NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

from The Telegraph, (via Sherwin Tjia)

From here.

A.O. Scott on the matter:

 

Is there a meaningful distinction to be drawn between exercising the imagination and just making up a bunch of stuff? When it comes to children at play, probably not: the pleasure of inventiveness matters more than the quality of the particular inventions. But children’s entertainment, made by grown-ups at great expense in anticipation of even greater profit, is another matter. The difference between inspired creation and frantic pretending is the difference between magic and mediocrity, between art and junk, or to cite a conveniently available example, between “Toy Story 3” and “Despicable Me"

The implication here is that inspired creation and ‘art’, are not, at least in the case of Toy Story 3, incompatible with making a profit ( see my take on this: Is Advertising Art? here). I suppose the moral of this story is that even if the first motivation is to make money, if artists are employed and directed to just ‘invent, play, and have fun,’ then the result is closer to real ‘art.’ than if they weren’t given free reign.

In fact, this motivation question lingered over me as I toured Pop Life,  currently on display at the National Gallery of Canada. Did Warhol,  his progeny – and their factories – do what they did simply to poke fun at how foolish collectors are? How mercenary, philistine our culture is? How wrapped up in seeking status, and blind to the presence or absence of true genius or talent? If so, the ‘movement’ makes a valid, invitingly ironic statement. If however the real motive, the real intent, was simply to self-aggrandize and make money, then the whole thing is a sham. Of course the truth lies in between. Somewhere, I’d say, a lot closer to the latter than the former.

Not to say Koons, Murakami, Hirst et al aren’t geniuses of a kind. They’re brilliant marketers, self-promoters, entrepreneurs. Unmatched in the art of exploiting the stupidity and greed of the moneyed classes.Or as Andy Warhol once put it "Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art."

Oh, and the original title of ‘Pop Life‘?  ‘Sold Out‘, but one of the featured artists insisted it be changed.

Two views of Pop Art

This from the latest issue of Guerilla Magazine, #23

Boldly creative and obsessively organized, Adrian Göllner is a man of two minds—and he draws upon both of them to win public art commissions all over the world.

Story by Nigel Beale  /  Photographs by Rémi Thériault

Several years ago I went through the Ron Mueck exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada. The sculptures, so meticulously human and life-like, were either huge or tiny. Despite breathtakingly accurate renderings of human flesh, eyelashes, toenails and hair follicles, if the works had been life-sized, the appeal would have evaporated.

The same somehow holds true of great fiction, where words themselves serve to distort or magnify reality. In so doing they hold us rapt.

Mueck’s sculptures fascinate us because, while we know they aren’t human (as we know, too, that words in a novel don’t produce real people), they so closely resemble the real thing that we puzzle over them, marvel at their verisimilitude, strain at the tension between likeness and difference, real and imagined, familiar and strange.

It is exactly this duality—this blur between the real and the unreal—that most interests Ottawa’s Adrian Göllner. His progressive rise to prominence through the winning of international public art commissions is rooted in a double nature driven by curiosity and artistry.

In the early 1990s, after George Bush Sr.’s invasion of Iraq, CNN started hawking a set of Desert Storm videos highlighting the “very best” of its Gulf War coverage. As Göllner recalls, you couldn’t at first figure out if the videos were for real or just some kind of parody; a joke; war served up in a neat infotainment package for consumption in the comfort of your living room.

The unintentionally farcical nature of the CNN videos inspired Göllner, whose army-base childhood in Germany had left him preoccupied with the Cold War (the artist’s military father was on assignment there “preparing for World War III” for much of Göllner’s early life.)

Riffing off this farce/fact dichotomy, Göllner created a series of Cold War trading cards, complete with bomb-testing stats, warnings about which countries not to piss off, and advice on how to prevent the “Reds” from taking over. The cards were convincing enough to keep people guessing (crass commercial product or parody?) and sold briskly. The Deifenbunker tourist attraction located just outside of Ottawa took 100 sets and invited Göllner to do a similarly themed on-site installation.

Adrian Göllner was photographed in front of Stand, the glass wall installation he created as part of the City of Ottawa’s Shenkman Arts Centre in Orleans.

Exposure here, and through a public commission he’d completed in Kitchener, Ontario, got Göllner a shot at another large prize, this one connected with construction of the Canadian embassy in Berlin. Göllner included his faux anti-communist propaganda materials as part of the bid and won the project. Using the propaganda “meant that I knew what Berlin meant,” reasoned Göllner.

In this instance and many others, Göllner’s ability to understand context, to research and grasp the import of architectural design and intent, and to come up with compelling-yet-elemental ideas has helped him win vaunted public art commissions all over the globe.

But there is another, equally important aspect driving Göllner’s success: his meticulous organizational skills.

“Public work is about 20% art… please read the rest here in the latest issue of Guerilla magazine.

Searching for an image of Whistler (see previous post), I happened across William Merrit Chase. What extaordinary talent

to be able to capture

so much 

emotional

intensity

in the faces

of so many

women

RUSKIN ON WHISTLER (1877)

FOR Mr. Whistler’s own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of wilful imposture, I have seen, and heard, much of the cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.

Whistler by William Merrit Chase.

WHISTLER ON RUSKIN (1878)

WE are told that Mr. Ruskin has devoted his long life to art, and as a result – is "Slade Professor" at Oxford. In the same sentence we have thus his position and its worth. It suffices not, Messieurs! a life passed among pictures makes not a painter – else the policeman in the National Gallery might assert himself. As well allege that he who lives in a library must needs die a poet. Let not Mr. Ruskin flatter himself that more education make the difference between himself and the policeman when both stand gazing in the Gallery.

