Art

Conservatives really like sculpture. They specially like marble carvings of ladies in wedding veils, or with silk sleeves, or with little lace handkerchiefs draped over their perfect feet.

I'd be the last to deny that these carvings are very pretty and very skilful. It must be very hard to represent something as soft as lace in a medium as hard as marble. (Are the sculptors actually carving the lace and the silk? Or is there a trick involved, some way of fooling the eye so it looks as if there is a carved veil hanging over a carved face? In a way that would be even cleverer. )

But the conservatives who endlessly put pictures of marble ladies on the hate sight formally known as Twitter see in them a political message. These carvings, they say, represent the Decline of the West. In the Olden Days artists carved chiffon veils out of solid rock. Now they nail bananas to walls in the name of art.

Well: "thinking old things are better than new ones" is pretty much the definition of "conservative". My own taste is in fact rather unfashionable, not to say old-fashioned. For example, I have been greatly enjoying the recently discovered 1966 Morecambe and Wise shows currently playing on Radio 4 Extra. They consist largely of well-delivered but extremely laboured word-play. ("Ah, Little John, I fancy it will be venison for supper". "What makes you say that, Robin?" "Oh, just a haunch.") [*]

Puns are puns, and I doubt anyone currently working in comedy could spin a career out of such slender material. But if I say "This sixty year old radio show is really very funny" then a swarm of mosquitos would descend and say "And all modern comedians are completely unfunny" and another swarm would add "If you tried to tell those jokes on the radio today, the BBC would CANCEL you."

The decline-of-the-west argument seems to depend on the theory that art is about representation and nothing else: that oil painting is a primitive and slow version of photography, and sculpture is an inefficient method of 3-D printing. A statue of a lady in a silk dress is Triumphant and Western to the extent and to the degree that it accurately represents a lady in a silk dress. Jonathan Truss and Thomas Kincaid are by definition better painters than Monet or Picasso because if they draw an elephant or a cottage, it jolly well looks like an elephant or a cottage. Picasso invented the word "cubism" to cover up the fact he couldn't draw. If a very sophisticated 3D printer could create a marble statue that was even more accurate than one of the Renaissance masters, that would, on these terms, be a better work of art.

Unless what we are admiring is not the artefact, but the skill which went into the creation of it. A photograph of a bowl of fruit might be just as pretty and just as accurate as an oil painting of one; but a painting is Art because it takes years of skill and practice to be able to produce one. In the decadent west, everyone has a camera-phone in their pocket.

I went to London to hear Bob Dylan sing some songs and to see Lucian Msamati and Ben Whishaw in Waiting for Godot, and spent the afternoon in between looking at Modern Art in the Tates Gallery.

The first exhibition I went to was a retrospective of an American artist named Mike Kelly. I had not previously heard of him. I had not in fact planned to see his exhibition; but it turned out that the Turner Prize was at Tate Britain and I was at Tate Modern. It seems that he was active from around 1980 to his early death in 2012, and that he was particularly known for doing surprising things with old teddy bears.

To my complete surprise -- this was honestly happenstance -- he also turns out to have had an interest in Superman. He didn't particularly care about the stories, but he was intrigued by the idea of Kandor. He was interested in the idea of a city-in-a-bottle: he was interested in the city's art-deco style. He was interested in the fact that there was no consistent depiction of the city -- it was reimagined each time it appeared in the comic. And he was interested in the fact that Kandor represents a sort of obsolescent futurism. It's both the lost home of Superman's childhood; and it's a 1950s vision of a future that never materialised.

The Kandor room in the exhibition consisted of four or five large bottles containing abstract shapes and objects which could be read as cities, and some enlarged comic book panels. I'm not exactly sure if the panels were part of Kelly's original work, or explanatory additions by the Tate. The shapes and colours were quite interesting in an abstract kind of way; there was abstract music playing and the room was in semi-darkness. But I didn't think that looking at objects in bottles particularly illuminated 1950s Superman, or urban design, or retro future town planning. I've always felt that silver age Superman functions as a series of evocative myths even when the stories are embarrassingly simplistic. You could also talk about Krypto, Superboy's childhood pet that is still romping around the asteroid belt. So I suppose what Kelly is doing is isolating the idea of Kandor and putting it in a room. He's saying "think of Otto Binder's idea as if it was a piece of art". Which is no more or less sensible than Yoko asking me to imagine that the moon is a tuna sandwich.

