Conceptual Art is a con

All the expressive arts have groups of practitioners who push the boundaries of their art form. 

In music the avant garde were experimenting with dissonance and strange time signatures from the beginning of the 20^th Century, pushing the boundaries until we arrive at “found” music on one hand, and John Cage’s 4’33”, three movements for any instruments the players choose to bring, as long as they don’t play a single note for the duration of the piece.  Music could go no further out.  The boundary had been reached.  Most composers currently working are back to producing music for an individual or a combination of instruments, including electronic devices, and no matter how inaccessible it may sound to the average MOR fan, it is recognisably part of a continuing tradition.  

In English literature we had “found” poems; we had BS Johnson publishing a loose leaf novel that the reader could tackle in any order they chose; but in many ways the boundaries were reached much earlier with “Tristram Shandy” by Sterne, published in the decade from 1759, with its totally black page, its concentration on the hero’s conception and birth, its learned references, and a concentration on the minutiae of domestic life and its mishaps – all foreshadowing Joyce.  Joyce could be said to have pushed at the limits with “Finnegans Wake” with its reinvention of the actual language.  But there has been a retreat from the extremes and currently esteemed practitioners generally produce accessible work which can be understood and appreciated by almost every literate person.

But the avant garde in the Visual Arts, having reached the limits with “found” pieces such as Duchamp’s “Fountain”, with the dribblings of Jackson Pollock et al, with reductionist sculptures such as Caro’s painted girders, with the use of collage by such as Richard Hamilton, still insist that the boundaries can be pushed further, until anything can be “Art” if the artist says it is.  And anyone can be an “Artist” if they say they are.  They don’t actually have to produce anything.  It has been suggested that all that’s needed is for the “Artist” to think a work.

By that definition I’m the best visual artist in the world . . . . . because I say I am.

Bellowhead

Not the visual arts for once, but music - Folk music at that.  Last night, with Linda, Anthea, Naomi and Paul, I went to the Norwich Waterfront to see Bellowhead.

They were excellent, as always, and we all ended up bopping and jumping up and down to their music.  If you don't know about them they're an 11 piece band, all of them multi-instrumentalists.  Among their instruments are guitar, banjo, concertina, accordion, bagpipe, trumpet, trombone, saxophone, sousaphone, tuba, guitar, banjo, mandolin, bouzouki, fiddle, cello,swanee whistle, tin whistle, loads of percussion, etc etc. Here's a taste of their music, although this is not from last night, but from a concert last year:

"Fakenham Fair"

Incidentally, since last night my new catch-phrase is going to be "Look at the Lesbians".  I'll explain.  For the first 20 minutes or so of the concert Naomi and Anthea were standing near the front of the crowd, behind two rather large young women who were clearly great fans of the group, and who were constantly dancing vigorously and energetically, if in a somewhat ungainly and quite dangerous way - dangerous to other people's toes, that is.  After a while it was all too much for Naomi who came and stood with Linda and I, further back, saying "I couldn't see the stage because of those two bloody Lesbians dancing in front of me!"

Disclaimer 1: at this stage I should make it clear that Naomi would not normally dream of being so un-PC as that, but enough is enough, and the two dancers were very annoying, even from where we were standing.

Disclaimer 2: neither myself, nor anyone in our party last night, has any information about the sexual orientation of the young women concerned.

As the concert went on and the tempo of the music increased, so these two young women threw themselves even more energetically into their pogoing.  I couldn't resist drawing Naomi's attention back to them as they leapt up and down with their arms over their heads, hair flying, horn-rim spectacle lenses glinting in the spotlights.  It was noisy, and I heard myself shouting into Naomi's ear "LOOK AT THE LESBIANS!"

So that's my new catch-phrase.  Now I expect to get told off.  Especially by Naomi.

From The Times

Rachel Campbell-Johnson doesn't think much of Damien's little show either:

"Hirst has been painting. And by that he doesn’t mean employing a team of assistants to produce the paint-by-numbers-type canvases familiar from recent shows. Hirst has been alone in his studio working with palette and brush.

"The result is No Love Lost — a show of 25 pictures. Seen from a distance they don’t look too bad. Their dark expanses are seductively presented in traditional gilt frames. They fill the galleries with an eerie blue Insect-O-Cutor-style glow.

