Two People, One Artist - Gilbert & George

The expression “don’t judge a book by its cover” always comes to mind when I think of Gilbert and George.  Described as looking like repressed 1930’s bank managers, they have been confounding the art world for over 50 years. 

Matthew Collings describes them as the Morecombe and Wise of existentialism, and admires the shock value of much of their output. But he argues that there is a precedent, the work of Francisco Goya - the “father of shocks”. Like so many artists who have explored the theme of shock in their art, Gilbert and George argue that what appears on the TV news deeply shocking every day.

George Passmore (left) and Gilbert Proesch

They describe themselves as living sculptures and annoyance and provocation lie at the centre of their work.  One only has to look at their dancing song “Bend It” featured in their 1981 movie “The World of Gilbert and George” to see  they achieved that aim.

Being ineligible for government grants and teaching posts being out of the question, they were isolated and poor and decided to turn to their only resource – themselves.  They fused their art with their identity and the world around them.

Gilbert & George singing “Underneath the Arches” (DailyArt Magazine)

They decided they were going to be ’two people, one artist’.  They claimed that when they left art school they were completely lost and needed each other, no doubt at least partly due to their total eccentricity.   The major advantage of the partnership, they argue, is that there is always someone there to answer a question.  So they never have to work in a vacuum – the bane of many artists. They speak of the loneliness of many artists – especially when their work is rejected, but they always had each other to provide comfort.  They developed the concept that ‘nothing matters’.

This may explain why their naked bodies appeared more and more in their art, including the fluids that comes out of them, during the 1990’s.  Among their targets was the bible which they wanted to ridicule, texts of which appear alongside images of their naked bodies.  For 2000 years, they argue, the bible has dictated how people should behave, including images of nudity being suppressed.  They sought to confound the viewer by presenting images of shit in a decorative, colourful way.

Blood, Tears, Spunk, Piss series 1996 (Research Gate)

They have lived and worked at 12 Fournier St Spitalfields in London’s east end since the late 1960’s. It’s now a fashionable location.  But in the late 60’s the area was populated by the homeless, poor families and ‘cockney market traders’.  There were hostels nearby catering for tramps, returned servicemen damaged by their war experiences and petty criminals, all of which provided inspiration for their art.  They first met as students at St Martins School of Art in 1967 and immediately fell in love.  Two years later they appeared as “living sculptures”, painting their faces silver so they resembled robots and singing that appalling 1930’s music hall song Underneath the Arches.

Gilbert and George are inspired by their experiences of living in London.  12 Fournier St has become a shrine for their art and their reference material is carefully and meticulously referenced and catalogued so they can easily access it for future projects.  Thousands of photographic images have been reduced to contact sheets which form the basis of their reference material.  Almost all their images are taken either in their studio or within walking distance of it.  “We never felt the need to travel to exotic locations in order to be inspired”, says George.  They love the cosmopolitan nature of the East End where everyone seemed to get along quite well.

From their Dirty Words Pictures 1977 (Schirn Press)

Their “Dirty Words” pictures of the late 1970’s were based on images taken from the immediate neighbourhood and included images of the locals photographed from the windows at 12 Fournier St.  They wanted to show images of what “the city feels like or smells like”.  London was experiencing a massive garbage strike at the time and the city looked like a waste dump.  The middle class press gave their work a caning.  They were even asked “why do you have black people in your work?” But while the media complained, the public flocked to see their work.

In 2007, they were the first British artists to hold a major retrospective at Tate Modern which featured 200 of their works – thought to be one fifth of their 40 year output at that stage.  They curated the exhibition by producing an enormous scale model of the gallery space and placing miniature images of each work just so.

This exhibition was quite a coup given the suspicion with which the British art establishment had viewed them.

New Normal Pictures, White Cube Gallery (Art Limited)

Some of their work seeks to explore the intersection between masculinity, shame, anality and art.  They draw the viewer into their work by being decorative and large scale so that by the time they realize what they are looking at, it’s too late.

In April 2021, they held the exhibition “New Normal Pictures” at White Cube. In reviewing the show, The Guardian made reference to the paradox that is Gilbert and George. They were angered by the way some people saw the bright side of the Covid 19 pandemic; saying how great it is to be able to drive across London without the traffic and being able to see the stars at night without the pollution. Meanwhile tens of thousands of people were dying in misery and funerals were taking place several times a day near their home. “They are masters of provocation and proudly right wing, but they also have a compassion that would put plenty of seemingly virtuous artists to shame.”