I was more interested in the film that was attached to the room, entitled "Superman Recites Selections From The Bell Jar and Other Works By Sylvia Plath", in which Superman does indeed recite selections from the Bell Jar and other works by Sylvia Plath. I enjoyed the dissonance of a fairly serious actor in a Superman suit being exhibited as Art in an Art Gallery; and the way in which Plath's very intense language was at crossed purposes to the space opera theme of the shrunken city. There was some interest in the way passages from Plath "sync" ironically with the idea of Kandor, rather as Pink Floyd (allegedly) syncs with the Wizard of Oz. And of course Plath is Literature and Superman is Popular Culture. But again, the fact of its having been done was more interesting than the actual doing of it.

Much of the rest of the exhibition struggled to pass the "quite interesting" bar. One room did indeed contain a kind of patchwork quilt sewn together from cuddly toys which the artist had acquired in thrift shops; which is certainly something I had not seen before, and something which one could spend more than a few seconds looking at. But the other side of that room contained more toys displayed in more or less purposeful piles. And evangelical church banners, with slogans saying things like "Fuck You! Now Give Me a Treat Please" embroidered on them. And a reel to reel tape of the artist's voice reciting all of Osvald's lines from Act 3 of Ibsen's Ghosts.

The explanatory notes explained that cuddly toys (home made) were symbols of love but also symbols of labour. Someone had made each one for some child, and needlework is traditionally woman's work. But they'd been turned into commodities by being sold at thrift shops. And that the act of giving a child a stuffed toy implied a transaction: the giver is somehow demanding that the child love them in return.

All very true. But I still felt that I was looking at a pile of cuddly toys.

"What happens if you perform only one part of a play" is not an uninteresting question. I once saw an actress performing the whole of Lady McBeth's role as a monologue, with the cues provided by a Greek chorus. And Ghosts is among other things about motherly love; so were we supposed to be drawing a connection between syphilis, euthanasia and cuddly toys? The artist was interested in ideas of ghosts and hauntings: the exhibition was called Ghost and Spirit. A lot depends on your being able to identify what text is playing on loop.

I think if I had gone into a trendy coffee bar or fringe theatre in 1990 and seen a huge pile of teddy bears arranged in a pattern on the floor I might have thought "That is interesting" and it might even have made me think "That is a bit sad and a bit sinister: some kid maybe loved that toy and now it's just in a pile." In an art gallery with explanatory notes it all feels a bit.... "so what"?

Another large installation appeared to be a large, irregular, wooden grid, almost like Ikea shelving laid on its side. Some sections had pink crystals stuck to the inside of them. This represented, apparently, the artist's high school, in so far as he could remember it: the crystal rooms were the ones he could not remember, possibly suggesting some kind of repression. Pink crystals might suggest the viscera we all have inside us; or it might suggest something extraterrestrial. He was interested in recovered memory syndrome and in supposed accounts of flying saucer abductions. Well, okay: but how could I possibly have known any of that if you hadn't told me? and now that you have told me what is interesting about the artefact?

I then proceeded across London to the Other Tate Gallery and purchased a ticket to see this years Turner Prize exhibition, as I had originally intended.

You know the format: four exhibitions, four artists, lots of outraged letters in the paper about how its all gone terribly woke, the weirdest and most controversial gets the prize.

Room One belonged to someone called Pio Abad, a British Philippine artist. I understand his exhibition to have been a recreation of one he curated for the Ashmolean in Oxford. The whole of one wall consisted of highly detailed black-and-white line drawings of historical artefacts juxtaposed with modern objects. A south American statue placed alongside an angle poise lamp; some kind of African mask alongside a pile of paperback books. The drawings seemed to me to be good: I couldn't tell if they were major-award-winning-good or any-art-school-graduate-good. The rest of the room included actual historical artefacts from the Ashmolean with the artist's own interpretative text; and a large concrete representation of one of Imelda Marcos's vastly expensive diamond necklaces.

