Angola launches a $6bn expansion of its agricultural production to feed the developed world, there's a piece of installation art that seems spot on...

...for a world of hypnotic reverie.

I think it's by Mexican artist Stefan Brüggemann - but I may be wrong.

Mark Rothko: more decorator than painter?

A big show of the work of abstract artist Mark Rothko has just opened in London and the mystic carpetbaggers are in full flow.

Writing in the London Times, Rachael Campbell-Johnson writes

it feels like stepping into a cathedral. It has a melancholy, almost sacramental, magnificence which comes partly from the scale of the installation and partly from the way that the colours almost open like windows, then close like veils drawn across a void. The eye slowly loses itself in its own thoughts.

And as Waldemar Januszczak writes

Rothko’s paintings are almost invariably understood as religious art without the religion; Judaism without the Torah. At its most purple, the myth seems even to note an accord between these gloomy Turnerisms and the Holocaust. His suicide topped it all off splendidly.

At college, I got off on all of this big time, turning my Joy Division off for a mo, parking my Hermann Hesse novels on the shelf and looking longingly at my Poetry Society prize on the wall. 

I wrote a (way too) long long essay on the relationship between Rothko and the Kaballah and looked long and hard in to the deep, dark, troubled soul that used to sit in the Rothko Room at the Tate Gallery as a teenager.

Almost as soon as the artist topped himself, everyone raided his art for whatever subliminal or intellectual desire they so chose. He was the Triumph of American Painting. He was the apotheosis of the tragic, tortured soul. He was the twinkling of God speaking to us. He was well...anything anyone wanted to make up that was soaring, meaningful, suicidal and...

Now I still believe much of this is true but one thing has been forgotten: and something that is exemplified by the acres of picture coverage given over to the current show in London and the roaring trade in Rothko posters and calendars.

What's forgotten is the decorative power of this work: and also the decorative nature of the language.

For all of the super-powered angst and verbiage surrounding his art, go on, admit it, it's all disarmingly attractive. It looks nice. It's slick, simple and phosphorous...like this piece of graffiti in a tunnel in Djakarta.

In a review of a book of photographs of Britain's urban landscapes earlier this year, the architecture critic of the Financial Times Edwin Heathcote wrote about the photography of Martin Parr and the genre of coffee table books devoted to pictures of distribution centres, service stations, round-abouts and other odds and sods of fetishized urban blankness.

He described these images as the boring presented to the knowing.

Go on. Own up. Rothko's work is spiritual, mystic etc. etc. but it is also disarmingly decorative, pretty and something deadly dull that we fill with our own interesting-ness - or not.

 

Beer mat architecture

In yesterday's London Times newspaper, The Cratehouse in Castleford, Yorkshire was named one of the top ten works of public art in the U.K.

Created by German artists Wolfgang Winter and Berthold Hörbelt, it's made out of hundreds of bottle crates perched on a shipping container.

 

In their book on Fleeting Architecture and Hideouts, Robert Klanten and Lukas Feiress saw The Cratehouse as part of a general trend for modular building and another brick - or is it crate? - in the wall of architects

losing their traditional sovereign right to the formal design of buildings/spaces...the overthrow of established etiquette in our built surroundings...

What's great about The Cratehouse is that it's a mad mix of the beautiful and the useful.

So experimental film-maker Katie Clark has made this:

And for two years, the object has been used for poetry readings, school workshops, meetings of the Rotary Club, even as a Santa's Grotto and halloween hideout.   

A brilliant combination of walk-through sculpture - described by the artists as a space of light - and usable object.

In late 2008, The Cratehouse will move from Castleford, Yorkshire to Kielder Forest, Northumberland and  join a number of installations there that include a Skyspace by James Turrell. 

The artwork was commissioned by Arts Council England, Yorkshire, curated by Yorkshire Sculpture Park and managed by City of Wakefield Metropolitan District Council. Its fabrication was supported by Northern Containers, Hessle Fork Trucks Ltd. and HDS Associates.

 

Judgement of Paris

Rubens is my favorite painter of all time.

And this picture - The Judgement of Paris - is one of his greatest.

But forget all talk of composition, shape, form, blah blah - and any other pompous conoisseur catalogue stuff. 

For from the chasms of the Internet, by an artist of no known name, comes a perfectly executed version of the story that may express far more accurately what was really going on when Hermes brought the son of Priam beautiful goddesses to judge.

42 Ways to say no

Just when you might be lost for words, conceptual artist Mel Bochner comes to the rescue in a piece (resolutely) called No, currently on show at the Peter Freeman Gallery, New York.  (via Frieze).

Hello Kitty (with a little bit of hell)

The London Financial Times reports that China has overtaken France as a market for art sales.