On The Streets - Bag Men, Photograph, 2020 (White Cube)

What keeps Gilbert and George going is the sense that they are always under attack, so they need to fight back.  They have always been outsiders, despite the 2007 retrospective.  “We were never normal”.

References;

The Guardian

This Is Modern Art – BBC Channel 4, 1999

BBC Imagine

David Sylvester - The Unique Art Critic

It’s been argued that there is a shortage of good art writers in this world today.  It’s not clear why this is the case – one suggestion being the proliferation of rubbish that masquerades as contemporary art.  Thus the traditional hierarchies of quality upon which art is judged have broken down, and no one is sure exactly what constitutes “good” art these days.  But in the not so distant past, there were some notable art writers/historians.  Robert Rosenblum comes to mind, another is David Sylvester.

Sylvester (1924 – 2001) was a complex personality whose involvement in art was multifaceted, embracing writing, curating, collecting and advising.  He’s been described as the golden lion of English art writing and one of the finest writers on art in the second half of the 20th century.

Giacometti's portrait of Sylvester from 1960

Sylvester made a point of really getting to know the artist whom he was critiquing, as well as their art. He was noted for his clarity of expression and he championed the art of Picasso, Matisse, Magritte, Giacometti, Henry Moore and Francis Bacon.  He was also skilled at making exhibitions, his first featuring the work of Moore.

During the 1950’s and 1960’s he wrote about football and cricket for the Observer, ran a cricket team called the Eclectics and reviewed films.  He was an avid collector of art from all around the world and his collection was constantly evolving. 

Sylvester allowed his attitudes to certain artists to evolve over time.  For many years he was hostile to the work of Picasso, but 40 years later he felt nearer to "accepting [Picasso's] genius, rather than resenting it".  His views on Matisse and Picasso are enlightening to say the least; "It is not even the question of Picasso versus Matisse," he wrote, "for even at those times when Matisse seems the greater, Picasso himself is still the question, probably because Matisse is a great artist in the same sort of way as many great artists of the past, whereas Picasso is a kind of artist who could not have existed before this century, since his art is a celebration of this century's introduction of a totally promiscuous eclecticism into the practice of art.”

Sylvester lacked any formal training in art but did practise painting for a while, before deciding in his late teens that he might be better at writing about art than making it. 

Sylvester with Francis Bacon

Of all the artists within his field of expertise, Francis Bacon was the one that Sylvester was most closely associated with as both champion and major critic.  Apparently, Bacon fell into the category of “artists for whom personal authenticity and a struggle to come to terms with reality were of utmost concern” to Sylvester.

Looking at Sylvester’s interview with Bacon from 1966, I’m struck by the easy, yet thoughtful conversational style he adopted.  There is also a psychologically penetrating aspect to his questioning, in particular in relation to Bacon’s portraits.  Sylvester asks Bacon to comment on the perception that much of his work is horrific.  Bacon responds that it’s been his objective to paint an image as directly and ‘rawly’ as possible and this directness may be interpreted as horrific.

Bacon’s portrait of former lover George Dyer

He asks Bacon if he has ever had a model sitting for him who he has painted many times from memory and if so, what has happened.  Bacon answers yes, and that the experience inhibits him (if he likes them) due to his propensity to carry out some injury to them on the canvas.  He’d rather do it in private than to do it before them.  Sylvester asks Bacon why he considers his distortions injuries and the response is that this is the way the viewing public interprets them.  “Don’t you think those interpretations are right?” asks Sylvester.  “Possibly” is the response. 

Sylvester asks Bacon if his mark marking is both a caress and a blow, an assault on the model, that is; his mark making represents contradictory feelings for the model.  Bacon quotes Oscar Wilde – “you kill the thing you love.”  He also states that many of his subjects are troubled souls.

It’s fascinating watching Sylvester roaming around Bacon’s shambolic studio, discussing his source material.  He expresses amazement when Bacon tells him he never visited Velazquez’ portrait of Pope Innocent X in Rome despite spending 2 months there.  Bacon responds by saying he didn’t want to see the original after what he had done to it.

Bacon, Study After Velazquez Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953

“I want to produce a very ordered image, but I want it to come about by chance”.  Sylvester argues that this is a matter of reconciling opposites.  “One wants to be as factual as possible and yet at the same time as deeply suggestive, or deeply unlocking of areas of sensation other than the simple illustration of the object that you set out to do – isn’t that what all art is about?” asks Bacon.