"But take a step farther and a pale, silk-papered boudoir transforms into what feels more like a teenage boy’s bedroom. You can almost smell the brooding odours of existential angst.

"Here are all Hirst’s familiar obsessions: the skulls, the shark’s jaws, the ashtrays, the spots with the odd iguana or little O-level, “still life” lemon added to the mix. Hirst floats his images on the dark surface of the canvas, mapping out their spaces and relationships with a mesh of perspective lines.

"These works are utterly derivative of Bacon (give or take a dash of Giacometti), but they completely lack his painterly skill. And their metaphors are as ham-fisted as the application of pigment.

"Look to the end of the galleries and you will see Poussin’s Dance to the Music of Time. Hirst appears to hope that his heavy handed memento mori will make him part of the line-up of art historical tradition. But the artist who has made his reputation with shock now produces works that are shockingly bad. And who knows, maybe this is his trick. Is his brand so strong that we can’t resist turning up to look — even at works on which we know no love will be lost?"          (The Times, 14th October 2009)

Here's the Poussin:

and here's one of the Hirsts, called "Requiem: White Roses and Butterflies 1":

It makes you want to weep, doesn't it?  But not in the way Damien wants you to . . . . .

Sewell on Hirst - from the Evening Standard

Utterly hits the spot:

Sewell on Hirst

Thanks to Nick for pointing me at this.

Does no-one love Damian any more?  Peter Conrad in The Observer doesn't:

Conrad on Hirst
.

A pic to make you sick?

Yes, that's Nick Serota, Director of The Tate Galleries, schmoozing with the sainted Damian.  The best comment on his relationship with the YBAs is Charles Thomson's 2,000 painting  

"Sir Nicholas Serota Makes an Acquisitions Decision":

 

So what have you done lately?

I hear you saying.  It's all very well slagging off other people's work, but what have you done?  So, to prove I'm not a critic (as if you couldn't guess that already) I'll occasionally stick in a piece of my work.  Not because I'm claiming any particular merit for it, but just to prove, in the words of Archie Rice, that "I have a go Missus, I have a go!"

This is an imagined view of the Sussex Ouse valley seen from the sea and a thousand feet up, with Newhaven in the foreground and the inland "Cliff" of Lewes upstream.  It's the third version of this subject I've painted, and interested me because it was the first large painting I'd made using acrylics.  I normally use (and much prefer) oils.  So I do have a go - and I'll post some more later.

Excuses for Tracey Emin

Number 1:

The fact that she can't spell, yet uses words as an integral part of many works, reveals a wonderful vulnerability. 

No.  It reveals that she can't spell and that she has total contempt for the consumer of her "Art".
Have a look at "Helter Fucking Skelter" (sic) above.  "Atitude", "Envey" Everythig", Steel".  How hard would it have been to check those words?

I've just found this blog which says stuff about Ms Emin better than I can - I'm too angry!  Have a look:

http://kirstyhall.co.uk/blog/2008/08/tracey-emin-20-years/

If it's not Art, what is it?

So before I let myself go about Tracey Emin, a few words about what YBA crew have actually produced.  In some of the reviews of the big Pop Art Exhibition currently filling the coffers of the Tate Modern the point’s been made that most pieces of Pop Art were comprehensible in a matter of seconds.  You look at it, get the point, and move on.  There is no depth; you don’t “lose yourself” contemplating a Lichtenstein or a Warhol.  This may or may not be a criticism; but the lesson the YBAs (Young British Artists as were – they’re mostly in their later 40s now) seem to have learned is that extreme novelty is a selling point.  That might take the form of gruesome dealings in dead animals (slaughtered for the occasion, let’s not forget), extreme sexual explicitness, or a sad parading of the detritus of their daily lives.  I would argue that, whatever these pieces may be, they are not Art.  So what are they?  How about reviving a term from the 19^th Century – they’re “Conversation Pieces”; an updated version of the sort of thing a rich Victorian might keep in his salon to provide an ice-breaking topic of conversation with his guests.  It could be an interesting arrangement of stuffed animals, like this one from among many produced by Mr Walter Potter from Bramber, Sussex in the second half of the 19^th Century (click on it to enlarge): 

Actually, that's both more fun and more gruesome than anything Damien Hirst has dreamed up.  And nobody's called it Art - it's Taxidermy.