Every so often the emergence of a figure like this will serve both to reinforce certain art world myths, and to provide reassurance to others toiling in obscurity by adding fuel to their comforting delusions.  Romanian artist Ion Barladeanu,  (b. 1946), spent more than thirty years refusing to live as an ‘honorable citizen’, whilst working, virtually in secret, on collages of real finesse that fuse pop, dada, and surrealism.  His works comment on the country of his birth both before, but predominantly after the Ceausescu regime.  They are composites of printed and photographic detritus, including many advertisements,  from the broken society in which he lived.  The figure of American artist Henry Darger springs to mind as an obvious comparison, though Barladeanu’s work is less idiosyncratic and one cannot help but situate it within a European tradition, despite the obvious influence of American pop.  It’s hard to tell from images on the web whether the work is really any good or not.  Has the art world fallen for him because of the quality of the works or because of the myth surrounding their creation?  It’s hard to say. I’m more than little late on this one, Angelina Jolie is already a fan.  Must try harder.  Read more here.

March has brought a significant improvement in the weather in Brum making wondering the streets as a pass time much more acceptable.  I am taking the opportunity to explore more hoping to find something, anything, of interest out there.

Florilegium (February) 2006 The Approach

Florilegium (February) (Detail) 2006 The Approach

This artist incorporates pressed plants into his work.  There’s also some sort of conceptual justification to what he does, but whatever, I think visually it’s very strong.  And I can feel Spring just around the corner.  I have heard that, because of the unusually cold weather we’ve experienced this year, it’ll be a little delayed.  When it does arrive however, it will be all the more spectacular.  I hope to enjoy some of it in Devon this year; I’ve been yearning for the countryside lately.

Shahzia Sikander, in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, The Illustrated Page Series #1, 2005-6. Work on paper (gouache hand painting, gold leaf, and silkscreen pigment). 80x66 inches (framed).

Whilst looking looking through previous shows at Birmingham’s ikon gallery I happend upon the work of Shahzia Sikander.  Her work embodies many of the formal characteristics that currently interest me.  Sikander was schooled in miniature painting in Pakistan.

I recently found a book of Persian miniatures that had belonged to my Grandmother.  The works contained within share many qualities with those of Sikander (who is Pakistani in origin but lives in New York).  I can gaze at many of the pieces at length – they are just exquisite.  Persian Art was coveted and ripped-off by avant-garde artists in the early twentieth century.  Now the contemporary art market is a global one with dealers vying with one another to show the latest sensations from China, India, wherever.

What is significant about creating anything of this nature is that it’s so labor intensive.  Every minute detail of every surface has been highly worked.  The tradition originates from a time when it was some guy’s only job and purpose in life to create such things.  He wouldn’t have had a day job getting in the way.  This accounts for why watercolor landscapes are so popular with the amateur artist – they’re quick.

But I think also that it is this very sense of their having been labored upon that explains their appeal.  They are artifacts from an opulent and luxurious past that seems at odds with the Ikea world we inhabit today.

Although art critics are more  powerless now than they ever were historically, it seems to me that they are all the more important too in the face of an art market controlled by a super-rich elite.  Further. as I shall try to show, I think that the tide has turned.  I believe people are beginning to look again for transcendence in art.  There’s a return to valuing craftsmanship; people are looking for a more obvious sense of substance.  Was Richard Wright’s triumph at the Turner Prize really such a surprise?  Even Damian Hirst creator of ‘For the Love of God’ has started painting.  `In my view there is an appetite for the spectacular again and the dry and inaccessible conceptual stuff just seems underwhelming and passé.  Maybe it’s the economic conditions, or perhaps we’re collectively beginning to get over the gargantuan hangover from the party that was modernism.  Theses are some of the issues I would like to explore here.

From now on I intend to keep a record of all the exhibitions I visit.  Currently I am based in Birmingham and so for the mean time the focus will be here in the West-Midlands and perhaps the North West.  But I also hope to visit London as often as possible.  In the last couple of years I have started painting again myself and become interested in non-western art.  It was an great privilege living in London because  it allowed me to have the enormous revelation that some of the best art I have ever experienced is contemporary.    It feels good to be alive right now.

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.

The concept outlined on the website is nothing if not ambitious:

We believe it’s time for a new, global, European-based media brand. With a keen focus, strong reporting, sharp wit and a more classic approach to design, we’ve dubbed our venture Monocle. At the core there’s a monthly magazine delivering the most original coverage in global affairs, business, culture and design. Alongside, there’s a web-based broadcast component covering the same areas through a variety of bulletins, mini-documentaries and talk formats. Focused on informing and entertaining an international audience of disillusioned readers, listeners and viewers, it is our intention to create a community of the most interested and interesting people in the world.

I have to admit that on the surface it doesn’t seem quite like the kind of magazine I had wished for. I haven’t bought a magazine regularly since The Face and Jockey Slut folded and I was hoping this might be the one to the fill the gap. Annual subscription is seventy five pounds which is a bit steep, and no doubt individual issues are at least a fiver. Worth looking at in the library though.

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?

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.

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

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/