In discussing Rembrandt’s 1659 self-portrait, Bacon makes reference to the ‘brutal’ image making of American abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock which he believes had all been done before by Rembrandt, such as his self-portrait which is anti-illustrational.  However, Rembrandt’s work had “the additional aspect of recording a fact – that is, his appearance which makes Rembrandt’s work much more profound and exciting because it is much more difficult.”

Rembrandt self portrait, 1659

It really is a wonderful interview and only a critic who knew his subject as profoundly as Sylvester knew Bacon could have pulled it off.  It inspired actor Jeremy Irons to publish a video in which he brings to life excerpts of the interview.  You’ll find the video on Iron’s website.

References;

The Guardian

Artcritical.com

Francis Bacon – Fragments of a Portrait, interview with David Sylvester

50 Years At Latrobe Regional Gallery

Latrobe Regional Gallery in Morwell is celebrating its 50th anniversary with an exhibition featuring 50 prominent Gippsland artists.  It’s an eclectic exhibition in which almost all the visual arts are represented.  Works in the exhibition are drawn from three sources; the gallery’s collection, the artists themselves and artist commissions.

The catalogue tells us that three themes have informed this exhibition;

land, and in particular the lived experience,

fortitude – a reference to the economic turmoil following the privatisation of the power industry in the Latrobe Valley and, more recently, the move away from coal fired electricity generation.  And the ongoing impact of the 2014 fire at the nearby open cut mine that blanketed Morwell in acrid smoke for 45 days.

connection – a reference to everything we do in a community.

Some of the artists selected for the exhibition have taught art at the nearby Federation University Churchill campus and others have lived and worked in the Latrobe Valley for many years.  A former gallery director is also included. 

Reference in the catalogue is also made to the travelling exhibition “Contemporary Gippsland” featuring a number of local artists that was developed by LRG in 1990.  The catalogue for that exhibition states that “regionalism does not mean a decline in artistic standards, irrelevance to contemporary artistic theory and practice, or that individualism is lost to some perceived notion of regional style or subject matter”.  The aim of that exhibition was to spread that message far and wide and this current show is aimed at reinforcing that message.

Featured below are some of my favourite works from the exhibition.

Bill Young, Spirit Of Morwell, 1990, acrylic on MDF, 183 cm x 240 cm

Bill Young’s work perhaps captures the conundrum that is the Latrobe Valley – a questioning of its identity.  This area of Victoria is unique in having a number of large rural towns in close proximity to each other.  So is the Latrobe Valley residential, industrial or rural/agricultural?  Or a bit of each?

Neale Stratford, Being Comforted By Death, 2013, digital pigment print on aluminium, 112 x 75 cm

Neale Stratford’s art draws on his experiences with Asperger’s Syndrome.  In creating his art, Stratford references the dark compositional styles and themes of artists such as Goya and Caravaggio.  I have visited a solo show staged by Stratford at LRG and it was a powerful and confronting experience.

Geoff Dupree, Waterloo Road, 1985, watercolour on paper, 77 x 221 cm

Apologies for the poor image quality, I had to scan the catalogue as I couldn’t find this painting online.  The location is Trafalgar, but it could be any town in the Latrobe Valley at night.  It’s a desolate and unsettling scene that is so typical of a depressed area at night.

Mandy Gunn, W(RAPT) 2012/13, recycled paper, shopping bags & wrappings on cardboard

Mandy Gunn does amazing things with cardboard and paper, and has for many years.  De-constructing, abstracting and collaging with a reference to textile techniques such as weaving.  I found myself drawn into the work through the swirling and undulating patterns, but there is an environmental concern in this work in that it references the issue of recycling.

Rodney Forbes, Submarine With Goat & Giantess, 2010, oil & acrylic on canvas, 92 x 259 cm

I think Rodney Forbes is at his best when depicting humour in his art.  You are drawn into the work by the clarity of colour and the complexity of the composition.  There is an almost cartoonish element to his work yet there is also a strong narrative element and Forbes often explores more serious themes.

Juli Haas, By The Banks Of Her Own Lagoon, 1995, watercolour on paper, 100 x 151 cm

Juli Haas, who died in 2014, won the Sir John Sulman Prize with this work in 1995.  Although the scene is cluttered with figures, there seems to be no interaction between them. There are sinister overtones to the work and yet this is relieved to some extent by the use of vivid, contrasting colours and an element of puppetry and theatre in the scene.