The second room, by Scottish Sikh artist Jasleen Kaur, is dominated by an old car with a gigantic doily draped over it: something which I have assuredly never seen done before. Music from her culture is playing in the background. There is a large perspex sheet hanging from the ceiling, on which are placed various objects, lovingly listed by the curators on an explanatory caption. ("Fake vomit" "Blessed iron brew" "Fruit pastel". These are literal examples and not satirical inventions of my own.) There are some photographs of cross-cultural Scottish/Sikh events; with an orange-sepia tinge; and an accordion and some finger cymbals which occasionally play themselves.

Romany artist Delaine Le Bas gets several rooms. They are all hung floor to ceiling with sheets of various fabrics; on which stick figures and icons have been daubed. There is clearly some purpose and skill to this: strange, demonic horses dominate the first room; the second room is dark; and the third is brightly lit with white ghostly figures holding leaves, and the words "know yourself" written on the wall. As you pass from the first to the second room there is a large paper mache representation of a horse, with a pair of shoes on the floor next to it. I don't know whether I am supposed to describe this as "immersive" or "interactive" or "walk-through", but clearly the whole complex of three rooms constitute a single artwork.

So: Pio Abad is pointing out that British museums are full of art looted from other countries, including his own; and asking us to draw ironic connections between, say, a bag of Tate and Lyle sugar and the cultural artefact from (I am guessing) on of the countries that was exploited for the sugar trade. I devoutly believe that our colonial history is fraught with exploitation. And I get that angle-poise lamps are kind of in one way nothing like ritual masks and in another way maybe a little bit like them. We are told that "much of the thinking behind the exhibition was staging these encounters". The artist says that "a lot of the work happens in that space in between, where the viewer contemplates something that I have produced in response to an artefact that I have looked at."

Very probably. But how is this "encounter" or "response" supposed to work? Someone once told me that to understand the abstract art of Mark Rothko you have to stare at one of his canvasses for a very long time; until the colours start to pulsate and draw you in. I can see how that could be true. I can at least understand what is being said. So is the plan that if I look at these drawings for a long time, the fact that the colonial exploitation of the Philippines was a Bad Thing would suddenly present itself to me? Or am I suppose to stand back from the wall, like Ozymandias, and somehow acquire some mystical insight from the grid of twenty or so small pictures, as opposed to studying each one? Or is the idea that I go away and do some homework and discover why that particular lamp resonates with that particular statue? But how do I do that in the exhibition I've just paid a tenner to look at? What's an appropriate amount of time to spend in each room? Or does this kind of art exist primarily in the catalogue and not on the wall?

The Jasleen Kaur room was, it turns out, more of the same. The photographs are tinted in orange because turmeric is important in Sikh culture and Irn Bru is important in Scotland. The objects on the perspex -- the scarf and the sweet and the bottle -- are all of particular importance to the artist. The car was the first car her father owned, and the doily signifies the fact that many Punjabi immigrants worked in the textile industries. Now you have told me that, I can see there is a certain amount of poetry to the image of the car draped in the cloth; and a certain amount of chutzpah in having physically created it. But I have taken it in at a glance; what am I supposed to have learned or felt? "Mass produced everyday objects are coded with symbols and images" say the captions. How? "Kaur cuts and pastes objects from her upbringing in Glasgow through the gallery to make sense of what is out-of-view or withheld?" In what way? "On the floor, found images of protest and restitution, described by Kaur as 'counter-images; aim to dispel myths around where solidarities lie." Well, they don't.

A couple of years ago at Sidmouth I saw a nice "folk opera" about a local lady who had recently passed away at the age of a hundred and something. The songs told the story of her life and struggles. In the final moments they unrolled a piece of embroidery that the lady herself had made. This was very moving, because we'd spent ninety minutes having the context explained. I don't know the context of the fruit pastel, and neither does anyone else.

The Romany piece -- which I found much more interesting as an object -- seemed to suffer from the same issue. Once you have given me the solution, I can see that the walk-through exhibition represented the journey of the soul to enlightenment. One room was, like, dark and the other was, like, bright, and there were even footprints going from one to the other. But it turns out that the drawings of horse-like-critters in room one, and the paper mache horse in room two, are representations of a china horse that her granny had on the mantlepiece, and the shoes represent the shoes that the artist wore as a child. Or something. How could I conceivably have known this? And once I have been told why is it interesting?