According to a nameless art critic:

It is simply emblematic of the French decline. There hasn't been a brilliant French artist since the second world war.

China claims 15 of the 35 artists worldwide who command seven-digit sales, and the country's artists have seen prices rise eight-fold in the past seven years.

Last year I visited the art district of Tank Loft in Chongqing.

The area is decked out in ways that we can only dream:

At the center of the district is a network of artists' studios, located on the campus of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute that's been designed with knowing understanding of military-industrial chic.

I've blogged elsewhere  about floors rendered smooth by the procession of Western art dealers and curators who have made pilgrimage here.

But what's great about the place is that alongside the professional artists is a network of studios of artists who are students at the Institute, like Liao Man:

Just check out her work.

Yes, it's saccharin and self-conscious.

And no, it doesn't command seven-digit receipts.

But there's a quiet, ironic exorcism and joke/celebration of consumerism going on here that loses nothing in translation.

Every image of her face bears a red mark that's a scar.

Art with baggage in tow

I love Takashi Murakami and his art.

The redeemed cosmopolitanism that curator and critic Dave Hickey highlighted in his Sante Fe Biennial back in 2001 was a fantastic catch-all for an artist who loves sheen, style, otaku and the baroque rendering of some kind of primordial iconography.

   

But there's something annoying about Murakami - and I can't quite work out whether it's him, the bad behavior of those who surround and promote him, a bit of both or a bigger message about art. :-S

There's a major retrospective of Murakami's work currently on show at the Brooklyn Museum.

At the gala opening last week, outside the museum, in pride of place, were street vendors

the kind typically seen on many New York/Hong Kong/Paris/whatever avenues, selling "Louis Vuitton" bags

writes Vanessa Friedman in the London Financial Times.

Guy Trebay in the New York Times gives an eyewitness account:

Standing outside them were men who resembled the African immigrant vendors who haul around telltale bundles of alluring, cheapish and almost-right copies of stuff from Gucci and Louis Vuitton. This time, however, these characters were playacting. The goods laid out on trays and tarps were real Vuitton accessories. They cost, as they do in the stores, a bomb.

The entire stunt - or piece of performance art, to use Friedman's words  - was designed to publicize counterfeiting.

In the words of the Chief Executive of Louis Vuitton:

It's an opportunity to send an artistic and political message, showing that street vendors can be good - they're part of the life of a city - but that counterfeit is bad - it destroys that life.

What is all of this? Art? Politics? Pure public relations?

Yes, to all of them.

But Murakami needs to watch out.

It's great that the street show defiles those who cherish the idea of art as the creation of a unique primary object and exhibitions as a pompous opportunity to celebrate and investigate all of this.

It also great that the blood boils when street culture is appropriated and selectively edited to make a pseudo political/promotional point on behalf of a luxury brand, and for an elitist band

who had almost certainly never bartered for an $80 copy of a $1,400 bag off a blanket on the sidewalk.

But Murakami is in danger of becoming a vehicle for moral judgement - and judgement over an economy that's a well-spring of his happy aesthetic.

For the black economy is an intrinsic part of the energy and joy of the city, its obsessives and obsessions. 

And it's somewhere in this culture that Murakami and his art finds its strength and expression.

Images of Brooklyn Museum street market courtesy of Athlete Movie.

Art's best kept fashion secret

What fuelled the action painting of American artist Jackson Pollock?

Was it angst? Nope.

Testosterone? Nope.

A sublimal drive towards fractal expressionism? Nope.

Tucked away in the print edition of this month's edition of V Magazine is the answer:

Pollock wore Converse All Star sneakers!

Time to re-write that macho history of Abstract Expressionism?

Over the counter avant-garde

According to Estates Gazette, the real estate magazine, artist Damien Hirst is to open his first art shop in Marylebone, London.

Known as Other Criteria, the store is to sell artwork, T-shirts, postcards, plates and books featuring the artist's work.

The London Evening Standard reports that

Among the Hirst items on sale will be an 18-carat gold charm bracelet featuring different types of pills as the charms. It costs £250,000, while a set of 12 plates decorated by the artist costs £10,000.

A key reason for the venture, according to one of the directors of the new retail company is that

Art has to be experienced and the shop is where people can experience it in a democratic atmosphere rather than a West End gallery.

In an age in which Kate Moss designs clothing for Topshop and pitched battles mark the opening of sales at Primark, it feels right for the avant-garde to see the shop floor as the contemporary Palace Square.

Even better, Hirst's diversification suggests a total revision of the history of art - as a canon of artists as unfulfilled shopkeepers, not angst-ridden expressionists.

Duchamp doing bathroom fittings.

Fragonard retailing cosmetics.

And Caravaggio doing Pinot Grigio - with a personal shopper service downstairs devoted to Colt Leather.