There have been times when I wonder if the locals appreciate what an important asset they have in the Latrobe Regional Gallery, given the poor attendances I have witnessed at some exhibition openings.  But long may the gallery survive and prosper.

“50 Years, 50 Artists” at Latrobe Regional Gallery runs until 12th December.  And while you are in Gippsland, I suggest you visit the Archibald Prize at the Gippsland Art Gallery in Sale and the “Our Entries” exhibition at Rosedale (weekends only).

Reference;

“50 Years 50 Artists”, Latrobe Regional Gallery catalogue

A Journey Around The Art World

Author and curator Matthew Israel embarked on a yearlong tour of the contemporary art scene, uncovering the working lives of artists, curators, gallerists, critics and he wrote of his experiences.  Nice work if you can get it.  The book was published in early 2020 which possibly represents unfortunate timing, given the devastating impact of the Covid 19 pandemic on the art scene.  As to how the art world emerges from the pandemic – only time will tell.

There are two chapters I want to focus on – art fairs and art schools.  Israel describes art fairs quite correctly as trade shows for the art world.  They are a booming business and he claims that there are over 260 fairs held globally as of 2017, and he begins with the biggest and most influential – Art Basel which is held in Basel, Miami and Hong Kong.  Apparently Art Basel works with roughly 500 galleries per year and upwards of 300 can take part in an individual fair.  I can imagine such an event as being overwhelming.

These fairs can be major tourist attractions with several other events running nearby and they can remake or establish a city’s image.  Art fairs come in various shapes and sizes of course, with some restricted to a single city.  The smaller ones start with significantly lower price points and tend to attract far less press coverage and critical acclaim. They can present a more intimate setting and many are long established and very successful.

Israel claims that the transactions galleries make at art fairs have become more significant than the business they do at their own locations.  In some cases, the bulk of a gallery’s revenue comes from art fairs.  So why are art fairs so popular?  One explanation is they provide a one-stop shop for viewing art from around the world without the expense of “globetrotting”.  Another possible reason is the rise of the internet which enables people to access art from around the world rather than visit individual galleries.  So when they decide to see some art in person, this is what they expect to see.

Art fairs have their critics.  Some in the art world argue that fairs diminish art with their trade-show design, overwhelming size and sales-first agenda.  Some galleries say the fairs are too expensive to take part in, or too exclusive in that they squeeze out smaller operators.  Others argue that fairs are killing the gallery as a site of business, turning gallerists into travelling salesmen, stealing time and energy away from the creation of good art and exhibitions and strong relationships with collectors.  Some collectors get irritated at being hassled by salespeople when trying to view art uninterrupted.

I can remember visiting an art fair at Melbourne’s Royal Exhibition Buildings a few years ago and seeing how little thought some exhibitors gave to the presentation of their stock.  I saw two large, brightly coloured works (all surface, no content) on display with a Bill Henson photograph squeezed between them – dark, moody, intense.  It was awful.  It was akin to visiting a car show and seeing a Ferrari parked between two Hyundai Excels.  But art fairs appear to be here to stay.

In discussing art schools, Israel focusses mainly on the United States, but I can relate to much that is written.  The argument being presented here is that these days “art school” can mean many different things.  With the vast amount of money that has poured into the art world in recent decades, art world roles have become more specialized and streamlined into professions.  Accordingly, training has been adapted to cater for these new professions.  

Some art schools are being set up to train people for careers as artists, art historians, art journalists, curators, auction house specialists, conservators, advisors, gallery owners, publicists, collection managers, social media experts as so on.  Most of these courses are run at graduate level.  These new courses reflect a broader trend in higher education towards gaining more vocational skills with an emphasis on developing practical skills rather than on art theory.  And the predominant focus is on working in the field of contemporary art, hardly surprising given the boom in interest in this area in recent decades.  Most of these new programs are marketed as a means of accelerating one’s progress in the art world – in a business sense.

But many students still prefer the graduate studio art programs despite the relatively high costs involved (brought on by a lack of government funding) and the little likelihood of making any money from their art practice afterwards. Thus many graduates will be saddled with massive debts that they may never be able to pay back.

