Le Flâneur

Partly it’s just that I wanted to add this image to my blog somewhere and partly it’s because I want to show my support for the idea put forward by this journalist here; but here it is, Damien Hirst’s latest sensational creation. I think it’s hella cool. It was doing the rounds in all the weekend glossies last weekend (it seems to have been made for this kind of consumption); of particular note was an interview with the artist by Will Self in the Telegraph. I think it’s a marvelous thing and undoubtedly when seen in the flesh it’s all the more impressive. Johnathan Jones believes (and I agree) that the object should be retained for a British museum rather than sold to a rich foreign collector only to be buried in storage somewhere:

Yet what masterpiece will remain in London to remind us of the best British artist of modern times? The Tate will have only a few shells and pill bottles as mementos of Hirst. For the Love of God - the diamond skull - is the perfect Hirst for a museum. Unlike the shark, which decayed, it is almost totally imperishable. It is designed to be a rock for the ages, covered in rocks. It’s a wonder of the modern world, with all the darkness at its hollow center that implies. It is, in its rarity and eerie beauty, one of the most amazing artefacts ever made in this country.

Now for the task of convincing the public that it’s worth the price tag, and as the author notes, deciding on an apt location.

In ‘researching’ my MA dissertation I came across this little gem, a Good Housekeeping advert from would you believe it 1988, obviously riding on the back of much anti-feminist sentiment. This poster is used by a scholar in an essay to make some very serious points about so-called ‘post-feminism’, but though I see point they’re making, I just can’t help seeing this kind of thing as rather funny. There’s an event better picture from Women’s Day (that I can’t be bothered to scan in), of Barbara Bush posing immaculately in Pearls on a White House sofa, superimposed with speech marks it reads: “Women’s Lib made me feel inadequate and useless”.

I feel like this dissertation, now more then anything else, is impeding me from getting on with the rest of my life. What doesn’t help matters is that I’ve been reading some fairly subversive literature recently slamming post-modern academia, and feminists in particular. Nick Cohen posits that, as well as certain historical factors, it is the academic left’s insistence on ‘theorizing’ identity politics, it’s zombie like fixation on ‘otherness’ and ‘the tyranny of the signifier’, that accounts for its current impotency and lack of moral compass. It’s an argument I find rather appealing having just come through the ‘cultural studies’ experience myself. A typical reading list at a university in the thrall of the ‘post’ies will contain a couple of essays by Enlightenment thinkers early on, and then the rest will be reams and reams of post-modern ‘theory’ characterised for the most part by unnecessary complex language and obscurantism. The general feeling is that the harder to read or understand something is, then the more worthy and important it must be. Maybe this sounds a bit anti-intellectual or plebeian even. But I honestly think George Orwell would be turning in his grave at some of this crap.

In 1996 Dennis Dutton, the editor of Philosophy and literature, opened an annual Bad Writing Contest. The winner in 1999, as Cohen highlights in his book What’s Left: How Liberals Lost their Way, was the radical marxist feminist theorist Judith Butler. There are several of her texts on my reading list, all of potential use in my dissertation – so help me god. Here is the winning entry in all its glory:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearctiulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

What, except on a very abstract level, does this have to do with reality? And what right do the writers of such stuff have to claim they are coming from the left? Is it any wonder that I’m beginning to take the view that the ‘University experience’ for many of my generation is a complete sham and a swindle?

An artist smiled at me once

Today the Observer magazine had a feature about a great British art institution that moves me to the pose the question:  Are Gilbert & George the Terrence & Phillip of art?  Two cohabiting scatologically obsessed men in more or less identical attire.  If you need any further persuasion then read the following passage:
Here they are talking about the long struggle they had to persuade the Tate to give them a retrospective:

George: ‘We said: “If you won’t do the show, simply write us a letter saying no” - which they wouldn’t do.’

Gilbert: ‘They wanted us in Tate Britain, but we said no.’

George:’We believe it is wrong that there is a Tate Britain and a Tate Modern. You can’t judge artists by their passports. It’s an apartheid. An apartheid in art!’

Gilbert:’Then they said: “OK, half in Tate Britain and half in Tate Modern.” So we said: “Oh, yes! And then we will have a ship [they mean going up and down the Thames between the two galleries] with a big shit round it!”‘

Cue uproarious laughter.
When in London recently I bumped into George (originally from Plymouth), in the street.  The artists live near Brick Lane and it’s almost impossible not to run into them at some point if you are there.  What a peculiar yet distinguished looking man I thought, and then I looked away.  Then, on realising who it was quickly looked back.  George had clearly registered that I had recognised him as the famous artist and seemingly then favoured me with a very sweet and benevolent smile, though I fancy somewhat suggestive at the same time.  From what I gather I should in way feel myself to be particularly privileged by this encounter, by all accounts both of them are friendly and popular in the community, but it was edifying all the same.  It’s not often a living sculpture looks right back at you.