There they might remain till the end of time; the one decently silent, the other saying, in good English, many high-sounding empty things, like the crackling of thorns under a pot – undismayed by the presence of the Masters with whose names he is sacrilegiously familiar; whose intentions he interprets, whose vices he discovers with the facility of the incapable, and whose virtues he descants upon with a verbosity and flow of language that would, could he hear it, give Titian the same shock of surprise that was Balaam’s, when the first great critic proffered his opinion.

Some years ago I was on a TV panel with a self proclaimed 'advertising guru.' His all-knowing aura gave rise to my subsequently writing this:

Oh Grand and Glorious Southern Guru, I am perplexed.

What ails thee, my peabrained little grasshopper?

My sleep has been short, my walls have been climbed, my hair has been pulled. I must know the difference between advertising and high art. Oh Great Creator, please give me the answer.

Stir no longer little vacuous one. Art is in the eye of the beholder, and yes, advertising can be high art.

But Holiest of the Holy, whilst I acknowledge there is a role for subjectivity in the appreciation of art, and that art and advertising similarly use form, colour and symbol to convey messages, and that both can be aesthetically pleasing and accessible, and that both share the goal of changing behaviour and attitudes, and that both often highlight the tension between reality and ideals and can shape aesthetic tastes, does not an adequate answer to my question depend upon a precise definition of the term art? Are there not different degrees of creativity and originality? Are there not different types of art? Surely Majestic One, advertising is not "high" art, but rather popular, propagandistic art?

Not so, little inchworm. Art is a function of apprehension, ergo, there is no difference between "high" and "low" art.

But Mighty Aphrodite, do not ads see the world only through a blinkered lens: as products and services, as target markets and audiences? Do they not promote only consumerism and uphold only the status quo? Are not their motives restricted by budgets and deadlines, and by the necessity of pushing product? How can ads experiment with ideas for their own sake when fettered by this capitalist manacle? Do ads not craft specific messages for specific audiences at specific times? Is not their goal to elicit singular responses? Do they not aim to please, to arrest the intelligence and to allay our fears with easy solutions, and are they not primarily concerned with positive reactions? And does not the prerequisite of mass appeal demand mediocrity? Does not art allow for a delight in, and the free play of, ideas for their own sake? Truly outstanding art rarely secures immediate popularity, n'est-ce pas Mon Dieu Seigneur? Does not art frequently encourage many ways of looking at the world? Is it not often purposefully ambiguous and open to conflicting interpretation? Surely, oh Towering One, artists do not worship audiences in the way advertisers do? Do they not intentionally break boundaries, counter the status quo, and question accepted beliefs? Many spend decades deconstructing society, transcending political, economical and religious systems, do they not? You listen not, my pint-sized parvenu. Art is in the eye of the beholder. Hence an advertisement, even if it's only one in a million, can be high art. But Lord of the Rings, is it not the sale that motivates the creation of advertisements. Does this not put advertising solely in the realm of the shallow and material? And thusly, are not ads only original in the context of commerce? And furthermore, did not that great Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye suggest that ads are farcical, ironic, and trivial (and that their prodigious power rests here precisely because we view them as a joke, without analyzing their bountiful effects)? In short, Monsieur Le President, are not advertisements viewed primarily with scorn? And does not true art inspire awe? And does it not create new ways of looking at the world and increase our depth of understanding about the meaning of life? And as such does it not reside squarely in the realm of the deep and spiritual? And does not great art burst forth with such stunning originality that it changes the way we see the world and ourselves? And are great artists, those rare geniuses, not moved by more than the simple desire for coin, and do they not dwell deeply on the profound questions of man's universal condition? And is not the equating of "high" art with advertising symptomatic of decadent, hollow, bankrupt, violent societies, which value material goods and facile solutions above all else? And as such All Knowing One, is this not an equation we should actively oppose?

Get not thy knickers in a knot wee Gordian. Your philosophizing incites me to slumber.

As mentioned previously, this work put me in another head space about a decade ago when it was on display at the National Gallery of Canada.

Here's what Anish Kapoor's been up to lately:

from The Guardian. 

And TimeOut:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du8dNvfY1bo

and, from the Brighton Festival, a slide show on his work:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkMclbnlJWY

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion” (1944)

Dropped in on Charlie Rose's site as I am wont to do, and found this interview with the curator of this past summer's Francis Bacon retrospective at the Met. I happened to attend the exhibition. These were easily the most arresting of the works on display.

"Head" VI, 1949.

Both capture a frightening post-war zeitgeist: the horrified realization/ comprehension that men can fall to grotesque depths; that they have a proven capacity both to commit inhuman ungodly atrocities and inflict massive, unthinkable pain on their fellows. Note the phallic, hyena-like aggressiveness; the cage surrounding the screaming pope is reminiscent of the glass enclosures at the Nuremberg Trials.

After touring in quick succession this exhibition and Titian, Tintoretto,Veronese at the Boston Fine Arts Museum, I was struck by how Bacon and the others all used very similar techniques

Titian Portrait of an Archbishop

to convince the viewer of the correctness of their diametrically opposed positions: God is great and good versus God doesn't exist, men are beasts. A battle for hearts and minds through the depiction of facial expression. The mouths especially, and how, if you get them right, you succeed in conveying incredible emotion, genuine anger, empathy,

Art scholar

benevolence, sadness and

Titian: self portrait.

evil.

Head 1 (1948)