So how does a student decide what program to study?  Complicating things in the studio art programs is the influence of artists such as Marcel Duchamp who asserted that anything can be a work of art if the artist says so.  Therefore there has been a diminution in the teaching of traditional skills such a painting, drawing, sculpture, print making and photography as well as a questioning of the notion of quality.  Now “art” can be almost anything from a painting to a sculpture to a meal or a conversation or an installation consisting of any materials that the artist sees fit to include.  Whilst I was studying at RMIT, I found exhibitions that were staged by my teachers to be the least inspirational of any that I saw.

There is also a debate about how separate to make such schools.  There is the ivory tower approach where artists are insulated from the art market.  The benefit of such an approach (theoretically) is that it gives the student an opportunity to develop his/her ideas without being pressured by ‘the market’.  Alternatively, there are schools which focus more on placement services, such as offering more professional development and encouraging exposure to the business of art and galleries and to subjects like branding as well as strategies for enabling a long-term career. 

I believe I would have benefitted from this approach at RMIT.  There was simply a lack of interaction with working artists.

Among the many people Israel interviewed for the book was Steven Henry Madoff, chair of the Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.  Madoff believes art school buildings should be remodeled into separate components, a network catering for different aspects of an arts course but functioning simultaneously. He also believes that ethics should play a greater role in what is termed foundation.  Given the rise of authoritarian governments, ethics is something that artists need to integrate into their practices, he argues.

Just as a footnote, not long after I graduated in 1997 with my arts degree, the RMIT abandoned its part time program.  I was still working full time back then so perhaps I was lucky.

References;

A Year In The Art World – An Insider’s View,  by Matthew Israel.  (Thames & Hudson, 2020)

Mandy Martin - Artist & Environmental Activist

Australian artist Mandy Martin died in July at the age of 68 after a long battle with cancer.  Described as a highly influential artist, educator and a passionate environmentalist, her art often explored the fraught relationship between humans and the environment.  She graduated from the South Australian School of Art in 1975, where she also taught.  Martin produced such a rich and varied oeuvre that I can only skin over the surface here.

From early on in her career she produced politically engaged work such as a screenprint referencing the Vietnam War which appeared in the New York feminist magazine Heresies in 1977.

Screen print for Heresies Magazine, 1977

For many years her work focussed on the impact of mining on the landscape of New South Wales and for 20 years she kept returning to the Cadia open cut mine to commence a new body of work.  A project would commence with a trip with her sketchbook placed on an ironing board, using pigments she found in the area as well as inks.

“My work has always been about the interplay between the natural environment and the industrial, you can’t talk about the degradation of the environment without talking about what you want to preserve in that environment”.  Some of her work presents a simple vision of the natural world contrasting with the impact of the industrial.  “It’s a juxtaposition between the two.”

Mandy Martin with her work Four Riders from 2016

Martin’s father was a professor of botany at the University of Adelaide and her mother an artist and she would often go on field trips with them, with her father collecting specimens whilst her mother painted.  Thus she thought it natural to see the interrelationships between science and art.  Her work has been credited with bringing an intellectual perspective to the issues of environmental degradation – not to scare people but to make them think.

She rarely used tube paints, instead preparing her own pigments which were often supplied by farmers, archaeologists and friends.  “I do some loose impasto work to begin with, then I lie it down and stain it and flood on more pigment and that kind of half destroys the work.  It sounds weird but lots of wonderful things happen, it runs and blurs and once it dries I work back into those ‘mistakes’ as it were.”  Martin didn’t like the ‘hand of the artist’ being evident in her work or the mannered brush mark.  Instead, she wanted blocks of colour and scrape marks.

Homeground 3, Ochre, pigment & oil on linen 2004, 1.5 m x 3 m

She felt that she was still painting the same picture, that her techniques and subject matter hadn’t really changed since the 1980’s.  “I’ve always been interested in texture and surface and because I do a lot of landscape based work, it’s natural to want to incorporate the materiality of the land.”

The aboriginal scar trees dotted across the central west of NSW (including on her property near Mandurama) were an influence on her work, and she worked collaboratively with a native elder Trisha Carroll in works such as Haunted.  Martin found that Trisha brought a spiritual dimension to her work which she found fascinating.

Haunted 1, ochre, pigment, oil on linen 2004, 1.5 m x 5 m

She had also been keen to push the boundaries of her work, which included a collaborative multimedia effort with her son Alexander Boynes  titled ‘Homeground’, a combination of her painting and his digital work.  I saw one of their collaborations at Latrobe Regional Gallery in 2019 – it was quite an eye-opener.