This may be the most disturbing piece of art I’ve ever seen. ‘Head of Mussolini’ by R. A. Bertelli (1933). A ceramic construction, it portrays Mussolini’s profile from which ever direction you see it. For a while Italian fascism and futurism were happy bedfellows. I saw it at the V&A Modernism exhibition in London recently - a show that has generated a lot of column inches. The picture doesn’t really do it justice. You have to be able to move around it to register its full impact. I enjoyed the show, though as is often the case with such blockbusters, it was rammed with people making it impossible to move around as freely as one would have liked. But as a highly ambitious project though, I think it went some to displaying the multi-facetted nature of its subject matter. Perhaps more space between exhibits would have been beneficial.

Posted @ 19:48:38 on 03 May 2006 back to top

OK so I’m responding to some negative responses to the image that was situated on the banner. The black and white photograph on the edge of the banner was deemed in some quarters cheesey and cliched. A fair point though it was never meant to be read as emblematic of the site itself. Nor was it meant to be some sort of indication of my psychological well-being. It was a just a fairly quiet image to sit in the corner and not detract from the text. Anyways I’ve replaced it with a detail of a painting by Martin Kippenberger called ‘Paris Bar Berlin’. I’m sure I’ll change it again soon.

This was a painting I saw at the first of the weirdly titled ‘Triumph of Painting’ exhibitions at the Saatchi gallery a couple of years back. It’s basically a painting of a wall of paintings in a cafe. Perhaps Kippenberger is referencing the tradition within modernism of paintings within paintings - I’m thinking here of Manet, Van Gogh and Matisse who all at some point painted works from their collections as part of interior scenes. One neat little idea of modernism is that it is to some extent the representation of representation. So works such as these are a kind of literal simulation of that process. But I like the sort of work that conveys a sense of affection for a place and I’m sure this must be a basic driving force for many artists. Maybe it was just a place in Berlin Kippenberger liked to hang out in. I’d like to find out more about it.

Kippenberger is a really interesting artist. Though an excellent painter himself his practice spread across a variety of media. Sometimes an assistant would paint something for him, or he’d employ a sign painter to copy an image he’d selected. He also made extraordinary three dimensional creations. All these tropes are gold dust for critics and theorists. I wish I’d been aware of his work when I was at art college as some of his work seems to encapsulated the notion of ‘good bad painting’ that I was searching for at the time (if that makes any sense). Prior to the Young British artists of the 90s Kippenberger was a master of self promotion and the propagation of his own myth, which maybe explains why the British art establishment never really embraced him up until now. I really enjoyed his long overdue retrospective at the Tate. It runs until the 14th of May.
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/kippenberger/

I had the pleasure recently of meeting two members of the lesbian art collective Toxic Titties. They attended our seminar on identity politics, an area in which they are heavily invested. They were very entertaining and charming as they discussed their latest projects. Being male and straight put me in a bit of a minority but this was no place for prejudice - this was radical critical theory with a punk attitude. Right on sister!

Naturally they were acquainted with our esteemed Professor Jones - part of the hip side of the Los Angeles art scene. It would seem as though LA divides into high end big bucks art palaces and a subversive bohemian counter culture just like any other big city. Though by their description in LA it is even more pronounced, it is after all the playground for the American super-rich (parts of it anyway). Can’t wait to visit.

There is an artist called Vanessa Beecroft who caters for the extremely rich. Her work seems to straddle a variety of contexts, I first encountered it in a style mag for example, but it has also graced the covers of respected art journals. Toxic Titties have a real problem with her work for obvious reasons. Mainly though it is because for some people, mostly straight men in positions of authority, though perhaps a growing number of women also, her work is designated post -feminist. Now this is a can of worms I don’t intend to open here but I would recommend to anyone to read Ariel Levy’s recent book ‘Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the rise of raunch culture’ for some thoughtful and considered insight into this matter. To cut a long story short though a couple of members of Toxic Titties answered a call on behalf of Beecroft for ’skinny boyish looking models’ and were recruited to take part in a performance at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. This involved standing around in high heels in the nude for punishing hours, both in a studio and in a three hour performance in the gallery itself. The result for the Toxic Titties was a damning indictment in essay format of Beecroft’s working practices. They exposed the exploitative mechanisms behind an image such as the one above. In the process of their stint as models, Toxic Titties also unionised and negotiated a better pay deal for the women involved. They had planned to sabotage the actual performance but I suppose they chickened out. They were apparently unprepared for how exposed and degraded they felt. The only escape from the boredom was to indulge in fantasies about their fellow models, the only real perk in their ordeal. Have a look at their website to find out more. http://www.freewaves.org/festival_2002/artists/toxictitties.htm