The last room, by one Claudette Johnson, was a series of paintings of people on great big huge canvasses. They were the kinds of paintings of people that look like the people who they are paintings of. Probably: there is some suspicion that the artist may combine the features of more than one sitter to get the desired effects. No-one has a name: the works have titles like "figure in raw umber" and "seated figure 1". There is some abstraction going on: a man in a solid turquoise shirt and a man in a red shirt pose in front of a solid yellow background; a man whose face is rendered in plain black pencil or charcoal is wearing a partly painted-in red and blue checked shirt.

It's not just a collection of portraits: it too is saying something. All the figures are black people; none of them are famous. The paintings draw attention to their artifice -- the tops of the canvasses chop the top or the side of the face away; a young man is turned away from the painter in an awkward pose. The paintings -- if I am allowed to say this -- seem to be interested in the actual physical blackness of black people; of the way in which light reflects off skin. Some of the images contain more light pigment than dark. There is one image of a dead or unconscious man in a red shirt laid across the lap of an older woman which is called "Pieta" but none of the other images appear to contain any conscious symbolism. The overwhelming feeling of the gallery is that the big, oversized faces are projecting personality: I found it slightly unsettling in the way that endless walls of famous white people in the National Portrait Gallery has never done. I checked the explanatory label: "This person deserves to win the prize because she paints pictures of human faces really well, and conveys their personalities really convincingly, with striking use of colour that makes you look twice", it said. No, of course it didn't. It turns out that the pictures "mediate questions about our private and public selves" "suggest that our identity is not fixed but is crated and changeable"; "embody" the idea that "black...is an unstable identity, physically, culturally, and politically." 

Well, all right. If you insist.

English literature departments used to teach The Death of the Author. "Texts" (which are not at all the same things as "works") were autonomous objects; a poem was a thing made, a thing which existed: the question was always "what does this poem mean" and never "what did the author mean by this poem." One assumes, I suppose, that if the poet is any good, the poem means roughly what the poet intended it to mean; but you can't bring his "intention" in from outside and force it onto the text.

Fools ask "Who is Godot?" and "What does Godot represent?" as if the answer -- Beckett's answer, deposited with his lawyer to be unsealed fifty years after his death -- would explain away all the difficulties of the play; as if Waiting for Godot, with an explanation would be more interesting that Waiting for Godot unexplained.

Bigger fools tell you that "Godot is God" or "Godot is death" as if that settles the question. The play "means" that God doesn't exist and won't ever come; or else it "means" that the thing that we are all waiting for is the thing whose arrival will signal not only the end of this play but the end of every play. But this is all non sequitur. Waiting for Godot is fascinating because it is "about" two people, waiting for a third person, who never in fact arrives, and what they do to pass the time.

Modern art -- modern art as mediated by the Tates Gallery -- seems to take the opposite approach. Don't say "death of the artist". Say "the artist risen again and ruling the universe; the artist who sits above the object and declares its one and only meaning". These horses and fruit pastels and wooden grids mean what the artists tell you that they mean.

It would be one thing to look at a picture of a scary man in a red suit and be told "This is a painting of the devil because the artist means it to be a painting of the devil." The painting of the man in the red suit is still just as good or just as bad a painting as it was already; but we have possibly learned something about why the painter painted it. But it's another thing to look at a small cube in an empty room and say "This is a sculpture of the devil because the artist means it to be a sculpture of the devil."

It isn't that the artist imposes meaning on the text: it's that the artist's meaning supplants the text: that the artist's meaning renders the text superfluous. What we are being offered is, in fact, empty rooms containing pure intention.

And the very first time someone did this -- Duchamp’s loo or Craig-Martin's glass of water -- it was possibly mildly interesting. The one hundredth time, not so much. Particularly when what is intended -- colonialism is bad, Glaswegian Sikhs exist -- is so banal.

[*] "So how did you fall in with the outlaws?" "I fell out with the in-laws"

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