In relation to the huge scarring of the landscape caused by open cut mining, Martin says “They talk about offsets but how do you offset something like that?  You can’t, once it’s gone it’s gone”

“I used to do a lot of detailed drawing, but I’m getting much older and arthritic so I’m being a lot broader and looser now.  I love painting because I’m totally seduced by the materials and textures and working on a good piece of linen with my favourite ochres and pigments makes me pretty happy.”  Following her death, the Canberra Times described Martin as deeply ethical and beautifully human. “Her art engaged society, spoke of its challenges and addressed the existential threats that it faced.”

Red Ochre Cove, oil, 1987, 3 m x 12 m installed in the committee room, Parliament House Canberra

Martin held numerous exhibitions in Australia and overseas and her work can be found in many collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

An article posted by Australian Galleries tells us that in the final weeks of Mandy’s life, she requested that donations could be made to assist an annual artist grant, which her family would like to name in her honour. The details of this artist grant which will support creative responses to the climate crisis are currently being finalised.  Donations can be made through the independent non-profit organisation CLIMARTE.

References;

Awarewomenartists.com

“The Beauty and the Terror” – Tom Griffiths (Inside Story)

Mandy Martin: Homeground Mini Doco – Bathurst Regional Art Gallery

Canberra Times

Johan Christian Dahl - Painter of Serenity

If I had to pick my all time favourite night time scene, it would be “View Of Dresden By Moonlight” painted by Johan Christian Dahl in 1839.  The towers reaching majestically towards the heavens, the flares on the riverbank, the candlelit rooms in the distance and the sheen of moonlight on the water.  (A very close second would be JMW Turner’s amazing watercolour “Alnwick Castle”, painted 10 years earlier.)

View of Dresden By Moonlight, 1839, 78 cm x 130 cm

You can see why he is considered the first great Norwegian romantic painter.  In his series ‘Art Of Scandinavia’, art historian Andrew Graham Dixon paints a bleak picture of life in Norway in the years leading up to the arrival of Dahl on the artistic landscape.  Norway was essentially a backward country of farmers and fisherman, cobblers and carpenters, there were no universities, art schools or art galleries so seeking an artistic career must have seemed a pipedream.  Or an irrelevance.

But that didn’t deter Dahl who was the son of a poor west coast fisherman.  His early paintings convinced a group of wealthy local merchants to sponsor his studies in Denmark and Germany, and he would spend most of his life abroad.  Yet he would consistently return to his native Norway for inspiration.

Winter At The Sognefjord, 1827, 75 cm x 61 cm

Sometimes he depicted harsh winter scenes, in other paintings the sun would be shining, but it was always a pale watery sun struggling to break through the clouds.  Graham-Dixon argues that Dahl saw the undeveloped landscape as a virtue, a symbol of Norway’s innocence. 

View from Stalheim, 1842, 190 cm x 246 cm

In his monumental “View From Stalheim”, Dahl seems to pull out all stops to produce a grand patriotic statement, perhaps presenting the essence of what it meant to be Norwegian at a time of rampant industrialization in other parts of Europe.

Dahl spent a large part of his life in Germany, settling in Dresden around 1820.  He befriended the famous German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich and they became very close and were godfathers to each other’s children.  They painted and exhibited together and from 1824, even shared the same house with their respective families.

View From Lyshornet, 1836, 41 cm x 51 cm

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer asked in 1840 “Why has looking at the moon become so beneficiary, so soothing and so sublime?  Because the moon remains purely an object for contemplation, not of the will. […] Furthermore, the moon is sublime, and moves us sublimely because it stays aloof from all our earthly activities, it sees all, yet takes no part in it…”

There is serenity and peace in Dahl’s painting of moonlit Dresden, a suggestion of nature and people coexisting harmoniously.  We see the Augustus Bridge spanning the Elbe River and the Baroque Church of Our Lady in the middle distance, and to the right the Old Town (Altstadt) – the historic town centre.  What could have been a meditation on loneliness and alienation has perhaps become a comforting scene, a reassurance that we are not alone.

References;

Art Of Scandinavia, presented by Andrew Graham-Dixon BBC 4 (2016)

artschaft.com – Johan Christian Dahl (2018)

Paul McCarthy - Art Of The Underbelly

It’s time to look at the dark underbelly of modern art, or perhaps to put it another way, to confront modern reality. The Guardian describes Paul McCarthy’s work as a relentlessly revolting vision of modern America.  He has been at it since the 1970’s.  His art depicts his nation as a crumbling edifice of pop culture, of creeping fascism and depraved, uninhibited capitalism.   “It’s a questioning of our condition,” says McCarthy, “our way of life. Look at America right now with its racism and its violence, and yet we have Disneyland.”  He is regarded as one of the most significant American artists of the last half century.

Blockhead & Dadies Big Head, Tate Modern (2003)

Born in Salt Lake City in 1945, McCarthy was initially a carpenter and labourer who produced art at night.  He describes Salt Lake City as a very patriarchal environment and with a very conditioned reality.  He believed he was abnormally sensitive to the pressure of the patriarchal institution, and by about the age of 20, he realised that he was living in a “fucked up” situation where normality was not what it seemed.  So he left.  He sees the role of art as resistance, to push back against how reality is presented and the image of the patriarch.

Rebel Dabble Babble, a collaboration with his son, Damon

He has produced large scale video works such as the 2013 ‘Rebel Dabble Babble’ which consisted of two derelict houses built inside a vast warehouse with video screens showing hard core pornography, supposedly featuring cast members from the film Rebel Without A Cause.  In 2008 he caused a sensation in Switzerland when his giant inflatable turd took leave of its moorings during a wind storm, bringing down a powerline before landing in a playground of a children’s home.

Complex Pile, Switzerland (2008)

I first became aware of McCarthy through the 1999 TV series ‘This Is Modern Art’ presented by British artist Matthew Collings.  In one episode titled Shock! Horror!, Collings asks “do you like being afraid, fed up with order and harmony and the world making sense (supposedly) and being the right way up, and you want sudden noises, horror and obscenity – try modern art.”  A strange introduction really, as the point of much modern art is that the world has gone completely insane.  Among the artists featured in the program are Tracy Emin, Gilbert and George, The Chapman Brothers and – Paul McCarthy.

A scene from Bossy Burger (1991)

In each episode of the series, Collings begins with a reference to the past.  In ‘Shock! Horror! his reference point is the incomparable Goya.  And that’s the point, if we believe that some of today’s art is pointlessly shocking and has no precedent, we need to look back to Goya – or even further back to Hieronymus Bosch.  To meet up with Paul McCarthy, Collings travels to Los Angeles “where there is always blue skies, pleasantness, bright colours and innocuousness.”  Surely nothing horrible can happen there.  Next we are confronted with McCarthy’s performance piece ‘Painter’ from 1995. Confronting to say the least – “a savage filmic assault on the values of the fine art world”, says Collings.  And then there is Bossy Burger of 1991 and Santa’s Chocolate Shop of 1997.  Watching these films, Collings describes them as “the Magic Roundabout meets the Texas Chainsaw Massacre”.  They were, and still are, shocking. 

A scene from Painter (1995)

The themes of violence and fascism, the constant questioning of the state of things have always underlined McCarthy’s work, he simply finds new ways of expressing these themes as the decades pass.  Subtlety isn’t in McCarthy’s metier.  At Hauser and Wirth in London in 2011 he exhibited animatronic sculptures of George W Bush having anal sex with pigs. “Tawdry images for dismal times”, according to the Guardian.

Train (2003-2009)

The Guardian asks has reality finally overtaken his ketchup-smeared visions of corruption?  There is an inevitability to McCarthy’s response.  “How much more absurd can you get than Donald Trump? It’s a really good example of a performance, its theatre. He’s really just manipulating a population……we’re still trying to figure out what the fuck’s going on. Even now. Like, what is going on? We’re so utterly fucked up that, if anything, we really do need these experiments into this reality.” 

WS Spinoffs, Wood Statues, Brown Rothkos at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles (2017)

There is always a constant questioning, and his materials include sex, violence, bodily fluids and sick humour.  It’s a risky business although McCarthy’s son Damon (who collaborates with him on many projects) argues it’s not risky as there is nothing to lose.  Still, McCarthy claims to have been censored four to five times per year.

References;

Paul McCarthy and Damon McCarthy in conversation with Tom Eccles – Hauser & Wirth

The Guardian

“This is Modern Art” – Channel 4 (1999)

Kathe Kollwitz - Artist With A Social Conscience

In her 77th year, Kathe Kollwitz (1867 – 1945) stated in her diary that it was her deepest desire to no longer live.  She believed that she was old enough to have the right to complete rest.  One of her friends claimed that she had a dialogue with death for most of her life. 

Woman With A Dead Child, 1903, etching dry point

She was the fifth child of seven.  She was a shy and anxious child and the deaths of three of her siblings, one prior to Käthe's own birth, exposed her at an early age to the quiet, eternal suffering of parental grief. Her mother’s stoicism, her concealed "deep sorrow" and emotional strength in the face of such loss had a powerful effect on Kathe and she would later incorporate these childhood observations into her own aesthetic depictions of mourning. 

Unemployment, 1909 etching and aquatint

In 1891 she married Karl Kollwitz who was trained as a doctor with a social conscience, they moved into their home in a disadvantaged area of Berlin where they were to remain for the next 50 years. Kathe’s work has to be seen against the rapid industrialization that occurred in late 19th and early 20th century Germany and the toll it was taking on the working class.  In 50 years Berlin’s population had swelled from 400,000 to 2 million.  The city had trouble coping and for many poverty became a way of life in a city containing slum tenements, housing thousands of textile workers who had flooded into the city in search of work.

The quiet, hard working life they led was undoubtedly good for her art.  Early in her career she was influenced by the 1892 play The Weavers by Gerhart Hauptmann, which portrayed a group of Salesian weavers who staged an uprising in the 1840’s over concerns about the industrial revolution.

Kathe began a series of prints based on the weavers.  Shortly after, her etchings won a gold medal at an academy show, but Kaiser Wilhelm II vetoed the award, describing her work as “gutter art” and a sin against the German people.  State approved art featured images of German power, but her career was established.  Another influence was the peasant’s war of the early 16th century.  She claimed that all her work was the distillation of her life and she acknowledges that she is a socialist artist.  This was due to the influences of her brother, father and literature of the period, but the real motive for choosing as a subject for her art the life of the workers “was that such subjects gave me in a simple and unqualified way what I considered to be beautiful.”

The Volunteers, 1923 woodcut

She got involved with the difficulties and challenges of proletarian life due to the women who came to her husband for help, unsolved problems of prostitution and unemployment grieved her and she determined to “keep on” with her studies of the working class.

She lost her youngest son Peter in World War 1, “everywhere beneath the surface are tears and bleeding wounds and yet the war goes on and follows other laws”. In her youth she wanted to mount the barricades of revolution, but in the wake of WW1 she wrote “I am and sick and tired of all the hatred in the world, I long for a socialism that lets men live free from murdering, from lying, from destroying and disfiguring, from all the devil’s work that the world has seen enough of.”

The Mothers, 1923 woodcut

During the years 1912 to 1920, Kollwitz produced very little finished work, labouring under depression she made many etchings but none were completed.  Having “come to a clear sense of her own past” she began to investigate the possibilities of sculpture and finally gave etching up.

Then she wanted to explore the possibilities of line work so she switched to woodcuts.  “It’s like a photographic plate that lies in the developer, the picture gradually becomes recognisable and emerges more and more from the mist.  Simplicity in feeling but expressing the totality of grief”, the war was still impacting on her art.

Memorial For Karl Liebknecht, 1919 a co-founder of the Marxist anti war Spartacus League who was executed in 1919 - woodcut

“It is my duty to voice the sufferings of man.  I want my art to have a purpose beyond itself and to wield influence.  Strength is what I need, it’s the one thing I need that seems worthy of succeeding Peter.  Strength to take life as it is and unbroken by life and without complaining and much weeping to do one’s work powerfully.”

For 14 years Kollwitz was a member of the Berlin Academy of the Arts, but was forced to resign following Adolf Hitler’s election victory in 1933 - her left leaning politics saw to that.  She gave consideration to returning to an old plan of producing a series of prints that focussed on the theme of death.  “I thought that now that I am really old, I might be able to handle this theme that would allow me to plumb the depths.  But that is not the case, at the very time when death becomes visible behind everything it disrupts the imaginative process”.   Images of the protective mother began to appear in her work during World War 2 and her home was destroyed during the bombing of Berlin.

The Grieving Parents, 1932 - a memorial to her son Peter, granite

At the end of her life she was hopeful that “other comrades can carry the banner forward”.   She died just a few weeks prior to war’s end. 

Käthe Kollwitz - Portrait of the German artist of expressionism,  Arts Council of Great Britain production 1981.

Art Of Germany – BBCTV  2010

The Art Story